Mei Mei gets to know the island and its people better.

Ikuto and the girls go for a swim at the beach. Much swimsuit fanservice. Ikuto: "Are you really 13?" lol.

Machi and her broom fetish. Machi and Ayane's great-aunt mentioned.

Mei Mei gets unwanted panda-love. The Lord of the North wants his title back. He and Ikuto fight and Ikuto wins by nosebleed.

Ayane plays one too many tricks on Suzu and the latter enters Neko-ken mode.

Slice-of-life, followed by Rin getting possessed by a ghost.

The phoenix story; cute and heart-warming.

Ayane wants a shikigami as well, and gets Ten Ten Daikon, lol.

Ayane vs Suzu in trying to please Ikuto. Flat vs Big, which do you like better!? Ikuto accidentally touches Suzu's chest and Suzu's heart goes into overdrive and she faints.

Machi vs Tanuki. Machi keeps losing, and gets really worked up. Lol.

Ayane vs Tanuki. Ayane keeps winning, and Machi gets worked up over this. Lol x 2.

Yukino in bloomers and chikage in lab coat.

Mei Mei tries to get over her stage fright and succeeds until Ikuto shows up to watch and her heart goes all dokidoki.

Rin exploring her more feminine side.

Ayane and Rin in dominatrix clothing.

Some sort of plot or something to get Suzu to go to school. I don't really understand fully myself. Ikuto chases Suzu around. (Only one school on the island and the kids attend like once a month or something. The teachers there are Kunai, Chikage, and Machi)

Gym class. Kunai's love-love-atmosphere over Toketa-san. Ikuto sucks at sports. Suzu gets extra math lessons.

Machi tries out Mei Mei's bear suit.

Ikuto and the crew visit the hot springs resort. Meet Sakuya...... combat android? In Meiji era? Hmmmmm. Ikuto versus this masked dude, who turns out to be Chikage's mom in disguise playing tricks on the whole bunch.

Omake is into the past, and Yukino's mom, Kagami, is just like Yukino, lol.

The great Shinobu introductory arc.

More Toono-san kappa action.

Some Suzu jealousy development.

Shinobu and Ikuto go help out Rin and crew in building a house. Ikuto and the other guys manage to finish the job, despite Rin and Shinobu's repeated attempts to destroy the construction, lol.

Shinobu, Ikuto, and Suzu go fishing. More cute Shinobu and her attempts to score points with her shishou.

Machi and her bottomless appetite.

Michiru's first appearance. Obaa-san (that grandmother) announces another "get the groom" kind of contest, and the whole island leaps into action. Apparently, from what I can gather, Ikuto has to defeat the four lords of the island, and the girls have to defeat each other and grab certain articles of clothing or stuff off of each other. If Ikuto beats the lords first, he gets to choose who he gets to go to the hot springs with. If a girl wins first, she gets Ikuto and gets to go to the hot springs with him.

The female cast form teams and go at each other and the rest of the island's girls, except for Machi who goes solo and is discreetly following Ikuto around and spying on the others with her miko magic. Points for Ayane and her utterly WTF-inducing shikigami magic.

Meanwhile Ikuto beats the Lord of the East and the South and gets their pendants.

Continues the contest arc. The female cast finally collide and try to take each other's stuff, but all get accidentally electrocuted in a hotspring bath by Toono-san.

Ikuto fights and beats the Lord of the North, and wakes up with his head in Machi's lap. Some chatting, and then he goes back to sleep.

Ikuto wakes up high in the sky as Machi's shikigami is carrying them to what I think is that tree everyone ended up at in that very first get the groom contest from volume 1.

Ikuto finds out the last lord, the lord of the west, is actually Kaarage-san (the chicken) who's been within him all this time.

Ikuto and Kaarage go off to the side to start their duel while all the island's girls start congregating at the tree where Machi's waiting.

The main course starts. Ikuto and Kaarage start fighting. Machi wipes out all of the unnamed girls of the island with a single blast. The rest of the female cast have teamed up together and arrive at the tree, and then all rush at Machi. Cue awesome wtfpwnage as Machi wipes the floor with the rest of the entire female cast all at the same time.

Kaarage adds an additional stake to the battle. If Ikuto loses, he has to leave Suzu's house.

Ikuto manages to beat Kaarage. Thanks to Ten Ten Daikon, Ayane and Suzu, the last female cast members standing against Machi, manage to beat Machi.

Machi and Ayane try to grab the rest of the girls' stuff and win the match, but Michiru conveniently falls out of the tree branch she was sleeping on and knocks the two sisters out. Suzu grabs the prizes but turns out Ikuto had already beaten Kaarage-san.

The end of the volume, Ikuto chooses Suzu and the two go on the private hot spring vacation. They have some close doki-doki moments broken up by Sakuya walking in on them. Meanwhile, the rest of the cast is trying to sneak in, but Sakuya beats them all back with no effort (making her currently the strongest female castmember in the story), but the group finally sneaks in.

At the end Ikuto and Suzu are about to have a hot spring bath together but the rest of the cast members jump in. Cue some stuff about Ikuto being happy about everyone or something, and then huge nosebleed geyser due to the rest of the castmembers being all naked.

This would be a great place for the anime to end, if it ever gets that far.

The volume's not over though. One Ayane chapter and her relationship with Monjiro and their past. Extremely touching, for me, and totally humanizes Ayane for me, if you can call it that.

A Mei Mei chapter, where she does some crazy contortionist stuff and....well..... it has to be seen rather than told:


http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/8...0154ed0.th.jpg

Michiru's formal introductory chapter. She's had earlier appearances but this is where her character really gets her screentime. Michiru is a sixteen-year old Hanyou, a cross between a human and a mythical folklore creature, in this case a Yuki-onna, "Snow Woman" I guess, which makes her basically half-human, half-yuki-onna. Her heritage makes her extremely weak against the heat and the summer but she is totally fine with the cold, and can walk around the island's freezing mountain tops with practically almost nothing on. She fell in love with Ikuto when he first washed up. You don't see it in volume 1 and episode 1, but she helped give Ikuto lunch at that time. He was all staring at her for some reason and she went all doki-doki from that.

Here, Ikuto gets captured by a giant snowman and gets taken to Michiru's mother, who lives in the snowy mountain tops. Suzu goes off to rescue him, almost gets knocked off by the snowman and Michiru comes to the rescue. The two go inside the igloo Michiru's mother lives in and find her just chatting with Ikuto (namely trying to convince the guy that she's a yuki-onna and him totally not believing it).

We find out Ikuto's tendency to stare at Michiru was because she resembled his sister. He wonders why he didn't realize that earlier and the reason is because of:

http://img209.imageshack.us/img209/9...0193om0.th.jpg
*BOING*

Omake: Something about some really hot-looking nine-tailed kitsune. Mmmmmm, reminds me of Ran, but with long hair. Mmmmmm x 2

First, some Shinobu and Mei Mei interaction. Turns out during one of her wanderings, Mei Mei came in and ate some of Shinobu's fish. Shinobu recalls this and chases Mei Mei around, but they soon make up. Cue Shinobu trying to be contortionist like Mei Mei, with funny results.

Next, Machi's shikigami suddenly fall ill. They look through all these records for a solution but to no avail. Their last resort is to head to a small, secluded mini-island a short distance from the main island and find that great-aunt that I mentioned far above. Machi heads off towards the island.

Meanwhile Ikuto, Ayane, and Suzu are off in the wild fishing or something and someone tries to steal their lunch. Ikuto grabs her and turns out it's Machi with white hair.

While Machi is off and now in the process of rowing a boat across the sea and towards the secluded island, Ikuto and the bunch find out that this Machi look-alike is actually Ayane and Machi's great-aunt. She's sixty-four years old and looks exactly like a white-haired version of Machi, which makes her yet another example of the island's total rape of the age-to-looks ratio. Talking about looking far younge than you actually are, sheeesh.

During their conversation we get some interesting hints that their great-aunt (I can't get what her name is) was the one who stopped a giant tsunami from wiping out the village about twelve years ago, the same one that the island lost all their men in.

Anyway, great-aunt has her shikigami find Machi and bring her to them, boat and all. The two meet and there's this funny "huh!?" moment.

Great-aunt is looking over Machi's shikigami, and Machi begs her to do something, and she promises to do anything in return. Great-aunt goes, "Anything?" and Machi agrees.

Great-aunt takes Machi to her home and some conversation goes on and then she challenges Machi to a duel.

I'm missing the chapter right after that one so I don't know the conclusion of the duel. Geh.

The next chapter is Rin's mother, grandmother, and her sempais are all out of commission because a bridge broke, sending them into the cold river. Rin offers to fix the bridge, and gets Ikuto, Suzu, Mikoto, and Shinobu to help out. More Mikoto and Ikuto interaction, with Shinobu punishing Mikoto in return. Anyway, they get the job done but everyone else did the actual work while all Rin did was yell at them and stuff.

Rin's mother finds out and takes out poor apprentice carpenter to her doom, mwahahahaha.