Not gonna lie, wasn't really feeling it today. Had to force myself to write. Part of the problem was that I actually knew what I was going to write today, so there wasn't a sense of discovery. I had this chunk in my head, and it felt more like dictation than anything else getting it down. a lot of what I'm writing is exploratory, which means much of it will be either tweaked or jettisoned when I get into the next draft, but write with no edits for now :-)
The Trump Taj Mahal. A perfect spot to begin. Phil would need an army for the coming fight. But that would come in time. Right now he needed a Hook and a Club. He had found that for the particular combination of amorality, desperation and intelligence he favored, there was no better place to troll than a poker room. And the only one that Phil really liked was in the Taj, largely because he liked Johnny Chan’s cameo in ROUNDERS. There was nothing like the symbolism of it since one of his main adversaries was also a sartorially creative Asian.
Of course the poker room had been redesigned since then, and was unrecognizable from it’s former iteration, but the spirit remained. And people could not resist the pull of tossing their chips along the same felt they had seen in big screen glory. Phil already had the Alexander suite on lockdown for the foreseeable future, so it was time to recruit.
The bulk of his army as it developed would be easily acquired through mental control or force, but he needed a lighter touch right now. The Hook would be his second and needed to be on board freely. It had been 8 hours since Phil first sat at the table, an amount of time barely worth noting at the poker table, but long enough that a sea of pretenders with thoughts of poker glory had managed to dump their chips to him. He hadn’t even had to manipulate the pathetic suckers. His advanced grasp of odds and lack of emotional investment in winning made him a God at these meager limits. But it was also here that unproven talent first showed itself.
When she sat down she did not immediately register as anything other than one more woman trying to walk the line between heartbreaker and whore. The media landscape had changed poker for women, and now many a young thing with thin hips and big tits threw on a hat and Garbo shades before trying to leverage cleavage into success.
But this one was different. She didn’t have the headphones grafted to her ears of someone who thought she was too good to pay attention. She watched the hands she wasn’t in. Acted decisively. Didn’t get upset when she lost a hand. Didn’t gloat when she won. And she won a lot. She also seemed to stay out of hands that Phil contested. They’d had no particular clashes, but her instincts to avoid the other predator at the table were keen.
A hand finally arose that gave Phil a chance to trap her. He’d flopped a straight flush against her presumed quads by the river. He let her take the lead the whole way, and hoped that his sudden gigantic bet at the end would entice her curiosity and bring all her money to him. Then when she left desperate and reeling from the terrible beat he would recruit her.
Except that she made a nearly clairvoyant fold. And then she left the table without a glance back at the competition.
Phil had found his Hook.
He just needed to find a puppy to seal the deal.
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