The unanticipated side effect of adding an unarmed skill to my repertoire was that I now had something new to train. It felt weird punching and kicking jumpcrabs and braygulls, but it brought in some fresh, much-needed experience points.

I hadn’t run into Rog for a while. We crossed paths at the Church, but he gave me some space. It seemed like some of the other kids picked up on this, and a few tried to talk to me about it, but I kept silent on the details. I wasn’t looking for a posse.

Unfortunately, it meant that some kids had started following me around outside of the Church as well. I had to lose them if I wanted to head back to the beach and train, which meant that afternoons were starting to be wasted by wandering through town and ducking the eyes that followed me.

I could have just stopped going to the Church. I didn’t think anyone knew where I lived, so I could take the long way from my house to the beach and back and avoid the other children entirely. I would have, except that the days were getting colder, training all day was yielding less and less, and it was nice to put a warm soup in my belly at midday. I was also learning more about Mirut by spending the afternoons in town, building up my mental library of appraisal details, and meeting some of the adults in town who I thought I could learn some things from, all of which was worthwhile as well.

In addition to that, there were a lot more of the rat-like beasts around the piers which I hadn’t yet grind on, so I was secretly impaling rats with earth magic in the alleys. A kid’s got to hustle, right? I didn’t think I had the magical skills to heal myself from some kind of disease, so I did not collect the rat corpses I killed. The other rats tended to clean them up for me.

I was more than a little curious about what they’d dismantle into, but I would hold back until I had advanced my 6-point magic skill as planned. Sadly it meant I was missing out on the small amount of experience I could get from cooking their meat, thanks to my cooking skill, but I wasn’t too keen on eating rat if I could avoid it anyway.

I had earned some experience beating up Rog and the beasts on the beach, and more still from killing the rats, so I was well on my way to level 5 now, but at this rate experience would again slow to a trickle before I leveled up. I was brainstorming how to bust through this plateau as I started to notice the experience from rats was drying up. I had overheard some fishmongers and other shopkeepers chatting about how the number of rats seemed to be on the decline of late, which made me feel a bit bad since I would likely be stopping soon. Sorry, Mirut, I won’t be acting as your alleycat for much longer.

The piers were always busy, full of sailors and fishermen and merchants and visitors. Listening to adult conversations helped me start to shape my knowledge about the world and the kingdom that I lived in. I didn’t even know this was a kingdom, prior to this. Apparently the kingdom was called Horuth, and the king was King Tobar Horuth. I inferred that royalty and maybe nobles actually had family names instead of patronymic last names, which were the names of their territory. I wondered who the Mirut family was in this town, if one existed.

It was at the pier that I met my first tamer.

I was watching some sailors unload crates after docking when I saw a funny looking beast looking down on me from between the rails of the ship’s deck. It was cat-like, or maybe a cat mixed with a monkey, but the ears weren’t quite right–more like a pair of deer ears on a cat’s head. They seemed much too large for the face, which was larger than a normal housecat, with big cat eyes and wicked looking fangs. The fur was thick and short, a dark brown, and the nose trended a little bit closer to simian than feline. It had proper little grasping hands rather than paws, and just a tiny tuft of a tail. It looked well-muscled while still being lithe. I waved at it and it waved back, startling me.

Someone nearby laughed at my surprise. “Is that the first gremline you’ve seen?” the man asked.

I took a look at the man, who was burly and sea-weathered. He wore a long leather coat with the cuffs rolled up which was covered in scratches. He had a friendly smile on his face, so I returned the smile. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s cute!”

The man laughed again, and whistled for the beast. “Not many folk would call him cute!” The beast–the gremline–disappeared from between the rails at the whistle and reappeared running down the ship’s ramp to the pier and scrambled up the man’s coat, perching on his shoulder. “This is Totter,” he said, introducing the gremline to me. “And I’m Forn.”

“I’m Pilus,” I said, introducing myself. “Nice to meet you both.”

I quickly appraised Forn and took in his information.

Forn Pashalson (Lv 31)

HP: 355/374

MP: 185/203

This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Status: none

EXP: 1966/3100

Skills: Cooking(++), Fishing(++), Knotting(+), One-Armed(+), Taming(++), Unarmed(+)

Familiars: Gremline (Lv 7)

Huh, the familiar information was new. And that little monkey-cat was a higher level than I was! Could I appraise Totter as well, since he was a familiar? I tried, but nothing came up. I felt like it should be possible and I was just missing something.

“So what does a gremline do on a ship?” I asked, nodding towards Totter.

“Ah,” Forn said. “You’ll see them on ships now and then, if they can land a crew member who knows how to tame. I grew up in a farming family before I found my way to the sea, and I learned to tame the plow beasts from my pa. A gremline,” he said, scooping Totter off his shoulder and holding him like a baby, leaning down so I could take a closer look, “is a beast from just south of here, actually. If you follow the coastline to Haklan, you can find them where the jungle meets the desert. They’re a wicked nuisance to a lot of the people that live around there, since they’re excellent climbers and hard to keep out of town, and will get into the food stores if they aren’t sealed up tight. However,” he continued, pointing to one of the big rats that was running by, “when tamed, they do an excellent job of killing polerats.”

He lightly tossed Totter onto a pile of nearby crates and he easily scampered up and over them, gaining the high ground, then leapt, pouncing on the beast that I’d been killing for days now which Forn had called a polerat. The gremline chomped down hard on the neck of the vermin beast, killing it. He brought it back to Forn, who took it from his little monkey-like hands. “These things get into the cargo, especially the grain, and make a real mess of it. But they’re good eating, too, so Totter pulls double duty protecting the cargo and bringing in some meat. Most of the men don’t like to eat them, and we have provisions, so Totter usually eats them himself, which means he can earn his own way on board.”

I guess I had been wasting the polerats I had been killing. I would collect a few next time I hunted them. I bent down, then stopped, remembering how I felt about strangers petting my old dog back on Earth. “Can I pet him?” I asked.

He smiled. “Sure. He likes to be scratched behind his ears.”

I scritched his ears and he made a funny chirping sound, then raised his arms. I glanced at Forn, who nodded, so I picked the gremline up like a baby and he got comfortable in the crook of my arm. He was heavy to me and my small body, and didn’t smell great, but he was pretty cute.

“He likes you,” Forn laughed.

I recognized a rare opportunity here. There wasn’t any farming in Mirut and I wasn’t sure how else I could learn about this. “How does someone tame a beast?” I asked the farmer-turned-sailor.

“Hmm,” he said, rubbing his chin. “The way I was taught, you find some high-value food that the beast loves. There’s a tamer trick where you can channel your will into the food. If you can feed them enough of that, you’ll eventually form a tamer bond. You’ll feel that when it happens.” He laughed, a little embarrassed this time. “Sorry kid, I’m not good at explaining it.”

I thought for a minute. “When you say channeling your will into the food, is that magic?”

He shook his head. “There’s no magic circle involved.”

I wondered if Forn knew that magic didn’t always involve magic circles and used to use spoken spells, but decided against asking about that. It didn’t sound like he used a spell to make the taming food anyway. Yet, Forn clearly had a higher MP than his skills and lifestyle would otherwise suggest. This will-channeling sounded like it could be akin to low-level enchantment. In any case, it almost certainly did use MP and therefore was magic, just not very well-defined magic. When I first learned that taming existed from my mother, she had said it wasn’t magic, but that might have just been the pretentiousness of a magic circle researcher.

I reached into my pack, hiding my hand so I could summon a piece of braygull meat, then offered it to him. “Could you show me how it’s done?”

“Sure,” he said, although he seemed like he was losing interest. Then he glanced at the meat. “This is a nice piece of meat, cooked pretty well too. Did your mom make this for you? I don’t want to waste it giving it to Totter.”

“It’s fine, I’ve got more,” I said. Then I thought better of it, as I didn’t want to come off as a rich kid. “My dad hunted them for us, but I’d really like for Totter to have it!” I did my best to give an innocent child’s smile.

Forn grunted and shrugged, then closed his eyes. I pulled up his stats so I could watch as he worked. He closed his eyes, with the meat between both hands, and I saw his MP start to drop as a weak glow appeared from between his hands. The meat’s glow faded as he handed it off to Totter, who had jumped out of my arms, and who eagerly shoved it into his mouth. “It won’t do anything since he’s already tamed,” he commented, “but it’s good to do now and then to reinforce the bond. If you abandon a tamed beast and never reinforce the bond, they’ll eventually revert to a wild beast.”

I had more questions, but Forn glanced at the sky and then at the crates. “Anyway, I’ve got to get back to this, but thanks for the meat. You can keep this polerat as a gift from Totter.” He tossed it at me, then raised his hand and wandered back to the ship to help the unloading. Totter the gremline chirped at me again, then ran after him.

“Thank you!” I called after him, making a face at the dead rat. Looking closer, I could see that the polerat’s ears, snout, and nose was a bit more horse-like than rat. I shook my head and faked putting it in my pack, dropping it instead into my inventory and looking at the details while dismantling.

I didn’t have the spare skill points for taming yet, but was glad to learn something new about this world. Contrary to what the people who used it seemed to think, taming was most definitely just another school of magic, an older style that possibly even predated spellcasting, since there were no spoken words. It might not be as flashy as creating fire, but there was a lot more potential for this than keeping rats at bay and plowing fields. A simple paradigm shift in how taming was understood could open the doors to a much more powerful practice. I filed away the knowledge, yet another thing to try and experiment with once I had more MP available and the SP to spare.

For now, I would kill some more polerats, collect and cook them up, and keep punching stuff until I hit level 5.