The card table is sticky. Not in a fun way. Someone spilled something, maybe a drink, maybe something else, and nobody cleaned it. The girl across from me, the one with the sharp eyeliner and the bored expression, she just taps her cards on the felt like she's waiting for a bus. Her name is Lena, I think. The game calls her that. She's wearing a leather jacket and this tiny top, and I'm trying to figure out the minigame logic because it's not poker, not blackjack, it's some weird high-low thing where you guess if the next card is bigger or smaller. Real model, they said. She looks like a photo from a phone that got compressed five times, a bit grainy, a bit flat. But the way she sighs when she loses a hand, that's almost real.

I win a round. The jacket comes off. The animation is just a fade, no smooth motion, like a bad manga panel transition where the artist forgot to draw the in-between. Then the top. Then she's just sitting there in her bra, still tapping the cards, still bored. The erotic part is supposed to be the striptease, but it feels more like watching someone undress for a medical exam. I don't know why I keep playing. The card game itself is so simple it's almost insulting, but there's this weird pull, like flipping through a magazine you found under a bed. You want to see the next page even if you know it won't be good.

The second girl, Mira, has red hair and a smirk that doesn't match her eyes. She cheats. I'm sure of it. The game never says she does, but the cards don't add up. I lose three hands in a row and she's still fully dressed, laughing at me. I wish there was a button to call her out, to flip the table, to do something other than just click and guess. But there isn't. It's just cards and clothes and that sticky table. The strip part is the whole point, but the real game is enduring the gaps between, the dead air where a real person would say something. They never do. They just wait for the next card.