Awww she's so cuuute!

Yes, she is. This is what happens when you're the familiar of a mage who's both a furry fan and into macro/micro... you may end up getting shaped by expectations.

And, as I've noted before, the 'micro' side is a lot easier to keep under wraps and quiet. Shrunken folks can be hidden in your apartment, while giant folks rarely have much privacy.

That is one really adorable Tiny. And a very useful Tiny at that! I hope that Alicia treats Lyta with kindness - even when she's about to commit an oops.

Oh, she does. Alicia's fundamentally a nice person for the most part, of the 'I've been picked on in the past and wouldn't want to put anybody else through that' sort. (Which is somewhat 'writing what I know', though I never got picked on for some of the things Alicia did.) And she really does want to learn about magic from Lyta.

Granted, the fact that there's a psychic connection in there and so by default Alicia can feel some of what Lyta's feeling (if it's strong enough) also tends to encourage good treatment. But it's mostly unnecessary for other reasons.

Lyta's so helpful~!

Interesting note with the 'picking on' aspect here, given how common such themes are in macro.
A psychic connection sure helps, but picking on people by itself should probably make you feel bad enough to stop you from doing it, especially when they're a fair few times smaller than you! 😭

Well, yes. I mean, it also helps that Lyta's looks and personality were modelled to a large extent on an imaginary friend that Alicia had when young, someone she could confide in and vent to, so there's a whole weird 'know you already' vibe going on, too.

But mostly it's just Alicia not being the sort of person to pick on people anyway.

People are complicated.

Syl would understand that too. Pod politics can get very rough, especially when you're a cub and learning the ropes.

It really helps when you look at a micro like Aliciia does, and think, "No. I won't do to this Tiny what was done to me. It stops here. I'll treat them kindly instead." And... both of them benefit!

Oh yeah. Most children are usually pretty much sociopaths at a young age, it takes a while for brains to get to the point where empathy really sets in.

(My mother was a kindergarten teacher; there's a whole branch of child psychology that is really fascinating in its own right for figuring out how and when children really wrap their heads around the concept that there is in fact a consistent external universe separate from them.)

But yeah, that sort of thing is the whole point behind the Prisoner's Dilemma. So much of life involves situations where one person may do better in the short term if they act selfishly no matter what others do... but acting unselfishly makes things better for everybody, including you in the long term.

A good part of why it makes such a good test for Explorer Pod candidates. In teaching cubs and calves empathy - not just for one another but for different species - your own empathy is tested. It's not the only such test, but it's a popular one. (Expected for a matriarchal species).

I really want to know more about Alicia and Lyta now. Lyta looks like the sort of Tiny that has a big heart and bigger knowledge. Priceless gems, after all, can be small too, but destroying them would be the worst sort of short-sighted idiocy and Alicia sounds like she fully understands that.

Doesn't mean that she won't get a case of the giggles if Lyta trips over her pencil!

Don't know if you're familiar with the work of Jean Piaget, who really pioneered a lot of work in developmental psychology after he noticed that children of different ages tended to make different categories of errors on tests, which suggested a great deal about the order in which people learn how to deal with reality. (My mother, when finishing her Bachelor of Education degree while I was in high school, came home one day and grumbled "If one more of my profs mentions Piaget, I am going to scream.") These days Piaget is literally someone who gets brought up in Psych 101 courses.

Right now all I've got about Alicia and Lyta is in the 'Sketch Upgrade' story chapters I've posted here, though obviously I have more in my head that hasn't been written out yet. Alicia's a bi-racial animation student in college, and Lyta is a combination of Alicia's old imaginary friend and the enchanted charcoal pencil with a spell for creating animated drawings to serve as temporary familiars. The latter of which she picked up at an estate sale from a deceased animator who had been somewhat of a hermit in life.

This is very cute! I love Lyta trying to lecture Alicia while turning a page. Thank you for sharimg!

Yeah, this was an idea that I absolutely had to get drawn at some point. And Emi is one of the better artists for this sort of thing.

Lookit the itty bitty kitty. Absolutely adorbs.

Yeah, she is. Even if she is dealing with trying to teach magic to someone who has natural talent but is just a way more intuitive thinker about it...

Just wants to make you squeeze and nose her all over the tiny self!

Very cute indeed!

She would eep and squirm and grumble and probably try to tell you that only Alicia gets to do that without asking first.

"just doing a little reading before bed time"

"A little light..." *thump* "... reading."