"I used to dream about the memory I have from my youth, my mother bleeding and crying while I was wrapped up in her arms, cowering from something. Human looking figures looming over us with several tail-like shadows moving behind them. Fingers pointed at us. Soft yet harsh whispers of 'half-breed', 'mutant', and 'disgrace'. But the scariest part of all were the animal-like sets of eyes that looked down at us without any feelings."

- Hestia Jin Tompkins

My name is Hestia Jin Tompkins, though I like being called Tia. You can say that I am 7 years old or 507 years old. And as you can see from my age, I am not really the regular human girl you see in the streets chatting with their friends. I am a fox.

My mother is a fox. Not like the regular foxes that you can see around the forests or the plains but a nine-tailed fox. The ones that are believed to be sacred animals if not one of the gods in namely China, Japan and Korea (though sometimes we are believed to be monsters because of some packs that attacks humans). You may think that I am talking non-sense but it is true. And we do exist.

Before I was born, my mother was considered the best from her pack. She was the most talented with spells and charms, most intelligent and wise, the most beautiful and graceful, and most what-ever-you-can-think-of. And because of this she was raised to become the leader of the pack. The only thing she 'fault' in her was her love for new adventures. She did love her home like everyone else if not more than anybody else, but she also wanted to see the world, the human world and the other worlds of the supernaturals, combined.

Each week she would set out on a journey for about a day, without the pack elders knowing. She would go to other woods, forests, and plains to make friends and learn the other cultures and histories from the others. It was part of her life to travel and learn the things that were so new to her. She would never stay in one place for so long, thinking that it was a waste of time when there the world is such a huge place. And that was before she had me. Before she had met my father.

She said that she met him in the beach. It was her first time in the beach and she said she was amazed by the beauty of the vast waters, the salty scent of the water and the soft and relaxing sound of the sea. She had fallen in love with the sea. And there was a man. Just feeling the waves and the wind, relaxed with his feet dipped in the water. The man was her father.

She never said any details about him. No other stories about how he had looked like, or was like. She just said she met him in the beach half-day travel from the forest we lived in. They became friends. They fell in love. They had me. Then he left for the sea. And never came back. But she always had love and hurt in her eyes whenever she talked of that short story, so I never really bothered asking her about him.

I once overheard the other foxes saying that when my mother came back pregnant from one of her journeys, everyone was happy for her, asking who the father was (since there all foxes were females, they must get the seed from elsewhere to multiply the number of the pack). They trusted mom to have gotten a seed from a respectable man, who may be strong, intelligent, witty, or someone just so much like her. But all those trusts were gone when I was born, everyone was shocked. Our pack of nine-tailed foxes all had similar color of furs, red, brown, or white, and all had red eyes. They thought I would be white furred too, like most of the foxes, taking after the fur colors of their mother. But I wasn't, I had pitch black fur with red and green eyes.

Because they never heard of any black furs throughout the country or the nation, they were in utter confusion and disgust. The different eye colors didn't seem to be helping either. The fact that I was so 'different' made the pack aggressive towards both my mother and myself. They isolated us, saying that I was born weird because of a curse from the gods. To them, my mother brought in a seed of a monster to their pack. She was a traitor.

At first, the pack had decided to ignore us, so we had to find food, shelter and other necessities by ourselves. My mother was left alone with a toddler before she could recover from giving birth. Living only with you mother is actually nice in some way, being there for each all the time, not really minding what the others thought or said. It was as if we had our own little world.

But like my mother, I was a very curious and adventurous little cub. And being what I am, I would sneak out of the house and observe how other cubs from the pack would play with each other. I was just a child and did not understand why we had to stay away from the other foxes. And although I had my mother, I wanted a friend. A friend to talk with, to play with, to spend time with, and to bond with.