Original Content

He took a moment to marvel at this. It seemed so far away, but it was there.

Alan reached for it. His arms, his body, everything was weighed down by something soft yet firm enveloping him, but he pushed it aside, chunk by chunk, bringing that daylight closer and closer. Eventually, his left hand grasped something metallic and solid above him, and with every bit of strength he had left in him, he pulled himself up. His head crested the pile of debris, and he saw that he was…

In a dumpster.

As his eyes adjusted, he looked around at the back alley said dumpster was in. Against all reason, it was the same one he'd checked out Friday morning. And then, he looked up. The hotel stretched up, seemingly infinitely, into the sky. He'd just been up there. And now he was here.

Alan struggled to comprehend just how in the hell he was alive, until he began to examine the contents of the dumpster he was currently the sole occupant of. Nearly everything that could have been placed in a dumpster would have, from that height, broken most of the bones in his body and liquefied his organs, or at least turned his brain into a soup-like homogenate, but he'd lucked out. This was a cosplay dumpster. The same properties that made foam rubber an excellent material to make cosplay armor out of, namely, that it was soft, durable, and maintained its shape without causing undue stress on anyone or anything, also made it a pretty good substance to land in. He'd gone maybe six feet deep into cast-offs and discarded pieces, but something else was in there, too, something that kept him from plunging all the way to the steel bottom.

Something that was still sticking to his shoulder. He reached back, and felt something… fluffy. And then the smell hit him.

So, dear reader, you may have a desperately inaccurate perception of furries. “Furry”, really, only describes someone having an affinity for anthropomorphized animals. They don't all have “fursonas”, they don't all have fursuits, and their sex lives aren't particularly different from the rest of the populace.

Well, mostly.

You may be under the misconception that furries occasionally fuck in their fursuits. This is almost entirely an oversimplification. Fursuits, herein defined as a costume that portrays, to an oft-cuddly degree, an anthropomorphized animal, are prohibitively expensive. There is a stereotype that furries have a disproportionate level of representation in programming, engineering, and other STEM fields, but really, furries are everywhere. It's just that only the successful ones have the resources to be truly loud about it. A fursuit represents an investment of time, of money, of spirit, and they are to be protected, and treated with care. Sending a smorgasbord of bodily fluids flying around them would be at least ill-advised, and at most, utterly offensive.

But, it would still be pretty hot to lay pipe with a flirty fox-dude straight out of Disney's awakening-inducing Robin Hood, so what, pray tell, is an enterprising, horny furry to do? The answer, of course, is the “murrsuit”.

“Murr” is one of those many onomatopoeia who date back to time immemorial, and have simply become a fact of the fandom. “Meep” is the sound that baby dragons make, “mwerp” is generally associated with lizards, and “murr” is the sound that a cloying, hornt anthro character makes. Kind of like a horny purr. Following from that, a murrsuit is a fursuit designed specifically to have sex in. Typically cheaper, in case of a total loss, engineered with cleaning and accessibility to certain areas in mind, the murrsuit is a completely different animal (hah) than the fursuit. Fursuits, for example, often have shape to them – like the shoulders of a high-powered ladies' business suit from 1987, specific areas are stuffed with padding and structural supports in other to create a form incongruous with the person within – thighs and legs are often amplified, along with everything below, in order to create the impression of digitigrade, rather than plantigrade, locomotion. This usually extends throughout the whole suit, creating a body that is unique to the character.

But this would be disadvantageous to a murrsuit. While, sure, it would be nice to be rockin', as Steve would put it, “fat fuckin' tits”, the structure required to do so would impede feeling, well, anything from a partner groping that particular region. So, murrsuits are made with thinner skin, with less structure in key places, so that the wearer can adequately experience, well, whatever they're trying to experience at the time.

So what, exactly, is the difference between a fursuit and a murrsuit?

A fursuit must be cared for, and it accurately portrays, on-model, your fursona of choice. A murrsuit, by contrast, does its honest best, while being thin enough to have fun in, and simultaneously being resilient enough to be power-washed three times in a weekend.

The murrsuit currently plastered to Alan's back like a cape had not, in fact, survived its last attempt at being washed, and he could make an educated guess as to why it was sticking to him. Sure, it could have been his own blood. But from the smell, that was very, very wishful thinking.

Alan scraped his back against the side of the dumpster, and felt the murrsuit peel off of him. Now that he could get a look at it, it was, in fact, a bit soaked in his blood, along with other substances. All of Alan's limbs seemed to work, though his right arm was badly bruised, and when he levered himself over the edge of the dumpster, pain shot through it before he crashed to the ground.

He lay there for a minute, staring at the morning sky.

He was alive. How the fuck was he alive? Why the fuck was he alive?

That thought ran through his head, over and over again, while his brain did its honest best to boot up. The sheer impossibility of what his life had become was crashing, over and over again, into the fact that he'd experienced all the shit that had happened in the last sixty or so hours, and couldn't place himself in a reality where any of that hadn't happened.

Alan knew this because over the last ten minutes or so of lying on the ground, he'd run through every scenario he could imagine that allowed some degree of fictionality to his experiences, and had justified none of it before a seagull started pecking at his ear. He jolted, batting it away with the seagull's best approximation of a squawk, and he picked himself up off the ground. He didn't know much anymore, but he did know that he was starving.

Alan, beaten, bloodied, clothes torn and hair matted, stumbled into the mall, and collapsed into a metal-armed chair outside the premises of a breakfast-themed health food restaurant – or maybe it was a health-food-themed breakfast restaurant. He had trouble picking his head up enough to take a good look. On top of that, feeling around, it seemed he'd lost his wallet somewhere along the line. There was no realistic way to get food here. Still, he had no intention of moving.

“Oh, shit, hey Alan!” Steve said. “Nice battle-damaged Tuxedo Mask, or…” He leaned in close, with a smirk. “Was she just that rough?”

Alan nodded weakly.

“Damn man, I'm jealous. Like, yeah, yeah, don't stick your dick in crazy, but if you do, call her by the wrong name and hold on for dear life, right?”

Alan didn't respond.

“Hey man, you want a breakfast burrito?” he said, putting his hand on Alan's shoulder.

“Yeah,” Alan said, and tried not to choke up at the charity. Years of masculine societal training made that significantly easier than it should have been, but he wasn't doing great. He could hardly parse the whirlwind of activity around him – chairs and tables being slid over, people half-recognized setting down backpacks and satchels, jostling for reserved positions, then leaving – a few minutes passing in the space of seconds – and returning with meals wrapped in aluminum foil.

“I just wanted a waffle,” Jack whined, picking at a fried egg sitting on top of intermixed rice and diced ham over a bed of lettuce.

“Trust me,” Henry said, “You'll be better off this way.” He was enjoying a platter of deviled eggs, garnished with celery and a thick tomato sauce that gave the distinct impression of a non-alcoholic, non-liquid Bloody Mary.

“But why does he get to have waffles?” Jack said, pointing a blunt knife at Jeff, who shrugged weakly.

“Because he's low on sugars and starches, and would be crashing by noon if he didn't have waffles,” Henry explained, patiently.

“With whipped cream, though?”

Henry's eyes darted over to Jeff, followed by his left hand, snatching the container mid-squirt. Jeff yelped. “That'll just make you sleepier,” Henry said, stuffing it into his backpack.

“Hey!” Jeff exclaimed.

“You'll get it back when we get off the T, okay?” Henry said.

Jeff nodded.

Sometime in the middle of all of this, Steve had come back, and dropped off a burrito about the width and length of Alan's forearm on a recyclable paper plate in front of him. Despite his hands being caked with a combination of substances beyond human comprehension, including a smattering of motor oil, he grabbed it in both hands, and tore into it, decapitating it as much as a burrito could be decapitated, and bathing in its innards.

Steve reached over, and splashed some Tabasco sauce over these innards. Alan wasn't prepared to hesitate, and chomped into a piece of scrambled egg whose relationship to hot sauce was best described as “saturated”. When he bit in, the vinegar, salt, and capsaicin exploded into his brain, and the world finally came into focus.

Arranged like the Knights of the Round Table, the illustrious alumni of the Pioneer College Anime Club occupied the entire mall-side seating of the Perky Peppercorn, a half-dozen intimate, two-person tables lined up to form something appropriate for the kings of anime nerds, with Henry, the Eternal President, at the head of the table, and Max, the current President, at the foot. And across from Alan, Sawyer pulled a seat away from the table, and sat down.

This immediately escalated Alan's Terror Threat Meter, licensed by the Homeland Security Advisory System, to Orange: High risk of terrorist attacks. Since she wasn't doing anything, just… sitting, menacingly, he could keep it there, and wait for local government officials to neutralize the threat.

She leaned forward, and stole a chunk of egg out of his breakfast burrito, necessitating an escalation to Red: Severe risk of terrorist attacks, though Alan was feeling in need of a rank higher. Maybe Black: “You're fucked”. Sawyer must have seen the fear in Alan's eyes, and she leaned back in her chair, stretching her arms out in the least threatening yawn she could muster.

Alan's eyes flicked over every single object on the surface of the conjoined table, looking for potential weapons, or at least anything sharp enough to slit Sawyer's throat, or even just annoy her long enough for him to get away.

Sawyer, again, noticed.

“Dude, chill,” she said, in a lazy drawl.

This was too much.

“What the fuck do you mean, “chill?” I'm only alive right now because-” Alan said, before being aggressively shushed by Sawyer.

“Chill. No need to yell. I'm not real, okay?” she said, with a conspiratorial wink.

Whatever “too much” was before, it paled in comparison to whatever “too much” was now, let alone where-ever Sawyer was right now.

“What the fuck does not real mean?” Alan hissed at her, failing to keep his voice below a whisper.

Sawyer shrugged. “I guess “not real” was going a bit far. I'm a hallucination.”

The tines of Alan's fork had made it well through his burrito and were making progress on stabbing through his oddly robust cardboard food court plate.

“If it makes you feel any better, it's not my fault,” she said. “You've gotta be in that weird state between dreaming and being awake.” She waved a disconcertingly real-looking hand through the air. “Like, with a bad hangover on top of it.”

Alan gave her words more credence than they deserved, and frowned accordingly. “But I didn't drink anything last night,” he protested.

Sawyer looked at him with the clearest expression of disappointment Alan had seen since his last family gathering. “Yeah, that's why I said “like”, dumb-ass.”

Alan studied her carefully. She looked plenty real. Though, thinking about it, the world did look a bit wibbly. Lines that should have been parallel were steadfastly refusing to do so, though only at the corners of his vision. And ninety degree angles weren't doing so hot, either. So, maybe she was telling the truth. Alan watched her eyes. Maybe he could find something there.

“Fucking eat the rest of your burrito, Alan,” she said.

Alan thrust a forkful of sausage, egg, and tortilla at her. “Why do you care?”

“I'm a hallucination!” Sawyer said, as if that explained anything. “I can't eat,” she continued, seeing his lack of comprehension. “But I'm still hungry as fuck, so get that shit-” she gestured at his fork – “out of my face, and into yours.”

He was pretty hungry, so he honored her request, and kept eating.

The other inhabitants of the table were having, as far as he could tell, a very normal time. None of them took note of Sawyer, and all of them looked… Well, when I say they looked “well-rested”, that is in the context of an anime convention. On day three, people had usually let their hygiene and sleep habits slip, and his friends were no exception to this. Henry had attempted to get them all to stick to what he called the 1-3-6 rule: One shower, three meals, and six hours of sleep per day of convention. And while everyone slipped up here and there, an attempt had been made. His efforts led to his crew being positively bright-eyed and bushy-tailed compared to the average.

Compared to Alan, they looked like Greek gods. To be fair, he'd slept in a dumpster. Just as he was taking another bite of burrito, he was struck by how much he smelled like he'd slept in a dumpster, and he struggled to keep it down.

Sawyer shook her head disapprovingly. “You corporeal types, you're straight-up insulting with your insistence on not giving yourselves proper self-care.” She produced a fork, and absent-mindedly started picking at her arm with it, dragging her striped undersleeves up. Alan's gaze drifted to them, to the little white lines the tines formed on her skin. As pale as it was, he could still see the distinction between normal flesh and what had just been raked over. Looking at them, he saw that some didn't fade. Some of the white lines ran up to her elbow, some just across, a slightly different texture and color than the rest. None of them responded quite right to the tines, and then, it hit him.

Alan went cold. “Are those self-harm scars?”

Sawyer put down her fork, and leaned back in her chair with a sigh. “Yeah. What else would they be?” she said, as if it carried as much importance as what flavor of gum had stuck to her shoe.

“Please,” he said, “I know you're trying to kill me and all, so you're probably not that invested in what I have to say, but…” He swallowed. “Don't do that to yourself.”

“Yeah?” Sawyer said. “Have you tried it?”

“No, but-”

“You ever think there might be a good reason for it?”

“What?” he said.

“You know, self-harm. Maybe it's a sort of… pop-off valve. A way of releasing feelings that would otherwise poison you.” She smiled. “Maybe you'd get something out of it.”

Looking at her, in that moment, felt like staring at a compressed ball of television static. Like the smell of acetone, eating away at the edges of his senses, of his thoughts, sensing just enough to know that important things were being dissolved.

“Sawyer, please, just stop.”

She rolled her eyes, and grabbed her wrist. Slowly, she ran her hand all the way up her arm, and in its wake, the scars disappeared. “Good as gone,” she said, with a smile, and rolled down her sleeve. “Y'know, I don't actually know if I self-harm. You just kind of expected it of me.” She smirked. “Technically, as a hallucination, I don't exist, so in an epistemological sense, I can't self-harm, seeing as I don't have a self.”

A bit of egg fell out of Alan's open mouth, and with it came a bit of hope. “Does that mean you uh… Can't hurt me?” he said, tentatively.

Sawyer held up a finger in the universal gesture of “Give me a second”, and Alan waited patiently as she bent over the edge of her chair, and rummaged through her satchel. He hadn't seen her sit down with it, and honestly wasn't sure of he'd seen her with it since Friday. It was getting a bit tough to remember all of the details of the last… many… hours. As he was saying, details.

When she came back up, she was holding a machete the length of her forearm.

Were Alan more in command of his faculties, he would have ran. However, he wasn't, so he froze solid, as Sawyer hurled the machete directly into, and then through, his face, to no effect.

“See? You're fine,” Sawyer said, while Alan tried to remember how to breath.

She grinned at him, and looked, pointedly, at his hands. “Come on. Keep eating, you dumb nerd.”

He obeyed. Somehow, having her inability to harm him proven hadn't made him feel any better about the situation. Probably because the real Sawyer was very, very capable of harming him, and he wouldn't be having a conversation with this Sawyer without the damage she'd inflicted. Hell, he'd never had the chance to clean out his shoulder wound, he'd just kept it hidden as best as he could… Having an open wound in a dumpster couldn't have been good for his immune system.

“I figured,” Sawyer continued,” that it was time for us to have a bit of a talk.” She waited for him to make eye contact with her. “Last night wasn't super constructive, if I'm being completely honest. I'd like to think I offered some pretty salient criticisms, worthy of a dialogue or two.”

Alan couldn't even form words to reproach her with. Dialogue? He was having a hard enough time thinking, let alone conducting analysis. And her stupid face was pissing him off. She was just smiling at him, waiting for him to say something, to make a mistake that she could leap on. Even in this, Alan had been reduced to prey. It was infuriating. Emasculating. It was-

“You doing okay, bro? You're kind of just staring into the middle distance,” Steve said, waving a hand and forearm through the center of Alan's sight-line, and incidentally, through Sawyer's torso. Alan jumped in his seat.

“Shit, I told you I'm a hallucination, don't be so spooked when I do “just a hallucination” things,” Sawyer said, rolling her eyes. “I thought the knife thing would have given you the…” She paused for effect. “Point?”

Sawyer doubled over in laughter, while Alan managed, only just, to wave off Steve, who shrugged and went back to his breakfast.

“Don't no-sell it, man, that one was on you,” she said, once she'd regained her composure.

“Me?” Alan said, frowning. “Don't blame me for your sense of humor.”

Sawyer's sense of humor was, apparently, tickled by this statement. “Dude, I'm a hallucination. I'm not even me, I'm just here to make it easier for you to figure some shit out.”

“What do you mean, you aren't you?” Alan said.

Sawyer kept smiling at him, and peeled the skin off her face. Alan yelped. But, as it became increasingly obvious that Alan was the only one there making a big deal of this, he tried to at least avoid looking at the gruesome display.

“Come on man, look,” she said, pointing at the area that once contained her face, with one purple-painted fingernail.

Alan looked. Under the flesh, under the blood, very clearly, was Alan's face.

He yelped again.

Sawyer let go of her skin, her face snapping back into place with a wet slap. “Sorry, but we're just so god-awful at having a conversation with ourselves that this was the best we could do on short notice.” She leaned forward on the table, her elbow phasing through a salt shaker. “That, and while you did technically get some sleep last night, it was more of a concussed demi-consciousness than actual sleep. So you're pretty lucky that I'm you're hallucination experience. There's so much worse I could be, like-”

Her expression soured, and she jabbed her finger at him, nearly touching his nose. “Hey! Stop that line of speculation right the fuck now! I like being me, and you like me being me, too. Also, please try to stop acknowledging me. I'm you. I can hear your narrative. Including this.”

Well, that was unnerving.

“You'll just have to get used to it,” she said.

Alan noticed that the whole meta-table had fallen silent, and he was immediately terrified that he'd drawn attention to himself and Sawyer somehow. But as he looked around, and followed the gazes that he found, all of them led to the head of the table, where Henry was sitting, with an expectant gleam in his eyes.

“So,” Henry asked, “How has everyone's con been going?”

Alan turned away, trying to do so with a speed that both avoided eye contact and wasn't fast enough to call attention to himself. “Smooth,” Sawyer commented. He didn't care. Thankfully, the others were delighted to share.

First was Sharon, the current webmaster of the Anime Club, and the Asuka from yesterday's Masquerade skit. The second she stood up, Steve harassed her, in a well-meaning sort of way, about the merchandise she'd picked up over the course of the convention. For some reason, he didn't seem to expect her to be able to carry a narrative herself, and was trying to lob her a softball of a story to tell.

“You know exactly why, Alan,” Sawyer said.

What little momentum she'd conjured ground to a halt at Steve's inquiry. She hadn't gotten much of any merch, and when she stated as such, the others jumped in, questioning her in the assumption that she was just being modest, or underestimating how interesting her purchases were, or was embarrassed of the franchises she'd invested in – all options that could have produced wonderful conversational fruit, if any of them had been real.

“I bet they aren't,” Sawyer said, rolling up the paper sleeve of a straw.

They weren't. Sharon kept growing increasingly flustered as she kept fending off question after question.

Alan felt something light rebound off his neck. Sawyer had wadded the paper into a spit-ball, and now that she had his attention, she stared at him.

He got the meaning.

“Let her fucking talk,” Alan said. He wasn't loud, but… maybe it was because he'd been so quiet, maybe it was his seniority, maybe it was how weirdly distant he'd been throughout the weekend, but the assembled members of the Anime Club shut up.

Sawyer nodded approvingly, and Sharon continued. Her core convention experience had been divorced from anime, gaming (both digital and tabletop), and even cartoons. Instead, she explained, it had been more along the lines of horror.

“Oh, like Nightmare on Elm Street?” Steve asked.

Sharon squinched her face in the effort of finding an adequate explanation. “Not really? More like… Robert Chambers?”

“Who?” Jeff asked.

“Clark Ashton Smith?” offered Dale.

“What?” Greg, the Current Secretary said.

“H.P. Lovecraft, but, you know, with less racism,” Henry clarified, and a chorus of “Aaah”s went up among the assembled.

Sharon shrugged. “Close enough, I guess. But horror fiction, and the making thereof. Like, okay, how many of you read fanfic?”

No hands went up.

“Smutty fanfic?”

Many hands went up, in the face of a direct attack.

“You read them online, right?” she asked. Those who'd raised their hands, to a man, nodded. “And when was the last time you read a book?”

“Uh, last night?” Miles, their token freshman, said. “I'm working on Moby Dick.”

“Fucking Gundam fans,” Sawyer hissed, and Alan nodded in agreement.

“Okay, good for you,” Sharon said, “but how'd Charles Dickens work?”

Silence.

“Asimov? Campbell? Lovecraft?”

More silence.

“Serialized publication, motherfuckers!” she said, swigging back a can of Pepsi like it was 40% alcohol. When she slammed it on the table, Sawyer synchronously brought down her fist. Alan wasn't entirely sure which made his plate jump.

“What?” Bill asked. Alan knew that he had an RSS feed rigged up to automatically download the latest installments of his favorite fanfic directly onto his desktop, but he also knew that Bill probably wouldn't make the connection.

“Nice choice of words,” Sawyer said, and Alan ignored her as best he could.

“What if there was just a portal, a place, where you could read some really good sci-fi horror?” she said. “Like, yeah, you can just Google that search term, but what if you had a guarantee? Linked by some vague concept, some vague overarching narrative, but you never knew what you were getting?”

So, like the original conception of a restaurant, Alan thought.

“Exactly. You don't order something, but instead, you submit your will to the chef. Or author, in this case,” Sawyer said. He nodded.

So, Sharon explained, she and several other authors had convened in the PHPBB2 message board of some website or another, coalescing around such a concept, determined to write fiction in a vaguely shared sci-fi horror setting. They'd all enjoyed each other's content, but writing something didn't quite make it real. They'd have to put it online, present it to the world, put a narrative stamp of continuity on it all. Make it all part of one setting. And finally, this year, they were meeting up, in person, to finalize it all.

An army of shrugs met her story, even as she explained that they'd be putting it all online, and approving new submissions, within a month or two.

“Okay, that's pretty good,” Sawyer said, and Alan couldn't help but agree. He wasn't entirely sure it happened, but it felt like they shook hands over it, and then, Alan clapped. It was shameful that no one else did it first, but from Alan's forceful hand-slaps and his insistent look, the others slowly joined in, one by one, until the entire table was working on a slow, tentative clap.

“Good enough,” Sawyer said.

While Sharon looked confused, she also looked satisfied enough with the reaction she'd garnered, and she sat back down, to a round of not-entirely-comprehending applause.

When it died down, Clive, unfortunately, was the only one not among them all not chewing, biting, or gulping their breakfast, and so, all eyes turned to him. He drew himself up, making himself a good three inches taller through means of spinal straightening only known to himself and a select few yogi.

“I'm awaiting the results of no less than three separate commissions among the artists here, and my anime music video contest entry won an honorable mention in the Drama category. Therefore,” he said, drawing in an unnecessarily dramatic breath, “I would consider this a successful convention.”

Dale, the Vice-President of the Anime Club and, for the period of time that they both had attended Pioneer College, official Clive-wrangler, cocked his head. “Oh? What did you commission?”

“Art,” Clive replied.

“Yeah,” Bill said, finishing off a bit of hard-boiled egg balanced atop a tortilla chip, “But I think he meant, what pairing?”

Dale nodded.

“You just assume that any art I commission is of the shipping variety? I'm offended,” Clive said.

Henry shot him a skeptical look. “Is he wrong, thought?”

Clive returned to his normal height. Alan knew the answer to that question.

“Kuja x Garnet Til Alexandros XVII,” Clive specified, with an equal measurement of shame and pride.

“Who” Greg (current secretary and one of the architects of the club's now award-winning fight choreography) whispered into Kevin's ear. Kevin (current treasurer and lead engineer of the club) leaped at the opportunity to explain a thing. “Dagger. From Final Fantasy-”

“ALL THREE PIECES?” Jeff asked, his fork frozen in the air, midway to his mouth.

“Hey, I think we can all appreciate the inherent eroticism of villainous cuckoldry,” Miles said. He was the youngest of them, only in his second semester, but considering how correct that sentence was, Henry's decision to include him in their room-sharing arrangement had already been vindicated.

Before Alan could nod, Steve agreed. “Yeah, it's hot.”

Clive shifted uncomfortably in his seat at the scrutiny, and so, Henry's eyes moved on.

“How about you, Steve?” he asked.

Steve put down his coffee, and smiled just wide enough to make the others concerned. “Oh, it went pretty well,” he said, and waited.

After about ten solid seconds of silence, Henry shrugged. “Okay, who's-”

“Don't you wanna know how it went?” Steve interrupted.

Jeff shot him a withering look. “Yes, that's why he asked.”

Steve grinned. He launched into a meandering story, introducing a beautiful, charming girl he'd met on the first day of the convention, and cataloging every interaction they'd had. Which, as it turned out, were precisely seven so far, but to hear Steve tell it, each one was a significant affirmation of her non-rejection of Steve, and it'd only be a matter of time before she was leaping into Steve's arms, and by extension, bed-sheets.

“So, uh, did she give you her number?” Jack asked.

“Nah,” Steve said, shaking his head. “Cell phones are the past, man.”

Alan cocked his head at Steve. “Did she give you any means of contacting her?”

Steve smiled back. “Not yet. But I've got this in the bag.”

Sawyer stared at Alan. “What?” She held her expression, and Alan flinched. “Okay, okay, I'll actually listen to him,” he said, to her. Alan turned to Steve. “Why?”

Steve's eyes lit up. He always loved it when someone was willing to play, and Alan, so many times, had been that guy. Alan could still remember that night that Steve, being told that Alan was “into video games”, Steve invited Alan to his dorm room in a tower at the other end of campus, and the two of them had played Resident Evil 4 together. It had been a good, if only serviceably so, night, until Alan noticed Steve's eyes flicking across his dormroom, over and over again, to a 1/6th scale figurine of CC, the green-haired vixen of Code Geass fame, bending over with enough sub-cloth definition to make Bernini proud, posed atop his desk. And the second Steve saw Alan's eyes on the figure, they'd looked at each other, and Steve had known he'd gained a captive audience, and in a way, authorization to just say what-the-fuck ever he wanted.

“Man, it's like meth,” Sawyer said, leaning onto Alan's shoulder. “That feeling of validation, y'know?” Alan looked at her. He'd been pretty certain he'd never needed a “sense of validation” to express his opinions.

“Dude,” Sawyer said, “You've been bullied into having no friends as a kid. You wouldn't have talked to any of these dweebs if you didn't feel safe with them. Don't rag on the need for validation. You stopped getting it on the daily when you graduated, and now you post edgy opinions on message boards five times a day, hoping that the combination of furious rejection and rabid confirmation will keep making you feel superior.”

That wasn't a fair criticism. Sure, it accurately described the motivations behind some of Alan's life choices, but it still wasn't fair. He decided to re-focus his attention on Steve, who was presenting all the evidence for why his sexual “success” was guaranteed, starting with the “dedicated” and “intelligent” techniques that Steve had used to keep presenting himself with opportunities to encounter the “beautiful girl” of Steve's dreams.

Sure, there were plenty of criticisms that Alan could make about Steve's techniques, but Steve had been the gold standard of masculinity for Alan. While it was only occasional, at least for the last couple years of their college life, Steve had been regularly sexually active, and so, by default, he outranked the lot of them.

“Seriously? That's all it takes to out-man you lot?” Sawyer said, laughing.

Alan flushed. It wasn't like sexual history defined someone's authority when it came to interpersonal relationships-

“And if it did, you would all have to listen to me,” Sawyer said, before feeling a distinct sense of dissociation from Alan. “Okay, okay, I'm just a hallucination, stop fucking worrying about my body count.” Sawyer slumped a little. “You know, even here, even now, you're disappointing.”

Alan did his best not to think about it, and Sawyer smiled. “You're not gonna do it, but I appreciate the attempt.” He didn't do it, in fact, and started to dwell on the thought of why, or how Steve did what he did. Like, what did Steve do that Alan didn't? Where did he draw the line? He'd seen gaslighting and roofies both described as “pro tips” for the lonely. What “seduction techniques” were too far? Alan didn't think Steve would commit actual, factual sexual assault… But what he thought women wanted, what women “deserved”, was… a bit of a stretch.

“Dude, she's been negging me back,” Steve said. “She's so into it, she just doesn't know it yet.”

Okay, Alan thought, that doesn't sound amazing.

“Oh?” Sawyer said, smiling. Alan could chuckled a bit at the idea of Steve parsing being insulted as a form of high-level romantic gamesmanship, but how long would Steve keep pushing, believing that consent's already been given, just in some subconscious, unstated, and unknown even to her, manner that only Steve could pick up on?

“Why don't you ask him?” Sawyer prodded.

If she was just in his head, she should know perfectly well why not.

Alan raised his hand, and a few seconds later, Steve noticed. “What's up?”

He took a deep breath. “So, hypothetically, if she wasn't interested in you, how would she let you know?”

Steve thought, silently, for far longer than anyone should have.

"She could just tell you, I assume," Clive said.

Steve shook his head. "Nah, she already did that, she didn't mean it."

"What do you mean, didn't mean it?" Jeff asked.

"Y'see," Steve said, "she told me to fuck off a couple times, right? But that's normal."

"How so?" Alan said.

"Well," Steve explained, "love and hate are closer to each other than indifference is to either. She's just being a tsundere."

"That requires a -dere part," Alan said, flatly.

Steve waved his hand dismissively. "Eeeeh, we'll get there eventually. Anyway, it's how it always works in the movies, right? She tells you to fuck off a bunch of times, and then you end up making out cause she never really meant it in the first place. Stands to reason."

Several of the others nodded. "Stands to reason," Jeff echoed.

"Doesn't that strip her of her agency?" Alan said.

Steve laughed. "Get with the program, man, I'm granting her agency, right? We live in a society that looks down on women for being sexual, and they can internalize it and repress themselves - Like, how are they gonna know it's okay to be themselves if no one affirms it, right?"

Sawyer leaned forward in her chair. "I bet he "affirms" it five times a day, unprompted."

Was that a masturbation joke? Alan thought.

"No, dumbass, I mean he's a sex pest."

I don't think he's done anything that awful.

"Anything that awful yet. Which, may I remind you, was you until Thursday night."

That, Alan couldn't deny, and he stopped listening to the conversation, preferring to just enjoy his burrito until Sawyer next demanded his attention.

Which was now, whenever "now" was.

"Oh, you're gonna love this one, Alan," Sawyer said, pointing towards the current focus of the conversation. Bill and Jeff were getting fairly animated, with Jeff slamming a boxed figurine on the table as a means of punctuation.

"You know how many booths I had to go to to find this? It's bullshit what they're doing to this show!"

"Fuckin' political correctness," Bill agreed.

Alan shifted to get a better look at the figurine. It was from a highly-regarded samurai anime from the late 90s that, due to the newly-breaking news of the author's conviction on child pornography charges, had suddenly become scarce.

"How much did that cost?" he asked.

"A hundred and fifty, all the prices are gouged at this point," Jeff said, frustrated.

Alan didn't even have to hear Sawyer to know what she'd say. "So that's a hundred and fifty bucks to the mangaka's defense fund?"

Bill snorted. "I bet he doesn't even see ten bucks in royalties for that."

"Fuck that," Jeff said. "He deserves more. This bullshit's put the whole manga on hiatus, and if I can do anything to help end that hiatus, I will."

"And you know what's really up with this, right?" Bill said, conspiratorially.

"Oh boy," Sawyer said, and Alan shrugged.

"This is all uppity Naruto fans upset that their little ninja show was ranked #12 on the Anime News Network's Best Anime of All Time list last year, and Ruroni Kenshin ranked 10th. They started pestering vendors to stop carrying Kenshin merch." Bill winked at Alan. "I've got a surprise for them, though."

Alan frowned. He remembered the headlines online about the case, and it had been pretty heinous. "But it all happened. He was convicted."

"Yeah, and?" Jeff said. "He was convicted on possession, it's not like he was making the stuff."

The blatant contradiction rankled Alan. "Aren't you buying his products specifically so he'll be funded to make more manga? By the same logic, he's funding the production of fucking child porn."

Sawyer nodded. "Don't forget the transitive property."

"Yeah!" Alan exclaimed. "In some small, fractional way, you're helping pay for that production by giving him money!"

Jeff rolled his eyes. "Dude, fuck off. They were probably just teens, anyway."

"That doesn't make it okay!" Alan yelled.

"Hey, not everyone can be me and get laid in 6th grade," Steve said, "I'm not going to judge someone for wanting to see what they missed out on."

Alan began a "What the fuck?", but was interrupted by Sawyer elbowing him.

"Notice anything?" she said.

And Alan did. The eyes of the table were on him, and they were annoyed. Not outraged, not offended, but annoyed by Alan making a big deal out of this.

"A few days ago, you'd have reacted the same way."

Alan knew she was telling the truth.

He withdrew from the conversation, and kept his eyes to his plate.

Some minutes later, Henry tapped him on the shoulder. He looked up - Sawyer, along with everyone else, was gone. Henry had such a look of concern on his face.

"What was that, Alan? That wasn't like you at all."

"I just-" Alan began. But he couldn't finish. What was the point? Everything he could say would just disappoint Henry further, would be more of a pain in the ass.

Henry helped Alan up from his chair. "You've been acting strange all weekend. I've seen you bleeding, you smell terrible, and your eyes look... wrong."

"I'm fine," Alan protested.

"No. You're not." Henry tugged at Alan's shirt, revealing the torn flesh underneath the gash in his shirt. "How did you even get this?"

Alan was tired of lying to Henry. "A girl hit me with a chainsaw."

Henry sighed. "Alan, what really happened?"

"And then she chased me off a rooftop. Before that she tried to choke me out, too."

"Alan..."

"Seriously, Henry, she's trying to kill me."

"Alan?" Henry said, more insistently.

"Yeah?"

"This is for your own safety." Henry grabbed Alan by the wrist, and dragged him away.