Mardock Scramble

The game had begun. Balot’s farewell game to the casino, her lap of honor. A game just for her.

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Ashley and Bell Wing were the first to realize what was going on.

The Doctor knew already, of course, as it was none other than the Doctor who had hatched the plan in the first place.

The only ones who remained oblivious to the end were the man from OctoberCorp and Shell.

Shell’s mind wasn’t even able to comprehend the possibility that something was going on—that he was being played—or, if it was, he soon suppressed those errant suspicions. The only thing that Shell knew was that he was winning, over and over, just as he did in life, and his victories were all he had to hold on to from amid his shame and disgrace.

For Shell was winning. From the very first hand up to the ten-game mark where they currently stood, the cards seemed to be going his way.

The Doctor’s plan was unfolding nicely. Your target is the golden yolks—don’t touch any white or shell. If you do end up getting some along the way, be sure to return them immediately once you’ve reached your objective. Balot understood what she had to do. The only question left now was the matter of timing. So that the plan would achieve its maximum effect.

It was around the twelve-game mark when it happened. The upcard was 9, Balot’s cards were 3 and 8.

The melee of figures at the bottom of her left arm showed her what she needed to do. Balot hit.

The card she received was a 6. Then she hit again, a 2. Total nineteen. At first glance it looked like her recklessness had paid off. In particular to the man from OctoberCorp, standing behind Shell and the chips, glaring over all he could see.

Balot glanced up at him before calling out her intention to stay.

Cleanwill John October, the man from OctoberCorp, wore a fearsome expression. Unrelenting and relentless. As if he wouldn’t permit Shell to lose a single hand, let alone the game. An impossible demand. Like ordering him to play Russian roulette with an automatic pistol.

Shell turned over his hidden card. An ace. Shell had won, by the narrowest of margins.

“Ha!” John yelped in satisfaction. Shell smiled even as he looked on at his cards with a grim expression.

Shell was hanging on by a thread, and he knew it. Balot was on the crest of a winning wave, on the ultimate winning streak, and yet she was somehow suppressing it. Leaving the door open to Shell. Cutting him some slack, giving him some rope—for what?

She was planning something. He could smell it. Even in his present state, Shell was still Shell, and he was usually the first to pick up on this sort of thing.

But it was already too late. The race had already begun: a drag race, where speed was everything and the first to cross the finish line took it all—and then mid-race Shell realized that the finish line was actually a chicken run straight to hell, and yet he couldn’t slam on the brakes or he would lose, and lose everything. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Balot’s hundred-thousand-dollar chips had run out. Before long she had also exhausted her supply of fifty-thousand-dollar chips too, and was on to the ten-thousand-dollar chips, burning through them steadily, one after another, like a chain smoker his cigarettes.

What did the others in the casino—the players, the dealers—make of such a scene?

Let me help you with that, they would have been thinking, most probably. They would have taken the chips in their hands and ran from the casino as quickly as their legs would carry them.

It was only common sense, after all—winning streaks didn’t last forever.

This girl and the lanky man beside her had lost it—they were suckers for pushing on past the point that their luck had run out, for not knowing when to quit while they were ahead.

Now their recklessness had driven the casino mad, forced the house to call in its big guns, and their chips were crumbling away like an asphalt road under a jackhammer. An unstoppable force—and one that nobody had any inclination to try and stop.

The whole floor seemed to feel this way.

And this was what Balot and the Doctor needed in order to bring the final act to an end on the requisite bang. How would the regulars who haunted this place react toward those who had just wandered onto their turf and won a fortune, and not even a small one at that? Some would be prepared to kill the interlopers to steal their newly acquired riches. Others might try and team up with them, use them to win big for themselves. It wouldn’t just be the other customers who felt this way but many of the dealers too, no doubt. Either way, they were a veritable hornets’ nest, ready to sink their opportunistic stingers into those who won big—another hurdle for Balot and the Doctor to contend with.