"Can I join this round?"

In retrospect, my question came out just a bit more sheepishly than I originally intended, but before I could correct my tone, my request was rebuffed with the bluntness of the business end of a war hammer.

"Denied," Judy declared on no uncertain terms, and I couldn't help but groan in disappointment.

"Are you sure we can't let him in?" my second girlfriend edged the first in my favor. "He looks so sad to be left out."

"No," my dear, if at the moment somewhat uncooperative, assistant shook her head as she pointed at me. "This is his punishment. The Chief is a cheater, so he will be excluded and has to sit on the sidelines and watch until he mends his ways."

"But I cannot mend my ways, because I didn't cheat!" I objected, though I have to admit, if I was listening to my words, I probably wouldn't have believed myself either. As such, after a brief moment of consideration I quickly amended, "Or rather, I only cheated a tiny little bit."

"Chief, stop digging yourself any deeper and deal already," Judy urged me on. We locked eyes for a moment, but it was a foregone conclusion that I couldn't win against her like this, so I decided to get back at her at some other opportune moment and instead I let out a sigh and began shuffling the pack of cards in front of me.

"I do hope we don't have to sit through listening to that after every round," a certain annoying butler commented on the side, earning him a hearty chuckle from the head of the household.

"Come on, grandpa! Let the kids have their fun!"

Sebastian sent an irritated glance in the direction of Abram and he whispered back in a low, almost threatening voice, "What did I tell you about calling me 'grandpa' in front of guests, lad?"

"Oh please!" the Dracis patriarch dismissed him with a scoff. "We are all one big family, aren't we?"

"Not quite," Lady Emese jabbed at her husband before she took an elegant sip from her fancy crystal champagne glass, and then she used her free hand to point at me first, then at Judy, and finally she said, "While I acknowledge them, these two are not quite part of the family yet."

Now, this might be a bit of a tangent, but I couldn't help but make note of the fact that her glass was filled with coke of all things, and her side of the table was jam-packed with various soft drinks, snacks, and sweets. There was such a huge mountain of them she was almost buried behind it all, but none of the other family members even batted an eye at the sight, so I figured it was her usual modus operandi and I also ignored it until now. But back to the scene at hand: after being rebuked, Papa Dracis immediately doubled down on his previous claim.

"But they almost are, and it's all just a formality at this point anyway!" Abram declared in a boisterous voice before he glanced at me in the company of a broad grin, a gesture I have long since learned to associate with him requesting support. Unfortunately for him, I was too busy shuffling the cards at the moment. Not that it stopped him from pointedly calling out to me in the form of, "Isn't that right, son?"

I gave the man a slightly annoyed look in return, but seeing how hard he was trying to maintain his upbeat grin, I ultimately gave up and answered, "It sure is, father-in-law."

The moment I said that, the middle-aged man's expression shone like that of an especially cheeky kindergartener who just got let loose in the vault housing the national candy reserve.

"You see, dear? Leo is already part of the family, and so is Judy! Isn't that right?"

There was a momentary pause in the discussion, as no one seemed to want to answer his rhetorical question, but then thankfully Sebastian intervened by diverting the flow of the conversation with a declaration aimed at me.

"My boy, if you dare to follow the lead of this foolish descendant of mine and attempt to call me something puerile, such as 'great-grandfather-in-law', in a vain attempt to garner endearment, I promise I will remove you from the premises in an instant, most likely through the windows."

"Oh, don't worry, old man," I answered with the finalized v1.0 of my roguish grin. "I can assure you that I would sooner try squeeze rock until delicious Russian caravan tea came out of it than to try to endear myself to you!" I scoffed at the mere idea, but since I accidentally reminded myself of something important, I quickly added, "By the way, I enjoyed your tea very much. When can I have another?"

"Everything in moderation, my boy," the incognito dragon told me with an inscrutable and ever so slightly aggravating smirk. "Let's say I invite you for another cup once you find ten more cursed items."

"Oh my, does that mean you scrounged your collection just for me? How nice, I promise I won't break any of th—" I was just about to finish my cordial discussion with the old man when I was stopped on my track by something touching my leg. I glanced down and under the table, only to find Judy's left heel repeatedly tapping against my shin.

I sent my girlfriend a questioning glance, and she responded by flatly telling me, "Stop picking a fight with Sebastian."

It was only then that it dawned on me that this was most likely yet another one of her oddly harmless efforts of inflicting slapstick violence upon me. It was inexplicable, but kind of cute, as usual.

"I'm not picking a fight," I denied her baseless accusations and simultaneously sent a glance towards the butler before adding, "We're getting along swimmingly, like a house on fire, aren't we, old man?"

"The proper idiom is getting 'on' like a house on fire, my boy, and as much as I hate to admit, I feel your choice of idioms quite apt in this situation."

"It's the burning part, isn't it?"

"Indeed," the old butler told me with a wistful expression. "It reminds me of the good old times; before we first met and I made a small mistake that haunts me to this day."

"Aw, don't be so sentimental, or I might be tempted to call you gramps just to make you stop."

Sebastian gave me a long, exasperated look and then buried his face into his palm and muttered something along the lines of, "I can't decide if that's better or worse than great-grandfather…"

Before I could respond, Elly let out a decidedly girlish giggle by my side, immediately short-circuiting my thought processes. When I directed my attention to her, she looked genuinely surprised by it for a moment, but then she quickly stated, seemingly to herself, "It's nice to see Leo and Sebastian getting along."

"How does that even remotely look like 'getting along' to you?" my assistant asked with incredulity seeping through her usual deadpan demeanor. "Their words were practically seeping with barely disguised sarcasm."

For the record, they weren't. I mean, I can't speak for Sebastian, but I for one never tried to disguise sarcasm. Not that I had to in this case, as we were having a perfectly friendly conversation (by our standards, at least), so I had no idea what Judy was talking about.

"But... They do get along, don't they?" the princess stated just a smidgen less certainty, after which she looked at the butler and asked, "You said you get along too, right?"

The old lizard appeared to be stumped for a good second, but then he forcefully cleared his throat and, through visible effort, he forced a considerably strained smile into his face that obviously didn't reach his eyes.

"It is, without a shadow of a doubt an undeniable fact that our personal relations have definitely improved in the recent past to some degree," Sebastian declared, and after spending a second to untangle his sentence, I tentatively nodded along. I mean, he wasn't wrong per se...

"Could you please just deal already? We don't have all day," the lady of the house grumbled a little as she tapped her fingers on the table, and after one last shuffle, I graciously obliged.

Now, in case it wasn't entirely obvious yet, our little group was playing good ol' Texas hold'em poker inside the Dracis mansion's spacious Poker Room. No, I'm not kidding; they literally had a room just for that. It even had a professional-looking round poker table with a green felt top and everything, and the rest of the room was decorated to invoke the look of a certain famous Las Vegas casino... or at the very least that's what Abram told me, and considering I never visited any casinos before, Las Vegasian or otherwise, I decided to take his word for it. If I had to give a quick description, it was uselessly posh, with way more mahogany wall paneling and crimson velvet highlights than good taste dictated.

To make a long story short, playing poker like this was apparently a long-standing family tradition among the members of the Dracis estate, and Elly insisted that being part of a session is pretty much the ultimate seal of approval we could receive from the family. The whole thing felt a little silly to me, to be honest, but I could imagine worse ways to spend a Saturday afternoon.

There was only one small issue with the game though, namely the fact that I was barred from actually competing by Judy, who completely convinced everyone that I should not be allowed to play, as I was, to paraphrase, 'a terrible, compulsive cheater who refuses to let anyone else win even one round'. It was a gross overstatement, as the last time we played, I can clearly remember her winning at least one. … Or was it a tie?

Either way, because of her lobbying to Lady Emese in particular, I was relegated to the role of permanent bank and dealer. It was a thankless job, but someone had to do it, so I sacrificed myself for the greater good and wore the mantle with pride and honor. Any claims about me being bitter about it are false news spread by disinformation-agents, and should not be trusted.

Anyhow, while I mused about this, I finished dealing the cards to everyone present and declared, "The starting bet is twenty. In the last round, the blinds went full circle, so we are starting from my left again."

The moment I said my piece, Elly and her mother put in the small and big blind bets, as if by reflex, and when they did so, everyone took up their hands.

"I call," Papa Dracis exclaimed with the polar opposite of a poker face, and after he threw in two tokens he continued with, "What were we talking about when the last game ended?"

"I fold," Sebastian decisively threw his cards into the corner before facing Abram and telling him, "I believe you were discussing the success of the 'streaming service', as the boy called it."

At this point it was barely worth a mention, but he naturally used air quotes when he said that. I used my heroic willpower to stop myself from sending a snide remark his way and instead I acknowledged Judy placing two tokens into the pot.

"You're right, grandpa! Thanks!" I could see the old butler had something on the tip of his tongue, but before he could say anything, Papa Dracis barreled on, forcing him to settle for a defeated sigh. "As I was saying, the website has only been online for two days, and it already made back two-thirds of the initial investment we made for the server park and the staff! If things continue like this, we are going to make a net profit by the end of the week! It is absolutely amazing!"

"To be honest, I'm considerably more amazed by how you managed to put all my ideas into practice in such a short time."

Abram let out one of his patented hearty chuckles and told me, "Don't sell yourself short, son! Anyone with enough money and connections could do my part!" I wanted to bring up that those two things were pretty damn significant in and of themselves, but at the end of the day, I decided to just take the compliment and let him continue. "Your ideas were the ones that made all of it possible! I could never in a million years come up with things like the subscription model, or the streaming service! Ah, I also raise twenty!" There was a momentary lull in the conversation as everyone matched the bet and I revealed the next card, but then Abram abruptly asked me, "By the way, how did you even think of these ideas?"

My hand paused for a moment and lingered over the newly revealed King of Spades, which made Judy unusually excited for a moment, so I figured she must've had at least a straight. Putting her literal poker face aside, my alleged father-in-law's question was one that I had already spent a lot of time thinking about.

Really, just where exactly my knowledge and expectations for modern technology and conveniences came from? From the moment I awakened into this world on the first day of September, whenever I ran into a brick phone, a VHS tape, or a CRT monitor, I immediately and instinctively considered them old and outdated. That meant that, through some currently unexplained means, I was aware of a certain technological level, which wasn't present at the time I regained (or gained, depending on who you ask) consciousness that morning, and I compared things to it.

Sure, the world, for another entirely unknown reason, quickly developed to meet my expectations, but it still left the original question open: why did I consider the previous tech level outdated, and why do I consider the current one perfectly fine? Where did that initial value judgment and expectation come from? And why was that it all plateaued at a certain tech level instead of going any further towards holographic interfaces and androids, the occasional magitech fembot notwithstanding?

This was but some of the many nagging questions that routinely annoyed the heck out of me but I could never get to the bottom of them, because every single time I would think I could get some breathing room to spend with theory-crafting and experimentation, the world always threw a wrench into my plans. In fact, considering how fairly uneventful my past couple of days have been (apart from the periodic Sentai attacks on Josh and Co. and my evening strolls with Rinne), I had a slowly mounting feeling of apprehension in the pit of my stomach telling me that it's just another calm before the storm; it was only a matter of time before something annoying was about to happen again. Like an alien invasion. Or a tax collector showing up on my doorstep. Or worse yet, an invasion of alien tax collectors. Brrr...

But putting my Cassandric tendencies aside for a moment, I quickly retracted my hand and told Abram, "It wasn't a new idea, just taking an old idea and applying it to a new consumer demand to reach a modern solution."

The Dracis patriarch looked at me funny for a moment, then he requested, about as sheepishly as I have ever seen him, "Can I use that line on the next shareholder meeting?"

"I don't mind," I replied with a shrug, earning me a toothy grin from our host and an impatient huff from his wife.

"Can we get on with the betting already?"

"Of course, dear," the Dracis patriarch seamlessly moved his smile over to my prospective mother-in-law, only to glance back at the new card on the table and immediately exclaim, "I raise forty!"

"It's not your turn…" I tried to object, only to get completely ignored.

"I call," Judy followed up by throwing her chips onto the pile practically at the same time Abram's landed.

"I fold." Elly decisively discarded her hand, followed by a moment of silence as Lady Emese pondered on her next move.

"I call, and raise another forty," she proclaimed, at last, followed by the clinking of tokens, and now it was Abram's turn to consider his options.

While we waited for him, I noticed that the Lady of the house was subtly eyeing me. Small correction: she didn't actually start just now, but had been doing so since we sat down around the table, but it was around this point that my patience began to dip into the red, so I sent her a questioning gaze and followed it up by an actual question.

"Is there a problem?"

"What makes you ask that?" she asked right back and crossed her arms in front of her ample chest while making sure her hand wouldn't be accidentally revealed in the process.

"I couldn't help but notice that you've been more irritable than usual," I told her straight as an arrow, tact be damned.

"Are you trying to tell me I'm usually irritable?" the lady of the house sent another question my way while her husband pushed a small pile of small denomination tokens into the pot.

"More or less."

It was at this point when I received yet another love-tap under the table, followed by a borderline pouting scolding by my dearest assistant.

"Chief, stop picking a fight with Emese. Also, I call."

"I'm not picking a fight," I retorted with a small frown. "I'm just telling the truth. Or are you telling me she isn't high-strung?"

Judy seemed like she wanted to respond to my question, but Emese beat her to the punch after one last glance at her cards.

"I fold. Also, I admit that I might be a little more worried than usual," Mama Dracis told us while still looking at me in particular. "For the record, it would help if someone did something about the people routinely assaulting my daughter."

"... Is that why you're staring a hole into my forehead?"

"Yes," Lady Emese huffed. "I'm looking at you because I can distinctly remember you declaring that you had them in the palm of your hand, yet they are still running amok, completely unabated."

"Mom, please stop putting Leo in a corner," the princess sprung to my defense with a pout on her lips. "We all agreed to leave them be for now."

"You have?" she inquired, with her question still aimed at me by the looks of it.

"Yes, we have." My confirmation resulted in the lady of the house lowering her brows into a disapproving scowl, so I quickly elaborated, "We are maintaining the status quo for our own ends. If the ambushers become more trouble than they are worth, I already have the means to shut them down with extreme prejudice."

"Then why haven't you done so already?"

"I already told you," I answered, mildly exasperated. "The ambushers are just a front, and I'm still in the process of collecting evidence on the actual mastermind, so we discussed this with the rest of our friends and agreed to put up with the inconvenience for the time being."

"Easy for you to say when you are not the one who has to fight them. "

The Dracis matriarch's verbal jab made me pause for a moment as I wondered how she even knew that, but it didn't take a genius to figure it out, so I sent a slightly miffed glance in the direction of my Draconic girlfriend. The moment I did so, she immediately sprung to action in my defense, completely oblivious to the intent behind my gaze.

"Mooom! I told you it can't be helped! Leo's been sick in the past couple of days, so he could help us even if he wanted to!"

"You're sick?" came the next question, and it finally managed to unknot the brows on Emese's face.

"Just a little," I confessed. "It's nothing serious, I just overworked myself a bit. I'm still not on top of my game, but I'll live."

"Oh." After that eloquent response, the lady of the household fell silent for a second or five, but then she added, "If you're feeling unwell, should we postpone the..." Her words trailed off into an implicit silence, and I promptly shook my head.

"No need, I'll manage," I reassured her, and this time it was Elly who gave us an odd look.

"What are you two talking about?"

"Don't worry about it princess, you'll see it soon enough," I told her with a wink and an enigmatic smile, and lo and behold, against all odds, it actually worked and she let it slide with a fairly neutral 'Oh, okay then' whispered under her breath. As such, I turned back to her mother and told her, "So, just to return to the previous discussion, while I'd like to ask for your patience, if our silly ambushers are bothering you that much, feel free to intervene."

"We're not. We've already issued an unofficial complaint, but Endymonion didn't move, nor did he explicitly tell us we can take care of things," she scoffed and then added, in a low voice, "There must be some internal politics involved."

"You're more or less correct, I suppose," I agreed and cut the conversation short as I glanced over to the last two players still holding their cards and asked, "Are you done betting?"

"I think so," Abram replied in an unusually tame voice, and Judy nodded with an affirmative grunt on her end. "Okay, so the current pot is..." My voice trailed off as I quickly calculated the value of the chips in the middle, and my brows involuntarily descended in a small frown as I asked, "Did you two throw in half of your funds during the first round of the game? Again?"

Abram only cleared his throat in what I figured was embarrassment, yet Judy simply nodded again, as if this was the most natural way to play the game.

"Okay then," I shrugged and revealed the last card.

"All in!" Judy declared before I even finished flipping the river card, and she simultaneously pushed in all of her tokens.

"I call!" Papa Dracis exclaimed in kind and roughly shoved his pile of chips into the middle. I, for one, spent a second glancing between the two before I exhaled a tired sigh.

"Are you two going to do this in every single game?" They must have thought it was a rhetorical question, as they didn't bother to enlighten me. In the end, I let another grown escape my lungs and easily told them, "Fine. Please reveal your hands."

The words barely even left my mouth when Judy put her cards onto the table and stated, maybe a smidgen smugly, "Straight flush."

"Oh boy," Abram responded as he scratched the base of his neck with his free hand and reluctantly revealed his cards, which were… a pair…

"Did you seriously go all-in on that hand?"

He answered my incredulous question with an embarrassed shrug and by muttering, "I was sure she was bluffing."

"You two have been doing this for three games in a row!" I complained as I pointedly smacked the deck of cards in my hands against the table a couple of times. "How are we going to play together if you two insist on knocking one of you out of the game in the first round every single time?"

There was no answer to my inquiry, so at the end of the day I stopped hitting the edge of the deck against the tabletop and proposed, "How about we take a break?"

"I believe it is an opportune time," Sebastian agreed with me, as planned, so I turned to my other collaborator.

"What do you say, Dormouse?"

My girlfriend gave me a flat look (or at least one that was flatter than usual), and commented, "I hate it that you decided to do this when I was winning."

"Decided to do what? Take a break?" Elly interjected with tiny, invisible question marks circling over her head, so I sent an eye signal to my other girlfriend and, after some more nudging, she finally rolled her eyes and stood up from the table.

"Don't worry about it; the Chief's just being weird as usual." Saying so, she walked over to the princess's side and began to tug on her blouse. "Let's go out and freshen up a little."

"Erm… okay, we can do that?" After saying that, Elly sent me a questioning look, but instead of saying anything I just gave her my best encouraging smile, and after a few long seconds of hesitation, she ultimately rose from her seat and followed my lovely assistant's lead.

Just before they left the room, Judy turned back for a moment and gave me a look that said, 'You owe me one', as if I requested some kind of back-breaking task from her. Anyhow, I acknowledged her, and once I did, she quickly closed the door behind her. With that part of the so-called plan finished, I let out a pent-up breath and turned to the remaining three people in the room.

"All right, with my girlfriends out of the picture, I'd like to officially open the first annual 'What should I gift Elly for her birthday?' brainstorming session.

"Oooooh, so that's what this was all about!" Abram exclaimed as he did that thing where he dramatically dropped his fist into his open palm.

"More or less," I responded with only mildly faked modesty. "I asked Judy ahead of time to distract Elly for a while. Since her birthday is coming up soon, I figured the time was nigh."

"Wait, dear? Did you know about this?" Abram asked his wife, and she nodded without any reservation.

"Yes. Judy told me about how Leonard wanted to discuss something to that effect today."

"What about you, grandpa?"

He turned to the old and at this point fairly drained butler, and he told him, "Yes. The boy and I already discussed the plans for today ahead of time."

"So I was the only one who didn't know?"

He looked a little confused by his exclusion, so I decided to just straight up tell him, "No offense dad-in-law, but we all concluded that you'd probably let it slip if we let you in on the secret."

There was a moment of silence, but instead of continuing the discussion, Abram only let out a chuckle and declared, "Dad-in-law! I like that!"

This announcement was followed by yet another, this time even longer pause, right until Mama Dracis let out a defeated sigh and turned to me again.

"So you wanted to ask us for advice on what to give her?" she asked me with just a hint of curiosity in her voice, and she was apparently quite surprised when I shook my head.

"No, actually, I already have a gift in mind; I just need your cooperation."

"Oh?" The Dracis matriarch did a perfect single-eyebrow-raise at me and inquired, "What exactly do you need our help with?"

"I'll tell you in a moment," I responded by flashing a toothy grin at her, after which I began to clean up the poker table by moving the chips and the cards out the way. Abram and Sebastian also helped me a little, and in a couple of seconds we freed up the middle. "Okay, this should be good enough," I noted with a satisfied huff. "Sebastian, please take out the plot device."

"The what?"

"The spear, I meant the spear," I stressed, earning me an exasperated grunt from the old man.

"Why you keep refusing to refer to things by their proper names is a mystery I would very much like to solve one day," he grumbled, but then he reached under the table and retrieved a long object wrapped in a white cloth, possibly a simple bed sheet by the looks of it, and he placed it onto the table.

"Is that the…?" Abram mumbled in an uncharacteristically low voice, but his question became redundant the moment Sebastian unwrapped the thing and revealed the plain and intensely eye-straining Spear of Dragonslayicus, or whatever.

"Long story short," I began as a stood up and slowly rounded the table, "I knew that Elly's birthday was coming up soon-ish, but I couldn't think of a good gift. I mean, what can you give to a girl who has it all? But then, due to a recent discovery, I realized there was something after all." By the time I reached the end of my not-at-all awkward speech (which I may or may not have written up in advance for dramatic effect), I stood in front of the seated Emese. I looked her in the eye and, after taking a deep breath, I softly asked, "Ma'am? May I take a look at your wound?"