Menzo
Frank gives you an address in Hong Kong Island, just east of Happy Valley.
You tell the woman that you've been invited to a magical spectacle, and she is welcome to come. She is excited and agrees to come along. You introduce yourselves. She says her name is Linda.
Your shift finishes up in a couple hours, and you make a cool two hundo in tips. You and Linda hop on the MTR. When you come up the streets aren't as crowded--it's now late enough that things have gotten a little quieter. You arrive at the address and are greeted at the door by a spirit. He seems to have been expecting you, but maybe that is just the way with spirits. "Come on in," he says, "it's starting soon."
Inside, down a short hall, is a large room with a wooden stage on one end. Everybody is seated on the floor, except for some spirits in the crowd, and a few magicians who are levitating themselves. You sit down and another guest asks if you have any deepweed. "You're gonna wanna be astral for this, trust me," he says.
All of the dialogue and singing is in Cantonese, so you have a hard time understanding everything. However, the play is so astrally vivid that you're easily able to pick up on the emotional content.
The Play:
Act I
The play begins with a man walking through a miniature city. Otherworldy voices chant in a soft fugue. As he climbs a small hill, the buildings slowly grow to proper size, and he enters a luxurious palace. Suddenly, he becomes old and feeble. He picks up a box resting on a mantle. He opens the box and is sucked into it.
A small girl comes and sees the box lying on the ground. She opens it. Green smoke rises up out of the box, and as she breathes in the smoke enters her body.
Act II
You are treated to scenes from the girl's life as a young woman. She has become an actress, the most beautiful and powerful woman in the land. Legions of fans adore her, and she leads a life of opulence and decadence. She meets a man--played by Frank--who falls in love with her, though she resists his advances. Frank sings many songs and performs miraculous feats, such as walking on his fingertips, to impress her, but to no avail.
Act III
The woman's behavior becomes erratic. She dares others to perform dangerous or deadly feats for her amusement. She calls together a troupe of actors and stagehands and produces her own film. The members of the troupe are given directions to burn the city and incite riots. In a particularly impressive visual trick, scenes from the film-within-a-play are superimposed upon the actors and stagehands, while they set up and act out those scenes. The scope of the film expands in both scale and violence, until it appears that the woman is directly manipulating the entire population of the city to conform to her visions of chaos. She looks around with a wild face, laughing. The soft fugue of spirit voices, which has varied subtly throughout the play, rises to a boom, as she chants along with it, in matching time and harmony, "This is Art! This is Art!"
She then shrinks to the size of your hand, as the whole scene seems to "zoom out," revealing that she is standing at the top of an impossibly tall tower. She dives off the tower, and the stage appears to lift off the ground and tilt towards you. The woman is falling through a dark, swirling vortex, which seems to be some sort of bottomless pit in the stage. Terrified, Frank's character dives into the pit, after her. He disappears into the void, as the woman rises back out, laughing maniacally. The lights fade.
Act IV
The booming fugue grows even louder. A haze descends upon the stage, and ghostly creatures appear to form out of it. They circle around the woman, chanting and growing taller. The woman's face falls blank, and the green smoke from the beginning of the play explodes out of her head. It is a demon of some sort. The other spirits seem to chastise it. You get the impression that they tell the demon it is time to stop fooling around with the humans, and come back to the spirit world, where she must grow into her true form and occupy her life with the serious tasks of mature spirits.
All of the spirits vanish instantly, and the lights come on, revealing the ravished world left on the stage.
Everyone claps and cheers. Frank comes by to greet you afterwards. "How'd you like it? Pretty crazy, huh!" He then lowers his voice. "Hey, I meant to ask--you seem like the kind of guy who works for a living." He winks. "Interested in an easy job with me tomorrow?"
