"Wow, this is really beautiful," Emily said as she entered the festival area. "Look at all of those lights. It kind of reminds me of my first sect before I died."
"Doesn't it? When I first entered my sect and it lit up just like this, I was reminded of the festival we had near our village too," Alex said.
"Oh, so you are used to going to festivals like this?" Emily asked.
"Oh yes. They take place once every 3 months or so during the change of every season," Alex said. "My father sets up a stall every time to sell some of the homegrown products or find potential customers for a business deal."
"I see. Then you must be quite used to these festivals. What should we do first?" she asked.
"Umm… let's just walk around and see what the stalls have," Alex said and looked through the stalls from the start.
The stalls sold various different things from food to clothes to toys to anything. They came across a stall selling cotton candy.
"Do you want some?" he asked.
"Sure," Emily said. Who didn't like cotton candy?
Alex paid for two large cotton candies and handed one to Emily. She took the blue one and left Alex with the pink one. They walked along with more stalls and tried different foods.
There was candy apple, some dumplings, sweets, fried noodles and many more.
"At this rate, I won't even need to eat anything later tonight," Emily said.
"Me too," Alex said and continued touring.
In another stall, Emily saw a bunch of different types of masks and wanted one. Alex got her a simple mask with a bunny face and ears. For himself, he got a mask that was fully white on the outside with no other design, but he could take it off and wear it inside out.
Once inside out, it would become a fully black mask. Essentially, he was wearing two masks at once. Thankfully, neither his nor Emily's mask obstructed any vision. He looked ahead and saw something that caught his eyes.
"Oh, those are up next," he said.
"Hmm… what are those? People seem to be playing there. Are those games?" Emily asked.
"Yes," Alex confirmed it.
"Oh wow, they have games too? Can we go play there?" Emily asked.
"Let's go somewhere first," he grabbed Emily's hand and pulled her through the crowd. Alex had to search for it for a few moments before he found it. He came up to a machine that had a line of people standing in front of it.
Alex got on the line along with Emily.
When it was finally their turn, Alex said, "Put your ticket in there."
"Hmm… oh, ok," she said and put in the ticket she got from winning bingo. Suddenly, the machine started spitting out small, connected papers, one after another.
"Wait, why are there so many?" she got a little overwhelmed.
"Didn't you get a 1000 points ticket? It will now shoot out 1000 points now," Alex said. He helped her in gathering all those that had dropped on the ground.
"Isn't this too many?" she asked.
"If you aren't very good at the games, it will end before you even know it," Alex said. "Let me get some too."
He put a 10$ bill into the machine and it spat out 200 points.
"Are you fine with that amount?' Emily asked. Compared to hers, Alex didn't have that many points.
"I'll be fine. In fact, even this amount might be too many," he said. "I'm used to the games in the festivals and don't need many turns to win in it."
"Oh, let's see how good you are then," Emily said and walked toward the game stalls with Alex.
The first game she visited was a basketball one where they had to dunk one small-sized basketball after another.
"What do I do now?" Emily asked.
"Oh, just put one end of the ticket in that machine there and it will take in… let's see, 20 tickets per turn, " Alex said.
Emily fed in 60 tickets and started playing herself. A person required 60 points in 40 baskets in 60 seconds to win a minor prize and required 60 points in 60 seconds to win a major prize.
Emily tried all 3 times and the maximum she could score was 23.
"Urghh, I'm really bad at it," she said. "Are you good at it?" she turned to Alex.
"I used to play this at every festival, so I can say that I'm good at it," Alex said. He stood in front of the machine and started throwing the baskets.
The basket was about 5 meters away, and Alex was accurately scoring 3 out of every 4th turn. Emily watched from the size and was awed at the result.
49 points in 60 seconds.
She went to the man handing out prizes and took a small palm-sized teddy bear. "You really are good at these games. You more than doubled my result," she said.
Alex gave an awkward smile and said, "Ah, Y-yes."
Internally, he was very confused. 'What's going on? I should have easily done 60. Why did my aim suffer so much?' he wondered.
Back at home, he played these games at every festival. His family was poor, so he couldn't play a lot, but the times he did play, he won them very easily.
'Damn, sleeping in the bed first, and now the capsule all the time seems to have ruined my body. I should really exercise more,' he thought.
"Alex, you coming?" Emily asked. She was ready to move on to the rest of the games.
"Yes," Alex got out of his stupor and followed her. The rest of the evening, the two people went through almost all of the game stalls.
They played the shooting games, the dart games, the dice games, placing rings around prizes, etc. Any game they came across, they would play it.
Emily had a lot of points and she played a lot. Once Alex's points ended, she gave some of hers to him. By the end, Emily had so many prizes that she had to get a bag to hold them all.
