She shakes her head, casually brushing off the concern: "Nah, it was some gringa.  It'll be fine, just if anybody asks tell them your name is Lucy Lopez.  Get cleaned up, sleep in a nice bed.  Show them that card in the morning at the breakfast bar, eat all the omelets you want."

"A gringa's a white gal, right?"





"Ummmm... Okay. Wow. Thanks... Lucy?"

A nod, yes, that's what the word means.  "That's me," she nods again.

"Okay, cool, cool, no doubt, no doubt... Well... Thanks... and, so long, then, Lucy. I'm Astrid. Maybe we'll meet again some day..."

"Yeah, sure, maybe."  Lucy nods.  "Go live it up, Astrid, have fun."

Very thoughtfully, Astrid moves off toward the hotel...

A couple of minutes later, Lucy's ride pulls up... "Lucy?" asks the driver. (Did she go for a taxi or for some sort of Uber-type service?)

Lucy checks the car's license plate against the one the Uber app on her phone told her to be expecting.  If it matches up she stands and moves to get in the back.  "Yeah, that's me," she says.  "Going across town to the Tropicana."  She'd rejected the thought of the Tropicana when she first got to Atlantic City, too stereotypical to go trolling around a Havana-themed place.  But the circumstances seem to have made the stereotype seem a little more comforting.
This message was last edited by the player at 16:21, Sun 09 Aug 2020.

It does.





"Got it," says the driver, a black woman, and she starts driving... The traffic is practically nil this time of night, so the ride doesn't take long, and soon Lucy is at her destination.

And that's about all the brain space Lucy has for tonight!  She'll check in at the front desk, pay cash in advance for a night, make her way up to her room, and get a shower in before heading to bed.

But one last thing to take care of first: she taps the screen of her phone to life and thumbs a text to the contact number she has for her dealer:  ok to stop by tomorrow afternoon?

Around what time? comes the reply.

3pm?

Drug dealers were not generally celebrated to be morning people any more than Lucy was, and this one even less so than most.  3pm would be right around the time he'd be dragging himself out of bed.

Yeah okay comes the reply.

Lucy's plan then is as follows, which she'll more or less adhere to unless she's interrupted:  spend the rest of the night and morning in uneventful quiet in her room, setting a wake-up call for the last moment when she'll still have time to get downstairs to the restaurant before the breakfast bar closes.  While she sits eating she'll be checking news sites on her phone, searching the websites of the local TV stations and newspapers for information about a fifty-something man shot to death in a casino last night - the only other psychic Lucy has ever met, even if only for a few seconds.

Then it's the bus to one of the neighborhoods of Atlantic City where tourists don't usually stray, but people looking to score street drugs are more likely to be familiar with.

In the morning, Lucy finds nothing on the web so far about the shooting. Maybe by the evening news?

So, when the time comes, Lucy takes the bus to one of the neighborhoods of Atlantic City where tourists don't usually stray... She arrives at her destination in pretty much exactly the amount of time she expected it to take.

Nothing on the news about a guy gunned down in the middle of a casino restaurant...  that's a bit weird.  There definitely was the expected swarm of cops buzzing around the place when Lucy was leaving last night?

Lucy debarks the bus in front of King's Pawn, but she doesn't go inside the actual pawnshop.  Instead she circles back behind the building to the door leading up to the apartment above the store, and jabs the doorbell at 3:12pm.  A few minutes fashionably late is an expected courtesy when arriving at the place of business of Hector Ortiz.  Hector's uncle would be downstairs running the shop, and despite Lucy's advance text last night, it may very well be that the doorbell would be what finally woke Hector up.  She makes sure to stand plainly in the security camera's field of view, looking up into its lens so Hector could see who was at his door.

Lucy definitely remembers hearing a siren or two... And some flashing lights... But in retrospect, maybe it was a little more calm than she was expecting...?




(Gonna let you keep doing this interaction a little longer... But I will confirm that yes, Hector is home, and will come to the door when the doorbell rings.)

BUZZZZZZZZ, says the door, after only a half-minute or so; possibly Hector was already up?  Lucy pulls it open and climbs the steps into the front room of the apartment Hector shares with his uncle.  And aha, that explains his early rise today: as she steps into the room she hears the TV, a Phillies game on the screen matching an array of Phillies paraphernalia adorning the walls.  She checked the score: good, the Phillies were up by five over the Mets in the top of the seventh, Hector should be in a good mood.

He was lying sprawled on his couch in faded jeans and no shirt, cigarette in one hand, Corona in the other, and as always, he made no secret of brazenly checking her out as she entered.  This did not bother Lucy; she was used to people perving on her (it was pretty hard to hide such thoughts from her after all).  And he couldn't help it, he was Mexican.  Though Lucy tried not to hold that against him.

He stretched out lazy like a self-satisfied cat as his eyes oozed over her, and greeted her in Spanish.  "We going to finally get it on today, mamacita?"

Lucy answered in the same tongue.  "I might, I don't know what you're going to do, cabrón."

Hector just smirked; they had danced this dance before.  It was more like a ritual greeting than actual flirting.  "Here for your usual?"

"Sí."  Her usual was thirty Vicodin and a couple of grams of cocaine.  The good stuff, not the mierda he sold to junkies.

He nodded and sat up, but before he could get up the sound of the crowd at Citizens Bank Park surged: the Mets had hit one out, two of them jogging the bases.  "... hijo de puta," Hector observed, grumbling sullenly as he stood and moved out of sight into one of the back rooms, leaving Lucy to wait while the game went to commercial as the pitcher got pulled.

Hector returns just as the game is coming back from commercials, with a white paper bag in his hand, printed with a red and yellow stripe and the McDonald's golden arches.  Where he'd managed to get a case of McDonald's takeout bags, Lucy had no idea, but he seemed to find it endlessly hilarious to distribute street drugs in them.  "The McFlurry machine is down," he says in English as he hands off the bag to Lucy, who responds in kind by handing back four hundred dollars, constituting most of the cash she had left on hand.  Today is going to have to be an earning day.

She glances into the bag, lingering while he counts the twenty fresh green twenty-dollar bills.  Then he nods, slipping the money into the pocket of his jeans.  "Esta bueno."  Another grinning pervy leer.  "You sure you don't want to stay around a while, watch the game with me?  I'm a real good time, manguita."

"Coño, Hector, you need to get a girlfriend."

"The fuck would I do with another girlfriend?" he grinned.

"Whatever fucked-up shit you're thinking of doing with me, I suppose," she shakes her head with an amused eyeroll, as she turns to head back for the stairs.  "Adiós, Hector," as she starts down.

"Adiós, Cubanita," he calls after her, flinging himself back down on his couch.

Errand complete, she heads for the bus back to the Tropicana.  Only a hundred and twenty dollars left on her, that's not even going to cover her room for the night.  She's going to have to spend the night at the tables.  The plan for the immediate future: spend not more than twenty of her remaining dollars on dinner, then once she's back at the casino, trade a hundred in for chips, make for the hold'em tables, and start grinding her way back into a stash again.

(GM rolls dice)

It isn't easy, but after a few hours, Lucy has once again amassed just barely over 400 dollars. Of course, she started by converting 100, so...

(Lucy has been just barely using her psychic ability in the smallest ways during these hours, so as not to risk tiring herself out.

Does she now:
--keep playing?
--keep playing but use her ability a bit more to try to get more money faster?
--stop for the night?)

She'll keep a couple of Vicodin at the ready, but she doesn't like being this close to zero.  She'll try to find a table full of nice fat fish, maybe frat boys on a bachelor party or tourists from out in the sticks or something?  People who bluff too much and play too loose and who are generally too dumb at poker to know that Lucy really wins way more than she should.  And then she'll lean on her psychic reads a bit more.

There's a bachelorette party over at a blackjack table who are drunker than they should be...

There's one middle-aged guy who is frustratedly trying to get back what he's already lost over at the roulette table (and it's not working) but Lucy can't do anything about roulette...

There's one black guy who's dressed very street (is he a rapper or something?) also betting big at one poker table... so far he's not really losing more than he's gaining... but if someone with Lucy's special skills were to join the game...?

Definitely option C.  Blackjack isn't any more vulnerable to psychics than roulette, and someone playing mouthy might distract attention from Lucy.  Though if she gets a few hands in and the rapper seems susceptible, she'll consider trying to just gently nudge him to invite those drunk college girls over to the table to join the game.  They're soooo pretty, and soooo drunk...  and wouldn't it work out nice for the real players to have them throwing their money around the table?
This message was last edited by the player at 16:12, Tue 11 Aug 2020.

The rapper (or whatever) is betting big, though... use telepathy? Or risk losing at first, to make him confident?

Or use telepathy to get him to invite the bachelorettes over right away?

If she's getting good action from the maybe-rapper and can get good enough psychic reads on him, she'll stick with that for now.  Nudging him to invite the drunk sorority girls over is the backup plan.

(So... Use telepathy to help win, now? Or just play it straight for now?)