Kuma Kuma Kuma Bear (Chapter 75-260)

Chapter 239

Chapter 239 – Bear-san, Caught Red-handed by Fina

Fina stopped at the door, her cheeks puffed up. Shuri walked in behind her.
Had something happened perhaps?
I decided to first greet them before asking.

「Fina, Shuri, I’m back.」

「Welcome back, Yuna-oneechan. Wait, that’s not it! Yuna-oneechan, what is with this book?!」

For a single moment, Fina had broken into a smile, but she immediately puffed up her cheeks again. Behind her, Shuri replied with,「Welcome back, Yuna-oneechan,」but her words were drowned out by Fina’s angry voice.
Fina walked over to me and loudly placed a book on top of the table. It was a copy of the picture book I had drawn for Princess Flora. It must have been one of the copies I had given to the orphanage children as a present.

「What do you want to know about it?」

「What do I want to know about it?! This is me, isn’t it?!」

She pointed at a cartoonish girl riding a bear on the book’s cover. Oh right, I had used Fina as a reference when I had drawn the girl. It was a bit late to complain about it now, though. I was actually more surprised that it had taken Fina so long to find out about the book.

「The children asked me to read a picture book for them, so I did, and then… I saw the girl in the book…」

Fina seemed quite a bit angry. Still, if she didn’t know anything about the picture book before this, how did she find out that I was the one who drew it? I decided to ask her before proceeding with explanation.

「The story is obviously about the two of us.」

That was true…
In the first volume, I told the tale of a girl (very much like Fina) meeting Bear-san, and together they searched for medicinal herbs for the girl’s sick mother and brought them to her. I had changed the way we had met a bit to make the story more suitable for a picture book.
In the next book, the girl’s mother became more ill, so Bear-san searched deep in the forest for a precious flower that could heal her. Once Bear-san found the flower, she used it to cure the mother’s illness.
I couldn’t have possibly written that Bear-san had actually used magic to heal her, so I had changed it to a flower that could cure any illness. Still, no matter how I looked at it, the picture book was based on Fina and me, so it made sense for it to be quite obvious to Fina. The character in the story was created with her in mind even though I had put in some effort into making sure that character wasn’t a split copy of her.

「Fina, this is a fictional story and none of these characters exist in real life. See, I wrote that down right here.」

I said and pointed out a certain part on the picture book with my puppet. There, it stated:

『This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons or actual events is purely coincidental.』
I had made sure to clearly declare it was all fictional, so I decided to try and use this as an excuse to appease Fina.

「Still, this ribbon looks exactly like mine.」

Well, I had modeled the girl off of her, so of course it was.

「Also, this story is clearly about me.」

I had based it on our meeting so I couldn’t contradict that, either.

「No matter how I read it, the book talks about me.」

She declared, fully convinced.
It looked like the common legal statement from my former world had no effect on her. Also, since I had actually used her as a model for the picture book, it was hard to make up any good excuses.