Enjoy─ha!
She could say what she wanted, but I was a gloomy girl whose sole nighttime activity up till now had been stargazing─and I didn’t have the faintest idea how I should act now that I’d been tossed into a casino.
The boys, however, were another story.
“Well, no point in standing around watching. I say we play some games and collect intel from the people around the tables. Everyone good with that?”
“Right. Play some games, that sounds good.”
“Please make sure you actually gather some information, Hyota. Don’t forget our real mission here.”
“Ha ha ha! Let your wagers showcase the beauty of your aesthetic, lads! We revel in beauty that we may revel beautifully! The games are afoot!”
With that, they split up and swung into action─although the child genius was already in line at the purchase booth.
He hadn’t broken into an impromptu celebratory dance number, but I suspect that as an artist, he may have been even more interested in the organization that produced those counterfeit bills than the rest of us.
The chips started at one hundred yen.
That may sound like small change in this era when a hundred yen can hardly buy a can of soda, but it was a pretty hefty minimum bet.
If you think of a hundred yen as roughly one dollar, that comes to around the same price as the cheapest chips in Las Vegas─in other words, the rates were as authentic as the setting, which was enough to sweep away any lingering sense that I was attending an event in a middle school gym.
The same was obvious from observing the skill of the dealers─not a dropped card or poorly tossed roulette ball was to be seen.
Not that I know anything about professional card dealers, but these people definitely seemed like pros─and like the bunny girl who had welcomed us at the door, all the staff appeared to be both good at their jobs and very enthusiastic. Whoever was running this place had clearly poured money into more than just the hardware.
It truly was true to life.
Anyhow, the maskless pretty boys headed off to exchange a thousand yen each, for starters─which gave them each ten chips.
“Uh…”
I guess they could write it off as an operating expense, but seeing real money in play gave me pause.
I’d picked up that counterfeit money Mr. Businessman had dropped, and now five thousand yen was circulating in the world.
If this was a scam, it was an insanely elaborate one, and the scammers clearly didn’t care about the cost-performance ratio. But nevertheless, we’d just lost five thousand yen─that is, five thousand yen that we might or might not win back had just vanished into thin air.
I felt vaguely like I’d fallen for a hustle, but I wasn’t at all sure the hustler was profiting off this─or if there even was a “hustler.”
Since we had no choice but to investigate this place if we wanted to find out, though, I suppose my fellow members were acting appropriately─and I figured I’d better follow suit by getting my own thousand yen’s worth of chips. But…
“No, young Dojima,” the leader notified me. “Tonight, you’ll be observing.”
Huh? Observing?
Was he honestly going to give me a moralistic lecture about gambling while I was still in middle school? Wasn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?
“Oh no, I very much want you to enjoy yourself. But being Mayumi the Seer, I’m afraid that whatever game you might play, your eyesight would amount to a violation of the rules. Considering you can see right through the spin of the slot machines and roulette wheels, the roll of the dice, even the backs of cards, betting money at a casino is going to be a bit problematic.”
“Oh…”
He was so right that I didn’t have anything to say.
Playing for fun would be bad enough, but playing for money was clearly out of the question─an excuse like “I can’t use my superhuman vision with my glasses on” probably wouldn’t hold much water beyond my own circle of friends.
Guess this elementary school Kogoro Akechi does occasionally say sensible things, as if they just popped into his head.
But then, why even bring me?
I’d rather be holding down the fort.
Well, I suppose I did come along voluntarily so I could keep an eye on the activities of the Pretty Boy Detective Club, so it didn’t make much sense to complain. And I’d gotten swept up by the atmosphere and accidentally shown a little enthusiasm, but once I cleared my head, I remembered that I don’t even like this sort of game in the first place.
I don’t play games on my smartphone (I don’t even have a smartphone), but that doesn’t mean I have some special fondness for low-tech games. The truth is, I didn’t even know the rules to most─which is to say basically any─of the games lined up in that casino.
So maybe observer was the perfect role for me.
As guardian of the Pretty Boy Detective Club (ah, what an illustrious title), I must devote myself to watching over them. I tucked the thousand-yen bill back into my wallet.
At least I’d avoided wasting money.
Also, I was curious to see what sort of elegant behavior the five pretty boys would display in this kind of place─each had his own special skill, from aesthetic judgement and oration to beautiful legs, gourmet cooking, and artistic talent, but whether any of those skills were useful for gambling was an open question─ultimately, they were supposed to be collecting information, but how would they join in the fun here?
I realized I’d probably stick out if I just stood there not at least pretending to enjoy myself, so I started strolling around the hall─with a (wine) glass of orange juice I’d gotten from a bunny girl in hand.
“Oh geez!” I blurted out.
While I was wandering around enjoying for just a moment the feeling of being at a resort, our leader had sat down at a blackjack table─blackjack of all things!
He liked the tough stuff, apparently.
I’m not one to talk, but did he even know the rules?
Sometimes I almost forget because of his grandiose attitude, but the leader is still very much a fifth grader, so when he sits in a chair like that his feet aren’t anywhere near the ground. He looked a little ridiculous, but at the same time he didn’t seem out of place.
His behavior was very grown-up, or rather, gentlemanly.
He seemed to be not so much playing the game as relishing it.
In that sense, blackjack did seem to suit him─though to me, Black Jack would always be the name of a doctor.
At the next table over, Vice President Sakiguchi was playing poker.
Poker I do know a little bit about. That is, I know some of the hands, but not all the rules… And I’d heard the Japanese rules were different from the rules everywhere else anyway.
The notion that the rules we know basically only amount to house rules was vaguely depressing, but that aside, it seemed like a fitting game for Sakiguchi.
Whatever rules they were playing by, the literal poker face of the student council president, who had used his eloquent bluffing skills to combat a criminal organization during our last case, was definitely suited to poker─plus, an erudite fellow like him probably knew all the international rules anyway.
The person I was really worried about was Mr. Bare-Legs, who seemed liable to get so caught up in enjoying himself that he’d forget all about the mission… And there he was, glued to the roulette wheel.