“Why are we doing this?” Becca asked me. She was sitting next to me in the passenger seat of my car, legs folded up in a way that was almost certainly not airbag safe.

“Because.” I told her, trying and failing to swat her legs down into a reasonable position. “It’s a goddamn Disney movie of a day outside, and I have the day off, and I wanna do something fun for a change.”

Becca didn’t exactly pout. Pouting was a fairly complex motion, when you thought about it (which I had), and Bec didn’t… do… motion. It had been three weeks, give or take, and my new roommate was still mostly statuesque. She was talking more, but even that, she did with barely any motion. It was kind of surreal, but then, I had found her in a shopping mall full of blood.

Speaking of. “Oh, and also, I have the extra money from testing out [Devil’s Due], so the tickets are within my budget.”

“You need to be more careful.” She flatly stated. It was the closest thing to concern I’d gotten from her, and it really did warm my heart. I was really upping my game on understanding stoic facial expressions and dull toned voices, at least when it came to her, and it was just kinda nice to be able to intuit real care when she worried about me.

__

The reason she was telling me to be more careful is that yesterday, Becca had come back from an evening jog to find me sitting at the table, trying to fill a small cup with my own blood, so I could test out my new Cards.

This, I admit, was a bit stupid.

See, I’d had this whole thing in my head where I could be one of those stone-cold badasses, who faced pain without flinching, right? Except that’s totally just not a human thing to do, it turns out. I’d learned this lesson sitting at the island counter of my little kitchen space, trying to figure out why it was so hard to stab myself when I knew damn well I could fix it. Probably. Mostly. Maybe.

When Becca had done that thing she did where she just kind of apperated at my side, I’d promptly let out a small scream, and slit my arm open by total accident. And hot damn, let me tell you! The kitchen knives I own are *not* sharp enough to make that not hurt.

I’d recovered quickly, though, and crushed the Card I’d quickly pulled out after dropping the knife with a clatter. Feeling it, trying to focus on what it actually *meant* to cast this particular spell, rolling the energy around my fingers. But not for too long, cause I was bleeding, and [Mend] was first up on my test list.

The feeling of skin pinching itself back together, fusing into unblemished skin without leaving a scar (but yes to leaving behind all my fucking blood), was weird. Weird… now there was a word I needed to stop using. It was rapidly becoming in danger of overuse in my life. It didn’t feel weird, it felt like my skin was temporarily jello. Fleshy pudding, pulled into an invisible point of suction, welded back together by a room-temperature blowtorch.

And then I was healed.

Holy shit, that was a rush.

I collected what I could of the blood still running down my arm in a little cup, noticing Becca pull back with more animation than I’d see from her most of the time. Blood, for obvious reasons, was a bit of a sore spot with her. Not wanting to subject her to it longer than was needed, I scraped my now-intact arm against the cup to get most of the blood into it.

And then it was time to actually try out [Devil’s Due].

This was a card that I had tried a few times, and filled in more text with each failure. It turned out, it had a lot of qualifiers that made it less useful than I wanted, but it was still a cool function, in theory. Qualifier one was that I couldn’t use my own blood while it was in me. Being as I was O+, it woulda been great to have that extra infusion (heh) of cash without needing to be needled or anything. So the blood or whatever had to be in a discrete container. It also had to be on just one thing. No selling off a series of organs from a dissected frog which had been super gross and smelled as formaldehyde.

So when it finally fired off properly, purified the cup of all the blood in it, and dropped a stack of gold dollar coins on the table, I was pretty happy. It took actual mental work, and too much waiting and paying attention to draw timers, to drag the information about how things functioned out. Actually getting results, and money, really was a spike of good cheer for me.

Which was good balance, because I hadn’t figured out how to get [Fruit Of The First Vine] to work at *all*. But with a name like that, it would either be super specific and super powerful, or super specific and super useless. In that coin flip, I wasn’t going to bet my personal hopes and dreams, but I knew which one I wanted, certainly.

__

“There’s going to be a problem.” Becca said. I glanced over, and she was still sitting there, but I’d heard a click and I was almost certain she had been fiddling with the air conditioner settings in my car when I wasn’t watching. “There’s always a problem.”

I grinned. “That’s the beauty of it! Even if there is a problem, at least it’ll happen on an awesome-sauce day, and then we’ll level up, and everything will be great.”

“I don’t think you should say that.” She said, voice inscrutable.

“That everything will be great?” I admit, I was kinda tempting fate on purpose now. But what would be the point of living comfortably with my magic as it was, never growing, never getting anything extra?

I’d done some Google-fu on how fast a human made more blood. Based on the chunk of change I’d gotten for one inept use of [Devil’s Due], I was actually pretty sure that I could make a living off it, if not a great one. I still hadn’t actually figured out how to *cast* [Fruit Of The True Vine], but if I could, that would give me another angle of money-making, as well as just a way to improve the world. And I was still on that original plan of just being a fucking awesome pyrotechnics manager for some grunge band somewhere. Basically what I’m saying is, I wasn’t ‘set for life’, but I was capable of getting by without ever progressing.

But nuts to that.

Becca’s tone was less neutral than normal. It had been an uphill battle getting her to use whole sentences, but she’d adapted. But so long of not using her voice left her with pretty much no context for infliction. Still, it was neat when she actually put feeling into her words. “When you say everything will be great, it means something is going to go wrong. TV taught me this. And also you said it yesterday when we went to dinner, and someone nearly died.”

____

That was an exaggeration. Mostly.

No one had *actually* almost died. Except for the one guy.

We were out at a vegetarian grill, which sounds awful, I know, but trust me on this. If your town has a veggie grill? Go check it out. They probably do this thing where you can get a bean burger that’s, like, eighty percent grilled onions, and it’s basically the perfect food.

You don’t like grilled onions? That’s fine, I didn’t need more friends anyway.

The point, which I have once again diverged from, is that we were sitting at this little patio, enjoying the blazing orange sunset, trying to entice a stray cat over, and also the onions (no I won’t shut up about this, it’s important), when I let slip the comment.

“This is great. Everything’s been really great lately. It’s nice that stuff has stopped going horribly wrong for a…”

I never got to finish that sentence before everything went to hell.

The thing was, I still wasn’t a hundred percent sure what had happened. But between what I’d seen, and what Becca had witnessed from her perspective, we’d reconstructed the Rube Goldberg series of events as best we could, and it seemed frankly implausible.

First, someone had started yelling at one of the cashiers. This had distracted a guy walking by who was either lighting a smoke or just fiddling with a lighter or maybe some pyromaniac, and his shirt had ended up briefly on fire. Being literally on fire was apparently distracting enough that he let slip the leash of the pomeranian he was walking, which I don’t really *blame* him for, honestly. The tiny dog, suddenly free for the first time in its life, did the only thing that entered its pea-sized brain, and lunged its poofy body up onto the patio where we were eating to almost immediately sink its needle-fangs into the leg of our waiter.

He then screamed, flailed backward, and perfectly dumped a bowl of mushroom pesto onto my head, before kicking the dog off in an arc that, I am told, was “majestic”.

By the time my hair met its pasta fate, I had juuuust about turned around in my chair to try to figure out why this lady was screaming at the cashier. So when I say that I was mildly surprised by this, please understand that I was surprised enough that if I’d had that stat pool, it would have spiked to well over thirty points.

What I *did* notice was that the dog-shaped hellion landed on its feet just off the patio, and didn’t lose time in bolting for its next prey, the cat that I’d been trying to make friends with.

That cat booked it right into the parking lot, and in front of a moving car.

Now, my reaction time may not have been up to keeping myself from getting new headwear, but Becca and I had been spending basically all our free time and spare draws together practicing. And maybe it was that, or maybe it was just my love of cats, but it didn’t take a lot more than what felt like instinct to snap out my casting gesture, and flick a [Shield] out at a ramped angle, and send the car’s tire slightly over the head of the cowering cat.

The thump and/or crunch of the car’s bumper hitting the ground got everyone’s attention, even the woman who was screaming about… I think it was being given ones instead of a five? I’d kind of tuned it out as soon as I’d registered it, even if she was making a scene. It also absolutely got the first real look of surprise I’d seen on Becca’s face. Eyes wide, frozen in mid bite around a piece of flatbread she was holding in both hands like a squirrel, she stared at me for several long seconds before tearing off the chunk of bread, swallowing heavily, and laughed.

It was short, barked out, quiet, and *real*, and it made my heart glow under all the sauce dripping down my shirt.

_____

“No one ‘almost died’. You’re overreacting. It was just a coincidence.”

She glared at me. “Your magic is mad at you for being cocky.” Becca said. “It doesn’t like it. Don’t say things like that.”

I rolled my eyes. “What’s the worst that could…”

“Eyes on the road.” I hadn’t seen Becca move, but her hand was on the wheel, keeping the car steady as we hit a pothole that I was sure major highways totally had normally.

I briefly glanced at the fuel tanker driving two lanes to our left. Then I cleared my throat, and said, “I’ve considered your point and am willing to stop taunting the universe.”

“Good.” She replied, sinking back into the seat.

I clicked my tongue in mild frustration. It wasn’t that she was *wrong*, exactly. I had a pretty solid idea now that whatever had gifted me with this bizarrely specific magic power had also put a giant cosmic bullseye on my back. It was just a bit hard to hear other people say it, you know? As long as your problems were just vague thoughts in your own head, they didn’t feel as concrete as when someone told you that something was wrong.

Glancing over at Bec, I saw her curled up, arms around her knees, watching the trees on the side of the highway go by. She was being deliberately silent, and I found it… comfortable. There weren’t many people I was okay just hanging out with without saying anything. Only one, really. And it was her, to be clear on that.

Now was a good time to just sit back, enjoy the feel of the road, and be alone with my thoughts for a bit.

My deckbuilding wasn’t great.

It was time I acknowledge this to myself. If the universe was turned against me (an it was) then I was going to have to seriously up my game. The *problem* was… well, life, I guess? Like, [Monk’s Bounty], [Incense], [Cauldron’s Toil], and [Graced Maneuver] were all just fucking invaluable for getting through my daily life. At this point, I’d saved well over a hundred bucks from the vending machine alone, and that sentence just made me sad as soon as I thought it. Fuck. I need to start bringing sandwiches to work or something.

Anyway. Roughly half my deck was stuff that didn’t really have “dangerous situation” potential, unless I had a plan that involved it. Another quarter of it was ramp; those Cards like [Potential] or [Journey And Destination] that spiked my pools up, and let me actually use things that I’d never get access to if I just relied on my deck’s natural growth. And then the rest were a few proven winners for crisis moments, like [Blast] and *especially* [Under Cover Of Fortune]. I needed to figure out how to get more of those, so I could buy them, and get… more… of those. Fuck. Again, fuck. Oh, and always, a couple cards that were under experimentation.

So, the deal is, I needed to refine what I was doing. I needed to better balance how many [Potential]’s I needed, or, better yet, rank up the ones I had. The rank two version was actually fucking *huge*, basically being two Cards in one, and it showed no sign of decaying back to its lower form. The only problem was, the condition to upgrade it was preeeetty specific.

It did make me wonder if.. Well, no, *how* I could rank up other Cards. Every new facet of this thing I discovered was just more *work*. I’m not complaining; it’s cool as hell, but it’s also a lot to keep track of, and this is not the kind of game I’m good at.

Okay. So. Priorities.

I needed to be prepared to fight if it came up, because I couldn’t rely on Becs, and I death is a pretty harsh failure state. I needed to be prepared to save someone if needed, because that was my moral duty as a human. And I *wanted* to get some kind of personal benefit from my Cards. So, how do we accomplish this?

Well, I kinda had a rough outline already. A few [Potential]s got me to casting capacity for most things pretty fast. Reset’s weren’t a huge problem, but I was vulnerable in that early period. I had a new deck to try, but I honestly didn’t have the ability to pay attention to drawing for that long at a time, even if it would get me there faster. It also didn’t let me use cards that cost more than six points of anything, which meant no [Triage And Stabilize]. And that one was *critical*. Two people were alive today because of it. That was… I took a second to breathe, hands tightening on the wheel. That was huge. Aside from that, a couple [Shield]s and [Blast]s, [Red Scrapper] which I’d not tried out but seemed like a shoe-in for this, and [Forge In Flames] all felt like exactly what I needed for survival. There was, then, the problem that I didn’t draw cards fast enough. That was my main gate right now, because no matter what I put in my Deck, cultivating a useable Hand was a trick. [Marquis Of The Greedy Sands] and [Smiling Lunge] were my only two draw options, and both sucked. Well, no, not ‘sucked’, but they were both kind of last resort things. The first one drew four cards, which was great, and then added an hour to when my next draw was, which was not. But still, not the worst trade. The second drew me three cards, sort of, and then I had to pick and use one of them within about ten seconds before they were all discarded anyway, which was less drawing and more just slightly random selection. I growled a bit at the thought of how easily that could get wasted, but I put it in my mental notepad for my new decklist anyway. If I was going to survive the future, I needed to try a few new tricks.

I cut out [Aura of Unconcern] and my other Ennui Cards. It turns out, when you’re living pretty happy and going on adventures every other day, it’s tough to feel the crushing weight of the world on your shoulders. Then I felt guilty about that, since I’d only escaped that fate by random chance and literal magic. Then my Ennui ticked up, and I stopped feeling bad pretty quick.

Okay. Time for some quick math.

It’s five hundred points for one of the packs of Cards. I made a little under that last month, total. What I needed was more Cards, or more points to buy the cooler Cards. The regional booster pack had actually been super cool with the hospital trick, and if I could find other ways to manipulate stuff like that, I’d be in business. Like, literal business, maybe. So, I needed to be able to get either Cards or points from my Task rewards, which meant… well, it meant ya gotta spend points to make points. Because I could not stick to one pack and a few random pickups every month. My selection right now was *nonsense*. I could do a hundred different things “kind of okay”, and that just wasn’t good enough.

-Reward Choice Up-. Thirty of my hard earned points, spent while stuck sitting in traffic a few exits before my off ramp, and I had that feeling of regret like I’d bought something dumb. But hopefully, that would pay off later. Hopefully.

Maybe if I spent enough points, new Decks would unlock on the shop. I’d only ever earned two extras of those, which made me feel like they were rare finds, and the ones the shop had on offer were just craaaap. A series of them, each one or , on and on through all the emotion-stats I had access to. I didn’t know what they did, and I wasn’t ready to pay five hundred cardbucks to find out, especially when that could get me access to actual cooler cards. But it did mean that I wasn’t upgrading in that direction, which meant I was still limited by my draw timer, which sometimes got agonizingly slow to watch tick.

Maybe I should give in. Who knows? Maybe it’ll turn out to be...nah, can’t think of anything to finish that with. It has the word “failure” in the damn title. Though knowing how this system works, that might not even mean anything at all. Or it might! The joke is that I do not, at all, know how this system works. Not really. I feel like an ant trying to understand a car; I’ve figured out that the tire has at least one groove in it, and I’m digging this groove, but I’m almost certain there’s something more to it.

I snapped my menu shut when the cars started moving again, edging our wheels closer to where Becca and I were headed for our day out. If nothing else, I felt like this was gonna be fun. It was midway into the week, I was loaded on pools and Cards, and I just kind of had this gut instinct that my little day trip idea was a good one.

“Hey.” I nudged Bec in the knee. “Wake up. We’re almost there!”

“Still a bad idea.” She said as I pulled off the highway.

I snorted at her. “Oh, come on. Have a sense of adventure! Besides,” I asked, as I drove us under the arched sign that covered the forested side road, “when’s the last time you got to see *penguins*?”

Oregon State Zoo, read the sign.