Original Content

“I'm telling you, fanfiction deserves to be sold here,” Nell said. She was the shortest of the group, but the loudest. She grumbled, hands shoved deep into the pockets of her hoodie.

Jake rolled his eyes. “Okay, I'll bite. Why?”

“Doujinshi.”

Alan's cheek, right below his left eye, wouldn't stop twitching. She was here for him, and every second that passed was one second closer to him becoming perforated.

“Yeah, doujins are great, but that doesn't explain anything,” Jake said.

Nell threw her hands out in front of her like she was about to strangle an invisible adversary. “What's the difference between doujins and fanfic?”

“One's art, one's literature, bam, done,” Rachel said back, over her shoulder.

“Damn it, Rach, that's the wrongest way to be right.”

“Fight me, nerd,” Rachel said, laughing, and kept leading the group towards a booth full of demi-pornographic merchandise – nothing explicitly smut, but shirts that said, in bold letters, “I <3 YAOI”, or more creatively, “I (picture of a lilly) YURI”, along with similarly themed hats, and the now-ubiquitous “yaoi paddles” – a boat oar with the Japanese word for gay content on them, to slap your friends with for amusement.

Alan shook his head. He was being paranoid. What evidence did he even have that Sawyer was real? Everything had been too ridiculous, it'd be – He looked down at his costume. Well, some of it had to have happened, otherwise he wouldn't be wearing this. Still, she wasn't here. The staffers who checked their badges at the entrance to the Dealer's Room, the merchandising hub of the convention, hadn't looked at him any differently than the rest of his group. He was almost entirely certain that one hadn't jotted down something on a notepad right after Alan passed him.

“There isn't one,” Fred said. The nervous guy in the t-shirt casually markered with “Pickle Inspector Enthusiast”, Alan had found that, within the space of the last twenty minutes, without saying any words directly to Alan, he'd convinced Alan that Alan should probably protect him from anything and everything that could possibly hurt him. “Well, not really, the art and literature thing is right but that's not the point and, sorry-”

“Poorly said but YES, Fred,” Nell said, grinning at him. “Morally, artistically, creatively since I need three terms in a sentence, rule of threes and all, what do you have to say to that, Jake?”

“Have you seen where we are?” Jake asked.

The question filtered into Alan's mind a bit more than it should have. The Dealer's Room was on the first floor of the convention hall, stretching out over the space that, on the second floor, was occupied by the Main Showings hall, where the concert had happened, and the Second Stage, where, at the moment, the winners of the Anime Music Video contest were being voted on. That amount of space was well-justified, as the Dealer's Room was the same kind of space that formed the majority of Comic-Cons – Official industry outlets and secondary retailers hawked the latest and greatest anime figurines, DVDs, posters, cosplay accessories, fashion, retro video games, vintage movie posters, incredible amounts of Japanese snacks and soda – Maybe it was less chaotic at some indeterminate point in the past, but it was a complete mess now. Off in some corner, the convention itself sold t-shirts and commemorative mugs, and even advance tickets to the next convention, rationed out to a lucky few. Even some of the fan-artists had bled into this space, meant to be reserved for larger outlets – it turned out that if you sold enough posters of the right characters making out, you could conquer the world.

“… What do you mean?” Nell asked, sensing a trap.

“I think he means that it's the Dealer's Room,” Alan said, tentatively.

“Okay,” Nell said, vibrating with the force of the many, many words she wanted to say, “one, why's the new guy on your side, two, you're still building up dramatic tension without actually explaining anything, and three, seriously, just tell me what you're getting at.”

Alan looked back at where Sawyer was, and was unsure whether to feel relieved or terrified that she was not there at all. Either it meant that he had made something out of nothing, or it meant that she was out for his blood and he'd completely lost track of her and-

“It's not about artistic validity, Nell, I'm not gonna get up your ass about The Doctor X Jack Harkness fanfic when I'm drawing fucking Alucard X Sebastien, it's about what it is. The doujins I'm looking for? They're made in Japan, they're imported through here, and I'm buying them through importers. It's a secondary market, not a primary market, and that determines where they're sold!”

He got more heated with each word, but none of that phased Nell.

“And does that make it right?” she said, prodding him in the chest with a rolled-up wallscroll she'd bought only ten minutes earlier.

Fred snorted, and then immediately winced, expecting some kind of backlash for what he imagined was an uninformed take. Instead, Nell gave him a one armed, but forceful, hug, and kissed him on the cheek. His blush, if attached to a Sterling generator, could probably power several small nations. “He gets it,” she said, and Jake sighed.

“Okay, I cede the point, but can we, y'know, acquire some doujins while we're here and stuck in the world where they're the one of the two sold here?” Jake flaunted his empty hands and completely un-stuffed backpack, while Rachel was engaged in sheathing a yaoi paddle, like a broadsword, through a loose belt on her hip.

“Are you aware,” Nell said, “That we are 17?”

“They wouldn't card us, right?” Jake said, hopefully.

“They would,” Rachel said, still fiddling with the paddle.

Alan's eyes had focused too much on the paddle. A paddle was a weapon, right? If he was ambushed, all of a sudden, by Sawyer, he could grab the paddle off of Rachel and slap her across the head. After a microsecond of thought, he recognized that one, it'd be very difficult to steal the paddle, and two, even harder for him to use it, effectively, as a weapon. Even if he got his hands on it, how could you swing it in a crowd like this? There was barely enough room to breath in the slow shuffle of nerds, governed more by Brownian motion than anything rational.

“Well, you handled it, right?” Jake asked.

Rachel coughed.

“You handled it, right?” Nell asked.

“About that,” Ellen said.

Rachel raised a finger, aggressively, at her. “Shush.”

“She insisted on getting them professionally printed,” Ellen continued, “despite my offers to do it myself, you know -”

“Don't,” Rachel interjected.

“Correctly,” Ellen concluded.

This sudden revelation stopped the group in its tracks.

“Rachel?” Fred asked.

Everyone else stared at her, and for the first time in the short time Alan had known her, she looked not at all in control of the situation.

She took a deep breath. “Okay, I fucked it up, look at these laminated pieces of shit,” she said, whipping out several cards from a heretofore unnoticed pocket in her denim jacket.

Nell grabbed one out of her hand, and observed.

“Uh, Rachel?”

“Yes?”

“This is shit.”

Rachel grabbed her forehead with her free hand. “I know, I know, I should have let Ellen do it, but maybe we can just, fuck, I don't know, steal them? The original artists were already paid, what's the difference?”

“That's a valid ethical point,” Ellen replied, “But not legal. We'd get caught and kicked out.”

With each passing moment, Rachel looked more and more out of sorts. “I mean, you don't know that, maybe we'd be fine, I could just do it myself, I've got way more experience stealing than-”

“In that outfit?” Jake said.

“You're the single most noticeable person in a five mile radius,” Nell added.

“Okay, if that's the issue,” Rachel continued, spitballing, “Maybe we can just send Fred in?”

“I guess I could-” Fred started.

“No,” Nell said, flatly.

Alan caught a hint of a smirk on Jake's face, just as he said “Why not?”

Nell grabbed Fred's wrist. “No.”

Alan had the answer, right in his back pocket. He raised his hand.

After a few more moments of arguing, Rachel noticed, staring at him. The rest of the argument continued for a few seconds, until everyone else's gaze, eventually, turned to Alan.

“Yes?” Ellen said, raising her hand to point at Alan.

Rachel slapped it down. “No, no, you gotta do it like this.” She cleared her throat, and took on the tone of an impatient teacher. “Yes, you in the back? Speak up!”

Alan flushed. “You know, I could just buy stuff for you.”

“Oh, shit,” Rachel said, “You are some kind of old fuck. What do I owe you?”

Alan wanted to laugh. This was the first time in god knew how long that he felt on top of things.

“Nothing,” he replied. “Anime club code.”

“But we're not part of an anime club,” Fred said, confused.

“You are now,” Alan said. “So, where's the booth?”

As the teens tried to figure out where, exactly, the illicit, fan-made, incredibly creative smut was sold, Alan rode high on the sense of being a savior. It wouldn't be technically incorrect to call him that. They would be missing out on this part of the fandom without him, or at least, the swag of it. All of them had already read as much kinky fanfiction as their eyes could absorb, and seen enough comic erotica to be fully fluent in memes based on them, so the moral weight of facilitating their access to physical copies thereof was, effectively, nil.

Cutting through the crowds, briefly unaware of the eyes following him, Alan felt like the kind of minor deity he knew he should have been. Vice President of an anime club of seven was a title too small, even for one he no longer held. He was, and should have always been, the leader. In slow-motion, he held a cross-laden staff high, as the teens held out an ermine train behind him, not the king, but the pope of anime. It was just a cane, and they were just keeping his cape out of the feet of the crowd, but they knew, they must have understood, his proper rank over them.

Smoky, raccoon-accented eyes met his gaze from across the room, and he cowered away like the Phantom of the fucking Opera, ducking into one of the aisles. It might not have been her, but he wasn't ready to take the risk.

“Wait, it's down that way-” Jake started.

“It's quicker this way,” Alan sputtered. “The traffic in the outer ring slows you down, if you take a route through the inner rows, you'll get there faster,” he lied – well, it might have been true. But he definitely could not make a definitive statement on the matter. Either way, it didn't slow them down enough for Alan to be further questioned, and before long, they were at a sketchy-looking booth, chock-full of longboxes of plastic-sleeved comics. While this wasn't the kind of merchandise Alan usually picked up at conventions, the raucous enthusiasm of his companions drew him in, and he picked up a copy of some Shou Tucker x Roy Mustang slash, which he chose purely for the audacity, and the amusement he could feel at the gall of anyone who paired those two characters off. However, around fifteen pages in, despite not being able to read a single bit of Japanese past katakana and hiragana, he'd found himself being thoroughly convinced that there was some actual romantic, erotic, and dare he say, spiritual validity to that pairing.

He shakily put the comic back in its spot in the longbox, unmoored by the power of artistic expression.

“God damn,” Rachel said.

“I know, right?” Jake said, flipping to the next page of whatever he was holding.

“Is that even physically possible?” Fred asked.

“Shut up,” Ellen said, snatching the comic out of Jake's hands, and then flipping through the pages herself.

Nell, for her part, laughed. “You're all such noobs. You should see the shit on fanfiction.net.”

Jake looked at Ellen's widening, but not disgusted, eyes, and laughed along with Nell. “They are, but hey, we all were once.” He grabbed another. “I love the artist of this one,” handing it to Fred. “It's not my fault if this awakens anything in you, but if it does, call me,” he said, smiling.

“Hey!” Nell objected, smacking Jake in the arm, which only seemed to make him more amused.

Alan put down his comic, and watched the horizon. He wished he was a few inches taller. Ellen towered over him, and if he was up there like her, he'd be able to see possible threats so much better. As he was, snippets of shapes might have been convention staff closing in on him, or Sawyer coming for him, but nothing was good enough for him to be sure. He'd been operating in fight-or-flight with not enough information for either for the last half hour, and it was exhausting.

Fred handed him a comic. “What do you think of this?”

Alan's Vice Presidential instincts cut through the fat, and he was struck with sudden clarity. In his hands was a rare, non-erotic doujin – after all, the term only denoted “fan content”, despite the English-speaking anime fandom understanding the term purely in pornographic terms. Flipping through it, with Alan's mild, barely functional knowledge of Japanese, he could see that it was about Renamon (you know, the sexy Digimon – at least according to the internet at large, even the non-furries) longing for her trainer, Rika. Despite not being able to properly communicate, despite feeling like a pet, like a subordinate, and not being able to express her feelings, it was pure, it was nice, and she'd rather let this persist than let anything harm what there was, even if she wanted it to be something more.

Alan handed it back to Fred. “It suits you.”

Fred flushed. “Uh, sure.”

Nell turned away from her current bit of exposition, and prodded Fred. “Yeah, buy it!” she said. “What's it about, by the way?”

Fred shied away. “Uh, stuff.”

Alan shot Nell a look, and despite not really knowing anything about each other, somehow, it crossed the gap of years and knowledge, and Nell dropped it. “Hey,” she asked, “Do you got this?”

Alan nodded, and looked over the group. All of them had picked up at least one comic, and Jake five, but they'd get carded, each and every one of them. And while they might not have thought about it, Rachel had. Alan nodded to her.

“Okay everyone, fun's over,” she said, and confiscated the goods. She brushed by Alan. “You got enough for these?”

“Yeah, it's Saturday on a convention, I've still got liquidity.”

She laughed in surprise. “Liquidity? What, are you some Jim Craemer fanboy?”

“Nah, I just jerk it to dictionaries.”

Rachel snorted, and shoved the comics to him. “I'll repay you in ten, meet us by the payphones.”

Now, this was The Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Eight, so as the group dispersed into the crowd, like a pile of teenagers who just accosted an adult into buying them some booze, Alan flipped through a thick cylinder of cash. It was still seven or so years before credit card payments would start to spread through the Dealer's Room, and ten before it would spread through anime conventions as a whole. This was one of the spaces in the spaces in the United States that held out on being ruled by cash for the longest, and as such, Alan had a roll of twenties that he could use as brass knuckles.

The vendor didn't care too much. He didn't even try to card Alan, until his boss elbowed him, and reminded him, gently, that policy was to card everyone, and that somehow offended Alan. He said nothing, but he'd thought that as long as Jeff's hairline was higher than his, he'd still get to consider himself young, but aging wasn't like running away from bears. You didn't just have to be better than the person in last.

Somewhere around the time he was handed a hand-written receipt, it hit him that he'd been alone for two entire minutes. He was in the middle of a crowd, now holding a plastic bag full of three point two pounds of pornography, but he was alone, he was in the sights of whatever the CIA wanted to have, and while he had no idea which one it'd be, one of his organs would pop any second now, and -

He took his change and bolted.

The Dealer's room was bridged across two main concourses – in-between were staff-only elevators, bathrooms, connecting corridors, and an alcove full of payphones that hadn't been used by anyone in the last five years. Every year of the convention that Alan had seen, the booths, with their little aluminum alcoves, had just been used as seating and a hangout space, and of course, Nell and Rachel were sitting in two of the booths, several feet above the ground, while the other three sat on the floor, and Alan dashed over to them, handing Rachel the bag.

She pulled out her wallet, and started to flip through it-

“Nah,” Alan said, “I said it's on me.”

“Are… you okay?” she said.

He was panting. Sweating. He didn't know if he'd really been running or not, but his heart was.

Ding.

There were, in fact, two staff-only elevators directly across from the battery of payphones, that Alan had never seen used. He'd always assumed that they were for freight – you know, when the dealers of anime merch had to come in and leave, they'd load some up in there and take it to wherever they parked their cars, but in that brief moment of alarm, he processed that the scale of things absolutely did not support that hypothesis – The quantity of goods they carried would take something much, much larger, or access through another wall, but not this, it had to be something else, and -

She was standing there, smiling at him.

Alan yelped. Sawyer cocked her head, and shook in a soundless laugh.

He threw the doujins at Rachel, and they bounced off the brim of her hat.

Alan ran, and Sawyer walked.