More fiction from a writing prompt from eons ago.
“Partulian!” the Master cried weakly from the tower window, “Come here for a moment? I need you.”
Partulian sighed quietly and laid down his quill. The stoop-shouldered badger levered himself up from his stool and shuffled carefully between the stacks of musty books piled on his desk. He glanced briefly at a fanciful collection of elaborate laboratory glassware and the particolored liquid bubbling inside; patted the top of a cage holding a sullen ball of fluff that snapped at his hand. The Master, a gaunt but still imposingly tall panther, stood gazing out of the window.
Partulian cleared his throat. “Yes, Master Kal?”
Kal glanced over at the interruption. “Ah, Partulian. Come here, come here.” He placed one gnarled, grey paw on Partulian’s shoulder and gently led him to the glass. Partulian looked out at the bustling cityscape below; magnificent golden and azure towers whose tops were wreathed in wisps of cloud, gleaming arrows of gravcars zipping in and out of the spires, a rippling carpet upon which rode an imposing tiger calmly smoking a churchwarden pipe. Partulian glanced over at Kal, who was staring out at the scene, once more lost in thought. Partulian cleared his throat once again.
Kal closed his eyes and squeezed Partulian’s shoulder. “Lad, how long have you apprenticed under me?”
Partulian looked curiously at the Master. “One hundred and fifty two years, Master; ever since I completed grade school.”
Kal opened his eyes again, blue and filmed with age but still piercing when he fixed them upon you. “One thousand years ago, magic returned to our world after countless millennia of absence. Our kind has adapted and evolved magic to coexist with and complement our technology and industry, and a new golden age dawned. For seven hundred and twenty of those years, I have been studying the arcana and occult and its intersection with science and engineering. But still there are mysteries that elude me.” He took his hand from Partulian’s shoulder and rested it on the one piece of modern technology in the room, a small silver flex-tablet, and looked at his apprentice sadly.
Partulian sighed wearily. “You can’t get your sudoko game to run, can you?”
Kal shook his head and turned away. “Be a good lad, will you?”