Elise Runs and Dorothy Falls

Chapter 36

Alexis Striper had a pretty messed up life, and honestly you don't know the half of it. The part you do know is that she had finally begun to scrape together a semblance of her sanity at around the time she found herself surrounded by immortal beings in some palatial somewhere some countless miles from home. And now, in a maroon bunny costume from her younger years (which she didn't remember putting on), she stood on the grandest casino floor she had ever witnessed, holding a tray with a fizzing punch martini. That's what the bartender had called it anyway, a 'martini'. She didn't smell any vermouth. Maybe her sense of smell had been blown up, too, not just her brain.

"Are you going somewhere with those?" asked a passing floor manager, a frog demon like the last few, who was obviously annoyed to begin with.

"Oh, yes," replied Alexis. "Sorry." She slouched into the crowd. The casino didn't have marble or plaster like the ones she had known; its walls, floors, and ceilings were constructed of cherry wood, ornamented with yellow jade statuettes, festooned with paper lanterns, and painted with depictions of the great monsters of the air. She had never seen architecture or artwork anything like it before. She hadn't seen anything like this crowd before, either, for the standout reason she didn't see anything entirely human. What happened to her? She had some time to think about what happened to her, but the only thing she remembered was a lot of explosions.

"Here you are," she said to a demonic pig in a tuxedo, setting down the martini in front of him. The pig played poker at a particularly shady table.

"What?" The huge spirit sniffed the drink. "This isn't mine!"

"Oh... sorry."

She took it back and wandered off. Looking down at the floor plan again and the numbers of the orders, she tried to recalculate where she was supposed to take this drink. However, frog demons were obtuse creatures (as you might recall their board game), and she honestly couldn't figure out where this beverage belonged.

"Maybe I'm looking at it upside down..."

Turning it the other way, Alexis made her way back through the crowd and towards what she hoped would be the right table. It didn't help she couldn't read their language, and therefore the copious notes and mathematical diagrams that went along with it.

When she was fifteen, and waited tables at the Roadhouse Grill outside Candlestick, she hadn't one-third this trouble! In fact, she'd had considerably less trouble—probably one-twelfth it—and that included her pre-gaming liquor rituals! She thought about what that frog demon said, about how many years she had left. On the bright side, if she couldn't find the table, there were a lot of really big windows to jump from.

She approached one of many side rooms where private games took place. Lavish green cushions lined the walls there, and those that didn't play lounged upon them, smoking strange plants and drinking from golden bowls and glass pipes. The lights were lower. Ponds and bamboo occupied the paintings: hiding places for mischievous beasts as they preyed on bathing humans.

"Here's your martini, sir."

She sat the martini in front a man who played poker against five others at a central table. Something about him stood out to her...

"Yay or nay," he said, passively chewing a cigarette as he addressed a particularly large crab-armed demon in a top hat.

Frowning, the monster folded, so with a puff the man reached out and collected the substantial number of chips from center, adding to his already substantial stack on the side. He gathered it all in one clean sweep, save a little ash piping off his joint.

"I didn't have it, by the way," he said, sloshing the chips all together. He spoke with no intonation whatsoever. "Not sure what you were thinking on that one, pally."