Mikio’s supervisor asked her, every once in a grand while, whether or not the time and effort and money she spent setting up these elaborate lesson plans for teeny-tiny groups of students was actually
worth it. Couldn’t she be more efficient, more effective, teaching a larger group of students more routinely?
To this question Mikio only cheerfully replied:
"Mimi-chan’s family and friends are all hundreds and hundred of miles away, so this is the funnest thing Mimi-chan can do!” And really, what was anyone supposed to say to that?
All in all it took over a week to recruit helpers and get permission to Use A Condemned Building For Purposes of Educating The Nation’s Youth (a real box to check on a form!) and sweet-talk the gate guards into looking after a group of poor sweet baby students for all of a few hours. When the foretold day finally arrived, Mikio was vibrating with excitement from the top of her head to the tip of her tail.
Gathering up her students like little baby kittens, she took the boys to the western gate and made them all line up in as neat a row as she could manage, and looked them in the eye one by one.
"Nao-nya,” she said sternly to Naoya.
"O-hagi,” to Habiki.
"Pokeori,” to Shiori.
"Your extremely important life-or-death mission today is to help these gate guards!!” Mikio gestured grandly to the gatehouse, where both of the shinobi on duty looked like they would rather be truly anywhere else, where students were not present.
"It is super duper critical that every single person who comes in and out of that gate gets checked in and checked out!! You will be here for four hours while you learn how to work as a really cool team and then I will come back to collect you!! Are your instructions clear!!” Azuki sat primly at Mikio’s side, and was looking at her as if the girl had suddenly grown a second head. Maru was mysteriously not present—he hadn’t been at the academy when they’d left, and even now at the gate the younger puma was nowhere in sight.
