WookieeBeta

From extreme youth, I was expected to always be the knight in shining armor.

Protect my sister? Fine.

Watch over the common folk? Sure.

Become Pharaoh, take on all the problems of an entire country and handle it flawlessly? Why not?

Save the world from the powers of the Shadow Realm? No problem.

Become a life-size guardian angel to a sorely lost young man in a completely unfamiliar century? All right.

Like I said. Knight in Shining Armor syndrome. Really, though, it's never bothered me. It's never been easy, and I've had my fair share of bad moments, but on the whole...it's what I was born for. Destiny, Fate, whatever you want to call it. It's just who I am.

So it wasn't the fact that I was, once again, rushing to the last-minute completely-unplanned almost-sure-to-go-wrong rescue that bothered me.

It was the fact that I was doing so while sitting in Yuugi's room in front of a laptop.

But perhaps I should back up a bit.

I am, to put it simply, a three-thousand year-old Egyptian spirit trapped inside a magical artifact. Yuugi is your everyday Japanese teenager. He also happens to be my direct descendant, and, interestingly enough, my reincarnation. Between the artifact, the blood relation, and the whole born-again thing, plus a bit of ancient Egyptian magic, we are similar enough that I am able to literally take control of his body. To possess him.

Which is why I, not Yuugi, was cursing at the dial-up connection.

I appreciate computers as much as the next spirit. They are wonderful sources of information and of entertainment. Unfortunately, they are equally good sources of irritation, and old faulty laptops and dial-up connections do not a won auction make.

What does eBay have to do with rescues? It's actually fairly simple.

I am not unique, you see.

There are plenty of other spirits floating around, even today. I am personally acquainted with several from my own time - ancient Egypt, that is, not the twentieth century.

Moreover, my people were not the only ones who thought trapping peoples' minds inside inanimate objects was a good idea. The practice actually began earlier. Much earlier. As in, thousands of years earlier, before recorded history. And in those times, a young girl from a middle-class family grew very, very ill. Her parents could not afford what little treatment was then available. They could, however, afford to affix her soul to an item, to prevent her from truly and finally dying. So they paid the local medicine man to seal the girl into a necklace.

How do I know this?

Thousands of years after the fact, my mother presented me with the very same necklace. The girl - her name was Aibou - began to talk to me. Then, when my life was in considerable danger (and by 'considerable danger' I mean one knife to my throat, several more to my back, and a handful of nearly-mortal wounds already inflicted just to keep things interesting), she possessed me.

It's astounding, how much damage two terrified children trapped in the same body can inflict.

To keep a (very) long story short, Aibou and I became close friends, and then we fell in love. And then, about the time I was starting to think that maybe life wasn't such a bad thing after all, some nut decided to seal me into an item.

I haven't seen Aibou in three thousand years. Truth be told, I thought the necklace would have been long destroyed. It should have fallen apart centuries ago now. But it hasn't. I'm not sure what exactly has happened, actually, but I know that now, that necklace is in the possession (no puns intended) of a man called xXantiqueboutiqueXx, and if this confounded connection doesn't time out on me again, it is my full intention to win it.