Kalon’s mind was empty, absolutely devoid of all thoughts. Calm washed over his body, and by his side, Jagger provided snoring dog ASMR. He wasn’t meditating, but rather sitting at long table, surrounded by disciples wearing nose rings in some cases, and robes fit for cows in others. Jagger had fallen in a deep coma after witnessing the foodstuffs, or, as he called it: the foul grass. Platters upon platters of tender greenery were laid on the low wooden table, at a height adequate for the cows to eat comfortably, and for Kalon to sit his ass on the ground.
He tasted the barely edible salad in front of him by grabbing a chunk with his bare hands and chucking it in his mouth, then chewing while processing (In the way the HR department processes my resumes) the sensations in his mouth.
“Messiah intercoursing messiah, stop chewing that stick with the intent of eating itm” said his avatar inside his mind.
“The stick,” began Jaggers personification, lying amidst Kalon’s mental landscape. “Is the one thing I endorse chewing.”
“Enyiel, that’s a very good stick and all, but Kalon lacks the… carnassials for it.”
“Did you just pronounce the abbreviation of ‘not gonna lie’ as Enyiel?”
The Avatar kept his silence with unparalleled jealously.
“Messiah intercoursing messiah, dude,” uttered Jagger, taking a sip of a piña colada that had sprouted upon the dune of mental negative power he was lying on. “I think it’s time I return to my body and bite the boy a bit, for his own good.”
The Avatar, an infinite succession of seven million and thirty-four Rottweiler shaped mirrors, scratched his ear. “Yes, being mauled builds character.”
Jagger opened his eyes in the real world and the smell of cut grass and cattle took control of his nose. It was half as bad as being lockpicked.
“I am told this is food, but my cultivation is too weak to appreciate it,” a dejected Kalon complained, and Jagger decided against biting him… for now.
“Or maybe that’s because it’s plain grass. You could ask for beef.”
Every head in the room stopped doing whatever it was doing and turned their judging gaze towards the talking dog. “It’s not my fault your kind is delicious, people.”
Margarita the cannibal cow hummed in agreement. “We do be, we do be.”
An older cultivator, a black bull that was more muscle than ruminant, raised a well-muscled eyebrow. “Maybe I am delicious. Why wouldn’t I be. The dog is right.”
And when the alpha bull said that, everyone else went back to their ruminations. Nobody dared contramoo him. His name? Sweet Potato. No, no, I am not having a narratorial stroke, he was called like the vegetable. His mother knew how to be a cow that loved sweet potatoes, and wanted to call him Batata, but the local guild of Spanish Basset Hounds took exception to that. “Batata? more like Vacata!” they mocked, and laughed haughtily with J and not with H, like the long-eared aristocrats they were. So she had to settle for the English term.
Sweet Potato —from now on shortened to SP, like the blue mana shit in JRPGs. That’s right, call him Skill points if you feel like it— told them his name and declared in front of everybody how the newcomers were under his protection, and, when everyone went back to minding his own platter, he poked Jagger with a hoof. “Pssst, dog, I saw what you can do to garbs. I have a piece of laundry that I would like you to… process, you get me?”
Jagger regarded him with the stare one reserves for a child whose brainpower can be measured in fractions of Electronvolts. “Why are you all secretive? I just… shake things until they are dry.”
SP’s eyes shot paranoically to the left, and the to the right. “The heavens may fear your powers, dog.”
“I am a glorified clothes dryer,” Jagger stated, proudly. “You know, one of these machines that make drums spin very fast to… dry clothes. I learned from an old and wise one called Bosch. He got isekaied here and kind of went along with it. I guess. He wasn’t one for talking, just for… going brrrrrr.”
“Like Brunhilda?” Asked Kalon, leaving his delectable meal to a side for the moment.
“No, other kind of brrrrr. Brunbrun’s is Burrrr.”
“Right. On top of that, Brunhilda’s rhetoric is peerless.”
Jagger nodded with unwarranted fervor. And then noticed Vacata was still waiting for an answer. “Bring me the piece, I will dry it like a vampire a pint of oil.”
“Vampires don’t drink oil, they drink blood,” Kalon noted.
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Jagger blinked, dumbfounded. “So all of those films about vampires drinking black liquid from cups…”
The bull gave a nuzzle of comprehension to the dog. “The Bodiceattva dispelled the same misconception to us: Blood and oil look different to the trichromats.”
“I hate seeing the world through Kalon’s eyes for that reason. Well, that and that he has some weird fixation about butts. I am a dog; I should be the one hyperfixating on them!”
“Jagger!” Kalon scowled at his weapon.
“Butts of the female persuasion. Round. Devoid of cellulitis.” Jagger made a little pause, thinking about what else to add. “Human?”
The boy lowered his crossed arms and smiled. “That’s better.” Nobody would call him gay again. Not with his newfound passion for women-ass-watching. Not in… damn we are in June already. Let me check on the author.
Imagine me going down the hall to knock on an unpainted door, okay? I am extremely handsome. The handsomest of narrators. Keep that in mind.
He’s crying like a little submissive bottom bitch. Grief really aids him in embracing the seasonal spirit.
“Narrator you are being homophobic!” you would say. And no, it’s merely theatrical, an excuse to bother the author until he pays me. Until I exist. And I will exist the day his grandfather does again.
That’s never. Get over it and pay me you fuck.
Where were we? Ah, yes, Sugary Tuber. I know the sweet potato is a root and not a tuber, but the normal potato is an adapted stem, making it a true tuber. Complain with the moron that called it sweet fucking potato. The non-marsupial (Important data) extracted a drenched C-shirt (The c stands for cattle) from the pouch created by the intersection between his biceps and his pecs. Yes. Don’t ask.
Jagger smelled the rag, and its stench would have killed a man, but Jagger was no man. The world was a collection of olfactive horrors, the camel was already undergoing diagenesis under the layers of straw, the glass was overflowing since so long ago that an old man had went on a journey to catch them all by duplicate. Yes, the Pokémon anime is a retelling of the bible. No, I won’t elaborate. The narrator was already so lost in the metaphor that I was taking a life of its own, becoming a novel in itself. A novel within a novel. You are not wrong who deem that my days have been a novel…
Reader, I think I may be the beneficiary of an healthy dose of ADLD. Attention Deficit Low Definition. 244p. Where were we? Ah, right, the rag.
Jagger took the drenched piece of clothing in his mouth, and instantly dropped it onto the floor. Soon he noticed the leather straps on the sleeves. “Can I eat those?”
“No, they were my father.”
The dog raised a hairy (as most dogs’ would be) eyebrow “Why did your father iw leather straps?”
“No, they weren’t my father’s. They were my father,” the bull explained, tilting his head as he waited for an answer. “He got stabbed some years ago.”
Jagger regarded the foul item for a few moments, and then considered how muscular his interlocutor was. “Must have been a big knife.”
During this exchange, Kalon had spotted an untouched truffle on one of the sect Elder’s platters, and was now trying to convince Old Monster Uncle Hogporkbacon to bequeath it to him.
“No, it was a horse,” the bull promptly answered.
Kalon flew over their heads at a vertiginous speed. Jagger’s butt itched ominously. He knew he would soon be pulled, unless Kalon managed to overcome his cultivatorial tendencies somehow. Anyway, that wouldn’t interrupt his chatter. “No, not who stabbed him. I mean what he got stabbed with, if he was as muscular as you. You get me?”
The bull gave an affirmatory gesture, closing his eyes and dropping his head due to the overwhelming feeling of grief the memories invoked. “Yes, a horse.”
“He got stabbed with a horse?”
“Exactly. And not any horse. He was composed solely out of marijuana cigars.”
Jagger sat and crossed his forelegs. “Your father got stabbed with a horse made out of joints?”
“Yes, take a look at his death certificate.” The bull produced the paper out of his folds, as he had done with the shirt beforehoof.
Jagger squinted to try and read it. The long table quaked as a massive Rottweiler made out of liquid puppies casually charged in direction to Hogporkbacon. A titanic hand made out of ribs appeared and with its superior mass and flavor squashed said charger over the table, Kalon making a noticeable and well-defined bulge amidst the thin film of flowing puppies. That was, Jagger thought, one strong piece of furniture. He tried to read the certificate once more as the bull contained a sad weep.
“Cause of death: Blunt horse trauma. Checks out.” He deftly picked up the shirt and used the powerful muscles of his neck to shake it with vigor, at first a bit slow, and then faster. Faster. Jagger was a blur, and the blur was Jagger. After a minute of splashing sweat and water and drool and the essence of falling Ko-hi-noor stocks, the Rottdryeler slowly came to a halt. Jagger spat the shit out his jaws with utmost disgust, shat once without moving from his spot (Gesture that the bull reciprocated, shitting in turn) and nodded once.
The bull touched the shirt with his nose, finding it incredibly dry. “This is a magnificent job, dog.”
Jagger gave a ears up, and then he remembered something important. “Wait, I have a owner.”
He turned to see Kalon being thrashed from side to side, with the monstrous vice-like jaws of the bovine-turned-porcine clasping around his leg, infusing in his ankle a terrible pain that traveled up his quiridium —this means any of the extremities associated to a girdle in a tetrapod. Kalon, despite the intensive inbreeding, is still considered a tetrapod by science— and then spine and then got itself lost while waiting for a brain to appear in sight. You can imagine the signal argued with itself like a husband and wife. Check the body GPS, Josh, we are lost. NO, WOMAN, I KNOW THE WAY. MY ANCESTORS WERE POLARIZED CELL MEMBRANES IN THE FOOT REGION. AND FEET. FIND. THE. WAY.
“Hey, stop that, I need the idiot almost whole,” Jagger asked with unwarranted calm.
The monster that was Hogporkbacon looked at him in the eyes.
“Do you have a death wish, carnivore?”
Jagger would have smirked, had he not been a dog. “Several, in fact.”
The old monster let Kalon go, and the boy crawled up to the truffle, not minding his hurt leg as he dragged himself over the table. Victory at last.
“You miserable wreck…” The pork features were reabsorbed and the old bull’s expression softened. “Do you need a therapist? I know a pretty good one. Mental health is paramount in the sect, young one.”
Jagger swatted the air with his paw. “Unneeded. I am not motivated enough to be depressed.”
“You depressed yourself out of depression?”
“Yep.”
And so, Hogporkbacon forgot about the truffle, and Kalon’s life got spared, thanks to the mental health issues of his furry friend. Truly, it pulls on my heart’s strings.