zanzjan | random openers

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The game began three years earlier when Onni's cousin Orph got him a job on the garbage crew of the Mandrake's Folly, one of the old skips doing the three week Tanduou-Moritau run. Each round started with each new complement of passengers and some small innocuous item stolen, such as a hairstay or an earring or a datapad stylus. It continued in a game of careful oneupmanship, and the round was called when the passengers, bereft of a random collection of items big and small, some noted as missing and some not, walked back down off the ship's ramp and on to the rest of their anonymous lives. The game ended, finally, when Onni was walking through the ship's back service corridors to avoid the departing guests, prize suitcase in his hand and expectations of the round being called in his favor in his mind, and found his eye drawn by something floating outside a small porthole where nothing but stars should be. It was Orph's severed head.