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“No but really, you should play me,” Cyno said seriously, TCG card in hand.
Lyney laughed shyly. “Oh, but I don’t think I managed to catch all of the rules!”
Lyney was in Sumeru on invitation from Scara – his amazing boyfriend – and he found himself in a tavern, setting up a card game with the current undefeated champion of the friend group. Cyno had previously beaten all of the other friends, including Scara, in Genius Invokation, while Lyney watched to learn the rules. Scara shamelessly scooted his seat to be next to Lyney’s, and leaned back to watch him as he sipped his drink.
“I will explain anything that you don’t know,” Cyno promised him, scrutinising his hand of five.
“Okay, but go easy on me?” Lyney laughed shyly, tucking a lock of hair behind his ear, and someone (Tighnari), elbowed Cyno so that he’d pay attention.
“Oh? Yeah. Yeah I can go easy on you for the first round. I will beat you only after you’ve learned the rules.”
“Many thanks!”
Cyno let Lyney move first, being the novice. “Ok first I will attack with, wait um, no I take that back.” Lyney narrowed his eyes at his character cards on the table again, reading the descriptions carefully and then looking at the cards in his hand.
“Setting up in the first round is a good idea,” Kaveh told him from the side.
“I disagree,” said Alhaitham immediately. “Once Cyno sets up too much it’s almost impossible to take him down. It’s better to attack first before he has a chance.”
Kaveh slammed down his cup in indignation. “No it isn’t! If you try to attack first without setup, then you won’t be able to kill him before he’s done setting up, and then you’d be completely defenceless against a fully set-up Cyno!”
“Woah,” Lyney said in a pitiful tone, cocking his head like a lost little lamb. “I guess I’ll just go with my gut.” Scara scoffed at the side.
Lyney and Cyno kept going at their card fight, and, true to his word, Cyno was clearly going easy on him as Lyney ‘hmmed’ and ‘ummed’ and pouted at the cards.
They were about one character each when Cyno had made up his mind to win. “This ends here,” Cyno stated cooly, holding a card up to his face.
Lyney gathered his dice and made his attack. “And that does… um…”
Cyno almost dropped his card. Kaveh spat out his drink, and a few others, having been paying enough attention to calculate the damage, started laughing hysterically.
Lyney looked up at them with a bewildered smile. “What did I do?” he asked innocently. Scara, who was clutching his stomach with hysterical laughter, braced his foot on Lyney’s chair, making it shake in time to the laughter.
“Good job Lyney!” Kaveh exclaimed, “You managed to dethrone the king!”
“Don’t feed his ego!” Tighnari protested, swatting at Kaveh. “He’s clearly not that strong.”
Cyno groaned from where he had his head in his arms on the table, taking more and more emotional damage the higher pitched Scara’s laughter got.
“Again!” Cyno demanded. “I will beat you this time!”
“Oh let him have this, Cyno,” Sethos said. “Hey Magician, up for another fight?”
Lyney beamed. “Well playing this game is more fun than I thought, so sure!”
Lyney seemed to be getting the hang of the game. He was starting to hesitate less when making moves, and he didn’t have to check the descriptions as often. He even started having a strategy, though it was still shaky enough to be inconsistent and unpredictable. He also, for some inexplicable and unexplained reason, started rolling better dice and drawing a consistently good hand.
“Wow, you’re really good at this!” Sethos said as he lost.
“Losing twice in a row?” Scara taunted. “Looks like you’re losing your touch there, Sethos.”
“Oh please, it was just beginner’s luck,” Lyney insisted. Scara started laughing again. “It does feel like I’m on a roll though.” Lyney tucked his hair back behind his ear, beaming up at the friends sweetly. “Can I play someone else next?”
“I’ll play you!” Kaveh offered.
Lyney and Kaveh played a short and thrilling game, where Lyney practically swept the floor with him, as if he already knew Kaveh’s whole pack. Which, of course, wasn't possible, as that would mean that Lyney memorised Kaveh’s entire deck while observing the earlier games.
“Oh this is getting interesting,” Tighnari said, “Can I play you next?”
Cyno sputtered. “I was going to play him to get back my honour.”
“Oh hush, you can wait a game or two.”
Lyney laughed, a pink flush on his cheeks from the warmth of the Sumeru tavern and elation of winning a few games. “I am pretty tired…” Lyney tapped his finger on his lip as he thought. “I’ll play you for a drink?” Lyney offered.
Tighnari shook his hand. “Game on.”
Surely, any time now, Lyney would lose from overconfidence over his fluke wins. Cyno, and arguably Sethos, went easy on him, and Kaveh was not very sober when they fought. Tighnari wasn’t going to go easy on him, or underestimate him.
Lyney shuffled his cards between his hands, making a rainbow in the air just to show off.
“Show-off,” Scara commented with a shit-eating grin.
Lyney made quick work of Tighnari. In fact, it almost seemed like he was not as efficient as he could have been, as he went with flashier moves.
Tighnari laughed. “You sure are a prodigy!”
Lyney hid his laughter behind his hand. “Snake wine cocktail please~”
That elicited another round of laughter from the table.
Cyno finally got his chance to play Lyney again, and this time, it seemed he was determined not to hold back.
“Ready?” Lyney teased, toying with a die between his index and middle finger.
“Ready. Let’s flip for who goes first.”
The game was fast-paced, with Lyney and Cyno’s cards going down one after the other, bombs getting blown and shots being fired.
Just as Cyno’s last character was dealt a fatal attack, Cyno slammed his hands down on the table and pointed at Lyney accusingly.
“He’s faking it!” Cyno accused.
“You beat Cyno a second time?” Kaveh wolf whistled. “Looks like we have ourselves a new king~”
“Don’t feed his ego!” Tighnari reminded him, both of them more than a little tipsy.
Lyney gave him a woeful face, “Who, me?”
Cyno narrowed his eyes and continued pointing his finger, though Tighnari held him back from leaning across the table too far. “I’ve seen people like you, seniors who sneak into junior tournaments just to hustle juniors and win easy medals in the novice division to deprive the up-and-coming talent of achievements!”
“Except that there’s no medals to win here, so he’s just hustling us out of cocktails and pride,” Alhaitham commented, amused by the situation.
“Oh, you’re a junior at Genius Invokation?” Lyney asked with an innocent pout. “I thought you were the unbeatable champion of the friend group.”
“Archons, you’re so hot when you pound people to pulp,” Scara said, leaning into Lyney.
Lyney booped his nose. “Even though they’re your precious friends?”
“ Especially so.”
“Rematch!” Cyno demanded.
“I don’t know, it’s getting pretty late…” Lyney mused, flicking eight dice up into the air in quick succession, and letting everyone’s eyes follow them as they somehow stacked neatly one on top of the other, all of them fire elemental. Lyney smiled at Cyno sweetly. “Beg.”
It seemed Lyney could do nothing but win that night, because Scara kissed him right after that.
“Is the only way to get your attention to be a little mean?” Lyney murmured as Scara pulled away just slightly, looking at his boyfriend's indigo eyes through his lashes.
“You know damn well how to get my attention,” Scara said. “But yeah hypercompetence and a pretty lying face is pretty high up there.”
“Oh, I’m glad~ I thought you were going to kiss me after I won the first time.”
“You did all of that just for a kiss?”
“I’m trying to seduce you.”
“Validation whore.”
“I thought we were friends!” Cyno protested from the side.
Scara stuck his tongue out at him. “Hoes before bros.”
Lyney took that tongue into his mouth and they started making out.
Over at the side, Tighnari comforted Cyno. “It’s okay. Lyney will return to Fontaine and take your losses along with him.”
“But… my pride…”
Kaveh was cackling. Alhaitham was chuckling. And Sethos got a kamera and snapped a shot of all of them.
The picture came out really great. It was one that Lyney and Scara would always treasure. Their copy had, scribbled in the corner in Lyney’s pretty red pen, ‘Us with Scara’s friends in Sumeru’, and underneath it in teal handwriting, ‘Never play a magician’.