Nothing Runs Without a Maid. Summoning the Third Shiso

[Core Room]

The dungeon collected the garbage, but everything that wasn't garbage had piled up into mountains, beyond anyone's ability to keep in order.

"This is practically a hoarder's den…"

"A hoarder's den it is. Even if none of it is actually garbage."

"Are we just short on storage space?"

"If it were books, we'd hurry up and expand the underground stacks, but this… the truth is, neither I, nor the Master, nor Mint has the faintest knack for keeping house. Perhaps we should just summon a maid."

The maid that was summoned was tall and slender, with hair of a pale-purple metallic luster (a structural color) and eyes of a deep purple verging on black. Her outfit was a plain dark-green long dress, with a white apron and cap.

"Race, True Lavender. I have no name."

"'True,' is it? So there are fakes out there too. The name's the problem here… Marie-san, what sort of names do maids tend to have?"

"A maid, meido… the land of the dead, you mean? Hades, Rhadamanthus, Minos, Aeacus… hmm… we really should have settled on some candidates in advance."

"There's no telling ahead of time which Shiso is going to get summoned, so what can you do."

"True Lavender is 'Lavandula angustifolia,' but if I shorten it to 'Angus,' that just makes her a Scotsman. The home of the maid is England, so it really ought to be done English-style… let me summon a reference book.

It was apparently common to call them by names like Mary, Jane, or Emily, regardless of their actual names. But Mary is the English reading of my own name, and far too confusing, so that one's out."

Marie said this while consulting the summoned reference materials.

"Then let's just hack the tail off of angustifolia and go with 'Anne.' Good enough!"

The Dungeon Master, renowned far and wide for its trashy made-up names. Chopping angustifolia does not, in fact, yield "Anne."

The Dungeon Core announced,

"I am called Anne. A proper, pedigreed English Lavender. Please command me as you see fit.

Be advised, however, that I am not a Lewd Lavender, so I cannot take on work of that sort of nature."

"Lewd?"

"Also known as French Lavender. A bunny girl in a French maid outfit with a skimpy, revealing miniskirt. And not a beastfolk, mind you, but an Asura."

But English Lavender is native to France.

The dungeon was, at long last, sorted, tidied, and cleaned.

And so the Dungeon Master, unable to remember the maid's name, took to calling her "Miss Maid."

Lavender comes in English and French varieties, and the French one has rabbit ears, so from that point alone, summoning a Shiso maid was always going to yield a Lavender. Incidentally, in present-day Japan the spelling "meido" is the common one.

At the end of the nineteenth century, in a Britain with a population of roughly thirty million, there were more than two million maids. In short, there were about as many of them as there are salespeople in Japan today.