✅ My Cousin's Keeper [NaNoWriMo 2021]

113. My Competitive Streak

There were seven people around the table in the basement, but I didn't know most of their names. Isaac introduced Kernigan to the others as we arrived – saying only that he was Mark Smith, a friend from out of town – but I forgot half of the names almost instantly. I had no doubt that Kernigan would remember all of them. Despite being a recluse, he struck me as the kind of guy who could recall just about anything he needed to know, and these were probably his kind of people.

As usual, an introduction by Isaac included mentioning name, occupation, and their favourite comic books or games. For Kernigan, he mentioned The Biker, the Don, and the Pope, which they had mentioned earlier, as well as Bride of Thanatos, which I'd never heard of. I guessed that it might be a series by some other author, so it wasn't too easy for the others to guess the man's true identity. From Kernigan's smile, I guessed that there was some kind of in-joke there. It wasn't important.

Then we were sitting around the table playing card games. We started with a simple one, as he had promised, which had a number of cards featuring characters from the Millhouse Underground universe, mixed in with other popular scifi and fantasy franchises. I recognised most of the cards, they were pretty iconic. But I spent most of the first game trying to get rid of a tribble, only to finally remove it and then realise that the current victory condition needed five dwarfs, not three like it said on that card. The second time around I did better, but we ended up drawing so many cards towards the end that we had practically a whole deck in our hands. That gave a distinct advantage to the people who had an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the different rules, and the different combinations they could be used in. There was no way I could get my head around what was in my hand fast enough, and the game went to Isaac's boyfriend. I realised when I came to congratulate Captain Smug that I'd forgotten his actual name again; and then I spent most of the next game with the question nagging at the back of my mind.

Everybody won at some point, I think. It was hard, but even I managed a game or two. Once I'd gotten used to the rules again, and the new cards that they had apparently added to the set since the last time Ffrances had dragged me along, I even found myself taking the game as seriously as they did. By which I mean not at all serious; everybody was laughing, and the games were always fun, even as they tried their best to win. It was refreshing, to say the least.

After a few games we switched to playing other games. There was a board game about a bunch of people running around a haunted mansion collecting weapon cards in an attempt to assassinate the housekeeper, thich was a lot of fun but rather complex to learn, and then a card game whose mechanics seemed to revolve almost entirely around borrowing things from your friends and not returning them. Both seemed like crazy things to have a game about, but everybody treated them as if they were perfectly rational plot lines. After a while, I figured that the story and artwork were really just there to give some kind of theme to what would otherwise be a pretty interesting abstract game. Regardless of how silly the concept was, I could look past it to the mechanics, and then enjoy trying to find the best way around the different strategies.

The last game of the evening was called Deleg8, and was all about managing resources in an office environment. I almost laughed at that, given that it seemed to represent most of the work I'd been doing for the last few months. But I think that in the real world of work, there was no benefit to be gained by marking all your tasks as somebody else's responsibility; and no monthly bonus for a manager who didn't actually do anything. Although I was surprised to find that even with mechanics that made little sense in the real world, it somehow felt like the complex wrangle of inter-office politics. We played twice, and the second time I ended up with a veritable mountain of paperclips in front of me, and one of the guys whose name I didn't know crowned me 'Queen of the Office', dropping a little paper crown onto my head as he returned from the bathroom. As silly as it was, I felt like I had accomplished something. And I wondered if maybe I'd been too harsh; if Tess was coming here in future, it might be beneficial for me to show up as well.