"Your name shall be... Catears!?"
To understand what led to this reaction, maybe it's better if we went back in time to a few hours ago.
At that time Daisy was energetically patrolling the top of the mountains surrounding the valley when she noticed many lines of black smoke rising up from the west.
"Barbecue party?"
One couldn't say her guess was completely wrong. If you think about it, there was indeed some meat burning over there, though not exactly as she expected. While reality was a lot crueler than her imagination, luckily the day she would discover this truth was still far in the future.
"How great.... I wonder if they have something aside boar meat..."
Grrrrr.
Feeling her stomach growling, Daisy massaged her belly a bit while regretting skipping breakfast because she was too eager to explore the mountains.
"I wonder if I can find something to eat around here..."
Daisy continued her patrol until she was a few birds behaving strangely in the air. Instead of flying around, like all other birds, they kept circling around a determined point, as if watching something or waiting for something to happen.
(Did they find something over there? Let's investigate!)
Forgetting her hunger due to her own curiosity, Daisy started running down the mountain, following the direction of those odd black birds in the sky, but just as she started getting close to the point they were circling around, they started to descend, making her lose sight of them.
Even so she didn't give up, continuing to run in the same direction, until her hard work finally bear fruits leading her to arrive at the point those birds had converged.
The scene looked quite odd to her, there were 5~6 birds peaking and scratching a cowered person on the ground.
(Since when the birds here were so audacious as to go around bullying people?)
Feeling a sense of self righteousness burning inside of her, Daisy charged at the birds with her spear in hands.
"Taste this, birds! The spear of justice!"
Rotating her spear, Daisy did a clean sweep, pushing all of them at once away from the person on the ground. Two birds were immediately knocked down, while the others, scared for their lives, rose in flight without looking back.
"Justice triumphs once more!"
Grrr....
"I wander if I can eat their meat..."
Turning back to the person cowered in the ground, Daisy noticed that this person was different from all other people she ever met in her life. She had cat ears and tail, her hair was fluffy like Master's, and her skin was brown instead or white or green and had many red marks on it, some due to her wounds, others completely natural.
Talking about wounds, it seems like those birds did quite a mess to the poor girl. Her clothes completely destroyed and there were traces of the meat in her arms and back being eaten by the birds, leaving a few holes where blood continued to bleed to this very moment.
Daisy frowned over such a sight, she couldn't even imagine the pain that the girl must have endured... if she was still alive, that is.
The first thing Daisy did was check her breathing. It was faint but it was still there. Her body was a bit cold, and leaving the wounds open should be dangerous, but daisy didn't know how to do first aid, so she was in a bit of a predicament where she wasn't sure how she should proceed.
"Hey Cindy, I found some -"
"Enemies!? How many? How strong are them? Where are they coming from? Quickly, tell me everything! Each second matters!"
"Calm down! That's not it! Listen..."
Cindy was the new maid who was solely responsible for the HQ. Aside from cleaning, she acted as a bridge passing down messages to all the base and sounding the alarm in case anything happened.
Every servant had some kind of build in communicator that could talk to the HQ as long as she was not too far from it, it was exactly the same thing that allowed the HQ to expand it's map as the girls explored around, and it was using this system that Apollo (or any other player) could order their servants around remotely. One more secret that Apollo had yet to discover was that because the bracer he wore was also connected to this system, he could pass down orders remotely directly to everybody, not just the HQ.
Daisy explained everything that happened, from the start where she saw the odd birds, to the part where she found the bleeding girl who was currently on her side.
"So, what do I do?"
Hearing the whole story, Cindy also felt troubled as she didn't have a clear answer. The hospital had yet to be constructed so there were no medics among the servants, and that's why knowledge over medicine and treatment was something that they currently lacked.
"One moment! I'm going to ask Master!"
"Master? Where is he??"
"He is going to the Lab right now."
"The Lab....all right! I will take her there! This will be faster than having Master walk all the way to get here!"
"...Hmm...All right! If you need anything else, just call!"
"Roger that! Over!"
Daisy approached the cat girl and carefully tried to turn her around, so that she could princess carry her, but as she tried to do so, she noticed the cat girl was holding something big in her arms, an egg of the size of a water melon.
Grrr...
Daisy stomach protested again, making her give a light punch in her own belly.
"Calm down! Once we get home, we can eat a ton, but for now, behave yourself!"
Carefully lifting the cat girl in a princess carry, the egg stood right in front of Daisy's face, as if mocking her hunger or challenging her to eat it. Even then, Daisy held on her self control and carefully carried the cat girl to the Lab.
"I wonder what this egg tastes like..."
...
Finally reaching the lab, Daisy arrived just in the to see the new girls receive their name.
She tried to enter the room in silence to not interrupt the ceremony, but coincidentally Apollo saw her reflection in one of the machines.
No, to be more exact, he didn't saw Daisy's reflection, but the cat girl's reflection, which made him exclaim in surprise "Cat Ears" and that's how the plant girl Catears received her name.
I thought of using Nekomimi instead, but since this is an English novel, it feels a bit wrong to use japanese words and many people wouldn't know the meaning of the words, making the joke lose half it's effect.... well, it's not like it was a good joke anyway XD so, sorry again for my bad sense of humor.