She blinks awake ... Ooh! A rift! And a calm enough one to see through.

And...

...Memories of Earth well up strong. Because that is a skyscraper in progress, and beyond it a city, more glass and steel and-

She goes through smart quick before it can close on her! (Invisibly. Because cameras exist.)

Hey Tamamo, are you listening? This could be important. You know those otherworlders that help introduce technology and stuff? Right? I found more of them!!

(Patience, kiddo. I'll be involved later, I'm sure, no need to rush to the ending all at once.)

She feels the distant divine presence of Tamamo glance at her, and then keep watching, the faint feeling of half an eye on her, clearly not intending to do anything right away.

Okay then... Okay. Wow.

First thing she does is, swap to biped-human form, because that's who cities are built for. Then look up through the construction and try to find the highest spot she could perch on... Then leap up to it, two or three stories at a time with supernaturally boosted parkour, and take in a big wide view of the city.

She can get up to the forty-eighth floor of this skyscraper, which is built in twelve banks of four, each rotationally offset from the bank below for little corner balconies. It's not very complete but it is structurally stable all the way up the dark maze of cables and crossbeams.

This is a pretty normal sized building for this city, with some things taller and some shorter (there are a couple structures that are only one story in the parts that aren't two, at the edges of a park, but everything else she can see is at least four). The biggest visible street has a few slow moving truck headlights but most of the streets don't look built for significant vehicle traffic. There's stairs down to a subway and some people walking around under the streetlights.

Gosh.

She tries to crawl through her vague memories for where this might be. Singapore has really immense density, right...? And they'll jail you for spitting chewing gum on the ground, she thinks.

What do any signs or writing look like? How's the weather?

There are light-up signs with letters made of simple shapes like boxes and triangles. Looks monolingual or at least monoalphabetical. It's cool and springy and partly cloudy.

It doesn't really look right for any of the east-asian languages she remembers. It's sort of in the general area. She's nnnnot a linguist though.

She's going to - invisibly - leap from the tower and really stretch the illusion muscles with an invisible but tangible illusory-paraglider. She'll get down to street level, and drop the last twenty feet or so after dismissing it midair. Maybe go for the park, maybe look for... Subway station? Those have maps, right?

The park doesn't have a map. Just plants, none quite familiar, and benches, and a playground with a zipline and a wobbly bridge between high play structures and one of those big circular swing things with room for six kids at once and slides.

The subway station has a subway map. This city has eleven lines. This station is the third station from the northeast endpoint of the light blue line.

Run along the tracks to a less crowded area that is a bad idea.

She's going to run along the streets and look for anything that is in English or looks like an embassy or something.

- Nope
- Nothing
- Triangles, squares, circles, crosses, V shapes pointing in various directions, squiggles.
- Those and nothing else.
- This might be a different language or just a wacky font.
- No such luck.
- There is no evidence that they have even identified the national flag!
- No.

This place is immense. It's kind of oppressive. It's also the middle of the night still... And she can't exactly enjoy fried chicken and video games or whatever else again if she doesn't have any fiat money or know the language.

There really should be some English around, it was the de facto world language... But she has been gone for decades, a lot can change in a century...

How was the park on greenery density? Probably insufficient for her purposes of somewhere to sleep. So she's going to pick a direction and quadrupedally run, and just keep going straight.

Eventually she hits neighborhoods of other character, including bigger parks, but not really dense plants per se.

The last subway stop connects to a surface train. The stops get farther apart, if she keeps going a few miles.

Yeah, she's already feeling uncomfortable and wants to interact with this place from a position of... Rurality.

Train tracks are open enough that she can run on top of them and really zip along and expect to be able to dodge any traffic.

...If the line isn't electrified or something.

It is! Probably she should not touch the tracks.

The suburbs give way to farms eventually. Grain. Fruit trees.

It was late evening when she left Tirra, so she's feeling quite tired by now as twilight starts creeping up. It's more comfortable out here, but not comfortably wild yet.

Any patches of not-actively-being-used plants out here? Those little long strips of woodland left up as wind-breaks like twenty feet across between fields sometimes? Failing that, a roof with a little secluded nook that seems unlikely to be frequently checked.

They have some windbreaks that also grow nuts or something, but occasionally there are truly otherwise useless shrubs serving this purpose.

She naps inamongst one of those for a while. Visible if you get close but her hearing is good enough to get some warning.

Before dawn the irrigation system soaks her.

ACK. They're wasting water on the windbreak?? Ehh forget the nap. She gets clear before getting completely soaked and goes to hang out in a road or something, damp, to think. They won't water the road. 

She's going to run out of energy being invisible all the time... But if she just hides away in the Woods Between instead (maybe she should have, she just tries not to spend all her time hidden away there) she won't be able to figure out where she is.

...Has she seen any animals out here in the agriculture zone? Other than, like, small rodents or birds. Farm animals, horses?

Not out at night, at any rate. There are barns that could have sleeping animals.

Mrrrrr tiiiiiired.

She goes back to the run, frustrated. They can't cultivate every inch of the planet, can they? Even in the Corn Belt or whatever. There's national parks and places that are just too expensive or not productive enough to develop.

Right?

If she keeps going she can find wetlands with bright red warning signs, and the landfill!

Eugh, more wet. Sure, wetlands are wild, but they're wet. And possibly some kind of toxic site, if there's that many signs...? She'd better avoid that, sounds unpleasant. And the landfill stench...

This has pretty quickly gotten less exciting than she thought. Because she's avoiding everyone. Which is her own fault.

...

She should have done this much sooner, but she starts 'saving' signs she sees as illusory text as she runs, and staring at them. And adding more that she thinks she remembers, mostly. Trying to pick out... Common words, or something.

A handful of short words are very popular on the alarming red signs and might mean "danger" or something like that.

A ways past the scary red sign zone there's some steep rocky mountainous areas.

Finally. Mountains are fine enough... Though some trees would be nice.

Of the 'curses' being a kitsune gave her, the city-aversion thing is probably the most inconvenient. It comes and goes, but it's strong right now.

She finds or maybe digs a spot to at least be kinda sheltered, a big rock on one side at least, to watch the stars and/or sunrise, and nap, and think in.

...Is this really Earth? With what night remains to her, she looks up at the sky... Does the moon exist and look right? Or, uh... Big dipper? That's the only Earth constellation she can actually remember.

Now that you mention it the Earth's moon was bigger than, uh, either of these ones.

Yeah........

She does need her sleep, so she naps as the sun rises and well after that.

Then...

Hmm.

If it's not Earth she doesn't have a slim chance of integrating into things without being noticed. She has zero chance. Okay, that can be exciting too. And Tirra could use more tech. Okay!

So what she is going to do is, non-invisibly, walk right back over the mountains, and right past the trash zone, and right through farm zones along the road again, until she sees an alien.

Two feet or four?

Four is faster, even if she's not in an itchy hurry anymore. (Knowing for sure that there is a wild to go to helps a lot.)

Well, there's a red truck trundling into the landfill zone.

Rotting garbage is still smelly and she has pretty good smellin'. Plus it's kinda rude to blatantly interrupt people at work. ...She watches it go for a bit, seeing if she can spot the driver, though.

The driver is focused on navigating and doesn't spot her back, but he looks mostly like a human, just with orchid-pink hair.

Hm! She kind of figured on humans or humanoids from the human-shaped doors and windows and things, but anime hair, apparently, okay.

It's still rude and kind of dangerous to interrupt drivers.

Onward. A bit faster, more of a trot.

There's a purple-haired one fixing a sprinkler!

...

...

There is a little bit of a pranking feeling in her, but this might Actually Be Important. So she should show her alienness quickly.

She could keep going, look for someone more official-like, but patience is not super her thing.

Bark! Bark!

She trots closer.

Still like thirty feet away, she shifts.

It is illusion show time!

Low-detail abstract person with ears and tail in a forest. They hop through a hole! And then they are in a farm. They look around, and turn into a four-legged thing, and run through fields, and then run up to a low-detail abstract person with purple hair and turn bipedal again. "Yeah, hi! I bet you don't know English."

(It's a lie, but it's a less confusing narrative! She can correct it later if necessary!)

The purple looks up when she barks, shrieks when he sees her, trips when he tries to get up from his squatting sprinkler repair position, and calms down just about enough to make a second attempt at bolting when she turns humanoid.

...Well, she certainly thinks this will get attention when he calls 911 or whatever number. She's not gonna chase him. She holds her hands up in vague apology and starts backing up again?

He's not looking over his shoulder very often as he pelts through the field of space broccoli.

Ehhhhhhh. She fucked up but is not sure how exactly. Or, well, what else do you do? Oh, right, they don't have legends of the kitsunes as helpful monster-alarms here...

...

Back on the road. She's gonna run again, citywardsly. Or until she finds train tracks. Completely visible.

A farm vehicle on the road coming the opposite direction screeches to a halt.

Same routine. Hi!

......this purple gets out what looks like a phone and starts taking pictures.

Wave wave! Illusions showing people talking through phones in two different locations to show she understands what phones are.

She nods, then stops like she's remembering that aliens might not nod.

Hmm? She does a curious head-tilt with emphasizing ear flick.

...Conjuring a bunch of random signs will probably just confuse her, though she's curious about how to read...

She ends up in a thinking pose. Maybe it's best just to wait?

The purple takes more pictures and after a minute ends up on a phone call.

She's gonna get a head start on the picture and text label game. Mountain. Field. Corn. Pond. River. Train. And so on. 

In Notal, not English, since that will be a more relevant language if things go well... Not that stable portals have existed for long on Tirra... And why is that...?

...sure, she'll take pictures of the alien alphabet book or whatever too.

Well, no rush. She tries to express sorry for interrupting the farming via illusion.

(It's really easy to stop talking aloud when you're doing illusions and know they don't understand the language.)

And then maybe - That might be a question about who they are calling? Or how long it will take? She provides several little two second loops of cartoon sun moving different distances.

The purple can’t make illusions herself. She makes some gestures. They aren’t very clear.

Shrug.

She'll conjure a stool to sit on and fiddle with illusions for however long, then.

In about thirty minutes a van pulls up behind the tractor. Two people with gray hair, one with blue, and two with green come out.

Wave wave. "Hello."

Are these the right people to present the pictures with words to?

The greens look really interested! They brought a big tablet and have installed all her letters displayed so far on it, look!

Sensible! Here are the sounds associated with each letter. They're missing this one and this one and that one. They go in this order.

Okay, here are the signs she saw and remembers (they're mostly the WARNING SIGNS). Is theirs phonetic too?

...yes and they are kind of alarmed that she encountered the warning signs!

Oh, she's fine, here is an illusion of her quadruped form on the good side of the signs sniffing and then making a disgusted face and turning away.

Oh phew. Yeah here is how to pronounce all their letters.

She's not really sure where to take the language lesson from here.

Will she get in their vehicle?

...First, she shows them a little animation:

A week or two, depicted by a rapid sun-moon (singular, white, out of habit) cycle spinning overhead, in a tower. The cartoon of her gets tireder over time.

A few days, in the mountains. She's perky again.

Then she'll get in if there seems to be some kind of acknowledgement.

They confer with each other and then show her a picture of a desert: good?

"Desert, okay." Image of her in a desert with a small smile. "Forest, great!" In a forest, big grin.

Is this picture of a forest okay?

Nodnod. It's a bit more complicated than that, but anywhere sufficiently wild, as in not actively manicured into a park, will be fine. As will retreating into the Woods Between, but she doesn't like to do that too much.

Not that she can say any of that right now.

She evinces familiarity with seatbelts without being shown them.

Cool. Off trundles the vehicle. The blue haired person spends the trip making various phone calls. The green ones are working on language; does she favor learning Tapap or teaching them Notal?

...Seems easier to teach them Notal? She'll pick things up by absorption sooner or later, she's sure. She thinks she recognized the word for 'phone' a bit earlier. Or maybe it was something else.

They will set themselves to learning Notal. One of them can doodle pictures on the tablet for anything they can't pull up preexisting photos for.

She's going to turn the usage of illusion to help way down after a bit. With a brief explanation that it makes her need the wild again sooner.

Words and example sentences and nouns and verbs and adjectives...

Colors? Stars and planets? They're called "Amentans", by the way.

She's a Kitsune! Her planet is Tirra and it goes around a star and has many different person-species on it, like Humans, Lizardfolk, Kobolds, Drakes, Harpies, Hawkkin, Lamia, Catfolk, Merfolk, Gnolls.........

Ooooooooooh. Aaaand how did she get here?

She draws an oval with forest on one side and a city tower on the other. "This is a portal. You walk through it and are on a different planet. On Tirra, they happen sometimes, just like how you sometimes have storms. They only last a few minutes or a few hours. I like exploring so I went through when I saw one! Kitsunes can go to the 'Spirit World'... To a different place. It's not a different planet. It's not in a direction. It's like where you go when you sleep, a dream place? And Kitsunes can always go home. Through the Spirit World."

They are still working on Notal but they get some of that, most importantly the tower. Can she find the tower on this map app, perhaps?

Uh...

It was near a park... And near the third stop on this subway... This one, she thinks. And she reproduces an image of the exact spot where the portal was.

It's almost definitely closed now though.

They're going to send people to check anyway.

Well it's their city.

"Nobody on Tirra knows how the portals work except maybe the gods, and they don't talk about that kind of thing. I have a friend who was studying portals and she learned to teleport, to go from one place on a planet to a new place without being in the middle places. But not to other planets. And not to make portals, only to find them before they happen."

That's a lot of new words. "Other people also study portals?" they ask.

"Sometimes. I don't know much about academic magic. Ah, academic is an adjective for studying things. Magic is ... The category that portals and illusions and shape changing is in. Sinnah is a genius. Very very smart. Maybe the very best at academic magic on all of Tirra. And she is hundreds of years old. -Kitsunes don't have children or die."

"...where do kitsunes come from?"

"There are nine gods. Tamamo is one, she takes people who died that she likes and turns them into kitsunes sometimes."

Yeah, she knows it's weird.

"Who died?!?" Do they have that word right. They should make rigorously sure of that.

??? Yes, that is what that word means?

-!

"-Oh, I'm not an undead! It's reincarnation!"

Uhhhhhh. Illusions come back out for this, following along her words.

"When a person dies, the body gets buried or burned, but the person becomes a spirit, and goes to the spirit world." Ghosts are floaty blue translucent people with wispy legs, in her idiom. "Kitsunes are supposed to... Talk to them, and give messages to family, help them until they are ready to reincarnate. Then after a while, they go to... A machine... That the gods built, called 'the great wheel of reincarnation'. And then later, the person's spirit gets put back into a baby that is being born. Being put back into a new body is 'reincarnation'. It's still a baby, and they don't usually remember much about before they died until they are adolescent or adult again. An 'undead' is what happens when someone dies but the body keeps doing things. They're really bad."

This is very reassuring. "Where do baby kitsunes come from then?" they ask after absorbing this.

"There aren't baby kitsunes. Only adult kitsunes that Tamamo made."

"You said reincarnation is spirit in baby?"

"Reincarnation is spirit in new body. It does not always have to be into a baby. It just usually is. For kitsunes, it's into a fox body, as an adult." They covered 'fox' as her four legged form. "I guess it's a little like being a baby? But it's more like recovering from a bad injury. You can't go to a two leg form for a few years. But your mind is adult."

"...where does the fox body come from?"

She thinks for a while, then, "Where do illusions come from? Magic. Where does a kitsune's body come from? Magic. I think kitsunes are made of magic, not meat."

They digest this, then say, "Amentans do not reincarnate?"

"I don't know!" It is way too early in the language learning to try to explain her multi-isekai situation. "I don't want to try to find out until I know... It's Tapap, right?"

"We speak Tapap, yes."

"You have the phones and more people, so it's easier for you to learn Notal first, and teach me Tapap later."

Siiiigh. She had really been hoping to revisit America, Earth... Modern conveniences. Being first contact is... Kinda not that. Even if they put her up in a hotel or whatever.

"Yes, we are sending the words to more greens for help."

"I also know other languages but Notal is probably the best for talking to other people from Tirra. Should I just say things all the time, does that help? ...Why green?" She casually runs her hair through a rainbow shader type effect, then lets it drop. "You color hair?"

The rainbow startles them for a moment. "Yes, talk all the time. We have green hair. We are green. Academic is green."

"I can just ramble, say whatever I think of, but it's a little hard to do that on command. Oh, trade! Giving things and getting different things. Tirra wants diamonds! They are small rocks made of carbon - ash - what is left after burning - clear and they will scratch any other rock." Scratchy claw motion.

"Carbon is the sixth thing?"

"-Uh, it's been a while... Hydrogen, helium, something, something... Boron? Carbon. Yes sixth thing. Water is two hydrogen one eighth thing, oxygen."

"We can make hard carbon things for Tirra!" Now, does she know any more elements by number?

She lists nitrogen at seven and eventually dredges up a few more from her memory. She knows element 92, uranium, by its isotopes actually- 232 and 235. And can identify a bunch of other metals by their properties.

Huh, weird. They fill in the periodic table as best they can. Compounds next or are they running into the ends of her feldspars?

Ehhhhhhh those are pretty iffy. Her memory is working overtime here and she keeps saying 'I could be wrong' and variations of that. She knows a bunch of random compounds by name, but not generally exact formulas or the precise chemistry involved. Most of them have common names, but there is also a haphazardly used standardized scientific naming scheme that she can't figure out the details of but maybe linguists can derive... The scientific naming scheme is heavily influenced by a different language, to a linguist's eye. It breaks lots of the usual Notal rules.

Oh well. There are plenty of other words to learn!

It'll take them four hours to get to the forest.

She's gonna ask after caffeinated carbonated beverages, crispy snack foods, and phone games well before four hours, though.

Uh, they have those, and she can borrow a pocket everything in guest mode right now off one of the greys who has Tree Puzzle Deluxe, but is she sure their food will be safe for her?

"Good question. It's probably fine if it smells okay. Most people on Tirra can eat the same things and your crops smelled good and looked edible. And if it's not fine it won't hurt me for very long. I don't even need to eat, it just helps and is fun. I just miss fried things and soda and stuff. I haven't had fizzy sodas since before my first reincarnation, I miss them."

"You are magic about eating things that it is safe?"

Handwave. "Eh... Not quite safe. Safe-er. More safe. Ethanol-" They did manage to translate that compound, "-And caffeine and things like that work on me. But... Kitsune body is made of magic. It's... We translated 'dream'? Some things about kitsunes are magic, and dream logic. It's not particles and chemistry, it's magic. Like a dream, like a metaphor. Intuitive things, pretending or lying to reality. And one of those things says: I can eat things, because food is for eating."

They are basically satisfied that she is magic about eating things that it is safe. They detour to a truck stop and the driver gets her some fried pickles, rice crisps, and fizzy tea.

Fried pickle is a little odd but it's so clearly mass produced snack food and it's so good even if it's also not the most amazing, fast food never is the same as quality dedicated restaurant food, but just because of the nostalgia of a car ride with packaged snacks. Her tail wags and her ears wiggle about it.

"Thank you! I missed this kind of thing so much! It's nostalgic... That means good memories. What should I talk about next?"

"Will people you know come here to you?"

"If I do nothing, no. Maybe the gods will do something if I pray to them and ask. Maybe Sinnah will want to come if I call her. Maybe someone else on Tirra knows things related to portals, but it isn't public- But news of a place like Amenta might make them change their mind. I try to avoid politics so I don't know people in the government of Notal to call, though."

(Tamamo?)

(...No response.)

"A god is? You can call?"

"A god is... A very very very magic and can pay attention to lots of things and does not have a body? They tell people what is good and bad, and they let people who they think are good use their magic. Those people are 'priestesses', or 'priests'. There are nine of them. I think they are like people in some ways and not in others. They have preferences, likes and dislikes. They can be angry or happy or amused or sad. But they don't think the same way as most other humanoid species, and they're- The way I understand it is that they have to worry about very dangerous secret things, so some of the things they do seem weird but they are trying to help?

I have a wand that can do calls. But it has only five uses, then it's dead. It sends twenty five words to anyone you think of clearly enough, and receives a twenty five word reply. It's for emergencies -When bad things happen and you really need it. -A wand is a magic thing that anyone can use. I can't do most kinds of magic that aren't specifically kitsune things. Some kitsunes have this disability, and some don't."

"Can we learn magic?"

"Can we pay for call a god or Sinnah in diamonds?"

"Maybe and maybe. I want to learn all about Amenta before doing anything dramatic."

This is disappointing but reasonable. The van trundles on while they try to build up enough words to answer all her questions.

"Diamonds are valuable because they are useful for magic, anyway, I don't need diamonds."

So what's up with this color thing anyway? Is it like gender?

Is it like what now? They have males and females in every color.

They can cover sex-ed related words, and, "In most species of people I know there are significant social differences between males and females? It is usually pretty stupid. Well. It's complicated... I think it's less prevalent when there is more learning and more wealth and more magic."

"Maybe the word I am looking for is... Caste system? Your parents were soldiers, and their parents, and their parents, and so now the only thing you can do is be a soldier. It is not a popular thing to do among species I know. Only a few societies did it. The modern society that is closest derives this effect only by... Proximity to land owning nobles' lines of succession. The nobles do not marry poor people, usually. But it's not... An official hard line. It's usually, not always."

"Soldiers can have children who dance, or do -" They elicit more vocabulary with sports clips and try to figure out how to say "police' and return to the main topic. "But not children who do academic jobs. Greens are academic jobs and -" Art, music, words for those. "Is that 'caste system'?"

"I think so yes. Okay then. ...We don't do that. It seems... Unfree, I suppose. I guess hair color is, like, the nobles of the Keshmin species have horns that point forward, and commoners' horns point back. They made having your horns bent forward cosmetically illegal."

"It is not illegal to have the wrong color, like an actor who is a person in a story for their job, or like you have a parent's parent of another castesystem and look their color. But it makes people think the wrong thing."

"...Need more words. It's 'caste' and 'system', by the way, you could have other kinds of systems, like a phone system or a voting system. System just means - a designed thing, with rules? I think it's - a little like dressing like a particular species or gender is for me? You can do it, but you have to commit, and people might think it's weird if you don't transition fully."

They definitely didn't catch all of that. "It is weird to be the wrong color except for an actor. An actor dresses to be someone in a story."

"I don't get it." Shrug. "But it's pretty important to you lot, right? So, what... The colors you wanted to define were, uh, blue green yellow orange purple grey. Oh, and I saw someone with red hair driving a truck."

"The reds are -" They have gone over the vocab on the danger signs, right?

She's kind of shaky on it? Toxic, poisonous, diseased?

Close enough for now!

(sus, tbh)

"Then how are the reds not all dead already?"

"They are good at not dying of this."

"What, they have more resistance to heavy metal poisoning or something? Better immune systems?"

"No... we will try to say when we have more words?"

"Sure." It clearly bothers them. She's going to keep playing earnestly confused for now and instead be earnestly confused about why fried pickles. Fried potatoes are better! (Only mostly joking.) They can talk about food, that's a good source of words?

They have fried potatoes too! They can go over lots of food words.

And here is the last place their vehicle can get to in this forested area. There are signs up, and they motion her onto a trail, consulting their everythings.