one square foot of ground so solid, unburdened and unburdening. Who: Ofelia Zhou & Ophion Barnard What: Bargaining between friends. Where: Ofelia’s home, Theatre District. When: Way backdated to late July, ~2 weeks after this conversation, evening. Rating: PG. Status: Complete.
Like some of his guildmates, Ophion handled the bulk of his studies at the Tower but reserved personal business for beyond the walls. Working against the deadline, the red mage imbued magicite to metal with practiced ease. (Perhaps he ought to have finished even earlier in case she needed them a few days prior in the mess against the water beast, something neither of them could predict.) He surveyed the disposability of her chosen with no envy. Fifty-two cards enchanted not with the loving care of a longtime friend, but with the cold perfectionism of a businessman. His desire to finish the job as quickly as possible was only to find discuss properly his end of the deal.
Ophion shot her a short message through the network as instructed and smoothed the wrinkles of his jacket as he put his communicator away, patting gently where he knew the cards were nestled in the inside pocket. Fifty-two cards and (nearly) twenty-five years, he mused on his way from his home to hers, the distance made shorter by his preoccupation with the upcoming discussion. He knocked on her door twice, after climbing the rickety side-steps to her apartment where it squatted above a café.
“Zhou,” he greeted, dropping the usual edge in his tone despite the semi-formal address of her surname, “It’s Barnard.”
A plaintive meowing soon issued from behind the door. A moment later Ofelia opened it – and a black cat immediately shot out and started winding itself around the man’s boots in figure-eights, crowing for his attention. Ophion’s predilection towards surnames made Ofelia smile slightly, and she repaid in kind: “Welcome, Barnard. Punctual as always. Come on in before she gets out.”
She nodded towards the cat, and soon ushered the both of them inside.
Considering the amount of gil that normally passed her hands at a single poker game, it was a surprisingly small apartment – the woman was obviously living beneath her means, leaning towards discreet practicality in the theatre district rather than lavish housing. The apartment was all creaking wooden floors and exposed beams, and an angled rooftop hanging low over their heads. (It gave the impression, more than anything else, of being an eyrie. Perhaps that was it.)
“Tea?”
“Hm,” he replied, a meaningless answer, perhaps, to anyone else. To her question, he gave the slightest of nods, while his eyes wandered from cat to ceiling, surveying her simple living as he always did. But this was not a meeting to discuss home decor.
Reaching into his pocket, Ophion drew out the enchanted deck to return to the gambler. “Your cards,” he began in a drawl and, though in most other cases his pride would have him refrain, added, “to your liking, I hope?”
“They would have been better earlier, but I can hardly fault you for being on time.” Ofelia let him hang onto it for a moment while she filled the kettle and set it on the old-fashioned stovetop, lighting the range with a flick of a match. That done, she finally plucked the case from Ophion’s hand and settled herself at the small dining table, sliding the cards out of the deck with one smooth motion, splaying them in her hands and fanning them between her fingers.
The metalwork was razor-sharp, the cards folded as thin as Merton Seurle could possibly make them without the cards simply splintering in one’s grip. They felt frail and fragile, and bent slightly at her touch, but they were dangerous.
And with Ophion’s influence, they now hummed with magic. Of an unpredictable sort. Fee touched one of them, her fingertip tracing a line down the edge (where it drew a bead of blood). Was this one Catastrophe, or perhaps Percent, or the stacking explosives? Impossible to tell until she flung them in battle.
“Do you play?” she asked, now cutting the deck. They had other subjects to discuss, of course, but Ofelia prowled around it like the very cat pacing around their feet.
Pulling up a chair across from her, he sat down to watch his customer test the weapons. Ophion took care to separate professional from personal, to compartmentalize his life and be free from the trap of emotional entanglements; he never was as successful at this as he hoped. His eyes fixated on her fingertips and his expression tightened ever slightly when she bled, in a way it wouldn’t have were she just another associate. (It stirred a memory: Ophion studying alone when the Tower stilled, cold metal against his palm, and the Dark licking his knife and his blood.)
"Never bothered. Can’t see why I should try gambling. I’m not exactly a lucky man,” he said at last, if clever still a beat too late. There was a scoff and a scratch of the chin as well to make up for his timing. Lucky men did not have their family and home stolen by flames in a single night. Unless, Ophion thought, he was lucky, if it was purely chance that kept him alive and not some greater purpose.
“Hmm,” she said, but that was it. Ophion Barnard’s losses were catastrophic beside hers, and sometimes Ofelia gave herself pause to reflect on that very issue. A dead mother, a ruined leg, and a lifetime in debt that she’d since erased? How paltry. At least she could pull herself up by her bootstraps, recover the gil, stubbornly bludgeon her life back into a semblance of order, and feed the hungry little beast in the back of her head that demanded higher stakes, more gil, and increased risk. A murdered family, on the other hand...
“You can make your own luck, you know. Fate is whimsical. Fickle. Capricious. But you can seize her. Try to make things better, recoup your losses. And that’s why you’re here today, isn’t it?” Ofelia dealt her friend a hand regardless, because it tested how the metal flew, how it landed on the table, and how its weight tested between her fingers as she pinched and threw. After a pause, Ofelia set another card aside and flung it across the room – it buried itself, quivering, into a wooden pillar (which was already nicked with dozens and dozens of marks, as if she had play-tested such things before).
“Right,” he said, in a simple, solemn agreement. Ophion reached out for the cards, not wasting his time or energy arguing the matter, not with her. He could suffer what he expected would be an embarrassing game for a woman with whom he had shared his past. Over the years, the clock ticked until their words bled together, until their hm's rolled into one another.
Though he had grown familiar with the deck to imbue magicite within them, handling them as playing cards felt foreign to his fingers. He was indeed here to make his own luck; the cards in his grasp to remind him that he still had hands to make that possible. “The usual run-through. If it will even amount to anything this time.”
“The trail gets colder the longer that time goes on,” she said by way of caution, though the warning was unnecessary. No matter the ends of the earth, Ophion would not give up this quest of his. A small smile flickered across her face – less amusement, more wry exhaustion and acceptance – and Ofelia looked up to meet the man’s eye over the fanned spread of cards. “But I know that doesn’t make any difference. The usual run-through, then: I’ll take some time off from the city, hit the road a bit.”
A pause, a beat, then she added: “Anything for a friend.”
The kettle started whistling, a shrill shriek that made Fee abandon her brand-new cards, rising to go attend to chipped mugs and spoonfuls of loose-leaf tea and Ordalian spices. “I’ll cast the net wider this time,” she said over the steam, “in case someone’s spotted him in a town further off than expected. People go to ground in the strangest places.” (Spoken from experience.)
“Hm,” he said instead of thank you, although that was indeed what he meant. Reaching across the table to straighten the cards she had left behind, Ophion cleared a space for the kettle and their cups. His face was turned to the table as he nodded an acknowledgement to her. “I’ll wait for your word then, Ofelia.” And all this was said without missing a beat, as if he would often deign to resort to passive waiting, to first names. How she and Azalea could get him to peel back his icy exterior and expose the raw interior was a testament to what they had. Ophion drew no attention to his reveal as they continued on.
As their conversation drifted between both the professional and the personal, time passed as easily as cards exchanged hands and mugs clinked against saucers. Before he realized it, night had arrived (or two decades, plus, had passed) in the company of one whose words and experiences weaved together with his own.