I'm BA-ACK! And with--the SEQUAL OF DOOM! MUAHAHAHAHA!

Enjoy!

It was the middle of summer—Tuesday July seventeenth, to be exact, and three o'clock in the afternoon. It was pretty quiet for a small town on the suburbs of a big city—and that's exactly what Bolingbrook, Illinois was. Very far out, to be sure—Chicago was about three miles away.

If you'd gone to the park, you would have seen a girl of just past fifteen sitting on a bench beneath an old oak tree. She would be leaning back and staring up at the sky, gold-flecked brown eyes closed almost all the way against the glare of the summer sun through her crooked, black-framed glasses. Her waist-length gold-blond hair would be hanging in a ponytail over the back of the bench, and a royal blue bandanna would be tied around her head. She would be wearing faded, baggy jeans and a long white T-shirt. Around her neck would be a black lanyard—on it her apartment key, a tiny hieroglyphics decoder, and a laminated YuGiOh card.

That's my favorite spot to just sit and think. And that girl happens to be me.

My name's Miriku Hernandez. As mentioned earlier, I'm about eleven days past fifteen. My personality? Oh, the usual teenage angstiness…with a good dose of sarcasm and psychoness thrown in, anyway. And that psychoness brought about the best summer vacation of my entire life.

It all happened last summer, in fact. Saturday, July eighth. I had been trying to watch the weekly episode of YuGiOh (which is my most favorite anime on the planet) on Kid's WB, when something really strange happened. See, I have this tendency to talk to inanimate objects when I'm upset or stressed—and YuGiOh had been cancelled, so I had started yelling at my TV. Its response was to spit out Yuugi Mutou, Malik Ishtar, Ryou Bakura, and Seto Kaiba. Spirits attached—except Malik's. The spirits also had their own bodies, which led to a few problems that we all managed to smooth out. Later, we were also joined by Katsuya Jonouchi. And between the seven of them, myself, my five friends, and everyone else we met along the way, we'd made it a summer to remember—I mean, our adventures, ranged from toga parties and karaoke nights to solving sibling rivalry between three cat-girls!

But finally, after about two weeks all the anime people were sent home. I had left the next day, hoping for new friends in my new lifestyle.

But I had been in Illinois for the past year, and I still hadn't made any new friends. No one had even paid attention to me for most of the year. I missed everyone I had met back in Florida.

Moodily, I twirled my lanyard between my fingers. Then I peered closely at the card. It was hued pink, like any normal trap card from the game. The picture was of a small wooden box overflowing with gold and jewels. And the name of the card was Pharaoh's Treasure.

I smiled a little. If you're thinking what I think you're thinking, than you're a pretty good thinker; I was given that card by Yami himself. I felt a small blush creeping up the back of my neck—he had given it to me after kissing me in front of everyone.

I really shouldn't be remembering that right now—after all, I did cast a spell to make everyone who had met the anime characters forget that they'd ever existed in out real world. But the presence of the card had jogged my memory. And a few others remembered, too—those with…ah…'romantic ties'…to any of the characters.

I blinked suddenly. There was a sort of niggling sensation at the back of my mind, like I was missing something. Something really, really important…

That was impossible. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The place was absolutely silent.

And it dawned on me. The wind had stopped blowing. The birds had stopped chirping. All the little lizards and such that ran through the grass had stopped moving. It was much too still; a deathly quiet had settled over the park.

A quiet that was suddenly broken by a rushing sound that built to a roar in an instant in the back of my head. It was deafening. I doubled over, squeezed my eyes shut, pressed my hands over my ears—

And tumbled onto the grass, the noise disappearing as fast as it had come. I sat up, and looked around. This was crazy. I wasn't even in the park any more.

Well, let me correct that. I wasn't in the Bolingbrook park any more. But I was in a park. A park inside a city somewhere. And for some reason, I was getting a sense of déjà vu—like I had seen it before.

Suddenly, there was a loud clap—and six separate thuds. I looked over my shoulder—and gawked.

There on the grass lay Terra Cooper, Samantha (Sam) Parker, Sonja and Damien Edachi, Marik Rama, and Mikayla (Mikey) Labrador.

But they all looked different. Terra's normally dirty-blond hair was now black. Sam's long, wispy blond hair was now a deep auburn. Mikey—who was almost identical to me, but for her high cheekbones and angular face—had hair that was now a burnished gold. Sonja, who looked like a female Jonouchi, now had hair that, though it was its normal color, slightly resembles Mai's. And her twin Damien looked even more like Kaiba than he usually did—his hair actually lay flat, and he had slimmed down from muscle to wire. Marik's red-streaked black hair was now more red than black.

At almost the same time, they all sat up and looked around. "What the hell…?" were the first words out of Damien's mouth.

Sam straightened her overly-large wire-framed glasses—and blinked, pulling them off. "Hey! I don't need my glasses any more!" For some reason, her normally blue-green eyes had changed to a dreamy silver-blue.

She blinked again, and stared at the others. "Man, am I seein' things!"

Everyone else's eye colors had changed, as well—except for Damien and Sonja, who had sapphire blue and dark brown eyes, respectively. Terra's had gone from hazel to cobalt blue, Marik's from yellowy-gold to deep lavender, and Mikey's from gold-flecked brown (like mine) to clear amber.

All of them began to talk at once—telling each other what they looked like. Mikey pulled off her own glasses, and blinked. "Hey, I don't need mine, either!"

I squinted over the top of my glasses. Everything was still blurry to me. "That's not fair!" I grumbled, crossing my arms. "I'm still blind as a bat! How come you two don't need your glasses any more, but I do!"

All of them whipped around. I swear their jaws hit the grass. "Miriku!" Terra exclaimed.

I grinned. "In person!"

Mikey blinked. "Uh—what happened to you!"

I shrugged. "Dunno—maybe the same thing that happened to you? What do I look like?"

Sonja pulled a small flip-mirror out of her pocket. "Take a look."

I looked in the mirror—and gawked. My face was more aquiline and triangular that it had been, and my eyes had angled upward. They had become the same shade of amethyst as Yuugi's. And my hair—

I had bangs like Yuugi's. Only they were half as thick—and twice as long. The blue bandanna I'd been wearing was holding my hair behind the bangs—but my hairband was gone. My hair was now black, edged with blue. It spiked out on each side at my shoulders (where the spines were long enough to reach outward to my elbows) and halfway down my back (where the ends touched my waist). The rest hung down like normal hair, reaching the back of my knees.

"Uh…whoa…"

Damien smirked a little. "That's what we said."

I blinked at them. "Okay, so I look the freakiest out of all of us. That we can agree on. Now, where the heck are we?"

Marik shrugged. "We have no idea—do you?"

I sweatdropped. "If I knew, I wouldn't have asked."

"Oh yeah…"

I rolled my eyes. "All right, smart one. What do you say to us figuring this out?"

"Sounds like a good idea," Mikey said, standing up.

I sighed. "If it weren't a good idea, I wouldn't have suggested it. Now, come on!"

Suddenly, there was another crack and thump from behind them. We all looked—and saw a girl.

She had shoulder-length brown hair with natural-looking gold and red highlights. She looked about as tall as me.

I blinked. She reminded me of a girl I had heard rumors about in school—Erica Drache. She was rumored to be about as strange as me, and very nice—but I had never met her in person. I'd only seen her across the cafeteria at lunch.

She groaned a little, opening her light brown eyes—and closing them again. "Ooh. Turn off the sun…"

I poked her a little. "Rise and shine, Erica…"

It worked. The girl sat up and blinked. "How do you know my name?" she demanded.

I shrugged. "School."

Erica blinked at me for a moment. "Aren't you Miriku—that new girl around school from Florida? But—what happened to you?"

She then looked around. "…And where are we?"

Terra shrugged. "We have no idea."

Erica looked at them. "Who are you guys?"

I grinned. "These are a few of my friends from back in Florida—Terra Cooper, Marik Rama, Sonja and Damien Edachi, Sam Parker, and Mikey Labrador. Now—we were just about to go figure out what happened. Want to come with us?"

Erica smiled, accepting my hand up. "Sure!"

"I know this place!" Miriku exclaimed exasperatedly. "I know I know this place!"

I rolled my eyes. "Well, that's all fine and dandy—but do you know how to figure out where we are?"

Miriku deathglared me. "Sonja. Shut up."

I heard a faint gasp, and whipped around—only to catch a quick flash of someone racing around a corner into an alleyway.

Erica laughed. "You guys are great!"

I smiled at Erica, putting it out of my head. She was a nice person, really—and it turned out that she also liked YuGiOh, and had a crush on Ryuji Otogi (Duke Devlin). It was too weird for words.

Suddenly, Miriku stopped. We all crashed into her.

"What's the big idea!" Damien exclaimed.

I saw her face. She was staring at something. I looked ahead.

It appeared that we had reached the town square. The whole area was paved in red brick. In the center was a low circular wall, with shrubbery inside it. Rising tall on a thick column was a huge, working clock.

Mikey cautiously tapped Miriku's shoulder. "Do you know where we are?" she asked hopefully.

Miriku looked at Mikey, wide-eyed. "Clock Tower Square," she breathed. Her head jerked around to the left. "Follow me! I know exactly where we are!"

Is that any good? I'm still not very proficient at starting stories...

Review, please!