I sat nursing the cup of tea until someone tapped me on the shoulder, and then I jumped, losing most of the contents of my cup in the process.

  “Oh, Assistant Manager! I’m so sorry!” The young woman ran from the room and returned moments later with a roll of paper towels. “Here… I’m so sorry…”

  I couldn’t even say it was alright. I just sat dumbly, dabbing at the tea stain on my white clothing.

  “You didn’t get burned, did you?”

  “Oh… No, it had cooled down, already.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  I could only see the top of her hair, at first, as she lay tissue on my lap and mopped at the floor, but then she raised her head and I had to bite my tongue to avoid crying, “Poppy!”

  It was Poppy, wasn’t it? A young Poppy, barely out of school. Poppy before she started using the skin whitening creams and had her nose job and her teeth painfully straightened. Before she dyed her hair. A na?ve Poppy. A Poppy who would be more likely to bite her lip to hold back tears if someone shouted at her.

  This Poppy made my heart hurt. She wasn’t the Poppy I knew now, a warrior in her makeup, beautiful and confident.

  No, even that Poppy didn’t exist anymore.

  Thinking back to the third scenario… maybe that timid Poppy had never gone away after all.

  And now she was dead anyway.

  “Did you need something… Ella?”

  “I was hoping you’d do a reading for me,” she said, standing and speaking to her feet, “but I’ve caused you so much inconvenience. Please don’t mind me.”

  “A reading?”

  “Your… cards?”

  Card reading… Was she talking about tarot?

  That would be something Poppy would be into. I’d never paid much attention, but along with personality quizzes, Poppy loved fortune telling. She would drag any of us she could find to every temple at New Year’s for our fortunes, consult every face reader and street seer she saw. Looking at this girl’s eager, disappointed face, I wanted so much to call her by a dead woman’s name.

  “Oh, of course…” My character this time must be one of those people whose hobby was reading tarot cards for her friends and colleagues. “Let’s…” I thought quickly. “Let’s go to my desk.” That had to be where she – I – kept the cards.

  I was right. Ella led the way to a small desk amongst many other small desks, where a fake fern sat next to a computer monitor, in front of a pin board covered in pretty illustrations of fancy goldfish. In the single desk drawer was a gold embossed cardboard box, decorated with illustrations of brilliant red flowers on a deep blue background. I opened it and tipped out a deck of cards with moon phases on the back of them.

  How did they do it, again? I trawled through my memories of the times Poppy had pulled me into some small stall or tiny shop, choking with incense, where a woman (it was almost always a woman) in fake velvet would lay out a deck of cards.

  I shuffled the deck in my hands, the cards a little too large to make the task easy. I felt clumsy and stupid, but I explained it away to Ella as being a little unwell. Once again, she tried to suggest we postpone the reading, but looked relieved when I insisted.

  I placed the deck on the table. Now what?

  “Um… Take the deck and choose a card. Whatever card feels… right.”

  Luckily, she didn’t notice my awkwardness. She took the deck eagerly, and closing her eyes, pushed a card out from the upper third of the deck. “This one!”

  The card read: Ten of Coins.

  It depicted, oddly, eight small children gathered cheerfully around a house, an elderly woman and… a dog-headed man. The woman was massaging the dog-man’s shoulders like he was her husband.

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  What the hell does this mean?

  There was no guidebook with the cards. I looked in the desk drawer and still couldn’t find one.

  “Assistant Manager?”

  “Oh, sorry, Ella… Do mind if I just look at the guidebook quickly? My mind is a little…”

  “No, that’s fine! I’m just grateful you’re doing this for me when you’re not well!”

  I drew the Encyclopaedia out, as if it had been in the desk drawer.

  What the hell kind of unscientific story was this?

  “What does it say, Assistant manager?” Ella asked, breathlessly.

  “Oh… Um… It seems that you’ll be experiencing a good financial situation soon.”

  No doubt about it, the girl let out a huge sigh of relief. “Thank you, Assistant Manager!”

  “I’m only telling you what this card means.”

  “But it’s very reassuring, and sometimes that’s all that’s needed.” After apologising again, she made me a fresh cup of tea and took her leave.

  Alone in the office, I flicked through the cards, and as I did, I realised that every card seemed to be decorated with a scene from a fairy or folk tale. There were many I didn’t recognise – The Star showed a blonde girl carrying a lamb and gazing at the night sky, Five of Cups showed a woman weeping in a river while an arm reached from the water and pulled at her clothing.

  I found Princess Perizade, my character from the second scenario, on the Page of Swords, and someone who might have been Hang Tuah on the Nine of Swords. Even the chicken-foot house lurked in the background of the Nine of Swords. I felt an odd pang of longing, seeing that building.

  As I shuffled through the unwieldy deck, two cards fell out. I picked up the Ten of Swords first, but it took me a moment realise what I was seeing – ten harpoons sticking out of bloodied water, and a pair of hands, fingerless, reaching desperately for a boat where a faceless person sat with a knife in their hand. I tucked the card back into the pile quickly.

  The Six of Cups showed two children passing each other flowers between separate windows. A raven perched on the roof of their house, gazing at a needle sharp, snowy mountain in the distance. I pushed this one back into the deck too, unable to look at the raven.

  Finishing my (once again) lukewarm cup of tea, I left the office, walking down the steps as a figure began making their way up them. In this humid weather, I felt very sorry for this employee, in one of those horrendous fursuits that made one claustrophobic, but little kids loved them and girls always wanted to take their photos with them. This one was a panda. Whoever was wearing it seemed a little too short for it.

  “Mik Tsaam?” A familiar voice, slightly muffled, greeted me from inside.

  “Peach!”

  We hugged, relieved, and then said, simultaneously, “Have you seen Calvin?”

  “I guess not,” I responded with a sigh. “Aren’t you hot in that?”

  “Yes, but it’s really hard to take off. That’s okay, when I return it, I’ll get one of the others to help me get it off.” She kept looking around.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just worried about him. I hope he’s alright.” She hunched her shoulders, a small girl made smaller. If she kept going, she might disappear. “This is a weird scenario.”

  I had to agree. The bugs in the scenario load and the NPC windows aside, why weren’t Jesse, Wai Meng and Han Sung-hyuk also here? Further, we were in a modern setting. A setting I knew, no less.

  Peach was practically dancing with anxiety. “How does this place look exactly like Ocean Park? It’s almost like we’re not in a game anymore.”

  “You’ve been to Ocean Park, Peach?”

  There was a moment of silence, then, “Yes, of course. I’ve been to Hong Kong once or twice, and I came to Ocean Park then.”

  Fair enough. “What role are you playing?”

  “Um… Well…” The little panda shrugged. “I’m not… sure?”

  “Did you get a bunch of glitches too?”

  “Glitches? Yes, it was really weird.”

  Great. “Did it at least tell you what fairy tale we’re in?”

  She shook her head. “It was all buggy.”

  I grabbed my head and groaned. “I’ve got my tasks, but they don’t make any sense. I have to ‘retrieve the souls in the water’ and ‘help the merrow’. What the heck is a merrow?”

  “Souls?” Peach repeated, her head turning uneasily towards the bay. “In what water? Out there? In the exhibits?”

  “No idea. We should find Calvin. Three heads might be better than two.” Honestly, I didn’t believe it. No doubt his instructions were glitching too. It would be the blind leading the blind.

  She nodded. “Let’s split up. We might find him faster. We’ll meet at the Big Circle.”

  “Oh, you call it that too?” I laughed. The Big Circle was what our friend group called The Summit at Ocean Park, a high vantage point where you could look over the whole area and into the ocean, because –

  “W- Well it is a big circle,” Peach protested. Strangely, she sounded ready to cry.

  “I’m not teasing you, Peach,” I said quickly. “I’m not… I’m sorry. We’re all…”

  “No, that’s… I overreacted.” She waved her paws. “I’m just tired. We need to find Calvin, quickly.” She turned and ran down the steps in her ridiculous panda suit. I almost expected her to trip at any moment, but she was down the steps and around the corner, out of sight, in a few moments. She had to have high Dex.

  I headed the opposite direction from Peach, rounding the restaurant. It was already closed, the lights off, all staff gone home. I checked the cable car station, where a line of people were preparing to take the last cars back down.

  Hong Kong was a blaze of lights. Although it was warm, I wrapped my arms around myself and watched the procession of cable cars roll up and down, silhouetted by the fading daylight and the city below. Sea spray and smog softened everything to glowing haloes; I reached up and felt above my head, but only felt a warm tingling.

  The last car set off, and the station was shut. I walked away, past the big circle of the summit, until I reached the Tower. The Tower was over seventy metres in height, and people were still queued to enter the rotating platform that rose slowly to the top. I thought about joining them – the view from the top might let me look over the whole park more easily – but it was so crowded that I decided against it.

  Further along, I reached one of the many pools where seals would play. This exhibition had already closed, but I could hear splashing, far more than would be normal for a seal. It sounded more like a human struggling…

  “PEACH! CALVIN!” With nothing other than an ominous feeling, I screamed aloud as I activated Angelic Flight and launched myself towards the pool. On the false rocks at the pool’s centre, surrounded by very confused seals, lay Calvin, dripping wet and completely still.