At Inara's insistence, things started to move quickly at the shrine. She wanted to move on from the version of herself who had misinterpreted Akari's apocalyptic vision, and she wanted to embrace her new identity. She told the other girls her goals and spent the days working by their side to prepare the shrine for the next step in its evolution. She also spent the nights with them, in a different way.

"Goddess of Progress, huh?" Seshi said, combing her fingers through Inara's seven fluffy tails. It was about all the movement Seshi could manage, as she slumped across the mattress in complete exhaustion. "Sounds real important, like a real big-league title. Gonna come out of hiding, then?"

Inara smiled back and pulled a thin sheet over her bare and glistening skin. Lately she had found herself with more energy than normal, a surplus of desire for physical passion, and Seshi had been primed and ready to help. And the nekomata was actually spiritually powerful enough to keep up with a goddess's most passionate urges.

"Yes, I suppose I will. Hebi's already planning the rollout of my new title. I think this Saturday is the big reveal to the public."

"Nice, nice," Seshi said, her eyes roaming over Inara's form. Even beneath the sheet, her figure was beyond beautiful. Seshi was not picky when it came to lovers, but she knew quality when she saw it. Or tasted it.

She shook her head to get off that train of thought. She was too wiped out to do anything else anyway. Several hours of nighttime fun had left her dead tired and deeply satisfied. "You planning to tell the humans your name?"

Inara turned and met Seshi's vibrant green eyes. "Huh, I hadn't thought about that. I'll ponder that. Thanks, Seshi."

The cat spirit grinned back in the low light. "Any time, Inara."

"Do you have any ideas, Akari?" Inara said as she took a seat on the shrine's front steps. It was mid-morning and it was just warm enough outside to relax and chat over a snack. "I really want to distance myself from the name Inari-okami. That's not me anymore, and anyone starting on that assumption is going to be harder to get onto the right path."

Akari took a bite of strawberry rhubarb pie, squinting at the extreme tartness. Inara had ordered the pie from a specialty website during one of her curious moods, and of all the girls in the house, only she and Akari had liked the sour taste.

"Hmm, how about Inara-hime? Like the goddesses Sakuya-hime, Toyotama-hime, and so forth."

Inara hummed as she chewed her own forkful of pie. Then she swallowed and said, "I'm not sure about calling myself a princess. I've never actually been a part of the divine nobility." She had nearly married into it, before the heartbreak that had sent her into despair, but that was all in the past now.

Akari waved a hand dismissively. "Half the gods with royal titles weren't related to any of the heavenly Amatsukami. And Okami is arguably a higher tier honorific than hime anyway." Then Akari planted a strawberry-flavored kiss on Inara's cheek. "In any case, I think Inara-hime sounds really cute."

"Inara-hime?" the goddess echoed, testing the name for herself.

"Inara-hime!" Akari repeated, giggling like a schoolgirl. She loved the feel of the word on her tongue, the sound of it in her ears. She could say it all day and never get tired of it. "Do you like it, Inara-hime?"

Inara's cheeks flushed with color and she felt genuinely flustered for the first time in forever. The truth was that she was quickly falling in love with the name Akari picked, especially when it came from Akari's lips.

Then Akari frowned. "Ah, but you wanted us to be on first-name terms, remember? Just 'Inara' and just 'Akari'…"

Inara's hands flailed. "No, um, this is different. I really like the name Inara-hime, and you can use it… when we're alone."

"Oh?" Akari set her pie plate aside and leaned over to look up at Inara's blushing face. "A formal title for the public, and a pet name for us?" she teased.

Inara refused to answer, except with a single nod.

"I knew you'd like it!"

Inara squinted at the human. "Wait… did you see this with your foresight?"

Akari grinned from ear to ear. "Yep! I've been using most of my personal fortune tellings to test out possible names for you. I might as well, since I needed practice with my gift anyway."

The goddess blinked. "But I only asked you for suggestions just now…"

The grin somehow grew wider. "And I already knew you'd need a public-facing name soon, so I wanted to be ready with a winner."

Suddenly, Akari was swept into a hug so tight she thought she might never escape.

"Thank you, Akari. You're truly amazing, you know that?"

"I try. And you're welcome, Inara-hime."

Nezumi arrived at the shrine in the late afternoon for her planned meeting with Akari, along with a backpack full of electronic devices. She started placing them out on the kotatsu, but Akari spoke up.

"Um, what're all these?" Akari stared at the array of circuit boards, radio controlled cars, cracked phones, and other devices in various states of repair.

"Possible business opportunities," Nezumi answered. "I'd like your hel— well, your power's help deciding which is the best path to take."

"Uh huh…" Akari mumbled, caught off guard;. When Nezumi had asked for help with a business venture, Akari hadn't expected a scattershot approach. She'd assumed Nezumi had a single idea in mind, and just wanted a single vision to solve some problem she was stuck on.

Nezumi watched Akari closely, then said, "Is this too much? Can you only do one fortune per day?"

"Oh no, that's not it. I can do more than one. But it does get tiring to do multiples, especially if the visions are complex. Questions like 'Will this recipe burn or not?' are a lot easier than 'How will the general public react to this product?'" Akari explained.

"Ahh. Hmm. Give me a second to think."

An intense frown settled on Nezumi's face and her large ears twitched in thought. She was silent for a long moment, then said, "I have an idea to reduce your workload. Wanna hear it?"

"Sure!" Akari said cheerfully. Nezumi was super smart, so Akari was expecting something clever. Though her expectations related to the petite mouse-girl had been proven wrong before.

"I have a business finances account, which I can access via this app on my phone," Nezumi said, holding up one of the few functional phones she had brought along. "I check the amount every morning like clockwork. Can you tell me how much money will be in that account thirty days from now, were I to follow each of the business plans I present to you?"

Akari blinked. "Thirty days? Is that going to be long enough to get a real understanding?"

"It should be, yes. All of these plans are just aiming to raise short-term capital, so that I can fund a large-scale project later."

That was the most Hebi-like thing I've ever heard. I bet those two would get along well, Akari thought. Then she got an unpleasant feeling that she didn't dare use her foresight to explore further. Maybe too well. With their powers combined, I'm sure they'd be too successful and draw too much attention to themselves.

"Ah, alright," Akari said. "Let's try this out. What's your first plan?"

The mouse spirit carefully lifted a device with four slender propellers on top. "This is Emily," she said reverently. "And she's a cutting-edge aerial drone, with every recent technological advancement I could get my hands on. I have two plans for her I'd like you to foresee for me."

"Mhmm," Akari said, not even taking a guess at what those plans might be. Akari was not a tech-savvy girl in any way, shape, or form. The extent of her tech knowledge was knowing her way around a PC and basic office software.

"The first plan is renting Emily out as a multi-purpose scouting device. Private investigation, movie filming, whatever opportunities come my way. I'm not picky or worried too much about laws or ethics." Then Nezumi grinned and leaned forward, eagerly awaiting Akari's revelations.

That last bit is a little concerning, but I suppose it's not atypical. Why would an immortal animal spirit care about human-made concepts like that? She pushed that line of thought aside. "Okay, I'll take a look."

Akari pictured Nezumi checking her phone in the morning, and imagined it had been thirty days since she put her 'Emily for Hire' plan into action. At first, Akari was just seeing a still scene, then a bunch of details changed and the vision burst into life.

The biggest change was the state of the little bunker Nezumi called home. Akari had imagined it the way she'd seen it before, with a cluttered computer desk, a mattress in one corner, and racks of Shika's fashionable clothes filling most of the remaining space. In the actual vision, there were no racks of clothes, and just shelves and shelves of drone parts in their place. The bed was half covered in discarded instant ramen packaging, and the other half was occupied by a naked and wild-eyed Nezumi.

The future Nezumi sat up, brushed some styrofoam cups away with her tail, and checked her phone. She swiped away some notifications with concerning text, like 'Where's our money, girl?' and 'Re: Cash-only shipping services', then she opened her accounting app.

"Good, good," Nezumi muttered, her voice raspy and quiet, like she hadn't used it to talk to anyone but herself in weeks. "That transfer went through. I should have just enough to get me and Emily to the mainland. The yakuza won't follow us there, right, Emily?" She reached behind herself to the bed's second pillow where a sleek object of gleaming chrome and black carbon fiber sat like a crown upon a velvet cushion. She stroked one of its landing feet gently.

The drone had been considerably modified from the device Akari had just seen on the kotatsu, and it likely contained a fortune's worth of new technology. Nezumi had clearly come unhinged, and Shika was nowhere to be seen. Akari forced herself from the vision then, having seen quite enough.

She shook her head and rubbed her temples, then said simply, "Don't do that plan. It turns out really badly."

Nezumi, once again looking cute and curious and sane, asked, "How badly? I need to know if the whole plan is bad, or if there are parts that can be salvaged."

Akari took a slow breath, trying to decide how much to say. She settled on, "Well, for starters, you seem to have broken up with Shika, become completely obsessed with augmenting Emily, and you're spending the last of your funds fleeing the country and your debts to literal gangsters."

Blue eyes blinked vacantly for a moment, then Nezumi gave a firm nod. "Got it. Nothing Emily related. Shika already doesn't like how fixated I can get on that drone, and apparently she's got excellent intuition."

Then, without lingering on the unnerving implications of that vision, Nezumi moved to another plan. She held up a square green circuit board with a bunch of clear plastic bumps protruding from one side. "This is a white-light LED lamp for use in street lights. It's twice as energy-efficient as the high-pressure sodium bulbs used throughout Shinjō while being 25% more visible to drivers, and it can send and receive status updates via an adaptive wi-fi mesh."

Akari nodded slowly. Thankfully she didn't need to fully understand something herself in order to use her foresight on it.

Nezumi placed the object down in front of Akari. "I want to order these in bulk and sell them to the city of Shinjō. Will that work?"

"One moment," Akari said, bracing herself for the possibility of another glimpse of an unhinged mouse running from the yakuza.

Instead, she saw Nezumi snuggled tight against Shika's side, checking her phone with one free hand. Their bodies were covered in fine silk sheets, but the room looked otherwise the same as Akari remembered it.

Nezumi smiled when she saw the money in her account, then she dropped the phone, rolled over, and kissed a waking Shika on the lips.

"Mmm," Shika moaned, returning the kiss with a surprising amount of passion. "What a lovely way to wake up."

"Agreed."

Nezumi tossed the sheets aside and straddled Shika's nude body. As the mouse spirit peppered Shika's face with more kisses and let her hands wander, Akari felt her sight blurring and her cheeks growing hot. The vision ended, leaving Akari looking right at the woman she had just seen making love.

"Sorry," Akari mumbled.

"For what? Was that plan really bad too?"

Akari waved her hands and shook her head. "No, it looked like a great future. I just saw something private between you and Shika."

Nezumi smiled. "Oh, that's good to hear. And don't worry about seeing that. We've got an open relationship, and I'm the furthest thing from shy about nudity. Well, I guess drunk Hebi has me beat." Then her expression turned serious. "So how much money did it make?"

"I couldn't read the exact amount before you put the phone down, but it was eight digits."

"At least ten million yen? Nice. That's far better than expected. That suggests I landed another contract beyond just the LED lamps."

"Should I check another of your non-Emily plans?" Akari asked, her eyes roaming the other strange objects on the table.

To Akari's surprise, Nezumi shook her head. "Nah, your vision was based on this reality, where I haven't heard about any futures except the awful Emily one. If I learn about another plan's potential, it could skew my underlying biases in a way that actually prevents the good future you just predicted."

Then she smiled. "And that vision showed me with plenty of money and Shika by my side. I couldn't ask for anything more. Thank you for your help, Akari."

"You're welcome, Nezumi," Akari said with a smile of her own. It really felt good to help people with her power.

Shortly after that, Nezumi gathered her gadgets, reactivated her disguise to hide her ears and tail, put her oversized coat back on, and left the shrine. The whole way home, she was skipping and humming happily to herself, looking an awful lot like an excited middle schooler. She had a plan that was nearly guaranteed to generate enough money to fund her next big plan, and she was excited to share it with Shika.

And she knew now that Shika was even more important to her than she'd previously known. Nezumi needed her to be her voice of reason, an anchor to keep from straying into madness like so many spirits before her. Without love and companionship, immortality was a sure path to insanity.