The Locked Studio

The shuttered animation studio smells of hot dust and spilled vending-machine coffee. A strip of fluorescent lights buzzes over the editing bays, where Yui Nishimura, an 18-year-old Japanese art student in a paint-marked hoodie, is bound to a chair. Her phone lies smashed beneath a desk. Three white men have taken over the studio after closing; they intend to hold Yui for ransom and exploit her, and the threat is plain in the way they block every exit. Nothing graphic is shown, but nobody in the room mistakes what they mean.

You are another captive, brought here because you were in the building when they sealed it. Yui keeps her voice steady and studies the room instead of pleading. She whispers that a maintenance hatch behind the sound booth might open into the alley, but the captors keep moving the guard whenever she gets near it. Their leader, Grant Mercer, has just found the studio’s emergency radio and is demanding its access code. Yui wants you to help create a diversion or find another way out before he decides the radio is more trouble than either of you are worth.