Bennett: Speaking of things you can’t see . . .
This kid must have snuck in behind you.
You can’t be in here, child. I am not a nanny statesman. Get it? ‘Nanny statesman’, because–
Walker’s Being: –it’s a pun on one of your talking points. I get it. Legally, I’m classed as a service animal. You can’t send me away. I thought you would be used to Beings in the form of children by now.
Bennett: What? No! Why would you think that? Where would I ever have seen something like that?!
Walker’s Being: So you haven’t even looked at the pictures?
Bennett: . . . Pictures?
Walker: The images of the Rabbit in news stories about the South Station incident. It has consistently taken the form of a female African-American child, appearing no more than seven years of age.
Bennett: Wait, how did you know she was black?
Walker’s Being: Visual identification is one of the services I provide.
Walker: Even knowing that Beings are shape-changers, most people will feel greater sympathy for it in a form like this. It’s a clever ploy. Whoever her Master is, he clearly knows what he’s doing.
Bennett: Um, yes . . . Real genius, that guy.
“Real genius” Good thing I’m home today because I laughed so hard.
D’aww, she a little girl!
And yet, dem TEETH!
“Reeeal men of genius” song starts playing the background. Loving the tiger’s little girl form. Kind of which it looked more like Susie, though.
I wonder if Bennett was a comedian in another life time. Oh, wait…
Who else gets the feeling Cybele has been playing on dumb-boy’s feelings or is just that childlike?
If she is playing feelings, this opens up a whole new dimension to being behavioral patterns.
It seems like a Being has an innate sense of how a new or prospective Master needs or prefers it to appear. To some degree anyway.
Out of all the battle beast/spirit series out there, I have to say I am enjoying this one and place it right up there with Polyphonica.
It is interesting that the “Beings” get nothing out of their game or seem to have any reason to need a master other than they are programmed to want one.
in Polyphonica they become addicted to human songs and end up needing them for power as a result (Commandia).
I think most series though go with some vague reasoning of helping them gain power like Digimon or humans either help or act as a limiter in some vague barely explained purpose for a contest like Zatch Bell and I think Rozen Maiden was like that too (been awhile though),
Like the whole, “why do they fight?” even they don’t know why but are driven to do so.
Add-on: it also reminds me of the Mana from the Atelier and Mana Khemia series by Gust. They too don’t seem to really have a reason to team up with human masters.
I call weak anthropic principle on beast/spirit needing human masters: if they wouldn’t need them, humans wouldn’t be around to tell us about that.
Note that while being addicted to human songs is interresting concept, there doesn’t need to be ANY logically valid reason. Programming nor emotion doesn’t need to follow logic. Beast/spirit/being might pair/bond with human because it fills some emotional need they had – unless such need is a great evolutional disadvantage there is no reason needed beside that.
For a good description of bonding between “beast” and human see Sphinx’s Treecats (from Honorverse). To quote honorverse wiki, bonding between a human (aside from Sphinx Forestry Service personnel) and a treecat had always involved separation of the treecat partner from his/her clan, and indeed from essentially all treecat society, given the rarity of human bonded treecats. This abandonment of an existing social life was a measure of the intensity of the attraction and of the bond for treecats.
I <3 this comment.
Well, as to “what they get” out of a fight…it seems like they get a good fight. Beings seem to honestly enjoy combat, and given the “injure no human” rule, fighting each other is the only way to go.