![](http://cobalt-company.wdfiles.com/local--resized-images/writing:2025-03-24-charmed-i-m-unsure/style="margin:/medium.jpg)
My dear friend,
Fiery spiders? Tides below. I've changed my mind; you must come home at once.
Do not fear that your response to the baby turtles means you are in any way especially soft or delicate, my dear. Your character remains unbesmirched by any hints of sentiment. It is simply a measurable scientific fact that turtles in general are exceptionally endearing, and the smaller they are, the more endearing they become, along an exponential curve. Baby turtles, therefore, have properties that can erode stone itself if they simply do things like walking around, tiny legs protruding from their round little shells at awkward angles as their slender necks wave to and fro trying to perceive things.
As to animals following me about, I can see why you might attribute this to charisma, due to your own genteelly baffled point of view on most human behavior. You have never made any particular efforts toward a train of followers and yet always seem to end up with one - therefore to you, anyone else also must naturally earn loyalty and adulation by simply exuding personality.
I had to explain to my Cobalt Company comrades that there was no magic involved in my relationship to animals, and to you I must explain that it also has very little to do with charm. I am simply knowledgeable about animals and endlessly persistent in training them to rely upon and obey me. I am pleased that there is nothing mystical or infeffable about it, because my way is so much more predictable. I cannot imagine what I would do if I had to rely on force of personality; I'm such a terribly average specimen in every respect. Except for the hair.
In the case of the baby raptor, for whom my heart still mourns if I am being honest, I was there when she came out of her shell, and I believe she mistook me for her mother, and from that point on I simply followed raptor care instructions to the letter. But then a gnome did some necromancy that we implored him not to do, and now she belongs to some horrid troll. Every word of that sentence is entirely literal, I'm afraid. As I said, it's rather a story.
I shall seek out Captain Sparkwire for engineering tips the moment she is not entangled with time travel or dragon Aspects or coordinating a mercenary response to a war against an Elemental Lord. So just before my granddaughter's wedding, or thereabouts. Perhaps my dear friend Slicket Throttleblast (such a name!) can get me started on the path to mechanical mastery. He is a gnome. If the name did not give it away.
Please stay unburnt,
Arric