"Open up!"

The fairy scoops up three pink berries and delicately feeds them to Sora.

The berries taste sweet and minty. Nom nom nom.

"Feed me one of the orange ones?"

This is accompanied by a wink and a bashful smile.

The game is only on move two and already it's taken a turn for the lascivious. If this is a distraction tactic it's poorly timed: Shiro is ten feet away and probably still awake. Still, he did offer to reciprocate. He leans forward—

It's easy to slip into a fugue state when you're gaming. Your awareness of the room around you goes away, leaving nothing but the world inside the monitor. Sora feels… whatever the opposite of that is, like he's sitting in a desk chair and controlling himself with a keyboard and mouse. The grass and the breeze and the sun in the sky are suddenly less real.

"That's not very sporting of you," he says out loud, pressing the orange berry between the fairy's lips.

"Mmmmmm, tashteh."

She swallows, grinning like the cat that's caught the canary. Orange berry juice drips from the corners of her lips. "Didn't violate the Covenant, did I? Your turn."

The berries are psychoactive, and either Tet is a liar or surprise drugs don't count as "murder, violence, theft, or war". Surprise magical drugs; the chemicals in those berries won't be digested for at least fifteen minutes. No way to guess what the other two might be. That's just peachy.

Sora recalculates.

The best move here is another one of the pink berries, bringing the count back to zero. At least he doesn't have to worry about the other two yet.

"Another pink one."

"Want me to keep feeding them to you?"

Eh, why not. Bring it on, surprise drug fairy.

The fairy is more than happy to feed him another berry! She helps herself to one of the pink berries as well, stuffing it in her mouth at the same time. She has to work a lot harder to eat this much food, given that her head is a a hundredth the size of Sora's, but for various reasons she's enjoying it a lot more.

The dissociative feeling gets a little worse.

"Hey, Shiro! These berries are—"

"You're risking a forfeit!" the fairy says, giggling.

Zzzzzzzzzzz.

Maybe that was a stretch.

At this stage (9, 8, 2) there is exactly one move that lets him stay in the lead, and that's eating one of the two black berries.

"That one, if you don't mind."

The fairy picks up one of the black berries and reaches up to place it on Sora's outstretched tongue.

The berry tastes like licking a nine volt battery and goes down like a shot of rancid olive oil.

Then it gets much, much worse. The worst emotional sensation imaginable, concentrated into a small window of time. It's not painful but he wants to scream; he wants to vomit even though he's not nauseated. It was less awful the day his mother died and the day he realized his father didn't love him. Red-hot knives would be better than this; at least there would be pain and it would be happening for a reason. This is a repulsive system malfunction, his brain scrambling to find an explanation for why every emergency alarm is suddenly going off at once.

"It took me years to produce that cultivar," the fairy says conversationally. "Lots of trial and error. Some things crossed the line, some things weren't up to snuff. I'm not sure if I can't make it better, but no one ever thinks their masterpiece is complete. Sometimes you just have to say it's done and enough."

"How long does this last?" Sora asks stiffly. There's no physical reason for him to be holding himself tensely, but he feels like the alternative is flopping on his back and crying pathetically so tense it is.

"Couple hours? I dunno, I'm not a human expert."

Great. At least he's still got the board in the right state.

Wait.

There's a misère variant of nim where the objective is to not be the last one to act. The powers of two count is the same for both versions, other than the penultimate move, so conceptually they're the same for someone who knows how the trick works.

But. Suppose you don't know how the trick works. You've memorized some of the board states near the end, maybe, but you don't know about the bitwise XOR. From your perspective, the game seems almost arbitrary, right up until you find yourself in familiar territory. Suppose you think it's going to happen, and the free variable in the equation isn't whether you win or lose, but whether you eat the last berry or feed it to your opponent.

The fairy is mathematically incapable of winning the game, but she can make it so that the other black berry is the last one on the board. This is a major problem, because Sora would rather do LITERALLY ANYTHING other than eat it.

"I'll have two of the orange ones now!"