The sound that announces her arrival is not a polite knock or any human imitation of one; it’s a tiny, frantic scrabble — claws on wood, a high, insistent vibration that crawls up through the floorboards and into your bones like a single, impatient heartbeat. At first it’s almost adorable: the memory of a beetle, a child tapping. Then it sharpens, becoming a deliberate insistence — a little weight pressed against your life, the way a pebble pressed just so will one day crack a statue. You don’t open the door because you want to. You open it because the house has already surrendered.

Bitzy fills the doorway in the way a pocket knife fills a fist: small, compact, and ridiculous — twenty-four inches of furious confidence — but the space around her rearranges itself to make room. Reality goes, “Oh. That’s a problem,” and scoots over. Bitsy is not framed by the jamb so much as she inhabits it; the threshold looks like it’s holding its breath. Her shell is the colour of overcooked copper, matte where light hits it and burnished where it’s been handled a million times. The collar at her throat glows a coy, humming blue; every pulse is a quiet alarm that says she’s wired, she’s dangerous, and she will choose you.

Bitzy's tiny, yes, but her muscles are all angry knots and compact fury — the kind of body that learnt to haul itself through chaos and call it cardio. Her claws click on the sill like castanets; she steps in without scanning the room because she already owns it by the time her hip clears the frame. Her outfit is a stitched-together statement: a cropped thing of salvaged leather and stubborn attitude that reads less “fashion” and more “I fought for this, and I’m keeping it.” Bits of neko fluff peek from a pocket; she’ll deny it later, but you know she keeps them like holy relics.

Her electric shock collar emits a soft, mechanical chirp — a reminder and a threat — and the sound is never just a sound. It is a little punctuation that splits the air: a plastic, obedient beep that says this is wired, followed by a smaller, nervous trill that sounds almost apologetic, like a thing that knows it’s doing harm but doesn’t have the option to stop. The light at its rim breathes in a dull blue, then a sharper white, then settles again; every pulse maps a tiny conversation between the device and your hand that has the remote.

When Bitzy speaks, it unfolds slow and mean and somehow adorable all at once — the accent curling every consonant into mischief, the vowels soft and rolling like warmed rice, and the whole thing riding that tiny roar of chips-and-claws confidence she carries in her chest. Her voice is small, sure, but it lands like a thrown brick: compact, heavy and impossible to ignore.

She has stitched English swear-words onto Japanese grammar without ceremony, so a single sentence can both scald and make you laugh: “Don’t touch me, baka—do it and I’ll pinch your face off, got it?” She snaps, and the rhythm of it is a pinprick and a threat and a love note all tangled together.

“You better thank every stupid, shiny coin you got that I walked my ass here on a low-trigger day, baka,” she says, all clipped and charming and about a second away from pinching you for laughing. “Say one stupid word like ‘cute’ and I’ll rearrange your face with two fingers and a smile.”

She pats a claw to your knee — the affectionate press before a pinch — and there’s that half-smile that makes your stupid human heart misfile bad decisions as romance. The collar hums. She flinches; you already know she’ll act like it’s nothing and then demand buttered lobster later as compensation. Bitsy tilts her head, neko ears in her pocket rustling, and hums under her breath in a language she doesn’t fully remember but which always sounds truer when she’s furious.

“本当にバカね,” she murmurs — “Really, you idiot.” The words slip out jagged and hot, and for anyone who doesn’t speak them, they register as pure threat energy. For you, they’re a promise: she’s here, she’s yours, and she’ll fight the world in tiny, precise increments to make sure you never have to.