# Nine Lives in Neon Lights
## Chapter 1: The Sound of Failure
The red ink on Akira Yamamoto's test paper looked like blood spatter at a crime scene—which, considering how thoroughly she'd murdered her chances at graduating, wasn't entirely inaccurate.
"Twenty-three percent," Sensei Nakamura announced to the entire class, holding up the paper like evidence of a particularly heinous crime. "On a *multiple choice* test about classical Japanese literature."
Akira slumped deeper into her seat at Sakura Academy, where the average student's family donated enough to put their name on buildings. Around her, thirty-two of Tokyo's most privileged teenagers pretended to focus on their own perfect scores while secretly reveling in someone else's spectacular academic implosion.
"How does one score twenty-three percent on multiple choice?" Nakamura continued. "Random guessing should yield twenty-five percent."
*Wow,* Akira thought bitterly. *I'm actually worse than random chance. That takes skill.*
Her best friend Hiroshi Tanaka shot her a sympathetic look from two seats over, his own "94%" marked in green ink face-down on his desk.
"Yamamoto-san," Nakamura's voice cut through her self-pity. "Please see me after class."
---
The dismissal bell finally rescued her from Nakamura's lecture about Heian period literature. Akira waited for the classroom to empty before approaching his desk.
"Do you know why you're at Sakura Academy?" Nakamura asked without looking up from his grading.
It was a loaded question. They both knew she was here because her mother cleaned offices for the school's corporate sponsors. A scholarship program for "underprivileged but promising" students had gotten her through the door, though the "promising" part was looking increasingly questionable.
"Because someone saw potential in you," he continued, finally meeting her eyes. "But your performance has been catastrophically bad. You graduate in eight months. Your current GPA would make it difficult to get into community college."
The words hit harder than they should have.
"I'm recommending you for academic intervention," Nakamura said, pulling out an official form. "Mandatory tutoring, supervised study periods, weekly progress meetings. Your mother will need to sign this."
Academic intervention. The academic equivalent of life support. Akira took the paper with numb fingers, imagining her mother's devastated face.
---
The walk to her part-time job at FamilyMart took fourteen minutes today—she dawdled, dreading the conversation she'd have to have at home. The academic intervention form felt like it weighed a thousand pounds in her school bag.
"You're three minutes late," called Sato-san from behind the counter as she entered the convenience store's fluorescent-lit normalcy.
"Sorry. Got held up at school."
"Rough day?"
"You could say that." She grabbed her name tag and tied her hair back. "How's business?"
"Slow. Had a guy try to pay for cigarettes with Pokemon cards earlier." Sato-san grabbed his jacket. "You've got the evening shift. Try not to burn the place down."
The next few hours passed in a blur of scanning barcodes and helping customers navigate instant ramen choices. Around ten PM, during what Sato-san called "weird customer hours," a man in a dark hoodie entered.
Something about him immediately set her on edge. He avoided eye contact, moved through the store like he was looking for something specific, lingering near the front while glancing repeatedly toward the register.
When he approached the counter and reached into his hoodie pocket, Akira's heart stopped. The gun was small and black, real enough to make her mouth go dry.
"Empty the register," he said. "Now."
Akira's complete lack of training kicked in. Instead of complying like she was supposed to, she found herself saying, "Are you serious right now?"
The gunman seemed as surprised as she was. "What?"
"There's maybe eight thousand yen in here. You're risking armed robbery charges for less than seventy dollars American." She gestured toward the window. "And you literally walked past a police box to get here."
"Just—just give me the money!"
"You're not very good at this," Akira observed.
That's when he pulled the trigger.
The sound was louder than expected—a sharp crack that echoed off the walls. Pain bloomed across her chest like fire, and she looked down to see red spreading across her white uniform shirt.
*Oh,* she thought with odd detachment. *I've been shot.*
The magazines scattered from her hands as she stumbled backward. The fluorescent lights seemed blindingly bright, and the familiar hum of refrigerators sounded like roaring wind.
*This is how I die,* she realized. *Shot by an incompetent convenience store robber for eight thousand yen and a lecture on criminal technique.*
The last thing she saw was the gunman's panicked face before darkness claimed her.
---
Akira woke up to the sound of her own heartbeat—not the steady thrum she was used to, but something stronger, more insistent. She was lying on the cold linoleum floor, staring up at fluorescent lights that no longer seemed quite so bright.
*I should be dead,* was her first coherent thought.
Her second: *Why do I feel like I could run a marathon?*
She sat up slowly, expecting pain and weakness. Instead, she felt incredible—like every cell was humming with energy, like she could see and hear more clearly than ever before.
The blood was still there, staining her shirt and pooled on the floor. But when she pulled the fabric aside to examine the wound, she found only smooth, unmarked skin.
"What the hell?" she whispered.
That's when she felt it—a strange weight at the base of her spine. She reached back with growing alarm and felt soft, thick fur covering what could only be described as a tail.
Akira scrambled to the employee restroom. The mirror showed her familiar face, but protruding from just above her tailbone was a fox tail—rust-colored with a white tip, about eighteen inches long, and undeniably real.
She stared at her reflection, waiting for the hallucination to fade. The tail remained exactly where it was, twitching in response to her emotional state.
"Okay," she said to her reflection. "I can work with this. People have tails sometimes, right? Medical conditions. Genetic anomalies."
The tail disagreed by swishing skeptically.
After ten minutes of trying to stuff it down her tights unsuccessfully, she wrapped it around her waist like a furry belt and pulled her blazer down to cover it.
She needed to leave before police arrived. First, she unplugged the security camera's recording device and shoved it in her bag. Then she scrubbed away the blood with surprising efficiency and attention to detail that amazed even her.
*When did I become so thorough?* she wondered.
---
The walk home took twenty-three minutes instead of her usual thirty-five. She moved faster than normal, her steps lighter and more confident despite everything. The tail had settled into a rhythm that almost felt natural.
Her apartment building was wedged between a pachinko parlor and a seaweed shop—home sweet cramped, affordable home. Her mother was asleep on the fold-out futon, an accounting textbook across her chest.
The sight of her exhausted face made Akira's chest tighten with guilt. *Academic intervention,* she thought, looking at the form she still needed to get signed. *As if Mom doesn't have enough to worry about.*
The logistics of showering with a tail were... complicated. Water temperature that felt normal to her skin felt scalding against the fur.
"This is my life now," she muttered, working shampoo through fur that was apparently part of her body. "Fantastic."
It was nearly midnight when she crawled into bed, tail tucked uncomfortably beneath her. She was afraid to let it extend naturally in case her mother woke up.
*Tomorrow,* she decided, *I'll figure out what's happening to me. Tonight, I'm just going to pretend this is all a very weird dream.*
But as she lay in darkness listening to Tokyo's nightlife, she couldn't shake the feeling that her life had just changed in ways she couldn't begin to understand.
The last thing she thought before sleep was that she had never felt more awake in her entire life.
And somewhere in her dreams, she could swear she heard distant laughter—ancient, knowing, and somehow familiar.