You stuff the corn into your mouth, ignoring the sad puppy eyes it throws at you.

You agree with your father's point. You didn't want it tagging along all the way to your apartment complex in Inimura Street. The people are pretty nice to you, but you can't assume that they'd be just as nice to a stray, presumably rabies bearing fox. It had followed you all the way from the restaurant alley, hadn't it? Why tempt it with food only to betray its trust at the very end?

You watch the people walking towards the exit. Some are clothed in heavy winter gear despite it being early October. Certain hardy individuals walk away wearing regular t-shirts. You crumple the cup, push through the flap and dump it inside the garbage can. The can is almost full, judging from the sound and distance through which the cup had fell. You clap the dust off your hands, recline and feel the comfort of the warm park bench against your back. Your phone buzzes in your pocket, prompting you to pick it up.

It's your boss and family friend, Sienna Cao, on one of her drunken calls again. In your notification bar, you can see that her messages to you on Chatterbug have exceeded the one hundred mark. The throb in the bruising on your abdomen returns with thousand-fold irritation and you huff to stop yourself from itching. You wish that the goon would've been nicer in punching the living daylights out of you; the damaged koi costume was still at the tailor's undergoing its umpteenth patch job.

You're still in the dark about how much Sienna actually owes the guy. Your apartment bill hasn't been paid in six months, thanks to your generous donation to Sienna. And even then the debt seems to be impossible to get out of. A pit of quicksand in the urban jungle, sucking you into the Underworld of gang-leaders, loan-sharks and goons. You pull out your earphones and click your tongue in displeasure at the tangled mass of cords. Your fingers proceed to knot and untie a minimum of ten new knots during the whole procedure.

When you look up, you gasp and frown. What had been a well-lighted and mostly populated park had turned into a thick forest of oaks and pines in the blink of an eye. You spring up from your seat, thunderstruck, trying not to scream your lungs out at the rows and columns of tress that had sprouted over the walkways out of nowhere.

The sky is now a deep murky purple dotted with white; the splash of the now visible Milky way cuts it in half with its dazzling array of stars. The air now holds a cold and heavy floral fragrance laced with a lighter stench of fish. There is a complete absence of human civilization in any direction that you choose to look in, be it the lack of skyscrapers rising above the tree line, the irritating honking of vehicles stuck in late evening traffic, or even the blare of of aggressive salespeople armed with megaphones and wearable advertisement boards. The sounds are replaced by the shaking of leaves, drolls of owls, high pitched cries of bats and the howling of wolves, with all of their bodies obscured under the shadows of the trees. There are fireflies flitting around encased in their spherical shells of light, but you wonder why they're coloured a pale teal as opposed to the typical greens or golds.

You're in a stretch of virgin forest, blanketed in fresh mountain snow, untouched by human invaders, except you. When you turn around, you notice the sudden disappearance of the seat on which you had rested your rump not even a second ago. Your phone has zero coverage in the middle of nowhere. Sweat drips off your forehand and sticks your t-short under your coat to your armpits. You look around, shivering like a leaf caught in a breeze in the chilly air.

You squint when you catch a flash of white streaking across the trunks in the moonlight. It slows down and pads towards you through the snow, panting and shaking its head. It's the white fox itself in all its fuzzy glory. You look at it and at the surroundings. From what you can tell, you were apparently teleported far away from Shikagami into one of the hundred or so National Parks. You have one in Hausenhoff around Mount Verna and its surrounding peaks protecting the last few thousand, endemic unicorns on the planet. You've gone there once, when you father was called in to assist a mare giving birth to triplets. Unlike Mount Verna, however, you can't see a single sign pointing towards the nearest park ranger station or an electronic beacon to use when you find yourself lost in the wilderness. It was just you, the fox, the moon and the stars.

Then the fox called to you. Instead of the usual yipping it had used to communicate, it spoke in human tongue with the voice of a female human,

"...Human, you have no time to lose. Follow me, and you can go home. Hello, human? Quick, move your feet!"

You're too gobsmacked by the talking vixen to form a coherent sentence. It lunges sideways, hops and tries to invoke your sense of alarm and get you to follow it, but you just stand there and stare at it, open-mouthed. Its voice has a pleasingly soft lilt, clear pronunciation and a musical quality, the kind that you hear in musicals or on radios. The vixen snaps at you and repeats,

"You can't waste anymore time, human, do you understand? Move your tailbone! Come on, don't be so insipid, lift your legs, do something!"

You simply open your mouth and scream.

You scream at the top of your lungs, stunning the fox and toppling it into a briar near by. You continue screaming, straining your throat for a full two minutes. You're desperate to wake up, to leave whatever skewed dream your subconscious has conjured up thanks to unclean corn. But the pinching, the screaming and the stomping get you nowhere. You walk around for a bit to clear your head. Somehow you bite down another breakdown in the middle of your 'dream forest'. There's nothing much you can do; you're in a dream, so the only way out would be seeing it to its end and waking up naturally. Or dying and waking up with a loud gulp of air. Two paths branch before you quite clearly.

You have scruples to follow a talking vixen. You've seen way too many movies and television shows about evil spirits taking cute animal forms to disarm suspicions about their real intentions. Plus, as you've learnt from the story of the Little Red Riding Hood, you can never trust talking canids who are being friendly with you.

However, the vixen seems desperate to get you moving. Though its wordings sound ominous, the sliver of hope within you assures you that unlike certain humans, foxes wouldn't betray your trust just like that because of their unawareness of treachery. Have you ever heard of a fox robbing a racoon dry by scamming it? your mind asks. You're willing to give it a try and gamble on your life; what if you actually get out of the forest?

｡:ﾟ.*･

｡:ﾟ.*･So, what will you do?｡:ﾟ.*･

If you feel that you have a better chance of survival on your own, then turn on your heels and RUN AWAY from the vixen to chapter 4.

If you're going to ACCEPT THE OFFER and trust the vixen to lead you out of the forest, follow it to chapter 6.

｡:ﾟ.*･

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