When the glass doors swung open and we stepped out, we were pretty upset. "It's your fault" May said.

"Hold on. I haven't had time to accuse you yet."

"Well, accuse."

"It's your fault."

"You bought the tickets."

"You took them!"

"You should have checked them when you bought them!"

"How could I know? It's her fault!" I said, pointing a finger at the girl in the tickets box, who chewed her gum loudly and didn't look very guilty.

"What's the problem?" she asked, with the kind of indifference that can only be achieved by people chewing gum.

"You gave us tickets for the wrong time!" I said, waving the tickets, I was hoping, furiously. "We wanted tickets for the early show! You gave us tickets for the late one!"

"I'm sorry" she said.

That was a pretty good line. I didn't know what to say.

"Um... we... we want our money back!" I said. That's what people usually say in such situations, I gather.

"No, we don't." May interfered. "We still want to see the movie."

"But it's late show.. we'll have to wait..."

"So what? Got anything better to do?"







"Actually yes! I wanted to write the Page!"

May sighed. "again? Isn't that excuse getting old?"

"Well, I'm late! I was supposed to put one on last month."

"Come on, Red, you know as well as I do that nobody cares if you put on your page or not. Nobody reads it. And besides, even if you will be home you won't write it."

"Well, maybe, but at least then I'll feel guilty about not doing it."

"You can feel guilty here with me. It's much more fun. Come on. We'll keep ourselves busy."

"Well... when's the late show?"

May peered at the tickets. "Twelve-fifteen."

I checked my watch. "Oh my Amanda, it's Two and a half hours!! What are we going to do here for two and a half hours?!"

"We can go sit at A Little Cafe, if you want" May said.

"Driving there and back? We'll only have time to spill a cup of coffee on ourselves and get back in the car. We can eat somewhere in this mall, if you want."

May was visibly disappointed. "So what do you want to do?"

"Well, there's a whole huge mall here, there's got to be something we can do to entertain ourselves for two and a half hours!"


"All those malls look exactly the same" I moaned. "Same tiles, same people, same clothes, same books. How much longer do we have?"

"I told you already, stop asking me what time it is. you have a watch, not me."

"Ah, right. Two hours, 28 minutes left. Damn, I payed good money for this watch. Can't it go any faster?"

"That's the price you pay for compromising on cheap merchandise. Come on, let's go to the lower floor. Maybe there's something to do there."



Because of the lack of obvious sources of entertainment, we had to make the most of what we had. There was a sign by the escalator saying, Kids under 5 are not allowed to use the escalator unaccompanied. "Of course," I explained to May, as we went down, "kids under 5 can't read, so what this sign actually says is, 'If you can't read this, then, um, ah, nevermind'."

"Kinda like putting a bumper sticker under your car saying "If you can read this, then I probably ran over you'."

"It's important to keep people laughing in their last moments. But what's so dangerous for kids about an escalator?"

"Are you kidding? It's a terrible risk! What if you don't take that last step in the right moment and get sucked down?"

"Yeah... I wonder what does happens to people who get sucked to the underside of the escalator. Do they keep going round and round, or do they just fall down to the lower floor? Oh, Hi" I said to the inevitable kids going down the up-going stairs near us.

"I think they fall, but by then they're so thin that they fall down slowly. Like a feather. Ao it's pretty safe."

"Cheez, the people who planned this place thought of everything!"

"You're right" May said, her gaze fixed on something behind my back. "They've even thought of us. Look at this."

I looked back. And there, behind me, glamorous and noisy, stood the answer to our problem: an arcade.

      Planet Arcadia

"Got any change?"

I emptied my wallet and gave May everything in it that was round, and she pushed them into the pinball machine. "Okay. Here goes. One Two Three." She said, and pulled the lever. To her credit I must mention that she managed to keep the ball in the machine for about 16 seconds. Then she slammed the machine with her fist. "Damn! This thing is broken."

"Why can't you just admit that you're not good at this?"

"I'm great at this! Well, better than you, that's for sure."

"That doesn't prove much." I said, and as May pushed for another ball, I leaned back against Street Fighter IV and watched. My attention, however, was soon distracted from the punching and kicking May to the girl who played the next machine, keeping the ball jumping, the score rising to squadrillions, and her face grave.

I fell in love. she had tight leather clothing, Serious face, brown hair, with one strand that boldly jumped out in front of her eyes in a slight curve, and a gorgeous nose. She looked like the kind of girl I'd marry and regret it for the rest of my life. Then she finished her game, gave her score, which was pretty close to what the last proposition for a manned expedition to Jupiter was rejected for costing, a grim look, left the machines, and went to the nearby fighting-machine, to fight against some human mountain with leather and skulls. Judging by the physical interaction between them, I assumed the relationship between them in real life was a little better than the one on the machine's screen.

"Damn! The right flipper is too slow!" May said, as yet another ball slid between her little rubber arms and down the drain.

"That's what you always say" I moaned.

"Are you saying you can do better!?"

"No. I'm saying it's a dumb game. Let's get out of here. I've just had a bad relationship."

May gave the machine a kick goodbye. "How much time do we have left?"

I checked my watch. "Two hours, twenty three minutes. That's no good. we'll run out of change long before we run out of time."

We started to move through the blipping, whirling, schmizzing and very cool crowd in the general direction of the real world, but then something caught my eye. "Hold on a second" I said to May.

"What? No, we have to go, we'll run out of money, we have a.... Oh, hell" she mumbled as she realized I was being grabbed by a tractor beam. Then she gave up, and waited while I stared wide-eyed at Virtua-Fighter. "Talk about dumb games. I thought you don't like Mortal Kombat and all that shit."



"I don't" I said, eyes fixed at the screen, where Jackie was practicing his famous huka-mama at the blonde bitch. "They're stupid."

"Yeah, I mean, you'd think after three games and two movies they'd learn how to spell combat right" said a passing kid with a baseball hat, but nobody noticed.

"But you like this one."

"I only like Pai" I said. "And besides, it looks so real."

"That's the part I don't get. There's plenty of guys here who look like they'll be happy to kick your ass. And I assure you it will be more real. Why don't you just pick up a fight?"

"Because it would hurt, Dummy" I said, and put a coin in the machine. I picked Pai, of course, and started kicking Jackie around, but somehow I couldn't do my favorite trick, the drop-spinning that knocks them dead every time. "Damn, this joystick doesn't move at all!" I shouted at him.

"That's what you always say..." May said, and half-watched me beat my enemies one by one until I was unfairly slain by Kage. Um, the third one.

"Dumb machine" I said and kicked it goodbye.

"Are we through being idiots now? I've got to go to the bathroom"

"Maybe. Let's get out of this place. It's made for idiots."





Nobody around us said anything. They're probably used to it.

"Why did we get into this place?! Our brains are probably getting mushed because we spend too much time in malls" I said. "Next thing we'll try the hook machine."

"The what machine?" May asked.

"The one with the little furry animals that you got to try to fish out with that hook. Like that one over there."

"Ooooh! I want one of these!"

I should have seen it coming. You probably did. "No, May! Nobody can get anything out of those machines! it's physically impossible! It's just for people to keep throwing coins in! It's not working, it's... May, stop it..." I started crying and begging, as I watched May insert a coin in the machine, fiddle with the buttons and having a cute yellow furry dolphin doll dropped into her hand by the generous claw.

"There. Now I'm happy. You want it?" she said with a smile.

"No thanks. I already had dolphin today."

"Suit yourself" May said and threw the dolphin across the railing down to the mall's ground floor.

A low rumble came from below. "Hey, what the!?" There was a pause. Then, in a low voice, hardly heard over the background music, "Oooh, a dolphin! Cutie!"