The Great Game

The crowd roared. Through the dust and smoke, through the lights, through the walls of the viewing box, the crowd roared. The roar shakes the roots of the world, travels through the streets, lifts through the smoky atmosphere, and sends tingles down the spine. The roar is a living beast, its appetite endless, driving on and on until it seems to rip the ground asunder. They roar for the players of the great game, they roar for victory, for defeat. They roar for comfort and for jubilation here, at the end of the game. The competitors, caked in dust and grime, dropping with fatigue, began their slow amble from the ring. Jubilant, even ecstatic faces loom over the competitors from all angles, resplendent in their fine clothes and jewels. Voices of the Marshals boom into the stands but are washed out by the roar. It is the roar of the crowd, it is the roar of a people, but it is not a roar for me.

Pok Drat stared listlessly out of the thick window into the desolate arena, below. Some may roar for me, but only in recognition that they will never see me again he thought, angrily. How many times have they cheered for me? How many trophies have I given my tower? How many of them owe their starts to me? The answers did not come.

Sighing, Drat turned from the window and surveyed his booth, barren but for the bank of screens to capture every angle of the action in exquisite detail. The door to the common room beckoned, but dread froze his paws to the ground as though rooted. Outside of this space, the inviolate Manager’s booth, his enemies waited. Breen would be insufferable after such a result, Drat knew from long experience, and would be waiting in the common room between the Manager’s booths with a hot glass of ikul in mocking celebration. His principle rival, Breen was not only fifteen cycles his senior, but had won in his genes a few precious extra centimeters of height. Drat scowled at the thought and resolutely pushed off the viewing bench and started towards the door, determined to make a good appearance.

The noise, as the door opened, set his teeth on edge. Someone was blasting some of that never-to-be-sufficiently-damned “nu” music at a volume that made fusion mining barges sound like a lullaby. Most of the Ovan in the room were, obviously, quite drunk, and were yodeling tower fight songs incoherently. Drat almost smiled when he saw another of his rivals screaming a song incoherently at one of the plants in a corner of the room but the urge vanished when he saw Pok Breen standing on the bar, imitating the final few moments of the game with a flagon of ikul to the wondering eyes of the group.

Breen happened to look up, at that moment, and screamed incoherently as he saw Drat exit his booth. Flinging both legs off the edge of the bar, he bounced on his well-cushioned fundament to a stumbling landing on the floor, sloshing a good bit of his smoking ikul out of the mug in the process. Getting close enough that Drat could smell the deefa weed on his fur, Breen started talking. About what, Drat wasn’t sure because the “singer” in the song suddenly switched to an ultrasonic yodeling style which had won her an Innovative Artist of the Year award. To Drat, it sounded like someone took a thousand Vulx younglings and threw them into a food reprocessor. To Breen’s credit, he apparently figured this out and stomped over to the unfortunate Ovan acting as the mixer and started smashing buttons until the sound cut out with a sickening burst of static.

“Drat! Buddy! Whadda match, whadda match! Your boys did the besht they could, yep yep yep, wouldn’t you say?”

Drat sighed and decided to act the gracious loser. “Yes, Breen, they did the best they could. Congratulations to your boys, they were the better side.”

Breen’s eyes glittered, drunkenly, as he slowly turned his head to face his admirers. “See? Wha’d I say? Losers always whine about their besht!”

The tittering laughter from the drunken Ovan at this witticism made Drat weep for his species. He opened his mouth to excuse himself but closed it suddenly as the drunken Ovan, apparently done haranguing the potted plant, threw the rest of his drink in Drat’s open mouth and, after taking a deep breath, began screaming an incoherent version of his tower fight song. Drat turned on his heel and beat a measured retreat to obscene laughter, almost making it out the door before realizing that the song being screamed at him from the drunken patrons was the one adopted by his own tower.

It was never good to lose a match. It was worse to lose a match and be ridiculed for it. Worse still to have cold, cheap ikul thrown in your mouth while someone mockingly screamed your own fight song at you. Drat pondered all of this as he stood in the empty common room of his home, wondering where having all of your possessions walk off fell in the spectrum. An Ovan some centuries in the past had created a phrase that was still used today, something about “everything that wasn’t bolted down”. It was a reference to some great literary work or another, no one was really sure any more. It appeared Sikk hadn’t heard that particular phrase before because not only had she taken everything that wasn’t bolted down, she had gotten help to take the furniture, which had been firmly attached to the floor.

Gloomily, Drat wanted to hate her but couldn’t really find it in himself. Walking to the wall terminal (which was part of the house’s construction) he checked his joint bank account to find that it was, unsurprisingly, emptied. That wasn’t such a great loss, since there hadn’t been much in there and the bank account for the company was in his name only, but it was distantly annoying. Wandering through the house, Drat took stock of what he had left. He had just written down “toothbrush with no toothpaste” when an overwhelming part of himself just said right, hell with it.

Leaving the front door unlocked, he turned right, walked the two corridors to the descending ring, was shot six levels down, walked one more corridor over, turned a quick left and stopped outside of Longneck’s on the fringes of the Entertainment Sector. From the noise, the night was in full swing. Suggestively shaved Ovan wandered past on the walkways, eyes glittering in the tube lights under any variety of pleasure drugs, twisting their bodies so that their artfully dyed luminescent hairs danced tantalizingly through all spectrums of light. Most of them kept moving past him, however, and he guessed that it was probably his expression. Trying to put on a game face, he pushed open the first of the doors, badly lettered with the words “You are in”, and entered the antechamber of the drink hall. That particular phrase had always bothered him, because you had to be outside the bar to read it.

At least the decibel level is somewhere below nuclear, Drat thought, admiring the swirling colors of the patron’s drinks and clothing. Longneck’s was sort of an in-between watering hole, a bit of a “nu”-metal hangout and a bit of a friendly pub. It did neither style well. The simple faux-wood tables were accented with eye-searing neon flexstring in every color imaginable, and some that Drat was pretty sure they had improvised. The ceiling had been a drab industrial color, hidden in shadow, until the night of the great Paintocalypse a few years back, where Kido, the owner, had found a vendor to mix ultrafluorescent paint with an ikul variant and encouraged patrons to “try to hit the ceiling”. Drat shuddered, remembering the haunting images of Ovan covered head to tail in a thousand shades of paint that glowed in any light, in every wavelength. It had been best described as “the aftermath of a beloved youngling’s vidshow character becoming violently ill from all orifices”. Kido tried to keep things a bit more manageable, these days, and generally only served more “normal” drinks. Everything else was pretty comfortable, actually. There were private rooms off of the main room for small parties, or a bit of privacy, and the couches were actually pretty comfortable. There was the usual assortment of game screens and such, but thankfully the speaker system for the games had blown out a few months ago, so patrons had to plug earpieces into the tables to hear the commentators.

The thought of drinks sparked a new urge, and Drat quickly sought out the door in the back which bore the lettering “a tavern”. Drat had never quite gotten the idea behind the lettering on the bathroom but Kido thought it added a bit of mystery to the place (he also had tried to get the lettering off at one point, but found out that it was nano-bonded ferrocrete marking spray and gave up). One immediate need taken care of, Drat let the “tavern” door shut behind him and looked for a seat at the bar. Squeezing in next to two Kotholu, he signaled Zaas behind the bar. He always felt better when he talked to Zaas. She was a younger Ovan, but she didn’t style her fur to the extremes that so many of the younger crowd did these days. She was intelligent, quick-witted, and made one hell of a Chili Ikul Incinerator.

“Hey stranger!” the perpetually happy youngster bubbled, “what’re you having?”

“Two shots, whatever you want to serve, to start, then just a mid-shelf ikul to keep the night going.”

She quirked an eyebrow at him. “Celebrating or mourning?” When Drat laughed at her she grinned sheepishly while mixing something that sparked blue orbs around the glass. “Yeah, I heard, but don’t get too crazy on me. Lots more opportunities out there.”

As she set the sparking shot glass in front of him, Drat eyed it suspiciously. “Yeah, but none as a Manager” he retorted. Shrugging mentally, he took the shot. Immediately regretting his decision he, in sequence, burped blue, saw red, and actually felt his heart not so much skip a beat as start a game of foursquare with his lungs. He coughed and rubbed his eyes, trying in vain to clear the kaleidoscope of very interesting colors that were swirling around his head.

“How was that, want the second?” A cheerful voice cut through the sound of a hundred Eeylian episopranos competing for space in his head.

“No…no. I think I’ll just nurse that ikul for now.”

“Smart boy.”

Drink in hand, and the aftereffects from the shot fading, Drat hunched into the bar. How long he sat there, he had no idea, but somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind Drat thought he remembered Zaas bringing him another ikul, or two, it was a bit muddled. Dimly he became aware of an excited conversation between the two Kotholu next to him. Giving another mental shrug, he listened with half an ear as they described some primitive planet something-or-other that one of their survey ships had just found. Since this kind of an occurrence was weekly, at worst, Drat could barely contain his boredom until the Kotholu began talking about how the race of beings inhabiting the planet had not even noticed the survey ship and didn’t seem to have any facilities to mine their in-system resources.

“’Scuse me, what?” He asked the Kotholu

They looked at him, tentacles waving in agitation as one of them bubbled something about “proprietary” and they got up to leave.

“Wait! Wait. I just want to know about the system. I mean, obviously a planet as primitive as that wouldn’t have much that a banking clan is interested in, right?” Drat was desperately trying to grasp at any shred of hope, at this point, and was fervently hoping that the ship hadn’t actually found something to interest the sponsoring Kotholu banking clan. If he could just get his foot in the door…

The more senior Kotholu, by his more intricate and colorful tattoos, gave Drat a cold up-and-down appraisal that spoke volumes of his opinion. “No, actually, the system had very little to interest us, just another G5 system with some primitive neophytes spending their time launching explosions into near-space and each other. There is some talk of…well, that’s proprietary. May I ask why you are so interested?”

Drat, grasping at the thin reed of hope that he saw, straightened his belts and stood unsteadily. Giving a slight bow he spoke quickly and decisively. “My friends, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Pok Drat and with my recent losses I find myself in need of new players…”