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.