The town of Wonder, California was pretty small. Large enough to claim a population and elevation sign. But small enough that every once in a while it was left off maps. Like that one time it wasn't in the Thomas Guide because the whole town had turned invisible. It was sometimes like that, this town.
In it, there were several things normal towns had. It had a couple gas stations, restaurants, used car lots, and Starbucks. It had a few churches. It also had a few less common things - haunted graveyards, underground caverns filled with glowing ichor, and a forest which apparently sprouted eyestalks every few years and went on walkabouts for exersize.
It was in this small town east of Talon in the foothills on the near side of the desert, where apple festivals every fall turned to pumpkin carving contests and costumery for their entertainment. They had two schools in this town. One was a public school which had grades Kindergarden through 6th, and the other was a private institution which catered to the village's unique population. Advanced Witchery was taught there, in addition to the normal things.
It came as little surprise to the inhabitants of this small town that a bigger city school had such things going on in it nowadays, Carramba was too far to commute even for the rather rich old families that had mansions and rode in private helicopters. So the school maintained its status and continued to attract instructors both mundane and wizardly.
One item of note about that school, Wonder's Wonders, it was a year-round campus. It taught day and night, whenever the students were able to come. Some were required on their family farms, while others could only attend when the sun had gone down due to ... certain skin conditions.
So while a lot of other kids drifted out to vacation campgrounds nearby during Summer, WW was still in session. Sometimes the students could see families out on the lake fishing or doing whatever else they did out there - from inside the tall rickety tower windows while they studied. Occasionally mundane families would mistake the school for a museum or attraction, and wander around inside until someone showed them out.
In late Summer when the tourists were heading home to do school shopping and grudgingly return to their daily lives, WW was gearing up to hold its annual Commencement. Akin to a normal graduation, though held at an odd time of year to everyone else's eyes, their Commencement showed the progress of their students in both mundane academia as well as supernatural skills.
At the age of thirteen, when most new students were arriving to the campus for their 7th grade studies, a trio of girls who lived near one another and always played together were ready for their first year's testing. Every grade had to go through their own Commencement, and if they failed one or both parts (mundane and exotic) they had to take that year over. No questions asked.
Fortunately for most folks, the town of Wonder had a higher intelligence than most groups that size, and certainly paid more attention to detail.
After all, when you might wind up a werewolf's lunch you want to make sure your spellbook is up to date.
Dacatie, Wanda and Selina were the three girls ready and willing to break through to their next year's studies. Commencement wasn't just a little exam or a parade with diplomas handed out willy-nilly. It was a month-long piece of work for everyone. At the beginning of October, the students were all expected to do some kind of major spell or ritual, along with their mundane testing. Each year's requirements were different, and so this year the trio of girls wanted to do theirs together. Their instructor decided it would be acceptable - there were only five other students in their grade so it would hardly be too much to ask even if the others got jealous and wanted to do the same thing. But she set the bar a bit higher.
Their test would be a combination of research, summoning and control. It might seem a little advanced for thirteen year old girls, but with their imaginations running rampant and spirits running high, they'd be able to pull it off. They had good wand control, it was said. They had good timing, and were known to be almost telepathic at times with their singular glances to one another.
At the end of their month, the trio boldly brought into existence a three-horned rat-demon, and coersed it to belch out a popular song before banishing it back to its place of origin.
They graduated with similar flying colors for their next two years, did separate work for grades 9 and 10, and were back together for their Junior year's Commencement.
"This year," their principal, Ms Witherwood, announced to the whole of the eleventh grade (all twelve of them, a family with twins and two others had moved into Wonder in the meantime), "we know that you have worked very hard indeed. However next season you will be expected to perform even more mature and difficult tasks, in readiness for your graduation into your adult lives. Your Senior Commencement will be harder and more complicated than ever - but this year you are expected to train and be ready for anything. This year, as always with our school's expectations, you will be required to seek out your Familiars, and if possible, your favored modes of transportation." The elderly but spry witch looked around the small gathering. "I realize that some of you have pets already, but a true familiar is difficult to find. And a good broom even harder!"
Wanda raised her hand, "Ma'am, may I ask, does it have to be a broom?"
"No, no," Witherwood said, "it can be any mode of transportation, so long as you are able to control it and cause mundane folk to ignore it if need be. A broom is very common, but some prefer a flying carpet, or even a mount of some sort. There was that one boy," she gave an exaggerated shudder, "who decided a flying boar would be best for him. That little beast left spoor everywhere - and don't dare look up while he was flying overhead!"
The class laughed, but they knew they had to get serious soon. Next year their studies would concentrate on real-world tasks like using magic to cook, clean homes and create items, but also to make artificial life like golems, task imps and homunculi to do work, and more difficult things like time travel and reality fixing. (You know, when someone's accidentally dropped a magical bomb into the loo and caused a half-mile crater where the lake was? Well the council had to fix that reality pretty quick! It was almost tourist season!)
"Decatie," asked Wanda, "do you think we'll all have the same kind of Familiar?"
The red-haired and crimson-eyed girl glanced at her staff, which had a swirling blood-red ball on the end. Somehow she was tuned to this, and could read whatever miniscule motes drifted through it. Her name, incidentally, was pronounced da-KAY-shee. "Perhaps, but what I see us having in common is our transport."
The girls knew that their friend couldn't give them specifics from her ball-reading, so they didn't ask what that might mean. They knew that they were in for some amount of difficulty however, because the others in the class had a bit more money than the three girls' families. It was one thing to be able to go to the grave yard and snap up some bones to assemble yourself an undead horse and cart (... or something...) it was another to be able to fly to the other side of the world and buy your own carpet.
"Mmmmmounts," Selina said, dreamily. All three girls were somewhat gifted with foresight or magical visions, Selina's were daydreams. Her dark charcoal-grey eyes always got out of focus when she was having one, but everyone knew that she could function well enough while she did so. "They're mounts. We're to have the same mounts." She tilted her head at Wanda, "anything to add?"
Wanda blinked, and reached up into her ridiculous hat. If she wasn't wearing it atop her strawberry-blond head, she had an assortment of sticks, rods, wands or whatnot keeping her hair back. Her divination came from reading one or another of these things. This time, she found a small wand which had a shiny tip. She waved it in a large circle, punctuating it with arcane motions, causing a fine plume of smoke to dot the air, and tilted her head back at Selina.
"They're not anywhere near us right now... But they are ... here. Here, I mean, generally. I guess that means they're not very common. They can't be horses or unicorns, or even flying boars."
They giggled. "But what? I mean... we have a lot of different animals in the forest and lake," said Decatie. "It's not one of them?"
"Apparently not," Wanda said moving her other wand through the air to clear the divination smoke. "But maybe they're close enough that we could do a road trip or something."
"You know my dad won't let me take the car," Selina said. "That last time I just don't think I want to repeat." Functional daydreams were okay for walking and chewing gum. Not for driving a stick-shift in the rain...
"Well we don't have to just use regular ways," Decatie said, "we did have that semester on portals."
"But we can't use those as our final project," Wanda said, looking at her printed instructions. "It says 'While personal teleportation is indeed a valid method it is not dependable and cannot be used by anyone else, as other methods can while a witch or wizard is unconscious or unable to propel themselves.' I guess that means that whatever it is has to be enchanted or intelligent."
"Brooms aren't really intelligent but they do sometimes come to your aid," Selina said.
"And animals are intelligent enough to come to you and sometimes big enough for other people to ride," agreed Decatie. "And we already know we're off to find mounts. Maybe we should start smaller," she shrugged.
"Familiars!" The trio cheered in unison after half a moment silence. They scattered to their own homes to do research individually about what would be the best for each of them. Selina was a 'dog person' but she had problems with wolves - and no domestic canine had ever become a familiar that she could find. Wolves were just too darn big for her and she knew they ate a lot more than a regular dog. If she wanted a canine she'd have to look to other exotics like foxes or coyotes, neither of which really floated her boat.
Something weird caught her eye though. When they were all upstairs at Decatie's house watching "Riders" (the Talon City Talent Agency's equivalent to 'Cops') she looked oddly at the show and waved her hand at it.
"We haven't done that spell yet," Decatie chuckled because it looked a lot like a 'rewind that' motion. The show wasn't pre-recorded though, they'd have to wait for the Tivo to finish up. While the show went to commercials, Decatie clicked the remote and went back to the point where her friend started spazzing out. "What are you looking at?"
"The.... the... THERE!" She exclaimed, pointing excitedly at the screen. Decatie put it on pause. "See that?"
"It's a dalmation," Wanda said, rolling her eyes.
"No, no it's not!" Selina said, "it's got wings!"
They paused the show, and all three looked intently at the screen. Sure enough, the ashen spotted white 'dog' had large grey and white colored wings - the same color as smoke or ashy water. It figured, because this spot was about the Talon City Fire department and their special dragon-riding group. They didn't use fire engines any more, they rode dragons into places, and controlled fire with magic or psionics. And they had a dalmation, but it was a winged wolf!
"I ... have got to get in contact with them," Selina said, "like right now."
"Well if you wait for the end of the show," Decatie said, flipping the Tivo back to the current show, "they have emails and phone numbers for everyone they promote."
To Wanda and Decatie it looked as though their friend was going to explode if the show didn't end fast enough. Eventually she got her contact information, and bolted home while the other two did a little more TV viewing. It would be Friday soon enough, and their weekend was going to be devoted to finding their own Familiars.
By Thursday Selina had gotten a reply from one of the people who worked at the Fire Department, and learned that the winged wolf in question, Eearil, was quite intelligent, and knew now how to get from one world to another - and knew apparently of a place that had one or two young cublings to send to good homes. Selina was going to get a visit by the chief there, and this thrilled her almost as much as the idea of getting her own cub!
While other girls might have been jealous, Wanda and Decatie were merely supportive and curious. They knew better than to think that having a familiar would mean they would be forever at odds. After all, Decatie was busy looking up some kind of exotic but complicated creature too, and Wanda was thinking along the lines of something with enough limbs to hold things for her.
Their weekend arrived as did Fire Chief Manny Steele of the Talon City Fire Station 108. On a big, black dragon. With an excitable winged wolf in tow.
The trio of girls could hardly blink. Their eyes were wide, and they hardly had an expression other than surprise when the dragon landed on the street near Selina's house. The houses along this wide street were uniformly spooky two or three story Victorian things, almost all done in bright ridiculous color schemes and having yards ranging from 'don't even bother trying to burn it down' to 'immaculate 20th century grass-is-always-greener'. Each had a large yard in front and an even larger yard in back, and suddenly the girls realized what their mounts were supposed to be.
"Hello girls," Manny said, pouring on the charm for an older guy. "You're Selina," he said looking at the girl with black hair. She mutely nodded, barely even looking at the man. Eearil the wolf bounded up, using his wings to skid to a halt and balance himself from bowling anyone over. "This is Eearil, the one you were asking about."
"Hi!" The wolf said, and that surprised everyone.
".... H... he talks?" Selina said, finally able to move. "I really really want to thank you for coming." Eearil stuffed his black nose into her extended hand, and while he wasn't as big and bulky as some of the local mountain wolves (and certainly not as big as the werewolf clan who ran around in wolfen shape) he was elegantly built and had a rougish charm rather like Steele himself. They all settled in on the porch of Selina's house, attracting the attention that a dragon usually did in big towns as well as small. A crowd formed around the black dragon named Ishamashii allowed the young and old to approach him, calmly. Apparently even in Talon seeing a dragon up close was an event, and the pair were quite used to it by now.
Manny answered whatever questions the girls had, and noticed early on that they too kept looking at the dragon he called bond. "You'd like to meet him too," he finally said as they were getting ready to ask permission for at least Selina to visit the station and use their facilities to locate her own winged wolf friend. The girls walked back down with him and Isha lowered his head to them, allowing them to look closely at the dragon's face.
"He's really beautiful," Selina said. "Do you think... there are dragons for us? I mean, we've all watched the tv shows about becoming a dragon rider and stuff. We've got to find familiars and mounts."
"What a truly innovative school that is," Manny muttered. "Yes, I do, actually, and Isha does as well. We'd still need your parents permission, and you'd have to pack. Finding dragons is not a walk in the park."
"You'd be surprised," Decatie laughed, "our park has unicorns, and our lake has a sea monster. Walking around here is a dangerous thing."
***
With a few enchanted objects like a necklace here and a bracelet there, a highly useful hair clip in Decatie's case, the parents of these girls allowed their children to wander off relatively unconcerned. After all, should something befall one of them, their enchanted parental-control object would immediately alert their folks, and bring them back home. Selina hoped to enchant things like that some day, and showed a bit more ability with it than either of the other two.
Decatie was exceptional at scrying and blood magic - her whole family was like that, after all their name was true to the words Blood Wind. Wanda had it in her head to become somewhat of an artificer in addition to her ritual divination. Among the three of them it was very hard to say who might be the strongest witch. Since they were different in their pursuits but had that one similarity that they could easily communicate with one another, no one really wanted to say whether any was better or worse. Surely, all three were about as smart as one another. Selina was a bit of a clutz though her mental abilities shone, while Decatie was healthy as a horse she often had some trouble changing her focus from her scrying ball to whatever was otherwise going on. Wanda was distractable by any shiny thing though she had impeccable handwriting and was quite deft with her fingers.
They'd never bothered to compete for any guys in school. Each of them saw the zit-faced nerds and the high-strung athlete jocks with equal disdain. They weren't into girls, they just weren't concerned about going steady. They loved to be asked out to dance, or movies or whatever - but they had a reputation for wanting to do things in groups rather than solo. If you didn't have two other friends to balance things out, you might as well go stag...
So they packed up and prepared themselves for a trip overland - on dragon back. Manny had Isha summon a couple others to the town. A light colored blue dragon was followed by...
"Is that a ... gryphon?" Decatie asked. "It is! Wow, I haven't seen one of those since I was a kid!"
"I remember that," Wanda added, "that was when we all got sick at camp."
"nnng," was all Selina wanted to say about that incident. She smiled widely and was happy that both the dragon and gryphon were amenable to being petted and gawked at. She was to ride with Manny, while the others had female partners. Decatie was pretty sure that a gryphon like Shannon Dooley's might work for her, though if they didn't find a proper bonding place (Manny had begun to explain the whole bonding deal to them) for one of those, a dragon would be great too.
Wanda sat behind Jennifer Munoz on the blue, and they waved energetically to the folks in the neighborhood, blowing kisses to their family members, and finally clutching on for dear life when the dragons lifted into the air.
With such ease, they moved up into the clear Autumn sky. Though in this part of California there were some trees that turned, most of the forest was evergreen - except that one part of the haunted wood, which had already turned bright orange and red, and would lose every single leaf come Winter. The patchwork of farms, pastures, forest and town spread out below, and all three girls knew that flight was in their future. Excited, they all looked to one another and back, sharing a kind of mental giggle.
They hung on tightly, Manny had asked if they wanted to see the Station house, and of course they did. Wonder had a small volunteer fire fighting group, but they also really didn't need much in the way of either police or fire services because of their magic and council to keep things under control. The girls had been in to Talon once or twice, visiting Los Angeles and Disneyland, and doing the tourist thing. But they hadn't really gone into the city proper, and they had never seen such things as a Starbucks on every corner...
They flew overland, rather than teleporting. Manny figured correctly that they'd be better off getting used to long flights than blipping around - they may or may not find dragons that could even do the teleportation or portal trick like most of the Station's. The foothills faded behind them as they headed west, the sun started to get into their eyes but by the time they reached Talon it was only mid-afternoon. The city spread out in clumps at first, and then downtown became visible as a series of towers and skyscrapers emerged from the lower land. The city itself was of interest to all three girls, though they knew they wouldn't be willing to move there. They liked the security of knowing everyone who lived nearby them, and being utterly accepted as witches helped too.
What they weren't quite prepared for was the fact that Talon had a large Anthro population. This was still something rather new to both sides of the world - Twoarth wasn't well integrated yet and there were no talking animals other than some enchanted ones in Wonder. They'd learned about the other side of the world in class of course, and knew perfectly well there was probably a town on the other side of the planet just like Wonder, only filled with ... Coyote and Crow people.
They couldn't help but stare, though apparently the Anthro of this city brushed it off with class. The fire station was fun to walk around in and learn about, and then they got the chance to walk through this weird arched doorway.
Into the Healing Den's extention which housed the Station's dragons. All three girls lurched to the side, and Manny laughed then shut himself up.
"Sorry - we all used to do that, but we're in and out of here so often we've adjusted. It's kind of like a sideways twist on the floor, isn't it."
"It's weird!" Decatie said, adjusting her dress as though it'd come untucked.
"Eh, it's no weirder than porting," Selina said, "remember that first jump?"
"And trying to land on the ground instead of four inches above it?" Wanda laughed and did a little wobbly jump to illustrate it. They turned when a woman came into view, and instinctually the girls all gave a polite curtsy. The woman adopted a surprised air, straightening up a bit and blinking. She was extremely pregnant, which contrasted with every other thing about her being long and lean and dangerous looking.
"Girls, this is Baeris Kshau, she's the Masterhealer around the place, she keeps everything going properly." Manny announced, and Baeris parted her thin lips in a wry smile.
"Hardly, that would be the staff. I'm always doing something else these days." Her voice was somewhat husky, a voice that Decatie was pretty certain to grow into when she was older herself. None of the girls could tell whether this woman was thirty or sixty, she didn't seem very young but didn't look obviously old - and she was pregnant, older women didn't usually get that way. Nor did they wear clingy slit-leg dresses. While pregnant.
Baeris extended her long hand and waggled her fingers, manicured black nails tipped them, and the girls bid farewell to Manny and his station partners. "We're going to find places for you to bond is that right?"
"And we need to find familiars," said Wanda. "Selina needs a winged wolf, Eearil said something about a wolfkeep."
"Ah yes," Baeris said, "there are still a few of them around, they're rather rare even after the big festival they had. We're all looking for things, girls, you'll never quit looking."
"If I ever quit looking for things," Selina said, "just shoot me."
"Good attitude," Baeris said. A large blue bat-thing came flying down, and the girls suddenly realised it was a tiny winged lizard or dragon. "This is Striker," she said. "He's a big pain in the butt," she scritched him on the shoulder, and took something from his taloned paw. "But he's quite useful for bringing information across worlds. Better than a cellphone I might add, because the service is lousy outside of reality."
The girls kind of paused as they followed the black-haired woman down the stone hall, shrugged it off, and continued walking. The gigantic blue flitter flapped off and then vanished, presumably having some kind of innate teleport ability. Baeris led them to a large humming room filled with computer equipment. "This is where you'll find samples of dragons you might befriend," she explained how to look - with a patience that said a lot of the people that might come through here were less adept at computers than this trio.
Soon they had spotted a couple likely places, and without pause opted for Nidus Avengaea. Apparently there was an emergency notice about the place, having a strange batch of foreign eggs put on their sands without any warning! Baeris had handed the girls a still-warm printout from their 'hot' information line, and the trio got it into their heads that they should help alleviate this problem!
But first... Familiars!