"Is that a challenge?"

"Is that a challenge?"

Stephanie takes a deep breath and sternly reminds herself that it is inappropriate to scream at foreign diplomats while eating dinner no matter how much they deserve it.

"I can't take that lying down. Humans, bad at strategy? Preposterous. The more strategy the better, I say."

"Sounds like you have something in mind."

"I propose a game of pure strategy," Sora declares. He picks up the nearest pack of cards (there is, of course, a pack of cards within arm's reach at this parlor table) and begins sorting the cards into piles by suit.

"A game of pure strategy… do you mean contract bridge?"

"No, that's the name: game of pure strategy," Sora clarifies. "Here's how we'll play: each of us gets all thirteen cards of one suit, a third suit serves as the prize pool, and we don't need the fourth. On each turn, we flip over the top card of the middle pile to serve as the prize, and then we each choose one card from our hand as a sealed bid. Higher card wins the prize. Aces are low, kings are high, and if we both make the same bid for the prize we add it to the next turn's prize and bid on an extra card. Or two extra cards if it happens twice, and so on. At the end, whoever has the highest combined prize pool wins – the ace is one, jack queen king are eleven twelve and thirteen."

"Elegant! I like it," Juno says approvingly. "Sure, I'll play."

Shiro almost feels bad for her.

"Low stakes?" Sora asks. He's not going to ask her for an unspecified favor or anything of that magnitude – unlike Stephanie, Juno does not have GULLIBLE printed on her forehead in block letters.

"Sure thing! Let's see…"

Juno raises a finger to her chin, eyes half-lidded. She glances over at her uneaten fish fillet.

"I know! You can feed dinner to me."

Excuse me, kitten, which one of us is the princess?

"Acceptable. In exchange, what I want… is to be allowed to pet you."

"Like… like an animal?"

"Yes."

Does Juno believe those two things are of equal value? Sure, why not. Besides, her goal here is to win. Winning is fun! Being fed dinner by a human servant in front of Princess Steph is just a bonus.

"I accept! Let's all have fun and play together."

Sora hands her all of the clubs, takes all of the diamonds for himself, and leaves the spades face-down in the center of the table. The hearts go back in the box.

"Do you want to shuffle?" he asks.

Juno gives the prize pool a wash, three riffle shuffles, a strip shuffle, one more riffle shuffle, and allows Sora to shuffle it himself before performing a final cut and laying it down. The first card is the four of spades.

Let's do this.

Juno plays her five.

And Sora plays the four.

Juno slides it over to her side and starts to discard her bid. She hesitates.

"We discard these, yes?"

"Wouldn't be much of a game if we didn't."

The next card is the seven of spades.

Eight of clubs.

Seven of diamonds.