This Is Not a Game Read Free Page B

revealed that the Rani had really been the Nagi all along.
     
    Hippolyte says: Ye flippin gods! SHE was an IT!
     
    Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says: I was expecting this. The players’ guide turning out to be the villain has been a trope ever since Bard’s Tale II.
     
    Hippolyte says: The Rani isn’t the villain!
    Chatsworth Osborne Jr. says: Of course she is. Who put the curse on all those people, I ask you?
     
    “We heard a rumor that the airlines can’t afford to buy jet fuel any longer,” the Dutch woman said the next morning. “Not if they’re paying in rupiah.”
    Dagmar considered this. “The foreign airlines should be all right,” she said. “They can pay in hard currency.”
    The Dutch woman seemed dubious. “We’ll see,” she said.
    The Dutch woman—horse-faced and blue-eyed, like a twenty-first-century Eleanor Roosevelt—was half of an elderly couple from Nijmegen who came to Indonesia every year on vacation and had been due to leave the previous evening on a flight that had been canceled. They and Dagmar were waiting for the office of the hotel concierge to open, the Dutch couple to rebook, and Dagmar to confirm her own tickets. A line of the lost and stranded formed behind them: Japanese, Javanese, Europeans, Americans, Chinese, all hoping to do nothing more than get out of town.
    Dagmar had checked news reports that morning and found that the government had frozen all bank accounts to prevent capital flight and had limited the amount of money anyone could withdraw over the course of a single day to something like fifty dollars in American money.
    A government spokesman suggested the crash was the fault of Chinese speculators. The governments in other Asian countries were nervous and were bolstering their own currencies.
    The concierge arrived twenty minutes late. The shiny brass name tag on his neat blue suit gave his name as Mr. Tong. He looked a youthful forty, and Dagmar could see that the cast of his features was somehow different from that of the majority of people Dagmar had met in Indonesia. She realized he was Chinese.
    “I’m very sorry,” Tong said as he keyed open his office. “The manager called a special meeting.”
    It took Mr. Tong half an hour to fail to solve the problems of the Dutch couple. Dagmar stepped into the glass-walled office and took a seat. She gave Mr. Tong her tickets and asked if he could confirm her reservations with the airline.
    “I’m afraid not.” His English featured broad Australian vowels. “The last word was that the military has seized both airports.”
    She hesitated for a moment.
    “How can people leave?” she asked.
    “I’m afraid they can’t.” He took on a confidential look. “I hear that the generals are trying to prevent the government from fleeing the country. There’s a rumor that the head of the Bank of Indonesia was arrested at the airport with a suitcase full of gold bars.”
    “Ferries? Trains?”
    “I’ve been through all that with the couple who were here ahead of you. Everything’s closed down.”
    And where would I take a train anyway? Dagmar wondered.
    Mr. Tong took her name and room number and promised to let her know if anything changed. Dagmar walked to the front desk and told them she’d be staying another night, then tried to work out what to do next.
    Have breakfast, she thought.
    The dry monsoon had driven out the rain clouds of the previous day, and the sky was a deep, cloudless tropical blue. Dagmar had breakfast on the third-floor terrace and sat beneath a broad umbrella to gaze out at the surrounding office towers and tall hotels, all glowing in the brilliant tropical sun. Other towers were under construction, each silhouette topped by a crane. A swimming pool sat in blue splendor just beyond the terrace. It was about as perfect as a day in the tropics could be.
    Her fruit platter arrived, brought by a very starched and correct waiter, and Dagmar immersed herself in the wonder of it. She recognized lychee