Past the doors, we were presented with an abundance of steps arranged in spiral stairs that descended into a blue light. The Clerk tapped his long metal claws against the wall to the rhythm of some song in his head.
Our steps echoed down and up the hole, making the path seem eternal. It wasn’t. It lacked Sandstorm Titan, Champion or Fury, birds not tribe-tagged as Dinosaurs, wording inconsistencies, and players complaining about the newest mechanic on Reddit. It couldn’t be Eternal.
Vacatrola walked behind me and her soft hands rested on my shoulders. I feared for my dear life, stuck between a cow and a hard place, which was coincidentally a murderous business owner.
“Alejandro Sanz,” I finally said.
“Indeed. I like his voice,” confirmed The Clerk. “Remind me to gift you a pack for that. Someday. Not today. Maybe never. But remind me.”
I looked back at Vacatrola like a deer staring at some approaching headlights. “Okay,” I conceded with a tiny voice.
We kept on descending, and, eventually, I realized the stairs worked as a treadmill of sorts, with them moving up in a subtle enough manner with every step you took, making the descent take way more time than it should.
“Why does this move?”
“Helps the obese ones survive,” answered The Clerk.
“Brutal. Whoever designed this place is my idol.”
“She behaves like an idol alright,” The Clerk mumbled just before we abandoned the stairs and we beheld The Machine.
“Muuu, shiny, muuu!” Vacatrola happily exclaimed before trying to extend her hand towards the white-and-blue twister that got unveiled on the cracked out ground ath the base of the stairs.
I stared into the thing, and the hypnotic pattern didn’t stare back into me. I am ugly enough to be ignored by spatiotemporally aberrant abysses. I wanted to stick my hand into it. To eat a part of that magic vortex of doom. It looked mint flavored.
I snapped out of it and stared at the Clerk, expecting him to explain.
He didn’t start doing it out of the blue, so I had to ask.
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“Is this the Machine?”
“No, this is the magical vortex of doom I have as a pet,” he said, and then made a pause. “Of course it is the machine you fool! You need to call it forth, though.”
“How?”
“Pstpstpst it.”
I Pstpstpsted the vortex of ethereal super-menthol toothpaste making the protocol hand motion of pstpstpsting.
I expected a cat of sorts to come out of it. That which arose from the vortex was way worse. Tortured purse dog souls molted out of its surface as old snake skin, and it wore one of those bands with cat ears. It was a giant Labrador, colored the same as the vortex, and it panted happily. Ominous, if you ask me.
“Meet the unmaker, human. This is an ancient creature that—“
“It’s a fucking labbie. I want to pet it,” I interrupted the Clerk.
“No, you will lose a hand or worse. He is made of destructive, highly reactive energy.”
“Master, can I pet doggy?” asked Vacatrola, pointing excitedly at the giant dog made of the stuff of nightmares. I pushed her into the vortex and the Labrador made a quick movement to snatch her, swallowing my companion without much chewing.
Horrid muffled screams followed. She was yelling from inside the dog’s body.
“My hands, Muuu, my hands are disintegrating… my breasts too, muuuu!” she narrated with an above-average concern as she died in some hell unknown to me. “Muu, I have meat under the skin, muuu!”
The Labrador grinned and his eyes shone blood-red. An unbecoming sight, considering the nature of the breed. I knew the son of a bitch was wagging his otter-like tail at the other side of the vortex.
Vacatrola kept narrating the horrors that happened to her inside the vortex.
“I have no muuu and I muuuust muuu,” were her final words. RIP Vacatrola 2023-2023.
“Dust in peace you beautiful leather source.” I turned to the Clerk, who was smiling wide and absentmindedly, as if the sounds of suffering were soothing to him. “Hey, when do I receive material for new cards.”
“You already did. Check your account balance.”
I thought about my account balance, and it appeared before me with golden letters:
GOOD BOY POINTS (GBP): 6
OMNITREATS: 50
“Sweet. How many omnitreats does the highest rarity cost to craft?”
The Clerk let out a defeated sigh. “My Brother in Chis, you have a virtual manual you can summon anytime.”
“Blacky didn’t tell me,” I retorted, engaging defensive measures.
“Blacky, as you call him, has the bad habit of assuming TCG players have an iota of common sense. Being a card store manager, I know that to be not the case. If you are done destroying your belongings, unsummon Muncher, please.”
The clerk began climbing the stairs back up.
“How?”
“Manual.”
“Your mom drives manual!” Defensive measures were overstressed, and emergency ones had to be undertook.
The Clerk clawed his jowls, making the horrible sound of metal scratching metal.
“Reverse the pstpstpst!”
I faced Muncher, who was panting anxiously, and after making the pstpstpst movement with my fingers to figure out how to reverse it, I pronounced the magical words.
“Tsptsptsp!”
The crack began closing and seeing it, Muncher had to squeeze his big head down the ever smaller hole, his skin wrinkling like a meat-mouth Shar Pei as he went back to his toothpaste dimension.
“Good, we can go now,” said the Clerk, and he began climbing the stairs. I followed without thinking much about the muuurder.