"Hey, don't be so upset."
"I might have beaten you at cards twice, but I earned you quite a bit in drink sales, didn't I?"
Lorne spoke to Kaspars, who stood beside him with a rather sour expression.
"You really weren't cheating?" Kaspars frowned, staring hard at him.
Lorne had won several hands in a row. Although Kaspars had watched his every move closely from the sidelines, he could confirm that Lorne hadn't cheated-or at least, he hadn't spotted any signs of cheating.
"I was just a little lucky." Lorne shrugged. "They're your cards, and you brought the players here. What's there to be suspicious about?"
He drained his beer. These few simple games of cards had given him a rough understanding of how to use a Winner's abilities.
How should he put it? After some basic experimentation, Lorne discovered that manipulating luck was somewhat different from what he had initially imagined.
He found that the "luck" a Winner could accumulate and manipulate was much like a stamina bar or mana points in a game. Its consumption was closely tied to the probability of the event he wanted to change.
And "good luck" was essentially a matter of making unlikely events happen. The less likely an event was, the more "luck points" it took to make it occur.
For instance, guessing the exact number on a die consumed more luck than guessing whether a coin would land heads or tails.
Of course, some things weren't so simple to calculate. When tossing a coin, for example, the first and second tosses weren't entirely independent events. There was some mystical connection between them. As the number of tosses increased, the corresponding consumption also grew. He would need to explore further to determine the exact pattern.
Lorne suspected that if "good luck" worked