Songs of the Illusionary Veil: Queen of Clubs

A Touhou Project fanfic by Achariyth

I didn't care what bullshit rambled from my lips. It didn't matter anyway. Strip all the fluff away from lurid tales and stories of old, and the core of my spiel was simple. Look over here at what I want you to see so you can't see what I'm really up to. It doesn't take much to palm a red ball from under a cup when no one watches.

Listen, only a sucker plays the shell game. You might have seen it around your city. Three shells or cups or whatever and one ball. Place the ball under one, and around and around they go. Where it stops, any sharp-eyed mark thinks they know. Pick the cup, and double your money. But you never will. I make sure of that. And when you walk away, broke, another will take your place. The lure of easy money always draws a crowd.

Call me Bandit. Many already have. I drift from place to place so you'll never have a chance to call me a second time. Give me nothing but a three cups and a ball, and I'll be back on my feet in no time. Give me a pack of cards, and I'm golden. Since I've made a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in the Village that Time Forget, this is a good thing for me.

The Way Back Machine had dropped me into a valley that wouldn't be out of place in one of those old samurai movies. There's a strange mix of peasants from before the Meiji, Western dress, and grown adults wearing animal ears. Not that it mattered. Whether human, rabbit, cat, or wolf, their yen still spent the same.

I raked in another pile of coins. The fools in front of me never seemed to learn that the ball that should have been where their money was had vanished into my hand. This next round, however, I'd leave it to chance. The occasional win would keep the crowd's greed stoked. Afterwards, I might even persuade a few to a friendlier little game of cards. High stakes or even odd ones, of course.

A couple days ago, that wheedling had been bountiful. I felt my smile brighten as I spun the cups. A pretty young librarian succumbed to charm instead of common sense. She'd walked into my rented room with a purse of yen. She ran out with nothing but an incandescent body blush, no match for a deck stacked colder than a glacier's heart.

I told you to call me Bandit.

The crowd cheered and pressed against the winners, a tall, lanky merchant with ash hair and a pretty blond in a strange take on the little black dress. Too many frills for my taste. I'd seen the look in their eyes before. Bandit had them hooked. Give me enough time, and I'd have both the merchant's shop and the girl on his arm.

Once again, the familiar spiel rolled out of my mouth. The shells swirled on the little board pressed against the edge of the dirt road. He followed a cup with his eyes, ignorant that my quick fingers had done their job once again. The ball would appear inside another cup, after he lost his money, of course.

The merchant set a stack of coins down in front of the center cup. Part of me expected the number in the frilly dress to protest, but her eyes were even hungrier than her boyfriend. Sorry, sister, the First Bank of Bandit always wins. I'll be the only one doubling, tripling, quadrupling his money today.

I lifted the center cup, watching for the exquisite moment when hope shattered. But the couple's smiles grew wider and the crowd cheered again. A single red ball sat beneath it, a twin to the one I'd slipped into my pocket moments before. Faking a smile that could mask the grinding of my teeth, I slid a large chunk of the day's gains next to the merchant's bet. A quick brush against my pants reassured me that I had indeed removed the ball from play.

At best, I had an amateur cheat on my hands.

The crowd groaned as I announced the end to my peculiar brand of streetside theater. I didn't care. Time to leave.

Take a tip from Bandit. If you find someone cheating, leave. Don't try to figure out the trick and, by the Crooked Warden, don't be a dumbass and confront the cheater. If you're lucky, and steel isn't tickling your ribs or you haven't had the sudden need to learn how to catch a bullet in your teeth, you're going to meet the hired help. Skull kickers, face smashers, brawlers, and brutes. I say this as someone who has hired his own collection of highly regarded and expensive unsavories on a regular basis. Save Bandit the need for these, and you might just save yourself an expensive set of medical bills.

As I tied the cups and coins inside a thick bundle, I couldn't help but watch as the merchant's girl stood on her toes and whispered in the ear of her friend, a honey of a honey-blonde tall enough to grace the streets of Tokyo, New York, or Paris. This honey laughed, and then cast her eyes towards me.

I'd seen her kind before. There's a type of young woman of a certain age that needs to be bound to their mothers' apron strings before she dives headlong into trouble just to prove she's no longer a girl. Had Mama Honey just seen that smolder in her daughter's eyes, she wouldn't have let her out of the house ever again. There's no way the tall blonde in the blue dress learned that from her mother. I'd make sure keep an eye out for her. And one more for that cheat.

"Isn't there some way we can keep playing?"

"I could buy something off of you..."

"But I don't have anything to sell."

"Perhaps that caplet?"

"You'll give it back after the game?"

Her name was Elysse or Alice; I couldn't tell which. Her lips did delightful things to vowels that no proper Japanese woman could match. It didn't matter anyway. Girls like her, so willing to plunge headlong into trouble, never used their real name.

I didn't set out to find this honey-blonde with the smoldering stare. She found me, Your Honor, I swear. I did keep a deck of cards, a candle-lit room, and soft sheets ready just in case opportunity came knocking with blonde hair, a model's body, and a sea of white frills and red ribbon.

I knew her type after all. And I knew how she'd act when a two pair revealed that a caplet, no matter how cute, doesn't cover much of a young woman or her debts. She turned her face, but her eyes met mine as she tugged on the laces of her dress. I slid a stack of chips over, and the fabric around her neck began to part.

I turned my back as she shimmied out of her dress. There's a dance to this. The more dignity now, the less likely she'd be to run out of here. So I pretend that I'm not that interested in her delicate state of undress, and she pretends that she doesn't know what the sight of her in a thin white shirt and petticoat does to a man. Meanwhile, we both ignore that she's taking off her clothes in front of a stranger. We're playing a game after all, and just doing what the cards tell us to do. Elysse doesn't realize, though, that the cards speak with my voice.

You really think I'd rely on blind luck with an adventurous young woman's body on the line? Are you kidding me? OF COUSRE I CHEAT! So does every red-blooded man that plays this silly game. Marked cards? Please, I'm a professional. Amateurs ink and rough up cards, and never as cleverly as they think. Professionals shuffle their way to success. I'd rather spend thirty seconds shuffling than a week doctoring cards.

Elysse folded her dress and set it on the table. Then, with a little twirl that spun the hem of her petticoat just enough to reveal a flash of toned thigh, she sat down in her chair. She made no effort to cover herself as she slid the cards toward me; if I hadn't seen her in her street clothes, I would have thought she was wearing a regular white dress. Not that she'd wear that for long. I'd purposely set the blinds high enough that it was essentially one garment each round.

I picked up the cards and smiled. There's a special hand I deal when it's time to discard a young woman's modesty, complete with a suite of Bandit's special lies. Two pair can be a great hand, especially when the high pair holds the Queen of Hearts and the Queen of Diamonds. I'll leave it to your imagination what sweet nothings you can whisper with those cards in mind. Too bad my hand's three of a kind.

See, there's more to Bandit's heart than larceny. There's a smidgeon left over for poetry. A little poetry sweetens the scam, after all. That three of a kind? All knaves. That's jacks, for those of you using Vegas-style decks. Not one ingénue has picked up on that little flourish; she's too drunk on the constant refrain of crazy, sexy, and beautiful.

I slid the deck towards Elysse. The pretty little thing, now only in white, cut the deck in a straight cut. None of this dozen little piles nonsense. It doesn't work, trust me. The longer cards slip and slide past each other in my hands, the better I can stack the deck in my favor. This time, I shuffled the cards just long enough to hide her losing hand at the top and my winning hand at the bottom. Meanwhile, the small talk chattered on.

The betting was over in a heartbeat. I pushed the beat a little harder than seen in a friendly game, just enough for a second piece of clothing. It was time for the lace round, after all, and I wanted to put to bed this silly nonsense that there weren't legs under that shift.

She smiled as she set down her hand in a tidy stack. One by one, she flipped the cards over. A pair of fives, then the queens. I stopped her right there with some soothing saying about the cards revealing her fate. "Artistic modeling," if that three of hearts I slipped into her hand is to be believed. The last card turned over.

The Queen of Clubs.

How the hell did she get a full house? No card shark worth their salt would ever lose track of cards like that.

I let the next hand go, too shocked to really pay attention to my cards. I should have stopped right there, once Elysse had earned enough cash to buy back her lost clothing. But hand after hand, it just got worse. A pair of sixes beaten by a pair of eights; three fours by three sixes. I even got beat by a queen high hand. Clubs, again. No matter if I dealt or she did, I still lost by narrow margins. With the blinds so high, I was soon down to only my skivvies.

A black-hearted trio of queens robbed me of even that.

Elysse scooped the cards up and tapped them into a deck. Cards rippled past each other as she gave them a quick but thorough shuffle. She flipped over the top card. The Queen of Clubs vanished back into the middle of the deck. Another quick shuffle and the first card again was the queen. Then she shuffled frantically, turning over cards at random, yet only the Queen of Clubs stared back at me. Whether second dealt, bottom dealt, or even pulled from the middle of the deck, the same card appeared over and over as Elysse gave a master's class in the art of the card shark, complete with tricks that I had never seen. She slapped the deck against the table and cut the cards into five piles. Dainty hands revealed the top of each. The Ace of Spades. The Ace of Diamonds. The Ace of Hearts. The Ace of Clubs. And you guessed it, the Queen of Clubs.

Proof positive that I'm the sucker at this table. Time to pay. I stood up and looped my thumbs through my waistband. Elysse stood up and help up her hand while another slid my pile of clothes off the table.

"I'll leave you with more than you left Patchouli." My brow furled until I remembered the librarian from earlier. I couldn't help the leer; in another place and another time, artists would have begged her to model for statues that would have made the de Milo gnash her teeth in envy. I got to see that show for free, courtesy of fifty-two assistants.

The blonde girl slammed her hand against the table. "Focus. You have only a couple hours to reach the border before nightfall. Leave now and you might make it."

"You're throwing me out like this?"

Her eyes narrowed. "My friend had even less when she ran out of this room." Shadows rippled behind her.

Fair enough. "So what happened if I don't make it to the border?"

"The cats around here remember a time when they stalked people for food and sport. Some of them long for those days of old." I gulped as I reached for the cards in front of me. The stacks flared in eye-searing gold flashes and vanished. "I said 'leave,'" she said. Steel filled her voice and her hands.

I'd seen longer knives, but hands that deft would make sure those points dug into something vital. "I'll let myself out."

The wind had already grown cold long before the sun ducked behind the mountains, but the darkness just pushed it into my bones. I'd even stopped shivering. With no sight of whatever border that blonde devil woman had mentioned, I'd need shelter and a fire. I'm no mountain hermit or survivalist, so I just stumbled through the thick forest.

Leaves rustled behind me. A figure padded out of the darkness. A human, thank the Crooked Warden. And while the night covered her face, it couldn't shroud the girl-next-door dress she wore. Not the most elegant of outfits, but, right now, I was in no shape to criticize.

"Hey, mister, let's play a game," the girl purred. She moved out of the shadows, and the moonlight caught the two cat ears poking out of a mass of braids.

Author's notes:

I find it interest what different languages can do to the same name. Portuguese, for instance, pronounces Alice as Elysse...

I spent too much time watching Ricky Jay shows the night before coming up with this.