We wandered through halls all new. Some of them had plants, plants! Hanging pots with succulents and wide leaved ones. Green, I had missed the color green, few things were green in the manse. Green, for the record, is not my favorite color. That would be blue. Don’t judge me, I was bullied as a child. Because I deserved it, but that’s a story for another time.

There were hanging ferns too. The place smelled suspiciously like dog urine.

“Blacky, do you use this small stretch of plant pots and glass ceilings as a bathroom?”

“No, but other guides do and it reflects in our universe due to the copy-pasting-creation approach of the goddess.”

I realized it was pointless to keep digging on the subject, partly because, were it a lie, Blacky would not admit to it, and partly because it had high chances to be just the plain truth.

We kept on winding down halls. One of them had its walls sketched with dozens of maps of a flat Earth. When I asked Blacky about that, he explained that we had no Maid to clean the drawings of the previous players that lived here. That I needed not to worry about ghosts, because the souls of the dead were thoroughly evicted from the pocket dimensions. That the Cavendish experiment proved gravity works at a scaled far smaller than planetary.

“What was that last commentary about.”

“What shape is earth?”

“Geoid?”

“Wrong it’s…well, yes, it’s Earth shaped. But the point is that Objects in the space tend to round up because— “

“Blacky, I am not a Flat-Earther.”

He sighed and inclined to my feet. “Hurray! Please, don’t die, Smartest One So Far.”

Then I noticed some of the maps had corrections, that not all the handwriting was the same.

“Holy Lord, how many of those madmen did you have to deal with?”

“Five! In a row! For making her angry!”

The Manual manifested in front of us.

It’s not advisable to make me mad. Like Blacky’s, your soul is mine, Player. You both are merely different parts of the battery, and you’d do well in remembering that.

“You… you forgot the Furry emojis.” I pointed out stuttering.

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

OwOh NoWo

“That’s better.”

The Manual poofed away and Blacky returned to his task to, in silence, lead me to the Data Centrer.

----------------------------------------

The place was filled with Hydrofluoric-acid-clear screens. Some may say I have an unusual fixation over harmful, potentially lethal things: Acid, cows, the goddess puns. But no! It’s just a usual fixation. I like being alive, it’s nice, there are good things in life. Card games, for example.

I approached the main screen, floating in the center of the room like a spindle composed of transparent muscle fibers. It contorted in the middle of the room, and it was as wide as three me’s, or two particularly mass-surplused ladies that ask you for your seat when you are coming back from a sealed tournament where you got absolutely shit drops from the packs and are beaten to a pulp by a son of his mother who exhausted the luck of several lifetimes on it and has multiple high-rarity cards to whip your ass with. Like, come on, I had a worse day than you, go be a human pug elsewhere.

Anyway, the thing was that, as the panels of almost-ethereal substance floated around, I walked up to the central screen, which apparently functioned flawlessly despite its weird shape.

“Does this have a keyboard?”

“It reacts to your thoughts, Master.” Blacky informed.

Racial slurs began flooding the screen. I opened my eyes wide from the realization. “Thought-speed slurring… this is great for when you lose against someone.”

Blacky shrugged as good as he could, being a dog. “It’s better for when you win against someone.”

I moved the icons on the screen around with my mind, and they obeyed perfectly. More than shortcuts, they were probably to remind the sure of the functions of the, for the sake of wrong and hurried speech, machine.

“Screen, show me a metagame snapshot. “ I ordered, and I needed not to do so, but I felt more comfortable calling the orders out loud. Mind reading computers are, once you are past the “Quickdraw Mauro, fastest slurslinger in the west” phase, a bit unnerving.

Decks sorted by their winrate and usage appeared. An advertence in yellow leytters against a black background floated above:

Deck names and card lists based on consensus among hundreds of samples. To see tournament winners, will it. To browse some real, random compositions of a given deck, will it.

The decks were listed by use rate in the last tournament, and by winrate, of course. The first place was taken by “Rottenman tempo”. Second place was Scorgi: D. Engine.

“What does the D stand for in there, Blacky?” I asked, pointing at the deck’s line.

“Depression.”

“How many people have suicided to Scorgi players?”

“Countless souls were lost to them.”

We hosted a minute of silence for the fallen.

Third place was Basenji Ramp. Catahoula Concerto was the name of the deck in the fourth place. Mariana combo occupied the fifth. Pug aggro was in the sixteenth place.

“I assume this is for PvP alone, and not for farming the Warden. Is this right, Blacky?”

He nodded, and I began pacing around, hands behind my back. “Then we can assume farming the Warden is an easier task than winnign a tourney, and that, due to the limited selection of decks at each stretch, there must be some sort of optimal strategy to do so.” I turned towards the spindle. “Show me the top Warden farming decks.”

A lists of names followed by “This User’s deck is private” appeared. Some of them had already reached stages nearing eight hundred. fourth and fifth place shifted in real time as I checked. It was a crude competition.

“Let me write a guide.”

A white window with the blinking little bar that informs you that you are capable of writing there appeared before me, and I gave the mental order to close it.

“Guide for Early Warden Farming.”

Zero matches. That is less than one, for all the fellow “math is for blockers” enthusiasts out there.

“Show me all the guides related to the Warden.”

More results than I, as a man with an aggro deck, could count. Seven at the very least.

I picked the “Guide to Surviving in Deck of Dogs: Early Warden Beatings for Steady Income.”