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The gardens of Sailoon castle were an exceedingly pretty, pleasant-smelling place, and one which Lina, even during her extended fit of I'm-not-going-anywhere, had never felt the urge to explore. It simply didn't fit with her image of what an adventurer, even a semi-retired one, did unless it was part of a cunning plan that eventually involved advanced breaking and entering. However, when Gourry suggested taking a walk to help kill the time, she had been just bored enough with watching Myth scratch away at her notebook to actually haul herself along with. As they walked, a little breeze came wandering along to play with their hair and cloaks, and butterflies fluttered here and there among cheerfully colored flowers, and Lina began to feel her brain slowly decaying at the pastoral sweetness of it all.
"Oh, I'm going to DIE. This is so BORING!" Lina threw back her head in a howl of righteous ennui. "HEY, L-SAMA! NIGHTMARE! PARADOX! ANYBODY! NOW WOULD BE A GOOD TIME TO SMITE US!"
Lina stood waiting expectantly for a long moment. Gourry, with a rare display of common sense, had taken a dive into the bushes at the beginning of her rant and now crouched there in the relative safety of the rhododendrons, awaiting a response as well.
Absolutely nothing happened.
Lina slumped to the ground in despair. "Pleeeeeeeeease? Anybody? I'm bored already….and I'm not even hungry….Someone has to DO SOMETHING!"
Gourry, having decided that divine lightning was not about to fall upon his companion, stepped from the bushes and moved to hover at semi-comforting range over her. "Lina? You're not hungry? What's wrong? Are you okay?" He rested the back of his hand on her forehead. "You feel normal…."
Lina checked the automatic urge to pound him about the head and shoulders, reasoning that he'd been displaying enough signs of incipient brain damage in the last few hours. She ran a hand through her hair and encountered the flowers she'd put there earlier, coming to a slightly unLinalike rationalization for not walloping him one. Instead, she almost-gently removed his hand and used it to pull herself back to her feet. "Ne, Gourry. Thanks."
Gourry smiled in his golden retrieveresque fashion. Lina smiled back in a remarkably unthreatening manner. She felt a simper coming on and nearly screamed again. Instead, she grabbed his hand and dragged him down the path at a pace that could only be described as frenetic, even for her, babbling cheerfully all the while. "Come on, Gourry. I feel my appetite coming back and you know the kitchen staff has probably already forgotten that they wanted to lynch me and I want to check out our old rooms in case Myth left something behind and you know what else we can do-"
Gourry, overwhelmed by the sheer volume, simply smiled, nodded, and allowed himself to be dragged along.
Lina's frantic efforts to diffuse the sexual tension lasted for almost three hours before even her considerable stamina began to wane. The kitchen staff had not forgotten her, and had run them off in a cleaver-meat tenderizer-spatula-ice cream scoop-and-garlic press wielding mob. Their rooms had already been picked over by the cleaning staff and divested of any trace of their occupancy; when they had gone down to the laundry to ask about any left-behind-items, they discovered that the laundry staff remembered her too. They had fled before they could discover just why they were tearing up loose sheets. Lacking anything better to do, they went back to the garden.
Myth hadn't, evidently, moved at any point in the last three hours and her notebook was rapidly approaching a state of satisfying fullness. She actually deigned to look up as they approached, grunted a monosyllabic greeting ("Can't talk. Writing."), and dove back in.
"Hey, Lina, I know." Gourry piped up after a few moments of inactivity in which Lina felt herself beginning to drift off, "Let's play cards."
"Gourry, you have a deck of cards?" Lina sat up and bounced in place until the adrenaline began to flow again, "Why didn't you say so before?"
There was an instant of ringing silence. "Uh," Gourry admitted, "Well…I don't actually have any cards." Lina's face fell. "But…but….Hey! I know. We can ask-"
"Luck!" Lina bounced to her feet and bounced over to their pack and began rooting frantically through it in search of their jelly jars, examining the labels closely. "Drama. L/L. Okay! Luck. Brace yourself, Gourry, this is going to be…loud."
Lina unscrewed the cap. Luck materialized with a burst of musical fanfare such as might be heard in the better class of traveling circus. "HIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!"
Lina unplugged her ears and grinned. "Uhm. Hi. We were wondering if you could help us….."
"Help? After being stuck in that jar? You just let me out so I could help you? You're only using me! WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!" Rivers of tears, neatly deflected by a well-timed shield; Lina began to entertain a vague fear that she was getting used to the wingless. "I want to go back!"
I'm going to regret this. Lina decided. "Back where?"
"Back HOME!" Luck bawled, her depressive phase lasting longer than usual. "I want to go back home and be with the clowns and watch all the happy people and animals and-"
"You can make us happy," Gourry suggested brightly and Luck's spirits snapped up instantaneously, her grin so maniacally bright it was actually attracting moths.
"Oh, really, Gourry-san? How how how?" Luck vibrated in place her joy was so great.
"Well," Gourry rubbed the back of his head, looking utterly ingenuous. Lina fought the urge to flee the immediate vicinity. "You could loan us a deck of cards."
"A deck of cards! Well sure!" Luck rooted around in her purse for a moment, and came up with a small cardboard box, the word BICYCLE stamped on the side in gold lettering and the seal still inviolate. "This is one of the boxes of cards we used back at the Bigtop Bigtop…I always carry one, just in case."
She handed the cards over and a shock of 200 proof Talent traveled up the natural conduit of Gourry's arm and took root somewhere in his brain. He grinned foolishly at her for the moment it took Lina to pounce on the wingless with the jelly jar and seal her away again. She screwed the Ball-embossed lid on vigorously and stashed it away again. Grateful for Gourry's ability to deal with someone even more inane than he, she resolved to play whatever game he suggested, thus neatly avoiding the necessity of teaching him one, as well. "Thank, L-Sama-at least we got the cards. What games do you know….Gourry? Gourry? What's wrong?"
Gourry grinned stupidly into space. Well, more stupidly than usual. Lina poked him one. "Gourry!"
The shaggy blonde swordsman came back to himself with a jerk. "H-huh? Uhm, what?"
"I said, 'What games do you know?'" Lina repeated, slowly and preparing to draw a diagram if necessary.
"Oh, I know a few. We play this game in Testabourne all the time…"
"What's it called?"
"Cutthroat strip poker."
"…."