Developmental Timeline
For the first day or two, your BOTIMAL® hatchling, though it will be able to raise itself up into a standing position, will move from place to place by grasping surfaces with the claws of its hands and feet/foot and (if applicable) its tail by pushing or pulling the rest of its body toward its intended destination. Its strength and sense of balance will develop rapidly, however, and by the end of its first week outside the ovum, at latest, it will be lifting its torso and head from the surfaces on which it moves, and crawling on its forearms and shin(s) and (if applicable) using its tail for leverage.
No later than the end of week two, your hatchling will be fully ambulatory. Some BOTIMALS® are bipedal, some are quadrupedal, and a rare few are tripedal. Until the ambulation phase begins, there’s no way to predict how many limbs your BOTIMAL® will use to ambulate, but because so much of BOTIMAL® behavior begins with mimicry of owner behavior, you might, if you want to try, be able to teach your BOTIMAL® to ambulate bipedally or quadrupedally via walking on two legs or crawling around on all fours, respectively, while your BOTIMAL® watches.
During the crawling phase, your BOTIMAL® will start to mimic you—your movements, as well as the sounds you make. Some are more interested in one kind of mimicry than the other at first, but all BOTIMALS® eventually mimic both aspects of their owners’ behavior to one degree or another. Once your BOTIMAL® learns to walk, if not before then, it will begin to improvise and experiment with sounds and movements. To many, these improvisations and experiments are some of the best things that BOTIMALS® do. Some believe these are attempts at communication—and they might be! They certainly seem to be. Some people find these behaviors annoying, though. If you are one of these people, know this: all you have to do to get a BOTIMAL® to stop behaving in any way that it’s behaving is cuddle it. And if you don’t feel like cuddling it when it annoys you, just put it in the PillowNest® and shut the lid. Though it might continue to move around and make noise for a couple of minutes in there, it will fall asleep soon enough.
Feeding Your BOTIMAL®
Did we say that cuddling is the easiest part of being friends with a BOTIMAL®? Maybe we spoke too soon. Feeding your BOTIMAL® isn’t exactly a three-legged race through a minefield, either! It can snack on just about anything you eat, as long as it also eats one LifePellet® per day. (NOTE: just as BOTIMALS® are able to process the same foods as human beings, they are vulnerable to the same toxic substances.)
LifePellets® supply your BOTIMAL® not only with all the nutrients it needs to remain healthy, but with enzymes vital to the proper digestion of other foods, should you choose to supplement its diet with other foods.
As for HOW to get your BOTIMAL® to eat, there’s nothing to it. Pinch a LifePellet® or bit of other food between your thumb and forefinger, hold the food in front of your BOTIMAL’S® face, and see for yourself. As a silky-mouthed hatchling, it won’t be able to do much more than gnaw and suck at the LifePellet®/food-bit before it, but soon enough (by the end of week three at latest), it’ll have a full set of teeth, excellent motor control, and will gladly take its meals into its own hands. Literally!
In addition to its daily LifePellet®, all a BOTIMAL® needs for sustenance is one thimbleful of water per day. We suggest using a plastic bottlecap, if not an actual sewing thimble, filled to the brim with cold water and secured inside the ovumslit of the PillowNest®. As a hatchling, your BOTIMAL® will lap the water from the cap like a dog from a bowl. By the time it reaches physical maturity, its head may have grown too large to drink in this manner, but its motor skills will have developed sufficiently enough to allow it to use the bottlecap the way a person uses a cup.
Odors and Grime
If your BOTIMAL® stays to a strict diet of LifePellets®, it will, unless it gets something smelly on its skin or velvet, give off a faint odor of grape-flavored bubblegum. If your BOTIMAL®, in addition to LifePellets®, ingests human food, it may produce other, less pleasant odors that will make you want to bathe it. A buildup of grime or a matted-down look to your BOTIMAL’S® velvet might also cause you to want to bathe it. Go ahead and do so! Just don’t use soap, which can irritate your BOTIMAL’S® skin.
Bathe your BOTIMAL® as often as you want, in the manner described in the FIRST BATH section above.
Rear Ejections
If your BOTIMAL® stays to a strict diet of LifePellets®, you will find a dry, glossy-black sphere the size of a pea, and redolent of grape-flavored bubblegum, in the PillowNest® every morning. This sphere is firm as an ovum, and it is your BOTIMAL’S® daily rear ejection, which derives its name from having been ejected through your BOTIMAL’S® rear. It is waste. Remove the rear ejection from the PillowNest® and flush it down the toilet, where all such things belong. Then wash your hands.
(NOTE: If your BOTIMAL® does not stay to a strict diet of LifePellets®, the color and odor of its rear ejections may be different from the color and odor of the rear ejections described above. Thankfully, the consistency of the rear ejections will remain the same.)
Mouth Ejections
Mouth ejections aren’t waste. When fully matured BOTIMALS® are deprived of their owners’ human warmth for too long, they become lonely and attempt to clone themselves. Some BOTIMALS® can withstand the deprivation of their owner’s simple human warmth for up to a week before they start attempting to self-clone; for others it’s a matter of just a couple days.
Before attempting to self-clone, BOTIMALS® grieve. Some signs that your BOTIMAL® is grieving include missing patches of velvet, hiding of the face in the hands or the underarm, reluctant chewing of LifePellets®, incompetent handling/dropping of the bottlecap when drinking, head-shaking, excessive scratching at the torso or legs, painsinging (you’ll know it when you hear it), overpreened (occasionally bleeding) claws, watery eyes, trembling lips, and general slackness of the face muscles (a “hangdog look”). If you discover that your BOTIMAL® is grieving and don’t wish for it to clone, simply pick it up and cuddle it. It’ll cease to grieve within minutes.
If, on the other hand, you do wish your BOTIMAL® to clone, don’t touch it. Soon enough, it will lie prostrate and hiccup violently for as many as sixty minutes. The fit of hiccupping will be followed by a mouth ejection, which entails the ejection, by mouth, of a glossy, cream-colored sphere—a “pearl”—roughly twice the circumference of a typical rear ejection. The first time you witness this, with its attendant throat-grasping and self-inflicted torso-punching, it might seem as though your BOTIMAL® is in danger of choking to death, which could cause you to feel upset or alarmed. DO NOT WORRY AND DO NOT INTERFERE. As long as you let it be, your BOTIMAL® will not die.