I never found the man inside you, it’s true.
Yeah, I've got the rockaway blues.
20.8k words… someone shoot me if I ever try to do something like this again.
A humongous thank you is in order to 
Gawain777 for being willing to crit this absolute monster of a piece. Seriously, thank you homie.
A second, even bigger one, is for 
Vishardsh for her Ironband canon, her willingness to throw together a rough canon lore doc for me, answering my endless questions, and also critting it. You are the hero of this piece.
This is a piece that's occupied my thoughts for a long, long while now. I've wanted to do a dialogue focused piece around a game of poker for a good while, and that happened to collide with my desire to make an Ironband piece around February of this year. Thus, this monstrosity. I hope you enjoyed reading it because otherwise I will have wasted so much of your time. (And if I did, I apologize!)
- This was originally going to be titled "ANOVA" but I thought that "Four Flush" sounded a bit better and wasn't a reference that would escape most people.
- The art style of the playing cards is a bit divorced from my usual style. I knew I wanted a simple, angular style for them and it ended up becoming an homage to a good friend from high school, closely mimicking my memory of his style somewhat. You'll likely never read this, but if through some wild cosmic serendipity you are, howdy Noah! Miss you man.
- If you're curious, here's the template sheet for the face cards. (The image is a bit blurry since it's a screengrab of the drawings as I had them in multiple layers and it's zoomed in.)
- A majority of the hands in the piece were drawn randomly with the help of https://deck.of.cards/old/. Of course, occasional tweaks and scripted hands were used, but most were actually random. (Clicking the four Kings adds three Jokers to the deck— the Thaumaturges— which means the digital deck had a slightly higher chance of producing a wildcard than the deck in the story, but here's my thoughts on that discrepancy: I do not care.)
Oh, also, all drawing are by me and released under CC-BY-SA 4.0. Alright that's it now bye.
