I followed through halls, through flights of stairs, through motley rooms, through an open pathway under a dark, spotless sky, where the road was paved with cards with their backs up. Eventually we arrived in front of a store with neon signs that simply said “Ye olde carde shoppe no scalinge allowede fucke ye.”
I wondered if this world had been particularly crafted to be the most stupid place my mind could conceive. I went ahead, opened the door, ringing the bell, and entered that place that seemed made entirely from sawdust. Actually, when you looked closer, everything, from the stands to the lone electrical tube that illuminated the place, was made from milled cards.
From below the counter arose a boxer-headed figure, dressed as a barman. It was cleaning the interior of a dice cup with circular, deft movements. It was, like The Warden, robotical in nature.
“Hey, Clerk, the prisoner arrived and beat level three of The Warden already.”
“Finally, one that won’t starve,” it claimed, smiling.
“That, we shall see,” retorted Blacky. “Give him the starting packs already.”
The clerk played a bit with his hands, showed them with the fingers spread wide so we would see he wasn’t hiding anything, put on a long sleeved T shirt he hid under the counter, and from its sleeves took out two sealed card packs. He slid those over the counter, leaving them in front of me. Both packs depicted a couple of Pulis swimming in circles, under the light of the dawn, as if they were the yin and the yang. The dogs seemed to be growing siren tails.
“Which card is depicted here?” I asked Blacky.
“Puli-merization,” he deadpanned.
I opened my eyes wide, “Do you hear that? The scratches that come from beyond the walls, the drums of war? That’s Konami breaking through the interdimensional veil to slit your throat with a cease and desist order.”
“Yes, this one is special enough to survive,” said the Clerk. “Open your packs, bucko, I don’t have all day.”
“You do,” retorted Blacky.
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Teeth were shown, barks were exchanged, and Blacky got out of the card, lunging over the counter. They had a bout of approximately fifteen seconds where they fenced with their mouths and bit the air some times. I grabbed the packs and stashed them into the pockets of my denim pants.
“That’s a breedial slur!” accused the Boxer-headed clerk.
“I am breedist! I belong to a glorious bloodline of German Riesenschnauzers!”
“Are you, mutt? Are you?”
“Yes,” Blacky said, wagging his undocked tail. “And even if I weren’t, at least my ears aren’t circumcised.”
They went for another bought, and this time The Clerk let out long, sharp claws and stabbed Blacky through the neck with them. My companion went limp and dropped in the floor like a bag of potatoes, before puffing in white smoke and disappearing.
The Clerk picked the dice cup and began cleaning it once again. “Straight to the rainbow bridge. Cunt.”
“Did you just kill my guide?” I interrogated, an eyebrow askew.
“We don’t use the K-word here, lad.”
“Could you be consistent with your word choice to address me?”
“We don’t use consistence here, champ.”
I placed both hands over the counter.
“Could you stop being contrarian? I was brought here against my will, a dog just got poofed out of existence in front of my very eyes, and you don’t help at all.”
The Clerk slammed his hands in turn. Claws as long as a cellphone dug into the cardmeal. His metallic lower jaw parted as that of a snake. “Listen, boy, keep asking questions and I’ll teach you how to defend Kamchatka!”
I raised my hands in the air and backed slowly. The Clerk calmed down.
“Good. Your guide will come back in short, they never remain dead for long. Anything you want to know about booster packs, legend?”
“You told me not to ask questions.”
“Questions not related to the card game, fella.” He finished cleaning the dice cup and spat a die on it. “Always Nat 20,” he put the cup over the counter to show me.
“So, are there any sort of offers? Structure decks to be bought? Any deterministic way to acquire staples?”
He raised a single finger. “One question at a time, next time. Sometimes some packs go into sale, you are encouraged to check the store every other day. Structure decks are a thing, most of them cost two thousand five hundred GBP. You can destroy cards you don’t want for Omnitreats. Omnitreats, in turn, can be used to craft almost any card you like. There’s your determinism, big wheel.”
“So this is a CCG and not a TCG…” I snapped out of it and asked the important question. “Is there any deterministic way to acquire food?”
“You can drop dimensional expansions from packs. One of them is the restaurant. You can use GBP to buy food there. A waste of good GBP, if you ask me. But you do you, child of the wild.”
“Stop it with the nicknames.”
He smiled with all his teeth, and I discreetly made my way to the door. When I turned, I found Blacky’s card floating in front of me.
“Hello there,” he said.
“How long have you been behind me?”
“Not long, it’s a long way to the Rainbow Bridge.”
“Fine, lead me back to my room, I want to open the card packs.”