Chapter 4: 4: Thief

I ran as fast as my new body would allow me to down the street, away from the child services building. My heart surged in my chest as I dodged the occasional piece of refuse on the sidewalk. The street was utterly empty of other people as I ran under the flickering light of the occasional working street lamp. I was still in fight or flight mode, my legs pumping with the type of speed only fear could provide and my eyes wildly searching out dark corners for threats. They seemed to be incredibly good at seeing through the darkness. I guess foxes have good eyesight.

My mind categorised what I needed to do. I’d always daydreamed about what I would need to do in all sorts of survival situations like this. I needed a place to sleep first of all because I was bone tired. I couldn’t pick any old abandoned house however, I needed to get far enough away from the evil building before I could be safe. I turned randomly into a side street, making sure that it didn’t have a “no exit” sign as I ran. I was looking for an abandoned house that didn’t look like it was being used for nefarious purposes and also wasn’t too old and decrepit.

I ran through the deserted cold streets of the Penrith suburbs for a long while, fuelled by fear of that evil woman and her dogma. Eventually I felt myself flagging and I chose the next suitable house I came across. It must have once been a lovely house, two storeys and white plaster walls. The place was also more than a bit run down. All the paint was peeling on the outside, and the yard was a mess of weeds and uncut grass gone to seed. Luckily for me, the place had not yet fallen to the thugs who liked to randomly trash houses like this.

I tried the front door, but it was locked and the door held firm. I made my way around the back to look for another entrance. After doing a full circuit of the house I realised that it was entirely locked up tight, I had no way of getting in. No normal way of getting in. I thought back to my fight with Barbara and how I had randomly teleported twice. Maybe it could get me in? I walked around to the back door and stared at it.

I thought about how I had felt during those awful moments of struggle. I had felt fear, a blind need to live, and… I had wanted to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. I concentrated on that feeling and then with a sudden lurch I was out in the backyard, falling over in a tangle amongst the long grass. Okay, I don’t have control over it. I guess I could randomly keep trying until it puts me where I want to be. I sure hope it doesn’t materialise me inside a wall. I walked back to the door and tried again. This time I was standing about three meters back down the path. I walked back and tried again, and again, and again. Finally, after at least a dozen tries, I got it, appearing inside the house.

It was kind of nice, the place was missing some furniture and the whole place was covered in dust. I seemed to have appeared in a living room. The floor was covered in a sort of horrific beige-yellow shag carpet that looked like something from… well, the seventies. There was a very large orange couch set against one wall that had obviously been too big to bother moving by the series of occupants that the place had had. It wasn’t just the seventies that was represented either, there was a bunch of S shaped chairs stacked in a corner, a hideous plastic coffee table with multi coloured fluorescent squares on it and finally, a broken flat screen from about eight years ago. Everything was worn out and broken.

I went to the couch, it was by far big enough to hold me. I flipped the cushions to deal with the dust and sat down. As soon as my newly rounded butt hit the couch I felt my body to shake. I hugged my tail to my chest and felt big fat tears begin to roll down my cheeks. I was too emotional to even form coherent thoughts. Just as my internal voice began to form a sentence, it would be cut off by the next one. My life had gone from bad to worse to downright awful. I had finished my degree, expecting to gain a bit of experience in New Zealand before maybe going overseas.

Instead, my mother had presented me with plane tickets and ordered me to go to the States. Had she listened when I told her that no one would hire a random newbie way down from our little country? No she had not listened. She’d said all the best engineers were getting high paying jobs in the States. Where did she even get her sources? Either way I had been turned down from firm after firm because I was too green to take the risk of moving me all the way here. Then this night had happened. Mugged in the streets of a city I didn’t know, all my stuff taken from me. Everything that proved who I was. I pulled my soft, fluffy tail closer to my face and shuddered as my mind skipped over the events of the night.

My new body, small and helpless against the world. The death of Jocelyn, almost made worse by the fact I could not see it, allowing my mind to fill in the blanks with horrible images. The uncaring government and their psychotic child protection lady. She’d called me a demon and a freak. She was right too, I was a freak of nature, or of some evil higher power. These freakish ears and this soft tail would forever mark me as not human. I would be treated poorly by many, with pity by others. I realised I had not even seen myself. I needed to find a mirror.

I stumbled up, and went in search of the bathroom and it took me trying a few doors to find it. Walking in, I noted that, the place was covered in blue and white tiles, a bath filling a large portion of the room, a toilet in another, and the sink front and center. The mirror had dust on it, just like everything else, and I began to wipe it off. I watched as my image was slowly revealed in the dim light of the bathroom.

My ears were huge. It would be impossible to hide them, impossible to function properly as a normal person when I was labelled as a freak by these things on my head. I hated them. I railed at them in my mind, tears still streaking down my cheeks as I stared at them. It was hard to control my emotions, the depression I had felt since I was around twelve years old was mysteriously gone. I’m not talking about sadness as one often does with depression, I’m talking about the form of depression where all one's emotions are muted and dull, and things that had once brought joy would instead bring nothing.

Without that muting effect, the sadness, terror and helplessness of the night was overwhelming, I didn’t want to live life as a freak, I didn’t want to have to constantly watch my own back in case some religious nut job like Barbara thought I was the spawn of satan and came at me with another knife. The knife. I looked at it, still in my left hand after all this time. It had seemed like some instrument of evil during the tense, desperate struggle in that room, but now it just looked… like a dagger. The steel was a dark colour, but otherwise it was fairly utilitarian. The type of dagger an apprentice blacksmith would knock out by the hundreds in Skyrim.

I looked in the mirror at what I had become, some sort of japanese fox demon. I looked at the ears. My heart beat hard as my emotions overwhelmed me, and I slowly brought the blade up to the base of my ears. How would I look without them? I had no human ears anymore, just a flat space of skin where they had been. Was there some sort of surgery that could move and reform them? I didn’t think so, but I could try and fix this on my own. I pressed the blade lightly against the base of my tall fox ear. I felt my tumultuous mind egging me on and my body shook violently with the conflict inside me.

I held that pose for several moments, until something finally snapped inside me. I threw the blade into the bathtub and it rang the tub like a bell. With the tension of the moment having drained, I collapsed to the floor in a heap and began to bawl my eyes out. This wasn’t the same unending desperate sadness of before, this was a release, a healing. My small body shook violently as I let myself go, feeling the emotions begin to order themselves for processing within my mind.

At some point I fell asleep there on the ground, snuggled in my hoodie, blanket and holding my tail.

When I woke the next morning, I felt awful. Turns out that sleeping on cold tiles isn’t the best idea. I sat up and stretched my arms up as high as I could and felt my breasts move with them. That was a new feeling. Standing up carefully, I looked down at myself. My hoodie needed a wash, it was wrinkled and dusty. I also needed pants and shoes. I sighed. It was a girly sigh, high and wistful. My first reaction was one of horror at the change that had happened, but the feeling never really got off the ground. I found that I didn’t mind the new voice.

“Hello, my name is Callum,” I told my toes.

It was a rather cute voice, the type of voice that you heard voicing the funny little animal character in an animated movie. I looked up, and caught my first good look at myself. It was like a blow to the skull. Standing in the mirror was a thin, short teenage girl. Her face was pretty, with high cheekbones and a small but full mouth and her nose was small and slightly flattened. I had a curious look I couldn’t quite place. This was most evident in the eyes, where a slight epicanthal fold was present. The eyes were also huge and orange with slight green flecks in them. I couldn't place my exact heritage, in one light I could be Irish, but then I would move my face a certain way it would seem like I was from the Ukraine or even Eastern Asia

The overall effect was an exotic type of pretty that would catch the eye, especially in a place where the local brand of pretty differed so much from how I looked now. My eyes traced up from there to the ears I had almost cut off last night. They were tall and very fluffy. The inside of the ears was a big tuft of white fur, while the outside of it had long ginger fur that wisped out at the very top into little white points. They were objectively adorable, even if they would make me stand out.

The effect was pretty much what you’d expect, a pretty little ginger fox girl. I might be able to get away with going out in public like this. Maybe. Except since no one believed me, calling myself Callum wouldn’t do. Did I need a name to tell people? What would it be? I rolled my male name around in my head. Callum. I couldn’t really think of a female version of that, but what if I messed around with the way it sounded? The C in Callum was a hard C, so what if I turned it into a K? I played around with it in my mind until I had a name that worked for me.

“Hey, my name is Kalia!” I told myself in the mirror, and I saw myself smile.

Okay, that was my name. Kalia. My chest felt suddenly so much lighter and I felt small tears forming in my eyes. Wow, that felt powerful.

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“Kalia, Kalia, Kalia, Kalia, Kalia, Kalia, Kalia, KALIA!” I repeated into the mirror, watching my own pretty smile grow wider and wider. It was funny hearing my name in my accent, I’d always found the Kiwi accent to be funny. Instead of “Kalia” it was “Kahleeyah”. I still had my accent, which was nice, something besides my hoodie that I’d kept hold of. Ask a Kiwi to say anything with an “er” sound on the end. We just can’t, it’s not possible. Clipper becomes Clippah, and so on.

I sat down abruptly on the ground and giggled uncontrollably. My, I was just a bundle of emotion now, wasn’t I? Last night I had been the epitome of self hate, and this morning I was embracing myself with a smile. I noticed my tail swishing around happily behind me.

“Come here you!” I said, pouncing on the offending appendage.

I caught it between my hands and the tiles with a laugh. I was so dumb. Literally chasing my tail. Still, it seemed to have a mind of it’s own. Gosh was it fluffy. I think the individual hairs on it were almost half a foot or more long. It was also as long as my torso was tall, which wasn’t actually that long in the grand scheme of things. It was big to me however.

I sat sprawled on the floor with my tail for a long while, just enjoying the positive emotions running through me. I knew it wasn’t going to last, at some point I would have to figure out where the hell I went from here. I think I needed to find that waitress, she had been an incredible help and had been very kind. I couldn’t keep running around in a dress shirt and hoodie however. I needed clothing. Except I had no money to buy clothing.

I did have a kind of superpower. That weird teleporting thing I was doing, and I’d put some sort of illusory blindfold on Barbara and the Security guard. Maybe I could use those to get money? I didn’t want to steal though, did I? I was desperate though. I decided it was time to get moving before I got really hungry.

I picked up the knife from the tub and went back to the living room. I found an old dish cloth and carefully wrapped the dagger in it, before stashing it away in the front pocket of my hoodie. I carried the blanket with me, but at some point I would need a bag. I left the house out the back door and walked down the path outside, carefully tucking my tail and ears into my hoodie. It was still hard to hide my ears inside the hood, but at least they weren’t so obvious.

The street was still deserted this morning, but I could hear the sound of a lawnmower running somewhere, and cars driving in the distance. I wondered about my blindfold ability. When I had used it, I’d wanted her to not be able to see me. What if…

I reached out with my mind the same way I had done last night, but this time I wanted a bright flash of light. Without a sound, a small orb of light appeared before me and exploded in a bright flash, causing me to go blind for a moment.

“Ow!” I exclaimed as I rubbed my eyes.

I recovered from my own silliness and walked onwards towards the center of town.

I was still a long way from the central business district when I saw something that made me slow down. I’d been noticing it a lot recently in this area, houses with confederate flags or imperial eagles. It was when I saw a white power thug leaving one of the houses with a woman of similar inclination that I realised I was in the middle of a neighbourhood that the people who had mugged me last night might live in.

I needed money right? Why not get revenge on some friends of those assholes. I watched as the man and his girlfriend or whatever left in a well maintained pickup truck. These guys wouldn’t trust banks, I’m willing to bet my tail on it, which means they might have money stashed somewhere in the house.

I snuck around the back of their property and looked in through the windows to make sure the house was unoccupied. It seemed to be empty, so I began to use my teleport power to try and get inside. I still had no way to control it, despite how much I tried to focus it in a certain direction.

It didn’t take long this time, the random number gods seemed to be in my favour today. I snuck around the small house. It was a very normal house, at least in construction. The decor was, well, less normal. Several swastikas were present, from a flag that hung on a wall to a painting of some historical figure I didn’t recognise. Where would they hide their money? I went in search of the master bedroom first.

The house being as small as it was, it didn’t take me long. The room was a mess. Clothing strewn everywhere, male and female. Looking around, I spotted a dresser, a double bed and a nightstand. I checked the nightstand first. I found maybe forty USD inside the nightstand, and pocketed it. Under the pillow was a gun. It was some sort of pistol, but I had no idea what type, because I come from New Zealand where most people have never even seen a handgun up close, including myself until just this week.

I began to search the room from top to bottom, and it was hard going. Mainly because of the smell. It seemed my new fox features didn’t stop at night vision and greater hearing. My nose was picking up every single less than lovely scent in the room. It was in the closet that I found what I was looking for. Underneath a pile of huge leather boots, frankly too many boots in my opinion, I found a loose floorboard, which opened up to reveal three more handguns, a shitload of ammo, and a whole lot of cash.

I didn’t stop to count it, instead grabbing a satchel that was not unlike my old one from the floor. I emptied it of its contents, which turned out to be not a whole lot and stuffed the money inside. It was bound up in neatly packed bricks, but there weren’t many of them. As soon as I had all the money, I raced out the bedroom door and through the house, my heart pounding with excitement and fear. I ran out the back door, carefully locking and closing before I ran off. I ran to the back fence and checked over the top of it. I’m embarrassed to admit it was rather difficult to see over the fence at my new height.

Seeing the coast was clear, I scrambled over the top of the fence and into the next garden, being careful not to disturb the plants too much. With as much sneakery as I could muster, I crept around the house and out onto the street, where I adopted a more natural walking posture.

I felt myself bubbling with energy, the rush of breaking in and stealing the money was frankly quite intoxicating. Involuntarily I let out a bubbling giggle, releasing the excitement and tension of what I had just done. What a rush!

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