Some of the hunters that had made the trip to Gurt with me and had seen my proud lubargs in action had asked about taming lubargs of their own to help them with their hunts and to keep as backup, but were complaining about the price being too steep.
Admittedly, I was asking a lot, albeit for a full grown lubarg. I told them they were welcome to go out into the wilds and try to tame their own, but I did have some lubargs I would sell our village’s hunters for a fraction of the cost, if they came back the next day.
The expression on their faces was a mix of confusion, doubt, and delight.
“Awfully small ‘bargs,” Bortag grumbled at the mess of puppies playing in the pen next to the Guild branch. One of the other hunters was grumbling, but a hunter named Hella had eyes wide.
“The young ones are… rather cute,” she said, then frowned slightly. “At least when their parents aren’t trying to eat you.”
“These young ones are weaned, and the parents are the proud lubargs that took down those thieving archers last season,” I said. “So no need to worry about the parents, at least.”
“But the little ones won’t be useful for at least a year,” Bortag commented.
“Maybe not against a bandit or a pack of other ‘bargs,” I admitted. “But they’ll grow quickly, and will help you with small game in the meanwhile. They can still chase mursin, help guide your prey into traps or ambushes. And,” I said, pointing. “They’re really cute.”
The truth was, while I knew that intellectually even fresh novice tamers could tame a rank E beast—I had evolved several rank F beasts into rank E prior to advancing my skill, and farmers and their children tamed rank E oxalires across the Kingdom—I was still a little nervous giving full grown predators to people inside the village, where loss of control could mean disaster. Rank really only told half the story, as far as I could tell, and had more to do with how much experience they needed before they hit their level cap, and thus opened the door for evolution.
Within a rank, there was a lot of room for variance in terms of size, strength, and most importantly, aggression. I did not know conclusively that more aggressive beasts were any different from passive, calmer beasts when it came to taming, but I would have felt a lot more comfortable with people keeping puppies, for the moment, than keeping potential killers, at least before they got a few points in their skills. I felt confident they could earn those skill points raising pups over the course of a year, especially if they actually practiced and tamed other small beasts.
I also did not know, one way or the other, if raising a beast from childhood had any effect on the taming bond, as opposed to taming a grown adult. It certainly seemed like it should, and I was able to engage with baby beasts that were entirely untamed on my farm. The lubarg pups in front of me were untamed, and had never been tamed, but were at least semi-tame in the traditional sense of the word, having been raised in captivity.
Still, beasts were not quite the same as Earth animals. I had no idea if the same rules applied, and had to act like they did not. While I could experiment with raising dangerous beasts without a taming bond and seeing if I could retain some level of training into adulthood, as I could easily dispatch a problem beast and heal myself, for most people it would be too dangerous. Out here in Freehold, with no Church, a bad injury could mean death, and I was absolutely not ready to reveal my healing magic secret within the borders of the Horuth Kingdom.
Collecting data about taming was part of why I wanted to organize and grow the ranks of tamers in my life, but I did also need to keep the people I knew and cared about safe, hence: puppies.
I may have also wanted to start normalizing companion beasts as pets, and cute puppies would definitely help that goal.
One of the hunters I did not know that well wandered off, saying he would think about it, but Hella decided to tame a puppy and she left with one trotting at her heels. She did not even make it out of sight before she crouched, scooped the puppy up in her arms, and sped away to fawn over it in private.
Bortag stood there, still unconvinced, chewing something. He spat it out, and looked at me. “I dunno.”
“Oh, just take one,” I said, since it was just the two of us. “I’ll eat the cost for the marketing value.”
“I’ll have to feed it,” he grumbled.
“You’re a hunter!” I said, shaking my head. “Take it outside the walls, shoot a bird or something. Feeding it won’t be an issue for you.”
He mumbled something, and I prodded him to repeat himself.
“What if it gets hurt?”
Ah. Fear of responsibility, I could understand.
“Well, you don’t have to take it out for hunts. You can just… raise it at home, if you’d rather. Treepo almost never hunts with me, but he still has value to me. He’s my companion, and my friend.”
Treepo stopped watching the puppies tumble over each other and looked up at me, chittering in response.
In the end, Bortag walked off with a puppy as well, and the next day I sold two more to Len and Harod, the village guards, leaving me with only one remaining. I ended up selling some of the young rockstalkers as well, which were more novel, and started seeing people being accompanied by their new pets while walking around the village.
So it was not a big surprise to me when the Guild door opened a few days later and Soren’s daughter Rena reappeared, this time accompanied by her exasperated father. The shy girl approached the counter slowly, looking off to the side where the last puppy was sleeping.
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She turned around and whispered something to her father, and Soren smiled softly at her and told her to ask me herself. She took a breath and turned back to me, lips pursed in determination.
“Can I buy a ‘barg puppy please?” she asked, with the severity of a serious child.
I held back a chuckle, and looked over to the last pup, who had woken up from her nap and was looking over towards Rena’s feet. I leaned forward over the counter and saw her not-a-pomeranian at her side.
I paused, thinking. While a novice tamer like Rena should have been able to control a rank E beast like the lubarg puppy without issue, I knew for a fact that controlling multiple beasts was a sticking point which required strengthening the skill. I did not have the precise measurements, and also did not know how much evolution factored in, but I had lost control of Nibbles the giant polerat when I had four evolved beasts, all rank E save for Gregory who was rank F. Rena’s bouncing vorbil was rank F, and adding a rank E was probably safe even with only the basic skill with no growth at all, but I was not willing to take the chance.
“You already have your vorbil.”
“I can’t have both?”
“You can, but taming and raising two is harder than one. It takes practice to be a good tamer, and ‘bargs get big and strong very quickly. Tell you what,” I said, an idea forming. “I’ll sell you a puppy when you can buy it yourself with money you earned from the Guild. I’ll buy any other vorbils or other beasts you can tame from around the village, and when you’ve earned what you need, I’ll let you buy the puppy. Assuming that’s ok with your pa.”
Soren nodded. “That’s not a bad idea.”
“But there’s only one left! What if someone else buys it?”
Soren bent over to meet his daughter eye to eye. “That might happen. Sometimes, you can’t get what you want and have to wait and try again later. I’m sure Pilus will have puppies again in the future,” he said, glancing at me, so I nodded an affirmation, mouthing ‘next year’ to him. “Even if it takes you a year, the ‘barg you get will be one you worked hard for and earned all by yourself.”
Rena’s eyes were watery with tears as she stared longingly at the final puppy, but she nodded. He wiped her eyes and gave her a hug.
I told her that the first of every different type of species she brought me would earn her a bonus, to incentivize her to tame multiple different beasts instead of just bringing me an army of vorbils, figuring the diversity would level her up faster. Rena ran out of the Guild to get to work, and her father chuckled as she fled the building.
“She can get pretty determined when she has a task,” he said with pride.
“Should I hold the puppy for her?”
“No,” he said after a moment of thought, then placed some coins on the counter. “But I suppose, as a Guild member, I should have a beast of my own, anyway.”
I stared at him in temporary shock, then laughed, shaking my head. “Such a doting father. At least wait to tell her until she brings me some kind of beast.”
Soren shrugged, a bit sheepish, and tamed the last pup before parting ways. I wondered how much it was for Rena and how much he just wanted a puppy himself. I was pleased that Rena still opted to practice her taming and started bringing me various small beasts to sell, citing that even though there was a puppy at home, she wanted to earn enough to afford the next cute baby beast I had before it sold out, all on her own.
* * *
Of all the things I had accounted for, the villagers complaining about dog poop was not one of them.
Living within walls, even log walls, meant that there was a finite amount of space, and unlike on Earth, the people who lived here did not have regular garbage collection. Even if they did, they did not have poop bags with which to clean up after their new pets.
Teaching people that pets, even tamed beasts, need bathroom breaks, was not on my Tamer Guild bingo card.
A major advantage of taming beasts compared to keeping mundane pets was that they could be directed to defecate wherever the tamer wanted, so long as they were given the chance to. Farmers had long since figured this out, and oxalire would go to a specific location where the dung was heaped, and it would break down naturally over time. Even still, the smell could be intense, but that was always outside of walled cities, not within.
While beasts could, technically, be told to use the latrines, the people who were less on board with the whole taming experiment that was spreading through the village were not so keen on sharing the facilities, so we dug some new latrines specifically for beasts when people could not take them outside the walls. I also introduced the concept of litter boxes to the village, and how shredded leaves or other sources of carbon could be a nitrogen sink that would keep the smells down, and that the whole mess of organics could be dumped into a latrine pit as needed, or simply buried.
So it went, and kinks were found, worked out, and resolved, and the first branch of the Tamers Guild was fully underway. Some of the members simply bought a single beast and found joy in raising it as a pet, or use for the beast in their lives, without seeking anything more. Other members took to taming more actively, bringing in local beasts for sale. I had to adjust the prices of common beasts down to not be overwhelmed, which led to people bringing in different beasts from the area that I had not encountered before. I added those to my bestiary and brought some back to the farm. Others were used as feed sources for the predators, which was a simple fact of life when raising animals like lubargs and rockstalkers.
I worked out the criteria for advancing Guild ranks which would become necessary, longer term, for buying higher rank beasts, buying beasts in larger quantities, and so on. I could appraise a person to see when they had advanced their skill and double-advance the skill beyond that, and theoretically triple-advance and master the skill, though I had no idea what that would ultimately take. I could not know definitively what could be done across the entire population of tamers in this world, but I based the Guild ranks off what I had experienced so far. At the novice, iron rank, I recommended tamers to limit themselves to three bonds of beast rank E or lower, with a recommendation to limit themselves to only one bonded rank D beast. I would only sell an iron rank member rank E beasts or below. Once someone could show that they could responsibly maintain a bond with a rank D beast, whether tamed or transformed, they could advance to bronze rank, at which point I would sell them rank D beasts.
The assumption was, at that point, they had advanced the skill, and as I was the only member who could grant rank advancement for the moment, I would be able to track that and see how true it was. I decided, generally, that once someone could tame or transform a Rank C beast, they would advance to silver rank, and once they could tame or transform a Rank B beast, they would advance to gold, which was basically where I put myself with double-advancement. Each rank of member could only purchase what they had needed to tame to earn the rank.
Abstractly, I considered that there might end up being a further “two-star” gold rank for when double-advanced tamers could tame a Rank A beast, which I had yet to even see in this world. If there were any Rank S beasts out there, which would likely require full taming mastery, that would be a “three-star” gold rank, but that was getting way ahead of myself.
When things felt like they were finally established, and the spring rains started to recede, I started planning my next trip into Gurt. It was time to resupply and spread the Guild’s concept beyond the small village and into the greater world.