The Great Game 🎲 Diopolis, Fallar Ultima

The Nature of the Game

The Grande Salle

Cocarider saw the Head Croupier, Diamarus, at the centre of the Grande Salle. Diamarus had four spinner discs on each of his three heads. The discs were triangulating the wave patterns emanating from the players floating in from the Cocabar. When Diamarus locked onto Cocarider, the information coming from the twelve discs couldn’t be syncretized into a coherent pattern. They jammed as they funnelled into the central brain between his three heads. Diamarus had no choice but to look away.

The Grand Salle itself was about the size of la Salle Blanche in Monte Carlo — if you could imagine it irradiated with a trillion gigajoules of every type of energy known in the 13 universes:

Cocarider was projecting an incredibly complicated wave pattern, fashioned from his many travels thorughout the Kraslika. Diamarus couldn’t identify the pattern, which resembled a hundred symphony orchestras and a hundred thrash metal bands playing all at once at triple tempo. It was as if a thousand Toxic Holocausts met a thousand Flights of the Bumblebee.

Chaos and harmony drifted in so many directions from Cocarider that Diamarus had to look away, otherwise he wouldn’t have been able to concentrate on any of the other players. In any case, he had decided long ago that it was futile to try to decode Cocarider’s wave pattern, let alone predict the relation between it and his game strategy. It was better just to look in his eye and try to decode his body language.

Diamarus looked into Cocarider’s occulus major, which slowly scanned the room, the gaming table, and the competition. His eye, which funneled one meter from the surface of his body to the 60 chambers of his brain, stopped on a shape that had only one head and two arms. A humanoid, it seemed. And yet the humanoid was humming with a golden light, the tightly packed loops of its single brain whirling so fast and so intricately that Cocarider decided the humanoid must have been trained by the Vicinese.

Cocarider knew that the Vicinese had their spies everywhere, always watching for a chance to locate the nearby Soul Star. They sat in their nordern roost, like an anxious hen over what they thought of as their golden egg, the Kraslika. As if their fantasies of Order and Meaning meant a single thing! Their fantasy meant one thing among a billion things, and each one those billion things meant something else.

Cocarider wondered how on earth this humanoid had managed to get to Die.

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The Planet Die

The planet of Die lies only 1.1 parsec from Fallar Prime and has a diameter of only 2.6 thousand kilometres. Yet Die has four characteristics that make it at once unique and spectacular:

1. Die’s axis is aligned with absolute precision along the nord/sood cosmic axis established by Vicino Prossimo and Fallar Prime. Hundreds of other planets are also aligned along this axis, yet all of these tilt from it by at least one billionth of a degree. Only Die follows the axis absolutely — or at least up to a million decimal points, according to the latest measurement.

2. Die rotates at the speed of 14.2 times per second, which is faster than any known habitable planet.

3. Die is more dense than any known planet, habited or otherwise. This is because it’s made of pure farridium, the densest element in the 13 known universes. Die’s density provides a centripetal force slightly stronger than the centrifugal force created by its rotation. Walking on Die is about the same as walking on the moon.

4. Die occasionally tilts from its regular axis so rapidly and erratically that it’s exceptionally difficult to predict at what angle the planet will lie in even the next second. It tilts up to 30 degrees in a flash. One moment the planet is rotating on its nord/sood axis, the next moment it tilts off its axis, and the next moment it’s back on its axis again.

It’s this erratic tilting of Die, referred to as a dietilt, that makes Die the ideal venue for the Chancemasters to hold their weekend Game. Every 11th, 12th and 13th day of the week they meet in the Grande Salle de Jeux in the capital city of Diopolis.

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The Game

Except for the Game’s controllers, the Chancemasters, and the licensed Betters, no one is privy to the details of the Game’s outcome. The secrecy surrounding the outcome is guaranteed in typical Fallarian style: all players and betters agree to be injected with a cerebral fluid. If they release any information publicly, or if they release any information to someone who then leaks it to the Press, they receive a neuro-chemical shock so violent that their bodies contort. Spinal fluid spurts from a tube or blood-jelly seeps from a crack in their skull, and they are dead within seconds.

It’s a high price to pay for being part of the Game, yet the players and betters think it worth the price. For the Game isn’t just an exercise in predicting the angle at which Die is about to tilt; it’s a prediction of what the cosmos is about to do. The information they gain is invaluable. And of course top secret.

One thing the controllers know for certain is that dietilts occur 28 seconds before cosmic Pulses, which appear to emanate from the Golden Hill on Vicino Concordia. Yet at times the Pulses seem to come from the edges of the cosmos itself. The Pulses intrigue and bewilder the controllers, yet it’s what happens before the Pulses that has preoccupied them for the last several decades.

Another thing the controllers know is that dietilts occur 15 seconds before fluxes in one or more of the following: 1. the mirror patterns of navy matter, 2. the gravitational feedback loops of galactic walls, 3. the subatomic drift of monad particles, 4. data mining or fractal convergence relay systems. All of these things are of great interest to the powerful Empires — the Vicinese, the Dolcezzi, the Baulians, the Copper Phantoms, the Skiff Blasters and, of course, the Fallarians.

The controllers want to know, Is there a cause that determines the fluxes, or are the fluxes merely a function of the physical forces inherent in the cosmos? Is there some larger Game at play?

In the Game, the Chancemaster who most accurately weighs the fluctuating forces of the cosmos, and who most accurately predicts the dielilts, becomes the holder of The Farridian Die.

The Die is a six-sided cube 8.1 inches wide. Deep blue and made of pure farridium, the Die is on permanent display in the middle of the Grande Salle de Jeux.

The planet itself is composed of farridium, the density of which increases the deeper one mines. While the Diopolans are able to mine .3 kilometres down, the farridium beneath that is too dense for any known neutron-laser or streak-drill to penetrate. Yet somehow a hundred years ago the Die surfaced in the Desert of Ood, perfectly cubed, having come from a depth of .9 kilometres.

Holding the Die in the palm of your hands would only be possible if you could lift a 3000 kilogram weight. If you were capable of holding the Die, you would feel the Die tilt 1.3 seconds prior to an actual dietilt. This fact has continued to nonplus the most learned Fallarian physicists. Even the Wizard Physicists of Farridicus 8 throw up their tentacles in dismay.

Fallar Discordia keeps close tabs on the Game. All the information the players use to win the Die is discreetly mirrored into the data banks and laboratories of Fallar Prime. The Military Council, stationed in the Cobalt District of Fallar Discordia, sees this arrangement as a perfect mix of profit motive, entertainment, military strategy, and subterfuge. 

The idea of gathering information from the Game was conceived 32 years ago by Knifestream, the most ruthless of the Demon Priests of the Black Horde. Knifestream continues to set the parameters of the Game each week, and to collate the information once it’s filtered through the data banks and laboratories.

Each time Knifestream passes on a crucial piece of information to his fellow Demon Priests, his red eyes burnish a shade darker. The other Priests nod their ebony hoods in agreement, and assure him that one day he will benefit ten-fold from all his hard work.

Secretly, the other Demon Priests intend to benetfit twenty-fold, and are happy to let Knifestream do the heavy lifting. Let him spend all that time wading through terrabins of data about star walls and intergalactic voids. It’ll keep him busy, Gascitar signals to his ally Kaldriscat. Knifestream’s diligence allows them time to mine the voids with microscopic mirror-devices, tiny slivers that reflect information through the darkest of dark matter directly to their hidden stations.

It should be noted that Knifestream hoards every tenth bit of valuable information. He hoards the most crucial pieces — the cipher discs that connivers like Gascitar and Kaldriscat will need in order to decipher all the other pieces. Knifestream is just making sure that when the time comes, he’ll be holding all the chips.

It should also be noted that Gascitar and Kaldriscat know about the discs that Knifestream believes he’s hiding from them. He was always a crude bumbler, that Knifestream! they nod to eachother, making sure that no one sees their shoulders shift with laughter beneath their black cloaks. The same tiny slivers they use to mine the voids are embedded into the fabric of Knifestream’s hood — except that these slivers are even smaller, undetectable to the sanctioned laboratories of Fallar Discordia. Several years ago, Knifestream suffered from a rare form of ear fungus, which Gascitar found in the trenches of Rabixia Fallix. The only hood fabric that gave his ears any relief was gifted to him with great ceremony by Kaldriscat.

They must really think I’m an idiot, Knifestream thought to himself. Slivers in my hood! Sanctioned laboratories! Darkest of dark matter! My third crawler! Knifestream had made a deal with the sworn enemy of all Fallarians: the Vicinese. In exchange for several useless species of angströminic ants, he received information from Tallicit of Breen, wife of Talfar of Breen, about how to reflect data from just beyond the edges of the darkest of dark matter. All I need to do is scratch one of my four ears every week or two and the idiots think they’ve outmaneuvered me!

It should be noted further that Gascitar and Kaldriscat…

They are a dreadful lot, those Demon Priests.

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Next: 💚 Di Firenze

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