Maxima looked at you. The smiling, muscled COW! FIGHTING! bovine on her singlet looked at you. "It is a mystery," said Maxima. "But unrelatedly, there's a lot of different types of cow out there, you know? There was a period in the early 21st century where cow genetics were dominated by a certain genre of cow beauty contest. They judged cows based on how "feminine" their head and neck placement was, which is an insane thing to say about a 600 kilogram animal. It got to the point where the competitions banned plastic surgery on cows to prevent people from making them more "beautiful". This continued up until Tail and Eye Disease, the mass culls and the rise of synthetic meats and almond milk, at which point there was a window of time when it seemed like the most popular cow chassis was too synthetic to survive outside a factory farming environment and all the factory farms were closed. But luckily weird hobbyists had maintained certain reservoirs of legacy cow genetics - and the Desolation of the Equator was not just good news for sheep. In addition, illegal rural genetic engineering has created several particularly hardy and violent strains whose purpose is to keep Murray-Darling river hippos from ranging inland and murdering motorcyclists."

"Gata would have eaten shit if she tried what you tried," she said, continuing on from her hyperfixation without slowing down, changing tone or any visible sign of transition. "You ever see a cat try to fight a cow? No? Because the cat knows better. The only reason we're even mentioned in the same breath is because we were playing a game, and the game made us both do a thing that neither one of us wanted to do. If we stopped playing, Gata could never hurt me - and I would never see her again."

She took a sip of her canned vegetable smoothie. "And I never did."