…or, My Cups Runneth Over
Watching Iason do something he wasn’t superhumanly great at was a revelation.
Let me rephrase that.
Watching Iason do something he wasn’t superhumanly great at—and couldn’t pretend like he was—was a revelation.
He wasn’t any great shakes at interpersonal communication, for instance, but that didn’t matter. He was hot. He was rich. He was an elf. You don’t have to be nice to people when you can glide right past them. If the way sunlight plays off your skin is enough to dazzle someone all by itself, it’s easy for them to miss what a manipulative asshole you are. Anybody who didn’t like him was either one of his epic enemies, or didn’t matter.
When he sat down to play cards, his heritage didn’t help him. Sure, it gave him everything he needed to be a first rate card player. He was cunning. He was perceptive. He could do the sleight of hand if it came down to that. But in cards, being an elf doesn’t give you a better hand to begin with. If he’d been playing other elves, pride might have compelled him to dig deep and work harder to beat them. Against a table of clumsy, mortal humans, his pride became a problem.
I’d pictured him putting on his usual cocky debonair front. He could bluff big, so big that it was transparent and obvious that people would walk right into the trap he laid for them. He could have done it, but he got pissed off when the first few hands didn’t go his way. He got moody and petulant.
At that point, he became less interesting to me than the game itself was.
Go on and guess what that did for his mood. I didn’t care. His bad night didn’t have to be mine.
We had five people. We were playing poker instead of cups so we wouldn’t lose anyone before we attracted a bigger crowd.
Standard cups is a four person game. In a casual game between unfamiliar players, you couldn’t count on a single odd man out sticking around for very long before they wander off, and that would have only left four. If you played cups without anyone waiting to jump in, your game was over for everyone as soon as anyone left.
It was Marlot, me, Iason, the little guy from our floor named Eric and another one Marlot had dug up somewhere. I sized the other guys up the way I had travelers at the tavern. It was a little weird. I was used to being “the kid” playing against adults; guys my dad’s age, or older if they were dwarves.
The lounge was far from dead. Juliana, who’d thought my name was “hey, gay kid!”, was watching TV with some friends. Other people came and went, warming up their meals, sitting to watch a few minutes of TV or a few minutes of play.
It wasn’t long before Iason started in on me, trying to get me away from the table. He’d grasped the rules of the game in one explanation, but the subtleties were lost on him. He was angrily folding when he couldn’t see the immediate value of his hand, which made it painfully obvious when he did have something.
“Iamie, I wanted to talk to you about our papers,” he said after putting his cards down again.
“You do yours yet?” I asked.
“Not yet.”
“What do you need to talk about?”
“I do not think that we should bore your friends with class talk,” he said.
“Yeah, okay,” I said. “It can wait until we’re done, then.”
“You know I am going to be busy all day tomorrow,” he said.
“You are spending the night, though, right?” I said. “So we’ll have time.”
“Honestly, Iamie, this is the most infuriatingly stupid diversion I have ever been subjected to.”
“Well, stick around, and we’ll start playing cups in a bit,” I said.
“Cups? What is that?”
“Another card game,” I said.
“Different from this one?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. A little terse, maybe, but he was getting on my nerves.
“I want to play that, then,” he said.
“It’s for four people,” I said.
“There are more than four people here.”
“Let’s wait until we’ve got some more,” I said.
“But you just said it’s for four,” he complained.
“Anybody know where Lonnie is?” the other guy—Burl, he was called—said. I didn’t know if that was his real name or not. He was burly enough that it could have been a nickname.
“She’s visiting her parents,” Marlot said.
“Iolana went back to Kaha Moai for the weekend?” I asked. I couldn’t believe she was willing to butcher such a pretty name. I also couldn’t believe she’d traveled across half the continent and then over hundreds of miles of ocean for a weekend commute. “What, does she have a planar doorway hidden away in her closet or something?”
“No, her parents rented a townhouse for her first semester here,” Marlot said.
“Why would anybody in their right mind move from a tropical island to here right at the end of summer?” Eric asked.
“This is just a crazy bet, but probably so their daughter can visit them on weekends,” Marlot said.
“Don’t they have any schools on Kana-what’s it?” Burl asked.
“Probably,” I said. “Probably good ones, too. She must have learned all those languages somewhere.”
“All what languages?” Burl asked.
“She speaks seven languages,” I said.
“Wow, you must know her pretty well,” Eric said.
He’d been in the meet-and-greet where she’d told the whole floor that little tidbit, but I let it pass. I had his attention, and Burl’s. That was an advantage. If they kept thinking about how to get an in with the beautiful island girl, they wouldn’t be thinking of their cards.
“We’ve gotten to know Lonnie very well,” Marlot said, rearranging the cards in her hand more than would be necessary to produce any useful result. “She told me that education improves in her odds in the village lottery.”
“They do a lottery?” Burl asked. “How much is it?”
“Oh, it’s not for money,” Marlot said. Her voice was low and even as she spun her bullshit finely. “Every year, one girl from each village on the island gets selected by lot as a potential bride for their god. All the finalists come together and the priests look them over and decide which one’s the most suitable spouse.”
“Every year, huh?” Eric asked. “Guy must get plenty of trim.”
He and Burl both chuckled a little nervously.
“Oh, well, it’s arguable how much pleasure he gets out of them,” Marlot said. “The theory is that they arrive in his realm in perfect astral bodies, but their physical forms take a bit of a beating on the trip.” Burl and Eric stared at her, not getting it. “What with the lava and all.”
“Holy shit, they throw the loser in a volcano?” Burl asked.
“Or the winner, depending on how you look at it,” Marlot said.
“The funny thing is, Iolana wasn’t really clear about whether she was trying to improve her odds of avoiding that fate, or of being picked,” I said. “Apparently it’s a huge honor, or something. Like being called to be a paladin.”
“Only instead of a nifty mount and a healing touch, you get your flesh melting off your bones,” Marlot said.
Eric and Burl had both gone pale.
“Huh,” Burl said, trying to laugh and failing. He forced a smile. I knew a lame attempt at a joke was coming. He was the tough guy at the table. He couldn’t wuss out. “Well, I bet those other chicks don’t care so much if they’re always the bridesmaids, huh?”
“The other females, having been chosen by fate, are not released from their duty ,” Iason said quietly. “The island of Kaha Moai has no large game animals, you see, so the islanders live on fruit and fish most of the year. However, some occasions—such as the wedding of a god—call for a more substantial feast.”
If we hadn’t just described sacrifice-by-volcano, he might have had to spell it out for them, but they got the picture he was painting without any more strokes. Burl swallowed, and didn’t try to push his tough guy cred any further. Iason pushed the fan of cards on the table in front of him into a neat pile and waited while we finished up the hand. After that, he got into the spirit of the game a little bit more.
We attracted some hangers-on as the night went on, and once there were enough people to get a couple of groups going we switched to our preferred game.
Iason got cups a lot quicker than he had poker. I think it’s because cups is a more violent game. The goal’s to stick your opponents and not get stuck yourself. You feint, you dodge, you attack. Poker’s a game of diplomacy, by comparison. It’s all posturing. By the time you get to the showdown, the game’s over. The thing’s decided.
Iason had everything he needed to be good at it, but cups suited his instincts better. It was a game of slyness and viciousness.
Think I’m crazy? Listen to the patter when guys get out a deck and play. You’ll hear some trash talk when around a poker match, but nothing like what you get in a good game of cups.
He did good, but Marlot did better. When he tried to slay the dragon, she popped out of nowhere with the queen of wands and took a trick with a point in it away from him. He kept discounting her. He kept forgetting her. She might have been pissed, but Marlot mid-game didn’t care about anything that was an advantage.
I watched Iason settle into the rhythm of it and I wondered how he’d do at partner games. I wondered if he fought on the field with the same panache he was slinging the cups with. I doubted it would be quite the same, but I was sure it would be a sight to see.
