It was the beginning of a new week and Penny decided to spend the day differently for a change. She wasn’t going to be stuck indoors, working on a project, studying or planning her next prank. She was going out into the harsh unforgiving world, on a mini vacation. Going to her computer, she found a few places she had always wanted to visit, but never found the time, money or motivation and printed out a number of photographs from vacation ads and agency recommendations, then got into the DTR out of habit, disguised herself out of precaution and teleported to the first place.
Las Vegas, Nevada. A vacation recommendation, probably paid for by some big casino owner or two, so the naïve tourist full of dreams of riches and money would be conned to visit and lose all their money. The people who cheated or won too big were banned from the casinos, but their success inspired others to seek their own chance in the casinos, and so they only profited from such events. Of course that was true for normal cheating, counting cards, using predictive algorithms, loaded die and bribing employees or teaming with them. Penny was going to try her hand on magic cheating and only win big one time for each visited casino. With some good planning, in a couple of hours she would have a fortune. And if she got caught, meh, this wasn’t her real identity. She had made a bunch of new IDs that could pass a normal identity check with just an afternoon’s effort and no infiltration of government agencies. Then why only employ such methods now, instead of starting her company that way? Legal, job earned money for which you pay taxes on were used for business and secretly earned money with unlawful means were meant for secret vacations and entertainment.
The first casino Penny visited was one of the les known and small ones in the city, but it was a good first target to experiment and perfect her strategy. First she went to the slot machines and used a few coins to study how they worked. Every once in a while the slots would miss by a single part of a rotation, so with a small application of telekinesis she could align them easily, the question was the release of coins was guided by mechanical or electronic principle. If it was the first her method would work and she would be rich with coins and possibly some additional reward, if it was the second the algorithm that governs the win-lose rate would not detect the win and not activate the coin release. That was why she decided to go with the human error method and just start cheating on human operated games instead.
Penny started by betting small amounts of money on red or black on the roulette table. She was winning and losing at a rate of 40/60 until she started applying small amounts of telekinesis very covertly on the ball and tipping it toward her desired result. Little by little she increased her bets and started putting her chips on the dozen, then on the six line, then on basket, then on corner and at the end on street. She was careful not to win or lose too much money while observing and trying to predict in the vicinity of which number the ball will land. After all she couldn’t make the ball jump half the roulette wheel and still pretend it was a normal bounce. When she was ready and could predict the ball with a success rate of 70-80% she got ready to place her bet and do her magic. The dealer span the wheel, put the ball into play and Penny concentrated. She predicted the route of the ball and the number of bounces and placed all her chips on a single number bet. The dealer announced there were no more bets and Penny got ready to deploy telekinesis. Only to not need it. The ball found its way to the exact number she predicted. She collected her winnings and cashed them out, then left the casino. It looks like she was going to have to try her cheating in another place.
In the next few hours a number of other casinos were hit and not always on the roulette table either. There was one where she tried to cheat on dice, another she used illusion magic to cheat on cards, a third she did try the slot machines and won big. At one place she even won a car from some big promotion or something or another, which she almost immediately sold to someone else for cold hard cash. By the end of her tour through Las Vegas, she had enough money for 50 vacations across the world, and if you didn’t count the travel expenses, maybe even 80. It was unknown if the casinos would ever know they were robed, but amongst the casino crown that day was remembered as a legend, a normal looking woman arrived in Vegas and after only a few hours was packing a million dollars in a briefcase. Of course the stories attracted a number of new tourists to the city to lose their money, so the casinos didn’t lose much.
After winning the money for her unplanned, unsponsored and impulsive vacation, Penny teleported to Kalymnos, Greece where she exchanged some money to the local currency, then bought some climbing gear like shoes, pads and talk pouch and went to a spot to free climb. Why not start slow and begin with ropes and full set of gear? Because of magic. She could fly if she wanted to, so the chances of her going ‘splat’ on the ground below were so close to zero, they may as well have been. Okay, she could panic when falling and forget to cast magic, or teleport or whatever, so she put a proximity measuring enchantment on her clothes that would activate a flying spell of last resort. The next couple of hours Penny learned how to climb, conserve stamina and other tricks the local climbers knew. When she returned home, she decided to study more about the sport and maybe take it more seriously.
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The next place she visited was Kīlauea in Hawaii. She really wanted to see an active volcano up close. Maybe someday she could build a villain layer in one, so it wouldn’t hurt to see one and come up with a plan on how to design and build the layer. Besides, she really wanted to spit in the mouth of an active volcano. She climbed up to the peak of the volcano, carefully watching for cracks in the ground where pockets of gas could erupt or where lava could flow and avoided them. When she reached the mouth of the volcano and looked down, she saw the orange crust with yellow cracks running through, hinting at the hot lava bellow just waiting to erupt. It was definitely a sight she would remember even if she didn’t have the memory that she did. Penny carefully aimed and spit into the mouth, the giggled and teleported to a beach on Oahu, another island in the Hawaii chain.
Penny bough a wetsuit, surfboard and supplies from the local shops and quickly went into the water. The waves today were the perfect height for her to learn how to serf natural waves after her success in the water park indoor wave generator. She spent another couple of hours learning, falling, riding and generally having fun, before succeeding to ride a 5 meter wave. Now after all the fun she had, she was hungry and in the mood for something fancy.
Penny dressed into something fancy and teleported to Paris, France, right in front of Clamato, a restaurant with good food without the need for a reservation. After all the activities she did today, she was ravenous and ordered a full course seafood meal or whatever was on the menu, because one could find only so much from a casual internet search about a place he had never visited before. The meal was delicious, the price expected and the service exceptional. When she had her fill, Penny paid her bill and then left the place and teleported to the Eiffel Tower.
She had seen the monument in books, movies and media, but seen up close, it really was a feat of engineering one could admire. Penny climbed the tower slowly, taking time to look at its construction, study the design and architecture. If she couldn’t enjoy herself fully, why bother going on vacation at all? When she reached the top, Penny took the elevator down and after walking a certain distance away, turned around and gazed at the full view of the tower. ‘Maybe next time I visit I will bring Jenny with me.”
While she was in France, Penny found a performing Mime and carefully observed his performance. It really did look like he was interacting with invisible objects, which was credit to how skilled the performer was. She could see how the god of pranks could be mistaken and create a whole new spell to mimic the feat of the performers with. She may as well have some fun. Penny visited a furniture store and bought a table and a chair, then she went and bought a pitcher, knife and fork and a plate, from another store then bought today’s newspaper and cast selective invisibility on all of them. Then she cast illusion magic on herself to appear with the makeup and clothes of a mime and carefully arranged the furniture on a street corner and started performing having breakfast and reading a newspaper. She was sitting on her invisible chair, holding an invisible knife and fork, eating and invisible meal, pouring from an invisible pitcher into an invisible glass, then drinking from the glass. Then when she was done, she crossed her legs and started reading and turning the pages of her invisible newspaper. Finally she folded her paper, put her hands on the invisible table and used it to help her stand up from the chair. She put everything into her pocket dimension stealthily and left the street corner. It was fun pretending to be a mime with the help of magic. Maybe next she would try to do fake magic with the help of real one.
The next few places she visited were a race track, where she rented a car and drove a few laps. With the help of her glasses and A.I.C.A. she even beat the track record. After that she jumped out of an airplane, wearing a snowboard or its air riding equivalent and a parachute, just to see what all the fuss was about. It didn’t beat flying with magic, but it was okay. Then she visited a ski resort and tried her feet with a snowboard. It took time to learn the differences between it and surfing, but she had fun and at the end could come down the mountain without a problem. She decided to have some Wagyu beef of high quality in Japan for dinner, after which she teleported back home.
-I had enough outdoor to last me a month. Now I can isolate myself indoors and not leave my lab for a month. Muahaha.-
And the evil laughter was accompanied by holographic lightning behind her and the sound of thunder coming from the speakers in the room.