So let me tell you about Vixie. Look, I know what you're thinking, but hold on, hear me out on this. Vixie is a Terran familiar who has run very, very far away from Terra, currently hiding out somewhere on Titan. On the outside she's cute, like mascot-cute. Like shelves of plush toys at the holidays cute, children pleading with weary parents for a chance at bringing one home cute. On the inside? She's like those parents, stretched to her limits at all times trying to make an impossible situation work, kids pulling at her hair and her ears while she's reflecting on how she ended up in this situation in the first place. She's surly in the way you get to be when you're at your wits' end. Calamity, indignity and misfortune follow her like they're a raft of ducklings, freshly-hatched, and they've imprinted on her as their mother. That's Vixie. Now, let me tell you about Brendan Miller. Who's that? I swear it'll all make sense, just give me a minute of your time.
It's September of 1999. The Dreamcast just dropped, and high-texture, arcade-style gaming has landed in the laps of North America's most fortunate children. Life is good. Mostly. Brendan Miller's a guy who works at a desk in a toy store, taking white tickets customers pluck from little pouches on display racks and fetching the corresponding games from a locked storeroom for them to buy. He's the guy you ask, "can you check the back? Maybe they have one more in the back" when you can't immediately get what you drove out here looking for. He's been in the back, he goes back there all the time, but maybe there's something you know that he doesn't. Maybe he just forgot to put enough tickets out for the games your kids wanted. You know? Just go check the back. For eight, ten hours a day, that's what Brendan Miller did. He took tickets, he went in the back, and he weathered strangers arguing a reality to him that he is sure, that he is absolutely positive, is false. He rents a studio apartment and drives a leaky, clankering Oldsmobile to and from his job, where he is assailed by assertions from people who are absolutely positive the actual reality of his world is different from what he is certain he knows to be true. That's it, every day, that's the loop, until one day he clocks out, walks to his car, and... boom. Everything goes white. Only sound is a thin, sharp tinnitus buzz. Never even saw what happened. Couldn't tell you what it was.
Now, real quick detour. I know you're like, I thought we were talking about Vixie? She's a familiar? Who's this other guy? We'll get back to him. Let's touch on that "familiar" thing real quick. Today, here and now, magic exists, right? We all know that, we've all met a sorcerer at least once in our lives. Magic is an expression of one's will, shaping an energy unique to Terra to produce a desired outcome. Magic takes many forms, but it all depends on this Terran energy to work. We learned this with the dawn of the space age, when Terrans started taking to the stars and realizing all of a sudden that their magic don't work so good up there. You gotta find ways to bottle up that arcane resource and bring it with you, because that's what you're actually working with. Imagine generations of potters who all believed they were just conjuring pitchers and bowls from the sheer force of their skill, only to leave their planet and realize it was clay they were shaping all along. Magic users were in that situation when commercial starliners started carrying them to other worlds.
Everything on Terra soaks it up, like a dish sponge left to sit in sink water. Spellcasters can load objects with this energy, like rechargeable batteries- gems and crystals are great for this, but are limited by their size and clarity. Some savvy few realized if you concentrated enough of it into one space you could shape it into a whole little creature as an extension of your will, you could build your magic battery out of magic energy itself and create a helpful little pal to do your bidding and fuel your spells. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and skill to create a familiar, but once you have one you can draw your spellcasting resources from them, refill them as needed, and if the time comes that you need to use up the last little bit of energy binding their form into a solid shape, they foof away, dissipating back into the universe, and you gotta go through the whole ordeal to conjure up a new one from scratch. Letting your familiar foof away like that isn't ideal, but as a last-ditch in-a-pinch sort of situation spellcasters have been known to make the call. That's the life of a familiar. You help aid your spellcaster, you fuel their magics, but you're sort of at the mercy of their individual whims. Being made of magic itself, familiars are cartoonishly resilient- they get squashed, they get stretched, they can splat against walls and get flattened by tipping cargo, their pancaked little body popping up on two little feet and waddling away to xylophone sounds a moment later. If something happens they stick their thumb in their mouth and blow real hard and they pop back into shape- they're woven from magic energy, not flesh and bone, so the only real lasting danger to their existence is the avarice of a magic-hungry sorcerer. It's a lot to deal with, being a familiar, and that's where the shoelaces of our story finally tie into a bow.
Vixie is a familiar, she was made to assist a wizard with their wizarding. She was created on Terra for exactly this purpose, but somehow a guy from four hundred years ago ended up inside her. The tinnitus buzz dims, the flash-to-white fades back to reality, and now you're in the super-cool space age future, the Sol system at your fingertips- but you're a fuzzy pink critter with grubby little paws, what do you do? Well, if you're Vixie, you peace out basically instantly. You just clocked out of work, something??? happened??? and now you're stuck in a tiny little body and some spell-speaking weirdo expects you to be at their beck and call? Hell no. Vixie hit the bricks, much to her conjurer's surprise. It took her a bit of time and a bunch of wandering around a brand-new Terra, but once she came to grips with the state of the world she found herself in, she stowed away aboard the first commercial starliner off Terra she could find and got the hell out of there. Anyplace else is better than this, and the further she got away from her conjurer, the better- she didn't know how she knew it, but she just had a feeling about magic guys like that, that they were bad news for her. So away she went, and that's how she came to arrive on Titan. Makes sense, right? Told you we'd get here sooner or later.
Calamity, indignity and misfortune follow Vixie wherever she goes. Being a guy from the 1990s, technology got way, way cooler than the Oldsmobile that shuffled her to and from work; but being a tiny little familiar, none of that technology is built to a scale that's usable for her. She can't fill out the pilot's seat of a starship, wearable computers don't fit over her ear or on her arm, everything cool is right there but it's just out of reach, figuratively and literally. Her old bank has a branch here on Titan- she realized it'd been bought up and renamed a few times over the centuries, it's First Bank of Terra now. She tried to access her old account, insisting she was Brendan Miller, the holder of her account, insisting she had the IDs to prove it, but she doesn't look like her old IDs so it's "sorry, we can't help you." That was probably the worst of it. She knows who she is, she's certain of this, she is absolutely positive, but everyone she meets seems to believe a different reality than her. It's "check the back" again, but for her own sense of self. She's just about at her wits' end.
Lemons to lemonade, it wasn't all sour grapes. Vixie found a few ways to leverage being a familiar in an unfamiliar world to her advantage; people tend to expect there was some other person she worked for, some other guy who was just on his way over, who could cover the bill or pay for whatever she was asking for, letting her dine and dash before the jig was up. She'd taken to spending her evenings at a little pub called the Ox & Carriage, standing up on a barstool, stubbing out the last of a stolen cigarette and telling the barman to "put a drink on her wizard-guy's tab." The pub's owner, Rocky, knew what was up, but he played along for the sake of a good story- it's not every day a runaway critter shows up in your pub ordering stiff drinks and puffing on Terran tobacco. Like any good barman, Rocky would give Vixie a little nudge, get her to sing her sorrows to him. Tell him her story. And man, did Vixie have a story to tell.
The bank thing, the more she talked about it, the more she fixated on it, and the more Rocky would probe her to unravel her tale. "Nineteen ninety-nine, huh?" Rocky would polish a glass that was well-past clean, just occupying his hands while he teased out the tiny familiar's sordid tale. "That's three-hundred ninety years. That's a lot of interest." Vixie would slam her little paws on the bartop, not even rattling an ashtray from the force she produced. "I KNOW, RIGHT? There's gotta be like, a million-- a trillion bucks in there! I'm rich, right??" It'd make everything worth it, every weird little thing that happened to Vixie, it'd all be worth it if she could just get into Brendan Miller's bank account and live off the interest accrued by all his unspent paychecks, sitting and stewing for centuries. "You don't look like a Brendan," Rocky would point out. Vixie slammed on the bartop again. "That DOESN'T matter!" Not even a straw rattled. "That shouldn't matter..!" She cussed out loud. "Pour me another one. W-- wizard guy's on his way, for sure this time." Rocky set down the glass he'd been polishing, pouring Vixie another virgin cocktail. He'd been serving her alcohol-free versions of all the stiff drinks she'd been ordering all night. She didn't seem to notice.
Seated at a booth behind Vixie, a band of thieves were nursing a round of actually-hard drinks and a basket of cheese fries, quietly watching the spectacle unfold at the bar. A Mercurian woman with a metal arm gestured to her friends, pointing and talking quiet, thumping her fist into her palm. Across from her, a scuffy Gen-3 Delta droid flashed her eyes to the bar, then back at her Mercurian companion, a smile growing across her face. An Accra droid's hardlight body flickers as she seems to interject, a soft look in her eyes, like she was pleading sympathy, before she was interrupted by an excited-looking Europan, animated by the idea proposed by the table. A second Mercurian rested her hand to her forehead, looking exasperated before she just waves her hand in that certain way, like she's given up on protesting. Rocky watched the table reach an agreement behind Vixie, beneath the din of the bar's bustling activity. He watched the first Mercurian- the one in the purple coat- stand up from the booth.
"ALL of this. I could live with ALL of this if they'd just... rrrrh! It's RIGHT there! It's MINE! I could just--" Vixie thumped her little paws on the bartop again. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, trying to find her calm. When she opened them, she found a clockwork arm leaning on the bartop next to her, propping up an impish woman with eyes like campfire embers. "Bank troubles, hmm?"
Amy produced a pack of Jovian aromatics from her coat, offering one to Vixie. She flashed a devilish smile. "You look like you could use a friend."