"Sure thing, Manny, let me know how it goes! Thanks again for the tamales."
I closed the door to my apartment as my guest walked out, then sighed tiredly and turned to plod back to the kitchen. A large ziploc freezer bag sat waiting for me there, steam fogging up the interior, holding a promise of dinner tonight, lunch, and possibly even dinner again tomorrow depending on how hungry I was between now and then. I grabbed a beer from the fridge, extracted a corn-husk-wrapped treat, and popped the can as I sat down on my couch.
The tamales were a payment for services rendered. While I did also accept money in exchange for my talents - as well as performing "real", if not terribly steady gig work - my rates always varied with my clientele. In this case, Emanuel Sainz was a neighbor, from an apartment on the other side of the building, and the consult in question didn't take long, so my rates were low. Also, his mother's tamales were worth their weight in gold, so it felt like a fair exchange: my magic for hers.
Admittedly, in this case I didn't think that she actually literally used magic. So far as I knew. As I bit into an unwrapped, still steaming tamale, I groaned happily and reminded myself that I did not, in fact, have real certainty that his mother did not use magic. I, on the other hand, very much did. Nearly my entire family possessed what the greater magical community apparently referred to as "minor talents". So minor, in fact, that we were not generally welcomed into the arms of the magical community at large, and I had never spoken personally with anyone other than a fellow fringe dweller to validate that was the term. For all I knew, they called us "squibs" or something equally ridiculous and pop-culture-y. These days, though, maybe not..
My talent was a bit of an odd one, but once I understood it well enough to judge, I always felt that it suited me. Taking a little time, energy, and concentration, I had the power to assess the range of possibilities that could result from... almost anything. If you shuffled a deck of cards, and told me to pick one at random, I could tell you that you had about a one in fifty two chance to pull the ace of spades. I could tell you that without using my power, because I graduated high school and had a pretty decent understanding of statistics, but I could tell you more or less the same thing with my power. The information wouldn't look quite the same, since to me that would look like a crystalline red field with just a hint of blueish green, rather than a specific number, but by now I had a good enough feel for the results of a power check to know what that meant.
Moreover, I could give a semi-decent lay of the odds for almost any situation I considered, with the accuracy of my reading - my "portent", as my nerdy father described it - increasing as my understanding of the situation got better. If a random stranger off the street asked me what the chances were that they would make it to work and back safely, I could give them a quick and dirty answer that probably didn't fall too far from an actuarial table. If I knew what they were driving, and what route they were taking, my portent would map closer to reality. If I knew them personally, and had driven their car, and the route they described, my results would be more accurate still.
Unfortunately, that's why my talent was regarded as distinctly "minor" on the grand scheme of things. In order to more accurately predict anything, to give better odds of success, I had to understand so much about the circumstances I was predicting that my ability became less of a scrying of future events, and more about pointing out the obvious.
Much of that came down to human free will. The one area that I'd always been relatively consistent with is predicting events that appear to an outsider to have a large degree of random chance, but that in truth are predetermined. Humans shuffling cards have a great deal of impact on the outcome of the deal of a hand of poker. A fully stand-alone electronic slot machine that relies entirely on its internal programming to generate results has no free will, and the only human intervention is down to the person pulling the lever. Even that has some impact on the results, though, which precluded me from making it rich anywhere in Vegas. There was also the issue of the Vampire Mafia. Apparently they frowned on any degree of "gifted" individuals intervening in their turf. I hadn't found that out for myself, having never been to Vegas, but my aunt was pretty clear it wasn't worth the risk.
Sometimes, though, someone wants to know the spread in front of them. Manny was an enterprising entrepreneur who wanted to get out of apartment life and 9-5 jobs, so once every couple weeks, he would engage my services and ask me what the odds of a new hustle panning out were. We would shoot the shit for an hour while he laid out his plans, and at the end of it, I would tell him what his chances were. He'd bring me some of his mom's cooking. I had a pretty similar setup with about a dozen other folks. Some of them I charged cash, some favors, and a few of them I offered the service for free for one reason or another.
I was just putting away the remaining tamales and deciding between video games or Netflix for the evening when a knock derailed my train of thought. I closed the fridge and ambled over to the door, peering through the peephole before letting whoever was on the other side know whether I was home. On spying the lovely face of my very pretty landlord, Sara, I paused. As far as I knew, I was up to date on my rent - probably - and she and I didn't normally talk casually. Sara didn't entirely buy into the awesome powers of my talent, but she was superstitious enough that on months when I might have come up short, she was willing to accept a trade of my services for the amount I was missing. That may have just been her way of offering me charity, but as long as the late payments didn't show up on my credit report, I was happy.
I paused for just a moment to consult my gift before opening the door. Engaging with people in real time was one of the ways my talent was weakest. People's moods fluctuated pretty rapidly when they were socializing, and while some outcomes were relatively fixed - groping a girl at a bar would lead to a bad end ninety-nine times out of a hundred - most had at least a little wiggle room. Worse, it wasn't as if I could look through all of the possible outcomes of a conversation and pick the one I wanted. What I got instead was more like a rainbow graph, with certain areas highlighting more vividly as I contemplated what I might say.
None of the standard greetings I might give flooded my mind with dangerous crimson, so I opened the door and gave my best winning smile. "Hey Sara! What can I do for you?"
My landlady was short - barely five-two - slender, and young, with dark hair tied back in a relatively severe ponytail. She was hispanic - I was pretty sure her parents were from Mexico, but we weren't 'talking about family' close, so I wasn't exactly sure of her nationality. She was also tasked with extracting rent from a collection of low-income losers who couldn't pony up the funds to find a better place to live. In order to encourage those of her tenants who would just as soon not pay their rent, the young woman generally adopted a largely stern, business-like manner that spoke of her resolve and position of power. Today, however, her eyes were wide, and rather than boring a hole through my head, they darted around the inside of my apartment the moment the door swung open. While Sara rarely shouted, her voice normally carried, which made the faltering way she asked me, "Hey Jack - mind if I come inside for a minute?" stand out even more.
"Yeah, of course - come on in." I stepped back and gestured inside, pointing towards the kitchen. I watched the brunette as she stepped through, taking a moment to admire the way her pants hugged her backside. Sara was fit, and while she and I had never been involved - nor had she given me so much as a hint that she was interested - she was worth checking out. Her hips swayed gently as she stepped over to lean against the kitchen counter, and it was only an unprompted flash of red from my gift that ensured that my eyes met hers when she turned around, rather than being caught blatantly in the act of looking at her ass. She took a deep breath as I closed the door and turned back to face her, clearly steeling herself, then spoke quietly.
