Ty didn't notice the elegantly dressed woman traipsing across the cow pasture with her velvet train trailing behind her. He didn't notice because she didn't want him to notice. She shook her head and went over to the cow, and cupped the animal's head in her hand. Mike's cow eyes looked up contentedly into the woman's face which Mike as a human would have described as beautiful. As a cow, he merely thought, she smelled good, and had a gentle touch for a human.
"Poor, Mikey, perhaps I should have empowered you instead of Ty when I began this game, but his multiplier value was higher than yours. I may just turn him into a cow when my game is over to teach him a lesson. In the mean time, if I'm going to beat Kurt, I really need to have a full complement of players at my disposal. Here girl eat this magic apple which just happened to fall from this tree," the young woman waved her hand, a tiny sprout shot out of the ground and as seconds the tree grew and aged years, until fruit ripened on a branch and dropped to the ground in front of Mike.
"Forget," she whispered, and cast her die, "2 Life points, well, I should still win as long as Ty doesn't do anything else stupid.
"Games within games. Who'd have thunk it?" muttered the farmer shaking his head. He'd been a game piece on this magic board for nigh on a century, he'd been everything from a troublesome gnat to a beautiful warrior princess, but he'd never seen a game played within another game before. It just wasn't done.
Mike began an unusually painful transformation from female bovine to male centaur. He bellowed bloody murder, and writhed on the ground. He vomited out grass and cuds, his skull sank inward upon itself with a nasty squishing sound. His swollen udder began to migrate up his belly, spraying milk as it shrank and moved. Soon a human chest could be seen emerging from the fallen animals torso, tiny udder shaped nipples sank into human nipples. To Mike it felt like someone had taken a plier to each sensitive nipple of his udder and given it a violent twist.
The farmer's and the villagers' hatred of nonhumans returned to indifference, well, hostile indifference. Esme's 2 life points weren't enough to restore the playing field to its former nature. She sighed, Ty's spell was modified to make the townsfolk hate all strangers as well as neighbors, without concern to their species or gender. The farmer glanced over to see his new cow changing into some hideous monstrosity. He hoped he could get his money back, as his milker became a centaur.