Aragón at Bronycon 2019 -- Day Two · 1:59pm Aug 27th, 2019
Bronycon 2019 lasted four days.
This is what that was like.
Disclaimer: The purpose of this blog is to show you the way Bronycon felt, as realistically as possible. Due to the nature of storytelling itself, this sometimes implies taking some minor liberties.
Everything told in these blogs is true, and dramatised to the best of my memory. Every line spoken has been kept verbatim whenever possible, and only changed when the flow of the scene or the grammar of the sentence required it so.
That said, while everything explained here happened, some events have been shuffled for convenience’s sake and to make it easier on the reader to follow the narrative. As such, the order of every scene here shown isn’t strictly chronological.
PART TWO
We’re all half-naked. My pants are down. R5h is looking at me.
This is the Fuckhouse.
“But you’ve never actually explained that,” R5h says. “What is it that you don’t like about Brandon Sanderson?”
I look to the side, wave a hand, and make a sound that’s like “Gngheeeh.”
It’s the second day of Bronycon, and in an hour or so we’ll be back at the Convention Center. For the time being, though, we’re having breakfast, taking turns for the shower, making sure we know where everything is. Busy busy busy.
“What is it that you don’t like about Brandon Sanderson?”
Talking literature, cause what else could we do. We’re all very basic here.
“I mean.” I take a breath and look around. Curtis, Oroboro’s brother, is over here having some coffee. Oroboro himself is over there, clad in a bathrobe, and he’s walking towards the bathroom, but it feels like he’s waltzing.
Oro’s what you picture when you think of Merlin in his youth. He talks slowly and clearly, enunciating every word; every time he talks to you it feels like he’s giving you a life lesson. He’s suave, likes to walk with his back straight, shoulders back, chin up, but his step is soft, he never stomps. He’s James Bond playing a pacifist run.
He’s also a perfect excuse. “Oro and Curtis both like Brandon Sanderson,” I say, looking back at R5h. “And they’re clearly listening, so I don’t want to… I mean, y’know.”
Oro raises his hand at me, making a toast even though he’s not holding a glass. Curtis shoots me a wink.
R5h archs an eyebrow. “You don’t wanna be an asshole?”
“Look, even if it’s fair criticism, it’s never cool to hear someone shit on a piece of media you like. Especially when the person doing the criticism is very openly not a fan.” I’m looking for my underwear, since I’m the one showering next, and for the life of me, I can’t fucking find it. “I’ve read Mistborn and I’ve got some fucking opinions on it, but I don’t wanna make anybody feel bad or—”
Pear is sitting down, legs crossed, a king in his throne. “Still salty about me and Numbers talking Harry Potter, huh.”
“HAHAH WHAT. ME, SALTY. PERISH THE THOUGHT.”
“I suppose that’s fair.” R5h shrugs, and I smile to myself. The good thing about nice people is that it’s easy to get them on your side. You just have to do the right thing. Fucking cheeky, that. “Okay, I’ll be going to the Convention Center then, see you there?”
“Yeah.” Still looking through my bags; my underwear is nowhere to be seen. Oh hey is that my kiwi shirt? I should wear the kiwi shirt. I love that kiwi shirt, it’s a shirt with kiwis on it. Oooh, and that jacket. “Meet you at Quills and Sofas.”
R5h has seen my clothing selection. “It’s like a million degrees outside, you sure you wanna wear a jacket?”
“I’m a fashionable man, R5h. Fuck the weather.” I grab the jacket even harder, and then I point at Pear. “And we can’t miss Miller’s panel, by the way. It’s today.”
“Oh, man.” Pear’s eyes light up, but his face doesn’t change. “Miller. I liked Miller. He kept insulting you. He was very chill.”
“Where the fuck did he go, though?” I ask, looking up at Pear from my baggage. “He sorta vanished halfway through the day. He wasn’t with us at—”
I raise both my hands up.
I move my hips in a sensually spicy motion.
“T H E S H A K E S H A C K.”
Pause.
And then I go back to normal. “Wasn’t he?” I add. “Like, I don’t remember Miller having dinner with us.”
R5h points at me. My hips, specifically. “You’re going to do that every time, huh.”
“Obviously.”
“Miller left us when we went to Quills and Sofas,” Pear explains, still sitting down, eyes clearly telling me he’s not going to address the Shake Shack dance. “He asked for permission to go say hi to Pascoite and just never returned.”
“Ah. Pascoite.” I shake a fist in the air. “Fucking Pascoite. When will he stop stealing what is rightfully ours.”
“We adopted Miller and he just took it from us like that.”
“Right.” R5h rests his fists on his hips, which are sadly not shaking with sensual spicy motions, and then makes a headway to the door. “Bronycon. See you there.”
“See ya.”
“Underwear!” I’ve finally found it. “Yes. Shower. Convention Center. Catch you later.”
R5h leaves, Pear and I stay. Pear is sleepy, and the bathroom is occupied, so I can’t shower yet. I go to the kitchen to check if there’s coffee, and open the fridge.
“Oh, wow. Look at all this Mountain Dew.” I don’t actually stop to count the cans, because I’m a real person and not a literary character written by someone who’s never been hugged, but let me tell you that my estimate is like twenty-four of those green fuckers. “Can we drink this? I’ve never actually tried Mountain Dew.”
“Ah. Mountain Dew. The meme drink.” That gets Pear’s attention. Mind you, he doesn’t get up from the sofa, but he sorta moves to the edge of the seat, which is good enough for me. “I’ve never tried it either. Want some now?”
“I don’t quite hate myself enough to have carbonated drinks for breakfast,” I say, closing the fridge. “Not yet. Tonight, though, I guess?”
While I’m saying this, Curtis has popped out of the bathroom. He lacks his brother’s sheer elegance, but in exchange he’s got swagger to spare. He’s Mick Jagger with less drugs and more heart. “It has a lot of caffeine,” he tells me.
I look at him. “What? Mountain Dew?”
“Super caffeinated, yes.”
“Wicked, we’ll drink it tonight then. I do hate myself enough for that.”
“Are you supposed to be like, the Doctor, or what.”
A random dude just stopped me as I walked through the con and asked me.
“I—” I blink. “Eh?”
“Like, the Doctor Who.” The dude’s short, and sounds half-asleep, half-surprised.
I look down. I’m wearing my kiwi shirt, which I love, since it has tiny kiwis all over it, and my brown suit jacket on top. Light brown pants and black fancy shoes, and my leather purse.
I look like a drawing of a History teacher that’s obviously sexualized, but you can’t quite put your finger on the specific fetish.
“…No?” I finally say, looking at the guy. “I, uh. I just dress like this. These are my clothes.”
“Oh. Okay.”
And he leaves.
Like the fucker just. He leaves. He asks me that, no fucking clue who this fella is, and then he just leaves, losing himself in the crowd.
I’m left there, Pear by my side, who’s looking at this with a hidden smile in his face. We’re near the escalator, a crowd around us once again, because you can’t be alone at Bronycon. There’s more people than ever, and you can see lads lining up over there, God knows for what.
I look at Pear and speak loudly to be heard above the noise. “Did you just fucking see that?”
“Whack,” Pear says.
“Do I actually look like I’m cosplaying the Doctor?” I look at my clothes again, sorta twirl to look at my back, my legs. “Really?”
“I think you look fine?” Pear observes me, scratches his chin. “Bit fancy, but you’re fancy.”
“I am! I’m fancy!” I run a hand through my hair. I recently got a new haircut I don’t like, and without gel to style it, it makes me look like I’m balding, which I hate. I’m pretty enough to pull it off, though. “I’m very fancy,” I mutter under my breath.
“Hey there!” a familiar cheery voice comes from behind us, and R5h enters from the back. He’s waving, he’s smiling, and there’s a golden attachment to his badge, one that reads “Writer.”
“Oooh!” We approach him, and I immediately point at his badge. “Pat!” I don’t call him R5h in real life, because how the hell do you even pronounce it? “You found the writer stickers!”
“Yeah! That’s the good news.” R5h gives me a shy smile. “Bad news is, this was the last one. But, you know, at least I got it!”
I whimper like a dog left out in the rain, and R5h pats my shoulder.
R5h is Mister Rogers on amphetamines. If he were a farmer he’d have a nickname for each and every single one of his sheep. He’s got an eternal smile that goes for mischievous, but comes off as affable. He moves slightly faster than you think he will, and he’s slightly stronger than you think he’ll be, but he has a gentle touch. He can be boisterous, but he’s never loud.
R5h is the friend you’d call to take care of your children in case of an emergency. There’s always a joke on the tip of his tongue, and most of those jokes you could tell to your grandma. It feels wrong when he says “fuck”, but then again, I’m a bad influence.
“Fuck,” I say. “No writer stickers left?”
“However.” R5h smirks, which makes him look like a nanny giving candy to the baby behind the parents’ back. “Rob has a label maker.”
Pear cocks his head to the side. “Label maker?”
“ROBCakeran?” I add.
“Yeah!” R5h rummages through his pocket. “I told him you wanted a label that called you a writer or something, and he, well. He technically gave me exactly what I asked for?”
R5h hands me a black label with white lettering.
WRITER OR SOMETHIN, it reads.
“And I asked him to get me one for Pearple Prose too.” R5h hands something to Pear. “But he had issues with, uh, the spelling of your name.”
Pear and I look at the second label.
It reads: PEURPAL PROSE.
None of us says anything. R5h and I just look at Pear, who silently reads the label a second time. Then—still without uttering a word—he nods to himself, and carefully peels the protective film off and sticks the label on his badge.
On top of his actual name.
“Good,” he says, patting it twice with the care one usually reserves for their first born. “We’re done here. Let’s go to Quills and Sofas.”
There’s a woman blocking the door to Quills and Sofas. She’s the one who kicked us out yesterday. Right by her side, there’s a huge line of people waiting, clearly itching to get in the room, some of them looking annoyed.
We ignore it completely, and make a beeline for the door.
“Hi, can I help you with something?” The woman sees us as we approach, and there’s a glint in her eye. She’s smiling, she’s polite, but that’s a business smile if there’s any. What are you doing, it says. Why are you here?
But I’m expecting this. I’m a master of my own universe. “Quills and Sofas,” I say, showing her my badge with aloof flair. WRITER OR SOMETHIN. My smile is worth a million dollars.
The woman nods. Some forces, she thinks, are not to be reckoned with. She steps aside. “Of course.”
And we enter, the people in the line glaring at us. My crew walks behind me, and the woman at the door doesn’t even address them—she knows they’re with me.
Turns out the artists are doing a paid event in the room, so the only way to get in is to show your special ticket or some shit. Hence the line, and hence the frustration, but if you’re a writer? “Okay!” I say, turning around to look at Pear and R5h. “Gotta admit it. Sometimes being a second-class citizen is worth it.”
It’s the second day of Bronycon, and eleven thousand people is the name of the game.
The problem is not that people crowd around spaces, making it hard to move—even though they do. The problem is, when the writing folks get to Quills and Sofas, they pepper around, they form small groups of five-to-ten people talking in circles—and I can recognize most of them.
You turn your head, and over there sits Miller, talking with Pascoite and Quill Scratch. Over here, Rob is fiddling with his label maker, hanging out with Georg and Admiral Biscuit. Majin Syeekoh and Dubs Rewatcher haven’t arrived yet, but I see The Elusive Badgerpony, and Applejinx, and Appletank, and Nyronus, each one doing their own thing. I hear Monochromatic just left, I hear Kuairu just arrived, and most people don’t know how RBDash47 looks like.
It’s a Where’s Waldo game where you’re trying to find every other guy. Quills and Sofas smells like felt and air conditioner cold, it’s a place of soft carpets and hard chairs, and there are typewriters on every table, the ones ROBCakeran brought. People sit down to write or to scribble on notebooks, and nobody knows where those came from. You hear snippets of conversation, and sometimes someone starts laughing really hard.
I notice something on one of the designated writing tables, one that’s strangely empty. It’s a piece of paper with a very good, expressive, drawing of Lyra. She’s looking mischievous. WRITERS SUCK, it says. SIGNED: THE ARTISTS.
I look at the northern half of the room—the artists are all seated in organized manner, doing some kind of speed drawing competition. You see them take turns, race each other, follow commands.
Then I look back at the writers. Everybody’s fucking around. I hear Trick Question, rocking an EQG Pinkie Pie cosplay, explain that it’s a shame the dress doesn’t show off her tits, because they’re really good tits.
I dabble in drawing myself, I think, as I grab the paper and a nearby felt-tip pen. I could consider myself a bit of an artist if I were pedantic enough. I could join them, I’m already in.
But, I mean. Come on.
LOL JK WE LOVE YOU, I see on the paper with the Lyra drawing. Small letters, on the bottom right corner—but it’s too late. I uncap the felt-tip pen.
OUR DICKS ARE SO MUCH BIGGER, I write. SIGNED: THE WRITERS.
“What are you doing?” Pear, behind me. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” I turn the paper around and then look at Pear. “Doesn’t matter. Where’s Miller?”
Miller’s looking at us with the closest thing he can get to a pout. It registers as absolute indifference. “Where did you guys go yesterday? You just disappeared.”
“We didn’t!” I say. “You just fucking left us when you saw Pascoite and then you never came back.”
“Yeah, we gave you permission to go with him,” Pear laments. “Shouldn’t have done that.”
Pascoite is right there, by the way. Sitting next to Miller. He’s looking good. “Hey, Pascoite,” I say, shaking his hand.
“Hi!”
But that’s as far as it goes. Pascoite will have to wait, because someone walks by me, looking somewhere else, clearly distracted—but I’m fast on the draw when I want to be. I turn around, twirling like a ballerina chock-full of cocaine, and pat the guy on the shoulder to signal my existence.
“Jaxie!” I say, grinning. “Hey there!”
It takes the man a moment. His eyes drift around, they stop at my shitty haircut and confusion arises, but then he looks down, sees my badge. WRITER OR SOMETHIN.
I help. “Aragón,” I say, grabbing the badge and flipping it the right way, showing it to him. “How’s it going.”
“Aragón!” Immediately, GAPJaxie brightens up. We shake hands, though it’s also kind of a high five, though it’s also kind of a hug. There’s laughter in his voice, and still some confusion in his eyes, but only when he looks slightly above my face.
My haircut is really shitty.
“Dude, I’m so glad you made it! It’s great to have you here!”
“I know!” I say. “I can’t believe I pulled the same hat trick twice.”
GAPJaxie is a gothic figure, but he doesn’t know it. When he talks to you, he looks you in the eye, and never blinks first. Every time you see him, he’s slightly taller than you thought he was five seconds ago, and he always seems to be concentrating on something you don’t know about yet. There’s a certain theatrical flair to the way he moves, all skittish snaps and long limbs. He’s Jack Skellington if Halloween had never been invented.
But he smiles wide, and he knows how to twist a sentence so you smile back. Jaxie is one of those people that seem to really like me, and I have no fucking idea why.
“Did you see the Bookstore already?” he’s saying now, nodding at the door that leads out of Quills and Sofas, which is not quite in the actual direction of the Bookstore, but it’s the feeling that counts. “It’s crazy.”
“It is! You know, I don’t like to talk about it?” I press my hand against my chest. “But my book sold out!”
“Everything sold out!” Jaxie exclaims. “They’ve been bringing boxes all morning, it’s crazy. I was worried I was bringing too many copies myself, but I guess there was no reason to worry.” He crosses his arms and smiles to himself. “Like, when we started unpacking and people talked about how many copies they’d brought, I got self-conscious? Because I’m selling three different books, and there’s around one hundred volumes between them all?”
I nod. I have no fucking idea how many books of mine are at the con. They sold out, though, so my estimate is around five thousand, because I am a massive narcissist. “Right.”
“And I was like, oh, no, did I overshoot it?” Jaxie chuckles. “And then I talk to Admiral Biscuit, who’s also selling three different books—and he’s bought over a hundred copies. Of each.”
My eyes go wide. “Holy shit.”
Jaxie’s grinning like a maniac now. “Yeah!”
I can see Admiral Biscuit from here. It’s not hard to miss it, since he’s wearing a baseball cap that reads “Admiral Biscuit” and a shirt that reads “Admiral Biscuit.”
He’s also giving out blue t-shirts to whoever wants to take them. By the end of the convention, half of Quills and Sofas will be wearing, or will have worn, one of his t-shirts. Every single one of them also reads “Admiral Biscuit”.
I nod to myself. “Biscuit knows how to have a good time,” I mutter.
“You know it.”
More people surround us, then, or rather, they join the conversation. They were there before, but I wasn’t paying attention, but now I am—and on that badge, I see a name I recognize. “Oh!” I perk up, and take a step forward. “Gardez! Nice to meet you! I love your work, you’re great.”
And I offer him a hand.
Earlier I said—there are two people at Bronycon that don’t look the way you expect them to, and Skywriter was one of them. I just met the other one, and his name is Cold in Gardez.
Cold in Gardez is a fisherman written by Hemingway. He’s blonde like the sun, like soft desert sand reflecting starlight. His eyelashes stand against his pupils with gold so bright it looks white, and his eyes look dark against them. He moves slowly and deliberately, and looks around often, as if looking for something that isn’t there. There’s strength in his grip, but it’s a steel wire, not a bulging muscle, and he emotes with his arms more than he does with his face.
And he’s my height, more or less. He’s got a pleasant face, soft. His stance is welcoming. “Hi,” he says, shaking my hand. “Nice to meet you too.”
Bronycon badges have a tendency to flip around. At this exact moment, all I’m telling Gardez is that I’m a WRITER OR SOMETHIN. So I flip it around. “Aragón,” I clarify.
Gardez blinks, and smiles again. “Oh! Aragón!” He fingerguns at the badge. “Right. Big fan.”
“Thanks!”
“Yeah, that last comic you did was really good.”
Some people have issues dealing with explicit praise aimed right at their faces. It can get overwhelming. I am not one of those people. “I know! I’m so glad it got such a good reception.” I place a hand against my chest. “And, you know, I don’t like to talk about it? But my book sold out?”
“Yeah!” Jaxie says.
Gardez gives me a knowing smile. “Everything sold out, though, didn’t it?”
“Yeah!” Jaxie says.
Conversation marches on pleasantly, while by my side Pearple Prose finds out that standing next to me is actually quite boring when I’m not doing something dumb. So he walks away, and that makes me sad, but then Wanderer D walks in, talking about stuff and also calling me dumb but like in a loving way.
So there we are, talking about stuff like what’s the worst thing you can say to a writer, having a pleasant talk. Jaxie, Gardez, Wanderer D, and me. The Big Dick Brain Circle. We’ve been friends for a while, and it’s neat that this particular group of people is finally together in the fle—
Wait, no, no we aren’t. Aquaman isn’t here.
“We should go to the bookstore,” I say to myself. Aquaman runs it, and I’d like to say hi. So I turn around and—there’s Pearple Prose again, standing in my blind spot, silent, observing. “Pear!” I say after wincing, not even bothering to ask him when the fuck he came back, because I’m a fast learner. “We were talking about how—you know, I don’t like to talk about it, but my book sold out.”
“I thought they found a second box.”
“They did, and I sold out again. I sold out twice.” I wiggle my phone in front of his face. “I’m in the Golden Oaks Bookstore server.”
“Oh.” Pear frowns. “Why?”
“I have no fucking idea. Let’s go to the Bookstore!”
Everybody’s sorta busy at Quills and Sofas. There’s so many cool people you wanna talk to that you can’t spend any significant amount of time with anybody. There’s always something to do, some place to go. The only way to actually sit down and have quality time with new folks is to make an agreement.
So we do that. We say, hey, let’s have lunch later. Let’s invite Monochromatic too, I’ve barely seen her. Deal? Deal. Mono is around, she sorta nods at this idea, but she’s clearly busy, so we go oh well, it’ll all sort itself out.
So I grab Pear, and we walk out of the room, because time’s running and I do wanna go to the Bookstore , maybe walk around Vendor Hall some, I’ve got some purchases to make. I look at the Big Dick Circle and shoot them some fingerguns—they’re already scampering away, dissolving—and I go “See you guys later!”
“Sure!”
“Later, man.”
“See ya!”
We all intend to cross paths again before the con ends.
That will never happen. By the time the convention ends, we’ll have seen each other in the distance, maybe waved a couple times, but we’ll be busy talking to someone else, or doing something important, or rushing to a meeting place.
Except for one guy, who’ll talk plenty to me. He’s the silver lining in this, the guy who somehow finds the time.
Thank God for Wanderer D.
“Aqua! I bought your book!”
Gray floors and blue fabric, pony asses staring at me from every corner, and forty-five different fanfic books in front of me. This is Vendor Hall, and I’m not queuing up at the Bookstore; I’m standing in front of the cashier, chatting him up.
“Oh, yeah,” he says. “You did. Thanks.”
“And also a copy of my own book! Even though it sold out.” I press a hand against my chest. “But, you know, I don’t really like to talk about it.”
The cashier arches an eyebrow. “Right, about that. We actually found another box.”
“Yeah, I read it on the chat. But it sold out again, right?”
“No, no, I mean a third box.”
I blink, and then frown. “Well,” I say. “I still sold out twice, so I’ve got the moral high ground.”
The cashier says nothing. He just looks at me.
The cashier is, of course, Aquaman, and he looks like he reads poetry when he’s not riding his black Harley. He slouches forward, and even though I never see him standing up right, I can tell he’s tall. He’s got bags under his eyes, but he looks rugged rather than ragged. There’s a shine in his eyes, and he only smiles when necessary.
He’s got a calculator with him, and every time a client comes by with books under their arm, he inputs the numbers with care rather than speed. We talk—me, standing; him, slouching—as I observe the people around and fiddle with the free bookmarks they give away when you buy books. With Aqua’s permission, I pocket some for myself.
“This one has my name!” I exclaim, grabbing one of them. It lists all the authors whose books are being sold in here. It’s a surprisingly long list. “I have to get one of these.”
Aqua shrugs, waves a hand at me. “Be my guest.”
“Sure will.” I shove the bookmark into my purse, and then smile at Aqua. “So! This has been a roaring success, hasn’t it?”
“The Bookstore?” Aquaman nods, glancing at his calculator and the pile of books sitting underneath. “Tell me about it. Some of these sold out so fast we barely had time to set up shop. Yesterday was crazy.”
“I saw! I came by.” I look at the line of people waiting for their books. Still insanely long, but not as bonkers as yesterday. “You all wanted to die back then, huh.”
“Did we?”
I wave a hand over my eyes, up and down. “You know this sort of face where you can tell that, like—light are on, but nobody’s home? You all looked like that.”
Aquaman rubs his forehead and looks up, recalling. “I honestly don’t remember,” he admits after a moment. “It’s all a blur. It was just a constant stream of moving around and selling books.”
“Hey, that’s a first world problem at least, though, isn’t it? You guys are being too successful.”
“I never imagined it would go like this,” Aqua admits, and here he gifts me one of his rare smiles. “It’s as good as it could be. Just, you know, exhausting. Everything’s selling out.” He points at a book with red on the cover. “Even D’s messed up edition.”
“Even my book! But I don’t like to talk about it.” I look at the book Aqua’s pointing at. I’ve noticed it before; if anything, because Wanderer D’s name is on it. “Also, what edition?”
“Yeah.” Aquaman reaches over and grabs it, starts paging through it to show it to me. “It’s exactly what it sounds like, a messed up edition. He made them, and then noticed that they were missing a chapter. So he—see?”
He hands me the book, open at a very specific page. It has a smaller book—“book”; it’s some pages stapled together, though the paper quality is really good—inside.
“It was missing a chapter,” Aquaman repeats. “So he just printed it himself, and added it in, and labelled them with a sticker that said ‘messed up edition’, and we thought they wouldn’t sell at all.”
I look at Aqua from above the book. “And?”
“And they sold out immediately. There are none left.”
I give a low whistle. “Dick big enough to rival Admiral Biscuit.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m super happy for D, though,” I say, placing the book back on the display—and then I see someone else. “Ah.” I wave at Aqua, and point behind my back. “You’re busy, so mind if I just…?”
Aquaman waves me off. “Sure, sure. Go on.”
“Neat, see you later.” I turn around, take two steps, and grin. “Horse Voice! How’s it going?”
“Oh! Hey! Aragón!”
Horse Voice smiles back.
Horse Voice is the Prince Charming of everybody who got too into Sons of Anarchy as a teen. He’s wearing a bad boy-esque jean vest covered in patches; the biggest one is on his back, and it depicts his Fimfiction avatar—a horse skull—while the rest is a combination of rock bands and generally cool shit.
Multiple times, while we speak, people stop to praise it. “Cool vest, man” is a sentence I’ll hear at least four times before I leave Vendor Hall today.
Horse Voice pulls it off; otherwise, it wouldn’t look as good. He’s a whole head taller than me, and during conversation, he nods very often—even when he’s not the one talking.
“It’s so nice to see you!”
“Same here, man!” I am being extremely honest; Horse Voice is a darling. “Wild how well the Bookstore’s doing, isn’t it?” I ask, pointing at the line in front of us. “I was just telling Aquaman about it.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. It’s crazy.”
“Yeah! Like—I don’t like to talk about it?” I press my hand against my chest. “But my book sold out.”
“Oh, good! Congratulations!” Horse Voice looks at the Bookstore display. There’s a sticker with Twilight’s crazy face on all the books that are currently unavailable until the authors bring more copies. Roughly half the books have it on. “Everything sold out, didn’t it?”
“Sure. I sold out twice, though.”
“That’s good, that’s good. Say!” Horse Voice looks at me suddenly, shy smile on his face. “I’m very glad to see you made it here this year too! Are you going to do a series of blogs on Bronycon, like you did last year?”
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” I say. “I mean, I got paid to come here, when you think about it, so the least I can do is write about it. The blogs had a good reception last year, so I promised I would write them again.”
“They were really good! I’m happy to hear that, they were really good.” Horse Voice nods, pleased. “They were—I really think you’ve got something going on in there, you could try to make something out of it.”
That’s an interesting concept. Writing more blogs like this? Could try to do it once or twice, see if people give a shit. “Thanks!” I say.
“I really liked how you described people.” Horse Voice is looking into the distance, wistful. I look in the same direction he’s glancing at. There’s a fuckpillow of Celestia sneakily spreading her asscheeks. Says a lot about Horse Voice that he doesn’t notice. “It was really interesting, how you did it.”
“Oh yeah, I got comments about it. I even made a blog describing the process.” I smile, and—fucking check this, because you’re never going to see it again—I smile shyly. “It was a bit of a happy accident, to be honest, but I did have a system, so it’s cool that people liked it.”
“It was really good! I’ve told people about it, some folks—you described me as a…”
“A skinhead who works at a kindergarten,” I finish. I look at Horse Voice, thinking, goddamn, I was accurate. He still looks exactly like that. It’ll be hard to come up with a different description for this year’s blog series.
“Exactly! And the whole blog was all written like—it has a name, I looked it up. I think it’s, like, gonzo journalism?” He points at me. “When the journalist himself becomes part of the story, gets involved.”
“Huh.” I’d never thought of it that way, actually. “Gonzo journalism? It’s funny you say that. Bad Horse once described me as Hunter S. Thompson, if he had done less drugs and more—”
I pause.
I mean, Bad Horse made that comment in those “How Not to Write Romance” blogs of mine, so the quote goes “Hunter S. Thompson if he’d done less drugs and more hentai.” But I’m not gonna fucking tell that to Horse Voice, I’m trying to impress the guy.
So I, you know.
Lie.
“—If he’d done less drugs and more pony fiction,” I finish. “So you’re not the first one to make that connection.”
“Oh, Bad Horse.” Horse Voice chuckles and points at the library. “He’s over there. Watch, I’m sure he’s going to be asked to sign my book again soon. People tend to mix us up all the time.”
“Bad Horse’s here?” I look in the direction of the Bookstore. I see Horizon, and Aquaman, and Paul Asaran, and— “Holy shit, he is. HEY, BAD HORSE!” I yell, waving.
Bad Horse turns around and shows me his back.
“He probably didn’t hear me.” I look at Horse Voice. “We’re friends, I swear.”
“Oh. Yeah, he’s nice.”
“You!”
Sudden interruption, and a nimble figure appears out of nowhere. There’s a big mop of hair on his head, and he’s tall and thin and moves in strange elongated movements. He’s handsome in a classical, very American sort of way, and he puts a hand on my shoulder and talks while getting really close to my face.
B_25, his badge reads.
“You! You’re great.” He takes a step back so we can both look at each other comfortably, and smiles, and joins both hands under his chin. “You’re badass, I love your work, I want to talk to you a lot, let’s do that later, I just can’t now.”
“Oh?”
Then B_25 turns to Horse Voice. “You too!” he says, clearly filled with glee and joy. “You’re great too, you’re amazing, but right now I’m like, up there.” He points to the roof with a finger. “Way up there. I’m not down yet.”
“Right,” I say.
“Uh-huh,” Horse Voice says.
“So I’ll talk to you later. But I really love both of you!” He leaves, but before losing himself in the crowd, he turns around one last time and gifts us a last “You’re great!”
Then he vanishes.
Horse Voice and I look at each other. “That was…?”
“That was B_25, we met yesterday,” I explain.
“I know, I know, we know each other.” Horse Voice blinks, still looking at the spot where B_25 disappeared. “He was really high.”
“He’s transcended the mortal realm and become one with his shadow self,” I say, nodding. “He’s having so much goddamn fun.” Then I eye the book that Horse Voice is carrying. Biblical Monsters. “By the way,” I say, pointing at it. “I love your cover.”
“Thanks! It was a real headache to get it right.” Horse Voice holds the book with pride, showing it to me. “You know, I can’t believe people are actually getting it. I’ve spent the entire morning here, watching people buy my book, and whenever someone gets it I go and ask them if they want me to sign it.”
My eyes get wide. “I tried to do that yesterday!” I screech. “That was literally what I was trying to do yesterday, that exact same thing! But my friends made fun of me for it and dragged me out.”
Confusion in Horse Voice’s eyes. “Why would they make fun of you for that?”
“I don’t know. I guess they felt it’d get to my head.”
“Would it?”
“I don’t think so, I’m very humble.”
“Aragón.” I turn around when I hear that voice calling my name, and Pear is there. Standing on my blind spot. I have no fucking clue how long he’s been there, he just keeps doing this. Quill Scratch by his side. “We’re back.” He sounds disappointed. “We didn’t find it.”
Quill Scratch is shaking his head behind Pear, crestfallen.
My expression mirrors theirs soon enough. “Oh, no,” I say. “What a shame.” Then I turn to look at Horse Voice, who’s looking at us, head cocked to the side. “There was a very spicy Luna fuckpillow,” I explain. “Pear wanted to show it to Quill Scratch.”
“Very spicy,” Pear clarifies. “The spiciest.”
“But I guess it’s not there anymore?”
Pear nods. “Someone must’ve bought it. It was too spicy for this sinful Earth.”
“You!” The nimble, dancing figure comes back. B_25 is here again, and he rests a hand on Pear’s shoulder. “You’re great! I love your work!”
Pear blinks twice. “Oh, uh. Thanks?”
I lean towards Pear. “B_25 is having fun,” I say.
“Oh. That explains everything.”
“You’re all great! Everybody’s great! Woooo!”
And he leaves again.
Man. Look at him go. He’s so happy.
Back at Quills and Sofas.
“Okay, so we wait for Mono,” I say, looking around, tapping Pear on the shoulder, “and then we go grab a bite. Just, you, Mele, Mono, and me. That right, Pear?”
“Sure.”
This gets Quill Scratch’s attention. “You’re going to grab a bite?” he asks.
“Yeah. You wanna come?”
“I’m getting kind of hungry, yes.”
“Okay.” I nod, still looking around, looking for Mele. “So it’s you, me, Mono, Mele, Quill, and that’s a wrap-up. Let’s—”
“Dream’s coming too,” Mele explains when he finds me.
“Right. Okay.” I nod again. “So it’s me, Pear, you—”
Five minutes later, there’s eight people coming with us, plus three that are supposed to join us halfway through lunch, Monochromatic is nowhere to be seen yet, and this is becoming an impromptu prequel to the Author’s Dinner.
So I just sit down, and take a little break, while people discuss what to do, what to eat, and seriously where the shit is Monochromatic, has anybody seen her?
Quill Scratch’s gotten attached to us, and Pear and him are hitting it off pretty well, because he is—and here I’m using Pear’s powers of description, so the quote is entirely his—pretty chill. It’s easy to worm your way into Pearple Prose’s heart.
Quill looks and sounds like the lost son of the guy who played guitar in Queen. He speaks with a pretty accent and wears the eternal smile of people who come to America just for Bronycon. There’s no spring in his step, he sets his foot down with surprising strength, but he’s nimble of limb, and looks young and fresh without looking kiddish.
He looks the way the Arctic Monkeys sound, it dawns on me. He’s an alt rock riff in human form.
“There’s fifteen people coming, or so,” he tells me. There’s an entire fucking crowd of people coming with us, looking around expectantly. People are hungry, but we’re not leaving yet. “What are we waiting for?”
“Uh.” I get up, eye the crowd, frown. “Well, we were waiting for Mono, but I guess she—”
“Oh!” A tall man sees me and his face lights up. It’s not his scene yet, but it’s coming soon. “Aragón! Skywriter and I are about to go grab a quick bite, do you want to come with us?”
“Horizon.” I blink. I met him at the Bookstore earlier. Horizon has been one of those people I’ve looked up to for ages, and that sounds great, but—people all around me watching, so I frown. “Er, we’re waiting for Monochromatic to show up, we were supposed to have lunch with her, so—”
Horizon looks a bit disappointed. “Ow,” he says. “Well then.”
He exits, stage left.
I turn to face Pear, who was with me while this happened. “Um,” I say. “Er. What just happened.”
Pear is also trying to process all of this. “Wait a minute,” he says. “Did you just reject Horizon? Horizon and Skywriter?”
“Holy shit. I think I did.”
“Aragón.”
“I got nervous!”
“We could be having lunch with Horizon and Skywriter.” Pear squints, seemingly blinded by the idea. “At the same time.”
“Oh god I fucked up didn’t I.”
“Guys,” Mele—his online name is Undome Tinwe, by the way, but I call him “Mele”. There’s an explanation for this, and it’s entirely reasonable, and it involves pornography, and I am not going to give it to you. Anyway, he says: “Mono isn’t coming, something came up.” He’s looking at his phone. “We can just go.”
“You rejected Skywriter and Horizon, and Monochromatic isn’t even coming,” Pear says, looking at me. “You’re so good at this whole thing.”
“Oh, fuck off.” Looking at the folks that are coming with us—the truth is, we’ve amassed quite the cool crowd. It’ll be a really fun lunch. “Majin and Dubs are coming later.”
“At least we have that.” We step out of Quills and Sofas, finally. An entire army, and Mele is leading. “Where are we going?”
“Why are you asking me? This is not even my continent, what the fuck do I know.” I say that, and I immediately start thinking about where we can go, because I am essentially full of bullshit. “I could go with a beer? Oooh! I have an idea! We could go back to—”
I raise both my hands up.
I move my hips in a sensually spicy motion.
“T H E S H A K E S H A C K.”
Pause.
And then I go back to normal. “Cause I quite liked it! The beer there was really good. And the name is great.”
A sudden woman’s voice comes from behind me. “The Shake Shack doesn’t serve beer.”
I stop walking—the crowd around me keeps moving, so I’m alone for a second—and I turn around. The woman who talked is the one that guards the gates to Quills and Sofas. She’s looking at me, determination in her eyes.
“They don’t serve beer,” she repeats. “It’s a milkshake place.”
I stare at her. “Uh,” I say. “They do, though? I had a pint there yesterday.”
“No. You didn’t.”
Pause.
“Wha—?”
“Aragón!” Pear comes back, grabs me by the elbow, pulls from me. “Come on, man, we’re all hungry.”
“Right, but—”
“We’re going to the Cheesecake Factory.”
“I just—!”
It’s useless. We have to leave, and we have to leave now. I never stop looking at the woman guarding the gates, not until we go down the escalator and she disappears from my line of sight. Who is she? What does she want? What did she mean?
I don’t know anything about her. I just know—in another world, in another life, she spoke in riddles only.
We all huddle up together, and we go to the Cheesecake Factory.
We’re immediately kicked out of the Cheesecake Factory.
I said it before, I’ll say it again—Bronycon is a constant game of the dwindling party. Like forty-nine people got out of the Convention Center at the same time, heading for the restaurant; now there’s only six of us. Still too many to get a table, though.
In order: Singularity Dream, Undome Tinwe (Mele, remember?), Bachiavellian, Quill Scratch, Pear, and me.
“Majin says he’s joining us, but he’s not in the city yet.”
“Right,” I say. “But where did Miller go?”
“He’s sharing a room with Dubs, so he had to check out at the hotel.”
The Cheesecake Factory we get kicked off from rests right underneath a pizza place, and everybody’s hungry, and nobody wants to move that much, so we just go there.
“Okay!” I pat Mele’s shoulder, and push him towards the empty counter as soon as we enter the restaurant. “Seven people, okay? Majin’s coming. We don’t mind the terrace.”
“Er.” Mele looks around—the place is busy, and there’s people waiting behind us already, a line is forming up—and then back at me. “Why am I the one taking care of this? I’m usually really not the person who talks to clerks.”
“Because we’ve selected you! Who else is going to do it? Me?” I point at my face. “The Spaniard with the high pitch voice? Like fuck they’re gonna understand my accent.”
“You’re perfectly understandable!”
“Ahahah, no. I’m super not. You’re the leader now.”
Mele whimpers.
Undome Tinwe is Niccolò Machiavelli, if Machiavelli had joined a boy band. He talks with warm tones and communicates through emotional speeches, but there’s a certain amount of cunning underneath, and you always notice that he’s quick to laugh at your darkest jokes. He can’t describe anything without getting overly excited.
He’s tiny, sort of my size, sways side to side when walking, though I think he doesn’t know. He always wears a purple t-shirt, because he says that makes it easier to locate him, that it makes him stand out in a crowd. Time and time again, as Bronycon goes on, he’ll be proven right.
“I mean, no, for real.” I point at my mouth. “I always have trouble ordering at restaurants in America. You know they can’t understand my accent.”
Mele squints, but he’s heard rumors. He knows what happened last time I went to a Starbucks. Then he looks at the crowd behind us. Pear, Quill, and Bachiavellian are all talking to each other, but there’s a sixth person with us, so Mele says: “What about Dream? He could do it. He’s not a Spaniard.”
I look at Singularity Dream. “I mean, he could, but I don’t think he gives a shit.”
Singularity Dream is looking at the terrace, blatantly not paying attention. There’s people ordering food, and we can see the waitress working from here. “Service is kind of slow,” he says when we notices us staring.
I follow his eyes. The waitress seems to be taking her sweet time, like she was swimming through jello. “They’re probably overwhelmed,” I say, feeling a lil’ bit of guilt. “Lots of people around.”
“Hmmm.” Singularity Dream nods. “It’s going to take us hours to get our food.”
“Hey, better than getting kicked out.” I point at the counter—which is still empty, by the way. We’re waiting for someone to come attend us. “Do you wanna be the one talking to the waitress?”
Singularity Dream slowly, carefully, scratches his chin. “No,” he says. “I don’t really care that much.”
I look at Mele. “Told you. You’re on adult duty.”
Mele groans.
A waitress ultimately comes, and Mele manages to say with a straight face that, yes, we see how full you are. Yes, seven people. No, we don’t have a reservation.
No, we, uh. We’d really rather not wait? Do you have anything for us?
But Christmas came early this year, cause here’s the first miracle—she ways “yes”, with the kind of dead, overworked-and-understaffed fish eyes that makes me tip 25% out of genuine pity.
So we sit, and ask for our meal just in time for Majin to arrive. By this point, I have learned that American food is the nutritional equivalent of a sledgehammer to the testicles, so I share my meal with Pear, and it’s delicious. Mele hasn’t learned this lesson, so he asks for a pretzel and a margarita, and our eyes go wide when we see the glass they place in front of him.
He asked for a margarita, but the liquid’s purple. There’s enough drink in there to drown a moderately-sized cat. It is the Tower of Babel of alcohol, designed for people who never read the Bible.
And then the waiter places the rest of the margarita on the table, next to the glass. It’s a whole-ass bottle she just placed right in front of Mele, or maybe it’s a shaker—I don’t know my cocktails. I do know my sizes, though, and I’m pretty sure I can fit my forearm in that bottle.
“I’m dead,” Mele says, looking at it. “I’m going to die today.”
We all agree. He will.
Lunch is pleasant; more importantly, it’s quiet. Relaxed. Something many people don’t realize is how important downtime is, how much you feel its absence when all you get is constant excitement. Everybody needs small moments of quiet. Even the quirky people who speak with a Spanish accent.
(You have no idea how significant this is going to be later).
Bachiavellian and I talk about American money, and how terrible it is. To my posh fashionable European mind, it feels fake, like Monopoly money, like you’re all playing a prank on me. It’s all green, every single bill is the same size, it’s impossible to tell the bills apart at a glance. Sure, if I’m calmly counting my money I can do it, but when I’m about to hand my money to the cashier, and there’s people waiting behind me? And I have to rush? Fucking nightmare.
God, and the coins, Jesus Christ. They make no sense—size and color seem to have nothing to do with value, they’re all completely random, they’re—
“Wait a fucking minute.” I’m looking at the coins, frowning. “Is this a peseta?” I hold it up, squint, look harder. “What the shit. This is a peseta. They gave me a peseta as part of my change?” Another strange coin catches my eye. “And what is this? A French franc?!”
Bachiavellian looks at the coins. “Huh. They gave you this?”
“Instead of actual money, yeah! None of these have any value nowadays! Not even in Europe!”
It’s difficult to describe Bachiavellian; we sit side to side during lunch, but we won’t see each other much after this. He’s gentle, rather than soft. He walks slowly and takes his time looking, but his eyes are piercing.
He’s quiet, in comparison with some people in the table, but I’m sitting there, so—that’s not saying much.
Talk moves on. You know how most countries have this thing where the south is full of rednecks, and the north looks down on them? Quill and Pear explain that in the UK, it’s the opposite. Because the big city’s in the south, it’s the northerners that are inbreds.
“Oh! I’m a little bit inbred myself,” I mention. It’s a story I’ve told many times. “My great-grandparents were actually cousins; their respective fathers were siblings.”
Everybody says, yep. That makes a lot of sense. That’s not a surprise in the least. And I go haw haw haw, very funny. Anyway.
I don’t like to talk about it, but did you know that my book—?
It’s a quick stop at the Fuckhouse: get in, rest an hour, get out. Lunch was heavy and Bronycon is hard to push through with a stomach that’s about to burst. This also gives us a chance to dump all the shit we’re carrying, all these items we bought and—
Sunset Shimmer’s on the TV. I immediately forget about my plans.
“Whoa hey.” I point at the TV, like a monkey seeing fire for the first time. “Fuck’s that?”
Half the Fuckhouse’s present—slouching or sitting around; some are reading, some are watching the TV. Oroboro is the one who replies.
“Equestria Girls special,” he says.
“What?” I look at it for a moment, trying to grasp the overarching plot. Adagio Dazzle shows up all of a sudden. My eyes are the sizes of plates. “Wait, what the fuck?”
“You don’t know about these?”
“I do not!”
Guess what? Turns out, there are frequent Equestria Girl specials coming out (think a long episode, slightly better animation) that tell different stories about the girls. I had no idea, since I don’t follow EQG that much, so to me this knowledge—which I assume is old news for everybody reading this blog—comes out of absolutely fucking nowhere.
Which is good! It’s a pleasant surprise if I’ve ever seen any. The special name, I learn, is Sunset’s Backstage Pass. It’s pretty fun. Lots of Pinkie Pie, which to me is always a plus. I’m giddy like a kid while watching it, pointing at the screen and repeating the jokes I find funny. Now and then it dawns on me that I actually enjoy this show a lot, and—
“Aragón.”
That was Pear’s voice. I look to the side. Pear’s there. “Hm?” I say.
Pear doesn’t reply. Instead, he hands me a can of Mountain Dew.
Time stops. Pear cracks the can open and looks inside; I soon do the same. Curtis, R5h and Oroboro notice us, and look expectantly.
American drinks are served in purgatory to punish those sinful of gluttony and greed. American drinks are what happens when sugar develops sentience, and its first thought is to murder you.
I have no hopes here. I’m not drinking to quench my thirst, I’m doing it to prove a point. Mountain Dew is the meme drink, the gamer fuel, and right now I’m just a part of the greater picture, one more punchline in an overly long joke.
It feels surreal to hold the can in my hand. Shaking with anticipation, I bring it closer to my mouth, expecting the worst, expecting a nightmare, and—
I sit, defeated. A part of me has died today. “I can’t believe I’m the kind of person who unironically enjoys Mountain Dew,” I say.
Pear pats my back. Pity in his face. He understands my pain.
We’re back in Quills and Sofas. It’s been a long day—we went back to Vendor Hall one more time to buy presents and to check on some more people, we’ve been meeting folks I haven’t had the time to introduce yet. At one point we came back, we grabbed another crowd, and went for a drink at a completely different pub. I’ve been meeting fans, signing autographs, it’s crazy.
It’s getting dark outside, and our legs are giving out. Miller’s panel will start soon enough, so instead or risking going away and not getting back in time, we’ll wait it out in here.
I feel someone punching my shoulder, only not quite. It’s more like knuckles lightly touching it—a fist bump, really. I turn around.
Well, if it isn’t Trick Question smiling at me. She’s not dressed as Pinkie Pie anymore, she’s wearing a more normal attire. “Did someone mention Mountain Dew?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Pear says. He points at me. “Aragón tried it today for the first time.”
“And?”
“I fucking loved it,” I say, looking into the distance. I think my eyes have lost all their shine. “I can’t believe I’m a person who enjoys Mountain Dew. This is what defines my identity now.”
“Yeah,” Trick Question says, fist-bumping my shoulder again. “I drink three liters of it a day.”
Pause.
Pear and I look at Trick Question. “What?”
“I do!” Trick Question looks at herself—again, she’s wearing normal clothes—and waves a hand. “Oh, I’m not doing like, a Pinkie Pie thing. I actually do drink three liters every day. It’s how my metabolism works.”
I look at her, up and down. Specifically, at her stomach. “You really don’t look like it.”
“It’s my metabolism, I tell you.”
Trick doesn’t walk—she glides, she feels floaty. She speaks with a calm, low voice, one that demands attention no matter who else is talking, and she seems tranquil, relaxed, at all times. Her most sudden movement is a blink.
I have no idea if she’s just exhausted, like we are, or if she’s just naturally this chill—but at the moment, she looks like she could walk through fire.
“Like.” I’m the one talking now, on the edge of my seat, grabbing my head. “It fucks me up. I was expecting something super sugary, and like—it’s so soft? It’s softer than Coca Cola!”
“Mountain Dew?” Trick Question asks. “Yeah, it’s way less acidic.”
“It was really good,” Pear agrees by my side, wistfulness in his tone. “I wasn’t expecting it either.” He looks at me. I can read his eyes. It’s the meme drink. “But we drank, like, two cans each?”
“And it was delicious, fuck me.” I look up at Trick Question, who’s been looking at us in silence for a while. “By the way, I saw your Pinkie Pie cosplay earlier. It was really good! You really looked the part, pulled it off really well.”
Trick Question does this thing where her mouth smiles, but her eyes smirk. “Why, thank you.”
“Yeah! Cosplay’s one of those things I sorta look up to, because it looks like a lot of work.” I grab my phone to check the time, and in doing so, catch my reflection on the screen. I frown. Bad haircut, and… “Pear?” I look at him. “I don’t look like I’m cosplaying the Doctor, do I?”
Pear smirks at me. “Still hung up on that?”
“Yes.”
“Aragón!”
Someone calling from the distance. I look, and someone’s waving, and then they come close and say: “Aragón, Applejinx is calling for you, he’s over there.”
I arch an eyebrow. I can see Applejinx sitting at a table on the far corner of the room. “Eh?”
“He says he wants to give you something.”
“Oh, shit, bribery? I’m all up for that.” I immediately get up, and dust my pants a little bit. Yeah. Yeah I don’t look like the Doctor. “Pear, Oro and the crew are coming from the Gala soon, we should wait for them and then catch Miller’s panel. Sounds like a plan?”
Pear shrugs. “If you think there’ll be time.”
I check the time again. The Grand Galloping Gala is a formal event, a dance where everybody’s wearing suits and dresses and fancy clothes. It ends before Miller’s panel starts. “Yeah, we’ll have like, ten minutes to spare. Like clockwork.”
“Neat.”
So, that settled, I walk to the other side of the room, and see what the fuzz is all about.
Applejinx is surrounded by writers, and he’s—drawing, actually. There are typewriters on the table, but he’s pushed them aside to make way, and he’s doodling on something.
“Aragón!” he says when he sees me. “I’ve been asking for you for a while!”
“I got told, yeah. What’s up?”
“I’ve got a present for you. Here.”
And he hands me a water pen.
Applejinx feels like that coworker that brings you coffee without you asking for it, just cause he saw you yawn at your screen. He talks with intensity, and clenches his fists when he’s excited.
He’s nice, Applejinx. Our first interaction was him apologizing for jokingly calling me an idiot in a blog about me being an idiot. That’s a running gag of his, to be extra but like in a good way.
So I hold the water pen. “Thanks! I have no idea what this is.”
“It’s a water pen!”
“Right.” I weight it around. It essentially looks like a normal marker, only you can tell that there’s water inside rather than ink, and the felt tip is soft, almost brush-like. “That tells me absolutely nothing.”
“Well, it comes with this.” Applejinx hands me a normal pencil, though this time I think I know what I’m looking at. “And this.”
Now what he hands me is an actual drawing, the one he’s been working on. It’s an earth pony looking at you, and he’s saying the words USE PHYSICAL MEDIUM YOU COWARD. There’s a glittery sticker on it, too.
“It’s so you feel compelled to use the physical medium,” Applejinx explains, crossing his arms and smiling at me. “Instead of only drawing digitally. Your comics are good!”
“Wow.” I look at the water pen and the pencil again. “You’re giving me this?”
“It’s a gift!”
“Thank you so much! There was really no need.” I look at the drawing, and then at Applejinx. “Truth is, I’m not really that confident in my artistic skills? I just sorta draw jokes.”
“Well, don’t close yourself to it!” Applejinx points at the normal pencil I’m also holding. “That’s a watercolor pencil, by the way.”
“Yeah, I know. You paint with it, and then use water to smudge the lines, right?” I pocket everything he’s given me, place it in my purse. “My sister owns a bunch of these. She’s the one with actual artistic talent in my family, you see.”
“That’s nice! But you can use it too. It’s very easy to do simple shading with it.” Applejinx gives me an encouraging look. “You should try it?”
“Ooof. Drawing, huh? Guess there’s no harm in trying. I—oh hey!” I look to the side for a moment. I saw someone enter the room. “That’s Bad Horse. HEY, BAD HORSE!”
I wave.
Bad Horse turns the other way around.
“We’re friends,” I explain to Applejinx. “He probably didn’t hear me.”
“Right.”
The conversation ends there. Applejinx gives me some more stuff—mostly so I can draw on something—and then I need to leave, because Oroboro, Curtis, and Eliott have arrived. This means the Gala’s ended.
And that means we’re headed to Miller’s panel.
“You can’t be here.”
We get immediately kicked out of Miller’s panel.
“Too many people waiting in line!” The Baltimore Convention Center has terraces, full with tables and chairs for you to sit on, and while during the day the heat is unbearable—at the moment it’s dark outside, and quite pleasant. Oroboro is the one talking. “I guess Linecon 2019 is real.”
“I guess if there’s so many people attending that they won’t let us in, Miller doesn’t really need our support,” I grumble. Then I blow my nose, because American air conditioning is like a constant assault against my handsomely tiny Spanish body. “Is that an actual thing, by the way?” I ask, blowing my nose. “Linecon?”
“It’s a meme already, yeah.”
“Amazing.”
Pearple Prose had to go somewhere, he promised to meet some friends, so we’re waiting for him to come back so we all can have dinner. Sitting with me at the table are Oroboro, Curtis, and Elliott.
Elliott is Oroboro’s boyfriend, and in a high-budget show, you’d cast him to play the President. His eyebrow is constantly arched, and he’s got the kind of quick wit that brings you shame for calling yourself a comedian. He gives a twist to every word, pronounces them with a hint of a valley accent, and it makes every quip pop.
“So how was the Gala?” I ask. They’re all wearing suits, which means that for once I’m not the fanciest person at the table. I mean, I’m still fancy, but, you get me. “You guys had fun?”
“It was okay,” Eliott said.
“We had fun dancing.”
I look at Curtis. He’s bigger than all of us, and the suit fits him perfectly. I described him as Mick Jagger with less drugs and more heart, earlier—and it’s an extremely accurate description. He’s a bit tamer than Elliott, doesn’t pop up as much, but you can tell he’s related to Oroboro, because the charisma is off the charts. If he brought an acoustic guitar to a party, and he played Wonderwall, he would make it work.
He would also probably not play Wonderwall.
“You look like their bodyguard,” I tell to Curtis. “What with the suit and everything. What did you even do at the Gala? Oro and Eliott danced together, no?”
I can tell Curtis is pleased with the bodyguard comment, because he puts on his sunglasses and looks at me with a bit of a smug face. It’s nighttime. I can’t stress enough how dark it is. He still leaves his sunglasses on. “Oh,” he says. “I make do. I know how to have fun.”
Curtis fucks.
That’s the subtext of this scene. Case I was being too subtle or something.
Conversation marches on. The day is over, and we’re halfway through Bronycon. We’re all relaxing, and Elliott mentions he feels like getting some crab cake, because this is Baltimore, and that’s what you do in the city. He starts looking up places with a high rating on the Internet, see if we can get good food for once.
Then Elliott and Oroboro start telling me how they met each other—and Elliott interrupts the story to point at me. “You’ve got glitter on your face.”
I blink. “What?”
“On your nose.”
I touch my nose. My finger comes off completely covered in red glitter, and my eyes go wide. “What the f—” I look at my purse. The drawing Applejinx gave me is in there, and it has a red glittery sticker attached. It’s right next to the tissues I’ve been using. “Oh, fuck. I look like I just made out with a stripper, don’t I?”
“Yep. It’s a look that suits you!” That’s Elliott speaking, who else. Then he continues his story. “So we met, and I had read fanfiction when I was younger, so I wasn’t all that weirded out when he told me he wrote some.”
“Yeah, he was open to it,” Oroboro says, nodding. “And then I told him about how, you know, I ran some panels at EFNW and so on, tried to test the grounds.”
“Hold on.” I’m gawking at them. “You told him you write pony fanfiction on your first date?”
“Yep.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He kept talking about how he wrote fanfiction, but he didn’t specify the fandom,” Elliott says. “So I was like, why is he avoiding that. Oh my god, he’s going to be into some weird shit, isn’t he.”
Curtis nods. “Kind of accurate.”
“Yeah,” Elliott says. “But then he went, well, are you aware of the existence of this show, My Little Pony? And I thought, holy shit, he’s been running panels about ponies.”
Oroboro is openly smiling by this point, grinning like a madman. “Yeah,” he says.
“Then?” I ask.
“Well, I didn’t quite know what to say.” Elliott shrugs. “So I just said, hold on. Are you telling me you’re horsefamous?!”
Oroboro nods. “And that’s when I said, well, shit. He’s a keeper.”
I’m about to reply, but then—my phone buzzes. I take it out of my purse, clean the glitter off, and then check my messages. “Pear’s coming back,” I say. “We should get going if we want to have dinner. Oh?”
Everybody’s getting up, but they stop once they see me inspect the phone a bit harder. “What?” Oroboro asks.
“Well, they told me they found a third box with copies of my book this morning, and I was checking the backlog in the Golden Oaks Bookstore server.” I waggle the phone side to side. “I sold out. Again. I sold out three times by now.”
Pause.
“Oh my God, you’re going to be—”
“I’m going to be fucking unbearable, yes. Let’s go get Pear!”
So we get up. And we go get Pear.
And at no point whatsoever do I shut the fuck up.
Next time: Dubs, 47, Octavia Harmony, Appletank, Swan Song, Mono, Horizon, D, and like -- half the people I said would be here but haven't been here yet, cause the blog got too long.
It's funny cause I know people dig their descriptions, so I make a point on working on them, but then I worry I'm being too self-indulgent and everybody but the person being described will think I'm annoying. Oh, well.
>Ctrl+F
>not really in it
>why live
Man, I’m with you on Brandon Sanderson. Dude’s like one of those Golden Age sci fi authors who’s in love with puzzle-box stories that don’t have much in the way of characterization. Like an Asimov who doesn’t drink or smoke.
Dude’s also apparently one of the nicest guys in publishing, and I dig his writing lectures on YouTube at least.
You didn't miss much at our panel. It was mostly just me crying, knocking over the microphones and screaming "WE CAN'T START WITHOUT ARAGON HE SAID HE'D BE HERE." Standard stuff.
I'm so glad I made those bookmarks. And not everybody sold out. I'm afraid Aquaman spent some time during his commute, going up to random people with my leftover Tutor books and saying, "Would you like to read a book about romantic horses and... wait! Come back!" Everything else I brought sold, though. I think I could have brought twice as many copies of Sisters, no prob.
Sat right behind you on the There Can Only Be One panel and said hi during the con. So good to meet you.
Is it weird that, at this moment, I have zero memory of the shake shack hip shake?
Also: arr five aitch is how you pronounce it.
5112464
Genuinely weird. You saying 'you're going to do that every time' that morning was like, legit 80% of the reason why I kept doing it.
Eat my rhubarb
Just the Doctor, no "Who" to be seen. (That goddamn philistine.)
She's a musician. There was a perfectly good Dali pony for you to say "writers do drugs, artists are drugs" with, you twats.
That's why we call them "soft drinks" you numskull. (At least you're the funny kind of numskull. Like the four Stooges (there were only three at any given time, but there were four of them total), those guys were funny and also numskulls.)
I don't think you need ponies as training wheels anymore. You could absolutely start writing original fiction in whatever spare time you have between cases (you were a lawyer of some kind, right?) and be just as awesome at it.
Oh good, I'm not the only one.
I can dispute neither of these statements.
EqG specials are pretty dang great, yes. Several are on YouTube if you care to look.
Ten minutes. At Bronycon '19.
Yeah, I'm not sure what you expected.
Don't worry, the descriptions are at just the right amount of indulgence. Eagerly looking forward to more, not least because the bulk of our interaction was on Saturday.
5112464
That's what we call a repressed memory. Go to a Shake Shack, see if it triggers anything.
Or, as a wiser alternative, don't.
So, funny thing about my label maker. I found out Sunday talking with one of the Pastel Pasture ladies (because I had to pack up all my typewriters so I helped clean too) that after Thursday, I was giving out enough labels to people that were just writers, that when they were doing their paid events, they just let anyone with a label go right in because they assumed they were just writers there for QnS.
It was kinda neat, in an accidentally stupid way of IRL shitposting.
5112452 TBH, the whole thing is amazing IMO, but your descriptions of people are fantastic, especially because a) the ones I actually know are exactly like that and I curse at myself for never being able to describe them so perfectly, and b) the ones I don't know that well are brought to life by them.
Oh, goody, this is the part where he meets me! I can hardly wait to see how I'm depicted.
...
I object! There was raunchy stuff no matter where you looked in that place! I demand this "evidence" be thrown out of court!And nine hours later, I realize I misunderstood this part. Derp.
Rest assured, I'd say you pulled it off. And I meant what I said about wanting to read more like these. There are still conventions in Europe, after all...
I didn't mention it at the time, but specifically: I had to ask an illustrator who barely spoke English to lower Twilight's tail. For you see, gratuitous depictions of pony-ass have no place on a collection of horror stories.
Wow, what a long blog, and so many people are yet to be mentioned!
I wish I'd known, I'd gotten a little bottle of styling gel at the CVS that first day. Instead now I have lots of pictures of you with the haircut.
Like language, the United States steals from European countries and just goes with it.
5112481
Counterpoint: without context, just "the Doctor" is vague and could be a number of characters, or even just a regular description. It doesn't uniquely identify him, which is kinda the point of names.
(Also, not sure if you already know this and were joking, but IIRC they're called soft drinks because they're nonalcoholic.)
I was probably too much of a coward to show it, but lunch woth ya'll was the most fun I've had in a while. It was fucking tubular to get to meet you.
5112547
I don't think you even told me that, that's amazing.
...Thank you for asking for that.
Herding fimfic authors is worse than herding cats, I swear. But I'm glad I got to have lunch with you that day, even if my memories blur halfway through that margarita (like, holy shit, when she brought that shaker out with the rest of the margarita I both celebrated the great deal I was getting and also died inside).
And the punchline is that Pear didn't end up having dinner with you that night, because we dragged him away to a different place when our groups intersected again because we're worse than cats, I tell ya. We saw Pear's sunglasses and went "ooh, shiny," and suddenly you were asking in Discord where Pear was and we were booking it out of the convention center with our new toy.
Now I know the tale of how I missed out on having a meal with you!
Oh well. Entertaining as always!
I just got that big dick energy. :P
Just to be particular, I don't quite reach three liters a day, but I often drink more than two.
Also, I do not breathe fire. That part is also a little inaccurate. But thank you for not mentioning the child in the gimp suit.
5112472
Super Trampoline takes three kinds of illegal hallucinogens and you can't even tell, and then there's Majin who always looks drunk. Or maybe you are always drunk. I don't know. I have theories.
Stars and little fishes, this is so true.
Dang it, I've gotta get working on my own retrospective, even though it's not going to be half this amazing.
5112578
I know the feeling!
The descriptions don't even begin to touch self-indulgent, they're just fantastic and wildly accurate. Make these blogs as long as you want, I love every second I spend reading them.
Yes it is.
5112556
Yeah, "the one from Doctor Who" is how you do that. Or in this case, the specific incarnation, because they look different enough that that would have been legitimately helpful in figuring out what the actual ****. (If it were the Thirteenth the Rando would look like even more of an idiot, and look it up if you're wondering how that's possible)
(Also, between discussion of the show's cider and some dude named "Mike" I was aware of the term "hard X" for a version of X with alcohol in it, but legitimately never made that connection. To be fair, it's not a description specific to the things we actually think of as "soft drinks"...)
Oh my god I never saw this
I don't know what's funnier, your "I don't like to talk about it" running gag or your descriptions of B_25. XD
Dude, I would have given you cold hard American cashmoney for that peseta and franc. :B
Oh my god, she does
In all seriousness, I love how much of this process involves telling other people's stories. Like how Oro met his bf, that's riotously funny and so great. :D
Okay, this blog made me sad I couldn't make Bronycon.
< This guy fucks.
These are absolutely glorious
Oh man. This.
I was accumulating coins like crazy because I didn't want to be the asshole holding up the line trying to pay with exact change. Doesn't help that everything seems to be priced so as to maximise the number of coins that have to be given as change.
Can it really be self-indulgent if the ones reading your blog are the ones being indulged?
Pan-indulgent or omni-indulgent, perhaps.
One of my favorite parts, which didn't make it into these blogs for soon to be obvious reasons, was us waiting around outside Quills and Sofas.
Aragon is all like "We are waiting for Mono!"
Waiting... Waiting.... I see Mono go into Quills and Sofas with a group of people.
Aragon: "Yep. Waiting to see if Mono wants to come have lunch with us cool people!"
Waiting.... Mono leaves Quills and Sofas with another group of people. Waiting.... Oh hey, there comes Mono again. Has Aragon noticed? He's looking in the general direction...
"Man, when will Mono come by!" Nope, totally oblivious. Maybe I should say something? Nah, Mono looks busy.
Great to hear your book was sold out 3 times. Although what sucks is that I was so ready to start reading once I got out of Baltimore, but I left the damn thing in the Hilton room where we stayed at ;~;
You will meet me and you will provide one of these descriptions, Aragón, or so help me gods.