Duran-kun and Kiyo-chan's Omake Theater

(featuring the Munakata family pet)

Shiho Munakata was the epitome of young maidenhood. She combined the elegance of the traditional Japanese lady with the gloss of Western formalism, then added to it the sprightly cuteness of her youth. Yes, indeed, words like ladylike and girlish, with all the stereotypical imagery they evoked, were precisely the terms that sprang to mind in describing her. One hundred percent of people one asked would confirm this, at least so long as the pollster asked Shiho herself first and immediately reported the results.

But even a more honest assessor would still have to admit that a long string of profanity (and multilingual profanity to boot; apparently Shiho's French classes were not going to waste) falling from her lips was not typical of her.

One such assessor was Arika Yumemiya, who had come along the path just in time to see Shiho cursing vigorously while shaking her fist at the sky.

"Senpai? Is something wrong?"

Shiho whirled around to face the speaker like she was a spinning top, a blush of mortification already starting to take hold before she realized that it was just Arika and she didn't need to defend her reputation after all. Instead, she let out a long sigh, not the first that Arika would hear from her that day.

"It's that damned bird."

"Yatagarasu?"

"Who else?" Indeed, Shiho was not on a first-name basis with many other birds.

"What's wrong, then? What did he do?" For her part, Arika had always found Yatagarasu to be a fairly well-behaved crow. For that matter, she found crows in general to be well-behaved, even the ones who had only two eyes and lacked laser breath.

"What hasn't he done?" Shiho raged. "He went rooting through the garbage dumpster behind the dorm in search of leftover French fries and ended up filthy! He perched on top of the tallest maple in the park by the chapel and sat there cawing for an hour, scaring off songbirds, and attracting so many other crows that it looked like a scene out of a Gothic novel!"

"I bet Sister Nao liked that," Arika suggested. "Though maybe Miss Alyssa found it scary since she's been dead once already?"

Gossip about the conclusion of the HiME Festival, it will be noted, had not been covered up quite so thoroughly as earlier events had, mostly because the Obsidian Prince had baited Shizuru and Kiyohime into killing off the leadership of the shady government group responsible for most of the cover-ups and memory-wiping. Virtually everyone considered this a net positive, which just went to show that even evil alien techno-magical overlords could still do the right thing some of the time, as Arika's grandmother might have said.

"But that was just the start of it!" Shiho went on. "He decided that he didn't have enough new shiny things, so he stole the left twintail clip right off of Chun Mei's head because it had those plastic jewels on it. Right in front of Tate-oniichan! It's bad enough that he picked the scarlet hussy over me, but now he thinks I can't control my bird!"

"He knows Yatagarasu, though, so I don't think he'd blame you," Arika pointed out.

Shiho let out a little sigh (proving that the narrator is not a liar), the blissful kind this time, suitable for a romantically-minded maiden, in case anyone needed a reminder that just because she had accepted reality enough to give up on Tate didn't mean that he'd been replaced in her heart.

"That's true, isn't it? Oniichan is a kind and just man." Her face grew stern again. "But that doesn't let that flying rat off the hook! Especially since he bit through the elastic and now I'm going to have to buy a senpai new hair accessories and apologize! I'm not going to take this lying down! You can bet your last yen he's going to be there bowing his head right alongside me!"

"Wow, he really has been up to a lot of trouble."

"It's like he's ignoring every bit of his training! I swear, if he doesn't get back here and behave he's going to get his flute right up his—"

For the sake of her senpai's reputation, Arika tried her best to edit out her memories of what she'd heard, which probably was not age-appropriate for her to be exposed to.

Finally, Shiho ran out of anatomically implausible suggestions and sagged, letting out another long sigh very much like her first one.

"I…I just…I know that I'm not the easiest bird mom to live with sometimes, but he's never gone completely off like this before," she almost cried.

"There, there," Arika said, patting her back. "He's a young bird, isn't he? And it's like my grandmother says, sometimes teenaged boys just need to follow the caw of the wild."

~X X X~

A/N: Some day, I will run out of awful crow puns, and you will all be free. Today is not that day. For people who are wondering who Chun Mei is, she's the background character in Mai's class whose design was reused in My-Otome for Nina Wang.