>>5782900The next few weeks and months went by without much special fanfare. Muffins began to grow quite rapidly—far from full lion-size, but quickly dwarfing most dogs with which you were familiar, and FAR more unpredictable in behaviour without your supervision—often stubborn, sometimes violent, and prone to strange periods of fearful isolation. You found Henzler to be much the same, curiously—moodier than she had been, wheeling between bouts of frantic activity and academic achievement during which your times together were characterized by a mania and a tendency towards obsession, only to later fall into quiet periods where she would only respond quietly, sparsely. On all occasions, she and the three-headed chimera seemed to do best together, whether playing with sparks from the tip of her newly-acquired, quite expensive-looking channeling-wand or simply sitting together as she pet the unusual oddity-of-nature.
“I asked my—the Archmage, about getting a chimera of my own,” your strange friend admitted one day. “As a familiar, since we’re… Approaching our senior years.”
“What did she say?” you asked, dreading the answer as you thought of that stiff-faced, inhumanly-gliding woman who was head of your school and a veritable Grand Mistress of that particular bio-magical art.
“She said I’d never be able to keep it alive, with my inability to…”
“Right,” you said. “Life Magic.”
You reflected on this matter for some time afterwards, and on Muffins, and on the way you yourself hoped to grow, and change—to become, perhaps, weirder, or at least ‘weird’ to the society around you. Then again, that didn’t seem to be doing Henzler any favours, did it?
