A Legendary Fox

In Ancient Japan there is a legend of a race known as the Kitsune a mystical being capable of transforming themselves into humans. The legend states that these beings are tricksters possessing magical powers as well as one or more tails depending on their powers and should be avoided at all costs. That last spotting of one of these creatures was over a thousand years ago and times are changing. Thought to have gone extinct or into hiding it’s time for us to come back into the world and see if we can coexist with society. My name is Fredrick I have just turned five and I am a Kitsune and I am about to enter elementary school in America in a human guise for to see if I can make friends. My family has lived in America for as long as I have been alive and with this new era of technology has been able to run a business form home using their computers to make granting us a comfortable life in seclusion. My parents having reached the age of adulthood have mastered their abilities to change their appearance to that of a local very easily and can go out and conduct business shop for groceries or do errand without being noticed.

It was easy for the adults to maintain their disguises as they have had many years to perfect their skills with disguise magic unlike the younger kits. The younger you are the harder it is to control and the disguises can have defects or obvious holes like the occasional fox ear showing up or getting so exited ones tail may show. My parents have been training me to control my abilities with the hope that I can join the regular humans in a thing they call school. My parents want me to make a thing called friends and interact with children my own age things I have never done before. Usually in a Kitsune family the mom will have many kits so they all grow up together and learn from the parents and siblings how to be successful for some reason or another I was my mom’s only kit and not having brothers or sisters to play with is apparently not a preferred way to grow up plus my parents do not want me to be home schooled. Traditionally the family teaches their kits slowly over many years how to master our magical abilities about the outside world and the rules that govern human society and Kitsune society.

Regretful in the area of America where we live the population of Kitsune are very small and tend to keep to them. Before we dive too deeply into our society, lives or other interesting characteristics let me tell you a little about myself. There are four main fur types for us depending on when were born our fur will change with the seasons. I was born in December making my primary coat type winter meaning it was primarily whit with some brown spots. Like most Kitsune I was born with that cute fox face small pointy ears with black tips. I have that little snout that narrow as it approaches my nose with a little black button nose and transparent whiskers that occasionally twitch. We have an incredible sense of smell long tails mine was primarily white with a few brown spots in the middle and a black point tip at the end on the tail. There are different forms of magic most of us are born with but most of us have the following two abilities one is a fox form art and the other is a human disguise form. Typically when we are first for we will be born in our fox form meaning we look like a baby fox and will act like one but as time moves we make transitions form our fox form to our more natural form.

From a young age we are taught how to stand on our back legs and use our tail to balance us in this standing form. It takes a while to master this ability and as we get older and more muscular we learn this form of standing and walking easily. At home we stay in our standing fox form in some comfortable fabrics and clothing of the local style that is popular to the region. Before this modern age of artificial houses and homes a lot of our kind lived in caves or underground dens. This led the parents of the kits to learn how to use their fox form magic. Other animals in nature do not care if they see a standing fox that can be anywhere from four to six feet tall. The problem was that we had a natural fear of humans with their weapons of various forms that we could occasionally enter forest doing what they called hunting killing and animal wearing its pelt occasionally or eating animals. We learn from a young age what humans smell like yes even the cleanest of your kind has a particular odor to us it’s a mix of an earth smell with that twinge of smoke and fire in it for good measure. Back in the older times when we caught the scent of human we were taught to transform into our fox form. Making us the size of a typical fox looking like a much smaller version of our natural selves in this form our speed increased and our indicts changed. Upon sensing a human most young Kitsune will transform take off running to our den or dig a quick hole to hide in just until we feel the threat is gone. It’s almost like a natural instinct of self-preservation to us.

With the age of iron, steel, glass and cities where the humans have come to conquer the natural location where we live times have necessitated us to make a change. As a result of the humans creating a thing they call civilization we have been forced into interacting with human kind more and more. As a result of this forced interaction and rapid expansion of humans into our territories we have perfected a new form of magic that of the human disguise. When we first began experimenting with this kind of magic we learned a skilled known as copy. This let us copy the looks of any human we had seen in our area in the last three says. At first this skill was working quite well we could look like the humans we saw the only problem with that ability is if you adopted the disguise of a particular human and well the same human you were disguised as saw you in their own skin. It freaked them out and occasionally this shock would break our concentration revealing our true forms to the human in question. They usually would ignore it but as more humans began showing up creating cities these human duplicate disguises would no longer work. Another problem was there was a time limit of how long we could remain in this disguise. We needed our own look or own identity that’s when we learned a form called adaptability. It let us take the various aspects form humans we had saw and take the looks and traits we liked from these humans and create a unique look and identity for ourselves. This would become our default human form and the unique features could be changed in case of and emergency. This form of disguise was easier to keep up as long as we concentrated on it.

This ability let us interact and live with the humans in peace and tranquility; humans taught us some of their various skills like fishing and farming. These skills we learned from the humans we taught to our kits so they could interact with humans when they got older. Typically a kit would spend the first twenty years of their young live with their parents learning about the human world how to interact with it then upon their twenty first birthdays we would be allowed to leave the family den and find our own place to live and make new families for ourselves. For a long time there would be large areas of Kitsune that lived together in cities helped raise the young and find us a place where we belonged. As times have changed and history was written about us we got stories in the human’s world and time has rapidly made us progress our skills abilities and form and now in this brave new century of computers, we are forced to adapt once again. For the longest times we stayed to our native homeland of japan but as more humans took over the island and the knowledge of other places we could live became available to us a great migration from our homeland began. New continents became available us to us as the birth of steam ships, airplanes and other forms of transportation technology evolved granting us a larger are to room and explore. Hopefully you don’t mind me talking about our culture and our abilities to much I am ready now I think to talk about myself.

As a young kit growing up in America my parents learned about the requirements for children to go to school a building where the human children learned about human culture. A school was a strange building that taught about math, social studies science, literature and other activities and other concepts of humanity. After learning about this institution my parents decide that perhaps it would be a good idea for me their son to experience and learn more about the human world. They talked to other human parents about this school learned the requirements for human children and decided that they would teach me how to act like a human child so I could go to school. I would be the first Kitsune in my family to leave the den at a young age and attend the human’s school. After turning a year old my parents worked hard with me to learn some of the various human skills that would be required for me to go to school everything from how to where the human clothes properly to how to use some of their strange inventions like this weird thing called toilet. Learning how to use this strange device was difficult for me but as I learned my parents would attempt to use this device with me. To go from using the back yard to a strange room was a challenge and figuring out the best way to use the bathroom as the humans called it was difficult to master. For the most part I could figure it out.

The second thing I was forced to master was my use of the human disguise usually this skill was taught over a much longer period of time. This was a skill taught over the period of twenty years to a point where we mastered the skill and could hold our human for long period times for the experienced maintaining a human disguise for a year with no breaks was possible. Trying to use this school for longer than thirty minutes as a young kit was incredibly difficult. Every day we would practice and every day I would be able to use the skills my parents were teaching me longer and longer and progressively my disguise ability was becoming better and better. By the time I was three I had picked my first human disguise out and was able to keep it going for four hours not an easy task for a rambunctious little fella like myself. With continuous practice dedication and a lot of hard work I was able when I turned four to leave my parents’ home and go on errands with them visit this new place called a park and experience all the mysteries of the human world. When the summer came my parents registered me to begin school that fall I was five years old excited to experience all the things the human world had to offer me. My parents were required to something called registration where they were forced to assign me a human first and last name I was to be known as Fredrick Softpaw.

 Then the day came a bright yellow vehicle stopped where I was standing in my human disguise with my family next to me this vehicle opened up with a hiss and clunk the human smiled and said hello there. This vehicle was called a bus and apparently it transported the other humans from their homes to this think called school. My parents gave me a little hug reminded me of some of the rules to blending in with the humans and with a deep breath I gathered all my courage boarded this thing called a bus. My heart was racing my stomach felt like it had eaten bad food I could tell myself shaking a little bit and my breathing was speeding up. Slowly this bus was leaving my house and I could look out the window as the place where I had lived for such a long period of time slowly got further out of my sight. The bus continued down the road and I just kept concentrating and trying to calm myself down as the bus picked up more and more humans. The bus slowly began to fill up that’s when this young human female came up to where I was sitting and asked if she could join me. I shook my head yes as that was all that I could do, she said in a sweet little voice high Fredrick I was surprised she knew my name. I panicked for a minute than noticed on her pink shirt was a piece of paper that said hello my name is Emily and had the words kindergarten on it. That’s when I remembered I was wearing on of these pieces of paper on my favorite human shirt. It was a blue shirt with a little fox curled up sleeping in the opposite corner from my name tag as it was called. I attempted to smile and said hello Emily I could feel some of my teeth losing their human shape with my tongue and closed my mouth quickly. She smiled back at me and asked if I was nervous or scared I said yes I am. She said that’s ok I am too but my older sister told me to be brave and smile and not to be nervous for she said school could be fun. 

Emily was the first human I had met so far and she told me a little about her sister her family and about how they had a crazy dog named buster. As she talked I feel a little less nervous I talked a little about myself and my family not quite knowing what exactly to say. I just kind of followed what Emily was saying adding my own stores and knowledge to the conversation. That made things go better and Slowly this large building came into view it was primarily brick and bright red stating South King elementary School the large bus pulled up to the southern end of the school and the doors to the bus opened again and the driver as they were called said all kindergarteners of father buss this is your stop and have a good day. Emily took my human hand I could feel he r soft hand were slightly cold and wet she said come on Fredrick it’s time for school lets go and don’t forget your lunch box. I concentrated on keeping my hand from turning into a paw grabbed my lunch box and followed Emily as she led me to the classroom that would be ours for the school year ahead. She lead me to the class room where an older human was waiting marking a sheet of paper as we entered the classroom and as we entered she instructed up to put our supplies and lunches in the areas indicated by pour names. I put my stuff in the designated area not knowing what to do next, that’s when I felt it the urge that I had to relieve myself. I asked Emily what I was supposed to do and she took me to the older woman she asked I a kindly and very gentle voice how can I help you. Emily said we have to go the bathroom to woman smiled and said ok and opened one door for me and a second for Emily and said go ahead go but once you’re done com back to the classroom. 

I found a stall with a door practiced what my parents had taught me about the bathroom easily no messes or accidents hear. Pulled back up the human pants arranged my tail carefully and resumed my human disguise and walked to the sink where I washed my hands smiled at myself and said perhaps things would be ok. I pushed the strange door back to the hallway where I saw Emily was waiting for me we walked into the classroom together and said thank you to me. I just smiled and said no problem, Emily confided in me she had to go as well. And that’s when the lady who had been marking us asked us to sit down at the small desks provided and introduced herself as Mrs. Smithfield and that she was going to be our teacher and thus began my first day of School and the beginning of me making my first human friend. I was excited nervous and happy for this marked my journey to understanding the human world.