I stared at the fox woman, not sure what to say. This whole experience was well outside of my comfort zone. Ordinarily it was easy to conform to social expectations when I felt like it, but nothing about this situation was ordinary.

She tossed the ball of rags in her hand a couple of times before dropping it on the ground. "I suppose you can take the girl out of America, but you can't take America's game away from the girl."

She was speaking English. She was speaking English, and it wasn't even the second or third strangest thing about the situation.

"Who are you?" I asked, feeling strange to be speaking my original language after years of living my daily life using my new mother tongue. "What's going on?"

She smiled at me. It felt very predatory, although that might have just been her pronounced canine teeth. "You're a lucky one. I have a limited time offer, just for you."

I crossed my arms over my chest. I was relieved that the situation had taken a turn for the familiar. Brushing off annoying sales pitches was well within my comfort zone. "Is that so?"

"You've been chosen!" she said, flinging out an arm dramatically.

As she spoke, a blue box appeared in my view. It looked like something out of an old computer game.

[Congratulations! You have been chosen to receive Inari's blessing!]

This was moving past an ordinary sales pitch and more into the territory of some sort of scam. I frowned. "This screen..."

"For your convenience, the blessing is provided in a form you can understand," she said.

The box disappeared, only for an even larger box to take its place.

[You have two unassigned perk points!

You have five unassigned attribute points!]

There was a pair of blinking alerts begging for my attention at the top of the box. Beneath it was what looked like a character sheet. I didn't let myself be distracted, focusing past the box on the dodgy fox lady.

"Why me?" I asked.

There was no such thing as a free lunch. And if you weren’t the paying customer, that only meant you were the product. In this world of magic and—apparently—gods, I could imagine much worse fates waiting at the back end of this offer than just being forced to sit through a sales pitch for timeshares.

"I picked you," she replied. "You were the most selfish soul available."

I rocked back in shock at her bold claim. She chose me? I'd long wondered why I had been shoved into the middle of the road for no apparent reason. Now it seemed that some supernatural creature had been stalking me in my old world, inciting murder. Hardly the kind of behavior that made me want to sign on the dotted line.

It took another moment for me to process the insult at the back end of her statement. "I'm not selfish!"

I acted in my own rational self interest, sure, but so did everybody else. If I was better at it than most people, I didn't think that was cause for name calling.

"Please," she said, waving a hand dismissively, "I've seen your soul. It's filled with nothing but self-regard."

"I naturally have to look after myself so I don't burden anybody else with the need to take care of me," I said. "It's personal responsibility, not selfishness."

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"You don't have to explain yourself to me," she said. "Besides, Inari doesn't ask that you do anything but fulfill your own selfish desires. She just wants to watch the chaos."

"Chaos? Cooperation in pursuit of mutual self-interest is the basis of organized society," I said. "It's the invisible hand."

For the first time she looked concerned, looking around the clearing for a moment. Then she turned back to me, all smiles.

"I assure you," she said, "no glamour or invisibility can get past my eyes."

I stomped my foot in frustration. "Don't you understand the first thing about economics?"

"I prefer to focus on useful topics," she replied.

I stared at her. I was utterly speechless. How could anybody consider economics useless? Economics was the most useful topic of all! It was nothing less than the systematic study of human behavior. For anybody living in a society made up of human beings, nothing could be more important. Perhaps this fox person had spent her whole life running around in the forest.

I shook my head, unable to keep my opinion to myself. "Ignorant—"

"Keep a civil tongue in your head, girl," she snapped, interrupting me. "Show some respect."

"How can you expect to receive respect," I asked, "when you're proud of your ignorance? Eco-urk."

I didn't stop talking of my own volition. The fox woman had stood and unleashed her magic. It covered the whole clearing, roiling with her fury and pressing down with a physical weight. I struggled to stay standing for a few seconds, then fell to one knee. I still refused to bow my head.

I looked her straight in the eye. Right was right, and wrong was wrong. It didn't matter if some powerful person wanted to throw a temper tantrum over it. The world doesn't change for anybody just because they're upset.

The magical pressure bearing down on me redoubled, forcing out a grunt. I had to look down and brace both hands against the ground just to keep from falling prostrate. All right, maybe a person with enough magical power could bend the world to her will. I was still right, though. With a grunt, I managed to wrench my head up and look her in the eye. At least, where I assumed her eyes were. My vision was going blurry.

The pressure cut out just as suddenly as it had been applied. I gasped for air, only now noticing how badly I had been struggling just to breathe. The magic this woman was capable of using dwarfed my pathetic efforts. I took note for the future: those bedtime stories that I had been starting to think of as fanciful exaggerations had, if anything, been understating just what magic could accomplish.

I took a moment to catch my breath. When I finally was able to look up I found the fox woman looking down at me with a smirk on her face. I had seen a flicker of anger when I had criticized her before, but it seemed that bullying me with magic had made her feel better.

"Well, if you insist on being difficult," she said, "I certainly won't force you to do anything."

The blue screen appeared in front of me once more. As I watched, the blinking options slowed, then stopped, then gradually faded to grey. Even having only had access to the system for a matter of minutes, I felt the pang of loss. My stats! My perks!

Truly, it was just as my professor had said. The pain of losing something dwarfed the joy of gaining it.

"Feeling regretful?" she asked.

I just glared at her. Of course I would like to have all the free power ups she had been poised to hand out. That didn't mean that I was going to admit to being wrong when I was convinced that I was right.

She chuckled. "Well, if you change your mind and make a sincere apology, I'll think about reactivating your blessing."

I pushed myself to my feet and stood, still glaring at her. My hands had balled up into fists at some point, but I knew it would be beyond foolish to try to attack her. I was far too weak. A casual flex of her magical power had thoroughly incapacitated me. If she wanted to, she could probably vaporize me with a flick of her wrist.

Instead, I settled for maintaining my sullen glare.

She kept laughing, but I had trouble hearing. Her voice seemed to be coming from all different directions at once. At the same time, her body blurred around the edges. I looked around the clearing, alarmed. It seemed to be spinning around me, even though I didn't feel like I was moving. The mismatch was making me dizzy.

Just when I felt that I was going to throw up or pass out, the world suddenly snapped into focus. I was standing in an unremarkable forest clearing. The improbable stream was nowhere to be seen. The divan was gone. The fox lady had vanished.

The only proof that I had just had any contact with the supernatural was the useless status screen blocking my vision. I crossed my arms over my chest in frustration and dismissed it with an irritated huff.

A moment later, I heard a soft thud behind me. Spinning around, I saw my little ball of rags resting on the ground, as if it had always been there.

I snatched it up, took one last look around the clearing, and ran back to where Kana was waiting.