Vixen Society
Prelude
A group of six Kitsune sat around a
table in a conference room, watching a seventh giving a presentation.
It sounded like the set-up to a joke, or the prelude to some massive
disaster. The magical power at the collective disposal of the group
was staggering: More than half of them had five or more tails, with a
nine-tailer sitting way at the back. But the one at the front, waving
her presenter's stick around and running the show, was a
harmless-looking, dark-haired young woman in a sharp business
suit—and she was even hiding both her ears and the merely two tails
she had.
"Here's our logo," she
explained, showing off a fancy vector graphic. It was a stylized,
cute red fox's head, turned to directly face the viewer, with its
snout tilted downward a bit and its yellow eyes enlarged a bit to
give it a "cute" look. "Should fit in pretty well with
modern mobile design...Aannd, let's move on to the initial ads I've
got lined up..."
The presentation shifted to a video,
vertical in resolution—an animation of a generic, corporate
person-blob with an accompanying narration by a charismatic, cheerful
female voice—that of the presenter, in fact. "Do you feel
like life is letting you down? Like you don't have the body, the
mind, the drive or the self-esteem you want?" The
person-blob had a black stormcloud building up over its head as it
went through a rapid montage of a dull day at some office building,
glancing briefly at other, more colorful and brighter-lit person
blobs who were visibly more energetic and busy having fun.
"Join Vixen Society!" The
person-blob pulled out a phone and tapped the logo from the previous
slide on it, and waves of bright color flowed out, chasing the storm
cloud away. "A brand new life advice app that's available
now, for free." It grew fox
ears and a tail and its life was suddenly better. "Get
anonymous advice from our experienced experts to cure all of your
worldly woes! Your identity will be confidential, guaranteed!"
"Pffh...fft....!" At the
conclusion of the fifteen-second-or-so commercial, one of the older
foxes in the room snorted, and failed to suppress a full-on laugh
that spread to the rest of the room. "How is this
meant to deceive anybody?! It is so transparently
a swindle!"
"Ahh, but it's free," one of the younger ones at the table pointed out. "You have no idea how much power that one word has."
"We aren't looking to catch the clever fish," the presenter answered, leaning forward onto a podium, as the chatter died down. "We want people who'll at least try our advice out, just the once, thinking: 'How much harm could it possibly do'? Anyway, check out the next one!"
"Ahh, but it's free," one of the younger ones at the table pointed out. "You have no idea how much power that one word has."
"We aren't looking to catch the clever fish," the presenter answered, leaning forward onto a podium, as the chatter died down. "We want people who'll at least try our advice out, just the once, thinking: 'How much harm could it possibly do'? Anyway, check out the next one!"
"Do you need advice, and just
don't know who to turn to? Trying to improve yourself, but don't know
where to start?
"Join Vixen Society! A brand
new life advice app that's available now, for free. Get anonymous
advice from our experienced experts to cure all of your worldly woes!
Your identity will be confidential, guaranteed!"
Another round of laughter followed—not
so much at the commercial's expense, but rather at the thought of
someone taking its promises seriously. The presenter followed it up
with: "To put things in perspective: We're going to be showing
these ads to thousands of
people. I know you all don't want to come up with personal advice for
every single one of such a number, especially if it won't even pan
out. For what we're trying to do, we only need 'several'
suckers...and hopefully a few
potentials among them." She moved on to a third one:
"Can't cheer up? Can't wake
up? Don't like what you see in the mirror in the morning when you
do? Maybe you're just looking for some help learning something new,
or a good exercise routine.
"Join Vixen Society! A brand
new life advice app that's available now, for free. Get anonymous
advice from our experienced experts to cure all of your worldly woes!
Your identity will be confidential, guaranteed!"
"Do we need to
worry about the law when it comes to that 'confidentiality
guaranteed' thing?"
"We certainly
won't be sharing around the names of our 'customer base' beyond our
own little group here," one of the foxes sitting close to the
front of the room said. "That's 'confidential' enough, isn't
it?"
"The 'guarantee' is literally only in the commercial anyway," the presenter added. "Not a single word of it in our legal agreement. And human companies get away with far, far worse use of that word every day."
"The 'guarantee' is literally only in the commercial anyway," the presenter added. "Not a single word of it in our legal agreement. And human companies get away with far, far worse use of that word every day."
The two of them—the
instigators of this entire plot—continued to field questions for a
while longer, until the seven Kitsune came to a full agreement on the
matter. That was good, because those two had already paid up and made
all of the the necessary mundane arrangements for everything to go
live the following day. There was only one final question before they
all dispersed.
"Any reason
we're going with 'vixen' rather than 'fox'?"
"It just rolls off the tongue easier," the presenter shrugged.
"It just rolls off the tongue easier," the presenter shrugged.
"That,"
the other instigator said, "and what we're planning for
those we find with promising potential..."
So...this started out as an idea for a series of captions, but when I started writing it two different things happened. First, every single bit of it ballooned way past the kind of length that I want in a caption, and second, I found that I wanted to do something with this story (or set of stories, depending on your perspective) that just wasn't possible in caption form. I would compare this project to OZK in estimated size, which is to say that I anticipate actually finishing it in a reasonably small amount of parts, even if it takes me a while to get all of them written. Anyway, there's a lot of this already written as I publish this, and the actual first part will come out tomorrow.
Oh, right, and let me know if you find the title font unreadable. I was looking for a "fancy looking script font" and just took the first one I could find that looked legible.
ooh a new app based tf advancher
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