Mutsumi, after coming down from her elation, brought Takebayashi to a favorite of hers, Revival cake shop. After getting slices of their cake and a few drinks to pair with them, the two of them sat down to start some chit-chat. "So...what've you been up to? How're your sisters?" Takebayashi asked, resting her elbows on the tabletop to get comfortable.

"No, no, no! You go first!" Mutsumi retorted, grinning wide as she joked around with her friend. "It's been forever since we've seen each other, you look great!" Takebayashi leaned in closer, pouting sneakily as an idea popped into her head.

"Mutsumi! I'm sorry..." She placed her hand on the redhead's shoulder, feigning heartache in an obviously forced manner. "But I don't see you like that. I have a boyf..." She was about to go into a false act before she covered her mouth with her hand.

"Oh? Oh!" Mutsumi went on the attack, smirking as the tables turned. "Fill. Me. In." Takebayashi sighed, pulling out her phone as their desserts arrived. A chocolate cake for her, paired with a glass of lemonade to cut through the richness; Mutsumi had strawberry shortcake paired with cafe au lait.

"Well, it was around last summer, and I went over to his house." She pulled up a photo of her and a boy with spikey hair and glasses.

"Sanada-kun, huh? You told me that you were childhood friends, but aren't you skipping a few steps there, Takebayashi?" Mutsumi teased, getting her cheeks pinched as punishment.

"We were bored one day, so we decided to go around the town. One thing led to another and it just sorta came out naturally. What about you, Mutsumi?" Takebayashi ended her tale somewhat anticlimactically. Mutsumi started to fidget, the topic of her love life was a strange topic to discuss with people.

"So, I told you about my sisters, right?" Mutsumi showed an old photo of the six of them, back before she started traveling. "Well, here's the six of us now." She moved over to a more recent photo, one from their trip to Kyoto a few months ago. "We all...well, most of us fell in love with the same guy."

"Yikes, sounds tough." Takebayashi clicked her tongue, slicing off a piece of her cake with her fork before pausing to think about something. "Do you know a boy named Uesugi Fuutarou?" Mutsumi's eyes widened, nearly dropping her coffee onto her lap.

"H-How?"

"I used to teach him. We used to be classmates. The rumor was that he had a crush on me, but it was kind of hard to believe." Takebayashi grinned again. "But, ever since he met one of you in Kyoto, he changed. So, was that girl in his photo... you?" She asked, dropping the playful tone to get serious. Friendly, but serious. Mutsumi shook her head, showing her the more recent photo and pointing to Yotsuba.

"Here's a picture of him. And yes, we fell in love with him." Mutsumi browsed her phone, showing her one of her many, many hidden camera shots of the tutor.

"He's really changed..." Takebayshi looked at the picture, feeling somewhat nostalgic.

"He has... But now that five of us have fallen for him, and we... started getting into fights..." Mutsumi instantly shifted the mood down a sadder path. "Hey, what do you think I should do?" She waited for an answer from Takebayashi.

"What do you mean?" With the lack of information, the black-haired girl couldn't properly form a response.

"I want him to be mine, of course, I do, but my sisters mean a lot to me. If it keeps going on as it has, we'll just get into fights. What do I do?" Mutsumi asked, waiting for an answer while also expecting Takebayashi to not give much help.

"I think it all comes down to Fuutarou, right?" She said, sipping on her lemonade. "I think the best you can do is be yourself and wait for him to decide." She ate the piece of the cake that she cut, thinking of a way to change the topic. Her eyes danced around Mutsumi, eyeing her food, her clothes, and the bags that she set down on the seat next to her. "What's in the bag?" Mutsumi visibly jumped in her seat, getting sent out of a spiral of pondering by the question. She smiled sweetly, her happiness quiet, contained, and cute.

"Oh, I just finished up a shopping trip with some... friends from my class." She struggled with one of the words in that sentence, bringing down her hand away from her face to rest both of them on her lap.

"You have friends now?" Her companion looked back at her with genuine shock. "Mutsumi, the girl who always wants to work alone, the one who intentionally acts rude toward people to not get close to them; you have friends!?"

"Watch it!" Mutsumi nearly popped a vein at her friend's repeated roasts. "But, yeah. I have friends. It feels nice." She started to look like a child, the simple joy of talking about her friends. "I... I don't really know how to describe it, it just feels really nice." Blissfully kicking her legs and bobbing her head from side to side, she started to eat her cake, her eyes shutting as her cheeks started to turn red.

"Aw, you're adorable. You're the youngest among your sisters, right? I know that you sometimes talk to me like a kid would, but I didn't expect you to act like one too."

"What does that mean?" With a drop of a hat, Mutsumi put up her cold front once more.

"I didn't mean it in a bad way." Takebayashi desperately tried to stop herself from pulling Mutsumi's cheeks again. "You look really cute."

"I thought you didn't swing that way. Already cheating on Sanada-kun, huh?" Mutsumi teased, chuckling to herself while stabbing her fork into the strawberry of her slice of cake. She swallowed her cake, but before she could eat her berry, Takebayashi pulled her cheek.

"Did you make anything new?" Halfway through their cake, their pace of consumption greatly impeded by their very animated chatter. Mutsumi looked up, bringing her hand up to her face as she tried to recall what she was tinkering on.

"I made some tracking devices and hooked it up to an app to show them on a map. Other than that, I finished that snake robot I showed you." She then paused, thinking about something for a while. "Are you busy after this? I have something I want to get."

"Oh, sure. What are you going to buy?" Takebayashi asked, already smirking.

"Something for Fuutarou-san," Mutsumi said, unembarrassed by it. It was the truth, after all. "Oh, by the way, did you see the result of the national mock exam?"

"Yeah, I saw that you were in the top ten. Fuutarou was number one, right?" The two of them finished their cake, Mutsumi paying for their food. The redhead brought Takebayashi to a smartphone store, browsing all of the latest models to pick one out for her tutor. "Well, are you going to do something with his new phone?" She asked as the two picked out the same one.

"Well, he is technically my tutor. I don't really need his help, so I'm kind of like another tutor. My sisters, on the other hand, would fail an elementary school test if it weren't for his tutilage. I'll just hook up the GPS of this phone to my app and..." She started rambling, hunching over to look at the device from multiple angles.

"Earth to Mutsumi. Come back!" Takebayashi snapped her fingers, trying to break the girl out of her daze. "Buy it first. Geez, you're hopeless." She teased, placing a hand on her hip while the other dangled down beside her. They left the store, Mutsumi carrying an additional bag in her hands. Takebayashi smiled, looking up at the sky. "We should meet up again."

"Yeah."

"Give it your all, Mutsumi. I'm rooting for you."

"Yeah. Thanks." The two of them parted ways, walking in opposite directions to get to their respective destinations.

"I'm home." Mutsumi called out from the other side of the door, her hands too full to get her keys.

"Ah, Nakano-san." A person walked up behind her, holding a slip of paper in their hand. Their landlord called out to her, handing her the paper with a frown on their face. "I'm sorry." Was all they said as they left.

Quickly skimming through the document, Mutsumi's eyes widened with every line of text that they scanned. Her mouth hung agape before her teeth bit down on her lip; the hand holding the paper tightened around the sheet, crinkling it as a single word escaped out into the ether. "Shit."

She knocked on the door, waiting as one of her sisters walked over to open it for her. "Mutsumi-chan, what have you got there?" Ichika asked, rubbing some sleep from her eyes and holding up a blanket to cover her body.

"Later! Onee-chan, you need to wake up, this is serious." Mutsumi stormed in, placing the things she bought on top of the kotatsu as she paced around the room. "What should we do? We can just go back, but then we'd have to talk to dad." She muttered, walking back and forth with her feet rhythmically banging against the floor and filling the apartment with noise.

"What are you talking about? Is something wrong?" Ichika asked before a sheet of paper was shoved into her face. She gave it a cursory glance, dropping the blanket in shock. "We have to move!" She shrieked. "I'll go look for a new place, but if I can't find one..."

"We can always go back to the suite..." Mutsumi grumbled. "But...that's our last resort. For now, let's not tell the others. They're all busy with their jobs, so asking them to look for a place might not be the best option."

"I hope we can find somewhere to go soon," Ichika said, noticing the flowers from their smell. After a brief explanation, she nodded and started looking for a vase to put them in. The others would arrive home a few hours later, gathering around the kotatsu completely unaware of what Mutsumi brought home.

"Ehem." Ichika got their attention, loudly clearing her throat while looking toward her youngest sister. "It's been some time since the school trip, and I know that you three have gotten over it, but Mutsumi has something to give the three of you." The sixth sister shuffled away, getting her things out of their hiding place. First up were the clothes, neatly wrapped up in some purple paper with a pink ribbon.

"For me?" Nino asked, tilting her head cautiously as she felt the package. The moment her fingers felt the familiar sensation of clothes inside of the paper, she breathed a sigh of relief. She looked at Mutsumi as the girl bowed her head. "I'll open it later." Nino tucked it under her arm, smiling as Mutsumi silently snuck another present from underneath the kotatsu, handing it over to Miku.

Unlike Nino, Miku opened hers right away, revealing the book that her sister got her. "Thanks." She gave a small smile, flipping through the pages and browsing the recipes that struck her fancy. Itsuki shuffled over, peeking over the third sister's shoulder and drooling at all of the pictures.

"Mine are flowers right?" Yotsuba said, stopping Mutsumi as she was halfway down the hall.

"How'd you know?" Mutsumi asked; all Yotsuba did was touch her nose. Undeterred, she grabbed the vase and presented the flowers to the sister with a green thumb. "Here..." She slowly walked toward Yotsuba, noticing that she was already beaming with joy at her new project. It was about time that this apartment had some plants.

"That reminds me, do you think the plants in my room are dead?" Yotsuba flipped a switch inside her head, suddenly worrying about something out of her control. "Ebata-san must've taken care of them, right? He must've."

That night, while the other four slept, the two sisters that stay up the latest had a chat around the kotatsu, just the two of them. "I'll ask my manager if he knows somewhere nearby, but how are we going to move our things?" Ichika said, flipping through her next script in preparation for an audition.

"We can have Ebata-san get them. But I don't really want to talk to dad, so can you do it?" Mutsumi fiddled with the phone she bought, managing to disassemble it so that she could find some room to attach her tracker. "I'll go looking for an apartment too, I can make a program to search the web for us."

"Just out of curiosity, why don't we just skip all the hard work and just move back to the penthouse?" The eldest asked, setting down her papers with a yawn. "I mean, we still have the keys, so all we have to do is move our stuff."

Mutsumi paused for a moment, imagining the conversation they would have with the doctor; the conversation she would have with the doctor. "... goodnight." She said, putting the phone back together and stuffing back into the box. She quickly set up her futon, burying herself under the covers as something returned to her; something that she hasn't had in a few months.

"Mutsumi-kun."