Rony’s new life began in the same fashion as her last ended; in helpless pain. She remained unaware of her surroundings, as much from the crushing pain of her bruised and battered body as her inability to open her eyes or hear.
Thankfully, it was short-lived as a soothing warmth suffused her what only felt like moments later and plunged her into sleep.
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What she quickly determined was her new mother spent a considerable time cuddling with her in their warm enclosure. It didn’t take long for the growling of her angry belly to first overcome her sleepiness with its twisting, then her embarrassment at the necessity to grope for the nectar from her new mother’s nipples. Thankfully, some new instinct helped with her search and she latched on like a lamprey. Hunger and discomfort fell away in the pleasure of warm milk.
When she felt delectably plump, she burrowed into silken fur, wept, and did her best to forget everything until blissful sleep claimed her yet again.
Rony world became an unending Ferris wheel of weeping, feeding, sleeping, and ruminating on her last day on earth. She had nothing but time.
She forced herself to admit there were many things she could have done better. Times when she could have walked away if she’d been paying better attention to her gut. There had been signs at the funeral. She'd simply dismissed them. In the end, the blame fell to her fa… the bastard. He had planned what he’d done. Or at least he had prepared for such events. Why else would he have a shovel, duct tape, and large bags of lye in his truck?
I guess all those rumors about him were true.
Rony wept, drank her sorrows, and mostly slept.
Time passed as she withdrew into herself.
It took weeks and an odd day or two in an oddly high end stable with a were-cat woman and an anime cat-girl taking care of her and her new sibling before she broke the cycle and paid more attention.
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Rony chuffed and sprawled out in the early morning sun and watched the cloud-dappled world floating by. She rolled the small bone gripped in the corner of her mouth like a farmer with a length of straw.
Rony had to admit to herself that drinking warm milk directly from the tit after a lifetime of drinking it cold from a plastic jug was the easiest of adjustments she'd had to make in the last few months. And, thankfully, she'd stopped nursing as soon as the other food her mother brought felt like enough to fill her.
At least the tit in question wasn't quite what she’d been expecting. Which made her feel a tad less awkward about the whole thing.
She did still feel lingering embarrassment from forgetting that some animals were born practically blind and deaf. She'd spent the first few weeks fearing she was blind and mostly deaf; fumbling about through smell alone and fearing the life she'd have to lead here as a cripple. That said, if you can find an ass you can find a tit in short order, and she muddled through.
The deafness turned out to be a blessing, as she wasn't sure how badly her improved hearing would have disoriented her. If it hadn't come in slowly, after she had time to adjust to her acute sense of smell, the thought made her shudder.
Mentally, she had been a wreck. Still was, truth be told. She'd spent many of those first days and weeks switching from kicking herself and bemoaning her decision to visit the bastard and her thrall of a mother—for provoking him—to grieving her death.
Strangely, she had no genuine regrets for taking Loki's deal. She'd not believed in life after death, to begin with, and that eternal unknown terrified her.
At least her new life provided plenty of distracting obstacles.
To say her new situation was a surprise might be the understatement of the millennia.
She left her bone alone for the moment, then rolled over and squirmed down into the thick grass. She laid her head in her paws and stared at the huge waterfall through its rainbow-bespeckled spray. The thundering sound did a good job of drowning the world around her. Especially the small group behind her.
That's right! She had paws. A tail too, and big ears. And damn were bones good at easing the aches in her mouth. This second round of teething was no joke.
Despite this new chance at life, Loki is a particularly virulent ass cancer, she decided, now that she found the time to reflect on her circumstances a little more.
If her new sister and mother were any sign, he'd turned her into a fox. The bastard probably thought it was funny as shit.
Though if pressed, she liked not having to bother with diapers. The resulting ass 'licking' she could pass on. She determined she'd avoid parenthood in this life, as it seemed to be expected of her new species.
There was hope, though. The same day she could finally see clearly, she found out what Ass-Cancer meant when he said she should shift before her fourth birthday.
She craned her head back to look at her new mother for a moment where she was hard at work. Her very humanoid mother with her three fiery tails.
At least the falls drown out the hammering, she thought.
Did she mention magic was apparently a thing here? Or that her mother looked suspiciously like a Kitsune straight out of an anime, in both forms?
Not Rony, though. No amount of wishing or brow furrowing had succeeded in turning her into a little fox girl. She'd even attempted to eat a little of the magic dust her mother used for work, only to get rudely flicked in the nose and carried away to another room and the care of one of the slave/servants her mother had.
But there was hope. The bleeding Ass-Cancer had hinted as much. She just had to learn how.
Which led to her current ruminations. Namely, did she attempt to learn the language her mother used with the two human servants/slaves, she'd brought with her, the language of the beaver people who were their hosts in this fantastical place, or the suspiciously familiar language her mother used with her sister and her? Perhaps two of them? Or maybe all three?
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The problem was that she didn't know how long her mother intended to stay with the peaceful tribe, or how widespread their language was. What if they were like some of the smaller Native American tribes and only a few thousand spoke the dialect?
Rony blew air out in a frustrated huff.
She had thought for a time that her mother had named her before she realized she used the same word for both her and her new sister. It must be a cultural thing not to name children until they reach a certain age. Probably means ‘child’ or ‘dear’ or something.
She narrowed down her mother’s name to Masae or Hu carrieu, though she figured it was the former as the latter often came with the now distinct smell of fear from the ones using it. That was before they'd arrived in this strange paradise and the tribe of Muskrat-Kin that called it home. Here, everyone used Masae.
Otherwise she hadn't made much progress on the local languages. She spent more time watching the people around her.
The Muskrats treated her mother with reverence. Especially when she worked at the small one wall smithy she'd set up near the bluff.
Many of the older youths spent whatever idle hours they had pumping the bellows or holding things with big tongs for her mother as she worked. A pair had even started working the grinding wheel.
Rony figured that had a lot to do with the distinct lack of metals used by the rats.
A few scurried sounds of paws scratching dirt and grass heralded the approach of her new sister, who chose that moment to pounce on her back and wrap her tail around her neck.
The pair turned into a rolling ball of fur and snarling as they tumbled down towards the water's edge. Each pinned the other for brief moments before gravity and the slope pulled them toward the lake's edge and eventually over.
The shock of the cold spring lake broke them apart, and Rony chuffed to herself as her fluff-ball-of-a-sister trotted up the slope and then made off with her bone.
It's fine. I was done with that bone and needed a bath, anyway, she told herself.
Rony shook the water from her fur and sulked her way to her previous sunny perch on the hill.
At least she thought it was spring. The place was a little queer and more beautiful than anything had a right to be.
They were on a floating island for Ass-Cancer's sake. One that had other islands floating by occasionally. Her current home even had a lake in the center, fed by a trio of mountains that floated high above, resulting in the wide waterfall thundering in a near-perfect crescent as it bounced off each before pounding into the surface of the half-dome of stone before her and flowing down into the lake in a curtain.
There was even an island the rats had tethered over the lake with thick spider silk rope ladders. So their chief had a private place to live. That and she suspected the creepy old greyfur wanted to make visitors work for her time.
Rony itched to explore the golden silk tree the muskrats seemed to worship. She'd tried, but they had firmly rebuffed all her attempts to get close.
She knew they used spider silk, because she'd seen them return from hunting with both grotesquely gigantic spiders and the strands. That and a few of the women seemed able to make the stuff flow from their fingertips. The tribe used silk for everything from tents to fishing nets. Being furry, they had little use for clothes.
The thought of the huge arachnids still made her shudder. Though she had to admit, they tasted a lot like lobster. Better than the gamey meat paste her mother insisted she ate at every opportunity.
With her heart finally settled from the play fighting, she laughed at her display. Brazilian-Jiu-Jitsu just doesn't translate to wrestling with four paws and a tail all that well.
Her tail was another oddity. One, her sister seemed naturally more proficient with. Despite its increasing fluffiness, it was much longer, at nearly twice her body length, and bent more than a fox’s had any right to. To the point, she'd say it belonged to a monkey, not a canine. She could wrap it more than once around a small sapling or, as she'd been practicing, her sister's limbs.
Her sister returned and licked her behind the ear. Rony just buried her snout in her paws and let it happen. Fighting it only seemed to push her sibling away. And despite the awkwardness, she didn't want to push her new sister away. Losing one was hard enough.
As long as she doesn't expect me to groom her back, she decided. She did it occasionally—but strictly to sell the deception that she wasn't different. Not because she found it relaxing.
When her sister finally settled into gnawing on the bone, Rony spent some time studying her constantly changing sibling to get an idea of her own changes. The waterfall made the lake's surface a lousy mirror, breaking her reflection into a smudge of distorted colors at the best of times.
She looked a lot like a normal fox aside from a few things, apart from the absurdly long tail of course. Foremost was in her color. Where most earth foxes she'd seen were normal shades of red, orange, or brown with white undersides and some black highlights, her sister was a beautiful metallic copper color with a lush black underside and tail that shined like a freshly waxed car even when wet.
Rony knew she looked largely the same, though there were differences she was aware of. For instance, the tip of her bronze tail and parts of her ears were a brilliant turquoise color.
For the tenth time, she scratched out the word hello in the empty patch of soil in front of her and studied her sister's face.
There was no bright spark of recognition in her eyes. Only the twinkle of a happy and curious young child. One that looked ready to pounce.
Definitely not Stace, she told herself yet again, before yawning at her sibling in mock boredom and pouncing on her preemptively before she'd closed her snout.
I need all the wrestling experience I can get, she decided, as she scrambled back out of the lake yet again.
The group of young Muskrat-Kin youths sent to watch them obviously thought their antics were worth a laugh. Which Rony did something about when one ventured close to the sandy water's edge.
She slinked up beside him before wrapping her tail around his leg and sprinting up the slope, taking his feet from under him and face-planting him in the lake with a sharp slap.
That worked perfectly! She crowed internally, only to be cut short when one of his friends picked her up and tossed her in the lake.
The entire troop piled into the water after her.
Rony glimpsed her sister still gnawing on the bone before a grasping hand dragged under her.
Traitor! she thought as her sibling returned her earlier yawn.
New-life lesson number 147: don't wrestle a muskrat in the water. She noted as she coughed the last mouthful from her lungs. Rat bastards! You’re supposed to be taking care of us! Not drowning us! She seethed.
It was times like this that she hated not being able to communicate properly.
Everything for her at the moment came down to the fact that she needed to learn a language. She needed information, and it was the only way. Her mother could speak to the others in her fox form, so Rony figured she could, too. She just needed to learn first. Though she was hesitant about practicing in front of others. She did not know what a normal learning speed was for Kitsune.
The muskrats and the servants, she decided. The language her mother sometimes used just didn't seem practical right now. Though she'd learn what she could of it when it was obvious her mother was trying to teach.
Another flying tackle from her sister broke her thoughts.
She had time.