A fox wakes up in a cheerful forest clearing. She feels like she just had the best night of sleep ever. There are distant, muddled memories of something else, but this body feels natural and whole.

There are berry bushes, and yellow daffodills, and wild rice rustling gently in the wind, and cedar and pine trees surrounding the little clearing, and the sounds of rabbits and mice in the low grass, clear and distinct to a fox's sensitive ears.

"Mrrrmp?"  She streeeeeeetches, yawning.

Something about this feels like it should be happening to her sister - what does that even mean?  - but the berries are sweet and her instincts are functional and her body knows more about how to survive than she does.  Yet.  She will be learning.  And that is a threat.  (To whom?  About what?  She doesn't know yet.  She'll find out.)

The berries are bright yellow and are extremely sweet, with a faint hint of something almost citrus to them.

...Also: Was she sleeping... out in the open... in the middle of the woods?!  That's just wrong.  Time to go look for somewhere to dig a den!  She's probably going to be here for a while!

It's old growth. There's lots of downed logs, root hollows, low bushes, churned ground, and other scrub that would get in the way of something bigger. Depending on what exactly she wants from a burrow spot, one can probably be found. 

...Actually. Maybe avoid that one direction. It smells ominous and faintly evil. Albeit not in a very active way.

...Yeeeeeahhhh avoiding the smell that makes her hindbrain go !!DANGER!!, even if it's more like !danger! right now, is just... good sense.  ...She should find somewhere not too near water, but not too far from a nice flowing river...  (Why does it matter that the river's flowing?  ...Reasons?  Something is very insistent that flowing water is probably safer than not-flowing water.  If there's not [- ---- -------] --????  ...That's weird.)

But having somewhere where the tunnels can't be much bigger than her is pretty good, actually.  ...Ideally somewhere she can duck under something and vanish.  And come out somewhere else, if she's lucky.

A good hour or two's wandering will produce a rough map: In the center, the little clearing. To the northeast, the bad smell. In the east, a lot of relatively stagnant water and wetlands. It's flowing, but slowly. To the south, a rockier and more barren area, and a proper creek flowing clear over water-smoothed stones. It's quite pretty. The trees change to tall crowning oaks with less undergrowth over to the west, it's quiet out there.

...Definitely not the wetlands.

There's some part of her that thinks she might be able to Do Something with the rocks.  ...She'll figure out precisely what she could do with the rocks later.  Right now...

Right now she's just going to let her instincts look for where the best spot for a den might be.  The things in the back of her head don't seem to have much input.

...Which way is the river flowing?

The river is flowing east, into the wetlands.

The soft soil on a hillside would be good. Taking over an existing burrow would be fine, especially if it can have multiple exits as a backup plan, as long as it's actually abandoned. There are multiple spots that seem fine for digging, but the best... The oak grove by the rocks is the most readily tangled and burrow-y already, and is relatively near the river while being far from the swamp. Plus, there are squirrels nearby, and they smell delicious.

...Yeah, that seems like a good spot to start a burrow.

She'll take a sniff for any abandoned-smelling burrows, first, though.  Better to have something to start with.

There's a few empty ones scattered around, one in the clearing she woke up in even, but none in the ~ideal spot~. Also, she gets to meet the local badger! It hisses at her, but nothing more so long as she keeps a distance. What fun.

...Yes, fun, that is how she would describe that, not.

...Well.  Time to start digging!

Digging is strangely easy, in addition to being satisfying to some deep part of her that wants to be snug and safe and sleepy.

[I'm a fox and I'm dig-ging a hole; diggy diggy hole, dig-ging a hole,]

...?!

It doesn't stop her from digging, but she will never admit that she bonked directly into the ceiling in her surprise at whatever that was.

Something from the other things in her head...  Sounds, with meanings, meanings beyond those simple things her instincts already recognize.

Strange.

She needs to know more.  She doesn't know how she could know more, yet.  But she'll find out.

(But right now, she needs to dig.)

Nothing disturbs her as she digs.

...Then there will, time and food permitting, be a rather impressive tunnel network starting to exist around her new den - perfect for ducking through if she's being chased, sometimes even mazelike.  [Like that thing with the soldiers and the tunnels through the mountains.]  ...Why does she know any of that?

Eventually, though, curiosity takes her upriver, because [Most towns start out built around rivers] and [If there are humans near here, we need to know where they're coming from and where they'll go.  If, and what, they hunt.  What they hunt with.  ...It's a risk to go near them.  But to have them surprise us would be worse.].

Food is plentiful, and so is time. It seems to be late spring verging into summer, and the heat and long days inspire a sort of lazy vibe to the world. All is well. Survival is not a struggle, with many subtle advantages over a true fox- Not to mention the boon of intelligence.

A viable path upriver requires wending southwest through the rocky areas for a while, then back east- Or swimming across the river, which is not too strenuous, but does leave one soaked.

The first sign of habitation is about an hour's walk upriver. A field of reeds, cut, soaked, and laid out in neat rows on the riverbank to dry. They've also cleared out some of the overgrowth here, with sandal marks and cutting marks from hand tools visible. Also, the smell of them is kind of unmistakable. Not unpleasant, maybe even slightly pleasant, but definitely unmistakable as 'human'... And maybe some cats, too?

The river water is cool, and it is hot.  She'll go for a swim; why not?

Interesting.

-- foxes are cat software on dog hardware --

That's rather irrelevant right now, surely --

Not exactly.  Cats domesticated themselves.  Foxes can be domestic too.

There's a few other random tools around- What might be some kind of brick mold? A wooden shovel. And a large sieve. Some baskets, halfway completed weaving.

--Oh, there's the people here. A woman up at the north end of the clearing, in a rough cloth tunic and sandals, with a flint axe, carrying a stack of firewood pieces. Plus a child maybe five or six slightly struggling to carry a handbasket laden with some sort of vegetable and some mushrooms. They're chattering away at each other happily enough, the kid babbling in the rambly way kids do and the mother indulgently responding, but... She doesn't understand the language at all. It sounds vaguely Asian?

Of course it does, I've been isekaied.  Why wouldn't it be Asiatic.  Aside from the concurrent question of how that happens.

Well!  Time to see if she can learn by observing the language the hard way.  When she has time.  Wonder if I know any of it.  ...Oh, gods, not ideograms.  I do not want to memorize seven bajillion characters for each individual word I might want to write!

The village is called 'Kua', with a down-and-up sort of tone (it's a tonal language)... Though that might just be the word for 'place' or 'home' or something. There's about eighty people, with solid palisade walls and a scattering of fields and foraging/forestry areas. The houses and construction and most of the tools are wood and flint, but there's some copper and iron around, too. A few times she's spotted, bright orange fox coloration sticking out against the forest's green and grey and brown. People treat the sight with... Vague indifference, really. A few adults will shoo her away, others won't care. One time, an eight-year-old sitting on a low stone wall will spend however long she'll tolerate the game tossing berries for her to acrobatically catch and giggling. Listening to parents talk to their small children is perhaps the best way to actually learn- 'Got your nose!' is fairly universal.

She identifies a total of four people with magic! One man is a waterbender, or something quite like it, and uses this power to fill cisterns on roofs while humming cheerfully. One woman will do little rituals and charms, incense or herbs or embroidered paper (...It does seem to be a complex character based language, unfortunately). They don't do anything really dramatic but she can feel the subtle power to them. One old lady has some sort of cleaning magic, or possibly a magic broom- A gaggle of teens assembly-line clothes and rugs and the like to her. She bops them with a raggedy old broom and all the dust magically falls away in a little pile, and they fold it and return it to others. Lastly, there's someone who has what seems like proper book magic. It involves a lot of drawing in the dirt or on chalkboards and careful positioning of his hands and rhythmic chanting and frequently checking a slightly raggedy scroll. He seems to mostly use it to repair tools and other small objects.

Oh gods preserve her, tones.  That's even worse.  She's in fantasy not!China.  She was only braced for fantasy not!Japan.

At least she has reasonably good hearing.  And - she hadn't noticed she had human color vision, still, taking the existence of colors like orange for granted - but she has human color vision.  Not the colorblindness she vaguely recalls seeing charts of gradients about.  What the fuck.  That's weird.

...Does anybody recognize the English alphabet, if it's scratched out in the dirt by a paw (overnight)?  It's a long shot, but until she figures out what the actual fuck is going on...  She may as well take long shots.

Scroll Magic Guy spends a while WTFing over the alphabet!

...Then Scroll Magic Guy finds that there are More Letters the next day, and a fox!

CAN YOU READ THIS?

Apparently he can't. He does very carefully copy both sets of writing down into a loose-leaf paper with a fountain pen.

...Except, ahhhhh. A fox. Upon observing her standing near the writing he seems to come to a big realization.

He bows and says some things in a more formal register than usual. "Good morning, ------ Fox. -------- Kua is ------- --- ------- --- you."

...She tries to emote moderate confusion, though she does wave a paw -- actually, no, she'll just...

Give her a minute, she's doing art.

stick-figure speech-bubble some-random-imitated-characters; fox, fox thought-bubble same-characters but crossed out, fox thought-bubble English SOME WORDS; stickfigure thoughtbubble SOME WORDS, cross out, questionmark-with-inquisitive-headtilt?

What is 'strength rice rest' supposed to mean?? Is it some sort of joke? It it just nonsense? ...Is that 'rice', instead, 'fertility'? ......He regrets that he does not really understand. (In slightly overwrought formal speech.)

Some other villagers are curious what's going on now and coming over to gawk at a distance. There's a conversation that includes a compound word (something-Fox) several times. She hears, distinctly, the name 'Tamamo'.