Notes: Written for Mxa for Yuletide 2015.
On the Cards
Manny surveyed the fruits of his labours proudly. This had definitely been a brilliant idea - a few more days of sales like this, and the shop was sure to be back in profit again for the first time since Bernard had decided to start setting the dogs on anyone who asked about eBook readers.
(All right, one dog, a wheezy little terrier called Cuddles that Fran had been temporarily dogsitting for an elderly neighbour in a futile effort to get into her will, but it had really bad breath and a nasty tendency to wee on your shoes if you stood still long enough for it to waddle up to you.)
But that was all in the past! Done with, forgotten. The new window display Manny had set up had gone down a treat, and the customers were flooding in. In fact, the only thing that was likely to go wrong was-
"Manny!" The roaring bellow from the next room made him cringe. Bernard must have woken up early thanks to all the extra activity - it was barely half past four in the afternoon.
Bernard appeared in the doorway looking dishevelled, which probably didn't actually have anything to do with the interrupted sleep. Bernard could make concrete look rumpled. "Why is my shop infested with vermin?" he demanded. "Everywhere I look they're scurrying around the floor, sniffing about in corners and scrabbling at the books."
"Those are children, Bernard," Manny said patiently.
"Yes, exactly! The greatest threat of all, with their sticky little fingers and their requests for the toilet and their horrible parents. I thought I told you to ban them from the shop?"
"Now, Bernard, remember what happened when you put up all those signs saying this was an adult bookshop?" That fiasco hadn't brought quite the improvement in customer quality Bernard had been hoping for.
"Oh. Yes." He looked faintly sheepish. "Yes, let's not do that again." He quickly found a new target for his ire. "But why are there tables? And chairs? I distinctly remember telling you never to give the customers chairs! It makes them feel welcome. The next thing you know they'll be bringing their friends." He waved a cardboard packet he'd liberated from Manny's new display. "And what kind of cigarettes do you call these? You can't even roll them properly, and all that colour printing tastes awful."
"They're not cigarettes, they're cards," Manny said. "It's the hot new craze! It's a collectible card game called Lands of Magic."
"Collectible? Card? Game?" Bernard flapped a hand irritably. "These words mean nothing! Get it out of my shop. Out!" He threw the box at Manny.
"Oh, but Bernard, it's selling really well," Manny said, sagging down with a whine. "The kids buy the packs by the handful."
"It won't last." Bernard sneered as he lit his cigarette. "It's one of those passing fads, like skateboards and the internet. Children don't like card games - they're for old women who read the Reader's Digest and carry lots of shopping bags inside other shopping bags and always smell faintly of gin."
"No, but this one's really interesting," Manny insisted. "It's got magic and dragons, and a system of rules that's actually remarkably sophisticated and intricate and allows for an almost infinite number of potential gameplay situations to arise."
"Feh," Bernard said dismissively. "How complicated can the rules for a game being played by eight-year-olds possibly be?"
Many hours later...
The shop was now dark and devoid of customers, and Bernard and Manny sat surrounded by disarrayed cards, empty wine bottles, dictionaries, calculators and scribbled scraps of paper.
"Right," said Bernard, with great determination. "So if I feed my dragon with a dragon food card in the dragon-feeding phase..."
"Nonononono," Manny corrected him hastily. "You can't feed your dragon until my wizard's had a chance to learn a spell!"
"Your wizard's already learned a spell," Bernard said with a suspicious scowl.
"No, that was last turn," he said.
"But I thought this was still a double turn because of the full moon effect?"
They both pored over their rulebooks again.
The door of the shop swung open as Fran marched in and flopped down beside Bernard with a heavy sigh. When this failed to garner the requisite response, she sighed again, more heavily. This also brought no result, so she leaned in close to his ear. "Heavy! Sigh!" she shouted. He leaned away from the spittle.
"My intuition is telling me Fran may have something on her mind," he confided to Manny as an aside.
Manny surfaced only slowly from his fog as he flipped through the pages of the rulebook. "Player one's wizard always moves first... except for when the enemy has played an ambush card, or if the wizard is slowed... but not if all wizards are slowed... Oh, hello, Fran!" he said brightly, blinking. "When did you get here?"
Fran growled and snatched up one of the many bottles of wine surrounding Bernard to swig directly from it. "I've had the most horrible day," she said, sagging back in her chair.
"How awful, what a tragic story, still, best not to dwell," Bernard said, making a vague patting gesture in her general direction without looking up.
"You wouldn't believe what I've been through in the last few hours," she continued, regardless.
"Probably not. Best not to even bother trying to tell me about it," he said.
"Some idiot drove right into the back of my car!" she said. "And then he had the nerve to say it was my fault because I was reversing down a one-way street. The street goes one way, I was facing that way - I don't know why he thinks he's got a leg to stand on. Plus the garage were so obviously trying to rip me off: 'You can't drive home without working brakes!' they said. Well, I showed them." She shook her head and finally turned her attention to the mess of cards that surrounded them both. "Anyway. What are you two doing?"
"Very complicated. You wouldn't understand," Bernard said sniffily.
"Really? Because it looks to me like you've got your creature cards all mixed up with your spell library and you've set the planes of battle up sideways."
Manny raised his head from his rule-induced stupor. "You know how to play Lands of Magic?" he said in amazement.
"Well, it's not like it's difficult," Fran said. "My neighbour's grandson was buying all the cards for a while because he was trying to find one of the silver cards to win the ten thousand pounds. Not that he deserved it, the annoying little brat. I can't believe I spent all that time selflessly helping the old bag look after him and that ugly terrier, without the slightest thought of personal gain, and she didn't even leave me any money! Does she think I'm made of generosity?"
"Children shouldn't be allowed to win money," Bernard said. "What use do they have for it? They can't even buy wine and cigarettes."
"It says here that ten thousand pounds is still up for grabs," Manny said, reading the back of one of the packets. "Imagine tearing open one of these packets and finding that silver card," he said dreamily. "It would be just like being in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory."
"Yes, I would definitely use the money to build a machine that sucks unpleasant children up through pipes," Bernard agreed.
"I could really use that kind of money to buy myself a new car," Fran said.
Their eyes all sidled, surreptitiously, to the mountainous display of packs of cards that Manny had put together.
"They do say that I have the luck of the Irish, you know," Bernard said, casually inspecting his nails.
"Who says?" Fran asked.
"Oh, people." He gave an insouciant shrug. "People who say things. I could probably just... pick one of those packs out from the display and find the one with the silver card in right away. Happens to me all the time."
"I don't believe you," Fran said.
"Well, then, I'll have to prove it," he said.
"Yes, you will," she said.
He plucked one of the packs from the display. "Probably in this one right here."
"Go on, then."
"I will!" He tore into it.
Wait," Manny said suddenly, "is the luck of the Irish supposed to be good luck or bad luck?"
Bernard ripped the packet open, flinging the cards across the room in the process, fumbled to recapture them, and then fanned them out triumphantly. There was no sign of the winning silver card among them.
"Well, obviously it takes a while to kick in," he said.
Manny awoke the next morning lying on something worrying sticky, listening to eldritch groaning sounds, and beset by a horrible smell. He identified these variously as the bookshop carpet, Bernard, and a combination of both.
When he sat up, he discovered he also had a vicious hangover, Fran's snoring head on his left shoulder, and a number of Lands of Magic cards stuck to his face. He took in the results of last night's drunken bender with dismay. "Oh, no!" Every single one of the hundreds of packs of cards he'd purchased had been ripped open, their contents strewn haphazardly across the shop. "All our profits! My lovely display!"
"My lovely ten thousand pounds," Fran moaned, sitting up beside him and clutching her head. She gave Bernard an accusing kick. "I thought you said you were lucky?"
"It takes a while, it takes a while," he said with a defensive shrug.
"What are we going to do?" Manny said, scurrying about gathering up cards. "The children will be here soon, expecting to buy more cards! We'll put looks of disappointment on all their little faces!"
"Yes, that'll be a good consolation for not having won the money," Bernard said.
"Bernard, this is serious!" Manny said. "I dipped into our rent money ordering all those cards."
Bernard grabbed him by the collar. "Dipped how far in?" he demanded, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
Manny squirmed. "Just slightly... a little bit... all the way!" he blurted, unable to hold up any longer under the interrogation. "But it was such an obvious money-spinner - and the man who came round with the catalogue was so nice and helpful..."
"You've sold our cow for magic beans!" Bernard gasped, shoving Manny away and pressing his wrist to his forehead in a dramatic swoon. "We'll be destitute - have to live like tramps, wandering aimlessly, sleeping in our clothes, begging strangers for loose change so we can drown our sorrows in cheap booze."
"Well, no change for you, then, is it?" Manny said. "I'm the one who'll be ruined by the ravages of the streets, victimised by predatory strangers after my sweet innocent flesh."
"Look, it's quite simple," Fran said. "We can use all these cards to have a Lands of Magic tournament. Charge all the kids money to take part, and then we'll just have to make sure we're the ones to win in the end."
"But these kids are professionals!" Manny said. "They know the difference between Death Squid and Death Octopus! They understand that rule about upgrading your wizard to a sorcerer! We'll be crushed."
Fran smiled enigmatically. "Trust me," she said. "You ain't seen nothing yet."
The scene for the card tournament was set. Children scowled intently at each other across cloth-draped tables and argued over cards with names like Suppurating Plague and Infestation. Bernard frothed on the sidelines, barking threats and orders at anyone who came too close. "No food! No mobile phones! No... whatever that is you're doing over there! Stop it at once! And don't read the books! Do you think I opened a bookshop so people could read books?"
That was when Fran came strolling into the room like a high roller, wearing a long coat and mirror shades. Manny followed close behind in a suit and sunglasses of his own, hair slicked back and pulled into a ponytail and two fingers pressed against his right ear.
He didn't have an actual earpiece in there, but that didn't stop him from reporting in as he whipped from side to side to check the room. "Shop floor is clear, shop floor is clear - go, go, go!" He hustled Fran forward at a crouching run.
She took a seat opposite her first opponent in the tournament, a very small and frail-looking boy in large glasses. Manny immediately loomed over him threateningly. "Don't crowd the lady!"
Fran laid a cautioning hand on his arm. "Now, Manny, remember, it's only a game. We're all just here to play cards and have a good time. Isn't that right?" She smiled warmly at her child opponent.
"Aren't you a bit old to be playing Lands of Magic?" the boy said sceptically.
Fran's eyes narrowed like lasers. "Prepare to be annihilated, child scum!" She grabbed her deck of cards.
Much later, when the debris of the tournament had been cleared away, the three of them sipped their wine and reflected on the day's events.
"We really shouldn't have done that," Manny said.
Fran solemnly shook her head.
"Competing against children for money is morally bankrupt, not to mention cruel," Bernard said.
"Plus they completely cleaned us out of all our cash," Fran added.
"There's no way that we're ever going to get that money back," Bernard said. "We'll have to sell some of the useless tat that's cluttering up the place. Stick this price tag on yourself, Manny."
"Actually, I might know a way that we can make some money fast," Manny said. They both turned to look at him. "There is this hot new card game coming out called Space Patrol..."
Bernard brandished his wine bottle like a club, and Manny cringed.