The fluffy ball of fur in Honor Harrington's lap stirred and put forth a round, prick-eared head as the steady pulse of the shuttle's thrusters died. A delicate mouth of needle-sharp fangs yawned, and then the treecat turned its head to regard her with wide, grass-green eyes.
"Bleek?" it asked, and Honor chuckled softly.
"'Bleek' yourself," she said, rubbing the ridge of its muzzle. The green eyes blinked, and four of the treecat's six limbs reached out to grip her wrist in feather-gentle hand-paws. She chuckled again, pulling back to initiate a playful tussle, and the treecat uncoiled to its full sixty-five centimeters (discounting its tail) and buried its true-feet in her midriff with the deep, buzzing hum of its purr. The hand-paws tightened their grip, but the murderous claws—a full centimeter of curved, knife-sharp ivory—were sheathed. Honor had once seen similar claws used to rip apart the face of a human foolish enough to threaten a treecat's companion, but she felt no concern. Except in self-defense (or Honor's defense) Nimitz would no more hurt a human being than turn vegetarian, and treecats never made mistakes in that respect.
She extricated herself from Nimitz's grasp and lifted the long, sinuous creature to her shoulder, a move he greeted with even more enthusiastic purrs. Nimitz was an old hand at space travel and understood shoulders were out of bounds aboard small craft under power, but he also knew treecats belonged on their companions' shoulders. That was where they'd ridden since the first 'cat adopted its first human five Terran centuries before, and Nimitz was a traditionalist.
A flat, furry jaw pressed against the top of her head as Nimitz sank his four lower sets of claws into the specially padded shoulder of her uniform tunic. Despite his long, narrow body, he was a hefty weight—almost nine kilos—even under the shuttle's single gravity, but Honor was used to it, and Nimitz had learned to move his center of balance in from the point of her shoulder. Now he clung effortlessly to his perch while she collected her briefcase from the empty seat beside her. Honor was the half-filled shuttle's senior passenger, which had given her the seat just inside the hatch. It was a practical as well as a courteous tradition, since the senior officer was always last to board and first to exit.
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 01] - On Basilisk Station
The series is military science-fiction, pretty 'hard' too, which is uncommon in the 'space opera' dominated genera. Honor is a starship captain, so Nimitz is often in the background, but not really a vital part of the story. Still, he serves the first element that I consider makes a great animal companion: the companion expands on the character it is attached to. Honor is, like most characters, defined by her position. She has to deal with all the 'starship captain' stuff. But having Nimitz is a window into another part of her personality and nature. Her outside demeanor can be cold, demanding, even frighting in her capacity for violence. But Nimitz shows the deep love and dedication that creates that surface appearance.
This is something that I think is under-used in most RPGs. An animal companion tends to be defined in terms of what it can do - but not I think in terms of how that bond reflects on the character. Of course, this is a tricky area given that it's just easier to define something by it's abilities mechanically than by it's more nebulous role-playing aspects.
While the first book has Nimitz in the background, in the second book he starts to take on some characteristics that make him look more like the stereotypical RPG animal companion...
Honor released the hanging rings and whipped through a flashing, somersault dismount. She was far from a professional-quality gymnast, but she landed almost perfectly and bowed with extravagant grace to her audience—who regarded her with a tolerant eye from his comfortable perch on the parallel bars. She inhaled deeply, using her hands to strip sweat from her dripping, two-centimeter hair, then scrubbed her face vigorously with her towel before she draped it around her neck and gave him a severe look.
"A little workout wouldn't hurt you, either," she panted.
Nimitz responded with an airy flirt of his fluffy, prehensile tail, then sighed in relief as she padded across to the wall-mounted grav controls. She reset the gym to the regulation one-gee maintained aboard all RMN ships, and the 'cat swarmed down from the bars. He'd never been able to understand why she insisted on cranking the gym's gravity clear up to the 1.35-gees she'd been born to. It wasn't that Nimitz was lazy, but in his uncomplicated view exertion was something to be endured, not chased after. He regarded the lower standard shipboard gravity as the greatest invention since celery, and if she had to exercise, she might as well do something he enjoyed, as well.
He scampered into the dressing room, and Honor heard her locker door rattle. Then he reappeared with a happy "Bleek!" and her hand shot up just in time to snatch a hurtling plastic disk out of the air in front of her face.
"Why, you little creep!" she laughed, and he chittered in delight, dancing from side to side on his mid and rearmost limbs while he spread his true-hands wide.
She laughed again and tossed the ancient frisbee back. There was too little space for the kinds of intricate flight paths she could manage on a planet, but Nimitz buzzed with gusto. He'd been a frisbee freak ever since the day he'd seen a much younger Honor's father playing the same game with his golden retriever, and, unlike a dog, he had hands.
.....[again Nimitz seems like a backround element, until later in the book -me]...
Fox frowned as the new arrivals approached him, then relaxed as one of them extended a dispatch case. He reached out to take it . . . and Nimitz suddenly catapulted from his stool with a snarl like tearing canvas.
Honor's head whipped around as the treecat landed on the back of the Security man closest to her. The guard howled as the treecat's true-feet sank centimeter-long claws bone-deep into his shoulders, and his howl became a shriek of raw, terrified agony as Nimitz's uppermost limbs reached around his head and scimitar-clawed fingers buried themselves to the knuckles in his eyes.
...The dead man crumpled like a felled tree, but the 'cat was already somersaulting away from him. His rippling snarl rose even higher as he slammed into a second newcomer, all six sets of claws ripping and tearing, and Fox and his men stared at him in horror. They'd been surprised by the length of his sixty-centimeter body when he uncoiled from Honor's shoulder, but he was narrow and supple as a ferret, and they hadn't realized he massed over nine kilos of bone and hard muscle. It wasn't really their fault—Honor had grown so accustomed to his weight over the years that it scarcely even inconvenienced her, and they hadn't made sufficient allowance for how easily her own Sphinx-bred muscles let her carry him.
Yet whatever their reasoning, they'd dismissed him as a simple pet, without guessing how powerful and well-armed he actually was. Nor had they even suspected his intelligence, and the totally unexpected carnage stunned them. But they were trained bodyguards, responsible for their head of state's safety, and their hands jerked to their weapons as the beast ran amok.
...Honor saw it all only peripherally. She'd always known Nimitz could feel her emotions, but she'd never knowingly felt his.
This time she did—and as she also felt the emotions of the fresh "Security detachment" through him, she exploded out of her chair. The heel of her hand slammed into the face of the newcomer closest to the Protector, and cartilage crunched horribly as she drove his nose up into his brain—just as his companion dropped the dispatch case, raised his other hand, and fired at point-blank range into Captain Fox's chest.
...Gunfire thundered across the dining room, bullets crisscrossing with the solid-sound fists of disrupter bolts. Bodies went down on both sides, and aside from the disrupters, there was no way Honor could tell who was friend and who was foe.
But Nimitz was unhampered by any confusion. The high-pitched snarl of his battle cry wailed in her ears as he hurled himself into the face of another assassin like a furry, six-limbed buzz saw. His victim went down shrieking, and the man beside him swung his weapon towards the treecat, but Honor flew across the carpet towards him. Her right leg snapped straight, her boot crunched into his shoulder, breaking it instantly, and a hammer blow crushed his larynx as she came down on top of him.
All the Mayhews' guards were down now, but so were many of the assassins, and Honor and Nimitz were in among the others. She knew there were too many of them, yet she and Nimitz were all that was left, and they had to keep them bottled up in the entry alcove, away from the Protector and his family, as long as they could.
The killers had known she'd be here, but she was "only" a woman. They were totally unprepared for her size and strength—and training—or the mad whirl of violence that wasn't a bit like it was on HD. Real martial arts aren't like that. The first accurate strike to get through unblocked almost always ends in either death or disablement, and when Honor Harrington hit a man, that man went down.
...[later she's watching a recording of what happened -me]... It seemed impossible that she'd survived, and as she watched Nimitz claw down a man who'd been about to shoot her in the back she knew she wouldn't have without her diminutive ally. She reached out to him, still staring at the screen, and he purred reassuringly as he pressed his head against her palm.
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 02] - The Honor Of The Queen
I'd say the stereotypical animal companion is a combat assistant, and here we see Nimitz can fill that role quite well. He may be cute, and for the two books to this point everyone's treated him as a pet (only honor knows he's more intelligent and capable than that), but he shares his owner's capacity for decisive violence.
This is another element of the great animal companion: character and companion are alike at heart. The choice of companion should say something about the character, should reflect on the nature of the character. While a fully-developed companion will have it's own unique personality, you should also see where character and companion are made for each other...
Leaves rustled, and she turned her head as a fast-moving blur of cream-and-gray fur snaked out of the pseudo-laurel behind her. The six-limbed treecat belonged to the crown oak and picket wood of lower elevations, but he was at home here in the Copper Walls, as well. Certainly he'd spent enough time wandering their slopes with her as a child to become so.
He scampered across the bare rock, and she braced herself as he leapt into her lap. He landed with a solid thump, his nine-plus standard kilos working out at almost twelve and a half here, and she oofed in reproach.
He seemed unimpressed and rose on his haunches, bracing his mid-limbs' hand-paws on her shoulders to gaze into her face with bright, grass-green eyes. Near-human intelligence examined her from those very unhuman eyes, and then he touched her left cheek with a long-fingered true-hand and gave a soft sigh of satisfaction when the skin twitched at the contact.
"No, it hasn't stopped working again," she told him, running her own fingers over his fluffy fur. He sighed again, this time in unabashed pleasure, and oozed down with a buzzing purr. He was a limp, heavy warmth across her thighs, and his own contentment flowed into her. She'd always known he could sense her emotions, and she'd wondered, sometimes, if she could truly sense his or only thought she could. A year ago he'd finally proven she could, and now she savored his content like her own as her fingers stroked his spine.
Stillness gathered about her, perfected rather than marred by the crisp, sharp breeze, and she let it fill her as she sat on the rock shelf as she had in childhood, mistress of all she surveyed, and wondered who she truly was.
...Nimitz raised his head and kneaded the tips of his claws through her trousers to register his discontent with the direction of her thoughts. She stroked his ears in apology, but she didn't stop thinking them; they were the reason she'd spent the last four hours hiking up here to the refuge of her childhood. Nimitz studied her for a moment, then sighed in resignation and laid his chin back on his true-hands and left her to them.
...And deep inside, where no one else could see, there were other scars.
The dreams were less frequent now, but they remained cold and bitter. Too many people had died under her orders . . . or because she hadn't been there to keep them alive. And with those dreams came self-doubt. Could she face the challenge of command once more? And even if she could, should the Fleet trust her with others' lives?
Nimitz roused again and rose on his haunches once more, bracing his true-hands against her shoulders. He stared into her chocolate-brown eyes—one natural, the other born of advanced composites and molecular circuitry, and she felt his support and love flow into her.
...She'd been planetbound too long. She no longer belonged here on this beloved mountain, looking down on the place of her birth through its chilled crystal air. For the first time in far too long she felt the call of the stars not as a challenge she feared she could no longer meet but with the old need to be about it, and she sensed the change in Nimitz's emotions as he shared her feelings.
"All right, Stinker—you can stop worrying now," she told him, and his purr turned brisker and louder. His prehensile tail twitched as he touched her nose with his, and she laughed as she hugged him close once more.
It wasn't over. She knew that. But at least she knew where she had to go, what she had to do, to lay the nightmares to rest at last.
"Yeah," she told the treecat. "I guess it is about time I stopped feeling sorry for myself, isn't it?" Nimitz twitched his tail more strongly in agreement. "And it's time I got back on a command deck, too," she added. "Assuming, of course, that The Powers That Be want me back." This time there was no fresh flash of pain at the qualifier, and she smiled in gratitude...
Here's a part of 'meant for each other' that I think many animal companions lack: the relationship needs to be a two-way street. Even if an animal companion is not as intelligent as Nimitz, the love and care the companion has for it's character should be evident. That's a key part of what makes that relationship special. Weather it's a comment from the GM, a fellow player controlling the companion (how cool would that be, to play the animal companion?), or something from the player - somehow you need those little moments that show how deeply the companion cares for the character; just as much as the character needs to show care for the companion. That brings the companion to life, and makes it more that an extra attack per round.
..."Wait a moment, Exec. I'd appreciate it if you could join me in my quarters. We've got a lot to discuss."
"Of course, Milady," Henke murmured, and looked across the bridge. "Ms. Oselli, you have the watch."
"Aye, aye, Ma'am. I have the watch," Oselli responded, and Henke followed Honor into the intraship car. The doors slid shut behind them, and the commander's formality vanished in a face-splitting grin.
"Damn, but it's good to see you again, Honor!" She flung an arm around her superior and squeezed tightly, then reached up to Nimitz. The treecat buzzed a happy purr and extended a true-hand in a handshake all their own, and she laughed. "Good to see you, too, Stinker. Still extorting celery out of your hapless companions?"
Nimitz bleeked smugly and flirted his fluffy tail, and Honor smiled back at her exec...
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 03] - The Short Victorious War
Here's another great element of Nimitz, his interactions with other characters and they with him, so he feels like a "part of the party" and not just a background afterthought. If you have a party member who has a companion- how do you feel about it and how does it feel about you? Having a moment when you can interact with a party-member's companion says a lot about how you interact with that party-member.
Queen Elizabeth rose as the two officers approached her, and Honor went to one knee. As a commoner, she would have been expected only to bow; a deeper and more formal acknowledgment of her liege lady was required from a peer, but the Queen chuckled.
"Get up, Dame Honor." Even her voice sounded like Mike's, Honor thought, with that same husky timbre. She looked up, flustered and a bit uncertain, and the Queen chuckled. "This is a private audience, Captain. We can save the formalities for another time."
"Uh, yes, Your Majesty." Honor flushed as her voice stumbled, but she managed to rise with something like her normal grace, and the Queen nodded.
"Better," she approved. She held out her hand, and Honor felt every centimeter of her height— and all of them off balance—as she automatically took it. Elizabeth's grip was firm, and the cream and gray 'cat on her shoulder cocked its head at Nimitz. The Queen's companion was smaller and slimmer than Nimitz. Fewer age bars ringed its tail, but its eyes were just as bright and green, and Honor felt the very fringe of a deep and subtle exchange between it and Nimitz. Then the 'cats nodded to one another, and Nimitz gave a soft "bleek" and relaxed on her own shoulder.
She looked at the Queen, and Elizabeth smiled wryly.
"I was going to introduce Ariel, but it seems he's already introduced himself."...
And for the GM, how do NPCs react to the companion? And what about other NPC animal companions? But the interaction isn't just from others to the animal companion, it can also be from the character to others through the companion...
Honor looked better, Henke told herself as she stepped into her friend's cabin, and it was true . . . as far as it went. Her face had lost that shattered, broken look, yet it remained a mask. Henke's heart ached every time she thought of what hid behind it, and she only had to look at Nimitz to guess what that hidden thing was. The 'cat was no longer gaunt and hunched, but the quick, eager mischief had gone out of him. His ears never rose from their half-flattened position, and he seemed to radiate a strange, dangerous aura, like an echo of the hunger Henke knew filled Honor. It was cold, as she was cold, and alien to everything Henke had ever sensed from him in the past. Still worse, perhaps, was the way he watched Honor. He sat quiet and still on her shoulder whenever she left the cabin; within her quarters, he refused to let her out of his sight, and his grass-green eyes were quenched and dark.
...Honor stood silently, watching her best friend from within her icy walls. She felt Mike's fear for her through her link with Nimitz, and a tiny piece of her heart longed to comfort that fear. Yet it was no more than reflex, too small and lost to be more, and she'd forgotten how to offer comfort, anyway.
Perhaps she would remember, someday, but it hardly mattered. All that mattered now was Denver Summervale.
"I suppose I'd better be going," she said after a moment. She held out her hand, and Mike took it. Nimitz let Honor feel the tears burning behind her friend's eyes, and that lost fragment of the woman Paul Tankersley had loved longed to feel her own eyes burn. But she couldn't, and so she squeezed Mike's hand, patted her gently on the shoulder, and left without ever looking back.
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 04] - Field Of Dishonor
Here Nimitz shows more of what's going on internally with honor; not something so needed in an RPG since we don't expose so much of each character's inner state (like in a novel) - but having an animal companion does give the player a way to share inner states via the companion's description and actions; which adds a tool to the method actor's toolbox :)
She'd wondered—sometimes, when she let herself—what would have become of her without Nimitz. No one else knew how she'd longed for extinction, how much part of her had hungered simply to quit. To end. She'd once intended, coldly and logically, to do just that as soon as she'd destroyed the men who'd killed Paul. She'd sacrificed her naval career to bring them down, and a corner of her mind suspected she'd actually wanted to sacrifice it—that she'd planned to use the loss of the vocation she loved so much as one more reason to end her dreary existence. It had seemed only reasonable then; now the memory was one more coal of contempt for her own weakness, her willingness to surrender to her own pain when she'd always refused to surrender to anyone else.
A soft, warm weight flowed into her lap. Delicate true-hands rested on her shoulders, a cold nose nuzzled her right cheek, a feather-light mental kiss brushed the wounded surfaces of her soul, and she folded her arms about the treecat. She hugged him to her, clinging to him with heart and mind as well as arms, and the soft, deep buzz of his purr leached into her bones. He offered his love and strength without stint, fighting her quicksand sorrow with the promise that whatever happened, she would never truly be alone, and there were no doubts in Nimitz. He rejected her cruel moments of self-judgment, and he knew her better than any other living creature. Perhaps his love for her made him less than impartial, but he also knew how deeply she'd been hurt and chided her for judging herself so much more harshly than she would have judged someone else, and she drew a deep breath and reopened her eyes as she once more made herself accept his support and put the pain aside.
She looked up and smiled wanly at the worry in MacGuiness' and LaFollet's eyes. Their concern for her flowed through Nimitz's link, and they deserved better than someone who floundered in the depths of her own grief and loss. She made her smile turn genuine and felt their relief.
Here's another element of the great animal companion: the bond with the companion allows the character to grow and develop. Most RPG companions have few effects on the character (the companion is usually a separate entity), but wouldn't it be neat if the GM described how you made that Will save because of your companion's bond? Or even better, like in these books, if you developed an entirely new ability from your bond? Honor gains the ability to read people's emotions through Nimitz - worth at least 'Advantage' or some bonus on skill checks to deal with people. This makes him even more valuable to the 'character' of Honor as something more than just an extra attack per round. That ability also allows her character to develop (though you'll have to read the books to appreciate how it changes her character).
A companion isn't just for the player to develop either...
Now she located a bench by touch and sank down onto it. LaFollet moved to stand beside her, but she hardly noticed as she sat, eyes still closed, and tracked Nimitz through the undergrowth. Treecats were deadly hunters, the top of Sphinx's arboreal food chain, and she felt his happy sparkle of predatory pleasure. He had no need to catch his own food, yet he liked to keep his skills sharp, and she shared his zest as he slunk silently through the shadows.
The mental image of a Sphinxian chipmunk (which looked nothing at all like the Old Earth animal of the same name) came to her suddenly. The 'cat projected it with astonishing clarity, obviously by intent, and she watched as if through his eyes as the chipmunk sat near its hole, gnawing at a near-pine pod's heavy husk. A gentle, artificially induced breeze stirred the foliage, but the chipmunk was upwind, and Nimitz slithered noiselessly closer. He crept right up to it and hovered, sixty centimeters of needle-fanged predator perched at the small, oblivious animal's shoulder, and Honor felt his uncomplicated delight at his own success. Then he stretched out a wiry forelimb, extended one true-hand's long, delicate finger, and jabbed the chipmunk with a lancet claw. The near-pine pod went flying as the little beast leapt straight up into the air. It whirled in astonishment, then squeaked, paralyzed by terror as it found itself face-to-face with its most terrible natural enemy. It quivered, trembling in every muscle, and then Nimitz bleeked cheerfully and batted it nose-over-tail with the same true-hand. The blow was far gentler than it seemed, but the chipmunk wailed as shock broke the spell of terror. It rolled madly to its feet, and all six limbs blurred as it darted for its hole. It vanished down its burrow with another wailing squeak, and Nimitz sat up on his haunches with a chitter of amused satisfaction.
He padded over to the hole and sniffed at it, but he had no more intention of digging his quivering victim out than he'd ever had of killing it. The object—this time—had been to make sure he still could, not to deplete the garden's livestock, and he flirted his prehensile tail as he sauntered back to rejoin his person.
"You're a pretty terrible person, aren't you, Stinker?" Honor greeted him as he emerged.
"Bleek!" he replied cheerfully, and hopped up into her lap. LaFollet snorted, but the 'cat ignored the armsman's amusement as unworthy of notice. He examined his claws and flicked away a stray clot of earth, then sat up and groomed his whiskers at Honor with insufferable smugness
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 05] - Flag In Exile
The GM can also use the companion to add a bit of comic relief to the story :)
"Got a minute, Ma'am?"
Honor looked up from her briefing room terminal. Rafe Cardones and Lieutenant Commander Tschu stood in the open hatch. Cardones had a memo board under one arm, and the chief engineer's treecat rode his shoulder, ears pricked and whiskers quivering. As Tschu's weary face suggested, he'd spent virtually all his waking time buried in Engineering, which meant his 'cat had spent little time on the bridge. Now she looked around with bright, green-eyed interest, and Nimitz perked up instantly on the back of his person's chair. Honor waved for the two men to enter, and hid a smile as she felt Nimitz's greeting to Samantha. 'Cats were totally disinterested in human sexuality, and she was relieved to find that even with her unusual link to Nimitz, the 'cat's amatory adventures had no effect on her hormones. That didn't mean she wasn't aware of what both he and Samantha were feeling, however, and she wondered if Nimitz had experienced the same thing from her and Paul Tankersley.
She pointed to chairs, then closed the hatch as Cardones and Tschu sank into them. Cardones laid his board on the table top, and she smiled faintly as he leaned back with a sigh.
"Why do I have the feeling you two have something on your minds?" she asked, and Cardones twitched a grin.
"Probably because we do," he replied. "I—"
He broke off as Nimitz flowed down from Honor's chair and padded silently across the table. Samantha leapt off Tschu's shoulder to join him, and the two sat neatly, facing each other. They gazed intently into one another's eyes, noses almost touching, only the tips of their fluffy tails flicking, and Cardones gazed at them for a moment, then shook his head.
"Nice to see things are going well for someone," he said, then turned and cocked an eyebrow at Tschu. "Does she have a 'cat in every port?"
"No." The engineer's deep voice was amused, despite his obvious weariness. "It's not quite that bad. But she does have a way with the men, doesn't she?"
Both 'cats ignored the humans, concentrating on one another, and Honor heard the deep, almost subsonic sound of their purring. The soft rumbles reached out to one another and merged, sweeping together in an oddly intricate harmony, and Tschu shot a startled, almost apologetic glance at Honor, who shrugged helplessly. In their native environment, young treecats often established temporary relationships, but mature 'cats were monogamous and mated for life. Those who adopted humans, however, seldom took permanent mates, and she'd often wondered if that was because their adoption bonds took them away from others of their kind or if they adopted humans in the first place because they were somehow different from their fellows. But she'd witnessed 'cat courtships, and this one looked moderately serious, which could have . . . interesting consequences. Unmated 'cats were relatively infertile, but mated pairs were a very different matter.
There was no point discussing it, though. What happened between Samantha and Nimitz was up to them—a point the majority of humans, who persisted in thinking of 'cats as pets, not companions, failed to grasp. That misconception probably stemmed from the fact that humans were almost always the alpha partners in their bondings, but that was because treecats who'd adopted had chosen to live in humanity's society and recognized the need to abide by human rules, some of which baffled them. They relied on their people for guidance, and not just socially; they knew they didn't fully understand humanity's technological marvels, and that those marvels could kill. But anyone who'd ever been adopted knew a treecat was a person, with the same rights and occasional need for space as any human. It was always the 'cat who initiated a bond, and there had been cases in which that bond was repudiated when a human tried to turn it into some sort of ownership. It happened rarely—'cat's seldom made the mistake of choosing someone who could do that—but it did happen...
...Honor felt Tschu's death. Felt it crash in on Samantha like a thunderbolt, felt it blast through her to her mate and from Nimitz into Honor herself. Rafael Cardones' head whipped around as his suit com carried him her animal sound of pain even over the wail of alarms, and he went white as he saw the loss and agony, the terrible, wrenching desolation, in her eyes. He didn't know what had happened; he only knew the woman upon whom every individual in Wayfarer relied had just taken a blow as shattering as her ship's, and he started to his feet in terror for her.
But Honor clenched her teeth and fought the agony down. She had to. Every strand of her being cried out to yield to it, to keen her grief as Samantha and Nimitz did, to reach out to her beloved friends in their moment of terrible loss. But she was a starship captain. She was a Queen's officer, and the bone- deep responsibility of thirty-two years in uniform and twenty years of command had her by the throat. She could not afford to be human, and so she was not, and her voice was inhumanly calm even as agony burned in her eyes.
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 06] - Honor Among Enemies
Another element that elevates Nimitz to best companion ever is that: he has his own character arc. By this point we've had over a thousand pages about Honor's trials and tribulations - which Nimitz has endured with her - but Nimitz also develops his own character and deals with his own troubles (which then lets some nice role-reversal where Honor has to be there for him). Through his own character arc, he becomes valuable, not just useful.
I wonder how many GMs or Players have thought of using a companion that way? It sure seems like few games have.
Honor Harrington leaned back in the pinnace seat and tried not to smile as Major Andrew LaFollet, second-in-command of the Harrington Steadholder's Guard and her personal armsman, crawled as far under the seat in front of her as he could get.
"Come on, now, Jason," he wheedled. His soft Grayson accent was well suited to coaxing, and he was using that advantage to the full. "We're due to hit atmosphere any minute now. You have to come on out . . . please?"
Only a cheery chirp answered, and Honor heard him sigh. He tried to crawl still further under the seat, then backed out and sat up grumpily on the decksole. His auburn hair was tousled and his gray eyes dared any of his subordinates to say one word—just one—about his current, less than dignified preoccupation, but no one accepted the challenge. Indeed, Honor's other armsmen were busy looking at anything except him, and their expressions were admirably, one might almost say determinedly, grave.
LaFollet watched them not watching him for a long moment, then sighed again. His own mouth twitched in a small grin, and he turned his eyes to the slender brown-and-white dappled treecat curled up in the seat beside Honor's.
"I don't want to sound like I'm criticizing," he told the 'cat, "but maybe you should fish him out."
"He has a point, Sam," Honor observed, feeling her right cheek dimple as her smile grew broader. "He is your son. And unlike Andrew, you'd fit under the seat."
Samantha only looked at her, green eyes dancing, and her lazy yawn bared needle-sharp white fangs. Two more prick-eared heads, each far smaller than her own, rose drowsily from the warm nest she'd formed by curling about their owners, and she reached out with one gentle true-hand to push them back down. Then she turned her gaze to the larger, cream-and-gray 'cat lying across Honor's lap, and Honor felt the faint echoes of a deep, intricate mental flow as Nimitz raised his head to gaze back. None of the humans present could tell exactly what Samantha was saying to her mate—indeed, no one but Honor even "heard" it at all—but everyone grasped her meaning when Nimitz heaved a sigh of his own, flicked his ears in agreement, and slithered to the deck.
He flowed along the aisle using all three sets of limbs, then settled down beside the seat LaFollet had tried to climb under. He crossed his true-hands on the decksole and rested his chin on them, gazing under the seat, and once again Honor felt the echoes of someone else's thoughts. She also felt Nimitz's mingled amusement, pride, and exasperation as he addressed himself firmly to the most adventuresome of his offspring.
As far as she knew, no other human had ever been able to sense the emotions of a treecat, and certainly no one had ever been able to sense the emotions of other humans through their adopted partner, but for all its unheard of strength, her link to Nimitz remained too unclear for her to follow his actual thoughts. That didn't keep her from realizing that he was taking the time to form those thoughts very clearly and distinctly, and she suspected he was also keeping them as simple as he could . . . which only made sense when he was directing them to a kitten who was barely four months old.
Nothing happened for several seconds, and then she sensed the equivalent of a mental sigh of resignation and a tiny duplicate of Nimitz poked its head out from under the seat. James MacGuiness, Honor's personal steward, had given Jason his name in honor of the kitten's intrepid voyages of exploration, and Honor knew she should have expected the marvelous new puzzle of the pinnace to suck him into wandering. She wished he weren't quite so curious, but that was a trait all 'cats—and especially young ones—shared. Indeed, there was something almost appalling about the compulsion
to explore which afflicted all of Samantha and Nimitz's kittens. Jason was simply the worst of them, with a taste for solo boldness worthy of his name, and Honor sometimes wondered how any treecat survived to maturity if they were all this curious in the wild. But this crop wasn't in the wild, and at least every human in the pinnace knew to keep an eye out for the kids.
And so did the treecats. Even as she watched Nimitz gather Jason in with one agile, long-fingered true-hand, another brown-and-white female came hopping from seat back to seat back with yet a fourth kitten. Honor recognized the new kitten as Achilles, Jason's barely less audacious brother, and smiled again as she watched his nursemaid haul him—wiggling and squirming in protest the entire way—back to his mother.
...But despite all the Navy efforts to accommodate her needs, Samantha had proven persistently unconventional. Perhaps that was to have been expected. Virtually all of the very few female 'cats who'd ever adopted had bonded to Forestry Commission rangers and never left Sphinx. Honor had run a check. No law or regulation required the registry of treecat adoptions, so the records she'd been able to consult had to have been incomplete, but as nearly as she could determine, in well over five T-centuries, only eight female 'cats had ever adopted anyone except a ranger . . . and that number included Samantha. That probably should have warned her that Samantha was unlikely to feel bound by whatever parenting conventions were "normal" for 'cats, but she'd still been surprised when Nimitz made it clear that Samantha wanted and intended to return to Grayson—with her kittens—when he and Honor did.
That had seemed like a very bad idea to Honor. She and Nimitz were scheduled to resume shipboard duty soon after her return, which would leave Samantha all alone with four rambunctious young on an alien planet whose environment included invisible and insidious risk factors which could kill even an adult 'cat, much less a kitten. Worse, she and her children would be the only treecats on the planet, leaving her as a first-time mother with no older and more experienced mothers of her own kind to whom to turn for advice or assistance.
Honor had tried to make those points to Nimitz and Samantha, and she'd been confident Nimitz grasped them. But she hadn't been certain Samantha understood even with Nimitz to explain them to her. Telepathy was all very well, but Samantha had seemed so blithely unconcerned by Honor's arguments that she'd doubted the message was getting through.
Until the week before their departure for Grayson, that was. It had never occurred to Honor to wonder about just how much seniority Samantha had among her own kind. She was quite a bit younger than Nimitz, and Honor had simply assumed that the wishes of a 'cat of her relative youth couldn't carry a great deal of weight with a clan to which she belonged only "by marriage." But she'd been forced to reconsider that assumption rather radically when no less than eight members of Nimitz's clan—three of them female, all older than Samantha—arrived on her doorstep. She'd been staying in her parent's rambling, five-hundred-year-old house on the flanks of the Copperwall Mountains when they turned up, and she'd hardly been able to believe her own eyes.
...She was helping Samantha and Nimitz establish the first extra-Sphinxian colony of treecats. For whatever reason, her two friends and—obviously—the rest of Nimitz's clan had decided it was time to plant their kind on another planet, and that represented a quantum leap in their relationship with humanity. It might also prove that they were more intelligent than even Honor had suspected. She knew Nimitz, at least, understood that the Star Kingdom was at war, and he'd had entirely too close a view, on occasion, of what humanity's weapons were capable of in ship-to-ship combat. It
was entirely possible that other 'cats had seen what could happen when those weapons were used against planetary targets and shared the information with him, or perhaps he'd simply extrapolated the possible consequences from what he'd seen himself. Whatever anyone else might think, Honor had always known he was brighter than most two-footed people, and she'd asked him pointblank if an awareness of the military threat was behind this extraordinary departure in the behavior of his species. As always, there'd been a frustrating fuzziness to some of the nuances of his reply, but the
gist of it had come through clearly enough.
Yes, he and Samantha did understand what nuclear or kinetic weaponry could mean for planetary targets, and they—or they and his clan, Honor wasn't entirely clear on that point—had decided it was time the 'cats stopped keeping all their eggs in one basket. She couldn't be certain, but she suspected that it wouldn't be long before other adopted humans were tapped to help move core colony groups from Sphinx to Manticore and Gryphon, the other two habitable worlds of the Manticore System, and that headed her towards other speculations. She'd become convinced over the years that 'cats in general were considerably smarter than they chose to admit, and she could see several advantages
which might accrue from concealing their full capabilities. No humans who'd ever been adopted could doubt the depth, strength, and reality of the bonds between them and "their" 'cats. Honor knew—didn't think; knew—that Nimitz loved her just as fiercely as she loved him. But at any given time, only a minute percentage of the 'cats' total population ever adopted, and she'd sometimes wondered if perhaps those who did filled the role of scouts or observers for the rest of their species.
-David Weber - [Honor Harrington 07] - In Enemy Hands
In fact, Weber uses Nimitz to develop and expand the 'game world.' Again, I can only summarize so many pages of the 12 or so novels that Nimitz is in (to some degree), but Weber actually uses the treecats, through Nimitz and Honor, to actually shape the future of his world. Which I imagine would be pretty damn cool for a player, to watch the mini-character they created grow into a part of the larger storyline.
Anyways, the Honor Harrington books are not only great in themselves (in my opinion, of course), but it's fascinating how Weber takes a simple concept like the animal companion and really grows and develops the concept; there are some things here that any player or GM with a companion would due to think on.
So who or what is your favorite literary animal companion? And what games do you think do them well (or terrible)? Feel free to comment below, I'd like to expand my thinking on this subject (given that I'm about to start writing my own game :).
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