Sitting on the futon of her dorm room floor with her three friends, Emily turned the card in her hand. She was half-listening to Michelle and Lachlan debate the finer points of Power Girl Z: Kill Zone, the second standalone movie in the Power Girl Z anime series, while Ansel drank a canned highball and dutifully nodded along. They had only known each other for two months, but they were already close friends: Michelle, a blond Australian, Lachlan, a freckled fellow American from Ohio, and Ansel, a tall, dark-haired German whose deadpan, teutonic humor they all found increasingly hilarious.

  “It doesn’t make any sense though! In season twelve, Power Girl clearly mastered intermediate-distance teleportation. What’s to stop her from just teleporting into the Kor Klan Syndicate’s hideout?” Michelle said, her voice rising.

  Lachlan rolled his eyes. “Because she needs a mental image! Remember what happened at the end of that season when she tried teleporting into Execudor’s palace? Wound up almost cutting her arm off…”

  “I know she needs a mental image, but why wouldn’t she just get the blueprints for the hideout?” Michelle rebutted, clearly annoyed.

  “Probably because the Kor Klan Syndicate is constantly reshuffling their rooms? They’d be stupid not to, knowing about Power Girl’s teleportation power.”

  Michelle sat back with her arms crossed in a huff. “See, this is why you shouldn’t give your protagonists overpowered abilities. You then have to keep putting restrictions on them, or making excuses for why they don’t work out. Right, Emily?”

  “What? Oh, yeah. Totally,” Emily said, blinking. She took a sip of her canned highball to try to cover up her lapse in attention.

  “You’re especially brooding and mysterious this evening, Emily. Or maybe the highballs are a bit strong?” Ansel remarked with his German accent, arching his thick eyebrows.

  “Oh, no. I’m sorry. I’m just thinking about this weird interaction I had today at Comic Con.”

  “A girl having a weird interaction at Comic Con?” Michelle said, laughing. “I’ve had a couple of those myself. Although usually I just give them my ‘dead stare,’ and then no one bothers me.” Michelle demonstrated the expression, her mouth slightly open, head tilted back, eyes bulging out like a corpse.

  Lachlan and Ansel both laughed, and Emily smiled. Even with her face contorted, the Brisbane-born Michelle was attractive in a blonde, irrepressibly sunny kind of way. One would never have guessed that Emily’s roommate had read the entire hundred and thirteen volumes of Attack on Deepholm in the original Japanese, or passed the JLPT N2.

  “I’ve seen that look before! It’s the look you gave me when I first said hi to you in our Japanese film class!” Lachlan exclaimed, barely making the words out between wheezes of laughter.

  “Be quiet! You want to get us busted?” Michelle said, slapping Lachlan’s knee before cracking open another canned Suntory highball. Technically speaking, drinking in the dorm rooms was forbidden, but the rules were often bent, especially on a Saturday night, as long as you weren’t too obvious about it.

  “So, what actually happened?” Ansel asked once Lachlan had calmed down and Michelle had loudly burped.

  “It might be tough to really explain… but I’ll try,” Emily said. So she recounted the whole interaction: the strangeness of the booth and the depressed man, the test that she had aced,— “of course,” Michelle said, grinning—and how the man had presented her with the little card that she now turned over in her hand.

  “I still don’t understand why you’re obsessed with that show,” Lachlan said, taking a long sip of his highball. “It’s so… kitsch.”

  “Hey, those fight scenes hold up!” Emily said. She paused though, and gave a shrug. “But I know what you mean. I don’t know. There’s just something about it. I must have watched it a hundred times when I was eight. Even in middle school and high school I’d put it on in the background while I studied. Probably like you and Milk Maid’s Revenge,” she teased, which earned a chortle from Michelle and a groan of denial from Lachlan.

  “So are you going to call her?” Ansel asked, taking the offered card from Emily and turning it with his long fingers. “The lone survivor of a cancelled show? How poetic.”

  “Should I? Isn’t it all a bit too weird?”

  “It is super weird, but you obviously have to,” Michelle stated. She frowned. “No offense, but is it because you think your Japanese isn’t good enough? One of us could talk to her, if you wanted.”

  It was a bit of a sore point, at least to Emily, that her Japanese wasn’t nearly as good as her friends’. Then again, the others had taken at least three semesters of Japanese, whereas Emily’s small college didn’t even offer it. She was decently self-taught on anime and manga, but she had been unceremoniously plunked into the foreign exchange program’s introductory Japanese program. After two months, she was still woefully out of her depth during actual conversations.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  “No, I think it’ll be fine. In season three, Michiko has this weird romance with an Australian exchange student. It was a major point of drama between her and the other Dragons, actually. But her English is really good by the end of the season.”

  “Well, what are you waiting for then? Drink! Call!” Michelle said, pushing a highball into Emily’s hand and tossing her cell phone in between them. “And then let’s go out!”

  Emily dialed the phone number from the business card and then set the phone on the tatami mat between them on speakerphone. Wow, it’s actually ringing. She was frankly a little surprised it was a real number at all. It rang again. Again. Emily felt disappointment creep in. This is so stupid. It’s all probably a prank, or some weird phone sex line.

  But then, on the sixth ring, someone picked up.

  There was silence. Emily leaned over the phone.

  “Hajimemashite. Um, Akiyama-san desu ka? Watashi no namae wa Emily. Eigo o hanasemasu ka?”

  Again, silence. The four of them bent over the phone a bit more. Could they hear breathing on the other end?

  Then a woman’s voice answered, raspy and emotionless.

  “Yes, this is Michiko Akiyama. How did you get this number?”

  Emily exchanged a wide-eyed glance with Ansel. He was the only other one who was much of a fan of Space Dragons, the only one who really appreciated what this meant. To have Michiko Akiyama on the phone!

  “I was given this number at Comic Con. I took a test? At the Space Dragon booth?”

  Another long pause. Emily imagined she could hear a long inhalation of a cigarette. Then a slow exhalation, stale air brushing against the phone’s microphone.

  “Jiro is still going to that? I thought he stopped years ago.” There was a humorless chuckle, and a murmur of consideration. “What is your name?”

  “Emily.” The phone’s speaker crackled, as if the connection was poor, or the person on the other end was moving.

  “So, you got a hundred percent. A gaikokujin.” There was a sigh. “That figures. You are a little late though, Emily.”

  Again, that phrase, the same one the man had used. “Too late for what?” Emily asked, frowning and leaning down even closer to the phone. They were all leaning in, Emily realized, so close that their heads were nearly touching, and even Lachlan’s perpetual smile had been replaced by a furrow of pensiveness.

  Emily could almost hear the smirk from the other end of the line. “You will see. I’ll tell you what, though. You can come visit if you like. It’s not like it matters anymore. Write this down. I will not repeat it.”

  Lachlan fumbled for his own phone, entering the address as Michiko spoke. God, it’s not even that far, Emily thought as Lachlan brought the address up on a map. Less than two hours away, on the coastal periphery of Tokyo, south of Mt. Fuji.

  “Come. Don’t come. I don’t care. I’ll be here though. Until the end. Goodbye, Emily.”

  The call ended with an unceremonious click. The four exchange students exchanged glances. The uncomfortable silence lingered for several long seconds until Lachlan broke it with a whisper.

  “I mean, obviously she’s gone a bit insane.”

  “That poor woman. She really never recovered, did she?” Ansel said, shaking his head.

  Emily didn’t respond. She stared at the phone, chewing her lip, and then came to a sudden decision.

  “I’m going to go see her,” Emily stated.

  Michelle scoffed. Then, seeing the serious look on Emily’s face, she held up her hands, as if talking down a wild animal. “Hold on. You can’t really be serious? That was too strange, even for me,” Michelle said. Her voice rose, incredulous. “Haven’t you ever seen Death Spiral? Closed Casket Two? Satsujin senpai? This is a classic setup for a murder-suicide!”

  “Don’t say that, Michelle. She just sounds lonely.”

  “Just because you’re lonely and traumatized doesn’t mean you get a pass for acting like a total weirdo. Everything about this is so creepy.”

  “I agree,” Lachlan said, nodding and then chugging his highball.

  “Ansel?” Emily asked, plaintively looking to the big German for support.

  The German avoided meeting eyes. “I’m not so sure, Emily,” he finally responded, sighing and shaking his head. “It’s been thirty years since I’ve heard of anyone seeing her.”

  “All the more reason for me to go,” Emily said. She drained her highball, and then crunched it in her hand. “I’m going.”

  Michelle gave a long-suffering sigh. “Ugh. Fine. But if you are going, I’m coming with you. And don’t you dare look at your phone again, we are not going tonight. You really think she’s going to be thrilled by you showing up in the dark? That’s absolutely asking to end up chopped up in some freezer.”

  “Yeah, and I’ve had like, five highballs. I’m definitely not taking the train to Kamakura,” Lachlan agreed, blinking rapidly.

  Michelle rolled her eyes at Lachlan before turning back to Emily. “We’ll go tomorrow. I’m sure there’s some cafe nearby I can study at.”

  “Me too,” Ansel interjected.

  “Yeah, I’m not missing this either,” Lachlan agreed.

  “And I’m seriously calling the police if you don’t check in after half an hour. The whole thing bloody weirds me out. The guy at the stall, this recluse lady. I’m not joking.”

  “I know,” Emily said, truly touched at Michelle’s concern. She squeezed her hand. “Thanks.”

  “Anyway, she’ll still be there tomorrow. What’s the rush?” Michelle drained her last highball. “Now, let’s go dancing!”