Article 30: Rainier+Victoria
MSF High is a school full of rivalries, and the reasons for them can vary from the superficial to the fundamental. In the case of the feud between Victor Grace and Rainier Latham, however, it's both. Why, exactly, Victoria remains in her Succubus body and continues to go after rainier long after she technically won what she could call a victory by draining him is something that she alone knows, but what started the fight in the first place is known to a number of students, and from all of their testimonies, it began on the bottom floor of the Mahou City Mall, at the city's Welcome Center.
Mahou City's Welcome Center is host to a number of different events and most days can be rented out for parties, meetings, or whatever other gathering is important enough to warrant a room overlooking the mall's fountain, but in the weeks leading up to the start of a school semester, they're completely booked with the various events welcoming and assisting new students at the school. The event in question happened while the welcome center was running a support group for new arrivals that had shown up in bodies different from the ones they had when they arrived. Both Rainier and Victor were present there, and both apparently for the same reason. As many students know, though Rainier looks now very similar to how he did before arrival, his body is in fact astoundingly different. On his Watcher station, he was a fully mechanical Android, while his body upon arrival was translated into a completely organic Watcher, though he retains some of his previous abilities. While many present had physical differences to fret over, such as tails that they couldn't control or the absence of wings that they'd spent their entire lives getting used to, Rainier's troubles were more internal. As a former Android, Rainier had no experience in dealing with his new inner workings, including his hormones. Unused to things like attraction to other students, he had hoped to get some advice, but he never even made it as far as his introduction.
Sitting to the left of Rainier was Victor Grace, another new arrival, completely bedecked in baseball gear. He explained that, on his home planet, he was an up-and-coming minor leaguer who was taken to MSF High after his dugout collapsed on him while he was trying to get a fan to safety during an earthquake. He proclaimed that he was a normal human on his home planet, but here he had ascended into a full-on Baseball Elemental. Rainier, having already learned of Elementals and the rules governing their creation and powers, scoffed at Victor's story, and when Victor asked what was so funny, Rainier began one of the first in what would be a legendary string of explanations. He told Victor that while it was theoretically possible that he could have become a sportsmanship or victory--especially likely, given his name--or teamwork Elemental, "baseball" was less an abstract concept and more a sport or even just thematics, and the likelihood was that he was simply still a Human who had joined the support group in search of attention. With every sentence that Rainier rattled off, Victor grew angrier and angrier, and every time he attempted to counter one of the know-it-all Watcher's points, he was met with a flurry of extraneous information. Eventually, Victory grew so frustrated at Rainier that he challenged him to a fight behind the school, which the other participants of the therapy session all encouraged. No one ever got to hear why Rainier was there, but they all seemed relieved to see him go.
Both students arrived at the sports field behind the school, coincidentally in its baseball diamond configuration, loaded for battle. Rainier was bedecked in his Watcher coat with his newly-designed bomb pockets, though at the time he had only figured out a way to mass-manufacture simple "vanilla" bombs, while Victor was in his uniform with a bat, glove, and set of baseballs all tied to his belt. Despite their audience being nothing more than a few track club members who were curious about what was going on, the two delivered dramatic speeches at each other before Rainier pulled a bomb on Victor and threw it with all of the might he could muster. Somehow, despite the argument being about Victor's apparently unhealthy obsession with baseball, he'd never considered the possibility of the bomb being hit back at him, and a small kaboom later, Rainier's second body of the day emerged from his closet.
Since then, the rivalry between the two is fairly well-known amongst the first-year students of MSF High. Though Victor--now Victoria thanks to one of Rainier's later bombs and a visit to Nurse Keiri--seems to now be the more unhinged among the two, neither will pass up an opportunity to make the other's life more difficult. It appears that neither is willing to let the rivalry go, despite the original reason no longer being relevant as Victoria is not even human anymore. Why, exactly, they keep going at each others' throats is a topic for an entirely different discussion, but the most popular theory is, of course, that the two have become physically attracted to each other. This is always proposed as a reason any two people get into a fight, however, so I wouldn't put any stock into it until some other evidence shows up. Whether Victoria is still a Succubus because she found some combat advantage in it or because she likes the way Rainier stares at her isn't something I'm willing to get into right now. Just try to use the example of Rainier and Victoria as a reason not to take yourself too seriously.
