Original Content

“Okay, but hear me out,” Jeff said. “Aura Battler Dunbine is an important piece of media. Think of it like a keystone at the top of an arch. Remove Aura Battler Dunbine, and you don't have double-Zeta, you don't have Escaflowne, and you don't have Garzey's Wing.”

Jeff Collins was important. Not to the average person, but between Alan, Steve, and the rest of the Anime Club, Jeff was the responsible adult. He wasn't just the person keeping them on the rails – he was the rails. An unstoppable force of good taste, media analysis, and the person making the weekly meetings of the Club even happen. He was the one booking the hotel room, and while Alan hadn't confirmed it, he was mildly certain that Jeff was still helping manage the books for the Pioneer College Anime Club, despite being two years an alumni rather than a student.

“Okay, but hear me out,” Steve said. Were it any other day, Alan would have given a quippy “No, but you're gonna keep talking anyway,” but instead, he kept quiet and let his questionable friend continue. Steve was an idiot, as far as Alan was concerned, just one who happened to be right and who Alan happened to agree with frequently. He was short, blond, and cute in a way that managed to pull men and women alike to him, despite being a callous 4chan shitlord. “We could be doing literally anything else besides watching terrible 80s mech anime at nine in the morning.”

Jack, Clive, and Bill, who Alan grouped together even when they weren't mirroring each other, nodded on the other side of the table. Jack and Bill were mid-bite into a Boston Creme donut and a chocolate cruller, respectively, but Clive, currently ignoring his Dunkin' Donuts egg and cheese sandwich, was more equipped to respond.

“I hate to agree with Steve, but we could be spending our time watching Yukikaze in the other video room.” The statement was met with a chorus of groans.

Jack, a chubby guy who was somehow managing to look like he was balding at 22, slammed his donut on the table, sending yellow, goopy cream flying. “That's just Area 88 with shitty CGI, and you know it!”

Alan couldn't find it in him to be invested in the conversation. Between the after-effects of the alcohol, and the effects of the memories – well, what he hoped weren't memories, at least – he was having a hard enough time dealing with an egg and cheese sandwich, let alone anything else. Without his participation, the conversation gradually processed towards a consensus.

The others scarfed down the last bits of their breakfasts, and Jeff stood up, tightening the straps on his backpack. “So, Aura Battler Dunbine it is, right?”
“Just to kill time,” Bill said, diplomatically.

“Yes, to kill time,” Jeff agreed, though in tone, he sounded wounded by the lack of import given to his recommendation.

Chairs were pushed back to their positions under the table, skidding loudly across the plastic mall flooring, and the entirety of the former membership of the Pioneer College Anime Club stood with purpose, minus Alan.

This was immediately noticed.

“You coming?” Steve asked.

Alan could always count on Steve to look out for him.

“Yeah. I'll be there in a minute.”

No one made a move to leave – awfully considerate of them, all things considered, but not what Alan needed right now.

“Sandwich,” Alan said in an attempt at deflection and/or explanation, shaking the article of food at them. It was a poor excuse, he knew – he could just carry it with him and eat it on the way, it wasn't like the convention hall had a ban on food – But it was the best he had at the moment.

Jeff opened his mouth to give just that argument, but Steve cut him off. “We'll see you there, then, right?”

If Alan was a Catholic, he would have crossed himself. “Yeah.” That brought the tone where it needed to be, and the other five left Alan behind, striding off to the convention hall, attendee badges in hand.

As Alan finished his sandwich, bite by terrifying bite, he was drawn inexorably towards what he had to do. He remembered the alleyway below him, the sight of the dumpster, the feeling of dropping just under a hundred pounds from well over a hundred feet up.

He had to find that dumpster, and see if there was anything in it.

The more the thoughts ran through his mind, the harder it was to keep down his breakfast, and he ended up stashing the last few bite, wrapped up on the waxpaper it had been served to him on, in his backpack. From where he was sitting, a mere thirty feet away was a disused, obscure exit of the mall, positioned at the exact midpoint between the convention hall and the hotel. From there, it was just a hop, skip, and a jump to a sequence of alleyways that led to and around the entire Sheraton hotel.

Alan knew, deep in his bones, that it was a terrible idea, but before he could formulate a cogent counter-argument, he was outside, feet carrying him into those side alleyways. If he could detach himself from the situation, things were really quite pleasant. The early spring seaside air, the slight morning drizzle of rain, the shade of the buildings, it made his cosplay much nicer to wear. He'd neglected to change out of it the previous night, only running a bit of water over it in the bath before passing out. The rain made him feel more clean, somehow.

It also made the concrete look disgustingly dirty.

Dingy, brutal, the runoff looking like something awful had collected and been poured out onto the street. Maybe it was. He passed by dumpster after dumpster, his nose perking up at each one, expecting to smell… something. He didn't know what “death” smelt like, besides descriptions in shitty novelizations of zombie movies and games talking about “the sweet scent of death”, which made little sense to him, but he felt like he'd know it if he smelt it. Nothing so far. Thankfully, at this hour, no one was in the back alleys behind the Sheraton. If it was anything like previous years, in a few hours, there would be a few cosplayers back here, desperately attempting repairs to their outfits before going back into the public eye, or people trying something a bit more unsavory while in costume. But at this hour, before nine? Alan could keep his eyes to the sky, looking for a familiar balcony so many floors up, without worrying about anyone finding him suspicious.

He had almost made the full circle around the Sheraton without recognition, and was ready to breath a sigh of relief, when he froze.

When a person talks about an “out-of-body experience”, the typical imagining is of someone, half-dead on an operating table, wisping their way out of their body, a ghostly apparition looking down on them, going “Huh, that's me, ain't it?” and then retrieving some details about a neighboring hospital room, at least enough for some television interviewer to find interesting. Or, if you're a little more conspiratorially-minded, some schmuck in a bare room, strapped to a metal chair in front of a beat-up table under a naked bulb light, being asked by the CIA to see what the hell the Soviets were up to via some form of telepathy.

What Alan experienced in that moment was far more common.

He looked up, and felt, intensely, what it was like to look down from where he was looking. His brain recognized and replicated, in that moment, two ends of the same experience, and for an instant, he was in both places, both times – On the balcony, watching a body fall through the air against the nighttime city lights, and on the ground, staring up into the rain, seeing a dingy concrete balcony get dingier with every passing drop.

The moments synchronized, and he watched a drop of rain fall, with all the weight of that beautiful girl's corpse, down, down, until it slammed silently into the same dumpster he'd seen the night before. There was a terrifying crash, and Alan stumbled backwards a few steps before realizing that the sound was all in his head, pure expectation. Just like before.

With each recollection, Alan grew more and more afraid that he was entirely right in his memory of the previous night. He willed his legs forward, thrusting his thighs out and hoping his calves and shins would keep up, feeling the pins and needles of nervous numbness coursing through his body. He fell onto the dumpster, holding fast onto its metal edges to keep himself upright.

The lid was closed.

Yet another chance to turn back.

It wasn't a choice at all, though, was it?

He threw open the lid, feeling bile rise in his throat, completely unprepared for what he, in the moment, knew he was going to see.

And then…

He didn't.

The dumpster was empty.

No body.

No trash.

Nothing.

His eyes darted all over, looking for any sign of blood, viscera, anything.

And there was nothing. In fact, the dumpster, despite being clearly in exactly the correct place, looked brand new, like nothing had ever been in it. It didn't have so much as a nick in it.

Filled with confusion and relief in equal measure, Alan changed that, and threw up into the dumpster, christening it.