Duran-kun and Kiyo-chan's Omake Theater
(featuring the Tokiha family pet)
"Unnnnh," Mai Tokiha groaned.
"Mai...Wa...ter..." Mikoto didn't really "say" it; that would have implied some kind of willful act. It was more like the words had somehow pushed themselves through the girl's slack lips of their own volition.
"It's your own fault, you know," Mai scolded her. "You went bouncing around the apartment like you'd been set on fire until you collapsed. It's not healthy to get so much exercise in this heat!"
Despite her stern words, Mai pushed herself up off the couch and went into the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator, snagged a bottle of water, and closed the door again quickly so that she wouldn't lose any more of the coolness out into the air than she had to. Carrying the water bottle back to Mikoto, she unscrewed the cap and put the bottle into the younger girl's hand. Mikoto slurped gratefully.
"But Kagutsuchi stole my curry bread! That was my lunch; I had to get it back."
Mai did not seem overly impressed by this argument.
"He probably saved your life. You know how bad you are with spicy food. And if you ate something like that today, when your body temperature is already so high, you'd probably dehydrate yourself from sweating."
The culprits for all of this collective misery were twofold. One was the weather, which had spent much of the week sailing right past "warm summer day" and right to "Sahara Desert," with the temperature hovering at thirty-five Celsius even in the shade. The other was the fallibility of modern technology, which had reacted to the sudden rush of air conditioning and fans with a power failure throughout Fuuka and Tsukimori. Deprived of cooling devices, Mai and Mikoto's apartment had rapidly degraded into something not unlike a large oven.
Despite it probably being hot enough to fry an egg on the kitchen counter, without power Mai couldn't cook anything, so rather than resort to scrounging through the refrigerator for cold lunch ingredients, she'd decided to wait and see if the power came back before it was necessary to eat as many perishable goods as possible.
Mikoto's stomach, however, wasn't particularly good at patience, so she'd gotten out a spicy curry bun that she'd had stashed. Before she'd even taken a bite, though, Kagutsuchi had swooped down and snatched the bread out of her hand. Mikoto, of course, wasn't going to take that kind of behavior lying down, and thus had begun a pell-mell chase through the apartment. She'd bounded off furniture and knocked over two stacks of books, several framed photographs, and a floor lamp while in (literal, given the temperature) hot pursuit of her would-be lunch.
The chase had ended with the curry bun sitting on the ceiling fan and Mikoto sprawled on the floor. Now, Mai hadn't lived with Mikoto for two years without building up some tolerance for this sort of thing, but all she wanted to do was to lie on the couch and try to stay cool (and why was she suddenly hearing Nao's voice in her head saying, "You've got those two hunky boyfriends on your string, so have 'em get over there and fan you like Cleopatra"?), which was not easily done during a chase scene right out of some old movie.
Which reminded her...
"And you," she barked, pointing up at her CHILD.
"Rowr?"
"You need to lie down and take a nap. It's hot enough in here without somebody flying around whose wings are made out of fire!"
~X X X~
A/N: Mai is such a mom.