Everyone chilled out as lunch progressed, even Doug, who after a little while decided that having two girls in the group made him cooler by extension. I couldn’t entirely fault him on the logic, since yeah… having friends of the opposite gender did actually make you seem cooler in the eyes of our peers. Well, most of them anyway, I didn’t give two shits and neither did Eva.

Speaking of Eva, she kept her hands to herself after all the talk of touching, which had me a little bemused. Like, why did she suddenly care about all that stuff now?

She did share some of her ham sandwich with me though, which was absolute bliss after nothing but fruit and veges. Don’t know what Mum was thinking when she gave me this lunch, I was a fox girl, not a bunny girl!

It was so interesting how many of us demi-humans there were now actually. There was one guy who had a full snake body from the waist down, it was crazy. I was also beginning to notice an… amusing trend. The types and numbers of certain species were very clearly skewed towards a variable that made sense when you thought about it, but was nevertheless extremely eyebrow raising.

See, there were a lot more mammalian features in the crowd than say, avian or reptilian, and I could see only one person with aquatic characteristics in the large lunch hall. What that told me was that the prevalence of a species was almost directly related to the fuckability of a given spirit race.

Fox girls? Cute, mischievous, and able to take human form? Far more likely to get frisky with a human than whatever had given the girl over there the big feathered plume instead of hair. Gosh though, there were a lot of fox girls around. One girl older than me over on the other side of the room with her friends even had two tails, while another off at a table by herself looked more like me… hold on.

Red and black curls exploded out in a mess down her back, although less frizzy than I remembered. She wore a nice, modest dress that fit her willowy frame, with a zipper-operated hole at the back where her huge fluffy fox tail came out.

“Saoirse?” I murmured, staring over at her.

Eva turned to me with a soft questioning noise. “What did you say?”

“Hold my spot,” I replied, throwing her a quick smile as I got up.

Dashing over to my cousin, I sat down next to her and grinned. Predictably, she twitched and let out a squeak of surprise, ears perking right up into an alert state. Her expression turned bright and happy when she recognised me, and I found myself pulled into a quick hug.

“Tia!” she exclaimed as I was let go. “I wondered how to find you! There’s so many people here and… I have to be in certain rooms at certain times and it’s all so very confusing. Why must I learn about the mechanisms of government, and what is this spell that people chant with hands over hearts at the start of the day? School is so much more of an enigma than I could have possibly imagined!”

“Yeah, those are called classes, silly,” I laughed. Her innocent distress was so damned cute. “Also, didn’t I give you my phone number?”

Her mouth dropped open and her eyes widened with chagrin. “Oh, yes you did. Goodness, I haven’t been thinking, have I? The wiseman in my first class called out a list of the students and he found it very difficult to pronounce my name correctly, which caused all the other children to laugh. It was very embarrassing and I haven’t been able to regain my mental footing since!”

Holding my laughter there was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Instead, I put my arm around her shoulder and asked, “Well, I’ve found you know. How about we take you over to my friends and we hang out, answer all your questions?”

“Your friends?” she asked, still wide eyed and perky eared. Dang, she was in full fox mode right now, alert for predators and embarrassment alike.

“Yeah, at that table over there,” I said, motioning in their direction with a hand. They were all staring over at us with open curiosity. Except Eva, she had an unreadable expression on her face.

“Oh, if they don’t mind,” she said nervously, her big eyes darting from one face to the next. Poor girl was so lonely, I could see it in the way her ears drooped and tucked in, as though she were hiding from a predator in tall grass. I’d be her new family though, at least until she found the others of her clan.

“If they mind, I’ll kick their asses,” I told her with a warm laugh, standing up and taking hold of her lunch to carry it for her. “Come on!”

She looked nervous, but she followed nevertheless, and I directed her to sit next to Noah, who’d probably love nothing more than to infodump for all her questions. Guy was like an encyclopedia of random useless knowledge.

“Hey everyone, this is my cousin, Saoirse,” I told them all as we sat down. “She’s just moved here from… um, a really remote area in Ireland. This is her first day in an american school and she’s feeling overwhelmed.”

“How come you’ve never talked about her?” Eva asked suspiciously, squinting at the other fox girl like blurry vision would somehow reveal all her secrets.

“Because I didn’t know about her until recently,” I shrugged, telling the truth. “She’s actually more distant than a cousin, but we’re just using that for simplicity’s sake.”

My friend let out a long breath, “Okay…”

Noah, without any social awareness that maybe he shouldn’t do it, grabbed the tip of Saoirse’s tail and pulled it up above the table. “Their ears might not entirely match, but the patterns on them and the tail are very similar.”

Stunned for a moment by the brazen accosting of her tail, my cousin stared in shock for a moment before yanking her tail out of his grip with a hiss. “It is bad manners to touch a woman’s tail like that,” she growled, before rambling off under her breath in some ancient form of gaelic.

“Oh, sorry…” my nerdy friend said, looking genuinely surprised. “I was just… ah…”

She shot him a silencing glare.

The table was quiet for several seconds as the awkwardness of the situation settled in. In that moment, I felt hands grasp at my own tail, and I turned to find Eva had snared it, threading her fingers through my soft fur.

Her eyes met mine with a soft challenge, eyes full of vulnerability, like she was testing to see if we were close enough that she could do that still. A small, private smile rose in answer across my lips, and I turned my head to flick her nose with the tip of my ear. I ended the maneuver with another wink before turning back to the table.

“So yeah uh… anyway, Saoirse is on her own here and I figured… she’s welcome here right?” I said, breaking the silence with a hopeful smile.

“She growled at Noah, so she’s good with me,” Doug grinned, offering a fist bump across the table to the confused fox girl. She squinted suspiciously at his hand, then as she realised she was supposed to interact with it somehow, reached out with her slim, pale finger to poke at it.

Doug laughed, along with Benny and I, and shook his head, “Nah, you’re meant to bump your own fist into mine, it’s a sign of respect here in freedom land.”

“I thought Ireland would know about fist bumps,” Eva commented, her voice missing the earlier suspicion. “Must have been a really remote island.”

Saoirse completed the fist bump with an embarrassed nod. “Yes… very. I have lived in isolation with my parents and other relatives since I was born. I only just got a phone in the last month, learned what a school even is, at leat properly. I mean, that is to say that I understood the concept, but I had never actually seen one. Oh, and signing papers! So many papers to sign, and they don’t take pawprints, so I had to learn how to write my name in cursive. Then there’s the part where no one can say my name right! Except you all, but Tia told you the correct pronunciation...”

Her jaw snapped shut when she realised that she’d been babbling, her blush rising further as though to compensate for the sudden lack of words flowing from her lips.

“It’s spelled S-A-O-I-R-S-E, but it’s obviously pronounced Seershah,” I explained to everyone while my cousin tried desperately to get her flaming cheeks under control.

Eva giggled, sending a smile across the table, “I feel that. Everyone tries to shorten my name to Eve, like the biblical figure. It’s actually short for Evaralie, which my mum just made up when she and… uh, my dad couldn’t agree on a name. Or at least, that’s how the story goes.”

“I am finding it very distressing, because the difference between the two is so very different, and therefore I do not respond when my name is called because it does not sound like my name to me!” Saoirse pouted, glaring at her food like the bread roll she was about to eat were the one that had gotten her name wrong.

That got a round of laughter from everyone, which had Benny launching into a comical impersonation of the ‘moron’ who would get her name wrong. Nevermind that he struggled to pronounce it properly, he was trying.

What surprised me was the way Doug was being the most chill with her out of everyone. The guy wasn’t even trying to actively hit on her, which was truly strange.

Noah, for his part, realised he’d gotten too far down his internal wikipedia rabbithole with the tail stunt and did his best to not be socially awkward for the remainder of the lunch period.

Meanwhile, my cousin settled in with her food, eating and watching the banter go back and forth across the table like she was at a tennis match.

Eva also didn’t let go of my tail at all for the whole rest of the period. I think she got comfort from it, the way she was idly messing with it or gently brushing and unbrushing it. Kinda sucked that she didn’t get a transformation of her own. I wonder if there was a way to remedy that?

My thoughts got themselves hooked on that problem, how could I give her the tail she needed? She was even more hyperactive than me, which meant that from a personality perspective she’d fit in as a fox girl no problem.

Now, she obviously couldn’t be given the spark of magic the usual way, that ship had sailed when her parents got frisky. But what if she were to visit the spirit realm? She’d just fade away, according to what I’d been told by the dryad and her tree husband… unless she had a sliver of fox spirit magic within her, right?

Was that possible? Was I just dreaming up things that didn’t make any sense from a magical perspective? Probably, but considering how malleable magic was to a sufficiently willed mind, it might not be so far fetched.

I needed to learn more about magic, and I needed to become far stronger than I was now. I needed to go out and beat the living piss out of some bad spirits until I understood them, understood what I had become, and then understood what made us tick.

QuietValerie

Aaagghhh sorry about the long wait between chapters atm. Writing is proving difficult and I don't know why. Thanks everyone for being patient, I'll try my best to figure out wtf is wrong with my brain this time and then get back to my usual pace. Also thank you so much to my patrons for being so incredible, I really really appreciate all of you and your support for me. I know some of you have said that $2 isn't much or whatever, but just know that it's the long term support that matters most. One time donations might buy me a new game to play (which I really appreciate), but the most important thing is that long term support helps me live my life from one week to the next. Thank you so freaking much. I mean it.