LJ Idol Week 11, in which the joker is most definitely wild
One day the gods were sitting in a dusty saloon on the wild western outskirts of Mt. Olympus (C'mon, you'd get tired of all those prissy hipster bars serving nectar and ambrosia too). Naturally, Dionysis was tending bar. Apollo had somehow rigged a keyboard into his lyre and was playing a bouncy tune while the nine muses took turns dancing on the counter. Hera stood in the corner, smoking a cigar and eyeing them all with a fairly intense level of disgust as Zeus looked on, eyeing them with a different emotion entirely.
The other chief Olympians sat around a table toward the back of the smoke-filled room, drinking a wide variety of questionable substances and taking in the scene around them. One of them had produced a deck of cards and proposed a friendly game. Hephaestus had voted for poker, and Poseidon had naturally wanted to play go fish, and all of them were relieved that Artemis was someplace else because all she ever wanted to do was shoot the moon.
But the more pressing issue is that actual decks of playing cards had yet to be invented (yes, I know what the previous paragraph just said, but nitpicking timelines is for mortals), so the Olympians had to take care of that little detail before they could decide on a game to play
Athena, the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy, started by reaching for the stack of perfectly blank cards in the center of the table. "I will begin by arranging them into four suits and sort them by ordered rank," she said. "Then a player can have an entire army divided into four platoons with which to strategically conquer an opponent!"
"Oh, how wonderful," said Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She took a sip of her strawberry mimosa and giggled. (Don't ask how she got a strawberry mimosa in a dusty old saloon. It's just one of those goddess things.) "Eros, dear, come here," she called out to her son who was busy getting into a drunken shoot-out with several centaurs who'd escaped from their hitching posts outside. "I need you to work some magic."
Athena rolled her eyes at the flurry of poorly aimed projectiles sailing to and fro. "Amatures," she muttered under her breath. "When I get involved in scuffles like this, Nobody wins."
Aphrodite took another sip of her mimosa and hiccuped, thoroughly ignoring Athena's comment and grabbing approximately a quarter of the cards from the grey-eyed goddess's hand. She held them aloft then again called out, "Eros!" The pint-sized winged god fired an arrow at the cards his mother held up, and Aphrodite beamed with joy. They were now covered with hearts!
"Oh for..." Athena gave Aphrodite an exasperated sigh and muttered under her breath, "Next time I'm getting Hades to tend bar, and we'll see if you like pomegranate mimosas as much as you like the strawberry ones."
"...What! HEY!!" Persephone indignantly snatched the second quarter of the deck from Athena and waved her magic goddess fingers in front of them. Suddenly, they took on the appearance of small shovels. "If you do that, Athena, I'll use these to help her tunnel her way back up! Mimosas and red frilly hearts in the Underworld, really!"
Seemingly unbothered, Aphrodite took a glimmering jewel from her earring and flicked it toward the third quarter of the deck. The cards immediately became embellished with cheerful looking bright red gemstones.
Athena fixed Aphrodite with a steely glare and began to retort when Ares, the god of war, unceremoniously grabbed the remaining quarter of the deck and barked out, "These are now clubs, and I'll clobber all three of you with them if you don't knock off this nonsense right now!"
"Such violence!" tisked Hermes, "and such a blunt, uncivilized way to deliver a message." He reached into a deep crack in the old wooden table and, from seemingly nowhere, produced four more cards, each displaying one of the newly created suits and marked at the top with an A. "Because all of you are being such A-holes" he said smoothly, placing the cards in the deck.
"We can't call the cards A-holes!" Aphrodite said, aghast.
Hermes sighed. "Okay, fine. Ace in the hole, or just Ace will have to suffice." The messenger god wrinkled his nose. "But some people really do deserve an A hole card!"
"You rang?" another voice spoke from the side of the table. Hades, the god of the underworld suddenly stood next to them. Athena could swear she heard Apollo start playing Grand Illusion on his lyre-turned-honkey-tonk keyboard and she bit back a snort.
The netherworld god seated himself and reached down to stroke all three heads of the loyal dog who'd followed him into the bar. One of the heads was holding a beat up old newspaper, wet with dog slobber, in its mouth. "I think," said Hades, "I can make the perfect contribution."
He pulled the ratty old newspaper from dog's jaw and set it on the table. With a wave of his hand, the soggy paper transformed into a single card with a jester in the middle. "This card," Hades told them, "has no suit and no rank. But the moment it comes into play, it will become the sole focus of the round and beat out everything else on the table."
Athena scoffed. "You can't be serious! I mean, how completely absurd! It's a card made from washed up old news the dog just dragged in. It's the universal sign for fool, it doesn't relate to any of the other cards in the deck, half the time the players themselves won't even know what's going on with it, and the minute it shows up in play, it throws off the entire game, declares itself a winner, and ruins it for everyone else. What in the blazing abyss of Tartarus do you call this thing?!"
And that, my dear readers, is the story of how the Trump card got its name.
The other chief Olympians sat around a table toward the back of the smoke-filled room, drinking a wide variety of questionable substances and taking in the scene around them. One of them had produced a deck of cards and proposed a friendly game. Hephaestus had voted for poker, and Poseidon had naturally wanted to play go fish, and all of them were relieved that Artemis was someplace else because all she ever wanted to do was shoot the moon.
But the more pressing issue is that actual decks of playing cards had yet to be invented (yes, I know what the previous paragraph just said, but nitpicking timelines is for mortals), so the Olympians had to take care of that little detail before they could decide on a game to play
Athena, the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy, started by reaching for the stack of perfectly blank cards in the center of the table. "I will begin by arranging them into four suits and sort them by ordered rank," she said. "Then a player can have an entire army divided into four platoons with which to strategically conquer an opponent!"
"Oh, how wonderful," said Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She took a sip of her strawberry mimosa and giggled. (Don't ask how she got a strawberry mimosa in a dusty old saloon. It's just one of those goddess things.) "Eros, dear, come here," she called out to her son who was busy getting into a drunken shoot-out with several centaurs who'd escaped from their hitching posts outside. "I need you to work some magic."
Athena rolled her eyes at the flurry of poorly aimed projectiles sailing to and fro. "Amatures," she muttered under her breath. "When I get involved in scuffles like this, Nobody wins."
Aphrodite took another sip of her mimosa and hiccuped, thoroughly ignoring Athena's comment and grabbing approximately a quarter of the cards from the grey-eyed goddess's hand. She held them aloft then again called out, "Eros!" The pint-sized winged god fired an arrow at the cards his mother held up, and Aphrodite beamed with joy. They were now covered with hearts!
"Oh for..." Athena gave Aphrodite an exasperated sigh and muttered under her breath, "Next time I'm getting Hades to tend bar, and we'll see if you like pomegranate mimosas as much as you like the strawberry ones."
"...What! HEY!!" Persephone indignantly snatched the second quarter of the deck from Athena and waved her magic goddess fingers in front of them. Suddenly, they took on the appearance of small shovels. "If you do that, Athena, I'll use these to help her tunnel her way back up! Mimosas and red frilly hearts in the Underworld, really!"
Seemingly unbothered, Aphrodite took a glimmering jewel from her earring and flicked it toward the third quarter of the deck. The cards immediately became embellished with cheerful looking bright red gemstones.
Athena fixed Aphrodite with a steely glare and began to retort when Ares, the god of war, unceremoniously grabbed the remaining quarter of the deck and barked out, "These are now clubs, and I'll clobber all three of you with them if you don't knock off this nonsense right now!"
"Such violence!" tisked Hermes, "and such a blunt, uncivilized way to deliver a message." He reached into a deep crack in the old wooden table and, from seemingly nowhere, produced four more cards, each displaying one of the newly created suits and marked at the top with an A. "Because all of you are being such A-holes" he said smoothly, placing the cards in the deck.
"We can't call the cards A-holes!" Aphrodite said, aghast.
Hermes sighed. "Okay, fine. Ace in the hole, or just Ace will have to suffice." The messenger god wrinkled his nose. "But some people really do deserve an A hole card!"
"You rang?" another voice spoke from the side of the table. Hades, the god of the underworld suddenly stood next to them. Athena could swear she heard Apollo start playing Grand Illusion on his lyre-turned-honkey-tonk keyboard and she bit back a snort.
The netherworld god seated himself and reached down to stroke all three heads of the loyal dog who'd followed him into the bar. One of the heads was holding a beat up old newspaper, wet with dog slobber, in its mouth. "I think," said Hades, "I can make the perfect contribution."
He pulled the ratty old newspaper from dog's jaw and set it on the table. With a wave of his hand, the soggy paper transformed into a single card with a jester in the middle. "This card," Hades told them, "has no suit and no rank. But the moment it comes into play, it will become the sole focus of the round and beat out everything else on the table."
Athena scoffed. "You can't be serious! I mean, how completely absurd! It's a card made from washed up old news the dog just dragged in. It's the universal sign for fool, it doesn't relate to any of the other cards in the deck, half the time the players themselves won't even know what's going on with it, and the minute it shows up in play, it throws off the entire game, declares itself a winner, and ruins it for everyone else. What in the blazing abyss of Tartarus do you call this thing?!"
And that, my dear readers, is the story of how the Trump card got its name.