Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The routine that formed over the following days was not elegant and it worked.

Sensor feed during class and shifts, checked compulsively, understood to mean nothing about biology. Conservative automated settings whenever he was out. Appraisal and manual recalibration the moment he was back, before he took his jacket off. Never more than three hours away.

The Engine sat outside all of it, available anywhere and useful for one kind of help: he could care for the avatar.

Which raised the question he had already answered and kept re-answering, usually around two in the morning.

Take her to the ward.

Meridian had a beast medical ward with equipment that made his taped-together case look like what it was, staffed by people who had spent careers on neonatal cases.

And a ward kept records.

Jin ran the version of it where he walked in with an egg. Sixty-three days overdue at purchase, terminally stalled, eleven percent vitality, clearance stock with a signed waiver. Then a technician’s notes across the following two weeks: maturation restarting from zero, vitality climbing, an embryo that four Verrow professionals had written off completing its terminal development at a rate that would have to be described somewhere as unprecedented for the species.

And then someone asks how. And the honest answer is a fan, a piece of cardboard, and a talent that reads structural completion, and the second half of that is true and the first half doesn’t cover the speed.

He had a file with a comparative-development flag on it already. He had a lizard whose skeletal density had been run four times because a specialist would not sign her name to it.

One flagged beast is a rare variation. Two is a pattern, and patterns get investigated.

So he did not go, and he was clear-eyed about the cost of that too. He was choosing worse care for secrecy, and the only thing that made it defensible was that the care he could give was working.

After she hatches. That was the plan and it held up. A hatched Iron-quality Ashwing Sparrow, weak, rescued from clearance, needing ordinary neonatal support — that was a completely unremarkable thing to walk into a ward with. Hatchlings were weak. Nobody would ask how she got there, because she would already be there.

Everything before the hatch had to happen in this room.

She got one Palewood Berry a day.

He was careful about that as well. The description had not changed, and neither had the arithmetic: it supported a recovery that was already happening and did nothing for anything in decline. One a day reinforced her baseline. Four a day would have reinforced her baseline exactly as much, and Jin had spent enough of his life on diminishing returns to recognize the shape of them.

Glitch brought it in every evening from the Mossfall Thicket, split it with one claw, and pushed the pieces into reach.

It took her about ninety seconds now, down from two minutes and ten.

The balance practice started on the third day, mostly because Jin got tired of watching her fall over.

He could not train her. That was the frustrating part. He had no command channel through a provisional bond, no way to position her, nothing to work with except a chick in a grey render space who wanted to stand up and kept getting it wrong in the same way.

So he sent Glitch in and pushed a compressed impression through their bond: the chick’s unsteady legs, Glitch’s stance, and a demonstration.

The response came back so blankly uncomprehending that Jin had to try three times, each attempt narrowing the same images toward her foot placement.

Glitch looked at the chick. Then he looked at his own feet, of which there were four, and then back at the chick, of which there were two, and the impression that arrived was the purest confusion Jin had ever received from him.

"I know it’s not the same. Do it anyway."

What followed was, Jin thought, the single funniest thing he had witnessed since arriving in this world, and he did not laugh, because Glitch would have felt it.

Glitch demonstrated a stance.

He did it with enormous seriousness. He set his feet, deliberately, one at a time, and lowered his chest closer to the floor, and then looked at the chick expectantly, as though this settled the matter.

The chick fell over.

Glitch reset and did it again, more slowly, with what Jin could only describe as emphasis on the foot placement.

The chick fell over.

The third time, Glitch bumped one of her legs into position with the side of his snout, moved it about two centimeters outward, and backed off.

She stayed up for four seconds and then tipped, and Glitch’s shoulder was there, and she came to rest against it rather than hitting the floor.

He did not acknowledge that he had done that. He looked away across the empty render space as if he had merely happened to be standing there, and his shoulder stayed exactly where it was until she had her balance back.

Yeah, Jin thought. Sure. Coincidence.

They did it for forty minutes a night after that.

Glitch was not a patient teacher. The bond carried a running commentary of offended incredulity every time she got it wrong in a way he had already corrected, and twice he simply lay down and stopped participating for several minutes.

He also caught her every single time, and never once let her hit the ground.

By the end of the week she could take a supported step: one leg forward while leaning against Glitch’s foreleg, weight shifting, the other leg dragging up after it. Once, without support, she got a foot out in front of her and moved perhaps four centimeters before folding.

That was the ceiling. She could not cross the space. She could not walk.

The treatment kept moving under him and he kept moving with it.

By the seventh day the heat pulses were down to two and a half minutes and the airflow phase had stretched to nine, because her chest pocket was now filling on its own faster than the element had ever filled it. The element had gone from being the engine of the process to being a nudge, and Jin could see the point coming where it would be a formality.

[Terminal maturation: ACTIVE — 58%]

[Vitality: 19% — stable]

Fifty-eight and nineteen.

He looked at those two numbers side by side and made sure he understood the difference, because they had a habit of blurring in his head at four in the morning.

Maturation is how finished she is. Vitality is how much of her there is.

She was becoming complete quickly and she was becoming strong very, very slowly, and there was nothing in the world that said those two lines had to meet in a useful place.

He noticed the thing about Glitch on the eighth night, while writing up the cycle log.

Eight days. Glitch had not left the corner of that desk for more than a few hours at a stretch in eight days, except for two academy sessions and one Mossfall run, and he had gone back to it every time without being told.

He had left the room precisely once, on his own initiative, and it had been to cross campus and interrupt a lecture.

He hasn’t complained.

That was the strange part. Glitch complained about everything. He complained about being made to hold position. He complained about avoiding stronger enemies, and about timers, and about being denied a bay full of loot on the far side of a quarry. He had spent four months registering formal objections to Jin’s entire approach to life.

He had not registered a single one about this.

Jin looked over at him, chin on forelegs, eyes half-closed and pointed at the case. Glitch was still impatient, still far more interested in fighting, and had tried to teach a bird to stand by standing harder. Yet when something belonged to their small unit, he would hold a watch for eight days and go for help when he could not fix the problem himself.

Jin decided not to say any of that out loud, because Glitch would have become insufferable about it inside a minute.

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