It's an interesting shift in their power dynamic, being asked what Jasnah should do instead of having her tell him—command, really. He doesn't mind it; it's a dynamic he's more familiar with, having spent the past 67 years as the preeminent expert on the Continent. Falling headfirst into this world and needing help to navigate it has been... different. Challenging. Feels like he's young again, in a way.
"You can keep it to yourself." A nod to her hand, talking through his thought process. "Since you had a twelve, that means anything but a ten or one of the court cards is a good pull."
He taps his own cards. "I'm going to stand." Then, defining it for her: "I've decided not to pull any more cards."
Canting his head toward her hand again, he asks, "What about you?"
Because when she turns the card toward herself, studying its sigils, she finds another ten staring back at her. Twenty-two. Too far. A clean, unambiguous loss. Her face stays perfectly composed but a small, private muscle behind her sternum tightens. What an inelegant game if one's fate hangs entirely on the arbitrary draw of paper. No systems to exploit, no levers to pull, no way to redirect causality except...
Except.
A beat too late, the realization slides cleanly into place: this isn't merely arithmetic. It's a game of inference. Of manipulation. The cards matter, yes, but the people matter more. What one reveals. What one withholds. What one pretends. She can't salvage this hand. But she can prepare the next.
So she lets the disappointment soften her posture slightly — just enough. A finely calibrated display of ineptitude, the kind that invites underestimation. Let him think she's struggling with such alien rules. Let him misjudge her learning curve, if possible.
In a tone that is a shade flatter than necessary, she asks: "When am I meant to inform you that I've gone over?"
A perfect novice's question. Almost artful in its feigned simplicity.
Unfortunately, Verso is enjoying this reversal in dynamic too much to question her manipulation. He likes being in this position more than he likes being in the position he's so often in since coming to Roshar; instead of being useless and confused, he's knowledgeable, teacherly. Someone who has something to offer instead of just being a drain.
So, he doesn't doubt her for a second.
"Have you gone over?" he asks, before adding, "That's all right. It's just a practice round." Preemptively soothing any disappointment. "We'll tell each other when it happens, since it means the end of the round."
He holds his cards up so that she can see: he'd had a Jack and a seven. Then, setting them back on the deck, he gestures for hers, too.
A soft hum like an admission. She flips her cards in her right hand — she's actually doing most of this card-wrangling with one hand, notably — and shows him her ten, ten, and two. Collapsing the small fan of three, she lays them back on the deck as he indicates.
— A funny urge makes her wish she could float above the moment and watch him more carefully, divorced from the ways in which she needs-must-will interact with him just to keep the conversation (and the game) going. Like how there, just there, he tries to counteract a disappointment he thinks might be there but isn't. Management.
Jasnah adjusts her posture, left hand sitting unused in her lap, and hold out her right.
"Yes."
Simple and direct. Her earnest attempt begins now.
Simple and direct! He notes the unused hand, but doesn't comment on it; if her discomfort when ungloving had been any indication, there's still a feeling of propriety there, even if she wants to pretend that she's rational enough to be above it all. The last thing he wants to do is make her feel ashamed for that.
So, when he shuffles and deals again, this time he places the cards a little to her right, a more convenient location. He takes a look at his cards, then places the top card face-up: a three.
Impassive, she eyes both her cards. Today is when a lifetime spent willfully not attracting emotion spren comes in handy — as Jasnah allows herself to look thoughtful, but not swayed.
She flips her top card. A six.
"With what?" Jasnah leaves a finger touching the six, but raises her attention to Verso sitting across from her. "Spheres?"
She has so many more spheres than him. But perhaps they could agree to a limited pool, to make it fair...?
"Francs, in Lumière." It's been ages since he's held a coin or banknote in his hand, though. Back before the population dwindled enough as to make an unfamiliar face notable, he'd occasionally paid a visit to a favored cafe or boulangerie during his returns to Lumière. The visits to the mainland became more and more infrequent, though, as his presence became more out of the ordinary—everyone in Lumière knows everyone now. The thriving, bustling city where he could disappear into the crowds is gone, and so are his days of spending time in fancy little cafes.
"Chroma, on the Continent." It's the currency all the Gestral merchants use. What use the Gestrals have for Chroma is as much a wonder to the omniscient narrator here as it is to you!
But he's mostly played this game with Monoco, so Chroma has been a rare bet. Neither of them have as much use for it as— "Or embarrassing dares."
Two different currencies. Not so surprising, she supposes, although the one thing all of Roshar can agree upon is the value of Stormlight and spheres. Doubly so, now that in conjunction they can fuel Radiant abilities. Warfare itself has changed with the refounding of the Orders.
She tries not to let herself get too distracted by that garden path. There's nothing she can do or say about it right now, caught on a ship. Unable to own her own name and rank. For now, she files away both words: Francs and Chroma.
Jasnah, if she's observant enough, might notice that Verso is a little impatient—just like he'd been to return to the cabin and play. It hadn't just been merely excitement to show off his work, although that was part of it; it's also, apparently, a character trait. Or personality flaw, depending on how you want to see it. He taps his fingers against his own cards, expelling restless energy.
"You know, like—" He pulls a memory out of thin air. "Loser has to go streaking through the Station." A pause. "Obviously, we won't do that one."
Of course Jasnah is observant enough. But — just like over dinner — she has this devilish little urge to prolong his impatience. To test and tease and make him wait it out a moment more. To test his restraint, perhaps. His self-control.
For once, she doesn't go for the obvious Jasnah-bait (what's a Station? and asks instead:
Ugh, maybe he shouldn't have shared that particular one. Probably a little too embarrassing. He hadn't cared at the time, though, considering it had only been Gestrals and Grandis there. He might have shown a bit more restraint if actual humans had to see him.
"It's a game based partially on chance," she intones, "I have to assume you lose on occasion."
Still! She now has to digest the idea of him, losing a bet, and running naked through a Station. A station for what? Again, she pushes the thought aside. And the thought of him streaking too.
"I need time to think of a suitable dare," she at long last decides. "Next round."
In the meantime? She asks for another card with a crooked come-hither gesture.
He's delighted that she has any interest in this sort of bet at all, honestly. It seems like something she might consider juvenile and foolish; Verso can't imagine Jasnah streaking in the snow, to say the least. Whatever bet she chooses to make, he doubts it'll be anything like the playful and boyish ones he made with Monoco.
Loser writes a 10,000 word essay on a topic of their choice, to be graded by the winner, probably.
Verso slides another card her way, and takes one himself. He glances at it for a brief moment, then sets it face-down.
"When you decide not to take another card, it's called standing," he explains. "And when you do take another card, it's hitting." He raises an eyebrow. "Want to stand or hit?"
— She enjoys feeling out the edges of what's deemed probable or possible. She enjoys finding limits. She wonders what she might find embarrassing. More so, she wonders what he'd find embarrassing. Not to mention the fact that embarrassment is context-dependent. Jasnah thinks there's a lot she could endure in the name of winning. We'll see.
She lifts her third card. Eyes it, chewing briefly on her bottom lip. She remembers an anecdote Wit once told her about cheating at cards. Was it a game like this?
"I'll stand."
She's sitting at seventeen, right now. It's a terribly safe place to be. But safe is as good as risky when there's nothing yet on the line.
There's nothing to lose except his pride, although that is admittedly exceedingly fragile. Verso takes another look at his cards, contemplative. It's not a great hand, but it's not an awful one, either. He could hit and still be relatively safe, assuming he didn't land on one of the higher worth cards.
— Unfortunately for Verso, he's playing cards with more of a Big Sister type. She reacts to his hand with a slight pursing of her lips and furrowing of her brow. Not...disappointment, per se. More like confusion. Would she have stuck on a fifteen? Should she stick on a fifteen, if she achieves one in future? Maybe Verso is more cautious than she first assumed.
Card by card, she reveals her hand: six, four, seven.
"What a waste of a win," she exhales — confusion giving way to a mild smile. Implying, perhaps, that she wished she'd devised a dare for him if she was going to win the and anyway.
Ah, maybe it was too easy of a win for her. Maybe, he thinks, Jasnah enjoys things more when they're hard-won. (Maybe he should have been playing a lot more hard-to-get this whole time.) He considers her cards, then leans forward to collect them and slide them back on the deck.
He shuffles again as he talks, as flashy as he can manage when the makeshift cards lack the structure of typical cardstock. Maybe he can get his hands on some when they return to Urithuru, and some paint. Verso has always preferred for his artistic talents to be in service of fun and games first and foremost.
"You're right," he says lightly. "You could've had me streaking down the main deck."
Her mild smile persists. As if, maybe, she might have been just cutthroat enough to make good on that dare — except she'd never risk the blow back of how it might escalate against her.
She taps the floorboard. Another insistent, eager sign to deal her back in.
"This time," she announces, "if you lose I expect to see your best Torreth impression."
Verso enjoys the evident eagerness—a reflection of his own impatience—but he likes the ridiculousness of her 'dare' even more. He's half-inclined to ask if she doesn't want something more academic and pragmatic, like a lecture on Gestral physiology or an explanation of the seasons in Lumière and on the Continent, but he's reluctant to look a gift horse in the mouth. So, he finishes shuffling with a little flourish (he's getting better at shuffling these cards now) and deftly flicks two cards her way.
"All right," he says, picking two cards for himself and peering at them. "But turnabout is fair play." That is: he expects to see hers if she loses. Much more surprising coming from her. Hell, he'd do a Torreth impression for free.
He places an ace face-up. "The ace," he explains, "counts as eleven, unless it would cause you to go bust." To go over 21, he assumes she'll understand from context clues. "In which case it counts as one."
"Bit uninspired," she complains. "Can't think up a dare of your own?"
It takes two tries to pick the cards off the floor, this time. A crinkled expression of frustration. Then, after a beat, she replaces them with the top card visible: eight, unfortunately. Of the two, that's the one she would have preferred to keep to herself.
look i couldn't find a way to make him taking another card more interesting
Verso's mouth twitches almost imperceptibly. "I'll hit," he says as he grabs another card from the top of the deck. His mouth twitches again. "What about you?"
— That's what she was waiting for. Some...indication, she supposed, on whether they traded back and forth who would make their decision first. She likes this position, going second, eking out a bit more information with which to choose what to do next.
She scrutinizes him a second longer.
"Hit," she says simply. Annunciating whatever Alethi consonant that is with a hard tap of her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
And when he gives it to her, she drops her scrutiny from his face to her new card. Hmm.
It's sort of fun being the recipient of her scrutiny, when it's not scrutiny over his incorrect actions or his immortality. Verso likes having all of her attention like this, on (relatively) his own merit instead of her interest in some nugget of information that he has to share, and he's already scheming how to get her to play with him at least one more time before they disembark.
She assumes he likes what he has. Or — of course — the other option: it's simply high enough that he can't risk...what was it? Busting. Jasnah, on the other hand, finds herself in the miserable mindset of having a result too low to stand if he's standing. And just high enough to remind her of how easily she'd gone over in the first round.
Staring at him, with her dignity on the line, she once again crooks her finger in that same slight give it over gesture.
Verso raises an eyebrow, but says nothing as he slides her another card. "Stand?" he asks, and I'm just gonna godmode that she doesn't get yet another card because otherwise we'll be here all day. When he flips his cards over, it's with a sense of smug self-satisfaction: the ace, a two, and a six. 19 altogether.
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"You can keep it to yourself." A nod to her hand, talking through his thought process. "Since you had a twelve, that means anything but a ten or one of the court cards is a good pull."
He taps his own cards. "I'm going to stand." Then, defining it for her: "I've decided not to pull any more cards."
Canting his head toward her hand again, he asks, "What about you?"
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Because when she turns the card toward herself, studying its sigils, she finds another ten staring back at her. Twenty-two. Too far. A clean, unambiguous loss. Her face stays perfectly composed but a small, private muscle behind her sternum tightens. What an inelegant game if one's fate hangs entirely on the arbitrary draw of paper. No systems to exploit, no levers to pull, no way to redirect causality except...
Except.
A beat too late, the realization slides cleanly into place: this isn't merely arithmetic. It's a game of inference. Of manipulation. The cards matter, yes, but the people matter more. What one reveals. What one withholds. What one pretends. She can't salvage this hand. But she can prepare the next.
So she lets the disappointment soften her posture slightly — just enough. A finely calibrated display of ineptitude, the kind that invites underestimation. Let him think she's struggling with such alien rules. Let him misjudge her learning curve, if possible.
In a tone that is a shade flatter than necessary, she asks: "When am I meant to inform you that I've gone over?"
A perfect novice's question. Almost artful in its feigned simplicity.
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So, he doesn't doubt her for a second.
"Have you gone over?" he asks, before adding, "That's all right. It's just a practice round." Preemptively soothing any disappointment. "We'll tell each other when it happens, since it means the end of the round."
He holds his cards up so that she can see: he'd had a Jack and a seven. Then, setting them back on the deck, he gestures for hers, too.
"Care to go again?"
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— A funny urge makes her wish she could float above the moment and watch him more carefully, divorced from the ways in which she needs-must-will interact with him just to keep the conversation (and the game) going. Like how there, just there, he tries to counteract a disappointment he thinks might be there but isn't. Management.
Jasnah adjusts her posture, left hand sitting unused in her lap, and hold out her right.
"Yes."
Simple and direct. Her earnest attempt begins now.
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So, when he shuffles and deals again, this time he places the cards a little to her right, a more convenient location. He takes a look at his cards, then places the top card face-up: a three.
"Want to make a bet?"
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She flips her top card. A six.
"With what?" Jasnah leaves a finger touching the six, but raises her attention to Verso sitting across from her. "Spheres?"
She has so many more spheres than him. But perhaps they could agree to a limited pool, to make it fair...?
"What do you gamble with back home?"
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"Chroma, on the Continent." It's the currency all the Gestral merchants use. What use the Gestrals have for Chroma is as much a wonder to the omniscient narrator here as it is to you!
But he's mostly played this game with Monoco, so Chroma has been a rare bet. Neither of them have as much use for it as— "Or embarrassing dares."
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She tries not to let herself get too distracted by that garden path. There's nothing she can do or say about it right now, caught on a ship. Unable to own her own name and rank. For now, she files away both words: Francs and Chroma.
"...How embarrassing? An example, please."
Preferably from real life.
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"You know, like—" He pulls a memory out of thin air. "Loser has to go streaking through the Station." A pause. "Obviously, we won't do that one."
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For once, she doesn't go for the obvious Jasnah-bait (what's a Station? and asks instead:
"You've done that dare?"
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"You just assume I lost?" he gripes.
A beat.
"—I did, but only because Monoco cheated."
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Still! She now has to digest the idea of him, losing a bet, and running naked through a Station. A station for what? Again, she pushes the thought aside. And the thought of him streaking too.
"I need time to think of a suitable dare," she at long last decides. "Next round."
In the meantime? She asks for another card with a crooked come-hither gesture.
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Loser writes a 10,000 word essay on a topic of their choice, to be graded by the winner, probably.
Verso slides another card her way, and takes one himself. He glances at it for a brief moment, then sets it face-down.
"When you decide not to take another card, it's called standing," he explains. "And when you do take another card, it's hitting." He raises an eyebrow. "Want to stand or hit?"
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She lifts her third card. Eyes it, chewing briefly on her bottom lip. She remembers an anecdote Wit once told her about cheating at cards. Was it a game like this?
"I'll stand."
She's sitting at seventeen, right now. It's a terribly safe place to be. But safe is as good as risky when there's nothing yet on the line.
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But he let Alicia win when they played pétanque for the first time, and she'd been so proud that she'd played with him all day. "I'll stand, too," he says, before turning his cards over. Two threes and a nine.
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Card by card, she reveals her hand: six, four, seven.
"What a waste of a win," she exhales — confusion giving way to a mild smile. Implying, perhaps, that she wished she'd devised a dare for him if she was going to win the and anyway.
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He shuffles again as he talks, as flashy as he can manage when the makeshift cards lack the structure of typical cardstock. Maybe he can get his hands on some when they return to Urithuru, and some paint. Verso has always preferred for his artistic talents to be in service of fun and games first and foremost.
"You're right," he says lightly. "You could've had me streaking down the main deck."
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She taps the floorboard. Another insistent, eager sign to deal her back in.
"This time," she announces, "if you lose I expect to see your best Torreth impression."
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"All right," he says, picking two cards for himself and peering at them. "But turnabout is fair play." That is: he expects to see hers if she loses. Much more surprising coming from her. Hell, he'd do a Torreth impression for free.
He places an ace face-up. "The ace," he explains, "counts as eleven, unless it would cause you to go bust." To go over 21, he assumes she'll understand from context clues. "In which case it counts as one."
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It takes two tries to pick the cards off the floor, this time. A crinkled expression of frustration. Then, after a beat, she replaces them with the top card visible: eight, unfortunately. Of the two, that's the one she would have preferred to keep to herself.
look i couldn't find a way to make him taking another card more interesting
FAIR.
She scrutinizes him a second longer.
"Hit," she says simply. Annunciating whatever Alethi consonant that is with a hard tap of her tongue against the roof of her mouth.
And when he gives it to her, she drops her scrutiny from his face to her new card. Hmm.
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"Stand," he says, echoing her crisp intonation.
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Staring at him, with her dignity on the line, she once again crooks her finger in that same slight give it over gesture.
"I'll take a fourth."
She's not happy about it.
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"Your turn," he says, pleased.
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slides back in here
the fun never stops!!
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