One evening, I’d just gotten out of the bath and retired to the dining room for a nice cup of cold water.
“Oof—this almost feels like this is going to give me brain freeze, but that’s nice in its own right,” I said to myself.
Halkara was in the dining room as well, reading a book. It seemed she hadn’t been drinking tonight. The title of her book was The Secret to Keeping Your Company Afloat, and I figured it had to be some sort of business-centric self-help book.
Eventually, Halkara looked up from her book.
“Um, Madame Teacher?” she said. “I have a question for you.”
“Go ahead, as long as it’s not something management related,” I replied.
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“Don’t you think we should let the mimic in the vacant room go out on walks sometimes?”
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Now that sure wasn’t the question I was expecting… I haven’t considered that at all, actually.
“W-walks…? Is that something mimics do?” I wondered out loud.
Mimics were treasure chest–shaped monsters that attacked anyone unlucky enough to try and open them. The mimic Halkara was talking about, however, was a sort of special one who lived in our house.
A member of the demons’ order of Appraisal Knights named Sorya ran an antique shop called Ten Thousand Dragons, and I’d recently been roped into exploring one of their warehouses with a phantom thief named Canhein. That warehouse was full of mimics, and for some reason one of them had taken a liking to me. I’d decided there’d be no harm in letting it follow me, and in the end, it had accompanied me all the way home and taken up residence in one of our empty rooms.
Taking care of an animal was harder than people gave it credit for, and I knew it wasn’t something I could treat like a game. Mimics, however, lived on a diet of dust, which meant I didn’t have to bother feeding it. Its eating habits kept the empty room nice and clean, actually, which was killing two birds with one stone. Plus, although I knew introducing new, invasive animals to the highlands would be a bad idea, there weren’t any other mimics around for this one to breed with, so I didn’t see any danger of it throwing off the local ecosystem.
So that’s how I ended up with a mimic living in my house…but honestly, its presence hadn’t made much of any impact on our lives since then. This probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but the mimic had spent pretty much all its time since then sitting still in its room. I wasn’t neglecting it, to be clear—I stopped by to peek in on it, and even opened its box every once in a while to make sure it was doing fine. It’s just that I hadn’t really interacted with it much in any other way. To be honest, it wasn’t the most exciting pet to watch.
And now Halkara’s talking about walking it…?
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“Why in the world would we take it for a walk? Mimics are supposed to stay still most of the time, right? It’s always sitting in the same spot when I check up on it, anyway.”
I was pretty sure the mimic would be totally fine even if we left it on its own for a couple months straight, but seeing as I’d brought it home with me, I felt an ethical responsibility to keep a slightly closer eye on it than that. My daughters peeked at it on occasion as well. At this point, that empty room was more or less the designated mimic chamber.
“Maybe so, but even mimics move around every once in a while, don’t they?” said Halkara. “It opens up its box on its own when it eats dust, too! I thought it might appreciate getting some fresh air out in the highlands from time to time.”
“Do you really think a dust-eating monster has much interest in fresh air…?” If anything, I get the sense it would like being secluded somewhere nice and quiet.
“Maybe they do! Think about how eager they are to bite anyone who accidentally opens them up. Mimics might be surprisingly active monsters, when all’s said and done!”
Halkara really isn’t backing down on this, is she? I guess they are supposed to be dangerous from a normal person’s perspective, if you’re unlucky enough to open one, so they probably can move quite a bit when the moment calls for it.
“I guess that makes sense,” I admitted. “Come to think of it, you always pay really close attention to animals, don’t you, Halkara…? Do mimics count as animals? You know what I mean.”
Halkara was pretty blasé about taking care of herself, between all the poisonous mushrooms she ate and all the booze she guzzled, but she could actually be very attentive when it came to taking care of something or someone else. That trait was probably a big part of why she could do a good job as her company’s president. It was something I certainly couldn’t hope to imitate, that’s for sure.
“You’re really flattering me today, aren’t you, Madame Teacher? I’ve never thought of myself as an attentive person at all! I just thought since the mimic’s our pet, it would only make sense to take it out on a walk sometimes, that’s all,” Halkara said, tapping her closed book with her hand for emphasis. It seemed she was having a hard time taking my compliment.
“Well, I can’t imagine taking it for a walk could do that much harm. Why not give it a try?” I said. “If it doesn’t want to leave the house, it just won’t follow us outside.”
How the mimic felt about this prospect was, of course, the single most important factor. Taking it for a walk to make ourselves feel like good pet owners would be an awful idea if it didn’t actually want to go. Then again, I had mixed feelings about treating it as a pet in the first place, considering we’d mostly just let it sit in an empty room…
“Understood!” said Halkara. “Okay, then—I’ll go take a look in the mimic’s room!”
Halkara got up and trundled along down the hallway. The mimic’s room, by the way, had a sign hanging on it that read DANGER! DO NOT ENTER! I didn’t think the mimic would instantly jump anyone who stepped inside, but it still seemed best to be a little cautious about opening the door, just in case. A pound of prevention, and all.
Fortunately, my daughters were very good about listening to me and had refrained from opening the mimic up when Laika, Flatorte, or I weren’t around to watch over them. The mimic seemed to be used to me (or I at least assumed so, considering it had followed me home and all), but there was no predicting how it would react to my daughters, and I didn’t want to wait until after they’d been badly bitten to take action.
I also knew that even though the mimic seemed comfortable around me normally, it could very well attack me for no real reason someday. I’d heard too many stories about people being mauled out of the blue by animals they’d kept as pets for years to think it couldn’t happen to me.
I heard Halkara’s voice from down the hallway. It was nighttime, so I could make out her words very clearly.
“Ooh, you really are energetic today, aren’t you! Good mimic, good mimic!”
Sounds like it really does want to move around a little, then. They sit still most of the time, sure, but I guess the main body inside the box must enjoy getting some exercise from time to time.