"Sure." Timer hands out the cards. "You new?"

"Timer. You prefer to move house every time you have a bad run, huh?"

"Don't know. I'll get back to you the first time it happens." He glances down at his cards: a 16 and a soft 17, but luck says go for it. "Oh, and hit on both."

Here's a three, here's a four. (The lady to the left of him busts.)

"See? No bad runs." He checks luck again. It says... hit the 19. OK, time to showboat. "Oh, and hit my 19."

"60. You?"

"Also 60." He hands over requisite quantities of play money and shuffles. "When'd you die?"

"Early 2000s. Were you clued-in to the weird stuff?"

"I was very, very clued in to the weird stuff. Are you doing weird stuff to my blackjack game, sir?"

"Well, I was. What, should I stop showing off?"

"I don't cheat people who can't afford to lose. Or my friends." He pauses before he shoots his mouth off. "If you'd rather, I won't play more hands. I can make money at the poker tables later the hard way."

"It's play money, nobody's going to knock you over for it, but is it even fun, doing it with magic?" Timer shrugs. "What is it you do, anyway?"

"Eh, showing off is fun. I do this and that. Gamble, walk through the library looking for odd and ends, stay a long step away from the torturers... It's dull, but it beats ceasing to exist. You do something besides dealing blackjack?"

"I pass the time. I don't have a regular occupation. Haven't been Downside that long, about five years. But I mean what's your witchcraft."

"Oh, yeah. I'm a very lucky guesser. I only get a 'good idea'/'bad idea' feeling, and it's hard to convince my luck that other people are important, but it keeps me in good health and wealth, so I like it. You have one of your own?"

"Yep. Hint's in the name. I know when the best time on a certain scale is to do whatever. Not necessarily a good time. There is no good time to set oneself on fire, but there is still a best time."

"Huh. Oddly similar, really," He cocks his head, "OK, that will bug me: When is the best time to light yourself on fire?"

"In the next how long?"

"Mm. A day?"

"Eight-oh-two a.m. tomorrow morning. ...Which is shortly before I expect to arrive at the home of a lovely lady who has a swimming pool."

"Hah. That's good. Much more fun than 'Don't do that.' Not that I don't have a couple odd stories, myself. One time it was a bad idea to leave the house for three full days, and it took me a week more to figure out that there had been a rabid raccoon sleeping under my doormat. Of course, down here I'd just assume Chainsaw was in the neighborhood."

"Yeah, I've managed to avoid him - partially power, partially that the lovely lady in question is more or less his girlfriend and often has a general idea of where he's going to be. You contract out your sentence? ...Did you have one, or are you just barely this side of the cliffs?"

"I contracted it. Not a big one, but I did help knock over a couple convenience stores as a kid. The funny thing is, the Wall Street stuff I did later was much nastier. That reminds me, what time were you from?"

"I don't actually know the year I was born in, I'm very fuzzy about everything that happened before I turned into a vampire. Died just a few decades after you though."

"Oh, you really were in deep! I only heard about those by reputation. Friend of a friend just barely got away, something like that. Never got old enough to roll the dice and see if it beat dying."

"I have no idea how I managed to die, actually, one moment I'm resisting the urge to get into a barfight with my significant other's crush and the next I'm getting served papers for eating people. But being a vampire was pretty good! And when the Volturi were usurped I was in on the ground floor of their replacement, that was nice."

"Ah, the usurpment happened after you died, then. So if you'd turned you would have been allowed to eat people but in most other respects the Volturi were not as friendly."

"Eating people wasn't part of the package deal? Maybe I should have looked for trouble sooner."

"It turns out vampires can survive just fine on animal blood. It just tastes nasty enough that only a couple of vampires, you know, noticed, and the folks they told largely did not care. One of the discoverers of this ethically mollifying fact was the new Empress's father-in-law, so when she stepped in she made eating people illegal."

"Sounds like a good Empress. A shame I missed out on the imperial, less-predatory future of biting people. How'd you enter the picture?"

"You mean how I was turned or how I came by my fancy imperial title?"

"Which one's a more fun story to tell?"

"Second one, definitely. So the Empress was gearing up to have herself a little rebellion, and I was staying out of the way, and then I received a visit from a lady named Addy. She copies powers and suspected I might exist, via indirect this-and-that, and my timer thought I ought to be there to say hello when she stopped by my little isle. To borrow my sense of occasion, you see, because she was in the little dustup up to her ears. She had previously been borrowing a power centered around the making of plans, and my power and that one agreed that I had best go join the rebellion, and at a key moment I escorted the now-Princess through a lot of werewolves in order to prevent any of them from alerting their Volturi lords and masters."

"Werewolves, huh? I never met them. But then, I never heard of the Volturi, either. Guess I was more in the dark than I thought."

"There weren't any active werewolves running around during when you would've been alive. They only actually turn into proper werewolves in the presence of vampires, and vampires left them alone until the Empress decided to go shake hands with all of 'em in an attempt to gather allies for her rebellion. It didn't work very well. Ultimately delayed her five years."

"Well, if it worked out well in the end, I guess that's all right. Rather a shame I missed it, I always liked playing for huge stakes but never found something where the reward felt right. Ending mass murder and making yourselves the secret government would have, I think. In fact...," He asks his luck If I'd dodged the planes and met them? It replies with a strong positive feeling. "... Yeah, would have been a good bet."

"Well, she did without you, but I'm sure she'd have been happy to have the extra witch."

"Witches are nice things. I made a couple friends. One could do literally magical things in the kitchen."

"I've been getting used to having food again, it's been interesting."

"Could you not eat as a vampire? I'm not a connoisseur, but I think I'd miss food. Especially when I have such good luck finding the good restaurants."

"Eh, vampires can swallow food if they have to but it's not remotely pleasant. By the time I died everyone was on this lovely substance called golden bubbly, conjured up by magic from inspiration from a magic bar. There wasn't much to miss, for me, haute cuisine a la peasant in medieval western Europe was nothing to get up early in the morning for. Also, turns out, I'm allergic to gluten, that was a fun mystery to track down in the early days of deadness."

"Well, if you want to make up for lost time, I've found some good places down here. A few centuries of practice turns out some good cooks. Want an invitation to the next dinner party?"

"I'd love one, if they can keep the wheat out of stuff."

"It'll be a unfamiliar challenge, he'll probably appreciate the novelty." He checks luck. Yep. "What's your res code? I don't remember the day, but I can send you a message later."

Nathan finds a scrap of paper and writes it down for him. "Am I correct in thinking that the next one is two evenings from now, seven in the evening?"

"Sounds about right. Handy, that. I think I have the host's code written down somewhere..." He searches, finds a small blue book. "Ah, here it is. I'll talk to him tomorrow, check about the menu."

"I'm looking forward to it."