Lili, a fighter in the King of the Iron Fist Tournament (Private Hunt)

(By the passage of time, characters appearing in this story are at least 18.)

"Asuka... Kazama...!"

Grumbling this name as a curse with a groggy demeanor clouding her otherwise fair features, a blonde-haired beauty began to stir from her rest. Emilie De Rochefort, daughter of the Rochefort oil dynasty, a many-time entrant to the King of the Iron Fist martial arts tournament and a zero-time winner, was most recently a freshman to a prestigious university, although she tended to shirk those responsibilities in pursuit of the woman she'd just named, who she treated as a rival and spent most of her life seeking to... Defeat? Impress? It was complicated. Asuka was one year her senior, and the precocious heiress seemed to admire her even as she constantly sought to demean and defeat her.

It wasn't rare for Lili (her preferred nickname) to spend many waking hours thinking of, plotting against, or otherwise bothering the young head of the Kazama dojo. Still, it was unusual for Lili to wake up muttering her name with such a pounding headache.

As loathe as she was to admit it, the only scenario that seemed to make sense to Lili was that she'd just lost a match to Asuka after being knocked , which would be a shade worse than even her usual track record. Judgment after judgment had been called in Asuka's favor when Lili had been unable to continue competing, been judged the loser as a match timer ran out, or simply performed a tactical retreat... But being knocked ?

"Unthinkable..." The slender-framed but powerful heiress cursed both herself and her rival as she struggled to her heeled feet in unknown surroundings. "Inexcusable!" For good measure, she threw in a few curses in her native French, feeling her knees shake as she placed a gloved hand on her forehead behind her straight blonde bangs. Instead of inspecting her surroundings, she decided to first try and count her bruises. She never regretted choosing the life of a fighter, but she did live in fear of the day she was going to lose a tooth to one of Asuka's elbows-

...

As Lili looked down, she did see very faint bruises, about what she was used to after a sparring session with someone skilled (and foolish) enough to lay a hand on her. What was more concerning was the reason she was able to see them so clearly. Her blue eyes widened in disbelief as she looked down to see neither the fashionable white dress she was so fond of, nor the sleepwear she'd ordinarily wake up in. Instead, she was looking down the cleavage of her own perky chest, which had been squeezed into a form-fitting outfit. Rather than finish inspecting herself, her eyes immediately darted up and around to learn who had inflicted this indignation on her. In doing so, her eyes met with a mirror that made her incomprehensible situation slightly easier to digest.

The costume consisted of a powder-blue one-piece strapless bodysuit with high legs, its blue pattern ending like a corset above the hips and transitioning to a pure white color for the bottom. While it did have attachments at the shoulders and fringes from the hips down only halfway to the knees, poofy like a doll's dress, they were completely sheer, leaving nothing to the imagination. Similarly, the tall white socks and long white gloves were both form-fitting and nearly sheer. Her height was elevated by a pair of tall black heels, which would be easy enough to walk in, but had large blue-and-white bows decorating them. A matching bow tie was included at the white collar she was wearing, the kind that ordinarily ought to accompany a shirt but, in this case, did not. They did, at least, match the black-buttoned white cloth cuffs banded at her wrists.

As she drew closer to the mirror to take a look at her face, putting gloved hand to her cheek and pinching herself to make sure she wasn't dreaming, the woman in the mirror did the same. She wore a black headband with floppy bunny ears of a shade to match the shoes. Her pink lip gloss seemed to be intact, but someone had even replaced her characteristic fashionable eyeliner with a dark shade that she thought made her eyes look doe-like and huge. Her hime-cut blonde hair falling about her shoulder blades in the front and all the way to the small of her back behind were unchanged from her usual, but seeing them unintentionally complete her doll-like appearance vexed her.

The fighter felt a vein pulse in her head as she reached behind to her tailbone, grabbing the cheap cotton tail that she'd known would be a part of this costume. "Ridiculous... Tawdry... And, furthermore, inappropriately infantilizing, like an over-sexualized princess from a children's cartoon." She vainly (and accurately) saw her body, with its long, slender legs and creamy skin, as the most statuesque and elegant a classy French eighteen-year-old could earn; for any commoners to see a body like this wrapped up like a trashy Barbie doll would be obscene. And to top things off, it was blue?! What madman would dress a noblewoman like her in such a common color as blue?!

Lili forgot about her rage at losing a match, and she forgot about her rival for the moment, unconvinced that woman, rude as she was, would stoop to a trick like this. Instead, her ire was squarely focused on whatever fool had been short-sighted enough to do this to a woman like her. The icy blue of Lili's eyes met with their reflection as an incredulous smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. "Someone is about to receive a lesson, oh, yes... There's not going to be anything left for Father's lawyers to sue. I shall issue not a beating, but an execution...!" Lili drove her heel into the grass, picturing a particular part of her envisioned captor that she'd enjoy punishing first...

She paused and finally took register of her surroundings, putting aside her anger for a moment to wonder once again if she actually was in a dream. She wasn't in her bedroom, an arena, or even a building, as far as she could tell. The area around her seemed like a forest from a fairytale, with a canopy of trees, colorful mushrooms all around, and a bed of grass that practically begged her to go barefoot. "As if I'll sacrifice the trifling bit of fashionability I've been allowed to present myself with," Lili stubbornly refused.

If this was a fairytale, though, it was the old, unkind type. It was readily apparent that this was no place for her to meet a Prince Charming or friendly dwarves. Besides the unnatural appearance of the mirror in front of her, the light shining through the tree-line above didn't seem like warm sunlight, but something manmade. That seemed to be supported by the fact that most of the woods around her were dark instead of similarly softly lit, almost like a spotlight was trained on her...

Lili began to consider her options. She had no phone, nor anywhere to reasonably store one... She wasn't relishing the idea of climbing trees in an outfit like this, and she wasn't feeling fully back to strength, regardless... She thought of crying for help, but the thought of her captor's laugh returning from the darkness and her own pride restrained her.

Luckily, something she saw next made her decision for her.