my first imp

Dahlia hadn’t really told anyone, but today she was getting an impup. Despite not really mentioning it, she was rather excited about it all. The date circled on a calendar, the days leading up crossed out.

She’d spent time weighing up the pros and cons of a number of imps, wanting to make the correct choice on which species was best for her. After repeatedly seeing that impups were ‘particularly tame and easy to take on as a first time pet’ Dahlia had decided that they were the way to go. She read up about them, studied training techniques and she felt quite confident that this was going to go smoothly.

It didn’t.

Truly Dahlia had no idea what just happened. She’d headed towards the impups, stood looking at what was available, when a chirop landed on her. “Hello.” she cooed at the imp, who attempted to snuggle closer to her. Sweet thing. “Where did you come from?”

A bun wearing an apron came charging after the imp, stamping his foot in annoyance. When he saw the critter snuggling up to Dahlia, he sighed. “Escaped his enclosure.” He explained. “He’s a mischievous little bugger, that one.” He didn’t mention that this was his third escape this week.

Dahlia just smiled, scratching the chirop’s head. “Are you mischievous?” She asked, voice filled with amusement.

“Tell you what,” the man’s voice ran out, causing Dahlia to look at him. “Since he seems to like you so much, I’ll give you 20% off.” She hadn’t been expecting that, but she heard herself say “done” faster than she could blink. Now she just needed to think of a name.

The problem with reading up on, preparing for and going out for an impup, then coming back with a chirop, is that you’re not as well prepared as you hoped. Dahlia watched her new imp happily zoom around her burrow. At first she was worried that he might knock things off the walls and / or shelves but he would turn at the last second with ease. It was quite impressive really, even if she did wince almost every time.

Sitting in her favourite chair, Dahlia flicked through the pages of a book until she found previously unread words. “What you should know before getting a chirop” Bit late on this section, but she carried on reading anyway.

Dahlia quickly learned she was going to need to get perches for him to land on, that he would need lots of room to fly and that he may like carrying messages. Testing this, she handed him some paper which he promptly started shredding with glee. Right. Okay, that was going to need some work.

After shredding the paper, the chirop nestled down on Dahlia and she absent mindedly stroked his head as she read about diet now and how letting them get fat would be bad for their wing joints especially.

It was while she was reading that an idea popped into her head! Looking at her new imp, a grin slowly crossed her face.

“Welcome home, Balor.”

Balor. He liked that.