August 9, 2025

I was at work when I received an email informing me that I had been charged for the possession of obscene materials and had to report to the nearest correctional facility. I felt a gnawing at my heart as I made my way to the facility somewhere in the middle of the tropical forest. There was an “elevator” that was as deep as a single body and needed one to hold onto a metal grate to ride. I scrolled through /mjg/ and read some posts that were making light of my predicament. Fortunately we were still able to use our devices here, granted that we could only charge them in the daytime while the facility’s solar panels were operational.

Panic suddenly set in when I realized that I would be here for months at least, which meant that it would conflict with my upcoming trip to Hong Kong. I opened up the email again and found that it attributed a bunch of quotes of things I had never said to me. A lot of them were League of Legends references. One of them read, “If Rich wins, I’ll make some saudis really happy.” I tried to get the attention of anyone who was in charge to tell them that they got the wrong person. I was pulled to the side and told that this place didn’t have “counselling rooms.” That was when I woke up.

–

I was in Hong Kong during night time. I had somehow been knocked onto the ground on the mountain road and my mom was helping me up. It looked like a storm had just passed through. Many of the signs and guardrails on the side of the road had been pulled out of the ground. The elevated gutter by the road was overflowing and sloshing with water.

I opened my phone and saw my photos from my friend attending a con. They were cosplaying as a White Blood Cell from Cells At Work.

I asked my mom why Dongmen (lit. Eastern Gate) tends to be the market in many various cities. She said there was no such pattern. We later met up with my dad and I wanted to confirm my suspicions before asking him the same question.

We walked through a market that hadn’t yet opened for the day as I fumbled with searching up my query on Google. Instead of using a touchscreen device, I was holding a large monitor and using a physical keyboard for input. Pages were loading unbearably slow and nothing seemed relevant to what I was searching for.