"I'm home," Mina called out as she let herself into her grandmother's villa. The expansive residence was perched on a cliff overlooking the refuge. The first floor of the building was elegantly decorated and used largely to receive visitors, such as high ranking Beast Tamers, members of affluent families and visiting dignitaries from other retreats. Her grandmother used the upper floor as her living quarters. After the excitement of meeting Pet and her first day of classes as an official novice, Mina was exhausted. She made her way up the stairs and entered the first door on her left.

As she entered the living room the teenager found herself swept up in an exuberant embrace. "Welcome home Little Sis. Was your first day as a novice all you were hoping it would be?" Her older sister asked, still refusing to let Mina go, despite the younger girl's attempts to escape.

"You might want to let her breathe first Val." A boy scoffed sarcastically from the other end of the room.

At his words, the seventeen-year-old looked down and realized Mina's face was turning red from where it was pressed against her chest. She quickly let go, allowing Mina to lean back and get a decent breath in. Mina rubbed her chest eyeing her sister in exasperation. The oldest of the siblings was brilliant but also somewhat of a scatterbrain. To those who didn't know her well, Valeria Estrall came off as a bimbo. Physically, Val was every inch the young beauty. She had the same silky black hair and bright green eyes as her little sister and in her late teens, she had curves in all the right places.

Mina peered around her sister, catching sight of her older brother who was sitting in front of the fireplace. There were text-books and papers spread out on the coffee table in front of him. Unlike his sisters, who looked like miniature versions of their mother, Kane took after their father. He had short platinum blonde hair and icy blue eyes hidden by a pair of silver-rimmed spectacles. The glasses gave the fifteen-year-old a distinguished look. Mina had one more brother, a nine-year-old named Zander. The youngest of the siblings was staying with their father in Aman city.

Aman was one of only four cities owned by the Order of the Beast Tamers that was open to the public. The city and its counterparts were the public face of the Order, travel through the Rahan's was restricted unless you were a member of the Order. Aman was where people would come to purchase familiars and as a result of its unique circumstances, only fully trained familiars could be found with the city. As a result, the children born and raised in the public cities had to live in one of the inner retreats for their formal education. Mina was luckier than her older siblings. While Valeria and Kane had spent the last several years away from both of their parents, Erika had travelled with Mina to the place of her birth for her Grandmaster Trial.

Kane gazed calmly at his baby sister, quirking a brow in expectation. "Well Mina, are you going to answer Val's question?" He queried.

Mina fidgeted in place. Losing the cool and steady demeanour she projected towards others. "What are you working on Kane?" She questioned her studious brother, attempting to change the subject.

"I'm working on a paper about aids to help some of the bear type familiars overcome their natural instincts to hibernate throughout the colder months of the year. And you're not going to distract us that easily. How was your first day?" Kane replied, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose.

"Yeah, tell us all about it. What's your first animal like? Is it a boy or a girl? Do they know what it's going to become yet? It's a reptile so I bet it will be some kind of snake. What about your teammates? What are they like?" Val babbled happily as she threw herself back down in her own chair by the fire. Mina's reptilian affinity had come as something of a shock to her family. Kane had taken after their grandmother with his affinity for bears. Val was like their Dad in that her strongest affinity was with canines, while Zander, although still too young to begin formal training, took after their mom with his avian affinity. Mina's affinity for reptiles had come out of the left field.

Mina rolled her eyes, smiling slightly. Her teammate Sasha was just as bubbly and optimistic as her older sister, perhaps that was why Mina was so eager to befriend the girl so much. "Today was great. I was assigned to 91161, and we named him Pet. Obviously, he's male, and no it doesn't look like he's a snake of any sort. His limbs are changing to adapt his body for a four-legged gait. My teammates are Talin and Sasha. Sasha is a first-generation Beast Tamer, she just came into her magic a few months ago so she's had a lot of catching up to do education-wise. Talin is from Jialan Retreat. He and his family just moved to Antica last year." Once she began talking the words just spilled out of her in a rush.

"Well, I'm glad to see you're eager to get going, Mina." Her mother spoke as she came into the room with their Grandmother. "But I heard that you turned down the chance to be one of the Chimera's handlers." Erika's tone was carefully neutral, neither approving nor disapproving of her daughter's choice.

A blush crept over Mina's cheeks but she stood her ground. "The teams that handle the Apex familiars are never set in stone. If they don't stay at the top of their class they'll be replaced quickly. If I'm going to work with an apex familiar then I'll earn my place, not have it handed to me in a blatant display of nepotism."

Erika raised an eyebrow as she shrugged out of her knee-length scarlet coat. "It's still risky. You can't really prove much of anything if you have the bad luck to be assigned a low-rank familiar. Or worse a trash familiar, like a gecko." She referred to those familiars whose magic was so minor as to be negligible.

Gran scoffed, rolling her eyes at her daughter. "Ignore your mother sweetheart. She's still traumatized by the parakeet incident. She had to retake the training aspect of her novice exams because the thing was so useless and timid. Really, Erika, you're thirty-eight years old now. There's no reason to go scaring your daughter on her very first day working with a familiar in mid-transition. The odds of getting a trash familiar are the same as the chance of getting an apex familiar, slim to none."

"Speaking of that, what will you do if your Pet ends up being an Apex familiar squirt? People will just say you got lucky then." Kane drawled from where he sat, flipping through a book on ursine anatomy.

Mina stomped her foot in a display of childish pique. "Then I'll prove myself by staying on the team. No one will be able to say anything if I take an apex familiar all the way from initial transformation to full training and sale."

"Kane do not get your sister's hopes up. Every year there are only two or three familiars in a single crop. If we're unlucky even less. The last few years have been bad for Antica, this Chimera is the first apex familiar found in almost a decade." Their mother admonished her son.

Kane huffed out a laugh, contradicting his mother. "You never know. It could happen, so long as the chance isn't zero anything is possible.

***

Mark

It had been an entire day since life as he knew it ended. Mark was starting to understand why Drew and Barry slept so much. Part of it was the whole reptile thing, sleeping more and moving slower in the cold, staying still to absorb as much heat from the sun as possible. The other aspect was the sheer boredom of it all. There was nothing to do, except eat, drink, shit, and sleep. Well, they could talk to each other but with two out of four of them trying to avoid using their vocal cords that wasn't much of an option. Mark spent the afternoon digging in his sandpit, pausing only long enough to keep hydrated. The chain was merged with a metal pillar embedded in the center of the pit, its sides were seamless.

Digging any kind of deep hole was a thankless task. No matter how much sand he scooped out the loose grains would just pour back into the hole. After a few hours, Mark was covered in dust and sand and still only managed to get down a couple of feet. Around dusk, he finally gave up and crawled out of the pit, dusting himself off as best as he could. He groaned and flopped down on the ground, muscles aching in exhaustion.

Drew shook his head. "I could have told you that wasn't going to work. You're hardly the first to have thought of digging out the pillar the chain is attached to. Most everyone in the reptile area has thought of it at least once or twice."

Mark panted for air, his heart beginning to slow now that he wasn't constantly on the move. "Did anyone ever succeed." He gasped out.

"Nope. The pillar is embedded into the very bedrock. What's more, the sandpit is really deep. There isn't enough slack in the chain to dig all the way to the bottom. The best we've ever managed is maybe a third of the distance, and even that's a guess."

"Great," Mark said sarcastically. Every new revelation hammered in the point that Mark was seriously screwed. The ringing of a distant bell drove him out of the morose daze he had fallen into. Within minutes of the bell, the gate opened and the novices paraded into the room and split off to feed their charges. While Sasha moved into the tack room to fill up the trough Talin and Mina opened the door into Mark's stall and stepped inside.

Talin studied the holes that had been dug around the pillar and sighed, he quickly grabbed a shovel from the tack room and returned to fill the holes back up. "Were you playing in the sandpit? You're such a silly boy. I bet you were bored while we were gone. Did you miss us?" Mina reached out and rubbed the top of his head.

Mark backed away from the dark-haired girl. Part of him wanted to think she was crazy, acting as though this whole fucked up situation was normal. He remembered that Valda had said she and the boy were third-generation Beast Tamers or more. To them, this was perfectly normal. Sasha's reaction was more disturbing in that respect. She had only been exposed to this sort of culture for half a year. Part of Mark wanted to argue with the novices, to shout and scream and rail at the predicament he was in. But he had already learned that those pleas would fall on deaf ears. Unlike Colvard, these novices would simply pretend as if he hadn't spoken at all. Still, he couldn't stop the growl rising up from deep within his chest as he snarled at the girl. He turned around, showing his back to the trio.

"He seems pretty hostile to me," Sasha observed as she stepped into the stall.

"That's a typical reaction," Talin told her as he walked by to stow away the shovel. "It will lessen once we have his tags, and if we decide to imprint him it will be almost non-existent."

"Im-printing?" Sasha asked, her head tilting to the side. "What's that?" While Mark remained with his back turned he listened to the novices talk, desperate for any scrap of information he could use to his advantage.

"It's covered in the chapter we're supposed to read for homework," Mina said. "While imprinting does make an animal in mid-transition more tractable most Beast Tamers don't go through with it. A Beast Tamer can only imprint one magical beast, so they have to choose carefully. At the very least we'll have to wait until we know what Pet is. Besides, we couldn't imprint right now even if we wanted to. His DNA is still mostly human. It will take time for Pet's animal genetics to assert themselves and replace his original DNA. You can't imprint until they're at least halfway through the transition.

The trio continued there conversation as they closed the stall door and left the pen. The second they left he turned to Drew and Barry. "What's imprinting?" He demanded.

Barry and Drew looked at each other and shrugged simultaneously. "Honestly we don't know. Neither of us has been imprinted. We've only heard bits and pieces about it. I don't even know what genetics and DNA are, although they sound pretty important."

"You aren't hiding anything from us are you?" Jake asked suspiciously. He didn't get along with Barry and seemed to have lumped Drew in by association. "If you haven't been imprinted your awfully cooperative with these bastards.

Barry let Drew answer that accusation, rolling his eyes in exasperation at Jake's paranoia. "No, we aren't hiding things from you. The things we know we picked up from our handlers talking amongst themselves. They aren't going to explain themselves to animals. As far as cooperation goes we've basically given up. Most do once their appearance is drastically altered. Also, we aren't just becoming animals in the body, but in the mind as well. The animal in you wants to cooperate, and it's growing stronger all the time. I've heard stories..." Drew frowned, trailing off.

He wasn't sure if he should continue but Barry spoke up, finishing his train of thought. "They sssay, that onsse you passss a ssertain point in the transssition the animal becomesss the one who isss dominant."

Mark's brow furrowed in thought. "A split personality?" He speculated.

"No. As the part of us that is animal grows stronger, the part of us that makes us ourselves grows weaker. Eventually, I will be Slithers, and what was once Drew will be nothing more than a lump of knowledge and fading memories of what once was." Drew thumped his chest.

"You're just trying to scare us, that's just a rumour. It won't actually happen, right?" Jake started off confident but his voice was quivering by the end.

"It's hardly been a day since your transformation began. What happens when your halfway through it? What about when the transition is complete? What happens in ten years, or twenty years? What about in thirty years or more, when you've been an animal for most of your life. At that point wouldn't that part of you just seem like an odd dream you had once upon a time?" In the deepening twilight, Drew's speculations painted a far darker picture then Mark had been imagining for himself. With Drew's speech lingering in his mind, it was bound to be a long and restless night.