![]() He looked up into Lukau's enraged face and this time he did smile. Majin also got to his feet, the top of his head coming comically short of the much taller Zora's chin. He swayed before he found his balance and then spun fully toward Majin. Lukau lurched unsteadily to his feet with a strangled, angry cry. Three threes, arranged in an approximate triangle. Majin leaned back in his crouch while Lukau leaned in, eyes alight with anticipation.īefore the dice could land on the faces Lukau was counting on, invisible to the unfocused eyes of the lookers-on, the shadows beneath cast by the lamplight above plumed upward in tiny, imperceptible tendrils, striking each die on the bottom, on the side, pushing them from where they should have settled, causing them to lurch to another face, and another until the tumbled over one last time and remained still. The dice hit the floorboards inside the ring of bricks and tumbled madly all the way across the circle, striking the bricks on the far side and then spinning back in toward the center. With weighted dice Lukau was obviously confident that he'd win the toss, so why not go for broke? Majin rolled the dice around in his hand again. That would earn back more than Lukau had come with, leaving him the night's winner. "Got my shift starting in an hour," Lukau mumbled, his tongue loose and imprecise in forming the words. Majin could almost read the Zora's math in his eyes. Then he looked at the pile in front of Majin, at least half-again as large. Not exactly a fortune, but not nothing either. It was less than half of what he'd already piled up before him when Majin had joined the game late, but it was still much more than the others had managed to hang on to so far. Instead he looked down at the pile of rupees left before him. The drunken Zora leered at him, fighting the twitch of his gaze toward the Tokay's clenched fist. The other three had backed out this time, so it was just he and Lukau betting on this round. ![]() "So what's the bet?" Majin asked, rolling the weighted dice around in his casting hand. A flash of unrestrained satisfaction flitted across Lukau's face, and the corner of his mouth twitched, fighting back a smile. ![]() Suppressing the urge to shake his head in amusement, Majin instead nodded as though satisfied that the dice he'd received were legitimate and closed his fingers around them. Majin offered a patronizing grin and took them, raising them and looking them over in his palm, making a show of ensuring that the Zora hadn't palmed the game dice and replaced them with fixed ones of his own as so many cheats tried to do. Tonight was no exception.Īfter a particularly strong throw, the Zora-a dockhand named Lukau with a penchant for frittering away his wages every night waiting for his retched luck to finally turn, shoved the three dice into Majin's waiting hand, following that with an unsteady, glassy-eyed glower as though daring him to beat him again as he'd been doing for much of the night. But the longer they let him cast the dice against whatever they put up, and the more ale they soaked up, the angrier they grew. These weren't newcomers to the backroom dice or card games, and most of them had one and lost in nearly equal measure as most did. ![]() More than once he heard curses murmured under their breath as they cast the dice into the circle, picking up angry snippets. Outside of the ring each player had a pile of rupees of various denominations in front of them, all of differing-and with the exception of Majin rapidly dwindling-sizes. Majin himself, along with an ale-sodden Zora with a paunch and a sagging layer of scales and a gaggle of bleary-eyed Hylians were crouched around a ring of bricks erected on the graying floorboards of the back room beneath the shifting light of an oil lamp hung from a nail on the crossbeam directly above their game. But what was gambled safely out of view could not be taxed or taken, and so establishments like these had cropped up all across the Great Sea. If chests of rupees amounting to small fortunes were being won or lost, or if property such as the limited island plots, ships, or the like were changing hands, this new government intended to have its due. Gambling itself was not illegal on the seas, per se, but high stakes games such as these were monitored closely by the Council of Isles, the winnings tracked and taxes assessed with meticulous calculation. Out in the front room of Tycho's Tap the clamor of the more savory patrons drew a comfortable veil around the gambling den arranged in the back. Wouldn't be the first time, especially with all the wary side-eyed glances he was getting from the others clustered around him. If he wasn't careful, Majin knew he was liable to get a fist thrown his way.
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