Bird familiar

A moment of concentration was all it took, and I had Installed Medea again. Maybe another caster type would’ve done just as well, but I had to admit, Medea was growing on me, for a number of reasons. Not the least of which was that I could make comparisons between how she had been dragged through the mud and how I had, too.

What came next didn’t even require some of her Divine Words. I just channeled a bit of that energy she used, held my hand out over the roof, and pushed. Like a weed on fast-forward, a few seconds later, a jagged crystal roughly twice the size of a baseball had formed beneath my palm. A photonic crystal — not a philosopher’s stone, but from what I remembered from Flamel, one of the steps to making one.

From there, it took maybe five minutes to shape it and breathe a transient, artificial life into my creation, and as I lifted it gently into my hands, the crystalline bird that was my new familiar turned its head with a deceptively fluid motion to look up at me with blank eyes. No spirit, no soul, just a rudimentary intelligence more like a computer program than a living thing.

Traditional methods involved the use of an actual animal. Cats and birds were the most common, but just about any animal could be turned into a familiar, if you had the skill. Medea preferred her Dragon Teeth, but those were too conspicuous to use in broad daylight, and I wanted a scout, not an army to fight my enemies with. For that matter, I wasn’t looking for a permanent assistant or anything, either, just a temporary set of eyes to help keep me safe. If I decided on something more lasting later, then that was for later.

The last thing necessary was to enforce my control over it. That, too, only took a moment of thought and concentration, a whispered contract, and a few seconds later, I felt my mind open up and connect to the bird in my hands.

It was nothing special. No epiphany or vast increase in visual acuity or anything. No, “I was blind, but now I see.” Just a…link, for lack of a better term. A bridge between my mind and the basic intellect of the crystal sitting on my palms. If I pushed, I could share its vision, so I closed my eyes, threw that connection wide open, and after a brief moment, barely a second, of disorientation, I was staring up at myself.

It was…weird. There was a strange disconnect between my sight and my sense of self. Medea wasn’t bothered, but to me, it was still a bit off-putting. I had to take several long minutes just to get used to awkwardness of the perspective, of the world being so much bigger, of looking up at myself, so tall and almost overbearing.

I didn’t have that much time, though. Tattletale was going to be showing up, soon, if she wasn’t there already. Fortunately, even though I could have taken manual control of my new familiar, it still had enough intelligence to know how to fly all on its own, so when I gave it the command to take off and scout out the area on Mason Street, it spread its wings and went without issue.