I shook him, relieved to hear his reply in coughs and groans. With great difficulty, I hauled him from the enclosure to the pavement. “Does anything hurt?”

  “L… Lungs…”

  I cast Heal on him, and he coughed experimentally.

  “Thanks.”

  “What happened?”

  “I heard… I thought I heard… you calling me.”

  “Me?”

  “In the water. I dived in to help…” Suddenly, it felt as though we were too close to each other. I rudely scrambled backwards.

  “Uh… I…”

  Calvin covered his face with his hands. “What the fuck do we do, Mik Tsaam?”

  He wasn’t talking about the scenario, that much I knew. But the answer…

  “I don’t know.”

  “I… I just want us to be friends again. But how…” He was crying.

  Damn it, I was crying too. “Can we be friends again? This… Calvin it’s a game, but these things happened. I don’t know what’s happening in the real world, but we’re here right now, and it’s been years. We’ve been in here for fucking years…”

  I clutched my face, as if hoping I could rip my body from my soul and be free from it all. “We had a baby.”

  “NO, WE DIDN’T!” Calvin roared, and I flinched, never having heard him raise his voice once in all the time I knew him. “This isn’t real, Maria.”

  “You didn’t have to go through giving birth to him,” I snapped.

  “‘Him’?”

  “He was real, Calvin,” I whimpered. “I didn’t want him, but he was real and then I did… Even if this is just a game… it still happened.”

  His dark eyes searched the park for an answer, a big man rendered helpless. “I can’t… I don’t…”

  “I don’t know what to do either,” I said, dropping my hands. They hung limp, every part of me aching to collapse to the floor in a boneless pile. “And Peach…”

  “It’s not… Doesn’t she remind you of Tommy?”

  I was about to ask him whether he should donate his eyes to someone who needed them more when I thought again.

  There were some things. While it was true that Peach was a lively, vibrant girl, and Tommy was guarded and subdued, they both had a sweetness to them, a gentle affection that I liked. At this, I felt a little easier – I’d been anxious that I had been projecting my love for Tommy onto someone else out of sheer desperation, but I wasn’t the only one who thought they were similar. I hadn’t imagined it.

  “You’re right,” I said.

  “What would Tommy do, then?”

  “In this situation…?”

  Tommy would smile quietly and say everything was okay, that his friendship wasn’t so cheap that something like this would break us apart.

  Even if he didn’t truly mean it.

  “You know he’d hide how he was feeling, Calvin,” I replied at last. “We… We should go and find Peach. Talk to her as well. I saw her earlier and she was looking for you.”

  Calvin hauled himself up, and I realised that he had lost some of his bulk, in the time we had been in the game. He was still a big man, but he seemed sharper, the softness carved off him.

  Keeping our distance from each other, we set off to the Summit. The lights of Hong Kong still winked at us across the bay, but everything felt so wrong. I was in a simulacra of my home, next to a friend who was now, against both our wills, more than a friend, and perhaps that meant that he was no longer a friend, that it would never be possible again.

  We waited in awkward, crouching silence until Calvin suddenly said, “You know I was just brought up by my mother, right?”

  “Right.”

  “My father abandoned her when she was pregnant.”

  What could I even say? The reflected lights danced on the water before us.

  “I’m just like my father.”

  “Calvin, no –”

  “I should have been helping you after what happened. But what did I do? I just ran away, like my shitty bastard of a…” He dropped his head to the railing with solid thud that would have hurt, in real life. “I left you alone.”

  “I wanted to be left alone.”

  “That’s because you didn’t know what to do. You were scared, weren’t you?”

  “I…” A gout of emotion gushed out of me like I was vomiting. I couldn’t stuff the sound back inside, retching tears and fear into the gathering dusk. “Y… You were scared too,” I forced out, unable to tell if my words were coherent.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

  “That’s… that’s no excuse.” I was suddenly enveloped in darkness. Calvin was hugging me, awkwardly, like he had never hugged someone in his life, and I realised that maybe that was true, but I just needed someone to hold me for a moment, so I pressed my face to his chest and howled.

  “Mik Tsaam… Mik Tsaam, I’m sorry... I still don’t know what… I’m sorry…”

  *

  Peach never joined us.

  We waited until past the closing time, almost receiving a scolding from a park cleaner until I was able to convince him I was a staff member. We hurried back to the office, where I checked the staff files for my character’s address, and then we stood outside the park and waited a little longer until it became clear that Peach would not be coming.

  “Maybe she saw us,” I said, guilt surging to my throat. “She saw us and… She likes you. I’m sure of it.”

  “I… I don’t know…”

  “I know you have bad self-esteem, Calvin, but I have eyes. That’s why…” I hailed a taxi and we climbed in. “When it happened… What do we do? This is such a mess.”

  The taxi dropped us off on the outskirts of Fo Tan half an hour later, and I forked out an exorbitant amount of money before we entered a dated but clean flat on the lowest floor. It was larger than my real apartment, and apparently I was living here alone. I found myself wondering how much time had passed in the real world, and the remembrance that I needed to find a new flatmate to cover the terrifying rent seemed disorientingly at odds with the situation I had just been in.

  Whoever had designed the place had a penchant for teal. The bathroom was awash with it – bathtub, toilet and sink alike, and the tiles in the kitchen were all patterned with the same colour.

  And yet…

  “What the fuck?” I whispered, frozen in the doorway.

  On the windowsill of the kitchen was a line of Miffy figurines.

  “What is it?”

  “Those… They’re my figurines!” As if approaching a spider, I crept towards the line of little plastic bunnies.

  Calvin followed uneasily. “Are you sure they’re yours? They could be –”

  I pointed the base of one of them, an old and scuffed little figure in an orange dress, some of the pain flaking from age. My name was shakily written in pen on the bottom. “I took this to school when I was six years old. Mother told me to write my name on it so I wouldn’t lose it.”

  “Mik Tsaam…” He stepped back. “Why did I expect it to say Maria?”

  “It should, given that’s my character name here, but… It doesn’t change the fact that this is my Miffy toy. And…”

  I began to open drawers and cupboards. Things were in different places, but they were my things. My chipped plastic chopsticks, many appropriated from various cha chaan teng throughout the region. My own clothes, piled haphazardly into a cheap pine wardrobe. The bedclothes with the yellow daisy pattern.

  I sat on the tiled floor, shrinking so that I wouldn’t touch anything. “Calvin… This is supposed to be a game. Why is all my stuff here?”

  He scratched his head. “Can you even say we’re in a game now, Mik Tsaam?”

  “This is like… what’s those webcomics you and Tommy and Rohan were always reading?”

  “The isekai webcomics? Where someone transmigrates into a book or something? That’s… In those stories, people usually die and reincarnate into someone else. This… doesn’t seem like that. Especially this scenario. The genre of the game…”

  “Right… it’s historical fantasy, isn’t it? All the other scenarios were like that…”

  “The only thing I can think,” he said slowly, “is that we’re in a simulation of some kind, that’s relying on our own memories to populate the details. Have you noticed anything before?”

  A faint memory floated to the surface. “Poppy… In that scenario… the stepmother looked like her mother. Acted like her too. I thought it was just a coincidence…” I stared at my hands. “Oh god, if you’re right, then the stepmother didn’t just seem like Poppy’s mother, she essentially was. And I just… What did I even say to Poppy at that time? I can’t even remember anymore. It’s been so long…” I slapped my cheeks and pretended the tears that leaked from my eyes was merely from the sting of the slap. “Even so, we have to focus on one thing at a time. Calvin, what were your tasks?”

  “Task one is to find the woman who saved me, and task two is to free the souls.”

  I stared at him through my fingers. “Would it kill the game to be more specific?”

  “I guess I already found the woman who saved me?”

  “Huh…? Me? No, I didn’t save you. You were already on the rocks with the seals when I arrived.”

  This was obviously news to him. He blinked. “What… Then… Did you see anyone else?”

  “Nope.”

  He groaned.

  “One of the tasks I got was to do with souls too. ‘Retrieve the souls from the water.’”

  “Maybe we’re supposed to work together then.”

  “Wouldn’t we have the same task? Mine says ‘retrieve’, yours says ‘free’.”

  For a lack of anything better to do, I got up and began to boil water for tea. The first cupboard I opened contained all of my cups; suppressing a shiver, I lifted out my favourite, a chipped round mug with a cow on it, and took out another with a faded but smiling blue and yellow cartoon fish for Calvin. As I found teabags, my eyes found themselves being drawn back to the fish.

  “Hey, Calvin… Doesn’t this scenario seem kind of like The Little Mermaid?”

  “I guess… Does that make you the sea witch? You should have pretended you were to one who saved me.”

  “The task screen said I’m a witch. And my character seems to have done tarot card readings for colleagues. What I don’t understand… Did you have any glitches in your scenario loading screen?”

  “The scenario name was difficult to read.”

  “That’s right. I thought I saw something else in there… ‘Soul Cages’. Given all this talk about souls in our tasks, I guess that’s relevant, but how? What does it mean? And there was a weird string of numbers and letters… What’s a merrow?”

  “A what?”

  “That’s just it. My second task is to ‘Help the merrow’.”

  “Ask your dictionary?”

  “It’s an encyclopaedia. And I already used it today to try and get through a tarot reading.”

  I poured boiling water over the Yellow Label teabags, added some milk, and handed a mug to Calvin. “I hope Peach is alright.”

  “She… probably isn’t.”

  “What are we going to do? Peach likes you. You and I… You know, I think this is the most we’ve ever talked to each other in our lives. We’ve known each other a long time, but…”

  Calvin turned the mug n his hands. “I don’t… like to talk much. Just hanging out is enough.”

  “I didn’t know about your dad. That sucks.”

  “What about you? I never met your dad either.”

  “Oh, my parents divorced before I started school. And I think it was my mother who wanted it the most. I don’t remember my dad much. I saw him a few times… He seemed like a very mild-mannered sort of person.”

  “Do you know why they divorced?”

  “Apparently my father was useless,” I said, trying to sound nonchalant, but burning my tongue on the tea. “Ow… So I had to work hard otherwise…”

  “If your mother thought you were useless, she’d throw you away too, huh?”

  “Something like that. Poppy and I were similar in that respect.” I set down my mug. “Have you felt like… Like somehow you realise you never really knew anyone? When I think about what happened with Poppy and Rohan… even… with you…”

  “Yeah.”

  “The only one who seems the same is Lee Wai Meng. That guy never changes.”

  “He’s a lunatic through and through.”

  We both laughed.

  “I wonder where they all ended up. Wai Meng. And Jesse. And that other guy.”

  “Han Sung-hyuk? Do you know him well?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “He seemed to be paying a lot of attention to you.”

  “Are you crazy? That guy has said like three words to me in total.”

  “Jesse also seems to be paying a lot of attention to you.”

  “Hey, what happened to the guy who was so inobservant that he hadn’t noticed Peach practically throwing herself at him?”

  “She’s not… That’s…” Calvin had turned bright red and hid his face in his mug.

  “Do you like her?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “See, it’s that attitude that –”

  “I don’t… I don’t know if I’m allowed to.”

  I smiled and I wanted to cry again. “We’ll find her tomorrow and talk to her. We’ll sort this all out.”

  “I hope so. I really hope so, Maria.”