Side Story:
Children
“Meow.”
As always, Cricket Eater’s voice came loudly from outside the door.
He could, of course, come in through any open window as he pleased, but when the windows were shut, he would have to plead, “Let me in,” from the other side.
“Just a moment…”
Marcela paused in her studies and stood to open the door.
Cricket Eater was the cat that Adele had been taking care of.
No, more accurately, he was the cat that Adele had “also” been taking care of. The cat who wandered from room to room in the girls’ dormitory.
However, the cat had taken a particular interest in Adele, and was most often in Adele’s room whenever she was present. When he wasn’t wandering from room to room to beg for food, of course.
And so, the female students all referred to the creature as “the cat Adele looks after,” which is why, after she left, Marcela had been the one to take over that duty… In fact, it had nothing to do with what the humans wanted. It was merely that the cat decided that Marcela’s room would be his next abode.
As she opened the door, Cricket Eater slipped into the room, his tail held aloft.
And then, as Marcela tried to shut the door…
One more shape slipped in afterward. A tiny black cat, with its tail held aloft also.
“Huh…?”
Slip, slip, slip, slip.
One after another, four more of them slipped in.
There were five little black cats in total, all the spitting image of Cricket Eater.
“Whaaaaaaaat?!”
Marcela, flustered, grabbed Cricket Eater with both hands, and lifted him up high.
When she looked hard at the cat, she saw…
“So you are a boy, after all… Then what happened to their mother?!”
Realizing that the cat couldn’t be expected to understand what she was saying, Marcela questioned him with a sort of gestured pantomime. She grabbed up one of the kittens and made a motion like birthing the kitten and nursing it, and then conveyed her question to the cat with her body language: Where did that other cat go?
If anyone else were to have seen this, Marcela would have been quite embarrassed, but thankfully, she was not thinking of this at the moment.
Perhaps Marcela’s painstaking actions were exceedingly clear to Cricket Eater, for it seemed that the cat had understood the question. Cricket Eater’s response to the question was this:
He averted his gaze from Marcela, and simply hung his head.
“Huh…?”
Marcela started at Cricket Eater, perplexed.
“You were abandoned…? And the kids were thrown out with you?”
Cricket Eater looked as though he was about to cry.
“This is a problem… There are six of you. I can’t possibly keep taking care of you in secret like this. Thankfully, it looks like they’re no longer nursing, but unlike you, an adult, they still have to eat special food. Also, sir, will you be able to look after these children the whole time while I’m away at class? If you take your eyes off of them for even a moment… This is hopeless, isn’t it? You’re always wandering around to hither and yon…”
Marcela, hopeless, called for help.
Soon, Monika and Aureana arrived.
“Let’s try and get them adopted.” Aureana, the first to speak, offered a solution.
“Hm?”
“Normally it’s cruel to separate them from their parents, but their mother abandoned them, and their father… he is the way he is. For these children, this is a much better option…”
Glancing over at Cricket Eater, Marcela and Monika silently nodded.
“O-of course! If it is the child of the cat that Miss Adele was caring for, then I shall gladly take on its care!”
It was far too easy.
The kittens were almost devilishly cute. Plus, if they were “the children of the cat Miss Adele took care of,” she could explain it to her father by playing the “when we find Miss Adele” card. There was a chance he might even let her keep them all herself. The third princess was more than capable of caring for a pet on her own, and this was a chance she was absolutely unwilling to pass up.
With that in mind, the third princess, Morena, happily accepted the five kittens into her home.
The three girls were pleased.
“It’s according to plan…”
Just as Morena had schemed, she was allowed to take care of the kittens herself. As the king saw it, when Adele returned, it might win her favor, if only a little, and give them something to discuss.
Morena was fond of the kittens and spoiled them with all her heart.
Then, because the court ladies misheard Morena calling them “the messenger’s cats,” and assumed she was saying “the messenger cats,” as in, “a cat who is a messenger,” other people began to treat them with especially high regard.
And so, this was the result.
After some time, Morena emerged from her kitten-filled reverie and appeared once more at Marcela’s door.
“Please save me…”
Her hair was disheveled, her arms covered in scratches, and five kittens were hanging from her back, swinging from their dug-in claws.
“I’ve failed to discipline them…”
“Ah…”
And so, the Wonder Trio and Cricket Eater, along with the other female students who had cared for cats at home, ran an Etiquette School for Kittens for ten days, after which they returned the cats to the princess’s hands.
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