Celestine Fox 013 (Patreon)

Delphi trotted happily down the corridors to the library while doing her best to keep track of the relative locations of refectories along the way based on the signage. She wanted to make sure she had an efficient route back after all. She absolutely wasn't making any plans to scout out which ones might be raidable late at night. Only a badly behave fox would consider something like that.

She suppressed the urge to laugh maniacally as she didn't think anyone here would find it funny. Anyway, while she did want to raid for admittedly greedy reasons, it would also be good practice to learn how to sneak around here. She did have another job to do eventually, even if she wasn't sure exactly what that job was yet.

It didn't take too much longer than it should have for her to find the entrance to the library, she only made a couple of wrong turns. These doors had a much more accessible pad for her to tap with a charge of her aura in addition to higher up ones. Hmm, she wondered if she could stretch her aura enough to activate the pad without having to jump or stretch at all. Maybe experiment with that later, she didn't have much stamina for that sort of thing yet.

Delphi bounced up some platforms next to one end of the main desk and found a place to sit and wait for her turn as there were two other people already there. When it was her turn she said, "Hello, I'm Delphi, Ramil's new familiar. I want to check out some books related to the research he's currently doing. I've been here with him once before but I could probably use a guide on how to use the platforms and how to find the right section for the books I want."

The woman at the desk touched a crystal that was embedded in the desk and her eyes unfocused. A moment later she nodded, "Alright, your aura signature matches. Let's get you set up then. Give me a moment." Delphi tried to see what the woman was manipulating with her gestures but she wasn't good at sensing any aura or magic that wasn't her own yet. Her attempt mostly just gave her a small headache. "Can I put this necklace on you?" At Delphi's nod the woman slid a chain with a disc like pendant over her head. "This will guide you to the dock for your platform. I've ordered one that should be more usable for you, and set the controls to offer more information by default. There will also be a side display showing you all the basic commands."

Oh good, she wasn't sure she could remember everything Ramil had showed her. But as long as there were no real risks, there shouldn't be any problems with her learning on the fly.

Learning the controls was not a terribly swift task for her but Delphi also took the time to figure out how to get into the settings. Oh, they used different names, but conceptually it was the same thing a settings in software she knew. Though, without the overarching concept of 'settings' to centralize them they were scattered instead of having one place to access everything. 'Pilot's controls', 'navigation appearance', 'researcher's index', all had to be found in their own areas.

Then there was the index system itself, which was weirdly sorted by her way of thinking. Delphi didn't actually know much about the Dewey decimal system beyond that it was a thing that used numbers to categorize what went where, but she wondered if she might not prefer it. Then again, this library was massive and it was very 3D, maybe this system was more efficient for the setup they were working with?

With everything that she had to learn just to figure out where to search for stuff combined with the process of browsing for the books she wanted, it was a very tired little fox who guided the platform back into place several hours later. Delphi managed to make it back to the front desk, but when she sat down to wait to talk to the clerk again she quickly passed out. When she woke back up eventually, she found her head resting on a fox-sized satchel with a note saying that everything had been checked out for her. The necklace for the platform control had also been removed.

Delphi expected the bag to be harder to put on by herself, but it seemed to slide into place with a strange level of ease. She wasn't sure, but she guessed that it was enchanted to make this easier.

Thanks to her previous scouting it was easy to find a refectory without too much wandering. She was still a bit tired and was happy to not have to walk even more. But then she ran into the problem of how to order. She didn't want to just jump up on the counter, but there didn't look to be another option for someone as small as her.

"Whoops!" came a voice from behind Delphi as a shadow covered her. She leapt aside to move clear, but the person had already recovered and was smiling down at Delphi.

"That was close, I didn't mean to startle you," said the woman, "I just didn't see you there. Er, are you lost or anything?"

Delphi shook her head and said, "No, not exactly. I wanted to place an order, but I wasn't sure if I'm supposed to just jump on the counter or something."

"Ah, look at you, so very well behaved. Well, I can help you up here if you want, but I think you want to try over there instead. While people keep trying to find a way to combine the lines, the logistics are too hard for feeding a lot of people, so there are size based serving areas." The woman pointed to an area almost half way down the rectory from where they were now. "If we don't split them up that way, people wind up getting in each other's way by accident."

"Oh! Thank you, and sorry for almost tripping you." With that, Delphi headed down to the indicated line, where her order was taken by a gnome. She still had to hop up a few steps first, but it did feel safer than having taller people walking around her while looking at food instead of where they were stepping.

"Hello! I'm Delphi, Ramil's new familiar. I'd like to get some food that can be wrapped for me to take back to him. Um, that includes a separate order for me, same safety stuff as for dogs and cats. Oh, can I have a small extra serving I can eat right now? I'm really hungry and I still have to get back to the suite. Whatever is easy and fast, but still tasty."

Her master didn't seem like a picky eater and her options were limited enough that Delphi certainly couldn't afford to be one, so she left the exact decision to the experts. The sample sized dish she got to have to fill her belly was tasty enough, but she still wished there was a bit more salt and spice. At least it had some herbs for a bit of flavor, along with the rice and vegetables mixed in with the meat. To mimic a prey's, ah, internals. Ick.

Once she was done, Delphi felt much better and started heading back home. Even if she got lost some how, she would know where it was. Or at least, where Ramil was. The boost to her energy did not quite last the whole trip there and she was dragging herself the last few feet before she was scooped up into Ramil's arms.

"You over did it I see," he said with a sigh, but she also felt a bit of amusement across their link. "Well, nothing for it but to feed you and tuck you in for a nap. I'd have gotten to you sooner, but my work was at a delicate point. I had to finish up that section for safety reasons."

As Ramil talked, he carried her in and placed her on soft cushion. "I'll be right back with you, I need to get everything put away for our lunch break."

He even cleaned up completely for lunch? That was a little wasteful time-wise; it wasn't like he shared a lab with other people. But he did seem very safety conscious, which was a good thing she supposed. It felt like only a few seconds had passed when she found a bowl of food under her nose. "Come on, eat up."

She must have passed out briefly. Delphi pulled herself together long enough to eat, then crawled into Ramil's lap to go to sleep.

"Hey!" he said, "I have to do more work after I finish!"

"Too bad," Delphi murmured, "you cleaned, so my pillow now." If he responded, Delphi didn't hear it before she was asleep again.

She was roused sometime later by the smell of food, though she was slow to wake up and overheard a snippet of conversation.

Kethi was there and laughing softly as she said, "Aw, she's adorable. It seems that Your Lordship is being ruled over by Her Ladyship, but is that not often the way? Though I associate that more with cats than foxes I think. Aren't foxes related to dogs?"

Delphi stirred and yawned before saying, "Cat brain, dog body. Sort of."

"Ah, she stirs," Ramil said, his voice directly above her. Hm, it was nice and warm snuggled into his lap, but that meant he'd really let her stay there all afternoon if dinner had been brought over.

Her stomach rumbled.

If she could blush, Delphi would have. "I guess I over did it, I'm starving again already."

Even so, she took her time stretching before she hopped off Ramil's lap and headed over to the food, passing by the book that Ramil had apparently been reading while she slept.

The food was basically the same as before, though the combination of meat and stuff had been changed. Delphi guessed that every meal was going to be simply meat, vegetables, and maybe some combination of herbs for a while.

"So what did you do to wear yourself out like that?" Kethi asked as she loaded the dishes from breakfast.

Delphi replied between big bites of her food, "Mm, I had an idea of how to maybe help Master better, rather than just trying to do the same stuff he can do. So I got some books to read up on, um, the place his current project came from. I thought I could take notes based on that while we were doing alchemy, as he prefers to not have that sort of knowledge maybe bias his experiments. Have notes from two perspectives might help if he gets stuck. I mean, maybe not most of the time, but it's not like I can do the experiments better than he can or anything."

"It's not a bad idea," Ramil said, "though only because she's an assistant. If she was an apprentice who would be moving on to independent work, I would strongly discourage it as I think my approach is usually the more accurate one. But a different perspective is more useful than a duplicate for team work."

Master was being serious and nerdy again. She thought it was cute.

Kethi shook her head and said, "I'm not sure I quite get it, but as long as it helps out. Alright, I'll leave you two to it. Have a good night!"

After Delphi had wolfed down her food, she eager trotted over to the stack of books she'd gotten from the library and began browsing through them. Her limited ability to grab things with magic mostly made it easier to spread books out and to flip pages more accurately. Ramil had said that she'd get better at it with practice and eventually it would be almost as good as hands. She was looking forward to that.

It didn't take long for her head to start swimming with all the information available. It did not help that some of the stuff written in the books conflicted with each other. Delphi was pretty certain that some of it was because of things changing, but there was probably also just wrong stuff, and she wasn't sure how to tell which was which.

Once her head started feeling too full, Delphi decided it was time to meditate a little while before bed. She was still kind of tired from her exercise earlier. For all that her new body was so much healthier than her original, she had to remember that she was still a kit. Thankfully, foxes grow up a lot faster than humans or elves.