RP:Blackjack
Pirate Hideout
Cesaria greased the right palms to find and enter the pirate hideout without trouble. Upon arrival at the dive, she realized she should have spent some time on camouflage. Her crisp, all-black suit and heeled boots may have been discreet in the funeral parlors of Cenril, but in this brined and browned tavern, she looked possibly insane. The black veil that obscured her face didn’t help the situation much. She removed her wide-brimmed hat and tucked it under an arm as she moved through the dense crowd. “Excuse me,” she said as she shoved past a bearlike man sloshing his ale on the floor and his needle-neck comrades alike. She made a beeline for the official gambling parlor which was cordoned off by frayed and cigarette-burned velvet rope. Two bouncers stood guard. Cesaria looked past their broad shoulders at the high-rollers tables as the back in search for one particularly wealthy pirate couple. “Can’t stay here, missy. Coming or going? You got a invite?” the older bouncer said. “An invite?” Cesaria asked. “Uuh…” She patted down her pockets to stall for time. Pirates took bribes, right?
Leander was already here when Cesaria arrived. Unlike new arrival Cesaria, Leander blended in and utterly nothing about his attire was memorable or worth describing. Leander had been here, for a bit actually, on tilt for a solid two hours to be more precise, but his luck was changing, as err... luck would have it. He was now up, marginally. Which was good because he sometimes (and by sometimes, certainly presently) operated as a sort of gambler’s pyramid scheme. He needed to win today, here, to pay off yesterday’s debts, elsewhere. He was adept at poker but the grind exhausted him, in particular whilst on tilt, and so presently he was seated at a roulette table of sorts, refusal to leave on account of his hot hand, a fallacy that was his personal religion when he got deep in his cups and when he was up. Both presently the case. Incidentally the roulette table he was at was near the velvet rope at which Cesaria currently lurked, but to dimension that further... this place both tried really hard but also phoned it in: the roulette wheel was apparently very DIY, seemingly constructed out of a trash can lid. Leander is paying no mind to Cesaria presently, for she is a stranger and money is on the table. Unfortunately, it won’t be going to him, not this go-round. Someone else wins big, though, the number right and everything. The table roars. There’s movement, this type of thing always inspiring rubbernecking.
Cesaria was about to lose the bouncers’ patience when the roulette table erupted in euphoria. An opportunist by force of her circumstances, she immediately picked out the winner by the halo of attention and barely-contained loathing that crowned him. “Huey! Huey!” his mates chanted. Cesaria pointed double finger-guns at Huey in the universal sign of ‘that’s the guy.’ “Yeeeaa, Huuueeeey!” she called out in hopes that his gilded rapture would inspire him to mirror her. Her bet paid off. “Eeeyy!!!” Huey shouted back, finger-gun pointing at the veiled stranger, still under the influence on a winner’s high (and pixie dust). Maybe this gambling thing wasn’t so hard after all. Cesaria leaned towards the bouncer’s ear and shouted, “That’s my boyfriend!” She pointed at Huey who was now as oblivious to her as Leander. The bouncer rolled his eyes, his jowls going a little slack at this trite lie. Despite his savvy intuition, the bouncer unlatched the velvet rope and let Cesaria through because she was young, a woman, and probably a babe under that weird veil, which was enough to keep these drunks placing bets with the pageantry of a peacock spreading its feathers. “Don’t place any bets,” the bouncer warned. Cesaria, who was evidently not a very good liar, pushed past the bouncer before he changed his mind. She joined the rowdy roulette table across from Huey and next to Leander whom she had yet to notice. Not understanding the rules of roulette, or caring to learn them, she glanced at the high-rollers blackjack table at the back of the room. Her gaze fell often on the woman who wore an expensive wrap dress and a deep-plunging pendant adorned with a peculiar dark blue gemstone. A drunk on Leander’s other side leaned across Leander to shout-talk at Cesaria. “What should I bet on, sweetheart?” His foul breath sprayed Leander’s chin with little flecks of spit. “What?” Cesaria shouted back. “Wha-wha should I-” “I don’t know the rules.” “Okay, well red or black, baby?” The drunk’s mate chimed in, “Tell him to bet straight up!” Several men snickered at the prank. “Okay, bet straight up,” Cesaria said, shrugging, not a part of whatever high jinks was unspooling on the other side of Leander. The drunk said “F*** it, fine, let’s do it. You only live once, yea boys?!” He bet it all (which wasn’t impressive, he had nearly lost it all and it was no wonder why). His little posse roared and clapped him enthusiastically on the back. 35:1 odds, a stupid bet in roulette, but he’s even stupider drunk. The trash lid spins and…. “AAAHH!!!!!” The entire table jumps. Several men grip their heads in their hands, eyes nearly popping out their skulls. The winner’s posse rhythmically bangs on the table. “HOO, HOO HOO HOO HOO!” they whooped like gorillas. They jostle one another and shove Leander, a poor casualty of their inebriated frenzy. The drunk man points at Cesaria and says “Call the next bet, sweetheart! You’re on fire!” Cesaria immediately regretted whatever she got herself into. “Same thing again,” she said. A man yelped in alarm. This wench was crazy! Hoo hoo hoo hoo!!
Leander didn’t lose a lot just then but it was still not an ideal result. Any depletion of his slim margin of winnings was undesirable. As excitement erupted around the table, Leander drained the whiskey tumbler in front of him and took quick stock of his chips. Not that he didn’t know how much he had, he just wanted to double check, also had the hope he’d count again and find money. It’s then that he’s sprayed with spittle by the man beside him, and, glowering, Leander recoils to give the man and his halitosis some breathing room, pun, yes. He’d not say anything yet. Instead he made a small bet on black to grind back what he’d just lost, and a waitress, detecting his empty glass, came by with a fresh whiskey. It paid - the casino - to keep the gamblers wasted. It’d been a bit of a lively crowd before, but the addition of Lucky Cesaria now made it all the livelier. The woman had an apparent talent, the table erupted once more. Leander, not having bet straight up, only profited a small amount, but now she had Leander’s attention. His gaze flicked to her, in the company of his rather drunk and woefully crude and human-acting table companions. He wasn’t the only one watching her, no doubt the casino kept employed a certain element that was trained to catch those with magical talents that could be used against the house. She’d be shut down soon if that was the case. But for now, Leander kept his gaze trained on her and slowly placed his bet, a modest but nonetheless sizable one, with the group.
Cesaria was able to piece together enough of the game to realize that her two-for-two fluke was extraordinary. Fred, the drunk with halitosis, reached around behind Leander to clap Cesaria on the shoulder, a touch she evaded with a smooth and immediate roll of her shoulder. No, thanks. No magic emanated from her now, just as it hadn’t with the first bet, and her hands were visible at all times. “Baby, where ya been all night!” Fred exclaimed. Cesaria feigned a smile as unconvincing as her interest in roulette, an expression obscured by the black veil she had not yet removed. She glanced again at the blackjack table, its participants calmer and older than the roulette crowd, then back to her immediate surroundings where she noticed Leander for the first time, or more precisely, noticed the attention he fixated on her behind an inscrutable gaze. Fred, feeling his lucky charm’s attention slip away from him, asked “What’s with the veil, sweetheart? You lose somebody?” Cesaria, accustomed to the question, answered without hesitation. “Yes, my husband.” She drew on her surroundings to sell the story. “A sailor.” She noticed a tattoo on a nearby arm. “They say a kraken did it.” Looking back at the blackjack table, she leaned into Leander and whispered, “What’s that game over there? Is that poker?” She spoke with a thick foreign accent that dwelled on vowels and r’s.
Leander didn’t pound the table or yell when the right number was called, and Cesaria proven right again. He merely straightened, and, eyeing Cesaria, collected his chips to cash out. That was it, after all. They’d shut her down soon. He’d not be in the vicinity when it happened, either. Such things could get ugly, even if this place pretended to be posh (it was not, the roulette wheel was a trash can lid). He’d have departed and on his merry way to settle his debts but for Cesaria’s invocation of one of the few conversation topics he’d an interest in. It is not that he glared at her in response, exactly, but it was a forceful gaze that he pinned the veiled woman with, to be sure. She didn’t seem all that deterred by it, rather she leaned close to whisper her question to him about cards. “Yes,” he answered simply, continuing to stare at her when she drew back. He tried to place her accent, but could not. The way he looked at her was so pregnant with thought there would have been no doubt he was not done, still gauging what else to say. Fred inelegantly got to the subject first: “Baby, I’m sorry, but that kraken’s going to get what’s coming to him.” “Hear hear!” shouted another man. “Kill ‘em all!” “That guy’s got a kraken tattoo,” Fred observed for the group, loudly, pointing at Leander’s rolled up shirtsleeve. “Kill ‘em all,” said Leander gamely. “Where’d it happen, babe?” Fred inquired of Cesaria. “Out here in Rynvale, there’s one. Slippery fellow, shows up every few months.” Leander’s face was carefully neutral as he drank from his whiskey. Fred was going to do all the interrogating for him.
Cesaria nodded along with the cries for kraken extermination, saying “Hear hear!” whenever it appeased the drunks. In truth, she had never had a run-in directly or indirectly with a kraken, at least not as far as she knew, which was a significant distinction in these parts. “Must have been the same one,” Cesaria said, careful not to over complicate a simple lie. She let Fred fill out his own story as she met Leander’s stare coolly. There was an intelligence to Leander’s stare that made her want to bet on him. “Do you know how to play poker?” she asked Leander, canting her head towards the blackjack table. “Can you show me?”
Leander mentally catalogued his most recent run ins, while in his natural form, with ships that led to those ships’ destruction such that people would have died. It wasn’t the case that he was Leander the friendly kraken, but he wasn’t exactly Leander the bloodthirsty kraken either. These things happened sometimes, was all. He wasn’t exactly fluent in human traditions but he did know that a veil suggested a recent death though, meaning the husband’s wouldn’t have been on him, and he didn’t know of any other krakens in the area presently. So either he had company, or Cesaria… was a liar. Maybe she knew that he knew something because she addressed him rather than Fred, who was the person eager to talk to her after all. No question her request was one to peel off, and he felt inclined to grant it, if only to sate his curiosity. “Sure,” he answered, and peeled away from the table, letting her fall in step beside him. “That’s a blackjack table, by the way,” he informed her, as they fell out of earshot of Fred and comrades. He wasn’t sure her interest was genuine but he briefly explained the basic premise of the game as they approached, but there wasn’t room to play just yet. “I work in boats, by the way,” he turned to face her at the conclusion of this brief overview. “Hadn’t heard of the Rynvale kraken in several months. They say he went elsewhere for the winter.”
Cesaria chuckled when Leander corrected her after just having told her it was poker. Perhaps it was a trick of the light playing through her veil, but as she chuckled her lips deflated into something gray, thin and dessicated. The transformation was so sudden that Leander would be wise to blame the whiskey, because a closer look revealed a normal, youthful face. On their way to the blackjack table, Cesaria dropped her voice to a whisper again, “I can’t place bets myself. I’ll slip you gold, you cash in, and whatever you multiply for me, I’ll give you a share of the gains. How does that sound? You owe me nothing if you lose.” Already her hand was slipping into his a small purse heavy with coin. If he cashed in, she’d wait for him at the blackjack table for blackjack 101. She nodded along to his explanation, retaining maybe a third of the lesson, in part because she had no genuine interest and in part because he introduced a few higher level concepts in a beginner discourse. The return of the subject of the kraken was an unwelcome one, but she humored him. “They must be mistaken,” she said. “I’d rather not talk about the kraken, it pains me too much.” A spot cleared at the table for a gambler and a plus one. Cesaria slipped into her seat and sat behind Leander to spy his cards. Often, her gaze lifted across the table to the wealthy pirate wife and her alluring, dark blue pendant. Depending on how Leander performed, she would decide whether or not to offer him a sweeter deal.
Leander had missed the brief transformation beneath the veil, or if he did notice a difference, would have indeed attributed it to the whiskey. The veil was a good strategy on her part. He’d intended to warn her against a repeat performance of whatever clever “guessing” had taken place at the roulette table, but she had a different plan. She wanted him to gamble for her. He appraised her, his suspicions about her calcifying. He didn’t care to ask questions about how she cheated, only knew that now he was infected with the knowledge that she did, somehow. He took her money but had said nothing by way of assent. Rather, as stated, he explained blackjack to her. More so than needed, no doubt. He then said nothing when, at the conclusion of his explanation about gambling, she batted aside his attempt to fact check her story about the kraken, and her husband. Rather, he simply grunted and, sitting down at the blackjack table, began to play. A seasoned gambler, he was... only slightly above average. He immediately lost a hand due to plain bad luck, and then very narrowly won a few hands. There was small conversation being made at the table. They knew Leander here, after all. He drank and played and didn’t cause trouble. “Who’s your lady friend?” one of the others had asked him. “A friend’s widow,” he’d answered. An explanation that made sense to him, on a kraken level, but not to anybody else.
Cesaria, as Leander would soon find out with his bad start, was not cheating. His luck was his own, and she had hoped to cling to his success for her own benefit. She watched carefully, asked some questions, ordered a glass of wine that she nursed for far too long, her focus on the game. Leander once again, stubbornly, brought the subject back around to her dead husband, who, of course, never existed, but the poor boatwright had no way of knowing that. A woman at the table, not Cesaria’s mark, said, “I’m sorry to hear that, miss. Was he a sailor?” “Yes,” Cesaria replied, hoping to avoid the topic of krakens in this kraken-obsessed cove. “Hope it wasn’t that kraken that’s been lurking in these waters,” the woman continued. Cesaria feigned a sad smile and left it at that. The casino’s obsession with this kraken finally piqued her interest and she glanced at Leander’s tattoo for the second time. In a lowered voice, she asked Leander as the croupier shuffled cards, “Did the kraken attack one of your ships? Is your tattoo to remember the fallen men?” As the evening yawned past midnight,Leander played a decent if unremarkable hand. Cesaria was no longer certain he had the mettle to secure her ultimate prize, but she felt committed to her gamble on him now, too late to pull out, and, whatmore, she pitied him for what she presumed was a run-in with the kraken. Must be hard. She knew hardship and sympathized easily with those whom fate had dealt a bad hand. “My name is Cesaria, by the way. Listen, you see that woman across the table?” she whispered again. “See her pendant? The blue one? If you get her to wager that necklace, and you win it, I’ll let you keep all the gold and take the necklace for myself. Sound fair?”|
Leander continued steadily grinding blackjack hands as Cesaria became the victim of his awkward explanation for her presence here. Fortunately for him, no one asked him to (a) identify this friend, or (b) the reason he brought his friend’s widow to a gambling joint. Cesaria addressed him between hands, asking about the motivation behind his tattoo, and he glanced at it. “No,” he said. He didn’t elaborate. It didn’t seem to demoralize her either, notwithstanding her alleged dead husband. Well then. They understood each other. He didn’t mind the arrangement, which benefited him. So, he played more cards. It got late. He’d been waiting for whatever luck he’d seen at the roulette table to manifest, but it never did. Perhaps it would now, he thought, as she made her suggestion. His gaze slid to mark the pendant, and then returned to Cesaria. He studied her for a prolonged pause and then addressed the pendant-wearing woman in question directly: “My companion here is admiring your necklace. I’d like you to wager it.” The woman, counting her chips, paused and instinctively fingered the pendant, growing coy. “What’s making the lady happy worth to you, Leander?” she asked. Leander barked a laugh, and replied, stacking a few of his high value chips: “Not very much, quite frankly.” The woman, though she smiled, made no move to remove the necklace. She watched as Leander added one more chip. They eyed each other, until finally she broke, under the pressurized gaze of others at the table, who were beginning to murmur. “Fine,” she said, and tossed the necklace in.
When Leander laughed, Cesaria pressed her knuckles against her lips to hide the foul transformation that quickly rotted her lips and crumbled the tip of her nose as she tittered. He amused her with his honest joke at her expense. In her amusement, she thought of another, a man she loved and who was in fact dead but had not made her a widow, and wondered what he would make of all this. She couldn’t wait to tell him, when the time was right. Thinking grim thoughts, she quickly regained composure of her face and said to Leander, “You sure do know how to sell it.” He played his hand well, but more importantly, he finally tapped into some of that luck he credited to Cesaria. He won! Cesaria’s hands flew to cover her nose and mouth as she squealed with delight. Beneath her palms flesh decayed, supernaturally sensitive noses might even smell it. She repressed her joy and felt her nose bud back into place. “Well done!” She clapped Leander on the shoulder as she rose, using him as leverage to push herself onto her feet. “The gold is yours, Leander,” she said as she scooped up the necklace. “Good luck with the kraken,” she murmured only to him, confirming what he already knew: she was no widow. She lifted a hand in farewell to the rest of the table. Then to Leander, she winked and turned away from him before he could see the joy set and rot on her face.
Leander won the hand with little trouble. He observed, out of the corner of his eye, Cesaria’s glee, and wondered privately whether she was not cheating after all, or whether she was merely a very convincing faker. In any event, they had not been swept up by security, and so the answer did not matter, and he would leave this place a richer man. There was something strange about her, and her veil was hiding something besides a deceased husband, but this was a magical land in which many things were strange and not every strange thing needed investigating. He recouped his other winnings as Cesaria retrieved the necklace. Perhaps she would grow comfortable to gamble herself in the future, he considered saying, but the words died in his throat. Instead, he snorted in response to her well wishing, and said only, very dryly, “Thank you,” without bothering to correct her. If she wanted to believe he had dealings with krakens, which he supposed he did on occasion, that was fine. “Good games,” he laconically told the table, and departed. He went to cash out, and as such did not offer to walk Cesaria out, or see the look on her face as she herself left, filled with happiness.