Once outside of the room, I took Blackys card —to which he had returned— and shook it violently.

“We need to do something about her! She is eating my things,” I whispered aggressively.

“She is your property,” Blacky stated, calmly.

“She is a… cowperson.” For a few seconds, the hamster inside my skull considered exercise dignifying and walked on the wheel. “Does that mean she has no human rights?” I asked with a mischievous smile.

“Human rights don’t exist here, to begin with. But yes, you opened her from a pack, she is wholly your property. “

I walked down the hall several steps so the cow girl would not hear us.

“I could use her to satisfy my baser needs…” I began.

“Yes, that’s the intended purpose of pack-companions…”

“Is she free from disease?” I proceeded with my vile line of thought. I had needs to fulfill. Ones that couldn’t really wait.

“All companions are untarnished at the moment of opening them from packs.”

“No, I mean prions.”

“Prions, sir?” Blacky asked, tilting his whole card as if it were his head.

“And salmonella and shigella and similar bacteria. Do I need to cook her first?”

Blacky turned, jumped out of the card, rested his body on the floor, crossed his forepaws, and then tilted the head. “You want to eat her?”

“She is eating my things, she is technically not human and she could provide several days or weeks of high quality beef. Where is the kitchen?”

“You need to open the Kitchen from a card pack, Sir Mauro,” he informed plainly, as he always did. One could notice Blacky was also tired of the rules of this reality. “Furthermore, companions are inedible. They poof away if they die.”

Defeated and with the stomach growling I let myself fall sitting to the floor.

“I still need to sacrifice her for something worthy to not feel bad. I cannot just stab her and call it a day, Blacky.”

“There’s always the pack-contents-crushing-machine in the store. You can destroy anything you get out from a pack in it, and you receive Omnitreats in exchange, and—”

“Omnitreats can be used to craft any card I want, right?” I interrupted him, grabbing the skin form the corners of his mouth and pulling.

“Any pack content you may want, sir. But it’s not cheap.”

I released Blacky’s face from my grasp.

“Who cares? She consumes resources as is, but can be made into resources with that machine. Furthermore, she is clearly not human and I have serious doubts about my safety around her. Who assures me she won’t try to eat me?”

“She can only eat you if you order her to, Master,” Blacky clarified. That was more worrying than tranquilizing. How did Blacky have an answer like that? Had companions devoured other players in the past?

“I cannot decide if this place is hell, purgatory, or merely an Argentinian-state-run heaven. What do you mean I can order her to eat me?”

“Well, there is this famous incident involving a catgirl, gonads and slang for certain sexual act.”

I felt my balls climb to my throat. “It’s one of those ‘careful what you wish for’ situations, isn’t it?”

“Some companions are very literal minded,” he confirmed.

“Then it’s decided: we will crush her to make new cards.” I turned hundred eighty degrees, and then after a second, did it again to face blacky once more. “Just out of curiosity, are you crushable?”

For the first time since I died, Blacky hesitated.

“No…” he finally said.

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“I will take your word for it.”

I went back into the room and found her thoroughly enjoying the cottony flesh of my innocent pillow.

“Hey, what’s your name, companion?” I demanded, trying to put on a façade of authority that wouldn’t crumble at the minor amount of questioning.

“I need you to provide one for me, muuu.”

“Vacatrola is your new name. Your first order is to follow me, Vacatrola.”

Blacky sighed. “You are aware that I am a polyglot, right, Master?”

“But she isn’t.”

“Muuu, I will follow, muuu,” said Vacatrola, who walked up to us with a step full of energy and happiness.

And she followed. She followed me as I followed Blacky down the red-carpeted halls, in direction to the shop. She didn’t question, she just marveled at miscellaneous items: lamps, stains in the carpet, the weird Borzoi shaped statues that seemed to change position every time I saw them. The statues were made of a substance resembling Marble. Vacatrola took a chomp out of one statue’s back. You could hear her chewing on the stone as we kept on walking.

Not even an hour before those moments I had thought that the Clerk was the scariest thing in that dimension. How wrong I was.

I had never considered how dangerous a cow with teeth with diamond enamel, it seemed, could be. Yet then I realized cows, dear reader, are a dangerous thing. We are talking, like, eight-hundred kilograms of cute hatred for humanity and peak methane production biotechnology. There are videos of cows eating live chickens. Just imagine it. A second you are a small chick following momma hen, and then you get abducted by this fat milk factory that aliens love to leave exsanguinated in the middle of a field. And she swallows you, the chicken, alive, because her teeth crush but don’t dig into your flesh like those of a traditional, honest to God predator. That’s how evil cows are. Don’t expect me to trust a woman that’s half-cow. “Monster girl” fits these nefarious beings like a glove.

If I have to say something positive about them, though, beef is a godsend.

We finally arrived to the store, and the bell made the clerk rise from behind the counter.

“This one is… rather quick, isn’t he?” the Clerk said, smiling and showing all of this sharp, metallic teeth.

“The cow girl is still a virgin,” Blacky answered immediately.

The information staggered him visibly, and he grabbed his chest as if he had received a harsh blow on it.

“Impossible. Is he… a lolicon?” he stuttered.

“No, I am just level headed. And she has horns. And hoofs. And eats everything.”

“Gay?” he asked, and produced a small pride flag from below the counter.

“No…” I spat, my eyebrow twitching.

“Furry?” The Clerk continued being a jerk.

“Listen, I like women, but they don’t interest me in the situation I find myself in. Less so when they are half-farm-animal women.”

He inspected me with eagle eyes, from head to toe.

“You can pull a closet from the packs,” he concluded.

“Vacatrola is… not my type, Clerk.”

“Muu mu mu!” Vacatrola nodded.

“And what do you want to do with her?”

Blacky remained silent. I felt the sweat gather on my brow. How does one tell a murderous robot-boxer-bartender that you want to turn a living, breathing girl into dog cards?

“Well, I need new cards, and I have no money… and Blacky told me there was a sort of … process to get cards that involves her and a machine.”

The clerk smirked and took out the dice cup. It was full of D-20s.

“The drink It’s on the house.”

“Humans don’t drink dice, Clerk,” Blacky reminded him.

“Want to eat lead, punk?”

Blacky jumped out of the card. I sighed, covered my ears, and hid behind Vacatrola, because she was rather plumpy and probably bulletproof enough.

He was going to die again.

I watched in horror as my guide snarled and the Clerk produced something heavy form under the counter. Then, in his hand, a cream-colored blur appeared, and after the fast movement to place her over the counter, it resulted to be only a cute, innocent blonde girl in a pink dress with a long, puffy skirt.

I left my hiding spot and approached her with caution. The girl breathed. She was wholly real, which was a bit unsettling, but nothing compared to the prospect of a shooting.

“How is she called?”

“I am Lead! May the Lord bless you,” said the child.

Blacky trembled with the tail between the legs.

“It’s just a little girl, man, what’s to fear?” I said, poking the girl’s nose.

She got her hands under the skirt and produced a couple of long-barreled revolvers. “I am from Texas.”

Then Blacky got demoted to a Chicago gang member of the unlucky variety.

“I shot the mastiff,” she said.

“It’s a Schnauzer,” I corrected the girl wielding two guns, for lack of one.

“Bless your heart.” She turned towards the Clerk “Can I shoot him?” she asked. the Clerk stashed her back under the counter and dusted off his metallic claws.

Blacky lay dead by my side.

“He needs you to care about him to go to the rainbow bridge, now that you know he revives. Rule of max drama or something,” the Clerk informed.

“Is that stablished by the universe or a caprice of him?”

“Caprice. Will you leave him there?”

“No, there is… something to do.”

I lifted Blacky’s mangled body on my arms, and, damn, the motherfucker was heavy.

Ceremoniously I carried him outside the store, into the bridge-way across the sea of darkness. And at the border of the path, as vertigo invaded my senses, I yeeted my guide into the abyss and proclaimed some words I had always wanted to say:

“Bid thy wincon farewell!” And then I proceeded to laugh like an aristocratic brat who likes aristocratic bugs.

It was hard to follow Blacky’s bloodied corpse as it fell, with him being black and not contrasting with the abyss.

“Nuuuu,” said Vacatrola. I had to caught her from the tail so she didn’t jump into the void too.

“No, Vacatrola, he’s gone. But you still have a long life ahead of you,” and then, I dragged her back into the store.

“Ready to meet the machine, Mauro?” said the Clerk.

I nodded, excited because the cowgirl was about to undergo the most radical “beefore and after” weight loss progression in history.

The Clerk beckoned to follow him behind the counter, and when we did, he led us to a door that had “Deck of Dogs” written with the paintings of different breeds performing tricks. It was like the card backs of the game.