The True Confessions of a Nine-Tailed Fox

Chapter 83: A New Home

Present day, in the Bureau of Reincarnation:

Whaaaat? They decided to stay? They don't want to go home?

The possibility that the rock macaque soldiers and wild boar demon wouldn't return to the Jade Mountains had never occurred to me. Because, seriously, who would want to move to the Claymouth Barony, of all places?

(Well, me, I guess. Technically, I'd died trying to move there. Hmmm.)

"Apparently not. They have expressed a – " Flicker pursed his lips – "strong desire to stay."

A strong desire to stay. And the barony did not have the forces to drive off a demon army, even a battered, half-dead, half-eaten one. I had to get back there to fix things – oh, wait.

But this must have happened two months ago. What are they doing now? And how do you know anyway? Can you cast visions of places like dragon kings?

If so, I could just have him show me Honeysuckle Croft right now, instead of trying to fly halfway across Serica in my next life.

But Flicker dashed those hopes. "I'm afraid that is not within my ken. At best, I could walk out the South Gate after work and look down through the clouds, but visibility is limited at night. And I'm on the clock right now. I don't have time," he tacked on before I could demand that we take a field trip this instant.

Awwww. That's too bad.

I didn't press the issue. Peering down over a cloud at the tops of miniscule buildings had limited utility. After all, I wasn't a star sprite and didn't have far-sight. Plus Flicker had more souls after me to reincarnate, starting with Not-Marcius, and none of them would appreciate the delay. See? I could be altruistic. I could accommodate other people's needs!

You haven't answered my other question, I reminded him. How do you know all this, if you didn't see it yourself?

It seemed like a straightforward-enough question to me, but for some reason, Flicker's eyes slid to a side. "Uh.... I'm afraid I can't answer that...."

Confused, I blinked my blackness. Wait, really? Why not?

Flicker studied the wood grain on the back of his door as if Glitter were going to pop up and command him to draw it from memory. "Ah, because the...individual who told me prefers not to have...their identity known...?"

What?! Now you have to tell me who it is!

"I literally just told you why I can't tell you!"

Yeah, when had that ever stopped me? I ran through the possibilities in my, well, not-head. It couldn't be Glitter. She didn't even know that Flicker had gotten tangled up in affairs on Earth, and if she ever did find out, she'd punish him rather than update him.

It also couldn't be the absentee Director of Reincarnation. The Kitchen God was too busy scraping together offerings from the kitchens and hearths of Earth to keep track of what was happening in his own bureau.

It most assuredly was not Cassius, the would-be Assistant Director of Reincarnation. He'd never stoop to communicating with a clerk.

As for the former Assistant Director of Reincarnation, the Goddess of Life had left the bureau and presumably had no further interest in it. (Arguably, she'd lost interest already towards the end of her tenure here, since she was looking forward to her next post as Director of the Bureau of Human Lives.)