“You can't just call Falco,” Clive objected.
Sawyer laughed. “I'll fight you for him, okay?” She set her chainsaw down next to the door. Alan was pretty sure he could still see some fibers of his costume in its teeth. The rest of the group had filtered into the hotel room, but Sawyer was keeping close to the entrance, watching Alan try to plan his escape.
“All right, but with who?” Clive said, clearly offended, but not enough to decline the challenge.
“Falco v. Falco, of course,” she said.
Clive ran his fingers through his hair, flicking the ends into the air, not even looking at her. “Acceptable.”
Sawyer walked straight into him, and wrapped her arm around his shoulders, pulling him into her like a teasing older sibling. “Don't think about it.”
“Uh, why not?” Alan asked. He winced as soon as the words came out of his mouth.
“You wouldn't like the answer. Let's hang out a bit, okay?”
Alan swallowed, trying not to throw up, and nodded.
The hotel room was, objectively, pretty fucking sweet. You see, when it came to accommodations at anime conventions, there were three tiers of quality, and, in effect, three tiers of people. At the bottom rung were any situation that required travel using public transit, or in more extreme cases, their own cars. These were popular among, well, poorer people, and the artists selling in the Artist's Alley, for the sake of their profit margins. Their situation made going to and leaving from the convention significant events. These people couldn't realistically attend parties and late-night events at the convention, cutting them out of the 18+ and 21+ events, and if something went terribly wrong at the convention, it could wipe out an entire day. Additionally, if they decided to cosplay, their costumes had to be all-day costumes, and they'd have to deal with, in some cases, taking public transit in full costume as an anime character, usually without much ability to quickly explain why they were wearing a poorly-made kimono and holding a cardboard sword as tall and as thick as they were.
The second tier had a much better experience, though they had to pay a premium for it. While staying out of town cost, at the most, sixty dollars a night, those who decided to stay within walking distance of the convention would pay, at a minimum, a hundred and fifty dollars a night, and they had their disadvantages, which were caused by rational market forces that were completely divorced from the experience of your average anime nerd. The long and short of it was that hotels in cities were usually rented by tourists, who wanted immaculate bedding, super clean bathrooms, and a “premium” look – all of which, of course, were good qualities. But the cheaper, further hotels, were mostly frequented by people on business trips. So, over beauty, over cleanliness, they prioritized what their clientele would need: Internet connectivity and electrical sockets. You and however many people you were sharing your room with could charge their phones, laptops, and MP3 players all at once, while at a second-tier, upscale city hotel, they'd have to fight for two or three available plugs, and pay a premium for an internet connection. With this second tier, you had none of this. Though in return for that sacrifice, and the premium you paid, you would receive the ability to properly attend the convention – stay as long as you want, feel free to get inebriated to stumble your way back to your apartment, and if you need to take a break from the convention, while it may take you fifteen minutes to get back to your room, you could go there and come back in an hour or two without significant additional investment.
But all of this paled in comparison to the third and final tier. Since time immemorial, conventions were based out of hotels. After all, regardless of the subject of a convention – anime, literary criticism, molecular biology – the unifying factor was that people were gathering there, coming from distant lands to concentrate an interest in a single, physical spot, where you could reasonably assume that the people around you would have the same interests as you, allowing you to participate in a level of casual socialization that was often well beyond the reach of nerds of any stripe. Many conventions still only took place within the grounds of a hotel, its conference rooms and hallways converted into a makeshift convention hall, an endearing, struggling, intimate affair. And while the larger ones, like AniMass, took place in a sprawling convention center, their beating heart was still the One True Hotel at their center. Staying at the one true hotel, whatever it was, made you a part of the convention in a way that the others did not. It made you a part of the shared narrative. What you did, how you spent your time, even in your hotel room, potentially added to the lore of the convention. There was never a sense of “leaving”, not until Closing Ceremonies on Sunday afternoon. It was an almost spiritual desire that made up the Sheraton's siren song, no matter how much those rooms cost.
This, of course, was what Alan and his friends sprung for. They were utilizing an ancient and respected technique: Cramming more people into the room than the hotel authorized. By doing so, the individual cost could be driven down to the cost equivalent of a mediocre imported figurine a night, and that, to those who'd tasted the glory of staying at the One True Hotel, was acceptable. The suite may have been meant for two, but even for the six of them, it wasn't half bad, so long as they remembered to pack sleeping bags and pillows. Alan, Steve, and Jeff slept in the “living room” of the suite, while Bill, Clive, and Jack took the bedroom, with the majority of them sleeping on the floor. They'd solved the question of who got the bed and who got the couch out of all of them by a tiered tournament of rock-paper-scissors, with Steve winning the couch, and Clive the bed, which had earned them both the honor of paying the tax for the room.
As the group divested themselves of their various merchandise, backpacks, and cosplay bits, Steve stretched, yawned, and like a felled tree, face-planted onto the couch. Steve's contented sigh was interrupted by a yelp and a series of expletives from Jeff, who held out his arm as if he could reach into the past and stop what had just occurred.
“What?” Bill said, and then saw Steve. “Oh, fuck.”
Slowly, everyone turned to Steve, and gasped as the horror dawned on them.
Steve peeled his face off the couch, the fibers sticking to his bloody forehead. “What?” he said, before looking down at the large bloodstain he'd just soaked into the couch. “Oh.”
“Steve, why are you like this?” Jeff said, pleading less with Steve and more with the reality that allowed him to be.
“They're gonna surcharge the pants off us,” Jack said.
“Well, what's done is done, right?” Steve said, laying his head back down.
Half of the population of the room lunged over, and yanked Steve bodily off the couch.
“Shit, shit, shit,” Jeff said. “It's worse than that. They could ban us from the hotel for this.” The tension in the room ratcheted up several notches.
“Wait, they can do that?” Bill said.
“Probably,” Jeff said, and winced in concentration. “Okay, okay, maybe we can salvage this. Does anyone know how to clean up bloodstains?”
Sawyer raised her hand. “Yeah, with the right tools and techniques.”
Jeff shot her a skeptical look. “Those are exactly what we don't have.”
Sawyer glanced around the room. “Does anyone have vinegar on them?”
Silence.
“Okay, how about hydrogen peroxide?”
“Who just carries around hydrogen peroxide?” Clive said.
“Henry has some,” Alan said. “It's a disinfectant, I think.”
Sawyer turned to him. “Only use it as a disinfectant in emergencies, and how far away is Henry, exactly?”
“In his hotel room?” Alan answered.
“Yeah, that's no good. Peroxide only works in the first couple minutes. WD40?”
Nothing but blank stares.
“Seriously?” Sawyer said. “You need to be better prepared, I wouldn't go to a con without a can.”
“So, shouldn't you have some?” Clive said.
She rolled her eyes. “Not on me. Does this cosplay look like it has pockets? How about talcum powder?”
Yet again, the silence was deafening. “You don't even practice good footcare? Well, shit,” she said, and stormed off towards the room's minifridge. “Time for Plan E.” She reached in, and pulled out a two-liter bottle of Coke. Sawyer took it, marched over to the couch, and began pouring it liberally onto the stain.
“Excuse me, what?” Steve said. He'd gotten to his feet, and came over to Sawyer's side.
She looked at him, still pouring. “The acid helps break up the blood, and I'm pretty sure the carbonation plays a small part, too.”
“But, uh-” Steve started.
“Soak it in water tomorrow, dry it off the best you can, and hopefully it'll just seem like you spilled water on the couch. If not, the hotel will care less about a cola stain than a blood stain, and they'll charge you less for the cleaning.”
“What if I want to like, use the couch, though?”
Sawyer re-capped the bottle, and tossed it to Jack, who very nearly fumbled it. She grabbed a towel from the bathroom, and folded it into a nice square that covered the cola-soaked patch. Steve looked at it, shrugged, and sat down on it. “You know what, Alan? Your friend's pretty rad.”