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Spamton and Jevil crowd around their void-constructed coffee table, low enough on the ground to facilitate sitting cross-legged. The dark cloak that acted as their table runner has been straightened and set with a deck of entirely jokers.
“YOU’LL WANT TO [Get out of the road!!!] BEFORE THIS [Stand off],” Spamton advises, tapping the backs of his cards. The jokers are stylized a couple centuries apart from each other. From the way that they've been playing, Spamton assumes it’s a scummy hand.
A peppy song plays from beyond the pocket dimension, interspersed with the bruised CRT’s chirpy dialogue. The pair can’t see a thing outside; it’s like being in another room. A limitlessly dark room. The obscurity and the muffled brass fanfare lend it the quality of hiding beneath stadium bleachers. The real game between worlds has already been won, and with no thanks owed to the two interlopers now chiding each other from within the Lightners’ inventory.
Jevil props his chin with a gloved fist; his head is cocked in wry consideration, blueberry coxcomb backlit by solid black. Yellow pinprick pupils glint within their dark cages. The bells on his attire offer an inscrutable shine.
Spamton has a low vantage point, with his nose being just about level with the table’s surface; this doesn't deter him from studying the jester as one might their rival in a dog show. Proudly gesturing at his Chihuahua of a hand: “THIS [Grand finale] CAN ONLY END ONE WAY FOR YOU.” Spamton’s been told that he’s great at bluffing.
Jevil covets his pair, switching their order endlessly in his hands like it’s nothing more than a game to him. There’s precious lint on the line, here! “OOH HOO? DOES THE SALESMAN SPEAK TRUE?” Jevil’s teeth poke out.
“YOU [Betcha!]. I’M A [Salsa]mAN OF MY [[Word]].” The dimension jostles a little in response to Kris’s movement; they bump into the table and then rock back. Music still chimes from the high, heavenly rafters. Spamton chiefly ignores the source of it, but he recognizes that damned audio file— HALL OF FAME.mp4— as if he were still in the editor’s booth hearing it for the first time. Like he said, he was ignoring it. With the prophecy subverted and Spamton booted from his sights, it was shaping up that Tenna would get to have his cake and eat it, too. “I’LL [Raise the roof!].”
He scrounges one hand over the floor of the dimension— an eerily soft and intangible material— and cobbles together two pieces of lint, which he flicks along with his initial bet onto the table. To complement this display, Spamton leans back on his arms. Sweat collects at his hairline. It’s a large investment.
“OH! AM I SCARED NOW, NOW, OF TWO LITTLE CARDS?” Jevil’s tail whips in intrigue, though he appears to be admiring his own jokers rather than Spamton’s steely expression. In fact, he was holding them at an angle so that Spamton could just about peek at the faces of them, if he leaned to the right…
Jevil tilts his head, turning smug. Busted. The jester weaves a levity into his words that spells doom. “DO YOU PONDER WHAT I SEE? PERHAPS TO TURN THE ODDS… I’LL MAKE THREE!”
Outrageously, or perhaps having quite explained his motive, Jevil draws another card.
“HEY,” Spamton warns, righting himself in a flash of clicking joints. “THAT’S [Cheater, cheater!]. THIS IS [Hold them], ISn”t IT?”
The jester-devil bounces in place, madly shuffling his three cards. “HEE HEE! JOKER HOLD ‘EM!” It is neither an agreement nor clarification.
“OKAY, NOW I GET TO [Buy one, get one free].” Spamton plucks two fresh cards from the deck and nestles them beside the rest of his hand. A peek reveals an amateur 3rd grader’s rendition of a joker; the other is a close cousin from the Major Arcana. Could this be played as a straight?
With the new cards in play, a tense focus populates the pocket dimension. The CRT’s voice and accompanying trumpets creep back in like a tide at midnight. Tenna could at least be quieter with the SFX while Spamton is getting his @?? handed to him in poker; nevertheless, he puffs his wooden chest and perseveres.
Jevil, in a power play that creases Spamton’s brow, takes a large stack of cards from the top of the deck and splays them out in front of him, merrily perusing. Eventually, he picks two to constitute his hand and neatly shuffles the remnants back into an orderly deck. He procures lint and raises the bet. “GOOD LUCK! THIS HAND MAKES YOU A SITTING DUCK.”
“DON’T [[Rhyme time]] AT M3E.” Spamton, with full confidence and animosity, gathers the lint necessary for his own raise. Their bets stand as opposing gray mountains on the table. “IT’LL BE [A hoot!] WHEN YOU STILL LOSE AFTER THAT [Illegal u-turn].” His bluffing is going fantastically, since Jevil doesn't suspect a thing; however, Spamton is also aware that Jevil has not folded once in the history of their cohabitation. The backs of Jevil’s cards glimmer like dragonfly wings.
Applause showers the world outside. Jevil deals out the community cards, opening their avenues to include a winking 1700s joker and two monochrome lads printed on flimsy copy paper. This is the good stuff; the kind of crafts a man can stake an empire of lint on, even when the odds look slim.
Spamton keeps the supply of lint going. Bets. Raises. Canned music, melted snow, the cheers of celebration from beyond the room. It’s better inside the darkness knowing that someone’s running the world-revealing errands for them; here, there’s just the hot air of competition, and the grins of a den of fools. Jevil, having lived through this thrice now at Kris’s side, deals the rest of their shared cards— the plainly-drawn turn, the holographic river— and a pattern emerges, spotted with the fervor of an opportunist careening towards a waterfall. Adorning the sleeves of the two most recently revealed jokers: hearts. They’re small, poorly inked.
Spamton nabs a pen from his pocket and scribbles hearts on three of his own cards. His slight frame means that he can hide this action under the table. Glaring down at his handiwork, he says: “SAY HI TO [The loser’s bracket] FOR ME.”
Jevil shifts his pair into one hand. “WHAT DOES A CAGE OF LOSERS MEAN TO US, US, ANYHOW?”
Spamton squints his eyes. “IS THIS G0ING TO TURN iNTO A [Sick burn]?”
“NO,” Jevil huffs, drawing his cards close to himself. After a silent beat, he strolls on: “MAYHAPS I’M IN THE CAGE NOW, GIVEN THE PLAY OF MY COMPANY.” He laughs jarringly, and Spamton jarringly laughs with him, forming the perfect worst sound.
Spamton tosses his pen somewhere very far away. “YOU LIAR, YOU’RE [Burning!!! Oh god please]_%!-- M- ME. ON [Porpoise]. [Please ignore] WH3N I [Burned you].”
“WISH GRANTED. TRULY, WE WOULDN’T KNOW A THING ABOUT LOSING,” Jevil tells him, gesturing at the fabric-lined pocket of space. A windy vacuum hums. “IMAGINE THOSE FOOLS OUTSIDE WAITING FOR THE HAMMER TO FALL!”
“[Don’t wait now], YOU_RE ABOUT TO [Find out more].” Spamton fans his heart-suited jokers. “R3aDY?”
“A POINTLESS QUESTION!” Jevil springs up, raising his cards. “HAHA! REVEAL!!”
They smack their cards onto the table, half a second away from grandiose flips on either side. The thunks lace with a sudden fwip of cold air. A flicker of darkness— true darkness, where even their lighted silhouettes disappear— interrupts the stand off.
Spamton, in the back of his mind, has been cataloguing the looping of the trumpets. He would know if they suddenly cut out as if choked. The reverberating CRASH! and shatter is slightly more obvious.
He’s on his feet in an instant. “THE [#@?!] WAS THAT??”
Jevil peers up at him from his criss-cross position. His mouth opens, shuts with a pout, and he jokes back, “THE LORD OF SCREENS, ELSEWISE WE’LL SOON HAVE COMPANY.” Pointed nails tap on the backs of his cards. “WELL?”
A dissonant dial tone hums and falls rapidly, like a bird struck midflight. It’s eerily close to where Kris stands. Spamton gets a feeling similar to the antsy pull of strings. “ISN’T THIS THE [Happily ever after]? THEY HAD THEIR FANFARE, [For Pete’s sake].” The crash rings in his ears. It’s the kind of noise that occurs without an explanation, because it would be fairly obvious to anyone with eyes what had imploded or shattered. In front of him, his cards lie in wait.
He jogs over to a dark fabric boundary and knocks. “KRIS!!! BU_DDY!!!! WHAT’S [Going on in the world today]?!” No response. “THE [[Clown]] AND I ARE [Checking in about a noise complaint]!” The felted darkness quivers but remains intact. The Lightner is ignoring him; the nerve! His pupils slant grievously within their lemonade lenses.
Jevil shuffles his cards, one after the other in an infinite cycle, chortling, “PERHAPS IT IS ANOTHER FOR THE CAGE?”, which helps the situation less than he thought it might. “COME AWAY AND PLAY.”
“[Hold it!].” Spamton grits his teeth. In response, Jevil shrugs his shoulders, which does guilt him, but not nearly enough to derail his self-imposed tangent.
Vexed that Kris would deny his request, Spamton scrabbles at the boundary with the ferocity of a cat at dense curtains. Weren’t the Lightners behaved enough to avoid the extraneous fights? Well, besides his and Jevil’s, which were very necessary at the time. But standouts like them were the exception. Kris’s brief excursion backstage got enough of an eyebrow raise out of him.
The fabric bemoans getting cut under his hands, but a torrent of swipes eventually tears a slit wide enough to see out of. He sticks his nose through and glares outside.
First, a landscape appears. The black horizon leaches from the shore, hiding its starlight and stirring hard hails of snow. They’re in the outskirts of the studio, he recalls, not through any personal experience, but from a first hand account, delivered optimistically even as remnants of sorrow floated on the brink of the conversation. Frost surrounded the world, which the studio was built to keep away; though, after enough problems with frozen pipes and snow blowing in through open windows, it became obvious that between the studio and the ice, only one was there to stay. At least the heaters still ran back then. That’s the extent of what Spamton knows as normal.
Here’s what isn’t: Kris is frozen on the snow. That is, they’re the only one standing upright; the other Lightners are bent in reaction to a background blur. Further on the shore, crumpling to his knees on wet ground, is Tenna.
Spamton’s jaw slackens. This happens at the pace of a slideshow: he stumbles back from the window with no governance of his limbs. “H0lY— [%€^!].” Just as quickly, he scrambles to it again, fingers prying at the felt boundary. He yanks his glasses off, blinking against frost.
A soundless scene plays out of his reach. In it, the CRT slumps sideways, his tailcoats shadowing him dizzily while his arms disobey and sink too fast into the snow. On his screen, fractured down the middle, bright color bars reflect his belated shock.
Something pokes Spamton in the side. “WHAT’S HAPPENING, HAPPENING?” In a snap, he’s back to the room. His cards have crumpled in his fist, Jevil intrigued at his side.
An .mp3 of static curdles in his throat. He nearly crushes his glasses. “KR!1111S Y Yo0U [Kitchen Sponge] [[Little ]] WH4T_* DID YOU [Do it today!]??!?!”
His face goes ashen and red-hot at once. He’s been cheated. He looks away for one second, and suddenly it’s dandy to fulfill that part of the prophecy? After all the implied deals Spamton made with the Lightners, knowing the partnership and the TV specials? And it had to happen during joker night?!
Jevil prods his shoulder. “HOW NOW, IS KRIS INVOLVED?”
“[[CAN IT]], MY EX JUST [Bit the dust]!!”
The room quakes in retaliation, forcing them to latch onto the wall. Kris dashes to catch up with Susie; the Lightner’s shouts trail in the thickening roar of night. Tenna catches his fall with his shoulder and shudders. He’s being swept away in snow.
Jevil utters laughter. “SO AFTER ALL—?”
“THAT [$%@>]ING [Inconvenient fortune]!!!” He shoves his glasses back on his face.
When the dimension stops throwing them around, the jester presses at his side: “LET ME SEE, SEE!” Spamton inches over to split the view, standing on their toes to peer out together.
In the fabric-toothed picture, Kris runs past Tenna’s prone form. Spamton screams at them to slow down; the wind ices his nose as he leans out, glaring at the back of that frozen red jacket. Tenna’d curled in on himself, wires sparking from his shoulders. “[T[Trash heap]]!!” Kris’s cloak whirls him out of view. Rage and hot grief shake in the pressurized cartridge of his chest. “[HEY!!]”
Jevil pulls him back before he can fall out of the pocket. Spamton falls back in. Excitement whirs with vibrancy in Jevil’s tone. “FOCUS, FOCUS!” A doughy blue finger points at the figure up ahead. After a gargled curse, Spamton cranes his neck to look.
The wavering silhouette grows clearer as the Lightners catch up with their opponent. The horned shape looms, a total penumbra, unflinching as Susie threatens it in apprehension. Understanding dawns on Spamton with the full petals of hysteria attached. “0HH!! DAMN!” The creature is a nightmare for Lightners and Darkners alike, though Darkners would know it as a reaper-wraith rather than a thing confined to their sleep. Its weapon hangs unmolded in its talons. Spamton exhales, the motion reaching every tense string in his body but failing to unwind any of it. “LOOK WHO’S [Back in town]! KRIS, You’RE [Off the hook].”
“TOO SOON OUR PATHS DO CROSS, AROUND, AROUND!” Jevil cackles. The horizon freezes into pitch. “BUT THIS IS NOT OUR GAME TO PLAY.” Spamton, meanwhile, storms back to the poker table, his pulse rabbiting like a frantic pianist’s finger on a key. Jevil turns to him. “WILL YOU NOT STAY?”
Spamton whirls. “DOES IT LOOK LIKE I’M [Leaving]?” He stuffs items from the table into his pockets: his comb, his gloves, his screwdriver. He does this slowly— stiltedly, at least. “I JUST N33D TO [Think it out].”
With a creak of limbs, he collapses into a sitting position and steeples his fingers beneath his chin. A mimicry of a pulse beats on his strings. He almost gets up three times and forces himself back into contemplation each time. He never gets very far.
Jevil dips his head. He jaunts to the other side of the table and pops into his spot, waiting for the other Darkner to pipe up.
“HE’S G01NG TO [Perish in[ONE Business Day!!]].”
“PERHAPS THIS IS A BATTLE THAT THE LIGHTNERS CANNOT WIN, WIN. ALL DOES FALL IN LINE WITH WHAT’S FORETOLD.”
“[Yes]. AND...” It wasn't supposed to be his call. Again. That was the point of resting easy in purgatory, where his bets only hurt his own lint supply. He knots his hands into a white-jointed spider. “HE’LL [Hate my guts] AND [Live] OR [Hate my [[Old]] guts] AND [Rest in pieces]. THIS IS [The short end of the stick].”
Jevil leans forward. “SO YOU’VE MADE YOUR CHOICE?”
His leg bounces restlessly. “JUST SHOW ME [Your hand] SO WE CAN [Get this Over With!!]!”
After a blink, the jester flips over his pair of cards: two jacks. Spamton’s brow furrows; but the rankings of poker hands chime in his head. His eyes widen and he slams his crumpled flush onto the table. “0h!! HAH! [Flushed]!”
At the same time, Jevil cheers: “A FIVE OF A KIND!”
“WHAT?” Spamton, in panic, glares at his cards. Then he looks at Jevil’s, and finally at the community cards. “M— M[Me]?” He fists a hand into his hair. Jevil nods, delighted. “WHY ThE [€#*$]_ WOULD YOU GIVE YOURSELF [A pair of nice slippers]?!”
“THE OCCASION CALLED FOR IT,” he giggles. “PERHAPS WINNING IS NO FUN AT ALL.”
Spamton, his brow furrowed, folds all their lint into one gray stratovolcano. He pats his pockets and finds them full of junk. He groans. “[Hang onto your pennies] FOR ME [Please]?”
“HEE HEE, BECAUSE YOU ASKED!” Jevil’s eyes slant curiously. “SO YOU’RE LEAVING AFTER ALL?”
His teeth click. “DO YOU SEE 4NYBODY [Really doing the work!]? I CAN [Get him back on his [Hyperlink Blocked]]— D0NT CLICK THAT.” He stalks closer to the window in the fabric.
Spamton’s been told he’s a great bluffer. That was, perhaps, against an opponent whose cards he could read in the reflection of his screen, but the infatuation didn’t help his poker face, either. Perhaps that's where winning the game got a little stale, and cheating came up as a way to make something of his own.
Jevil slinks to the side of the table. “I’LL MISS OUR GAMES, GAMES.”
“YOU WON’T BE [Lonely on a [ ]] FOR T0O LONG.” He pauses at the boundary, then looks back. Somewhere, across the floor, he sees his pen. Jevil hangs back by the table, hands clasped. “[See you on the][CRocodile].”
A chorus of sawblades wails from the heavens of the world. Jevil waves at him in a high arc, his blueberry tones flashing against the dark. Spamton shimmies his way out of the fabric slit, one limb at a time, until he slips and falls out all at once.
…
(The [Dealmaker] came out of your inventory!)
* O0F%! [TRASH HEAP]!!!
([Dealmaker] fled the fight…?)
(OH MY GOD DODGE THE STARS..!!!)