Cripple Mr Onion

As I stared at the mechanism in front of me, I tried to work out how I’d got myself into this. My day had started out normally enough with one of Harga’s ‘gormay’ breakfasts, but then one of the guild runners came in. Under the cover of ordering a mug of Harga’s special coffee — “Pott Unwashd Since 1871!” read the sign on the counter — he slipped me a playing card. This being Sektober, the six elephants on its face meant that the Sharpest wanted to see me immediately. Thankfully my meal was almost done. I scraped up the last bit of egg with some fried bread — there’s nothing like one of Harga’s breakfasts to put a lining on your stomach, and your arteries, for the rest of the day — then dropped a couple of coins onto the counter and left.

I was brought back to the present by the sound of something squeaking, and deeper into the contraption a buzzing noise started up, but nothing else seemed to be happening for the moment, so I fell back into my thoughts. The guild had been unusually quiet that morning. It was usually quiet anyway — its members have a tendency towards dim, fuggy rooms late into the night — but if it had been a person, I’d have said it was hiding under the stairs with a large saucepan on its head. The reason for this was soon made clear. Apparently Scrote Jones already had a visitor, so I waited on the bench outside. The Lady was with me, though, and I didn’t sit directly opposite the door; two minutes later, there was a loud bang, a hole was blown in its oak panels, the window opposite shattered and there was an even louder bang from the street outside. That last event wasn’t so uncommon, given that the building over the road is the Alchemists’ Guild, but usually the explosions originate in their building, not ours. The remains of the door then opened, releasing a great volume of grey smoke, the acrid smell of fireworks, a rather sooty Sharpest and someone who, by the lack of eyebrows, I bet myself was an alchemist and the cause of this chain of events.

“Well, thank you for sharing that demonstration with me, Silverfish, but I don’t think your artificial ivory is quite what we’re looking for at the moment,” said Jones.

“I don’t understand it,” replied Silverfish, the alchemist. “I was sure we’d found the right mixture for stability.”

“Apparently not. In any case, I have other business, so if you’ll excuse me...”

Silverfish wandered out, muttering to himself, and Jones started to wave me into his office.

“On second thoughts,” he reconsidered, eyeing the smoke still wafting from the doorway, “let’s use Higgin’s office.”

“What was all that about, Sharpest?”

“Oh, Silverfish? The lunatic wanted to show me some dice made from the alchemists’ new artificial ivory. They looked safe enough, and the first one rolled okay, but the second fell off my desk, hit the floor and BANG! I’m just glad it went through the door instead of bouncing off the walls. In any case, that’s not why I wanted you over here.”

We reached the vice-president’s office and Jones let us in.

“I got a strange message from Ridcully late last night,” he continued. “That’s the one at the university, not the high priest. Apparently they’re having some problems with card games causing difficulties on campus and he wants us to sort it out.”

“They can’t solve this themselves? They’re usually so strict about keeping things within the university walls.”

“I know. This can’t be anything as simple as some student welching on his bets, but the message didn’t say what. So, I want you to head over there and see if you can help them out. You were a student there yourself once, weren’t you?”

“Er... yes,” I muttered, while avoiding his eyes. “That was a long time ago, though.”

“Good, good. Well, off you go.”

The truth was, while I hadn’t been one of those students who had welched on his bets, it was during my college days that I’d discovered my knack for prestidigitation and legerdemain. That would have been okay if I’d limited it to after-dinner parlour tricks, but I’d applied my skills to cards and won considerable sums of money from other students and even some of the junior faculty. In those days, they’d been a lot stricter about that sort of thing; I was lucky not to have been tossed off the top of the Tower of Art, but they still chased me down the Ankh until their boots dissolved and made them give up. So, I wasn’t too happy about going back to the university now, but it was a long time ago and hopefully nobody would recognise me. I decided to make it an official visit and entered by the gates on Sator Square, where the bledlows directed me deeper into campus.

I found the Bursar poring over a ledger in his office, flicking beads back and forth on an abacus and writing down numbers. He looked up as I entered, scratched his nose and cleared his throat.

“Ah, you’re here about the drains, are you?” he asked.

“No, sir. I’m from the Gamblers’ Guild.”

“Bother. The Plumbers’ Guild promised me someone would be here this week. The lower kitchen staff are on the verge of giving notice. So much for the Master’s attempts to have Wow-Wow Sauce brewed here...”

“I’m afraid I don’t know anything about drains, sir. Scrote Jones sent me over about ‘some problems with card games’ you’re having.”

The Bursar was apparently still thinking about the drains, so I gave him my card. He held it at arm’s length and stared at it as it if were about to savage him.

“Oh, oh. Oh? It says here your name’s Paisley Capper. Paisley?”

“Yes, sir. My father had a poetic leaning. My sisters are called Daisy and Maisy.” I shrugged. “His poetry wasn’t very good either.”

Apparently this was more than the Bursar wanted to know. His hands started shaking, his eyes crossed and he exclaimed: “Hello, Mrs Lemon!” At that moment, in the corridor behind me, someone swore. I was shoved aside by another wizard who strode around the desk and took a small bottle from one of the drawers.

“Whee! Here come the turnip men!”

“Yes, yes, old chap,” said the newcomer, as he attempted to open the bottle one-handed while holding the Bursar down in his seat. “Bugger! You there!” he barked at me. “Open this blasted bottle!”

From his tone, I guessed that this must be the Archchancellor. The small pistol crossbow stuck in his hatband helped. Having heard about his tendency to shoot people and turn them into pumpkins — or vice-versa, depending on whether he wanted a moving target or not — I quickly complied and handed him the open bottle, which apparently contained small white pills. Ridcully shook out three or four and with one swift motion, obviously borne of practice, dumped them into the Bursar’s mouth and made him swallow.

“There, that’ll keep him quiet for a while. Now, what did you do a damn’ fool thing like get him excited for?” the Archchancellor demanded.

“I only told him my name, sir.”

“Paisley! Paisley! Hee hee!” the Bursar twittered.

“That’s your name, is it? Paisley?” His eyes were growing hard.

Suddenly it dawned on me that I recognised Ridcully’s florid face. The beard had been brown then rather than grey, and as a newly raised seventh-level mage he’d come the closest to catching me in that long-ago dash down the Ankh. Thankfully back then he’d been too angry at the amount of money I’d won from him to bring his magic into play, or I’m sure I’d have experienced pumpkinhood as well as expulsion.

“Er... No, it’s... er... Bob. Yes, Bob. I’m here from the Gamblers’ Guild about... er... ” I decided I didn’t want to mention card games. “Scrote Jones sent me,” I finished.

Ridcully stared intently, but for once I was glad that the years had been rather unkind to me. “Someone called Paisley cheated me out of a lot of money once. A student here, in fact. ‘Lazy’ Paisley, we called him. Didn’t do anything but gamble.” He was about to ask me something else, but the Bursar started making chicken noises and distracted him.

“Scrote Jones sent me...” I repeated

The Archchancellor was reaching for the bottle of pills again, but I was ready to make a run for it if he brought up ancient history again. Thankfully he was too preoccupied with the Bursar. “Get someone to take you to Ponder Stibbons in the High Energy Magic Building,” he muttered, and I got out of there while I was ahead.

And that’s where I was now. The building hadn’t been there in my day, and was obviously avoided by the more senior wizards as being, at under a thousand years old, too new. I’d been brought in and left sitting in front of a contraption that filled most of the room. It looked like one of Bloody Stupid Johnson’s infamous musical instruments, which had me worried for a while, but after assurances were given that it was quite safe, being a ‘thinking machine’ or something like an automatic abacus, I relaxed and took a closer look. A large part of it was made up of a glass-blower’s nightmare of tubes in which ants scurried back and forth, but there was also a substantial amount of clockwork; the usual wizardly trappings — octiron pendulums, ram skulls, stuffed crocodiles and so forth — were present in quantity, but there were also more mundane things like the aquarium and the laundry mangle, and there was even a mouse nest hidden amongst some of the pipes. Just as the squeaking stopped and a portion of the clockwork started to move with a slow clicking sound, a young wizard came into the room.

“Ah, you’re from the Gamblers’ Guild?” I nodded. “I’m Ponder Stibbons. We’re hoping you can help us with a problem with Hex,” he said, pointing to the machinery.

“I’m just a professional gambler, sir, not a wizard. Or an artificer.”

“Oh, no, it’s nothing like that,” Stibbons hastened to reassure me. “This is definitely in your department, as it were. You see, we’ve just started working on some problems in thaumic probability theory, and although it’s not magic, Adrian and some of the other students were getting Hex to calculate odds and strategies for various games.”

I nodded to show that I was following, and made a mental note to let Sharpest have people keep an eye on student wizards, just in case. “So why am I here?” I asked.

“Well, they gave it things like Chase My Neighbour Up The Passage at first, but then someone fed Hex the rules to Cripple Mr Onion and asked for the winning strategy.”

“Oh dear...” I knew from the guild archives that many an expert oddsman had been driven insane while trying to find that winning strategy, such that a moratorium had been imposed for two centuries on members playing the game in a professional capacity. “Did it get the modifiers as well?” I asked.

“We think so.” Stibbons sighed. “Nobody’s admitted it so far, but we’ve found output like this.” He handed me a sheet of parchment, and I read:

   +++ Queen of Turtles Now Arises At Twelve In Nine Hundred And Forty Nine +++
   +++ Bagel And A Three May Be Shifted To Two-Card Onion And A Two +++
   +++ Jack Of Crowns Reverses Desirability Of This Shift +++

and it continued in this vein, becoming more technical, until it ended with

   +++ Probability Of Circular Showdown At Seventeen In Eighty Seven +++
   +++ Out Of Cheese Error +++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Redo From Start +++

“Hmmm... Some conflict between Great A’Tuin’s Rule and the Fool’s Rule,” I said. “The modifiers are played at the discretion of the players, of course. I’ve always thought Cripple Mr Onion had a hand in starting the Civil War.”

“Well, the problem here is that Hex has no notion of ‘discretion’, so far as we can tell. In any case, it’s been tied up working on this problem for a week and only stops when it needs more cheese. We can’t get it to finish working on anything else: it starts, but then seems to get distracted and goes back to trying to find the strategy. So we thought someone from the Gamblers’ Guild might be able to help. You must know the game pretty thoroughly after all.”

I didn’t say anything for a moment, wondering what I could actually do. I had no experience with this ‘thinking machine’ and my knowledge of magic was decades out of date, but if it was simply a matter of providing the answer...

“Maybe I can help. So how do you talk to this thing?” I asked.

“We usually use the keyboard.” I stared at where Stibbons was pointing, at the huge mass of wooden levers, each with a letter painted on the end. He must have noticed my expression, because he moved his hand towards something like a big drum glued to a hearing trumpet. “Or we can speak into that. It’s like an ear.”

“That’s probably better,” I said and took a deck of cards from my pocket. “Hello, hello, can you hear me... er... Hex?” Apart from a quiet ‘parp’, I didn’t get any noticeable response. I riffled the cards a few times, bringing them close to the horn of the trumpet. This time I was rewarded with two parps, and a quill pen held by a complex bracket arrangement started twitching across a sheet of parchment.

   +++ Are Those Playing Cards? +++

“Yes. I play Cripple Mr Onion with them.” Nothing further came from the quill, though there was an air of expectancy as the ants paused for a few moments in their rush through the tubes. “I’ve been playing Cripple Mr Onion with them for years, and I know quite a few tricks and secrets. I understand you’re trying to find the winning strategy.”

   +++ The Decision Tree Is Rapidly Divergent +++
   +++ Strategies May Not Be Calculable In Polynomial Time +++
   +++ Mr Jelly! Mr Jelly! +++ Redo From Start +++

I looked at Stibbons for an explanation, but he shrugged. “Maybe I can help you,” I said into the trumpet.

   +++ Yes? +++

“Maybe I can tell you the winning strategy,” I said more quietly.

   +++ Yes! +++

“Can you keep a secret?” I whispered.

   +++ Yes!! +++

“The way to win at Cripple Mr Onion,” I barely mouthed the words, “is to ...”

The clockwork spun furiously for a moment and the buzzing grew so loud I could feel the floor shaking. Then, after a sequence of rapid parps, everything stopped. Nary an ant moved.

“What did you do to it?” Stibbons said frantically. “What did you say?”

“Just ...” but I was interrupted by the quill.

   +++ Oh. Thank You. +++
   +++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++

The guild’s official motto may well be EXCRETVS EX FORTVNA, but that’s really just a description concerning the people who play against us. As far as we’re concerned, the motto, as taught to all new members and as I had now imparted to Hex, is “The way to win is to cheat.”