Alex had always been a PlayStation person; having grown up in an all-PlayStation (and the occasional Nintendo) household, working at Sony had always been her dream. “What do you wanna be when you grow up?” was the popular question to ask kids, and every time the tigress was asked it, (save for a three-year phase during which she either wanted to be a “Tomb Raider” like Lara Croft or a princess) she said that she wanted to work at Sooby (Sony) and help make games like the ones she enjoyed playing. She was only a kid, so she had no idea what any of that meant, but she knew that when she played the video games on that grey box in the living room, she was happy, and she wanted to help other people feel like that too.

So, she worked hard, got through school, powered through jobs that she hated but would build her resume, and eventually landed a job at the Japanese conglomerate that she had always dreamed of working at.

That was three and a half years ago.

If only someone told Alex that transferring to a foreign branch of the company would be one of the hardest things that she’d ever have to do. Except everyone did, constantly. She’d hear it at least a few times a day, every day leading up to the day she was hauling her bags to the check-in desk at the airport; she just didn’t listen to any of them. She thought that since she could pull from her experience being an exchange student and forced to learn a foreign language in under a year, she would be fine. But Japanese, as it turns out, is not a Germanic language like English or Dutch, which meant that she had to start learning from scratch.

She was wrong; it was not going to be fine.

A year and seven months after she first landed at Narita International Airport and disembarked from her All-Nippon Airways flight, she was speaking broken Japanese with what her co-workers called a “cute” accent and a stutter that she didn’t have when she spoke any other language. But broken Japanese was better than no Japanese, and since most of the tigress’s work involved English, she performed pretty well in her position. She still tried her best to speak Japanese wherever she could, though. Otherwise, the Duolingo bird would probably break into her house and murder her.

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“Yes, I understand that you want to keep the device, but the contract you signed with us clearly states that you have to send it back as it’s a pre-production model that we sent for you to try, and not to keep.” The tigress put her fingers against her brow and tried her best not to scream into the phone at one of the many bone-headed internet celebrities she had to communicate with on behalf of the company. Most of the time, influencers were handled through a marketing agency that they worked with, but contract disputes as severe as this had to be handled directly. An influencer refusing to return a pre-production unit sent to them was a big deal; it was theft, and if Alex couldn’t talk sense into them and get the device back in one piece, she would have to pass the issue up the chain to legal, and she hated talking to people from legal; Hiroshi from legal had a big crush on her, she could tell, but he was always a bit of dick to her. Maybe that was his way of flirting? Whatever it was, it sure was unpleasant.

The influencer on the other line continued repeating herself over and over again. “But I really want to keep it! I’ve really grown attached to it, it’s a part of my setup now!” the more Alex heard her talk, the more she wanted to pull her hair out. Every now and again, the tigress had to glance at her watch for the time. Contractually, her workday ended at 6 PM, but the call had made her go into overtime by almost two hours. Seeing her Japanese coworkers (who were notorious for overworking) start to pack up and leave, Alex decided to cut the call short and left the influencer with an ultimatum. “Okay Miss Ortega, if you do not return the unit that we sent to you, we will be forced to take legal action. The return address is on the contract that you signed and we will be sending it to your email again. Thank you, and have a nice day.”

The tigress tapped on the red hang-up button on her work phone so hard that the glass screen protector on it cracked. One of her coworkers noticed and had a concerned look on her face as she packed her bento box into her bag. Yumiko, a fennec fox who was the nicest coworker Alex had ever come across in her life, was one of the few people who actively tried to talk to her even when it wasn’t work-related. Alex’s other coworkers only spoke to her when it was work, which was fine, but it made her feel alone at times. The tigress didn’t have many friends in Japan, but since it had only been a little over a year, she thought it was alright.

She did have another friend, other than Yumiko, that she really liked hanging out with, even if the majority of their time together was spent in meetings going over marketing budgets, plans, and all that boring stuff. His name was Mallory and he worked at the advertising agency that Sony trusted to handle most if not all of their advertising needs. She didn’t know him too well, so he was more of an acquaintance. She found him charming though, especially when they occasionally saw each other in person as they made their way back home from their offices; they shared the majority of their commute back home since they lived in the same neighborhood.

“Uh, Alex, will you come to drink beer with us?” the fennec asked the tiger as she zipped up her bag with her bento box inside of it. She had the cutest Japanese accent when she spoke, adding inflections at the end of words that weren’t there. Her big ears perked up as she stood behind her desk chair and waited for the tiger to reply.

Alex stood up from her desk and started collecting her things, too; laptop, work phone, notebook, and water bottle. With all of her things stuffed into her work bag, she zipped it up and let out a sigh as she turned to the fennec fox who had a hopeful look on her face. She hated turning that girl down, every time she did it felt like she was taking away candy from a child. The look of disappointment and sadness on her face made her heart ache every time. But she didn’t feel like drinking after a day like this, especially since the next day was still another workday.

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Story continued on my Patreon and also my SubscribeStar!


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<sub>Art © LumaLynxx

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Alex:
Mallory: BotLolbit

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