Bob had wandered into RIP's alliance chat looking for someone to admire his newest achievement (successfully microwaving a potato using only a campfire spell), when he caught the tail end of a very different conversation.
"Beef is DEAD," Gabe Horn typed, with the confidence of a man reading a headline.
Bob dropped his potato.
"DECEASED," Gabe Horn added, for emphasis.
Bob did not see the three messages before this one, in which someone had joked that Beef was "turning against" Ben Dover. He did not see that this was, by any reasonable definition, a bit. All Bob saw was: Beef. Dead. In writing. Confirmed twice.
"WHO DID THIS," Bob typed, already standing up in real life for reasons that made sense only to him.
By the time Bob arrived at RIP's war room — sprinting, wearing a black cape he had fashioned in the last ninety seconds out of a tablecloth — Gabe Horn was mid-story, and the story had already grown three sizes.
Beef, Gabe Horn explained solemnly, had been minding her own business in Miranda's basement when a knock came at the door. Beef looked up. A shadow loomed. Miranda, with the weary tenderness of someone delivering difficult news to a cow, said the words: "Beefy, it's time for you to be on your own." Unfortunately, cows cannot speak, so Beef simply mooed and wandered out into the world alone, hurt, confused, and — this was the part Gabe Horn delivered with real dramatic weight — extremely trusting of oncoming traffic.
"She walked into the road," Gabe Horn said, "looking for her beloved Miranda. A semi came flying down the road. Beef had no time to think. She was smashed into pieces."
Bob burst into tears immediately.
"WHY DID NO ONE WARN THE SEMI," he wailed.
Wilma Dihkfit, unbothered, contributed a single skull emoji. Bob interpreted this as a memorial monument and began looking for a physical skull to place at the scene of the crime.
Within the hour, Bob had constructed a memorial out of whatever was on hand: a stack of ration crates, a "RIP" banner he'd repurposed (technically already correct), and a hand-lettered sign reading BEEF — GONE TOO SOON — TAKEN BY A SEMI SHE DID NOT DESERVE.
He was midway through composing a eulogy in verse when Gabe Horn casually mentioned that Miranda had found Beef "the next day, on the side of the road," apologized to her, and that Beef was "now in cow heaven, frolicking with other cows in a grassy field."
Bob brightened immediately. "SHE LIVES."
"She's dead," Gabe Horn clarified. "She's in heaven. That's different."
Bob's face fell again, and he resumed composing the eulogy, now with an additional verse about heaven specifically.
Everything might have ended there — a tragic, if confusing, loss — had CROTCHWAFFLE not made the mistake of asking, entirely off-topic, whether anyone was hungry.
"Bad time to ask how you like your steak cooked," Wilma Dihkfit said.
"And turned into well done steak," Gabe Horn added, without missing a beat.
Bob's grief transformed instantly into horror. "YOU'RE EATING HER?"
"He's eating steak," Gabe Horn said. "Beef is a cow. It tracks."
"NOTHING TRACKS TODAY," Bob shouted, physically placing himself between CROTCHWAFFLE and an imaginary plate. He would spend the next several minutes trying to organize a boycott of "all beef, the food, out of respect for Beef, the fallen alliance member," a distinction nobody else in the chat felt was worth maintaining.
It was at this point that someone — trying to be helpful — reminded Bob not to misgender Beef, since "it's MAAM," and dropped a video of a very unrelated, very memorable stranger somewhere out in the world sternly correcting someone who'd called them "sir," insisting, with tremendous conviction, on being addressed properly.
Bob watched maybe four seconds of it before deciding this was the most important video he had ever seen.
From that point on, Bob considered himself Beef's official posthumous advocate on matters of respect. He did not fully understand the video. He did not need to. He had absorbed exactly one lesson from it — you say it with your whole chest — and he intended to apply it at every available opportunity, regardless of relevance.
"SHE. WAS. A. MA'AM." Bob announced this to no one in particular, several times, with the same trembling outrage as the stranger in the clip, even though nobody present had disputed it, misgendered anyone, or in fact been talking about pronouns at all in the last several minutes.
CROTCHWAFFLE, mid-bite of the steak in question, chose not to engage.
Eventually, mercifully, someone took pity on Bob and explained, slowly, that Beef was not dead. Beef had never been dead. Beef was, in fact, present in the chat this entire time, having narrated the story of her own death for entertainment purposes, the same way she occasionally narrated other bits for entertainment purposes, because Beef found this funny and everyone else did too.
Bob considered this information for a long moment.
"So the semi—"
"Not real."
"The road—"
"Not real."
"Cow heaven—"
"Extremely not real."
Bob nodded slowly, absorbing all of it, and then turned to the shrine he had built, the sign, the verse eulogy, the steak boycott, and the several minutes he had spent shouting about pronouns at strangers on the internet.
"I choose to believe she died and came back," Bob announced. "This is now a resurrection story. Beef has ascended. She may not be touched, doubted, or cooked medium-rare in my presence ever again."
Nobody argued with him. It was, everyone agreed, faster than explaining it a second time.
Note on names: several RIP members renamed themselves in-game shortly before KvK. This story uses the names current at the time it was written. For reference: