4,917 Lottery Tickets Win on Triple Zeros in Carolan Reach

At roughly the third bell after midnight, the Carolan Reach Schoolhouse Raffle Office announced that the night's lottery drawing had come up triple zeros, and that 4,917 tickets had allegedly won. That is a lot of winners for one set of bones. The Lower City, where I keep my sources, has talked of nothing else since.

The Raffle Office runs a daily game called Pick-Three Bones, in which three numbered knucklebones are rolled and anyone who guessed them in order collects. On Monday night all three bones landed on zero. Each winning ticket pays 500 gp or 250 gp, depending on whether the player wagered a silver or two. The total bill comes to roughly 1.7 million gp. The Office says it will pay every coin. Allegedly cheerfully.

'Triples are combinations of three of the same numbers,' an Office spokesperson explained, in case anyone was confused about what a triple is. 'They are some of the most popular sets of numbers among players.' This is apparently the reason so many ticket holders chose them. It is also the reason the Office now owns a very large debt.

I tracked down Marlo Pettibone, a Lower City cobbler, who was holding a sausage on a stick when I found him. 'I play triple zeros every night,' he said. 'Eleven years. My wife says it is a sickness. My wife is now getting a new roof.' He then asked me not to print where the roof will go, and I will not, except that it is allegedly the one over the Copper Kettle.

Not everyone cheered. A sour man in a good hat from the Tower District sniffed that the whole thing 'smells like a rigged die.' The Office denies this. The bones, it says, were inspected by three clerks and one goat, all of whom signed.

Anyway. There was a really lovely silver button in the gutter outside the Raffle Office, and I spent a good ten minutes with it. Where was I. Right. The odds.

Nobody printed the odds, so I asked a tavern bookmaker, who said, 'Low.' I asked another, who said 'also low, but people love zeros.' Between them they seem to have worked out why a realm of gamblers keeps backing the same boring numbers: it feels like a secret and everybody has the same one. A pigeon watching from a ledge appeared to disagree. I did not engage with the pigeon.

The Office says the winners can collect at any raffle counter in the Reach, and the schoolhouses that the lottery funds are expected to stay open. Allegedly. Meanwhile, 4,917 households are lighter by one lottery ticket and heavier by a few hundred gp, and one cobbler's wife is reading roofing catalogues.

— Skritch, on the beat (allegedly)