“All in!” Tessa hooted, pushing her pile of chips into the center of the table.
““Again?!”” the twins shouted on the edge of their seats. They were already out of the game, but were still watching intently.
“…fold,” Aoibhe muttered, tossing her cards onto the table.
“Call,” Engineer grunted, pushing their own chips into the center of the table.
Miliam was already out as well, but she would have folded if she were still playing. She’d made the mistake of calling one of Engineer’s bluffs, only to realize she had no understanding of dragonewt body language and had badly misjudged the situation when they threw down a full house against her straight.
“Okay, let’s see your hands,” Miliam told the two remaining players. Tessa went first, dropping a flush: the queen, eight, five, three, and ace of spades. Engineer blinked several times before revealing their own cards, and everyone was silent for a moment at what they saw. It was also a flush, made up of the same cards, but they were hearts.
“How the f-” Aoibhe began, cutting herself off at the last second to check her own hand again. Miliam didn’t catch any reaction positive or negative, but she had a feeling Aoibhe would have won that round if she hadn’t folded. Eun-ji and Min-ji both ‘oohed’ in surprise as the elf and dragonewt split the pot and Miliam collected the cards.
“She looks excited no matter what hand she gets. I have no idea how to read her,” Miliam admitted while shuffling the deck. She wasn’t very good at it, but she was also the only one here that had played poker before, so no one was judging her for it.
“Every time I call she has a better hand and every time I fold I do,” griped the fay sitting beside Miliam. Tessa wasn’t winning every round, but she hadn’t folded even once. Every single round she went raised, called, or went all in, and she’d yet to lose the latter.
Done shuffling, Miliam dealt out cards to the three remaining players. As always, a grin lit up Tessa’s face when she saw her hand, but she’d done the same thing when she’d had nothing but a high card that was only a five, so that meant absolutely nothing. Aoibhe started the round by raising, and Tessa and Engineer both called.
“I’ll discard…these two,” Aoibhe declared, dropping two cards on the table. Miliam dealt her two more, which were regarded with an impassive stare.
“Just one, please!” Tessa said, flinging a card across the table to Miliam. Her grin didn’t change when she saw the new card.
“Three,” said Engineer, handing the cards directly to Miliam. They blinked each eye separately when they saw their new cards, but Miliam couldn’t determine if that was a tell or just something dragonewts did.
“To hell with it. All in,” Aoibhe said, pushing her chips to the center. Tessa eagerly matched the motion, while Engineer folded silently.
“Alright, hands on the table,” Miliam instructed. Aoibhe put down a straight flush with a ten for the high card. Diamonds. All eyes turned to Tessa, who slapped a royal flush on the table- except it was also diamonds.
“Hey, why are there two tens?” Aoibhe squawked, glaring at the elf. Miliam took both cards and compared them while Tessa struggled to hold in laughter. She noticed a slight difference in the one from Aoibhe’s hand and realized it was from a very similar deck, but not the one they’d bought on Northeast Gate Station. The same manufacturer, but a different print run, maybe?
“Uh, Aoibhe, I think yours is from a different deck,” she said awkwardly. The twins gasped as Engineer looked on, expressionless to Miliam’s untrained eyes.
“Wh- hey! I didn’t cheat, I swear!” Aoibhe defended, but Tessa burst out laughing at the same moment and she turned her glare on the elf. “What did you do?”
“I put an extra ten in like, three rounds ago just to see if anyone noticed!” Tessa admitted between cackling and stuttering breaths. Miliam sighed, just thankful it was a friendly game and not one with stakes.
“…does it count as cheating if the extra card wasn’t in the winning hand?” Eun-ji wondered, looking at Min-ji, but her sister just shrugged in confusion. In all honesty, Miliam didn’t have an answer to that question. Technically it fooled Aoibhe into overcommitting, but it’s not like she would have beaten a royal flush either way.
“Hand. Legit,” Engineer grunted, nodding in Tessa’s direction. Aoibhe sounded like she’d sprung a leak right now but she didn’t rebut the point. For her part, Miliam just wished Abigail had accepted the invitation to join them. She seemed adept at managing Tessa. Sadly, she’d demurred, saying it was best for the crew to build their own dynamic.
When Aoibhe grabbed all the cards and started sifting through them for more duplicates Miliam figured it was best to move onto something else.
“Hey, who wants to give some video games a try? I saw a racing game that allows six players,” she said, hopping out of her seat and heading for the entertainment center. The twins forgot about the card game pretty much instantly and hurried to claim their favorite controllers, while Engineer began to drag their special chair over more sedately. “Not sure how we’re going to have enough space on the screen though…”
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“Why do you think we have so many? Just turn the others on,” Aoibhe said, nose still buried in the cards. She was basically playing solitaire at this point as she sorted the cards by suit and number.
“Wait, really? It’s that simple?” Miliam asked, expecting there to be more steps, like changing the inputs or specifying the number of displays to use.
“Aye, it’s all set up for it already. Just make sure you’re close to the screen you want when you turn the controllers on so they’ll pair properly.” As she set another card in place, Aoibhe glanced at Tessa, glaring a bit. Miliam wasn’t really sure what she was expecting out of the elf.
“You really don’t need to check them all. I only slipped one in. I think. Unless I palmed two by accident? I’ve never done it before. I just kind of looked it up on the way back when I remembered I had a deck already. Oh! That was after you bought this one, sorry, captain. I didn’t think you’d want to turn around just to return a deck of cards so I figured you’d rather not know but now you do anyway so I guess that plan didn’t work out- oh, the light blue controller, please!”
No one was actually reaching for it, so Miliam just stared Tessa down until she hopped up to get the controller herself. To be fair, it probably took that long for the thought to even occur to her, and she probably hadn’t been expecting Miliam to get it for her. Shrugging to herself, Miliam slotted in the game she’d selected and booted it up.
It was a spaceship racing game with specs she wasn’t sure a 21st century supercomputer could have supported. In the past, games simulated what was essentially a shell with paint on it for everything that appeared in 3D. There was typically nothing underneath that shell, leading to the phenomenon of clipping the camera through it to see empty space. Gaming technology had moved so far past that as to make it look like Pong.
While watching the twins play games over the past week, Miliam had realized something: for at least some in game objects, everything was being simulated. According to the description of Sloop Racers 2, the game she’d selected for today, the ships they’d be using were actually simulated down to the smallest component. The game would track the condition of every single part for the purposes of tracking damage, so if one ship fired at another, it wouldn’t just reduce a nebulous health bar- it would actually deal localized damage that would be shown on-screen. And it wasn’t just using pre-generated graphics either; the physics engine generated realistic battle damage on the fly.
Everyone picked their ships and Miliam started the game. It was immediate chaos.
“Eun-ji, you’re out already!?”
“I forgot the controls were inverted!”
“She took me out with her…” Miliam muttered, looking at the debris on her screen. It was, admittedly, impressive to look at. Eun-ji’s ship had speared right through her own, resulting in a tangled ball of scrap she would have believed was hand-rendered if she didn’t know any better.
Tessa immediately slammed all her power into the thrusters and zipped ahead, but she wasn’t paying attention to her warning indicators. Her ship overheated and missed a turn, running headlong into an asteroid in the unrealistically dense field they were flying through. Engineer flew through a moment later, flying conservatively but steadily. Miliam looked over at the dragonewt and found they were dexterously operating their controller without using their claws. Granted, she wasn’t sure if that was for the benefit of the controller or the claw tips. For all she knew the controllers were nigh indestructible.
Now that she was eliminated, Tessa started narrating the competition.
“Three contestants are out but the survivors are neck and neck! No one knows why these asteroids are so close together, but all that matters is dodging them! Engineer is in the lead with steady and controlled piloting, but wait, here comes Aoibhe!”
“Tch.” Aoibhe clicked her tongue as she clipped an asteroid, but it was such a near-miss that the damage was minimal. “The sensitivity is nothing like a real ship,” the pilot complained.
“Ooh, that little mistake has cost her! Our resident pilot recovers from the impact, but Min-ji makes the most of this chance, gaining on her rapidly. Engineer was in the lead, but now they’re heading into a section that’s going to take some pretty quick reactions, and their playstyle just isn’t a match for it. We have Aoibhe catching up- but her engine is overheating, and there’s Min-ji slipping past!”
Min-ji took the lead, beating out the actual pilot of the crew while Aoibhe and Engineer vied for second place. Despite Aoibhe’s wild piloting, which allowed her to make use of numerous shortcuts and narrow gaps the others couldn’t safely slip through, Engineer’s skilled resource management kept them in contention, making up ground when Aoibhe was forced to slow down and let systems cool off.
“Go Min-ji! You can do it! Oh, there’s a shortcut there, turn, turn!” Eun-ji shouted, clinging to her twin’s shoulders as she backseated. Min-ji ignored her, sticking to the main route instead. It seemed to be working out for her, as the other two weren’t having much luck catching up.
“How am I losing…? I’m literally a pilot,” Aoibhe huffed, leaning forwards.
“If you ask me, it’s impressive you’re doing this well without playing the game before…” Miliam observed, setting her now-useless controller aside.
“I didn’t ask,” Aoibhe quipped in a sing-song voice.
“And our pilots are clear of the maze, heading out into the final straightaway! It’s the last chance for Aoibhe and Engineer to catch up, but Min-ji has a serious lead now. She’s keeping her speed down so her engine doesn’t overheat, but could that be the opportunity the others are looking for?”
Aoibhe and Engineer gunned it in the final stretch, but just as they were catching up, so did Min-ji. With their engines already red-lining, the two behind Min-ji fell away in her wake.
“And the winner is Min-ji! She wins a grand prize of…this ten of diamons!”
“Hey, that’s the one from the cap’n’s deck!” Aoibhe shouted, snatching for the card.
Miliam just sat back in her chair as Aoibhe tried, unsuccessfully, to grab the card from the much faster elf, toppling furniture in the process. It looked bad, but she knew Aoibhe wasn’t going to take it too far based on the way she was grabbing for the card and not Tessa herself. Eun-ji celebrated Min-ji’s win as if it were her own on the other side of the room and Engineer tilted their head to the side, reviewing the controls.
It was a bit chaotic, but Miliam thought that was alright.