What A Good Imp

Amaryllis sat on the floor, typing away at her laptop. She was working on a few emails that needed to be sent to various authors about all their projects. Some had months before the deadline, but she did check up on them because they usually turned in a manuscript long before the deadline. Most were a month or mere weeks before their deadlines. Others… Well, they were well past their deadlines. She knew for one, the email wouldn’t work, but she knew better than to visit that house unannounced.

As she hit send on one, she felt a soft, cloudlike thing climb into her lap. She looked down to see Aurora, her Stellaram. She was lucky that Aurora was well trained. Took her months to get Maria to stop climbing onto the keyboard when she was working.

She reached into a jar she kept on the table. She had baked macadamia cookies earlier and she didn’t see any harm in sharing a little with her imps. It seemed Maria had heard the lid moving and now pressed against Amaryllis’ thigh. The bun broke the cookie into tiny parts. She gave each imp a small bit of the cookie before returning to typing.

She got a sentence typed before she saw movement in her peripheral. She turned her head and saw Maria doing some of the tricks that she had been trained for lately. The woman clicked her tongue and the uniqor trotted over, looking proud of herself. Amaryllis couldn’t deny that the imp did well. She took another piece of cookie and gave it to Maria.

Aurora noticed this and rolled off the bun to do a bouncing trick. Amaryllis sensed a theme and closed her laptop. Emails would have to wait. When the stellaram returned, she gave the imp a small bit of cookie as well.

Each imp kept doing other tricks to get more of the cookie. The bun found it adorable and kept giving up the sweet treat, which only encouraged the imps further. The cycle continued, until only one piece of the cookie was left. The imps both had the same amount of cookie bits.

“Well, there’s only one bite left. Who should get it?” Amaryllis asked her imps. The uniqor and stellaram looked at each other. They seemed to communicate telepathically for a moment. They then did something unexpected.

Amaryllis giggled as her imps started running around. Aurora got a ball, Maria pushed a piece of wood over. They lined the two up. Aurora seemed to keep the ball in place as Maria walked daintily across the wood. At the end, she leaped onto the ball. Aurora moved out of the way and Maria started walking the ball around the room.

She had never seen her imps do this before. After a moment, Aurora stopped at a wall and pointed her horn at a picture. Amaryllis raised her eyebrow at this, taking a moment before speaking. “You want me to eat the last piece… after all that work?” Her imps made small noises of approval before coming back to the bun. She loved her imps.