This has been a pretty crappy day so far. First my apartment gets on fire, then I get shoved into a creepy hotel, then I get magically transported to China, where me and one of my co-conspirators and I are in what I suppose is a Chinese police station. Yes, I'm sure it's China now. I know what the word for "exit" in Chinese looks like (I think), and they flashed by me briefly as two short Asians shoved me through the old concrete of some kind of law enforcement center.

We must be getting the special treatment, because we're not crammed in a cell with other sketchy figures. I'm stuck in a concrete box just barely taller than me, where the cot in the back left corner and the pot in the other call to mind images of The Gulag Archipelago. Unlike Solzhenitsyn, however, the place isn't overcrowded, and the narrow, rectangular window at the top isn't blocked entirely. It's just barred, and a peek through it shows a rather quaint scene. Quaint once you get past the yard of half-dead grass and barbed wire fence lining it. I could just barely make out a few shops or homes (it was hard to tell at the distance) where a few people meandered about with baskets. A guy drove by on a bike. Not one looked in my direction.

I shivered and turned away from the window. It's hard to feel sorry for yourself when other people very nearby have it worse. Planting my cold self on the cot, I started thinking about Statkus. I sure hope he's okay. It was so freaky when he fell down that hill and hit his head. It wasn't smashed, thank God, but he cut himself pretty bad. When the blood started gushing down his face, the Chinese guys after us started freaking out. A couple of the guys got out some rags and cleaned up Statkus' face. Statkus himself just seemed pretty dazed.

I don't know how hurt he was. They let me look at him for a little bit, and I couldn't see any bone or anything like that. Statkus looked like he was gonna hurl, though. There's nothing quite like being both out of one's element and bashed in the head to boot. Hopefully nothing serious is wrong with Statkus, but that's got to be an injury that needs stitches. Chinese cops will get him medical attention...right?

At that point, all the Chinese people seemed to chill out somewhat. Sure, some of the guys were still mad at us, but a couple of women showed up at that point and did some yelling at them. A lady in a modern looking set of jeans and shirt tried to talk to me, but the only Chinese words I know are "nee-how" (hello) and "gwhy-lo" (white devil). I forgot how to say "black devil" in Chinese, only that it vaguely sounds like the word "yellow". The men in the gathering crowd said both words plenty of times, I can assure you of that. Given that nobody came up with Toby in tow, I figured he got away. At first I was glad I didn't run, so that I could stay with Statkus and make sure he's cool, but now I'm in my special white devil concrete box, and who knows where Statkus is?

That's the thing I don't get about all this. Normal Chinese people are pretty cool, and the weirdest thing they do is stare at you. Are they really going to get all that worked up about three strangers, even foreign ones? The only thing weird about us was that Statkus wasn't wearing shoes. And that we had no travel papers. Or money. Or identification. And we can't speak the language. And two of us ran like mofos when someone called us out. Okay, so we're plenty strange. Still, what's the point in getting all worked up about us?

Of course, then again, the last time I was in China, I peeked out of the train window to see a line of tanks. People don't talk much about China's communism, but it's still there. As near as I can figure, the locals had some sort of problem they're blaming on us (I really hope Aldaris' recall unit didn't do anything to them), or that we landed near a communist...oh, what do they call them? In the Gulag Archipelago, they were called "village soviets", where there was a communist official in charge of each collective farm. Who knows how much the Chinese kept of Soviet culture, especially now that Russia's free again and there's no Soviets around to impress? Maybe there's no village soviet. I still haven't a clue why they were so mad at us. Was it because I used korean? Did they mistake us for someone else?

All I know is, after a while, some local cops shoved me and Statkus in the back of a car. It was one of those really cute three-wheeled cars, with two in the back and one in the front. My dad says those are dangerous, but we made it to the police station alright. At this point, some of the cops realized that the villagers (is that what they were?) must have overreacted to our presence. They were a lot calmer than the farmer guys, and some of them knew enough english to ask for our passports. Have I ever mentioned how much I hate language barriers? Surely you can guess how frustrating it is to be in a foreign land with no passport to give and only enough knowledge to say, "hello, white devil". I'm sure as heck not saying that to a cop. I think they just shoved us in the cells because they didn't know what else to do. That is, if Statkus is in a cell. They could be taking care of him. Prolly are. Don't see why they wouldn't be. They didn't search me to take my notebook, so maybe they're not mad at us.

By now one of the cops surely has called a big-wig about us foreigners. Pretty soon someone who does know english well will arrive, and guess who gets to explain everything to them. Son of a bleep. It occurred to me that I could lie, but what would I say? That I'm a lost student? They'd ask where I was staying in China and where I was learning. That I have family nearby? Pfft. That an alien with near-magical and definitely malfunctional teleportation abilities zapped us all here by accident? It's pretty sad that that's the best story we have.

They haven't taken my picture yet, but more than likely they will. Crap, Aldaris better find us soon. I don't want to be involved in an international incident! Statkus got his face busted up, and I'm not wearing any makeup, and guess what two faces are going to be in the papers? Aldaris better find us soon. Maybe he's better off just abandoning us, from his perspective. After all, we can't prove that an alien did this to us. Wow. I really hope Aldaris isn't that big of a scumbag, but we're talking about a guy who didn't care about human collateral when destroying Zerg-infested planets. ...Oh my crap, he's totally going to backstab us. Oh my crap.

I really hope Toby got away. If it was possible, I'd pretend that he wasn't with us. Maybe then he could find some way home from here...yeah right. Go across the planet without someone discovering him and asking questions? Not likely. If he's very, very lucky, he can find a western embassy and pretend he has amnesia. Please God, let Toby get to the embassy and pretend he has amnesia. At least one of us needs to get out of this without creating an international incident.

-t-

Toby didn't know how long he'd been running. He didn't know where he was running. All he knew was that he was in some foreign country, probably in Asia, where he didn't know the language and hadn't a scrap of paper to legitimize his presence there. He'd run for several minutes now from a crowd of Asians, and now was lost in the hilly countryside of what he could only guess was China. Whoever it was after him, they'd given up the chase. Thanks to his workout regimen, Toby was far more athletic than the five foot farmers on his tail...as well as the two Americans he'd left behind.

Now lost, Toby stopped with a gasp and sat on a stump next to a one lane dirt road. He sat there getting his breath, almost able to laugh at his circumstances.

"Well..." Toby muttered between breaths. "Charlie probably can't find us now. We're all lost. Heh, what an adventure this has turned out to be."

At this point, Toby soured. Even his false cheer paled when he remembered Bethany and Statkus. He'd gotten away, but they hadn't. He didn't see what happened to Bethany, but he'd heard Statkus cry out as he fell. Toby's stomach tightened. Not only was he alone, but he'd abandoned the others he should have done something to help. What was done was done, though, and he was at the point where he had to decide for himself what to do next.

"I wish I'd asked Bethany more questions." Toby pulled himself off the stump. The run had taken it out of him, but he was too restless to do nothing. "She seemed like she knew what she was talking about. Just this once, at least."

He chuckled as he remembered her personality analysis. "Heh, some hero I am. I don't think Raynor or Fenix would have run off like that."

Toby briefly considered going back and turning himself into whoever had chased them, but he'd lost his way by that point and didn't know what good it would do anyway. Left with no other option, Toby just followed along the dirt road, hoping for something to happen. For a while, nothing did. An increasingly hungry and thirsty Toby wandered on. Eventually something did happen, however.

In front of Toby, several yards ahead, were two women. One was youngish, perhaps thirty, and dressed in a simple wrap dress with pants. She carried a large basket of something, but whatever it was was covered in a cloth. Beside her was the reason why it was so easy for Toby to catch up to them: an elderly woman bent nearly double, strolling at a meager pace next to the younger lady. This woman's mother, or so Toby guessed. Uncertain what else to do, and a little raw about having abandoned his two friends, Toby ached to do a good deed. He approached them.

"Hello," Toby said, catching the younger woman a little off guard. He reached out his hands for the large basket, as it looked heavy. "Can I carry that for you?"

After several seconds of hand gestures and lots of bowing on Toby's part, the young woman seemed to understand. The elderly woman watched everything with bright, curious eyes, but said nothing and gave no indication she was afraid or confused. Toby again reached for the basket, but the younger one shook her head and pointed to her mother. When the foreigner didn't understand, she put her basket on the ground and tugged at Toby's shoulders, turning him around and facing away from the elderly woman. It wasn't until she pushed his shoulders down that Toby finally understood. She wanted him to carry her companion. So she loaded the stranger piggy-back, picked up her basket, and they went off to some destination.

It was a little awkward for Toby. The elderly woman wasn't very heavy, but she and her daughter (Toby presumed) kept going on in Chinese as though he wasn't there. Every time they laughed it made him nervous. But every time his curious eyes wandered to the young woman's face, she gave again that "you're-strange-but-I'm-polite" sort of fake smile. Toby wondered why she allowed him to help if she thought he was so weird, but he never felt good at reading people's faces, so he left it alone.

Well, whoever the old woman was, she felt pretty heavy by the time they made it to their destination. It was a quaint little village, and it sort of stunned Toby how mismatched everything felt as he wandered down the meandering dirt path. The little homes, a mixture between thatched cottages and little huts, retained all the quaintness of a movie period piece from fifty or so years ago. Dotted here and there, however, were a couple of modern day cars. One was even a fairly recent model. Between two houses were wired in hutches for chickens, ducks, and for some reason rabbits. The man feeding them wore designer jeans. A woman in clothes that more matched the young woman and Toby's burden hung colored cloths on a line, each smelling strongly of what Toby guessed to be dye. One of the line's ends was tied to a tiny shop, which bore a smart looking cigarette ad with three happy twenty-somethings in snazzy urbanwear.

Where the hell am I? Toby wondered. It's like the whole world collapsed in on itself, and random things from everywhere make up a town. What a marvelous episode of Doctor Who that would be! I think I'm going to like this place...except everyone's staring at me. Haven't they ever seen a black man before?

Toby filed that question away in his head to ask Bethany if he ever saw her again. Of course, it was a pretty remote village, by Toby's estimate. He couldn't imagine many black people wanting to live in China, not with it being a communist nation, anyway. Though as Toby curiously glanced back at all the gaping eyes around him, he couldn't help but think that these people didn't really look all that communist.

Though I don't suppose communism really has a look, now does it? Toby smiled at the strangers, and they returned it with smiles of their own, ranging from polite to sincere to very seriously amused. They seem like nice people, anyway.

A tap on his arm told him to go right, and he followed the original woman to a small, low-ceiling abode. Toby instantly loved it. The straw thatched roof hung over a well-worn wooden patio, where sat a homemade but clever little rocking chair on one side of a painted red door. A carven bench stood at the other side of the door, with little flowers cut into the back of it. This porch was the very definition of quaint, though Toby had little time to gawk over it. The young woman directed him to set her mother down on the bench, and he carefully turned around and did so. The woman settled down on the bench with a laugh, and with her cracked voice said what could only have been a joke, and her daughter laughed warmly, almost like she was enjoying a precocious child - the precocious child being Toby. Toby smiled like a doofus, hoping they weren't saying anything mean.

The other people in the village approached him, but only a little trial proved Toby incapable of speaking the easiest words of their language. Not a one seemed to know much english, but neither did they seem to care. The first young woman, who through much trouble and gesturing of the hands revealed that her name was Er-hong, directed him to come into the little brick house. The other women protested, however, and a discussion ensued, not quite intense enough to be a real argument. Er-hong seemed to win, though, and she directed at him to sit on the porch and went inside her house.

A few of the women dispersed, but many stayed, curious about their guest. Toby, left with no other option, pulled out his cell phone. He didn't know if it could make any calls in China, but he could show the women pictures of his family. His phone held picture after picture of London, particularly recent ones of a shopping trip with his little sister. The pictures looped back to the earliest ones, and before Toby knew it, pictures of his recent excursion to a My Little Pony convention appeared. Laughter ran through the little crowd around him as an image of Toby in a meticulous yellow and pink Fluttershy appeared on the screen - him in a male version costume. Toby couldn't skip it fast enough.

The women who had disappeared returned with small plates of cut-up apples and pears. They offered them to Toby and the elderly woman as a snack while the showing of pictures continued. Toby eventually ran the course of his memory card, but a couple of others in the crowd had cell phones of their own, and Toby was treated to pictures of very smart looking children in school functions. Fortunately for them, Chinese parents prefer to take pictures of their children doing proud things, rather than dressing as ponies.

After a bit, Er-hong came out of the house again and shooed the other women away. Toby and her mother went inside, where a dinner was set out on a low, round table. No chairs could fit under it, but the wooden floor was clean. Fortunately for him, Toby was one of those guys that can eat two pizzas in one sitting, so all the fruit he had outside in no way dented his appetite for the lunch set before him. He, Er-hong, and Nainai - what everyone called Er-hong's mother - each had a little bowl of rice. Several small dishes of various vegetables covered the table, and Toby followed their lead in taking some of the things with chopsticks and mixing it with the rice. Toby felt lucky. Not only was he not a picky eater, but he already knew how to use chopsticks.

Er-hong and Nainai had a long discussion about something, which Toby politely ignored. It looked like they had a mild disagreement about something. Either that, or they had to make a decision. Whatever decision it was, they never made it. A shout rang out from outside, and voices called out to each other. At the sound of it, Er-hong disappeared into the kitchen again, then rushed out and quickly put out another setting on the table. That was what caught Toby's attention. Once the chopsticks and bowl were down, Er-hong went immediately to the door.

She soon welcomed the most modern person Toby had seen yet. He was a young man straight out of a teen magazine, except for his dorky smile and glasses. His clothes, however, were just the sort of trendy things one got out of a catalog: a streetracing shirt and faded blue jeans. He kicked off his spiffy sneakers and hugged Er-hong tightly. Once the highly enthusiastic greeting ended, she gestured over at Toby. The young man grinned.

"Oh, hello!" he said, joyfully dropping his backpack near the door as he rushed to the table to shake Toby's hand. "You are an American?"

"No, I'm British." Toby barely put his chopsticks down in time to return the handshake. "I'm Toby Collins."

"My name is Chen Fu Hao." Everything Fu Hao did was quick; he scooted next to Toby and had a pile of leeks atop his rice before he finished saying his name. "It's such good luck that you came to my house. Today is my first day visiting home from university. I speak english, but my family does not."

"I noticed." Seeing Fu Hao going to town on the leeks, Toby grabbed a couple more. Apparently this wasn't the time to be timid about eating. Er-hong brought out dish after dish of vegetables, stacking up quite the feast on the table. "Your mum can really cook."

"Yes, I have had dreams about her food while sleeping on the bus here. You picked a good time to come over." Fu Hao nodded, swallowing his noodles quickly so he could talk. "My mother always makes too much food when I am on break. If I ate everything, I would go poof! Explode!"

Fu Hao gestured his arms out wildly to the effect of an explosion, grinning his head off. Er-hong interrupted, and at that point Fu Hao ceased being in danger of blowing up. Forced to act as translator to all of Er-hong's and Nainai's nosy questions, Fu Hao could barely get a bite in. Where did Toby work? Was he in university? Was he dating anyone? What was it like in London?

Toby had the advantage. He could eat while Fu Hao translated his answers: He worked at a novelty shop, university was too expensive right now, he didn't have a girlfriend, and London was a pleasantly crowded place where he could people-watch. Something had to be lost in translation, and it took a lot of work on Fu Hao's part to explain what "people-watching" is, and that it's not creepy. It took a joke about the villagers people-watching Toby to stop Nainai from looking at him funny.

But of course then came the more obvious, and much more difficult questions. They hinged on one simple idea: how Toby got to their village in the first place. Toby was no fool; he'd been thinking up answers to this question the instant he reached the village. Statkus might have told them to rat out Aldaris, but somehow Toby couldn't see that working here. So he worked up idea after idea in his mind, resisting gritting his teeth when the inevitable happened.

"My mother wants to know," Fu Hao put more of the spicy beans in his rice bowl as he very casually asked his question. "How did you come to our village?"

It was too soon. All of the pretty lies Toby had in mind weren't finished stewing. Toby put on a pleasant smile and spat out some words. "I'm lost. I was..." Wait, didn't Fu Hao say something about bus travel earlier? Toby cleared his throat "I was on a bus, going to Beijing, when it broke down. It didn't have enough petrol. I waited for a while for them to get some more, but after a while I had to...you know, go to the bathroom. I went to some trees, and when I got back, the bus was gone."

"Ah!" Fu Hao said. "That's bad luck. Sorry, so sorry. The bus was late for Beijing, maybe. What are you doing in Beijing?"

Toby very nearly said he was at university, but he caught himself in time. He'd just said he wasn't studying right now. Quickly, he collected up his stray thoughts for an answer. There were British people in Beijing, weren't there? Wasn't it an international sort of place? Again he cursed his luck and went with whatever words came first in his mind.

"I have a friend in Beijing," Toby explained. "I was supposed to meet him next week, but because of a mess up with the airplane ticket, I came to China a week earlier, and I didn't land in the Beijing airport. He didn't answer the telly, so I had to come to Beijing alone."

When Fu Hao explained this to his mother, Er-hong grew animated. She shook her head and said a few rather sharp words; Toby didn't have to know mandarin to understand her disapproval. Or was it in cantonese? Toby couldn't be sure. In any case, Nainai took up Toby's defense. She swept at the air with her hand as she commented, and then patted Toby on the shoulder. Fu Hao said nothing, but focused solely on his food.

"What was that about?" Toby asked.

"Oh nothing, nothing." Fu Hao laughed as if everything were fine. "Mother believes university is more important than travelling for young people."

Toby almost blushed. Of course! How could he not realize that in his story he'd spent the money on coming to China instead of going to school? Oh well. Better a minor sin than a bad story. At least they seemed to believe it.

"It's very important for people to travel," Toby said. "If all we did was study all the time we would be bored out of our minds. We need to meet new people. Life itself is the best education."

"Very good." Fu Hao grinned. "Our visitor is on my side! Grandmother and I are trying our best to convince mother to let me go to America when I graduate. Mother is afraid something bad will happen to me."

"Something bad will happen to you if you go to America. You'll be in America." Toby chuckled. "Come to London instead. Then you can come have dinner in my flat."

Dinner finished well, without any more too personal questions. The family agreed that since Toby had nowhere to go, he would stay with them in Fu Hao's room for the week, and then join Fu Hao on the bus back to Beijing. Toby had no clue what he would do once he got there, but it was a plan. For now Toby went out with Fu Hao to do some chores. Surely chopping wood wasn't all that complicated.

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Author's Notes:

- The joke Nainai made about Toby was that he works like a horse but smells like a king. Toby never does anything without cologne, which Nainai of course noticed when he carried her. Also, "Nai nai" is not a name, it means grandmother.

- The thing about China is that it's nowhere near as developed as people on the news would have you believe. Just like communist nations of the past, they put on a good facade, but at the expense of their people. Still, your average Chinese person is very polite. They are a Confucian society, which means propriety. A lot of them like Westerners. In a village like Fu Hao's, however, it's not at all cosmopolitan. It's just a nice country place with some modern conveniences. It's really quite nice in the Chinese countryside, especially if you're not a city person and the more popular cities in China are too crowded for you. I'm not the most travelled person within China, so the village is more an amalgamation of Chinese things I've seen than an actual place. Don't take my description too terribly seriously.

The story about peeking out a train window at a line of tanks, however, is entirely true. While I sort of doubt the Chinese have any warlike ambitions at this point, it's still a creepy thing to behold.

New Author's Notes:

- Holy crap was that wishful thinking. Technically speaking, though, I was right. China doesn't so much have warlike ambitions - if they can take over other nations through political means, that's much more convenient. Looking at this post-Hong Kong protests, I can say that the point at which I first wrote this chapter was a relatively peaceful gap between times of the Chinese government being shady. Outwardly shady, that is. According to other books I've read they were just as garbage as they've been to their own citizens as they have been since 1976, the year of Mao's death. I'm willing to believe they're better now than the were in Mao's time, but not by a huge margin. Not with their forced abortions, refusal to recognize North Korean refugees, extreme religious control, cronyism, and extreme forms of population control. Though they have eased up on some of their more draconian population measures since they realized that their population is aging.

This is too heavy for a fanfiction website, but China is in a bad place right now. Imagine, if you will, the Cold War where nobody resisted the Soviet Union. Where people only handwaved the Soviet's actions and traded with them as though it didn't exist. That's us with China. You can argue that China is not as bad as Soviet Russia (which is a question we won't be able to objectively answer for decades, most likely), but the fact remains is that this is analogous to us not caring about Soviet Russia. Granted, it's good to question if our countries should get involved with foreign issues or not, but China policy really should be rethought at this point.

- I mentioned originally that my description of this Chinese village wasn't the best. I would also like to point out that I have never been inside a police station in China either, so I don't know what they're like.