She lands in a pile of fluffy cushions on the end of someone's bed.

"Eeep!" says, presumably, the someone in question.

The speaker is a redhead who looks about 19, sitting cross-legged at the other end of the bed with a heavily stickered and bedazzled laptop balanced on her knees. Her attire—a hoodie and sweatpants—might spark memories of Weiss's previous life. The room is small; the floor is covered with discarded clothes and takeout containers, and the walls with K-pop posters.

Blink blink blink.

Wow! Right into someone's house! That can't be very likely!

Her ears dip and her tail sags and her head bows in contrition.

Shift. It's draining to do it in an instant but not that draining. 

Quickly illusion up her typical leather and linen wanderer outfit. She holds up her hands. "Sorry! Magic accident!" She says, in Notal, the most popular human language.

(That's not Korean or English, didn't sound like Japanese or Chinese—and she's white—)

"Uhhh...English?" she tries hopefully. 

She squints in thought. Something about that is familiar. Her eyes go to the laptop, then widen. 

Is this her old home???

"Uhhhhh.... Yesssss? Maybe?"

"Ok. Hi. Who are you, and why are you in my dorm room???" (She speaks English with an accent, but is making an effort to speak slowly and clearly.) 

She shakes her head and tries to puzzle out the words. It's like digging up something big and heavy from the mud. 'Who are you', okay, and something something 'my room'?

An Earthy room. With a laptop. And posters!!

She flings a cartoonish shadow sketch of her leaping out the window onto a wall as if to say 'I can just leave?'

"...I'm Weiss. Ato thul... Sorry? I get out?"

"No, no, it's okay, it was an accident, right? —hi, I'm Ji-Min." 

She pulls down her hood, letting two fox ears pop out. Impossible to say whether they were there a second earlier. 

"Where did you come from?"

Ears! Her own perk up instantly. They're very expressive. 

"...Trying to, uh, remember English. Long ago. From-" her brows furrow. "Isekai? And hi!"

Ji-Min doesn't speak Japanese per se, but she does know a bunch of Japanese words that have been loaned into English and other languages, including 'isekai'. 

"...you're from another world???" 

"Yeah maybe! Monsters and witches! And foxes." She waves her tail. "There was... Big magic. Uh... Like behind a... Dam? It does isekais sometimes."

"Well, we have monsters and witches here too—and foxes, obviously." She wags a floofy tail that doesn't seem like it could have had space to hide behind her back. "You're a really big fox, though. And you don't even have your second tail yet! Are you going to get bigger?"

Nice illusion! Or possibly a shift. This is definitely a sister fox! She bounces on her feet and grins.

"Oh, probably only a little bit. Apparently I was scared at first so I got big and strong and mean looking? Magic." Shrug. "Foxes best! Hug?"

"Foxes best!" she echoes gleefully, and then she sprouts fur and shrinks and very quickly…

There is a fox! She's much smaller than Weiss's fox shape, only a little bigger than a regular fox, but she's extremely fluffy and, contrary to the image, has two tails.

Now there can be fluffy foxhugs! 

Hugs and pets and fluffy tail hugs! There is always time for these important things.

She wraps her tail around the cute sister fox and will hug and scritch, but doesn't change back herself. It's just a little tiring to do that constantly.

She pulls a wooden hairbrush out of her tail and holds it questioningly?

"Mmmm, yes please." Hugs are important, but Ji-Min unsnuggles to allow better access for brushies, because brushies are also important. 

She will carefully and patiently brush both of those pretty tails. Slowly and thoroughly. She's done it often enough to know how to do it just right, too. She's in no hurry, even as her thoughts bounce around, trying to remember Earth Stuff.

Happy sleepy fox. 

At some point, the cellphone on the nightstand buzzes with an incoming message, but it's aaaallll the way over there, and Ji-Min is comfortable. She flicks an ear at it in annoyance and doesn't move. 

Her ear also twitches at the sudden, intrusive noise. Ooh, phones! Also, ugh, phones.

Hmm. Yeah, she doesn't want to stand up either.

"I only vaguely remember lots of things, but phones are still annoying..."

Back to brushies. Her own tail could use some attention too, probably, maybe in a bit.

The phone buzzes some more, but that's Future Ji-Min's problem. 

A few minutes of brushies later, someone bangs on the door, and a young-sounding male voice calls, "Ji-Min, are you in there? Can I come in or are you having sex?"

Invisible foxgirl!

Ugh, why did she decide to have friends. Who thought that was a good idea? 

"One minute!" she yells back. 

She grows and stretches, fur receding and clothes reappearing between eyeblinks in a smooth transition to her human shape. She keeps the ears and tail. 

"It's okay, it's just my friend. You can stay invisible if you want, but the worst he'll do is assume we were having sex and tease me about it." 

...Visible again. She's barefoot, and she stretches a bit.

"Yeah sure. We definitely weren't, but eh. I'm... Kinda shy though. So you know."

"Okay, got it!" She gives a quick thumbs-up. "Let me know if you need me to kick him out." 

Ji-Min goes over and opens the door. 

"Ok, your virgin eyes are safe, you can come in." 

Her friend squawks in mock outrage. "Ji-Miiiin," he complains, but he does come in. 

He spots Weiss, and his tone immediately changes. "MinMin! You have a strange girl in your room! Were you having sex?" 

"Your coat is rumpled. Were you?"

He cackles. "I like you, let's be friends! I'm Wei Ying." 

That disarms her for a moment, actually. "Uh, sure? Okay? I'm Weiss Faron."

"Nice to meet you! So, what were you doing that had MinMin too distracted to check her phone?" 

"Yes, he's always like this," Ji-Min contributes. "You don't have to tell him if you don't want; it's none of his business."  

She has a thought to make him brush her tail as an apology, for some reason, and shoos it away with an ear twitch.

"No nevermind. What was so urgent, anyway?"

"Oh, right! MinMin, you said you wanted to walk to the dining hall together!" 

Huh? It's not dinner t—oh, wait, it is dinner time. How did that happen. 

"Right, yeah, sorry, I lost track of time. You coming, Weiss? I can pay for your meal." 

"Sure why not? --Pizza. I bet dining halls have pizza I can have real pizza again! Ooh ooh! And root beer!"

"No beer. The dining hall won't sell alcohol, for some reason." 

"No, no, root beer! It's an American thing; it's non-alcoholic. You're on the wrong continent for it, though, sorry!" 

(He talks considerably faster than Ji-Min, so Weiss might not have caught all of that.) 

"Mmmmm... Coca-cola then? Ah, Ji-min, should we hide the ears and tails? I have a little curse, there will always be something. But it can be, like, oh that's a tattoo."

"That depends. Are you okay with people asking you stupid questions, like why are you white?" 

Without missing a beat, Wei Ying jokes, "Oh my god, Ji-Min, you can't just ask someone why they're white." 

"I mean... I know tan and brown kitsunes from where I was before, too? Like, this is Earth, right? That place wasn't."

Here, have a quick illusion splayed out into midair, to demonstrate.

"...I have fifty million questions!!! You're from another world??? How did you do that? Who is she?" 

"She's pretty," Ji-Min contributes. She's seen Weiss's illusion magic already and doesn't find it quite so surprising. 

"Hehe. I don't really know the why! It's as mysterious to me as anyone else. But it's exciting to be back! And can't most kitsunes do that? I mean, usually it's just shadows..." She holds up her hand to the nearest light source, sketching a quick shadow-swordfight on the wall. "That's Megi, she's a real- Sweet? She's nice."

"We can do something pretty similar, I don't know if it's exactly the same. But, anyway. Most foxes like us in this world are East Asian—like me, I'm from Korea—and you'll stand out. So people will probably ask you stupid questions about it." 

"I guess I can always tell increasingly outrageous lies until they get the point. I'm from mars, you see, the cosmic rays turned me white."

Ji-Min giggles. "Nice. Come on, then, let's go get some food." 

She grabs her phone, makes sure she has her wallet and student ID, and pushes Wei Ying ahead of her out of the room. 

Weiss looks around at the cheap student-dorm hallway. It's so familiar and yet so strange at the same time. (Her ears twitch towards most random noises).

Most of the residents seem to have personalised their doors at least a little, with nametags and little decorations. The door they just exited says "Ji-Min's room", with a line of Korean text underneath that probably says the same thing, and has a few drawings of foxes tacked up. 

"Hecuba's room" has additional signs plastered all over it saying things like "KNOCK AND WAIT ON PAIN OF PETRIFICATION". There's a warning sign hand-drawn in imitation of a road sign, showing the black silhouette of a person's head with snakes fanning out around it. 

"Kapua's room" is written in the swirliest bubbliest writing possible. There are flowering vines all the way around the doorframe. 

"Katherine's room" is written in slightly awkward cursive that was clearly trying for elegance, with a border of abstract coloured-pen swirls. The door is otherwise blank. 

"Pet-rif-ic-ation..." She sounds out the word. "Yeep. I don't have magic resistance except on the full moon."

"—hmm? Oh, yeah, Hecuba. She's a sweetheart, you don't need to worry. Just don't go in her room without knocking. That's what the signs are for; she'd be really upset if she petrified someone by accident." 

"Sweetheart?" Wei Ying objects. "Don't tell lies to poor Weiss! She's really mean!" 

Wei Ying gets a skeptical eyebrow-raise from her.

"I thought so, you don't put up warnings if you're not-" She waves vaguely. "Just. Yeep."

"Oh, yeah, for sure. They can fix it, at least, but it's still not pleasant to be turned into a statue. Or so I'm told." 

Hallway hallway stairs. There are stairs both up and down; Ji-Min heads down. 

She's quiet and thoughtful for the next few moments.

Wei Ying is an expert at filling silences! 

"So you're from another world? What's it like?" 

"Pretty strange! I must have been gone for decades but this dorm building looks approximately normal? Aside from containing magic people... That's not the world, though. So I'm pretty sure that world had an apocalypse a couple thousand years ago? There's still lots of places with old cursed magic gunked up, that spit out monsters if you poke 'em. But people poke 'em anyway, because they want more land to own. Oh, and magic. There's a lot of magic and-"

She blushes suddenly and changes the topic.

"-Ooh, yes, there are canyons there that you could fit whole mountains into, all radiating from this huge crater. And all sorts of weird animals- Weird to an Earthling, anyway. Hextreads! They're sort of like six-legged deercows. As one example."

"They sound cool! So you're from Earth originally? What part—ohhhhh, right, you're American!" 

"I'm not sure I really count anymore. But I was once."

"How long ago? Do you remember what year it was?" 

"Mrrrrrrrrrr.........."

She closes her eyes to think. She still navigates the stairs perfectly well.

"...I used to play Super Smash Brothers?"

"I think the original's been out maybe fifteen years or so? I can check, hold on!" He pulls out his phone and starts tapping away. 

"Do you remember if it was on a big screen with a controller, or on a handheld console with a little screen?" 

"Big screen. With... My friend. Todd. I liked being Pikachu."

Wow, nostalgia bomb.

"Hmmm, that doesn't narrow it down very much; Pikachu's been in every version of the game since 1999," he complains. "—it's 2015, by the way." 

"I don't know. I definitely feel like it's been more than fifteen years. Noten went through at least two different Kings. Maybe a Narnia sitch?"

"A what?"

"In the Chronicles of Narnia these kids spent a hundred years in a world in a closet and when they came out it was, like, a weekend later."

"Yeah, could be—oh! We should see if we can find your family! After food, though." 

And indeed, they've arrived at the dining hall. There's a growing queue for food, and the long tables are already half full with chattering groups of students. Almost everyone looks human, and more than half are white.

Ji-Min waves to a few people on her way in; she seems reasonably popular. She makes sure Weiss ends up between her and Wei Ying in the queue. 

"O pizza thy beauty calls out to me, where art thou with thy delicious cheese and tomato sauce - no tomatoes where I was at, I tell you-"

Ji-Min gasps. "Oh, you poor thing, how terrible!" 

They can absolutely get Weiss some pizza. There's plain cheese or pepperoni.

Ji-Min gets chicken korma and rice and fails to persuade Wei Ying to get anything other than pizza, or to get some salad with his pizza. 

Pepperoni!! And also a smattering of whatever else looks tasty, with a focus on meat!

Ji-Min swipes her student ID for her own meal and a credit card for Weiss, then leads the way to a table. 

On the way, they pass a human-looking Asian boy who glowers at Ji-Min, his expression darkening even further when he sees Weiss trailing her. Ji-Min acts as though she doesn't notice. 

Weiss is immediately tense. She surreptitiously grabs the tip of her tail, gathering up blue embers in her palm before thinking better of it and letting them dissipate with a deep breath.

This is a frigging cafeteria. It's not like a fight is about to break out.

He confines himself to glaring. 

Ji-Min lets herself be flagged down by a group of chattering students and finds space for herself and Weiss to sit together at the edge of the group. 

Wei Ying starts to follow, but then he spots someone he knows on the other side of the dining hall and goes off to talk to them.

(If Weiss pays attention to him after this point, she'll see him bothering a gorgeous-looking Asian boy who seems to be completely ignoring him.) 

"I got to admit, I feel a little lost, Ji-Min." She half-whispers.

"But uh, hi everyone."

And yeah, Wei Ying seems to be that kind of chaos kid. She smiles a bit.

"Hi, nice to meet you!" says a girl with leaves and flowers twined in her hair and around her neck. "I'm a dryad, and my real name is unpronounceable with human-shaped mouths but you can call me Kapua!" 

"Kapua. I might be able to get the right one if it's just sounds and not a scent, psychic impression, or something like that. Is everyone in this town magic?"

"Nope! But we like to hang out with each other. Critters are more interesting than humans!" 

"There are...probably ten or twenty critters in this room, counting us? That's assuming I know about most of them, though. Half of these people could be closeted werejackals and I'd have no idea." 

(There are around a hundred and fifty people in the room in total.) 

"...Huh. Is the school particularly concentrated maybe? A masquerade situation? I never heard about any of this until I woke up in a different world."

A tall girl wearing a choker rolls her eyes. "I mean, this building is a little bit critter central because it's where they stick everyone who needs 'special accommodations'," she air quotes, "but it's not like anyone comes to uni not knowing critters exist. When I tell people I'm a wereswan I get 'huh, there are wereswans?', not 'wait, werecreatures are real?'" 

"...Would people also know this in New York? Maybe shrug it off as the same thing as ancient aliens or the illuminati?"

"...weren't there literally dragons at the Twin Towers on 9/11. Like, I was three and in Tyneside and I know that." 

"I was eight, and I saw them on the news," says a guy with a ginger beard and a Scottish accent. "Are you literally from a different world, then? One that, what, just has foxes and nothing else?"

"Apparently!! Or, well, I was from Earth, no foxes or anything else, and then a truck hit me, and then I was a fox. And then I lived in that world for a few decades and now I'm here."

"Wow! So you've been on three worlds counting this one? What are the others like?" 

"I don't remember much about Earth. Faint impressions of... High school, and video games... But Tirra I think was pretty interesting. Kinda medieval? But about one in twenty people had some kind of magic, and there were so many critters that a lot weren't even critters really, it was just humans and lizardfolk and harpies and gnolls and mers, not something rare and special. There's a bunch of gods, who I'm very sure are actually real, we got miracles and everything- Whether you want to call them 'powerful spirits' instead of 'gods' or not- Uh, the monsters kind of put a damper on it though. I think they're left over from some kinda apocalypse? I fought 'em sometimes."

"Tirra sounds like a video game," Scottish guy comments. "Especially with having to fight monsters."

"—there's no danger of the monsters getting through to here, the same way you did, is there?" 

"Uh... It's not impossible but the rift that took me here closed about as soon as it opened. Rifts are a known thing. And there definitely weren't monsters around when I came through. I can smell 'em a mile off."

"Oh, good. Well, let someone know if you smell any, I guess." 

"Smell what?" says a boy in a wheelchair, rolling himself up to the table with a tray of food balanced on his lap. 

He spots Weiss. "Hi, I'm beautif—fuck! I mean, hi, I'm Onnu, you're beautiful." 

"Monsters. Haven't smelled any so far, just plastic and car smog." She fails to hide a slight grin. "Nice try."

"Sorry, English is my third language, and I was distracted by your beauty." 

His accent isn't recognisable from her memories of Earth, but it's not British or American. (Also, if Weiss looks closely, she might notice that he has fins, not feet, poking out from beneath the blanket over his lower half.)

She does notice.

"I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree, Onnu, but I'll take the compliments. I'm Weiss."

Yeah, he knows when to quit. 

"Nice to meet you. So, what's this about monsters?" 

"Weiss is from another world where they have them! And before that, she was from an Earth that had no critters at all!"

"They're really nasty! And not like critters- Like, alien, and mostly dumb, and even the smart ones are pure evil. It's good you don't have any here."

"We might have them, or something like them, and not know it. Lots of critters are hidey, or only exist in one part of the world, or both." 

"The modern world is pretty interconnected, though! I mean, just at this table we've got critters from every corner of Europe and Asia. Monsters like that would have to be somewhere really, really remote! Like...the Amazon rainforest, or the Siberian tundra, or Antarctica..." 

"Oh, there are absolutely critters we don't know about in all of those places."

She splays her hands on the table and - as if part of it turned to a video screen, there's a shifting mass of black goo. It forms up into a shiny beetle-predator-demon looking thing with razor antennae and a circular maw and skitters off.

"—uh?! What the fuck was that???" 

"One of the monsters I am referring to. That one was a slickling. They like to blind people with those antennae. Four out of ten dangerous."

"That was a four? I don't think I want to see a ten." 

"That was an illusion, right? How does it work, did you make the picture from memory, or make a window to somewhere on Tirra, or is it like a recording you have stored...?" 

"Yeah, maybe not. The tens are pretty nasty. I think I got kind of a ridiculous stack of powers with my isekai? That was from memory and imagination."