Alan had a cue to wait for.
Their skit was, conceptually, a simple one. They would re-enact one of the climactic scenes of Neon Genesis Evangelion, one of the most successful anime of all time. In that scene, Asuka Langley Sohryu, half-German, half-American, all-angry pilot of Evangelion Unit Two, engaged in mortal combat with the autonomous Mass Production Evangelions, monstrous figures in all-white with armor, warglaives, and crimson-lipped smiles revealing shark-like teeth. In the movie, she lost. She dies – Sorry for the spoilers, but this is 2008, and the movie came out in 1997, so you've had plenty of time – and the anime club, as a whole, was at the very least annoyed by this. Of course, they wanted to do something to correct this: Some of them wanted a different ending through fanfiction, some through the remake movie series that was still coming out, some expected the manga to end differently, but their answer came to them one day, as in their group chat of all of the officers that had ever served the anime club, Steve had offered up a tantalizing piece of information.
[Hey, you know the Green Ranger?]
[Yeah?]
[So I hung out with him at a convention, and he taught me fight choreography? Anyone wanna learn some shit?]
The members of the chat had taken the clear excuse to reconvene on the Pioneer College campus. It was odd to take Steve of all people as their teacher, but, strangely, it worked. While at first it was just a way for the disparate crew of the Anime Club, very few of which had moved on, to meet back up, it warped over the weeks. As Steve taught them the basics – really, the only things he knew of fight choreography – and they ran out of stuff to do, someone had to come up with a proposition to keep this, whatever this was, going.
That someone had been Alan. He'd been living in a shithole town vaguely adjacent to the Pioneer College campus, the same one he'd lived in for the last year of his degree, only managing to find work in bookstores and convenience stores. It was nothing short of miraculous to have something to bring the only people he truly cared about back into his life, and the prospect of letting that go prompted an existential crisis. His solution, the best he could come up with on short notice, was this skit.
Clive, the pretty-boy poet of the group, was the least inclined to engage in physical combat, and so, he was the first to be taken out by Sharon. As the first female officer in the Anime Club in the decade and a half of its existence, she was defaulted the role of Asuka, and it was a lucky coincidence that she weighed slightly south of a hundred pounds. With the right turns of momentum, she could absolutely launch herself through the air – which she did, grabbing Clive's head with both hands, triggering the stage-blood bags on the sides of his headsock, sending a satisfying spray of blood into the air as she followed his face into the ground.