Destiny calls those who patiently wait. And back then, I happened to be the one who had waited the longest… and since I had waited so long, it’s also probably why things turned out, in the way that they did.
The train was rather empty today. Sure, it was early in the morning, but it isn’t always so on Fridays. On Fridays, most salary people don’t commute to their offices unless they were required to finish up any remaining work in time for the weekend. And if the work was light, it usually meant that in two hours they could travel back home again and begin to enjoy the rest of the day with their families. Therefore, as a student, to get on an uninhabited railcar, you would need to plan your trip to start and end at a time between 7 and 8 a.m., in order to avoid the unnecessary rush. It wasn’t, however, the time most people my age took the train; it was much too bothersome to wake up so early for school, and even more onerous now during the summer. Time watching the cityscape flew by and by the time I had exited the train; the platforms and streets had already become noticeably busier.
I was going to meet a friend. You might like her… she is what I like to call a “cookie”.
“Hey Rosie!”
“Hey Johnny!”, she cried, ”How was the trip from West-side?”
“Nothing to complain about. There was an old elderly couple shooting the breeze but otherwise it was quiet.”
“Good… Excited?”
“Very, actually.”
“That’s great, let’s get going. It’s finally the time you’ll be getting your cards. How do you feel taking this first step in claiming your independence?”
“I’m not taking my independence, Rosie. We’re just getting some cards, sold at every corner stand and superstore.”
“Yeah, then why don’t your parents allow you to have them?”
“I told you before…they just don’t want me to that’s all.”
“Well my opinion is that they’re dinosaurs. Just take a look around you! What kinds of parents forbid their kids from playing a game that every kid in the world is playing? It’s been around, forever!”
“It’s not been that long. It’s been at most twenty years since the Deckmeister group at Studio Productions first launched it.”
“18 years, 7 months, 13 days and counting…see it’s the background on my watch.”
It was the newest model. She was showing off.
“That’s not the point.” I was beginning to regret this, “And, I’m still not sure that it’s the right idea.”
“No, Johnny, stop it right there. Don’t go chicken on me!” She bullied me in the way that she always did, “You’re the one who called me last night saying you were fed up with being the only one left out! Anyways, I found the perfect spot to start searching for your first pack.”
That was more temptation than I could bear to hear at the time. I gave in. Everyone knows that in the game of Red Diamond, buying the packs is one of the hardest parts of the game. It wasn’t like the lottery system of the last generation. All packs were themed uniquely and players would buy the packs based on a list of prescribed cards on every pack. There were a myriad of different pack types and each pack’s content needed to be carefully analyzed to see if the cards would gel with your play style. Production Studio had made it part of the game to seek out the cards you really wanted amongst a sea of rejected sets or sets whose purpose wasn’t yet made clear.
Rosie had chosen a spot that she said couldn’t miss. And for a Red Diamond player, intel was everything. Each location selling cards is scrutinized for their card-type diversity and quality of packs. There was no rest for the connoisseur looking to extend their decks in the current meta-space.
The location she had picked out was up in her part of town. There wasn’t much in the East-side that you couldn’t find in the West-side, except for in this case, a few smaller shops that were a remnant of the historical layout of the city. Mostly they were smaller dives with a musty smell and poor lighting, but for the fledgling Red Diamond connoisseur they could be veritable diamonds in the rough. It was exciting to see what Rosie had been going on for, for a week at school. She had stumbled across this area purely by accident, getting off the commuter bus a stop or two late.
“Goldmine!” she had said, “Packs from every set thrown about randomly as if they didn’t have a difference in value.”
You knew it when Rosie was intimately excited by something as she’d jab at you until you were too. Packs were expensive and a mistake like this would have cost the negligent retailer dearly. Rosie was in it for the score.
