“There are going to be limits on how exactly we can measure your senses, but we’ll do the best we can,” Tia told Baby Bear. “Let’s start with sight, okay?”

Once again, the bear held both of his round, slightly-flattened paws out towards Tia to indicate the thumbs up.

I wonder if he’d hold his paws differently if he were flipping someone off, Aaron mused while Tia set something up on her phone.

Phone in hand, she walked away from the dinette and down the hallway to the bedrooms. She stopped at the corner and turned around, phone held in front of her. A large E took up most of the screen. She did something with her phone that caused the E to change directions. Each time, she asked Bear to indicate what direction the legs were facing.

Baby Bear got them all right.

She came back towards the dinette, stopping at the end of the hall just five or six feet away from the table. When she held up her phone again, it had several lines of random letters in different sizes. It wasn’t quite as many lines as Aaron was used to, but he recognized the classic eye chart right away. Bear read through the lines — which seemed to be on an app that let Tia cycle through them — with both eyes and with a paw covering each of his eyes in turn.

Finally, Tia came back to the table and set down her phone. She shone a tiny flashlight in Bear’s eyes for her last test and even Aaron could see that Bear’s eyes didn’t respond to the light in the slightest.

“You’ve got decent vision as far as I can tell, Bear,” she told them. “I’m not an expert or anything, but I’d say it’s around 20/20. It’s a little surprising because I thought bears were supposed to have bad eyesight.”

“That’s a common misconception,” Aaron said.

“Slander and lies,” Bear complained.

Aaron patted the bear on the head. “If I remember right, the conventional wisdom is that bear’s had strong senses of smell to make up for bad eyesight. But I think they see about as well as we do.”

“And bears can see in color, too,” Bear added. “It’s a conspiracy by Big Cat because they’re jealous. Lions and tigers are in cahoots to make bears seem less awesome.”

“Right, well… there’s some other tests we can do to get a better picture of your overall vision, too,” Tia said.

“Let’s do it!” Bear cheered. “We’ll show those big kitty cats who’s the bestest murder floofs. It’s bears, by the way.”

For Tia’s next test she pulled the drapes over the windows almost completely closed and turned off the lights. Baby Bear was able to identify how many fingers she was holding up from everywhere she stood. He could even see her standing at the end of the hall, which was the darkest place in the apartment.

The truly interesting thing, to Aaron, was that he could also see her with relative ease with only a sliver of light coming in through the windows. And, he realized, she was moving around the apartment in the darkness without any obvious problems, too.

So low-light vision seems common enough to drakus, Aaron thought.

“What about total darkness?” he asked when Tia came back to the table and began rummaging in her bag again.

“Hmm? What do you mean?”

“Well, Bear’s not actually an animal and doesn’t have rods or cones or irises, so he sees purely with magic, right? What if he can see even if there’s no light at all?”

“Maybe,” Tia said. “Your guest room doesn’t have a window, right?”

Aaron shook his head, then remembered they were mostly in the dark. “It does not.”

She pulled two things out of her bag. One was a stubby flashlight. The other looked like the world’s stubbiest toy lightsaber, a tube of glass a little over a foot long extending from a thick handle.

“Alright, let’s get in there and check it out,” she said.

Aaron scooped Baby Bear up from the table, where he had his nose in the empty cookie packet, and followed Tia to the second bedroom. The room had an odd orientation but he hadn’t taken the time to give it much thought before. Now was as good a time as any and Tia might be able to shed some light on the strangeness.

“Do you have any idea why this room’s door is on the hallway before the turn?” he asked. “It seems odd to have it come out here instead closer to the guest bathroom.”

“Probably because it’s not really a bedroom,” Tia said with a shrug. “You have to have a window for a room to count as a bedroom, so this was probably designed as an office or something during the initial renovation to combine the two apartments.”

In the room, Tia set her flashlight things on the dresser and began to set up for their experiment. She had Aaron pull the bedspread off the bed while she turned on the light in the closet on the far side of the room. Then she told him to sit on the bed with Baby Bear while she hung the bedspread over the door.

Aaron was going to ask how she got it to stay up until he realized it was probably a trivial piece of magic for her. Very useful, though, to be able to magic up double-sided tape at will.

With the door blacked out, Tia crossed the room back into the closet. She turned off the light and the room was plunged into pitch darkness.

Aaron blinked at the sudden change. He could see the room with a level of detail he could only describe as severe. It lacked color. Instead, everything was in grayscale. There was something disconcerting, something off about the way everything looked. It took Aaron a few seconds to put his finger on what.

There are no shadows, he realized. Holy shit, that’s weird.

Without shadow, nothing looked quite right. Objects had a quality — a fakeness — to them. They were surreal, almost. They were too defined yet seemed to blend into one another. Aaron’s depth perception was struggling with the change, as well. He was glad he was sitting because he didn’t trust himself to move much until he could adjust to the change.

One other thing was clear — Baby Bear could see just as well as he could, if not better. The teddy bear waved at him happily when Aaron happened to look down while surveying the room. He was also watching Tia as she carefully progressed across the room back towards the dresser, using one hand to guide her along the wall.

Seeing in the dark must not be as common as low-light vision, Aaron thought.

Tia had finally made her way to the dresser. She was clearly making an effort to be as quiet as possible. Bear, standing on Aaron’s lap, kept glancing up at him with a smirk as he watched her progress. Sometimes he even imitated her by miming exaggerated sneaking.

Slowly, Tia felt for one of the lights on the dresser. Her hand found the shorter, regular-looking one first. She slowly lifted it up and raised it above her head.

“How many fingers am I holding up, now?” she asked.

Bear looked up at Aaron and very clearly rolled his eyes. Then he raised a paw until it was just below his chin and puckered his mouth into a small O. He wasn’t sure, but Aaron thought Bear was shushing him.

“Four,” the bear answered.

“Are you sure, Bear?”

“Four fingers held up, final answer.”

Tia shook her head, even though she didn’t know they could see her. “Sorry, Bear, that’s wrong.”

“No, it’s not,” Bear insisted. “Four fingers and a thumb, raised above your head, holding a thingy.”

In the lightless void of the guest room, Tia blinked several times. Then she looked up at her own, as if to confirm that she was, in fact, holding some kind of ‘thingy.’

“That’s– that’s right,” she finally said.

“I know,” Bear boasted.

“Well, holy crap,” Tia muttered. “Alright, well that was unexpected. Let’s, uh, let’s test a couple other things.”

Tia swapped between the two lights she’d brought into the room. Aaron suspected the flashlight was infrared and the wand-tube thing was ultraviolet, but neither he nor Baby Bear were able to see light outside the visible spectrum.

After those tests, they returned to the dinette. Tia’s last test of Bear’s vision was to see how good his peripheral vision was, which was how they learned the most shocking thing about how Bear saw. He didn’t see with his eyes, at all, but somehow perceived the world around him in every direction at the same time and with the same visual acuity.

Through the clever use of advanced mystic apparatus — such as a plastic bag and a cardboard box — they were able to figure out some limits of Baby Bear’s omnidirectional sight. He existed in a sensory field that extended a little over two inches around him in every direction.

The field could pass through barriers, to a degree, and gave him a full field of view if even a part of it was clear. It couldn’t penetrate everything, however, Some quality of an object, other than its thickness, seemed to block the field. Tia suspected it was how solid the material was, but wasn’t sure.

If he was inside a closed box that was larger than the field for every part of him except where his feet were touching the box, he could see as if the box weren’t there at all. But if that box were placed on the dinette table, whatever quality the table had effectively closed the gap.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

Baby Bear’s hearing operated on the same basic principles as Aaron and Tia’s. If they had him muffle his ears, it muffled his hearing. After playing around with some apps on Tia’s phone for a couple minutes, they learned he could identify specific sounds at lower volumes than they could and hear much higher frequencies, as well.

His sense of taste was harder to pin down. Tia had a collection of small glass ampules with droppers she had prepared. Each ampule contained a small amount of blue liquid and was meant to determine if Bear had the same basic taste buds as humans and how sensitive they were.

The experiment didn’t work out, though. When Tia would pull a dropper out of an ampule, Bear could identify what was in the solution by smell. Salt, sugar, lemon juice, and something Bear didn’t know the name of; Tia told them it was lime pith. It only took a minute for Tia to run through about a dozen of the ampules and Bear got them all right — even the one that was just distilled water.

“I do wonder if your taste buds are adapted the same way a natural bear’s are,” Tia mused, packing the box of ampules back into her bag. “Like, will you enjoy flavors that a bear in the wild would that a human wouldn’t?”

“You should ask the next magic teddy bear you meet,” Bear replied. “Because I’m okay chomping on some sushi and sashimi, but not so much with chewing a living fish right out of the river. And I’m one hundred percent for sure not gonna eat bugs or moss or whatever.”

Tia held her hands up in surrender. “I’m not judging one way or another, Bear. Anyways, how about we test your sense of smell next, seeing as it kind of wrecked the taste test.”

“Sure, bears smell great!”

He wasn’t kidding.

Tia had done some basic web searches to have an idea of how good a regular, living bear’s senses were, particularly compared to humans. Smell was where they shone. Not just compared to humans, but compared to every other animal in the world.

“Your average dog has a sense of smell a hundred times better than a human and a blood hound’s is three times better than that,” Tia told them. “A bear’s sense of smell is seven times better than a blood hound’s.”

“No fucking way,” Aaron said. “That’s what? More than two thousand times better than a human? That just seems made up.”

Baby Bear held out a paw towards Aaron. It was oriented in a way he was pretty sure confirmed his early theory about a thumb’s up versus flipping the bird.

“I know; it sounds insane,” Tia agreed. “The internet is a festering pit of calumnies and vitriol, but it’s rarely this consistent. I think there’s a good chance it’s true, but we still need to see how close Baby Bear is to, say, a grizzly.”

Of course, Baby Bear was only too happy to participate in any tests that would lay their doubts to rest. To say he was smug in doing so would have been doing a disservice to smugness. He was downright haughty, even bumptious, in proving the unparalleled might of his nose.

He could list every meal, snack, or drink each of them eaten going back several days, mostly in order, and with relatively good accuracy. He could smell things Aaron had eaten that Aaron didn’t even remember eating and the same went for Tia.

“That’s bullshit,” Aaron complained. “Bear senses are bullshit.”

“Kinda makes you question how much benefit we’re really getting from brushing our teeth, doesn’t it?” Tia said while Bear took a victory lap around the dinette table.

“Ouch,” Aaron replied. “Too real. And also, it makes me think of the bathroom, which I really don’t want to think about after learning just how good Bear’s sense of smell is.”

The bear in question blew a raspberry — another mystery, considering he didn’t have a tongue or anything resembling the rather fleshy lips of humans.

“I tune most of that stuff out,” he said. “I ignore most things I can smell, actually, but that goes double for gross people stuff like poops and whatnot.”

“That’s a small comfort, I guess,” Aaron muttered. “Why in the world do bears need such powerful senses anyway?”

“All the better to snuggle you with,” Bear said, the picture of wisdom.

“I guess we’re just lucky bears are dumb and can’t use tools,” Aaron mused. “Otherwise we’d be screwed.”

“Damn straight,” Bear said. “Hey, wait a minute…”

“Just a couple more to get through,” Tia said, checking her phone. “Which is good because Alice should be here fairly soon.”

The next set of tests were meant to measure Baby Bear’s sensitivity to touch. Poking, pulling, prodding, pinching, using objects with different temperatures, materials, consistencies, and more all revealed that Bear felt things pretty much the same way humans did.

Tia confessed she wasn’t entirely confident in the accuracy of the results, however. After all, Bear could basically see anything she tried to use as a stimulus so there was no way to effectively ensure he was relying solely, or mostly, on touch alone.

“There is one thing, though,” she told the bear. “You don’t seem to experience any real discomfort. I’m curious if you experience pain the same way we do.”

“Well, I am a bear,” Bear said. “We’re the toughest of tough!”

“Maybe,” Tia admitted. “In any case, even if you’re willing to do more experiments on that subject, I’m not comfortable doing any more strenuous tests without expanding my magical talents a bit. I’ve never really put much attention towards restorative magic and I’m not sure whether magic that heals or repairs would be more effective if you accidentally got a minor injury.”

“Pshaw! I was full of holes a week ago and my head was almost falling off. I can take it. Easier than eating bugs, that’s for sure.”

Tia considered the bear for a moment. “We’ll see. We can talk about it more when I come to check on you while Aaron’s on his delving trip. For now, the last thing I want is to take a sample of your fur for some testing.”

“Not my fuzz,” Bear gasped, hugging himself. “I need that. For my fuzziness!”

“I just want to snip a tiny piece from the end of a bit of your fur, not cut it down to its roots or anything. Plus it would give us a chance to see if your fur grows or regrows. That would be pretty good to know, right?”

Baby Bear sat down and considered this for a solid two minutes, occasionally rubbing his tummy with his paws and mumbling inaudibly to himself.

Aaron wanted to reassure his bear that it was okay to say no, but decided to wait until he’d made a decision on his own. Setting a boundary without any input from Aaron would be good for Bear’s personal growth. If he agreed, Aaron could make it clear he’d support a choice either way and give Bear a chance to change his mind.

Finally, Bear came to a decision. “Okay,” he said. “But take it from the bottom of one of my footsies. It’s the least snuggliest, least cutest place.”

“It’s okay to say no, Bear,” Aaron said. “There will be enough times where I’ll have to ask you to follow my directions even if you might not want to, but this is not one of them. Your body is your body, you have the final authority on what happens to it as far as I’m concerned.”

“No doy,” Baby Bear said, flapping a paw dismissively in Aaron’s direction. “It’s nice of you to say, but I already knew that. I might only be a day old but I’m also older than you are. I know you better than anybody, Aaron. You’re my person!”

“That’s very sweet, but, uh… who says ‘no doy’ anymore?”

“Not to ruin the moment,” Tia said, “but I want to make it clear that I also would have reminded you about your bodily autonomy. Anyways… let’s give you the tiniest haircut.”

She laid a piece of wax paper on the table and positioned Baby Bear so that his feet were on top of it. Then she leaned over the table, a tiny brush and pair of tweezers in one hand and a pair of scissors in the other.

After tousling the fur on the bottom of Bear’s feet with the brush — a brutally ticklish act that caused the teddy to squeal and squirm, requiring Aaron’s help to keep him still — she squeezed a tiny bit of fur with the end of her tweezers and snipped off the very tip with her scissors.

Or she tried to, at least.

Baby Bear’s fur proved to be recalcitrant in the face of the scissor blades, with little respect for their sharpness or the physics of leverage involved in their operation.

The tiny bit of fur proved to be downright disrespectful of the very purpose of any blade, in fact, remaining obdurately attached even after Tia began escalating to increasingly sharp objects in an effort to secure her sample.

After five minutes of increasing frustration, Tia boastfully announced that, “Play time was over!” and began casting spells at Baby Bear’s foot.

The first spell formed a shimmering barrier that rose up from the table. It was tiny, not even an inch high and only a couple inches across. It was flush with Bear’s foot, which was pressed against it. Except for a small tuft of fur, the tip of which was just barely poking out over the top of the energy field.

Then Tia created a second, nearly identical barrier, coming from above. The two panes of magic were almost touching, with just enough space between their edges to pinch the end of that errant tuft of fur between them.

Finally, Tia performed a third spell. Carefully. So very carefully. Watching her, Aaron could see she was concentrating more intently on this sorcery than she had for the simple barriers. She didn’t perform her incantation aloud, so Aaron wasn’t positive what it did, but when she finished there was a woosh of air and the tiny bit of Bear’s fur rustled, as if in a breeze.

Yet it remained resolutely attached.

“What the actual shit?” Tia complained. “How the crap did that not work!?”

“I told you I was tough,” Baby Bear bragged, wiggling on his butt and tapping the arcane shields with the bottoms of his feet. “Built bear tough!”

“What was that spell supposed to do?” Aaron asked.

“It was a severing spell. One strong enough it could hurt a drakus, maybe even take off a finger or ear.”

Aaron whistled. “That’s strong.”

“I guess I could get a microscope and some other stuff and try to just, like, plop Baby Bear on the damned thing,” Tia mused. “That might be an option.

“Not exactly the most scientific of experiments that have ever been conducted, but I think you’ve done a good job so far,” Aaron said. “I’m sure you can figure something out.”

Tia sighed. “We’re in magic waters that might be largely uncharted and we don’t have unlimited time, so I’m trying to make the best of it.”

“I think it’s sciencey enough,” Baby Bear said, patting Tia’s hand gently. “Barely.”

A pause — a long pause — settled on the table like a weight.

Bear broke the silence. “Get it? Bear-ly? No? Well, I thought they were very good… ex-bear-iments.”

“You said he was surprisingly durable, right?” Aaron asked.

“Yes, very.”

“Good,” Aaron said, picking Baby Bear up and hurling him down the hallway.

The bear cackled gleefully as he soared through the air until he hit the far wall with a fwump.

“And make sure you hide your fuzzy little butt in one of the drawers,” Aaron called down the hallway. “Not just because Alice is coming but as punishment for those awful puns!”

Baby Bear continued laughing as he waddled around the corner of the hallway towards the bedroom.

Aaron’s phone buzzed in his pocket and he took it out to find a new message.

“Alice will be here in five minutes,” he said.

“Awesome, I’m interested to see some oneiromancy in action and she’s probably the only person in the Drakon with even half a chance of doing it well,” Tia replied.