Warm Blood

She rolled over to look at Eve, who was sleeping peacefully, the headband from her maid pyjamas having fallen behind her head. Penny then very carefully pushed herself up with her elbows, casting a glance over at her mother, who was sleeping with paperwork scattered across her blanket.

Penny knew she had two choices: stay in bed and stare at her phone until Eve or her mother woke up, or get out of bed and quietly watch TV while eating some bread for breakfast.

After some consideration, which included checking their social media accounts for engagement (they were getting way more Likes on their Japan trip pics and vids than anything else), Penny peeled the covers away from her and stepped down to the floor. She stealthily headed to the separate toilet room, where the very beginning of a light grey morning sky was visible through the frosted glass.

She then washed her hands and face in the bathroom, which had a large window overlooking Akihabara. She dried herself and then stared out the window, looking down at the street below. It wasn’t as busy as usual, but there was still some activity, including what must’ve been café maids heading home after working the night shift.

Penny grabbed some bread from the top of the minifridge in the living room. She pulled out some kind of chocolatey butter paste from the fridge and spread it over the bread, which she then ate while watching TV.

Children’s programming was mainly all that aired this early in the morning. Penny settled on a variety show featuring a colourful mascot that looked like a children’s art project itself, with simple shapes coloured in with primary colours stuck to its body. The mascot was teaching a group of kindergarteners a dance that made an animated sun appear.

Penny turned her head to glance at the glass door of the balcony, part of her hoping the ritual would make the sun appear in real life as well. Unsurprisingly, the sun wasn’t quite out, but the sky was just a little bit lighter.

Penny was still groggy, but didn’t want to climb back into bed. If she went out on her own, she wouldn’t get lost if she stuck to their block, right? She could just get a small can of coffee from a vending machine, and look around at her own pace, stopping to admire every well-designed flyer or absurd gachapon machine that caught her eye.

Penny finished her bread, turned off the TV and stood up.

“I’m gonna do it,” she said quietly to herself.

She got dressed in the bathroom, put on a black zippered sweater with Splatoon 3 graffiti designs on the back, and wrote a note for Eve and her mother in case they wondered where she had disappeared to. With one last glance back at the living room, Penny slipped on her sneakers and slipped out the door.

Penny felt alienated the moment she reached the hotel lobby and the security guard greeted her in Japanese. She accidentally responded with “good afternoon” in mumbled Japanese and then stumbled out of the building in embarrassment, her face red.

Outside she glanced around, and realised more than ever that she couldn’t read anything that wasn’t in English, and wouldn’t understand anything anyone said to her in Japanese. Eve had been her safety net, and Penny swore she would never take Eve’s confidence for granted ever again.

Flyer maids were beginning to line the street, and some of them called out to Penny, though Penny just kind of said “hi” in English in response as she passed by.

Caffeine would make her less inhibited, so she stopped at the next vending machine she saw, one covered in a design of a small army of Pikachus. She picked out a can of BOSS Café au lait, put in the appropriate number of yen, and the can thunked down the dispenser. Penny cracked open the can right away, a splash of brown liquid landing on her fingers.

The heat from the can felt nice in her hands on what was yet another cool grey morning. She took a few sips that quickly turned into glugs, this can much sweeter and milkier than the others, making it much easier to guzzle.

She could feel the rush of energy coursing through her veins. It was enough for her to pull out her phone and look over the list of phrases that she had screenshotted on it.

Next time, when someone spoke to her, she’d try to say the correct phrase back.

Penny finished the can by the vending machine since it had a small recycling bin beside it, and she didn’t want to risk having to carry the empty can with her until she returned to the hotel room. She tossed the can into the recycling bin and then discreetly licked off the liquid that had been drying on her fingers.

With very little that she felt she could do on her own, Penny decided to go through with the full walk around the block, expecting at least her mother to be awake and watching TV by the time she circled back to the hotel.

She took a flyer from a maid with tired eyes, and thanked her in Japanese. While turning left at the corner of the block, Penny glanced down at the flyer, which had a chibi-style drawing of a faceless maid dressed in black. Her first thought was that it was a cursed object, made even worse by the fact that there weren’t any garbage bins around. All she could do was fold it until it formed a small square that she stuffed into her pocket.

It was only after putting the flyer into her pocket that she noticed its ink had turned her fingers black.

That’s what I get for going out on my own, she thought, but then managed to shake the thought away. She could believe in things she had seen directly in front of her, such as aliens and faceless maids, but there wasn’t any proof that curses actually existed.

The sound of very pleasant acoustic guitar playing perked her ears. It sounded like a Final Fantasy song being played in a bossa nova style. She noticed a small crowd formed around the performer up ahead, though she couldn’t quite make them out.

Penny decided she would watch the performer play for a bit, as it was something she could do without having to interact with others. She reached the crowd just as the song came to an end, a smattering of applause and the jingling of yen marking it as a mighty fine performance of a song that held a special place in the hearts of otaku (at this point Penny realised it had been Melodies of Life from Final Fantasy IX).

The performer thanked the crowd, smiling a wide, confident smile. He paused for a moment, as if trying to decide which song he should play next. That was when he took notice of Penny, and gave her a small wink.

Penny could tell he wasn’t fully Japanese. Since he was playing bossa nova, did that mean he was also Brazilian?

“Any requests?”

It took Penny four full seconds to register that he had not only asked her, but that he had asked the question in English.

“Oh!” Penny said. Her mind then tried to quickly think of a song – something that would suit the Akiba crowd. “Maybe ‘Concerning Hobbits’? You know, the Shire theme from Lord of the Rings?”

Part of her actually wanted to hear it. The Fellowship of the Ring had been one of her favourite movies as a little kid, and that piece of music was one of the main reasons for it.

The performer nodded, still with a smile that kept people wanting to stay near him. He performed a bossa nova rendition of Concerning Hobbits that was one of the most joyous things Penny had ever heard – and it seemed to her that much of it was improvised.

The song ended, the performer received more applause and yen, and Penny’s heart felt a tiny bit larger, the cursed flyer already forgotten in her pocket.

The performer thanked the crowd and put his guitar back into its case. The crowd lingered just a little bit too long before finally realising he was done and dispersed. Penny was about to leave with them but the performer stopped her with a smile.

“Are you here on vacation?” he asked, clasping the guitar case shut and slinging it onto his back.

“Yeah,” Penny said. She wanted to ask him the same, but was worried about offending him.

“Same. Sort of,” the performer said, now standing casually as he talked to her. “My dad’s family is from here. We’re here for my grandfather’s funeral.”

“I’m so sorry to hear that.”

“Too much information, right?” the performer said with a playful smile. “My name’s ****. I’m from Brasilia.”

“I’m Penny. I came here from Canada.”

“Really? Hey, that’s a coincidence! I’ve been thinking of going to university in Canada. Maybe in Toronto, but I’m not sure yet.”

Penny nodded. She liked talking to the performer, but wasn’t sure what she could say that wasn’t related to videogames and anime.

“I like to play my guitar, but the place where we’re staying has strict rules about ‘noise’. I thought, why not come out here and practice? And maybe make a little money as well.

“Do you like this stuff?” he then asked, nodding in the direction of an anime figure store, its screens running ads for Evangelion toys.

“K-kinda,” Penny admitted. She wasn’t embarrassed about her hobbies, but she was worried this guy would be judgmental of them.

“I don’t know much about it,” he said. “Back home I just study, stuff like architecture and the supernatural. With that, school, and guitar, I don’t have much time for anything else.

“Not even girls,” he said, winking at her.

“That sucks,” Penny said. Why wasn’t she capable of saying anything interesting?

Well, he was just a stranger after all, albeit a very talkative one.

“You were playing that Final Fantasy song,” Penny pointed out, though she tried not to say it accusatorily. “And you know ‘Concerning Hobbits’.”

“One of my gifts is being able to play any song, even if I haven’t heard it before,” the performer said. He said it with another playful smile, but at the same time it sounded like he meant his words.

“To be honest, I took the train to Akihabara because I heard there were ghosts in the maid cafés. But the maid cafés are so expensive! I figured I’d make some money by busking, but it’s still not enough.”

“You like ghosts?” Penny asked, surprised.

The performer appeared equally surprised by her question.

“‘Like’ them?” he said, as if asking himself. “I thought I just found them interesting, but maybe . . . Maybe I do.

“How about you?”

Penny looked across the street at the anime figure store, and then looked down the street at the flyer maids, and then up at the ads for videogames, anime and manga.

“I like videogames and anime,” she said.

The maid who seated the trio made the shape of a chicken drumstick with her hands instead of a heart, encouraging them to imitate her while saying “drum~stick” in English in a saccharine, singsong tone. Leslie asked the maid if she could do it again while he recorded her, but the maid pointed at the café’s No Photography sign. Leslie explained who he was, showing the maid his TikTok, and the maid smiled and said she would ask the manager.

Eve managed to convince Penny to only order tea, though that tea was expensive matcha tea with matcha whipped cream on top. Eve ordered the same, while Leslie ordered a chicken basket, which he fully intended to eat on his own.

The maid left with their orders after giving them a big, dimpled smile, a short bow, and a playful bounce as she turned around. Once she was gone, Leslie took a 360-degree video of the café without permission, and his cocky smile made it clear it was not the first time he had ignored a café’s rules to do whatever he wanted.

“Shouldn’t we wait for the maid to come back with permission?” Penny asked, putting just enough edge in her voice to make it clear she thought what Leslie was doing was wrong.

Eve was normally one for rules as well, but even more than that she was one for making Girls Mode a success, so she poked Penny’s leg under the table.

“If he gets caught, he gets caught!” Eve said to Penny with a smile.

“She’ll come back with the manager, who’ll thank me for coming and give us special treatment,” Leslie said confidently, double-checking the video he just took before putting his phone away.

“You know, I’ve been giving our collab a lot of thought,” Eve said as if days had gone by, even though they had only just met. “Earlier we were checking out a firehouse, and then the chief came out and dressed us up as firefighters. Soooo, what if we ask the manager if we can dress up as maids? Then we can serve you something, like a piece of chicken, and act maid-like.

“I think that would be super-cute. I already know Penny would look amazing. Then you could post the video on TikTok and tag us on it and tell people about Girls Mode in the description.”

Leslie thought about it for a moment, squinting his eyes slightly.

“Hmm, not bad,” he said. “‘A chance encounter with two foreign maids.’ Wow”

“I like the ‘wow’!” Eve said excitedly.

Leslie stroked his chin while continuing to squint, trying to think up ways he could improve it.

“Oh, the maids are here,” Eve noted with an expectant smile.

“‘Maids’?” Leslie asked, confused by the “s”.

The three of them watched as eight maids, including the one who had left, surrounded their table, with very little space between them. Each of the maids had a wide smile frozen on her face.

The maids stared at the middle of the table. Penny and Eve followed their gazes, though all that was set on the table were tiny dessert menus held up in plastic stands. The maids then suddenly shifted their gazes to Leslie, and right when Penny and Eve were about to follow their eyes again, the lights flickered out, putting the room in total darkness.

In the brief moment when the lights had flickered, it looked to Penny like some of the maids had disappeared.

“Spooky,” Eve said, unsure of whether this was part of the intended experience.

The lights turned back on, and a single maid was now standing directly behind Leslie, her hands resting on his shoulders. Leslie’s eyes were wide with fright, the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end.

There was no one else in the café other than Penny, Eve, Leslie, and the maid touching his shoulders. Leslie couldn’t see it himself since he was facing away from her, but Penny and Eve were staring at the empty space where the maid’s face should’ve been. Their frozen, fearful expressions did little to put Leslie at ease.

The maid lowered her head to Leslie’s right ear, her hair hanging down and brushing against him.

“I asked the manager,” the maid told him.

“Y-yeah?” Leslie responded, wishing he was anywhere but a maid café for the first time in his life.

“He said ‘No Photography’,” the maid said calmly.

“That’s okay,” Leslie said, his voice trembling. “We can just enjoy the experience.”

“But you already took a video, Master,” the maid said.

“No, I didn’t,” Leslie lied quickly.

“Yes, you did,” the maid responded, putting her empty face closer to his ear.

“No way,” Leslie lied again.

“Yes, and now you must live there, inside the video,” the maid told him. “But don’t worry, Master – we’ll take very good care of you.”

Leslie’s phone then turned on by itself, its glowing screen visible through the fabric of his pocket. The maid reached into his pocket and pulled it out. Leslie felt powerless to stop her – for some reason, he couldn’t even bring himself to try – and simply watched as the maid set it on the table in front of him, the video he took playing in a loop.

“Ready, Master?” the maid asked him.

“No,” Leslie responded. He barely comprehended what it was he was supposed to be ready for.

Three openings formed on the maid’s face, two for “eyes” and one long one for a “mouth”. Inside each opening was a black void. They opened in such a way that it looked like she was smiling.

The lights flickered out, and just as quickly flickered back on.

Maaya was standing where the faceless maid had been, and looking down at that maid’s body, lying unconscious on the floor. The maid’s face had returned – not the fake face comprised of openings, but the pretty face that had seated them at their table.

“Maaya!” Eve exclaimed in surprise.

She then stood from her seat while smiling happily, her knuckles pressing against the table.

“You totally saved us!”

Penny remained seated as she stared at Maaya with her own surprise, her eyes then falling to the empty chair where Leslie had been sitting. The video was still playing on his phone, and from it was the tinny sound of several maids singing Happy Birthday in harmony.

Penny and Eve stared at the phone in confusion, while Maaya looked at it with a serious expression.

In the recording, which seemed to be playing from an alternate dimension, Leslie was sitting in the seat he had disappeared from. 7 of the 8 maids were singing and clapping as he looked at the cake they had set on the table in front of him. Leslie appeared to be crying, and was repeatedly trying to blow out the candles, to no avail.

Maaya put the phone into rest mode, leaving it on the table.

“Someone had to be this month’s sacrifice,” Maaya said to Eve, tears forming in her eyes. “I’m glad it wasn’t you.”

“Can’t you . . . do anything for him?” Eve asked.

“We did,” Maaya said. “As long as this video exists, he’ll always be happy. After his tears dry, anyway.”

“What if you delete it?” Penny asked.

Maaya gave Penny a slight smile.

“We shouldn’t do that,” she said.

Eve felt bad for Leslie, especially since he was famous. It also started to dawn on her that this might be the last time they saw Maaya – unless, of course, Eve decided that she still wanted to be a maid.

* * *

Penny, Eve and Maaya found themselves back on the street outside the café, with no activity around the police station across from them. Penny wondered how long it would take Leslie’s family to file a missing person report. She considered looking up his family members through his TikTok followers, and letting them know what happened – but then what would happen to her?

It was very lightly raining, and Maaya was very lightly smiling. Penny couldn’t tell if she was a good or bad maid, and Maaya looked at her as if she knew what Penny was thinking, and didn’t have an answer for her.

Maaya was holding a small white box containing two cupcakes she had taken from the café before they left. The cupcakes had pastel blue frosting topped with pastel pink strawberry-shaped soft candies.

Maaya handed the box to Eve with an apologetic smile. Eve had tears forming in her eyes that she managed to blink away. This wasn’t how she had wanted to say goodbye.

“Thank you for everything,” Eve said.

“Thank you for showing me Akiba from an outsider’s perspective,” Maaya said. “It reminded me how special this place is.”

“I think you’re very special, too,” Eve said, smiling.

Eve then gave Maaya a quick hug, the container still held in her hand. She was looking forward to eating her cupcake while crying in the hotel room.

“Let’s keep in touch,” Eve said. “You can see us in Canada on our YouTube channel, and we’ll see you here on your Instagram.”

If she still exists, Penny thought.

“I’m glad we got to see Akihabara beyond the surface,” Penny said. “Thank you very much.”

Penny kept her farewell simple and polite, as part of her kind of just wanted to get out of there.

Maaya waved, smiled, and then walked off, heading in the direction of a subway entrance. She descended the steps, and two strangers came up. It felt somewhat anticlimactic, but everything has to end at some point.

Penny and Eve looked at each other, Penny wiping the tears from Eve’s eyes.

“You okay?” Penny asked.

“It’s . . . the greatest time I’ve ever had in my life,” Eve said, truthfully. “Want to check out a couple more stores on the way to the hotel room?

“We can get some snacks.”

* * *

“A couple more stores” turned into a single visit to the Akiba branch of Don Quijote, a massive, multilevel discount store that had a prominent location in each district of Tokyo. The exterior was big and bright with flashing signs and multiple billboards, its mascot a blue penguin wearing a red Santa hat that greeted customers from above the explosive Don Quijote logo.

The store’s theme song played on a short loop, a catchy, stuttering jingle that was amusing for a few minutes but scraped at the inside of one’s skull over a prolonged period.

Inside was even flashier and louder, with tons of products on display from the legendary Matcha Green Tea Kit Kats to anime-themed pyjamas, including cozy-looking Eva units.

Eve took a basket, though they didn’t expect to buy much. They did toss in a pack of the Matcha Green Tea Kit Kats, believing Penny’s mother might like to try them as well.

They climbed to the second floor, the steps of the staircase sparkling with glitter, mirrors running up the wall beside them. Combined with the bright lights of the building’s interior, it made the climb nearly blinding.

The second floor was entirely made up of sweets and snacks. They decided they wouldn’t add more snacks to their basket, but still wanted to look, to appreciate the colourful designs of the packages and inventive flavours, especially the seafood-flavoured snacks. The shrimp chips reminded them of Ennio, and Penny briefly and quietly prayed for his soul.

The looping theme song finally proved to be too much for Penny, so she put in her earbuds and played Lovely Sewer by Yves Tumor on her phone. Yves Tumor was a musician who Cale had recommended, both for the stylishness of the music and the fashion sense of the artist.

Eve noticed Penny put her earbuds in, so, for the rest of their exploration of the mazelike building, she simply smiled at her as a form of communication. With no sound entering her ears except for the music, Penny could tell more than ever that Eve’s smile, though still sincere, had a wistfulness to it.

Penny wanted to reach out to touch her, so that she would feel better, but wasn’t sure how weird the gesture would come across without any words to contextualise it.

Eve took Penny’s hand and placed it on a ramen snack with a mascot character wearing a silly hat. Penny wasn’t sure why she did that, so she took her hand away. Still, she couldn’t help but laugh a little.

Penny laughing was rare, but not as rare as when they had first met a year ago. Back then, she might’ve had something that could be called depression.

Eve’s eyes were filled with light. Penny realised she had put the Yves Tumor song on loop by accident.

Other customers carefully reached past them to grab the ramen snacks.

And the girl said, I like you with all of my heart.

And the girl said, I’m glad you’re my friend.

And the girl said, I’m glad we made it here.

And the girl said, I am, too.

On the top floor they found a selection of novelty items on sale. Little of it was of particular interest, though part of that could’ve been the two of them feeling worn out after experiencing so much in a single day.

Penny and Eve briefly separated, to cover more ground and finish off the building, Penny only rejoining Eve after hearing her gasp through her earbuds.

* * *

Back at the hotel room, Penny’s mother nibbled on a Matcha Green Tea Kit Kat half while doing what looked like accounting, the TV set to a news channel. Penny’s mother was sitting in the coziest chair, which she rarely got up from, Penny sitting on the couch and leaving room for Eve.

Eve was in the other room changing into the pyjamas she had purchased at the Don Quijote.

Although Penny couldn’t understand what the newscasters were saying, nor read any of the text onscreen, she could tell what was happening in the footage: a black, tar-like substance had been found in Akihabara, located under the buildings that had maid cafés.

It was the same as the documentary she had watched on Netflix back in Canada, about a black tar forming underneath her city. At the time she wasn’t sure if it was a mockumentary or factual, and simply watched it as entertainment.

Before she could give it too much thought, Eve entered the living room, dressed in café maid-themed pyjamas.

Eve smiled at Penny and sat down. She then handed Penny her phone.

“Take a picture,” she said.

Penny obliged, snapping multiple pics, including a couple of Eve making peace signs. Eve then took her pastel blue cupcake out of the white box. Penny recorded a video of Eve peeling the wrapper off the bottom of the cupcake and biting into the frosting while watching the TV.

Penny smiled while recording the video, still not quite believing she had gotten her friend so fully immersed into the world of otaku culture.

“What do you think of the cupcake?” Penny asked, keeping the video rolling.

“I love it,” Eve said as tears formed in her eyes.

“Where’s Maaya?” Eve wondered. Penny gave Eve a concerned look that told her she didn’t know.

Are you in the creepy vending machine alley? Eve texted Maaya.

Her phone vibrated in response almost immediately, and she eagerly checked the screen, only to be deflated by a Failed Delivery message.

The girls looked around, unable to get their bearings.

“What is this place?” Penny asked.

They checked the nearest vending machine, which, unlike all the other machines they had come across on their trip, sold beetles. Penny and Eve could not tell if the beetles in the display lineup were real or fake, though they certainly looked impressive, with strong-looking horns and pincers.

The vending machine beside that was even more confusing, with cans on display that were wrapped in white paper and had kanji written on them in tiny characters, so that it seemed entire paragraphs, or perhaps even short stories, had been scrawled on them. Eve tried using the translation app on one of the display cans, but the English text it spat out was largely gibberish, except for a message from a person wondering if they would ever be forgiven by their mother.

The next vending machine was dark and busted, its broken display window devoid of items.

The girls heard a nearby metallic scraping, and turned their heads to another wall of vending machines, the sound seeming to come from behind them. Penny’s overactive imagination placed the sound as a serial killer dragging a metal bat against the pavement, the killer clearly on their way to their next victim. She spared Eve that thought, though Eve’s imagination wasn’t much more pleasant.

Eve checked the GPS on her phone.

“We’re in Akiba,” she said. “The GPS doesn’t list this vending machine area, though. It just shows us as being on the first floor of a small apartment complex.”

“I’ll try to get us out,” Penny said with some determination. “Follow me.”

“Okay,” Eve said, smiling as she put her phone away.

There was only enough space between the machines for one person to move at a time. Penny believed she could make use of her Shin Megami Tensei experience, the games often forcing the player to navigate labyrinthine and trap-infested dungeons.

The traps in the alley were plentiful, including poison panels that the girls narrowly avoided stepping on. The lack of random encounters did little to put Penny at ease – as they were the only people in the maze, it made it feel that much creepier.

Eve cut her legs on a piece of metal jutting out of one of the vending machines, though thankfully she had already received a tetanus shot from the last time she had accidentally cut herself on a random piece of metal. She put some saliva on her finger and smeared it across the cut, then gave Penny a thumbs-up while winking.

“You don’t have a Band-Aid or anything?” Penny asked, gesturing to the star bag Eve almost always carried with her.

“I heal really fast,” Eve said proudly.

Penny nodded, though she was still somewhat concerned. Then she turned her head to face forward again, and found herself staring at an oddly-shaped silhouette standing a few feet ahead of her, close to the exit of the maze.

Eve’s hands landed on both of Penny’s shoulders, making her jump.

“Just let him mug us!” Eve pleaded. “I don’t want to go back in the weird maze.”

It took a hell of a lot for something to unsettle Eve, so if she didn’t want to go back in the vending machine maze, Penny knew she would have to suck it up and go forward.

“Here goes,” Penny said, closing her eyes and taking a few forceful steps, all while making a sound like a cat stuck on a curtain.

“Are you here for the vending machine graveyard, too?” she heard a youthful male voice ask them in English. The voice sounded pleasant enough, so Penny risked opening her eyes, and saw before them a Taiwanese-American boy of around 16 or so.

The boy was wearing a bright yellow rain jacket that was translucent enough for his simple, unassuming clothing to be visible underneath, the type of clothes Penny used to see in church. He had his hood up – that, along with the stiff material of his rain jacket, was what had given his silhouette its odd shape. The jacket also had a high collar in front that covered his mouth.

“‘Vending machine graveyard’?” Penny parroted back, her eyes widening. “That is where we are! We ended up here by accident.”

“I didn’t see you go in,” the boy said curiously.

“That’s why it was an accident,” Penny said, somewhat losing patience with the boy’s overly familiar questioning.

“I’ve been waiting here an hour,” the boy explained, “to see what comes out.”

Penny and Eve looked at each other, as if to telepathically decide whether they should ignore the boy or not, and then Penny tried to lead Eve past him by sidling up against the right wall. The boy turned to face Penny, his back against the left wall with no space between them.

“My name’s Leslie,” he said.

Penny looked at him in slight discomfort, then turned her head and kept going. Eve was next, though she at least said “hi” with an awkward smile as she passed by. Leslie turned his head to watch them go.

Penny and Eve made it out onto the street, finding themselves near a river. There were some large restaurants and pachinko places nearby, but also some dark spots, the shadow of night enveloping any buildings that weren’t covered in lights and signs. It was lightly raining, which felt nice after being in the stuffy maze. They felt like they could finally breathe again.

The girls looked up the street, and saw with some relief that they were only a couple blocks away from Akihabara’s bright and busy core.

Leslie jogged out of the maze, taking a sharp turn to place himself in the girls’ line of sight, and then continued jogging in place as he smiled awkwardly at them.

“I was told that the vending machine graveyard leads directly to a portal of lost maids,” he said, taking a massive gamble on whether that sentence would make any sense.

Penny and Eve looked at him, not knowing what to say. If they hadn’t seen, heard and experienced everything that had happened in the past few days, they would have already been walking past him.

“But you don’t look like maids to me,” he added.

“If there was a portal, why would it matter?” Penny asked. She said it almost dismissively, but was in fact somewhat curious.

“Because the lost maids are the ones causing all the strange shit in Akiba,” Leslie said.

Penny and Eve looked at each other again.

“Who are you?” Penny asked.

“I’m Leslie,” Leslie reintroduced himself. “A maid afficionado. I have a TikTok all about maids.”

Penny and Eve stared at Leslie, once again regretting interacting with him.

“It’s lit,” he said, defending himself with a smile. “Seriously. I have like a million followers.”

“We have a YouTube channel,” Eve said, finally chiming in. She was already thinking about how it might benefit them to know someone with a million followers on TikTok. “It’s about gaming and fashion and stuff.”

Eve flashed Penny an imperceptible look that said “we should keep talking to this guy.”

She then turned back to Leslie, though for him she had never looked at Penny at all.

“I’m Eve,” she said.

“Nice to meet you, Eve,” Leslie said.

He looked at Penny.

“Penny,” Penny said without opening her mouth.

“Are you two here on vacation?” Leslie asked. He stopped jogging at this point, as if its hypnotising effect was no longer necessary.

“Yes,” Penny answered as succinctly as possible.

“Same, I came to Japan with my parents and sister, covering the whole trip with sponsorships. Me and my dad will be in Japan for two months, so that I can generate as much content as possible. He sometimes helps record my videos.

“My moms and sister are just here for the free trip. They’ll be gone soon.”

“We’re here because Penny always wanted to come to Japan,” Eve said, placing her hands on Penny’s shoulders and smiling widely. “She plays like every game that’s been made here. Her expertise is one of Girls Mode’s secret weapons!”

“‘Girls Mode’?” Leslie asked, raising an eyebrow.

“It’s our YouTube channel,” Eve said. “But we’re thinking of branching out to TikTok soon.”

Were they? Penny tried to think back. They must’ve entertained the thought at some point, but all signs pointed to Eve being fascinated by this stranger’s success. Penny decided she would just go with the flow, since Eve was the one who handled uploading the Girls Mode videos, as well as posting on social media to try to get people to look at them.

“It’d be really cool to do a collab video,” Eve offered boldly.

“Have you been to any maid cafés?” Leslie asked.

“We sure did! We’ve been hanging out with one of the maids from it. She was just with us . . . I should check to see where she is.”

Eve couldn’t believe that she had been so wrapped up in networking that she forgot to try checking in again on Maaya. She resent her text to Maaya somewhat anxiously while trying to hide her anxiety. Penny and Leslie both went from looking at Eve to looking at each other.

“I’m a 16-year-old boy who speaks extremely limited Japanese,” he said. “I’ve never thought about what it would be like to be friends with a maid. Maybe part of that is not wanting to spoil the illusion. I’ve just been interested in that whole world – who wins, who loses, and what happens to the winners and losers. Why it’s worth fighting a war to serve lonely people.”

“Yeah,” Penny said, though without any meaning.

“Even me, I’m not the only maid enthusiast, or maid café influencer, or whatever you want to call me. The first time I went to a maid café, it was a place in a Japan Town in another country. I was only like 6. The maids called me ‘Master’. I took that very seriously. As I grew up, I kept wondering: what makes me ‘Master’? Am I still a ‘Master’, even though I hadn’t been to that café in years?

“The answer was to keep going to maid cafés. I became a TikTok celebrity at 14, posting reaction videos to café tours and rating maids I came across. My parents helped me arrange virtual reservations at different maid cafés, where I’d be a tablet propped up on a table, and the maids would come with their perfect smiles and take my orders from a million miles away.

“It was genius. Different cafés ended up sponsoring me, since they saw a tangible boost in foreign customers. It helps me and my family take trips here.

“But, sometimes, when we’d try to visit the cafés, they’d be gone, like they vanished into thin air. Where did they go?

“‘They lost,’ a maid said once, without looking at me. She had overheard me talking about it with my dad. The maid was in the middle of collecting dishes from the table next to us. I looked at her, but she wouldn’t make eye contact. My dad just laughed.

“‘They lost’? What the hell did that mean? I started investigating. I feel like I learn a little more every time I’m here.

“I think I see them sometimes, when I’m lost in thought: maids without faces. One time one of them bumped into me, and I looked down, and I was holding a teacup on a saucer.”

Penny tried to stare at him with a neutral expression, but Leslie could tell she was trembling slightly.

“The tea was hot.”

Leslie stopped talking, instead looking at Penny with the eyes of someone who had fallen deep down into a rabbit hole.

“Maaya’s fine,” Eve said with a relieved smile. She was still in the middle of texting Maaya, and seemed to have missed out on Leslie’s entire monologue. “She ended up somewhere else, really far away, and is just gonna head home now.”

Eve then put her phone away and smiled apologetically at Leslie.

“Should we get some tea somewhere?” she asked. “Maybe talk about the collab?”

“Do you think we’d be able to involve Maaya in some way?” Leslie asked back, implying that he would only collab if Eve’s maid friend joined them.

“I can ask!” Eve said enthusiastically.

Leslie nodded a little, the wheels in his head already turning as he thought up questions he could ask Maaya.

“There’s a maid café that specialises in fried chicken,” he said. “Want to check it out?”

“Sure, but we’ll just have tea,” Eve answered for both of them, knowing Penny wouldn’t be able to resist the offer of fried chicken even this late at night.

Penny flashed Eve a quick, imperceptible look of betrayal, her mouth opened as if she was about to argue.

The three of them walked in the light rain together, Eve and Leslie doing most of the talking as they shared their experiences as YouTubers and TikTok influencers. Penny mainly watched the reflections of neon signs and anime billboards in the puddles ahead of them, though the more she looked, the more she was worried something might show up in the reflections that shouldn’t be there.

Penny looked up just as they reached the building with the fried chicken maid café. It was located on the second floor of the building, above a more traditional maid-less restaurant. The café’s sign depicted a chibi maid waving around a golden-brown drumstick like a magic wand.

A stylish woman was handing out free medical masks by the gate, and Penny and Eve eagerly accepted them, putting them on through harsh coughs. Maaya was wearing the black mask that she always kept with her.

“We can go somewhere else,” Maaya suggested.

Penny and Eve looked at each other for a few seconds, as if telepathically discussing the situation.

“It’s okay,” Eve said. “We’re already here, right?”

“We could try waiting out the smoke somewhere,” Penny said, a little bit more rationally.

“There’s a café right by the gate,” Maaya said, pointing past two girls who looked like they had entered reality through a portal to a magical girl anime.

Maaya was pointing at a neon sign for Hoshino Coffee, which had a large orange tea kettle with a big H on it as part of its logo.

“Coffee sounds good!” Eve said. “Maybe they’ll have hot chocolate for Penny.”

Penny was slightly embarrassed by how much that comment made her sound like a kid.

“I’ll have coffee, too,” she said, almost defensively.

“Okay, let’s all drink coffee!” Maaya said enthusiastically, and led them towards the stairs that went down to the café.

A trio of young adults in their early twenties were blocking the entrance to the stairs, too caught up in their conversation to realise they were in the way. Maaya apologised in Japanese as she pressed past them, and one of the young adults apologised back, in such an exaggeratedly formal way that his friends laughed at him.

Penny and Eve followed Maaya down to the café entrance as the young adults continued laughing at the top of the stairs.

The café interior had a cozy atmosphere with warm lighting and exposed brick walls, along with classy coffee-themed decorations and framed prints. Maaya put up three fingers when the waitress greeted them by the front counter, and she led the girls to a table a little over halfway through the café.

This time Eve sat with Penny, and Penny wondered if it was so Eve could look at Maaya while she drank her coffee. The waitress handed them English menus, and Maaya took the Japanese menu that was already on the table.

All three quietly looked over the menus, until Eve gasped.

“Look at all the puddings!”

The pudding section came complete with professionally-photographed pictures of each pudding, and each photo could’ve been framed and hung up on the café’s walls. They all looked so fancy and delicious that Eve started tearing up slightly.

“It’s a wonderland,” Eve said.

Eve selected the Showa retro-style pudding, which came with what looked like a thin layer of melted caramel and topped with whipped cream. As she was the only one to order food, she offered to share it with everyone.

The waitress returned and took their orders, and then took the menus back as well. Penny excused herself from the table to use the washroom, which was located near their table.

Penny entered the washroom as Eve excitedly and loudly anticipated the pudding behind her. In the washroom was what would be one of Penny’s greatest challenges yet: a Japanese toilet, with a hundred buttons and no clear flushing mechanism, with none of the labels in English.

“Oh no oh no oh no,” Penny said, the most terrified she had been the whole trip, including what had been her first airplane flight.

While making use of the toilet, Penny fumbled with her phone to try auto-translating the labels, but all of the words came out fractured and nonsensical, with terms like “fungal ejector” flashing onscreen for a millisecond.

“No no no no no,” Penny said.

From their table, Eve and Maaya could hear random buttons being pressed and an existential wail, though they were polite enough not to comment on it.

Penny exited the washroom, her hair drenched in sweat and her eyes reddened as if she had been crying.

“The washroom’s really cool,” she said, returning to her seat. “I didn’t have any problems with the toilet at all.”

The waitress returned with their coffees and Eve’s Showa-era pudding, its golden caramel coating and appetising jiggle instantly becoming the centre of attention. The cups and plates clinked and clattered pleasantly as the waitress set them on the table. Beside the pudding she placed three tiny spoons for the trio to share.

The trio thanked the waitress in Japanese, and then each of them smelled and blew on their hot coffees while eyeing the pudding hungrily. If it wasn’t for their friendship, the girls would have engaged in a bloody brawl over who would get the first taste.

“It looks delicious,” Maaya said.

“Ow,” Eve said, sucking in her lips after attempting to sip her coffee. “Too hot.”

“The pudding might help cool you a bit,” Penny said, licking her lips. She knew Eve would need to take the first bite before anyone else got to try

Eve nodded with an eager smile, but before picking up one of the dainty spoons, she made sure to take a picture of the pudding and upload it to Instagram. A split second after posting the picture, the Show-era pudding received nearly 800 likes.

Penny and Maaya froze in place as they watched Eve take the tiny spoon and break the golden skin of the pudding in a timid and apologetic fashion.

“I’m so sorry,” Eve said to the pudding, tears forming in her eyes despite an anticipatory smile ever-widening on her face.

Eve took the first bite with her eyes closed and her hand on her cheek, as if to prevent the tiny morsel of pudding from exploding out the side of her face.

“Yeah, it’s so good,” she said, answering a question nobody needed to ask.

Penny and Maaya were now standing on the table and holding their own spoons as they stared down at the pudding. Eve was already going in for her second tiny spoonful, not paying them any mind.

“Mm, yeah,” Eve said. She had closed her eyes the moment the next morsel entered her mouth. “So good.”

Penny stared down at the pudding in disbelief, impatiently waiting for Eve to give her the go-ahead. Eve opened her eyes and glanced up at Penny, as if noticing her on the table for the first time.

“Want to try it?”

The girls ate the pudding, each taking quick, small bites. Eventually they made their way down from the ceiling.

* * *

Back on Takeshita Street, a light rain had helped put out the smoky atmosphere, though the faint hint of a bonfire-y smell lingered. Eve kept looking at their receipt, believing they had been accidentally overcharged. Maaya told her not to worry about it, and covered Penny and Eve’s shares – time was limited, and arguing with the café staff would take up too much of it.

They began walking up the dense pedestrian street, which was lined with highly fashionable stores and cafés. Above an elaborate crêpe shop was a dog café, fluffy white pups paid to pant at the upstairs window; a group of teenage girls were sitting on a bright red couch, petting the ones that came to them.

Displayed along the length of the crêpe shop’s longest wall was their entire selection presented in small windows, some savoury but mostly sweet. Penny and Eve couldn’t tell if they were real crêpes sprayed with a kind of shiny glaze to prevent them from rotting, or the most realistic-looking plastic food they had ever seen. If real, they wondered how often the items had to be replaced.

“We can get crêpes on the way back,” Maaya suggested.

Just in case they didn’t, Eve suggested they all take a picture together in front of the wall of crêpes. Maaya handed her phone to a girl dressed like a virtual idol from the future, and the girl happily took their picture for them. Maaya then used her camera to record a video of Penny and Eve performing a special crêpe dance, which Eve said was necessary to get the sugar rush from the Showa-era pudding out of their system.

One of the nearby buildings was a blackened husk with glowing red lines, a team of firefighters continuously hosing it down from an alley. Penny took a nervous peek at the firefighters, quickly scanning their determined faces, and breathed a sigh of relief when she didn’t recognise any of them from the fire station.

Everyone else on Takeshita Street continued along their business as if the building wasn’t there.

Maaya pointed out a three-storey building across from it, called Capsule King, which was a dense maze of gashapon machines seemingly offering every line of gashapon toys currently in circulation in Japan.

Penny gazed upon the stacked rows of machines filled with Pokémon capsule toys, the machines lined up just outside the entrance, beckoning pedestrians with enough spare change to wander in. A bright glow caught Eve’s attention, and she turned to see that they were Penny’s eyes, lit up with the shiny lights of the Capsule King sign.

“Of course we’ll go in!” Eve said, voicing Penny’s thoughts.

The girls entered the building, which blasted the loudest music they had yet to hear in Tokyo, clearly intended to ensure a steady traffic of new customers. The song playing was Serenade of Water by Men I Trust, a chilled-out downtempo tune that had likely never been played this loudly before.

The loudness would’ve successfully shortened the girls’ exploration of the building, if Penny hadn’t realised just how cheap this place was as a source of souvenirs.

“Heh heh heh,” she chuckled to herself, perhaps more loudly than she had intended due to the music.

In addition to the expected anime-themed capsules, there were also miniatures of just about everything in existence, including cars, refrigerators, TVs and packaged food items. That was how Penny found the cheapest, and thus most perfect, souvenir for Cale: a capsule toy of a Harajuku fashion victim. Penny put in her 50-yen coin and turned the chunky, clicking handle that exchanged the coin for the figure.

She peered at the figure through its transparent plastic container and was shocked to see that the toy looked just like Cale, including her startling purple eyes, albeit wearing even more over-the-top clothes than she usually wore.

“Doesn’t this look like Cale?” Penny asked Eve, who looked at the toy in surprise.

“Wow, it does,” Eve agreed. “Maaya and I found a machine with toys that look like us, too.”

“What,” Penny said flatly.

She knew that Eve meant toys that looked exactly like them, and not just figures vaguely resembling them.

“It’s upstairs,” Eve said with a smile. “C’mon, I’ll show you!”

Penny followed Eve and Maaya up the brightly-lit stairs, which was in a state of constant motion, the other shoppers heading up and down much faster than they were.

The trio made their way to the window overlooking the street. Penny looked down at the colourful river of pedestrians, and then looked up, noticing for the first time that the sky was already darkening.

How could it be so late already? She squinted a bit harder, and realised the sky was covered in a thick layer of black clouds, with only the barest hint of dark blue sky past them.

“Here!” Eve called Penny over excitedly.

Eve was standing by a capsule machine and grinning at the display art, revealing a cast of toys that included Penny, her mother, Eve, Maaya, and some faceless maids.

Maaya snapped a picture as Penny and Eve looked at the toys in their tiny plastic UFOs, Eve with an upright grin and Penny with an upside-down one.

“What should we do?” Eve asked eagerly. “Should we get some?”

“I don’t want to,” Penny said, without a second thought. “Just because they’re us, doesn’t mean they’re for us.”

She then looked from the machine to her Cale toy.

“Maybe it’s creepy if I give this to Cale. I’ll just grab a fashion magazine if we see one in a store.”

“She’d love that for sure,” Eve said sweetly.

Penny put the Cale toy on top of the capsule machine so that she could be with her friends.

* * *

Near the end of Takeshita Street were art galleries supporting local artists with a pop art bent, the type of paintings that would hang most appropriately in the apartment of a Harajuku denizen. The gallery buildings were as bright and stylish as the shops and cafés, with bright sculptures made up of pleasing abstract shapes built into the façades.

Maaya led Penny and Eve to a three-storey gallery broken up into small, individual-yet-connected rooms, the entrance to each one accessible on platforms in front of the building, much like a Japanese apartment complex. In each room was a different exhibit by a local artist, with the artists sitting on stools to show, discuss, and hopefully sell their artwork.

In one of the rooms on the first level was the artist of the ballpoint drawings from Maaya’s maid café. The artist was sitting on a stool and looking at her phone when the girls entered, Penny and Eve recalling the style but not quite placing it. They stood admiring a detailed drawing of a ghostly figure reflected in moonlit water.

“These are by Lily – her art is hanging at the café,” Maaya told them.

“Oh, that’s right!” Eve exclaimed at the realisation. “Her art’s so beautiful, like something out of an old and mysterious fairy tale collection.”

“I’ll tell her that.”

Lily looked up from her phone curiously, and her eyes fully lit up upon recognising Maaya. The two happily talked, and talked, and talked in Japanese, and then Maaya introduced Lily to Penny and Eve.

“My Canadian friends like your art,” Maaya said, telling Lily what Eve had said.

Lily gratefully accepted her compliment and explained her process. Penny and Eve found the fact that she did everything with a single pen to be very inspiring. For them, it was a bit like how all they really needed for their YouTube channel was a single cellphone camera. The key ingredients were inspiration and imagination.

Eve expressed that she wished she could buy something, but enjoyed looking at the art just as much. Lily gave Penny and Eve her business card, her info written in the clearing of a ballpoint forest. Penny and Eve then told Lily the name of their channel, which Lily wrote down.

Penny and Eve recorded a short video of them looking at the gallery, and were sure to record the drawings individually as well, to edit the shots in afterwards. Eve told Lily that they’d put the gallery info into the video, as if they were a bigshot influencers with a lot of sway.

“Thank you,” Lily said.

“We used to dance together,” Maaya told Penny and Eve after they left Lily’s exhibit. “She quit being a maid in order to focus on art. But she still comes around sometimes, and the owner offers to display her drawings. Lily sometimes makes sales that way.”

The girls explored the other exhibits, going from cute bird paintings to edgy, graffiti-style paintings of guys with swords and guys with swords riding motorcycles. They made their way upwards, and on the third level they found an exhibit where a girl was sitting on a stool in a white maid outfit with a pastel pink bow.

The maid-in-white had long black hair and mismatched eye makeup, with a large vertical black star painted over one eye and a black crescent moon painted over the other. She looked to be in her late teens or early twenties.

The maid-in-white’s exhibit consisted of black-and-white photographs of Akihabara, the subjects always maids holding umbrellas. Whether the maids were standing alone in a small side street or sitting on the road in the middle of a busy intersection, all were staring blankly at the camera. Depending on what angle Penny and Eve looked at the photographs, it seemed like their faces were perpetually in a process of disappearing, a disorienting effect akin to lenticular trading cards.

There was a dark atmosphere around the maid-in-white herself, not helped by the way she stared at the girls with wide eyes, her mouth hanging open. Penny and Eve had been stared at like that by strange people on buses back home, but it wasn’t what they had expected from an artist in a hip Harajuku art gallery.

Organon by Men I Trust was playing on a boombox in the adjoining exhibit, which the girls would never get around to.

“Have you seen maids like the ones in the photos?” the maid-in-white asked Penny and Eve in English.

“We saw a lot in Akihabara,” Eve answered pleasantly.

“And in Shibuya,” Penny added. She had a feeling the maid-in-white meant maids without faces.

“Our friend’s a maid, too,” Eve said with a proud smile as she gestured to Maaya.

The maid-in-white smiled a crooked smile at Maaya, who smiled back somewhat darkly.

“Yes, I know Maaya,” the maid-in-white said. “She’s one of the survivors of the last maid war.”

“’Maid war’?” Eve asked in surprise.

“She’s joking,” Penny said quietly to Eve.

“No,” the maid-in-white said. “No no no no no. Every few years, when too many maid cafés have opened up, there’s a turf war to determine who can stay and who can go.”

Eve looked to Penny for help determining whether this was a joke, too.

“It has to be a joke,” Penny said quietly, keeping her eyes on the maid-in-white.

“No,” the maid-in-white said. “You’ve seen the winners in Akihabara, and you’ve seen the losers lurking around, waiting to get their revenge on your ‘friend’.”

Penny and Eve both looked at Maaya to determine whether this was part of the joke.

Maaya continued smiling darkly at the maid-in-white.

“It’s something that happened,” Maaya said. “But it’s also kind of a joke.”

The maid-in-white smirked again at Maaya and then looked back at Penny and Eve.

“I quit the first maid war the moment it started,” the maid-in-white told them. “For me, the ability to serve awkward, lonely men, and foreign tourists who treat maid cafés as a joke, wasn’t a cause worth fighting for.

“Those who lose the wars have no one left to serve, and thus they lose themselves. Sometimes they do terrible things. But no matter how hard they try, they cannot bring harm to the winners, or those who fall under the winners’ protection.

“My art – my photography – captures their essences. Those who buy the photos then bring the lost maids into their homes, where the maids can find happiness serving forever.”

Penny and Eve looked at the photos again. Unlike the other people in the photographs, the maids looked like they were really there, with slight movements visible, as if they were breathing.

Is this why Maaya became our tour guide? Penny wondered.

“The photos are for sale,” the maid-in-white reiterated, “but not to a winner.”

The moment the maid-in-white said that last word, a tear that had not even begun to form fell from Maaya’s eye.

The three were riding a commuter train, thankfully not as packed as it sometimes was, with only a dozen or so people spread out across the train car. Many of them were lone office workers, some of whom appeared to have fallen asleep at one point and went unroused for their destinations. There were also a few high schoolers, though classes must have already begun at least an hour ago.

Maaya was occupied with her phone, as was every other passenger on the train who was awake, though Penny and Eve were far more interested in their surroundings. At the left end of the car were video screens looping an ad for the anime adaptation of Blue Giant, a jazz-themed manga series Edith and Jill had mentioned during a conversation about music manga. Set above the nearest door was a looping ad for Splatoon 3, showing the highlights of a full match.

There were also train maps, including ones showing the line the girls were currently on, with the next station lit up with a bright yellow light.

The view through the window was by far the most exciting part, with a seemingly endless stream of office buildings, apartment complexes, department stores, arcades, on and on, the streets below almost never visible.

Penny and Eve had no idea a city could be so big. Downtown Toronto felt like a few blocks compared to the entire concrete planet they had landed in.

“We’ll be in Shibuya soon,” Maaya said, glancing up at the station map.

Shibuya was the ward they had decided to check out next, though Penny and Eve would’ve been happy with any of the options. What leapt out about Shibuya was, of course, Shibuya Scramble Crossing, as well as Harajuku, the street fashion district. Whenever Penny’s friend Cale talked about the latest fashion trends, she always started with whatever was happening in Harajuku. (And, when I had asked Joysuke to design Cale, I sent her Harajuku fashion images for inspiration.)

“I’ll get Cale some kind of accessory there,” Penny said. “That will really blow her mind.”

The prerecorded announcement playing over the train’s PA stated – first in Japanese and then in English – that they would soon be arriving at Shibuya Station.

Maaya stood while continuing to look at her phone with both hands. Penny and Eve followed her lead, the two gripping the handrails. The train came to an impeccably smooth halt, with none of the jerkiness of Toronto subway trains; they could see how Maaya was confident about standing without any support.

The girls exited the train right before a large crowd got on, the platform itself much busier than the one at Akihabara, though with less anime ads.

They descended the stairs, heading deep into the station interior, which had one of the most confusing layouts of all the stations Penny and Eve had experienced up to that point. Every direction seemed to lead to an equally viable entrance or exit, yet there was only one correct way to go, and Penny and Eve had no idea what that was.

It didn’t help that people were constantly heading in every direction – if Maaya hadn’t been with them, Penny and Eve would’ve been swept away to different places, never to see each other again.

“Here – stay close,” Maaya said, sensing how overwhelmed these two Canadians were.

Maaya led them to a large tunnel with large windows for walls, and Penny and Eve gradually realised that the windows were overlooking the famed Scramble Crossing itself, the pedestrians below crossing it diagonally in waves.

Eve grabbed Penny’s hand and the two excitedly raced up to the window; they stuck their hands and faces against the glass, gazing out at Shibuya with widened eyes.

“Anime is real,” Penny said under her breath.

“It sure is,” Eve said.

Maaya used Eve’s phone to take pictures of Penny and Eve with the Crossing visible past them. She then recorded a video of them walking down the tunnel and exiting out onto the street, the recording continuing as Maaya followed Penny and Eve into the middle of the crossing. Maaya panned around them in a circle as the hundred or so other pedestrians seemed to walk directly towards the girls and the camera. Maaya then stopped the video, and the girls hurried back onto a sidewalk.

“Let’s add it to the Girls Mode YouTube Shorts right away,” Eve said, already in the middle of uploading the video. “That way we’re not spamming a million videos when we get back to the hotel room.”

Eve had picked Banana Co by Radiohead to play over the video – specifically the full band version from the Street Spirit single. It was a song Maya liked – not Maaya the maid, but the Maya who was Eve’s friend back home. Maya was into alternative rock, the more ’90s and emotional the better.

Eve showed Penny the video after it uploaded. The title was ANIME IS REAL.

Penny smiled as she looked at the video, though the smile lessened when she noticed some strange figures amongst the pedestrians heading towards the camera near the end. She asked Eve to show her the original file so they could pause it and look more clearly.

“That’s odd,” Eve said.

In the video was a trio of girls in black and pink maid outfits, each with a different hairstyle, and each without a face. The spots where their faces should be also appeared slightly more pixelated than the rest of the image.

“The video didn’t render their faces,” Eve said, disappointed. “Maybe they got too close to the camera?”

“Yeah,” Penny said, though she believed otherwise. “That sucks.”

“Oh, do you know about the 3D billboards?” Maaya asked them, having apparently missed out on their conversation. “There’s one close by.”

The trio walked up the street to the left, which was lined with large department stores with large front entrances and large advertisements and logos. Maaya stopped a short distance into the street and pointed out the animated billboard high across from them, which had a second, shorter curved side to it that accentuated the sense of depth.

The titular protagonist from Sick Lizard Master – a manga series that had recently received an anime adaptation – was peering down at the pedestrians below, moving from one side of the billboard to the next, the series logo remaining onscreen in the upper-left corner. At one point in the loop one of Sick Lizard Master’s enemies, a hairy boar-faced man from outer space, dropped down into the screen and began fighting with Sick Lizard Master.

Sick Lizard Master managed to defeat the boar alien with his special staff, but immediately after an entire group of boar people filled the screen, forcing Sick Lizard Master to crawl out the bottom of the billboard and scale down the building below.

Penny, Eve and Maaya watched as Sick Lizard Master reached the sidewalk, opened a rusted metal door, and disappeared into the building with the billboard.

Penny looked at Eve to make sure she had recorded it, and was relieved to see that Eve was holding up her phone with a huge grin.

“There’s the second video for today’s Shorts,” Eve said.

“How is that possible?” Penny asked Maaya, in total disbelief. “Does it also use like a 3D projection or something?”

“Hmm,” Maaya wondered. “Maybe it’s a mix of the billboard screen, a projection, and then a live actor in a costume when the character gets to the bottom?

“I mean, we do have live tokusatsu stage shows in Japan, performed outside for the public. It could be something like that.”

“Oh,” Penny said. In a weird way, she found it comforting that not even Maaya was certain how the effect was accomplished.

The door that Sick Lizard Master had entered suddenly slammed open, the door loudly banging against the wall. Penny, Eve, and Maaya, along with other nearby pedestrians, stopped to look at the doorway.

A man wearing the same outfit as one of the boar aliens casually exited through it; maskless, he was in the middle of lighting a cigarette that was held between his lips, one hand cupping the lighter to prevent the wind from putting out the flame.

“So, they did use live actors?” Penny asked aloud, still uncertain.

The woman who had been dressed as Sick Lizard Master came out from behind the man, just as the man was finishing taking a long drag off his cigarette.

The woman struck the man against the back of his head with the bottom of Sick Lizard Master’s special staff, causing the cigarette to fly out of the man’s mouth. The woman then hit the man again, as hard as she could, causing him to crumple down to the sidewalk, like a puppet that had just had its strings cut.

Some of the pedestrians gasped. A police officer, who had been standing by Scramble Crossing, took notice of the scene and trotted on over.

“How about a ramen lunch?” Maaya said to Penny and Eve, who were still watching the scene play out with stunned expressions.

* * *

The girls sat at a ramen restaurant a couple streets over, at a table by the clear plastic curtains separating the restaurant from the sidewalk. Eve sat beside Maaya, more closely than she would have sat beside Penny – or perhaps it was Maaya sitting more closely beside Eve.

The waitress brought out their bowls of ramen. They all picked the same thing, which was pork ramen in a white-ish broth that was pleasantly thick, much different from the watery ramen Penny and Eve had tried at restaurants back home.

The song “kisses” by Slowdive was playing over the PA.

Penny added all the additional toppings that were presented on tiny plates on the table as Maaya described each of them. After filling her bowl, she looked up from it to Maaya and Eve, and saw how happy they were. She pulled out her phone and snapped a photo of them, which she could tell Eve greatly appreciated, her cheeks reddening slightly.

“Let’s eat,” Eve said with a hungry smile.

Maaya and Eve ate noisily, slurping their noodles to cool them, while Penny ate hers carefully and quietly, not wanting to splash herself with the broth. It was one of the most delicious things Penny had ever eaten in her life.

“My compliments to the pig,” she said as tears of joy formed in the corners of her eyes.

“I could fill a bathtub with this and sleep in it,” Eve said.

“Maybe you are strange girls,” Maaya said with a smile.

The trio headed for Harajuku after lunch, cutting through a small district of love hotels and associated toy shops. The love hotel exteriors were eye-catchingly tacky, some with faux Roman pillars and statues, and others with hearts incorporated into every aspect of their design. There was also a jungle-themed hotel that piqued Eve’s interest until Maaya explained what a love hotel was, and then Eve blushed.

“I thought it was something like a Rainforest Cafe,” Eve said.

Eve stopped Penny when it seemed like they were exiting the district.

“Wait!”

Penny looked at Eve in surprise.

“What’s up?” Penny asked. “Did you forget something?”

“YouTube Short,” Eve said. Strangely, she appeared slightly out-of-breath even though she hadn’t been running.

“Okay?”

Eve stood closer to Penny, turning her head to speak into Penny’s ear with a slightly hushed tone.

“R-record a video of me and Maaya walking into the jungle,” she said.

“Are you sure?”

“It’ll be a joke video.”

Penny looked at Maaya, who was standing a short distance away, letting them have their secret conversation.

“Eve wants to walk into a love hotel with me?” Maaya asked.

Penny stared at Maaya for 10 seconds, then slowly nodded her head.

“Okay, let’s do it!” Maaya said enthusiastically, grabbing Eve’s hand and leading her towards the jungle-themed love hotel.

Penny fumbled with her phone and recorded the video, which looked more like evidence a private detective would collect of an extramarital affair. She wasn’t sure if posting it online would be the right thing for Girls Mode, but knew Eve would be happy to have the video to look at every once in a while.

After Eve had fulfilled her spur-of-the-moment fantasy, the trio continued on to Harajuku, this time making their way through a residential area, with houses, an elementary school, a tiny green space, and a small fire station. They stopped at the fire station, an anime-style poster on a bulletin board catching their eyes, with cute, chibi-fied versions of fire fighters hard at work spraying water towards the edge of the paper.

Penny and Eve both took photos of the poster, and an elderly man came up behind them with his hands held behind his back.

Maaya greeted the man in Japanese, and the two briefly spoke. The man then gestured to the station and said something in Japanese, and Maaya turned to Penny and Eve to translate for them.

“I told him you like the poster, and that you’re YouTubers from Canada, and he’s wondering if you’d like to take pictures of the firetrucks. He’s actually the chief of this station!”

“Sure,” Penny and Eve said at the same time.

Maaya relayed their response to the fire chief, and he disappeared into the building, the large shutters scrolling up a moment later.

The firetrucks inside were bright red and totally spotless, as if they were polished by the hour. They were also more rounded than the firetrucks back in Canada, which were sharp rectangles with noticeable dirt and rust.

“They’re so shiny,” Eve said.

The fire chief disappeared behind one of the trucks and returned with a full uniform in his hands, including a classic red fire hat.

“Would you like to wear it?” he asked Penny and Eve in English.

Penny felt a bit awkward about it, but Eve’s enthusiasm won out.

“Yes, of course!” Eve said.

As Eve clumsily went through the effort of putting on the heavy-duty uniform, which was clearly too big for her, the fire chief brought another uniform to Penny. Penny glanced at Eve, who looked like a kid playing dress-up, and then looked back at the second uniform, and was afraid she would disappear inside it.

A younger firefighter appeared from the station’s office, his eyes flicking back and forth between Penny and Eve in some confusion and a lot of amusement.

“They are YouTubers,” the fire chief explained to the firefighter, and then the two spoke together in Japanese.

The firefighter helped Penny put on her uniform, Penny having gotten lost inside it. With both their uniforms on, Penny and Eve posed by the firetrucks, first together and then with the fire chief and firefighter. Maaya took the pictures with everyone’s phones, swapping between them with great speed.

The alarm went off, signalling there was a fire out there that needed putting out, and that these Canadian girls should probably take off the uniforms and get out of the way.

Before they did, however, the firefighter suggested they ride the firetruck out of the station, so they’d have a video of it to share online. Penny and Eve agreed, if only to be agreeable, but the entire time they were secretly hoping that there weren’t people out there burning to death.

The girls hopped off the truck after it pulled out of the station, and the trio waved goodbye to the friendly fire chief and firefighter. They then returned the uniforms and continued on their way.

“People here love to involve foreigners when they have a chance, so they go home with good memories, and tell others about how wonderful Japan is,” Maaya explained as they continued to Harajuku.

“It is wonderful,” Eve said. “I can tell how proud the firefighters are of their jobs.”

“Good morning!” Eve greeted her enthusiastically.

Penny gave Maaya a small wave with a friendly smile as Maaya looked up from her phone. Maaya returned the smile as she put her phone away.

“Hungry?” Maaya asked them.

The Mister Donut was a two-floor coffee-and-donut place that reminded Penny and Eve of a certain ubiquitous chain in Canada, only better in every conceivable way, from the inventive assortment of donuts on offer (including matcha and cherry blossom-inspired donuts) to the cleanliness of the location.

Penny was more into savory foods than sweets, but that didn’t stop her from ordering the most chocolatey donut they had, and Eve picked out a pink-frosting-glazed donut shaped like a string of pearls. They didn’t want to overdo it on the caffeine, so Penny ordered a bright green watermelon soda and Eve just went with water.

Maaya ordered a limited edition “misdo meets” matcha donut and a black coffee. The trio then took the stairs up to the second floor, where they were lucky enough to find three available stools at the counter set against the window.

Happy New Year by Let’s Eat Grandma was playing over the PA.

The girls sat and enjoyed their donuts and drinks while watching the buildings and signs across from them and the movement of the people below.

“We were at Mandarake earlier and saw a maid outfit in the street,” Eve brought up to Maaya, as if just remembering it.

“Oh!” Maaya exclaimed. “That’s part of an ad campaign for an underground idol club. They’re running a Battle of the Maid Bands tonight.”

“‘Battle of the Maid Bands’?” Eve asked, concerned about a physical brawl involving maids.

“Four maid-themed groups are going to perform, and whichever receives the loudest cheers wins.”

Eve stared at Maaya in shock while slowly chewing a large bite of her donut. Maaya patiently waited for her to finish.

“That sounds amazing!” Eve said as soon as she was able to.

Maaya smiled knowingly.

“Are you interested in seeing it? I can get us in without tickets.”

“Through your maid connections?” Eve asked, intrigued.

“That’s right. In fact, some of the band members were working at the café yesterday.”

Penny continued looking out the window while finishing her donut. She looked down at the four flyer girls widely-spaced out on the sidewalk below, and wondered if any of them could be band members as well.

“Including you?” Eve asked Maaya with widened eyes.

“No,” Maaya answered, smiling. “I’m happy enough to be part of the scene, and to help my friends choreograph their dance routines. They’re also happy when I bring in audience members to cheer them on.”

“We’ll cheer,” Eve readily offered. “We’ll cheer for all the acts, but we’ll make sure we cheer loudest for your friends.”

“It starts at 7,” Maaya said, pulling out her phone to text Eve the event info. “Is that okay with you?”

Eve looked at Penny, who gave Eve a thumbs-up.

“I sent you the info for the event, in case you want to learn more,” Maaya said. “It’s in Japanese, but you can auto-translate it. It might help in case you do a video about it.”

“Thanks,” Penny said, finally speaking up. “We wouldn’t know stuff like this was happening without you appearing out of nowhere to tell us.”

“You’re the angel of Akiba,” Eve added.

Maaya laughed.

“It’s heaven, isn’t it?”

* * *

The middle of the day was spent popping into different stores, including a multilevel doujinshi shop and a toy store devoted to a single manufacturer, as well as eating a ramen dinner. With Maaya assisting on camera duties, Penny and Eve also recorded a walking tour of the streets of Akihabara for Girls Mode.

That took them to 7PM, and the line to get into Club Badman, the venue for the Battle of the Maid Bands. There were already fifteen people ahead of them, some carrying the day’s purchases from Akihabara’s shops, and a few wearing shirts, jackets and buttons of the bands they were about to see. Many already had their tickets out, which the maid with light pink hair at the door inspected as she let them in.

When Maaya, Penny and Eve reached the maid, she looked at Maaya with instant recognition, and the two briefly spoke together in Japanese before Maaya gestured for Penny and Eve to enter.

“Have a good time!” the maid said to Penny and Eve in English as she waved to them with a friendly but clearly practiced smile.

The Club Badman interior was dark, with a black floor, ceiling, walls and stage. The light in the club mainly came from the constellation of small purple, blue and green spotlights set up high on the stage’s walls and ceiling, and which were slowly rotating in different directions.

It was much less of the bright and frilly aesthetic that Eve had been expecting, and more of the type of punk-ish, atmospheric environment that Maaya’s brand of maid had stemmed from.

Ballet Mécanique by Etsuko Yakushimaru and Yoshinori Sunahara was playing loudly over the PA.

Penny and Eve looked around the club as they waited for Maaya to rejoin them. They noticed that the stage had some sound equipment with tiny levers and small flashing lights, as well as microphone stands off to the side, but no musical instruments.

The other attendees seemed to have mainly arrived solo, and several of them were either posting about the event or searching up other posts about it. Mutual fans then recognized each by the merchandise they wore, and teamed up to cheer on their favourite groups.

The more this happened, the more the club buzzed with anticipatory chatter, and Maaya finally rejoined Penny and Eve as the night’s MC – the same pink-haired maid from the door – took to the stage with a microphone in hand.

“Good evening, everyone!” the maid said to the decently-sized crowd in English, before going through the rest of the preamble in Japanese.

Maaya translated for Penny and Eve: “There are four groups tonight: No Time for Butlers, Hello Emeralds, Plus Seven, and the Eternal Blues (these are my friends, the maids from the café you went to). Whichever band receives the most cheers wins, but, in case of a draw, the judges will determine the winner.

“The judges are the club owner, a former underground idol, and a record label representative. The prize is 50,000 yen and a CD release with a small record label.

“The groups will be selling merchandise after the show. Drinks are available at the bar.”

“Now, let’s get started, shall we?” the maid MC announced in English, glancing at Penny and Eve with a big smile.

The maid skipped and then hopped offstage as No Time for Butlers began shyly filtering onstage from the back, the group members flicking nervous glances at the audience. The audience encouraged the group members with expectant applause.

No Time for Butlers were styled in Harajuku-inspired anything-goes fashion with bright, bold colours and accessories, including plastic pastel frogs attached to their outfits. The group members were all holding their own microphones.

“We are No Time for Butlers,” the frontmaid said once she had taken her spot in the middle, closer to the front of the stage. She did a short laugh, then counted up to their first number: “1, 2, 3, 4.”

No Time for Butlers performed to a pre-recorded backing track, as all the groups would, but with live singing and choreographed dancing.

The crowd cheered during the entire performance, even those who were there to support another group. The joyous vibe was enough for Eve to cheer and clap as well, and Penny managed a smile, which was her own way of cheering.

Their third song was their last, and afterwards the group members took turns thanking the crowd and politely asking them to cheer for them during the judgment phase.

No Time for Butlers left, and, after a short preparation period, Hello Emeralds came onstage. Hello Emeralds had outfits decked with costume jewelry, which caused them to sparkle whenever the spotlights hit them just right.

The group leader, who had slightly long and pointy ears, held the microphone with both hands.

“Thank you for coming,” she said to the crowd. “This song is a cover. It’s called ‘Summoning a Portal’”

She then dropped the microphone, and a red monolith rose up from beneath the stage, the monolith bleeding as Hello Emeralds performed an energetic J-pop number.

Penny’s nose started bleeding as well, and then she blacked out.

* * *

Penny was still standing when she came to. The sound of the audience cheering came to her ears as a rush of indistinct white noise, and it took several seconds for her to realise what was happening. Up onstage were two representatives from each group, the pairs standing together in different spots, with the pink-haired maid MC off to the right as she gestured to the Eternal Blues. According to her, the Eternal Blues were the recipients of the loudest cheers in Battle of the Maid Bands history.

“That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life!” Eve exclaimed, clapping and hopping up and down, her eyes on the winning group members.

She then looked at Penny, who looked back at Eve with widened eyes, dried blood running from her nostrils to her chin.

Eve stopped smiling and looked over her friend in concern, her eyes inspecting the details of Penny’s face as if she were an emergency responder. Eve’s hands were holding Penny’s cheeks, squishing her face slightly.

“Are you okay?” Eve asked.

Penny nodded. But Eve knew Penny usually nodded in this type of situation.

“What’s wrong?” Maaya asked, taking notice of Eve’s squeezing of Penny’s blood-stained face.

“I just zoned out,” Penny said. Her eyes were somewhat teary and bloodshot from not having blinked for 40 minutes. “I think I missed most of the show.”

Eve and Maaya helped Penny out of Club Badman as some of the other audience members watched them leave in confusion. The trio exited the club just as the Eternal Blues received their cash prize, the cheering even louder than before.

There were just as many pedestrians as ever on the street, but it seemed strangely quiet to Penny, to the extent that the only sounds she could hear were coming from Eve and Maaya. The black of the night sky was visible past a sea of wispy black clouds.

“Want something to drink?” Eve asked.

Eve held Penny’s hand and led her to a vending machine serving cold drinks.

“Which one do you want? Wanna try another orange one?”

Eve opened up her coin purse and sifted through it, readying a 100-yen coin for the machine. She then smiled at Penny patiently while waiting for her to select a drink.

Penny pointed at an orange drink from a brand she had yet to sample. Eve paid for it and pulled the bottle out from the dispenser, handing it to Penny.

“Are you sure this will help? Wouldn’t water be better?” Maaya asked Eve, slightly confused.

“This is the best thing for her,” Eve responded. “Carbonated drinks are like healing potions, at least for Penny.”

The bottle made a satisfying kssht sound as Penny turned the lid, and she proceeded to drink down half of it in one go.

“Ahh,” Penny exhaled. “Okay, I’m better now.”

“See?” Eve said to Maaya proudly.

Penny pulled out her phone to check how much time she had lost.

“9:30 . . . We should go back to the hotel soon.”

“I’ll walk you back,” Maaya offered. “In case something else happens.”

The girls headed back in the direction of the hotel, stopping to watch a green commuter train cut through the sky as it barrelled across a bridge high above the street. The lights within were bright, and Penny and Eve could make out all the many people sitting and standing, the passengers shooting towards wherever the night was taking them.

Inside the glass box, completely submerged in water, was a fluffy grey Nebelung cat. The cat was comfortably floating in the middle of the water, apparently able to breathe without issue. Penny looked at the information sheet stuck to the glass to learn more: the sheet called the cat something other than a cat, even though it very clearly was one.

She then watched the small TV that was set up beside the tank. Looping onscreen was a video explaining how to care for the water cat, in particular how to prepare one’s home for it. This included keeping the home in a semi-flooded state, so that the water cat could swim through it to access its food and little box, as well as to play.

Penny wished she could take the water cat home with her, but knew her mother would never allow their home to be flooded. She touched the glass with the tips of her fingers, and then groggily opened her eyes, having awakened back in Japan.

Penny looked up at Eve, who was sitting up in bed and typing on her phone with a focused expression.

“Don’t tell me what time it is,” Penny said to her.

Eve then looked at Penny, clearly struggling not to tell her what time it was.

“Tell me what time it is,” Penny relented.

“6:30,” Eve said with a smile, as if glad to no longer be by herself. “Good morning.”

Penny sat up, the hood of her pajamas falling from her head. Despite being groggy, she knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. The 5-6 hours of sleep she did manage to get would need to be enough to see her through the day.

“I know you don’t drink coffee, but . . .”

Penny thought about it. She looked past Eve and over at her mother, who was still sleeping in the other bed. She might have been snoring as well, but Penny didn’t want to appear rude by commenting on it.

“Yeah, I think I need some.”

“Okay!” Eve said excitedly, but with a hushed enough voice so that she wouldn’t wake Penny’s mother.

Eve hopped out of the bed and Penny slid out after untangling her leg from the blanket, the two entering the living room where they could talk more freely.

“If we start our day early – like, if we go out right now – and don’t come back until night, then that should be enough to reset our internal clocks. We want to avoid coming back during the day so we’re not tempted by naps.”

Penny groggily listened and nodded.

“If you try to go back to bed, I’ll have to fight you,” Eve added, and Penny wanted to believe she was joking.

Penny slowly nodded again.

The girls got dressed, Eve in a blouse and skirt that looked like they were purchased from a fairy tale mall, and Penny in a graphic tee of Lloyd’s wanted poster from Tales of Symphonia. Penny decided to get the shirt after playing through the latest remaster of Symphonia with Edith and Jill.

“I’ll write a note for Mom,” Penny said. She used the room’s complimentary stationary to write GONE FISHING onto a small notepad, with a doodle of her and Eve holding fishing rods at the bottom. She knew it didn’t matter what they wrote, just as long as they did write something.

They looked out the balcony window and were pleased to see it was no longer raining.

“Coffee,” Penny said to Eve after they put their shoes on.

They exited the room and took the elevator down to the lobby.

* * *

The early morning light was just bright enough to cut through the thin veil of grey covering the sky. Instead of going to a café or store for the coffee, which ran the risk of being more expensive, Penny and Eve decided to make use of a vending machine – which were everywhere. No matter where they looked, at least one vending machine was within eyeshot, with bright, eye-catching colours and designs, and lights lit up under the drinks like thirst-quenching Christmas trees.

So plentiful were the vending machines that Penny and Eve only just then realised they were standing directly in front of one, and this BOSS-branded machine happened to sell hot cans of coffee.

The coffee cans were half the size of pop cans, each made from different varieties of beans and with varying levels of blackness. Penny went with a rainbow blend (whatever that meant – all Penny knew was that she liked the vibrant rainbow design on the can), and Eve picked the can that had BLACK printed on it in massive sideways letters.

“Your tastes are so mature,” Penny said after they had plucked their cans from the dispenser.

“Maybe that’s why I like Maaya so much,” Eve said with a smile while looking down at her can. “You know, since she’s a year older than me.”

They opened their cans at the same time; Penny took a couple gulps from hers, and Eve took a few sips.

“You can marry Maaya, and I’ll marry BOSS,” Penny said, referring to the pipe-smoking mascot on their coffee cans.

“He does look handsome,” Eve said. “And he looks really proud of his coffee.”

“It tastes good,” Penny said. “Better than whatever I’ve tried at home.”

Penny downed her can in a few more gulps.

“We’ll survive on these,” Penny said with a grin, the caffeine already jolting her awake and making her feel less inhibited.

“When we need to,” Eve said carefully, knowing how easily Penny could get addicted to unhealthy drinks and snacks.

“Where should we go?” Penny asked, eager to go everywhere at once now that BOSS was coursing through her veins.

“I was texting with Maaya earlier, and she suggested a store called Mandarake.”

“‘Mandrake’?”

“Man-da-ra-ke. It’s like a department store but for used manga, games, figures, stuff like that. It’s supposed to have 8 floors.”

Penny’s jaw dropped lower and lower as Eve’s description went on.

“Mandarake it is!” Eve then said happily.

Before they left, however, Eve made a point of finishing her coffee. Trash receptacles were apparently nonexistent in the streets of Tokyo, forcing pedestrians to walk with their garbage and dispose of it at home. The result was the cleanest streets Penny and Eve had ever seen in a big city, though the only other big city they had been to was Toronto.

Some vending machines had small recycling bins beside them, but only some. The BOSS machine was one of them, and Eve didn’t want to risk an indefinite search for the next one.

“Take some pictures of me,” Eve said after popping her empty can into the bin, the caffeine now hitting her as well. “I’m feeling inspired.”

Eve cycled through different poses beside the vending machine as Penny snapped some photos, treating the machine like a dance partner at an elegant ball. Eve then posted the pictures on her Instagram, and would later add them to her modelling portfolio.

She thought about submitting the photos directly to BOSS, along with her résumé. Eve’s mother currently acted as her agent, which would make finding a gig in Japan a challenge for her. But she could see it happening, just as she could see anything happening. Positivity was the key she used to unlock most doors.

Penny didn’t mention to Eve that passersby had been staring at them during the shoot; she would keep that tiny amount of embarrassment to herself. Penny did notice that she cared a lot less about doing something potentially embarrassing and drawing attention to themselves while they were in Japan – perhaps because she knew that the people who saw them might never see them again, while back home they were always surrounded by the same groups of people, including people who would never let them live certain things down.

The flyer girls were already lining the sidewalks as Penny and Eve followed the GPS on Eve’s phone to the Mandarake location. Every once in a while, Penny would accept one of the flyers for the small thrill of the interaction, though that meant she now had a thin stack of flyers she was holding onto.

“I’ll need a bag,” Penny said as she walked beside Eve, who was looking down at the map on her phone. “A cool reusable one, for all the random stuff I find.”

Eve was wearing her shoulder bag with a star on it.

“You can just put things in mine,” she said.

Penny slipped the flyers into Eve’s bag as they waited at a stoplight.

“I still want a cool bag.”

“I know.”

Penny and Eve walked past a man handing out packs of tissues with advertisements for his company on the wrappers. The man was wearing a tailored business suit, which made him look slightly out-of-place in Akihabara. If the tissues had a cute character on them, Penny would have taken one, but they were covered in kanji instead.

The man took a couple quick steps to catch up to Penny and pushed a pack towards her.

“Here, you’ll need this,” he said in practiced English. He had a polite smile and appeared somewhat apologetic for invading her personal space.

Penny took the tissues in slight confusion and the man returned to his spot on the sidewalk.

“Can I put these in your bag?” she asked Eve.

Eve looked at Penny and then pointed to her own right nostril, indicating that Penny should use the tissues first. It was a gesture that Eve had gotten used to ever since she had become friends with Penny.

Penny touched the spot under her right nostril, felt a slight dampness, and then looked at the bright-yet-dark red blood on her finger. She then opened up the pack of tissues and held one under her nostril.

Penny’s previous nosebleeds had been caused by the presence of aliens, so this was concerning to her. She couldn’t remember the last time she had picked her nose, and it wasn’t like the air was dry.

By the time they reached Mandarake, her nosebleed had stopped, and, with no garbage nearby, Penny folded up the used tissue and slipped it into her pocket.

A black-and-white flyer to the right of the entrance showed Haruo Yaguchi from Hi Score Girl in white-eyed crazy mode. The text on the flyer was all in kanji, so Penny could only imagine that Haruo had just discovered his dream store, just like all the other otaku filtering in. Hi Score Girl was one of Penny’s favourite anime, a show about a game-obsessed kids growing up in the 90s and experiencing each major shift in arcade game technology, along with home consoles.

Penny had Eve take a picture of her beside the flyer as she made a peace sign; she had never thought of herself as a peace sign kind of girl before, but it was something to do with her hands as they took all these photos in Japan.

Penny took a look at the photo after Eve snapped it and noticed a hint of red beneath her nostril, which she then proceeded to wipe away with her thumb.

The girls entered the building, the first floor mainly made up of conveyor belts leading to cash registers and Mandarake-branded merch, including shirts and bags with exclusive artwork by Oshikiri Rensuke, the creator of Hi Score Girl. The conveyor belts with the cash registers were the buy-back counters, where customers could unload their used goods in exchange for cash they would inevitably spend on other anime, manga and videogame merch. The used goods that Mandarake purchased would in turn be stocked in the store.

Penny stopped at the section with the bags, already knowing she would buy one, but struggling to pick which design she desired most: the one where a girl was being chased out of the store by aliens, monsters and robots, or the one where the girl had successfully shopped at the store and was leaving with bags in tow – along with one of the robots strapped to her back. The artwork was black & white, printed on black bags.

Eve pointed at the design where the girl was being chased.

“That’s the most like you,” she said somewhat teasingly.

Penny picked up the bag, silently acknowledging the truth behind her friend’s words. A sign in English read that merchandise must be paid for on the floor it’s found on, so Penny went ahead and bought the bag, happy with her first real souvenir.

Dismissive by Clark was being played over the PA.

The staircase leading up the building was located outside, with the doors to each floor accessible from the landings. Penny and Eve took the stairs up to the second floor, Penny carrying her bag. She looked at the building across the street, which had a glowing neon I (HEART) AKIHABARA sign. Penny felt like she was seeing her own heart light up.

The girls entered the second floor, which was filled with rare dolls protected by brightly-lit glass cases, magical girl and shoujo anime toys, and cosplay accessories for dressing up as the magical girl and shoujo anime characters.

They took their time admiring the dolls, which had an uneasy mix of realism and exaggerated anime qualities, their wide, colourful eyes seeming to gaze directly into Penny and Eve’s souls. When they came to the penultimate case, they stopped, and tried to find words that wouldn’t creep each other out.

The dolls in the case were dressed like the maids from the café where Maaya worked, including a maid that looked eerily like Maaya. The heads of the dolls nearest the Maaya doll were turned ever-so-slightly towards her, as if to ensure attention was drawn to her.

After sucking in their breath, Penny and Eve stepped over to the final case, which had more maid dolls, only these ones were dressed entirely in black, without the splashes of pink of the previous dolls. Five dolls were lined up in a row on each shelf – except for the empty middle row, where all that remained were five price stickers.

“At least none of them look like us,” Eve said.

“Yeah,” Penny said. “That would be creepy.”

As they exited back onto the staircase, Penny and Eve did pass by two dolls on an unlit shelf that shared some resemblances with them, from their mismatched heights and hair colours to Penny’s glasses, though they failed to notice them.

The clouds of the overcast sky were beginning to darken somewhat. Penny tried to focus more on the thinner layers of cloud, where it seemed like shafts of light could break through at any moment. Keeping her head turned to the clouds, Penny accidentally bumped into Eve’s back as they ascended the stairs to the next landing.

“Sorry,” Penny apologised in embarrassment.

“Sorry, it’s my fault for moving slowly,” Eve apologised back needlessly. “Everything looks so cool and I keep getting distracted.”

They entered the building’s third floor, where a blast of popular shounen manga awaited them, as well as some vintage manga and anime magazines. Penny and Eve weren’t the biggest watchers or readers of shounen anime and manga, though Edith and Jill had gotten Penny to watch JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Ranking of Kings with them. But even though they weren’t necessarily fans of a lot of the series on display, they still appreciated the bright, bold aesthetics, as well as the pure boyishness of it all.

The girls flipped through random books as they winded their way through the floor. Eve fell in love with some of the silly-looking monsters on the covers of the retro live-action special effects magazines. They then oohed and aahed at the magazines with unique Ghibli art on the covers, released in the same years the movies came out.

Eve noticed a blur of movement out of the corner of her eye, and turned her head just as a maid in black stood at the end of the aisle they were in, as if the maid had popped into existence at that very instant. The maid was smiling at Eve, though her eyes appeared cold and doll-like. The maid then began walking backwards while continuing to look at Eve, eventually bumping into the shelf behind her and causing random volumes of shounen manga to tumble to the floor.

“What do you think’s on the fourth floor?” Eve asked Penny, turning to her friend with a frozen smile.

“Hmm, I dunno,” Penny said, not noticing the maid herself. “Probably more of the coolest stuff ever. You ready to check it out?

“Yeah,” Eve said, still with her frozen smile.

The girls left the third floor, Eve vowing to remain brave so that her best friend could maintain her role as the one who was scared of everything. They then entered the fourth floor and immediately turned around and walked back out, the wall-to-wall doujinshi of a rather adult variety being even less of their thing than mainstream shounen manga.

The fifth floor was devoted entirely to BL, and there they took the time to explore again. Penny flipped through a mildly spicy volume with attractive artwork, and then stared at the cover, wondering how she’d be able to slip it past customs on the way back home.

“Are you thinking of getting a souvenir for Edith and Jill?” Eve asked.

“Yeah, but . . . maybe not this,” Penny said, reluctantly putting the book back. “I’ll get something that doesn’t have a chance of being confiscated.”

“That leaves out this floor,” Eve said.

The sixth floor was where all the movies, music and videogames could be found. Since Penny and Eve had already seen what felt like every notable game in existence at the Super Potato, Penny skipped over them to instead focus on the CDs, in particular the game soundtracks. Many of them had beautiful and unique cover art, and Penny kind of wanted some of them just for that, despite not owning a CD player. She was especially drawn to the Yoshitaka Amano artwork on the front and back of All Sounds of Final Fantasy I & 2, a compilation album from the ancient past of 1988.

“You’re never going to listen to it,” Eve told her.

“Yeah, but . . .”

“You’re never going to listen to it,” Eve said again.

Penny sighed and put it back on the shelf. The Pixel Remaster rearrangement of the Castle Cornelia theme from the first Final Fantasy was playing over the PA, and it was one of the sweetest pieces of music Penny had ever heard.

They exited back onto the stairs and looked out over the street together, realising just how high up they were getting.

“Let’s take a picture together when we get to the top,” Eve said.

“We’re almost there,” Penny said, wishing the building was even taller.

There were only two floors left. The seventh floor had vintage toys, collectable cards and stickers, and seeing figures taken directly from ’60s special effects shows gave the floor a museum vibe similar to what the girls had experienced at Super Potato.

Eve was once again enamoured with all the silly monsters from various classic tokusatsu series, especially their big, expressive eyes and open-mouthed expressions. She could imagine being a princess in a world where such monsters were her knights.

Eve told this to Penny.

“See, if I can develop an RPG like the old Final Fantasies, then I can make that happen,” Penny said. “I’d just need some of the music for inspiration.”

They then checked out a glass case of shiny Evangelion phone cards from the ’90s. The cards were used for payphones, and the anime and videogame characters in their designs made them sought-after collectibles.

A card featuring Rei in a pink kimono jumped out at Penny as something Jill would like to have, especially since it was only a little over 100 yen. She decided to buy it, so that Jill’s souvenir would be covered, leaving only Edith and Cale. Cale was Penny’s most fashionable friend, taking outfit inspiration from Harajuku fashion TikToks, so Penny wanted to wait and see if she ended up in Harajuku herself before picking something up for her.

The final floor had contemporary figures and models based on current trends in anime and videogames. The large amount of Spy × Family figures, gachapon and ads, including massive posters throughout all of Tokyo, made it out to be one of the most popular series at the moment, and which successfully got Penny interested in wanting to check out the anime when she returned to Canada.

Eve received a text message, which she read intently.

“Maaya says she’ll be ready soon,” Eve said. “We’ll meet her at a place called Mister Donut.”

“I’m ready for a donut.”

“Think Mister Donut and the Super Potato are friends?”

Penny and Eve returned to the final landing, taking multiple pictures together with their backs against the railing, angling the camera to incorporate as much of Akihabara as possible. Penny was sure to hold up her bag and the phone card in some shots.

“No,” Maaya stated matter-of-factly. “Most buildings don’t have basements in Japan.”

What they could make out of the floral wallpaper through the shadows had been faded with time, and the wooden doors lining the walls were chipped and scratched; the hallway not only felt lived-in but also somewhat poorly maintained, like people lived here but didn’t care that they did.

“If this is street-level, the exit must be close,” Maaya added, taking the role of leader.

“Should we record a video?” Eve asked Penny.

“I think we should just get out of here,” Penny said anxiously, still staring ahead.

Penny and Eve followed Maaya down the hallway, Maaya using her phone’s flashlight to light their way. Penny kept checking the spots where the walls met the floor for cockroaches and rats, but the lack of them did nothing to alleviate her fears.

The muffled sounds of a first-person shooter videogame emanated from one of the apartments on the right (if they were apartments), the door vibrating with bass-heavy blasts.

“It smells like milk that’s been left on the counter,” noted Eve.

Penny didn’t want to note anything. She felt less like she was in Tokyo and more like she was back home in Southwestern Ontario, or at least some nightmare version of it.

The hallway seemed to go on for fifteen minutes, far longer than any hallway should, though the girls wondered if it was simply their fear slowing down their perception of time. Finally, and thankfully, they came upon the green light of an exit sign, its arrow pointing to a large metal door. Penny couldn’t help but look at the silhouette of a green figure exiting through a white rectangle and think of a shadow person escaping into the light.

Maaya turned off her light and opened the door, which creaked loudly. They were immediately greeted by a bustling, still-rainy pedestrian street somewhere in Akihabara. The girls exited and fully breathed in the cool night air.

“What a strange exit,” Eve commented. “It’d be better to just take the stairs.”

“Do you know where we are?” Penny asked Maaya, feeling like she just wanted to be back with her mother at this point.

Maaya looked around. A seemingly-unending stream of pedestrians passed in front of them, each holding an umbrella. Penny and Eve tried to follow Maaya’s gaze despite being totally disoriented.

Maaya pointed out a three-storey building she recognised with a different maid café on each floor, and then she pointed out the Hard-Off located at the intersection where their pedestrian street met another. The moment Penny opened her mouth to ask what “Hard-Off” was, Maaya explained that it was a used electronics store.

“The thing is,” Maaya said, confused, “we’re not near the Super Potato. I know where we are, but not how we ended up here.”

“Should we go back to the Super Potato, to talk to the police about the arcade?” Penny asked.

“No, don’t worry about that. We reported the situation, which is the main thing,” Maaya reassured her. “If they need to reach me, they can call me back.”

Penny’s own phone vibrated with an incoming message. She read the text from her mother, suggesting she not stay out too much longer.

“Can you point us in the direction of our hotel?” she asked Maaya.

“I’ll lead you there,” Maaya responded with a smile.

Eve smiled as well, happy to spend more time with their new friend. On their way back to the hotel they took notice of a green commuter train running along a high bridge in the distance, the bright lights of the train cars visible through its windows. The way the city felt so alive at night was a massive change from their hometown, which would shut down completely by 8PM, and it made Eve wish she could stay out even later.

When they reached the front doors of the hotel, Eve turned to Maaya, her heart racing as she worked up the courage to ask her to hang out again.

“If you’re free sometime, it’d be so cool if you could show us around some more,” Eve said, the words stumbling out of her.

Maaya looked at Eve happily, as if those were the exact words she had been hoping to hear.

“How about tomorrow?” Maaya offered. “We could meet for lunch, and I can show you a couple more places for your videos.”

“Yes, that would be great!” Eve exclaimed, her eyes nearly tearing up with happiness.

“I’ll text you the directions tomorrow morning,” Maaya said.

The girls then said goodbye to each other, and Maaya disappeared back into Akiba, her transparent umbrella joining a group of others as if they were a school of jellyfish. Penny and Eve entered the hotel lobby, Penny struggling to process everything she had witnessed that night and Eve mulling over what she should wear tomorrow.

Shunka Ryougen by Haru Nemuri was playing over the PA in the hotel lobby, and followed Penny and Eve into the elevator as they rose back up to the 20th floor.

They re-entered their room, and in the living room Penny’s mother was sitting in a chair with even more work papers spread out across the table. A variety show was playing on the TV, the panelists presented in circles onscreen as they reacted to various meme videos from around the world. For anyone else this might’ve been incredibly distracting, but Penny’s mother often worked with the TV on, typically setting it to the news. Since Penny’s mother was always working, this was her main way of experiencing entertainment.

“How was it?” Penny’s mother asked without looking up from her laptop, typing as she talked. “Did you have fun?”

“It’s amazing!” Eve excitedly answered first, as if the strange occurrences with the arcade cabinets weren’t worth mentioning. “There are so many wonderful stores and restaurants, like the cafés with dancing maids.”

“You actually went to a maid café?” Penny’s mother asked with a raised eyebrow, though her eyes remained on her work.

“It was cute,” Penny said, not wanting to bring up the arcades, either, lest her mother keep them from going out again. “I wouldn’t’ve gone by myself, but going with Eve made it fun.”

“We met a maid,” Eve added. “She handed us a flyer for a café, and she ended up dancing there, and then she showed us a cool game store.”

“We’re going to meet up with her tomorrow,” Penny said. “She’s our age, and wants to help with Girls Mode. I think we’ll get a lot of views with her.”

“How nice,” Penny’s mother said. “Could you share her contact info with me, in case I have trouble reaching you?”

Penny knew this was her mother’s way of saying her daughter should be wary of strangers she just met in a new city. Eve passed along Maaya’s number to Penny’s mother, and Penny added it to her own phone as well.

“And the melon bread?” Penny’s mother asked, clearly sensing Penny had forgotten.

“I forgot!” Penny said. “I’m so sorry.”

Penny felt genuinely bad about it, since her mother had handled everything to do with bringing them to Japan, and here Penny had failed to do such a small thing for her in return.

“There are several konbini right next to the hotel, if you don’t mind going back down,” Penny’s mother said while comparing a pale blue work paper with a document on her laptop screen.

Penny got the message: her mother really wanted this bread.

“Get yourself some snacks as well,” her mother suggested. “We don’t have anything here, and you’ll likely have trouble sleeping due to jet lag.”

Penny looked to Eve, expecting her to appear exhausted after their first night out, but Eve was smiling back excitedly, if anything with even more energy than before. Perhaps it was an effect of the coffee she had at the maid café – Penny didn’t drink coffee, herself, so she was unsure how long the caffeine lasted.

Before they headed back out, Penny’s mother mentioned to them that the umbrellas in the black holder outside their room was for every guest’s use, and that they should take a couple.

Penny and Eve left the hotel room, and pulled out a pair of transparent umbrellas that were still slightly wet from previous use. It made them wonder what other guests were staying on their floor, and if they were foreigners like them.

“What if I stayed here and became a café maid?” Eve asked Penny on the elevator ride down.

Even if Eve was half-joking, as she sometimes was, the question took Penny aback.

“What about your family and school?”

“I’d still have a family, and I’d still go to school,” Eve responded with a thumbs-up.

Penny sighed in relief, now that it was clear her friend wasn’t totally serious.

“You’d be a great maid,” Penny told her honestly. “Everyone would love you, and you’d get requests all the time.”

“And it’s sort of like being in the entertainment industry,” Eve said enthusiastically. “Especially with the stage performance.”

Eve’s ultimate career goal was to be in “the entertainment industry”, whether that meant being a model, an actor, a YouTuber, or now a café maid.

“We’ll have to ask Maaya about it,” Penny said helpfully.

The elevator door opened, and for a brief moment Penny was fearful they would find themselves back in the dark hallway with the floral wallpaper. The lobby was thankfully as it should be, and the girls got off as a Japanese woman got on.

Penny and Eve cut across the lobby, the aging security guard now pacing down the middle with his hands held behind his back. He was checking the seats of the black lounge chairs as he walked, as if keeping an eye out for items that might’ve been left behind.

At the hotel entrance Penny and Eve readied their umbrellas, and popped them open as they exited back into the rainy night. They tilted their umbrellas to look up at the neon signs as they headed left; last time they had gone right, and this was a fine enough excuse to see a tiny fraction more of the city.

There was something comforting about all the stores still being open, all the flyer girls still handing out flyers and checking texts from their significant others, and all the pedestrians still passing back and forth while carrying bags containing anime, manga, and videogame-related goods. It felt safe and alive and filled with endless possibilities – in particular, endless possibilities to find something to buy. Penny wondered about living in Akihabara, herself, but knew she’d have trouble stopping herself from spending money every day.

The girls passed by other foreigners who were huddled together in a group in full cosplay, each checking their phones as if wondering where they’re supposed to go. Penny couldn’t determine what they were cosplaying as, but when she made eye contact with the one dressed as a kind of martial arts lizard, she smiled knowingly, as if to silently shout “I can’t believe we’re here!”

“Oh, look!” Eve said, and Penny turned to look at what had caught Eve’s attention.

The pair stopped and gazed up at the 7-Eleven sign lit brightly above the 7-Eleven they were now standing in front of.

“All the 7-Elevens closed down in Canada,” Eve said, looking at this one as if it were the last store in existence.

“I remember them,” Penny said. “The abandoned one by Cale’s place burned down last month.”

A trio of cashiers greeted them in unison as they entered, each wearing a green uniform with white, orange, green and red stripes running across the chest. At first glance the 7-Eleven was similar to the ones from Penny and Eve’s childhoods, but upon further inspection the snack selection was entirely Japanese, with childlike manga mascots on many of the packages. Penny couldn’t help but peruse the magazine stand as well, checking out the manga magazines and wishing she could read them.

She then pulled out a videogame magazine and flipped through it, hopeful she would find previews of games that had yet to be announced in North America. One section was apparently devoted to Metroid 7, but outside of the logo on the first page of the article, the pages were all black.

When she was about to close the magazine, not wanting to be reminded of her uncomfortable experience in the arcade, she noticed that black glossy letters were set against the black paper. She opened the magazine wider and tilted it under the store’s bright white lights, trying to read the letters, but they were neither Japanese nor English, and in fact didn’t resemble any written language she had seen before.

“Okay,” Penny said to herself, as if that was all that needed to be said, and she placed the magazine back onto the stand.

Is Your Love Strong Enough? by Bryan Ferry was playing tinnily over the PA.

Penny turned around just as Eve excitedly stepped towards her with five different packaged breads in her arms, including the melon bread for Penny’s mother.

“I found the melon bread!” she said triumphantly. “And bread with red bean paste, and bread with custard!”

“Nice,” Penny said, somewhat shaken by the magazine. “Let’s get some drinks, too.”

Penny’s mouth had gone dry, and all she could think about now was the coldest, most refreshing drink. They checked the refrigerators, and Penny picked out a carbonated orange drink, though she had also been eyeing a milky matcha tea thing that looked oh so delicious, and which she decided she would try next time.

Eve picked out a strawberry milk. They decided not to get something for Penny’s mother, since Penny’s mother either drank coffee during the day or water in the evening, and they didn’t want to upset her sleep schedule even more with something caffeinated.

They purchased the snacks and drinks together, the cashier helpfully explaining how to pay at the machine that was set up in front of the cash register. Penny looked at the machine with wide, confused eyes as the cashier gestured to the picture of a paper bill on the touchscreen; Penny pressed it, fed her cash into a slot, and watched as her change was spat out the bottom.

The cashiers thanked Penny and Eve in unison as the girls left the store with a small plastic bag in tow.

* * *

Penny’s mother nibbled on her melon bread, savouring the flavour while typing on her laptop with her free hand. As Penny’s mother and her work had taken up much of the couch, Penny plopped herself onto the chair and Eve simply sat on a cushion in front of the coffee table, the girls enjoying their drinks and snacks while watching TV.

Penny put herself in charge of the remote and flipped through news programs and variety shows on her quest for fresh anime. Even if she couldn’t understand what was being said, she could still appreciate the visuals – and knowing she’d be able to lord it over Edith and Jill, her childhood friends who had first introduced her to anime, for the rest of their lives, was a uniquely exquisite pleasure in and of itself.

Penny took sips of her carbonated orange drink every few channels, and offered her review of it being one of the tastiest orange drinks she had ever drunk in her life. A lightbulb appeared over Eve’s head, and she quickly got up on one knee as she gestured for Penny to stop.

“Snack reviews!” Eve exclaimed as Penny stared at her with the bottle’s lips against her own. “Like, little ones for YouTube Shorts!”

They set up Eve’s phone, propping it on the table so that it faced the TV, where a random late-night anime was in the middle of airing. Penny sat with her knees on a cushion a bit to the left of the screen, so that the TV and her upper torso were both in frame.

“This is the most delicious orange drink I’ve ever had,” Penny said to Eve’s phone. She then took a sip and turned her head to look at the TV.

Onscreen was a crying baby being carried by an ogre across what appeared to be a medieval landscape. The baby bit the ogre, and the intense pain they caused it made the ogre run so fast that it burst through a castle gate, knocking down all the soldiers within. The baby slipped from the ogre’s grasp and, mere moments from hitting the ground, cast a spell that put themselves in a floating bubble. The baby drifted off to safety while continuing to cry.

Penny turned back to the camera.

“I got it at 7-Eleven,” she added. “In Akihabara. I recommend it.”

Penny then gave a thumbs-up and Eve stopped the recording.

“That was amazing!” Eve said excitedly as she checked the framing of the video on her phone. “With the anime on the TV and everything, this could get like a hundred views. I’ll upload it now.”

Penny couldn’t help but feel caught up in Eve’s excitement and smiled at her. She then sat back in the chair to resume channel surfing.

More and more anime popped up onscreen, though Penny noticed the shows were also becoming slightly more risqué as the night wore on, which she might not have had a problem with if her mother wasn’t half-watching with her.

Penny cycled back around to a news channel – just as the reporter talked over a man being led out of a hoarder’s nest in handcuffs – and placed the remote onto the coffee table.

“I’m going to try to sleep,” she announced.

“Good luck, sweetie,” her mother said without looking at her.

Penny got dressed in her hooded Rilakkuma pajamas and Eve slipped into her pale blue nightgown. They took turns brushing their teeth and then got into the left bed in the bedroom.

Penny and Eve had already returned their attention to each other.

“You’d think they’d dance to like an anime theme or something,” Penny said. She looked down at her empty plate, only just now realising she had finished her pancake.

“I kept waiting for them to invite a customer up, like at a theme park,” Eve said, her eyes sparkling at the idea. “I totally would’ve gone up if they tried that!”

Penny opened her mouth to speak, but Eve spoke for her: “I know, there’s no way you would’ve danced.”

Eve took a sip of her coffee, then continued speaking with an encouraging smile: “I still would’ve rooted for you.”

The shadow of a maid who wasn’t their own fell onto their table. Penny paused in the middle of gulping down her orange drink to glance at the shadow’s owner.

The flyer girl was standing there, less like a maid in a themed restaurant, or even like a girl who handed out flyers for one, and more like a girl who had just got off work and was about to enjoy the night.

“How was it?” the flyer girl asked. “Did you like the performance?”

“It was sooo cute!” praised Eve. “When you told us this was a maid café, I was expecting way more sweeping and a lot less dancing. But now that I know what they’re like, I want to come to one everyday.”

“I’m so happy,” the flyer girl said. “I choreographed that dance myself.”

Penny and Eve were blown away – they wouldn’t have expected that from someone so close to their age, especially not from someone they had just seen handing out advertisements on a rainy street.

“You must be a higher rank of maid, then,” Eve said with a huge smile.

“S-tier, for sure,” Penny agreed.

The flyer girl smiled appreciatively at them.

“Not quite,” she said. “I’m more of a freelancer . . . I like to be able to come and go as I please.”

The flyer girl pulled out her phone, looked at it, then looked back at Penny and Eve.

“My name’s Maaya,” she told them.

“I’m Penny,” Penny said. She was secretly happy to be having a full conversation with a local in English.

“I’m Eve,” Eve said. “I know someone named Maya back in Canada.”

“Oh, are you both Canadians?” Maaya asked, genuinely interested.

“Yup! We live near Toronto.”

“The Maple Leafs, right?”

“That’s right!” Eve responded, impressed. “You know a lot.”

Maaya looked to her right. Penny and Eve’s maid had appeared as if from out of thin air. Maaya spoke to the maid in Japanese, and the maid nodded in response before heading towards the front counter.

“Your half-hour is up,” Maaya informed Penny and Eve. “You could stay here, but you’ll be charged for another 30 minutes.”

Penny and Eve looked at each other; the look said “as cool as this place is, we shouldn’t waste our money.” They made use of their napkins and stood, satisfied with the experience.

“Is this your first time in Akiba?” Maaya asked them.

“It’s our first time in Japan,” Penny explained.

“What made you decide to come here?”

“My mom came on a business trip,” Penny said. “We’re just tagging along.”

“We have a YouTube channel called Girls Mode,” Eve added proudly. “We haven’t used it in a while, but we have a thousand subscribers on it. We’d post Let’s Plays, reviews, makeup tutorials, game development tips – pretty much anything that came to mind.

“We want to revive it during our trip, and post some travelogue videos.”

Maaya smiled a knowing smile, like she was eager to share a secret with them.

“I can show you a few places, if you like,” she said. “I know Akiba like the back of my hand.”

Eve looked at the back of Maaya’s hand, and found it slender and pretty. She then looked at Penny, as if leaving the decision to her. Penny looked at Eve and could tell Eve would be glad to spend more time with Maaya. They then looked at Maaya together.

“Sure,” Penny said, slightly weirded out. Despite Maaya being close to them in age, Penny knew she shouldn’t be totally trusting of a stranger they had just met in another country, especially since Eve clearly would. She decided she would keep her guard up for both their sakes.

Yes, let’s follow the strange maid, Penny thought as she and Eve followed Maaya to the front counter. What the heck are we doing?

Eve paid for both of them with her credit card, which had been set up for her by her upper-middle-class parents. To Penny, “upper-middle-class” meant Eve’s family was fabulously rich, but she never commented on this out loud around Eve, since she knew it would make her feel bad.

“You can pay me back at the hotel room,” Eve said with a smile. During the trek from

Narita Airport to their hotel room in Akihabara, Eve had taken notice of Penny’s struggles to figure out which Japanese coins were worth which amounts of money. Covering costs for both of them was simply a way of streamlining their experience.

The counter maids bowed and thanked them, so Penny and Eve bowed and thanked the maids back, with Penny blushing as she bowed clumsily and awkwardly.

Penny felt embarrassed by her attempts at interacting with pretty much everyone, especially in comparison to how effortlessly Eve integrated into a society so unlike her own. She didn’t get it – she was the one who was 1000% into Japanese video games, 80% into manga, and 70% into anime, not Eve.

It was like the shyness she had spent her first year of high school breaking free from had come rushing back, wrapping her up in its quiet comfort.

But, also, it was just the first night. She would keep trying.

“Let’s go,” Maaya said.

The trio exited the maid café, descended the green-lit stairs, and made their way back to the slightly rainy street.

“Where are you staying?” Maaya asked them.

“It’s that really tall hotel close to where you were handing out flyers,” Penny said. “We’re staying there with my mom. I forget what it’s called.”

“Oh, that one?” Maaya said knowingly. “That’s a nice hotel. Western-style beds, modern design . . . One of my aunts stays there when she visits.”

Hearing Maaya casually reference her family made Penny feel more comfortable. The trio stuck close together as they walked, with Maaya slightly in the lead.

“We won’t venture too far from it,” Maaya assured them. “It can be fun to get lost in Akiba, but maybe not on the first night.”

“You speak English so well,” Eve complimented her.

“Thank you,” Maaya said. “I’m paid extra when I send foreigners to cafés, so I’ve been taking advanced courses online.”

She then smiled at Eve. “Would you like to practice your Japanese?”

Maaya, in Japanese, asked Eve what she was most interested in doing in Akihabara. Eve picked up on some of the words, and answered: “Penny is a huge, huge fan of games. I want her to see the coolest game store.”

“That’s easy,” Maaya told them. “It’s Super Potato.”

Eve nearly gasped. The idea of going to a place called Super Potato was all she needed to achieve perfect happiness. It didn’t matter what kind of store it was.

“I’ve heard of it,” Penny said, while Eve silently imagined a potato with magical powers. “It’s a big retro store, right?”

“That’s right. It takes up the top three floors of a building.”

It didn’t take long for the girls to arrive at Super Potato, the three sheltered from the rain by Maaya’s transparent umbrella.

Depicted on a big yellow sign was an anthropomorphic potato with a surprisingly Western design, looking more like the mascot of a Canadian chip brand than something used to promote a videogame store in Akihabara. Maaya asked if they wanted to take a picture in front of it, and used Penny’s cellphone to take a picture of Penny and Eve with the potato visible above them. Penny had managed an awkward smirk for the photo, while Eve had a big, cheesy smile.

“I can help record videos for your YouTube channel as well,” Maaya offered.

“Really?! That would be amazing!” Eve responded gratefully.

Eve passed her phone to Maaya, as hers was more advanced than Penny’s. After showing Maaya which buttons to press, Maaya began recording the pair as they climbed the steps to the first level of the store. The climb was slow as Penny and Eve kept stopping to admire the retro game posters, featuring everything from Parodius to a roster of Claymation enemies from Super Mario RPG. Penny took the time to explain all the Japan-only games being advertised, mainly for Eve’s sake but also for their modest YouTube audience.

Locals who were used to the posters had to navigate around the girls, apologising as they did so. Eventually they located the entrance to the first level, and Penny’s legs nearly buckled at the sight of all the old games within, this floor focusing on older systems like the Famicom, Super Famicom and Mega Drive. (Penny then explained that the Famicom was the NES, the Super Famicom was the Super Nintendo, and the Mega Drive was the Sega Genesis.)

Penny grabbed Eve’s arm and squeezed it, needing an outlet for the rush of retro game energy coursing through her veins.

“It’s beautiful,” Penny whisper-shouted. For a moment Eve assumed she was referring to the life-size Fox McCloud statue just past the entrance, but, no, Penny clearly meant everything.

The retro posters continued into the store itself, and CRT monitors displayed the attract modes for Final Fantasy VI and Sonic the Hedgehog 2. In addition to all the games – presented either in their original boxes on the shelves or as loose cartridges in tidy bins below – there were rare soundtrack CDs, strategy guides, artbooks and toys, including an entire row of deluxe Puyo Puyo character figures.

Penny took her time in each section, with Eve happily following, Penny pointing out rare and unique games as Maaya recorded the tour. The artwork for many of the games was quite beautiful, with hand-painted manga-style illustrations on nearly all of them. The games’ original cardboard boxes were also packaged well in clear plastic sleeves, preventing fingerprints and other damage from the many browsing customers. Penny truly believed the store should be listed as a museum in official travel guides.

“Oh, Sailor Moon!” Eve exclaimed, finally finding something she not only recognised but actively enjoyed. Apparently, Japan was treated to an entire run of Sailor Moon games that had never made their way to North America, with a tonne of them on the Super Famicom.

The Sailor Moon section gave Eve an opportunity to speak to the Girls Mode viewers, with Eve explaining that she preferred the monster-of-the-week episodes to the high stakes fever dream finales, and how she preferred the slice-of-life scenes to the actual fighting. What she liked most about the fight scenes was the Sailor Scout outfits and transformation sequences.

She then struck Sailor Moon’s iconic pose, and some other customers asked Maaya if they could have their pictures taken with the blonde girl doing the anime poses. Maaya translated for Eve, and Eve accepted despite being slightly uncomfortable – in her mind, this was the price of fame for a YouTuber.

The trio moved up to the second floor, where the rest of the games could be found, everything ranging from the PlayStation era to software for contemporary systems like the Switch 2. Eve was lucky enough to get a Switch 2 for her birthday, while Penny still had the original Switch that had released when she was a toddler. Whenever Eve visited Penny, Penny asked Eve if the Switch 2 was coming with her.

While Penny basked in the glory of the retro sections, soaking in the history that emanated from their stylish jewel cases, Eve checked out the Switch 2 section, looking at the Japanese titles with tremendous curiosity. Maaya stuck with Eve, recording her reactions.

Eve spotted a case that featured Princess Rosalina on the cover, with no one else on it other than Lumas.

“What?!” she exclaimed as she lifted up the case.

“That’s Super Princess Rosalina,” Maaya told her in amusement. “You don’t have it in Canada?”

“What? No! If we had this, then I’d have it!”

Eve stared intensely at the box art, her mouth hanging open. It was what she had always dreamed of: a Mario game with 0% Mario and 100% Rosalina. Her brain was suddenly filled with different voices, some encouraging her to buy it (would such a game even have a language barrier?) and others trying to convince her not to spend so much money on the first day (who knows what else she might find?).

Eve was sweating while frozen in place. It was the most Penny-like she had ever felt. Finally, she put the case back on the shelf.

“Maybe I’ll come back for it,” she said to the camera with a smile.

Maaya stopped recording and handed Eve’s phone back to her.

“You’re getting a low battery,” Maaya said. “But you do have enough for a few more videos, if you find something else interesting.”

“In that case, we should find Penny and see how she’s holding up,” Eve suggested. “She’s either completely energised by all the games, or all the games have sapped her energy and left her enfeebled. I can never guess which it’ll be.”

Eve and Maaya located Penny between two CRT monitors, the left one running the attract mode for the first Ryū ga Gotoku (or Yakuza, as she knew it in Canada) and the right running Phantasy Star Universe’s, both on PlayStation 2. Penny was hypnotised by the left screen, its fictionalised depiction of Kabukicho reminding her that, yes, she really was in real-life Tokyo, something she had always dreamed of but never thought would one day become reality.

“Are you ready for the final level?” Maaya asked her.

“I don’t know if my heart can take it,” Penny said half-jokingly.

Maaya looked at her in concern. “Do you have a medical condition?”

“Penny’s medical condition is that she likes games a little too much,” Eve explained to Maaya with a smile.

“I think you’ll survive it,” Maaya told Penny reassuringly. “The last floor is a small arcade and snack shop.”

Maaya led them to the next set of stairs, which had some old prints of atmospheric Katsuya Terada fantasy artwork on display.

“Do you come here a lot?” Eve asked Maaya from behind as they ascended.

“No, but I try to learn the area in order to be helpful to tourists. Not just foreigners, but people visiting from elsewhere in Japan. The more helpful you are, the more likely it is the person you’re helping will get around to the maid café you told them about.”

“But you must like games if you work in Akihabara, right?”

The girls reached the final floor. Maaya turned to Eve and smiled.

“Of course, I like games. I don’t own any consoles, though – I do all my gaming on my phone.”

Eve and Maaya then turned to the spot Penny had been standing, but she was already gone, having disappeared into the arcade without a word.

“Oh, we need to record a video of her playing at a cabinet!” Eve said. “We missed our chance the last place we went.”

Eve and Maaya entered the small arcade in search of Penny. They were immediately struck by the unexpected jungle theme, with fake trees and plants set up around the game cabinets, including vines hanging down from the ceiling. The theming made more sense when they stumbled upon a life-size statue of Naked Snake from Metal Gear Solid 3, who was holding a broken wooden gun. Maaya figured the statue came first, with the jungle aesthetic thrown together afterwards.

Maaya took a picture of Eve as Eve copied Snake’s pose, her gun fingers pointing to the floor at an angle. Unlike Snake’s stoic look, however, Eve had a cheesy smile. She was thinking about how big a surprise the photo would be when she showed it to Penny. Maaya and Eve then exchanged contact information, so Maaya could take pics and vids with her own phone and send them to Eve at the end of the night.

“You’re like an unofficial member of Girls Mode now,” Eve told Maaya happily.

“You can pay me when you’re famous,” Maaya joked.

Eve thought about it for a moment.

“We should be thanking you for your help,” she said seriously. “If you see something really cool, and it’s not super expensive, I can buy it for you.”

Maaya smiled in amusement.

“No, I was only joking,” she said. “Please don’t. I’m happy to show Akiba to people. It’s a passion of mine, since I love it so much.”

“In that case, if you ever come to Canada, I’ll be the one to show you around!”

Maaya smiled warmly.

“I’d like that.”

Eve smiled back.

“We just have to be careful of the shadow people,” she said matter-of-factly while still smiling.

Maaya looked at Eve in confusion, unsure whether she was joking or not. Maaya and Eve then looked at Penny, who had appeared from the next row of cabinets. Penny looked at Eve with a somewhat haunted expression.

“I think something’s wrong with the arcade games in Japan,” she said.

“What do you mean?” Eve asked.

“I . . . I’ll show you,” Penny said. “Make sure you’re recording.”

Penny led the girls down the next aisle as if in slow motion, flicking glances left and right; it was as if she expected a digitised creature to jump out of one of the screens and attack them. Maaya recorded Penny from behind, following her like a camera in a third-person videogame. Maaya was also looking left and right, wondering what it was that had weirded out this shy girl from Canada.

Kandy by Fever Ray was playing over the PA.

Eventually Penny brought Eve and Maaya to the cabinet that had concerned her. The marquee made it clear it was a Marvel vs. Capcom 2 machine, but the screen was rapidly flickering black and white. Two players were sitting on the stools in front of it, their hands on the sticks and buttons, a look of concentration on the left player and a joyful smile on the right.

But their hands weren’t moving, and neither were their bodies, their expressions frozen unblinking on their faces. Maaya recorded the players, and at this point she was a bit freaked-out as well.

“Don’t look at the screens,” Maaya warned Penny and Eve seriously.

Penny and Eve then looked around them, and noticed that all of the screens were now flickering, and every single one of the players was frozen in place. They then glanced at the exit, having noticed some movement in that direction, and spotted one or two women just as they were leaving. They had only caught a glimpse, but they’d swear the figures were wearing black-and-pink maid outfits.

“Is it some type of seizure?” Eve asked Maaya.

“That seems most likely,” Maaya responded.

Maaya leaned down and spoke to the frozen Marvel vs. Capcom 2 players in Japanese, asking if they were okay. The players failed to respond.

“If it’s a seizure, we shouldn’t risk moving them,” Penny offered shakily.

Maaya nodded and contacted emergency services on her phone, explaining the situation as calmly and clearly as she could.

The girls then headed to the snack counter, hoping to find an unfrozen attendant, but the space past the counter was devoid of life, and they didn’t want to head into the small back room uninvited.

Their next thought was to head back down. They exited the arcade and went into the down-only elevator, where the only options were the emergency button and the button for street-level.

“What do you think they’re seeing?” Eve asked Penny curiously.

“What do you mean?” Penny asked back. “It’s just flickering screens.”

“But . . . what if they’re seeing what we saw in the other arcade?” Eve hypothesised. “It wasn’t normal, right? Maybe we were frozen, too.”

Penny looked at Eve, wondering if she was right. Then she looked down, not wanting Eve to see just how anxious she was.