"Oh~? Yeah, it is pretty much finders-keepers. Unless it's cursed shit. That's Inquisitions-Purifiers. This is the Northern Federation. So named because it is a federation, and in the north, and 'Let's not fight wars against each other when there's monsters eating the peasants' is about all the Walled Cities and great academies and sorcerous sects and other high muckety-mucks can agree on."

"...Somehow I am still pleassntly surprised they can agree on even that much."

"...Is it still dangerous to enter the exclusion zone until it stops being smelly, or...?  'cause it smells like it's letting up."

"Risk is a matter of degrees. I'm not sure what you're saying? Going in to that compound? Bad idea. The local head honcho is a self-styled noble baron answering to the Walled City of Silkweave, he'll be eager to do a purge and pay to support a shrine on the site to purify it over a generation or two, that's the whole reason he got his shiny badge."

"...Ahh.  Okay.  ...Goodness, that's...

"That's going to take a long time."

"I guess it would take a while to remediate, if it's lasted this long to begin with."

She looks a bit - not precisely lost in thought, but rather like thoughts are randomly slamming into her brain like birds running into windows.

"...I have no idea why my brain is deciding to throw at least half a dozen separate ideas about how to fuck up this curse at me, depending on the available metaphysics.  ...There's no way it's going to be anywhere near that simple, because if it was, state-of-the-art wouldn't be 'slap talismans on it and have faith the gods will sort it out over a few generations', surely.  But damn if I don't want to try anyway, assuming I have the slightest hope of accomplishing anything.  Which I don't because I am a baby fox, but - hope springs eternal, I guess.  And I want to fix it."

"...Do we know what doesn't work?  For disrupting the self-sustenance of these curses?  Because there's gotta be something that holds them together..."

"Just killing the monsters does not work. It sort of - smears them? Disrupts things, forces a phase change, but they come back. Maybe in a year, maybe in twenty. All the powers of wizardry to negate and counter and abjure avail little- Lots of things have been tried, I don't know what exactly, but I'd have heard about it if any worked. They can contain it, but not get rid of it. Similarly the little tricks one can learn that make what is called a 'witch', those never solve the problem forever, merely forestall it. What is known to work is purification rituals by a priestess, worked day after day and year after year, exerting your soul as a conduit between the Light Gods and this reality until it is as fatigued as a farmer's muscles, until the darkness is truly scoured from the air and water and soil. Some of the most worthy and difficult tasks are done one long, long day at a time. I have done this, too, at times. There is comfort in routine, even unpleasant ones. What also works is just... Living there. Souls accumulate the darkness, and when they pass on it vanishes from this world."

"...well of course killing the monsters itself doesn't work, generating the monsters is part of the bounded field, you'd need to introduce a disruptive cascade --"

"..."

"...Hm."

"But yeah I'm not surprised that a direct counterspell just doesn't actually work, notwithstanding that I don't even know what that is in practice.  That's the first thing you'd harden your Fuck You magic against, because it's the obvious counterplay."

"I suppose the categories of idea I'm thinking of, then, generally come in two flavors.  One is 'figure out how to replicate the "souls passing on eats the darkness" thing in something that can ethically be grown or deployed en masse', and the other is 'turn the field's destructive potential against itself'.  ...I imagine that that's not your field of expertise, though.  And speaking of wizards and suchlike, uh, what is magic like?  I saw this guy with ritual circles, a couple of enchanted items, a waterbender, your cleric stuff...?"

"Curiosity is a good, foxish trait."

She licks an ear.

"I don't think you're going to get anywhere the gods haven't with the second thing, but the first doesn't sound impossible? I wouldn't say it's an urgent problem. Hmm, well, in terms of magic people can do- It's not just humans, you know, the local Big Guy is a bit of a racist is all- Hmm..."

She uncurls and stretches slightly.

"Unf! So. You've got wizardry, witchery, sorcery, and priestesshood. Wizardry is heavy on detail work and involves drawing things either in the air or on the ground and injecting willpower into them very precisely, the big draw is that a spell will work the same way for two people if they do it the exact same way. Witchery is - well, hard to teach, you just sort of keep trying things and eventually something works, or it doesn't. Once you have it, it's just a knack you have, like cleaning anything you swat with a broom, or making potions of bacteria-killing from ordinary mint tea. Water bender? What a curious appellation. He's a sorcerer. Someone with innate influence over an element- Not a chemical element, but a conceptual one. It sometimes runs in families and is fairly rare, sometimes it can be awakened with a tribulation. There are these training cults around that will nearly drown you, bury you alive, and so on, to try and make it happen. Earth, water, air, fire, lightning, sometimes weirder stuff. Priestesses, as I've said, mostly do wards against curses, purifying, and giving out little blessings or miracles, and they require being chosen by one of the Light Gods. This is all in addition to various niche, innate, or special magics of course- Like kitsune powers!"

"...Yeah, 'waterbender' is an Earth reference.  Work of fiction where the magic was, roughly, - oh you wouldn't know the guy - anyway, earth, fire, water, air, elementally, with martial arts as the medium.  ...Not surprised that the way y'all call it translates to 'sorcerer', though.  Sorc/wiz distinction has been a thing for longer than magic was definitively real.  ...And speaking of translation, I'm glad I just heard you say 'bacteria', because if your outworlders and-or gods hadn't gotten to germ theory, that would really cut in to my diamond manufacture ambitions."

"...Are there proper enchanted items?  Since I'm pretty sure the only one I've seen was actually witchery, given all that."

"Mhm, me too, I'm aware of her distinguished broominess~ Well~ There's a few kinds, mostly wizardry-made. You've got scrolls and wands and artifacts, in increasing levels of expensiveness. I'm not a wizard. There are old old relics around here and there too- Stuff from Tirra, or divine artifacts, or things that just had enough mythos around them for long enough to become their own thing. Like the Moon Tears which legend says can turn people into kitsunes, or the great orrery which teaches everyone who looks at it about orbits."

...The description of the great orrery simply poleaxes her.  "I know about orbits, but how the fuck does it communicate the proofs of that?  Does it just jam a lesson on orbital mechanics directly into someone's brain?  And, like, if so, how?  That's...

"That's like making a magical equivalent of the fucking Rosetta Stone that actually teaches you its languages on its own - without you having to actually translate anything - when you try to read it, what the fuck?"

"I guess that's why it's an artifact, good grief.  ...I wonder if you could - no, I shouldn't say...  Oh, but it would be such a grand trick to play..."

"...Anyway, that's a project for later."

"...Also, life goal acquired, visit that grand orrery and figure out what it's even doing.  ...Probably not seriously doing that, I don't even know where it is, but dear gods that's.  Something.  I want to poke it with a stick.  It smells like jumping several steps on the tech tree, if there's even the faintest hope someone could reverse-engineer it - and I probably won't be capable of it on my own, not without more sustained effort than I know how to do - but I do kind of think it is.  ...Possible, I mean."

"...But...you were saying about Moon Tears?  Because by all rights I am pretty sure I shouldn't be ranked even in the top three most kitsune-coded people I - knew -"  She winces; those memories she has of them are often very personal, "- so, well, I wouldn't have figured I'd be the one to reincarnate thusly.  ...And seeing as, as far as I can prove, this may as well be the same universe, I do kind of have to wonder if I ran into one.  Before magic was evident.  Somehow.  ...To be honest I'm still just trying to figure out why now, why here, and why this.  Other than some absurd noöspheric conjunction that I can't really rule out, but you'd think I'd land somewhere that spoke English - or whatever its modern descendants are, because frankly there's no way the language calling itself English of my time could be time-capsuled so thoroughly, it had a tendency to mug other languages for spare verbiage - anyway, if it was affinity that controlled, I shouldn't be a fox in the middle of the forest in not-China.  So other than 'Tamamo pranked me', which, you know, is also pretty impossible to rule out because I'm pretty sure she'd find outright lying about this sort of thing funny if we asked her..."

She trails off.

"I'm just...  Trying to put things together and make the world make sense again.  Even though I already know that there's no way it will, because real life doesn't have to make sense.  Shit just fucking happens sometimes, and this shit sure did happen, and, well, I'm going to have to deal with it, aren't I?"

She sighs.

"At least this might have maybe disenfuckened my neurochemistry a bit.  I hope.  I can but hope.  ...and, well, if the depression does make a resurgence and try to eat me, I can probably stave it off with magic.  Because magic's cool."

"It is! I love being a kitsune. Hmm... I'm about ready to head back to civilization if you are? Or you could stay here. You don't have to stick with me. It'll probably be a year or two before your Red Dream."

"I would like to stick around people who can understand me, generally speaking.  I'm sure I'm going to pick up the local language out of sheer immersion, whether I like it or not, and despite the historically-attested difficulties, but...  There's something to speaking and knowing you will be understood, and listening and knowing that you will understand, so far as one's ability to understand the concepts in play permits."

"Hmm... Well, I'm not really a motherly sort, you know? Then again, you're not much of a usual kit. So precocious it's a little unnerving. It clashes, you know? Like a toddler going 'mother, I require sustenance'. I can stick around for another few days, maybe a week, but I don't intend to remain for long. I bet you can hang out around that village, or maybe near the town, especially if I explain you. And there are more kitsunes you could run into. We wander, pretty often."

"I don't think I get it, but I get it," she says, pushing the translation effect to its limits in conveying the particular tone with which she tried to convey that she doesn't have enough grounding in kitsune-ness to grok the too-precocious-childness, but nonetheless thinks that the example sufficed to understand it.  "The uncanny valley is a thing, for sure.  ...I'm not asking for you to adopt me, anyway.  Just...

"Well, as was frequently bandied about in my last life, humans are social creatures.  I don't want to be alone, or, even worse, alone in a crowd.  I've had more than enough of that for two lifetimes.  So, I don't know, I was thinking I might go with you, at least for a little while, if you were willing to have me along?  Depending on where you're going, I guess.  And I'd try to pull my weight.

"...I'm not exactly hugely invested in here-in-particular, you know?  It was just...  The village along the river, the forest where I respawned.

"...Unrelatedly, it just occurred to me - does the speaking-to-foxes thing work with writing?  Or is it spoken words only?  If I could get a reference for the fucking logograms -"

"...Annnd there goes my brain again, running off on a tangent about constructing translations of everything into everything else the long way by fox magic if we can just get enough kitsune, with the right native languages, in the right place, for long enough.  That's probably... ...logistically infeasible, to say nothing of the other questions of translation that I can't imagine you want to hear me go on about for five minutes."

"...At least this isn't the first time I've had to learn another language?  Although frankly I know only a few dozen words of French, and most of them badly.  To say nothing of -"

"...I said I wasn't going to go on that rant."

"But seriously, the - linguistic distance - between my tongue, and what's likely the ancestor of yours, is immense.  There was this study that said they were the hardest to crosstrain amongst the pairings studied, and it would probably be easier for both sides to learn Spanish."

"...Well, it didn't say that in so many words, but it was very notable to me that both native English speakers and native speakers of Mandarin Chinese found Spanish - which is a lot like French - easiest to learn.  Haven't the slightest idea why, unfortunately.  Never actually read the darn thing, and propably wouldn't remember the details even if I had, given how everything else has been.  But it's - funny, nonetheless."

"I'm not sure what you mean by the speaking with foxes thing? It's Tamamo's fault. That's my answer when something doesn't make sense and is too hard to think about, hihihi~"

She sniffs towards the exit of the burrows... The nearest one, at least... But then settles down for slightly more snugging.

"...Yeah, but like, are the things that are Tamamo's fault going to include 'mysteriously Knowing all the bajillion individual characters the local language uses if a fellow kitsune writes them down for me'?  English orthography is bad enough; I'm going to hate having to learn every word twice."

"Oh, no, fox language is spoken only. Ordinary foxes speak it too but they have really distinctive accents. And grammar."

"...Damn.  There goes that plan.  I guess now I have to hope that your not-Chinese at least has some way of writing down a character's phonemes built in, even if that's probably its own whole mess."

"You might do better with Notal? It's phonetic."

"Oh, probably.  But I'm here, so I'd better learn the language people actually speak, ne?  Even if Notal does sound interesting."