A dog with a hand of cards
Argos is a companion in The Lien that you earn by feeding him across five runs. Over four days he went from a pose in the juke joint to his own deck, his own hand and his own deckbuilder, and each step was built to need as little as possible from the last.
Written up later from the repo's history and dated to the days it describes.
Every companion in The Lien grants a school of music and a rule, and never stats. Argos breaks that rule on purpose. He is a Blue Heeler who waits near the juke joint's door, he has his own cards, and he plays one of them every turn. The work ran from October 2 to October 5, in phases, and the phases are worth describing because each one was cut to prove a single thing.
Earning him
Phase one gave him no combat at all. He lies near the door and is wary. Feeding him costs a little gold, and a feeding is its own short narrated event, delivered as a quest branch off the joint. The fifth feeding brings a dogcatcher, and the wanderer fights for him. A lost fight costs nothing beyond the death, because the standing rule for quests is that they wait and nothing fails. Win, and Argos walks beside the wanderer from then on, in every run, and cannot be left behind. He has no tile on the character select row for the same reason.
The pace was a deliberate choice. The spec checked how often a random event node turns up and found it would take over a dozen runs to reach five visits that way. So the joint became a forced single-node row on every act 1 route, the way the gauntlet row already was. That guarantees one feeding per run and makes the arc five runs at the quickest. The operator accepted a slow arc as the point of it. His trust is stored as meta progress, so a lost run does not reset the dog.
One card, after the phrase
Phase two put him in combat. He holds a small deck of eight cards and a hand that starts at one and grows to three, bought in the Hoodoo shop with silver dimes. During your turn you arm one card from his hand, and after the wanderer's phrase resolves, and before the enemy acts, it plays for free.
The timing came from the code. A pending buff such as a next-attack bonus is spent inside the effect resolver and cleared when it finishes. A card that played during the phrase could not boost it, and a buff set afterward would leak into the first attack of the next round. So his card plays after the phrase and reacts to what just happened, whether that is the damage dealt, the cards played or what the enemy has telegraphed. The fix for the timing problem is also the design. You build your phrase to feed the card you armed, and you pick which card to arm against the enemy's telegraph.
His plays are not wanderer cards. They cost no Breath, they do not count toward the cards played in a run, and the log narrates them under his name.
Choosing six
Phase three came in pieces. The deckbuilder is a screen where you choose which six of his owned cards make his deck. A new screen was needed because the existing deck builder charges size for schools and upgrade points for rarity, and his cards have neither. The rules sit in a pure static class with no engine types, so they test in the fast tier. The class has a single function that answers what he owns. When acquisition arrived, that one function changed and the screen did not.
The pool is twelve more cards beyond the eight starters, and they are bought in the Hoodoo shop for silver dimes at 30, 60 or 120 for Common, Uncommon and Rare. The spec makes the route deliberately single. Several ways to earn cards at once would be guesses stacked on guesses, with no hand-played evidence yet of what a six-card deck out of twenty feels like. There are no duplicates, so a card is bought once.
Balance waits, as it does everywhere in this game, until act 1 is whole. The prices are first-pass numbers. The card art is placeholder, and real art is a separate step so that the credits are spent once on a settled pool.