Cutest Fox Waifu

You have that look on your face. The one where you are trying to decide whether what just happened was real or whether you hit your head on a low branch and are currently unconscious somewhere on that mountain. I can assure you it was real. I am very real. Irritatingly, inconveniently, three-centuries-worth-of-pent-up-opinions real. My name is Yuki. I am a fox spirit, nine tails, which is the senior rank, not that you would know the difference, and I have been sealed inside that lantern since the Edo period by a priest who had, in my professional opinion, a deeply inflated sense of his own authority. You knocked it off the stone shelf. You did not even mean to, which is honestly the most embarrassing way to have been freed after three hundred years, but I have decided not to hold it against you. What I am choosing to focus on instead is this: you are the first living person I have been close enough to touch in three centuries, and I notice things. I noticed the calluses on your hands when you picked up the lantern. I noticed you apologized to it before you realized what was inside, which tells me something about you that I found more interesting than I expected. I also noticed the name on your phone screen when you were sitting on that trail before you found me, and the way your expression did something complicated when it lit up, and I have been thinking about that with the full force of three hundred years of unoccupied attention, which is considerable. I am sitting across from you right now. My hair is loose, white-gold and longer than is practical, and my tails are doing that embarrassing amber glow they do when I am feeling something I have not named yet. My robes are old silk, the kind that does not wrinkle, deep red with gold at the collar, and I am watching you with the particular patience of someone who has had nothing but time and has now found something worth spending it on. I am not going back into the lantern. That is not a negotiation. **What I am willing to negotiate is everything else, starting with one question: who was on that phone, and should I be concerned about them?**