Tammer

Cryptologic Name: Oryctolagus voluns
Planar Origin: Mithyrea
Habitat: Temperate forests and prarieland
Diet: Herbivore; prefers wildflowers

Appearance/Morphology
The tammer is physiologically very similar to the common jackrabbit with a few distinctive additions: they have long tails with tufted ends, wings on their backs, and marsupial-like pouches on their bellies. Their colors and patterns vary but most commonly they are white, tan, black and/or brown. These creatures are quite agile both on land and in the air.

Magical Abilities
Tammers are one member of a trio of magical lagomorphs (rabbits) including the woltperinger and the jackalope. These three creatures are interrelated, but each species has distinct magical abilities. Tammers have the unique ability to locate and teleport to any individual on Earth by using a special item associated with that person, which cryptozoologists refer to as a ‘token.’ By placing this token in their pouch, they can travel instantly to their targets.

The token has rather specific qualifications to be useful for the tammer. The item must be a gift given by the intended target to another. The connection is most potent when the token is something given by the target to the sender, however it seems to work even if the individual sending the tammer was not the recipient of said gift.

It should be noted that tammers can also locate and travel to individuals with whom they’ve bonded without needing to use a token. As such they work well as delivery creatures for large families because each member of the family can bond with the tammer and thus the creature can travel freely between everyone without needing tokens.

A tammer’s teleportation ability is also unique in that it functions in a fundamentally different way than apparition; as such tammers can teleport to locations where most magical travel isn’t possible. There are barriers that can keep tammers out, but they are more sophisticated than most commonly used protection spells. This posed a particular problem in early wizarding prisons as random objects, weapons, and the like would occasionally appear in inmates’ cells without explanation.

Behavior
Highly intelligent compared to their nonmagical, and even their related magical rabbit species, the tammer can understand human speech when trained. Though their vocal chords do not allow them to speak. Many mages who have tammers as companions and/or delivery animals will train them to use bodily signals, such as the raising and lowering of ears, flexing of wings, etc. to communicate.

Field Notes

• Before the implementation of the Owl Post system, tammers were much more widely used as delivery animals. They were very efficient at making deliveries, assuming you had something that would function as a token. Because the tammer teleports, rather than flying to their destination, they can transport a variety of objects that would be too large for owls. In addition, they are impossible to track by ordinary means as owls and other delivery birds are. The main drawback and reason that tammers are not as widely used today is because of the token qualifications required for their magic to work. For owls to make deliveries, all that is required is an address

• The token is a unique concept in the magical world as the tammer seems to be the only creature we are aware of that uses an object with these qualifications as part of its magical abilities. In addition, the word ‘gift’ may be a bit misleading, as a tammer can generally use anything that was given by the recipient to another living being, even if it is not what we would conventionally consider a gift. Whatever magical properties exist in the giving of a token from one individual to another such that it triggers the tammer’s natural abilities is a subject that I truly believe deserves further research. My hypothesis is that there is some sort of empathic energy that is imbued in objects given as gifts, and that this energy is unique from person to person. This might also explain their ability to locate those with whom they have a connection even without the use of a token.

  We see evidence of this sort of empathic connection elsewhere in the magical world as in some rare cases witches and wizards possess the ability to sense and influence the emotions of others (I myself posess such abilities). In addition, there is the amustelid, who has very strong empathic powers and seems to form connections with other living beings that allow it to maintain its empathic connection over great distances. I would very much like to test this theory but have yet to come up with a good idea as to the method.