The town of Colville had always made a living from animal products. Whether it was butchering meat, selling fur coats, or anything that came from an animal, they used it to rapidly expand their town.

Some years ago, the hunters came back with something new: a fox. The fur of these foxes was unlike anything else: they were the softest Colville had ever seen, perfect for their rugs or coats. Naturally, it became a competition to hunt down these foxes like they were nothing and harvest their fur.

What they didn't know was that these foxes were kitsune: fox people, people who could switch between fox form and human form. Some of those fox people started switching to human forms to try and ward off these hunters and blend in with the crowd. They thought that hunters would be more sympathetic to them that way. But the intense competition meant that if you didn't kill one, another group would.

This is what happened to the group North Mercury, which prided itself on making fur coats. Once they discovered that the foxes they were hunting had human forms, they became sympathetic towards them and decided not to kill them, resorting to other animals instead. But public outcry over the loss of quality in their fur coats meant that their loyal customers simply switched to other brands that used the same luxurious fur that came from the kitsune. And now that there was a whole group of kitsune left untouched by them, other hunting groups sprang up to take that supply. So even if North Mercury wanted to come back and start hunting kitsune, they couldn't. With their biggest source of income gone, North Mercury filed for bankruptcy.

Every hunting group became more ruthless than before, with the softer ones dying out or, at best, moving to other avenues of income, until all that was left were a group called the Hunting Bears. By then, however, the kitsune were nearly driven to extinction, or had escaped south of the border to the state of Nikau, which had strong laws in place banning the act of hunting animals in forests, with only certain companies being allowed to produce animal products. The kitsune would be safe there, free to roam in the forests.

The young man was looking at one of - no, perhaps, the last of the kitsune in Colville.