It’s Working!! episode 7, and Otoo returns, this time bringing a new employee, Aoi Yamada. Aoi arrives with a sad and sorrowful tale, but Souta sees through her story in an instant. Aoi proceeds to cause havoc everywhere, almost causing Yachiyo to attack Oto again, out manipulating Hiroomi, and telling Yachiyo that Jun likes her.

Well, we had a nice thing going in the restaurant, and except for the few usual disturbances, pretty much things were going well and no one was really rocking the boat.

Than Aoi arrived and totally threw everything off. Of course, the biggest thing she did was let the cat out of the bag about Jun liking Yachiyo, which is, of course,  just irritating Jun even more now, but seems to have thrown Yachiyo into full out confusion. This could possibly be the start of Yachiyo perhaps seeing a world with more than just Kyouko in it.  I’ve kind of thought that Yachiyo and Jun might eventually get together, but didn’t really know how they would get from where they were to that point.  This certainly opens the door pretty wide for that to happen now.

Also, while Souta might be the weirdest one at the restaurant, he at least appears to be the smartest one, seeing right through Aoi’s story. However, since everyone else there bought her sob story, he ended up having to play along, at least while they were around. But it’s pretty clear that he nailed it when he said she had simply run away from home, and that Yamada isn’t really her last name.

Having said that, I’m with Souta in wondering what the whole story is. She may have a legitimate reason for running away (though, considering the type of story this is, it could be a really dumb reason too). The only person who might have the ability to find out is Hiroomi, though it seems that Aoi has perhaps found a way to counter him, at least for the moment.  However, given that Souta is the only one who really suspects something, I’m guessing he’ll be the one to find out sooner or later, probably because Aoi messes up.

Once again, we saw very little Poplar in this episode. We really, really need a good Poplar-centric episode here soon. If one didn’t know better, one would think that Inami was the centerpiece female in this story, given how much we’ve seen of her (though we didn’t see much in this episode). However, in theory, the story is supposed to center, partly, around Poplar, which makes it even stranger that we see so little of her.