Slots and Pachinko (3)
As soon as their shift at the factory ended, Yan and Karl headed straight for the tavern. “Two beers over here!” Karl shouted as he plopped down heavily in a corner seat. Yan took the spot across from him.
“Krruu—!” The moment the mug touched his lips, Yan drained half of it in one go. Karl was doing the same, his eyes already hazy. “Man, I feel alive again,” Karl said, slamming his empty mug onto the table. Color had finally returned to his face.
“Hey, did you see that new guy who started today? Tall as a damn lamppost and clumsy as a baby deer.” Yan chuckled as he shoveled a handful of boiled bean pods—the tavern’s complimentary snack—into his mouth. “That idiot’s something else. The foreman told him to tighten a screw, and he started turning it the wrong way. Kept muttering, ‘W-why isn’t this working…?’ while sweating buckets. I swear…”
“Pfft! For real? Damn, I wish I’d seen that.” Karl slapped the table and burst out laughing. “Judging by those hands, we should get him wasted at the next company dinner. Who knows? Maybe the dwarf blood sleeping in his veins will wake up and he’ll turn into an ace overnight.”
“They say the newbie can’t even hold his liquor. He’ll probably just turn into another drunk. That’s about it.”
The two of them spent a long while cracking jokes at the poor rookie’s expense, using him as their entertainment.
“Gotta… take a piss.” After several mugs in a row, Karl’s bladder was full. His face flushed red from the alcohol as he stood up, mug still in hand, and staggered toward the bathroom.
Left alone, Yan idly fiddled with the empty pea pods scattered across the table. He was just lifting his mug to finish the last of his beer when a loud cheer mixed with disappointed groans erupted from a corner of the tavern.
Yan had been too tired and drunk to notice earlier, but that area had been noisy for a while now. He could even hear a strange mechanical whirring sound every so often. Finally curious about the commotion, Yan picked up his half-empty mug and wandered over.
A crowd of five or six men had already gathered tightly around something in the corner. Peering over their shoulders, Yan saw a bizarre contraption he had never seen before.
“What the hell is that?” he asked the man standing beside him.
The man glanced at Yan, then fixed his eyes back on the machine. “Oh, this? It’s called a slot machine. Apparently His Highness Mikhail made it. Kinda like that gacha thing they did with the Red Label before. If you win, they give you some snacks or whatever.”
Yan craned his neck to get a better look through the crowd. The device was a wooden box about waist height. On the front were three small glass windows, and inside each one, cylinders covered in different pictures were spinning furiously. Bells, lemons, cherries, clovers, jewels, treasure chests, and the number 7.
One of the men yanked the long metal lever on the side. The cylinders spun again with a loud clatter. He stared at the spinning images with a fierce scowl, then slammed the button at the bottom. With a sharp click, the cylinders stopped one by one.
[Bell] — [Lemon] — [7]
Nothing happened.
“Aww, fuck!” the man spat, clearly disappointed.
Yan stood behind the crowd for a long time, watching them play. The rules were simple: insert a coin, pull the lever, press the button to stop. If three identical pictures lined up horizontally, you won. When someone won, a few small brass coins called “tokens” would drop out from the bottom. The snacks you could exchange them for were pretty lame—dried raisins, a handful of berries, some tough jerky, or dried fish. The grand prize was just a single sausage and a beer set.
Yet the men’s faces showed more joy than disappointment. They laughed and shouted like children, riding the highs and lows of every few tokens. The heavy feel of the lever and the razor-thin tension as the reels slowed down seemed to be entertainment enough.
After watching for a while, Yan started thinking he might give it a try himself. That was when one of the men who had been losing nonstop finally exploded.
“You piece-of-shit junk!”
He roared and punched the machine. A loud thunk echoed through the empty space inside, ringing across the entire tavern.
The tavern owner behind the counter immediately bellowed back. “Hey, hey, hey! That thing’s rented, you idiot! You want me to yank that tiny sausage out of your crotch and make stew with it?!”
At the owner’s crude insult, every customer in the tavern exploded with laughter. The man who had hit the machine turned bright red.
Then one of his buddies slapped him on the back and started teasing him. “You dumbass! Can’t you tell this thing can be controlled? Guys with no skill like you can’t do it!”
The man stepped up to the machine with a cocky swagger. “Watch and learn. I’ll show you how it’s done.”
“See that? This is what control looks like!”
The man who had bragged after winning twice in a row and collecting four tokens quickly deflated. After that, he couldn’t hit a single win. His final pull stopped on [Cherry] — [Cherry] — [Lemon]. An agonizing near-miss.
Sympathetic groans and mocking laughter erupted around him.
“Ugh! Must be the weather today. My instincts are completely off,” the man muttered an obvious excuse as he stood up. Outside, the sky was perfectly clear without a single cloud.
His friends immediately started slapping his back and ribbing him. “Bullshit! Control my ass! Go lose some fat on those fingers, you pig!” “There’s not a cloud in the sky and you’re blaming the weather?!”
Amid the loud laughter, the group returned to their seats. Thanks to them leaving, the area around the slot machine cleared up. It was finally Yan’s turn.
He dug into his pocket and pulled out a single one-iron coin. He slid it into the slot, then grabbed the heavy metal lever and yanked it hard. The solid weight felt strange yet satisfying in his hand. With a heavy clunk, the three picture-covered reels behind the glass began spinning wildly.
Yan stared at them for a moment, then pressed the button without hesitation.
Click.
[Clover] — [Lemon] — [Clover]. A miss.
But Yan wasn’t disappointed. It had been so close. Instead, his heart was pounding. The weight of the lever and the tension of hitting the button were strangely addictive.
“What are you doing? You done drinking?” Karl, who had returned from the bathroom at some point, asked from behind him while Yan kept feeding the machine.
“Yeah, yeah, just a second.” Yan answered half-heartedly and dropped in another coin. He was completely hooked.
One one-iron coin let you play the slot machine five times. The device had been built specifically to only accept that denomination.
Second try—miss. Third try—miss. Fourth try—[Cherry] — [Cherry] — [Cherry].
With a cheerful jingle, three tokens poured out of the chute at the bottom.
“Oh!” An excited cheer slipped out of Yan’s mouth before he could stop it. The onlookers chimed in too. “Whoa, you’re on a roll, buddy!”
The brass tokens felt heavy and shiny in his palm. It was just a cheap trinket, but the sense of accomplishment from winning it himself was immense. It reminded him of the Red Label gacha from before. Yan was officially addicted.
He emptied every coin left in his pocket. After using seven coins, he had collected seventeen tokens. His luck seemed pretty good.
“Just a little more…” Yan looked at the prize exchange list. Even the cheapest, lowest-tier item required twenty tokens. He was three short. The thought of chewing on sweet-and-sour berries while drinking beer made his mouth water.
With a regretful sigh, he checked his pockets again, but he didn’t have a single one-iron coin left.
“Hey, Karl,” Yan said, turning around. “You got any one-iron coins?”
Instead of answering, Karl gave him a shove. “Move aside, you broke-ass loser. It’s my turn.”
Before Yan could protest, Karl pushed him out of the way and stood in front of the machine. As if showing off, he pulled out an old leather coin pouch from his waistband. He opened it, grabbed a fistful of one-iron coins, and piled them on top of the slot machine. There were at least twelve of them.
This kind of scene gradually became common not only in taverns but in general stores, tobacco shops, and even the snack counters of history halls.
Since the prizes the machines dispensed were all rather lame, it didn’t create the same explosive frenzy as the previous gacha event. Still, slot machines and pachinko slowly established themselves as casual little pastimes to burn through spare change and kill time.
And so, people gradually grew accustomed to gambling.