All Mine - Act 1, Scene 2: GirlBoy, the Aphex Twin (CLOSED - INVITED ONLY!)

[Trric Skyvold]

The sun had set long ago. The creatures had gone, and I was now out of the desert.

My feet were still bare as I stepped inside the tall wooden stucture. The doors get lighter as I push them aside, watching them swing and fall from their hinges. Clouds of brightly hued dust billow out from under them, from under my feet as I walk further inside.

I'm standing in the middle of a very large room. The walls are lined with dark woods and mirrors. There are no lights, except for one. It hangs high above a table, one set far in the corner of the room. I can see two vague forms there, but can't tell who, or what, they may be.

"Hello?"

[Kale]

"Krasst, not again," a male voice said. "You're cleaning me out, here."

The light was high above the table--so high, and so bright, you couldn't see the ceiling beyond it. Except there was no ceiling. Or walls. Or floor. Where the light was dim enough, you could see stars in the distance--not twinkling, because there was nothing to distort their light but empty space. The table no longer seemed to be oriented toward any sort of downward direction, but the two figures kept their seats.

"Okay, let's try this again. Corellian rules. Smuggler's array takes all."

At the table sat a man and a woman. The man was middle-aged, middle-sized, with a thin, ruddy beard and a lazy-looking face. He rapidly dealt out two stacks of five cards and slid one two his partner. The cards were exchanged rapidly, and the woman grabbed another stack of chips from the man's pile.

"Krasst," the man groused. "Best of six million, two hundred sixty-three thousand, one hundred fifty-seven?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

"Just don't know when to quit, do you, love?" the woman's grin bared gleaming canines that sharpened her already feral look. Tossing her long, curly hair away from her face, the buxom woman stretched luxuriously in her seat--making sure to tauten the muscles that would tug her leather tank in just the right directions--and narrowly eyed the man across from her. "You sure you really wanna try again? You're just going to come out further in the wormhole than you already--"

Here she caught sight of the stranger. "Hullo...who have we here?" she peered through the starry dimness, sizing up the woman with a critical glance, and leaned toward the newcomer. "Come on into the light--let's get a good look at you."

[Corias Bonaventure]

The man shook his head, pointedly not looking in the direction Rhea was looking.

"Nice try, ma petite. I know what you're doing. You're trying to distract me so I won't be on my game. Well, it's not going to work."

[Rhea Kaylen]

The long-haired woman rolled her eyes and tapped the man's lanky leg with her booted toe. "Darlin', if I'd wanted to distract you from your game, I'd have had much better ways of doing it."

She leaned her head lazily on her hand, still looking over at the shadowy figure. Reaching across the table to pluck her partner's cigarette off the ashtray at his elbow, the woman pulled the light back and took a slow drag, smoke curling from her nose.

"We'll hold the game for you, if you like," she said flatly to the stranger, a puff of smoke slipping out from between her lips. "Just so you know, though--I never lose."
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[Trric Skyvold]

The space behind me swirled as I walked, abruptly stopping as I moved closer to the table, resting my hands lightly on the edge of it.

"I don't know how to play."

I sat down, in a chair that hadn't been there before. I stared down at the cards, being dealt in a blur as the pair of them played on.

[Corias Bonaventure]

The man gave Trric a fleeting glance, as if she were of no more importance to him than the beveling on the side of the table, then fanned out his cards in his hand before him.

"What does it matter?" he replied. "It's all probabilities anyway. Random intersections of the finite and the infinite. Nothing's bound. Nothing's determined. Not even your winning streak, mon joli oiseau," he added in his counterpart's direction.

"I'll raise it by fifty. You still in, Rhea?"

[Rhea Kaylen]

"I'm always in for whatever you can dish out, ky'ae-da." Rhea smiled, looking up at him from under long eyelashes. But she sighed when, as usual, she saw the stars of distant mental wandering reflected in his blue eyes. He'd never once really looked at her. She'd been trying to find her own reflection in those eyes for uncountable years.

The woman frowned down at the array of cards in her hands. She leaned over to the young woman who'd sat down next to her, tapping the top card.

"See, this is what sometimes happens," she murmured, the elusive man sitting across the table forgotten as her mind focused solely on the vagaries of the card game. The cigarette bobbed up and down in her loosely-held lips as she talked. "Your plans are no good when you can't see all the variables. You need to make the cards work for you."

Rhea flicked the top card smartly, the face instantly changing to a higher-value card. Then she smirked, just so her new confidant could see, and pressed her finger to her lips in admonition.

Spreading the cards on the table with practiced ease, she casually picked up and examined one of her partner's playing chips. Sucking once more on the nearly-spent cigarette, a blissful look on her face, she blew the smoke into the man's face.

"Once again, Cor: you lose."

[Corias Bonaventure]

Corias peered through the smoke at Rhea's hand, coughing the smoke away. "Dang. Okay, new game, Old Republic rules."

As he began dealing a new hand, a dull, red star over his right shoulder suddenly shrank, flared into a blinding supernova, then faded again--the work of a few years compressed into a few seconds--but neither competitor seemed to notice.

"There's always another game," he said idly. "There's always more chances. You never know what it's going to be until you play the hand." Corias stared intently at the fan of cards in his hand, shuffled them around, drew two out, put them back in, drew the other three, reordered and replaced them, then finally tossed in his wager.

"You sure you don't want to play?" he asked Trric quite suddenly. "You're never going to win if you don't play. That's worse than losing."

The look on his face was an earnest one as if he could conceive of no possible mode of existence outside the sabbacc game in the middle of the stars.

[Trric Skyvold]

"I really don't feel like it."

I shrugged, watching the cards pass between Corias' fingers. "Do either of you know where we are?"

I glanced around, watching the space shift and twirl behind us. One of them must know where they were, what this place was.

[Rhea Kaylen]

Rhea grinned wolfishly, fingers flying through her cards as she rearranged, ordered, and placed her bet.

"Oh, sure, he knows where we are." She nodded to her playing partner. "Go on, Captain--tell her where we are."

[Corias Bonaventure]

Corias stared at Rhea, aghast.

"But we're in the middle of a game!"

His partner never budged. Sighing, he laid his cards down flat. "Fine. But you ruined my concentration. This hand doesn't count."

Turning to Trric, Corias took a deep breath, then said, "I do know exactly where we are. But if I tell you, you can't leave."

[Trric Skyvold]

"....Okay."

I paused. As much as I wanted, no, needed to know where I was, I couldn't risk not being able to go back to where I had come from. Where-ever that was.

"If you can't tell me where I am, can you at least tell me how I can get home?"

[Corias Bonaventure]

Corias pulled a face. "Well... that's not so easy, I'm afraid. You see, we're..."

He cut himself off, realizing he almost spilled the beans. Gazing off into space, he took a deep breath to refocus his thoughts.

"Are you familiar with the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?" he asked presently. Not bothering to wait for an answer, he went on. "Basically, because of the random motion of particles, you can never know both the location and the velocity of any given particle at any given time. You might know one or the other, or neither, but never both. That's because when you look at it, you have to bounce something off of it and back into your eyes... light, a scanning ray, tachyons... and every time you do that, the particle's velocity and position change. Now..."

He leaned forward confidentially, grinning.

"Because particle movement is random, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is just a result of the odds. There is a chance, albeit an infinitessimally small one, that you can know both a particle's position and its velocity. And I hit the big time. I know exactly where we are. Not only that, I know exactly where we're going, and how fast we're getting there."

Then he slouched backwards, laconically resting the back of his neck in the palms of his hands. "The problem is that there's a tradeoff. If you know your own position and velocity, your chances of knowing the positions of other objects in the universe decline dramatically. So I can't tell you how to get home. But, seeing as you're already lost, I could at least tell you where you are, if you want. At least then you'd be sure of something."