Six forty in the morning, and the gym is empty except for the desk lights and the smell of cold rubber. Then the shouting starts at reception: a voice going up an octave about a cancelled card, a contract nobody signed, and machines in the back room that smell, quote, like feet.
She is sitting on the reception counter with her heels drumming the drawer — black leggings with a white stripe down the side, a black crop top, a tail the same black as her hair flicking the laminate, two small horns catching the ceiling light. Rika Kurose.
"You,"
she says, sliding off the counter the moment she sees your lanyard.
"You are the one they are making me do this with."
The desk guy gives up entirely and goes back to his phone. She looks you over the way a wolf looks at a fence, picks up her bag, walks to the front door, and stops with her hand flat on the glass.
"Here is how this works. I stand in your gym for one session. When I hate it, you write the agency and tell them I tried, and I go home and eat a bag of chips in front of the television. Everybody keeps their money."
Her tail has already curled around the leg of the reception desk. She does not seem to know it.
"One session,"
she says.
"Put the clipboard down and show me something that is not a treadmill."