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Minglin got the short straw.
They had literally drawn straws because the owners of the escape room situated in a sprawling warehouse in the old harbour district (now gentrified and full of hipsters so of course there was a wuxia/xianxia themed escape room that did a roaring business) said that they couldn’t let more than six people be on one team because of insurance restriction, so one of the six colleagues had to join a different party. Their boss, of course, had to stay with the main team; he was new, and Minglin had organised this little manufactured adventure so he could get included into the kind of after-work fun their team used to have with their old boss.
Someone from her uncle’s huge circle of friends and acquaintances lived nearby and had recommended this place when she’d talked about her search for a good place to take her team to while she was overhauling the menu for the Four Season Manor’s summer outside café. She did all the advertising for the Manor now, for free; but that gave her access to their enormous network of resources that were usually strictly for queer people. Demi or gray-ace people belonged under the queer umbrella, Minglin was sure, but she didn’t feel the need to point that out, argue with anybody about it, or even properly define herself.
Now here she was, the one that had organised the trip, and the short straw said she had to leave her colleagues and their new boss alone in the Coffin Town room and join three complete strangers in the Tomb Robber room. Her uncle’s acquaintance said he’d helped to design the new Poison Antidote room and of course recommended that (the Traditional Chinese Medicine references were all correct, he said, as that was his profession), but it was already taken when they arrived.
The three strange guys were squabbling when she joined them, one of them (the jaded one) doubting the whole endeavour, the next one (the strong silent one) demanding they get on with it, and the third (the preppy privileged kid) repeating that it was a bet with his aunt’s husband, and that guy was all about bets. “You’re not wrong,” the jaded one said, “I used to know him quite well, and he’s still keeping the forfeit from the bet he lost to me when I met him ages ago.”
The jaded one didn’t look old enough to have known anybody ‘ages ago’, but Minglin said nothing to that point.
Instead, she cleared her throat. The preppy one looked at her. “Oh, hello!” he said, putting on a polite smile. “Excuse my friends -- they’re rude as always.”
Minglin didn’t comment on that; let them do their thing. She just had to go through one of the escape rooms as their party had already paid when booking, and she didn’t want her colleagues to think she didn’t have fun without them. That would just make them feel bad. She could probably work with the preppy kid and leave the jaded one and the silent one to their own devices.
“I’m Xue Minglin,” she said, “and I’m here with my colleagues, but the lady at the counter won’t let more than six people do a room, and I got the short straw. We work for an ad agency here in the City; we’re the brand building expert team.”
The jaded one looked at her briefly; she didn’t like the look, but bit down the defensive comment. Let them underestimate her, then.
“These brats are certainly the short straw,” the silent one ground out. “I want out of the artificial Lost Tomb as much as you probably do, and the only way out is straight ahead.”
“This guy is Di Feisheng,” the preppy one said. “I’m Fang Duobing, and our unenthusiastic friend is Li Lianhua. We’re vanlifers; our bus is called Lotus Tower, and we do whatever jobs come up. We’re in the City for my aunt’s wedding.”
“Speak for yourself,” the jaded one -- Li Lianhua? -- said. “I’m a TCM doctor, and ‘our’ bus is actually mine, hence the name. Sometimes I don’t know why I put up with these two idiots.”
“She doesn’t want to know all that,” Di Feisheng said. “Let’s get through this, then; how hard can it be?”
“We’re ready,” Fang Duobing called to the attendant, and she explained the rules to them once more before leading them into the first room of their ‘adventure’, and theatrically locking the door behind them.
The room was dim, and each of them had nothing but a flashlight; their first task was to turn on the ‘ancient eternal torches’ these kinds of tombs sported in all the dramas.
Li Lianhua did that within three minutes, finding clues in the murals under the cone of his flashlight, very familiar with the traditional symbolism and imagery. “Of course the clues must be easy enough for casual drama watchers,” he said, turning a brass bagua in three different directions. The lights turned on (LEDs with fire effect), and the door to the next room rumbled open.
The preppy kid forged on ahead, then jumped back with a squeak.
“Zombies!” he gasped.
Scarily stitched-together life-sized puppets with animatronic effects, Xue Minglin amended in her head as she stepped into the room. They were quite well-made, squarely in the uncanny valley on purpose, and effectively blocked their way to the very obvious open door on the other side of the room, floating on almost invisible strings. “Nice algorithm,” the jaded one said, trying and failing to worm his way between two of the puppets.
“Let’s treat them as real,” the preppy one said. “You wouldn’t play a video game and remind yourself it’s not real; that kills the fun.”
“We’re not here for the fun, but for the bet with your aunt’s husband,” Di Feisheng pointed out.
“You’re the one who goes feral at Mario bloody Kart,” Li Lianhua said with a slightly superior smile. “Let Xiaobao enjoy himself, if he wants to.”
Says the one who already had his moment of triumph, Xue Minglin thought.
“As we’re probably not meant to physically fight the zombies, papermen, whatever you call them,” she said out loud, “I guess there is a way to deactivate them, ban them, cut off the resentful energy they run on, whatever trope this follows.”
Fang Duobing, it turned out, knew all the relevant dramas, so he and Minglin stood well clear of the puppets and tried to argue their way into one Grand Unified Theory of Chinese Drama Zombies. In the meanwhile, the silent one sidled his way along the walls, poking all the decorations a bit aimlessly, and Li Lianhua tried his luck with the figures themselves, quite daintily grabbing a few of them by their necks. “You’re thinking nails in the brain, huh?” the preppy kid said. In this moment, though, the silent one had reached the door on the other side, and pulled a lever.
The puppets stopped.
“Good boy, A-Fei,” the jaded one drawled. “It doesn’t have to be that complicated, after all.”
A brief grin at Fang Duobing that almost encompassed Minglin.
“That might have been an emergency brake for the escape room people, in case customers get into trouble,” Fang Duobing said.
“Not wrong,” Li Lianhua said. “But the main thing is, we solved this room and got to the next one.”
He pulled a nail from the neck of the zombie he had been holding on to as ‘A-Fei’ stopped the whole show.
“I’m not your dog,” the silent one growled as he stepped into the next room, which was a corridor with blank ‘stone’ walls that rumbled ominously. “Incorrect,” the jaded one mumbled, with a positively malicious smile.
“I’m not Fox Spirit,” Di Feisheng amended, without any real rancour.
The walls of the corridor started moving inwards, Star Wars trash compactor style.
Fang Duobing gave a squeal, grabbed Li Lianhua by the elbow and ran. Di Feisheng spread his arms wide, touching both walls as if to physically stop them from squashing his friends as they fled. Minglin stopped for her usual ‘just a moment, please’ of questioning everything that was obvious, noticed the one torch in the corridor that wasn’t burning, walked up to it and lit it by one twist at the base. The rumbling stopped.
“Cute how you always protect HuaHua first,” the silent one chuckled at the preppy one. His face looked a lot nicer with a smile on it. He had a deep dimple on his chin that gave him a lot of personality, compared to the smooth, youthful and slightly nondescript faces of the other two.
“You can deal well enough with whatever comes your way, and you never faint, A-Fei,” Fang Duobing shrugged. “I help the one who needs it.”
“Aw, Xiaobao,” the jaded one said, patting his friend’s cheek. “You remember it’s not real? A-Fei was trying to engage the safety of the passage, I guess. You can’t squish your customers to death, not even if you're the edgiest new escape room in the City.”
“Also, I have been known to faint as well,” A-Fei said, with the slightest bit of a pretend pout.
“After you almost drowned and then got a mighty knock on your head as the waterfall spat you out,” ‘Xiaobao’ said as if that kind of life-threatening adventure was the most ordinary thing in the world.
Minglin amended her impression of her companions. There was a playful affection there between them that was almost touching.
“Right,” she said. “What’s up next?”
It was the main ‘tomb’, and their next assignment was to open the sarcophagus and get the treasure they were here for; Minglin couldn’t quite remember if it the macguffin was supposed to be a golden mask or an elixir pearl; it didn’t matter, as the main thing was to get it and then get out.
“We have eight minutes left,” Di Feisheng said.
“No, it’s 45 minutes all in all, and we can’t have been more than ten minutes,” Minglin said.
“Incorrect,” Li Lianhua said. “Our bet with Zhan-xiong was that we’d solve this place in twenty minutes, and then he’d give us the access card to his company parking lot for our bus. We keep being chased off; the City has changed a lot. Nobody wants a bunch of dubious vanlifers with a dog in their tiny back yards.”
“Let’s not rip down the fourth wall yet again,” Minglin said, deciding on the spur of the moment that these guys were actually okay, and probably gay after all. “The attendants are watching us, of course; if we break their mechanisms, they will kick us out. If we don’t make twenty minutes, then rest assured that I know people who know people who know people. For example, I know the TCM guy who helped design the Poison Antidote room; he lives and works in a warehouse about three canals further inland. Either he or my non-paying client from Four Season Manor will know a place where you can put your Lotus Tower; they have connections all through the City.”
“Four Seasons Manor?” Li Lianhua said, smiling. “I’ve heard about them, but we didn’t arrive in time to wrangle an invitation to their great party.”
The preppy one laughed. “And here we are in the Tomb Robber room as you said you’d get confused in the Poison Antidote one because of inaccuracies about your craft. Sometimes you’re too clever for your own good, Lianhua. Never change.”
Okay? Xue Minglin grinned. She decided she did like them, and would help them.
“After the escape room, we’re going for coffee in the Manor’s first courtyard anyway; they run a café every summer. You can come with if you like; perhaps they’ll know something better than a soulless company parking lot out in commercial high-rise land where your bus can go. Perhaps they even own that kind of land.”
“Wouldn’t it be fun if we won the bet against my aunt’s husband and then noped out anyway?” the preppy one said, and the jaded one nodded, finally showing at least a little bit of enthusiasm.
So they did that.-