Inn 54

"Hey, you, the one who looks like you got in an argument with a sandstorm!" Ferrl waved the clay-baked personage over. "Want to sit and play? Second one's optional."

Nico waved in return, and settled down with a pitcher of water and a glass. A small cloud of dust rose when she dumped her bundle on the floor and herself in a chair. She took a breath to speak, coughed instead, and drank a little, swilling the water around in her mouth.

"Not sure about playing. Haven't in ages. What do they put on cards here?"

"Yeah, hold on a sec..." Ferrl dealt out ten or so cards in order to find one of each suit.

There were five suits in all, marked with different animals' footprints - paw, hoof, bird's foot, humanoid hand - plus leaves.

"Those, plus picture cards." She found one of those, which was from the 'hoofs' suit and showed a horse. It was pretty handsome, which was why she'd picked up the deck somewhere on Eodea in the first place.

The symbols seemed vaguely familiar, but then, some things were popular in many places to put on playing cards. Despite having seen cards from the same tradition as this deck, Nico did not make the connection with their place of origin; the Eodean cards she had seen had been different styles, including things like featuring a boar rather than a horse, or bear paws rather than the cat's or dog's paws in this deck.

She made an approving noise seeing the quality of the picture card, but generally seemed a bit lost in thought, whether due to dried-out brain or trying to remember game rules was an open guess.

"What's all that dust from, anyway?" Ferrl asked, now shuffling again.

Nico put down the glass she'd been sipping from and shrugged. "Desert. Steppe during dry season. I walked through it." She smiled up at Laffent, not quite chatty enough right this moment to expound on it automatically.

Ferrl stopped shuffling and gave her a look. "In that case, you sure you don't want something stronger than water?"

She gave that some thought before answering happily, "I think booze would be too much of an incentive to pass out on the spot."

"Right." Ferrl chuckled. "You ever tried that booze they make from cacti, in those misshapen glass bottles?"

"Uh, possibly." If not the specific drink she was referring to , something similar, somewhere down the line. "Is it something you'd remember, or does it burn a hole into your memory?"

"In my case, I remember the first four or five shots. After that, reality got a little plastic," Ferrl said.

She divided the deck into two piles, placing them side-by-side to make sure they were even. "Do you know Snap?"

"I suspect I fill up a bit more quickly," Nico said, while thinking about card game rules. She knocked back the last drops of water before hazarding a guess.

"Add to central stack of cards in turn, slap it if the last card added was... A picture? to get the whole stack, whoever ends up with all cards wins?"

"That works for me," said Ferrl. It wasn't the variant she'd played, but perhaps that wasn't surprising.

Nico poured herself more water, and gave Ferrl a plaintive smile.

Ferrl gave her a stack of cards. "Shall we see if the desert's dried out your reflexes, then?" she grinned.

Nico cleared her throat and said, "Give me just a minute or three..." She folded her coat lengthwise and hung it over the back of her chair, and made another trip to the bar. She returned with a pastry, eating a third of it on the way back to the table.

She set the rest aside and licked icing from her fingers, chasing it (and some dust) with more water before attending to the cards.

Seeing that Ferrl was going to hold her half-stack in one hand, she Nico did likewise, and said, "Well, then..."

Ferrl nodded and flipped over the first card. When it came to reaction times, she had the definite disadvantage, but she didn't know that yet.

She made the first capture, anyway, since Nico had gotten caught in the rhythm of revealing cards. In addition to that, her mind was too busy going 'oooh, pretty' at the painted dog before remembering what the game was about. She chuckled a little and shifted her weight, leaning forward a bit more.

Ferrl wasn't green¹ enough to let an early win make her overconfident, but despite it all, pretty soon her reaction times averaged out as longer.

"Damn, girl, I'm glad we weren't betting on this game," she said at length when it was clear that Nico, literally, held all the cards.

Nico picked up a hand of cards off the top of the stack, fanned them, and gave them a melancholy smile. "So am I."

"Anyway," she went on, putting the cards back and changing gear to cheerful, "can I ask what you do when you don't look for people to play cards with?"