Oh, the misery (Everybody wants to be your enemy)

Nicky's first impression of Japan was that it was an incredibly lonely country to live in. Beneath the sparkling view of Tokyo's first-world skyscraper cities and its rich cultural heritage and its cuisine and always-polite people was a sense of quiet urban desperation that Nicky wasn't unfamiliar with. She was a suburban kid that would never get used to London proper, and Tokyo, despite its cultural differences, reflected so many of the lonely, desperate things she had internalized about the big city. And normally, she would be fine living with that for a short bit. After all, big things happened in the big city. She wasn't going to grow as a person and a competitor keeping to the outskirts of where the action lay. She needed to get out of her comfort zone sooner rather than later.

It was just... it grew especially lonely on holidays. No family, no real friends, few acquaintances, and a language barrier a mile wide separating her and the locals. The last few months in Japan had not been good for her social life.

And it was especially hard on New Year's Eve.

Still, the wonders of technology meant she still had some remote company on what should have been the most festive of days.

"I'm eating fine, Mummy." Nicky said to the blank zoom screen of her laptop. Mummy never did get her camera fixed. She was in one of the booked rec rooms of the AFW Apartment complex, sprawled across the sofa and staring at the ceiling. Her little apartment was getting a little too depressing. She needed new walls to stare at between training sessions. "Food's alright just gotten a bit tired of fish every second meal."

"You've always been a picky eater, Nicolette." Nicky missed home. Even her mum's constant nagging was soothing at this point. "Look at you now. Stick-thin! All skin and bones! Have you been throwing out half of your plate every meal."

"I'm not losing weight."

"Bullocks."

"I'm factually not losing weight. I weigh myself for a living."

"Lots of self-deception here. You can lie to me but you can't lie to the mirror."

"Definitely not to the weighing scale."

"I knew we should have packed you more quality mash on your way there. The oriental food clearly isn't-"

"We can't use that word anymore, mummy. It's very improper."

"You called that Italian lass-" Frankly, she didn't. She said A LOT of things across 20 minutes of boxing and mutual soccer ball kicking. It hardly narrowed it down.

"I know what I called her."

"Glass houses and all that innit?"

"It was the heat of the moment and I was defending British pride!"

"Didn't do the best job, Nicolette."

"Didn't do the worst one either." Okay, she did not want to spend NYE reminiscing about her greatest meme-worthy blunders. "How's daddy?"

"He's got a deployment."

"Nick? Nico?"

"All working."

"Daddy still doesn't want to talk to me, does he?"

A brief pause. She didn't need a visual to see her mother's hesitation. "He's stubborn but he'll come around."

"Will he?" A flash of bitterness passed through her "He never has."

"Look, we're always kept the military in the family. He just needs some time to-"

"Not be a bleedin' tyrant and micromanage my whole sodding life? I think not."

"Be fair to your father."

"That was the fair assessment. You don't want to hear the unfair one."

"Look-"

"'You'll love Her Majesty's Armed Forces, Nicolette. Serving's in our blood, Nicolette. I'm gonna disown you if you do anything else, Nicolette'. Doesn't sound like he gave me a lot of options, did he?"

"Let's not talk about this right now. It's a downer on the mood."

"Yeah, he is."

"What about the-" A pause. "The italian?"

"Well, you sure know how to shift from one nasty subject to another."

"No, I think the italian lass just popped in through the door-"

The speed at which Nicky shot up from the sofa would put Sonic the Hedgehog to shame. The head turn as she faced the door would have ripped the neck off an owl, but her mum wasn't fibbing. Entering through the door was Le Duce herself: Adele Monstrosorry. The demon of Anzio. Her sworn nemesis. Someone she knew would actually kill someone to save a packet of pasta careening off Tokyo harbor - but that was what she was here for, wasn't she? It dawned on her that her rec room was the only one with a functioning oven for her evil pasta ways.

Didn't matter. She booked it. It was hers until midnight.

"Call you later. Love you." she managed to blurt out before slamming down the laptop. "Oi!" She shouted out at the invading pasta abomination, pointing an accusing finger at her. "This my room. Private property might not mean anything in Anzio but it does in this here apartment, so beat it."

Adele just wanted some ravioli. Was that too much to ask?

Somber was a halfway decent way to describe her mood for the past week. The spirit of joy and giving cast its spell far and wide over the Far East Nation, filling hearts with splendor and warmth. The atmosphere weighed her limbs and made her heart hollow. For the first time in her life, she wouldn't be with her family for a holiday.

All of that against the backdrop of a horrible match with some British bulldog. Weeks had passed since then and the bruises still stung like it was yesterday. Malice made them heal rather slowly. She'd become so fixated on her errors; what she could have done better, whether it was even worth doing in the first place. Now that mark was on her debut for all time. It was an embarrassment, a sham she would never live down. And now at the lowest point she’d been all year, the last face the Italian wanted to see was…

…Merda.

The disgust written across Nicky’s face was shared by Adele at first glance. And here she went again. It wasn’t like Adele wanted to come down here.

As she had to discover, Momentum was severely underfunded and cut corners where they were able. Her food stand in the cafeteria was lacking in much other than the bare minimum. The dorms weren't much better. Far from the condos and high-rise suites that the Friction and Tension talent enjoyed. She didn't even have a working shower for the first couple of weeks. All of that was bound to change now that they were under new management, but that did little to help her current issue. Even Adele did her best to ignore it by promptly stomping her way to the other side of the room and avoiding eye contact.

It didn't work. Even as she turned away and started walking to the other side of the room without so much as a word, she could feel Nicky's gaze piercing through her. Judging the Italian like it was her divine right. She bet everyone in her family thought that way. She must have come from a prestigious line and bought her way into this promotion. That was the only way she could imagine they would let someone with this bad of an attitude into Japan, let alone a professional fighting league.

After a long march to the other side of the room, Adele sprung the microwave door open, tossed her bowl inside, and slammed it shut. Her fingers blazed across the numbers and pushed 'Start', promptly folding her arms and becoming as still as a statue.

Two minutes.

Just two.

That was all she needed and she would be out of the blonde's stupid hair.

Over the next one hundred and twenty seconds, the Italian intensely pondered the most clever one-liner she could think of once she was on her way out the door.

Unbeknownst to the trespassing Anzoian with a questionable grasp on facility booking privileges, there was a third occupant in the room. Her vocabulary was extensive but largely indecipherable, and her demands were both specific but many, but she made up for it by being the cutest thing in the room. In any room, actually, and she did not take kindly to the persistent drone of the oven interrupting her nap time. Chaircat Mao, the calico that Nicky had found as a kitten in the hallways a few months back, emerged from under her blanket cover on the sofa, slid down to the floor with the grace of a, um, cat. She turned her head to the oven, to Adele, to the oven again, and then to the wall socket powering the oven... before making a beeline for it, seeking to kill the oven or risk eletrocution trying. Thankfully, she was scooped up by Nicky before anything happened. She protested with indignant meows, flailed around with her feet, and tried to bite her chin.

"Look," Nicky said, completely ignoring the antics of the young cat in her arms. Whatever hurtful, mean things she had planned to say to Adele was completely dispelled by the sight of Chaircat Mao. She stared at the Italian creature, trying hard to look dignified while a baby cat struggled in her arms. "It's the holidays and you're not going to ruin it-" Not that there was much to ruin. She was already alone in a foreign land, isolated from what should have been yearly festivities. "-For me. So do what you need to do and leave me be."

"Mao."

"Leave us be." Nicky corrected, rocking Chaircat Mao like a baby. It didn't soothe the cat in the slightest, and she continued pawing away in the direction of the oven, as if she could strangle it out of existence from a distance. "I'm going to turn around and I'm going to pick a netflix show to watch, and you will be gone from the leisure room - my leisure room that I've booked- by the time I've picked something."

And with that, she turned around, trusted that even evil Adele wouldn't do something to her on the holidays, and plopped herself down onto the sofa. She turned on the big movie projector, popped open her laptop (Mom was gone. Shame), and synched it to her VPN'ed Netflix. She was going insane trying to navigate through the Japanese version. The drone of the oven went on and on and on, a background annoyance as she picked through Netflix Britain's catalog.

Vampire Diaries? She stared into the dead eyes of supposed teenager Nina Dobrev and her two old (and too old) co-stars. She wasn't that desperate for entertainment.

Bojack Horseman? No, she wasn't looking to be even more depressed. Plus Princess Caroline made her feel funny things. Funny, forbidden things...

Last Kingdom? Wasn't into Vikings.

Vikings? See rationale above.

Better Call Saul? No, she wasn't looking for anything that pretended an ambulance chaser was a human being.

House of Cards? Spacey disgusted her.

Stranger things? She wasnt old enough to pretend it was good.

Marco Polo? Well, she was already in Asia. What was the point living through it again.

Sense8? She heard there was an orgy. Pass.

Tiger Kin- Pass.

She had watched Orange, Jessica Jones, Black Mirror, and too many of the options on the list. Which left her incredibly few choices. Something blue and red caught her eye as she was flashing through the 'critically acclaimed animation' list and its hordes of ghibli and pixar movies, and she squinted at it.

What the hell was 'Arcane'?

"We watching this?" she looked down at Chaircat Mao. The cat stared back into her face and answered thusly:

"Mao."

"Seems like a winner, yes?"

"Mao Mao."

"I agree."

She clicked on her remote and pressed play.

What a bitch.

The back of Adele’s mind was still burdened by the first impression she’d been given of Nicky Gunnery in their introductory Twitter exchange. Namely, just how much of an impolite, gutless, shameless loser she was. When they’d finally met face to face and settled things blow for blow, the Italian was amazed how much of that turned out to be as true in real life as it was over cyberspace. Even looking past the pent-up nerves and adrenaline, at the other end was nothing but a vain and spiteful creature her father used to read about in fables and bedtime stories. A monster inhabiting the body of an innocent girl.

That was what a life of privilege and plenty did to you. You strutted around like the whole world was yours as if everything was permitted and no consequence was too great. She even had the nerve to bring a pet with her despite the strict policy against indoor animals.

Adele would be the bigger woman and choose not to report them tonight. For the adorable cat’s sake.

The Italian simply stared through the microwave window at her food circling round and round in the center. The metronomic whirr of the cycle became her sole fixation, emptying her thoughts into mundane action. She didn’t hear anything after Nikki’s final warning; not the television, not the cityscape outside. Sixty seconds later, the microwave screeched a half-beep only to find Adele’s hand already gripping the handle and throwing the door open. Her hand grabbed the bowl of food and-

“Ah!” Burned herself. Cheap Japanese crap. The Italian reached over and tore off a scrap of paper towel. She carefully used it to grasp the lisp of the bowl and act as a barrier as she cradled it in the palm of her hands. She plucked a fork between her fingers before she turned on the spot and rushed for the door before Nicky could try to instigate another fighter in her usual way.

The sound of gunfire halted her first step out of the door. Adele turned around and curiously stared at the screen. She walked back towards the couch quietly, drawn in by the sullen imagery and hauntingly captivating hums. The sounds of destruction filled the room as the screen flashed red with the blood of innocents, the tears of crying children, and the stricken faces of the crestfallen lamenting their weakness to stop the inevitable, senseless slaughter all around them.

“Reliving your country’s glory days?” Adele leaned in and propped her elbows on the couch, watching the violence on display. Her eyes suddenly glimpsed the progress bar a second before it faded away and let the show uninterrupted. Adele’s brows furrowed with a sense of familiarity.

“How did you get Netflix working?” Her voice was missing the animosity and disdain that seemed to worm its way into her voice whenever these two were within a mile of each other. It was almost like she’d forgotten how much the name Nicky Gunnery made her want to vomit.

Chaircat Mao Mao (Chaircat Mao to her favored), like all cats, was born into this world with an intuitive knowledge of her place in the universe: her at the top, and everyone else as either chair, scratching post, food dispenser, or miscellaneous accessory to her comfort. Did she doubt in her grand purpose when she was abandoned by her egg donor and left to fend for herself in a crevice of some over-renovated building? Not at all, and her faith in her future god-empressdom was soon rewarded when she was picked up by one of the servants. It went well at first. She was fed, pampered, allowed free range around her new domain, and snuggled by her subject.

But.

The servant grew too big for its britches. A time came when the food became more sparsely given, when being picked up no longer held any desire to her. More damningly, the servant had begun staring back and forth from that infernal light machine with cats inside it, staring into it intensely before trying out some kind of new trick. A rung bell when she bit, yelping when she scratched, vocalizing something like "You're making me sad" when she hissed and bared her teeth - the change was clear. The servant had begun to demand rights, and there was nothing more unbecoming than a servant that demanded a say in the vision of the empire.

Chaircat Mao Mao had no means to put the upstart in her place, for while she deserved the world, she knew only the crevice and the room and this other room.

Until the other servant came, and Chaircat Mao Mao saw in it weakness and compliance that was not present in the first servant.

Spoiler:

She would do.

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Nicky was not really a fan of animated television. Dad didn't disallow it in the household but he always ingrained in her and her brothers that they were for kids and one shouldn't waste too much time with entertainment for children. And while that early impression had faded as she watched some pixar and ghibli movies, it had never truly left her. She would always choose a blockbuster before an animated feature, a documentary before a cartoon, a television show before some blocky CGI show. However, she was desperate for something to do on this most hollow of festive nights, and just lying down on her bed and sinking into utter loneliness was not a productive option.

And thus came Arcane.

A show that opened up in fire and a gentle hymn. Chaircat Mao head shot up in rapt attention, her green eyes fixated on the screen as Nicky gently stroked her. As she aged out of kittenhood, Chaircat Mao was beginning to become more aggressive and unruly and thus far the cat-training tips she had dredged up from the depths of Reddit had only the slightest improvements on her mood. Fortunately, the TV kept her busy. Not the laptop though, for some reason. She hated that thing with the burning fury of a thousand sands. Nicky caught herself humming along to the child's hymn as gorgeous animation gave her an introduction to the world of Arcane: Fire, Loss, Conflict. Horrible things, yes, but also empathy, guardianship, comfort, warmth. She was already engrossed in this show and the two sisters-

“Reliving your country’s glory days?”

Nicky's head jerked in shock. She turned to her left, and there was Adele Monstrosorry.

Still in her room.

Still. In. Her. Room.

That she booked.

"Get lost." Nicky said quietly but firmly, turning back to the television. She was done with her until the time came again to settle things once and for all in the ring. "Go crawl back to whatever-"

"I wake up to the sounds of the silence that allows~"

Oh shite, this was catchy.

"For my mind to run around, with my ear up to the ground. I'm searching to behold the stories that are told~"

Nicky found herself bobbing along to the beat of the tune. She never caught Adele's follow-up question in her engrossment of the lyrics and artsy statue opening credits.

"When my back is to the world that was smiling when I turned~"

Chaircat Mao was less impressed. She slid off Nicky's lap, bounded across the length of the sofa, and placed herself right in front of Adele Monstrosorry. Her eyes darted to the bowl of Raviolli, then fixated itself on Adele, as if daring her to earn Chaircat Mao's affection.

Figures. Nicky had the manners and courtesy of a snake. Maybe she should have suspected that from what she understood of upper-class British society, perpetually living in their naive past. She couldn’t even engage in neutral conversation without being verbally abused and dismissed by the woman who was hogging the entire rec room because she was too lazy to buy her own damn television.

Whatever. Adele came around and sat down on the opposite end of the couch. She was only half-listening to what the British woman had to say, preparing herself mentally for the unwarranted berating. Her suggestion fell on deaf ears as she got comfortable in the seat and watched the cinematics play out.

Well, this was a colorful show if nothing else. Probably going to be a bit bleak if the introduction was anything to go by. She was never one for cartoons but-

“Oh, the misery!~”

Oh merda, this was lovely.

The Italian bobbed her head to the beats. She had no idea what this story was about, but if this piece and the imagery were anything to go by, there was bound to be a lot of tension and rivalries. It was distressing, yet powerful and motivating at the same time.

What a well-constructed opening. Her English wasn't the best, but that chorus alone was worth a Shazam the next time she-

"Oh." She gasped at a sudden warmth that tingled the back of her hand. Adele looked down to find Nicky’s adorable feline friend flicking its whiskers.

"Hi there." The endless curiosity in his eyes provoked her own as his gaze seemed to dart between the Italian and her dinner. She connected the pieces instantly. Unlike this little fellow's owner, he had manners and politeness. Couldn’t imagine where he got it from. Adele smiled back and tilted her bowl, showing the sauced rotini glistening with chives and freshly-cracked pepper. “You want some? It’s alfredo.”

Adele’s attention was brought back to the screen. It appeared that a bunch of ragtag heroes was doing…parkour? Oh, this might just be her next binge. She opened her mouth to ask for the name of the show, but stopped herself before she stepped onto another witty Saxon landmine. Forget it. She would ask the name again later.

Her eyes remained glued to the screen and watching the blue-haired girl - Powder? Like hair powder? - nearly plummet to her death before the older sister in pink saved her. Adele’s hand busied itself by pinching pieces of pasta and holding them by her lap, inviting their mutual friend to indulge if he’d like.

Chaircat Mao Mao stared at the bowl, her head tilted curiously at the offered bowl. Her gaze drifted back up to Adele, then back to the bowl, the back to Adele again... and it seemed it had come to a decision. She turned her back on Adele, swept her back legs left and right, as if burying something in her litterbox, and bounded back to Nicky's lap. Once there, she resumed eye contact with Adele, staring her down with those piercing green eyes and those infuriatingly cute lips curled up in a forever-smile.

A smile that was mirrored in full by Nicky as she witnessed the Grand Rejection. "Oh, would you look at that," Nicky smugged smugly, beaming as if she had won the lottery or she had finally killed the last pasta plant on earth. "My girl here has actual standards." She tickled Chaircat Mao's head, who didn't deign to respond to it, continuing to stare Adele down with an eerie, almost defiant air. "Well, you got your scum chow so its about time you shuffled off back to hell, yeah-"

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM.

Nicky had seen a lot of fictional explosions before. From the laughably low-budget ones on CW television shows that couldn't fool a child, to the high-budget but uninspired ones that she saw in every modern blockbuster in the last 10 years. She was jaded by them. She didn't care when it happened nor did it ever threaten to excite her. They simply existed.

But this? Oh, this was the first explosion she cared for in years. The high-tension build up, the carefully orchestrated animation, the sound design, the perfect blend of 3D animation and 2D effects - it was perfection. This was a gem here, and she wasn't going to ruin it and New Year's Eve by fighting Adele Monstrosorry every step of the way. No, she would sternly ask her to leave the room and if she had any shame in their twisted vessel of her, she would do so.

After this episode.

And if not, well... she needed an excuse to settle their score anyway.

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"So Vi is obviously going to betray Vander," Nicky said mid-way into episode two. Initially, she pretended to address the questions solely to Chaircat Mao, ruffling her fur and babying her while the cat "Mao'ed" back her answers... But Chaircat Mao was no one's thigh kitten, and had since retreated to one of the shelves on the other side of the room.

With the entire bowl of Alfredo.

Nicky didn't know how Chaircat Mao got it up there and she certainly wasn't going to ask.

Which left her incessant need to talk about this wonderful show with-

"I'm just saying, all the pieces are in place. It's very basic foreshadowing." Nicky said. She still refused to look at Adele and they were seated as far away as possible from each other, but they were at least talking. "But nooooo, you think Claggor's gonna turn evil. As if!"