A dreary gray hung in the air overhead as the sky grew cluttered with dark 
clouds. Drops of rain began a distant symphony on the cold concrete below as 
Jinsaku trudged through the shipyard in the increasing downpour, though he was 
far too distraught to care how much his clothes soaked through. His vacation 
had just ended, but he found that he could not escape what he was running away 
from no matter how far he traveled.

So the game would never end. Eric was living proof, a man who had taken to the 
farthest reaches of the world to escape the clutch of the torture. Yet, the 
other day had proven that time nor distance was a solution to an exit. How had 
the captain come about to that revelation of the card's paradox of spontaneous 
luck and self-harrowing misfortune? Perhaps it had been the same way that he 
himself had, when he had shown Katsuya the visage of Shade, when the game 
became something that had torn into his own personal life and left a scar that 
would never fully heal. After that, it was never quite the same as it had been 
before. And now he had seen the same minion attempt to kill another man. How 
many more horrors would these creatures inflict upon others before the 
nightmare was over? How much more would he have to watch before the dream faded 
away into smoke? And even then, when his vision was clear once again, how much 
of his life would remain the way he had remembered it?

Jinsaku pulled his stack from his pocket, gingerly flipping through their 
numbers until he was starring into the empty eye-sockets of Shade. He hated 
this card so much, hated how it acted and thought, hated its insatiable 
bloodlust, hated how its disgustingly violent demeanor seemed to violate every 
portion of the game. He had never asked to be involved in this. He had never 
been asked if he wanted to participate in this unspoken tournament that dealt 
with human lives, if he wanted to enthrall himself with horrible monsters who 
were satisfied only with fighting. He had never thought of them as real 
creatures, only slaves as much trapped and bound by the rules of the game as he 
was. But after Shade had taken the initiative in his last battle, he wasn't 
quite so sure anymore. Maybe HE was the only one who was really trapped.
Sometimes, it was nice to wonder just how he would have turned out if he had 
never touched the cards in the first place... sometimes, it was even nicer to 
wonder how Katsuya would have been.

His fingers tightened around the minion's thin resting place that rested in his 
tense hand, and the malicious cloak only laughed up at him with its toothy 
grin. It knew that Jinsaku was trapped and it reveled in his helplessness. It 
knew that he was looking for a way out and would never find one. It knew, and 
it silently mocked him. 

"Kimi ga..." ("You...") sputtered Jinsaku, fiery eyes glaring down at Shade. 
Slowly, he forced himself to calm down. Anger had never gotten him anywhere, in 
or out of matches. Yet, he wanted to do something. He didn't want to have to 
watch another person be hurt on his account, even if it was someone as low as 
Campbell. What if next time it was someone who didn't deserve it so much? 
Someone like Katsuya? Or Michael? When would be the next time that he wouldn't 
be fast enough to control his minion's lusts? And what if it was not only 
Shade... what if he suddenly could not control the others as well? Were the 
lives of the ones he might hurt even worth his own if he gave up all his cards?

Eric had lost his fiancee to the game. How could he live each day afterwards 
holding her card in his hand, fighting battles with others, even try to 
maintain a normal life in solitude? How long would it be before he himself 
began taking the cards of people's souls? There were only so many minions in 
the game, it was only natural that mass accumulation become centered in the 
ones who remained alive. Someday, if he wanted to keep his precious life, he 
would have to forsake his own priority and take someone out of the game. Or 
perhaps that was the only solution to escape, accepting the inevitable darkness 
of being entombed within the playing field forever.

"Damn," muttered Jinsaku, his eyes clenching shut in frustration. His eyes 
burned with fury as he glared at the tarot in hand, and they slowly narrowed 
with resolution. "You don't control me. I can live my own damn life." Yanking 
Shade's card from his deck, he flung as far to the side as possible, watching 
it land in a nearby heap of rubble and debris. He had already hurt two people 
with that beast, his best friend and perhaps his worst enemy. In the end, it 
came down to the question of which he cared about more: his own selfish 
victories or the well-being of people's innocence. He chose the latter. 
"I have other cards to fight with," he said coldly as he stared down the 
discarded ghost. "Maybe I'll loose, but that doesn't matter as long as other 
people don't have to get hurt." He spat on the ground unceremonially and turned 
to walk away, knowing that Shade must be hearing every word he said. "I'm going 
to be stronger than Eric was. If I'm going to have to end up with a stack of 
people's souls like he did, then I'd rather walk away a looser. No one else is 
going to get hurt by my hand. Nobody."

Drops of water poured from the sky now in a vertical flood of rushing liquid, 
and Jinsaku hunched his shoulders up around his head as he walked away, back 
towards his dingy hotel room. It was then that he realized that the player's 
luck seemed to be ignoring him that day.

...

"Is there really a finale to this ordeal? Or is that something we as human 
beings like to fantasize about so we merely have the comfort of knowing that 
there is a beginning and an end...?"

-----------------

High Stakes
Chapter Sixteen: "Thirteen"
Starring Tyrell and Jinsaku

Created by NeoVid
By Yuusuke

-----------------

"I still can't believe you walked all the way through the rain just to talk to 
me," mumbled Steve as he pulled a towel from a closet shelf and tossed it 
towards Tyrell. 

"Ah, I needed to get out," said Tyrell jokingly. "You know I hate getting 
cramped up in one place for too long." But he couldn't say the words with the 
usual flare he carried behind them. It was probably because his mind kept 
flooding with the visage of Talia's painting. What was he supposed to make of 
such a thing? It was like being told you were going to die within a week and 
then being left in suspense to see what happened. Did Talia have the power to 
predict these things? Was he really going to be taken out of the game? Or 
perhaps it was not so much an actual prediction as something she might aim to 
accomplish.

"Oh come on," said Steve, setting about the blazing fireplace with a poker. 
"You make it all too obvious how much you hate bad weather. Don't tell me you 
came all this way just because you got cabin fever!"

"Heh," laughed Tyrell, but it his cheerful demeanor was slowly slipping away. 
"Well, something popped up the other day, but I'm not sure even you could help 
me."

"Try me," said his friend with a grin. "After everything that's happened 
lately, I'm hesitant to say there's nothing I haven't seen!"

Tyrell just sat himself down in a chair, pondering on where to start.
"Annette and I saw Talia again the other day," he said. "This time it was on 
the streets, but she gave Annette a painting of..." He paused for a brief 
moment, the words seeming to grow thick in his mouth. "... it was a painting of 
me, of what my 'card' would look like when I'm taken out of the game. Or, at 
least that's what I presume it was, can't be too sure of anything these days."

"Of your card?!" said Steve in surprise. "And Talia gave this to you?"

"Yeah," replied Tyrell. "Annette tried to catch her when she realized what the 
painting was, but she got away in the crowd. I would have tried to bring the 
thing here to show you in person, but the rain probably would have soaked it 
through by the time I got here. Truth is, I'm a little worried. Nobody knows 
much about who Talia really is. Maybe she's just a player gone mad for all we 
know, but we saw her do things nobody has ever done before in her match with 
Annette. And now she's brought up this card of myself, like giving me a death 
sentence. I just don't know what to do."

A moment of silence permeated the room as Steve stared at his friend, the low 
crackle of a  fire growing in the hearth sparkling every once in a while. 
Finally, the man forced himself to reside in a chair beside his friend and 
break the stillness.
"How many cards do you have left, Tyrell?"

"Only two," came the response. "I lost my last battle to keep Annette in the 
game."

"Look, maybe this is all just some sick mind game that's playing with your 
head," said Steve. "You were perfectly fine until this came along and you still 
had the same number of cards! You said yourself the way Talia acted was 
abnormal, maybe this is just a false alarm."

"If it were anybody else, I'd say the same," said Tyrell. "But this is Talia 
we're talking about here! This girl's got minions with power that nobody has 
ever seen before! She saved Annette from becoming lost in the game! If this 
were just your average joe on the street that did this, then yeah, sure I'd 
brush it off like a practical joke. Yet, we're talking about a person who isn't 
even supposed to exist, and who knows what she's capable of."

"Alright, alright," said Steve, massaging his temples with his fingers. He 
suddenly rose up from his chair with a heavy sigh and marched off to the 
kitchen, heading straight for the refrigerator and rummaging through its 
contents. "So I guess what we have to ask ourselves is what Talia really is in 
this whole mess," he shouted from within the cold confines of the appliance. 
"Is she predicting the future here or something?"

"Not quite sure, but it does make me wonder how it would connect human cards to 
herself." Tyrell paused as he put his hands up to catch the beer that Steve 
lobbed to him as he returned from his trip. Popping the top open and taking a 
long chug, he placed the beverage on the table and rested his chin atop in 
propped arms. "If she's been around for that long, she's had to have taken SOME 
people out of the game, right? Now, I know we're all hesitant about using these 
types of cards in matches, but what if it's just a normal thing for her? Like 
using a minion?"

"So you're suggesting that maybe there's not really much difference between, 
say, my oil painting of Typhex and this painting of yourself?"

"More or less, to say the least," said Tyrell. "I've been thinking a lot 
lately, especially since we discovered that these human cards can also be used 
in battle. Other than the difference that they have no listed stats and they 
don't seem to combine well with other cards, they seem to work pretty much like 
minions."

"Feh," mumbled Steve as he sipped the watery alcohol. "I don't think I've ever 
heard you ramble on this much at once before."

"Well, you know what they say: 'Only bored people wonder about the way these 
types of things work,'"said Tyrell with a slight grin. "I thought a guy like 
you who'd been studying the game all this time would understand!"

"Me?! Bored?!" laughed Steve. "I prefer the term 'intellectually deprived' to 
that crap." He chuckled and leaned back in his seat, his body a bit more 
relaxed by the drink and jokes. "Alright so maybe this is all true, but what 
about when we tried summoning up Terry's card? You said I was stuck in some 
kind of trance and that he was almost completely consumed by angry behavior. 
Where do those parts come in?"

"I've been thinking about that too. You said that you felt like you knew Terry 
after the experience, right? Well, you also said that Terry felt like an 
underdog, that everyone else was better than him. I think that may explain not 
only his appearance, like his daggers, but also his behavior. I'm thinking that 
maybe a human card's initial conduct becomes determined by the strongest 
emotion or desire of it's previous life. I guess in some ways, that explains 
Annette's behavior as well."

"I see what you're saying..." said Steve. "So the 'trance,' you think it may 
just be a result of this whole unadulterated emotion thing?"

"Maybe, I can't really be sure on anything here," replied Tyrell. 

"But what does all this have to do with the connection between humans and 
minions?"

"Well, let's try thinking of it this way," said Tyrell, taking another sip of 
his beer. "So we can merge two minions but not a minion and a human card, 
right? Has anyone ever tried merging two HUMAN cards?" 

Steve just stared at him with his beer halfway to his mouth. It took him a 
minute to put it back on the table again.
"You're kidding me, right? I mean..."

"Yeah, I know, it's hardly the most humane thing to do," said Tyrell gravely. 
"But let's play the devil's advocate here for a moment, because we know that 
not everybody is as 'moral' as us. Look at Campbell, you've seen the tricks 
he's pulled to win his matches. I wouldn't doubt for a second that he'd take 
advantage of anything he could get his hands on."

"All right, you have a point," said Steven. "So what WOULD happen to two human 
cards? Would they even merge? They didn't seem to like the minions that much."

"But you'll notice how unlike the behavior of the minions the human cards seem 
to be. On one hand we have Terry, who's seems consumed with hostility. On the 
other, we rarely see the minions in any emotional state at all, with the 
exception of maybe Talia's Fluttercat. I don't think this is mere coincidence. 
I think that this has more to do with card types than anything else, sort of 
like the way merging certain minions produces different end results. Maybe 
that's what's causing rejection between the types."

"But what does it all mean in the end?" asked Steve. "Sure, they have 
differences in behavior, but how does this connect all the cards together?"

"I've been playing around with some theories lately," said Tyrell, setting his 
beverage aside. "Haven't you ever wondered where the cards came from? It's not 
like the players and the game are a part of everybody's everyday lifestyle. It 
had to have come from someone, somewhere, and with some purpose in mind. Here's 
a thought I came up with: what if minions ARE humans?"

"What?" said Steve, his face slightly contorted in confusion. "How do you 
figure into that?"

"Well, what are the minions?" asked Tyrell. "In terms of real life constructs, 
they're beings of pure fantasy, creatures grown and evolved far beyond any 
normal animal on this planet, living or dead. Some aren't even that, instead 
taking on the form of monsters that resemble nothing on this planet. So how did 
they come to be? Let's start at the beginning; the only new cards we've ever 
seen come into the game are from players who are taken out of it."

"Go on, I think I see what you're saying..."

"So if players are consistently merging cards to create new ones, then 
logically we should assume that the number of cards are consolidating over 
time, right? But the game has gone on for longer than either of us can remember 
and there's never been any sign in diminishing numbers. You'd think that the 
challenges would become more centered, that there would be fewer players, 
right? But there's no sign of any of that happening at all and random people 
somehow end up becoming rookies with cards in their hand. It's pretty much the 
way we started out as players. The answer? There ARE more cards being made, the 
human cards, though most often we do not recognize them in this form. Now, if 
the human cards really do take the most prominent wish or emotion of its host's 
former life, I think it would be safe to assume them to be a construct of pure 
sentiment, the appearance on their card being dictated by this passion. So what 
if combining two human cards---"

"--- changed their form into something completely different..." finished Steve. 
"We often classify emotions as something inherent, without a real, solid 
form..."

"Exactly," said Tyrell. "I think human cards initially APPEAR human, just 
because that is how their hosts originally envisioned themselves. But what 
happens when you combine the thoughts of two or more human beings? The thoughts 
become jumbled and mixed, the straight structure is shattered. Combining, say, 
Annette's bravery and Terry's anger would not create an clear-cut picture. So 
what if the picture of the card represents this change and turns into something 
more 'bestial?' Like the normal pictures we usually associate with the 
minions?" 

"Dear lord..." breathed Steve. "So we may very well be playing with our own 
lives here. But how does that explain how cold and heartless the normal minions 
appears to be?"

"This is just a thought, but the more one material is combined with others, the 
more diluted it gets and the less apparent it becomes in the end result. I 
think that pretty soon a minion gets cluttered with so many emotions that they 
may just meld into indifference and cancel out one another, at least in most 
cases. I suppose melding human cards of similar emotions might produce a 
different result, but we can't be certain of anything here. This is all just 
theory."

"But it makes sense in a lot of ways," said Steve, staring at his half-empty 
beer can. "That's what scares me. I mean, yeah, we don't have any proof to back 
this up yet and I sure as hell don't want to go around playing with human cards 
to try to get the evidence. Still, it's not exactly a comforting thought that 
we're joking around with people's lives. It's like having an army at your 
disposal and sending them off to die against one another." He suddenly grabbed 
the can and took a long drag before settling back down again. "Who would come 
up with such a sick system? And why?" 

"I'm not sure..." said Tyrell. "When you think about it, this is incapacitating 
human beings. It's taking them, sending them against one another, and trapping 
them in a simple card. Maybe somebody just doesn't like us very much."

"Could it be Talia?" 

"I don't think so. If she was really as cynical as this hypothesis is, then 
there was no reason for her to keep Annette alive, even if it did put her 
'soul' literally in the palm of her hand. I still don't know where she fits 
into all of this..."

"So this painting she made of you," started Steve. "If she helped Annette, 
maybe this is just a warning."

"Hmmm," mumbled Tyrell, leaning back in his chair. "But who would she be trying 
to warn me from?"

-----------------

"Son of a bitch..." muttered Jinsaku as he stomped up the stairs to his room. 
As if recent events hadn't been bad enough. He thought he had at least enough 
money leftover to catch a taxi home, but after hours of passing cars and 
finally being able to hail a cab to the side, his feeble cash supply had 
mysteriously disappeared. The driver had been plenty unhappy about stopping for 
nothing, and drove off with enough mud and grime in his wake to thoroughly soak 
through his already sopping clothes. To top off the fabulous adventure, he had 
been forced to walk home through the thunderstorm. All he wanted now was to 
peel off the shit he was wearing and take a hot shower to hose himself off. As 
he settled his grimy body down in an old chair, memories trickled back from 
years past, and he momentarily reminisced about how the situation was so much 
like...

"Damnit," he cursed under his breath. He had tried to throw away his cards more 
than once before, and each time it had resulted in them merely circling back to 
his hand, usually not without some kind of hardship or misfortune happening 
first. But this was only one card, so he figured he hadn't been upsetting any 
rules of the tournament. Perhaps he had been wrong. 
Yanking off his shirt and tossing it in the corner of the room, he pulled out 
his stack of cards and stared at their faces. Nothing seemed out of the 
ordinary until he began to count through their numbers. If he had thrown away 
Shade, then why did he still seem to have the same number of cards? He slowly 
began to sort through the thin pieces, sliding back face after face until he 
reached a final black card behind all the familiar names. He knew immediately 
that the skull-faced monster was not going to let him escape, not this time. 
Words began to formulate in his head as the cold, grinning visage began to melt 
back on the face of the card. 

'You hate me,' whispered the thin, raspy voice of Shade.

Jinsaku felt a chill run down his spine at the card's recognition of his own 
animosity. 
'I just want you out of my life,' he thought vehemently. 'I want to get out of 
this damn trap that I'm in and live a fucking normal life. Is that too much to 
ask?' 

'You hate me. You tried to get rid of me.' 

'Of course I hate you. You've done more harm to me than all the other cards 
combined. I wish I had never gotten you, I wish I'd never had to put up with 
all the crap you've given me...'

Shade's toothy grin only seemed to widen as Jinsaku's words trailed off, and he 
swore that the room got colder with the next words that rang through his head.

'I will make you... regret...'

"Nantte iu koto ga...?" ("The hell...?") said Jinsaku aloud in his 
bewilderment, only faintly realizing that his hold on the English language had 
been abruptly loosened. Struggling to concentrate, he forced himself to think 
straight once again. 'What the hell are you saying?'

'I will show you how valuable I am in your hand. You will regret...'

Without another word, the card suddenly began to shimmer and vanish into thin 
air, leaving nothing behind but a thin trail of blue sparks. Jinsaku let the 
other cards drop to the floor as he stared at where Shade had once been. Was 
the damned thing gone for good? A voice inside him sincerely hoped so, wishing 
that he could finally be free of that hideous creature forever. However, those 
last words still irked him. Shade did not 'talk' to him often, and never had he 
been quite this adversarial. This almost seemed like an easy escape, but the 
cards had never let him run away before and he doubted this could be any 
exception. Would Shade return again to cause him grief? But if he was not in 
his own stock of minions now, then how would the retribution come across? He 
had never thought particularly hard about the restraint with which he had used 
that card. Yet, how would someone more tainted with selfishness wield such a 
killer? How would another utilize such bloodlust to his own advantage? 

Perhaps Shade was no longer his own, but even though he would no longer have to 
face the vile demon himself, was that for the better?

"You will regret..." repeated Jinsaku coldly, and he shivered with the thought. 

-----------------

Notes:
This thing sucks. A lot. My motivation to writing this was at an all time 
low... well, that's not true. I've had worse. However, it wasn't very high 
either. Personal crap and the all-mighty power of procrastination have impeded 
my progress on this work, and as a result I feel it is little to be proud of. 
Hate me or whatnot, it matters little in retrospect of this writing's quality. 
>B

The title itself was used as a duel metaphor from a game that I'm pretty sure 
most people have heard little or nothing of. The game "thirteen" involves 4 
players and divides amongst them a standard deck of cards to that each receives 
(surprise) thirteen. The object of the game is to get rid off all your cards. 
Since the process of that is long, complicated, and completely irrelevant to 
the story, I shall not bother to explain it. However, metaphorically it 
pertains to Jinsaku's plight within his entrapment and his wish to be free of 
the minions and their battles. In a secondary, more abstract metaphor, thirteen 
actually has many different names of which it goes by, as does the many 
mysterious faces and rumored purposes of the game Jinsaku and the others play. 
Okay, so the whole damn thing's obscure, sue me. 

At any rate, thanks to Ilmater and NeoVid for pre-reading this gutter trash. Yeah, 
I'm "the guy who wrote FFL#6," bite me. :D

Yuusuke, the angsty mushroom
www.geocities.com/busyyuu/



Beware the Radish
http://www.mit.edu/~johne/btr/
8/21/00