I made myself a little promise to return to the subject of Tananda and Chumley’s problems at a later date, then joined the others in staring thoughtfully at the ceiling. Time crawled along, and no one said anything.
“Well, so much for brainstorming,” Aahz said, reaching for the wine again. “I’ll admit I’m coming up blank.”
“Perhaps it would help if we started by defining the problem,” Chumley urged. “Now, as I see it, we have two problems: Markie and Bunny. We’re going to have trouble figuring out what to do about Bunny until we find out what Don Bruce has up his sleeve, and we’ve got to come up with a way to keep Markie from totally disrupting our lives until her father comes to pick her up.”
“If he picks her up,” my partner corrected helpfully.
“I’ll admit, I still don’t know how you did so well in that game to end up with Markie in the first place,” the troll said, cocking one outsized eye at me and ignoring Aahz.
“Dumb luck … with the emphasis on dumb.”
“That’s not the way I heard it,” Chumley smirked.
“Whatever your method was, it was successful enough to make you the talk of the Bazaar.”
“What!?” Aahz said, sitting up in his chair again.
“You would hear it yourself if you weren’t spending all your time sulking in your room,” the troll winked.
“When I went out after little sister today, it seemed that all I was hearing about was the new dragon poker champion of Deva. Everybody’s talking about the game, or what they’ve heard about the game. I suspect they’re embellishing upon the facts, from some of the description of the hands, but there are those who are taking it all as gospel.”