I considered the term for a while. \u00a0The problem is, the only familiars I was really, um, familiar with were generally cats. Oh, I knew a couple of dogs, but as a rule of thumb dogs were suspicious of magic. One turtle. A very odd turtle to be sure, I actually thought the turtle might have been a wizard who had done something, well, bad, with reality. I was sure there were others, but no one kept a human as one. \u00a0Maybe a cat girl from anime? Nah. \u00a0Plus, she’d have to have those cute pointed ears on the top of her head, and her ears appeared (app-EAR-ed?) to be normal.<\/p>\n
I shook my head. What was a familiar, then? \u00a0I had a handful of definitions to choose from, magic being that lovely place of overlapping terminology based on a combination of sources in common. \u00a0The lowest denominator of magic, some of it being based on terms in science fiction or casual deterioration of religious vocabulary, I supposed. \u00a0I occasionally toyed with the idea of writing a book about a time in the future where magic was a standardized form of study and the terms were set, but if I was writing it while it wouldn’t have terrible Latin-based constructions I’d probably still be terrible and lose some culture’s contribution.<\/p>\n
Which was an amusing side-note to being “woke,” as an opposition to the living dream of the maya<\/em>. \u00a0I had struggled with the term ‘awake’ already,\u00a0personally caught between Shirley Jackson’s, “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream,” and Peter S. Beagle’s, ”\u00a0Most people are wide awake only now and then\u2014on special occasions, as you might say. But a magician is wide awake all the time, on call for everything, which is why most people call him a magician.” \u00a0I kind of put myself (in both cases) as someone too prone to hitting the snooze button.<\/p>\n But that’s far from knowing what Nen meant as ‘a familiar.’ Was Janet someone like the Sources of Fionavar, there to be tapped for power? A companion to offer occasional guidance, like Rosetta of Joan Carris’\u00a0Witch-Cat<\/em>? Or what he seemed to be suggesting, a convenient host for demons to pop in and out of? \u00a0And where did the sigils fall into it, if anywhere?<\/p>\n “What do you mean by ‘familiar’?” I finally asked.<\/p>\n “Touched,” Rayya said, but there was the hint of her hiding her smile. \u00a0Nen turned to share some kind of expression with her, but I didn’t catch what it was.<\/p>\n “Touched,” I repeated. “And what does that mean?” I was afraid to keep speculating as it would drag me down rabbit holes I had no intention of touching with the hares of my chinny-chin-chin.<\/p>\n Nevermind. It didn’t sound good even to the weird depths of my head.<\/p>\n “Just as you are,” she said.<\/p>\n “Oh, I’m touched, all right. Touched by your compassion and easy-to-comprehend descriptions,” I said, making sure the sarcasm was laid out nice and evenly. “What do you mean?”<\/p>\n “Do you know what day it is?” Nen asked, and I don’t know why I detected a bit of anxiety to it.<\/p>\n “Um,” I glanced at my watch to tell him.<\/p>\n “Tomorrow will be a year and a day,” Nen said.<\/p>\n “Since… a year and a day ago?” I glanced at my calendar.<\/p>\n I hadn’t planned on any kind of celebration, any kind of anniversary marking my return to the world. \u00a0I still had many of the same problems, the same questions, but I had fit right back in, culture shock retreating like a wave on the shore of my personal beach-being… which meant it probably hadn’t been all that much of a tidal wave. \u00a0“Oh,” I said, feeling like I had to respond to him.<\/p>\n He and his sister had been unwanted guests at first. Not like the kind on Ed’s pens, but an evil I only found necessary the time I watched Nen fight a Beyonder I originally called a demon. \u00a0Since learning more about demons, I wasn’t sure I would keep the epithet. \u00a0Over the … year, I guess, they’d turned more like friends. \u00a0Even after our spat where Nen had said he wasn’t there to be one… we bought books together, and I remembered to get them cake pops, and I knew their favourite cereals, and even if we didn’t understand each other a lot of the time, we were… friends. \u00a0Right?<\/p>\n I felt very cold and alone in the dark for a moment.<\/p>\n “What does that mean?” I finally asked. \u00a0He hadn’t said anything, just stared at me with his strange eyes and his wild hair, and his weird clothes and everything I had actually learned to find kind of adorable, to be honest. \u00a0I put up with the weird organic and herbal soaps and their occasional silences and pointed looks.<\/p>\n He glanced at Rayya, and I believe my heart jumped a beat.<\/p>\n She inclined her head to him, and he turned back to me. \u00a0“Nothing. \u00a0Except perhaps we should have a…” he took a deep breath, and said, conversationally, “party.”<\/p>\n “A party?” I asked? My emotions were strained.<\/p>\n “A party,” he said, and I didn’t understand his look.<\/p>\n “Who would we invite?” I asked, ignoring everything we’d been talking about up to that point.<\/p>\n “I will write the guest list,” Rayya said. \u00a0She was leaning on the door, now.<\/p>\n “It’s kind of short notice,” I pointed out.<\/p>\n “The people who need to come will find time in their schedule,” she said, and I got a creepy vibe from it.<\/p>\n “Don’t go killing loved ones or anything,” I warned, as if I could stop her. “That’s never a great way to have a celebration. \u00a0And it is a celebration, right?” if my voice cracked a little on that last, I ignored it.<\/p>\n “Yes,” but there was a pause I was getting ready to over-analyze. \u00a0Nen shook his head. \u00a0“I cannot lie to you. We have made a decision.”<\/p>\n If I had learned nothing over the year, I might have asked more questions, but I could tell now. \u00a0It wasn’t body language, exactly, what they shared, but it was a sense I had grown.<\/p>\n I would ask more questions. \u00a0Later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Later is just another day?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1001002,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-chapter-10-opener"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1001002"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.3-2-1-boom.com\/doctor-e\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}