Duran-kun and Kiyo-chan's Omake Theater

(featuring the Sugiura family pet)

"That's the last of it, Professor Sasaki," Midori Sugiura announced. Gakuten-O, in his chariot form, carried out a bucket of broken stone. "The passageway is totally clear."

Professor Sasaki mopped the broad forehead beneath his receding gray hairline with his handkerchief. The baking sun of the Egyptian desert was savagely hot. Even in her khaki shorts and shirt tied off to bare her midriff, Midori still felt it pounding down. Not that the outfit was doing her any good in other respects, either, as the professor hadn't given her one single lecherous glance.

"Excellent work! Let's go inside and see what we've found."

The group descended into the tomb, flashlights sending their beams stabbing down along the narrow passage. The professor led the way, Midori half a step behind him on his left, and the two seminar students behind them. Gakuten-O brought up the rear, its wheels gritting on the dust. It's like a scene from an old mummy movie, Midori thought.

"It's too bad we don't have torches, though. This modern equipment is so unromantic."

"We are not here for romance, Miss Sugiura, but for knowledge," Sasaki told her sternly. Since Midori rather wished that he did have ulterior motives in bringing her out there, she wasn't fond of this pronouncement on multiple levels.

"Hey, the pursuit of knowledge can be romantic. Look at Abelard and Heloise."

"Wasn't he castrated?" one of the students said.

"Or Marie and Pierre Curie, working side-by-side to unlock the mysteries of radium."

"Didn't she die of radiation poisoning?"

"Naoko, you are seriously ruining the mood here. I mean, we're the first people to enter this tomb in three thousand years!"

"Whose tomb is it, anyway?" asked the other student, a boy named Ichiru.

"We don't know, yet," explained the professor. "Hopefully, there will be inscriptions to explain that, perhaps in the spells and prayers customarily engraved or painted on the tomb walls to protect the soul of the deceased in the afterlife."

"You mean, like a curse against anyone who violates the tomb?"

"Curses? Don't be silly, Ichiru," Naoko chastised him.

"I'm not! I've read about these things! Did you know that everyone involved with the Tutankhamen expedition is now dead?"

"Given that that was in 1922, I'd be more weirded out if they were all running around alive and well."

"Go on, Professor, you tell her!"

"I should tell you. It's one thing to have respect for the cultural practices and beliefs you are exploring. It is quite another to fall prey to superstitious tommyrot!"

"Yeah," Midori chimed in. "I've raided tombs, broken into sealed areas, and gone around opening up musty old places on four continents and I've never seen one curse. Okay, there was that one giant Orphan that had been sealed up in Fuuka Shrine, but even that was a monster, not a curse."

Gakuten-O gave a yip. It had actually been the one to defeat that Orphan, after all. Professor Sasaki and Naoko just glared at Midori; apparently the adventures of the HiME of Wind did not suit with the message they were trying to pass on to Ichiru.

"But really," she hurried on, taking quick steps towards the tomb door, "that's neither here nor there, and I'm sure that we don't have to worry about…any…ancient…seals…"

Her voice trailed off as the circle of her flashlight beam stopped moving down the wall, focused on a blob of hardened clay that fitted into the corner between the massive stone tomb-door and its jamb. The outline of the head of the god Anubis was impressed into the seal, and six more were carved into the frame and door around it in a circle.

"The Seal of the Seven Jackals!" breathed Ichiru. "The sign of the ancient tomb-curse of the priests of Amun-Ra!"

"Wait, why would priests of Amun-Ra use a different god's symbol for their curses?"

"Don't confuse him with facts, Miss Sugiura," Naoko said.

Professor Sasaki rolled his eyes and got a very serious "What's wrong with the college students of today?" look on his face.

"Can you read the hieroglyphs on the door, Professor?" Midori asked.

"I believe so. Let's see, now… 'Whosoever shall break this seal and violate the tomb of Sneferu, chariot-seller of Luxor, shall suffer the fate of…' Hm, the writing becomes obscure here at this point."

"Did you hear that?" Ichiru yelped. "It is a curse! We have to leave now, or else—"

There was a soft crunching sound.

Four pairs of eyes turned towards Gakuten-O, who had the remains of the clay blob clenched between his leonine forepaws. There was a long moment of silence, in which one could almost believe they could hear their pounding heartbeats echoing in the passage.

"Bad boy!" Midori spoke up. "You know that we were going to remove that intact so it could be preserved and studied as an artifact! Keep acting like this and I'll leave you home with Youko instead of taking you on the next archaeological excavation."

"There isn't going to be a next excavation for any of us!" Ichiru wailed. "We've all been cursed! The inexorable hand of Fate is moving against—ow!"

While it might be assumed with good reason that one of the other three expedition members had smacked him upside the head to shut him up, Ichiru had in fact just banged his foot on the wall while running around wailing.

"Congratulations," the professor said.

"Eh?"

"To him? For what?"

Sasaki had taken out his phone, onto which he'd loaded a number of his more important reference works before leaving Japan, and had been studying it carefully during the byplay over the broken seal.

"Possible empirical evidence of the effectiveness of this ancient curse. I looked up some of the rarer vocabulary so I could complete the translation. It finishes with, 'the fate of having the earth itself turn against him, and he shall strike his foot painfully upon Geb's bosom.'"

Naoko blinked, dumbfounded.

"The curse on this tomb is that those who violate it will stub their toe?"

"Makes sense to me," Midori said with a shrug.

"Somehow, I'm not surprised."

"Come on, it said he was a chariot-seller, right? Do you think an Ancient Egyptian used-car salesman would have the cash to buy a really nasty death curse? Good magic costs money!"

~X X X~

A/N: As you can see, I still prefer the official translation of the name of Midori's CHILD, even if I have no idea whatsoever why Bandai decided to write it that way.

Geb is the Egyptian god of the earth, which you probably figured out if you didn't know it already.

This story was suggested by an incident in the Scooby-Doo episode, "Scooby Doo and a Mummy, Too," whereupon learning that the pharaoh Anka pledged to return to life if his mummy was removed from his tomb and turn the ones responsible to stone, the following exchange occurred:

"A most ominous curse, indeed!"

"As all ancient ones are, Professor."

And I had to think to myself, why? Why must it always be the momentous and important that comes down to us out of the past? What about the vast majority of trivial nonsense that their societies must have generated just as ours do today? And you know that Midori would be the one to find it…