Let's Play Rich Man-Poor Man!

As the class organizes a rice ball stall for the school culture festival, the debate over flavors turns rowdy. Yuki backs Tohru's three-flavor suggestion, and when Minami and Mai mock it as revolting, Arisa cows them into silence with a lead pipe. Kyo's pitch for battle rice balls is shot down by everyone, and the group's instant embrace of Yuki's dud-flavor idea right afterward stings him. A sudden swarm of cats piling onto him seals his humiliation, and he storms off to the roof.

Tohru finds him there still buried in cats and notes how fond of him they seem. He explains that every zodiac member draws their own animal near. When she asks whether he will rejoin the festival prep, he brushes it off, saying they hardly need him with Yuki around, and admits he envies how easily talent seems to come to his rival, martial arts included, a path Kyo walked first only to be overtaken.

Back in class, Tohru proposes a round of Rich Man-Poor Man, and Kyo caves once Arisa goads him, the loser bound to handle cleanup. Yuki, meanwhile, is gently rejecting a girl's confession, catching her face to stop an embrace as she tells him he is kind yet walled off, too rarefied for ordinary girls. He looks in on Kyo enjoying the card game with classmates but chooses not to join, and a later exchange with Tohru sours into another clash with the cleanup-bound Kyo. Recalling that Kyo longs to defeat Yuki and win a place in the zodiac, Tohru is delighted by the thought yet tries to break up the fight, only for Kyo's attack to end with a kick to the chin.

Leaving work, Tohru tumbles down some steps while lost in thoughts of Yuki, and a laughing blond child approaches. Spotting her name in a notebook, he asks if she is Tohru Honda, rattles off German, and plants a kiss on her before she flusters, gathers her things, and hurries away, dropping a festival flyer. She then runs into Yuki, who offers to see her home.

On the walk a drunk man shoves Tohru into Yuki and triggers his transformation. Yuki confides that his childhood home felt like a cage, and even free of the main house he still feels shut off and unable to mix with people the way the more sociable Kyo does, which leads Tohru to realize the two resent each other out of mutual envy. At home he shelters his secret vegetable garden from an incoming typhoon, and Tohru, echoing her mother's lesson to trust rather than doubt, likens his kindness to a candle that makes her smile, prompting him to promise he will join the card game next time and work on opening up. The next day, watching Kyo craft his own rice ball, she muses that talents may sit on a person's back like a plum on a rice ball, unseen by its owner. The episode takes its title from one of Tohru's lines and gives both Momiji and Kagura their first appearances, adapting chapters 8 and 4.