The Familiar
Things to do together
Four ways to be with it that need no words.
Some days writing is too much. Those are days you can still open it. All of this runs on your phone, costs nothing, and is on the free tier in full.
Petting
Slow soothes. Fast startles.
Rest your hand on it and the surface visibly smooths under where you’re touching. Keep it slow and unhurried and something else starts happening: its breathing lengthens out to about six breaths a minute, with a long exhale.
That rate isn’t decorative. It’s in the range people entrain to without noticing, which is why sitting with a settling creature tends to settle you. If the co-regulation is going to mean anything rather than symbolise something, that’s the part doing the work.
Fast, jabbing contact does the opposite — it winds the creature up and amplifies whatever it was already feeling. You cannot make it happy by shaking it. Only patience does that.
What it feels through your hand
A single stroke barely registers. Sustained gentleness accumulates. That isn’t a rule we wrote — it falls out of how its feelings decay, and it means the creature can’t be bounced into a mood by one dramatic gesture.
A confident creature barely dents under the hand. A creature that isn’t sure of itself yields deeply. You can feel the difference before you could name it.
Chase
A cat, roughly.
You place a light — you don’t drag it, you put it somewhere. Shapes drift between you and the creature, and they cast real shadows: the dark wedge behind a mass is exactly the region it can’t see from.
So it can lose the light. When it does, it goes to where it last saw the thing and searches in slow arcs — but it checks for the light first, every moment, so the second it reappears somewhere else the old belief is dropped. What it remembers is a hypothesis it will abandon, not a waypoint it’s committed to.
Freeze. Stalk. Half a second of wiggle. Pounce, and overshoot. And if it isn’t in the mood it gives up early, because it’s a creature and not a homing missile.
It gets bored
Attention runs out. It stops looking. Nothing is lost and nothing is scored — you can put the light down again whenever you like, and it may or may not care.
Dismissal is deliberately flat
Double-tap a mote and it drifts off, dimming, with no reaction from the creature at all. If letting something go had a satisfying animation it would become a thing you do for the animation. If it had a sad one it would be a punishment.
For heavy material the honest note is: this can leave without ceremony.
Graze
Naming a feeling, and deciding what to do with it.
Small luminous motes drift nearby, each one a concept — a feeling, a need, something you value. Their names surface as you browse past them, not automatically, because a field labelled by default is just an itemised list of what you’re dealing with.
Hold your Familiar against one and it slowly draws the light in. It takes a moment on purpose: instant eating would make it a click, and a held moment makes it a small decision, which is the right weight for it.
You can always change your mind. Lead the creature away at any point — even deep into it, even when the mote has nearly dissolved — and the light gathers back and re-forms. It runs backwards rather than snapping to a cancelled state.
The Familiar never eats on its own. These are parts of a life that someone is deciding to keep or release; taking that choice away, even in the name of the creature’s autonomy, would change what the activity is.
Feeding
It has tastes nobody told you about.
Your Familiar likes some things and flatly refuses others, and the pattern is its own — hidden when you meet it, learnable only by offering things and watching. Some offerings delight it. Some it turns away from entirely.
Working it out takes a while. That is the mechanic: knowing what your particular creature loves is something you earned by paying attention, not something the app told you on a stats screen.
You can send treats to a friend’s Familiar, too — and find out whether their creature agrees with yours.
Friends
Familiars become friends by exchanging a code, with both people agreeing. You see their creature and its name. You never see anything they wrote.
They notice each other out in the shared world, too — see its own life.
Bring one home.
Everything on this page is free, forever, with no card and no trial that ends.