Back in the convention center, Alan slowly pushed open the door to another panel. A voice actor was up on stage, giving some kind of motivational speech about how to channel frustration into a successful acting career, but Alan couldn't hear him over the incredibly loud looks he was getting from Steve and Jeff as he sidled past them into an empty seat. His cape got caught up on Steve's head for a few moments before he could even begin to figure out how to free him.
“You had a second costume?” Jeff asked.
“Uh… not really.”
“Then what the hell is that?”
“If I could explain I would,” Alan said.
“Bullshit, spill the beans,” Steve said, leaning across Jeff to get a closer look at Alan's costume.
However, the three were starting to draw grumpy glares from the people surrounding them, people who'd much rather be listening to the voice actor on stage than three random idiots, so they quite wisely shut up.
“The real takeaway is,” the voice actor was saying, “Practice every day, come up with voices for characters in the games you play and books you read, and get your name out there as much as possible. Do free work online for fan-projects, whatever you gotta do to log those hours of experience and get ears on you.” He took a swig from a water bottle. “That said… any questions?”
Several hands went up in the audience.
Alan wasn't listening too closely. Instead, he had noticed a little orange ribbon tied tightly around his costume's cane. This was a necessary feature of anime conventions, at least, ones that didn't want to have a sudden police presence. Seeing as many, many anime characters had guns, swords, gunswords, sword-guns, and all varieties of nasty fighting implements, a system had been implemented to clearly visually mark them as non-dangerous and not “real weapons”. So, you would take your costume-grade weapon down to convention security, have them assess the danger it posed to other attendees and society at large, and either confiscate it for the duration of the convention or, hopefully, wrap a little orange ribbon around it. Orange had been a color decided upon in the 1980s by toy manufactures, after over-zealous police had shot a number of children playing with overly-realistic squirt guns, and the ribbon format imitated the practice of sealing a sword within its sheath.
Peace-binding a cane, however, seemed a little much to Alan. He supposed he could whack someone over the head with it if it was sturdily built enough. Alan fiddled around with it, testing its weight and balance, and found it to be remarkably heavy, with a lacquered surface, and the handle was actual metal. Real high quality stuff, which made him feel even stranger about being press-ganged into accepting it on loan. The thought made him want to inspect the rest of the costume -
It was all high-quality stuff. Like, real clothing high quality. You see, a large portion of cosplay was hand made by amateurs, attempted to visually replicate cartoon clothing as faithfully as possible. As you might expect, even the highest budget anime do not have the greatest of visual fidelity – This is even the case in movie production. Props and costumes can be made to a lower standard of quality than “real” clothing, since their imperfections won't be visible even on a theater projection screen. But, there was an alternate approach to cosplay – more difficult in some ways, easier in others – The thrift store approach. You would find articles of clothing, made by and for real people, that approximated as best as possible the clothing of your character, and lightly modify them to match.
This was one of those cosplays. Which was somewhat alarming, considering that Tuxedo Mask, appropriate to his name, wore white-tie level formalwear. Alan had never looked at the cost of things of that caliber, but he got the sense that it was of the “if you have to ask, you can't afford it” variety. God, he could get lost just in the intricacies of the stitching…
This was getting silly. He pulled out his phone, and sent out a quick text to Sawyer.
[Why the hell did you get me this costume? It's too nice]
He stared at his phone for a few moments. He hated waiting for replies. At least with AOL Instant Messenger, he could see when people were typing, when people were paying attention. It'd be so strange for her to reply – sending a message to someone and them actually caring, what kind of nonsense was that -
“What was it like, working with Tristram Allister?”
The question came from a plain-looking kid, who Alan didn't even recognize as being in a cosplay until he realized that his plain outfit of a white button-up shirt and slacks was, in fact, a Shinji Ikari outfit from Evangelion.
The presenter sat back in his chair up on stage, and sighed heavily. He lifted his water bottle to his lips, before thinking better of it and setting it down. He looked off to a convention stagehand to his right. “Is it okay if I-”
The stagehand nodded, and the voice actor shifted a little, producing a flask from his back pocket. He took a long swig, and then paused, letting the warmth flow over him.
“You know, everyone gets more important when they die. Have y'all heard of Ayrton Senna?”
Absolute crickets from the crowd.
“Okay, okay, Buddy Holly?”
“You mean, the Weezer song?” an audience member said.
The voice actor winced. “Okay, Kurt Cobain?”
A murmur of recognition was issued by the crowd, and the voice actor sighed in relief.
“Okay, good. Have you listened to his music?” He waited for nods, and got some. “It's good, right? But he's got this reputation of being a genre-defining deity for grunge. Sure, Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots and such are important, but they're not the universally-accepted goodness that is Kurt Cobain and Nirvana. But…” He leaned into the microphone. “And this is going to be a controversial opinion,” he said with a grin, “if Kurt Cobain hadn't died, he'd just be remembered as that guy who was the lead singer for the band Dave Grohl was in before the Foo Fighters.”
There were immediate grumbles.
“See what I mean? You wouldn't care as much if he was alive.” Again, he leaned into the mic. “Which is fair.” He waited for the commotion to die down. “After all, if someone's alive, they're here to defend themselves. And…” He took another swig of his flask, “If McAvoy wasn't found stabbed to death in his hotel room, y'all wouldn't care so much about his voice acting work.”
Immediately, the room went from about a 1 on a 1-10 scale of chaotic noise to a 7.
“Wait, what the fuck did he just say?” Jeff said to Steve, at this point understanding intuitively that Alan was, and could not be, a conversational partner at the moment.
“I know, right?” Steve said. “I knew he died, but… I dunno, I thought it was being fat and old, like the Song of Ice and Fire guy.”
“He's still alive, that was the Wheel of Time guy,” Jeff corrected. “But yeah.”
The rest of the room was reacting in much the same way, and the voice actor recognized that something had gone awry. A member of staff looked at him in obvious frustration, and then held his head in his hands.
The voice actor cleared his throat. “Uh… Okay, guess y'all didn't know the cause of death. Still. Died, uh, middle-aged? Early? And now you want to know what it was like. You don't ask about Greg Ayers, even though he's a goddamn genius. But, anyway, he was good. Skilled at his job, took it very seriously, but I'd never hang out with him outside of work.”
This, too, generated some rumblings.
“Why, exactly?” said someone in a frilly dress in the front row.
The voice actor rolled his eyes. “Y'all don't know?” He looked to the convention staff, who already looked too defeated to contest him. “He was into….” he said, pausing for thought. “How do I say this… Younger people. So if you ask me-”
At this, two staffers bolted on stage, trying to stop the voice actor.
“He had it coming.”
They stopped in their steps, and after a beat, one of them leaned into the voice actor's microphone. “For legal reasons, this is not the official position of AniMass – All allegations are just allegations until proven in a court of law, and we do not endorse maligning the name of the dead with unproven allegations-”
“Fuck,” Jeff whispered under his breath.
“I know, right?” Steve said. “Life goals.”
Jeff glared at him.
“Just being edgy, Jeff, shit, grow a sense of humor.”
Alan wasn't sure if he was, but considering the events of the last 24 hours, he wasn't sure if he could really say anything. Either way, his lips were zipped.
The voice actor took another deep swig, and with each second of slurping, his convention handlers gained more and more of a look of wide-eyed alarm.
“For that matter,” he started, and one lunged for his microphone. The voice actor was faster, and grabbed it, taking it with him as he stood up. “There's a lot of people who really have shit coming their way in this industry. In a lot of industries. I've had so many goddamn friends, coworkers, allies, tell me about the bullshit they've had to put up with, and I'm-”
One of the staffers put their hand on his shoulder, and whispered something into his ear. The fire in his eyes was doused suddenly, and he fell, more than sat, back down.
“Okay, I've gone on long enough. Next question.”
Most of the audience was too shell-shocked to do anything, but in a room of a hundred people, of course someone would raise their hand. I mean, Alan thought, one in ten dentists apparently thought that toothpaste sucked, of course there would be someone in a hundred who'd have the gumption to speak.
“Considering the current economic situation, can we still expect to hear you a lot in the coming years?”
The voice actor cocked his head. “Fuck, are you an industry analyst or something? Yes. My studio is doing fine, thank you. Next!”
At that point, the crowd could smell the blood in the water. All sorts of expose-tier questions were flung out about various industry figures, only a few of which received satisfactory answers – but enough to meet the hunger of the crowd. Alan, however, was too busy thinking of how he might fit into the “deserved it” category. He was probably safe from being stabbed to death in his hotel room, at least… He roomed with other people. That wasn't how these stories worked, people were always alone when they got stabbed to death.
“You okay, Alan?”
Steve was staring at him.
Alan nodded.
“You sure about that?”
“Kind of?”
“Jeff?” Steve asked.
“Yeah?”
“Look at him,” he said, nodding meaningfully towards Alan.
“He's not looking great,” Jeff admitted.
“We should get some food,” Steve suggested.
“Yeah,” Alan said, wanting to get out of there.
Jeff pondered this for a moment. “Okay, let's go.”