It had been... Quite a week for Allen, by this point. A week ago now, he dueled Arasen Ishikawa right after midnight, pulling victory out of his hat after almost mucking the game up for himself by forgetting that "Drytron Meteonis Draconids" could attack all special summoned monsters. After ditching Arasen to deal with the guards (or so he assumes), Allen the next day had to redo his math homework due to Timothy, a person from Uniteal, asked to copy it... and took it to the faculty lounge and actually used a photo copier in front of the math teacher to copy it. Allen had to redo his homework as punishment. Timothy got detention... That he skipped. Allen, and two of his friends, Blake and Roger decided they were gonna... Well, for lack of a better word, lynch him. Sadly, they never got that chance that day due to the aforementioned detention skipping.

    That day, instead, Allen had his first, but most likely not last, encounter with a first year who has been getting a fairly bad reputation, Shinsei Tsuyokawa. The Japanese leprechaun got on Allen's nerves fairly quickly due to stomping on his math homework that he was redoing, and after a.. very verbose insulting spree, him and Allen ended up dueling. Allen had his field entirely demolished, and made a comeback from a completely empty board and won thanks to one of Allen's favorite cards, as well as one of his main go-to's, Magi Magi Magician Gal. With her effect, Allen took control of Shinsei's Satellite Warrior, and defeated him with his own monster. Thanks to the bad reputation he had gotten due to his own actions, Shinsei was apparently laughed at under the crowds breath as he stomped off and essentially swore revenge on Allen over it. Allen even found chocolate and a thank-you note from a girl in 1-B on his desk the next day.

    Finally, Allen thought he could get revenge on Timothy..... but after that day, he has been absent from school due to a streak of bad karma. This however, didn't stop Allen's weird week, as there was another event that happened during it that was noteworthy. A chat with the student council president, relating to the pro dueling team "Critias". Allen still couldn't quite get out of the weird funk that conversation left him in, despite it being a few days since it happened. 

    So, Allen decided to do his favorite past time to kill some stress; Practice his stage magic. Finding a nice spot outside the dorm after classes, Allen set up in his usual attire, and proceeded to start practicing. As per usual, people stopped to watch. With as often as Allen does this, it's become a common sight and he's recently taken to explaining some of the easer to do tricks. Due to them requiring someone to be skilled in sleight of hand, usually none of the people he demonstrates the tricks for can actually manage them properly, but that's to be expected. There had been some who asked to learn some more... 'practical' tricks, but Allen could tell that was a can of worms he wasn't wanting to deal with, so he turned them down.

    As he was finishing, he gave his usual bow of putting his left leg behind his right, holding his left arm out to his side, and turning his right arm into a bend in front of himself. Then, when he started to clean up his stuff, he heard someone come up behind him and speak. Turning to the source, Allen was about to say thanks when he stopped and had a suspicious expression for a split second, before switching back to a smile. The smirk on this person's lips gave Allen some red flags, as usually the only ones that smirk when they say things like that to him are the sarcastic ones looking for a way to insult him, or people wanting him to teach them 'practical' tricks.

    Hearing the guy introduce himself, Allen replied in kind. "I'm Allen. Allen Akiyama." He replied, looking up and down the guy. He saw the skateboard sitting under the guy's arm, and felt like the latter was the more likely scenario for why he was being chatted up. However, Allen knows well that you can't judge someone based on their appearance. After all, he was thought dwarves were supposed to be jolly, happy souls by Snow white, but Shinsei was for what seemed like all intents and purposes a ball of rage and arrogance. Wanting to avoid an awkward silence, Allen figured he might as well ask about the only real thing he could ask about. "So.... Do you have a last name or?..." He asked, as he figured it was common for people to at least give their last names if introducing themselves.

'    ... Masamune as a surname?' Allen thought, wondering if the guy got teased in school or had weird expectations placed on him due to the historical relevance of the name. However, Allen was then kind of..... Well, no. It wasn't kind of, but very confused by the rhetorical question the guy gave. "....... I'm Japanese? Of course I know the name Masamune? There was the extremely famous swordsmith Masamune, and there was the legendary General Date Masamune. There was also a few poets from the early 1900's who also were surnamed Masamune if I remember correctly." Allen responded, extremely confused by the attitude about the name. "Why, was there someone famous in your family? I don't keep up with celebrities." He added on, being point blank about that he doesn't know anything about the guy's family.


    ... The pause of Riku being in thought definitely did not help Allen's confusion. when he apologized for being bad at social interactions, it took Allen every fiber of his being to hold back the words of 'Yeah, that much was obvious from you spacing out.', that he almost blurted out, but managed to keep in his thoughts. Instead, he responded more politely. "Don't worry about it. You're doing fine. Or at least better than Timothy... Speaking of which, if you meet a guy from Uniteal with a broken nose, don't let him copy your homework. He'll use an actual photo copier in front of the teachers." Allen said, with a very clear grudge in his voice at the idiot he was talking about.


    However, Allen quickly shrugged off his grumbling. "Anyway, thanks for the compliment. I picked up the hobby from my father. He was a really good guy from what I've heard about him." Allen said, with a bittersweet and somewhat lonely expression on his face. One he didn't even know he tended to make when he spoke about his father. "According to my mother, I'm a LOT better at them than he was." He added on.

    Hearing the professional duelist comment, Allen was kind of impressed. "Oh, cool. I honestly didn't get into following any pro duelists, so I don't know him." He said, apparently that being a bullet dodged after Riku mentioned their dad abandoned them. '.... Okay, there is clearly a lot to unpack there for him, but I'm just... not gonna prod that one open.' He thought, deciding that it really wasn't his place to attempt to get the guy he just met to spill his guts about his father. "If it's any consolation, my father isn't around either. He passed away on a business trip before I was born." Allen explained, though he didn't elaborate on the bunch of oddities about it. Such as that the next of kin, IE his mother, were informed of how he passed away, or how it was that he passed away in Silvershine.

    Allen didn't say anything to the info about Timothy, aside from let out a sigh. It amazed him that Timothy was that stupid. He hadn't met Riku before today, so it was clear they didn't share math class, and their math teacher has been caught on record saying she assigns different homework to each class so that they can't swap homework between them. Yet Timothy was stupid enough to ask someone from another class for their homework to copy?.... Allen seriously was wondering if Timothy paid someone to take the exam for him to get into A rank. At least Karma got Timothy back. In a cosmic twist, it's even funnier given he slipped in his dogs crap, and he actually named his dog 'Karma'.

    Riku seemed to have got the same idea that Allen did when it came to not prodding the other about their absent parents, and thus was happy to keep off of that topic. Hearing the assumption that he was good at Dueling, he couldn't help but reply. "Well, I did beat the proctor without losing a single lifepoint, but it was just a really bad match-up for him. He told me to not hold back and play at my best, and his deck couldn't get up to speed fast enough having it's normal summon messed with." Allen explained, recalling how his proctor kind of floundered due to dark magical circle banishing his monsters on normal summon, preventing him from getting enough materials on board to go into his best monsters.

    Hearing the question about the aces for his deck, Allen had a bit of a sheepish look to his face. "Ah... Well, my deck is kind of weird. at least half the monsters in the maindeck, and the entirety of the Extra deck could count as aces in the right situation." He explained, though he did elaborate more. "However, I do have two specific go-to monsters in it, which is what I put down for my aces on the application." He said, though the sheepish smile stayed as he recalled the complaints the person filing his paperwork gave him about putting a monster from a different mechanic than his dorm down on it as an ace.

    "The ones I put down were 'Dark Magician the Dragon Knight' and 'Magi Magi Magician gal'." Allen said, expecting a confused reaction from Riku. After all, he was acutely aware of the weird reactions people seemed to have about using monsters that weren't part of your dorms mechanics outside of sheer utility, like Dragunity Knight Romulus. Or at least it was outside of pendulum users and some of the link users from Uniteal. But so far they've been nothing but crazy weirdos who seem to do some of the dumbest stuff possible out of sheer spite at existence... But considering the only ones he's actually personally interacted with have been Timothy and the chick from class B who threatened to get him in trouble over dodgeball, he didn't have the best examples. Still, that confusion with the other two dorms has actually won him games before, and was a key part in beating Shinsei.