First and Last
A Rozen Maiden fanfic by Aondehafka
Disclaimer: the characters and concepts of Rozen Maiden are owned by Peach Pit, not me. This story is based on the anime, not the manga.
Warning: This is set between chapters 8 and 9 of my first Rozen Maiden story, Atmung, with the final scene taking place somewhat after the ending of that story, and it also uses a plot point that I revealed in detail in Megu and Suigin Tou's Excellent Adventures. It's not necessary to read MaSTEA for this one to make sense, but Atmung is required reading.
There were eighteen rooms at Furinkan High School currently designated for storage. Aside from that broad similarity, these rooms differed in just about every respect. Size, contents, remaining free space... no two were even close to identical. However, there was one characteristic shared by seventeen of the rooms—in addition to their more useful contents, all held a liberal amount of dust.
In the eighteenth room, light flared in a long, vertically-placed pane of glass.
Out of the light stepped a tall young man with messy black hair, brown eyes behind glasses, and an unenthusiastic expression. He was wearing a gray shirt and blue pants—which, as they didn't have an obscene message and wouldn't hinder him in a fight, meant he was in full compliance with the school dress code—and carried an elegant, crimson-gowned doll in the crook of his arm.
He took a few deep breaths as if to fortify himself, then looked down at her, his expression softening a bit. "Ready for our first day here, Shinku?"
The doll in question, meanwhile, was looking around with her own unenthusiastic expression. She didn't answer right away.
"Shinku?" he prompted after a few moments.
"This room is clean and orderly enough now, I suppose," the Rozen Maiden said, with the air of one making a great concession. "But it is still too cluttered. We need to move some of these things to other rooms."
Jun let out a groan. "You know, we spent four days over the last two weeks cleaning this place to match your standards."
"Just because something is a good start, does not mean it is good enough."
"But we can't just take stuff out of here and drop it somewhere else! If it was stored here, that's where people are going to look for it when they want it again."
Shinku sniffed disdainfully. "I highly doubt that anyone is ever going to come looking for something stored here. With all the dust that was here when we found the portal-glass, it must have been decades since this room was last used."
"As if you've spent enough time around dust to be able to estimate that accurately," Jun muttered under his breath.
"What was that?"
"Nothing in particular..."
"In any case, we will be starting all our days at Furinkan by arriving at this room. That needs to be as pleasant an experience as possible, in order to set a positive tone for the day."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Jun said, giving up on the argument for now and moving toward the door.
"We say 'yes' once, do we not?" Shinku asked coolly.
"No, you say it once. I say it anywhere between one and five times." He mumbled figures under his breath for a moment, then said, "I think our combined average works out to be about 3.14159—"
Shinku tossed her head, causing a hair tassel to fly up and smack him on the ear. "Try to remember that we are not in a comedy sketch, Jun."
Resisting that straight line was harder than all the cleaning he'd done in the past two weeks, but resist it he did. Instead, he paused with his hand on the doorknob and looked seriously down at Shinku. "It's going to be okay, you know," he said.
The Fifth Doll blinked. "I... what? Jun, what did you mean by that?"
"I know I'm not the only one who's nervous about this," Jun said. "But we're in it together, and we're going to do all right. This is nothing compared to what we've already been through."
Shinku ducked her head, her cheeks flushing through pink to a color not far removed from her gown. "How could you tell?" she asked in a small voice.
He smiled back at her. "It's years past the time when you seriously acted this much like a cool, elegant, aristocratic lady. When you go at it this hard nowadays, I know it's a mask for something else."
"I see." She took a deep breath. "And you are right. You and I have had a few scattershot introductions to people in the last two weeks, but today is where I commit to being an open, obvious presence among humans. It is... difficult to prepare myself when I don't know what to expect."
"I know the feeling," he admitted. "But we'll be all right."
"Yes... we will." She smiled at him. "Very well then, let us go."
"All right." Jun opened the door and the two of them exited to the hall beyond, heading for his assigned homeroom.
"We are still going to remove the excess things from that room," Shinku added a moment later.
"Yeah, yeah..."
With their N-field shortcut it took them all of two minutes to get from the Sakurada household to Furinkan, but Jun and Shinku had still left early. The storeroom was already clean enough for Jun, but he at least agreed with one sentiment Shinku had just expressed—starting their school days on a low note was nothing he wanted. And so, rather than waiting until the last minute, the two of them were among the first students to arrive, and when they got to his assigned homeroom on the fourth floor they found an empty room waiting for them.
As a result, he and Shinku had their choice of seats. Jun claimed one in a prime location: middle of the far left column, right next to a window. He cracked it open, admitting a pleasant breeze. Shinku settled down on the left edge of his desk, closing her eyes and enjoying the last few peaceful moments before their term at Furinkan officially began.
It didn't take long for other students to start trickling in. When they did, Jun's column was filled before any other was even halfway taken. A clump of people who'd come in together settled down in front of him, claiming the two seats ahead of him in his row and three of the four seats diagonally forward and to his right. Judging by the lively conversation the teens were carrying on, all of them had known each other prior to this. Jun watched for a few moments, wondering whether he should interrupt to introduce himself to the guy who'd settled in front of him, or wait on trying to socialize until someone else sat down nearby.
He looked away from that group and scanned around the room, experiencing a minor jolt when he realized there was already someone seated behind him. He had no idea when the pale skinned, red-eyed girl with short blue hair had arrived, but she was already in her seat with her books neatly put away. She was gazing out the window with a fixed, none-too-happy look on her face. Once again Jun hesitated awkwardly, trying to muster the savoir faire and social grace to introduce himself.
That only lasted a moment, though. That was how long it took to notice the pen in the girl's hand wasn't just moving idly around in circles, but he needed several long seconds more to process what he actually was seeing. Without looking at what she was doing, the girl was drawing a highly-detailed, well-rendered picture on her desktop, one which showed a cringing, faceless bureaucrat as he cowered beneath a menacing giant. At first the thing looked to be robotic in nature, but as Jun watched a few more details get filled in he saw that beneath the metal of the giant lay twisted flesh.
'She's got talent, but if she ever does a manga I don't think I'd want to read it. No way would it have a happy ending.' He shivered and looked away, unfortunately just in time to miss seeing the girl label the bureaucrat as 'Author of the Excess in Education Act'. Had he caught that detail, he undoubtedly would have felt a little more at ease with the idea of speaking to her. As it was, he just took another look around the room, hoping to have at least one approachable person sit nearby.
A few moments later, it looked as if his hopes would bear fruit. By now he had seen that most people here seemed to know a few of their fellow classmates already. However, if that was true of the boy who'd just come through the door, there was no sign of it. He walked slowly through the room, looking around but not greeting anyone. Nor had anyone given any indication of recognizing him by the time he reached the seat to Jun's and Shinku's right.
"Hello," Jun said firmly, pushing aside any uncertainty. "My name's Jun Sakurada."
"Nice to meet you, Sakurada," the other boy said, an instant before Shinku could speak up with her own introduction. "I'm Yoichi Nakamura. And you're in my seat."
"What?" Jun asked blankly. "What are you talking about? There's no assigned seats here."
"No, there's not," Yoichi agreed. "But I did my homework on this place, and I found out that you can settle all kinds of differences of opinion with an honorable challenge. You've got one of the best seats in the room, there's nothing nearly that good left for me, and so I'm going to have to challenge you for it."
For a moment Jun eyed the other incredulously. Then he spared a glance for Shinku, wondering why she had yet to speak up. It wasn't as if she was pretending to be a real doll or anything; she was staring at Yoichi with a hooded expression that no-one would mistake for the carved blankness of a lifeless object. Still, she didn't seem eager to interrupt; maybe she wanted him to handle this himself for whatever reason. "Let me see if I've got this straight," he asked. "You're going to start a fight in your first five minutes at your new school?"
"Who said anything about a fight?" the other shot back with a friendly grin. "I'm talking about arm-wrestling."
'Okay, that means it's not going to be any contest at all,' Jun reflected. 'Not with how much I can boost my own strength, anyway.' Aloud, he said, "And I'm supposed to give up my seat if I lose. What do you give me if I win?"
Yoichi inclined his head in a gesture of respect. "So you do have an idea of how things are supposed to work around here. Good! Let's see... I'll introduce you to my sister Ayemi. She's pretty cute, and she won't be here at Furinkan until next year. So getting to meet her now is definitely a good opportunity, Sakurada-san."
"Ohh-kay," Jun said blankly, a little too surprised by this to notice Shinku's reaction. The Fifth Doll's stare had shifted now into an outright glare. "You know... I really don't know how things work around here. Can I turn down the challenge?" At this, Yoichi's expression shifted into a disapproving, vaguely contemptuous look. Before he could say anything, Jun continued, "Arm-wrestling isn't a fair contest. I'm a lot stronger than I look."
"What makes you think you're the only one?" Yoichi shot back, amiable once more. "And I would certainly hope you are."
"Huh?"
"Sakurada-san, you're a guy who's brought a pretty little dolly with him to high school. Unless our homeroom teacher's a lady and that's a gift for her, you'd better be a heck of a lot stronger than you look." Yoichi grinned at him. "Come to think of it, though, Ayemi likes useless but elegant things like that. Maybe I'll introduce you to her either way—WHOAH!"
There had been enough time for Jun to process the phrase 'useless but elegant' and realize what was about to happen, but not enough for him to come up with any ideas for damage control. As such, he was relieved when Shinku only summoned a whirling cloud of rose petals that surrounded the gaping Yoichi and yanked him off his feet into the air.
"My name is Shinku, the proud Fifth Doll of Rozen Maiden," the doll in question said coldly, now standing to her full height and glaring up at her prisoner. "You would have to challenge both Jun and myself for our seat, and I believe common courtesy says that ladies go before gentlemen." Jun's relief dimmed noticeably as she produced a new stream of crimson petals. These flew to the window, plastered themselves around the glass, then pushed outward. With a muted crackle the glass was removed from the window, leaving a gap more than large enough for the unfortunate Yoichi to float through head-first.
Once he was completely outside the building Shinku rotated him further, until he was upside down and facing back at her. "You have lost your challenge for Jun's and my seat," she pronounced. "I could drop you now and at the very least you would be knocked unconscious."
"You could drop me now and I'd twist upright and make a perfect two-point landing," Yoichi retorted. "But I'm guessing you could do much worse things to me right now than drop me."
Shinku gave him a nod.
"All right," he said with a sigh. "I lost. I admit it."
"Very well then." Shinku spun him back upright, drew him back inside, and released him. Jun noticed that she didn't return Yoichi all the way to true vertical; he was still about ten degrees away from it when the petals flew away from him and out the window.
It didn't seem to bother him, though. He flexed in midair and landed easily on his feet, then offered a rueful grin that was clearly meant to include both Maiden and medium. Shinku, looking more than a little self-conscious now, turned away to restore the glass she'd broken. "No hard feelings, I hope?" Jun asked, figuring it was better to extend the olive branch himself rather than wait for Shinku to do so.
"Absolutely not," Yoichi said firmly. "You guys are interesting, and interesting people are the only ones worth getting to know. I'll take that seat next to you, and be glad of it."
"Is too too late for that."
Yoichi blinked and, along with Jun and Shinku, turned to face that previously-empty seat. It was occupied now, by a girl. Like Shinku, her hair was yellow and her nationality was not Japanese, but that was where the similarities ended. Her eyes were a deep violet and her hair was one shade darker than freshly churned butter. She wore a Chinese-style dress over a figure developed enough that Jun had to wonder whether this might be her second or third attempt at her Freshman year.
The unnamed Chinese girl offered them all a grin, an expression which seemed to become a bit predatory when it reached Yoichi. "Is you going to challenge me now? I will not settle for something silly like arm-wrestle."
Unlike the newcomer, Yoichi's face was now flat and uninviting. "No thanks," he said shortly. "I make it a policy to stay away from Amazon girls and challenges."
The girl's eyes narrowed. "Why you say that, exactly?"
"Cause I can be friends with all kinds of people. But as far as romance goes, my mind is one hundred percent made up—I want a normal girl, not a fighter." Yoichi turned away from the fuming Amazon and offered Jun and Shinku a wave. "Catch you later, Sakurada, Shinku the proud fifth doll of resin maiden." He walked off, taking a seat toward the middle of the classroom.
"Hmmph," the girl said, then muttered something under her breath in Mandarin. Later, Shinku would inform Jun that it had been, "He's lucky I am an Amazon. Japanese fighting girls would beat him bloody for that. Attitudes like that are why they have to accept sharing the rest of the strong men, and they'll be bitching about that for another decade."
At the moment, though, all he could do was wonder what the girl had said, and why Shinku was boggling at her. "Um... so, if you didn't hear before, I'm Jun Sakurada," he said hesitantly after her grumbling wound to a close. "And this is Shinku."
"My name is Tisane," she replied. "Glad to meet you, glad to sit beside interesting person." Raising her voice, she added, "Also glad not to have to beat up coward to make that happen."
Yoichi, currently listening to the conversation of a couple of people in front of him, gave an ostentatious yawn but didn't otherwise reply.
As the minutes slipped by, Shinku fought a steadily-growing sense of unreality. As she had told Jun earlier, she hadn't known what to expect now that she had finally quit hiding to interact with the world. In her darker moments, she had imagined Jun's classmates recoiling in fear or disgust. At best she had expected to be the center of attention, a subject of awe and disbelief as the students realized what a marvel was in their midst. She'd even spent time planning what she might say to explain herself and her nature, pondering how much information to give and how much to withhold for now.
Since Yoichi took his seat, she'd received exactly five curious glances, all from people too far away to easily speak to her.
All around her conversation swirled like the currents of a river. Tisane had looked like she wanted to talk more with them, but her attention had been hijacked by the group in the block ahead of them. Shinku was beginning to get the impression that—love them or hate them—the Chinese Amazons were fairly notorious, and at least these five boys approved wholeheartedly of having one in their class.
Jun, meanwhile, was carrying on an awkward exchange with the girl seated behind them. The ice had been broken when he glanced back at her drawing and saw just who the doomed bureaucrat was supposed to be. At first Shinku had joined in the conversation, but two things had quickly become apparent. One, Rei's social skills were only a little better than Jun's had been in his hermit days. And two, although she did her meager best not to show it, the girl really didn't like dolls.
And so, with as much good grace as she could muster, Shinku had left the two of them to flounder through their learning experience. Meanwhile she sat quietly, all but unnoticed, and wondered what sort of lives these young men and women had lived. Had they somehow all blinked at the same moment and missed the part where she manifested supernatural abilities to put Yoichi in his place?
Or perhaps, she thought with a start, it might be something simpler. Had it been a mistake to position herself so that Jun was between her and the rest of the class? Perhaps if she moved from the left side of his desk to the right, she wouldn't seem so unapproachable. Now what would be a good excuse to reposition herself like that?
"Oops." Beside her, Tisane had dropped a notebook onto the floor.
"I'll get that!"
It was not the Fifth Doll who spoke. In the time it took her to realize an opportunity had appeared, the two boys seated in front of her and Tisane had already blurred into motion... an act which ended with them slamming their foreheads together. One of them managed to grab the notebook and hand it back anyway, massaging his bruised forehead with his free hand. Shinku heaved a quiet sigh.
Before she could come up with any new ideas, the issue was rendered moot. The door swung open one last time, admitting the homeroom teacher. He was a Japanese man of medium height, more muscular than Shinku expected was normal for an educator. However, considering what the Excess in Education Act had made of Furinkan, she found herself worrying whether he might still be too delicate to look out for himself.
Then she got a closer look at his clothes. At first glance they just seemed like a standard medium-quality suit, but a more intense scrutiny revealed the existence of numerous hidden Velcro seams, positioned at each place that would naturally be a point of constriction if the man had to move too fast or forcefully. With such an arrangement, if he did move like that the seams would rip open and allow free movement without actually damaging the clothing. And as she peered closer yet, she realized that the suit was constructed of some kind of fabric she'd never seen before, something that she sensed was more durable than ordinary cloth.
From her time at Jun's old school Shinku had learned of the standard classroom practice of the students standing, bowing to the teacher, and then sitting before things officially began. Here, apparently, they weren't going to bother with such things, as the teacher merely wrote his name on the board and said a few words of introduction.
"...And I hope we'll all have a pleasant, constructive, character-building year together," the sensei said. He cracked a faint, dry smile. "I suppose I should be relieved to only see one violation of the rules so far. Shinku-san, please find a seat."
"Eh?" The Fifth Doll took a second to realize that line had been addressed to her, and then several more seconds to try and parse the meaning of it. "What do you mean?"
"One student to a desk," the teacher replied.
"I understand that concept well enough," she replied. "But I fail to see how it is being violated here. Jun is the student, and this is his desk."
The faint smile was no more than a memory now. "Young lady, I read your file and know this is your first official school experience. And I won't pretend that Furinkan High doesn't play fast and loose with a large number of the rules. But pretending that you don't even know you are officially a student?"
"But I'm not!" the Fifth Doll shot back, now so flustered that the protest came out as more squawk than statement. As that fact registered with her, she stopped, took a breath, then said more calmly, "Jun received a large packet of paperwork in the mail, containing the details of his enrollment. If I were officially registered as a student, should I not also have received one?"
Hina Ichigo hummed cheerfully as she put the finishing touches on the drawing. She sat back and looked proudly at it for a few moments, then took a fresh sheet of paper from the stack nearby and began work on a new picture.
Suisei Seki chose that moment to wander by and pay a little more lip service to her duty of supervising the smallest Rozen Maiden. She stared at the drawings that had already been completed, then at the one Hina Ichigo was currently working on. "Why so many pictures of Shinku?" she asked at last, sounding more than a little annoyed at that fact.
"Cause her name's all over the other side of these pieces of paper. See?" Hina Ichigo said, holding up the pages in question.
"She's right, Sensei," Jun spoke up. "I was the only one to get anything from Furinkan."
"I see. There must have been a mistake made somewhere, Shinku-san, but as I said I've read your file and I can assure you that you are officially enrolled in our Freshman class. You need to go to the office now and pick up a copy of your papers."
"...Very well then," the Fifth Doll replied, more than a little discomfited at this outcome but not seeing any protest she could make.
"When you come back, please choose one of the remaining empty seats," the teacher added.
For a long, silent moment Shinku's gaze roamed around the room, from the teacher, to the three as-yet-unclaimed seats—the closest of which was four rows away—to the curvy, exotic, extroverted girl seated next to Jun. Her lips pressed together until her mouth was little more than a thin, brief line. She gave a curt nod, jumped down from Jun's desk to the floor, and strode to the door with as much dignity as she could muster.
To Jun's credit, he felt no desire to snicker at any part of this spectacle, neither Shinku's progress through the forest of desks and students that towered over her, nor the moment when she reached the door and realized the hook of her cane would just slip off its round knob. He bit down on the urge to leave his seat and open the door for her, hoping that one of the students seated next to it would be friendly enough to offer.
One of them actually was moving to do just that when Shinku took matters into her own hands. A swirl of crimson petals wrapped around the doorknob, struggled for a moment with the slippery metal, then succeeded in twisting it far enough for the latch to disengage. Head held high, Shinku marched proudly out, pulling the door firmly shut behind her.
"She not realize she was student... does she even know where office is?" Tisane asked Jun in an amused whisper.
It had only taken Shinku a few steps to realize that she didn't know where to go. It was true that she and Jun had received a tour of the school two weeks earlier courtesy of the Saotomes, but Shinku had only listened to it with half an ear. Most of her attention had been focused on senses that normal humans didn't possess, trying to analyze the various residual energies that swirled through Furinkan and pick out something familiar. Finding the portal glass had been all she really cared about; if the upperclassmen had mentioned the location of the principal's office, that fact had sailed right over her head.
Still, she had only needed a moment's thought to determine how to find it. She simply walked down the hall until she found a room that wasn't empty and didn't have a class taking place for her to interrupt, then went inside and asked for directions.
Fortunately she'd found herself in the ladies' restroom, rather than the men's.
Shinku tried her best to focus on that one semi-bright spot as she marched through the halls to her destination, but it did little to lighten her mood. She fumed quietly as she thought back to the girl she'd found there, staring down at her with mild curiosity, ignoring the question she'd asked to instead give her directions to some place called Hot Springs of the Cursed Doll.
Still, a second, arctically-polite repetition of her question had gotten results, even if the girl had looked none too pleased at her tone and had swept out of the room without saying anything other than the bare minimum to get Shinku to her goal. 'Perhaps later I will regret not being more polite,' the Fifth Doll mused as she headed down the hall. 'But I doubt it.'
Five hallways and three staircases later, Shinku found herself at the door leading to the Principal's office... or at least, she was where she had been told to go. But she was beginning to suspect that the other girl might have been less than honest. The door in front of her was, to put it mildly, bizarre. It was made from some wood Shinku had never seen before—coconut palm, according to Holie—with a handle crafted from a large seashell. Letters were burned black into the door, a bizarre mix of Japanese and English that read 'The Big Kahuna Kuno Atsuna'.
Even though she remembered the name 'Kuno' from Jun's school correspondence, several long moments passed before Shinku decided to enter. Then it took several long moments more before she could figure out how to operate the handle without risking damage to the beautiful shell. With that task accomplished, she braced herself, opened the door, and stepped through.
Braced or not, she was still taken aback at the layout of the 'office'. The room was at ground level, but its ceiling was so far overhead that she thought it must reach to the roof of the five-story building. The walls and ceiling were sky blue, painted with some very realistic clouds which almost seemed to be slowly drifting along. The light was bright and warm, and although Shinku knew it was artificial rather than actual sunlight, her senses couldn't tell the difference. She couldn't determine whether the tile of the floor outside continued in here; whatever material this ground was made of, it was covered with billows and drifts of sugary white sand. On the whole, she thought probably the tile ended at the door, since if it continued into this room that would make it even harder to explain the grove of flourishing palm trees.
She couldn't see any sign of the ocean, but there was a distinct scent of it on the breeze. She could also hear the faint rumble of surf, now softer, now louder than the sigh of the wind through the palms. There was another sound as well, one which was obviously man-made rather than a very well-designed fake; from somewhere on the other side of the palm trees came the strains of ukulele music, played with enthusiasm and skill. The Fifth Doll stared around, taking in the whole 'Principal Kuno's office' experience, and could only wonder one thing.
'How much of the school's budget was expended on this one room?'
As she stood there, dazed and unmoving, the music came to an end. From behind the trees ambled the man who'd played it, at least if the ukulele in his arm was any indication. He wore dark sunglasses on his head, flip-flops on his feet, blue drawstring shorts, and a floral-print shirt louder than Hina Ichigo. He was deeply tanned and a bit more muscular than Jun's homeroom teacher, and rising out of his black hair was what looked to Shinku's disbelieving eyes to be a tiny palm tree.
Sensing her mistress's distress, Holie whispered that it wasn't actually a living tree, but rather a very convincing replica. Just like the rest of the room, Shinku thought with a quiet snort.
She didn't have much time to feel relieved, though, as the man had set down the ukulele and crossed the distance separating them, and was now staring down at her. Abruptly, he spoke. "School's not been in session fifteen minutes yet, an' already we got somebody get sent for some discipline? An' it's not dat bad kiekie Ranma? Hoo boy, dis gonna' be a fun year, I can tell." He grinned at her, his teeth startlingly white beneath his tan.
The expression actually helped settle Shinku's nerves a bit. She didn't think there were many principals who'd react so amiably to the kind of situation he thought he was facing. "I am here to get some missing paperwork," she said politely. "Not for any discipline."
"Dat's what you think, li'l waihine," the principal shot back. "Maybe you not know it, but you standin' there in violation of the most important rule we got here at Furinkan High."
Shinku blinked. "I- I am? What rule?"
In one smooth motion the man reached down and lifted her bonnet off her head. She blinked again, mystified as to how he'd done that without untying or breaking the cords that should have held it on. With his free hand, he held up a pair of barber's clippers. "Simple. Boys get de buzz cuts, girls get de bowl cuts." He grinned once more, turned on the clippers, and reached for her hair.
An instant later one long tassel of that hair had wrapped around his arm. An instant after that, he was sailing through the air courtesy of the most indignant head-toss Shinku had executed in all the centuries of her existence. His flight was short, sending him headfirst into one sand dune and plowing all the way through it, to stop halfway through the next dune in line.
"Such effrontery! How dare you!" Shinku demanded, as if the man's head wasn't currently buried under three feet of sand and there was any way he could hear her. He'd dropped her bonnet during his flight, and she now stalked over to retrieve it and restore it to its rightful place, giving her hair a few indignant pats even though the principal hadn't managed to disarrange it.
Of course the clippers wouldn't have actually cut her hair, she thought, trying to use the fact to calm herself down. It didn't work. No matter that the Rozen Maidens were immune to normal damage when they weren't in close proximity to each other and eligible for the Alice Game. No matter that his clippers would have shredded themselves rather than parting even one strand of her golden locks. It was the principle of the matter!
The sand shifted, falling away on all sides to allow Principal Kuno to sit up. He'd lost his sunglasses, but there wasn't so much as a leaf out of place on his Big Island Coconut Palm Bonsai Honor Topknot. "Ohhh..." he groaned. "You such a tiny li'l waihine, Big Kahuna really misjudged your reach."
"What right did you thi—imagine you had to do something like that?!" Shinku demanded.
"Big Kahuna's school, Big Kahuna's rules," the man shot back, wearing a smirk that looked frankly out of place on someone who'd just eaten so much sand.
"And do you seriously expect me to sit still and accept such treatment?"
"It'd make a nice change," the principal muttered. Louder, he said, "You want yo' paperwork or not, li'l waihine?"
The Fifth Doll of Rozen Maiden smiled back at him as sweetly as she could. "Are you saying that if I do not submit, I will no longer be a student here? Because I think that whoever wrote the Excess in Education Act might have something to say about that."
Shinku didn't know what person or persons that had been, of course. This was basically just a shot in the dark. The only reason she'd even thought to bring it up was the reminder Rei's drawing had afforded a few minutes ago. Nevertheless, she noted with great interest the way Principal Kuno paled beneath his tan.
"Okay, okay, you got me." He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped sweat off his brow, then reached down into the sand and pulled out his sunglasses. "Shouldn've tried dat bluff, I guess. You showin' you definitely got what it takes to be a student at dis fine institution." Recovering a little of his poise along with his shades, he added, "Once you got a proper haircut, anyway."
"Is that right," Shinku murmured, her eyes narrowed and a faint grin curling her lips. His constant harping on the subject had given her a wonderful, awful idea. "Does it really mean that much to you, to give me your preferred haircut?"
"You got dat right!"
"But..." The Fifth Doll glanced modestly away. "But how can you ask me to accept such ugliness? I may not be a normal girl, but I still want to look pretty. How could you take that away?"
"What you sayin', waihine? You not look bad after I get done wit' you. That just crazy talk!"
"It most certainly is not. A bowl cut would look horrible on me!"
"Trust da Big Kahuna, Miss Shinku. I give you a haircut for de ages, one that shine like noonday sun over de Big Island!" The principal was practically vibrating in his joy at this point.
"I... I don't know... It seems like such an awful risk," the Fifth Doll said as demurely as she could. "How can you ask me to believe that? My hair doesn't grow like a human's; if you did give me such a style I would be stuck with it forever no matter what it looked like!"
"You... you mean dat, li'l waihine?" the principal asked, his voice hushed and awestruck. "After I give you a bowl cut it never gonna grow back out?"
"Then you see my dilemma, surely?" Shinku asked briskly. She'd exhausted her ability to seem tremulous and timid, but it was okay—after that last revelation, she could tell that the man was hooked beyond any hope of squirming free. There was no chance in the world he would turn down her proposal. "Still, perhaps I could be persuaded to a gamble... or it might be more appropriate to call it a challenge..."
"Just you name it!"
"I will sit down unresisting while you use those clippers. If you really can give me a bowl cut that looks good on me, well and good. But if you can't give me one that you yourself admit is beautiful, you will allow me to make one change to the school of my choosing." Not bad for only an hour into her first day, Shinku thought smugly. Jun had been far too skeptical of her ability to reorder things around here. Now, which change should she make first, replacing the pineapple mascot with a rose or altering the lunch hour to match Detective Kun-Kun...
"Dat all you want?" Principal Kuno asked eagerly. "You got it! Right dis way, Miss Shinku!"
She followed him behind the grove of palm trees, to find a desk and chair. Settling herself on the desk put her at just the right height for Principal Kuno to play the role of barber. Shinku removed her bonnet and looked away, her eyes resting on the painted horizon and a triumphant smirk on her lips, waiting for the moment when the man's haircutting tool choked to death on her indestructible locks.
With his own smile, as unseen by Shinku as hers was by him, Principal Kuno raised the clippers high and charged them with chi.
'What kind of worksheet is this anyway?' Jun wondered as he stared down at the paper before him. ' 'In a kidnapping scenario would you rather be A) the rescuer B) the rescuee C) the kidnapper D) whichever one you weren't in the last two kidnappings'?!' It wasn't even the strangest question he'd encountered yet, and he was only halfway through the test. The surreal nature of the sheet was beginning to make his brain spin. It was distracting enough to push most thoughts of how Shinku was doing to the back of his mind.
Then the ring on his finger blazed like a supernova, and all those thoughts and concerns came roaring back.
"Shinku!" he yelled, bolting upright out of his desk and looking around, as if that was going to reveal her.
As the test was intended to provide psychological data on the students and Jun was unwittingly revealing some things that it wouldn't, the teacher didn't immediately reprimand him. Instead he opened a notebook and jotted down, 'Sakurada—probably closer to admitting the truth to himself than originally estimated'.
With that done, he opened his mouth to instruct Jun to sit down and stop distracting the other students, wondering whether the boy would argue or just ignore him and race out of the classroom. Before he could say anything, though, a rumbling boom vibrated through the air. Roughly a third of the class had enough experience with explosive property damage to realize it had come from something breaking upward through the floor two stories below them and half the building's length away.
A second later came another, louder, closer boom—this one through the third story floor. Another boom, and whatever was breaking through the building was now on their level of the building. Five more crashes, this time through walls rather than floors and ceilings, and then every student of homeroom 224-D was once more present and accounted for.
Shinku was little more than a streak of crimson as she rocketed through the air, barely stopping in time to avoid sending her medium through the window. "JUN!" she wailed, clutching desperately at him.
"Sh-Shinku?!" he gasped, staring down at her in disbelief. Her dress was rather grimy with fragments of plaster, tile, wood, and spackle (understandable considering the barriers she'd blasted through in her frantic flight to him), but what would have been shocking in other circumstances didn't even register now. One of the hands that clenched so tightly at his shirt held something else as well—the bonnet that usually rested on top of her head.
With that not in in its usual place, there was nothing to hide the horrible truth. Shinku's long golden locks were gone, replaced by a bowl cut that clashed horribly with the general elegance Rozen had given his dolls. She let out another wail and buried her face in his shirt.
Tisane made a tsking sound. "Shinku, you supposed to go to main office, not stupid Principal Kuno," she chided.
If Shinku heard this, she gave no sign of it. Jun certainly wasn't paying attention to the Amazon, instead focusing on the Fifth Doll with everything he had. "She... she'll never be able to smack me with her hair again?" he whispered, fortunately low enough that none of his fellow students caught it over the sound of Shinku's sobs. "No... NO!"
As if on instinct one hand came up to Shinku's back, softly rubbing with a calm, soothing motion. The other hand came down onto her ravaged hair, gently stroking it. With each stroke the strands grew again. It took only seconds for him to fully restore Shinku's hair, though it was nearly a minute longer before the return of the familiar weight registered with her. Her sobs trailed away to sniffles, her grip loosened on his shirt, and finally she dared to lean back, open her eyes, and look down. When she saw that her hair was back to its rightful length, she gave a deep, extremely relieved sigh. She looked up again, meeting Jun's gaze as a warm, trembling smile broke out on her lips.
"Wow, Jun," Tisane interjected, not even bother to lower her voice this time. "If you can undo buzz cuts and bowl cuts, you is going to be really popular here." A murmur of agreement followed her.
"Unfortunately it is a service that applies only to me," Shinku said coolly.
"Selfish," the Amazon-with-a-death-wish pronounced, sticking her tongue out for good measure.
At the front of the room, the teacher made another note: 'Tisane—student apparently has no concept of learning from others' mistakes instead of making them all herself.'
"Jun was able to restore my hair because of who he is and what I am. It is not something that he can do for humans," Shinku said, in a tone that might have left frost on the windowpanes had she not been facing away from them. "Now, if you will please excuse me..." She didn't wait for an acknowledgement before turning away from Tisane. Brushing the grime off her dress and pulling replacement ribbons from its folds, she returned her hair to its usual style.
"So..." Jun said. "Sensei, is the main office or the principal's office where Shinku needs to go?"
"It would have been the main office," the man said with a sigh. "But if you went to the principal to get your paperwork, then by now he will have already had it sent to him, and you'll need to go back there."
"I see," the Fifth Doll said with a small, grim smile.
"Do you? Well, good luck," the man said dubiously. "Please hurry up and finish your business there, Shinku-san."
"I will be glad to do that," she pronounced. "But before I go, let us get one other task out of the way."
Surprising exactly no-one, the Rozen Maiden then turned to face Tisane with a glare. "You have my apologies, but if I must sit in a different seat from Jun, then it will be that one. I would prefer to do this without a challenge."
"Not on you life!" Tisane shot back with a taunting smile, jumping to her feet and pulling a chained flail out of its hiding place in her hair. Then she hesitated as something occurred to her. "You is alive in first place, right?... AIEEEE!"
An exciting few seconds later the room was littered with countless rose petals, Shinku stood triumphantly on the desk next to Jun's, and a battered, dazed, googly-eyed Tisane had been dumped in the farthest available free spot. The Fifth Doll held the pose for a moment, then summoned her power again, disposing of the leftover rose petals and also fixing the hole in the wall. Her ability to repair damage so quickly and completely drew stares from everyone, even the third of the class that so far hadn't batted an eye at her ability to dish it out.
Unaware that she had just sown the seeds for months of being nagged to join the Maintenance Club, Shinku took a deep breath, growled something in German, and left the classroom once more.
"What did she say, Sakurada-san?" Rei asked.
"I don't speak German," Jun replied. "But I'm guessing something along the lines of 'No more Miss Nice Doll'."
Thirty minutes passed before the door to homeroom 224-D opened again.
In those thirty minutes, Jun had learned a surprising number of things. For one, even though he'd received his schedule of classes in the paperwork mailed to him, today none of those classes would take place. The entire day would be spent in an extended homeroom period, getting various things out of the way for the year.
For another thing, seat challenges were officially sanctioned, explained to everyone by their sensei shortly after Shinku left on her mission of revenge, and there was no need to limit said challenges to something as innocuous as arm-wrestling. Matches could only take place on this first day, or within a transfer student's first two homeroom periods. He'd fought off several more classmates who viewed his seat as prime real estate, and although they hadn't given him much more trouble than Yoichi had Shinku, he wasn't able to match the sheer spectacle of the Fifth Doll's attacks. As a result, Jun suspected he hadn't seen the last of those challenges.
Between dealing with his own fights and watching the ones targeting other kids in his row—and where Rei had come up with an attack like that, he had no idea. An energy projection of interlocking pink paisleys?—Jun hadn't had too much time to worry about Shinku. For most of the half-hour he'd felt a slow, steady drain from his ring, but that was more reassuring than anything. Whatever situation the Rozen Maiden was in, it wasn't one that she thought called for extreme measures in fight or flight.
Thus, when the door swung open and Shinku zipped through, he was shocked to see her hair once again in a bowl-cut.
The Fifth Doll flew across the room to sit on his desk, a grimace on her face that was half-satisfied, half-disgusted. "Jun, if you would be so kind...?"
"Shinku, what happened?" he asked, even as one hand stroked gently through her hair to regrow it. "How could he beat you again?"
Shinku said nothing, even as her hair reached its customary length. Jun frowned. "Shinku? What—?"
Crimson flared as petals appeared in the crown of Shinku's hair, twisting into ties for her hair as they materialized. This technique allowed her to restore her hairstyle near-instantly rather than the moments it usually took... which in turn allowed her to smack Jun upside the head with a restored hair-tassel before too much time had passed since his impudence. "For your information, I did not lose," she said coolly. "I accomplished much of what I intended, and when I return I shall achieve the rest."
This particular lock-lashing hadn't been any more painful than usual, but—falling as it did under the category of 'biting the hand that feeds you'—Jun found it irritating. "So this time you managed to lull him into a false sense of security?" he asked.
Shinku was not amused. "I pummeled him senseless, assuming that he had any sense to begin with, and left him tied up on the floor of his own office." She sniffed. "It was not the first time I have wished Father made me able to conjure the rose's thorned vines as well as its blossoms."
Jun shivered, and pushed back thoughts of how much worse his early days with the Maiden might have gone. "Okay... so why did you let him get you with the haircut again?"
"He had so much help this time that I was forced to prioritize. I crippled a few of his subordinates, but I couldn't bring myself to keep doing it." Shinku paused sadistically, waiting for her medium to shrink back in horror. He just stared steadily back at her, one eyebrow raised as if to say, 'Nice try but I'm not about to freak out without a little more detail.' Unsure whether she ought to be annoyed or happy, the Fifth Doll continued. "They were only trained crustaceons, but still. With that many I couldn't defend myself, strike back at him, keep him from retreating, and avoid crushing crabs and lobsters. I decided to take the path of least bloodshed."
"So as long as you weren't trying to stop his attacks, you were able to get in your own against him," Jun summed up. "Did he try anything offensive other than the haircut strikes?"
"No, he did not. And it appears as if you expected that, Jun. Why is that?"
He nodded to the boy at the desk in front of him, who had started the day on the other side of the classroom but had gotten lucky in his challenge against the seat's original claimant. The boy was talking to a few others in front of and around him, getting to know his new seatmates-for-the-moment. "I talked to Kado-san there for a minute or two, and got some information about the Principal. Like, how he's crazy about haircuts and that even if he tries to damage someone the normal way in a fight, it would only be to slow them down or stop them so he could manage to cut their hair."
"I see." Shinku's lips curled into a smile. "Did he tell you the man would break down in tears when he saw me return with my hair back to its rightful length?"
"Nope. So that's what happened when you went back this last time, huh?"
"Yes. His first reaction was bleak despair. He pushed that away to find new strength in his outrage, that a haircut he had thought would last forever was gone without a trace." Shinku's expression twisted from smile to smirk. "I rather doubt he will be able to manage that shift from despair again, once I return in a few moments. Tied up, beaten, and robbed of any hint of his triumph... it should be easy for me to extract my just reward from him."
"Good luck with that," said Genryu Kado, having just disengaged from the conversation he'd been involved in and turned around to face them. "If you get back there and find him still tied up, it'll be a miracle. My big bro' told me that over the past three years, the guy's gotten insanely skilled at escaping from ropes."
"But I did not use ropes," Shinku said smugly, holding out one hand and summoning a few score of crimson petals. They twisted together to form a line that frankly looked a lot less comfortable than ordinary rope, due to the petal tips that stuck out like thorns.
"Huh. Well, that might work," allowed Genryu. He reached out to poke at the rose-cord. "Although these things sure don't look that strong. But even if the petals won't tear, they don't look like they've fused or even tied into knots. What's keeping them together?"
"My own energies and will."
"That's all? What if the Principal flares his chi?"
Shinku cocked her head to one side, giving him a quizzical expression. "Chi? What is that?"
In addition to an older brother, Genryu had three younger sisters, one of them of an age to stand about as tall as Shinku. Other than that there was little resemblance, but at this last question he still reacted instinctively to give her a sad, gentle, utterly condescending pat on the head. "You'll find out soon enough," he said. "But maybe you ought to take Sakurada-san here with you as backup, when you go to finish things with the Principal."
The Fifth Doll tossed her head indignantly, then clapped her bonnet back into place. "I am quite capable of handling him by myself. I shall do no such thing!"
"I still say you didn't need to come with me," Shinku grumbled, trying hard not to look as happy about Jun's presence as she felt.
"And I still say I'm coming anyway," he said firmly, staring down at the doll in the crook of his arm. "If nothing's wrong and he's still tied up, we could make him watch as I grow a couple dozen yards of your hair. Let him know that if he keeps on giving you grief, we can make long blonde wigs available for any girl he gets with a haircut."
She beamed back at him, highly pleased at this suggestion (though mildly disturbed at how quickly her medium seemed to be adapting to Furinkan). "An excellent suggestion, Jun! I don't think Kun-Kun himself could have done better."
Jun was quiet in the wake of this extravagant praise as they made their way to the closest stairwell. As they neared it, he stopped and asked, "It's kind of late to be asking... but are you really okay with all this? Sure you won't have regrets later?"
"What do you mean? What would I regret?"
"It's been a long time since you told off Suigin Tou for one particular thing," he returned. "You told her Rozen hadn't made you guys to bring pain or harm to humans. Fighting like this... beating up that girl, even if she was asking for it... I just want to make sure you aren't going to hate yourself tomorrow."
"I see." Shinku was quiet for a moment, then said, "I'll admit it's a fine line to walk, but I am firmly on the correct side. Do you remember the first strange thing we saw when we visited Furinkan?"
"Saotome-san fighting that guy? I'm not likely to forget."
"From everything I had understood up to then, it shouldn't have been possible. Not even close. For a human to deal and withstand such levels of punishment..." Shinku shrugged, her expression shifting for a moment into something a bit helpless. "I still don't know how humans can reach such a level on their own... but the fact is that I can clearly sense extraordinary things in all our fellow students. Some of these qualities I can understand now, and for some I'll need more experience to do that."
"So you could say for sure that you wouldn't do any real harm to Tisane," Jun said.
"That is correct," Shinku replied coolly, her eyes narrowing just a bit. "In point of fact, the impact of the petals almost did not affect her at all. It was the dizziness from spinning around so quickly that incapacitated her, and that has certainly worn off by now. So you don't need to worry about her."
He snorted. "Like I already said, I was worrying about you, and whether you were going to feel awful tomorrow. I know you would, if you accidentally did something permanent."
"Jun..." she said, gazing up at him with eyes now wide open.
"Of course, now that I think back over the years... I should know you don't have a problem with handing out temporary pain."
In one smooth motion Shinku slipped out of his arm, dropped like an express elevator to land on his foot with both of hers, then rebounded up into his arm before it could do more than begin to spasm at the pain. Jun was left hopping down the hall on one foot, holding the other with his left hand while still supporting his passenger. The Fifth Doll snorted disparagingly. "Honestly, Jun. Sometimes I wonder if you have latent masochistic tendenCIIEES!"
She'd been staring up at him instead of watching where they were going. The tumble down the stairs caught Maiden and medium equally off-guard. Of course, one of them was immune to normal damage, and the other could strengthen himself enough to achieve a reasonable facsimile thereof, even after being caught by surprise. But that surprise was debilitating enough that the shield was the only kind of recovery he managed. The tumble took them all the way down to the ground floor, with Jun's hand ending up somewhere that would normally have earned him a slap.
This time, though, Shinku opted not to punish the transgression. She simply pulled quickly but casually away before he could notice, then stood up and brushed off her dress. Jun's recovery took longer—like Tisane, the impacts hadn't done much, but the dizziness was another story. Eventually, though, he got back to his feet, grumbled a few choice phrases about stairway designs that made it possible to fall all the way down instead of ending up on a landing one floor lower, and picked Shinku up again. "So, which way do we go now?"
"Left down this hallway."
Jun ambled off in the direction indicated, moving noticeably slower than he had at the beginning of the journey. When Shinku commented on this, he grimaced and admitted, "My confidence is getting a little shaky here. All the stuff that's happened so far, first to you and now to both of us... if I were superstitious, I'd think it was an omen that if we kept up this approach we'd be asking for even worse trouble."
"What a good thing it is you aren't superstitious, then," the Fifth Doll said in a tone that brooked no argument.
He snorted, then mumbled, "Or it's a good thing I've got those latent masochistic tendencies." Shinku ignored the comment.
Not much else was said on the way to the principal's office. On reaching it, they stopped for a moment. The door hung ominously open, showing the knife-edged boundary across which sand mysteriously never spilled... and revealing that the principal wasn't where Shinku had left him. There were plenty of individual rose petals, but if they had ever been ropes there was no sign of that now.
Although Principal Kuno was out of sight, he was obviously still present. The strains of ukulele music floated on the breeze, louder and bouncier and more playful than Shinku had previously heard and not sounding a bit Hawaiian. In fact, she recognized the tune as one that was currently popular with Japanese girls in the ten-to-thirteen-year range. Why would the academia nut play such a thing, she wondered for a moment, then shrugged it off as unimportant. "Let us go, Jun," she proclaimed, her blue eyes gleaming as she stared forward past the office in front of her and into the triumphant future.
"What I wouldn't give for a stocking cap right now," Jun muttered glumly, rubbing his free hand over the top of his head. It was clear he wasn't actually bald, but the half-millimeter of hair that Principal Kuno's clippers had left him wasn't much comfort.
"I hardly think it is necessary," Shinku pronounced. "There's such a dark cloud of gloom and failure hanging over you, it's almost impossible to see you at all. Instead of complaining, why don't you focus on recovering your strength."
With some effort, he turned his head to look directly at the Rozen Maiden standing beside him. With his position—collapsed in the hallway outside the principal's office, the wall at his back the only thing keeping him even partially upright—their eyes were more or less level. Jun had to admit, the bowl cut she wore for the third time now probably didn't look any better than his own hair (or lack thereof). "I'll fix you up again as soon as I can," he groaned.
"It... wasn't that," she said, looking away. "I suppose I can endure this for an hour or a day if need be. But if you go back to the classroom with no strength left, what will you do when someone challenges you for your seat?"
"Shinku..." He swallowed, then said, "You're worried about me?"
"I'm worried about a lot of things," the Fifth Doll said briskly. "For one, are there many teachers loyal to that lunatic principal who have inexplicable mystic powers?"
"Not sure I'd say Hinako-sensei was all that loyal to him," Jun replied. "Honestly, it seemed more like she was calling the shots than he was."
"He did cave in immediately when she demanded he turn over my paperwork," Shinku noted. "And during our battle, when I pointed out to him that she didn't have a bowl cut, he just laughed and said, 'Li'l waihine, de Big Kahuna be crazy like a fox, not stupid.'"
Her medium heaved a sigh. "Shinku, I hate to say it, but... we're in over our heads." When she didn't say anything in response, he clarified, "Both of us." Still nothing. "Even taking into account your ability to fly."
"Enough, Jun! I get the point!" she growled. "I can certainly recognize when it is time to retreat, regroup, and get more information."
"Such as how on earth Hinako-sensei was able to switch between being a little kid and a full-grown woman," he mused.
"I would think that her ability to drain energy both from you and even myself was more important," Shinku said with a sniff and a glare. She and Jun had gotten separated early on in the combat, with him facing Hinako-sensei while Shinku attempted to take the principal down one last time. It had been an unpleasant surprise to learn that he hadn't gone all-out in their first fight, and even less pleasant to learn that she could feel it through the Rose Bond when Hinako caught Jun in a draining attack. At the moment she could move around easily enough, but flying or producing rose petals was beyond her.
"You didn't hear what she was saying while I was fighting her," he said. 'If you can even call it a fight. What the heck was I supposed to do? I sure couldn't punch or kick a little kid, and it didn't get any better when she grew up. Maybe Shinku does have a point... if I could have done my own energy draining, that would have solved a lot of problems.' He grimaced. 'Although not if it somehow turned me into an adult woman.'
"What did she say?" Shinku asked with a frown.
"Well, she seemed to be focused on different things. When she was an adult she was just chewing me out about being disruptive, talking back to the authorities, stuff like that. But when she was a kid she was yelling about how boys shouldn't play with dolls. You'd probably have heard her yourself if there hadn't been all those explosions going on from your half of the room."
"Actually I think I did hear some of it," the Fifth Doll said. "It almost sounded more like she was jealous of you, rather than saying it wasn't something a boy should do at all."
"What, you think she wants to get you for herself?" Jun chuckled. "Well, if she tries it, just give her your usual treatment for a few days and the problem will go away on its own—OW OW OW!"
At least Hinako's energy drain had one positive effect, Shinku thought. With Jun having no strength left, it was easy to twist him up into a human pretzel.
Once Jun unwound himself they sat quietly for another five minutes. Eventually the young Maestro broke the silence. "So you agree not to fight with the principal any further for now?"
"...All right," she said reluctantly. "And I shall even give up entirely on one of the reasons I had for doing so. Altering the lunch hour to match Detective Kun-Kun would disrupt the lives of all the students for no real benefit to them. It would be kinder and much more reasonable to simply record the episodes. That way we can watch them at our leisure, together with everyone at home."
'And that way she can enjoy throwing her weight around by making everyone else wait for us to get home before watching,' Jun thought, allowing himself a quick grin that it was fortunate Shinku didn't see.
"But mark my words, Jun," the Rozen Maiden continued. "I do not care how long it takes—I will get that mascot changed from a pineapple to a rose."
The approaching dawn was a slowly brightening smear on the horizon. All was quiet in the courtyard of Furinkan High and the surrounding streets, despite the vast crowd of students gathered there. It was as if the world were holding its breath.
The silence was broken just as the first rays of sunlight struck the top of the flagpole. The cascading notes of a trumpet split the air, in a song as magnificent as anything anyone there had ever heard. The music held sorrow and joy... welcome and farewell... the gentle pain of nostalgia and the hope of new birth. Everyone present strained to listen, and even the students who'd been grumpiest at being forced to get up before dawn found their irritation washing away.
The trumpeter finished his piece at the exact moment that the flag atop the pole became fully illuminated by sunlight. He lowered his trumpet, bowed his head, and spoke the name of the piece he'd written for this occasion. "Aloha."
It was now the student president's turn. He stepped forward and a large portion of those present tensed, knowing from personal experience just how long-winded this boy could be. But he merely spoke a few quiet words about the importance of perseverence, then called for the final actors of the scene to take the stage.
Out of the many, many students and other spectators watching solemnly as the old pineapple-themed flag was lowered for the last time, one Noriko Kawachi felt the gravitas of the moment especially keenly. This was only her first year at Furinkan High, and she was proud to have it starting out on such an auspicious note.
As the new flag—white background emblazoned with an elegant crimson rose—was raised into place, the student body let out a long, echoing sigh. Noriko could tell that some of them welcomed the change, some were none too happy, and some were just recovering their earlier annoyance at getting up before the sun. As for her, though, there were precious few places she'd rather have been just now than here.
Noriko turned to the person nearest her, a lady with long golden locks and eyes as blue as Noriko's own, who looked a little too old to be a student, a little too young to be a teacher, wearing a beautiful dress and a smile even brighter than her hair. Standing beside her with his arm around her shoulders was a tall man with disorderly black hair, his own age about as hard to pin down as his companion's. Noriko moved fast, wanting to be the first to say what she was about to, and knowing that there were plenty of other people nearby who would beat her to the punch if she didn't act now.
"Congratulations, Grandma," she said, grabbing Shinku's hand and giving it a squeeze. "You've been working toward this for a long time, haven't you?"
Author's notes
To answer Shinku's question from scene four, not a yen of the school's budget was spent on the principal's office. Kuno Sr. paid for it all out of pocket. The Kuno clan are filthy rich, for anyone reading this who isn't familiar with Ranma . And if anyone wondered why the students didn't care about Shinku's repair abilities being used to fix the glass of a window but marveled when she undid the hole she'd blasted in the wall, the answer to that is in Megu and Suigin Tou's Excellent Adventures with the character of Hiroto Kuppohari (or rather, his fighting style).