Chapter 66: Mei Saves the Day
The tension in the air was palpable as the final day of the matchmaking convention dawned, thick enough to spread on toast. The competitors were down to their last challenge, and Julian Ashcroft was pulling out all the stops—literally, as he’d insisted on having every door stopper removed from the venue to create what he called a "seamless technological environment." Ava had spent the morning reviewing client profiles, fine-tuning her plans, and double-checking every detail with Ryan, all while trying to ignore the faint sound of Julian practicing his victory speech in the adjacent room.
"I swear he’s gotten worse," Ava muttered, rifling through her notes for the tenth time. "Yesterday I heard him referring to himself in the third person."
Ryan, sprawled in a chair nearby, snorted into his coffee. "Classic villain behavior. Next thing you know, he’ll be stroking a white cat and explaining his evil plan."
As they walked into the event hall, Ava whispered to Ryan, "This feels like walking into a lion’s den."
"Don’t worry," Ryan replied, casually dodging a frantic event coordinator who was sprinting past with an armful of tangled fairy lights. "Mei’s the kind of person who trains lions, then convinces them to do circus tricks. We’ve got her in our corner."
Ava shot him a skeptical look. "That doesn’t comfort me. Last time Mei ’helped,’ three people ended up in the fountain."
"To be fair," Ryan pointed out, "they all found true love afterward. Wet, but in love."
---
Unbeknownst to Ava and Ryan, Mei was already hard at work backstage, implementing one of her infamous schemes with all the precision of a cat burglar planning a heist—if the cat burglar wore floral prints and carried emergency matchmaking supplies in her purse. She’d been observing Julian’s team with the kind of keen attention she usually reserved for matchmaking disasters and all-you-can-eat buffets, and she’d noticed something intriguing: Julian’s assistants looked about as stable as a house of cards in a wind tunnel.
Eric, the uptight assistant who seemed perpetually one coffee away from a nervous breakdown, had been muttering about "system instabilities" all morning. Lila, the younger assistant whose enthusiasm for technology was matched only by her inability to keep her desk plants alive, had been caught frantically googling "how to fix corrupted algorithm urgent please help" during her lunch break.
Mei saw an opportunity, and like any good chaos agent, she seized it with both hands.