Reincarnated as a Familiar

Now I can tell you a little more about my new life. You understand that summoning is a sort of cosmic marketplace, and that I’m on the supply side of it. You’re probably asking what a summoner is paying me in exchange for my help. That’s simple: mana.

Mana is a little different in every world, but if a world has mana, it follows a few rules. It always powers magic. More accurately, magic is defined as the practical application of mana. Mana translates neatly to energy in your world. Really, your world doesn’t lack mana, it just doesn’t provide the most fanciful ways to manipulate mana. For my purposes, mana is like fuel or money. I need mana to power my special abilities when I’m here in this space between worlds.

The other thing that I see when a request comes in is karma. Karma is a summary of a person’s actions in life. The catch is, actions are a lot more complicated than a one-dimensional quantity can express. Karma tells you shockingly little about the character of your client. However, if you take the job, the situation on the ground will tend to give you enough additional information that you can make a moral judgment.

Take my client just now. He had just a little positive karma. It wouldn’t have mattered if he were negative that much karma instead. He was under attack by bandits; unless something else came to light along the way, I’d have no reason not to help him.

Not everyone with negative karma gets it by pushing kids into wells. Sometimes you’re hired to protect a wagon, and that wagon is full of awful things that you don’t even know about. On the other hand, a murder might actually raise the murderer’s karma, if the victim’s past actions were harmful enough.

*

Incoming Request

World: R-71

Spell Level: 2

Duration: 30 minutes

Mana offered: XX

Karma: +XX

This has easy written all over it. It would be a waste to decline it.

Request Accepted

Select your form.

Choice: Floating Eye

Select spawn location.

With a gentle splash, color covers the firmament. Rock walls form my surroundings, and a small band of explorers are nearby. My client is the party’s wizard, and they appear to be exploring some sort of tunnel. This is the most cliché sort of job: reconnaissance.

Floating eye familiars are less autonomous than the fierce night panther I controlled before. While its form spells out its purpose, its most developed feature is its telepathy. As a floating eye, my job is to relay what I see to my client, while scanning his mind for where he desires me to move next. As braindead as this sounds, there is room to do it well: a floating eye’s telepathy can be used to detect monsters without seeing them, and while this information can’t be relayed as-is, experienced summoners will notice hints if I give them.

“Will this really work?” one asks.

“It’s already working. I can see through it if I close my eyes.”

“Take it around the corner, then.”

There are two simple minds around the corner. Definitely not humanoid, definitely living, but I can’t tell you more than that. If I can communicate this to my client without turning the corner, then I won’t have to risk getting attacked and destroyed by the creatures, and my client will get the full benefit of his spell.

“What’s the hold up?”

“Relax, I’m telling it to go, it just keeps stopping short.”

“I thought you knew what you were doing.”

A word to the wise, client: find a new party, one without backseat drivers. He’s clearly not picking up what I’m putting down, so I’ll have to turn the corner. I approach along the far wall so I have better chances of escaping after he sees the creatures. I get a line of sight past the corner, and there are spitting cobras. This is going to be bad.

One cobra spots me and spits venom directly at me. Thankfully, I was far away and high up enough that it couldn’t reach. I start retreating.

“Two spitting cobras!”

“Shit! Let’s get out of here!”

“We can take them!”

“You can take them alone, I’m leaving!”

Smart choice, all but one of you. My client intelligently sends me to scout ahead of them as they run away. I’m not detecting any other minds, so I speed ahead. The party backtracks to leave the cave. Just as the exit is coming into sight, my time here comes to an end.

The color fades away, and twinkling lights in the distance cut through the darkness.

Easy jobs like this don’t score as much mana as combat jobs, but they’re rewarding in their own way. Combat jobs tend to happen in the same bunch of places. High population density areas, major roads, important resources, cities. You can only see so much of a world through combat. It’s these little jobs that take you off the beaten path.