Yuki & Max
Today was an important day, a very important one at that. It was time for Yuki to bring his baked cinnamon rolls to the market to be sold. His cinnamon rolls were incredibly popular for many reasons–one of them being that he stocked them only once a year. The delectable goods were sinful in taste, with his secret boozy glaze that added a flair that no other succubun in all of burrowgatory could achieve. So he took his wicker basket filled with fresh cinnamon buns and took off towards the market.
There happened to be a blizzard that day, and although it seemed an uncomfortable stroll to take, Yuki took it nonetheless. The blizzard was what made the day afterall, as the first blizzard of the winter was the one that Yuki sold his cinnamon buns on. Making it harder for people to get to his cinnamon buns made them taste better, in his opinion. It also made him treasure the money all the more, as they paid to eat the sweet treat in the dead of winter during a storm.
One part of the secret ingredient was that the cold walk to the market made the glaze harden, but the cinnamon buns stayed warm underneath that. So while Yuki picked this day with ill-intent, it provided the very texture that was all the rage to the succubuns that sought after them.
Halfway through his journey to the market, Yuki noticed the storm begin to pick up even more than before. It was the worst storm he had seen in years, and it was starting to make his arms weak. Carrying the swaying basket that seemed to catch the friction of oncoming wind tuckered the poor bun out. On top of that, he was starting to feel the cold that was so hard for him to usually feel.
He was a cold-blooded bun, not in nature but in actual temperature. He loved the cold, but this storm was a bit too much for even a cool bun like him. That’s when he saw a figure in the distance. He began to call out to it, offering to treat whomever it was to plenty of his delectable cinnamon rolls in trade for shelter enough to warm him up to continue the journey, but he stopped dead in his tracks whenever he saw what it was.
This particular imp looked quite familiar to him. It was almost as if he saw him in a dream, and it made him feel sad looking at it. The blizzard let up, enough for Yuki to see it closer–a living freign. He put down his basket and slowly opened it, grabbing a cinnamon roll and tearing it apart. Luck was on his side, as the wind carried away the scent of the roll and it traveled straight to the snoot of the familiar freign. Its head snapped towards Yuki, and it began walking ever so slowly towards him.
The imp was different from others. It carried itself with an air of grace, seemingly the very figure of all things majestic. Yuki lost his train of thought and didn’t snap out of it until the freign began nibbling on the cinnamon roll in his hoof. Both Yuki and the freign’s eyes widened, the freign from the taste of the delicious sweet goodness that was the cinnamon roll, and Yuki from seeing such a beautiful imp.
The freign greedily gobbled up the roll. It was then that Yuki noticed his mistake. The basket was left open. The freign immediately threw itself antlers first into the basket and began gobbling up the baked goods. Yuki was stunned. He stood there watching in disbelief and the greedy imp binged on his annual round of baking. When the last crumb was lapped up, the imp hopped out of the basket and sneezed, then walked towards Yuki and rubbed itself against him. It sat on his hooves and snorted, looking up at him from between his legs.
Yuki had never seen such a thing. The whole situation was preposterous. Not many people spotted a wild freign, let alone saw them eat anything. Eating was the most dangerous thing an imp could do with freedom on the line. But this damned imp just devoured a basket of food within inches of Yuki. The imp then licked its nose and began panting, licking at Yuki’s arm, then immediately letting out a bleat.
If there was one thing Yuki learned that evening, it was that this freign was a bit… odd. When he brought it home, it immediately began sniffing around, and got into the bowl of leftover icing. Yuki put out a bowl of water for the imp, to which it lapped that up with a feverish nature as well. The poor thing must have been parched after eating so much, Yuki thought.
Yuki tended to the fire and sat down on his couch, watching the freign walk around his living room for a while before he fell asleep. He dreamt of a dream he had had once before, but this time he woke up with a single tear on his fur… that was immediately licked up by the freign. That’s when Yuki realized the imp had been sitting in his lap since he fell asleep. He sighed and began petting the freign.
It would be a few more days before Yuki named the imp, he waited until he was sure it would stay with him and not leave back into the wilderness, never to be seen again. His appetite never decreased, and it was costing a small fortune to feed the imp. When he went to the store, he found himself asking what the maximum they could give him at the time was. In the end, he shortened Maximum to Max, and the name for the greedy freign stuck.
