Interlude: Buying Coins at the Casino

"Tria, let's go play at the casino, yo!"

"A casino, huh. So they've got that sort of thing too. This is the Royal Capital, all right."

There was an establishment like that in the Royal Capital, so we decided to drop in and play.

"Apparently it opened recently, yo! Said to be state-of-the-art, yo!"

"So, new content! Whew, sneaking in an update where we couldn't see, not bad, devs. Give us a heads-up, though, a heads-up."

"But even if you say a casino opened in the Royal Capital, aren't there way more players who couldn't care less, yo?"

"Why does this game even call itself a social game, anyway."

It's not as if the players interact enough to build a 'society' with one another. Truly a mystery.

"I wonder if there'll be bunny girls? Will there, I wonder!?"

"I want there to be, yo! There ought to be, yo!"

I mean, it's a casino! Bunny girls come standard, just common sense, right!

And so, we headed off to the casino, skipping the whole way there.

 

＊　＊　＊

 

"Doing business in the Royal Capital, where those two aren't around, soothes the heart, it does…"

A certain merchant had come to the Royal Capital.

This merchant's home base was Tsudon. But he was a shrewd operator who had extended his commercial reach far and wide, and he had a branch in the Royal Capital as well.

Thanks in part to the crops grown by the Spirit-Possessed he'd had the misfortune of getting tangled up with, he'd come into a windfall of easy money, so lately he'd been trying his hand at entertainment facilities — casinos and the like.

Today was for an inspection of one such place.

"Well, well, Owner! Here for an inspection?"

"Mm. Is it going well?"

"Yes! They're marvelous, those slots and vending machines!"

The casino's main attractions were machines such as slots and coin vending machines.

The state-of-the-art automatic machines, which made full use of magic-tool technology, required no human hand at all.

You feed coins into the slot machine, and both forfeit and payout are automatic.

And if you run short on coins, you can buy more from the vending machine anytime, right on the spot.

"Right? None of the waiting for coin-counting or cashing out you'd get at a conventional staffed casino."

"Yes. Which means the customer turnover is good, too."

"And it's good that one coin costs twenty copper. There was the matter of the slots needing their own special coins, but…"

"Yes. An optical illusion, I suppose you'd call it. When the number of pieces drops to one-twentieth, a lot of customers seem to bet far more boldly."

Slots where your coins swing up and down in the blink of an eye, and a vending machine that lets you top up the instant you run low. Thanks to this combination, a few minutes came to equal several hours' worth of play at a conventional casino.

The longer you play, the more the house profits. That's gambling.

And where there are people who spend recklessly, one of a merchant's lines of business, moneylending, flourishes too.

Make them spend money, lend them money, collect the money. That loop.

In short, business was very, very profitable.

"With profits like these, I can even meet the outrageous demands of those Spirit-Possessed…!"

"? Owner?"

"Ah, no, it's nothing."

… Business costs money in all sorts of ways.

I mean, well, since he could properly recoup the money from the Spirit-Possessed, the ledger came out in the black in the end. It's just that most of it went to antacids and such.

"Well then, I'll go take a look at the branch. I'm leaving this to you."

"Yes, sir! Understood, Owner!"

And so.

To that very casino, the two Spirit-Possessed came.

 

＊　＊　＊

 

"I'll buy 838,861 coins, yo!"

Standing before the coin vending machine, Alto suddenly came out with this.

An oddly specific number.

"You're buying that many? Do you even have the money?"

"Oh oh oh, don't you know, Tria, yo? If you buy 838,861 coins, you can get them for 4 gold, yo!"

"That's an ancient bug, isn't it."

When a variable's counter goes past its upper limit, it loops all the way around and resets to 0. It starts counting over from 0, so you wind up able to buy them for a price lower than even a single coin's worth.

It's like the moment in a lap race when the leader catches up to a straggler, and for an instant the lapped runner looks like he's ahead of the leader.

In technical terms, this is called an overflow.

That said, this is a thing of the past. It's a bug peculiar to early low-performance games, which had to slash their capacity so severely they'd even skip setting an upper limit. In this day and age it doesn't exist unless someone slips up.

"No way that still works. I mean, 'gold,' so that's four gold coins?"

"I'd rather it be copper, the lowest coin, yo. Well, no harm in trying, right, yo? So then, purchasing… 838,861 coins～"

Alto punched 838,861 into the coin purchase machine. And the purchase price came out to, sure enough… four copper coins.

"Oh, seriously, yo?"

"Hey now, that bug's going way too far."

"What's the harm, a glitch isn't cheating, it's a feature, yo! If it lets you input it but doesn't handle it, that's on them, yo!"

Satisfied, Alto fed in four copper coins and confirmed the purchase.

Instantly, coins came clattering and pouring out of the purchase machine.

"It actually let you buy them."

"Yeehaw! It's like the coin purchase machine hit the jackpot, yo!"

I wondered if all 830,000 of them would really come out. But then it stopped at probably around 10,000.

"Huh, they stopped coming out, yo? I probably haven't even hit 20,000 yet, yo?"

"I guess this machine just doesn't hold 800,000 coins, naturally. Size-wise."

"Tch, what an outrage, yo! And after it let me input it! This is a bug, yo! I demand a fix, yo!"

"The very picture of an entitled complainer, demanding fixes only for the parts that don't go his way."

"Hah, good point, yo. If they patch this, the glitch that lets me buy coins on the cheap might get patched too, yo… I'll keep my mouth shut!"

So saying, she clattered the spilled coins into storage. Just then, a staff member came over.

"U-um, sir…"

"Hm? What is it, yo?"

At Alto's beaming smile, the staff member sucked in a sharp breath. He'd caught sight of the Halo above her head.

This was entirely the establishment's own blunder. Being no more than a lowly staff member, he had no desire to speak up and get himself killed over it.

"… Th-those slots over there are our recommendation!"

"Is that so, yo, is that so, yo! I'll go give them a try right away, yo!"

"Right then, maybe I'll buy some too. This vending machine over here should still have coins in it."

"Hieee!"

— Fortunately, both of them blew every last coin, so in the end the casino suffered no loss.

And by their next visit, this vending machine's defect had been fixed.

"Fast response, yo. Tch."

"Well, nothing to be done about it. Let's give the devs some credit for being competent."

"Whether it's 'competent' when there was a coin-purchase bug in the first place is debatable, yo?"

"For real. Oh, let's play something other than slots today. Last time we got completely cleaned out."

"You said it, yo!"

That day, they bought their coins the normal way, and then lost every last one.