“You must stay absolutely silent while we’re in the house,” I whispered to the baby treehopper, who was clutching at the inside of my shirt. “If my parents find you, we’re screwed.”
I was brainstorming any possible explanation for how this could have happened that didn’t involve me leaving town, for the eventual time where I would get caught. Was this dumb, adorable little familiar worth ruining all my plans if my parents gave me hell for it? What if I couldn’t level up anymore, and was stuck idling until I turned 10 and got an apprenticeship? All my hard work would be for nothing, and I would barely be ahead at all.
I decided to put the rest of my level 6 SP into my new taming skill. I hoped that with better taming ability, this creature would listen, even though it was a child. I had no first-hand knowledge of how taming magic works and what the limits of it were. Totter the gremline seemed pretty autonomous, but was that how all tamed animals worked, or was he given that freedom by Forn?
I also couldn’t help but wonder if this would have happened if I had never spoken to Forn. Would I have tamed it without any knowledge of how it was done? Or did I set myself on this path by learning how, and then being in a position where I both had SP and could feed an animal something that had touched my magic?
“And also,” I whispered as we walked, “no pooping in my shirt. Or my bed. Or my house. You can poop in the toilet, or outside.”
Hopefully, it could understand me.
* * *
I lay in bed, absently petting the treehopper who was curled up asleep on my chest. We had avoided exposure for today, at least. I pulled up my stats and skills and considered what this would mean moving forward.
Pilus Horgson (Lv 6)
HP: 63/63
MP: 14/72
Status: none
EXP: 21/600
Skills: 4-Point Magic, 5-Point Magic, 6-Point Magic(+), Appraisal(+), Cooking, Inventory, Literacy, Taming, Unarmed
Familiar: Treehopper (Lv 1)
SP: 0
+ 4-Point Magic (1/10)
+ 5-Point Magic (0/10)
+ 6-Point Magic (0/100)
+ Appraisal (0/100)
+ Cooking (0/10)
+ Inventory (0/10)
+ Literacy (0/10)
+ Taming (3/10)
+ Unarmed (0/10)
If I managed to get away with keeping this familiar in the short term, I should probably toss 7 SP into my taming skill as soon as possible so I could gain more control over it and prevent exposure until it was grown. Once it was an adult, I could release it back into the wild. I couldn’t half-ass things now that I had taken on this decision to bring it home with me.
That meant I would have no SP to spend on other things until level 8. That was almost 1300 EXP away. The only way I could earn that much experience, fast, was back out beyond the wall and in the jungle.
Fortunately, my parents hadn’t noticed the damage to my clothes. I had some other clothes, so I would wear those in the meanwhile. Hopefully it wasn’t that unusual for young children running around town with no oversight to tear their clothes and I could ask Sharma to sew the torn ones back up, once I concocted a story to explain the damages.
I should probably set aside one set of clothes as my jungle clothes instead of damaging every item of clothing I own, I thought.
What I really wanted to advance as soon as possible was my inventory skill. It was a cheat skill in the first place, but advancing it so that I could hold more stuff would be incredibly useful. I had been running into the limits of my inventory for too long now. Advancing my inventory wasn’t exactly productive in the same way that working on my other skills would be, particularly my magic.
Should I advance 5-point magic instead, and try to learn how to cast illusions? Maybe I could keep Treepo safe that way.
Wait. Treepo?
I looked down at the sleeping beast, barely visible in the weak light of the night. I groaned softly. I had already named it without even realizing it. I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl! Well, Treepo isn’t exactly a particularly gendered nickname.
I was exhausted from my day in the jungle and the stress of sneaking around behind my parents’ backs, made worse still with a familiar now in tow. I thought my anxiety would keep me awake, but soon enough I was struggling to keep my eyes open.
“We’ll figure this out tomorrow, Treepo,” I said with a yawn.
Treepo chittered softly in its sleep.
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* * *
As it turned out, I had very little to be worried about. My parents hadn’t been that attentive in the first place, which was obvious if you consider all the magic practice and beast murder I had done in the yard before I turned five. Now that I was older than five, they paid me even less attention.
If I hadn’t been a reincarnated person who would now be approaching middle-age, I would have probably been pretty worried about whether or not my parents loved me. They were so distant, but it seemed like most parents in Mirut were distant with their kids. Maybe that was just how the kingdom or the world operated here. It occurred to me that comparing child-rearing in this world to my world, in modern times, was probably unfair. It wasn’t that long ago on Earth that grade-school children were working in the mines, not fussed over and doted on like they are now.
In any case, it made it pretty easy for Treepo to avoid detection. Mostly, he just hung out inside my shirt while at home. At least, I thought he was a he; it was hard to tell on a creature so young, particularly because treehoppers seemed to have a mostly internal genital orifice. He would outgrow the ability to hide in my clothing soon, but he could probably hide in my pack then for a while. Once he was large enough, I could probably get him to hide in the tree outside the house when I was coming home and sneak him in through my window at night.
Waking up over the next few mornings with Treepo curled up and cuddled in my neck ended any plans to release him once he was grown. I had always been a sucker for animals back on Earth. No matter how frigid and distant I would try to be in this world, made necessary in part by the fact that I was killing a lot of this world’s beasts, the act of taming probably affected me almost as much as it had affected him.
All I could do was move forward.
Of course, I faced a different challenge when I handed off a package of meat to Bosh.
“...Is this treehopper meat?” the large man asked, dumbfounded, after staring at it for a minute. He stopped me before I could answer. “No, I don’t want to know. There’s no way you’re dumb enough to go outside the wall. How would a kid even get outside the wall?” he muttered to himself as he moved to his workspace, grabbed a knife, and started piecing out the meat.
“Would you believe it jumped the wall? And that I found it in the town?” I asked trepidatiously.
“No,” he snorted with an air of disdain.
“Well in that case, here, I have more,” I said, pulling another couple of packages out of Bosh’s large sack, which he had since given to me to keep.
Bosh continued to mutter to himself while he worked. I sat in the chair in his back room and watched for a while, absently patting at Treepo inside my shirt.
In the end, Bosh gave me 5 coppers for each treehopper, which was better than a gull. Apparently there was a decent appetite for their meat amongst those with coin to spend. I wasn’t sure I would be able to eat any of it, myself, now that I tamed Treepo, so I would sell him the rest of it over the next couple of days.
“Please be careful,” he said to me seriously when I left the shop.
I grinned and he just shook his head and shut the door.
I made my way out of the back alley and to the main street, glancing at the shops. The coin was burning a bit of a hole in my pocket lately, but I didn’t really need anything that I was aware of. I wanted to buy some stuff from the magic store, but the proprietor knew my mother too well, so that was off the table.
I checked the fishmonger stalls, peering up at the variety of seafood that could only be fished up in deeper waters. I wondered if Treepo liked fish. I would have to learn what his favorites were and stock up.
I eventually made my way back to the beach. It was a beautiful, bright day outside, so there were too many people around to get away with much training. I was still tired from the previous night anyway, as sleeping with a new pet takes some getting used to. I lay down on the sand, soaking in some of the day’s heat, and took a nap.
* * *
I was back in my yard, hunting through the gardens for nodmice. I wasn’t feeling great about the day’s activities, but I wanted to learn about how Treepo grew and leveled up. My hand snaked out and nabbed one of the sleepy looking mice, which squeaked angrily at me. “Sorry,” I said to the small beast, and snapped all four of its legs.
I placed the nodmouse on the ground in front of my little treehopper. Treepo looked at me, then the nodmouse, then back to me. I pointed at it. “Kill that,” I said. The beast prodded at it, unsure. “Look, I know you’re a child, but technically so am I, and I’ve killed tons of these things. That meat you ate when I met you? That was one of these. It’s full of meat. Kill it and you can eat it.”
Treepo hopped over the squirming, injured beast and kicked at it ineffectually with his back legs. The beast cried out. I watched as Treepo fumbled around with the mouse, like watching a kitten figure out how to use its limbs for the first time.
“Don’t you have teeth? Can’t you bite it or something?” I watched and pondered, thinking back to the adult treehoppers. I guess he hadn’t been taught how to kill things yet. Then I remembered how I was attacked, and had an idea. I scooped Treepo and the injured mouse up and moved to the tree in the yard, and set him on the lowest branch, with the nodmouse on the ground below. “Try now,” I told my familiar.
Treepo stared down at the nodmouse, gears turning in his head, then he pounced. He came down hard on the rodent, which squeaked loudly once then fell silent.
“Ok, there we go,” I said. I found him another and watched him do it again. It seemed like as he fell on the prey, he would nab it with his front paws and then viciously kick out with his back legs, stunning or killing it. He only seemed to use his mouth for eating, but maybe when he got bigger he would bite as well. I couldn’t remember if I had been bitten by the treehoppers or just slashed at. They attacked so fast when fully grown that it was hard to parse, and I had also been swarmed. “Let’s try some singbirds,” I said.
I used weak air magic to stun the birds near the tree, and as they fell I watched Treepo leap at them, slamming them in mid-air to the ground. After a few, I checked his stats.
[Treepo] Treehopper (Lv 2)
HP: 7/7
MP: 1/1
Status: none
EXP: 11/20
Treepo had gained some experience just from eating new pieces of meat, but gained a lot more from killing these animals. Given the small amount of experience needed to level up, I figured he could hit level 4 pretty easily. I knew, from experience, that soon these small creatures wouldn’t give him much EXP at all, at which point things got tricky. He was still physically too small to attack bigger, stronger creatures. As far as I could tell, he had no skills nor any skill points. If he did, the metasystem was hiding it from me. Since the metasystem had accepted his name, I didn’t think that was the case, which meant that Treepo wouldn’t be able to learn skill-based combat abilities, nor magic. In that case, I didn’t know how I could possibly get him to level up more in the future against a foe like a rocky shieldback.
For the moment my concern was getting his HP up. I didn’t want him to die if he got attacked because of me. My eyes kept focusing on that 1 MP, though. It hadn’t changed when he leveled up. My working theory was the amount of HP or MP one would get leveling up had to do with the experience they acquired on the way to their level. With no skills to learn, and therefore no magic, it could be that Treepo could only ever gain HP. In that case, why did he have any MP at all? Wouldn’t he have 0 MP?
I hadn’t been hunting in my yard for a long time, so there were plenty of mice and birds around for Treepo to kill. Unfortunately, he was still a child, and quickly got sleepy, especially after he ate. I waited for him to wake back up so we could get back to his training, and while he napped, I started practicing some simple illusion magic.