Posts Tagged ‘gambling’

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Escape Pod 985: The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace

Escape Pod 985: The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:06 — 40.4MB)

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The Interdimensional Rift at the Lucky Sunrise Bingo Palace

by Ryan Cole

So I’m sitting there with Bubbee—the two of us hunched over our empty paper play-cards, our fingers not yet bloody with magenta bingo marker—when the first rift appears.

It’s smaller than I’d expected. Little more than a paper cut in the space-time continuum. Only five inches long as it floats in midair beside the flimsy folding card table in the back of the ballroom, where the purple carpet flows into the heart of the Bingo Palace. As I watch, it starts to fold, slinky-style, over itself, ‘til the air turns hot and the rift starts to crackle and the paper cut rips into a three-foot-long gash, and before I can speak, before I can nudge Bubbee to warn the referee, there’s an arm poking out from the chasm in the air, then a chest and a face and a whole body slips from whatever dimension it decided to leave to fall into our own.

Bubbee sees it too. “Damn doppelgangers,” she says. “Can’t win at their own games, so they come to steal ours.”

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Black Future Month

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Escape Pod 808: Win Again

Escape Pod 808: Win Again is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 31:17 — 43.5MB)

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Win Again

by Lina Munroe

“I want a do-over!” Zira crumpled her opponent’s collar in her fist and twisted it tight around his neck. Glasses shattered against the hardwood floor, spilling drinks at their feet.

Arkady Fabian just laughed. It was a harsh rasp of a sound, mean as sin, that didn’t quite match the sparkle in his left eye. His right eye was bisected by a long scar that ended somewhere beneath his thick brown beard. When he blinked, slow and mocking, the aperture of his right eye spiraled closed over the red glow shining from somewhere deep in his skull.

Zira scowled at the cards. She knew he’d stuck some up his sleeve, but she thought she was good enough to win anyway. She hadn’t accounted for the extras he’d stashed while she was focused on his sleeve. She couldn’t believe she’d fallen for the classic misdirection cheat like some amateur. Now he got to keep that glorious ship of his that she would’ve pushed out to the far end of the galaxy and back just because she could, and she was forced to pick her way through the mess below deck where she’d docked her hoopty starhopper. The old thing had nearly rattled itself to pieces getting her here and then had the nerve to start leaking fuel again when they docked. It was probably still overheated.

He laughed in her face again, the sound scratchy from years of smoking. “Deal’s a deal, Zira. Pay up.”

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Escape Pod 575: Red Kelly Owns the Moon

Escape Pod 575: Red Kelly Owns the Moon is an Escape Pod original.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 29:40 — 42.8MB)

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Red Kelly Owns the Moon

By Shaenon Garrity

Nobody remembered how Red Kelly got his hands on the moon. He picked up a lot of things back then. You had to, working at the Westinghouse on a brazier’s pay. Red played cards, ran numbers around town, and, every other year, warmed hands for the Democratic machine in Pittsburgh. It wasn’t unknown for him to come home with an acquisition of mysterious provenance. Once he got the Kellys an entire patio table and chairs, with an umbrella and that. The umbrella was printed with the name of a restaurant whose owner had bet a bundle down at Duquesne Gardens.

So it wasn’t surprising Red had the deed to the moon. It didn’t even come up until, well, must have been 1968 of course, when the two men in the tailored suits showed up at the Kellys’ doorstep in North Versailles. You don’t forget a thing like that, the whole neighborhood watching through their lace curtains. Red was still at work, so Blanche Kelly sat the men down in the living room, introduced them to the girls, and set up boilermakers. They were from the military, it turned out, which was a good opening since Blanche had been a WAC. She cut a deck of cards.

At 4:30, Blanche pocketed her winnings, got in the car, and drove to the bottom of the hill to pick Red up from the bus stop. She left the girls to keep an eye on the men.

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