“Can someone give me a hand?”
King Arthur* #quote
Today's blog post has nothing to do with watermelons, except for the
fact that I have mentioned it has nothing to do with watermelons,
which in itself may make it have to do with watermelons. Thus I may
be wrong and it certainly has to be a discussion on watermelons.
Anyway onto the flash fiction!
Genie Casino
Jason found a magic lamp. He rubbed it. But instead of a genie
coming out he got sucked in. He looked at his body. His skin still
its usual pale peach, he expected it to be burnt or something after
the explosive flash he saw, and his simple denim pants and white
shirt a little wrinkled but fine. His black hair got tussled from
whatever force pulled him into the strange place inside the lamp.
The location in the lamp was a massive casino. Far more vast that
what physics would allow to fit in such a small lamp. But magic
wouldn't care. He saw humans sobbing and cheering around various
casino items like slot machines while genies floated around in suits.
The ghostly tail that replaced legs made them exceptionally obvious.
The table with rows of dice caught his eye more than anything. And
not normal dice. He could see small writing on each of the dice. He
walked up to the table and its hundred of dice. A statistician by
occupation he had a fascination with numbers and dice without became
immediately intriguing.
“A new face!” The genie at the table smiled with a friendly,
marketing smile. “You want wishes? This is the best place in the
casino to get them! Roll the dice of your choosing and if a wish
comes up then you get it. But like every place there's a downside to
here. We genies gotta put in bad magic, it fuels us and the magic
equilibrium. So if you hit a curse written on the dice it happens to
you.” The way the genie told Jason of the downsides had that rushed
tone of 'legally obligated disclosure' businesses find such distaste
in. “But I can see you're a lucky man. I know you'll avoid the
curses on each one and get all the wishes. So pick the dice with the
wishes you want. Roll any of the dice you want as many times as you
want to!”
Jason looked at them. “May I roll different ones as many times as
I want? I have complete freedom?”
“Yes!” The genie tried to encourage Jason to roll while also
trying not to look at a man who spent his time at the dice table
getting unlucky and cursed.
Jason spent about an hour looking through all the dice, separating
them into stacks and sorting them. The genie looked at him oddly. The
most he'd seen people take to decide on a wish they wanted on a dice
was twenty minutes before they started madly rolling over and over
for it or others. People started gathering around the table as they
saw the massive sorting of dice.
After going through the hundreds of dice Jason arrived at ten.
“Ten different ones?” The genie peered at them to see what
curses and wishes the dice had written on them specifically. “Why
these? Which one is it?”
“All of them. You should get a piece of paper, I'm going to roll
all of these one thousand times each.” Jason smiled. The arms
dropped. Jason however, just smiled. The crowd around the lamp
murmured.
“Why would you do that?”
Jason replied, “No comment.” He'd rather not have the house
throw him out for figuring out a trick. And his trick revolved around
numbers. Being a statistician came in handy in such a magical place.
He picked dice who's curses and wishes were related. Even though the
odds of curses happening favored the House(as odds favored the
casino) he picked ones that when averaged over a large sample(a
thousand rolls) the related wishes would cancel out. One of the
curses on the die would be to lose your car(or a car of the ones you
have if you had more than one) but another one would be to get many
cars. If he didn't choose the right ones they wouldn't have been
related enough to cancel each other out.
After getting his many, many wishes granted, they threw Jason out of
the casino and removed the dice game.
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