“Yes, sir. But please do call me, if anything happens.”
“I will.” I nodded and dunked the towel in the bucket Myusel had brought.
It might’ve sounded good, but I guess I fell asleep practically the moment Myusel left. When Hikaru-san had come to trade places with me yesterday, I had told him I would be fine watching over the baby, but I guess I dozed off lying next to Man’ya. And I had been so sure I would never fall asleep on the cold, hard floor.
“Uuuumm...........................” I blinked. The last thing I remembered before dropping off was Man’ya’s face, just across from mine. She had opened her eyes while she sucked on my fingers, but then she had gone back to sleep. Not wanting to wake her up, I’d just dozed right alongside her, my hand still in her mouth.
“Man’ya?”
All I saw in front of me now, though, was empty floor. Man’ya was nowhere to be seen. Even the memory of the feeling of her tongue lapping at my fingertips was gone.
“Wh-Where’s Man’ya?!” I felt the blood drain from my face.
Man’ya was gone. Had something happened while I slept? Where could she have gone, still in a torpor from her fever? I seriously doubted she was up walking around...
“What are we gonna do?” I sat up quickly, looking around the room—and froze.
There was Man’ya in a corner. But she...
“Man’ya...!”
I rushed over to her. She was facing the wall, and had rolled up into a ball so I couldn’t see her face. But I could see a wound of some kind, a big one right on her head. She must have gotten up and about while I was sleeping and ended up hurting herself.
Talk about a screwup...!
I touched Man’ya—and she promptly squished.
“Wha? What...?!” I cried. Man’ya deflated like a balloon with the air let out. She had already seemed pretty sick, but now she looked like a frog that had tried and failed to cross the road. What had I—
“Wait...” Then it started to dawn on me. “Skin...?”
“Ugi?” She had arrived beside me without my noticing it—Man’ya, who now cocked her head curiously at me.
“Man’ya?! But how? Oh, I see...” What I had rushed over to had been nothing but Man’ya’s old skin. Man’ya hadn’t been inside it all. She had probably been on the other side of the bed or something. It was simple: she had shed her skin. And she had done it so neatly that it seemed to leave a duplicate of her. That wound in her head must have been where she had crawled out of the old skin.
“Ahhhh...” I sat down right where I was, weak with relief. Man’ya was still looking at me.
“Man’ya,” I said.
“U?”
“How’s your fever?”
“Gi?”
She tilted her head again as if to say she didn’t understand. But I assumed her fever had broken. In fact, she gave a very relaxed-looking yawn. At least she didn’t seem to be in distress anymore.
“Thank goodness...” I said. Then there was a knock at the door. I went over and opened it to find Myusel standing there, with Brooke and Cerise. She must have brought them straight here when they got back.
“Shinichi-sama, how’s Man’ya-chan?” Myusel asked, worried.
“Oh, about her—”
“Emokureu!” Man’ya squeaked, poking her head out from near my feet. (That meant “Welcome home,” by the way.)
“Man’ya-chan?” Myusel said, startled to see the child in such good spirits.
“Uh, Brooke, Cerise, can I talk to you for a minute?” I gave Man’ya to Myusel and ushered them all into the room, where I showed them the flattened duplicate of the child.
“My goodness,” Myusel said.
“This isn’t some kind of illness, is it?” I asked.
“No sir, just some shed skin.”
“But it came off so neatly,” Cerise said.
“So she wasn’t sick after all. I’m so glad...” My shoulders slumped with relief.
Reptiles shed their skin. Obvious enough—but I had never seen a lizardman do it, and didn’t know what the skin looked like after it was shed. I had no idea if any of this was normal.
“Our apologies, Master. ’Tis at about this time when lizardmen children first shed their skin. ’Tis a perfectly normal event for us, and we simply forgot to tell you about it.” Brooke bowed his head.
“Aw, hey, don’t worry about it. I should have thought to ask.”
“So do lizardmen always get a fever when they shed their skins?” asked Myusel, who was still holding Man’ya.
“No, certainly not always,” Cerise answered. “But it’s possible she was having trouble regulating her body temperature.”
“How’s that?”
“Very young children sometimes aren’t good at storing up heat.”
You’re probably familiar with so-called warm-blooded and cold-blooded animals. Warm-blooded animals, like us mammals, can make their own heat to make sure their body stays the right temperature. Cold-blooded animals (snakes and lizards being the best known representatives), on the other hand, are more strongly influenced by outside air temperature, and their body temperatures can fluctuate significantly.
That doesn’t mean, though, that a reptile’s body temperature is always equal to the external temperature. Even cold-blooded animals need heat sometimes. The chemical reactions in their bodies are most likely influenced by their temperature. If they want to move fast, for example, they would need enough chemical reactions for their muscles to respond, and for that, you need a certain amount of heat.
So when snakes and lizards and the like sit out in the sun, they’re storing up heat, after which they will frequently start to move. If they get too cold, all the chemical reactions in their bodies slow down, and they lose the ability to move. In extreme cases, they can even just freeze in place and die, sort of like hibernation gone terribly wrong.
That much I knew from books. But lizardmen weren’t in any of my reading. Maybe the sunlight that had caused Man’ya’s egg to hatch prematurely had also left her with plenty of stored-up heat. That could have thrown off her metabolism, so to speak, and caused her to release a lot of heat when she shed her skin. That
