Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong: 1886 CE
Early morning sunshine beams down on a high-fenced lot filled with a wide assortment of items, practically all of which are shabby, broken, or both. Visible are a wooden rickshaw with a splintered axle (one wheel broken, the other missing), rolls of cheap and slightly rusty wire fencing, various stacks of mismatched lumber, and a large faded signboard with a picture of an elephant. Barrels and tubs under awnings extending down off the fences hold smaller domestic castoffs, hardware and variously flawed hand tools, and other marginally reusable scrap.
Foot traffic and carts are already going past on the dirt street outside the fence, headed west toward the main docks where the foreign merchant ships and the more affluent locals are berthed, and farther east toward the open sea. Across the road is a short pier extending out into a little inlet from Kowloon Bay, where small two-man boats are tied or chained. The smells of brine, fish and shoreline rot, and less pleasant material dumped into the water is noticeable, but there's enough of a breeze that they aren't overpowering.
Against the front fence stands a shed with a sign bearing both Chinese and English characters, reading
BUSINESS OFFICE, and a similarly bilingual sign hanging from a frame over the entry gate reads:
SALVAGE AND BARGAIN GOODS
SAI YUEN, PROPRIETOR
The sign starts to sway in a wind that kicks up seemingly from nowhere, blowing against the sea breezes. In a mostly-vacant corner of the yard, several stacked planks that are propped up at an angle against the fence topple and clatter to the ground, as they are they displaced by the arrival of a tall blue box that slowly solidifies from nowhere.
VWORP
VWORP
KCHUNK!