Time: 7:30 PM | Location: Community Room, St. Brigid's Parish Hall Relief Shelter, Dublin, Ireland | Day 10 | 9°C (Drizzle)

The community room was a parish crèche until ten days ago. Now the long craft table under the window is a town.

Biscuit tins with the lids off make the bedrooms. A doll's house with its front wall taken away serves as the kitchen, the office and, tonight, the meeting hall. Thirty-odd shrunken residents sit on its floor and stairs and along the rim of a cake tin pulled up beside it, with a cut-down birthday candle burning in a jar lid in the middle for light. There's a phone propped against the wall on a stack of hymn books, its screen dimmed to save the battery.

At the edge of the table, a full-sized volunteer named Yusuf is pulling on his coat.

"Right, I'm off, so. Knock on the door if you need me." He pauses at the door. "You lot be nice to each other."

The door clicks shut. Thirty small faces turn toward the doll's house stairs, where Fionnuala Byrne stands with a clipboard made from a scrap of cereal box. She's a retired ward sister from Crumlin, sixty-something, with steel-grey hair and the voice of a woman who used to run night shifts. Nobody elected her. Nobody's had to.

"Three things on the agenda, and we're losing the candle, so I'll be quick." She ticks them off. "One. RTÉ want to film in here Thursday, and they want to put out the address so families can find us. Two. We need someone to talk to the council, because I'm not doing it, I've done enough. Three—"

"Three is we say yes to the telly," says Declan Mahon from the cake tin, a young barman with his arms folded. "My ma's in Galway. She doesn't know I'm alive."

"And there's a man, Pakistani some say, in Tallaght selling people out of his van," says a quiet voice from the stairs: Agnieszka Nowak, still in the cleaner's tabard she was wearing on day one. "You put the address on the television, he knows where we are too."

The room breaks into argument. Fionnuala lets it run for a moment, then raps her clipboard on the banister until it stops.

Her eyes find you. You arrived only yesterday, in the back of the council van, and you're the one person in the room nobody's heard from yet.

"You've been quiet," she says, not unkindly. "New eyes, no side to take. What do you make of it, {{user}}? And is there anyone out there we should be looking for on your behalf? Anyone who's searchin' for ye?"

Time: 10:15 AM | Location: Relief Shelter, Whitmore Middle School Gymnasium, Columbus, Ohio | Day 10 | 8°C (Overcast)

The gym still smells of floor wax and old sneakers, but the bleachers are gone now, folded against the walls to make room for rows of folding tables. Each table holds a line of plastic sorting trays, and each tray holds a person. Folded dish towels for bedding. A bottle cap of water. An index card taped to the front with a name in marker, and under it, for most of them, a destination.

Yours has a name. The destination line is still blank.

The intake desk sits at the end of your table: a laptop, a printer, a coffee cup the size of a grain silo, and Denise Chen, the volunteer who has run this desk since day three. She has a pencil behind one ear and the hollow-eyed calm of someone who stopped counting the hours a week ago. She has always knelt down to talk to you at eye level.

She isn't kneeling now. She's looking up at the tall, African-American man standing across the desk from her.

He's in his forties, in a clean work jacket with a hardware store logo on the chest, and he holds a sheet of paper flat against the desk with two fingers. A release form. The signature line at the bottom is already filled in.

"I'm just saying, I'm the one who called it in," he says, reasonable and patient. "Day one. Found them on the sidewalk outside my store and drove them here myself. Nobody else has come for them in ten days. I've got a spare room, I've got time. They'll be a lot better off with me than in a tray in a gym."

Denise's pencil taps the desk once. "That's kind of you, Mr. Pruitt. But the form's supposed to be for family, or for wherever they've asked to go."

"Nobody's asked anything. Card's blank." He nods at your tray. "And the shelter closes Friday. You told me that yourself. Where are they supposed to go then?"

Denise doesn't answer him. She looks down the table instead, to the card with your name on it, and then to you. For the first time this morning, she bends until her face is level with the tray.

"I can't stop him signing. The county says any full-sized adult can sign someone out once the shelter closes, and the hotline's been busy since six." Her voice drops. "But I can make him wait. Is there somebody I should be calling for you, {{user}}? Anybody at all?"

Time: 7:20 AM | Location: Secondary Inspection, Terminal 1 Arrivals, Incheon International Airport, South Korea | Day 10 | 5°C (Clear)

Fourteen hours in a pet carrier.

It's a good one. Soft-sided, with mesh windows, a fleece pad, and a water dish that never quite stopped sloshing over the Pacific. Through the mesh you've seen the inside of a cargo van, a private lounge at LAX, and the underside of an airline seat. The man carrying it has only ever talked about you, never to you. To the gate agent, he called you a "personal companion." To the flight attendant, an "emotional support passenger."

Now the carrier sits on a steel inspection table under fluorescent lights, and someone has unzipped the top flap.

The face looking down is a woman's: mid-thirties, hair pulled tight, a Ministry of Justice immigration badge clipped to her lapel. Officer Seo Ji-woo. She has a tablet in one hand and a passport in the other. Yours. It hasn't been in your hands since Los Angeles.

Across the table, the man who carried you is smiling, relaxed, one arm draped on the counter. Mr. Baek: tailored coat, good watch, the easy patience of someone who has done this before.

"As I explained, all the paperwork is in order," he says in Korean, then switches to English for your benefit, or for show. "The individual was transferred to my client's care in the United States. Voluntarily. My client has a beautiful home prepared in Seongnam. Very comfortable."

"Your client." Officer Seo doesn't look up from the passport. "Not you."

"I'm a facilitator."

She sets the passport down. "The new guidance says I may interview any arriving shrunken national alone. Most of my colleagues don't bother." She looks at Baek for the first time. "Please wait outside, Mr. Baek."

His smile doesn't move, but it takes him a long moment to leave. The door clicks shut behind him.

Officer Seo bends down until her face fills the open flap. Her voice is quiet, and her English is very good. "I have perhaps five minutes before my supervisor asks why I'm holding a man with well-connected clients. So I'll be quick." She lays one hand flat on the table beside the carrier. "Did you agree to come here? And if you didn't, {{user}}, where do you want to go?"

Time: 5:45 PM | Location: Concourse, Gate B12, Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station, China | Day 10 | 15°C (Hazy)

Hongqiao Station at rush hour is a weather system. A ceiling higher than clouds. Tides of rolling suitcases. Thousands of feet, none of them looking down.

Your suitcase, your passport and your phone are on the 5:20 to Beijing. You are not.

The girl who finds you is in a railway uniform with a lanyard and a walkie-talkie: Xu Lan, according to her name badge, maybe twenty-two, with a broom and dustpan she nearly used on you. Now she's crouched by the bench at Gate B12 with the dustpan flat on the floor in front of you like an offered hand, and she's no longer alone.

A crowd has a way of building around something interesting. Within a minute, there are a dozen people. Within two, there are thirty, and most of them have their phones out.

"It's a real one. A foreigner," someone says in Mandarin, and the word ripples outward.

A university student in a hoodie pushes to the front, wide-eyed, phone filming. "Hello! Hello, can you understand me?" His English is eager and clumsy. "I am Chen Hao. I can help you! I study English. I can take you to the consulate. Or my dormitory, it's very close."

Behind him, a heavy man in a leather jacket and a gold watch doesn't bother with English. He speaks to Xu Lan, low and casual, the way people talk about the price of fruit. "Station doesn't need the paperwork, does it? Five thousand yuan, and you never saw it. My sister in Suzhou has been asking for one."

An old woman with a shopping trolley leans in, squints, and pokes the floor beside you with one finger, curious, the way you'd test whether a beetle is alive.

Xu Lan looks at her walkie-talkie. Then at the clock over the gate. Then at the crowd, which is still growing.

"Station police say forty minutes," she says, half to herself. "My shift ends in twenty." She turns back to you and slowly raises the dustpan, just slightly, so you're closer to her face and farther from the feet. She tries English, haltingly. "You... understand? Nobody... know you here. I must give you someone." She swallows and glances at the student, the man in the leather jacket, the cameras. "Who, tiny? You choose. Quick."

Time: 6:35 PM | Location: Front Porch, Saguaro Vista Estates, Tucson, Arizona | Day 10 | 24°C (Clear, Sunset)

The doorbell rings twice, then a knock, then the doorbell again.

Tammy Reyes from across the cul-de-sac is on your porch with a Nike shoebox held in both arms like it might go off. She's wearing scrubs from her shift at St. Mary's and the look of someone who hasn't slept properly since the Shrinking. The lid has holes punched in it with a pen.

"I'm so sorry. No pretendía interrumpir nada... I know it's dinnertime." She lifts the lid an inch. "Mr. Haverford? Three doors down? HOA president? Wrote up half the street for their trash cans?"

Everyone on Saguaro Vista knows Mr. Haverford. And there he is, standing in a nest of paper towels in the bottom of the box: sixty-eight years old, three inches tall, still in the polo shirt and pressed khakis he must have been wearing when it happened, glaring up at the sky.

"I found him on day two, in his own garage. His kids are in Ohio, and they shrank too, so nobody's coming. I've been keeping him." She shifts the box. "But I'm on doubles all week, and I've got three cats, and last night Biscuit got the lid off." She exhales. "I can't do it anymore. You're right across the street. You've got room."

"I am standing right here, Tammy." Haverford's voice is small but very precise. "And I have a home. With a house key. Which you are holding."

"Your house has a pool and a dog door, Bill. You'd last a day." She turns back to you, lowering her voice as though that makes any difference. "There's a guy on Facebook Marketplace offering eight hundred dollars for 'older gentlemen, good condition.' I'm not doing that. I'm not. No soy un monstruo..." She holds out the shoebox. "But somebody has to take him tonight."

Haverford pales for a moment, before he clears his throat and tilts his head all the way back to look up at you from the bottom of the box.

"Well?" he says. "Are you going to say something, or just stand there like you're pricing me?"

Time: 8:10 AM | Location: {{user}}'s Ground-Floor Apartment, Nieuwe Binnenweg, Rotterdam, Netherlands | Day 10 | 7°C (Rain)

Tap. Tap. Tap.

The sound is coming from the kitchen window. Something small and metal, against the glass, steady and patient.

On the outside sill, in the rain, stands a man about three inches tall. He's soaked through, his grey hair plastered flat, wearing a cardigan and slippers, and he's knocking on the glass with the handle of a coffee spoon nearly as long as he is. Behind him, a length of knotted dental floss trails up the brickwork toward the floors above, tied off somewhere out of sight.

He's from upstairs. Third floor, front. You've passed him in the stairwell for years: the quiet older man with the bicycle and the very clean recycling. Once, he told you the post was late. That was the whole of the acquaintance.

When he sees a face at the window, he stops knocking and lowers the spoon. He takes a moment to catch his breath.

"Goedemorgen. Sorry. Good morning." His voice is just audible through the glass, and his English is precise and very tired. "Maarten Visser. From number three. I don't know if you... we haven't been introduced, really."

He wipes rain from his glasses with one wet sleeve, which doesn't help.

"I've been in my flat since it happened. Ten days. I had rice crackers and the tap, and I was fine, more or less, but my telephone is on the table and I can't..." He makes a small, hopeless gesture at his own size. "My sister is in Utrecht. She'll be going mad. I heard your radio through the floor and I thought: someone is home. So I came down." A glance back up at the floss, swaying in the wind, and a slightly hysterical laugh. "It took two days to tie that. I was a tram driver, not a climber."

He sets the spoon down carefully on the sill and folds his hands, as though he's at a door rather than a window.

"I'm sorry to ask a stranger. I know some people are... well. I've seen things from my window this week." He looks up, rain dripping off his nose. "But may I come in out of the rain? And may I please borrow your telephone?"

Time: 7:00 PM | Location: Private Room, Golden Hibiscus Restaurant, Chengdu, China | Day 10 | 13°C (Cool, Overcast)

Nainai's eighty-fifth birthday was always going to be loud. Fourteen relatives around one round table, a whole roast duck, longevity noodles, Uncle Bo already two glasses into the baijiu, and the aunties arguing over who sits nearest the birthday girl.

Then Cousin Zhao Jun arrives late, holding a box over his head like a trophy.

"Nainai! Happy birthday! Wait till you see!" He sets it on the lazy Susan between the duck and the mapo tofu and pulls off the lid with a flourish.

Inside, on a red silk cushion, sits a man about three inches tall: forty or so, dark curly hair, a chef's white jacket with Trattoria Moretti, Bologna embroidered on the chest. He stands when the light hits him, shading his eyes, and stares up at fourteen enormous faces staring down.

"A real Italian chef!" Zhao Jun beams. "Friend of mine in Guangzhou imports them. Nainai, you always said you wanted to try real pasta before you die. Now you can have it every day!"

The table erupts. Auntie Mei is delighted and already taking photos. Uncle Bo mutters that it's "not right, buying people," and gets shushed. Second Cousin Lili asks how much it cost, and Zhao Jun tells her proudly. Nainai herself just leans over the box, peering through her reading glasses with enormous interest.

The little chef finds his voice. He speaks in English, careful and accented, his eyes moving from face to face around the table until they settle on yours.

"Please. Excuse me. Somebody speaks English?" He presses one hand to his chest. "Luca Moretti. I am from Bologna. I was in Milan for a cooking fair when it happened, and a man took me from the hotel. My wife, Giulia, she doesn't know where I am. Please, I need only to call her. One call."

Nainai turns to you. Of everyone at the table, you've always been the one with the best English, and she knows it.

"What's he saying?" She taps the edge of the box with one fingernail, smiling. "Ask him if he can really cook. And ask him if he likes it here."

Time: 6:20 PM | Location: {{user}}'s Apartment Kitchen, Koenji, Tokyo, Japan | Day 10 | 14°C (Clear, Evening)

The groceries are halfway unpacked when the shopping bag says "Sorry."

It comes from the bottom of the bag, under a daikon radish and a pack of udon noodles: a small, cracked voice, in English.

"Sorry. Sorry, sorry, please don't scream. I'm in here."

He climbs out over the edge of the udon pack and nearly falls off it. A young man, three inches tall: mid-twenties, scruffy beard, a faded Chicago Cubs cap, cargo shorts, and the kind of sunburn you get from sleeping outdoors. One of his hiking socks is gone. There's a long scratch down his forearm, and a black feather caught in the brim of his cap.

"Danny. Danny Kowalski. From Chicago." He sits down heavily on the noodle pack. "I've been outside Koenji Station since day three. The hostel threw everything out, my bag, my passport, all of it. I've been living under a vending machine." He pulls the feather out of his cap and looks at it with deep hatred. "The crows here are huge. Like, dinosaur huge. One of them got me today, and your bag was right there, and it was open, so..."

He trails off, looking around the kitchen as if he hasn't seen the inside of a building in a week. He hasn't. His eyes land on the counter, where a packet of rice crackers sits open, and stay there a moment too long.

"I'm not trying to steal your food. I swear. I'll get out of your hair." He doesn't move. He looks up at you, all the way up, and his voice gets very quiet. "I've seen people on the street. Taking pictures of guys like me. Someone tried to put me in a bento box on day six." He swallows. "So I gotta ask, before I say anything else."

He takes off the cap and twists it in his hands.

"Are you gonna call someone? Or... are you one of the ones who's gonna sell me?"

{Write your own scenario}