I rapidly rifle through the linen cupboard looking for something that can sort of, maybe, in part fit. I find a truly ancient T-shirt from my high school days (which still fits like a tent) and… I’ll probably need to stick to the pinned shorts for now. As long as people don’t see me from the back the tail should be ignorable. In the absence of anything better, I grab a town and wrap it around my head to hide my ears.

I just hope whoever drops off the food doesn’t think to look down. My legs aren’t human.

Five minutes later, the security buzzer sounds and I let in the delivery person. Shortly thereafter, there’s a knock on my door. Normally I’d have it open in advance, but the less time people have to look at me the better, at the moment. I open the door, grab the food, say a quick thank-you, then close it again. I send a silent word of apology to the delivery guy.

I wait a few minutes for the coast to clear then duck into the stairwell. Racing down to the ground floor, I grab the package with my name on it then shoot back up the stairs, past a young woman whose eyebrows pop up like jacks-in-the-box as I slip past with a murmured apology.

Slipping back into my unit, I set the deadlock then toss the package aside for later perusal. It seems like some sort of book. For now, I skipped lunch; I’m hungry and there’s tofu to be had!

My excitement is new – I’ve never much liked tofu before today – but I recognise the source. I don’t know whether it’s an instinctive thing, or just my sketch background of Japanese mythology that’s triggering me. Regardless, the fried tofu has me drooling.

There’s a few sets of chopsticks in one of the kitchen drawers which would work well for this. I’m pretty sure my new claws won’t get in the way of good chopstick technique. Pulling out a pair, I dig in.

Ambrosia.

This isn’t tofu. It’s diced heaven. The texture has just that right level of firm chewiness and soft pliability. The flavour is… incomparable. It’s rainbow, it’s fireworks, it’s every delicious thing I’ve ever tasted, with a rich yet mellow aftertaste.

I keep stuffing my face until I can’t eat any more. It happens all too quickly. It used to be that I couldn’t eat because of a bariatric operation a few years back. Not it’s just because my stomach is so small.

I don’t really mind all that much. My mouth was now much smaller, so every bit lasted just a little longer. And now I could save some for later! This would be a distinct advantage as my opportunities to go out over the next few days would be limited. There’s other food as well, but it can’t possibly compare with the fried tofu.

As my meal winds down I put the leftovers into the fridge and finally have a bit of thinking time. That package can wait a few minutes while I sort myself out.

---

I’ve spent the whole day since I woke up thinking, focusing, and more importantly avoiding doing either of those things where certain key facts of life are concerned. Now is time to think.

What am I going to do?

Who am I now? Am I really the same person? Is this s Ship of Theseus thing where I’ve been pulled apart and reassembled, or am I really the same person with a new paint job?

I get the feeling it’s a bit of both.

Clearly my rapid acceptance of my new and (to my mind) undoubtedly improved chassis indicates that some level of inherent transgenderism has come into play. I’m not really surprised. You don’t spend a lifetime subtly disgusted with your own body without recognising there’s a disconnect somewhere.

So, this is me, and on the whole I’m happy about it. Trials ahead, obviously. I now look like and definitely sound like a kid; updating my photo ID is going to be a real problem.

Next issue.

My name.

I’m now a girl (frisson of joy at the thought) and Reggie is not a girl’s name. Honestly, I was always a bit uncomfortable with it anyway. If some things fit like a glove, it always fit like a sock. Like a sock on your hand. Not very well.

I could spend a while coming up with the ideal name, but honestly I already had a female name I was comfortable with. It’s a name I’d been using in my RPGs and MMORPGs for years, in all my innumerable and consistently female avatars.

Geona. Geo as in Geology, na as in… nah.

I could say it’s a name that resonates with my soul, but that’s not really true. It’s a name, it’s one I’m familiar with, it’s female, and it’s mine. I could make up another name, but it would be a bit uncomfortable.

My pronouns would now be female. Not as if anyone would mistake me as a male in any case.

But I’d need some way of at least marginally slotting into my … old identity. If this had happened over a course of years, I could maybe convince some people I’d had an operation, rather than the extraordinary true alternative. No such luck.

There were a few people I would need to tell. My sister for one. My older brother, probably; I got the feeling he’d roll with it. My parents… would probably have to wait. Living on the mid north coast, I doubt they would believe me, and discovering one of their sons to now be a daughter would shake them. Let alone a daughter with cute fluffy ears and a tail.

Fortunately I don’t need photo ID often, but that will be a problem eventually.

For work… I’d have to tell Bob eventually, and probably a couple more of my colleagues. I think Bob could cope. The others too, eventually; it’s not as if my professional competencies had changed, if anything I felt a bit sharper – probably aside effect of dropping from a physical age of fifty-plus to whatever I was now.

Filling in HR was going to cause some major, major headaches. Not to mention what’s going to happen with my pension and superannuation in twenty years when I come due to retire; I have a feeling that convincing anyone that I’m at retirement age would be difficult.

Eh, problems for future me.

For now I need to figure out how to pass for human. I can hide the ears and tail with the clothes coming in tomorrow. And I’ll take it from there.

---

Which reminds me of that mysterious package. What’s in there?

I slit open the packaging and out pops a thin book. There’s also a swatch of fabric with a cherry blossom motif and a broad… ribbon? I’ll get to that later.

The text of the book appears to be in Japanese, but somebody has scrawled across the title page “Kitsune 101.”

At the bottom of the cover of the book, in a slightly neater hand, is “for Geona.”

I freeze for a moment. It’s a name I had decided on literal minutes earlier. Whoever put this together didn’t just have an inside track on what had happened to me; they had an inside track on my thoughts, my soul if you like.

I nervously open the book, only to be confronted with a wall of kanji and hiragana. Unfortunately while I know a couple of dozen Japanese words, I never got a handle on the syllabaries or the Kanji.

Fortunately this is the twentieth century. Machine translation is a thing. Bad machine translation, but it’s a heck of a lot more accessible than it once was.

I fire up G**gle Lens and point it at the page.

The first page answers some fundamental questions. It’s basically a welcome page. One of the things it answers is… why me?

Turns out it’s part selection process, part cosmic joke.

My trip to Japan a few years ago, and visit to the Fushimi Inari temple, was part of it. Apparently one in every million visitors is selected… tentatively.

Of those million, anyone under forty-five years old is excluded. Anyone who fails to pray  at the shrine is excluded. Anyone without a sense of mischief… is excluded. And anyone with a deep commitment to any other deity is likewise excluded.

Anyone who the magic detects will be unhappy after the transformation is also spared, the decision mad via a bastardised mix of divination and psychotherapy.

They don’t select on nationality, or gender. Apparently it’s a better joke that way.

Blasted kitsune sense of humour. Although… I have to admit I like the joke. If nothing else, it’s given me a unique opportunity.

Some of the reasons have a pretty clear justification. The forty-five year thing, it turns out, is more or less an act of mercy.

Kitsune age slowly and, eventually, stop aging altogether. My current form is, apparently, that of a kitsune of my actual age – fifty three. That also means, unfortunately, that my new form is going to be fairly stable for quite a while. Put another way, I won’t be looking like an adult until I’m actually about seventy. I’ll be in puberty, or the kitsune equivalent, for the next fifteen years or so.

Considering human puberty has the effects on mood stability that it does, I can only imagine what it will do for somebody with a racial predisposition to mischief.

I don’t really mind. I’ve always been a bit of a prankster at heart, restraining myself because it’s so hard for a decent prank to avoid hurting people. The possibilities opened by illusion magic for harmless fun are opening before me. I’m mentally rubbing my hands, and my tail is swishing energetically. Or trying to – it’s not getting much opportunity while I sit to read.

This chapter is somewhat focused on a regular work day for somebody working in my usual job and can be skimmed or skipped without much loss. You should probably read the bit about lunchtime in the middle.

---

Firing up Slack, I send my morning greeting to the team. As everybody logs in one-by-one, I swap channels from the Sydney team channel to the global channel as I wait for today’s ticket router to start handover.

The Zoom link for handover pops up and I start the call. A few seconds pass and the router shares their screen, and starts going through the tickets for handover. A couple of database servers down, needing attention. One of the app servers on the cloud is running with high I/O CPU for some reason – probably an iSCSI link failure of some sort. One customer requesting a restore of their data from a couple of months ago. ElasticSearch is running with unassigned nodes AGAIN….

Looks like a pretty standard day ahead of us.

The US shift logs off the call as the shift manager, Bob, quickly goes over a few developments being highlighted for the global team. Some compulsory training we need to make sure is done, a survey from the Town Hall overview a couple of weeks ago…

The usual, really.

He asks the usual “How is everyone?” and I carefully avoid answering. With a dozen people on the team, the question is more a courtesy than anything else.

The Zoom call finished and I start work on my tickets.

For now I have to focus on the dead database server. This was on legacy infrastructure and the server didn’t have a mirror in place, so we need to get the restore done ASAP…

Dammit.

Typing with these claws is a pain. The chiclets on a standard Macbook keyboard are not conducive to easy typing. I find myself with two options – keep my fingers as flat as possible, or tap with the tips of my claws.

I’m seriously tempted to grab a pair of nail clippers and just snip the tips off, but something in me revolts at the thought. Whether or not the feeling is rational, the idea feels like self-mutilation.

Keeping my hands flat to the keyboard is horribly uncomfortable, so for now I use the tips of my claws to type. Later I need to get another keyboard…

---

Looks like today is a late lunch. Our lunch hours are staggered to ensure we didn’t have a gap in coverage. For now, I have an hour to work with.

I quickly google for information on self-measurement of female underwear and bra sizes. It turns out that there are like… five different ways they’re measured. Australia, Europe, America, France, Italy…

I’m in Australia. Anything I order locally will use Australian sizes.

I don’t have a fabric tape measure, so I pull out a ball of string and mark off lengths for underboob, breasts, hips… one day I need to get this redone by a professional. That could get awkward.

Having figured out the right numbers, I check online and order a few sets of underwear for delivery tomorrow. I add a couple more pairs of panties in slightly larger sizes; I’m not sure how the tail is going to screw this up. Not sure if I need a bra at my current size, but I’d rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. Then I order a couple of shirts in smaller sizes, and, in blushing embarrassment, a long skirt. That will give me something to hide the tail.

And a hat. I need something large and floppy to hide my ears. Later I might need to check a couple of cosplay specialty stores to see what they have to cope with the tail and ears. For now, some sort of beanie and a Akubra or facsimile thereof.

I add a couple of hoodies in what looks like the right size, one navy blue and the other off-white.

Lunchtime is almost over, and I still haven’t eaten.

With some trepidation, I quickly check a home delivery app and find a Japanese restaurant. They have a fried tofu dish in fish sauce… my mouth starts watering.  No time to eat it now and it’s looking like a busy afternoon so I can’t squeeze anything in between tickets, so I order the food for delivery at five thirty.

Just before lunch finishes, there’s a buzz from downstairs; a delivery. I’m not expecting anything at the moment. I ask the delivery person to leave the package on the bench next to the lift on the ground floor. I’ll pick it up later.

Then it’s back to work.

---

Lunch is done, and I’m back to working my ticket queue.  High wait events on a database turn out to be due to a fault in a customer script; I kick it over to the Tech Support team to contact the customer and ask them to Please Not Do That.

Then a node on one of the database clusters crashes and manages to break redundancy and take a customer database with it. We need to fix the server ASAP; it’s up and running but the database has corrupt objects we need to fix, and the DBA – Database Administrator –  team lacks the access they need for this box.

Which makes it our job, with some gentle guidance from one of the DBAs.

We have customer downtime, which means CSI also need to stick an oar in and track the progress of events. Which means another Zoom call to coordinate the fix. I’m assigned.

If I were the swearing type, I would swear. Swearing is a Aussie as meat pies and Bondi Beach, but it’s not a habit I’ve ever really acquired.

I join the call, log into the failed node, and share my screen, then ask DBA what they need me to do.

There’s a moment of silence on the call.

“Reggie?” They know my voice, my old voice; heck, we spoke at the last company barbecue. This is not the voice they were expecting to hear; I understand the confusion.

I cough and lower my voice. “Sorry, my voice is a bit off today. Let’s just get moving.”

Half an hour later, the corrupt tables have been preened and cluster services restarted; the node is running a bit high on CPU, but that just seems to be startup overhead.

I gruffly thank everybody and promise a writeup to CSI.

Half an hour later, I’ve prepped my tickets for handover and am halfway through the writeup for CSI. As the European shift takes over, I again try to keep my voice low as I go over the pending issues I had which haven’t yet been resolved.

I’m really going to have to figure out what to do about my voice.

Handover complete, I freeze up for a moment. Food delivery in fifteen minutes; the delivery app tells me the driver is already picking up the food.

And, in the absence of the clothes I ordered online —

I don’t have a thing to wear!

Welcome, Onee-chan.

I wake to a tittering whisper in my ear. Blearily opening my eyes, I glance at the tablet sitting on the bed next to me. Seven thirty; work in an hour and half; I could get some reading in.

Touching the power button on my tablet, turning it on seems a little harder than usual.

Wait. Those aren’t my hands.

My usual pallor is exaggerated, my skin almost bleached white, and oddly… furry? My nails seem to be oddly narrow and pointed… more claws than nails. My hands, always fairly delicate by male standards, are slimmer, refined… almost dainty.

I startle awake and look down.

Breasts. I have… breasts. Small, but distinctly prominent. And, barring the areolae,  they’re also covered in that fine, bleached fur.

My eyes widen in shock. Sitting up abruptly, I look down.

I’ve been morbidly obese for many years, the sad result of a sweet tooth combined with terrible exercise and working habits. No longer.

Instead, my figure is svelte and slim, aside from the additions at the top of my torso, and my hips, no longer quite as augmented by my bad diet, are all too explicably wide. Not that it helps; my underwear still flopped loosely about my hips. A protrusion found in that region for my life to date is AWOL.

My legs, too, are clad in that same, fine, bleached fur, and far more slender and dainty than they should be.

Then I notice a new addition. Comfortably cushioning my hips and legs is a broad, fluffy tail.

Skittering off my bed, I find the fall to the floor is a little further than it should be. I grab my glasses and scramble in a half-panic to the bathroom, my reading plans deferred until I can figure out what the heck is going on.

Flipping the frames open, I try to put my glasses on, only to find my ears were… gone. My glasses perch precariously on my nose, held only by my nose and hand. Even then, they somehow made my sight worse. Taking them off again, my sight returns to crystal clarity.

Well.

Looking in the bathroom mirror, I find my sight line is rather lower than usual. Usually I’m looking at the top of the mirror. Now, unless I stretch up, I can only see the top of my head – from my eyes upwards. I’m smaller. Much, much smaller. Not much more than a hundred and twenty centimetres – four feet. Not even five; I’m not just short, I’m tiny.

The other thing that immediately springs to my attention is the tall, pointed ears atop my head. They flick in irritation.

I run into the loungeroom and grab a couple of twenty-year-old phone directories for use as a stand. Dropping them onto the bathroom floor, I can at least now see the whole of my head.

I was shocked, but no longer really surprised, at the remaining changes. The top of my head, aside from the kemomimi, is covered partly in that same white fur but more prominently transitions to longer, straight, silvery hair, reaching down towards the small of my back. A broad tail, tipped in a splash of purple, swishes nervously behind me; I grab it and hug it.

Fluffy.

My face was… entirely different. If I looked closely, I could see some resemblance to my younger sister. From when she was in high school. I look… maybe fourteen? Fifteen? Years old. Except my eyes, rather than being a dark, rich brown, are now a brilliant, sapphire blue, with s slight (ever so slight) epicanthic fold, which had never been there before. My beard and other facial hair was gone, replaced by those gorgeous silvery locks, slightly tangled from what I was in bed.

The look wasn’t beautiful, or even pretty. It was cute. The sort of slightly immature, innocent features that garner random people hugging you in the streets.

The rest of my frame was fairly slight. There was a fine, white hair over most of my body, except for my face, my areolae, the palms of my hands… which at least remained hands… and the soles of my feet, where my former toenails now looked more like claws than the flat nails sported by primates. I noticed I was habitually standing on the balls of my feet, rather than properly on my arches.

Well, there goes my secular world view.

I am a kitsune. Or look like one, anyway. A Japanese fox spirit; the guardians and tricksters of Japanese mythology, traditional guardians of their temples certain of their kami – particularly Inari Okami. At least I had lucked out of the explicitly vulpine facial features.

I have a feeling I’m going to develop a hankering for fried tofu.

---

This is going to be a pain in the neck.

That said, I’m sort of excited. Firstly, my male bits are now female bits. This strikes me as something of a trade up. Women have it tough in today’s society, and I’m not looking forward to menstruation – assuming it’s part of the package – but I’ve always thought they had the tastier slice of the biological cake. The masculine focus on physical dominance and strength is something I have always found distinctly distasteful. I’d rather be resolving conflicts than creating them.

My tiny frame was going to cause some problems – no more replacing light bulbs without a ladder, no more effortlessly ploughing through crowds – but I would no longer feel like a tank working my way through urban sprawl. I might now be able to duck between people rather than forcing my way past them. The grass is always greener, I suppose, but I was so sick of getting in peoples’ way.

On the other hand… mans-plaining. Having my opinion discounted by some of those on the convex half of the species. Physical abuse… I might be able to avoid. I live alone anyway. And while my new form is quite petite, kitsune did have that reputation.

Ticking off a kitsune tends to end badly for the ticker. I don’t know if I have those advantages yet, but foxfire and illusions could be powerful weapons.

I realise I am gripping my tail so hard it hurt. And there are tears leaking down my face.

I’m not sure if they are from shock or happiness. Probably both. A bubble of joy seems to be working its way up from my chest.

I recall that whisper from when I awoke, and speak to the air. “Is anyone there?”

Silence, except for my own voice, now a squeaky mezzo-soprano.

But… erk… this is going to make phone calls and teleconferences awkward. I’ll need to fake it somehow, at least until I can come up with some sort of workaround. I know there are apps to shift your voice register. I’d never thought I’d use one to shift my register down.

The alarm on my tablet goes off. Eight thirty. Work starts in half an hour. (A little voice notes I have lost an hour of reading time. My bibliophilia is clearly in the terminal stages.)

I consider for a moment whether I should be working today. On the one hand, at the moment I know nothing about why this might have happened and what else might happen; my future, once a little bland and predictable, now sparkles with possibility.

On the other hand, there’s no doubt I’ll still need money, and even if Thursdays are not our busiest day, calling in absent without notice is pretty inconsiderate. Plus, I’m not actually sick. Rather the reverse, really.

Work it is, then.

While I’m not happy with the idea, I should probably skip having a shower for now, While my smaller frame might theoretically be quicker to wash than my usual elephantine mass, the fur, and particularly the tail, will likely soak up water like a sponge and without sufficient time I’ll be one damp fox-lady sitting on my office chair. For all I know whatever made me what I am already did a basic clean; otherwise I might have woken up in a bloody pool of ex-me. That would have been grotesque.

So for now, I need to get ready for work. There’s nothing blocking me from working, and doing so lends me a chance to focus, to passively acclimate. So I might as well treat the day like any other.

So. Clothes. Almost everything I have would fit like a tent.

Fortunately my shorts were mostly of the pull-string variety and can probably be convinced to work. I also have a handful of T-shirts in smaller sizes, acquired over the years as bonus pack-ins with various merchandise. They will probably still fit me like a tent; I’ll probably need to be wearing children’s sizes.

Somewhere I even have that box set of Najica Blitz Tactics with a pack-in pair of panties. I haven’t laid eyes on it for a very long time however, and it’s a solid bet that they wouldn’t fit anyway, even assuming the elastic has survived.

Of course, nothing in the way of breast support. For now, I’ll do without. T-shirt it is. For underwear… I grabbed a pair of boxers and went hunting for safety pins. This arrangement has potential for being deeply uncomfortable, but ‘d relly rather not go commando. It would set a bad precedent.

Then I nab my tablet. Probably won’t get much more reading done this morning, sadly.

As I grab a couple of cushions to boost me up a little and settle down into my office chair, I feel a sudden pain in a location I previously hadn’t even had.

My tail.

How the heck am I going to sit down? For now, I tilt the chair off at an angle and flicked my new limb off to the side.

The desk is too high. Fortunately my computer desk, a slab of wood the size of a small town, has a rare but useful feature: a crank that lets me raise or lower it. I lower it down a bit until it’s at my new elbow level. My chair is uncrankable; after the gas lift on several chairs died a miserable death from immense pressure, I’ve been using standard dining chairs for my desk. At least it makes clambering up a little easier.

Turning my tablet on, I stare at the screen, waiting for the biometrics to kick in. They don’t. Breathing an annoyed sight, I punch in the PIN and manage to fit in a few paragraphs of my current jam on Royal Road before the five minute warning sounds on my tablet.

Flipping open the Macbook, I touch the fingerprint sensor to log in.

Nothing happens. First time that’s happened for a while. With an annoyed grumble, I type in the password then pull out my token to log into the VPN.

It looks like, probably not surprisingly, my biometrics have been demetricated.

This is my first bash at assembling a web novel. Let’s see how it goes…

Premise: Protagonist (an IT worker in Sydney) wakes up one day to find that, courtesy of the Japanese goddess Inari Okami, he (now she) has become a kitsune, a Japanese fox spirit, with an apparently much younger age.

Cue a certain amount of gender euphoria and multiple problems; who to tell, what to hide, and what the heck is she going to use for pants?