Chapter 17

As Laura returned to her room, she found Takeko taking a nap on her desk. Sitting down in front of the little Tanuki, the Kitsune poked his little belly until he cracked open his eyes.

"Hey there sleepy head." she addressed him. "You mind helping me with figuring out a better illusion for my eyes? I'll even get you some snacks you like tomorrow."

Seeing the little spirits ears perk up, it was easy to tell she had his interest. "Sure, but how can I help you? You know I only know the gist of that stuff." Takeko asked slightly confused, his head cocked to the side.

"I want to practice moving the illusion I have now to roughly where I am looking, and need someone in the know about this to judge how good a job I am doing." Laura said, as she dropped the illusions hiding her tails and ears, releasing a bit of mental pressure she had barely noticed building up.

"I can do that. Just make sure to get me some potato chips when you get snacks." the Tanuki replied with a small nod.

With her lips pulled into a thin smile, Laura pulled a notebook out of the messenger bag leaning against the desk. Tearing five sheets of paper from it, she numbered them from one to five before spreading them across the desk.

"So I'll say a number and then try to move the illusion to look at that piece of paper." Laura explained to the spirit still sitting on the desk. "You just tell me how it all looked."

"Got it." Takeko replied before focusing his gaze on the Kitsune's eyes.

"Let's start with 5" Laura said as she tried to move her 'eyes' to look at the piece of paper lying on the right side of the desk.

"Well they are looking in the right direction, but they kind of jumped to that position." the brown furred spirit explained his observations. "Like one moment they look straight ahead and the next they are focused on the pieces of paper."

"Okay." Laura replied before thinking that feedback over for a moment. "Let's try going to 3 this time then."

They continued to practice like this late into the night until Laura had managed an acceptable semblance of natural eye movement down and headed to bed, bundling herself up in her tails once again.

After breakfast the next morning, Laura and Daiki were headed into Hiyokuna for a bit of grocery shopping, if it could be called that, seeing as they were mostly planning on buying a load of various snacks and sodas. As they walked along the road into town, the two of them discussed how to best transport their shopping back, seeing as only the Kitsune had thought ahead and brought an empty backpack with her.

Once they reached the town itself, they had settled on packing the cans and bottles of whatever drinks they would get into the spirits backpack, while they would just get plastic bags for everything else at the supermarket itself.

Walking through Hiyokuna proved quite challenging for Laura. With more people out and about, she had quite a difficult task at hand to keep her tails form hitting random people passing the duo. The handful of times she failed at this, the young German quickly apologized and hoped the others would assume it was her backpack that touched them.

Once finally inside the Supermarket, the Kitsune was mostly focused on not knocking anything over with her invisible tails, nor hit more people with them. As they reached the snack aisle, Laura was a little overwhelmed with the difference in selection compared to what she was used to back home, and ended up picking one of everything that looked interesting, as well as two packs of normal chips for Takeko, all the while getting suggestions from her fellow student.

A few minutes later, while Laura was busy picking up a couple of things she had knocked down in her excitement, Daiki collected a handful of each of his favorite snacks.

While the selection of beer was a bit disappointing to the German, she did pick up a six pack, as well as some more familiar brands of soft drinks. Once Daiki had picked the drinks he wanted for now, they quickly went to pay for their purchases, before spending way too long packing everything up so they could carry it all back to campus.

Once they had returned, the duo first went to Daiki's room, which turned out to be one of the first rooms on the second floor of the men's dorm. Taking all his stuff out of her backpack, Laura said her goodbyes and after he had reminded the spirit of when the training would start the next afternoon she returned to her own room, where Takeko was no doubt already waiting for his chips.