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edenfallingSummary: Nyota Uhura, Christine Chapel, Hikaru Sulu, and Gaila -- the not-quite-senior officers of the Enterprise, minus the two disqualified for being underage and/or crazy -- gather for their weekly game and gossip session. This week's mission is Hearts.
Notes: This fic was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One in incredibly belated response to the WILD CARD square. (Yeah, I went literal. Sue me.) It's also in response to a prompt from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
vehrec: Kirk, Spock, kicking back and relaxing over 3D chess-or maybe even some sort of 4D chess where you can phase out pieces for a certain number of turns. Just relaxing on the Enterprise I suppose, R&R, the actual people don’t matter.
It's nominally set in the same universe as A History of Handcrafts and A Guide to Guerrilla Knitting, but that has no practical effect on the story. (1,975 words)
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
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All on a Summer's Day
---------------------------------------------
"What's the game for today?" Nyota asked as she claimed her seat at the corner table unofficially reserved for the weekly Not-Quite-Senior Officers Game and Gossip Session. She was the last one to arrive this time. Gaila and Christine had less far to travel between their stations and the rec room, and Sulu hadn't been stuck trying to wind up a diplomatic conference call relay right at shift change.
If she never had to play interpreter between minor planetary governments and Federation Senate committee members again... well, she'd be out of a job, and it's not like adding nuanced subtitles for both sides of the discussion wasn't an interesting challenge, but she had rarely heard so many different ways to say nothing of substance at such tedious length. There were reasons she was in Starfleet instead of in some ambassador's retinue.
Christine looked up briefly, the weird, stretched stars of warp speed visible through the window framing her upswept blonde hair in shimmering light. She smiled across the table, then returned her concentration to the deck of cards she was shuffling. The rainbow colors of her fingerless support gloves clashed cheerfully with the sober blue-checked pattern on the backs of the cards. "Today's mission, should you choose to accept it, is Hearts."
"Is that metaphorical or just a suit name, like Spades?" Gaila asked around a mouthful of what looked like pureed salad.
"Suit name," Christine said. "Hearts is a trick-taking game, but this one is everyone for themselves and the goal is to avoid taking points. Every heart card is worth one point and the queen of spades is worth thirteen."
"And the jack of diamonds is negative ten," Sulu added.
Christine shook her head. "Not today it isn't. Basic rules first. We can start messing around with variants some other day." She turned to Gaila. "Play goes clockwise, the person with the two of clubs leads, you have to follow suit if you can, you can't lead hearts until somebody sloughs a heart or the queen, and just to make it extra fun, if you take all twenty-six points, your score for that round is zero and everyone else in the game gets twenty-six points each; that's called shooting the moon."
"Statistically, I think anyone serving on this ship has a much better chance of shooting an actual moon than pulling off that particular trick," Nyota said. Gaila and Sulu laughed, and Christine held a fan of cards across her mouth to hide a smile.
Ha, victory. It wasn't quite as satisfying as getting one over on Kirk -- and speaking of that, she needed to think of a good next move in their knitted gag gift competition -- but the day she couldn't drop the right words into the right place, she'd turn herself in as her own mirror universe duplicate.
"I think the odds ran the other direction when the game was invented," Christine said after a moment. "In any case, we can play a set number of rounds, or until somebody hits a hundred points. Whoever has the least points at the end wins."
Gaila tapped her spoon against the rim of her salad bowl as she repeated the rules under her breath. "Okay. Got it. Does suit precedence matter?"
"Nah, just face value," Sulu said. "Oh wait, one more thing. After the cards are dealt, you get to pick three to hand off to somebody else. First hand, we pass left; second we pass right; third we pass across the table; and fourth we hold." He glanced at Christine. "Unless that doesn't count as basic?"
Christine shrugged. "I don't care. Nyota? Gaila? Do you have a preference?"
"I'm fine either way," Nyota said.
"I'm always in favor of sharing. And you don't have to go easy on me. I'd be fine even playing with this jack of diamonds rule," Gaila said. "I have to introduce you guys to Orion dice games next week. If you think Terran card games are complicated, you have no idea what you're in for." She grinned, bright and competitive.
"Did I mention that when you play jack of diamonds rule, you have to take that card too if you want to shoot the moon?" Sulu said innocently.
"Still not that complicated," Gaila assured him. "But it sounds like you'll need to keep your brain running in top gear. You should get some food. I wouldn't want you to claim that I only beat you at one of yours species' own games because you were low on glucose."
"I wouldn't claim that because I'm going to win," Sulu said, but he shoved his chair back and ambled toward the bank of food replicators on the near interior wall. "Hey, Uhura, Christine, you want me to grab you something while I'm up?"
"No thanks, I already ate," Christine said.
"Some wali na maharage, please."
"You got it."
Christine handed the deck sideways to Gaila, who cut it into five piles, tapped the cards back together, repeated the process with three piles, and then again with two. "Guess the pattern," she said.
"Primes?" Nyota ventured.
"It fits, but that wasn't the intent."
"Reverse Fibonacci," Sulu said as he dropped Nyota's Tanzanian-style rice and beans onto the table, then set down a slice of mushroom and pepper pizza for himself.
"Also fits, but still not the intent. You're too focused on math. I'm not defined by engineering or computer science. Think. What are we here for?"
"Games and gossip, but what does that... oh, of course. The four of us plus the notional Orion table-guest courtesy, the three actual senior officers, and the two we disallowed for being underage and/or crazy," Christine said triumphantly.
Gaila pointed a finger at her. "Bingo! So come on, deal already. I want one round to make sure you haven't forgotten to tell me any important rules. Then we can get down to gossip."
Nyota ate several mouthfuls of her wali na maharage while Christine dealt the cards. Then she scooped them up and arranged her hand by suit and face order. Hmm. This was... not a very good bridge hand. That was odd. Usually some obscure variant of Murphy's Law dictated that people ended up with brilliant hands for games they weren't actually playing.
It wasn't a terrible Hearts hand, all things considered, though the lone three of hearts made her slightly nervous. She also had the jack, six, and two of clubs; the jack, eight, seven, and three of diamonds; and the queen of spades, nicely insulated by the nine, eight, three, and two.
Nyota tapped her nails against the table, considering. There was no chance of shooting the moon, so her best bet was to empty a suit and hope she could slough any nasty surprises Sulu might hand her. On the other hand, emptying clubs (aside from the two, since sloughing points on the first trick wasn't allowed... wait, had they mentioned that to Gaila?) would be a bit obvious. Maybe she should just dump all her high cards.
No, the first plan was better.
Nyota pulled the jack and six of clubs and the jack of diamonds. "Here you go," she said, and handed the cards to Gaila. "Don't look until you've passed your own."
"Well, duh." Gaila frowned at her own hand, then rapidly pulled three cards and handed them to Christine.
"Sorry about this," Sulu said as he handed his own choices to Nyota.
He didn't look particularly sorry, judging by the badly hidden grin on his face. She looked at the cards. Queen, seven, and five of clubs.
"You have an interesting attitude toward risk," she told him.
"I'm in Starfleet, that goes without saying. Anyway, Christine's is weirder," Sulu said, sounding somewhat distracted as he worked his own new cards into his hand. "What in the galaxy am I supposed to do with this?"
"I think we're all asking that question right now," Christine said with a serene smile. Her expression didn't change one iota as she picked up Gaila's discards.
Nyota ate another few mouthfuls of her dinner while Gaila made exaggerated tragic faces at her newly acquired trio of cards and integrated them into her hand. Then she led the two of clubs. Gaila played the ace, Christine played the king... and Sulu sloughed the ace of spades.
"Huh," Gaila said, tilting her head and drawing in a deep breath as she stared across the table. "Don't you have any hearts?"
"Can't bleed on the first trick," Sulu said with a shrug. "But after that, watch out!" He flexed the fingers of his free hand like claws.
Gaila gathered in the cards and stared at her hand in evident deep concentration. Then she led the jack of spades.
Christine played the ten. Sulu grimaced and played the king. Nyota smiled. "Sorry about this," she said, and placed the queen delicately on top of the pile.
"You didn't get dealt any spades?" she asked as Sulu collected the trick.
"None," he said. "Dammit, Gaila, why couldn't you have led diamonds?"
"Would that have helped in the long run? We already knew you were out of clubs," Gaila said. "And if Nyota knows you didn't start out with any spades, that means you didn't pass any to her, which means she felt comfortable holding onto the queen, which means... she has a bunch of other spades? I'm not sure what good that knowledge does me, though accurate models of reality are always better than otherwise," she added.
"It means you might be able to force her to take a spade trick and then get stuck leading spades to mop up the last points in the round," Christine said. "Stop dithering, Hikaru. Play a card."
They played out the rest of the game in fierce concentration. Nyota managed to avoid taking a single trick, safe or otherwise, and felt quite pleased with herself.
"And that's the first round. Count up your points, people, and I'll write down the scores," Christine said as she pulled out her padd.
"None for me," Nyota said.
"You didn't even take any tricks," Gaila said grumpily. "Two for me."
"I have five," Christine said as she drew a makeshift grid with a stylus and noted the scores.
"And the other nineteen for me," Sulu finished. He gathered everyone's cards together and began to shuffle. "You may think I have terrible luck. You may think I'm an unskilled player. But I tell you, that was only the first round, and I will have my revenge!"
"Will it be served cold?" Nyota asked. "Because I've always thought that revenge tastes better hot. It gets too sickly-sweet as it cools off." She scraped the last remnants of her dinner from the shallow bowl and licked the sauce from her spoon.
"It's conceptually impossible for revenge to be too sweet, and I am the master of slowly compounding despair," Sulu said as he handed the deck to Christine, who cut it in three uneven piles. He reclaimed the resulting stack and began to deal. "For example, the captain is still trying to figure out if I liked the knitted sword cozy or if I was hideously offended by his presumption, and he gave that to me six months ago. And that's one of my quick and sloppy efforts. So tell me, Uhura, do you feel lucky?"
Nyota looked at her friends. She thought about the incredible coincidences that had brought them to this ship and kept them alive through impossible odds. She thought about the negotiations today, which brought a new planet one step closer to joining the Federation.
"Yeah," she said. "I do. And unlike Kirk, I have no compunctions about giving you deliberately presumptuous knitted gifts, so unless you have some ridiculously distracting gossip? You are going down."
She picked up her cards and smiled.
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End of Story
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This was not the fic I meant to finish tonight -- that would be the Narnia genderswap "unexpected love" fill -- but what the hell, it's a thing, and I wrote it, and it's done. *resolve face*
Also, yes, I did in fact deal four hands of Hearts and play the entire game out against myself. I was going to decide the hands for thematic reasons, but that got ridiculous and unworkable very fast, so I figured I would go with random chance instead. :-)
Notes: This fic was written for Cotton Candy Bingo Round One in incredibly belated response to the WILD CARD square. (Yeah, I went literal. Sue me.) It's also in response to a prompt from
vehrec: Kirk, Spock, kicking back and relaxing over 3D chess-or maybe even some sort of 4D chess where you can phase out pieces for a certain number of turns. Just relaxing on the Enterprise I suppose, R&R, the actual people don’t matter.It's nominally set in the same universe as A History of Handcrafts and A Guide to Guerrilla Knitting, but that has no practical effect on the story. (1,975 words)
[ETA: the AO3 crosspost is now up!]
---------------------------------------------
All on a Summer's Day
---------------------------------------------
"What's the game for today?" Nyota asked as she claimed her seat at the corner table unofficially reserved for the weekly Not-Quite-Senior Officers Game and Gossip Session. She was the last one to arrive this time. Gaila and Christine had less far to travel between their stations and the rec room, and Sulu hadn't been stuck trying to wind up a diplomatic conference call relay right at shift change.
If she never had to play interpreter between minor planetary governments and Federation Senate committee members again... well, she'd be out of a job, and it's not like adding nuanced subtitles for both sides of the discussion wasn't an interesting challenge, but she had rarely heard so many different ways to say nothing of substance at such tedious length. There were reasons she was in Starfleet instead of in some ambassador's retinue.
Christine looked up briefly, the weird, stretched stars of warp speed visible through the window framing her upswept blonde hair in shimmering light. She smiled across the table, then returned her concentration to the deck of cards she was shuffling. The rainbow colors of her fingerless support gloves clashed cheerfully with the sober blue-checked pattern on the backs of the cards. "Today's mission, should you choose to accept it, is Hearts."
"Is that metaphorical or just a suit name, like Spades?" Gaila asked around a mouthful of what looked like pureed salad.
"Suit name," Christine said. "Hearts is a trick-taking game, but this one is everyone for themselves and the goal is to avoid taking points. Every heart card is worth one point and the queen of spades is worth thirteen."
"And the jack of diamonds is negative ten," Sulu added.
Christine shook her head. "Not today it isn't. Basic rules first. We can start messing around with variants some other day." She turned to Gaila. "Play goes clockwise, the person with the two of clubs leads, you have to follow suit if you can, you can't lead hearts until somebody sloughs a heart or the queen, and just to make it extra fun, if you take all twenty-six points, your score for that round is zero and everyone else in the game gets twenty-six points each; that's called shooting the moon."
"Statistically, I think anyone serving on this ship has a much better chance of shooting an actual moon than pulling off that particular trick," Nyota said. Gaila and Sulu laughed, and Christine held a fan of cards across her mouth to hide a smile.
Ha, victory. It wasn't quite as satisfying as getting one over on Kirk -- and speaking of that, she needed to think of a good next move in their knitted gag gift competition -- but the day she couldn't drop the right words into the right place, she'd turn herself in as her own mirror universe duplicate.
"I think the odds ran the other direction when the game was invented," Christine said after a moment. "In any case, we can play a set number of rounds, or until somebody hits a hundred points. Whoever has the least points at the end wins."
Gaila tapped her spoon against the rim of her salad bowl as she repeated the rules under her breath. "Okay. Got it. Does suit precedence matter?"
"Nah, just face value," Sulu said. "Oh wait, one more thing. After the cards are dealt, you get to pick three to hand off to somebody else. First hand, we pass left; second we pass right; third we pass across the table; and fourth we hold." He glanced at Christine. "Unless that doesn't count as basic?"
Christine shrugged. "I don't care. Nyota? Gaila? Do you have a preference?"
"I'm fine either way," Nyota said.
"I'm always in favor of sharing. And you don't have to go easy on me. I'd be fine even playing with this jack of diamonds rule," Gaila said. "I have to introduce you guys to Orion dice games next week. If you think Terran card games are complicated, you have no idea what you're in for." She grinned, bright and competitive.
"Did I mention that when you play jack of diamonds rule, you have to take that card too if you want to shoot the moon?" Sulu said innocently.
"Still not that complicated," Gaila assured him. "But it sounds like you'll need to keep your brain running in top gear. You should get some food. I wouldn't want you to claim that I only beat you at one of yours species' own games because you were low on glucose."
"I wouldn't claim that because I'm going to win," Sulu said, but he shoved his chair back and ambled toward the bank of food replicators on the near interior wall. "Hey, Uhura, Christine, you want me to grab you something while I'm up?"
"No thanks, I already ate," Christine said.
"Some wali na maharage, please."
"You got it."
Christine handed the deck sideways to Gaila, who cut it into five piles, tapped the cards back together, repeated the process with three piles, and then again with two. "Guess the pattern," she said.
"Primes?" Nyota ventured.
"It fits, but that wasn't the intent."
"Reverse Fibonacci," Sulu said as he dropped Nyota's Tanzanian-style rice and beans onto the table, then set down a slice of mushroom and pepper pizza for himself.
"Also fits, but still not the intent. You're too focused on math. I'm not defined by engineering or computer science. Think. What are we here for?"
"Games and gossip, but what does that... oh, of course. The four of us plus the notional Orion table-guest courtesy, the three actual senior officers, and the two we disallowed for being underage and/or crazy," Christine said triumphantly.
Gaila pointed a finger at her. "Bingo! So come on, deal already. I want one round to make sure you haven't forgotten to tell me any important rules. Then we can get down to gossip."
Nyota ate several mouthfuls of her wali na maharage while Christine dealt the cards. Then she scooped them up and arranged her hand by suit and face order. Hmm. This was... not a very good bridge hand. That was odd. Usually some obscure variant of Murphy's Law dictated that people ended up with brilliant hands for games they weren't actually playing.
It wasn't a terrible Hearts hand, all things considered, though the lone three of hearts made her slightly nervous. She also had the jack, six, and two of clubs; the jack, eight, seven, and three of diamonds; and the queen of spades, nicely insulated by the nine, eight, three, and two.
Nyota tapped her nails against the table, considering. There was no chance of shooting the moon, so her best bet was to empty a suit and hope she could slough any nasty surprises Sulu might hand her. On the other hand, emptying clubs (aside from the two, since sloughing points on the first trick wasn't allowed... wait, had they mentioned that to Gaila?) would be a bit obvious. Maybe she should just dump all her high cards.
No, the first plan was better.
Nyota pulled the jack and six of clubs and the jack of diamonds. "Here you go," she said, and handed the cards to Gaila. "Don't look until you've passed your own."
"Well, duh." Gaila frowned at her own hand, then rapidly pulled three cards and handed them to Christine.
"Sorry about this," Sulu said as he handed his own choices to Nyota.
He didn't look particularly sorry, judging by the badly hidden grin on his face. She looked at the cards. Queen, seven, and five of clubs.
"You have an interesting attitude toward risk," she told him.
"I'm in Starfleet, that goes without saying. Anyway, Christine's is weirder," Sulu said, sounding somewhat distracted as he worked his own new cards into his hand. "What in the galaxy am I supposed to do with this?"
"I think we're all asking that question right now," Christine said with a serene smile. Her expression didn't change one iota as she picked up Gaila's discards.
Nyota ate another few mouthfuls of her dinner while Gaila made exaggerated tragic faces at her newly acquired trio of cards and integrated them into her hand. Then she led the two of clubs. Gaila played the ace, Christine played the king... and Sulu sloughed the ace of spades.
"Huh," Gaila said, tilting her head and drawing in a deep breath as she stared across the table. "Don't you have any hearts?"
"Can't bleed on the first trick," Sulu said with a shrug. "But after that, watch out!" He flexed the fingers of his free hand like claws.
Gaila gathered in the cards and stared at her hand in evident deep concentration. Then she led the jack of spades.
Christine played the ten. Sulu grimaced and played the king. Nyota smiled. "Sorry about this," she said, and placed the queen delicately on top of the pile.
"You didn't get dealt any spades?" she asked as Sulu collected the trick.
"None," he said. "Dammit, Gaila, why couldn't you have led diamonds?"
"Would that have helped in the long run? We already knew you were out of clubs," Gaila said. "And if Nyota knows you didn't start out with any spades, that means you didn't pass any to her, which means she felt comfortable holding onto the queen, which means... she has a bunch of other spades? I'm not sure what good that knowledge does me, though accurate models of reality are always better than otherwise," she added.
"It means you might be able to force her to take a spade trick and then get stuck leading spades to mop up the last points in the round," Christine said. "Stop dithering, Hikaru. Play a card."
They played out the rest of the game in fierce concentration. Nyota managed to avoid taking a single trick, safe or otherwise, and felt quite pleased with herself.
"And that's the first round. Count up your points, people, and I'll write down the scores," Christine said as she pulled out her padd.
"None for me," Nyota said.
"You didn't even take any tricks," Gaila said grumpily. "Two for me."
"I have five," Christine said as she drew a makeshift grid with a stylus and noted the scores.
"And the other nineteen for me," Sulu finished. He gathered everyone's cards together and began to shuffle. "You may think I have terrible luck. You may think I'm an unskilled player. But I tell you, that was only the first round, and I will have my revenge!"
"Will it be served cold?" Nyota asked. "Because I've always thought that revenge tastes better hot. It gets too sickly-sweet as it cools off." She scraped the last remnants of her dinner from the shallow bowl and licked the sauce from her spoon.
"It's conceptually impossible for revenge to be too sweet, and I am the master of slowly compounding despair," Sulu said as he handed the deck to Christine, who cut it in three uneven piles. He reclaimed the resulting stack and began to deal. "For example, the captain is still trying to figure out if I liked the knitted sword cozy or if I was hideously offended by his presumption, and he gave that to me six months ago. And that's one of my quick and sloppy efforts. So tell me, Uhura, do you feel lucky?"
Nyota looked at her friends. She thought about the incredible coincidences that had brought them to this ship and kept them alive through impossible odds. She thought about the negotiations today, which brought a new planet one step closer to joining the Federation.
"Yeah," she said. "I do. And unlike Kirk, I have no compunctions about giving you deliberately presumptuous knitted gifts, so unless you have some ridiculously distracting gossip? You are going down."
She picked up her cards and smiled.
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End of Story
---------------------------------------------
This was not the fic I meant to finish tonight -- that would be the Narnia genderswap "unexpected love" fill -- but what the hell, it's a thing, and I wrote it, and it's done. *resolve face*
Also, yes, I did in fact deal four hands of Hearts and play the entire game out against myself. I was going to decide the hands for thematic reasons, but that got ridiculous and unworkable very fast, so I figured I would go with random chance instead. :-)
jen
Date: 2014-08-11 05:33 am (UTC)Re: jen
Date: 2014-08-11 07:45 am (UTC)