The Poker Game

When the immortals play games, everyone loses.

     A curl of grey smoke lazed it's way past her prominent needle-like right fang and drifted to hang in the unmoving air with it's previous brothers. A cancerous miasma clinged to the immediate area formed from her previous exhalations and the sight of it brought her pleasure equal to the discomfort she could see on her counterpart's face. Virtue hated anything fun, and this was just one of those occasions.

     Vice tapped her cigarette wand in the black acrylic ashtray sitting on the table and considered the icy cards before her. The game was poker, the name was five card draw. She preferred Texas Hold 'Em, but she was devilishly good at all gambling games as they fell within her realm. This wasn't fair, of course, but she made it a point not to play by the rules. Immortals couldn't interact with one another without creating major dischord so in an effort to keep things as boring and mundane as possible Virtue had suggested they play a board game. Since he came up with the terms, it was up to Vice to solidify the details. She wanted SOME competition, so five card draw it was.

     The room was infinitely large, holding a small cosmos as well as their poker table. Currently their game was drifting past a miniature super nova, stardust exploding with technicolor beauty. The elegance and majesty of the expanding supersystem was wasted on it's audience. Vice yawned and clicked her elegant nails against the green slate in front of her.

     "Um. Check?" Virtue sounded unsure and apprehensive and the corner of Vice's luscious tar-black lips turned up in an amused sneer.

     "Say..." she drew it out, looking him over with half-lidded eyes, "why don't we get down to business? Raising you three." Three clear chips that appeared to have galaxies trapped inside them clinked heavily on the slate. Virtue frowned at his hand, trying to justify the need to actually gamble. Pathetic.

     "Well, there's talk among the council of bringing up our predecessors' case again. They would have contacted you, but you're notoriously hard to get a hold of, so...here I am." She had been taking a sip of the blood red wine she had materialized a second before, but on revelation of the subject at hand, Vice swallowed hard and stared down the milky white immortal in front of her.

     "You MUST be joking."

     "You know I wish I was? Regardless of what you think I DO have a sense of humor, but you know I could never lie. Not even to you." There was a hint of bitterness and three chips left his hand and hit the table to settle in with the ante. Vice huffed in disbelief.

     "Are they calling us up?"

     "Not yet." He put down two cards and she dealt him two more.

     "Well, what do they expect to find! The family is dead. All of them. Worse than dead... They were exponged from existance! We were pulled into this mess involuntarily and NOW they want to reconsider? I won't be repurposed. I won't." Virtue wasn't the problem of course, but she glared at him anyway. A single card, cold as the vacuum of space, slipped to the discard pile and she picked up another. An uninterested glance told her it was just the card she needed. As always.

 

Author's Note

As with all my works and, I would wager, almost all the works on this website, this thing will be under construction for quite some time. Like any other author I seem to have trouble working on my stories.

Reviews

[Rogue]

I enjoyed this. You have a very unique and interesting storyline going here. My interest is definitely piqued.
The first paragraph seems just a bit weighty with adjectives. That would be my only critique of this.

[TLK]

"A curl of grey smoke lazed it's way past her prominent needle-like right fang"
Hold up on the exposition there!

Give us an ACTION or an IMAGE that will push us forward, instead. What does a 'prominent needle-like fang' look like? Is it a small stalagmite/stalactite (forget which) hanging above a smouldering fire? Is it bared in anger, or in insolence, or is it just cruel bitey furniture for a cruel bitey face?

Here's a sentence that would grab me:
"Vice liked to bite things with her needle-like right fangs. Things she hated, things she liked. But all she had to put in her face right now was a cigarette."

This comes out a bit Raymond Chandler, but we're immediately talking about a CHARACTER in a STORY rather than a TOOTH and some SMOKE.

Hope this helps you in future.

[Saichiro Wolftotem]

Well, this is more in the middle of the story, which is why it probably doesn't make the punch you're looking for. Might I suggest my other piece "Ten True Things About Me"?