One reason Fair Ladies is popular is because the ten-card deck lends itself to easy customization; in a house like Rose Gold, it's commonly illustrated with pictures of the house's most popular whores, serving as advertising and guard against certain forms of cheating at the same time.

I feel like I've mentioned the Shark Pit before, but it's not in the glossary, so maybe not: it's St. Louis's combination jail and prison, and considered a pretty nasty place even by prison standards.

(How much will we all regret the new format letting me indulge my taste for worldbuilding even more than usual? Guess we'll find out!)

I apologize for missing a few updates. Thanks to my nephew, who is now in the germ factory known as preschool, I spent most of April and part of May down with one virus or another. All this stuff tends to move into my lungs, so the dry cough that hung on wasn't new or unexpected. Finding out it was possible to cough hard enough to pull the muscles that hold together your ribs, though, that was new. Would you like to know what you use the muscles that hold your ribs together for? Every. Damn. THING.

So yeah, now that I can sit up at a desk without agonizing chest pain, I'm hoping to do a bit better on updates, but I've burned through my buffer and things are kinda... a lot here. I promise not to vanish for years again, but it may be rocky for the summer.

Fair Ladies is a popular gambling game across the Empire of Earth. It features a pyramid deck of cards numbered one through ten, with duplicates equal to the card rank: a single one, two twos, ten tens, etc. The goal of the game is to avoid 'catching' a pair; the last player standing wins.

Lest people think I am far more clever than I actually am, Fair Ladies is a straight rip-off of the Cheapass Games/Crab Fragment Labs game Pairs using the Goblin Poker rules varient. I bought this game off Kickstarter years ago and enjoy the heck out of it for a quick game, plus some of the deck art is amazing.

No, I haven't changed my mind on the hybrid format already -- but it occurred to me, about halfway through wrestling with this page, that while a lot of the scenes I write benefit from big lumps of prose, some just work better as comics. And, you know, it's my story. I make the rules.

(This is not a particularly surprising realization, I just would have expected it to happen with a more action-y scene. Ah well, we take the insights where we find 'em.)