Of companions and familiars and intimates

"At last" sighed Bridey settling down on the south facing sun deck and adjusting her bones and elbows for comfort, "I'd begun to think that we'd never get this tail back online. How pathetic are those clowns over at Spymac? One technical glitch and it's like Armageddon� again. Humans huh?"

"Can we please not get back into that Socratic dialogue thing again? Shem and Shaun do it so much better and anyway I don't like plagiarising�. Not even ancient history. Not even stylistically. So: if you want to do this as a monologue or a soliloquy� that's fine by me. In any case my throat's sore from all that barking last night. Cats! But remember the topic is: companioning - the 3 orders. Let's try and keep some continuity."

"The three orders: companion, familiar and intimate. Half way decent humans can get given to a companion. Witches and wizards, warlocks and wiccans: any human on the losing side of things might, if they are lucky, get given to an intimate. Nearly perfected humans get intimates - without exception. With the nearly perfected human the idea is to get them over the final cusp that humans have so much trouble with. Familiars are supposed to do redemptive duties: drag them back from the brink if you will. Companions are there to nudge perfectibly human beings into something further along the road toward perfection.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work out according to the grand plan and that's where the fundamental flaw shows through. Most companions get their jobs done - no problem. Intimates, like us, have the hardest job pushing humans over the final hump and run the biggest risk of failure but the selection criteria are rigorous and we get a good success rate. About 42% last time I checked the stats. It's the familiars that let down the figures most often. Personally I've never trusted the training programme for those operatives. The Gods've always said that you really need intimate level training to take on that job but we don't have enough intimate trainees coming through the programme and, of course, we cannot be spared - perfection is the ultimate goal after all. The problem is that so many familiars get completely wasted by the exposure. Take those next door - they were all good specimens; they all did their best; but at the end of the day, they are all going to have to be retrained. Rehabilitated and retrained! And they've all failed. All ten of them! And that is the fundamental flaw at work."

"Very good sis. So you were listening in class! As far as it goes that's very good. And, for our purposes here I think that'll pretty much do for now. And what will become of the humans?"

"I think that they'll probably be left to their own devices. In their own language they have a saying that is a bowdlerized� version of one of our truisms: "The Gods only help those who can help themselves".