Familiar Familiars
It’s always nice to know that a letter of mine is connecting with wizards across this magical of ours, and the way I often find out this rewarding, gratifying news is through the sudden abundance of angry letters questioning my abilities or intellect. I’d be annoyed if I wasn’t acutely aware of who my audience is. You all are passionate young wizards, with fire on your tongues and your brains alight with sorcerous possibility. It would be hypocritical for me to rebuke you for your correspondence, for I certainly wrote to some of my favorite wizards in my youth with some outrage or another, when for some reason I thought I knew better than the greats. Thus, this letter is for all you who wrote in after reading my last letter, utterly bewildered, asking why I did not simply send my company assigned familiar to fetch the blindness antidote, rather than trying to grab it myself and tripping in the process for all to see?
Actually, my patience runs short as I write this. How dumb do you think I am? Obviously I would have sent a familiar to get the potion if that were an option. Obviously, that was not an option.
Before I go any further, I supposed I must describe what a familiar is for anyone who is reading this and is somehow unaware. A familiar is a small animal, usually a cat, fox, or bird, but any animal with a magical consciousness will do. Originally a mage could find a suitable familiar by searching an enchanted forest or bog for a companion to bond with over the course of many weeks, but now we have people at the Grand Celestio Council of wizards who go out and recruit familiars for us. Again, they have magical consciousnesses, so a good sales-wizard just has to find the right pitch to convince the creatures to come work with us. Usually the cats require sunbeams to lie in during their breaks, the foxes request piles of leaves to jump in, etc.
The purpose of these magical wizard companions can be intuited from my previous descriptions; they help wizards perform their magic, either by physically grabbing things for us to use in spells, or lending us the support of their magical essences. I wasn’t assigned a familiar myself until I was promoted to Mid-Level Mage, but once I was, I quickly noticed how much easier it was to find the words I needed for my spells after just a few minutes of petting a cat.
We’ve now arrived at the source of the issue; the familiar assigned to me. I didn’t get to meet this cat before we were assigned to one another, it just showed up at my desk a few days after my promotion. She is a gray and white tabby cat with medium length fur, green eyes, and absolutely no sense of decorum. Where the other cat familiar assigned to my coworkers sit around quietly and calmly, waiting to be disturbed from their slumber but still willing to go fetch the requested materials, Osprey, my familiar, acts more like a dog. She chases spells across the room, steals herbs and pressed flowers from my desk that I was using for spells and chews on them, and once she shattered a potion bottle and started eating the shards of glass. To this day I still don’t know how she survived. I’ve asked my supervisors if they actually gave me a devil disguised as a cat as some sort of hazing ritual, but they insist she is just a normal magical cat. After a while I simply stopped requesting her assistance, as I am much more productive when she isn’t trying to “help” me.
After my blinded crash, my eyes were ironically opened to the reality that I needed a familiar I could rely on. I went to the office of one of my superiors to request my familiar be switched with another, at which point I was informed that Osprey has just informed them she was retiring to become a regular house cat in another dimension, the typical retirement package for tenured familiars. I didn’t question how a familiar as wild as Osprey was already eligible for retirement, I simply sent a good luck wish to whoever she selected to be her owner in that other realm. They will need it.
Before any decisions could be made without me, I asked my supervisor if I could meet the newest batch of recruited familiars myself and choose one of them, rather than being randomly assigned one again. It seems I’ve built up some good will since being promoted, because my request was accepted, and tomorrow I have an appointment to meet with the new familiars. I’ll update you all on how that goes next week.
May the moon shine favorably and without hesitation upon you,
Alexan Drytus
