Art by Gravewalker!

What little moonlight there was in the starless sky cast its rays through the nearest sill, beaming comfortably onto Vivi’s open pages, spread apart by devoted pinkie and stalwart thumb. The position was practiced; the Vulpix lay poised, pointed toward her window, just where the moon’s wan glow reached its perfect trajectory. The celestial body, after all, acted as a perfect sundial for her allotted time before bed; when the light at last faded, she would have no distraction from pulling blankets over her cold, exposed feet and at last taking to the realm of sleep.

Her supple thighs huddled close to her slightly generous stomach for warmth, accentuating the stoutness of her frame. The contours of her pajamas swam down her thick legs like striped rivers, a comfortable stockiness pushing at their threaded frames. The only sounds audible consisted of her shuffling paws against the strewn covers and the soft pushes of air through her dilating nostrils; a symphony of silent focus.

“Oh, poppet… you missed a bloody darling time to foreshadow,” came her dainty whisper in a seeming breath to nobody. Her charcoal eyes dipped low, then to the right, and lastly up again as she skimmed the remaining page, hovering over the author’s pen name located at the vellum’s roof. Her thick fingers curled beneath her chin. “But the rest is simply so well put-together… you know what? I’ll excuse it.”

Six tails flicked in unison behind her like a barrel of feathers, each curling around her generous frame. There, so absorbed, she looked like a crimson shrubbery whose only movements entailed the telltale nudging of her glasses and the slow, meticulous shifting of her paws with every passing passage. But why stop at just a few passages? A few pages? Further, why only one book? There were so many of them, after all…

Oh, certainly, she’d read them all before. I wasn’t as though that had ever stopped her. The night would be long, and her recursive sense of wonder, longer.