"Yeah, I just thought maybe you'd get a sense of whether it's too girly, they don't like L endings, they don't want to be named after a substance..."

"Don't like the sound of it, I think. Probably not because of the L?"

"Hmmmm. How about fiction references - Chime? Kazul?"

"...Chime's good," she reports after a moment."

"Cute! I don't know if, uh, any of you, have read the books, they're fun if you like YA fantasy."

"I have not. I think. I don't recognize the reference, at any rate."

"Tamora Pierce, series about teenagers with magic powers about stuff like gardening and sewing. One of them makes a glass dragon by accident and they name it Chime."

"--Oh that is so cool."

"I'm glad you and Chime like it!"

"I don't think Chime had any idea of the name's cool origin when they okayed it. ...And Chime's gender is an 'I'll get back to you on that' situation, not a definitely they in the long run situation."

"If I remember right they 'she' the book Chime but it's not a very strongly girly name, could go either way. And I could be remembering wrong and find it incredibly hard to read when I'm backlashed or I'd offer to look it up."

"--Oh, yikes, that sounds awful, I'm pretty extroverted but I do like to read."

"Yeah. I fit it in during downtime. If your thing turns out to be a miracle instant backlash cure I will do so many more dungeons and still have more time to read."

"--How would your backlash feel about being read to?"

"It accepts this but I have to interrupt a lot."

"I could find a book about espers, or something, if you have one lying around, and you could interrupt to give me context or details or something topical. If there's such a book you'd find it useful or pleasant to have read to you."

"I have Espers Since The Seventies, my room's the one with the blue door and it should be on the shelf, second from the top, leftish I think."

"Okay, I'll go get it, I will leave this stationary phone behind for just a minute. With Chime. Chime?" 

There is the soft clack of the landline's receiver being put down on the table, and then a fluttering sound, and Chime begins making dragon noises into the phone. 

"Mrow."

Chirp. Cheep! 

Lucy is back shortly and opens the book to read from the beginning. 

May has commentary about the espers book:

"Yeah so esper awakening takes a week, puts us at real bad backlash levels and just sits there, and some of it can mimick normal medical conditions but rare ones..."

"There's a decent movie about that case, they stretched 'we don't know what esper compatibility is but somehow I want to keep touching this stranger' into an entire two-hour romance, I haven't seen the whole thing but Ren loves it."

"Esper is a stupid name, honestly, it has a nice mouthfeel but a lot of us don't have any extrasensory perception abilities at all."

"Yeah they didn't know back then that if you don't kill a dungeon dead it will come back meaner."

"Man, I really want to take a look at a dungeon at some point. Espers don't have some kind of vaguely core-like organ that if you destroy it it kills them, right?"

"We have all the human organs which answer to that description!"

"--So remember how I said I remembered being mes that had powers unlike my own but were also called magical girls? In one of those, magical girls fought sorta dungeon-like things called witches, and then it turned out that witches are what happen when a magical girl, uh, accumulates too much backlash--that's not it exactly but the thing in question is more like backlash than most things I've encountered."

"Wow. No, excess backlash just causes organ failure and shit. Also dungeons and espers started being things around the same time so you'd be positing some time travel or something."