"HOW!?!" the winged horse bemoaned, shaking as his hoofnails dug into the rim of his duel disk. "You've never played this before! You've never planned ahead in your life! So how... HOW... did YOU... beat ME?!?"
Ellen's grin was as wide as it was self-satisfied. "Why, I simply believed in the heart of the c--"
"NO THE FUCK YOU DID NOT!" Max bared his flat teeth, pupils shaking as he stared down at his cards tried to put the pieces together. "There has to be an explanation. Some cheat, or a trick, or..."
"I drew all my cards from the top of the deck like anyone else," Ellen assured. "If I tried to skirt the rules, you'd have called me on it. I even surrendered my RCGs before we started. So give them back. All of them."
"NO!! You CHEATED!! I can... I can prove it, just... give me time."
"There's nothing to prove! Free them, Crawford. They don't belong to you."
He glared across the battlefield, eyes still calculating, until finally he gave a great equine snort.
"Fine. Have them. But know this: if I ever figure out how you beat me... I will have my revenge."
Ellen smirked, and let the conversation die. Volta and Wren fell out of their crystalline prisons, the former snarling and crackling before Ellen raised a hand to stop her.
"Let him go," she said as the pegasus took to the skies. "He's been beaten at his own game. That's going to sting more than any voltage you can pump into him."
Volta huffed. "He deserves both."
"Yeah," Ellen agreed, "but villainy isn't always practical."
"Look at you, getting into the spirit of things!" Wren chuckled. "So how did you beat him?"
"He told me ESP wasn't allowed and I told him I didn't get that channel," she explained dryly. "He basically handed that one right to me."
Volta screwed up her face in thought. "Aren't you terrible at psychic stuff?"
Ellen shrugged. "There's only so many possibilities in a card game, so I don't have to be very good to see the next move or two. All the rest was just luck."
Wren made a face, and Volta voiced the uncomfortable thought that had hit both of them:
"We were really close to dying, weren't we."
"Oh, yeah," Ellen admitted. "'Heart of the cards' is just another way of saying 'seat of my pants.'"
"Cool. I'm gonna go have an existential crisis for a few days."
"See you at dinner Wednesday!"
