It started at a card game

Some people swear by card games like Dragon Poker, or Cripple Mr. Onion, or Damage, even Double Fanucci. Some people play Pyramid, or Tall Card; hell, I've known some who swear Cups is the greatest game ever invented. Personally, I like my games a little more basic. Blackjack works for me, War, and I have taken part in some very lucrative rounds of Combat 52 Pick-Up. Won an enchanted sword at that, one fine night.

But when I’m in the Gambling Hell, I play Hi-Low. Well, I bet on Hi-Low. The actual game is as simple as can be. Two to four players take turns drawing off a standard deck, and the highest card wins. Winner of the last round draws first, then draw proceeds around to the left, until all players have drawn, at which point all players show their cards. That’s the whole game.

Betting on Hi-Low, now, is something else entirely. You can bet on the winner, on who gets second, third, or fourth card; you can bet on whether one player will beat another, on the number of times a given player will win or lose, on the total number of wins or loses by a particular player, on the number of times a particular player will win or lose in a row, on how many times a particular suit or number will appear during a set run of draws. You can, in fact bet on anything that comes into your head, as long as you can find a taker. Some of these bets may seem like incredible long shots, involving sets of factors on which no person could possibly make odds. When the individuals who make up the betting pool include Demon Princes and hypermetric computational entities, psychic precognatives, persons with access to workable methods of scrying and divination, those who can speak to the unquiet dead, and Stochastic Men who read order into chaos, well, all bets are off, no pun intended.

So the simple game was really the quiet eye of a very complicated storm of wagers, some taking place before the game began, some taking place before each shuffle, some taking place before or after each player made their draw.

I’ve made a good amount of cash over the years, betting on my gut. Today, though, today I was flush, and felt lucky, so I’d gone whole hog. I’d bought a spot at the table, and hedged it so guaranteed to leave with at least something I wanted, and possibly a whole lot of it. See, along with my place at the table, I’d bought a percentage on my bets. That is, I’d bought, from the management of the Gambling Hell, a payback on winning bets placed on me. The Hell took a 1% fee for all bets placed, win or lose. Of the money they took for those bets based on my place in every draw, I got 2% of what they took. Way I figured it, if I stayed in the game long enough, I was bound to at least make back the cost of my place at the table, and maybe the percentage charge as well.

However, my real hope for cashing in lay with Andros and X, my betting partners. Andros and X were very successful professional Hi-Low bettors, with a clocked win rate of 56%. It wasn’t strictly legal, by the house rules, for me to have money on a match while I was getting the percentage back. You could get paid coming or going, but not both. It was one of those rules that everyone broke. It was a way for the Hell to toss out people they didn’t want around anymore. The Gambling Hell never let its own regulations get in the way of business. Bless the owners’ black and flabby little hearts.

So I spent ten hours sitting around a small, well-lit table, drawing cards, eating free food and drinking free drinks, listening to the joy and pain of the betting crowd roll over me at the end of each draw.

My fellow card players were an interesting lot, too. The fellow across from me was wearing a containment suit, with the most complete coverage I’d ever seen. Made sense, really, as he was one of the Infected, from a locality of such lethal diseases that that the local human stock had evolved to the point where they could survive anything but the absence of disease. The containment suit was as much for him as for the rest of us; if the illnesses he carried had spread, instead of re-infecting him constantly, his super-charged immune system would have begun to destroy him for lack of anything else to fight.

To the right, there was one of the Celestial Architects. This particular specimen might have been human or human derived, but who could tell without asking impertinent questions? It was humanoid, anyway. The Architects made their money by using proprietary dimensional and temporal technology to produce made to order planets, solar systems, localities, and other, more outré topographic places for customers with very deep pockets. I’d never been this close to one before. A bit staid for my tastes, but very polite.

Our fourth for the game was less commonplace than the rest of us. Wreathed in shadow, even under the table’s spotlights, it seemed composed of writhing tentacles, red, staring, only occasionally visible eyes, and distractingly misshapen appendages, it was an authentic Deep One, a horror from beyond space and time. It had spent the game snacking on small, screaming creatures it grabbed from a covered dish beside the table and speaking in a voice that was composed of hugely disconcerting buzzing, whistling, and screeching, which was only slightly improved by the cultured Indian accent that came out of the thing’s translation cube. For all of the Deep One’s off-putting presence, it did make quite amiable small talk.

And there was me. Compared to these three, I was as normal as could be, even with my third eye, and the left hand made of crimson metal.