Original Content

Come on, said a voice deep within him.

Priorities. Find safety. Find other people. THEN, and only then, deal with this.

With that thought shouting into every space between his ears, Alan, with great effort, found his feet and how they should relate to the ground, and then, bolted.

Bolting is a funny concept. When we use that verb, we're usually thinking of wild animals, and up at the top of the list are deer, who are also the subject of numerous idioms. Relevant to this case is the phrase “deer in the headlights”, referencing a tendency of deer to get crashed into by cars, but that material factoid didn't cover the memetic space held by the idea of “getting absolutely wrecked by a deer flying into your windshield at forty-five miles per hour”, which was a somewhat obscure fear of 73.6% of Americans, according to a Pew Research Poll conducted in 2005. If you didn't fear this, the three nearest people probably did, and you were probably weird. Congratulations. The point being, when we imagine the word “bolting”, we associate it with involuntary, nigh-suicidal movement on the part of unthinking animals.

That is why Alan crashed through two light, rubberized swinging doors, a metallic door halfway-opened by a D-list celebrity, and then, with a thud and a crunch, through a disguised door that led to yet another conference hall. The second Alan saw the hundreds of cheap chairs, and the feet of congoers slowly making their way towards them, his arms gave out. Sawyer probably wouldn't kill him here, and that “probably” was enough for him to faceplant on the floor. Hell, his shoulder wound wasn't even that important, now that he had time to think about it. He'd either bleed out and die, in which case it wouldn't matter, or he wouldn't, and it'd be fine.

Alan smiled into the carpet.

“Tuxedo Mask?”

He ignored the voice. Clearly it was some bullshit he was making up.

“What was his name again? Fuck, it was just a couple hours ago, someone has to remember,” a forceful female voice said.

“Um, I think it was…”

A third person laughed, performatively. “You think? Come on, even you can figure it out.” Alan was fairly sure that she couldn't figure it out on her own.

“Alan?” the hesitant boy offered.

“ALAN! Yes!” the first voice said. The sound of a high-velocity high-five cracked through the air. “So, uh, Alan?”

Someone's finger jabbed into his shoulder, only a few inches west of the tear made by the chainsaw. “You alive?”

He really, really didn't want to respond.

“Should we like, get some help?” the boy asked.

“Like what?” the second girl said.

“I dunno, call 911 or something?”

Fuck.

That meant that not responding would result in him being a bother to far more people than he was comfortable with. He waited for Rachel's next thumb-jab, and moaned in pain.

“Hey, he's alive!” Nell said.

Strong hands grabbed him by the shoulder and shoved him upright. He was frog-marched over to a nearby chair, and was sat down. Ellen withdrew her hands, and Alan let his eyes flutter open. Blood had poured from his scalp, down onto his eyelids, and the drying liquid resisted him.

“I need a towel and a water bottle,” Rachel said. Jake and Fred each handed her one of the requested reagents, and she poured a third of its contents into a towel before scrubbing Alan's face.

He opened his eyes. Rachel, still in costume as Punk Chibi Moon, was staring into him. He shivered, in the worst possible way. “Hey,” he said, and glanced away. Rachel grabbed him by the chin, and analyzed his gaze, his skin, his pupils.

“I'm taking the rest of the bottle,” she said, and Jake tried and failed to stifle an objection. “You're drinking this,” Rachel said. The second Alan nodded, she grabbed him by the chin, and tilted it upwards. She poured the water bottle down his throat.

Several gulps later, Alan's throat seized, the water flowing out of his mouth. Rachel slapped him. “Keep drinking,” she said, and Alan didn't have the presence of mind to disregard an order like that. Just as his chest started to flare with pain, demanding air, the water ran out, and Alan gasped.

“What the fuck happened to him?” Nell asked.

“Is he okay?” Jake asked.

Alan's skin crawled at being the center of this much sympathetic attention.

“Give him a minute,” Rachel said.

“Just a minute?” Ellen said.

Rachel sighed. “Okay, till the end of this panel. We make the call, together, if he's still…” She looked at him. “Fucky.”

Alan shook his head, despite feeling like an iron bar had been taped to his forehead.

“I'm fime.”

She grabbed him by the chin, staring uncomfortably close into his pupils. “You sure about that?”

“Fine,” Alan said, correcting himself. “Fine. I'm fine.” He winced as another pain shot through his shoulder, and he wasn't sure just how many seconds he'd lost in the moment.

“You staying for this panel?” he asked. He wanted to beg her to please stay, to keep him next to her, for her friends to form a nice and orderly barrier between him and the prospect of chainsaw murder.

Shit, he thought. Chainsaw murder. Like that voice actor earlier.

At least, he thought, if he died, he'd be in, if not good, famous company.

“Yeah,” she said, softly. “You're having a rough weekend, aren't you?”

If Alan was more comfortable with physical affection, he'd probably want to pass out and fall into her arms. As he was, Alan fell back into his chair, and let his eyes roll to the ceiling.

“Seriously,” she said. “You can tell me about it later. In fact, I insist. But…” Alan felt slender, warm fingers intertwine with his, and grasp hard. “Whatever the fuck is going on, you stay awake and alert or I'm calling a hospital. Got it?” She punctuated that last sentence with a tug on his hand.

“Yeah,” he slurred, nodding.

“Yeah?”

Alan redoubled his efforts, and managed to get out a perfectly-enunciated “Yes, Rachel.”

She laughed. “Hey, you remembered my name!”

“Yeah,” Alan said. “I just…”

“Yes?”

“Need some sleep,” he said, and his head rolled onto his right shoulder, touching his wound and jolting him upright.

“And your shoulder?” she asked.

“I uh,” Alan said, thinking. “Ran into a door.” Technically correct as a statement, it allowed him to feel slightly less like an asshole than if the lie was complete.

“Suuuuure,” Rachel said.

“Several doors,” Alan added, amending his statement.

She rolled her eyes, but didn't let go of his hand. “Do you even know where you are?”

Alan looked around the room, down to his wristwatch, and queried the nigh-encyclopedic knowledge he had of the 2008 Convention Schedule.

“The Advanced Video Distributers official panel,” he said, and Rachel raised an eyebrow at him. “Okay. You pass. For now.”

AVD's industry panel was one that Alan had, coincidentally enough, intended to attend no matter how this convention went. AVD was, perhaps, the most currently prominent, and historically significant, anime localization company that hadn't earned the virulent hate of the community. Harmony Gold and 4Kids, despite their extensive catalogs of translated content and talented voice actors, had worked their way onto the fandom's shit-list through independent serieses of choices that treated their properties as generic children's shows, ironing out a lot of the artistry in order to make their shows more palatable to a 5th-grade audience. But AVD was sacred.

It was one of the earliest publishing houses of anime in America, appearing in the middle of the Texan desert in 1992, bringing clamshell-clad VHS tapes of trashy shows into video stores across the nation. And as much as it gained a stable of talented voice actors, as much as it collected the licenses to highly-acclaimed television shows and movies, it was this initial moment, and its legacy, that cemented it as a pillar of the fandom, and thus, the industry.

It might sound counter-intuitive, but the trashy quality of AVD's early translated properties marked it out as something exceptional. Think of it this way: When you decide to introduce a friend to a favorite band of yours, you culled that selection. Even if you grabbed half the playlist from a Greatest Hits album, you pulled out songs you thought were crap, and put in the most incredible forgotten B-sides you could find. And, from the earliest VHS and Betamax tapes back in the early 80s, the industry was trying to sell America on “anime” as a medium. Only the best shows, the most artistically validated movies, could come over. Studio Ghibli's films, Katsuhiro Otomo's Akira, and the Space Runaway Ideon movies dominated the field. But AVD simply did not give a shit, and in doing (or not doing) so, introduced anime fans to a whole world of content they never knew existed. Despite the best efforts of the localization and translation houses, the amount of anime that made it to American shores was never enough to slake the thirst of fans. And so, they were desperate, ready for any trash someone was willing to shove down their throats. Though no one could predict just how much they would love that trash.

Turns out that if you're into something niche, and you're used to being ridiculed for your non-standard interests, as nerds tended to be at the time, you learned to revel in going directly and forcefully against the grain. So the more trashy shows were, the more audacious it was that AVD even bothered to license them, the more their audience gobbled it up. By the late 90s, they were even adding in-jokes as bonus features – like a “jiggle counter” for particularly lewdly-animated shows. Eventually, this success led to fame and power, which allowed AVD to secure the licenses for incredibly popular shows, artistic masterpieces, giving them a bizarre selection of products, a sort of inverted Bell curve of quality. This earned them equal ridicule and reverence, but among “real fans” like Alan, it made them a truly cutting-edge company. Anyone who was anyone would want to know their next batch of licenses, and while they'd probably already seen a fan-translation of their more popular properties, it still mattered.

Alan did his best to stay focused on the stage, and the man pacing back and forth across it. Despite how oddly boring the presentation was, having something, anything to focus exclusively on helped keep him from nodding off. The longer it went on for, the more Alan's metaphorical brow furrowed. Usually, AVD would lead with the announcement of a highly acclaimed show, announce a bunch of crap, hit the middle with another work of genius, and then fill the rest with more crap, then pirouetting off of that to stick a landing on a third and final piece of Cinema. This was not the case tonight. In fact, as far as Alan could tell, by the end of the presentation, they hadn't announced a single high-profile show, only floating a raft of the weird and camp.

“So, let's move on to questions,” the AVD representative said, and several staffers ran around, bringing microphones to various fans whose hands went up. Most of these were comments or compliments, completely ignoring even the idea of a question, or asking questions that had been answered long before, and many, many times since then.

The next fan cleared his throat, before leaning in to a microphone already held awkwardly close to his face by a staffer. “Will you be licensing the new Evangelion movie, and if so, what quarter do you expect to publish it in?”

This was a question that, until this moment, no one had been stupid enough to ask. Evangelion was one of AVD's core properties. Since licensing the original television series in 1995, and then the movies, and then the comics, and then a nigh-on-criminal amount of merchandise, AVD had become seen, in some people's minds, as “The Evangelion company”. Part of this was due to Evangelion being so popular that it drew in new fans left and right, who didn't know many other shows yet, but most of it was due to their legitimate devotion to the franchise. From the moment of the movie's announcement several years before, to its 2007 release, to now, no one in the fandom realistically questioned who'd bring it to the English-speaking world. This fan, most likely, meant it as a softball question – maybe get the scoop on a big yet obvious piece of news, give AVD a publicity hit, and scratch their ego a bit for being right about something.

The AVD rep stared at the dweeb with the microphone. First, the dweeb holding it, then the dweeb speaking into it. Both had wronged him, somehow – Alan could see it on his face – by giving time and energy to such an idiotic question.

“I cannot confirm nor deny any plans for future licenses,” the rep said, flatly. “Anyway, for his enthusiasm about our products, can we get him a box set of Samurai Gun?” The sales rep had passed out several DVDs and pieces of swag thus far, but a whole series was going above and beyond. The questioner smiled awkwardly, and gave a thumbs-up, but the oddly robotic nature of the reply had had an impact. A half-dozen more hands shot up in the audience.

“Wait, they're a future license? Like, you haven't even started work on a dub?” another fan asked. By the door, the third or so of the crowd that always left during the Q&A part stopped cold in their tracks.

“As I said, I cannot confirm nor deny any plans for future licenses.”

The next question came. “Okay, but the French dub is already out – What's your excuse?” Regardless of success or reverence, once people smelled blood in the water, a crowd could turn against you in a matter of instants.

“As I said-”

Another nerd, this one holding a camcorder, grabbed the microphone. “I'm a correspondent with the Anime News Network, when did AVD switch to this policy of non-confirmation? Back in February, you-”

“As I-” The sales representative let out an aggravated sigh. “You know what? Fuck it.”

The room fell silent.

“Answer me this. What's the difference between getting fired now and getting laid off in a few months?” he said, staring daggers at the correspondent.

The correspondent pondered this. “Uh, depends on your finances-”

“Fucking nothing, that's what,” the sales rep said. “Have any of you been paying attention? To the news? To the economy? To goddamn anything?”

He took a big swig of his bottle of what may or may not have been water, all things considered. Then, he took the lack of a response as an answer. “Of course you wouldn't. Guess I gotta be an educator to all of you fucking children.”

Alan felt Rachel's fingers tense.

She let out a low whistle. “Shit, this is getting spicy.”

As much as Alan wanted to commit the brewing fight to memory, he was currently in the process of understanding just how weirdly intimate it felt to know how someone was going to react by feel. He reflexively tried to pull away, and Rachel secured her grasp on him.

“No,” she said.

“Huh?” The sales rep had launched into a diatribe about subprime mortgages, and Alan was legitimately unsure of whether or not Rachel had said anything more.

“I said I would keep an eye on you for this panel.”

“Those weren't your exact words,” Alan protested, weakly.

“True,” Rachel said. “But it's still what I'm going to do. Then I'm going to find your friends, and then they're going to keep an eye on you.”

Somewhere, far away, Alan heard Jeff yelling. “If everything is that dire, why haven't we heard anything from any of the other major publishers?”

The sales rep took another swig, and laughed. “Because shareholders? If they can string along the shareholders for another quarter by lying their asses off about existential threats, they will do it. And are doing it, as far as I can fucking tell.” Off to the sides, the staffers who weren't holding the microphones were frantically making phone calls.

“Okay, okay,” a guy dressed as Lupin the Third said, shaking his head, “You're telling me you don't have anything more? Like, you won't at all?”

“Bingo,” he said, with a half-smile. “Any shows of ours you like? Someone's going to have to buy the rights off of us while we fall apart.”

“What?” the Lupin said.

“The dot-com boom, for fuck's sake. Were you even cognizant when that went down?” Before the Lupin cosplayer could even respond, the sales rep scoffed at him. “I don't even want to know where you were on 9/11. Probably middle school. But back then, it was financially viable to run a service that sold World Wide Web addresses. Get $100 for a “ilovedogs.net”, $20 for “dabeegcheez.org”, $35 for “unfinalfantasy.com”, and you'd pull in enough money to sustain a small business. But when the internet bubble burst, we had to shift.”

His half-smile turned into a whole grin.

“You see, while you couldn't run a company on it, you could, as an individual, hold domain names ransom. I made tens of thousands by holding on, for years, to domains that big companies or rich individuals wanted, and waiting for them to cave. And that's exactly what's going to happen here. Not just us, but a whole bunch of companies are going to fire most of their staff and burn everything down to make a quick buck on their way out while the industry contracts.”

“Think it couldn't happen? Do we have any Macross fans in the audience?”

A small, hesitant selections of “woos” rang out.

The sales rep nodded. “You guys know what I'm talking about. Harmony Gold has been holding that license hostage for a decade. They barely have any business left, so all they have is taking hostages.”

Seemingly satisfied, he stopped talking, and it took all of five seconds for the room to erupt in shouts, panic, and the throwing of assorted merchandise at the stage.

Rachel, mercifully, let go of Alan's hand. She stood, corralling her friends.

“We have to leave.”

Ellen, impossibly, already had a metal chair over her head, ready to be thrown on stage. “But…” she protested.

“Yes,” Rachel said, “Smashing bad people is good. But it doesn't matter – you'll just pirate shows anyway and they'll live on merch sales, same as we've been doing for literally ever.”

“But,” Fred said, handing another chair to Nell.

“No buts!” Rachel insisted. A chair appropriated by someone other than their group flew over their heads. “Safety is the first priority. We're out.”

With that, she marched the six of them out. For a minute, they waited, leaning against the wall a few dozen feet away from the door, but the roar of the crowd hadn't diminished in the slightest. In fact, more people were coming into the panel, pushing back convention security that was still trying, in vain, to get everyone out of the panel room. Over the din, Alan swore he heard the sales rep yelling, though his words were indecipherable beyond their taunting tone.

But then they cut off, followed by the whine of microphone feedback.

“Uh,” Rachel said. The others were shouting, but they weren't close enough to Alan for him to hear. “This isn't normal for conventions, right?”

Alan shook his head.

She looked at him, honestly. “Any advice?”

He shook his head, and then put some thought in it. “Get out.” He might not have seen anything like this before, but he trusted his instincts. He could imagine even just a tenth of the crowd having his darkest impulses, cut loose for the world to see, and it wouldn't go well.

Rachel's eyes grew wide. “How far out?”

Hah, Alan thought, despite the situation. She is of my generation. He couldn't imagine what it was like to not have the 9/11 attacks as part of your childhood psychology, and he couldn't imagine that psychological impact not manifesting as having a threat assessment of horrific things happening at each and every place you went to.

“Just to your hotel rooms,” he said, before remembering. Rachel shot him a frustrated, judgmental look, and Alan flushed. “Star Market, maybe. The mall is probably good, but just in case, get across the street.”

Down the hall, Steve sprinted, holding a flaming sign that, as best as Alan could tell, said “Will Glomp for Scritches XD”, punctuated with a cutesy anime catgirl underneath. He disappeared into the crowd outside the door, which had become as dense as the nerd equivalent of the atomic slurry at the heart of a neutron star. Jeff, backed up by Jack, Clive, and Bill, chased him into the chaos, shouted words of concern drowned out by the crowd. Henry, further on, brought up the rear, with the newer and more tertiary members of the Anime Club forming a phalanx around him, cutting through the swarm. Bill and Clive were holding up their backpacks to form a sort of snowplow-wedge, shoving aside apoplectic dweebs with ease.

Rachel took a deep breath, considered all this, and nodded. “Okay. We'll evacuate to there.” She studied his eyes. “Are you coming with us?”

Alan stared at her. He didn't want to shake his head, but… “I can't.”

“Your friends are in there?”

He nodded. “Get out, get safe.”

And, against his expectations, Rachel wrapped her arms around him, and pulled him into a tight hug. “You're a good friend,” she said, directly into his ear. “Rachel Vasquez. Like the comic artist. Nod if you heard me.”

He did.

“Friend me on Facebook.” She turned away, and looked at her group. They were glancing between her and the increasingly rambunctious crowd furtively, looking for direction. “Just in case,” she said, grabbing Alan by the shoulders, “What's your name? I'll find you if you don't find me.”

“Alan Smith,” Alan Smith said.

“Really?”

“Yeah, I know, generic as hell,” Alan said, in the same response he'd given a thousand times. Name jokes were like place-of-employment jokes – you'd hear them ten times a day, every day, until you escaped, and as tiring as it was, eventually you developed a reflex for them.

Her face froze as she committed the information to memory, and then, she pressed her forehead to his.

It was… so warm.

“Don't take this the romantically,” she whispered.

Surprisingly, he knew what she meant. “I won't,” he said.

“I don't know how you do things.”

Henry flashed in Alan's mind. The need he felt wasn't sexual, but almost… familial.

“But you're insecure as fuck, and maybe you need to work though that. Try more skinship with your friends. I don't fucking care if you think it's gay, maybe try cuddling sometime.” Alan did not want to talk to her about how many times he and Steve had fallen asleep on each other's shoulder after a late-night, wine-fueled batch of fighting games.

So, he nodded.

“I have to go to them,” Alan said, and Rachel pulled away.

“You best hope I don't message you first,” she said, waving. Then, she took Ellen under her arm, despite their height disparity, and the group bolted. Alan was suddenly, and totally, alone.

He dove into the chaos.

Alan couldn't recount the events of the next couple minutes. It was a pile of thrown elbows, screaming, things on fire that should not be, crowd pressure, and by the time it was over, he was on the floor, barely catching his breath, on the far end of a structural pillar one floor beneath where he'd begun.

Steve was bleeding onto the floor tiles, a head wound of unknown origin spilling blood, but not doing enough damage to make him stop laughing. Henry was, despite this, trying to tend to him, ruining a full third of the stash of fast food napkins he kept in his backpack by soaking them in nerd blood. Down the hall, a wave of Boston police charged up the stairs and into the fray. It was the third they'd seen so far, and they hadn't seen a single cop come out. Alan wasn't sure if his lack of sleep and his excess of terror were warping his perception, but the horrible groan he heard coming from above was equally likely to be coming from the sheer mass of humanity roiling in anger, or from the essential structural elements of the convention center struggling to hold.

Henry cleared his throat.

“I know you all had plans tonight, but I'm calling it.”

Steve raised his hand like a student, despite his head being cradled in Henry's lap. “What if I want to see Dick and Busters tonight?”

Henry frowned. “This isn't a democracy. We're going back to the hotel until I have confirmation this has blown over. And that's final.”

Steve groaned, but Henry shushed him with a granola bar to the mouth.

“Where'd you get that?” Alan asked.

“I'd never leave my tribe without a supply of protein and fiber,” Henry said, standing. “Let's go.”

And, with surprising coordination, they did. With the assistance of Henry's undergrad phalanx, they were out of the convention hall, and into the hotel within the space of two minutes. Henry, though, kept pushing them onwards. “We're not out of this yet. This kerfuffle could still propagate down to us. We get to our room and hunker down.” There was no room for argument. It wasn't like Henry had said it forcefully, but it was just a fact. At the elevator, their group split – the undergraduates and Henry were split across two rooms on the 14th floor, while Alan's group was on the 18th.

“You're in charge from here out. Do right by me, understand?” Henry said. Jeff nodded – when divorced from Henry's leadership, Jeff was the default leader, and between Alan's still-wet shoulder wound, Steve's bleeding head, and Jack, Clive, and Bill's general idiocy, Jeff was the best-equipped among them. Like an embassy of Henry, he was a satellite, a remotely-operated center of reasonableness in all of this.

When the door closed, leaving the seven of them alone, they fell silent.

They made it all the way up to the 18th floor, out the open door, down three turns in the hallway, and quite a feet down to the door of their shared suite. Jeff swiped his keycard, and with a click, the door unlocked.

One by one, they went through. Steve seemed completely unphased by being currently bleeding, and slung his backpack across the room, narrowly missing the TV, bouncing off the wall, and landing on a loveseat. “Hey!”

Alan waited his turn to go in. There was no sense in shoving past the others.

“So, while we're stuck here, anyone up for some Smash Brothers?” Bill said.

Behind Alan, an all-too-familiar voice said, “Hell yeah. I call Falco.”

Sawyer.