...Well of course it's personal, intimacy is by its very nature.  She wouldn't let just anyone touch her unless they're pretty girls down hormones, you don't even have the right body for that!

But this little old lady has - it's not transactional, it's not "do this much niceness to earn the right to touch fluffy tail", but - the kindness and consideration and unflinching acceptance she has shown has nonetheless earned her the liberty of at least this.

Tail-brushing can go on steadily for a little while, then. She has nothing more important to be doing. (Some of the village's residents are still looking towards her, curiously, between bits of their daily labors.)

...Ohh, that feels ...very nice.  Gods, she doesn't know how she went without for this long.

...She's just going to be curled up in this lady's lap, purring softly - lost in her own little world, until things start to bother her again.

Eventually, the brushing stops.

The sun is high in the sky; An hour or two has passed. Miss Grandma- Who does have a name, it's Xia Ren- Starts gently nudging her and taking about how she needs to go somewhere else.

Of course; she'll just carefully extract herself from - oh, goodness, she can't remember the Chinese honorific for the life of her, even if it's probably going to be accurate to this not-Chinese she's dealing with as the vague memories of that one Monty Python joke are to the not-Latin - well, she can think it in English anyway, it's fine - honored grandmother Xia Ren's lap.  ...She is very thankful for the time she was given.

...Has Books Guy written his letter, yet?

Scroll Guy has written a letter and dispatched it via an energetic teenage girl who's delighted to have an excuse to run instead of weeding. Not that she'll know this without asking.

She's going to find him, at least.  Hopefully once that happens he will tell her.

He's apparently preparing an elaborate diagram in the dirt around a row of five felled logs. Deep in thought double checking the giant circle and the angles of the odd glyphs scattered around it. He doesn't notice her at first.

...She is going to watch him and be very careful to not disturb the process.

He measures things out with weights on strings and what is recognizable as other geometry tricks, making sure the placement is very exact, down to a degree or less. There are over a dozen sigils, and he starts on the next after sufficient scrutinizing and checking (and double-checking the scroll nearly religiously). He looks to be about halfway around the circle, if the same number of glyphs go on each side?

This is very interesting.  ...She wonders how small you could make a circle if you did chipfabbing techniques at it.

When he finishes the current glyph, he notices her and startles and looks worried. Then composes himself and bows again.

"I write and large child go, in past. Two days maybe other village write here."

...!!?!  This was Not The Plan!

"Big small human wander [which way]?', she avoids getting anywhere near his ritual circle.  'Fox wander.  No monsters."

"Big small human wander [south]*."

He points; The direction is further upriver.

*new word

...Then she is going to go that way and catch up to the child travelling alone as soon as reasonably possible!

There's a well-beaten dirt road! She can smell whoever ran down it earlier, it's a pretty fresh scent trail. She does not immediately catch up.

(She does pass a little graveyard with a torii gate at the entrance, which feels... Magical in some way. There's a couple of floaty blue lights in there!)

...She will investigate that... later.  Although, considering the Aesthetic, she has a few guesses and they're all flavors of ghost.

She just hopes they're friendly ghosts and not evil ghosts.  They look a lot like wisps though so she's hopeful they're not going to be banshees.  Even though there's no way that visual association holds.

(...if this is Not-China then how did torii get here?  Cross-pollination from the local not-Japan?  Do they just have appearances in China that she's not aware of?  She's pretty sure torii are more Shinto than anything even if she doesn't know that for sure...  ...Does China have Shinto?  She'll never know, she supposes.)

She can catch up enough to see, on a particularly straight stretch, a teenage girl of maybe fourteen sprinting down the path ahead.

...Whew, that kid's fast.

She has her goal in sight, though!  And she'd never forgive herself if this kid got eaten by a grue!  So she puts on a bit more speed.

She doesn't quite catch up before the kid reaches the next village over; It's quite similar to the first one, if a bit more established, more populated. There are more stone buildings.

Kid goes straight to the big castle-like pavilion structure in the center of town.

...Please tell her she can at least just follow the kid where she's going, without - causing upset, or snarling up traffic, or doing any Parkour(tm) - for attempting to navigate a sufficiently clogged human-scale traffic artery while in the form of a small fox would merit the capital letter.

This place isn't a city; It's a small town at best. There's plenty of room. There's also a trail of people who react to her, foxlike, passing by. Even if there are other animals on the street. A fox in a hurry attracts attention.

Kid is currently: Proudly presenting the letter to one of the two guard types at the castle-pavilion-thing!

There is now a fox with the kid!  Gently poking them with a paw, in fact.

...She is, honestly, inclined to dramatically overact exhaustion once she has their attention, because it would be kind of funny.  But she decides against it; she just waves, instead.

(And pants, tongue lolling out, for real.  Because that really was a workout.  Good grief, what did they feed this girl?  Or is this fox things being fox things and humans being persistence hunters as usual?)

Kid grins down at her and ruffles her ears like a dog!

Guard seems a little concerned after the kid explains that this is the '----- fox' (the compound word pretty clearly by now means 'kitsune' or something like that), but there's a brief discussion...

And then kid is pointing off in a new direction. "The ------- is over there!"

The kitsune cannot help but grin back!  And give a bit of a headbump.  Scritches good.

Now to the translator-mage-person!  Hopefully!