Anime conventions, when it came to food, were almost universally cursed. Convention halls, whether they were rented out to nerdy enthusiasts of Japanese cartoons, figurine collectors, or the National Collective of Ardent Geologists, charged exorbitant rates for food. After all, if you were at a convention to speak with the top experts in your field, having traveled across the country, paid for plane tickets, and rented a hotel room to do so, it was safe to assume that you wouldn't want to waste any time in acquiring food, and wouldn't wander too far away from the convention center to find a restaurant. Most convention centers, therefore, offered chicken fingers, fries, hot dogs, and, in the case of anime conventions, fifty cent ramen packets, for eight bucks a pop, with another three dollars per drink. It was, in short, highway robbery, and probably a violation of some standard of human rights.
AniMass, however, was different. As Karl Marx would explain it, it was all due to the differences in material conditions. You see, economics are defined by a complicated matrix of, well, everything that feeds into the chaotic interaction between human beings, but to simplify it down, to take it to brass tacks, at most conventions, you had to cross the street to get outside food. You might think that wasn't enough, but Alan had attended AniMass and numerous other conventions for years now, and that was the one unifying factor. Other conventions had monopolized the internal food supply, and AniMass had not. It took approximately zero effort to walk from the convention center into the adjacent mall – You didn't even have to go outside – and from there, into their food court. If you were willing to spend below sixty seconds outside, you'd even be able to access 1. A sushi restaurant, 2. a Chinese-American fusion place, and 3. A supermarket which could supply you with enough dumb snacks to last you an entire weekend for less than twenty bucks. At thirty seconds, you could hit up an organic food supermarket, and an All-American sports bar that, at this point, had realized that one weekend a year, they'd be swamped by anime nerds, and modified their music playlists to include not just the Pokemon Theme, but also the Poke-Rap, and more importantly, Misty's Song off of the hit album, 2.B.A. Master.
Staying entirely indoors, you could access the in-house restaurants / bars of three separate hotels, two pizza joints, and an upscale grill, but those were all limited by the fact that they were priced at, well, regular food prices. People of all economic classes attended anime conventions, but except for the wealthiest of attendees, everyone behaved like they were poor outside of the convention hall, because every dollar spent outside was a dollar that wasn't spent on merchandise, or the work of local artists, or celebrity signatures, or any of the things that attendees had traveled god knows how many miles and made god knows how many sacrifices to get. So, the average convention-goer had only two real options.
The first was to go to Chinatown, which had the greatest food-quality to price ratio in the entire Greater Boston area. Between The House of $3.99 and the Bao Bao Bakery, you could buy enough food to feed the Spanish Army, with each dose being good enough to make H.P. Lovecraft stop being racist, with a quite modest budget. However, this took effort, and only the most dedicated of congoers made this trek – though they were rewarded with delightful bootleg anime merchandise for their efforts, along with VCD copies of Sailor Moon and Dragonball. We would explain VCD and the glory of forgotten media formats, but we don't have the time in this narrative, so, moving on -
The second, and more well-tread option, was to go to the food court of the mall that connected the convention hall and the Sheraton Hotel. Whatever time period you may be reading this in, dear reader, the state of the common food court has declined from the glorious heights it reached in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight. The average restaurant contained within occupied a unique economic position – in order to be price-competitive, they needed to keep at a lower price than family chain restaurants like Applebee's, or Chilli's, or to be more local, The Ground Round – and in order to be quality-competitive, they needed to surpass the food standards of “fast food” chains like McDonalds. While the conflicted results of tugging socio-economic conditions often caused problems, or worse, tragedies (when it was applied to say, the construction of multi-level shopping malls), in this case, it made miracles. Places like Sbarro, a confluence of all things that could be, with effort, described as pizza, and Sukiyaki, a “Japanese” restaurant that didn't, in fact, sell food of even vaguely Japanese descent, but did, in fact, sell delicious food, and the holiest of holys: Panda Express.
To understand the significance of Panda Express within the context of AniMass, you had to understand the underlying string of events. Anime fans, the kind of people who attended anime conventions, loved Japanese food, or at least the idea of it, and so, flocked to Sukiyaki. However, considering that several thousand people attended AniMass, this rendered the lines at Sukiyaki intolerably long. So, these crowds spread out to other east Asian restaurants, because well, the attendees were already taking the leap from Japanese food to Sukiyaki, what was another conceptual jump or two? And then, the important distinction became “who could dispel the lines”- And the answer to that was, of course, Panda Express. The alacrity with which they could accept, process, and deliver an order was almost in defiance of the laws of physics. And while those orders weren't always technically correct, whatever food you did receive was universally delicious.
As such, Alan was chewing, thoughtfully, on a piece of Orange Chicken.
“Okay, real talk though, was there ever a General Gau?” Steve asked, to no response. While Alan was mentally occupied for several important reasons, Jeff was consumed entirely with one. He vibrated, like an object desperately trying to phase through another in a poorly-coded video game, while staring intensely at a newspaper-sized, unfolded sheet of paper. The convention schedule. He was muttering under his breath at the pace of an auctioneer, and neither Alan nor Steve could make anything out of it.
Steve shrugged, and leaned across the bench towards the next table, which was occupied by a flock of girls, all cosplaying as characters from Tokyo Mew Mew, full of bright-colored clothes, matching wigs and contacts, and a revealing, vaguely fetish-maid-esque aesthetic topped with animal ear headbands.”Say, ladies, do you think there was ever a General Gau?”
In return, he got three confused stares, one extremely suspicious stare that was clearly identifying him as a potential threat, and one girl, the blue-haired one, started talking. “I mean, if there wasn't-” The purple-haired one raised her hand quickly, and the blue-haired one stopped. “It's a Caesar salad situation. End of story.” Even Steve could tell that the look in her eyes said “I know you want to hit on us, but please don't,” and he took the hint, rocking back to, and then past, his own table.
“So,” he said to the next table, “What do you guys think?”
At the table on their other side sat Jack, Clive, and Bill, the other legends of the Pioneer College Anime club. At this point, all three had graduated, but for two years, they had held down the fort after Alan, Steve, and Jeff's departure, and they'd run a loose, but enjoyable ship. Bill's eyes lit up, and he gestured forcefully at Steve with a fork, but his mouth was full of egg-roll. Jack rubbed the first of his chins in thought.
“I… don't know, to be honest,” he said. “I guess there could be? But isn't most American Chinese food, like, not real Chinese food?”
Clive, who even sitting down towered over the other two, put down his chopsticks, and dramatically brushed back his long, blond hair. “The declaration that American Chinese food isn't real Chinese food is terribly invalidating of the immigrant experience, isn't it?”
Steve, still leaning at a forty-five degree angle, snapped his fingers and pointed at Clive. “That's a good point!”
Jack looked mournfully at his meal, and started rubbing his forehead. “Uh… sorry. That wasn't right of me.”
“I don't think anyone was offended,” Steve said quickly, hoping to keep Jack out of one of his depressive moods. His receding hairline could have been genetic, but it certainly didn't help that he rubbed his forehead whenever he was worried, which was, effectively, always. Steve looked to Clive, who didn't respond, and kept his nose high in a vaguely imperious way. Steve needed some backup, though, and looked to Bill.
Bill had just forcefully swallowed his egg-roll, and he practically leapt across the table at Steve. He may have been well south of five foot five, but he had the energy of an Olympic athlete, just compressed down into the frame of a hundred-pound nerd. “No, of course not, but there's like, five different relevant questions here Steve – One, is it or has it always been General Gau?”
Steve blunk. “What?”
Clive sighed, and leaned back in his chair. His blazer and shirt slid open slightly, revealing the swell of his immaculate, hairless chest. “Wade-Gilles and Pinyin, dear Steve.”
“Wha-”
Steve didn't even get to finish the word before Bill made a squeak of frustration. “You don't even know that? Steve, c'mon, it's-”
Now was Clive's turn to interrupt – “The different romanization systems of Chinese. Mao Zedong is the same as Mao Tse-Tung, Confucious is Kong Qiu, Cao Cao is Tsao-Tsao-”
Bill snickered. “And Cao Pi is?”
“Tsao Chi, you philistine,” Clive said, sighing.
“So,” Bill continued, “the point is, is Gao even his name? How many layers of transliteration are we working on?”
Clive rolled his eyes. “It's all irrelevant. In all my studies of Chinese history and literature, I have never once met a famous character who could even charitably be mis-labelled as “General Gao”.”
Jack finally looked up. “Wait, so you know all of Chinese history?”
Bill grinned, baring every last one of his teeth.
“Yes,” Clive asserted.
Bill slammed his hands on the table in delight, sending a soy sauce packet arcing through the air. “Well, did you know about-”
And that was Steve's queue to duck out. Those three would go on for hours.
“So, uh, how you doing, Jeff?” he asked.
Jeff deflated, and let the convention schedule slip from his hands. He stared into the middle distance, and the paper slowly soaked up teriyaki sauce. Steve looked at the increasingly damaged schedule with alarm. “It's no problem, we've got three of them, it's fine,” he said, reassuring himself as much as his catatonic friends. Still, he pulled the schedule out of Jeff's food.
“There's no way to do it,” Jeff whispered.
“Do… what?” Steve said, pre-emptively wincing.
“We can't. It just won't work. We're fucked. We're completely fucked.”
Alan sat bolt-upright. “What?” he said, with desperation coming in at the corners of his mouth.
Jeff let out a pained yell. “We cannot afford to go to the Cosplay Dating Game if we want to get into the The Pillows concert!”
“Oh,” said Alan.
Steve echoed this, followed by a “Why?”
Jeff snapped a plastic fork in twain. “We have our methods, we've got our routes, but between increased security and new attendees somehow figuring out the layout of the back hallways, I simply cannot guarantee success. We need to account for the possibility that we have to stand in line.”
Steve groaned. “Really? God damnit.”
Alan's phone vibrated, and he jumped in his seat. Steve shot him a look.
“Oho, is that that Sawyer chick again?”
She'd sent him a few messages over the past hour, just asking about his friend group, what shows he was into, the usual stuff, but Steve had taken it as an indication that Alan was about to get a new romantic interest. Alan wasn't comfortable with that idea, but it wasn't like he could tell Steve why, so he'd played along.
And yes, it was.
[You coming? I'm going to be a little late, I had something to take care of.]
Alan typed out a response.
[Yeah, I'm eating dinner, but I'll be there soon. How can I find you?]
Alan knew better than to expect a quick response, but before he could shove his phone back in his pocket, it vibrated again.
[Don't worry, I'll find you. ^_^ ]
“That quick? She's into you, dude,” Steve said, smiling.
Alan severely doubted that. And even if she was, there was only about a fifty-fifty chance that his life even got to have romance in it anymore. Still, he pushed back the table, and stood up. “Sorry guys, but I've got to go.”
“Formal ball?” Jeff asked.
Alan nodded.
“Good luck,” Steve said, winking. “See you in the morning, right?”
Alan sighed, as did Jeff. “Don't jinx it for him, Steve.”