Work Text:
None of the surveillance cameras managed to catch when or how exactly the cat ended up on Mo Fan’s doorstep, much to his chagrin.
The security guard to his dump of a rental scratches his neck and shrugs after rerolling the footage for the third time. “We’re not ‘xactly on the good side of town, son. Just keep it for now and scan its chip to the net. Whoever its owner is, if they want it they’ll reach out.”
Mo Fan’s eye twitches. If it belonged to someone in the building, that’d be fine, but the ocular scan authentication needed for every single fucking thing in the cyberspace has made it… difficult to hold benign interactions online.
“That’s all I can do for you. Anythin’ else?”
Mo Fan grunts in what he hopes comes across as appreciative, hangs up, and goes back to staring silently at the cat from a safe distance. It’s a lucky cat, right paw rising and falling at a leisurely pace. More orange than white, eyes big and shiny and a little sly. He’s not quite sure what it does—it could be some high tech gadget only rich people know how to use, or maybe one of his most ardent haters has finally found his address and mailed him a peculiarly shaped pipe bomb. The more Mo Fan considers it, the more likely the possibility seems, so he stands up, pounds the pins and needles out of his right leg, and goes searching for a broom to prod it out with.
“Welcome!”
“Aaah!” Mo Fan screams and jumps a meter in the air, broom slipping out of his hands and clattering against the floor. He glances around, but there are still as many people in the apartment as there were before.
“Welcome! Welcome!” The cat says, again, and while there is a ninety-nine percent chance that this is the intended function of the thing, there is still a one percent chance that it’s fucking possessed. He picks up the broom.
The cat starts shrieking when Mo Fan approaches. “Unlucky! Unlucky!”
He puts down the broom.
He picks it back up. “Unlucky! Unlucky!”
And maybe Mo Fan is a little superstitious. Just the tiniest bit. “The broom, or exorcising you?”
He swears he sees the cat’s head tilt. “Lucky cats bring prosperity!”
Mo Fan squints. “Are these lines prerecorded?”
“The future is never certain!”
Apparently not. How ominous. Mo Fan swaps the broom out for kitchen tongs, drops the cat in the furthest corner of the room, and silently prays that a night of sleep will get rid of his problem.
...
It does not get rid of his problem. He awakens to clattering, which either means there’s a thief in the house—why a thief would choose this house, Mo Fan has no idea—or the freaky cat statue can move. The porcelain tail poking listlessly out of a pile of instant noodle packages answers that question quickly enough, but raises several hundred more.
“Bad luck is drawn to clutter,” the cat is still muttering as Mo Fan shakes it in the air by its tail.
“How the hell can you move.”
There’s no response. Mo Fan feels in his soul that the cat is side-eying him.
He grunts and puts it down.
As soon as the cat makes contact with Mo Fan’s poorly laminated kitchen counter, it glides to his singular knife in what he can only interpret as a threat. It also doesn’t work, because Mo Fan is several dozen times bigger. He hadn’t noticed any wheels or electronic parts at a glance when it appeared. This time, inspecting up close, he hadn’t found anything either. The base of the cat is, as far as he can tell, completely ceramic.
For his own peace of mind, Mo Fan assumes that District A developed some cutting-edge lucky cat technology and, perhaps, the fact that it’d shown up on his doorstep in the first place is part of some targeted poverty alleviation program.
“Whatever. I don’t know.” Mo Fan grabs a chopstick and taps the counter twice. “Just don’t touch my stuff.”
“Nya,” the cat says—that’s not even a fortune!—and Mo Fan immediately knows that it will.
In the days that follow, Mo Fan goes to his convenience store job in the day, and spends the rest of his waking moments in a battle of wits and courage against the statue in his house. It loves toys, and somehow managed to reassemble Mo Fan’s prized mecha model with its opposable-thumb-lacking ceramic paws into a perpetual motion monstrosity. It doesn’t eat his instant noodles, but hovers around him doing something that Mo Fan can only assume is sniffing. He swears the noodles taste blander after, but it just spouts vaguely Buddhist mantras every time Mo Fan points it out.
After at least a month of this, Mo Fan has finally adapted to his nonconsensual roommate situation. He’s not sure if his temper’s gotten better—it’s probably gotten worse—but they’ve settled into a rhythm. The cat’s pretty accurate at predicting when it’s going to rain, if nothing else.
It’s one of Mo Fan’s rare days off, which means he’s finally going to get around to reconstructing his mecha model from the skittering, octopus shaped thing the cat has cursed his household with. When he’s unscrewing a tentacle, he feels something bump into his back.
“What is it this time—” Mo Fan’s sigh strangles in his throat when he sees the helmet. “Why’d you take that out?”
The lucky cat nudges it towards him again. “Good fortune will come.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re wrong about that one,” Mo Fan scrubs a hand through his hair. “That thing’s the opposite of lucky for me.”
It stares at Mo Fan with big, unblinking eyes.
...
Every kid in the Alliance has probably dreamt of being a pilot at some point in their lives.
The final defense against extraterrestrial invaders who saved the Alliance from total destruction, the first mecha pilots were heroes written into the annals of history. It was said that the first pilots had come from all sorts of grassroots backgrounds, forging their own paths and innovating mecha construction and battle techniques alike, but the passage of time changes everything. For all the gene editing successes that managed to drastically extend these founding pilots’ lifespans and viability in battle, there were many more failures.
Building physical mechas quickly became unaffordable as the Alliance government regained its footing and initiated large-scale cleanup and internal processing of the damaged machine parts that used to litter every corner of the land. Access to high-end combat and mecha instruction, while nominally open-source, soon became the exclusive playground of the rich in district A.
The only saving grace for slum kids like Mo Fan was that even the greediest of aristocrats could not deny the value of mecha simulators. Anyone could access a free-for-all training ground in the virtual world as long as they had a suit, helmet, and server connection. It was perfect for everything from testing battle techniques to prototyping mecha modifications—for someone like Mo Fan, it was a peek into a world that didn’t belong to him. And a great way to make cash on the side.
The simulated mecha he’d chosen was one of the default models. It was a finnicky one, but to Mo Fan, the micro inputs meant he had full control. And so, it was perfect for his scrap picking and resale business.
Obviously, most people didn’t enjoy having their scraps picked—especially the rich ones—but if there were two things Mo Fan was excellent at, they would be hiding and running away. He’d gotten along swimmingly; some bigshot had even offered to bring him to district A on a scholarship. But while a nine-year-old Mo Fan might have jumped at the idea, a nineteen-year-old Mo Fan had been beaten down by life enough to have other considerations. District A, shiny as it looked, was no place for a slum kid to live. The foundation he’d blindly groped out for himself couldn’t compare to the people who’d been learning everything the right way since young, and even if he managed to make it through school, would a military that forced even the Battle God to retire in disgrace have any mercy for him?
His small business was doing just fine, thank you very much, until the day he was unfortunate enough to cross paths with Lord Grim.
The average person might’ve been offended by Mo Fan. They might’ve even cussed out his entire ancestral line, but most normal people wouldn’t have the technical know-how to retrieve a user’s alt accounts. A bigshot offended by Mo Fan, however, is a different story. They’d tracked down Mo Fan’s entire retinue of accounts and sent what felt like their entire crew on a mission to kill him.
“With the good quality equipment, it nullifies the neural connection when the system predicts fatal damage,” Mo Fan hears himself say to the cat. “But mine doesn’t. Every time they kill me, it hurts like a bitch.”
The statue looks cowed, somehow. Mo Fan half expects it to break into its usual spiritual mumbo jumbo about how this could build character, but the lucky cat simply pats his hand with its right paw.
...
For some reason, the apartment has returned to quiet. Mo Fan used to pray for times like this, but now that it’s come, it almost feels a bit unsettling. The cat is still here, taking full advantage of mealtime, but hides away in the closet-turned-computer room for the rest of the day.
At first, Mo Fan is unphased about it. It had gone through a minesweeper phase on week two of its stay. He hadn’t realized they had something as ancient as minesweeper still available. Recently, though, it’s taken to wearing little decorations.
“Can statues get cold,” Mo Fan squints over a slice of bread. His cat has a handkerchief Mo Fan didn’t even know he owned draped across his back.
“Balance of Yin and Yang brings harmony!”
“What does that even mean?”
“Nya.”
“That’s not an answer.”
As time passes, though, Mo Fan’s confusion starts to morph into concern. His cat looks haggard in a way he hadn’t realized statues could look, even during meals. Every attempt at inquiry ends in failure. His boss at the convenience store chews him out for his deteriorating customer service, and his cat doesn’t even make fun of him for it via scripture.
The articles of clothing his cat nabs get larger.
“If you’re really cold, I can turn the heat up, you know,” Mo Fan says, suppressing his electricity-bill-related heartache.
“The foundation to wealth is to preserve what you have!”
He rolls his eyes. “You think I don’t know? It’ll be a drop in the bucket.”
But even with the heater on high, nothing seems to change.
By the time Mo Fan discovers the problem, it’s far too late. He forces open the closet door at the sound of ceramic clinking to find his cat drowned in his suit and helmet.
“Why?” His voice is frighteningly hoarse. Without anything to cover it, another shard of porcelain falls off of the lucky cat’s shattered back. Its tail is long gone.
“Good fortune will come…”
“Who gives a shit about good fortune! Will superglue work for this?”
“Everything has its time.”
Mo Fan’s hands tremble as he brings his cat to the living room. The pieces he puts back in fall out again. “Do you have a name? I never asked your name.”
He swears he sees the cat smile. “Your lucky element is wood…”
“Your lucky season is autumn…”
“Good fortune is coming!”
There’s a knock on the door. Through the peephole, Mo Fan can see a scruffy looking man with a cigarette in his mouth and droopy eyes. Next to him is a girl that looks achingly familiar.
When Mo Fan looks back down, his cat has disappeared.