The Great Game 🎲 Diopolis

The Chancemasters of Die

The Cocabar

To prepare for the Game, the Chancemasters take two dozen cocarollers — small cubes of sugar modelled on the Farridian Die. They wash these psychotropic hallucinogens down with several dozen nephtane martinis.

They do this in The Cocabar, which is right next to La Grande Salle de Jeux. The bar itself screams with particulate lasers, beam-scrawlers, and radiant ion drones. To the Chancemasters the bar is like a thousand pinball machines, each emitting coded neon signs they decode just to get their minds up to speed. 

To the human eye, the bar would look like an enormous rectangular box crisscrossed with burning rays and incandescent force fields. That is, it would appear this way if the human put on a ray-visor two inches thick. Otherwise, the bar would look like a square sun, too bright to look at. If humans even blinked at a martini shaker in the bar and weren’t wearing a light-visor, their eyes would fry in a split second.

By the time the Chancemasters entered the Grande Salle their brains were already spinning twice as fast as usual in 60 different directions. This isn’t a figure of speech, since many of them have brains that are in fact very similar to 60 integrated spinning hard drives (in the days before everything became solid state). Or, to use another analogy, their brains are like 60 record players hooked into the same speaker. This last analogy needs to be qualified, however, since each of the 60 record players would have to emit trillions of sounds, images, and wavelengths, and each would have to contain bank upon bank of gradient equalizers and synthesizers. Each ‘record player’ would also need to tilt in relation to the input coming from the other 59 ‘record players.’ The ‘speaker’ or Chancemaster would likewise need to calibrate his or her frequencies in relation to the frequencies of the other ‘speakers’ or Chancemasters, who were now floating from the bar to the Grande Salle.

Cocarider

Cocarider was the nom de jeu given to Farrixion Salopard, the greatest Chancemaster the croupiers of the Grande Salle had ever seen. Cocarider was from the Fallix Galaxy, which was, like Fallar Ultima, part of the Great Black Wall of galaxies stretching across the centre of the Black Pulse universe.

The Fallixians were one of the craftiest species in the cosmos. They had co-existed with the Fallarians for billions of years because they shared one thing in common: they didn’t trust anyone. This distrust had a fortuitous side-effect: since neither trusted their leaders, they were more than willing to align themselves with any species as unscrupulous as they were — as long as that other species didn’t expect loyalty in return. 

As long as the Fallixians could be counted on to act in their own self-interest, the Fallarians got on with them perfectly well. They even had a sort of camaraderie that was grudgingly admired throughout the Black Pulse, where generally one species would connive the gruesome death of the next species, always making it perfectly clear that they despised the other species, and that the other species deserved an even nastier death. Yet the bond between Fallixian and Fallarian was different. They almost went so far as to suggest that they could tolerate each other’s company.

Cocarider was perfectly suited to be a Chancemaster. To begin with, he was an octaliffar prelix, a mature adult of the eighth gender. As an octaliffar, he could mate with any of the other seven genders but could never be called upon to watch over a nest of helpless brats. He could collect the most intimate information from any Fallixian of any sex, yet he was never required to live a domestic life. As a result, he never had to limit his sources of information. He was free from any responsibility and could concentrate on the one thing that mattered to him: winning the Farridian Die.

As a prelix, Cocarider also had the ability to mate with any other life-form, as long as that life-form could provide a receptacle — egg, spiral binder, flow-grappler, etc. — that could accommodate the ‘darts’ that he discharged from the primal brain around which his other 59 brains revolved. As an alien species, he was actively discouraged to stick around and raise his mongrel specimens, yet once the dart hit its mark, he could gather information from his offspring as long as it was still living. If his child in any way started to work against his interests, all he needed to do was emit a death pulse at his own personal embedded frequency, and he was once again a bachelor, carefree and at leisure to go his merry way, mating with whoever he pleased. At present Cocarider had 80,000 such sources of information from all 13 universes. When he stepped into the Grande Salle he possessed information so diverse, so arcane, and so forbidden that the other Chancemasters didn’t stand a chance. He was the James Bond of Diopolis. 

Diamarus

Diopolans were by constitution the most arrogant of croupiers. Bred in Die’s strict hierarchy, and having reached the apex of this hierarchy, they looked down on every creature that walked, slithered, or swam into the Grande Salle. 

The Diopolan croupiers were exceedingly proud of themselves, yet they were also an unhappy, alienated lot. The Head Croupier, Diamarus, was perhaps the loneliest of them all. It didn’t help that he considered the croupiers beneath him so much grub-dung under his claws. He refused to smile at even the wealthiest of dicers, considering it already beneath his dignity to crack orders to his subordinate croupiers from beneath his dark purple shell. 

There was one exception to Diamarus’ general disdain, and that was the Fallixian they called Cocarider. In Fallarian, this name sounded something like Kod’dfaldtrxa’dtrroda, the sound and concept of which is best translated as one who rides the wave of a drug that sharpens perception while at the same time making you feel like a Big Bad Wolf who can blow the House down. 

Cocarider gave Diamarus chills down his scale-coated spine each time he floated into the Grande Salle. Diamarus could almost sense with his antennae the plates of farridium shift in the ceiling. He could almost feel the farridium torso bars in the walls straining to remain planted in the planet’s dense rock. 

Deep down, Diamarus loved the Game so much that he despised it and wished to be rid of his horrible addiction. He fantasized about living in a little pink bungalow on a pleasant lake, surrounded by juicy pink creatures he could pluck from the trees and eat without so much as bothering to get up from his hammock. 

Diamarus couldn’t live without the Game or without players like Cocarider. And yet he hated the Salle de Jeux and he hated working for that overgrown cockroach Knifestream. He was convinced that the whole thing was a trick, a tool turning into his back like a screwdriver, twisting out information, all to benefit the Fallarian Demon Priests. His deepest wish was that Cocarider would play so brilliantly that the House would come crashing to the ground.

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Next: Tales: 🧚🏽 The Ancient Mariner

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