A stranger falls into step with him as he gets off the bus at his destination. He's dressed like a businessman, if businessmen still wore hats.

Dylan shoots him a look of inquiry tinged with suspicion.

"I hear it's traditional, to make a fresh start when you go off to college," the stranger says. "A clean break. Isn't that right, Dylan?"

He takes a deep, measured breath, shoves his hands into the pockets of his hoodie hard enough to strain the fabric, and keeps walking. Whether or not he's going to wreck this guy, he's not going to wreck this guy in the middle of the crowd at the bus station.

The stranger laughs.

"Oh, don't worry. I'm not going to tell your parents where to find you. Quite the opposite! I wish you the best of luck, and, out of the goodness of my heart, and my support for your endeavours, I'd like to offer you a little... perk."

He can think of several things to say to that. Suck my dick features prominently in the list. He makes the effort to avoid going there—and it does take an effort—because the more steps you take down that road, the harder they are to retrace, and, again, it would be strategically inadvisable to smash this guy's face in while they're still in the middle of a stream of people getting on and off buses.

"The terms are this: I will grant you the power of complete control over anything—and anyone—you own, and temporary control of anything within your domain. Establishing a domain is up to you. In exchange, you owe me... a favour, to be collected at a time of my choosing. Maybe next year, maybe ten years from now, maybe never. Who knows? Anything is possible. Are you interested?"

...well, yes, of course he's interested, if he could believe for a second that this guy was in any way telling the truth, which he does not.

"I'm pretty sure it's illegal to own people," he points out mildly. It's not any of his top five objections to this conversation, but it's a start.

"In the eyes of the power, what matters is whether they consider themselves yours. Getting them into that state is, again, up to you."

"I'm also pretty sure magic doesn't exist." He rounds a corner and heads for an exit, slipping out of the bulk of the crowd.

The stranger follows, totally unconcerned.

"'Magic' is such a... reductive word. What's that quote, again? More things in hell and earth...?"

"Heaven," he corrects automatically.

"My mistake."

Smiling, the stranger takes a few steps ahead to open the door and hold it for him on his way out.

There are so many layers to this interaction and he's probably not seeing half of them and he wants to rip through them by force, and, also, having this guy acting like a—servant—is feeding the same part of him that wants to listen to that offer.

What's the worst that could happen? He says yes, and... nothing comes of it, because magic isn't real and this guy is just a really good cold-reader? A really good cold-reader who knows his name for some unexplained but presumably mundane reason?

"What good is 'temporary' control?" he asks guardedly.

"Well, as long as something never has to leave your domain, you can change it however you like. And if it does have to leave... you can edit out any inconvenient memories, for example, from someone you've been... hosting. Changes you make will persist if they're restoring the state something was in when it entered your domain."

He lets the door close behind them and falls into step again.

"Tell you what. I'll offer you a free trial. You can have this power for the next twenty-four hours, and tomorrow afternoon I'll come by to hear your final decision. Does that sound fair?"

There's something just a little off about his smile. Like it wasn't fully made to go on a human face.

"Twenty-four hours isn't a lot of time to 'establish a domain'. Doesn't sound that fair to me."

"Be creative. I'm sure a man of your talents can figure something out."

He claps Dylan on the shoulder in a companionable fashion.

Dylan shrugs him off violently and stops in his tracks, not trusting himself to move right now. This street isn't that busy but there are people here and he needs to not start a fistfight. Breathe. Just breathe.

The stranger laughs again, without a care in the world.

"Free trial, no strings attached. What do you say?" He spreads his hands.

The angrier he is, the more appealing it sounds, to have arbitrary control of anything he owns. To be able to own people, if he can convince them to accept his dominion.

"Fine," he grits out. "Whatever. Get lost."

The stranger tips his hat, and strolls past Dylan headed in the opposite direction they've been traveling, and after a few steps the sound of his footsteps just... stops.

He turns around, careful to move only in slow, controlled, deliberate ways.

Yep. The guy just vanished out of the middle of the sidewalk. There's no door there he could've walked through, and—Dylan looks up—no window he could've somehow silently climbed to.

Point in favour of magic existing, he supposes.

He resettles his heavy backpack on his shoulders and keeps walking. According to the map he looked up before he got here, his residence building should be just down the street from the bus station. (Is his dorm room going to count as his domain? Not likely, it's hardly his except in the most superficial and temporary sense...)

The building is right where the map said it would be, and once he gets there his room isn't hard to find. It's suite-style, with four single rooms off a central common room with a couch and a little table and a TV and a tiny kitchen, and his room is 201D which is the closest room to the common area in suite 201.

He dumps his backpack on his bed, oofs in relief at being finally free of the weight, and cautiously ventures down the hall to see if any of his suitemates are here. He's arriving just about as early as it is possible to arrive, so they might not be, and honestly he's kind of hoping they aren't because he's still fairly on edge from that conversation and when he meets his suitemates for the first time he'd like to not come off as a snappish asshole or, even worse, as a mess of barely restrained violence. Granted, he is a mess of barely restrained violence, but he'd rather most people he meets not find that out.

A few minutes later, a blonde girl wearing a backpack bulging at the seams walks in,

Accompanied by a young man carrying a similarly-bulging duffel bag. 

"Hi! I'm Eliza." 

"Hey." Can he manage a friendly smile? Maybe a mildly awkward one. "Dylan." The other guy did not introduce himself but right now he can't think of a non-awkward way to point that out so he's just going to let it sit.

"I'm your roommate, this is my boyfriend Joey." Friendly cheek-peck. 

He smiles fondly at her and then nods politely at Dylan. "Hi." 

"Good to meet you both," he lies smoothly, trying very hard to steer his mind away from the thoughts generated by that casual display of affection. He should think about... experiments he could do to figure out the boundaries of this 'domain' thing. Find an abandoned warehouse to squat in? Buy a tent? Buy one of those bed tent canopy things? Build a pillow fort?

The two of them disappear into 201A to start unpacking. 

"Disappear" is perhaps not the best possible word; the door is left open, and if he looks in, he can see them, taking things out of one of the two overpacked bags and putting them in places. They orient with respect to each other automatically; they aren't silent, but a lot of their communication is non-verbal. 

But if he doesn't want to interact with the fact that they, and their casual, automatic affection exists, then they aren't at all obtrusive. 

After about five seconds of this, he decides that he needs to be somewhere very else.

He thinks about trying to turn a sock into a second backpack or something, but no, he's just going to go out there with his hoodie and wander around in search of stuff to decorate his room with and if he buys anything he will haul it home without help. Or buy a second backpack. Anything else would take too long.

It gets easier once he's in the elevator, and easier still once he's out the front door. Something about the way those two were interacting... it felt wrong, but in a strangely enticing way, like looking at someone whose face is so punchable it makes your fists itch. It felt—well, a lot like the way he feels around his parents, when they're being Like That.

If that's how it's going to be, he might need magic powers just to keep him sane and out of jail.

But that's getting way ahead of himself. So the spooky guy disappeared, fine, maybe he had a secret trapdoor or some dumb shit like that. It's not proof. Dylan would really like some proof here.

So how does he find it?

He combs his fingers through his hair and collects a few loose strands, then twists them into a vague approximation of a thread and winds the thread around his finger several times, tucking in the end. Now he has a gold ring.

Then he concentrates on it, remembering the familiar sight of his parents' wedding rings around their fingers... and now he has a gold ring. He looks around to make sure no one saw him casually fulfilling the dreams of centuries of alchemists.

But that's not quite all the way to proof, because how would an ignorant slob like him know real gold from a hole in the ground? What if he's imagining it somehow? So he keeps walking until he sees a big WE BUY GOLD sign, and he walks in with a story about how he found this in his late grandma's jewelry box and he doesn't even know if it's real gold, what'll they take for it, and as he expected, the man behind the counter is only too happy to help. He walks out with an amount of money that is very much a ripoff in one direction if he did make a real gold ring, and very much a ripoff in the other direction if he didn't, and either way the man did not look at him like he was crazy and so he must conclude that either he is much crazier than he thought or he really truly does have magic powers.

With that verification taken care of, he's happy to go hunting for pillow fort materials. He buys whatever's cheapest, intending to transmute it all into nicer but functionally identical things once he's home; he's not quite sure how far his transmutation powers will stretch, and wants to give the pillow fort idea as generous a test as possible to find out if it's possible to make it work at all.

It takes him about an hour and a half, all told; the sun is getting low by the time he makes it back to the suite hauling big poofy bags of cozy textiles.

When he returns, the suite is more populated than when he left it. 

Joey is sitting in the chair nearest to the kitchen, reading what is on closer inspection a biology textbook. Eliza is in the kitchen with an unfamiliar third person, who is making tea while Eliza stirs something in a saucepan. 

The door to Room C is firmly closed and locked. 

Oh, good, Those Two aren't touching. He manages a friendly smile on his way past.

The new face smiles back.

"D'you want some lemon pepper chicken thing?"

His new suitemates are very nice. He doesn't bother hiding his mild, pleasant surprise. "Oh, sure! Thanks! Let me just..." He carefully scoots past them with his big poofy bags and heads into his room to set them down.

(And, in his room with the door closed, he takes a few seconds to sort through all his new blankets and pillows and make them nicer, more like the stuff he remembers from home. Though he does have the presence of mind not to replicate the hand-crocheted blanket his mom gave him when he was five; it would be tough to explain picking that one up at a store, if anyone noticed.)

Soon he's carting an armload of pillows back out into the common area and cheerfully stacking them on the couch.

"What are you doing?"

"I'm making a pillow fort!"

"Walked right into that one, didn't I. Fair enough. Hi, I'm Lenore."

"Dylan. Nice to meet you."

"Do you want some help?"

"Aww, but if you help me then I don't get to be proud of doing all the work myself! Tell you what, you can help with the next one."

He stacks up the pillows and goes back for some blankets with which to reinforce his creation, then another round of pillows, then finally some more blankets. The fort is looking pretty spectacular by the time he's done, a riot of colour and coze.

The kettle clicks.

"I think I can make this stretch to four cups," says Lenore, peering into it. "You want any tea, Dylan?"

"Depends, what kind?"

"Oh, he knows about kinds! I have Earl Grey, chamomile, and peppermint."

Is she making fun of him—? He needs to not think about that.

"I would love some chamomile."

"Coming right up." Though she does pour everyone else's cups first. It transpires that the water will, in fact, stretch to four.

Eliza takes peppermint; Joey takes Earl Grey. 

Eliza's lemon pepper chicken thing turns out to be a sort of chicken stir-fry with, in addition to the advertised black pepper, onion and sweet pepper mixed in, served on toast. 

"Thank you very much!"

He retreats into his pillow fort with his food and his drink, and intones from within, "Welcome to my humble abode!"

She giggles, half-falling half-sprawling sideways over her boyfriend's lap as she hands him his plate. 

Lenore, as soon as she has her tea and toast, follows Dylan into the fort with them. "Oh, it is cozy in here. Well done."

"I try!"

"Try not to un-cozy it with your crumbs, I've had breakfast in bed enough times in my life to know that toast crumbs can make pillows and blankets direly less comfortable."

"Fair point."

"I like to live on the edge."

"Suit yourself." 

When both of them have polished off their toast and tea, Eliza levers herself to her feet and peers inside the fort to evaluate Lenore's plate and estimate Crumb Levels. 

Lenore has done an astonishingly good job at keeping her crumbs contained! She hasn't spilled her tea, either.

Dylan is likewise done eating and has likewise maintained a reasonably clean environment, though he does actually have a couple of crumbs scattered in his vicinity.

Good enough. She wiggles her way in carefully. 

She curls herself into a mildly unnatural shape, gets situated comfortably, then calls: "Yeah, it's fine!" 

Okay, cool, pillow fort time. 

"Hey, Lenore, if you're done with your stuff I can clear your dishes?"

"Be my guest."

He leans carefully around the happy couple to get her plate and cup, then consolidishes and takes everything to the sink.

Lenore, freed of her burden, curls up cozily.

"I live here now."

"Well, I'm glad the fort is a success. How about you guys, you comfy?" he asks on his way back in.

"Yep," Eliza says, rubbing her face cat-like against Joey's shirt. 

He makes an affirmative noise and pets her. 

"Awesome."

Maintaining careful control of his movements (and trying his best to look like he's just trying not to step on anybody), he tucks himself back in under the blanketed roof.

Okay. Now he's got them all in one place, and he needs a way to test whether the pillow fort is a valid domain space. Honestly he should've built one in his room first; he just got excited. Except, he supposes, he doesn't have easy access in his room to small objects he doesn't already own, so figuring out a test wouldn't be the most trivial thing in the world... okay. Focus. He's in the situation he's in now, he has to handle the situation he's in now.

"So I think the traditional thing to do is talk about our majors, but I'm also up for declaring the pillow fort a No Business Zone if people would rather," says Lenore.

"Early childhood development."

"Pre-med."

"Business, actually."

"Psychology!"

"What, not an undeclared among us? Hn." She is tempted to swat Dylan with a pillow and chastise him for being a basic bitch in his choice of majors but they do not, actually, know each other well enough for that yet. 

How to spin this... eh, maybe the smart thing to do is just let someone else talk.

"I am going to become a therapist and be a gift to all mankind with my intimate knowledge of how to survive having catastrophic emotional problems," says Lenore, very cheerfully.

Score one for letting other people talk!

"All the information about my catastrophic problems is locked behind friendship level five." 

"I respect your life choices! It would be a smaller and less beautiful world if everyone was exactly like me!"

"I'm a fan of her being like herself instead of you." Hug. 

"Awwwwww."

Okay, he can't take much more of this.

If his magic works the way he feels like it should—if it works at all—if the pillowfort counts—then everyone in this fort is going to get gradually cozier and comfier and sleepier, hopefully gradually enough that nobody will decide to leave the fort.

Eliza sighs, muscles visibly relaxing as her eyes slide shut. She makes a contented humming noise and leans closer into her boy. 

Lenore is fully prepared to nap in a pillow fort with people she met an hour ago and will be the first to yawn.

Due to how yawns work, Dylan is now also yawning, which is on one level annoying because he really needs to not let himself fall asleep in his cozy fort, but on another level helps sell the illusion that none of this is his nefarious doing.

The important question, though, is: can he get them all to fall asleep here without anyone getting suspicious and leaving?

Oh look a cozy nap zzzzzzzzzzzz. 

What she said.

He waits until he's sure all three of them are down, and then tries to think.

This is a pretty comfy pillow fort but he's still pretty sure he just verified that he can do magic in a pillow fort he built himself. Good to know. Now he has to verify that the thing about memory modification works the way it's supposed to. So... he should wake someone up, and have something happen that will be memorable enough they'll talk about it later if they remember it but not insane or upsetting enough to get him in trouble if he can't make them forget; and, while he's messing with people's heads, he might as well see if he can get the other two to dream about extremely specific things. He can start a conversation about it afterward to find out if he succeeded.

First things first... who should his chosen victim be? Lenore seems like the one who will take weird stuff in stride the most. The other two should probably stay asleep.

Then, what should he do to her? He has plenty of ideas for what to do to a helpless girl he has completely under his control, but he reminds himself very firmly that there is a time and a place for that sort of thing and the time is not when he's barely begun to figure out how these powers work and the place is not in a pillow fort completely open to the air just down the hall from the mystery suitemade who's presumably still locked in his room but might come out at any moment to grab a snack or go to the bathroom. So, leaving aside any suggestions that could get him arrested, what kind of event can he arrange that's weird, memorable, and mostly innocuous?

How about...

Lenore half-rouses into a sleepy haze to find herself staring at a bright pink feather, which proceeds to start tickling her nose. She splutters indignantly, but her limbs are heavy with sleep and she can't seem to move properly, so the feather has her pretty much at its mercy. Is someone holding it? She can't open her eyes far enough to tell. "H-hey... quit that..." No one is going to take her seriously while she is both half-asleep and giggling. She gives up on her ineffectual protests.

And leaving aside how hot it is that she was that helpless in his power Dylan puts her back to sleep and reverts the feather into the scrap of pocket lint he transmuted it from, then does his best to erase all memory she has of the encounter. Then he tries to plant vivid and specific dreams in Joey and Eliza: for Joey, a dream about rowing across a lake of bubbling, fizzing Coke or Pepsi (the dream neglects to specify the brand) on a raft made of the toast they just ate, and for Eliza, a dream that Lenore revealed she was secretly a were-gecko and then refused to stop climbing all over people with her tiny adorable gecko feet.

Having accomplished all this, he lets himself flop cozily into a semi-doze among the pillows and then wakes everybody back up.

Eliza unflops just enough to confirm that Lenore is human-shaped and not climbing on anyone and then reflops. 

Dylan gives his best sleepy yawn.

"Well, that was not a nap I intended to take." He sits up and observes the sleepy friends. "Did anybody else have totally batty dreams? I was on the run from the law with the Mario Brothers and Luigi kept quacking like a duck."

"There was...a boat? Sorry, I don't usually remember my dreams very well." 

Eliza checks her phone and blinks. 

"...The dream I had wasn't especially unusual as dreams go but I don't usually dream during naps that don't last, like, way longer than that one did." 

"I also don't usually fall asleep in the middle of the day. Magic of the pillow fort, I guess. Hey, Lenore, you awake? Have any crazy dreams to share?"

She yawns hugely. "Nope, I napped like a very cozy log. What time is it?"

Eliza shows her glowing phone screen to Lenore. 

"Acceptable. We've got time for plenty of silly party games before bed, if anybody's into that."

Suspicious squint. "What kinds of silly party games. I'm going to pre-emptively veto beer pong." 

"Can't play beer pong anyway, we don't have any beer! What silly party games would you like?"

"I always wanted to try a pinata! I dunno, I haven't really been to--many--parties." 

"Need I point out that we also don't have a pinata?" Then she pauses consideringly. "I guess we could make a pinata... no, we also don't have a huge bag of candy. Tell you what, though, you bring the huge bag of candy and we can totally do a pinata anytime. In the meantime, does somebody have a suggestion that uses only materials we already have?"

"If we can find a deck of cards and a card game we all know, we could try that," Dylan suggests. "I didn't bring one, though."

"Oh, I know card games! ...I know...two-person card games...that don't require manual dexterity...some of which were homebrewed and probably don't stand up to outside inspection." 

Snort. "I have a deck of cards."

"Oh, please teach me your insane unplayable homemade card games," says Lenore, clapping her hands together delightedly. "We can extend them into bigger insane unplayable homemade card games together! Fun for the whole family!"

Joey levers himself out of the cozy pillow fort. "My suite is in a different building so I might be gone as long as ten minutes." 

"We will miss you terribly."

The corner of Eliza's mouth and one of her eyebrows quirk up slightly. 

I will miss you terribly. 

A miniscule dip of his head, and a glance at the other two--yes, but isn't real human socialization going so well. 

Her lower lip creeping forward less than a millimeter in the barest hint of a pout, then her eyes close and she relaxes back into the pillows. I'm totally going to complain about it anyway, but yes, you're right. 

And he exeunt. 

"So Dylan, this pillow fort idea was brilliant, can I contribute to the enterprise? I want us to build one that takes over the whole common space."

Oof, how to play this...

"Yes but only if you give me all your contributed building materials and I keep them in my room when we're not using them. I'm very territorial. I may also start demanding tribute in the form of snacks."

"I will get you a little crown and call you King of the Pillow Fort."

"Sounds good." Now is not the time to dig into how weirdly, disproportionately good it felt to hear her say that.

"I volunteer as royal snackmeister." 

"Awesome. Hey, you were making food when I showed up, too—do you like to cook?"

"Yeah. --I don't know how prominent a hobby it'll be going forward but it's something I'm already good at."

"Well, then I'm glad to have you around, because I suck at it pretty bad." He stifles a wince with the ease of long practice; it's useful and practical to acknowledge your flaws, he can't just magically become perfect at everything and so dodge having to ever admit there's something he's bad at.

(Well. Maybe he can, now? But that sounds terrifying and should be a project for later when he has the time to think it through.)

"Does that make this a perfect opportunity to learn? I'd sure like to know how to make that toast thing."

"Next time I'll buy or bake nicer bread and then it'll be even better." 

"You bake your own bread? Fancy."

"Not always, but it's not actually that hard..."

"It's not?" he says, intrigued. Maybe there's something to this 'learning to cook' idea after all.

"--Well, I don't actually know how hard kneading it is. Joey tends to do that part--uh, I think we have reached at least friendship level one and it's getting sort of awkward to talk around, I spent a lot of my childhood with various health issues that are why I have approximately no physical skills more advanced than walking in a straight line and had so much time to get good at cooking."

"Sorry to hear it. I look forward to profiting from your misfortune in the currency of free cooking lessons."

...is that line... going to go over well?? Wow, Lenore is a character.

"Don't call 'em free until you've dealt with my comparative disadvantage in kneading bread dough." It might or might not go over well with someone with a history of more than (1) friend to practice on, but,,,

"Hey, if I'm learning to make bread, I might as well learn to knead it!"

"Now you're just provoking me to make you regret it. There will be so much bread. Your arms will fall off."

"I can help!"

"See? Teamwork!"

"Cool. Teamwork is good." 

She sort of puts her hand in the general direction of the other two such that, if neither of them have any particular reaction to it, she won't have done something Weird, probably, but, if either of them wanted to do a Handsqueeze, her hand is super available for that. 

A Handsqueeze Opportunity!! Lenore is all over this.

Dylan misses the implication until Lenore has already taken it and then feels like it would be weird to belatedly join in.

Eee. She is getting a good grade in Human Interaction, a thing that is normal to want and possible to achieve. 

(She isn't going to shake Lenore off, or anything, but if Lenore does happen to let go, her hand is still, like, right there.)

Lenore does eventually let go!

All right, sure, handsqueeze. (He lets go faster than Lenore did, not wanting to test his luck.)

(She doesn't try to hold on past when he wants to let go, but she does give his hand a very firm squeeze while they're held.)

And then Joey returns with a novelty playing card deck.

"Oh, it's so charmingly gruesome!"

"I'm going to be a doctor!"

"An excellent reason to have a charmingly gruesome deck of cards."

"I suppose." 

He genuinely doesn't see what's so gruesome about the cards? It's not like they're, like, photographs of actual bloody human tissue, or anything like that, just drawings of anatomical structures not usually visible? But he also doesn't see any value in starting an argument about it. 

"So I heard something about card games?" prompts Dylan.

"Card games!" 

Eliza makes Joey shuffle. 

The first card game she explains, demonstrating with a handful of imaginary players whose hands she has laid out on the floor, is sort of like Uno, only instead of "number or color," each card within a suit has a set of characteristics assigned quasi-arbitrarily to them by seven-year-olds; for example, two, seven and Queen are all "fresh." You can only put one card on top of another if they share at least one characteristic but are not the same number or suit. 

"Does anybody have a notebook and pen handy? I think we should write down a chart to refer to if we're going to try to actually play this. And I totally want to try to actually play this."

Eliza levers herself up and dips into her room, returning with a notebook and a pen with twelve different colors. 

"Impromptu handwriting contest, or would you rather write them all down yourself because you might as well since you made them up?"

She flips the notebook open and starts drawing up a chart, clicking through the different ink cartridges as she color-codes it. 

"Since Joey is going to be a doctor, I have to have good handwriting to compensate." 

"Sensible!"

(Dylan is peering at the paper trying to read what all the traits are and which cards have them.)

"Oh," says Lenore, peering in from the other direction, "it looks like a disintegrating starfish!"

Snort. "I bow to your pareidolia." 

"I'm not seeing it."

She traces a shape on the page: one arm going toward Oeuvre, one heading up toward 6, one sort of over by where Guy has three checks for the three face cards, and then the remaining two kind of vaguely disintegrating down below. "See?"

Squint. "Maybe??"

She pats Dylan's arm. "I don't see it either."

Hopefully it won't be super obvious that he pauses for just a moment when she touches him.

Anyway, moving right along, "Does this game have a name?"

"I think it should be called Disintegrating Starfish."

Snort. "It's called one hundred sixty nine." 

"Disintegrating Starfish is a much cooler name but you made the game so you get to name it. Let's play!"

"In my defense I named it as a small child who didn't see the starfish!" 

She deals everyone a hand of five cards and flips the first card off the top of the deck to start the discard pile. 

"And that was entirely reasonable of you!"

There will be a lot of consulting the chart going on while the newbies pick up the rules. For all that, it is still pretty fun, mostly for novelty reasons.

All this simple lighthearted fun is—useful for Dylan's goals and he needs to get used to it.

Eliza and Johann are, unsurprisingly, much better at this game than the other two; neither of them need to consult the chart, and they're both better at strategizing what things are connected to what other things are connected to which third things. 

Eliza wins the first round. 

Lenore picks up the correspondences pretty quickly and manages to hold her own in the second round, though she doesn't win it.

Which leaves Dylan plodding along as the obvious loser, consulting the chart every time he has to think about where to put his cards. This is Fine. If it wasn't fine, that would be a problem, so it's fine and that's that.

"Well, that was fun, I think, but I don't play many normal card games. I have no idea if it's objectively any good with more than two people."

"If everybody had fun then it doesn't super matter how objectively good it was, right?"

"Personally I had a great time!"