i'd been walking west down a long, obscure road at night in a slimly populated town in the middle of nowhere. a man started following
me on a bicycle. i started hopping on one leg. it made me go really fast. the street had no businesses on it, for me to hide in. just
lots of small buildings that appeared to contain defunct businesses. their lights were on. you could see shelves & counters inside the
stores, but they were abandoned. sometimes a few people would be congregated in front of one

finally i came to the building. a building full of games. it was a very large single-story building. gigantic & not
quite cubic. a little broad. rectangular. like a warehouse. it was bigger than a very big gymnasium. it felt like
something that had existed since the 1950s & had never been abandoned or retrofitted to a better purpose. it just
kept existing & being active in a zombified fashion. i don't remember seeing a name for it, or a sign on it, or near
it. it never seemed have any faculty present. it was implied to be the only entertainment venue in the city of any sort

the whole building had kind a sickly sweet smell, like a roller rink i once went to

it had a small entrance area with nothing in it. the floor there was tiled. the tiles were white with black flecks in them. there was
only one fluorescent overhead light, near the entrance. as you walked through the room, it never got outright dim, but it was clear that
you were only being lit by one light bulb from one direction. this room didn't have finished walls, just frames of wooden beams with
insulation behind them. there was a doorway at the far end that led to the main room with the games. to the right of that doorway,
there was a hallway leading off to some back area. it sort of jutted into the entrance room. the walls of that jut were empty frames

i never explored that side hallway. i looked into it & saw that it became very dim & purple-lit. an awful color palette of dark, saturated
purples & pinks. it looked more modern than the rest of the building, with walls & a floor & ceiling that might have been made of plastic

the doorway that led into the main room had no door, or frame. it was a moderately sized rectangle cut out of a section of wall

the main room was gigantic. very tall. this was the part of the building that felt like a warehouse. it had nothing at all to justify that
height. everything could have been taken care of in a room about eight feet tall. with one exception, in the corner. i'll get to that

this room's floor was carpeted. it was that sort of flat, grey, designless carpeting that's almost texturally
indistinguishable from a marble floor. the walls of the room were strictly white. the room was adequately lit

which is to say, sterilely lit with white light, like an office. i never really noticed the lights, but i have to assume they were mounted
on the walls. it felt like the light was coming from the ceiling of a normal-sized room, but it couldn't have been coming from the ceiling
of this room. up so high, they would have to have been very bright,. the lighting here didn't feel like it was coming from lights that bright

it was the kind of lights where your eyes might be detecting a faint & irritating flicker but you can't quite tell

there were games in this room. not arcade machines, really. they were like chuck e. cheese games. the games were arranged
in a grid of equidistant clusters of four or six machines. each cluster was two rows, of two (or three) machines. each rows
had it back to the other row. there was maybe fifteen feet between each cluster. i don't remember any noise coming from these
machines. or any music playing. or any sound, really. there might have been the hum of an AC mounted near the doorway

the demographic of the people walking around & playing the arcade games seemed to inexplicably consist
solely of unrelatable middle-aged men. it was implied that most of them came here & played the games
nearly every day. none of them could find much else to do. none of them spoke to each other

in the corner of the room, stretching from the floor to the ceiling, was an enormous fluorescent illustration of a fortune
teller. it was made of dyed plastic, & backlit by an orange light. the illustration itself, beyond its physical size, was
sort of dramatic, enticing. it had that "fair" art style. you know, how the games at a fair will have illustrations on
them? & they all seem to be such boilerplate representations of whatever they're illustrating that they exist in a
weird aesthetic niche that nothing else seems to touch. at the top of this was a big scroll that said "SHE IS HERE"

the fortune teller didn't seem to serve any purpose, like marking the location of a fortune teller sitting in the corner or something. she
seemed like the sole, inexplicable piece of decoration. it seemed like getting her set up in that corner was probably a fairly involved
process, yet she was such a listless & incomplete addition to the room. she sort of hinted at an aesthetic for the building, but ...
wasn't sufficient to solidify it, not in the slightest. all she did was exaggerate the soullessness of the decor around her

if i'd encountered this in real life, i might have wondered, similarly to the building as a whole, if a single
human being had ever earnestly wanted her to be there, or if she'd been erected as part of some runaway bureaucratic
process that no one ever thought about, instated potentially decades ago by some obscure arcade company that no one
cared about the name of ... still, i probably would have been sort of awestruck, & felt glad that she was there