I must have dozed off during the flight at some point, because I awoke to Amayralas shaking my shoulder.
"We're here, honey," she told me. Readjusting in my seat, I felt a pit in my stomach and realized we were going down. Straight down. The dragon had stopped using its wings to keep us in the air, and was now using them as a parachute. I held onto my seat and silently hoped that I didn't throw up now: not after such a smooth ride. There was a thump as the dragon's feet made contact with the ground, and all the passengers lurched forward.
"Dragon 0284 has landed, for the 1:48 direct flight from Ohio," a man, likely a gate agent, intoned. "Passengers may disembark at this time."
I stood and gathered up my shopping bag and backpack. A gate agent pushed a staircase on wheels to the end of each row to allow the riders to walk down. I met Felix in the exit queue, watching with curiosity as he slipped a gold coin into a jar labelled "tips".
"You tip your dragon?" I asked. Felix stared at me as if it was common etiquette I should have known.
"She just flew us halfway across the world. Of course I tipped her."
I didn't question it. It seemed like I'd just have to soak in all the ways of these people; these people who weren't strangers. As hard as it was to believe, mere months ago I must have been one of them. The people on the plane may well have recognized me. I only wished I had a gold coin to tip the dragon.
"Where are we going now?"
"Well..." Felix said, checking the clock on the wall of the Casimir Dragon take-off point (which was about triple the size of the Ohio airport). "It's almost four in the morning. I'm sure you'd want to sleep before your first day."
Felix yawned, and I smiled. I had slept on the plane: I had a feeling that he needed more sleep than me. Nevertheless I nodded.
"There's a place nearby. The Eafon Inn. I stayed there on vacation last year," Felix told me, ushering us out of the airport.
The Eafon Inn was a building with a style of architecture I couldn't quite place. It was a blend between the Victorian farmhouses in the countryside and the stone fortresses of medieval times. The inn was entirely built from plated rock, but turrets and dormer windows randomly punctuated the steep roof.
At the front desk, a plump bald man greeted us warmly. The room was surprisely cozy considering it was stone-walled, with a thick carpet, sunken couches, and a blazing fireplace. Overhead, a few stray white doves flew with their talons clutching rolled up papers, which they deposited in a basket marked "Reservations".
"Welcome! For two?" the man asked, eyeballing us. "Where are your parents?"
I started to speak, but Felix cut me off. "We aren't siblings. And our parents aren't here."
I looked down at myself, and saw that my hair had become wavy and reddish-brown. Cursing this unintended Mimicry, I stepped away from Felix. The man looked at us even more strangely.
"Indeed. For one night?"
Felix nodded. I guess
"One room or two?"
"Two," we replied automatically. Felix handed over a few coins, and the bald man gave us each a key.
"Rooms 40 and 42. Third floor, west wing. Complementary breakfast is at eight, but I'd suggest you get yourselves some more rest. Lunch is pay-as-you-go, but since you'll skip breakfast, it's on me."
"Thank you," I began to say. Suddenly I felt a tickle on my shoulder. Looking down, I saw wisps of reddish hair falling to the floor and disintegrating, like feathers being shed. I stifled a gasp.
Felix looked up and glanced at me. Eyes widening, he finished signing the papers and said goodnight to the clerk. He grabbed my shoulder and steered me to the stairs before I became completely bald. He finds room 40 and pulls me inside before I can twist away.
"Anya, you've got to control yourself. Mimics don't just mimic random strangers, that's rude."
"Do you think I wanted to?" I asked, sighing in relief as my brown hair grew in. "Look, you brought me here to learn, okay? I'll try harder, but... why don't you have that issue? Why do you never uncontrollably replicate anyone else?"
Felix sits down on a leather armchair, exhaling. "It's complicated. Mimic kids always have one of two problems. Problem A: they can't do it. They go to school on winter solstice and spend months trying to change themselves into anything at all. Or, in your case, Problem B: they can't stop Mimicking, and it gets quite uncontrollable. I'm Problem A, but my dad's been teaching me a few things so I'm able to mimic quite a few things."
I snorted at the strange boast.
"I get it, you can't resist it yet, but you should know that it's considered very impolite to mimic strangers. Friends are one thing, but random people are a different case entirely."
I nodded. There was a lot to learn. I never wanted anything to do with Mimicry, but now that I was here in Casimir, I felt obligated to learn it all.
"Now go sleep. I'll meet you downstairs at one o'clock, okay?"
Hearing Felix mention the word sleep sent a wave of fatigue over my body. I hadn't rested in over 20 hours, and my limbs were starting to protest. Stumbling heavily across the hall, I let myself into my bedroom, fell forward on the bed, and fell asleep.
I slept for many hours, and when I finally opened my eyes they seemed to close again of their own accord. The room was dark, but a slit of light through the curtains told me it was day.
I forced myself to stand, and I changed into new clothes from my bag.
I opened the door and was nearly taken out by a white dove carrying a domed silver platter.
"Sorry," I said, wondering whether I was supposed to apologize to animals in Casimir. The dove simply continued down the hallway, delicately placing the tray on a hall table and rapping sharply on the door with its beak.
Wandering down to the lobby, I waved hello to the balding man at the desk. Either his shift was really long (he was there early in the morning) or it was later than I thought.
"He's in the garden," the clerk said, no doubt remembering me from my interesting hair experience yesterday.
"Thanks," I said, following the man's finger to see a glass door. Slipping out, I saw a thin dirt trail. I followed it, in a slightly curved path, until it broadened into a clearing. Well, not quite. It was a grid, of sorts. The dirt trail made up the lines, and in each square grew a tree. These trees weren't like anything I'd ever seen, and they weren't any type I could name. The one nearest to me had branches twisted in a complicated weave, and leaves like blue silk. Behind that, a tree had limbs that seemed to float upwards, as if gravity were pulling it in the opposite direction. I walked a little, transfixed by the garden, and saw Felix knelt down beside a tree.
"Hey," I said, quietly. He seemed to be in a somber mood, and I didn't want to intrude. Felix turned his head up, face more serious than I'd ever seen him.
"Oh. Hi, Anya."
I stood there, awkwardly. My eyes wandered over to the tree. This one was quite large, although not nearly as big as some of the ones in the back of the grid. It was almost like an umbrella, with branches spidering out thinner and thinner until they ended with barely wisps. But the petals, instead of leaves, the tree had thousands, maybe millions, of tiny pink petals smaller than my thumbprint. A few fell to the ground in the breeze, but they clutched onto the branches with strength more than I would have expected from such tiny blossoms.
"So," Felix said. "I—I guess you're wondering what this is."
I nodded slightly, afraid to disrupt this mood.
"It's, well, it's a graveyard."
I looked around. This beautiful place?
"When Mimics," Felix started, then paused. "When Mimics die, they manage one... final transformation. A plant. We can't become plants, you know. We can't switch back. So it's tradition. Whenever someone is about to take their final breath, they don't pass, you know, like normal people. They use their dying strength, and they... become something beautiful. Normally, we have to mimic something that's real, or mythical, I guess. But this one transformation, you can be whatever you imagine. This tree, Anya. It's my grandmother."
The concept was so bizarre to me. All of this was, but I sensed that Felix didn't feel like explaining further. We were silent for a while: him kneeling at the trunk of this ethereal plant, and me standing behind.
"She was a mythomorph. A pegasus. An Aureate too, she was deputy head of the Mimic Assembly."
"She sounds great."
"She was."
More silence.
"How long ago did she, you know..."
"Only four months ago. I don't understand. She was so healthy, too. My dad didn't give me any of the details. Let's go, Anya. I was just waiting here for you to wake up."
"We don't have to leave if you want to be here longer. I'll stay."
"No. Let's go," Felix said, more forcefully. He stood and started ahead on the trail leading back to the inn. I had no choice but to leave behind the otherworldly garden.
When we arrived back at the hotel, the bald clerk insisted we take him up on his offer of complementary lunch because we'd slept through breakfast. He glanced at the large clock above the desk and laughed heartily.
"It appears it's supper time now anyway. Here, take this." He handed us a note with loopy handwriting. "There's a place just down the street. Old Sentell owes me a favour anyway, and the tavern here is no place for kids like you."
I felt a little embarrassed for sleeping so long. Hadn't Felix told me to wake up at one? Still, the excitement was exhausting. The nice man shooed us out, and we walked down the road to a small restaurant called Sentell's. Only after we'd left did I realize that I hadn't lost all my hair due to unintended Mimicry. That was a good start to my time here in Casimir.
Felix and I handed our note to a gruff man with a name tag labelling him as Salvin Sentell. He grunted but couldn't ignore his debt to the Eafon Inn. He pointed to an outdoor booth and we sat down. I looked over the menu. Doing a double take, I realized it was a different language. When I pointed this out to Felix, he laughed at me.
"You do realize that's the language you've been speaking since yesterday, right?"
I glared at him, hoping he was kidding.
"Kyer. Language of Mimics."
"No."
"Yep."
"Well, if we can already understand pretty much every language, why do we need our own?"
Felix considered that. "I guess maybe because this is our own language. It came first. You only know English..."
"And French. And Russian. And Portuguese," I added. Felix rolled his eyes.
"You only know those languages because it helps you Mimic. So that, if you wanted, you could become an old Russian man and speak like him no problem."
That made sense, I guess. But... "I could become a man?"
Felix exhaled, obviously annoyed with all my questions. "It's complicated. Let's just eat."
I obliged, realizing that I could read the menu, new language or not. Funnily enough, Kyer felt more natural than the English I spoke in Ohio. There was nothing foreign about it at all: so much so, that I didn't even realize that I'd changed languages. I was glad to have Felix to explain all this, but sometimes his impatience irked me. I couldn't help it that Felix had grown up knowing all this stuff and I hadn't. Well, maybe I did know it all, but my stupid amnesia just erased the memories. Either way, tomorrow I'd start at a real Mimic school, and finally get the answers I needed.