Lucy 2: Lucy chooses her first punishment

“What’s a furlough?” asked Lucy while she scratched her temple.

“It’s like when you get fired temporarily but get your job back in a few months,” answered Mia.

“Big Business Mia’s expertise coming in handy!” said Faith, patting Mia on the back. Mia was typically very busy being a businesswoman saleslady thingy–a fact Faith was intimately familiar with whenever Mia blew them off every other weekend back when they lived nearby each other. Faith was just glad someone knew the word. She continued, “I was gonna say it’s a designer fur coat or something.”

Mia shook Faith’s hand off her back. She didn’t want to seem too helpful toward Lucy. All Mia did was define a word, so she didn’t like Faith hyping up the minor assist.

“Well I definitely don’t want my Fabric Furloughed…” said Lucy, “And Undo Unto Others is based on ‘do unto others as they do unto you,’ right?”

“I think it’s ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’” said Sophie.

Faith corrected, “I think it’s: ‘undo unto this conversation please’.” It got a laugh out of the rest of the room.

“Alright, undo unto has officially lost all meaning. Undo unto. Undo unto.” said Lucy. Everyone joined in with chanting ‘Undo unto’. The room was filled with tongue-twisting murmurs that eventually petered out as everyone collectively agreed that “To-un. Do-un.” was breaking their brains a little bit.

Lucy was heavily leaning toward just using her bonus card and skipping her first punishment. She flicked the card a few times while thinking.

Sophie seemed to read her mind, and had a whole strategic spiel ready. The horizontal brunette explained, “The punishments haven’t been too bad so far, but a leveled up one, is that what your bonus card says? It could be horrible. My guess would be that the punishments get worse as we go along as well, so you might want to hold onto that for now and skip a mid-game punishment and then avoid punishments for the rest of the game. Skipping this first one and then guaranteed leveling up your second one could mess you up real bad.”

Sophie’s logic went above and beyond persuading her. Lucy said, “Alright, alright, you had me at The.”

Lucy added, “How bad could a weather girl punishment be anyways? _Wind Advisory_? Is it gonna make me blindly point at things behind me while I talk? Big whoop…”

With no objections, Lucy reached forward and took her desired card. The other two sucked back into the board with a SCHWOOP.

Lucy gulped and read her first punishment aloud, “Wind Advisory. Punishment. The world tilts just so, and suddenly the very air itself plays favorites. Drawn to you, it lifts, flutters, and billows with uncanny devotion at every opportunity.”

Nobody said a word as they all waited for something to happen. They all expected something, but the worst that Lucy noticed was some of the trees outside shaking a little more than they had been today. She wondered if the card just made it a little breezy outside, but she couldn't tell if the slight wind speed increase was her eyes playing tricks on her or not. It could've even been a coincidental natural breeze as well.

Lucy let loose a relieved “phew”.

Faith saw that nothing seemed to be happening and added her usual taunting. She said, “Wow guys I didn’t know we were playing with the fweakin’ wind’s favowite…”

Lucy just nervously chuckled, nodded, shrugged, and passed the dice over to Mia for her turn. She was thankful that her punishment seemingly wasn't activating yet, and was in no hurry to do any testing in that regard.

Mia wasn’t exactly dreading her turn, but she certainly wasn’t looking forward to it. She had a plan in mind for the rest of the game, and they were all about to see it come to fruition if everything went as Mia envisioned.

The Birthday Girl tossed the dice into their tray, ready to get this over with.