Rachel stood just outside of the convention center, letting the morning drizzle dampen her hair, and let herself feel refreshed by the bite of the early spring ocean breeze. She felt... triumphant. A few years earlier, when the last day of the convention had rolled around, Rachel had been terrified, just barely hiding her fear behind a punk-rock Sailor Chibi Moon cosplay. She'd been in high school, and it was only realistic to think that in a year, when they'd all gone off to different colleges, every thing they had, socially, would be dashed to the winds.
Ellen took a drag off her e-cig, blew a massive cloud of vapor into the air, and smiled at Rachel from down the alley.
Things looked a bit dicey back then. Shortly after that convention, ADV and a number of other translation / localization houses shuttered their doors, and a bunch of smaller conventions stopped existing. The economy contracted, and it looked like Rachel and company would get utterly fucked in the job market. They did, of course, but...
Jake was struggling to fit himself into his cosplay, and while Fred and Nell were helping him, Jake had been working out, and that was the one body shape that none of their cosplay suppliers had seen coming.
Even if life had scattered them to the four winds, anime conventions were something they could always unite around. The fandom always gave them a shared thing to talk about. Who knew where the next few years would take them - graduate school, jobs all over the country, weirder things - but they could at least all agree to keep coming to AniMass. To spend one weekend like nothing had ever changed. Each one of these weekends flowed into each other, as if the convention was a special place in space-time, isolated and unique.
By that reckoning, 2008 was only maybe ten days ago, at most.
While the world around them had gone to shit, attendance had gone up at conventions. There was more solidarity in nerd communities. She didn't know when, or how, it started, but they'd been rooting out racist, sexist, and all-around awful elements in their community since then, exposing them and kicking them the fuck out. Maybe it started with those voice actors who'd died around then, and all the stories that came out about the awful shit they'd done. Maybe it was the sense that even when the law did nothing to protect you, someone, something in this community would take out those who wronged you.
Rachel wondered what Alan thought of all this. He'd been a contact with a version of this community that existed before all of this, and just as the old world faded away, so did he, apparently. He never answered her texts, and she never managed to run into him at any conventions. She wished she could remember what his friends looked like, that'd widen the net a little, but he'd just pointed them out to her in a dark concert hall from far away, and that wasn't enough to help anyone.
Oh well. She hoped he was doing well, but she had friends to reconnect with, and a convention to enjoy the hell out of. The world could take a lot from her, but it wasn't fucking taking her nerd community from her.