tl;dr: A developer built Varkos, a low-latency AI dog companion for Skyrim that can execute complex multi-step commands (hide-and-seek, conditional triggers, looting), fight alongside the player, and evolve its personality over time. The system runs mostly locally on an M4 MacBook using a custom hybrid stack: optimized Qwen3-ASR for speech-to-text, PocketTTS/Qwen3-TTS for voice, and a bespoke "Action Latent Encoder" (embeddings + classifiers + rules) instead of a big LLM for action planning, hitting sub-500ms response times. The author plans to open-source parts of it and extend Varkos across multiple games via a "void mode."