As the time to the meeting ticked down, the spirits of those waiting seemed to rise. Pirates from different guilds who hadn't seen each other in a while were meeting up again after a long time apart, and everyone seemed to be talking to someone else. But Callista didn't look for a familiar face. There weren't any here.
She pushed her way through the enthusiastic crowd, looking for a way to pass the time. It would be a few hours, and she didn't want to enter the guildhall earlier, so she stopped at a group of barrels used as tables where someone was serving drinks. There weren't many people living on the island, and so there weren't many businesses. It was clear that someone had just set this up.
It looked like someone had started a gambling session, and that caught Callista's eye more than the drinks did. Maybe that wouldn't be a bad way to spend her time. She stepped closer to the table to see what was happening.
The girl at the table looked barely of legal age to gamble, and yet she was running the show with the ease of someone who'd been doing this for years. Light sparkled off her perpetual smile as she dealt cards, took gold, and excited the crowd with a few carefully placed comments and winks. She glanced up and caught Callista's eye.
"Well, what do we have here!" she called out. "Come on, darling, come try your luck at my table! People have been winning big here today, isn't that right?" The crowd backed her up with a loud cheer.
Callista raised an eyebrow. Darling? The casual language was more than a little surprising to hear, but she could tell the girl was the kind of person to use that with anyone. She seemed... flashy. A bit literally, as she was wearing an outfit that was so sparkly it almost hurt to look at. Was it her gambling strategy to blind people with gemstones so that they couldn't read their cards correctly?
That thought gave her an idea. Maybe she could use a strategy like that.
"I'm in," Callista said, taking a spot at the barrel table.
The girl grinned at her. "Lovely!" She shuffled the cards, lazily flipping them from one hand to the next. "We're playing Hearts. Do you know the rules, or do you need them explained?"
"I could use a reminder." Callista knew the general rules, but maybe pirates played differently. Sometimes they put a spin on things.
"Alright! The objective of the game is to be the player with the fewest points at the end," the girl began, dealing cards to each of the players - four in total, including herself - as she spoke. "The end is when someone collects fifty points. Heart cards are worth one point each, the queen of spades is worth thirteen. Whoever lay down the highest card during the round has to take all the discarded ones."
She finished dealing and sat back on her makeshift chair. "For the first round, the first player - that's whoever has the two of clubs - lays the two down, and the other three players follow suit, discarding a clubs card. If you don't have one, any suit will do, but you can't discard a heart or the queen of spades on the first round. And we go from there. The second player starts the second round, the third starts the third, and so on and so on. After the first round, you don't have to start with clubs, you can start with any suit."
She grinned.
"Now, the fun part. You three-" she gestured to the other players at the table "-place your gold - however much you'd like - into the centre of the table, and I, as the dealer, add half as much as what the rest of you put in. Whoever has the fewest points at the end of the game get back what they put in, plus what I put in, and I get whatever's left. Simple enough. Got it?"
Callista gave it some thought, then nodded. "Alright." She reached into her pocket and tossed a handful of gold coins on the table. The other players did the same, and once everyone had put their money in, they checked their hands. Callista narrowed her eyes as she added the cards up-- this wasn't a great hand. It was probably going to take some trickery to make this a win.
The dealer examined the pile of gold, then counted out half that amount from her own purse and added it to the pile. "Lovely. Who's got the two of clubs to start us off, then?"
The player directly to Callista's right placed the card down on the table, and the game began.
For the first several rounds, things proceeded as expected, with everyone at the table collecting points about equally. The player to Callista's right - Airdrie, she'd introduced herself as - had the fewest points of them all, and was getting cocky, adding a few gold to her wager each time the cards fell in her favour. The dealer encouraged her- subtly, of course, but encouraged her nonetheless, making sly remarks about her luck and how well she chose her cards and how much she stood to win if things kept going her way.
Airdrie didn't seem to notice the gleam in the dealer's eyes that meant the dealer also knew exactly how much she stood to gain if things stopped going her way. Callista had a bad feeling that something might just come along to change that.
As Airdrie added yet another couple of gold to the pile, the dealer's gaze landed on the back of her cards, all the mischief and cheerfulness dropping from her eyes as she inspected each card closely. The other two players, more interested in how much Airdrie was adding, didn't seem to notice, but Callista raised an eyebrow. It seemed like this girl had a few tricks.
After a moment, the dealer blinked and looked away, her expression shifting back to what it had been before. "Are you sure you'd like to add that much?" she teased. "Things could change, darling, and you're standing to lose a lot if they do."
Airdrie looked a little confused by this sudden shift in attitude, but quickly wiped that from her face, giving the dealer a smirk. "It'd take some kind of unholy miracle to change my luck that badly."
The dealer held her hands up and leaned back. "You know best, darling. Go ahead, I think it's your turn to start this round."
Airdrie glanced down at her cards and did a double-take, eyes widening, before she remastered her poker face. That brief slip, however, was enough to make the dealer's smile grow just a little too wide. Airdrie scanned her cards, then slowly placed down the queen of spades.
Callista's eyebrows went up. Something was definitely afoot.
While the other players took their turn discarding cards, she found herself focusing on the hand Airdrie, who was biting her lip slightly, was holding. They seemed... off somehow, not quite like all the cards in the rest of the deck. To test out a theory, she closed her eyes, yawning loudly so it wouldn't seem strange, and then slowly, slowly blinked her eyes open again.
There. For just a moment, her vision did something strange, like it was trying to replace something she was seeing. Airdrie's cards had seemed to flicker and fizzle out before they looked normal again. The card on the table, the one that seemed to be the queen of spades, had appeared as the seven of hearts for that brief instant. Callista had no doubt about it: the dealer had changed the cards' appearances, and she'd been able to see through it in that short second after her eyes had opened and her sight had readjusted from what was really there to the illusion that she'd placed.
It was a good trick, but what the dealer didn't know was that two could play at this game.
Callista discarded when her turn came around, and then focused on what she wanted her cards to look like to the others. Most of them would be various heart cards, but she'd leave one or two of other suits so it wouldn't be suspicious and get her accused of cheating. Four people was about as much as she could fool at once. She glanced across the table at the dealer. Callista wouldn't be able to change much of her hand, or she'd guess what someone else was doing, but... it wouldn't hurt to make a few of them look like bad cards that might have slipped past her notice.
To her credit, the dealer's expression remained serenely cheerful as she examined the new cards Callista was showing her. Nowhere near as strong a reaction as Airdrie had to her illusory cards. Play continued as normal, with the dealer starting to rack up more points as Callista continued to manipulate her cards into less favourable ones. Airdrie, as well, started gaining more points, her face falling further every round as she realized exactly how much gold she'd bet and how much she was losing.
It was a clever strategy the dealer was using, when Callista stopped to think about it. Find a person with more gold than sense, manipulate them into thinking they'd win so they'd wager more, then make them lose at the last moment. Whoever had won would take what they put in and what the dealer had put in, and the dealer would get the rest- which, when they would count up all the money the poor loser had put in, was quite a lot.
Complicated. Harder to pull off than usual gambling scams. While it was highly unfair, she had to at least respect the cunning and skill of anyone who could pull it off.
Airdrie was the first to hit fifty points, which ended the game. After all the points had been counted up, Callista ended with the fewest, and the dealer counted out her winnings from the pile in the centre. "Nice game, darling," she said, pushing her gold across the table to Callista with a wink. "You really know how to get the cards to do what you want them to."
Callista smirked, and she stuffed the gold into her pocket. "You could say that," she agreed, double-counting the money to check that it was the right amount. Just to be safe, she slowly blinked while staring at it again to make sure she wasn't seeing things and ending up with gold that didn't exist. The other players were still at the table, packing up-- with Airdrie still looking discouraged-- and she added to the dealer, "I could say the same about you."
The rest of the players clearly hadn't heard, even though she'd maken no attempt to lower her voice. It was like the words hadn't even been said or reached their ears. They'd gone deaf to that single sentence.
When the players had cleared out, still oblivious to what she'd said, Callista stayed at the table, giving the dealer a thoughtful look.
"You're pretty subtle, you know. I bet you do this a lot."
The dealer swept all her cards up into a single pile, then slid them up her sleeve and out of sight. "What, play gambling games with senseless rich people?" She gave Callista a sideways glance. "Or are you accusing me of cheating somehow?"
Callista shrugged. "Cheating? I don't know about that. Maybe using a couple talents that others don't have to your advantage, but I don't have an issue with that."
The dealer paused and gave her a much more interested look. "Really now. That's an interesting take on the situation, darling. Most people wouldn't hesitate to call my 'talents' cheating." She flashed her a smile. "You know, you have some... fun talents yourself. I've never had anyone mess with my senses quite that well- most people don't manage to fool me, but it took me a good turn or two to figure out what you'd done. Have you ever considered using your talents for anything like this?"
Callista thought back to the gold coin from a few days ago. "Oh, I don't know. Occasionally as a means of... getting away with stuff. I don't actually regularly gamble."
"Oh, I didn't meant screwing the dealer over, I meant more along the lines of screwing other people over," the dealer corrected. "You don't have to gamble to earn money from it."
Callista raised an eyebrow. "You know, this sounds awfully like you're encouraging me to do some illegal stuff. Can't have anyone hearing that." She looked around, focusing on the nearest people in the crowd, and tuned them out from their conversation. "Would be a shame if everyone went deaf to us."
The girl glanced around, then back to Callista with a new gleam in her eye. "Such a shame," she agreed. "Hey, totally hypothetical question that's unrelated to what we were just talking about: how do you feel about getting rich?"
She gestured to the pouch she kept her coins in, which was now considerably fuller than before she'd gotten here. "Well, as I have just found out, the feeling is pretty nice."
"Right, right. And how do you feel about... business partners?"
"I'd be open to trying that out."
The girl grinned. "What's your name, darling?"
Callista decided she'd have to get used to being called that. "I'm Callista Arien," she said, extending a hand.
The girl took it. "Lisa Mercier. Pleasure to make your acquaintance."
Callista glanced around the makeshift pub with a smirk. "We have a couple hours to kill before anything starts. Feel like causing a little trouble, perhaps with another game?"
"Trouble?" Lisa asked innocently. "I'd never- unless you have an idea?"
She pointed to a couple pirates in fancy clothes. "It involves a few rich pricks."
"Well, I do love anything involving rich pricks, especially if they end up less rich at the end of it," Lisa mused.
"For sure. You still got those cards?"
"Darling, if I'm ever without my cards, assume something is very wrong," Lisa declared dramatically. She tipped her hand, and the deck slid out of her sleeve and landed neatly in her palm.
"Excellent." Callista smiled, and she lifted the sound block she'd had on their voices. She waved over in the direction of the targets she'd had her eye on. "New game starting soon, take your seats if you want a chance to win big!"
And as she watched the people trickle over to what looked like a good opportunity, she realized she'd actually found herself one. Callista could only hope it would be lasting.
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