“…Peblus Magnificus. Pebl for short.” Kraant whispered delightedly to his new pet rock. He deliberately did not think about how he was talking to a rock, and instead focused on the tiny little sense of animation coming from it. He felt a sort of shiver in the air, and knew that this rock was now his. Forever.

He’d used the new spell he’d been… given? taught? by Lung-Tze, Contract Familiar. It was a fairly simple spell, as such things went, and it had taken only ten of his 30 MP. He was using Detect Living, also, just to make sure that everything went according to plan. After all, he doubted that Lung-Tze would be pleased by his presentation of a normal stone as his “familiar”, so he’d really had no choice but to use the spell. He hated this Geas, had he mentioned that?

After a very minimal discussion on the nature of magic, which essentially boiled down to “tell the universe what you expect, and make it happen”, he had been pierced by those glowing eyes just as he had when the Geas was made. This time, however, he felt a sense of knowledge passing into his mind, and had acquired the new spell. Lung-Tze had told him to spend the next hour gaining a familiar, preparing himself how he thought best, and then to go to the Stock-Keeper’s main office. Kraant didn’t know what to expect, exactly, so he thought that “preparing” should mean regaining his MP. As soon as he was nearly-full, he stepped out of Lung-Tze’s quarters and proceeded to his assigned location. Hopefully, more instructions would follow, or else he was fairly sure he’d be expected to stand there doing nothing and being inconspicuous until Lung-Tze found him.

As luck would have it, he actually traveled the last few dozen meters alongside his Geas holder, ensuring that he would receive some kind of instruction. He stepped into the office behind Lung-Tze, and followed the Dragon-faced Stock-Keeper past several closed doors into another room entirely. Inside was… a sort of cage, much taller and wider than anything the Organ-donors could reasonably be expected to inhabit. Space, after all, was never a luxury they really encountered. This seemed large and strong enough to hold even an Overseer, which may well have been the point. Inside the cage was a teleportation gate, or at the least the arch that allowed teleportation gates to form, and Kraant did not want to know what was on the other side, to warrant the cage.

“Get in.” Lung-Tze opened the gate to the cage, and gestured slightly. Kraant suppressed a sigh, and stood just in front of the archway.

“You will spend one full day inside a dungeon of my own making. This is an instanced dungeon, meaning that even if I threw every Organ-donor inside, you would never see a single one of them. This is your, personal, instance of the dungeon. If you had a party with you, that would be the only party inside. These are not common, but they serve many unique purposes. For example, training. Your only directions while inside the dungeon are to survive, to return to the gate in exactly one day and remain until the gate is opened, and to strive to understand your familiar.” Lung-Tze sounded almost bored, which was possibly a good sign, and he didn’t so much as whisper when he summoned the portal, which was not a good sign. That took serious power and familiarity with the spell, Kraant understood, which meant that this was likely a place that the Stock-Keeper himself used often for training purposes. And if he was strong enough to open a portal wordlessly, then he was strong enough to train against things that wouldn’t even notice stepping on Kraant.

Kraant stepped inside anyway, because Geas, and complained internally. At least Pebl was in his pocket. Pebl understood his pain.

Speaking of pain…

Kraant stepped through the portal into fire. No, scratch that, he stepped into Fire. Nothing so mundane as to be used for cooking, or warmth, or light. No, this was a primal element, a force of nature, and he was an interloper. He realized that, while he was taking damage simply from breathing, his Regeneration was almost precisely counter-acting the flames. So, like most mortals, any damage he took would stick around. That was almost definitely deliberate on the part of Lung-Tze.

Of course, nothing would be gained by standing around. Kraant looked around, and realized that he was in a cavern, and realized also that he had no idea where the light he was seeing was coming from. Chalking it up to fire being half light and half heat, and totally filling the cavern, he began to walk to the east, and the only tunnel leading away. He idly ran a single claw along the wall beside him, scratching a light line to guide him back when the time came. Speaking of time… yes, he realized he had a general sense of exactly when it would be time to start heading back. That is, he sort of vaguely knew, kind of, that it was a while away, but that the instant he needed to return he would know to return. It was a decidedly uncomfortable thing to think about, so he stopped thinking about it. He took Pebl out of his pocket and whispered to it.

“I hate this Geas, Pebl. I hate it so much.”

Pebl sat there on his palm, unmoved.

It was several hours before Kraant encountered his first opponent, which was a thoroughly unsurprising Fire Elemental. He threw Pebl at it. Pebl killed it, and Kraant saw that Pebl seemed almost to… absorb some of the Elemental’s power. This bore experimenting upon. Kraant quickly flipped through his menus and tried to log out, but was informed that doing so would remove him from the dungeon, and presumably invoke the wrath of his Geas-holder. Deciding that looking at the forums for information on familiars wasn’t quite that important, he began to experiment.

He rapidly discovered that, despite lacking any means of locomotion, Peblus Magnificus could follow him around under its own power. He also discovered its status screen, and was outraged by the results.

Name

Peblus Magnificus

Power

1

Load Cap.

0

Race

Rock

Control

1

Stamina

1

Age

1 day

Charisma

4

Spells

0

Size

Tiny

Morality

0

-

Class

Familiar

Knowledge

1

-

-

HP

1/1

Sense

1

-

-

MP

0/0

Luck

1

-

-

Authority

0

-

-

While he hadn’t really expected much in the way of HP or spells, being as a rock mostly just sat there and didn’t take damage easily, he was furious that this… sedimentary blob had more Charisma than he did. It wasn’t even a particularly attractive rock! It was sort of dark grey-ish, with flecks of lighter color, sort of like himself. It was uneven on most sides but had a rounded side that he sort of thought of as the “bottom”, meaning that the biggest lump was on the… upper-left? Or right, but that felt off, somehow. Upper-left. Now that he really looked at it, he had to admit that the simplicity and unassuming nature of the newly-minted being was sort of admirable. Cute, even, in the way that even an ugly baby or a fish could be considered cute.

Holy hells, Charisma was sneaky! He thought a rock was cute! These stats really had an effect, huh?

Kraant spent a little while trying to find out exactly what his familiar could do. Nothing had come after him since the first elemental, after all, and he had been told to understand his familiar here. So he tried using Ward: Living and found that, yes, Pebl was now considered living. He tried telling it to follow him, to stay put, to fly, and to absorb the ambient fire mana. Surprisingly, flight was the only one of those commands it was incapable of following. He even tried commanding it purely mentally, and was able to track it with Detect Living even around a corner, as long as he closed his eyes. The slight signature of life around it was too dim to track beyond-line-of-sight if he kept his eyes open, and he wasn’t sure if that was a sign of poor Magus-ing or a poor choice of Familiar. Not that, to be fair, he had had many other options for casting the spell on. The cot would have burnt up immediately in here, and his manacles wouldn’t have had even this limited mobility… unless he could have ordered them off of his wrists… damn. He should have thought of that sooner, but how was he supposed to know how this worked?

He also discovered that, for now at least, he was limited to this one familiar. While he could have tried to break the connection, and potentially form a new one with one of the wild elementals, he wasn’t willing to risk failure. It didn’t seem like a simple thing to do. Besides, Pebl was growing on him.

The rest of the day was fairly uneventful. He wasn’t able to interact with the elementals personally, since Ward: Living had no effect and getting close enough to attack them with his claws wasn’t an option. He had no materials for traps, since he wasn’t about to shatter his feet again without Regeneration handy, so he sort of just… had Pebl get near them, and siphon as much power as he could before the elementals floated away from the little familiar. Pebl, therefore, got much much stronger much much faster than Kraant in this place, and when Lung-Tze opened the gate back to the cage (half an hour late!), Kraant was surprised to see that Pebl glowed softly, in the rich warm golden red that had so ethereally lit the dungeon. He glanced at its status while Lung-Tze opened the cage and led him to his rooms.

Name

Peblus Magnificus

Power

2

Load Cap.

0

Race

Hot Rock

Control

1

Stamina

1

Age

2 days

Charisma

4

Spells

1

Size

Tiny

Morality

0

Spell: Spark

1, 0%

Class

Familiar

Knowledge

2

-

-

HP

1/1

Sense

21

-

-

MP

3/3

Luck

1

-

-

Authority

0

-

-