Ante's End

A Modern Mythos tale (in slight retrograde)

By Devin McTaggart

Chapter One

Nobody expects to have their life changed within fifteen minutes of hearing Oasis' "Wonderwall," but it happened to me anyway.

I didn't know it at the time, naturally. Hell, I'm still not entirely sure what happened to me, but I'm writing it all down, just so that I can try and make some sense of it, but if it doesn't make any sense to you either, I guess that's okay. My therapist said committing my thoughts to paper would be good for my mental health, so that's what I'm going to do.

My name's Brian Gleeson. This story starts the day before Thanksgiving, in 1995, hanging around the University of Omaha campus, when most of my fellow students had gone home, but Wednesday night was game night, and I never missed it, since it really was my only social outlet after I'd gotten out of high school.

Back in high school, I played football for Creighton Prep as their quarterback until a freak accident on the field my junior year took away my chances of ever going pro with it. One of my tendons ripped at the ankle, right off the bone, after I got tackled hard. The injury was so bad, I spent most of my spare time in the spring in physical therapy, just regaining the ability to walk normal again.

I knew as soon as it happened that I was never going to be an athlete again, and that hit me harder than the linebacker did, and while getting back to normal was all I could think about, I knew I was going to have to completely change my entire path in life. I'd been planning to play football through college, and with that option yanked away from me, I had to pick up the pieces and build an entirely new life, which, all kidding aside, left me a bit bitter and resentful.

Just about a month after my accident, my girlfriend, Jenny, left me. She said it was because I was angry and lashing out at her all the time, and yeah, I guess maybe that was partly true, but it was also just as much because she didn't want to be paired up with the crippled kid, which was how everyone was talking about me behind my back.

And it was also during the downtime of my physical therapy that my younger brother introduced me to a game that would become my obsession with all my spare time. I made fun of Timothy when he introduced me to it, but he insisted that if I spent a little bit of time with it, I would get hooked.

Turned out, he knew better than I did.

The game in question was Gambits Of Avalon.

I'd heard my brother talking about it with his friends when they'd started playing it a year or so earlier, but I'd mostly tuned them out. Tim and his friends were nerds - they spent most of their time either playing videogames or jamming out with their garage band. But once they'd picked up this card game, it had become the thing they were doing during every break in band practice.

Gambits Of Avalon was the first game from a company called Renegade Sorcerers, and they were calling it 'The First Trading Card Game Experience.' You would buy packs of cards, construct a deck and play against an opponent. You had cards for Ley Lines, which produced Arcane Power, and you would put coins on those to show much you had expended them for the turn, to play Evocations, Inspirations or Antiquities, or to pay the cost to Summon Champions.

Champions were the meat of where the game was played. They were heroes and villains and monsters and all sorts of mythological creatures, each with two stats - Strength and Endurance. Strength was how much damage a creature put out; Endurance was how much it could take before it was defeated. You would keep track of how much damage a champion had on them with coins from your pocket, and whenever they had more damage than their Endurance, the Champion disappeared back into the ether.

Within days of picking up the game, I realized there was actually a bunch of math involved in deckbuilding, but within those realms of math, there were endless opportunities for self-expression. How you won, and if you looked cool doing it, was almost as important as winning was itself.

I remember how much I laughed the first time my brother tried to get me to play the game, but say what you like about little Timmy, that kid's persistent and he does not take no for an answer. Plus, his enthusiasm for the game was just relentless. He kept coming back to me again and again, telling me about what new thing he'd just figured out, or what cool new card he'd just acquired, and it was in that latter half that he piqued my interest.

One of the 'features' of the game was how you were encouraged to 'win' new cards - by getting them from other players through a mechanic called 'ante.'

Ante meant that when two players sat down to play a game of Gambits of Avalon (or GoA, as people would call it for short), they would each reveal the top card of their deck, set it aside, and whoever won the match would get both games. Doctor Winston Grubler, the game's creator, said he was inspired by how kids had traded marbles when he was a child, and how he missed the sort of 'intermingling of game pieces and trophy winning' that games used to have, which was something he wanted to recreate. He wanted kids to be competing for something tangible, something they could hold in their hands.

Before, when I'd been playing football, I'd also been playing a bunch of poker. When I stopped playing football, they also mysteriously stopped inviting me to the poker games as well, although I suspect that had more to do with them getting tired of me wiping them all out than it did me no longer being on the squad. To say I was good was an understatement. It had been part of the reason I'd been a pretty decent quarterback - I could glance at people and quickly read intentions.

That skill, it would turn out, transferred to a lot of things in my new life, and those instincts I'd honed both on and off the field transferred well in figured out if my opponents were bluffing in GoA.

I lost the first few games of GoA I played with Timmy, but once he had me fixated on the game, I started applying my brain to what I could sniff out. As encouragement to keep pushing harder on my physical therapy, my parents started buying packs of GoA to reward me to work through the pain, and it went from Timmy teaching me about the game to me teaching him how to get better, how to deck build and, most importantly, the difference between short-term and long-term gains in the game.

One of the first lessons I ended up teaching him was the sometimes the downside was worth the upside, and in doing so, I helped turn him into a bit of a local celebrity. When Timmy had given me my first batch of cards, he'd given me a handful of great cards, but he'd also dumped a lot of what he called 'chuff' on me, cards that were so bad that any time people opened them, they almost considered throwing them away, they seemed so bad. And sure, there were a lot of them that were crap, but there was one in particular I didn't understand why people were slagging off.

That card was called 'The Wandering Knight.'

Based on its stats, the card wasn't anything remarkable - it cost 4 Ley Sparks to get in play, which put it firmly in the low-to-mid-range tempo, and it had 2 in Strength and 2 in Endurance, which were a little lower than on-curve for the champion's cost. But at the bottom of the card was a special ability that most players were constantly making fun of. "Sacrifice a Ley Line: Remove this Champion from the game then immediately return it to play."

Now the reason Timmy and his friends were constantly mocking this was that sacrificing a Ley Line was removing one of the core assets that allowed you to play the game. You were only allowed to put a single Ley Line card into play on each of your turns, so by getting rid of one, you were essentially putting yourself tempo-wise behind your opponent. So nobody was running the card, and they were sitting in piles of unplayed cards everywhere.

Until one day I slotted one into one of my decks to show Timmy what he and everyone else had been missing. By using The Wandering Knight as an interceptor, putting it between an attacking Champion of Timmy's and my own face, then sacrificing a low-resource Ley Line, I avoided taking any damage from the combat, no matter how big Timmy's creature was. And I had the Wandering Knight around to do the same thing again on his next turn. Then, on my intervening turn, I would attack Timmy with another card he and his friends had made fun of - Silent Rogue.

Timmy had claimed that Silent Rogue was far too big an investment for her tiny stats, and I could see what he thought that. She cost 3 Ley Sparks and provided only a meagre 1 Strength and 2 Endurance, but she also had an ability that Tim and his friends thought was irrelevant. "This creature can't be intercepted." That meant no matter what an opponent did, once Silent Rogue struck, that damage was going to be taken. But Timmy's point was that with a player having 20 Endurance, it would take far too long for Silent Rogue to extinguish them.

Which led me to the third gem I'd found in the 'chaff' pile they'd given me. It was an Antiquity, an item that would sit on the battlefield. The player who played it could turn on or off to use certain abilities to get them an edge, usually at a stiff cost. It was called 'Covered In Blood.' It simply said: "Pay Three Endurance: Target creature with Strength 1 or less gains 2 additional Strength until end of turn and deals its next combat damage as Lich Damage."

Paying three Endurance (which was a player's life pool, and started at twenty) for a single use of an ability seemed insane, but Lich Damage meant that any damage that the Champion dealt to a player would take that player's Endurance and give it to the Champion's controller. This meant that as long as you could ensure that the creature using Covered In Blood hit your opponent and didn't get intercepted by one of their creatures, you were getting back what you paid into it.

It only took a couple of games before Timmy realized exactly how powerful a deck I'd built using cards that he and his friends had overlooked as 'worthless.' Timmy asked if he could borrow the deck from me and then went to play in a local tournament on the weekend, where he beat out nearly fifty other kids to finish in first place.

I was a little annoyed that he did it and I didn't, but I sort of knew it was me who'd built the deck he'd used, so I considered it my own win.

Senior year of high school, unable to play football, I went down a rabbit hole of not only Gambits of Avalon, but game theory in general, so much so that I was having to pick up bits of programming from the local geeks to help me work through some of the more advance calculations, as new cards were introduced to the game, and I worked very hard to evaluate them, looking to spot where the designers had built skill testers in.

By the time I was off to college, I had a new path in mind - I wanted to become a game designer. I wasn't sure which specific field of games I wanted to work on - I'd also let Timmy introduce me into the world of videogames, but none of them had held my attention quite the way that Gambits of Avalon had. That said, half a dozen other 'collectable card games' had come and gone within just the three years since Gambits of Avalon had launched the field, all of them trying to take a piece of the pie and none of them sticking.

On top of all that, my beloved GoA was being forced to make a pretty big change, one that I definitely didn't like. As of January 1^st, 1996, they were ending the 'ante' mechanic in Gambits of Avalon. It had been decided that the mechanic was a little too much like 'gambling,' and if Renegade Sorcerers wanted to continue selling their game to kids, they needed to take out that one element of the game. The company had reluctantly agreed to drop the mechanic from any future sets, and announced in Wyvern Magazine that when the year rolled over, players were strongly encouraged to discontinue using ante in any of their games.

A lot of the local game clubs were holding 'Ante's End' events, places where people could come out and get their last few games of GoA in the traditional format, and the campus's Game Knights Club seemed like a good way to get a few games in before I headed back to my parents' house for Thanksgiving. There only seemed to be about a dozen people hanging around the Milo Bail Student Center, and a lot of them were already engaged in games already, but I did notice one guy - far too old to be a student, but a professor maybe? - over at a table by himself, a small suitcase with them, which made me grin.

The Suitcase Players, as we liked to call them, would show up anywhere they thought they could get a game, and had toolboxes inside of small suitcases with all their individual decks, ready to pull out at a moment's notice. They loved ante games, and they always took great delight in showing off how good they were. And don't get me wrong, they were usually pretty good. But I knew I was better, and I loved breaking them because the difference between them and me was that they took their pride in winning, and I took my pride in being good at the game, win or lose.

He looked like he might've been in his sixties, with long salt and pepper hair pulled back into a long, several-times braided ponytail that hung down his back. He had on a sort of grey suit that contrasted with his tan skin, and I was fairly certain I could see a few tattoos peeking out from his sleeves. He was wearing leather gloves, which was an interesting touch. And despite the fact that it was November in Nebraska, he was wearing goddamn socks and Birkenstocks. How his feet didn't get both soaked and frozen so exposed like that was absolutely beyond me. Even just walking to and from his car, he had to be fucking freezing.

I had Oasis playing on my portable CD player, and Liam Gallagher was telling me all the roads I was walking were blinding or something, but I'll be honest, the words had kind of lost their meaning in the month I'd been listening to the CD. It was catchy as fuck, but I still don't know what that song's about. I slid the headphones down to my neck and offered him a slight smile. "Hey man, you looking to get a game of GoA in?"

"Only if you're playing for ante," the man said, his hands shuffling two handfuls of sleeved cards together. That was how I knew he was a real suitcase player. Nearly everybody I knew just carried their cards in a box with them, and didn't think to put them in sleeves, but the Suitcase Players? They considered the cards an investment and not something to have fun with, which drove me crazy. I'd started putting mine in sleeves as well, though, because it tended to make people think I was a Suitcase Player, rather than an actual player.

"Gotta do it for as long as it lasts, right?" I said to him with a laugh, offering my hand for him to shake. "My name's Brian."

Despite the gloves he took my hand and shook it, and his grip was much firmer than I'd expected. "Nice to meet you, Brian. My name's Mervin."

"Mervin, huh? Don't think I've seen you around here before, Mervin," I said, sitting down across the table from him, reaching into my satchel to grab the box with my three decks in it. "What sort of game you want?"

"Bring me your best, man!"

"Dragonriders, it is," I told him, grabbing the red deck box, setting it on the table. "What about you? What're you going to play?"

"I figure I'll try an old classic - Arthur's Crew."

I tilted my head to the side with a slight smile. "I mean, I appreciate the classics, man, but the metagame's shifted a little bit since then. I know that a few of the cards in the new expansion that just dropped, Deliriums, were supposed to help with it, but I still don't know that it's that viable against the current landscape."

"I don't think everyone's been studying Deliriums quite as much as they should, so let's give it a go," he told me. "Ready to ante?"

"Cut first, naturally."

"Naturally."

I cut his deck and he cut mine, and then we both flipped over the top cards of our own deck, to set them aside for ante. I glanced at the card I'd turned up and frowned. "Lucky for you. Katria, Lady of Blades. One of the key components of my deck, and not exactly a cheap card. I think it's like forty bucks right now." A deck could have up to four copies of any given card, but I'd only managed to track down two copies of Katria at that point, so I would be playing with my deck's power knocked down a few pegs. She was a very powerful Champion, so much so that everyone had realized it on Delirium's release a few weeks back. I hadn't been able to find anyone who wanted to sell or trade their copies. The art depicted a very gorgeous looking Persian woman with a large flaming scimitar in one hand, atop the back of a muted blue ice dragon with frost dripping from its claws. She wasn't wearing a whole lot in terms of armor, but most of the Dragonrider faction didn't - bras and loincloths, and maybe a few shoulder pads here and there. All very Boris Vallejo. Because it was. Vallejo had done some of the art for a few cards in GoA, including this one. Everything about the card was badass. Rumor had it Vallejo had done nude versions of several of the characters for the game's creator, but that had to just be rumor and hearsay. "What did you flip?"

"It's one of the promo cards that Wyvern Magazine sent out. Limited edition," Mervin said, a look of frustration on his face, although there was something disingenuous about it, as he held it out for me to look at it. "It's Nimue's Focus. The deck plays fine without out, but it's easily the most valuable card in my collection, since it's promo only and you had to mail in for it and you had to be one of the lucky winners they picked for their contest. It's not even technically in the set, but it's playable, at least for the time being."

The image on the card's art was a silvery hand holding up a broad-bladed golden axe out of a pool of water, with blue glowing runic script on the side of it. It even seemed like the art was using some kind of foiling treatment maybe, although typically GoA cards didn't do that, at least not yet. I wondered if they were testing it on these small print run cards they were doing in partnership with the magazine, but I didn't really know how to find out. Back in those days, you had to do your homework the hard way, and getting news on stuff like games was tricky. There were six golden stars reflected on the water encircling the hand and the weapon. The art style was gorgeous, but it was by someone I didn't recognize - Anya Marla Fog. Whoever she was, she was very talented. The line work in particular was exquisite, even at such a small scale.

"I haven't even heard of this card," I told him, handing it back to him. "There's a lot of rules text on it. What's it actually do?"

"It imbues creatures for a single turn, makes them more powerful before they disappear at the end of the turn," Mervin said, putting his ante in the pile with mine.

"Disappear?" I asked him. "You mean you sacrifice them?"

Mervin laughed, shaking his head. "Gods no! That'd be terrible. They're just unsummoned back to your hand, and you can still play them again. It's an Inspiration that materializes with six charges and once you remove the sixth charge from it, you sac it. It's pretty neat effect and really powers up some of the cards."

"Very cool," I muttered, although my conscience started to worry that maybe I was going to end up taking more than I'd intended. "Bet that's worth a pretty penny."

"It's probably worth a couple hundred bucks."

"Whoa!" I said, putting one of my hands up. "Look, if you want to back out or cut again, I'm totally cool with that. That's too way big a card to be staking in an ante game with a total stranger. Want me to cut a second time?"

The older man smiled a me and shook his head, the spirit of gamesmanship strong within him. "If we're playing an ante, then we're going to do it right. Besides, only for a few more months, so might as well make'em count, right?"

"They're only cards I guess," I chuckled with a little shrug. "I think it's bullshit they're getting rid of the ante rule, but I guess some states were threatening to ban GoA. Flip to see who goes first?"

"Heads." I flipped the coin and revealed it, showing Mervin had won the right to go first. "Okay, play a 3-spark earthen Ley Line, use one spark to summon Sir Lucan the Butler, who's a 1/3 with Accompany. Your turn."

"Nice opening. Draw my card for turn. Play a 4-spark fire Ley Line, use one spark to summon Lady Agata, The Whistling Needle, who's a 2/1 with Airborne. Your go."

"Man, all the Champions in the Dragonriders faction are gorgeous women, aren't they?" Mervin said, tilting his head to look at the card I'd just played before playing his next two. "I mean, I know they're all just drawn pictures, but the artists always draw them so scantily clad."

"Yeah, well, after the faction set before it, Warlords of Karmadrome, I think most of us players had seen about as many shredded shirtless guys as we could take for a while," I said with a laugh, responding to his turn with another Ley Line and another Champion of my own. "A singular Conan is one thing, but an entire freakin' army of them? That was a lot to take in."

"I must say, I did prefer the more traditional armed knights of the earliest sets, but I can understand each faction and expansion wanting to have its own identity," Mervin replied, playing his next few cards. "It's not like the other sets don't have bulbous men or lascivious ladies. Speaking of which, that's three Champions from you so far - two in play and one in ante - and they've all been rather scantily clad women. That by design?"

I grinned and offered a little shrug. "I've kind of gotten too good at this game for the local scene, so I started building decks more on art themes or general gameplay concepts than I did purely trying to win. Like, if I was as cutthroat as some of the people who go to the big tournaments, I'd be playing Cemetery Stacks or Fish Deathball, since it seems like those are the only two decks being played at the national level right now. But where's the fun in that?"

I pushed my two Champions into the red zone, declaring them as charging. Mervin looked at them for a moment then shrugged, since neither of his Champions could intercept. The Airborne ability - which meant they could only be intercepted by other Champions with Airborne - gave the Dragonriders faction a quick, aggressive tempo that was hard to keep pace with, and despite the fact that they had very little Endurance, it seemed like Mervin's deck wasn't running much in the way of spot removal or pinpoint damage. Arthur's Crew decks tended to focus on just building up a massive board state and then playing one of three classic 'finisher' cards to allow them to just plow through an opponent's defenses and kill them in a single turn.

The game went back and forth, he and I pecking at each other's Endurance, until I could see he was getting ready to make his big move, so I kept a few extra resources available, and then, sure enough, came the play I was expecting.

"Declare my entire board as charging," Mervin said, pushing all his Champions into the red zone.

"Declare no interceptors," I responded.

"Cast Arthur's Unification as an Inspiration," he said, grinning wolfishly. "All my creatures gain 2 Strength per each other creature charging with them."

"Response. Play Marta's Madness as an Inspiration, which nullifies all damage done this turn by chargers and interceptors," I said confidently.

"Response," he said, his grin growing even wider. "Play Merlin's Insistence as an Inspiration, overriding Marta's Madness, causing it to fizzle."

"And final response," I said, watching his face just drop. "Play my own Merlin's Insistence back at you, overriding your Merlin's Insistence, causing it to fizzle and letting my Marta's Madness resolve uninterrupted. I have no more responses. How about you?"

"Just one," he sighed, as his shoulders slumped forward. He reached his hand out to shake mine. "I concede. You've nullified my big strike, and now I've got my pants down and you can just crack back with lethal." We shook hands and he let out a soft laugh. "I did not expect a Merlin's Insistence back from you! How many of those are you running in the deck?"

"Just the one," I told him. "It's a little off-theme, but sometimes you just know you need to be able to break someone's combo, and M.I. is still the best-in-class for that sort of thing. And I drew it very early, with Marta's Madness not long after that, and I've been holding both for when you decided to make your big move. Arthur's Crew decks usually try a Unification or Hunter's Howl to break board stalls, and I could tell the little dragonriders that were both Airborne and Shadow Stepped were driving you crazy, because it wasn't a lot of damage each time, but it was a slow peck-peck-peck that was just chipping away at you."

"Well played, my boy. Very well played indeed," he said, laughing as he shook his head and picked up his Nimue's Focus, holding it out to me. "And I believe this belongs to you."

I waved my hand insistently. "Forget about it, Mervin," I laughed. "You told me how much that card's worth, and I couldn't bear it if I ended up being the one taking it from you."

"Young man, I knew what I was doing when I agreed to play you in an ante game, and if I am not a man of my word, then what am I?" Mervin grumbled at me. I swear I also heard him say, "who beats a creator at his own game?" beneath his breath, but I knew what Doctor Winston Grubler looked like, and Mervin wasn't it. He reached over and took the Nimue's Focus card and handed it to me in its sleeve. "I suppose this won't be worth too much more anyway, what with ante ending in a little over a month. But you need to make me a promise, Brian. You need to include this in whatever deck you're playing from now until January 1^st, and you must always play for ante if offered. Don't worry. You only really need to play six games between here and there, to get the full benefit. Well, unless you get some truly unlucky ante draws. But you'll work it out just fine, I'm sure."

"The full benefit?"

"To say more would be to spoil the fun of it, my boy!" he said, clapping me on the shoulder. "You won! Enjoy it! Keep winning! Maybe you should go play them, they look like fun." He was pointing behind me so I turned to look, only to see nobody walking into the room, so I turned back to look at Mervin, but he, his deck and his suitcase were gone. And I do mean gone gone. Like, disappeared. The room was so wide open, I would've seen him in any direction, but he just vanished.

That was the point when I realized things had gotten a little strange.

I thought about packing it up and heading back to my dorm room, but there were still a handful of players loitering around the hall, so I figured I'd get a game or two before I went. I saw Bobby and Chris were just wrapping their game up so I decided to see if I could get in on the next one.

"You two just about done? Figured I could play whoever's sticking around, wipe the weirdness of that old-timer off me."

"What old-timer?" Chris asked me.

"The guy I was just playing with."

Both Chris and Bobby turned to look at me as though I'd spoken in a language they didn't understand. "What are you talking about?" Bobby asked. "You just got here."

"Bobby, I've been playing with some Suitcase Player for the last half hour!"

"Are you drunk?" Chris asked me. "'Cause if you are, I'm not going to tell anyone, but you need to stop drawing attention to yourself with all that nonsense talk. You just walked in that door like thirty seconds ago. Anyway, I'm done, so if you wanna play a game or two with Bobby, that's fine."

"You two are pulling my leg, aren't you?" I asked them, but the look on their faces told me they were completely convinced I had just walked into the room a minute or so ago, and hadn't been sitting at a table twenty feet away for the better part of an hour.

I decided it wasn't worth the headache of trying to figure out what was going on, so I just sat down in the seat Chris got up out of. I felt a slight headache as I started shuffling my Dragonriders deck and then realized what it was that was bothering me. I unsleeved the Nimue's Focus from the sleeve Mervin had given it to me in and resleeved it in one that matched the rest of my deck before shuffling it in, taking out one of the four Shadow Dart cards I had from the deck to bring the count back down to 60. Then when I started shuffling, everything felt right in the world again.

"Ante game, yeah?" Bobby asked me as he presented his deck to me for cutting.

"Damn straight," I said, setting my deck in front of him. "For as long as we can."

His ante card was just a Shadow Dart and mine was a Merlin's Insistence, so we were basically playing for pennies. The game went quickly and I beat him pretty handily, so we had time for one more game. I took his Shadow Dart and set it aside while he sleeved in a new card to bring his deck back up to a legal 60. Then we shuffled up, cut each other's deck and revealed our new ante.

My ante card was Lady Agata, The Whispering Needle, so I clearly had skin in the game, as she was a $15 card. And when Bobby flipped over his top, I knew things were about to get interesting. He revealed a copy of Aleksandra, Primordial Hydromancer and I couldn't help but grin a little bit. It wasn't that she was that expensive of a card - she had resale value of about $15, that of my Lady Agata - but she was hard to come by, as she was from Deliriums, the set that had dropped just a few weeks ago, and it wasn't hard to see why.

The card itself was powerful - 6 sparks to summon for 5 Strength and 8 Endurance, with an ability that allowed its controller to redirect a spell with a single target from its original target to a new target for just the cost of a single spark - and people were already talking about seeing her in tournament play. But there was also the artwork itself, by Boris Vallejo, a tan woman in a barely there golden bikini, surrounded by waves, an expression of powerful serenity on her beautiful face. The card was incredible to look at, and I have to admit, the second I saw it, I wanted to win it and bad. No human woman could ever be that gorgeous.

The game went by slowly, with each of us taking a good amount of time to consider our turns, but at the end of the day, Bobby always plays overly cautiously and never bluffs, so I could always make equal or better combat exchanges in my favor. And, twenty minutes later, I had him on the ropes, with Katria, Lady of Blades dealing the deadly finisher.

"Good games," Bobby said to me. "I hope you treat Aleksandra kindly. I didn't have her in a deck long enough to enjoy how powerful she is, but I certainly did enjoy looking at her." He handed me the card with a soft sigh, as I set it down on top of my deck.

"Don't worry," I told him. "You've still got a whole month and change to win her back from me."

"Cool, thanks man. Anyway, I gotta get going. I'll see you after the break."

"Sure thing, man. See you soon."

I gathered up my things, and I took out a common Clouder Snarer from the deck and put Aleksandra into my deck, setting it back to the standard 60 card count in doing so. I also glanced at the Nimue's Focus, which had given me a clutch turn in the last game, and felt like something was off. It took me a good minute or so to realize there were only five stars on the artwork now, which seemed odd, as I was certain there had been six when I'd first gotten it from the old man.

I couldn't take too long to think about it, though, as they were closing up the hall for the long weekend, so I gathered my things and headed back to the dormitory. Despite the fact that my folks lived up in Bennington, only a half an hour away or so from campus, I'd moved into the dorms so I could get the whole college experience, but there really wasn't much in the way of student housing. I think there were all of 50 of us in the dorm building I lived in, each of us with our own room, and I liked the fact that even if I didn't have an apartment, I had a little space of land that I could call my own. The plan was to go home the next day for Thanksgiving, but not stay at my folks place any longer than I had to.

As it turned out, plans would change quite a bit.

I unlocked the door to my room and the inside was basically pitch black, as I'd apparently forgotten to uncover the windows before I left, or maybe I'd done it intentionally to help keep the room a little warmer. I stepped in and closed the door behind me and then flipped on the lightswitch.

"So, this is the lair of a dimensional warlord," a voice said from inside my room. "I cannot say I am that impressed."

I turned to see that my room wasn't empty, but, in fact, Aleksandra, Primordial Hydromancer was laying atop of my bed, wearing the exact gold shell bikini I'd seen her wearing on her card not more than ten minutes ago, although the look on her face seemed a lot less serene and a great deal more... engaged. She turned on her side and thrust her chest in my direction a bit, arching her back, as if she needed to draw my eyes to her svelte form any more than they already were.

"As for the warlord himself," she purred, "well, that does seem impressive. Let us see what you are made of conqueror..."

I remember thinking that if this was a prank, it would most certainly be the greatest all-time prank in the history of greatest all-time pranks.

But it wasn't.

And it was going to change the rest of my life within the span of just a month...