"Yep. If you'd cast one to hurt me, I could potentially be in trouble, but my field's hard to get through and you're a beginner, so probably not. If Circe threw a hobgoblin at me, I would be bleeding profusely. But she hasn't seen fit to do that. Yet, at least."

"Are you being facetious again or is that sometimes done?"

"Nah. I just like antagonizing her. She appreciates it. Somewhere deep in her heart."

"Which you know because..."

"In theory, because we bear a deep connection invisible to the jaded eye. In practice, because her office door told me so."

"Awww."

"That's the advantage of having bits of yourself lying around like that, really. Clears up a lot of social context you'd rather keep implicit. I knew a girl with a familiar who did that, but he was the incorrigible prankster type, so it wasn't so effective."

"What's the deal with familiars?"

"Mm... Basically, you take an animal and you put a little bit of your soul into it. Then the animal becomes a sentient being, heavily influenced by your personality but not a copy of you, and feeds energy back to you. Increases your power reserves and can help with spellcasting, but if it gets killed you're in for trauma and a major hit to your Essence and you have to keep it with you if you want to use it. I'm considering getting one for myself, if I can figure out a plan to ward it up enough."

"Innnnteresting. Probably don't want one but I'm not positive."

"Yeah, legally they count as a specialized dependent, so it's a pretty big investment. But they're pretty much guaranteed to like you, and it's very likely you'll get along with them, so there's a lower bound on how badly it can go."

"I mean, I'd get along really well with an exact copy of my personality. An inexact copy is kind of uncanny valley in some ways."

"No, not like- not an 'inexact copy', like a personality shaped by yours. Like, if you designed a best friend for yourself, then superimposed it on whatever bits of 'personality' the animal had already. If you familiarized a pig, it wouldn't start writing in marble notebooks, but it'd definitely never try to read yours. As an example."

"Do pigs have some advantage that outweighs their being pigs?"

"Hey, I know a girl with a teacup pig. They're cute and they're really smart! Actually that's a disadvantage, probably, you want the animal to have as little preexisting personality as possible so it doesn't end up fucking things up. That was the issue with the girl I mentioned, she familiarized a mammal and he already had enough tendencies to corrupt the personality. They still got along, but it was inconvenient. S'why most people go with reptiles or birds."

"Birds can be smart. Corvids and the parrot family, anyway, you're probably safe with a sparrow."

"Yeah, I was talking about owls and the like. Stay the hell away from crows unless they already like you. That's the caveat, by the way, if the animal's smart enough and you're already friends you can do what you like."

"Noted. ...Now my brain wants to know if I can turn my sister into my familiar, which is probably a hilariously terrible idea even if I could and even though she likes me."

"Yyyyyeah. I feel like you wouldn't want to warp her personality, plus she already has a soul so it'd probably reject the fragment in the first place. I guess you could do some kind of heinous arcane surgery to make room, but. Again, with the 'your sister' thing."

"How do souls work?"

Ariel shrugs eloquently. "Complicated magic shit. It's connected to Essence reserves and the BIT, and that's what I know. Research is unfortunately bottlenecked by the fact that live tests would make the word 'unethical' totally inadequate, mad scientists and necromancers keep shitty lab notes, and there's not a lot of soul-related divinationy stuff because the whole subject makes people queasy."

"Like... my sister can turn into two of her. It doesn't last, but once the two of her have been desynchronized they act like two of her. They can't even twine each other. So does she have two souls all the time, or some of the time, or can one soul run two people?"

"Ah. Equivalent cases around here, it's one soul in two; the extra body isn't really a person, it's a collection of ectoplasm. In your case, I dunno. Unless she came over here for some tests."

"I mean, she'll probably visit me eventually, I could probably talk her into some tests. But she can converge into either body."

"Interesting! Not conclusive, for all we know they're both just ectoplasm, but interesting."