Pt. 8

Penny and Eve found themselves in a dark, covered, mazelike alley that was packed with old vending machines, where the only light came from the dim, sometimes flickering display lights.

“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.

In 3 Mins by 34423 was playing in the stairwell as they ascended to the second floor.