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The roar of the crowd is deafening, especially to Xavi. The din rings in his felid ear so much louder than the hominid. He clutches his tablet tightly, to ground himself. He will never be used to the crowds.

The announcer booms fuzzily over the PA, “Ladies, Germs, and Viruses of all ages, welcome to the 14th annual Mathamania Stadium! Are you ready to rumble?”

The crowd cheers incoherently as Xavi's opponent sizes him up. She's actually an old friend, and Xavi doesn't know if that's a blessing or a curse for him. Dolores Payne is a woman built in the shape of an industrial fridge and twice as heavy. If this was a hand-to-hand match, Xavi wouldn't stand a chance.

"For our first match, in the right corner, you know her, you love her, you fear her, give it up for PRINCESS PAIN!"

Dolores makes her entrance and waves from the other side of the arena, but not to the crowd - to Xavi.

They go nuts for her anyways. Xavi takes his last step towards the threshold with a deep exhale.

"And in our left corner, we're welcoming a first time participant to Mathamania, the last man standing of the Calculesium, say hello to THE CATSEYE!"

Xavi straightens up his back, opens up his stance, plasters on an uncharacteristic smirk, and so transforms into the Catseye. As it leaps into the arena, cape fluttering, the applause is not quite as thunderous for it as for the opponent - and while Xavi would dwell on the reasons for that, or flinch from the sound - the Catseye does not care.

It's not here to win. It's here to fight.

“Two terrifying gladiators squaring up tonight, folks! Place your bets at the terminals and grab yourselves some popcorn because it’s about to get BLOODY! Both of them seem ready to go, so let the match… BEGIN!”

Payne is as cocky as ever. She motions to the Catseye to attack first. It does not need her permission. Its claws glide over the keyboard of Xavi’s tablet. To start, a basic, but trustworthy spell. Modus ponens, applied to the nature of fire. If oxygen is sufficient, combustion can occur. Since oxygen is sufficient …

Combustion occurs and the opponent ducks under the blast, but it still catches the tips of her pastel pink hair, singeing them briefly before the sparks fizzle out.

She responds with her own arc of flame. The Catseye deflects it with a negation and the crowd roars like a faulty engine as it glances Princess Pain’s armored shoulder. The Catseye, in its predatory nature, still seems more feral than Dolores has ever seen it before. She doesn’t give it a second chance.

The math drowns in the adrenaline and the crowd. Payne is putting up a fight, if only by the skin of her neck. Like second nature she scribbles lines to pages of mathematical proofs most civilians never think about, much less learn, all the while maneuvering around the wild animal wearing her old friend’s skin. Her notebook is growing fuller and fuller.

The Catseye has little concept of time but its impatience swells with each minute the woman across the ring remains on her feet. It barely knows the spells it is casting now, leaving the muscles to do the mind’s work.

Fat beads of sweat begin to crown Princess Pain's forehead. The Catseye is tiring too, though it does not acknowledge it. Matches of this intensity seldom last more than fifteen minutes, and both gladiators are panting like strays in a heatwave. They're too evenly matched.

The announcer's words are too blurry to hear. Dolores can tell her reaction delay is growing longer and longer. Xavi's - the Catseye's - is too. She negates another ponens spell, and sends a duplicate spell careening back with it. Both miss, but just by a hair. The next blow to land will finish this.

They don't even break eye contact. Dominance has to be claimed. Spellcasts are solved for in near sync. The stadium lights are too bright and the background noise is so loud it's tangible. They don't see or hear anything but each other. Hours pass in the millisecond between. The world screeches to a halt, and then both snakes strike from the grass.

The Catseye takes a backseat as both mages' lives flash before their eyes. Later, they'll know it wasn't really a near-death experience.

When reality flickers back in a minute later, they are both on the floor, sore and coming down from the high of a match well fought. The announcer's voice is worse than a fire alarm going off during a hangover.

"... double knockout for the first time in a decade, folks! I've never seen anything like it in my time here, for sure! Anybody who saw that coming is a rich son-of-a-Kataraxian!"

Xavi loses consciousness again as he's strapped to a gurney and carried off.

When he comes to, he sees florescent panel lighting and beige popcorn ceiling. The pain is intense, but he is used to it, barely wincing though he is sore on every surface of his body inside and out. The room is silent, still. Nobody came for him. Xavi is alone. Suffering alone.

Xavi is always alone - muffled voices from a doorway interrupt his thoughts. First, a middle aged man, deep but smooth, shouting without shouting in a Northwest Provincial accent. A doctor?

"Little girl, I must insist you hand that over to me. This is your last warning, before I call security."

Louder, a young woman, a teenager really, vowels warbling as if her voice box was not built to form them, hissing in response.

"Bite me, clean-gene."

The door bursts open and Iris Taia, his pupil, the Pupil, dashes to his bedside. A man in robin's-egg scrubs and a medic's robe lumbers after her. She wiggles out of his attempts to restrain her with a trained ease, and speaks as if he were not there.

"Xavi! Daba, they weren't going to give you painkillers till you woke up! Can you believe this? I thought you said this would be as good as the Calculesium!"

The doctor lunges for her again. Iris ducks under, slipping through his grasp fluidly.

"Girl, I will have your head for this. Wait till security arrives!"

"He's awake anyways, you literal scrub. And he's my legal guardian, I have visitation rights!"

"Oh? I'd like to see your paperwork, then, since the desk didn't have it. If mutant fighting dogs even can read."

The girl's facial tendrils flare and her eyes frost over. She opens a compartment in her heavy plated armor and pulled out something too big to be a binder but too small to be a briefcase. She tosses it at the doctor and snarls as he catches it.

"Us mutant fighting dogs tend to keep our paperwork in good order. Which reminds me, your system's information is out of date by, oh, about 50 different forms and waivers? I was going to enter them myself this morning, try to get on your good side, but, I guess I can't do that if I can't read, now can I?"

"Girl -." The doctor winces, pauses a moment, and tries again, softer. "Miss Taia. With all due respect, I have other patients whose charts need to be filled tonight, and my wife and I-"

"I don't give a fuck about you or your wife or your charts or your schedule, clean-gene. Give my daba his happy juice, now."

Xavi has to bite down a laugh as the cowed doctor adds the morphine Iris had evidently swiped from the pharmacy into his IV, whimpering the whole time like a wounded animal. She glares at the man's back as he rushes out the door, muttering to himself. As soon as he was gone, she dims the lights and snuggles up against him on the medical mattress, like she did when she was small. The analgesic so hard fought for kicks in, and Xavi could finally speak without much pain.

"Not as good as the Calculesium. Second best."

Iris lifts her head from the crook in his elbow she is attempting to bury it in.

"Huh?"

"You said I said this place was as good as home. Earlier. Had to clarify."

"Of course you did, you pedantic drolloid."

Xavi's felid ear flicks in a reflexive annoyance. Somehow even that hurts, morphine be damned.

"Iris..."

"Okay, yeah, language, I get it: You pedantic fuck. But anyways, what a downgrade."

"Yes. Calculesium was the best."

"I miss it, daba."

"Me too, dasi."

They stay cuddled up like that for a good while, but eventually Iris leaves to retrieve rations from the automat and Xavi's equipment from wherever it's being kept. Xavi's not as familiar with Mathamania Stadium's layout as he'd like. He knows it's mostly underground, like the Calculesium once was, but crowned by the arena at the top, for easy spectator access. He's pretty sure Iris memorized the floor plans before, but he was equally sure she'd forget them and get lost for a few hours anyways. That girl...

There's no window for him to gaze out of contemplatively like a man thrice his age. Even if it feels like he's aged four times that much in the past year. Windows don't materialize out of feelings. Maybe if he had his tablet, but that does not materialize out of feelings either. He wishes the wall had some paint on it he could watch dry. Anything to distract from the nostalgia. Usually he'd fidget, but morphine only works so well on a mutant who's built up a resistance, and the dose, he thinks, is lower than usual.

He counts the number of bolts on the steel door; there are thirty-nine but there's a gap where a fortieth bolt should be. Then he counts the number of whole cinder blocks on the adjacent wall. A hundred and eighteen, but if they were aligned perfectly and not staggered (a poor building choice, he knows, but still) there would be about a hundred and thirty. He counts the number of shelves and cabinets in the room - nineteen - the number of florescent lights - twelve- and so on and so forth until he runs out of things to count. The room's not completely barren, per say, but it's not exactly a maximalist daydream. And now he's back to his thoughts. His eyes linger on the door, his mind on the past. Iris. His deformed heart seizes a little as he gets drunk on the memories. An inter-dimensional portal. A home he wrecked. A child he took, a mother he might as well have killed himself. Guilt rises like a tidal wave, but before it can come crashing down on him, his self-loathing is interrupted by a knock at the door.

"Come in."

Dolores rolls into the room in a rickety clinic wheelchair that his old doctors wouldn't have let him prop his feet up on, much less use. Still, he says nothing, waiting for the friend he hadn't seen in over a decade to say the first word. The silence lasts a bit longer than it should; she's no mutant, despite their shared occupation. She can't read his mind.

"So... how the hell have you been, kitten?"

He laughs and it hurts. It hurts because he has built up a resistance to most opioids at this point. It hurts because the last time she called him kitten they were too young to know what an innuendo that could sound like. He missed it. He missed her.

"How do I start."

"Start at the beginning."

His face pinches up, his sole felid ear lies flat. He swallows his own saliva, but his throat feels dry.

"Op 26 failed. I got demoted. Retrained, transferred to another division. Retired from full time duty when the arenas opened up the year after. Became a gladiator. First at the Calculesium, then here when when Calc got destroyed. Picked up a student somewhere along the way. Came here. Fought you."

"Fought me? That felt like a near death experience back there. It wasn't. But it felt like it. Kitten's got claws now, don't you?"

He shrugs, unsure of how to explain the Catseye. It's a longer story than he has energy for at the moment. There will be other chances, now.

"How about you, princess? Can't believe you used that nickname in your shtick."

"Oh, yaknow. I was on covert mission during Op 26. Stayed with our old division for a few years, then came here, for my sweet sixteenth. And Princess Pain is a great name. I'm the closest thing to royalty our planet has anyways."

Something on her body beeps, and Dolores sputters out a few curses as she pats herself down for the source. Her beeper is wedged between one thick thigh and the woven polyester of the chair cushion. She glances at it, and sighs.

"Damn, I gotta go. It's good to know you're alive, kitten. See you around."

She takes her leave, and Xavi is alone once more.

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