Phantom Link and Familiars (in General)

So, I'm looking though a few fight summaries just now and I've noticed something odd. Phantom Link doesn't seem to work when familiars are the ones being attacked. I'll use a typical fight between Major Stars and Critical Fumble.

Round 4 goes as such:
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior crunched Wayne Rogers with Devastation Hammer [369276]
Kate Village absorbs damage [74320]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior draws strength from his weapon! [58991]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior pulverized Wayne Rogers with Devastation Hammer [356211]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior draws strength from his weapon! [19658]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior cries "GM rolls another 20!"

Basically his heavy tank pounds my FB mage twice, the first time Kate absorbs as much damage as her PL will allow, the second hit she does not. Wayne dies, Kate does not. Seems normal to me.

Round 5 goes as such:
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior pulverized Kate Village's familiar with Devastation Hammer [374619]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior draws strength from his weapon! [32924]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior crushed Kate Village's familiar with Devastation Hammer [350975]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior pulverized Kate Village's familiar with Devastation Hammer [387540]
Keken Lvl 11 Orc Warrior cries "GM rolls another 20!"

Here you notice Kate doesn't step in and try to protect her familiar with PL despite the fact that she's actually alive(Not that it would matter in this case). The familiar kicks the bucket here. Leaving only my enchanter, Kate, to get waffled in Round 6.

So basically, the question can be summarized as:
Is PL supposed to help familiars or am I misunderstanding something?

interesting maybe the familiars don't get counted as real minions

Well, how much HP does your PL minion have when PL stops working? If the PL minion can't absorb enough damage to keep the targeted minion alive, PL won't work and the targeted minion will be hit normally.

Ahhh, that may be it. I thought she had more HP than she actually does as I wasn't counting my own FB splash damage into the equation. She doesn't have enough HP to absorb another (74320) blow.

My bad, ignore me.

Ignore me even more. I just noticed she absorbs splash damage taken by my familiar.

My Wall abosorbs damage done to my IF

The oddities are caused by two things. The first one is very simple:

"PL will not absorb any damage if it is unable to absorb enough to keep the original target alive."

The second one is that a PL minion will only absorb an amount of damage up to its remaining hitpoints (I think*). So if it only has 10,000 hitpoints left, it'll only absorb a max of 10,000 dmg. But because of maybe the rounding on the 10% PL damage reduction, they are sometimes left with some tiny amount of hitpoints and survive an additional round.