Two hours later, he left just over five hundred dollars ahead and far more confident of his abilities. He was also mentally drained and had trouble keeping his eyes open during the drive home. Fortunately, he was back relatively early, and his parents didn’t give him the third degree over where he had been or why he had been out so late or anything. A quick hey and yeah, I had dinner, was enough to let him get to his room, where he collapsed on the bed and woke up the next morning still dressed in the clothes he had been wearing the previous evening! Magic sure was draining! He practiced more during the week, trying different things without much success. He returned to the casino the following Friday night and made a thousand dollars before quitting, and then he worried about being too obvious in the small local casino room.

Over the next week, he checked out all the casinos in San Diego and played all the roulette tables that were available very carefully, even the ones with double zero. He worked hard at making sure he was hiding his ‘good luck’ by not winning much in any single session and appearing to lose bets frequently. He camouflaged it well enough that none of the suits in the pits paid him the least heed. By the end of the week, he was up nearly five thousand and having trouble containing the excitement he was feeling! The hardest thing was not showing off! Man, that was hard. He had to be so careful of his own actions and reactions. He was worried that they’d ban him or something if the casino staff twigged. He tried to keep a serious, calm demeanor throughout, but it was hard to resist jumping around and ensuring everyone knew he was winning!

Realizing he would do something stupid if he kept going, he took the next week off. He told his parents he had been playing poker and had made a few bucks to explain the extra money he clearly had. His dad gave him a quick lecture on gambling, about not getting in too deep and quitting while he was ahead, while his mum voiced her general disapproval of gambling as well, but neither asked him to stop. He suddenly realized that, somewhere along the line, they had started to see him as an adult. Instead of telling him what to do, now it appeared that they would advise him when they thought he needed advice but would no longer forbid him from undertaking things they didn’t want him to do. Hmm. Interesting. One benefit of his Doctorate, he supposed.

He used the week to catch up with friends, went into the university, and caught up with his former fellow students, those that were there anyway. On the next Friday, he received an email from Franny telling him about a new site in Britain on Hadrian’s wall she was going to join the dig on the following year. She had apparently been invited by the head of the research team as a welcome to the faculty thing even though she was just a junior lecturer. The fellow was head of Classical Studies at the university where she had managed to obtain a limited teaching gig. Good for her. Oh. There were still numerous spots for volunteer workers, but why invite me? He puzzled over this for a bit as his field was Minoan and Mycenean studies, not Roman. Ah. He twigged when he reread the cryptic middle part. Someone wanted to meet him, probably that girl he had seen in the video call. She was going to be on the dig, he guessed. Hmm.

Better late than never – sorry people

He refused to give up and kept trying endless different methods and ideas while getting increasingly frustrated in the process. Eventually, he gave up for the day and didn’t return to the roulette wheel until the following morning after his folks had left for work. The previous day, he had brought the wheel downstairs and put it on the dining table after he had used his dad’s spirit level to check it was level. He repeated this positioning, idly spinning the wheel and ball until the answer suddenly hit him in the face. Individual numbers might be hard to pick, but colors weren’t! Every second slot, the color alternated! In no time at all, he was slotting the ball into either red or back with, if not with ease, at least with considerable reliability. On top of that, there were plenty of times the ball flopped in the color he wanted without him actually doing anything to help it, which stood to reason as it should land in one color or the other roughly fifty percent of the time anyway.

He practiced all day, most of the next, and by late on Friday, he was confident he could cause the ball to flop into the next number often enough. Not every time, and sometimes it bounced two or even three numbers further on, but he could do it often enough that he was becoming increasingly sure of beating able to beat the house betting red or black. He hoped. Unless there was some pitfall he wasn’t aware of when it came to a real casino’s roulette wheel. He thought of the horror stories one heard of people who got too lucky getting taken out the back and beaten up, but he was pretty sure they were just stories. They were perhaps based on things that happened back in the old days. These days he imagined the problem would be that if one casino twigged and barred him, then all the casinos would know n no time flat! No matter. He would be careful and not win too much.

On the next Friday night, after some research, he borrowed dad’s truck to “go out” and went to the Barona Casino because they had single zero roulette wheels at that casino. He fought his way through a gaggle of people to a point where he had a clear view of the wheel. He decided to go for red for the next ten spins and then black for ten. Of course, from a random number point of view, the sample was way too small but still. He managed five reds in a row, one black, then four reds out of the ten red spins. He then managed six blacks before missing and then another six before stopping. Right. Time to put his money where his newfound magic was!

He pulled twenty bucks out and put it down on the table. The dealer gave him four five-dollar chips, and he put two on red, the minimum bet being ten dollars. He was nervous as all hell, but the ball lobbed straight into a red anyway! Huh. He doubled up his bet, and, this time, he had to push the ball on and got red again. The butterflies were almost too much as he moved down to the board and picked up twenty dollars giving him ten dollars in winnings. He managed another red and collected twenty more, after which he backed off and stood in amongst the small group watching the table and didn’t try to influence the next spin, which came up black. Still, he had thirty dollars profit and had proved his idea. Probably. The whole experience of using real money on a real wheel had been so nerve-wracking that the butterflies in his gut were only now subsiding! What he needed to do right now was to sit down to get over the bad case of the shakes!

His folks started hinting about what he planned to do next. Did he envision an academic career or something else? Or at least they attempted subtle questions along those lines. He rather thought they were hinting they wanted him to tell them he was getting a job. He gathered they’d be happy with him getting any job! The truth was that he had no plans, not really. Everything had changed. He wanted to study this strange magical ability he had acquired, but he realized that to be able to do that, he had best come up with some way of making money. And some method that gave him a sizable income for as little work as possible so he could spend his spare time on the magic stuff. So, what could he do? At first, he had no idea of what he could do to earn money and how his newfound abilities would help him earn a living.

Three days later, he was trailing his folks around the mall, and they happened to pass a games shop. He begged off following them on their errand and agreed to meet them in the food court up the way. While walking past the shop, he noticed a roulette wheel and had an idea. He entered the store and found a spot where he could see the roulette wheel better and decided his idea looked like it was maybe workable. After contemplating the roulette wheel for a minute or two, he asked the shop attendant if he could get a close look at the mini-roulette wheel they had in the window. Okay. Casinos all around the world had roulette wheels, and they were famed for being unbeatable. There was a spell idea he had been fooling around with that might just be usable on a roulette wheel. He spent a good amount of time studying the mini-roulette wheel, and in the end, he spent nearly sixty bucks buying the thing.

During the next week, while his parents were at work, he experimented with the roulette wheel. Of course, it was much smaller than a real one, and the ball was much fiddlier, but he practiced and practiced trying to make the ball land in a particular number. At this, he failed dismally unless the wheel turned so slowly that it almost stopped. He seriously doubted that casinos would let their wheels get that slow. No matter what he tried, he just couldn’t get the ball to land in the number he wanted reliably. After a week of disappointment, he was about ready to give up on the whole idea. Instead, he took a break from it for a couple of days while playing around with other stuff. He worked on the translocation speel, which was what he started calling the spell that moved things. He could only move one thing at a time, but if he held something, that object would translocate with him.

Three days later, he sat down and studied the roulette wheel problem again. So, what could he do? He spent another couple of hours trying various things, but the basic problem was that the wheel’s rotation made it too difficult to focus on any one number as it whizzed around. Or even a number type, as in a big number or odd number. He could sort of pick out single digits as the wheel spun, but they were so spread out around the wheel that it was still hard to get the ball to stop in one. He would probably make money if he tried betting on the single-digit numbers, but it was erratic. At least on this small roulette wheel.