She’d arrived inside a crammed shipping container, compressed into the metal box like a cheap commodity with no care, or consideration for her well-being. They tossed her in along with the others and bolted the heavy doors. No food, no water, no hope. The lorry had taken them all to an industrial warehouse, and from there she’d been unceremoniously loaded into a transit van. Hours later the van stopped, its white bulk greeted by the plaintive squawk of a lone seagull.

She’d been specifically chosen for a particular job in the arcade. There would be no questions, no paperwork and little chance of escape. Money had changed hands and she was nothing but a paid-for possession. Without the means to resist, she had simply become a commodity employed to make the customers crave her. Without agency or choice, the arcade was just another box in which she was a prisoner, impuissant and trapped.

Weeks after arriving, she’d never left the glittering hell hole. Her existence took its entire meaning from being nothing more than eye candy designed to entice. Her job was perfectly matched to her skill set. She was simply there to draw the customers in, and she’d only been given shelter because she was precisely what they wanted…pretty, and potentially available for a price.

She never spoke to the customers, just met their imbecilic, rapacious gazes with her own steady, passive eyes. Her reality consisted of fatuous fools giggling manically as they stared at her, slurping fizzy drinks, and chewing gum like camels, with less elegance. They would have disgusted her, or catalysed her pity had she possessed an undamaged emotional hinterland, or the capacity to exercise autonomous judgement.

Such things were not part of her makeup and had she acquired such qualities, she would not have survived the fate assigned to her. Without self-examination, reflection, or personal empowerment, she was in a sense immune to the facile ignominy of her pointless existence.

From within the glass walls of her new cell, she’d seen hundreds of animated faces studying her form and scheming a tawdry means of fondling her. Greedy glances betrayed the fact that those who eagerly regarded her, considered her nothing more than something to be taken without consideration of her feelings, or desires.

The place was a brightly lit flesh pit reverberating with a chaotic atonal symphony of clangs, crashes and loud tuneless jingles, assailing all within with remorseless intent. Nature had been kind in that she heard nothing, her ears useless from the moment she’d come into the world. A blessing she never celebrated, unaware of its significance or value.

Escape, sought or not, had presented itself more than once, but slipped away with clumsy, uncoordinated callousness. She’d been so close to unknowingly finding a way out of the arcade, however every missed opportunity saw her fall back into servitude. Although jostled by others as she performed her silent duty, she’d never felt any form of connection with those she amused. She felt nothing. She said nothing. Her bright pink attire suggested a happy countenance, yet she could not have been more inert.

The ever present prospect of escape would perhaps have given her hope, had she the desire to entertain it. Perhaps her imprisonment, her forced presence would have weighed heavily upon her heart, had she ever examined the fact. As it was, escape flirted tenaciously with her, but she felt no active regret when capricious fate declined to release her from the arcade’s tentacles. Spared the dreams of a victim, she simply existed, numb and unmolested by the grubby futility of her existence.

The mechanical claw edged above her fluffy pink head, jerkily descending before its three prongs pressed themselves into the soft stuffing of her toy panda form. Steadily she rose above the other soft toys within the brightly lit glass box, travelling slowly at ninety degrees towards the metal tray just below the glass petition at the front of ‘Panda Grabber’. The claws lost their weak grip and she plummeted back into a sea of small pink pandas. Game Over.