Chapter 1: An Afternoon of Work

Mason is probably a wonderful wizard. Truly, I believe that he is probably the best wizard in the world. But sometimes, he just needs my help with some of his problems. My name is Arcturus. I am a wizard’s familiar. It comes with a lot of wonderful perks, fewer of which have to do with the “wizard” aspect and more of which have to do with the “tower” aspect than a typical human would think. I assume that elves probably would think it had to do with wizard too. I’ve not met one, but I’ve heard about them and once saw one in a scrying ball and as far as I can tell they’re just humans with slightly better hearing.

Today, Mason was performing an experiment on how to collect anima from his carefully-formed garden. It wasn’t necessary. I already could collect more than enough anima for myself, garden or no garden, and Mason never seemed to need any for himself, like most humans. But he liked to paint his little statues with anima, which frankly always seemed to make them more interesting but less useful. What’s the point of a rock that smells like a living thing? It’s just false advertising. It can’t be chased. It doesn’t even scuttle around on the floor like one of the balls of yarn that Mason had infused for me. But Mason thought he needed to do it, so I decided to help him out. For now.

I would start by reviewing his research so far. Mason’s notes are terribly boring, you have to understand. He only writes in one sense. The ink smells the same throughout, and there are distracting parts of his notes where it seems like he tried to put extra emphasis on something by rubbing his own smell onto it but it turns out he just rested his arm there while writing. I tend to get frustrated when reading his notes. Mason knows this, and is very accommodating of my needs. So when I jumped up onto his desk and stood at the notes, he was remarkably patient. I let him finish whatever he was writing before I started, of course. I have my manners, after all. When he lifted his pen away from the page, I stepped forward under his arm, allowing him to pet my fur while I worked. He obviously needed the break; his last sentence had ended halfway through.

But first, I started from the beginning. It was, to use a euphemism popular amongst human scholars, dry. I never understood it, because all paper was usually dry and all ink was usually wet, regardless of what was written there. The word they should have used was “unexciting”. Or “boring”, if you weren’t a polite familiar like I am. The first three paragraphs were dedicated entirely to documenting Mason’s current method of anima collection. That was stupid. First of all, his methods were inefficient. Anima was not meant to be collected by those odd jars and spell-bound runes he left throughout his garden. Anima was the very essence of life. It had to be chased. It had to be hunted. It came from climbing trees and from stealing feathers from birds’ nests, from frightening voles and mice and little sparrows. Sometimes, it came from killing those creatures. I had tried to demonstrate this to him more than once, by bringing a freshly captured feather or a freshly dead mouse back to the house, brimming with unharvested anima (through a great deal of self restraint on my own part, I might add). Mason had always dutifully cleaned it away. The feathers he sometimes kept, putting them in one of his dozens of odd little drawers that he used for what he called “spell components”. The were all too small to fit in and usually filled with foul smells. For reasons that didn’t make sense, he put the worst drawers closest to the ground and the counter. The ones in the middle always seemed much more interesting but it was difficult for someone of my stature to reach them.

But then he would leave the feather in the drawer, slowly leaking its anima out into the surrounding drawers until the boring and gross smelling pastes and powders gleamed slightly with it. I assume the more interesting leaves and animal fur and other types of feathers also gleamed slightly, but again, Mason did not seem to be aware of the fact that I could only see the boring ingredients.

The summary of Mason’s current “jar and rune” method of anima collection took up about three pages. I batted them aside with one paw. I already knew how those worked. Poorly, is how those worked.

There was a second stack of pages. I moved under Mason’s arm again, as he seemed to have gotten confused about where I was, and was missing my fur entirely, touching his pen to the fourth stack of pages instead, risking ruining his already sloppily incomplete notes with more ink from the pen in his hand. The second stack of pages was much more interesting because it had my name on it. I made sure to take special note of anywhere my name or anything describing me came up, using one paw or sometimes my nose to smudge scent markers onto the pages, vastly improving the paper’s legibility by leaving some texture behind in the form of my paw pads or whisker marks in the slightly-damp ink. Mason seemed to notice, and thanked me by vigorously patting the top of my head, which made it difficult to continue as his pats pushed me away from the page. I didn’t mind, though. I appreciated the praise enough to work around the inconvenience.

Once I finished adding notations to the paper about me, I moved on to the third stack, which seemed to be a bunch of numbers. I understood numbers well enough, though I found that in general they were boring and not typically helpful. There were some interesting words on this page though, words in a strange language that I did not understand. Mason used it sometimes, usually when he was sitting outside watching birds or inhaling the good scent of fresh trees. I sometimes wished he had taught me to read that language too. If he mostly used it while in such real places, the writing must be fascinating. Maybe he was composing poetry, or recording epic tales of hunting or feats of strength or magic. I guess he preferred to keep those things to himself though. I understood. I didn’t tell Mason about every last detail of what I did when I was expressing myself either. We were family, of a sort, but we were still each our own people.

Each word, or maybe poem or story, seemed to take up almost a whole page, with the boring numbers squeezed into the space next to them. After each strange word was a translation in the letters I could read, which seemed to be grossly inadequate. One of those strange words was a lengthy squiggle with dozens of other squiggles coming off of it, and at the bottom it was translated. But “illus. of an arcana rose root system” took up so much less space. Why even bother with this other language if seven words took up almost a whole page? And what was “illus.” anyway? That’s not a real word. I made a notation for Mason to check his spelling on this translation and then moved on to the fourth stack.

Mason seemed to be reviewing the fourth stack of papers as well. He had his pen in hand, though once again he seemed to have supplied it with dark ink instead of a more reasonable medium for notation like scent. Even color or grit would make more sense than more words spelled out in dark ink. Humans (and I assumed elves) seemed to be one of the only creatures in the world that preferred to use words for every aspect of writing though. Perhaps they wished to be secretive. Their words were basically a sort of code. Without Mason’s help I would never have properly understood it. I will credit humans for that. They keep their secret code closely.

The fourth stack was a proposal for a new type of anima collection. At the top was another of those strange poem-stories that I couldn’t understand, this one made up of a thick band of two markings formed into a wobbly loop, with oddly fine writings at each end. I could not make tails nor paws of it. In between, several magical sigils that I did understand were marked, possibly as a sort of notation. It looked like they were a spell to collect ambient anima. Perhaps the method of that collection was detailed in the secret writing, but one thing I did notice was that there was a problem with it. One of the runes was poorly designed. As a familiar, my understanding of magic energies is innate. In fact, I am even better than normal people, and far superior to humans (or again, I assumed elves) at sensing and using magic energies. Mason, with his comparatively weaker wizards’ senses, had missed part of one of his runes. It would allow anima to slowly leak out of the spell. I left a scent mark on that rune, and then for good measure, dipped one claw in the ink pot and carefully marked a notation on it in the ink words. As the saying goes, human habits make human habits.

I read the rest of the page. This one was nearly as interesting as the pages that were about me. It seemed to detail a unique method of anima collection that was mobile. It was, I have to admit, ingenious. Mason obviously had very important business to see to and couldn’t always be interrupting it to go collect his own anima, and I obviously had even more important business to see to and I couldn’t be bringing him freshly charged feathers and dead rodents every day. Stationary anima collection was not meeting his usage. We both knew why. Anima didn’t sit still. It existed in the aspects of life. Growing trees, scampering squirrels. I even produced some myself when I basked in the rays of the setting sun or chased an insect throughout the towers’ rooms, a throwback to my mundane heritage before my ancestors learned magic and allied with wizards. Of course, magic was not free, and I now required more anima than I naturally generated. Fortunately, my mundane ancestors were also consummate hunters, and I retain all of their skills and then some. The main difference is that instead of consuming crude materia from the flesh of what I hunt, I now consume the far more delicious and refined anima.

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I finished reading Mason’s notes. It seemed his plan was to attach this spell somehow to a natural seeker of anima. Perhaps a tree that sought the sun or some sort of flitting insect, chasing scentful flowers? (Mason has informed me that flowers are, in addition to being scentful and sometimes shiny, colorful. Apparently, colors are sort of like smells that you can see with your eyes. But flowers are already perfectly easy to smell. I think humans must have made up colors just to mess with familiars. Someday I’ll ask an elf if they know what colors are. I’ll have to make sure to get to it before Mason can bring them in on the prank.) Once attached, the spell would travel away from Mason, following the richest floes of anima. Every so often, the spell’s holder would return to Mason, depositing the collected anima into one of the anima vessels he would place around the house.

It would probably work. It was still not anything close to an efficient way to gather anima, but Mason had never seemed to care about inefficiency. Really, all this would wind up being is a slightly more sophisticated rune-and-jar system that would allow Mason to manage fewer runes and fewer jars because he wouldn’t need to make sure there was always a rune and a jar where the anima was richest. But, for a wizard, Mason was being surprisingly clever. I suspected that the next time we traveled together to go talk to all the other wizards, they would praise him for his cleverness. And I could explain to the other familiars how I had moved Mason one step closer towards understanding anima.

Mason seemed to have finished reviewing as well. He had finished the missing sentence, after I had pushed on his arm enough. He wiped his pen clean, corked his ink, and reached up for one of his magic-working tools. He had a short strip of leather with metal bits at the ends of it, and he began to scratch at the leather strip with one of his little wands. He wasn’t moving any anima around, nor even boring materia or nauseating potentia. Just carving a little piece of leather. Perhaps later he would infuse it. For now, my work was done. I had notated his pages. I settled down, moving off of the hard table and onto the soft cushion Mason kept for me near his lamp, which was always warmed from the heat. There, satisfied, warm, and not yet terribly hungry, I settled down, tucking my feet underneath me and wrapping my tail close to my body, and I took a nap.

When I awoke, I was much hungrier. I looked at the enchanted sundial Mason used to tell the time and realized that it was probably because nearly a full hour had passed. Why hadn’t he awakened me for dinner time? But Mason was still at his desk, using one of those odd little eyeball hats he sometimes used (they probably had something to do with his so-called “color”) to work on the strip of leather.

He noticed me stirring, and said “Good news Arcturus! I was able to finish my prototype!” I scowled. Success in wizarding was fine and all, I was very proud of what a skilled wizard Mason was, but missing my dinner was not an acceptable price to pay for it.

“Hold still,” Mason continued, and reached past my head. I felt a soft pressure on the fur of my head and my neck, and realized that he was trying to apologize. As a show of my good graces, more than out of a belief that he genuinely understood why his actions were wrong, I softly purred for a few seconds. When Mason finished his apology pats, I realized there was still a weight on my neck. I reached up with one paw to push off whatever was sitting there, only to find that it was the strip of leather Mason had been working on earlier. He had worked it into some sort of loop using what he called “human artifice” and hung it about my neck.

I scratched at it, and bared my teeth. I was determined to remain calm, so I didn’t let a complaint escape my throat, but Mason needed to know I had not agreed to this. He noticed, and told me “Don’t scratch at it. It’s just a collar. It’s a good thing!” (I did not believe him about this). “It’s a sign of companionship. Now anyone outside the tower who sees you knows that you have a real home and someone who loves you.” (Okay, that was better. It still wasn’t quite enough of a reason for me to walk around with this hideous object around my neck.) “And there’s one more trick it can do,” Mason pulled one of his little anima brushes out of an infused jar and reached past my head again, ignoring my raised fur and flattened ears to touch the tip of the brush to the collar. Suddenly, a gentle and warm flow of anima was passing into me from the collar. I kept up my threatening stance for several breaths longer, just to be clear that I wasn’t going to forgive him that easily, but then I relaxed. My scowl from when I had awoken, I left in place. I pointedly looked at the enchanted sundial, and then back to Mason. He followed my gaze, and said. “Oh, I’m sorry Arcturus, I didn’t realize it had gotten so late, and you were asleep. Alright, you’ve done enough work for today. Let’s get you some dinner.”

I followed him to my bowl, where he poured out a few of the bits of dried meat and assorted other interesting smells, and I daintily but quickly gobbled them down, only releasing my scowl when I had finished and my hunger had subsided. Mason went to the door when I was done and asked “Do you want to go on a hunt, Arcturus? I’ll be out collecting some anima from the array. Maybe you can find something fascinating. Come back and tell me about it once the fire is lit.”

So, burdened grievously but tolerantly by my new “collar”, I set out into the late afternoon’s long shadows. Mason was right. If anything would make me feel right, it would be collecting some anima. And just like Mason’s plans for a new collection system, I could sense the richest floes. I hoped he finished that project soon. I was curious if he would be able to attach his spell to something that I could follow around. It could be fun, watching a butterfly or squirrel that unknowingly wore one of the more ingenious spells I had ever helped design as it went about its day. I just hoped he would notice my correction to his runes first. Unless he planned to attach his spell to another familiar, allowing that slow leak of anima would cause erratic behavior in an animal. And since I was already swamped with my own anima collection, that would mean another familiar, and I wouldn’t stand for it. 

After all, Mason was my wizard. And I was his brilliant familiar, who fixed all the errors in his spells and brought back enough anima to sustain the both of us. Trusting the task to anyone else would be an insult to the hard work I did.

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