“A name, huh? Let’s see… It’s a mimic, so why don’t we call it Mimi?”
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That’s the most predictable name you could’ve possibly proposed!
“Let’s give it a bit more thought, okay?! Like, at least five minutes’ worth or so!” I insisted.
Oh, but then again, Fighsly named herself that because she was a fighter slime, right? And I named Smarsly and Wizly based on basically the same logic that would justify calling a mimic Mimi. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad name, after all…?
No, no, we really should give it some more thought. There’s no harm in at least considering it, right? Plus, a walk like this is the perfect chance to think up a name! There’s always a chance Halkara will come up with something a little less glaringly obvious!
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We spent a few minutes just strolling along through the highlands, letting the mimic set our path by jumping ahead of us. In my last life, I’d lived in a part of the world where just walking outside for a couple minutes could end with you dripping with sweat, so I was very glad to be somewhere a little cooler this time. There was nothing worse than taking a bath, then ending up sweaty and gross again just because you decided to walk over to the nearby convenience store…
“How about this one, Madam Teacher?” said Halkara.
Oh? Sounds like she came up with another idea for a name!
“We could call it ‘Box’! What do you think?”
“I think we’d be better off sticking with ‘the mimic’ at that point!”
Something was very weird about how Halkara went about expressing her love for her pets. Maybe she viewed names from a really utilitarian perspective? You only had to look back a century or so in my old world to see people who put numbers in their kids’ names based on their order of birth, and that was considered totally normal.
At that point, Falfa tugged on my sleeve.
“Falfa thinks Mimi’s a really cute name, Mommy!”
“All right, that settles it! Let’s call it Mimi! That’s the only vote I need to hear, personally!”
If my daughter says it’s cute, then I have no reason to argue about it!
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“That’s good enough for me! From now on, our mimic’s name is Mimi!”
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Halkara was perfectly happy to see the name she’d proposed get adopted. There was just one little factor that still had me a bit hesitant, though: Mimi was clearly a girl’s name, and I had no clue what sex our mimic was.
Maybe it’d be better to call it…I don’t know, Milo or something? Actually, do mimics even have sexes?
I wasn’t going to get anywhere with that line of inquiry on my own, so I decided to ask Shalsha instead.
“According to Shalsha’s guidebook, ‘Nobody knows.’”
Okay, fair enough. If not even a monster guidebook can help, best to just accept the mystery.
“Okay! I think this is settled. Mimi it is!”
And so that night, our pet mimic gained a name.
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A week had passed since we gave our mimic its new name, Mimi. On that day, my family and I had decided to take Mimi out for a walk again, this time while it was still light out.
After the success of our first walk, we’d taken Mimi out again for two days straight. It hadn’t seemed very interested, though, and it had barely moved at all either time. It had been particularly lethargic on the second attempt—if a stranger had happened to catch sight of us, they probably wouldn’t have seen it as anything other than a treasure chest left mysteriously lying around the highlands. In the end, I’d had to carry Mimi home myself.
That’s why we decided to give Mimi a few days off between walks. It seemed like keeping them as an occasional thing would be to its preference—it wasn’t like a pet dog that would happily go out and about every single day.
I guess that makes sense. Of course a mimic would stay indoors most of the time. Walks are probably just a nice change of pace for it.
If you asked a group of people who liked to hike whether they’d spend three hundred days a year up in the mountains if they could, an awful lot of them would probably say no. That’s how it went for a bunch of hobbies, really—they were nice on occasion, but downright inconvenient if they became your primary occupation.
As expected, after having stayed inside for a few days, Mimi was excited to get outside and jump around the highlands. I was starting to think one walk a week or so would probably be just right.
“Yep, yep! There’s nothing like a mid-afternoon walk!” said Halkara, who sounded quite spirited as well. If I had to pick out a single problem that spoiled the image, it’d have to be the helmet. She sure was wearing it again today.
“Hey, don’t you think you can stop wearing that thing? It’s gotta be heavy, right?” I said.
“I would, but Mimi still tries to bite me every once in a while, so I think I should probably keep it on for now,” said Halkara. “I don’t want to over-rely on your healing magic, after all. I might as well defend myself as best I can on my own!”
Just then, before Halkara even finished her sentence, Mimi jumped up to bite her head from behind.
“See?”
“Okay, but do you have to sound happy about it?! You should be scolding it for biting you, if anything!”
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You named Mimi, for crying out loud, and that more or less makes you its parent! If you act happy about it biting you, it’s never going to stop!