2.3 For Yuri, I Build a Better Monster

There’s something incredibly surreal about sitting across from a dangerous witch while she tears into a plate of carne asada fries like her life depends on it. Pandora left shortly after introductions were over, so it’s just me and the witch going out to eat.

In the past twenty minutes, I’ve learned three things about Erica Walker, the civilian alter ego of Ferromancer:

First, she grew up in southern California, near the border, and she has very, very strong opinions when it comes to Mexican food. I will never again dare to suggest that Chipotle qualifies, let alone Taco Bell. The restaurant she brought me to is a local chain, one I’ve seen before but never frequented, with pretty plates and a sauce bar.

Second, Ferromancer is crazy about cars. She took me through her pocketspace workshop to a more normal garage where she keeps her “manual swapped 1994 Mazda Cosmo with a three-rotor 20B-REW engine.” Apparently it cost her forty grand to ship the thing overseas from Japan through an import broker. I told her I didn’t know anything about cars—I don’t even have a license—and that it just looked like a black car to me. She told me it was a Black Forest Mica car, because apparently car people have special names for colors.

Third, and most shocking—though it really shouldn’t have been—Erica is just as much a nerd for magic as I am.

“So the thing about all the theorycrafters on your powerscaling boards,” she says through a mouthful of fried potato, melted cheese, and guacamole, “is that they’re too mechanistic.” She swallows and washes her food down with a gulp of cold hibiscus tea. “I’ve read through those forums, I’ve looked at the subreddits, and these guys are just fundamentally incurious about anything that isn’t directly relevant to figuring out which of their favorite girls is the bigger badass that would no diff your girlie. They don’t see the meaning in the magic, and all its signs and symbols.”

I lean in, the promise of magical theory from a real magic user overtaking my hunger for this genuinely quite good plate of chicken enchiladas in green sauce. “So wait, okay, I’ve got a friend who talks about this. We’re both active in the wargaming side of the communities you’re talking about, the nerds who model powers and try to game out how a fight would go. This friend—Mord’s her name—is deeper in the community than I am, and she’s always bringing up theories she’s read from outside those spaces in arguments with other users or when she’s complaining about them to me. She’ll be preening if she finds out she was right about any of this stuff. She’s got this pet obsession with semiotics that usually goes over my head.”

Erica finishes a bite of steak and sour cream. “It’s a bit more complicated than that, but yeah, semiotics matters. Magic cares about a whole lot of things that are more metaphysical than physical. Of course, I’ll grant that’s not always obvious when you don’t have the inside scoop, and both witches and magical girls are pretty tight-lipped about their powers for opsec reasons. And when it comes to familiars in particular, well, the civvies don’t get a lot of chances to see how the meat is made.”

“So how is it made?” I can’t resist asking. Any pretense of acting cool has completely fallen away at this point; I don’t want to play the social game and build my rep, I want to know everything there is to know about magic. This is a dream conversation for me.

Erica leans back and smirks, a bit of Ferromancer seeping back into her expression. “You’re an eager girl, aren’t you? I bet you were squealing on the inside when you walked into that room and saw all those local legends.”

I totally was. My cheeks go pink. “I mean, how could I not? I live here. I moved here to be closer to magic. I’ve spent an unhealthy amount of time following the big names.” I scoop more enchilada into my mouth to cover up my embarrassment.

Erica’s smirk takes on a playful cast, eyes twinkling. “Disappointed that you got the stranger instead?”

I nearly choke on my food. I force it down with an awkward swallow and blurt out, “No way, definitely not!” The pink on my cheeks deepens to red. Fuck, fuck, stop blushing! “I mean, okay, it was really, really cool when you made Radi—when you made the other two back off.” And it was hot, whispers my treasonous brain.

I was starstruck and overwhelmed when it came to Radiance, Lilith, and Bombshell, but Ferromancer is different. I have to fight to keep my gaze from lingering on her neck and shoulders and lower down, on the span of skin exposed by her loose top and that damnably implicative jacket. Looking at her face is worse, in a sense, because at any moment I feel like I’ll be consumed by those fiery, all-seeing eyes. Her lips are so expressive that I can’t help but wonder what they’d taste like, even if right now the answer is fries and hot sauce.

I don’t understand my own body. Why am I having this reaction? For all that I haven’t been in the dating scene for a long time, it’s not like Erica is the first attractive woman I’ve been close to in all that time. But maybe this is a brain thing, not a body thing. Ferromancer was powerful and intimidating and just plain cool, but there’s another aspect, too: she’s paying attention to me.

Erica watches my reactions, taking note of my blushing cheeks and nervous chatter with a subtle deepening of her perpetual smirk. “You can say Radiance and Lilith,” she reminds me. “Veiling will keep outsiders from eavesdropping on what we’re really saying; if anyone is trying to listen in, they’ll just hear a perfectly ordinary conversation about groceries, or the weather, or whatever makes sense to their brain.”

“Right, right. Sorry, I’m so new to this.” I feel a little embarrassed about that and a lot embarrassed about my emotions running so hot, but Erica waves me off.

“Don’t worry about it. We were all new once. Do you think I could always hold a room like that? Nah. That’s the kind of presence that comes with making your two years.”

My two years. The reminder of the guillotine hanging over my neck—a sword of Damocles, as my friend Femur would call it—is a bucket of cold water dumped on my feverish brain. I’m not here to flirt with a cute girl, and I’m not here to geek out, either. I’m here to push the odds back in my favor and build myself into the kind of witch that can fight Strix Striga and walk away with all her limbs.

Erica—Ferromancer, in this moment—sees the change come over me and nods, serious again. “Yeah, a little perspective never hurts. The skill you’re about to learn is important.”

I nod back. “Right. And, I promise, I’m ready to learn.”

Her sense of mirth creeps back in. “Hey, lighten up. You’re learning from the best of the best, and I don’t let my students fail.”

The thought of being one of her students warms me. I know she’s just talking about the job that the Jovians have given her—Pandora’s request to teach me a bit about familiars, which I have to assume must have been negotiated in exchange for something or to pay off a debt—but I wouldn’t mind if it was more than that. I’d like that.

We finish our meals in comfortable silence, devouring what was left. We get refills for our drinks, and when Erica is enjoying more of her hibiscus I poke at the last topic again: “So, that ‘two years’ thing… is that real? Pandora told me that only one percent of witches survive their second year, and most die in their first. I didn’t question it at the time, but those numbers aren’t just terrifying, they’re confusing. And this seems like something I need to understand.”

Erica wiggles her hand in a so-so gesture. “The numbers are real, but only if you’re talking global. The PNW isn’t like the Balkan disaster or the warlord states out in eastern Africa. The U.S. and Canada, and countries like them, are a lot more stable, and stable places want to keep stable. You don’t have the same factors here that were pushing those other regions into explosive violence even before magic lit a fire under everyone’s asses. Truce enforcement works, here.”

“Witches still die,” I point out. “Why? How?”

Ferromancer drums her fingers on the table, bites her lip, and looks up and to the side. It’s the first time I’ve seen her stopping to choose her words. “A lot of witches are stupid and reckless. To put it another way, our benefactors tend to pick a lot of girls that were predisposed to acts of violence and a lack of self-control. They pick women with a history of criminality and mental illness, because those make easy knives, and because throwing enough knives at a crowd means you’re bound to hit someone. For all the fuss I raised about meaning earlier, the rule of three that can kill a mage is pretty damn mechanistic: three killing blows, traded between two magic users over any length of time, and the result is a permanently dead witch—or a dead magical girl, which is what our side is hoping to get out of empowering that kind of witch. It’s a shotgun method.”

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I shiver. “Do you think I’m one of those knives?” I almost don’t want to hear the answer, but I have to ask the question. Criminality doesn’t fit me unless you count petty shoplifting, but mental illness? I’m not stupid, I know my relationship with Sophia isn’t anywhere near healthy.

“Nah,” the other witch says easily. “You’re an ‘investment,’ as they like to put it. Like me, and like Radiance and Lilith, and most of the witches who hit that survival threshold. We’re the chosen few, their golden one percent. We’re special, doll.”

I’m special. It’s an idea so potent and thrilling that I feel lightheaded. The Jovians didn’t just choose me to become a witch, they chose me to become one of the witches they care about, the kind of witch that gets to sit at the high table with Radiance and the Coterie and the secret witches like Ferromancer and—maybe—Delilah.

I just have to play this clever. I can do that. I know I can do that.

“So,” I ask, “where do I start? What do I need to know about familiars?”

Ferromancer leans in and rubs her hands together. “My favorite topic. I’m going to say something, and I want you to give me your gut reaction. No overthinking it, no saying what I want to hear, just pure instinctual response. Got it?” I nod, and then she says, “Every familiar, at its core, is just software running on hardware like your common robot. They’re all machines.”

Immediately I feel a sense of rejection. That’s wrong. That’s absolutely, completely wrong. Wait, why do I feel that so strongly? I remember what the witch said and force out, “That feels wrong, but I don’t know why.”

“Interrogate that feeling,” she instructs. “Dig into it. Don’t deny it, just look at it closer.”

So I do. I close my eyes, steady my breathing, and focus on the sense of wrongness in my chest. It’s… it’s like a cold spot where there should be warmth. The furnace inside me, my Prometheus, it doesn’t like that framing. I reach for my power, for my magic, and it shows me the kiln again, wet clay cut into shape and fired. The hand of a titan reaching down to give the burning spark of life to an empty vessel.

I open my eyes. Ferromancer grins. “Here’s your first lesson, kiddo: every witch is different. Every power is different, and it finds meaning in different symbols.”

It clicks. “Your magic is technological, so it sees familiars through the lens of technology.”

“Bingo. So whenever I give you advice and I use that kind of language, you have to do the work of translating it to your own lens, whatever that is. Figuring out how your power thinks is the single most important step in improving how you use magic.”

I chew on that. “I think I get it. I’ve been talking about this with friends, a little, and doing some research on my own.”

“Good!” Ferromancer praises. “Keep doing that. Now, I watched your fight with the meathead. Those golems of yours were pretty stupid, weren’t they?”

I wince. “Yeah, I was not impressed.”

“That’s pretty typical of basic familiars. To put it in my terms, you’re looking at machines running very basic programming, the kind that need lots of verbal commands with lots of specificity, because they will interpret your orders as simply and literally as possible. But hey, they know how to move and how to hit things. But the robot I built? You saw how it moved, how it fought. I didn’t give it a single order and yet it was switching weapons and employing multilayered tactics against Bombshell. Some witches have familiars that toss around banter or sing their master’s virtues.”

I’ve seen that kind of familiar plenty of times; they’re especially popular with the Visage stable of witches. That does raise a question: “At that point, is that really a machine? I mean, if it can crack jokes and come up with its own lines, doesn’t that suggest it can think for itself?” Which has all kinds of alarming implications that Femur and Mordacity have argued about endlessly while Mike and I shot each other in Halo.

“You can teach a machine to mimic human speech,” Ferromancer dismisses. “That’s true of the non-magical variety just as much as it is of a familiar—a constructed familiar, I should say, since obviously a brainwashed human is still a human. Seen the latest neural networks, the chatbots and image generators?”

I’ve been making rent the past couple of months by selling AI-generated porn to internet perverts too stupid to realize they could be generating their own for a tenth of the price, but Ferromancer really, really doesn’t need to know that. “I’ve seen a bit,” I say as vaguely as I can.

“It’s the same principle. You feed a large language model enough human-written jokes and it figures out how to stitch them together and regurgitate them, but that doesn’t mean it understands what it’s doing, it just knows when something matches the pattern or doesn’t. You can teach it how to perform a specific task, or even a broad category of tasks, but that’s not the same as general intelligence like a human being has. They’re not alive. The religious argument is that they don’t have souls, but that’s never meant anything to me. The familiars I make, even the best of the best, at the end of the day they’re just dumb machines pretending to be smart.”

I’m itching to share some of that with my nerd friends, but I’m here for a reason. “So, how do you make them act smarter? How do you build a better monster?”

“Craft and intent,” Ferromancer answers immediately. There’s a rote quality to her response like she’s said it a hundred times before. “On a physical level, higher material quality translates to greater functionality. For me that means computer chips and advanced alloys, and they work even better the more of a hand I had in every step of the production process. For you, it’ll be something that fits your power.”

Prometheus, the sculptor of clay. “Maybe I should get into pottery,” I joke.

“You should,” Ferromancer says, completely serious. “If that’s what your power is telling you, listen to it. Connecting a real craft to your work is one of the most consistent ways to enhance your familiar creation, especially if your power has some in-built resonance to a specific artform.”

“Right. Yeah, okay, I guess that makes sense.” I wish I’d brought a pen and paper to take notes with. I could use my phone, but that doesn’t feel respectful enough. “So, the other half of it. Intent. What’s that about?”

“Just like materials, you get out what you put in. If your perception of a familiar is disposable chaff you’re throwing into the mahou grinder, that’s what you’ll create. When I make a familiar, it might be magic that does the final work of bringing it to life, but I sketch out detailed schematics every time as if it was a real machine. That gives power to the act of creation. The more meaning you can inject into your creation, the more your magic will resonate with the final product and enhance the resulting familiar.”

Well, I don’t think I was thinking about the result at all when I made my first golems, so that tracks. Schematics are all well and good for a roboticist, but what would my version look like? Sculpted clay dolls? Of what? “How do I do that?” I ask directly. “I mean, where would I even begin?”

Ferromancer drums her fingers along the table again. “Well, aside from your power, is there any kind of focus in your life that lines up with making minions? It can be anything, really. Some witches are dollmakers with a control complex, surrounding themselves with their vision of ideal beauty. Some witches are furries. I’ve met one witch who stole all her familiar designs from World of Warcraft monsters. Ask yourself if there’s a piece of media where the creatures in it really appeal to you.”

My favorite card game immediately springs to mind. “There’s one, yeah. There’s a trading card game I like where you sling spells and summon monsters to defeat your opponent. It could work. Hell, the most popular way to play that game is all about picking a single creature that appeals to you and building your strategy around its abilities.”

“Oh, you play Magic: the Gathering too?” A shot of Erica pep slips back into her voice, earnest curiosity undisguised on her face. Is she—is she excited to learn that?

My mind blanks. This can’t be real. “Wait, you play Magic? Like, actually? But, I mean—” You’re so cool, I want to say. You’re another girl. You look like you bathe regularly.

Erica laughs, full-throated and rich. “Oh, the look on your face is adorable right now. Yes, I play, and I’ve been playing since Alara block. Witches are allowed to have hobbies, and in fact I highly encourage it. Keeps you grounded. But keeping on topic, I’d say that gives us an easy next step: you can rifle through your collection and pick out all your favorite cards, and then we’ll practice building familiars off of those.”

It sounds perfect. Except, “I actually sold off most of my collection when money was tight,” I admit. “I guess I could scroll through Scryfall and save a bunch of tabs.”

Something new crosses Erica’s face: offense. “Seriously? Nah, we have to fix that. Hey, you got an LGS you like?”

“Uh, yeah. Troll Bridge Games.” I blink a few times, uncertain why she’s asking.

“Cool. Meet me there tomorrow. Afternoon work for you?”

“Yes,” I answer automatically, brain still not caught up with what’s happening.

Erica grins. “I’ll show you my collection. I’ve got the good stuff. And then, once you’ve found a few cards you like, I’ll take you back to my workshop and you can practice with whatever materials I have on hand. By the end of the day, you’ll have your first real familiar.”