A Wizard's Best Friend
As promised in my last letter, this week I bring you, young wizards of future repute, an account of my first time selecting my own familiar as a Mid-Level Mage at the Grand Celestio Council of Wizards. As a brief re-cap, a familiar is a magical creature who assists wizards in their wizardly duties. If you want to know why I am suddenly in need of a new familiar, refer to my previous letter, but it suffices to say that my entire experience with familiars has been somewhat peculiar, and thus the experience of selecting a new one was nothing like I could have suspected.
After being employed by the Council but before being selected by or assigned to a mage, familiars spend most of their time in a room we call the Atrium. The Atrium is full of magically summoned trees and rivers flowing out of the multiple portals that surround the room on various walls, giving the familiars the freedom to explore enchanted glens and forests in their spare time. Rather than a real ceiling, a huge portal opens up to the sky of the material world, so that the bird familiars have space to stretch their wings. The Atrium is always stocked with fruit and nuts, and both wet food and dry food for the cats.
I’d say I probably spent about thirty minutes wandering around the Atrium getting acquainted with the various familiars before I made my final selection. All the cats ignored me until I started looking at the foxes, at which point the cats wanted nothing more than for me to pet them. I watched some of the foxes play with the more active cat familiars, while other foxes were busy pushing piles of leaves through one of the nearby portals, amassing a giant leaf pile and taking turns diving into it. This jumping continued for about five minutes before two cranky badgers commandeered the leaf pile for a nap. The bird familiars spent most of the time I observed them racing each other around the trees, twisting over and under the branches, and also dropping pebbles and seeds on the cats and foxes when they weren’t looking.
It was while I sat next to one of the conjured rivers, watching the turtle familiars swim, that a flash of white caught my eye. At first I thought I had imagined it, but then the little head popped up from behind the log again. Curiosity got the better of me, and I walked over to where the creature had been peaking at me, only to discover that it had snuck away as I approached. I looked around for a few seconds, and saw a long pink tail whip around and disappear into one of the woodland portals. I checked my timepiece quickly to make sure I had enough time for an inter-dimensional detour before I had to be back to my desk, and hopped in after the creature.
In the serene mystical glen I fell into, two things immediately caught my eye. A bundle of glimmering blue-purple berries hanging in a bunch from a tree branch, which I knew to be a rare fruit perfect for strengthening any potion you threw one into, and hanging upside-down by its tail next to the berries, a small white-faced opossum.
I respected the possum’s ambition, and immediately offered it the position as my familiar, which it seems to have gladly accepted given that it’s been at my desk every day this week. A few days ago I mentioned how well the possum was doing after just a few days on the job, to which the wizard in charge of coordinating the familiars told me they didn’t have any opossum familiars employed at the moment. I considered this new information for a few seconds, before clarifying that my new familiar was a cat named Possum. I don’t know where this creature came from, but it is efficient and skillful, and I am not interested in having to choose a third familiar. The mystery of where my new friend came from can be solved another day, and I’m in no rush to get there if Possum keeps helping me find rare spell components.
May the moon shine favorably and without hesitation upon you,
Alexan Drytus
