“I think there’s something wrong with the way her breasts don’t sway. A chest that large– they should have some bounce, shouldn’t they?”

Hiro was tired and his eyes burned. He bit the inside of his lip to distract himself. “Yeah, I suppose so.”

“You suppose so? Have you ever seen a well-endowed woman’s breasts? I mean in real life, like right in front of you. Not in a porno.”

“Sure– now and then.”

“Don’t lie. I can tell when you’re lying.” Kazu had the controller in his hands, making the girl crouch over and over.

Hiro took his glasses off and rubbed his face. Delineate deformable regions, grab acceleration data from the bone in the torso. “I can implement that, sure. You want it on all of the female characters?”

“Put it on the characters that make sense to you. I’ll review it later.”

After Kazu had gone Mayuko crept up behind him. “What was that about breasts?” she said conspiratorially.

Dale was always swearing by video game work but tonight’s Heineken seems to have animated him even more than usual. “I finally got my car back from the shop thanks to that Eldritch gig,” he says, waving the stub of his cigarette around. “I know you think you’ve got better stuff to be doing, but that dinky theater company of yours isn’t going to pay the rent. Right?”

Rebecca stares off the balcony into Culver City’s balmy orange night. “Yeah. Not here, anyway.”

“Well, either you’re gonna make it work here, or you’re gonna give up,” Dale says, with uncharacteristic bluntness, as he lights up again. “Don’t think it’s going to be any easier in New York. Seriously.”

Suddenly, he sits up in his cheap plastic patio chair, mouth widening into a frown, chest expanding with air. “In a land long obscured by the Shroud of Mist, a new evil something something. And they were called... the Eldritch Kings,” he stentorates, then belches. “Seven hundred dollars.”

Rebecca smirks. “How many beers have you had?”

Dale gives a sharp, short laugh, and raises his bottle. “Still on my first, baby.”

Irvine’s late afternoon sun made Sean’s reddened and tear-streaked face all the more vivid. “I tried to find them but I could only find three and this one isn’t white all over, it has spots on it,” he stammered, the stones cupped in his hand.

“Aw, that’s okay,” his father said. “You made a good effort. You did your best, and that’s what count–”

“No,” Sean cried, wiping some tears away with his fist, which was curled around the rocks. “I was supposed to finish it. I was supposed to bring you ten white stones from the backyard and I couldn’t–”

“Sean, I... I didn’t even know if there were ten white stones in the backyard when I asked you to find them. I was just giving you a quest to find as many as you could.”

Marco sighed, eyes transfixed on the reflections off the chrome of a mixing bowl. The pâtisserie was not doing very well lately and unless he got a couple big jobs soon he might have to consider the possibility of going back to the hotel, hat in hand– of all the cruel fates.

A bell rang towards the front of the store, and Marco looked up to see a man in his early thirties who must have been on his way to work. He wore an off-the-rack business suit that hung off his shoulders awkwardly, the fabric bunching up at the edges. Marco knew the type: old enough to be in charge of things and young enough to have faith in his adulthood.

“I’m in the market for a custom cake,” said the man. “And I hear this is the place to come to get one. Could you tell me about what I’d pay?”