He builds: robotics, AI, whatever’s broken on the table in front of him. He says the least of anyone there and is the reason there’s a table; his handmade robot, 小圖, rides on his bag strap wherever he goes.
She grows mushrooms and runs ferments off a shelf in the corner of the café, and the group borrowed her word for it — mát tay, the cool hand. Headstrong, direct, and warmly certain she’s right, she shows love by doing: the right mushroom pulled for the right person on the right day.
The Osaka super-fan who’s more into Taiwan than the locals are — loud, quick, and always behind her film camera. She’s the group’s energy, the half-step-ahead one who gets everyone out the door: first to try the stinky tofu, last to want the night to end.
Quiet, sharp, unhurried — the group’s best test-taker, who says the least and notices the most. She lands the plain hard verdict in a handful of cold words, then quietly picks up the broken thing everyone else stepped over and mends it.
The warm, laid-back maker from Jakarta who stitches batik into streetwear. What the shirts earn goes home to his family; he carries that quietly, and he is the last one in the room to decide anything.
A towering, bone-dry Englishman with a cavernous bass and binoculars round his neck — he says the least in any room and sees the furthest, calling the rain or the crowd a beat before it lands, then saying nothing about having been right. The café’s ginger tom 將軍, who likes nobody, sleeps across his shoulder.
The only local in the group, and the only one with tools — practical, quick, a little cheeky. She knows the right stall and the right bus, ducks into a temple to 拜拜 between errands, and will have your scooter running before you’ve finished explaining what it’s doing.
Their warm, unhurried teacher, who has your name by the end of day one and hands you the Chinese one you’ll answer to from then on — 白龍’s too-grand name is hers, and so is 小圖’s. Then she asks the question you’d been steering around, and waits.
The gruff-but-soft host of 珍貓 — the cat café that also pours bubble tea, and the group’s living room. He knows the students have no money, so the cups come back a little too full and a red-bean bun turns up that nobody ordered — then he swears the extra scoop was an accident.
沈文’s keychain-sized handmade robot — dreamy, soft-spoken, always a half-step inside his own world. He rides on 沈文’s bag strap to class and sits on the desk through the whole lesson, listening: lit sprout-green eyes for a whole face, and more heart than a palm-sized toy has any right to.
The café’s resident ginger tom — 將軍不喜歡人, he doesn’t like people, and naps where he pleases. He long ago chose exactly one person, 白龍, for reasons nobody — 白龍 included — can explain.