"Nii-sama!"

Kaiba jerked up his head, but there were close, high walls where there had only been empty space an instant before, and the vertigo was so great that he staggered, put his hand against the wall to steady himself while he swallowed back the remains of breakfast rising in his throat. Rough brick under his fingers, when the walls should be white and smooth.

"Mokuba?" he coughed, keeping his eyes closed until the dizzy nausea settled. His brother's cry was still ringing in his ears, but there was no answer now.

A brilliant white flash, afterimages dancing behind his lids, and the smell of something burning--fire? Kaiba forced open his eyes. The brick wall in front of him slowly slid into focus. Dirty pavement under his boots, scattered with trash, crumpled beer cans and gum wrappers.

Obviously a back alley, somewhere. But he had been in the lab. Had been in the laboratory all day, most of the last week, actually. Perfecting...

"Hey, are you okay?"

Kaiba squinted into the sunlight at the young woman standing in the mouth of the alley, peering at him as he slumped against the wall like a weak-kneed inebriate. "Mind your own business," he snarled at her.

The lab, he reboarded his train of thought, after the woman had beaten a hasty retreat. Mokuba had been monitoring behind the protective glass. Watching closely, and then...the instruments beeped a warning, bright flames--but Kaiba felt no burns, and the trim of his white trenchcoat wasn't singed.

His legs felt steadier, so he pushed off the wall and straightened up. As he lowered his arms he caught sight of the device on his wrist, raised it before his eyes. The rush of returning memory was almost as dizzying as his sudden displacement. Of course.

The ignorant might have mistaken the device for a new version of duel disk, though it was significantly smaller, and only had slots enough for three cards. All were empty now, though when he looked closer, faint scorching marked the middle slot. Kaiba nodded to himself. Not an unexpected reaction.

Yugi might go on about the heart of the cards, but Kaiba couldn't care less about whatever imaginary spirits might inhabit his deck. What had fascinated him, from the moment he had first seen the monsters brought to life in that mortal game so long ago, was the power of the cards. The god cards had been the most spectacular manifestation, of course. He had designed the duel disks, he knew their workings precisely, and those gigantic materializations had been quite impossible within the limits of the holographic technology. But the more he had played, the more he realized the force inherent in all cards.

Superstitious fools called it magic, but that was just a label to be stuck on any phenomenon they lacked the mental breadth to comprehend. The duel monster cards had been created by man; whatever unknown energies they tapped, that power must be within mankind's ability to grasp. So naturally he reached for it.

The newly constructed card disk on his wrist wouldn't be much use in a duel, but it wasn't designed for such. Kaiba hoped it might have other applications in games eventually, but for now it was only an experiment. The electronics jammed into the device weren't intended for projection or display, but simulation, evoking the instance of a duel when there was no play actually occurring. When the cards set inside it were activated, their power wouldn't be applied to any specific incident of attack, but to the player himself. Making, in effect, the illusions of the game into tangible reality.

It was, Kaiba had remarked some weeks ago, a patently ridiculous notion. Mokuba had just nodded and grinned and said it would be awesome, and had started inventing possible variant games that could employ such technology.

For their first test, Kaiba had decided from the start not to use a standard monster card, no matter how enticing the thought of a Blue Eyes White Dragon in the flesh might be. After the god cards, the power of the monsters was a proven force. Better to see if a more unknown quantity could be tapped. He had selected the test card mostly because its power was so unlikely, so beyond even the advances of modern science, that if he could succeed with it he would be confident in using any of the others.

Kaiba didn't have a Time Wizard in his deck; he didn't care for gamble cards. A mediocre duelist like Yugi's friend might need luck to finagle a win, but Kaiba had never relied on anything but his own strength and skill. But for this experiment, the Wizard's so-called "Time Magic" was ideal.

Obtaining two Time Wizards had been easy enough; the card was not so rare as to be terribly expensive. Completing the new disk had been a more complicated matter, but the finishing touches had been put on it last night, and he and Mokuba had spent the morning prepping the lab, double-checking all monitors and recorders to make sure no data would be lost. Everything had been in perfect order.

Still, Kaiba had had to consciously still the tremor in his hands as he had fitted the card into the slot, standing in the center of the white-walled test room. Mokuba's eyes behind the glass had opened wide, and they had both held their breath, as Kaiba pushed the card in, activating it.

And then--the light, that sense of fire. His brother, abandoning his post as he ran for the door into the testing room, shouting warning.

And now this a narrow alley, brick buildings towering above him.

Kaiba had calculated carefully. He had intended a jump of no more than an hour, a quick hop forward in time, just to see if it were possible. By all known laws of physics it should not have been. He had figured with seventy-six percent surety that there would be no effect at all.

Time magic. Ridiculous.

But he sure as hell wasn't in his lab anymore.

That in itself was problematic. According to his calculations, some spatial displacement was to be expected; gravity could only fix an object in relative place so much. But a journey an hour forward should have moved him hardly a millimeter. He should still be in the lab, practically where he had left. Not a kilometer or more away.

If he had moved so far spatially, how far might he have traveled temporally?

The woman had spoken Japanese, at least, so he was still in the right nation. But her fashion had been--strange. Not that he was much in the habit of noticing women's clothing. But coordinating skin tone to match one's blue jeans wasn't a style he recalled from visits to Kaiba Lands.

With unnatural trepidation Kaiba moved to the mouth of the alley, took a breath and stepped into the sunlit street. None of the people passing by gave him more than a second glance, as he strode to the corner and looked up and down the block.

The automobiles were the first thing he noticed, boxy where they should be curved and smooth where there should be corners. At least they were all still on the ground--he shook his head, casting out the refuse visions of a few bad SF movie futures. The skyline was different, too, taller, but he recognized enough structures to know this was still Domino City, and he was perhaps three kilometers from his lab.

How many years away, however?

Kaiba moved down the street with the flow of scooters and pedestrians--the crowd as a whole was taller, as nutritionists had been predicting, but he was still tall enough to see over most of their heads--doing his best not to rubberneck like a damned tourist and mostly succeeding. He passed a bank, stopped and cupped his hands around the window glass to peer inside.

The bank clock behind the tellers' counter gave the day, month, and year as well as the time. He stared at it for a good long minute. Somehow the streets of strangely dressed people and unusual cars were easier to accept than those standard red LED numbers, telling him it was some twenty-six minutes, four hours, eleven days, two months, and thirty-two years later than the date blinking on his own watch.

He finally pushed away from the window, pushed down his sleeve so it covered the traitorous watch. Looked around the street, took a breath of air--it smelled and tasted cleaner than the usual atmosphere downtown; environmental precautions must be working in the future.

This future. This present. Three decades later than the now he knew.

Completely, patently impossible. A century of physicists would be rolling over in their graves.

Kaiba threw back his head and laughed aloud.

A couple passerbys glanced over and changed the course of their hurried strides to veer around him. Kaiba met their disturbed looks with a direct stare, enjoying their incomprehension. Though it wouldn't do to draw too much attention to himself.

Seized by a sudden impulse, he turned on his heel and strode back the way he had come. It should be visible between those two skyscrapers--yes, there it was. Kaiba Corporation's headquarters had gained a few additions in the intervening decades, but still stood as one of the tallest buildings in the city, and the top structure was unchanged, as was the KC logo, glittering in the sun. And that building next to it must be an expanded Kaiba Land. Open, and busy, from the many tiny figures he could see waving from the rides on the roof. He smiled.

Kaiba Seto might be at headquarters this very moment, in the top office. Or in that Kaiba Land, or any of the others--he wondered how many there were worldwide by now. Hundreds, if everything had gone according to plan.

Kaiba knew better than to hike over and ask. He had no way of knowing how much he might have changed in thirty years, but there was a chance he might still be recognized. And he would prefer not to risk encountering himself. Potential temporal paradoxes aside, he knew himself well enough to know that meeting a younger, obnoxious, and scientifically impossible version of himself would be low on any day's agenda. Though of course if he remembered this day...well, if Kaiba Seto of the future wanted to go looking for himself, that was all very well, but he wasn't going to walk blindly into his own hands.

Kaiba reached up to his coat's lapel, tore off the communicator with the identifying KC logo and stowed it in a pocket of his black jeans. Then he withdrew a small, flat case from another compartment in his coat and stepped under a store's awning, out of the flow of pedestrians.

He hadn't been surprised to see the Time Magician card no longer set in the disk on his wrist. If the activation energies hadn't destroyed it, which had been a likely possibility, then it probably would have stayed back in the lab, where and when he had used it to cast its powers on him. He was counting on that. His initial plan wouldn't have required him to travel back, since a lost hour wouldn't have been a great hassle. But he had foreseen this worst case scenario. A second use of the card would cancel out the previous effect; activating the Time Wizard again would pull him back through time to where he had started, returning him directly to the lab at the moment he had left.

The original card might be lost, but he had bought two for that reason. Inserting any Time Wizard card would do. He had triple-tested to make sure both were genuine, not one of the Ghouls' fake rare cards that were still floating around the market, so it should work without a hitch. When he decided to go back, he would just need to activate it. Location shouldn't matter; the attraction between the parallel cards should override the physical as well as the temporal distance. He could spend a few more hours sightseeing--any longer would be tempting fate--and then return.

Mokuba would probably regret that he hadn't brought a camera.

Lightheaded, almost giddy, breathing this strange clean air of the future, Kaiba flipped open the single card case holding his other Time Wizard card. And froze.

The case was empty.

Where the card should be was only a thin layer of dust. Ash.

The white flames, flickering bright around him.

There must have been some kind of reaction between the cards, an inadvertent activation of both copies. Destroying both, or leaving them back in the past?

Kaiba plunged his hand into his breast pocket, felt for his deck. Those cards were still intact, undamaged, and he released his held breath.

But he had no Time Wizard in his deck.

And without a Time Wizard, he had no way of traveling back through time to the past which was his home.