What the heck did you just make me watch? No inspiration outside of my own brain, but thanks for taking 48 seconds of my life that I can never get back.
I'm sure she has nothing to do with the quest, but she is nice to look at. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minki_van_der_Westhuizen
It is a spin-off of Space Ghost Coast to Coast called Cartoon Planet. They had a lot of skits and songs between blocks of cartoons. They ended up putting all the host segments on their own show. They also did Brak Presents the Brak Show Starring Brak and The Brak Show (trust me....it's a different show lol). I watched it a lot as a young ranger
I was thinking that Minki and Rinki were named similar to Vaniki, the special-spawn-method rare-spawn rat in original Dragon's Necropolis from SoV expansion. Vaniki is described as an evil witch by Neb, who asks you to get her heart in order to give a key. Minki and Rinki have somewhat different personalities than Vaniki, but their names are similar, so may be one of the inspirations. Relevant quote from the key quest: Key quest details: https://everquest.allakhazam.com/db/quest.html?quest=2609
Of all lore in the entirety of EverQuest, the one I know most about is the Paebala/Chetari hahah. So yes, definitely some influence from Vaniki. I in fact tried to reverse engineer their language based on that quest you linked. Unfortunately, most of it is just gibberish with only a few repeating words. I did make Rinki and Minki have a little snippet of conversation in ratman language, and I very much did NOT just roll my face across my keyboard keys. So... I guess I'm so passionate about these cute lil guys, I went as far as to start making a canon language. ANYWAY, /tangent off
Imagine "Minki Boodle!" playing every time you hit the Complete Heal Macro..... ....actually don't imagine that, preserve whatever sanity remains.
So fun story.... songs pop in my head playing EQ and I change the lyrics to fit the situation. So, Minki popped Hey Mickey (Toni Basil) into my head. And since he is looking for his brother, the lyrics became... "Oh Minki you want to find, you want to find... your brother! Hey Minki!"
The 80s were the best , although I have to say Goldfingers version of 99 red balloons really is WAY better than Ninas any day.