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The watermelon had made it into space.
That was the first thing I needed explained.
Not a crystal.
Not a meteorite.
Not some glowing fragment of a dead planet.
A watermelon.
Green rind. Red middle. Seeds. Apparently vacuum-resistant.
Around it floated cherries, grapes, bells, letters and enough blazing stars to suggest somebody had taken an ordinary fruit machine and fired it through a telescope at unsafe speed.
I started with €52.70 and left the stake at €0.60.
There was no reason to challenge the universe immediately.
The watermelon had already survived launch.
The first few spins behaved as if none of this was unusual. A bell landed beside a K. Cherries appeared. Grapes formed a small line. The reels sat inside a bright blue frame while comets and nebulae stretched across the background, making every €0.60 spin look considerably more important than it was.
A watermelon line paid.
That settled nothing.
If anything, it made the situation worse.
The cosmos had apparently accepted fruit as a legitimate celestial category.
A purple Star appeared several spins in.
It acted as Wild, helped a line, then spread downward before the win was settled. Symbols beneath it changed with the same casual authority normally reserved for actual astronomical disasters.
A small payment came back.
The Star had altered part of a reel and accomplished financially about what three decent cherries could have managed by themselves.
That became the early relationship.
The stars looked ambitious.
The money stayed grounded.
Another Star landed later and spread down through a bell and a letter. Better shape. Wrong neighbouring symbols. Nothing useful connected.
The star had just rewritten part of the universe and still failed to organise three objects from left to right.
Meanwhile, the watermelon kept appearing with perfect confidence.
Twenty-four spins slowly took the balance down to €46.10. Nothing violent. A few little fruit wins. One Wild. Another Star that spread beautifully into absolutely the wrong part of the reel.
The background continued promising galaxies.
The foreground kept paying grapes.
A second stretch brought more of the same. One bell line. Cherries. Several letters. A Bonus symbol appeared on its own and looked expensive without achieving anything.
Then two Bonus symbols appeared together.
Still not enough.
The next spin returned to fruit as if the cosmos had simply forgotten what it was doing.
By the time €42.50 remained, the screen had produced enough shooting stars to make a normal night sky look lazy, but the bankroll was still moving in one direction.
Then four Bonus symbols landed.
Four.
The whole celestial fruit bowl finally aligned.
Starstruck opened with ten Free Spins.
That felt appropriate.
The universe had spent the base game decorating itself.
Now it was apparently ready to interfere.
The trigger spin itself found €1.20 through an ordinary line, leaving €43.10 going into the feature.
Then the first guaranteed Epic Star arrived.
Gold and blue.
Much more serious-looking than the purple version.
It landed on reel 2 and expanded both upward and downward until the entire reel was effectively under star control.
Full reel.
Wild coverage everywhere.
No win.
Excellent.
A whole reel had been conquered by an Epic Star and the surrounding fruit simply refused to cooperate.
The second Free Spin brought another Epic Star.
This one spread across a position where a regular Wild already sat.
That mattered.
The Wild was transformed into the spreading Star setup with a multiplier attached.
x5.
Now the celestial event had a number.
A small line passed through it.
€1.50.
That was better, although the scale remained funny.
A star had expanded through a reel, absorbed a Wild, emerged at five times power and produced enough for a coffee.
The watermelon appeared again.
Still alive.
Of course.
At that point I had stopped questioning its survival.
If the stars could rewrite reels, the watermelon could breathe in space.
The next Epic Star spread across another reel but missed anything useful. Then another landed and picked up x2 through a Wild interaction.
That one found a line.
€0.80.
The stars were gradually establishing a hierarchy.
Plain Star: local disturbance.
Epic Star: full-reel occupation.
Epic Star with multiplier: celestial authority.
Fruit: civilians.
A pair of FS Bonus symbols landed together on one of the feature spins.
Two extra Free Spins were added.
The feature had extended itself.
Good.
The cosmos had requested overtime.
The symbols then transformed for the spin evaluation and the reel settled into another small payment.
Nothing dramatic, but now twelve Free Spins were in play instead of ten.
That gave the stars more room to misbehave.
And they did.
One Epic Star landed on reel 4 and spread across the entire column.
A bell changed.
A grape changed.
A K changed.
The reel looked magnificent.
The paylines looked unconvinced.
No useful connection.
That was becoming a speciality.
Supernova Shooting Stars could produce the visual equivalent of a stellar collapse and then discover the neighbouring J was in the wrong place.
Then came the x25.
That one changed the atmosphere.
An Epic Star spread across a reel and picked up a multiplier large enough to make every surrounding symbol suddenly important.
Twenty-five.
The number sat on the star like somebody had promoted it from celestial body to local deity.
Now I wanted anything.
A tiny line.
A miserable line.
Three pieces of fruit holding hands across enough reels to involve the star.
Something connected.
Small.
Very small.
The x25 applied.
€3.00.
Three euros.
The biggest multiplier of the bonus had arrived wrapped in cosmic light, spread through an entire reel and found a base combination so modest that twenty-five times it still looked like lunch.
That was perfect.
The star had brought astronomical force to a terrestrial problem.
The next few Free Spins kept the pattern alive.
Epic Star.
Spread.
Sometimes useful.
Sometimes not.
Another ordinary line.
A little return.
The remaining feature wins accumulated in pieces rather than explosions.
€0.60 here.
€0.90 there.
Another modest Star-assisted hit.
The final total reached €9.60.
Not huge.
Not disastrous.
Just enough.
When the feature ended, the balance returned to €52.70.
Exactly.
The same number I had started with.
That was almost too neat.
Thirty-five paid spins of fruit, bells and wandering celestial bodies had reduced the balance. Four Scatters had opened a twelve-spin cosmic spectacle. Epic Stars had spread across full reels. One had reached x25.
And after all of that, I was back at the exact starting point.
The galaxy had reset the coordinates.
I kept the stake at €0.60.
No reason to raise it after a feature had managed a perfect financial orbit.
The first spin after Starstruck gave nothing.
The second produced a little fruit line.
Then another dry one.
A purple Star appeared and spread downward through a useful-looking section.
No connection.
The universe had gone back to ordinary incompetence.
A bell paid.
Then several spins without anything.
The balance began slipping below the starting point again.
No spectacular failure.
No x25 disaster.
Just sixty cents at a time disappearing while comets continued streaking beautifully behind the reels.
That was somehow more fitting.
The bonus had used Epic Stars to drag the session precisely back to zero.
The base game then resumed charging admission to outer space.
A Wild helped one line.
€0.60 back.
Another Star spread and missed.
Grapes appeared.
Watermelon.
Cherries.
By now the fruit looked completely comfortable in the galaxy.
Maybe they had always lived there.
Maybe Earth had been borrowing them.
The last part of the session returned only €3.00 across twenty spins.
€43.70 remained.
Nine euros below the beginning.
The x25 Epic Star was still the thing I remembered most.
Not because it paid well.
Because it looked capable of bending the universe and ended up producing €3.
The watermelon was still on the reels.
The bells were still floating in space.
The stars were still shooting through the background.
Nothing on screen acknowledged that the cosmos had spent an entire feature restoring my balance exactly, only for ordinary fruit to take nine euros afterward.
The final spin left a watermelon beside a bell and one lonely letter.
No Star.
No multiplier.
No astronomical event.
Just produce drifting through deep space as if that had always been normal.
By then, it almost was.
Somewhere inside Belly Smackdown Golden Gains, a perfectly normal afternoon is being cancelled.