And, poker game! Got the rules figured out. Interesting video Andrew recommended for research on auction varieties. I'll be back tomorrow with the game itself; this is just the setup of its rules and stuff. I'm sure I'll be able to squeeze a few thousand words out of the game itself, as I've written (copy/pastes into program with word count) 693 words just in overview. That's not even describing the rules and strategies of the individual poker variants I talk about!
EDIT: doing a bit more research, it turns out that it makes a lot more sense to have a full orbit, rotation around the table so that each person at the table gets to sit to the left of the dealer once, than to have it as just one hand of the game. Because that would represent a major lopsidedness if I get to bid first on stud hi-lo only one hand, while bidding last on the texas hold-'em. There are weird magical "individual player powers" at work, but I'm not sure if that balances everything out. 25 hands per table, with 50 hands played in the end? Or 5 hands, and only ten hands played in the end? I dunno yet. 50 hands seems like a lot, but it does give a lot of time for crunchy stuff to happen. So I'm leaning toward that.
Having the variant change every hand can make the game feel disjointed and lack flow. Players like the ability to get into a game and actually play a hand of the variation before it changes. Since you will fold most of the hands you'll be dealt, if only one hand of a variant is dealt, players may lose interest in the game.
There's not really a good way to rewrite the explanation right now without gutting a lot, and I really like this word count, so, eh. I'll fix it in post.
miracle's faith
Michael J Miracle used to have faith. It wasn't that he lost it gradually. Or that he woke up one day and it wasn't there. He couldn't pinpoint where it had happened, but he could guess how. When Miracle was a child, his father had gently explained to him how there was no such thing as the monsters who lived under his bed and in his closet and which went bump in the night. Miracle had scarce believed it, but time after time, being woken up by the monsters, his father coming in and checking inside the closets and underneath the bed, there being nothing there each time, gradually assuaged young Michael's fears, and in time he came to believe that it was as his father said. There are no monsters. There is no boogieman. There is only a fevered imaginative mind at work, conjuring specters out of the shadows and the sounds of night. Father's opening of the closet door, exorcism by torchlight of the underside of the bed, proved this. Like a magician pulling back his sleeves and tilting the interior of his top hat audience-ward proved that there was nothing in his sleeves and in his hat and that thus his tricks were no illusion at all but the truth. The dark was actually crawling with monsters, of course, but Miracle's father being there acting as an outside observer showed Miracle that if you can't see it, it isn't truly there, and all our monsters and all our angels and all our gods are just tricks of the light and shadow and imagination filling in the blacks between them. There were no monsters, and there was no Santa Claus, because under objective light, there was nothing there at all.
But then the monsters turned out to be real after all. Only they carried no magic for him.
Miracle's interest in computers, especially computers in the supernatural world, was similar to how he lost his sense of wonder. It was like drinking all night and you're drunk and it doesn't happen gradually but it just happens and it may as well have always been that way. Technology played such an important role in everyday life, and why would that have changed just if everyday life had supernatural things in it?, but it was something a lot of people tended to overlook and that made Miracle rare and thus important. Not that everything rare is important. Miracle just had a way of getting people to see the value in these things. Numbers, maybe; logic. The world was changing at a rate faster now than the evolution at the industrial revolution, or the Age of Enlightenment, or the advent of movable type, impacting magic now in a way that could be beneficial. Every advancement in technology and in science made the magical community that much smaller as the edges of the map were sketched in and people stopped believing, but now people who did still believe could gang together and share. Networking and collaboration. (establish that that's not always a good thing. also make this lecture sound different from Moone's lectures on the same subject somehow.)
contragate
Unwin was the case officer into the probe into Moone's affairs. Hesketh Unwin was part of Project Overneath, which was, from what Moone could reckon of it, the supernatural espionage community's answer to the FBI probe into the CIA's secret funding of the Contras. Moone was careful not to equate correlation with causation, of course, but noting the Iran-Contra affair proceedings in the newspapers, at the same time Moone himself was being audited for his collusion with the Persian djinni, and had put two together with two, though maybe the second two wasn't a two and all and his four erroneous. Were the djinns the Contra? Moone didn't know; maybe it was- ha!- just a coincidence. But if he was right about this, then... then Overneath and Tetragrammaton really were official agencies of the United States, for whatever that was worth. Or based themselves heavily off of their corresponding non-magical agencies. Why that, though, when the distinction between foreign intelligence and domestic law enforcement was largely bureaucratic? Nothing formal was brought up against Moone; maybe it was just his bane coming into force in a very, very twisted way. The way that it was his bane at play when he was consigned into Tetragrammaton in the first place. Or maybe it was his boon; the beneficial and the harmful were so easy to confuse, and after all his acquaintance with Unwin had led him here, and it was definitely Moone's boon in play allowing him to be privy to Unwin's signs, sigils and codewords.
The Poker Game!
Five tables, five players each, each playing five hands against each other; winner of each advances to master table, where there would be a final five-hand game and the final bidding for the NOC list. The tournament doubled as an auction, as well; at the end, with the chips having fallen as they had during the five hands of poker, there was to be an auction to be declared the winner of that table, to go on to the master table. The poker "winner" and the one to advance to the next table would not necessarily be the same person, under these rules, though of course the winner of the poker game itself would have the best advantage to advance, having scored most of the money from their opponents.
To keep things fair, but mostly interesting, though, the auctions (at first the auctions just to get onto the next round of poker, but after five hands of poker at the master table the auction to win the NOC list itself) would not be open auctions at all. Instead, they would be what is known as Vickrey-style: sealed bid, no team knowing the precise bid of any other team; the highest bidder wins, but only needing to pay the bid amount of the second-highest bidder. The amount of money left after the payment and advancement to the higher table would be the amount of money they winner would have to start out with there, and there would be the added wrinkle of the highest bidder needing to demonstrably prove that they have as much money as they bid, though they would not pay that much.
The poker itself was open stakes; that means, as it sounds, that more poker chips could be bought at any time. Any time during the poker bidding itself, that is; the auction phase after the five hands still needed to take place using only the money represented by the chips on the table. It's unusual for open stakes to be in effect at anything but an amateur level, but the Tooth Fairy had it set up this way for two reasons: one, it made him more money, and two, the prohibitions against such staking rules are generally in place because of the interest of time restraints, but magical monetary transactions eliminates this quibble. Open-stakes betting was of course very good for Unwin, with his gradually increasing pool of resources. Each opponent also had their own magic boons bestowed upon them, as well, which would make gambling against them very interesting. Regardless of whether Unwin's twisting of his own received boon was technically cheating or not; it could be argued either way, but Unwin had plausible deniability on his side.
Tooth Fairy introduced the hands themselves. Each round of poker, each hand in the round, was going to be a different poker variation. To celebrate the game itself! And because it required strategies to get mixed up a bit, which always kept things fresh and exciting! And also maybe because the Tooth Fairy couldn't decide which variation to play, so just declared the tournament mixed, tossing all his favorites into the pot like a poker pot-pourri. He had selected five poker variants, two of them hold 'em and three of them stud: start off the first hand as a standard Texas Hold 'em, move onto Omaha Hold 'em for the second hand, third hand Razz, fourth hand Stud, fifth hand Eight-or-better. Together, they formed HORSE, and the Tooth Fairy was naturally quite amused by this fact. HORSE!
The HORSE mixed game poker variant was of Tooth Fairy's own invention; it would make its debut in the mundane world a full decade afterward, from Moone's timeline point of view; any HORSE poker game or variation thereof (such as the ever-popular HOSE) descends from the swanky gambling halls of the pearly-white Tower of Babel. It wasn't the Tooth Fairy who learned the variant from the mundane world; that's not how time travel works, or at least not the Babylonian format of time travel. NOT AN ANACHRONISM.
a pontifex lecture
There were a lot of cannibalistic rites back then. Different gods were served different ways, and all gods were, real, true, as far as that went; it was all part of the same religious system. Not like, which of these protestant groups should I join, they all prescribe different ways to worship the same God, and only one of them can be the right way, right?? It's more of, which sports team do I want to root for, this local place really likes these guys, but it's not like a zero-sum game where only one team can win, right? These myths are believed all throughout Greece, though So nobody's going to crucify you in the streets for rooting for the [russian team] when you're in the city where the [that team's rivals] are from. Choosing one god to worship over another usually came down to, whatever winds filled your sails, whether you need your crops of whatever to prosper or not. And they believed in an afterlife, but it was pretty crappy, so there was no point in looking forward to that. For lack of a better term, they were atheists who believed in gods. Their lives were focused on and anchored in this life, and not the life to come.
So this is how their belief affected the magic. True worship requires sacrifice, wouldn't you agree? The sacrificial center in a mortality-oriented order required literal sacrifice to enter the realms of the gods. In the rustic land of Arcadia, a famously pristine pastoral place, home of the Great God Pan, the rites of their highest mountain point were all about transformation into wolves, by the sacrifice of, people, the ritual consumption of human flesh to act as a catalyst for the transformation. Which may seem kind of horrific from an outsider's perspective, but there's nothing terribly unique about any of this; just the concept of the wendigo of the native americans, combined with the Sporagmos, the ritualization of later cannibalistic rites of the Romans. Sympathetic magic, sacrificing a human to be devoured by wolves, to keep the wolves away from the flocks, and just, saying it was all ordained by Zeus. Lycaon's sons each taking turns feasting upon the flesh of one of their brothers.
People became horrified of the prospect of the cannibalistic rituals, said later that gods punished the sons of Lycaon, sparing only Nyctimus, the night. All are sacrificed for their cannibalism. And, getting rid of the cannibalistic rites, changing the myth alongside it. We alter ritual to better fit our myth, but we invent myth in the first place in order to explain our ritual.
[pontifex alters the myth so that the gods partake of human flesh. sacrifice, consumption. The ritual of transporting to the Dreaming required the sacrifice of consumption.
a pontifex lecture
There were a lot of cannibalistic rites back then. Different gods were served different ways, and all gods were, real, true, as far as that went; it was all part of the same religious system. Not like, which of these protestant groups should I join, they all prescribe different ways to worship the same God, and only one of them can be the right way, right?? It's more of, which sports team do I want to root for, this local place really likes these guys, but it's not like a zero-sum game where only one team can win, right? These myths are believed all throughout Greece, though So nobody's going to crucify you in the streets for rooting for the [russian team] when you're in the city where the [that team's rivals] are from. Choosing one god to worship over another usually came down to, whatever winds filled your sails, whether you need your crops of whatever to prosper or not. And they believed in an afterlife, but it was pretty crappy, so there was no point in looking forward to that. For lack of a better term, they were atheists who believed in gods. Their lives were focused on and anchored in this life, and not the life to come.
So this is how their belief affected the magic. True worship requires sacrifice, wouldn't you agree? The sacrificial center in a mortality-oriented order required literal sacrifice to enter the realms of the gods. In the rustic land of Arcadia, a famously pristine pastoral place, home of the Great God Pan, the rites of their highest mountain point were all about transformation into wolves, by the sacrifice of, people, the ritual consumption of human flesh to act as a catalyst for the transformation. Which may seem kind of horrific from an outsider's perspective, but there's nothing terribly unique about any of this; just the concept of the wendigo of the native americans, combined with the Sporagmos, the ritualization of later cannibalistic rites of the Romans. Sympathetic magic, sacrificing a human to be devoured by wolves, to keep the wolves away from the flocks, and just, saying it was all ordained by Zeus. Lycaon's sons each taking turns feasting upon the flesh of one of their brothers.
People became horrified of the prospect of the cannibalistic rituals, said later that gods punished the sons of Lycaon, sparing only Nyctimus, the night. All are sacrificed for their cannibalism. And, getting rid of the cannibalistic rites, changing the myth alongside it. We alter ritual to better fit our myth, but we invent myth in the first place in order to explain our ritual.
[pontifex alters the myth so that the gods partake of human flesh. sacrifice, consumption. The ritual of transporting to the Dreaming required the sacrifice of consumption.
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