The monkey can wait while Oakley writes three words and a line.

Oakley doesn't cathede very often, but is willing to try. At least the doors are tall, they appreciate as they enter.

The cathedral is not currently holding a service. There are a handful of Londoners among the pews anyway, and a clergyman keeping an eye on them. He double-takes at Oakley, but waves amiably.

Do people just... sit around in churches? Oakley wouldn't know. But they approve of all kinds of loitering on principle, and they wave back to the cleric.

What does the monkey do?

The monkey leads them towards the back of the church, but the cleric stops them before they can get very far. "Do you have some business with the Bishop?"

"Yes!"

Well, one assumes, anyway. They proceed onwards.

The cleric stops them again. "Please state your business and your title, and if you have an appointment."

Oakley stops just a hair from the man's palm, roughspun poncho yarn reaching out to touch. They stare queerly at him, looming, looking for all the world like they have no clue why he's in the way. Heat does not radiate from the gentleperson's neartohand flesh. Their eyes on the clergyman's pate aren't especially warm, either.

They smile wider. Is that warm?

"The Bishop asked me here, and I'm concerned that if you haven't been told who I am, that you aren't supposed to know. That will teach me to use the front doors." Colorless eyes wrinkle behind white fabric. "You can tell him brought the monkey, if doing that will help you make sense of things. I'm willing to wait."

Oakley really assumed the monkey would be more helpful than this. Monkeys are usually quite helpful, in their previous experience. Nothing is the same in London.

His eyes widen, and he shivers. "Oh! Of- of course - I'll let him know you're here. With your... monkey."

He vanishes into the back office, and after a few minutes comes back out. "Please, go in," he says with a bow.

Oakley continues smiling. They can't believe that worked.

Does the monkey actually want to go where the bishop is? How complicatedly Oakley has to move in the next ten seconds or so hinges on this.

Yes, it would appear that it does.

The bishop opens his door and smiles thinly at Oakley. "Come in, my child," he says. "We apparently have urgent business."

Oh good, a patriarch. How nauseating.

The gentleperson ducks through the doorway.

The Bishop of St. Fiacre's is a man with dark skin, a bald head, and piercing eyes. He looks at Oakley with some interest. "So, you've come to me... why? The Marvellous isn't for another four years, you know. I'd play sooner, but you'd have to convince the others, and that's quite a task when half of them don't want to play in the first place. Hello, Gregory," he says to the monkey, as an afterthought. The monkey pretends not to have heard him.

Oakley was really hoping they could ignore the bishop and Gregory could talk, but perhaps that was naive.

"Oh, good, you know about the game of cards. I'm working from very limited information at the moment." Oakley sits, somewhere, so to be at eye level with the bishop. Long pale spidery fingers crisscross over one crossed knee. "I was meaning to meet a lady, but she is arrested. I made friends with this monkey, instead, who brought me to here directly."

"Also, I seem to convince your cleric that I am some kind of dangerous employee of yours. This was very easy."

"I believe he assumed you were one of my cousins, actually," the Bishop says absently. "They come to me seeking my aid every so often. How limited is your information? Do you in fact know anything except that it is a card game?"

"It's a very special card game, with steep costs and a reward so special that the rumors it generates are of gold and dreams. I begin to see the shape of the thing from these misshaped echoes. And so I'm very sure that my information will only become less limited as I proceed."

"Also, it has a very silly name."

"The name has been translated half a dozen times," the Bishop agrees, "and each time it has grown more ridiculous. In its original form it was called-" he scrawls a symbol on a sheet of foolscap. When the symbol is finished, the paper goes up in flames, leaving a pile of ash. "Which translates, as near as I can tell, to 'something delightful.' But with infinite layers of meaning, as is typical to that tongue."

He takes a sip from a cup of tea sitting on his desk. "The stake is steep, indeed. And it must be played by the six who played the previous game, plus one to replace the winner. Traditionally it is played only under a certain concordance of stars, but that requirement can be waived with consent from the players. The other requirements cannot. And, of course, the prize... is anything. The winner receives their heart's desire. The thing they want most. No limitations." He sips again. "Few limitations, I should say. They cannot manufacture love."

The gentleperson appears disgusted by the symbol, and relieved when it vanishes into ashes. Infinity ought to take place over time, or some equally expansive dimension. It shouldn't take place over a penstroke. Blech. Gesture, gesture, gesture. A motion of something thrown over the shoulder. Further gestures.

The gentleperson collects themself.

"The game that grants a heart's desire cannot grant a heart desire. Cute! As to the requirements, the stars are usually fickler than that, or far less fickle, usually not that middling level of fickle, in my experience. Why do they bow to mortal whims? And how does one even see the stars from down here?  And why do I ask these questions aloud?"

Oakley is not asking the Bishop, clearly. This they do ask him:

"I suppose one of the game's last players might have been a woman with a red headwrap?"

"Not at all," the Bishop says. "That monkey, however, was one of them. Along with the Topsy King, the deviless Virginia, the Manager of the Royal Bethlehem Hotel, and Mr. Pages. And myself, of course."

Nod. Nod. Oakley has no clue who any of these people are*, but will get nowhere by admitting this. "Of course!" And of course the monkey plays cards. Why not. This is just what London is like.

...

*On reflection, Oakley does recognize a name or two. Virginia (what a funny name!) is... the Queen? No, the mayor? And, well, the Manager of the RBH presumably manages the RBH. And the priest is the priest, but it's there that the clues run dry.