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  Zan Xinyi had actually downloaded a lot of gacha games over the years, always drawn in by the flashy character art and the promise of an interesting world. However, she then usually uninstalled after only a few months.

  Why?

  Because she hates relying on luck to succeed, and she hates spending money. She’s simply incompatible with the genre.

  Rather than wasting your life tied to the wheel, just take the known.

  That’s also why she’s forcing Wei Shengyuan to move into her apartment, instead of either of his. It’s inefficient to live separately, and she’s not willing to live somewhere new.

  He should just appreciate how much effort it was for her to cart his precious water purifier and his art tablet and computer set up and his wheelchair up the stairs.

  Though he has kind of taken over the bathroom. Whatever. He has one tag now, and he can switch it between his water purifier when he’s filling the bath and his computer once he’s settled into the bath, completely set up with a tray over the water.

  With everything hashed out, they now have to do the actually annoying shit.

  Game development.

  Also, due to the aforementioned circumstances, they are holding this meeting in the bathroom, with him in the tub and her on a stool. Ridiculous. What type of boss lets their subordinate lie down while she has to crouch over her laptop?

  “I can’t believe this actually works,” Wei Shengyuan says again, eying the tag in disbelief. “Were you a witch this whole time? Magic is real?”

  “No it isn’t,” Zan Xinyi says. “For the first level, I have some thoughts. It’s going to be a straight road with trees on either side, so the player character can only go in a straight line. There’s going to be exactly one fight, and then the level will end.”

  “What type of game are we even making...”

  His tailfins splash a bit in the water as he frowns.

  “It’s a gacha game named Sunny Days Sparkle Power: Endless Hell.”

  The splashes in the water completely stop as he stares at her.

  “I see,” he finally says weakly. “Someone else must have helped name it.”

  He can believe that if he wants.

  “You’ll need to make the backgrounds, the characters, the enemies, and the UI elements,” Zan Xinyi says.

  “UI elements? I don’t even know what the battle system is supposed to look like. Characters? What characters? This is not an art direction. This isn’t even an outline.”

  “I know you’ve played gacha games before. There’s going to be one character who’s meant to be the player’s avatar, and then there will be gacha summonable characters who act as fighting units.”

  “There’s a reason indie developers don’t make this type of game,” Wei Shengyuan says numbly. “Xinyi, this would be a crazy thing to do if the world wasn’t collapsing.”

  “There’s one thing that makes it doable.”

  “What?”

  Giving him that one tag has really made him gullible. So really, this isn’t about the game. It’s a life lesson. Wow, she’s been doing him so many favors today.

  “It doesn’t have to be good.”

  The silence stretches out as he waits for her to say more.

  “The game,” he says finally. “That you want me to work on. For possibly years. It doesn’t have to be good.”

  Now he’s getting it.

  “Exactly. So--” Zan Xinyi cracks her wrists just thinking about how much programming work this is going to be. “Let’s start cutting corners. Never do something the hard way. Never do detail work. Do not draw complicated clothing. I’m thinking a very dim background where it’s hard to make out that you haven’t drawn that many trees.”

  “I really hate you.”

  Zan Xinyi pulls up a new page on her laptop and starts taking notes on everything she’s just said. If she forgets any of this later it’s going to be a nightmare. She tentatively titles the thing ‘design notes’, and then starts dividing everything up into sections. Level design. UI design. Battle design. Character design. Environment design. Enemy design.

  A lot of the people in her Computer Science program had wanted to be game developers. She’d thought they were idiots, getting an eminently desirable degree only to consign themselves to terrible pay and the worst work hours known to man.

  She presses down on the next key with unnecessary force.

  “For the enemies-- I’m thinking shadows.”

  “Why--” Wei Shengyuan pauses, suddenly enlightened. “Because you think they’ll be easier to draw. Zan Xinyi, you really don’t know anything. If the environment is a road lined with trees-- possibly even a road through a forest, lit dimly-- then shadows will be a nightmare to draw. Do you know what makes shadows clear? A light source.”

  He’s so picky.

  “Just make it day time,” she snaps, before instantly having the perfect justification occur to her. “The game’s called Sunny Days Sparkle Power, so having things relevant to the sun is reasonable. We’ll start the scene with a dim forest environment, and as the characters move forward there’ll be a dialogue pop up like ‘Oh no... the clouds have parted, and the sun can get through!’ Then, with a stronger light source, you create the battle setting.”

  Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

  “This game treats timing as important? Enemies emerging and leaving based on changing environmental cues, like day and night. Different weather patterns?”

  “Sure,” she says. This game is timing themed. Deadline themed, in fact.

  He’s frowning so much, jotting down ideas on his own tablet. Good. If she’d been the only one taking notes, she’d have killed him.

  No, too drastic. She’d have dropped one of her years old bath bombs on him so that the itchy powder would irritate his gills and drive him crazy. There. Much better.

  “Xinyi?”

  “Yes?”

  “Since it turns out the title is relevant, are...sparkles also relevant?”

  “Are you the game designer, or am I?”

  Underneath the battle UI note section, she jots down sparkle power.

  “Give me some rough sketches as early as possible,” she says, and leaves the bathroom to program on her way more comfortable couch.

  Three days later, there’s almost no more food in the fridge and the grey box she’s been using as a character prototype has successfully walked through a grey and flat landscape until it encounters its mortal enemies (two spheres).

  Getting her battle system working has been...

  The player avatar isn’t, itself, meant to be a combat character. This is a gacha game, so the cube’s only job is to stand back and let other more interesting characters fight in its place. So the two spheres are actually going up against two pyramids that the cube has called forth, which requires that she make the trigger for the cube to call them forth. Then she has to assign enemies and allies a health and a resource system, and then figure out how to portray their abilities on screen, and then--

  Anyway, it’s more of a relief than anything when she realizes that she needs to take a break from coding and go scavenge for food.

  Wei Shengyuan is a capable enough cook-- at least, better than her-- but her kitchen is not set up to aid a wheelchair bound man in any capacity, so he’s always making her chop stuff up. Most of the vegetables had come from his place, anyway. She keeps frozen meals and half eaten convenience store snacks in hers.

  “I’m heading out,” she gives a cursory knock on the bathroom door and then opens it before he can respond. “I’m going to shake down the other apartments for their food. Speaking of which, isn’t it strange that there aren’t more people in the building? I haven’t seen a single soul aside from you, and I had to haul you and your shit up the stairs. Over many trips.”

  She’s caught him in the midst of transferring from the tub to the wheelchair, and he gives her an agonized look as her interruption nearly makes him fall. The bottom of his shirt is also soaking wet, because he refuses to not wear one even when sitting in water.

  “Because of the emergency evacuation notice, Xinyi. We’re not in the safe zone that the military intends to defend.”

  “I never received one,” she says, before recalling her dead phone. “Oh, you didn’t leave?”

  He hisses at her, the most inhuman sound he’s made so far but composed entirely of human frustration.

  “How would I have left, Zan Xinyi? What mode of transportation would have guided me to safety?”

  She can’t answer him.

  “Since everyone’s left and won’t be back, their stuff is even more up for grabs,” she says instead. Well, unless they lost their mind to the evil eye, turned into a weird zombie, and are even now shambling through the trashed ruins of their own life.

  Zan Xinyi shoots a glance at the overflowing trash bin in the kitchen and sighs. Fuck, and she has to do something about that too. A lot of that was in there before staying in the apartment became a 24/7 existence.

  “Do you think we can just pitch it out the window?”

  He hasn’t followed her completely linear train of thought, and just glares at her, still stuck between the tub and his wheelchair. His arms are trembling from the strain. She’ll leave him to that, and she’ll leave the garbage for later.

  Ah, wait, she’ll also need to throw out all of the garbage on the entire floor, and maybe the floors directly above and below them, or the entire place is going to smell. Stealing cleaning supplies from other apartments just to actually clean them out is really not anything she’s desired to do with her life. Janitorial work is miserable, and she swore she’d never do that type of gig ever again.

  She puts on her mask, steals the tag from her computer, and sticks it onto the mask to make sure it’s filtering properly. Then she ties her apron with all of its useful shit back on, stocks some hairpins for picking locks, grabs her broom, and paces down the 4th floor hallway, pausing and listening in front of each door to hear if something’s moving inside.

  On the last door, she does hear something.

  No thumps, no shambling.

  Is that music?

  No. There’s words, but no tune.

  Zan Xinyi presses her ear against the door, trying to figure out the sound. After staying there for a full minute, the sound repeats again, exactly the same as before. Maybe a recording, or someone left their tv still on. But the power should be completely out...

  With a soft click of the lock, Zan Xinyi slips into the apartment, broom out.

  She surveys the place room by room, aware that any corner could be concealing another spider or worse. Nothing, nothing, nothing. There’s things missing here and there, likely taken during the evacuation of the tenant. The sound stopped when she walked in, so there’s nothing to triangulate its source.

  She glances at the family pictures on the wall. Single mother, three kids. The eldest son looks tall enough to be in highschool, the next girl has the dead eyes of a middle schooler, and the youngest is barely out of diapers. Wow...handling all of that alone...

  Another person who was already in hell, huh?

  She sweeps the apartment until all that’s left to check is the bathroom. She reaches for the door handle and shakes it. Locked. Time for the hairpins to do their part.

  “Emergency. I repeat. Emergency. This is your last warning. The military will no longer conduct retrieval missions into Zone One. In addition, you must pass a mutation index check and prove that your mutation rate remains below 50%.”

  It takes a moment to jiggle the lock open. She can smell blood even before she swings the door all the way open. Blood...and earth.

  Every apartment’s layout is essentially either identical to her own or mirrored. So, even the bathtub is in the same spot as where Wei Shengyuan is in hers.

  So it’s almost automatic that her eyes would go there first. There, cradled in plant roots and brightly colored flowers, is a desiccated corpse in the tatters of a suit dress. Clutched in her embrace is a battery powered radio.

  “You must pass a mutation index check to enter our fortifications,” the radio continues, relentlessly finishing its message. “There is currently no known method to reduce mutation level. If you act with aggression, we will assume that the Grey Rot, colloquially referred to as the evil eye, has set in, and the soldiers will shoot. This is your last warning.”

  Zan Xinyi carefully pulls the radio out of the arms of the dead woman, and accidentally dislodges something else.

  A piece of paper drifts to the floor.

  If my children are nearby, don’t let them read this.

  The flowers have been beneath my skin for sometime, and they are warm, and their roots do not cause me any pain. I no longer drink, and recently I even earned a bonus at work.

  Recently, I fell and struggled to get back up.

  So, I sent the children to live with their grandparents for a few weeks. Thank goodness I did.

  Mom, I’m sorry. I lied to you. I will not be coming to pick them up on Tuesday.