And there he was —
Blindy, sitting at a sticky card table,
eyes flickering in the universal color of bad decisions,
watching his chips get oh-so-comfortably scooped
into the eight greasy hands
of a grinning alien bastard
with a mouth clearly designed
to eat other players
after taking their money.
And the worst part?
Blindy had been winning.He had the best hand.
Right up until…
The Tentaculon aristocrat clicked his teeth:
“Ah yes, forgot to mention…
we’re playing with two decks.”
Blindy froze.
His eye twitched.
He smacked his own forehead. SMACK!
Too hard.
Fireworks of pain and poor life choices erupted inside his skull.
That was the exact moment Zeros entered the hall.
He tilted his head the way machines do
when trying to understand
why the universe still exists
and how creatures like his partner
keep being allowed to breed.
Seeing Blindy wince,
Zeros’ rage softened.
Very slightly.
By 25%.
“You…” he said coldly.
“Did you just knock out the last surviving brain cell you had?Was there ANYTHING left in there?
And on top of that —
you lost ALL our money?!
…AGAIN?!”
Blindy groaned, clutching his forehead:
“Shut up, you intergalactic walkin’ landfill.
I—I’m tryin’ to focus on regrettin’ my life choices.”
The Tentaculon millionaire shoveled the chips
into a huge bioluminescent pocket
and huffed contentedly.
Blindy sat hunched,
like a victim of cyber-blackmail,
thinking:
Should I pull out the plasma blaster?
Probably… no…
But damn… it’s tempting…
A FEW HOURS LATER
Blindy sat in the pilot’s chair
with a wet rag on his forehead,
reclined back,
slowly digesting the pain,
the humiliation,
and the mathematical catastrophe
he had proudly called “poker.”
The ship was silent.
The kind of silence that gives goosebumps
even to people whose brains are already fuzzy with mold.
An hour passed. Or two.
Blindy waited for Zeros to storm in,
to yell,
call him an idiot,
a worthless cutlet,
a failed investment of the human species.
But instead?
NOTHING.
And that was infinitely worse.
Because when Zeros is silent —
it means somewhere in the universe
hell has either already begun,
or is warming up its engines.
The ship door hissed open.
Heavy metal footsteps
sliced the silence in half,
each one thudding through the hull
like a warning.
Then, onto Blindy’s lap — with a THUD!
A bag of c-bucks dropped.
All Ꞩ6,000,000 plus Ꞩ4,000,000 “compensation for getting screwed over” = Ꞩ10,000,000, perfectly even.
Blindy flinched.
“Wh–what the…?”
He peeked inside the bag — carefully.
“Where’d you even get—”
And then he froze.
Because he finally noticed:
green, thick Tentaculon blood
splattered all over Zeros —
on his arms, legs, chassis,
even across his once-pristine, factory-polished forehead.