Kawada Asa. Hair: blue. Eyes: blue. Age: thirteen. Homeroom: Lily Class, teacher Nakata Ami. Birthday: February 25th.
It was February 24th.
"What!"
Futari wa Pretty Cure Blue Moon ~solar eclipse~
Bonus Episode: Asa's Birthday! Cake Misadventures
Nakayama Yoko's eyes went wide. "Why didn't you tell us earlier that Asa's birthday was tomorrow?"
Kondou Hoshi shrugged, running a hand through her mess of hair and tugging out knots. "Her birthday's her business, you know? Besides, her mom works that day. I didn't think she'd want to be reminded all the time."
Ogata Mia poked her index fingers together. "Doesn't that mean we should work harder to make her birthday special, Kondou-san?"
"I agree." Okamoto Yukari nodded and twirled the end of her braid around her finger. Since a few days ago, she'd stopped wearing her braid in a circle around her head and started wearing it down her back. It was easier to put up in the morning this way anyway.
Hoshi looked around at them. "I guess so, but if you guys are going to do something, just do something she's gonna like that won't take a lot of time, all right? Her birthday's tomorrow and all."
"Then it's settled," Yukari smiled. "Let's all surprise her in class tomorrow, all right?"
Yoko had a bad, bad feeling about this.
"Your birthday ~susu?"
Asa nodded, lying down on her scratchy, worn blanket. "Yeah, it's tomorrow! I'm not really expecting anything much, but maybe Mom will bring home a piece of cake and a present like she did last year. Do you guys celebrate your birthdays in the Garden of Days?"
Starry put a paw to the side of his face. "Hmm... We do, but we usually go to the shrine and then go home and plant a flower ~susu."
"Hmm..." Asa thought about this for a while. "I guess you guys don't have apartment buildings, then, right? Or do you have a community garden for that? I thought those were just for vegetables, though."
"Susu?"
"Never mind."
The instant Yoko got home, she headed to her room to change as usual, and emerged not in her oil-stained work clothes but a black shirt and pair of white lace-trimmed pants that her parents would actually allow her to wear outside of the garage. She walked over to the linen closet and began to rummage through its contents.
Her spiky-haired male body double walked past, boggling at her. "What are you doing, Yoko?"
Yoko sighed. "For your information, Takashi, I'm looking for the aprons."
"Aprons?" He raised an eyebrow. "What, finally ditched your hobby for something girly like normal people?"
Yoko whipped out an apron and smacked him in the face with it. "All that muscle-building is getting to your brain. I can do what I want." She walked off into the kitchen and tied the apron on, leaving her twin to stare after, shrug, and pick up his gym bag to leave.
Forget Takashi. She was making a cake.
Hoshi had headed back into the school instead of going home, and was removing items from the Home Ec room's fridge. She'd brought half of the things from home in the first place, so no one could accuse her of stealing. She just needed to use the room. Of course, she could just go home, but there was one thing: she lived in Fubuki Town. Riding the train to Kazahana City in the morning with a cake in hand was not her idea of a good time. Better to make it here, store it here in the refrigerator, go home and sleep, and come back to pick it up before class.
Perfect plan.
Mia paced around her kitchen, looking over a couple of recipe cards. She sighed and stopped in the middle of the floor.
"What does any of this stuff even mean...? I should just give up. I can't ask Mom, she's going to be late today." Her pink hairbow drooped. She quickly shook her head back and forth.
"No! I should be confident! Kawada-san is going to need a cake, and I need to learn to bake anyway, so I won't back out and get her a present instead! If no one makes her a cake, then it won't be a birthday, right?"
She took a deep breath.
"All right!"
But what of Yukari? Surely the shopping addict would go buy a present, rather than succumb to the same thought as the other three and think she was being original by making a cake instead, right?
Well, surely she thought that at some point, but as she wandered the Seiki Open Mall, it quickly became clear to her that she had no idea what Asa even wanted. The last time she'd taken Asa and Yoko shopping with her, Asa had been fidgeting and eyeing the door at all of Yukari's favourite stores, so clothes and purses were out. Clothes and purses, sadly, were the only things Yukari knew inside and out. She made a token attempt of going into a store to look for merchandise of Asa's favourite shows, but realized she didn't know what the girl actually owned or what half of it was.
Thus, she ended up in the Mugen Bakery, looking at a selection of store-prepared cakes.
Well, she tried.
"All right."
Yoko hadn't so much as touched the family's oven before, but the instructions on the back of the box of cake mix were simple enough. She was already well into mixing the powder, eggs and milk in the mixing bowl, and carefully read the box to see what she should do next.
Hmm, this was fun. She wouldn't drop cars for it, though, no matter what her brother said. Takashi seemed to be looking into a career as a professional nuisance.
"I think it was like this..."
Hoshi scratched her head and took two eggs to crack against the edge of the glass bowl. A crumpled piece of looseleaf held the recipe she glanced at from time to time. This would work. She got decent enough grades in Home Ec, didn't she?
Mia, on the other hand, was currently failing Home Ec. Logically, to her, making Asa's cake would be a good way to practice and get her grade up. In reality, she had read on the recipe card that she needed a pan, and brought out a frying pan onto the stove instead of putting a cake pan in the oven. The butter was taking too long to melt in the pan, so she'd turned up the heat and gone to read the newspaper to pass the time. When she looked up, the pan was on fire.
"Kyaa!" She turned off the stove knob and splashed a glass of water onto the fire. It only grew. "Oh, no, oh, no, oh, no..." What could she pour on the fire? Wait, the recipe said to add brown sugar! That was granulated, like dirt, and you used dirt to put out camping fires, right? She tossed the half-cup she'd measured into the pan. The fire went down a little. Mia grabbed the brown sugar bag and poured out a waterfall of sugar onto the butter pan until the fire inside it completely died down.
A pile of sugar on top of blackened, crispy butter residue remained. Mia looked at the mess, then at the recipe, and started arranging cherries on top of it.
Yukari was savvy enough of a shopper to know that loitering around looking at things was frowned upon if you did it for too long; the associates would assume you were waiting for them to get bored of watching you so you could steal something and run. Thus, she didn't want to spend too much time in the bakery, but none of these cakes looked good enough. Three were carrot; carrot cake was disgusting. Four had slid against the sides of their cases and were smushed to varying degrees. One was a cupcake cake; those were even more disgusting than carrot cake, because the sheer volume of icing made one's head hurt with a single bite. Then there was the one that looked like the decorator had been asleep while working on it. The icing blobs were so scattered and blurred together that it was difficult to figure out what the picture was supposed to be, and some of the icing ran off the side of the cake.
The only half-decent one was half a meter wide, a quarter of a meter tall, and had a small figure of a logging truck in one corner and some trees in another.
Well, one had to make sacrifices, right?
Yoko's cake was coming along well. She knocked all the bubbles out of the pan, smoothed the top with a spatula, and lowered the cake into the heated oven. Closing the door and setting it, she leaned back as the cake started to bake. It was a little embarrassing, starting a present at the last minute, but... the image of Asa smilling when she received the cake at school wouldn't leave her mind. Why was that?
"Nngh. It's way too hot."
Hoshi waved a tea towel in front of her face. Stupid school oven. The cake was already baking inside it, but the heat was filling the rest of the room. She dropped the tea towel onto the counter and made her way to the window, hoisting it open. Sure, it was February, but Kazahana City wasn't that cold. The worst she'd ever seen there was that freak snowstorm a few months prior that subsided within a class period, and she was near-certain, looking back on it, that that had been the work of one of those monsters. Her home was a lot colder.
The wind blew into the Home Ec kitchen, and she thought she heard birds.
The recipe called for pineapples. Mia ducked her head into the refrigerator and quickly confirmed that they were out of pineapples.
"Umm..." She rummaged through the refrigerator and freezer. "What else does Kawada-san like?" She thought for a minute. She'd only ever really seen Asa eating those instant packed lunches from the convenience store. Oh, and taiyaki from that stand in the Seiki Open Mall.
Taiyaki! Taiyaki was a pastry, which meant its ingredients were interchangeable with cake's, right? And as it turned out, they had natto in the freezer.
Ignoring all common sense, she arranged blobs of frozen natto in the crispy frying pan of ruined ingredients.
The cake was made. Yoko had left it out on the counter to cool and gone to do some homework before coming back to ice it. She heard her brother coming home, then her parents, but kept doing her math problems. Only when she was done, late into the night, did she get up and go to the kitchen.
She stared.
The plate on the counter was empty of anything but crumbs.
She took a slow, deep breath.
"TAKASHIIIIIIIIIIII!"
Hoshi was lucky on that front. No one was in the school, and she managed to get her cake done while it was still only five PM or so. No one could eat her cake when she left it on the counter, but she stood around observing it anyway for lack of anything else to do. She pulled out her phone and began to text her parents with the time she was coming home. She only looked up when she heard a bird chirping. Chirping and making tracks all over her good cake.
"Ew!" She dropped the phone and started swinging a spatula at the bird. It flew out the window in a panic. Hoshi glared after it and looked disapprovingly down at the tracks in her cake.
...well, a third of it she could save. This was the worst day ever.
At the late hour that Mia heard her mother coming home, the entire place was filled with smoke. She looked down sadly at the oozing puddle of food, and then over at a blob emerging from the clouds, which she could only tell by the long pink skirt was her mother.
"Mom?" Mia slumped over beside her creation. "Help..."
The next morning before homeroom started, the Lily Class was gathered around five girls and four cakes. Asa, in the middle of the clump of people, sweatdropped. Hoshi, Yoko, Yukari and Mia looked exhausted.
"Um... these cakes..."
"Most of my cake got ruined," Hoshi explained, looking at the small portion left behind in the pan.
"The bakery had nothing else good," Yukari said, pointing to her giant logging cake.
"I pulled an all-nighter making a new one," Yoko mumbled, nearly falling asleep in her desk right then and there.
Mia laughed nervously at her own cake, pink with a white heart and the best-looking one there. "My mom made mine..."
"Kirei was always amazing at cooking and baking!", Ami-sensei said. "It looks wonderful, Mia-chan! But I'm sure if you made a cake, it would be just as good!"
Mia turned green, remembering the bubbling black monstrosity in the frying pan. "N-not really."
Hoshi frowned. "Well, since apparently everyone had the same idea, what are we gonna do with all this cake? Asa can't eat it all. Okamoto's cake alone would feed the whole class and more."
Asa rubbed the back of her head. "I can share, you know, Hoshi."
"Wonderful!" Ami-sensei clasped her hands together. "Such generosity! The future of the world is looking brighter every day thanks to sentiments like this! I propose that we invite everyone in the middle school division for a party in the lunch room at noon! Cake for everyone, for Kawada-san's birthday!"
Asa turned bright red. "All that for me? I..." She looked down at the floor. "At my old school, no one even remembered my birthday."
Hoshi fluffed her hair. "C'mon. What are we if not your friends?"
"She's right, you know!" Yukari beamed. "Besides, now we all have a chance to celebrate!"
Mia smiled a little. "I think so, too, Kawada-san."
"Mmm..."
They all looked over. Yoko really had fallen asleep at her desk. As everyone around them laughed, Asa smiled.