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1. Tseng has a viewing garden. It’s in his apartment, right off the kitchenette, where a narrow shaft leads upward through his building to daylight—a plot about three feet square. It is designed austerely, for repose; there are some scholar’s rocks, a spiral of silver sand, and three kinds of downy moss. Most of the time he views it out of the corner of his eye, when he’s cooking his dinner.
On bad days, he sits on the linoleum with his back to the stove and watches it through the dust dancing in the filtered light.
2. Tseng does not own ancestral swords, but in private, when extremely irked, he swears in Wutainese.
3. His father was a haberdasher. That business was destroyed during the Shinra-Wutai war; father survived, mother perished in friendly fire.
4. He has been quietly embezzling funds from his employers. Nothing anyone would notice. He is not putting this money away for retirement, which he doesn’t imagine he will ever see.
5. The Ghost Line was born when Scarlett temporarily curtailed his access to the IT Research Lab. Tseng was so incensed by this act—clearly meant to punish his rejection of her sexual advances—that he began developing his own secret network of parallel processors scattered throughout Midgar.
6. Tseng has exceptional color vision.
7. Revenge is a secret, private, rarely indulged pleasure. Tseng meters out all his pleasures, but he meters his revenge with care; he thinks he could easily become addicted.
8. Not only does Tseng have a keycard to Reno’s apartment, he actually spent the afternoon there once, when Reno was in Rocket Town with Rude, running the security detail for the cryptography conference.
On a very bad day.
9. He confirmed his long-held suspicion that he was gay at age seventeen, on a week-long bicycle trip with his best friend—a revelation that has, in his adulthood, made very little difference to the trajectory his life has taken. That solitary arc.
10. He loves dogs.
11. Tseng starts most days in the gravball chamber at the Shinra Executive Gym, beating the hell out of a little blue ball that never did anything to him.
12. Tseng’s favorite article of clothing is a wool scarf, arctic white.
13. He has destroyed exactly three cell phones. In fits of rage.
14. He stripped the hardwood floors in his apartment and refinished them himself, with tung oil. One of the most satisfying experiences of his life.
15. Nowadays, the only person he will allow into the makeshift ring on the sprung floor down in Goombah Basement is Reno. This is another way of saying that the only person who is permitted to see him angry, exhausted, or grieving is Reno.
16. Tseng is lactose-intolerant.
17. Saunas make him horny: a good reason to avoid the one in the Shinra Executive Gym.
18. He has killed a man with an umbrella.
19. His childhood dream: to be an archaeologist.
20. A secret passion is high-end jewelry. A fantasy that he only rarely permits himself: Reno in absurd Rufus Wainwright couture, tight striped pants, diaphanous shirt sliding down his shoulders, a heavy pearl necklace spilling down his exposed back. He lets himself think about that once or twice a year.
21. Tseng can get stains out of virtually any surface or material.
22. Sad fact: he doesn’t know how to “blend.”
23. He has a higher unarmed combat rating even than Rude. He’s meaner.
24. He reads several languages, speaks two.
25. He doesn’t see why diplomacy shouldn’t include a little bribery.
26. Tseng makes a distinction between people in his command and the rest of the organization. Call it playing favorites. On some fundamental level, Tseng is a battlefield commander who feels his first job is to bring his guys home. Alive.
He has disobeyed certain key orders in order to accomplish this.
27. He goes to exactly one bar: a small, drafty, underappreciated robata bar that serves the best cold sake in Midgar. He takes care never to mention this to anyone, in order to preserve the appearance of sobriety.
28. He has killed a man while wearing only a dress shirt.
29. Freedom, no longer available to him, remains a possibility in Reno. On an obscure level he revels in that freedom, which he experiences, against all logic, as a kind of gift.
30. Tseng is most ashamed of having engineered the death of a senior research fellow of Wutai University who had come very close indeed to developing a viable alternative to mako power. A man he liked very much.
Tseng still hears his voice, sometimes, at night.