Erikoinen Kervovasdottir, or Erikoinen-Watches-Skies, b. 457, was one of the most successful flying aces of the Low Imperial Period, and furthermore an extremely well respected game-theorist and -practitioner in her own right, considered a master of the Alchemy tables, Jucker's Dice, and Capture the Crib. She was credited with over a hundred decisive air combat victories, and was in high demand for missions of formation for both her demonstrated skill and her manifest natural luckiness.

Erikoinen's reputation for great natural luck began with an event that might, on the face of it, be taken for an example of bad luck. Her clumsy attempt to smuggle aides-mémoire into a Balogh examining chamber was exposed before she even had a chance to make use of them, meaning that she was forced both to take the exam without assistance and to suffer bodily forfeiture. But as it happened, the version of the exam she received dwelt almost entirely on material she knew exceptionally well, thanks to her longstanding and intense interest in games of chance: questions of probability, the history and science of gaming, the religious significance of chance and divination, and even an essay on the Wager of Hortus. She earned one of the highest Balogh scores ever recorded. As those who invested such things with significance often observed, if it had not been for the delay at the gates, she would not have arrived at the Invigilator's desk at the precise moment that she did, and she would therefore have received an entirely different, and doubtless far less fortuitous, version of the exam.

The episode of her forfeiture was equally well favored. The Wheel of Forfeits fell on finger; the ivory counter fell on one. The dispenser who conducted her forfeit was the oldest and gentlest, the most generous with anelgesonacs, and the most deft hand with the cauterizer. Erikoinen wrote later that she was often grateful for her missing fingertip, finding it far more a boon than a handicap. "For one thing," she observed in her gaming monograph/memoir, Watch the Skies and Your Opponent's Pockets, "it meant that people recognized me wherever I went. My fame proceeded me with every handshake." Some of her contemporaries claimed that it was also the key to her incomparable skill with a tipping dynamo control. Her "little limp," the uneven pressure in her grasp, they claimed, made her impossible to track.

Some claim that Erikoinen's assassination by poisoned cup in 502 was, in fact, a suicide. The main support offered for this claim, however, is simply the quality and consistency of her luck until that time. It is simply impossible, proponents of this theory claim, that anyone with such natural luck as she could fall prey to a scheme that relied so heavily on the victim's predictable behavior. This commenter cannot credit such a superstitious account, especially in the face of a complete lack of evidence that Erikoinen felt any eagerness for her own oblivion.

See also:

Chance

Invigilators

Wager of Hortus