Fang looked into the room and beheld the glorious marble, his pupils widening into black circles as they sought to take in every iota of its splendor. He didn’t even notice when Lillian stood up, carrying him with her into the room; he only had eyes for the marvelous marble coming closer.
While he was transfixed, the humans started speaking, the old, bearded resident of the room pinning Aurelia with a steely glare. “Ms. Aurelia. Care to explain yourself?”
“Of course Headmaster. I was managing the teleportation array, and brought these four back from their first excursion in the wilds, in the Ashwoods. They came back reeking of dragon and spouting some nonsense about exploding dungeon cores. I decided that this was a situation better fitting your expertise.”
The headmaster’s eyes flicked to the students as they were mentioned, lingering for a moment on Fang as he prowled to the end of Lillian’s knee and lithely hopped up onto the desk. His eyes were back on the blonde gnome a moment later. “I see. We’ll deal with that in a moment. But what I meant to ask, Aurelia, is ‘Do you care to explain to me why half the hedge maze is lying in ashes, and the other half is still burning with dragonfire?’” He gestured at the window behind him, which overlooked what little remained of the hedge maze.
Aurelia looked out the window. The corners of her mouth twitched upwards for a brief moment before returning to her stern frown as her gaze returned to the headmaster. “No.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Yes. Now.”
“Well it seems like some spunky little fire mage didn’t understand that the walls are supposed to be walked around. And then someone breathed dragonfire all over it.”
While the humans made noises and puffed themselves up, Fang made his way across the desk, padding across papers to approach the mighty marble. The thing was bigger than his head, and it seemed to have another warped cat trapped inside it. Fang froze for a moment, but with his immense feline intellect, bolstered even further by his whopping Intelligence of 51, his hackles barely even raising before he deduced that this was his reflection. Probably. Fang ducked his head, flicked his ears, and slowly approached the orb sideways, just to make sure.
Lillian watched on in horror and mentally entreated Fang to come back, while the headmaster said, “Aurelia. You don’t want to play this game right now. Why did you burn down the hedge maze? Was one of the bushes offensively tall?”
Aurelia bristled at the remark. “Perhaps. Though they weren’t much taller than you.” She gave the headmaster the sort of glare that would make a student debate changing schools on the spot. Possibly names and underwear as well. “But if you must know, they were in the way, and walking around might have made me late for this meeting.”
“I suspect I will regret asking, but what, exactly, were you doing in the maze that demanded such immediate action as to justify burning it down rather than waiting and doing it right?”
“Chasing the cat.”
“Chasing the cat. Is that what the students are calling it these days?”
Fang, finally close enough to be convinced that the marble did not have an entirely separate cat stuck inside it, reached out and, almost reverently, swatted the marble.
Fang immediately blinked back a few inches and hissed at the marble as it teetered off of its cushion. The thing had stung him! Fang launched himself at the offending orb, sending the papers beneath his hind paws shooting backwards as he plowed into the marble, dead set on correcting this grievous perversion of the natural order. He smacked the sphere off the desk, ignoring the pain in his paw from the brief contact. The stinging sensation from the first swat was already fading from the pain of stepping on a hot sidewalk into a faint warmth of sunlight spreading up his leg and being drawn into his core.
Aurelia nodded at the cat as the headmaster waved his hand, floating the beast core into the air. “Cat.”
Lillian jumped to her feet, reaching out towards Fang as she said, “I’m so sorry Headmaster Geriard, he’s a bit unruly and I haven’t figured out how to control him yet and I didn’t want to interrupt but he keeps-”
Fang slipped between his familiar’s grasping hands like water, kicking off of them to launch himself at the flying orb, swatting it downwards and pushing against the air to reposition himself just enough to swipe his claws again on the descent, sending it careening to the side.
Alex spoke over Lillian, “What my companion means to say is that the cat is why we were planning to come see you even before Ms. Aurelia arranged this meeting.” He put a hand on Lillian’s shoulder and steadied her, holding her back from attempting to lunge across the desk in pursuit of Fang, who had landed on the floor and launched himself after the still-floating marble, getting a couple good swats in and barely avoiding crashing into a bookshelf. “We came across the cat in unusual circumstances and thought it would make a good familiar since Lillian didn’t have one yet. But we may have rushed into it a bit, and there were some…” Fang jumped up, bouncing off a bookshelf and the air to keep the marble away from the ceiling, blinking after it and attempting to land on it to pin it to the ground, but the cheating marble darted to the side before even touching the floorboards. “...irregularities we wanted your wisdom on.”
The headmaster raised an eyebrow at the students, his fingers still pointing at the beast core and guiding it around in the air. He guided it towards the open area behind their seats, in front of the door, and Fang followed, his vicious attack slowly turning into play as Fang was reminded of why the elusive marble was his favorite prey. “‘Irregularities’ might be putting it lightly. Don’t worry about the core, I’ll be surprised if this cat is actually capable of draining anything substantial from a Rift Ravager’s core, let alone break it. But why don’t you tell me about what happened. The dungeon, the cat, the dragon. Your excursion from start to finish.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
So they told the story of their trip out into the wilds. Charlie told most of it, with Lillian chiming in frequently with regards to ‘Chairman Meow’ and the others contributing their corrections or additions along the way. They told him about the cat being in the safe zone around the teleporter, about his unusual behavior and the familiar ritual gone wrong. They mentioned the trip to the dungeon, and the death aspect inside. The strange zombie swarm and the incident with the sleep spell the next morning led up to them finally reaching the dungeon core, but being unable to challenge it on account of it detonating before they even set foot in the room.
The cat’s death and the difficulty of reviving him was followed by his mysterious disappearance for several days, in which they’d finally had a more standard excursion, smoothly practicing skills to cull the beasts and collect their valuable parts. All culminating in the Flash Phoenix hunt, where the cat appeared again out of nowhere, breathing fire and somehow setting himself ablaze while recklessly dispatching the bird, followed by a relatively uneventful return. At least until Aurelia filled in her side of what she smelled and the chaos in the maze.
At some point between the dungeon and their return, Fang tired of the floating marble, and after a few indignant meows demanding that it land and lose fair and square, slunk back to Lillian’s lap, receiving well-earned sunshine-infused pets for his mighty battle against the cheating marble.
The headmaster clasped his hands and stared at the cat for a long moment after the story finished, then sighed and sat back in his seat. “Well, it seems I should stock up on headache remedies for the coming semester. I’ll look into the issue of the dungeon core soon. I expect I’ll need you all to join me when I do, cat included. As for the dragon and hedge maze… well, it seems the cat acted on his own. There’s only one dragon I can think of in the Ashwoods, and she isn’t the scheming or vengeful sort. If he encountered her and somehow survived, that should be the end of it. In terms of punishment…”
Lillian’s party tensed at the pause, and even Fang perked his ears up to figure out what the fuss was, what had dared to interrupt his petting.
“Normally, going out and interacting with a wild dragon like that would be an automatic expulsion, no matter the circumstances. But this situation is a bit of a… gap in the rules. You, Lillian, are a student of the Academy, but you did not actually do anything wrong apart from being a touch over-eager to get a familiar. Or to get her a familiar, as the case may be,” he said, sanding a stern glance across the rest of the group. “Normally, you would be responsible for the actions of your familiar, but in this case, the cat is not technically your familiar. The Academy does not punish familiars for their binder’s actions, for reasons that should be obvious. On the other hand, the binder in this case is not a student of the Academy, and so no school rules apply to him. Now that doesn’t mean you have free reign to let this cat run wild. But it does mean that punishments are essentially up to my discretion. And in this case, I’m going to say that you need to bring him for a checkup with Aurelia each week until we’re sure everything is fine. Other than that, I’m letting you off the hook. This time.”
A wave of tension flowed out of the group at his announcement. All except Fang of course. By the time the old man had finished his blathering, Fang’s eyelids were already drifting downwards.
He looked down to Fang, whose eyes were drifting closed on Lillian’s lap once again. “As for being the familiar rather than the binder… I wouldn’t worry too much. The vast majority of the familiar bond is symmetrical. The mana storing, spell-focusing, and spell delivery aspects of the bond work in reverse just as well. However, the familiar ritual requires a significant gap in mental attributes that familiars which gain significant enough magical ability for it to matter are vanishingly rare until significantly higher levels. The primary function that will not work the same in reverse is resummoning. Most familiars are exceedingly fragile, and a significant portion of the ritual is devoted to ameliorating that fact, tethering their soul to the binder’s such that it doesn’t drift off into the afterlife upon death. As a healer with your particular specialization, I expect you have more familiarity than most with this complication to resurrection.”
“Y-yeah,” Lillian actually jumped a little when she realized the Headmaster was waiting on her reply. “I actually evolved my revival skill, which opens up the amount of time I have to bring someone back by a lot, but even with that it was tough to heal the little guy fast enough to bring him back. The longer it took, the harder it was to reach out to the soul. Wait, do you mean that if I hadn’t brought him back in the dungeon I really wouldn’t be able to resummon him?”
The hand petting Fang’s back got shaky and started to squeeze him. Fang squirmed out of her grip and pounced up to prowl across the desk, giving the marble the occasional glare as he sniffed at pens and inks, before honing in on the teacup perched at the edge, blissfully unaware of its impending doom.
“Indeed,” Headmaster Geriard said, “But you were in fact able to do so. Quite luckily, as breaking the familiar bond is quite unpleasant, and him passing into the afterlife when it was so new almost certainly would have done so. However, consider the opposite. If you were to perish, your soul would linger with this cat. In theory at least. A reversed bond like this has never actually been achieved before aside from rare, niche cases such as liches.
Fang nudged the cup of tea to the side, enjoying the ringing pat of his paw against the porcelain and the sloshing of liquid inside it as he watched it inch closer and closer to the edge, sending the occasional glance back at Lillian as she mentally entreated him to stop, no, don’t you dare, and other such silly human phrases.
“But regardless, because of this bond, familiars are much easier to resurrect than people. Due to the present and willing soul, there are relatively simple items and spells which can be used to revive them. In theory that should work to bring you back to life Lillian, should you perish. But, as I mentioned, a human as a familiar has essentially never happened before, so it is difficult to be fully certain. Rather than waiting for to to happen naturally and just hoping it works, we should really put theory into practice as soon as possible, with proper precautions. Later this week should do, once you’ve had some time to recover from your excursion. Does Friday work for you?”
There was a moment of silence as Fang’s nudges finally brought the cup to the edge of the table. Then one last shove sent it over, tumbling down to crash against the floorboards as Fang stared smugly back at Lillian, before jumping down from the desk when the white mage shot to her feet, darting along the edge of the room as she asked, “You want me to die to test if I can come back? No. No nope no not gonna happen nope never not a chance No.”