Smoke permeated the air at the busy Takeshita Street entrance in Harajuku, the gate decorated with a cute, colourful owl, gift-wrapped boxes, and stars, all of which were made out of artificial flowers. Despite a building being on fire farther down the street, Harajuku was popping off, the dense crowds largely made up of pedestrians wearing bold, individualistic outfits. Just about everyone was masked, as well, to cut down on the amount of smoke they were breathing in.

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.