Alan wandered through the convention halls in a haze. The conflict between the warring factions of his mind led to a loop of indecision. He both could not abide by rendering his implied agreement with Henry a lie, nor could he possibly commit to going back to his hotel room and letting his guard down. Both actions were mutually exclusive, and neither could be ignored, and so, he'd basically turned into a zombie, shuffling mindlessly.
The experience was familiar, if not in the current intensity. Pretty much everyone had experienced it, he thought – when you both had to do something, and were not at all in the mental state to do it, you could easily fall into a loop of scrolling through the latest events on the internet, checking forums, refreshing endlessly to hopefully see new content that'd engage your brain, anything to throw agency to others, away from yourself. That was pretty much his life for the past two years.
He'd graduated with a degree in English. Of all things, he'd picked an absolutely useless degree. Of course, that seemed like a fine choice at the time, given the lies that were told to, well, everyone he knew. “Follow what you love, and you'll find a place in the world” – utter bullshit, as far as he was concerned. He liked storytelling – that's what he loved in anime, after all, unique angles of storytelling, rendered by an unfamiliar culture in methods defined by the limitations of budget and a particular medium. Alan was the kind of person who wanted to find every goddamn thing John Campbell ever wrote and make some kind of meta-analysis of media. But that wasn't exactly an employable skill. He wasn't sure what he'd even do with what he'd learned if he had any choice in the world available to him. Let alone figure out how that fit into the material conditions of the world he actually lived in.
So, after applying to a scattershot collection of jobs vaguely related to his skillset, and failing to find employment in any of them, he settled into retail, and never moved out of the apartment he'd moved into in his last year of college. The landlord still sucked, the place was still small, but he'd managed to swing a discount based on the fact that he was around year-long, unlike the usual student populace. Of course, that had its own downsides. His neighbors, when they existed, were students. People with dreams and aspirations and every failure of his was rubbed in when they inevitably moved out, to destinations unknown, fueled by whatever degree they'd gotten.
But he'd accepted it, at this point. He had no idea where his life would go, no plans beyond making it to the next day, but he'd found a rhythm. Online gaming, particularly MMOs (massively multiplayer online games, for the uninitiated) had given him a place to exist, socially, where he didn't have to face the anxiety of living, physically, in a college town as a failure of the same system that everyone else was succeeding in. And in terms of motivating himself to keep living, to see the next week, the next month, there was anime. To a lesser extent, there were book series, television series, online comics, all sorts of things, but anime was, thankfully, well-suited to keep him going.
You see, anime had an aggressively “seasonal” release schedule. There would be a slate of shows, between ten and thirty, depending on how well the Japanese economy was performing, coming out each literal, actual season of the year. At the beginning of fall, you'd get a slate of shows, which would end at between ten and thirteen episodes. Then, the second that set ended, you'd get the winter slate, and then the spring after that, then summer. You'd see shows grow popular, and if that popularity was expected, they'd show back up two seasons from then, and if it was unexpected, you'd get one a year later. Sometimes, you'd see a series become far more popular on the American side of the internet than the Japanese, and you'd engage in a campaign to try and make it popular back in Japan – while Alan didn't have much disposable income, others ordered Japanese DVDs and comics, even if they couldn't understand them, just to pump up sales numbers. The important part of all this was that you could get engrossed in the meta-narrative of it all – the survival and death of shows, the experience of loving things and watching them finish, seeing things coming down the line and wondering whether the studio producing them could get their shit together – the trepidation of seeing a manga you held dear being assigned to a terrible studio, or finding out in adaptation that your interpretations of a comic were drastically wrong, or -
It was the spice, the bread and circuses, so to speak, that kept Alan going.
Besides that, he just kept putting one foot in front of the other, shambling towards death one day at a time. That's what everything was, really. Things to occupy his mind until he died. To that end, he probably wouldn't have found his possible death at the hands of Sawyer that terrible – in fact, it would just be speeding up the process. An “any%speedrun”, as the video game community would put it. But there was that endless cycle of anime keeping him going – animating him, as it were. So, considering that he'd killed someone, as far as he could tell, between the options of being murdered and living out the rest of his life in jail, one of those options could still, in theory, involve anime. So he'd prefer that one.
He was thinking something along those lines, and rubbing his right eye, when he heard sobbing. Not crying, not some sniffles, but on a scale from 1-10, only about one notch south of “wailing”. Alan, heretofore mostly unaware of where he was, snapped to attention. On his left was the massive picture windows of the third floor of the convention hall, and the still-absurd line stretching ever-onwards towards the registration room, full of people in costumes still desperately attempting to get their paperwork signed and become allowed to officially participate in the convention. But that wasn't the source of the crying. Instead, it was on his right – that side of the hall was, well, a cavalcade of rooms, all given to various purposes. Most of them were panels. Further down the way was the large rooms devoted to super-popular events, like last night's Hentai Dubbing, and the Artist's Alley, where artists sold their own original art, and their takes on popular characters and scenarios, but he wasn't that far down.
The sobbing was coming from a gaggle of teenage girls, sitting outside a panel room. Looking at them gave him that sense of revulsion from seeing “those damn kids” that one got when they saw fashions and styles owned wholly by a generation newer than them – The teenagers were wearing bright colors, striped, with extravagantly-styled and puffed hair in what he was fairly certain was called the “scene” style. He wasn't sure what that meant, but their mascara ran down their cheeks as they attempted to comfort each other. He checked his watch. It was five minutes past the beginning of the next batch of panels, so he understood – it sucked being locked out of something you came here to see, but fire safety codes were a thing, and rooms had attendance limits for a reason, and -
He looked around the corner, and saw that the door was open. There were rows and rows of seats, but no one was inside. In fact, there was a staff member turning people away at the door. Alan looked at the staffer, at the girls, back at the staffer, and figured he'd give him a shot.
“What's up with the panel?”
The staffer scrutinized Alan, and then settled on an answer.
“Closed.”
“Uh, why?”
The staffer's expression hardened. “It's closed. End of story.”
Alan backed away, and stood awkwardly in the middle of the hallway, unsure of how to proceed. He wanted to know, but…
“I can't believe he's dead,” he heard, barely achieving coherence over the sobs.
Alan's head whipped around towards the scene kids.
“What?” he asked. He instantly regretted it, knowing in his heart exactly how they'd look at a weird guy butting in, but they didn't. Instead, they just looked… pleading. The way anyone hurt would look, really. He rephrased his question. “Who?”
“Vic,” one of them said, sniffling.
“Wait, like… the voice actor?”
The girls nodded.
Well, shit, Alan thought. There was no way…
“How do you know he's dead? It's just a canceled panel, it could be for anything-”
Another one of the girls spoke up. “Our whole chat group's been going off about it. His hotel room is roped off, and there's a bunch of staff there.”
Alan's heart sank. He wasn't a huge fan of the guy or anything, but that did sound bad.
“Wait,” he said, “how do you know where his room is?”
The girls looked at him like he was crazy, and then realization dawned over their faces. “Well,” one of them said, proudly, “He gave me his room number yesterday.”
She couldn't have been more than fourteen, and Alan couldn't think of a single reason that wasn't a federal crime that she'd have that number.
His head swam with thoughts, and he spoke before any of them could rise to coherence. “I know this is asking a lot, but can you tell me where he was staying? I want to pay my respects.”
The girl wiped the tears from her eyes, makeup dripping down her cheeks, and nodded. “Yeah. Room 2130 in the Sheraton.”
“Thanks,” Alan said, bowing his head, and left.
Fuck, Alan thought. He found his feet carrying him to hotel while his mind parsed what the hell his brain was doing. It went something like this:
This was an opportunity.
Regardless of what he may or may not have done, this was far more important, or at least, far more attention-grabbing. If there was an investigation into the murder of a prominent voice actor at one of the largest anime conventions in America, that'd way overshadow the disappearance of a single young girl at that same convention. Hell, she could just have run away, like ten thousand other Americans every year, but the police would be wrapped up with the case that'd get them some kudos. This was a moment of hope and he really, really needed that right now.
So, what he also needed was to see that this was real.
2130.
When the elevator door opened to the 21st floor, he was hit with the smell. Stories would talk about the smell of death, and like most people, he'd smelled what it was like when a rodent died in his walls, and that smell was unmistakable. He'd kind of expected it.
But that wasn't what he smelled. Instead, the scent that hit him, like a truck, was the overpowering smell of lemony cleaning chemicals.
The room would be a short walk down the hall, and Alan carefully made his way down. The smell got stronger the closer he got, and when he turned that last corner, he saw a flurry of activity around the open door to room 2130. Hotel staff, with a cart full of heavy duty cleaning chemicals, were trying to strongarm their way past several cops, who in turn were trying to question some convention staff, in the standard blue uniforms of AniMass administration. Seeing police made Alan want to bolt, but his curiosity overwhelmed any good sense he had left. None of them were looking his way, so he tried to angle himself to get a good look inside the room.
He did.
They'd removed the body, but it was very, very clear just where it had been. The bed was soaked through with blood and gore, and there was a line of blood, and chunks of… well, voice actor, painting the walls, ceiling, and standard Sheraton television and bureau set, like he'd sprayed his innards outwards as a result of being torn open right down the middle, while he'd been laying in bed.
Alan's stomach nearly leapt out through his throat. It wasn't like he hadn't been exposed to a lot of gore and dead bodies on the internet, but this was in front of him, and Jesus that was a lot of blood. He quickly turned away, and hid himself in the little cavity in front of the door to a nearby room.
“I think he's got the right of it, Ted,” one of the cops was saying.
“Yeah?”
“Well, how else would you explain it? It's creative, I'll give him that.”
“I guess, Bob. Sure beats doing it Cobain-style, right?”
Alan had, at this point, recognized the metallic scent of blood underneath the overpowering cleaning chemicals, but there was something else there. Something very familiar… It wasn't the smell of cut grass, but his mind was associating it with that, and that was putting the answer straight out of his head...
“Suicide by chainsaw is a pretty metal way to go,” the first cop said.
Gasoline.
“But,” the second cop asked, “Where's the chainsaw?”
“I'm real sorry about that,” the staffer said, sheepishly. “I'm afraid that the volunteer who found him freaked out, and tossed it out the window. We think it landed in a dumpster, and got carried away by the trashmen.”
“That's a shame,” the first cop said. “But I understand the reaction. Standard trauma response.”
“Can we bring them in for questioning? That sounds super suspicious,” the second cop said.
The first cop laughed. “I already talked to them. The staff brought me them a half hour ago, they're clean.”
“Don't you think this is… suspicious?”
“What do you mean?” the first cop said.
“I mean… Thinking about it, how would he even do it? And at a convention? No signs of drug or alcohol use, no signs of depression or mental illness?”
“Carefully, Ted. And this kind of thing happens all the time, right?”
“Oh yes,” the staffer said. “You never know the mental state of celebrities coming into these events. They off themselves in pretty creative ways sometimes. We think it's because of the heightened attention at conventions. If they have the slightest inclination towards suicide and egomania, it provides them the most theatrical stage possible to end their life in the most dramatic way. It elevates them from a minor celebrity in a minor field to an enduring legend. And if they fear they're going to be remembered as a piece of shit to work with, well… death solves that.”
The first cop hummed his assent. “Like Dale.”
“Who?” the second cop asked.
“Earnhardt. NASCAR. Raced dirty as hell, had his share of haters. But he was like Pink Floyd.”
“Uh, what?”
“His last big hit was the wall!” the first cop said, cackling at his own joke. “And now everyone worships him. It stands to reason.”
“It stands to reason,” the staffer concurred.
Alan's mind was screaming that every possible vibe here was bad. Something very, very fishy was going on, and even if it wasn't, he should not be around cops right now. He'd seen enough. He knew Vic was dead, and maybe that would save him. Maybe he could just keep awake, keep alive, and enjoy this fucking convention.
A few tens of seconds later, the elevator doors closed behind him.
You know what?
He was going to try and enjoy this convention.