calescent | vision

"Good, I wanna have a shot at winning and I dunno how well you'd partition, Kiri."

"Partition?"

"Not use the things she reads, do what she would have done if she didn't know."

"Huh," says Loel.

"That is certainly a skill," says Sarelle.

"I can do it some of the time, and I think I can do it for the purposes of making uncontaminated trades in a game we just made up that I don't much care about winning, but I'm not a particularly good actress."

"I can't decide whether I'd be really bad at that kind of thing or really good at it," muses Loel.

"Mmm, probably good at some subskills, I don't know about the whole shebang."

"Mm," says Loel. His tentative conclusion is that he is in fact really good at what you might call 'really immersive lying', which is a kind of acting like you don't know something when you do. (And not something he'd like to bring up right now, given that there is still one person in this room who doesn't know his life history.) But, on the other hand, some kinds of knowledge are much harder to ignore than others.

"Yeah," says Kiri. "Anyway. What kind of point values? One point per coin, plus five points per complete non-overlapping blessing set, six if it's Sarelle's?"

"That seems slightly disproportionate, but we can always change the rules if the first game doesn't work out."

"I'd have suggested smaller numbers of points for sets if there were fewer than six of us. Anyway, we all have equal shots at getting sets poured into our bowls, assuming we can get the bowls full of the same numbers of coins without wrecking the randomness... I guess the numbers don't work perfectly, maybe we should skim a set of extraordinaries off the top or something."

"Happily, none of us has an extraordinary blessing. How many coins are there, Loel?"

"In theory, three of everything," says Loel. "But I haven't actually counted."

"I will do that, then."

She goes to the bin and starts picking through it.

Aleko helps.

It doesn't take long.

"Three of each exactly," Sarelle concludes. She separates out one each of synthesis, triumph, and time. "And now what remains is neatly divisible by six."