Our First Anime Con

The car was already full before Naomi's duffel bag showed up, which meant the duffel bag did not so much get packed into the trunk as negotiated with.

"It has to go somewhere," Naomi said, standing in Dana's driveway at 5:47 in the morning, holding the bag against her chest like a shield. "I didn't overpack. This is a reasonable amount of stuff."

"You brought four pairs of shoes," Mika said, from the passenger seat, not even looking up from the garment bag draped carefully across her lap, inside which lived four months of her life in the shape of two enormous fabric wings and a headpiece she'd repainted three separate times. "For a convention. Where you will be standing the entire day."

"Different outfits require different shoes."

"You brought one outfit."

"I brought options."

Marcus, already folded into the back seat with his knees somewhere near his ears because Mika's wing case had claimed the legroom on his side, didn't open his eyes. "Can we please just put it on my lap and go. I would like to be unconscious again within the hour."

They wedged the duffel bag into the last remaining gap, which involved Dana standing on the bumper for leverage and everyone agreeing not to look too closely at what was happening to the shape of Mika's headpiece box in the process, and by 6:03 they were pulling out of the driveway into a sky that hadn't fully committed to being morning yet.

"We were supposed to leave at six," Dana said, checking the dashboard clock with the particular grim satisfaction of someone who had said this would happen and had, in fact, been right.

"We're leaving at six-oh-three," Naomi said. "That's basically six."

"Four hours, Naomi. Every minute we lose now is a minute we lose in that parking garage later, and you have seen the pictures I sent you of last year's parking garage."

"I have seen them. I chose not to be afraid of them."

"That's your first mistake of the day," Marcus said, from the back, still not opening his eyes. "There will be several more."

This was, Naomi understood, less an insult than a kind of ritual greeting, the specific affectionate needling that came from three years of friendship she'd only fully joined a year and a half ago, when Marcus — her lab partner in a class she'd nearly failed, the person who'd first invited her to trivia night with people who already had their own shorthand for everything — had folded her into the group the way you fold a new ingredient into a recipe that's already mostly finished, carefully, a little uncertainly at first, and then like she'd always belonged there. She still felt, some days, like the newest member of something the other three had built together over years she hadn't been present for. This was the first time all four of them had gone anywhere overnight together, and she had said yes to the convention before she'd fully processed what it actually meant, only that Mika had looked so happy describing the cosplay meetup, and Dana had lit up talking about the signing, and Marcus had shrugged and said it was fine, conventions were fine, and something in her had wanted, badly, to finally be inside one of these stories instead of hearing about it secondhand afterward.

"Okay but for real," she said, twisting around in her seat to look at Mika, "what do the wings actually do? Like, do they move?"

"They articulate at the shoulder joint," Mika said, and something shifted immediately in her voice, the particular brightening of someone given permission to talk about the thing she'd spent four months of her life on. "I built a harness system so they can lift about thirty degrees if I pull this cord here — see the little loop? — which took me forever to get right because the first version just made them flop sideways like a broken umbrella."

"That's so cool."

"It's extremely cool and she will not stop talking about it," Marcus said, eyes still closed, though he was smiling now.

"I will stop talking about it exactly as much as you stop talking about your card game tournament results, which is to say, never," Mika said, and Marcus opened one eye long enough to flip her off with real affection, and Dana laughed from the driver's seat in the specific way she laughed at things she'd clearly witnessed a hundred times before and still found funny anyway.

---

They stopped once for gas and, forty minutes later, a second time, because Naomi discovered with genuine horror that she had left her badge printout on her kitchen counter, a discovery that produced eleven minutes of frantic scrolling through her email on spotty gas-station wifi before she confirmed, with enormous relief, that the confirmation email itself would scan just fine at will-call and the printout had never actually mattered.

"You could have led with 'I think I forgot something' instead of 'we need to turn around,'" Dana said, pulling back onto the highway.

"I panicked. I'm allowed one panic. It's my first con."

"You get one panic per hour, going forward. Budget accordingly."

They ate gas station breakfast sandwiches somewhere past the second stop, the car filling with the smell of microwaved egg and the particular companionable silence of four people who had run out of new things to say to each other at six in the morning and were content to just exist in the same space instead. Mika controlled the music with the quiet, absolute authority of someone whose car this technically wasn't but whose taste this definitely was, running through a playlist that alternated between anime openings none of the others could name and pop songs Marcus complained about exactly as much as he mouthed along to.

"You know every word to this song," Mika said, catching him mid-verse in the rearview mirror.

"I know zero words to this song. I am making sounds that happen to be adjacent to the correct words."

"That's not what adjacent means."

"It's exactly what adjacent means, you're just choosing not to accept it."

Dana reviewed her schedule for what had to be the fourth time on her phone, murmuring panel room numbers to herself like an incantation, and Naomi watched her do it with real curiosity.

"Why this guest specifically," she asked. "Like, out of everyone who's going to be there. What makes her the one?"

Dana didn't answer right away, eyes on the road, and when she did, something in her voice had gone quieter than its usual bright, list-making register. "Starlit Frontier came out the year my mom got sick. Like, the actual year, almost the actual month. And I watched the whole first season during the worst part of it, in the hospital waiting room, on my phone with one earbud in so I could still hear if anyone called my name. And there's this one scene where the main character basically has to keep walking even though everything around her is falling apart, and Elena Voss — she voices her in the dub — there's this one line reading that just. It got me through some very specific nights that year." She glanced at Naomi in the rearview mirror. "So it's not really about meeting a celebrity. It's about saying thank you to someone for a thing they probably don't even remember doing."

Nobody said anything for a moment. Marcus reached forward from the back seat and squeezed her shoulder, briefly, the kind of gesture that clearly required no further explanation between the three of them, an old grief handled with old, practiced gentleness.

"That's not what I expected you to say," Naomi admitted.

"Most people don't expect it. Most people think I'm just really into the show." Dana shrugged, though her hands had tightened slightly on the wheel. "I am really into the show. That's also true. It's just not the whole reason."

---

Somewhere past the second hour, a car merged into their lane with a full-size cardboard cutout of some anime mascot strapped upright in the back seat, grinning out the rear window at the traffic behind it, and Naomi nearly climbed over Marcus trying to get a picture.

"That's a good sign," she said, delighted. "Right? That means we're getting close?"

"That means somebody else also left their house at an unreasonable hour," Mika said. "But yes. Also that."

By the time the skyline came into view, hazy with early heat, and the first roadside billboard for the convention appeared — a stylized banner featuring characters none of them recognized advertising ticket packages nobody in the car had bought — traffic had thickened into the specific, resigned crawl of a city absorbing several thousand extra visitors at once. Dana spotted three more cosplay-adjacent vehicles in the next fifteen minutes alone, one of them with a passenger visibly changing into some kind of armored chestplate in the back seat at a red light, and something in the whole car's energy shifted upward at once, four people simultaneously waking up to the fact that they were actually, finally, almost there.

The parking garage was, as promised, a nightmare — five full levels of circling before Dana found a spot wedged between a minivan covered in decals from three different shows and a rideshare idling with its flashers on, disgorging two people in matching armor who immediately began arguing about which elevator bank was faster.

"We're in," Dana said, killing the engine, and something like reverence settled over the car for exactly three seconds before Mika's wing case slid off the seat and everyone had to scramble to catch it.

---

The convention center swallowed them the moment they cleared the initial security checkpoint, and Naomi stopped walking entirely, just past the metal detectors, staring up at a ceiling three stories high strung with banners the size of billboards, at an exhibit hall floor stretching out further than she could see the end of, at a wall of noise made up of a thousand overlapping conversations, vendor announcements, and someone's badly amplified panel trailer playing on a loop somewhere to their left.

"Okay," she said, faintly. "Okay, this is a lot."

"It's always a lot," Mika said, gently, adjusting one wing strap that had shifted during the walk from the parking garage. "The first twenty minutes are the worst. Then your brain sort of stops trying to look at everything at once."

The badge line moved slower than any of them had hoped, snaking back on itself twice through a roped maze before finally depositing them in front of a row of tired but relentlessly cheerful volunteers who scanned confirmation emails and handed out lanyards with the practiced efficiency of people who had already done this several thousand times that morning alone. Naomi held her badge once it was finally in her hands like it was something breakable, turning it over, reading her own name printed under the convention's logo.

"I have a badge," she said. "I'm a real attendee. This is a legal document."

"It is extremely not a legal document," Marcus said, "but I understand the feeling."

They didn't split up immediately. That was, Dana insisted, tradition — a full lap of the main exhibit hall together before anyone peeled off toward their separate plans, the four of them moving as one loose, easily distracted unit through aisles of merchandise booths selling everything from acrylic keychains to full suits of foam armor, past a section of the hall entirely given over to plush toys stacked in pyramids taller than Naomi, past an artist selling watercolor prints of clouds that had nothing to do with any anime at all and had somehow ended up here anyway.

Naomi's overwhelm, in that first hour, wore the shape of pure delight. She gasped audibly at a wall of holographic trading cards. She made Marcus stop so she could photograph a man in a full mechanical suit that lit up and hissed steam from hidden vents every few minutes. She bought, within the first forty minutes, a small enamel pin shaped like a sword from a show she'd never seen, purely because the colors were pretty, and Mika had to physically stop her from also buying a second one in a different colorway.

"You don't need two," Mika said. "You need to pace yourself. This is a marathon, not a sprint."

"It's a really pretty sword."

"It is. You already have it. Put your wallet away."

They found the first line for something worth waiting in around eleven — a small booth selling limited prints from an artist whose work Mika had followed online for years, prints that would sell out by early afternoon if history was any guide — and stood together in the growing queue trading commentary on cosplayers passing by, Dana quietly identifying every reference the other three missed with the specific, delighted authority of someone who watched more anime per year than was probably advisable.

"That's from a show that ran for exactly one season in like 2019," she said, nodding at a woman in an elaborate feathered headdress. "Nobody talks about it anymore except in one very specific corner of the internet. She's brave."

"You know that off the top of your head?"

"I contain many useless facts. It's my one marketable skill."

It was there, in that line, that the day's schedule first started to visibly strain — Dana checking her phone, doing math against the signing's posted start time, calculating how long she could stay in this line before she needed to peel off toward the growing crowd she could already see forming near the autograph hall two wings over.

"I need to go," she said, finally, apologetic, stepping out of the print line just as it started moving. "The wristband cutoff is not a joke, I've seen the horror stories. I'll catch up at the food court at one."

"Go," Mika said. "Get your wristband. We'll bring you a print if we make it to the front before they sell out."

Dana hugged each of them quickly, an old habit from years of this exact kind of splitting-up, and disappeared into the crowd with the particular urgent energy of someone whose whole day now hinged on getting somewhere on time.

---

Mika's meetup wasn't until noon, which left her a stretch of time to wander Artist Alley with Naomi trailing beside her, Marcus having peeled off separately toward a hall he'd spotted advertising tabletop demos, promising to reconvene at the same one o'clock deadline.

Artist Alley was quieter than the main exhibit floor, rows of tables staffed by artists selling prints and commissions and stickers, a different texture of energy entirely — less spectacle, more intimacy, actual conversations happening between fans and creators rather than the exhibit hall's louder commerce. Mika moved through it slowly, reverently, the way she always did, stopping at booths that caught her eye, occasionally recognizing an artist's name from online and lighting up with the specific joy of meeting, in person, someone whose work she'd only ever known as a username.

"This is your show," Naomi said, stopping at a booth selling prints depicting a moody, rain-slicked cityscape, a lone figure with wings silhouetted against a gray sky. "Hollow Season. Right? That's your character?"

"That's her," Mika said, quiet, something catching in her throat at the unexpected sight of Suzu rendered by someone else's hand entirely, a stranger who'd found the same show, sat with the same quiet, aching story, and turned it into something she was selling for twelve dollars at a folding table in a convention center in a country three thousand miles from the one where Mika had first found it.

She bought the print without hesitating, and the artist, ringing her up, glanced at the pin on her bag — the small enamel wing charm she'd commissioned herself, months ago, before she'd even finished the costume — and did a small double take.

"Wait, are you cosplaying her today?"

"Later. I'm not in it yet, I didn't want to wreck the wings walking through the parking garage."

"You have to send me a photo. I've drawn her probably thirty times and I've never once seen anyone cosplay her. I didn't think anyone else even watched this show."

Mika laughed, delighted and a little disbelieving, and promised she would, and walked away from that booth a full two inches taller than she'd walked into it.

It was a small thing. She understood that, rationally — a stranger recognizing a piece of art, a brief exchange lasting under two minutes. But she'd spent the last three years since moving to the U.S. quietly recalibrating, over and over, how much of herself translated into a new country's shorthand, how many things that had felt central to who she was back home simply didn't register here, required explanation, got the polite, blank nod of someone humoring an interest they didn't share. Hollow Season had been the first thing, in a long stretch of adjusting, that had felt like hers without needing translation — a show she'd found on a recommendation from her cousin back in Osaka, quiet and strange and aching in a way she recognized in herself, and she had built this costume, stitch by stitch, as a way of saying, without needing to explain any of the rest of it: *this matters to me, and I want to see if it matters to anyone else here too.*

She hadn't told any of the others the full size of that. She'd told Naomi, in the car, a small, quiet fragment of the fear underneath it — that nobody would recognize the character, that four months of careful work would draw only confused, polite glances. She hadn't told her the rest, the part underneath the fear, the part about wanting so badly to feel, just for one day, entirely legible to the people around her.

---

Naomi's overstimulation built slowly enough, that first stretch of the day, that she didn't fully notice it happening.

It started small. A booth blasting a trailer on loop at a volume that made her ears ring every time they passed it, twice, three times, four, because Artist Alley circled back near the same corner more than once. A crowd surge near a popular booth that pressed her, briefly, tighter against a stranger's back than she was comfortable with, an experience that left her heart racing for a full minute after she'd extracted herself. Someone's oversized foam prop clipping her shoulder hard enough to actually hurt, the apology tossed over a shoulder already moving on, too fast for her to process before the moment had passed.

She didn't say anything. She told herself, each time, that this was simply what conventions were like, that everyone around her was navigating the exact same crowd and exact same noise and clearly having a wonderful time doing it, that flagging her own smaller discomfort would make her the person who couldn't handle the thing everyone else found effortless.

By eleven-thirty, waiting in a slow-moving line for a bathroom that seemed to serve half the exhibit hall, she noticed her hands had gone faintly cold despite the room's overheated air, and put it down to hunger, because she hadn't eaten anything since the gas station sandwich, and told herself lunch would fix it.

By noon, standing at the edge of Mika's Hollow Season meetup, watching seven Ash-Walkers arrange themselves for photos against the convention center's floor-to-ceiling windows, surrounded by a growing crowd of onlookers whose combined chatter and camera flashes had merged into something that felt, suddenly, less like excitement and more like a physical pressure against the inside of her skull, she found herself stepping back, and back again, until she was standing at the edge of the crowd rather than inside it, watching Mika's joy from a distance that had opened up without her quite deciding to create it.

Mika caught her eye once, mid-pose, and gave her a small, questioning look — *you okay?* — and Naomi smiled and gave a thumbs up that felt, even as she made it, like a small lie she didn't have the words yet to correct.

---

Marcus found the tabletop hall almost by accident, drawn in by nothing more sophisticated than a demo table with an empty seat and a stranger who waved him over with the easy, evangelical enthusiasm of someone dying to explain a rule set to literally anyone who'd sit still for it.

He hadn't told the others, in any of their planning conversations, how much he'd been quietly dreading this exact stretch of the day — the part where Dana vanished into a fandom he didn't share, and Mika vanished into a costume built from a show he'd never watched, and he was left to either fake enthusiasm he didn't feel or wander alone admitting, silently, that he was the one person in this friend group who'd never quite found his own foothold in the thing that had originally brought the three of them together. He liked Dana and Mika's shows well enough when they described them. He'd genuinely tried, more than once, to get into something they loved, and it had never quite taken the way it clearly had for them, the way it seemed to be taking, already, for Naomi. He'd come today mostly because his friends were coming, the way you show up for people rather than for the thing itself, and some small, quiet part of him had wondered, packing his bag that morning, whether that would be enough to actually enjoy the day or whether he'd simply spend it politely waiting for it to be over.

The demo table changed that calculation within twenty minutes.

The game itself was small, strange, and entirely unfamiliar — a card-based strategy game built around a fictional setting he'd never heard of, tied loosely to some tie-in property he didn't recognize, though the mechanics themselves turned out to be sharp enough, and the stranger running the table patient enough, that Marcus found himself leaning forward, actually engaged, for the first time all morning.

"You're good at this," the stranger said, an hour later, after Marcus's second win in a row against a system that was, apparently, not supposed to be beaten this early by a total newcomer. "Like, unnervingly good. Have you played anything like it before?"

"Not even a little. I just like figuring out the shape of a system." Marcus turned a card over in his hand, studying it. "It's satisfying when the pieces actually fit together."

"You should come back this afternoon. There's an open tournament bracket starting at three, casual, mostly for fun, but the prizes are actually decent."

Marcus bought the starter set before he'd fully decided to, the same box that would end up, several hours later, drawing two strangers' delighted recognition across the exhibit hall floor, and left the tabletop hall with something loosening in his chest that had nothing to do with anime at all and everything to do with discovering, unexpectedly, that this whole enormous, overwhelming event had room in it for the thing he actually liked too, not just the things his friends liked that he was quietly, patiently enduring on their behalf.

---

The trouble started a little after twelve-thirty, in the gap between Mika's meetup wrapping up and the group's agreed one o'clock food court check-in, when Naomi stopped answering her phone.

Nobody noticed immediately. Dana was still in line, closer now, watching the wristband cutoff number creep steadily upward on a hand-lettered sign a staff member updated every twenty minutes, currently sitting at one hundred and sixty-one out of the promised two hundred, close enough that leaving now felt unthinkable. She'd been in this line for over an hour, and the anticipation had built into something almost physical, a nervous energy in her hands, a script she'd been quietly rehearsing in her head — not a speech, nothing that dramatic, just the plain sentence she wanted to be able to say clearly instead of dissolving into the kind of babbling she was fully capable of when actually faced with someone whose voice had once talked her through the worst year of her life. *Thank you. That scene meant more to me than you probably know.* Simple. She'd practiced saying it without her voice shaking. She was almost there.

Mika was packing her wings carefully into their travel case before the crowds thickened further, chatting easily with two of the other Ash-Walkers about where to get food, already composing, in her head, the message she'd send the artist from the print booth once she changed and got a proper photo. Marcus had lost a genuinely embarrassing amount of time to the demo table and was now three packs deep into a starter set he had no intention of returning, texting the group chat a photo of his hand of cards with the caption *i have made a terrible financial decision and i regret nothing.*

It was Mika who noticed first, checking the group chat at 12:50 to confirm the food court meeting spot, and finding Naomi's last message timestamped over an hour earlier — a single photo of a merchandise booth, no caption — followed by nothing.

*hey where are you*, Mika typed.

Nothing came back.

*naomi?*

Still nothing. She tried calling. It went straight through to voicemail without ringing at all, the flat, immediate tone of a phone that had actually died rather than one simply being ignored.

By one o'clock, when Dana finally peeled away from the signing line — wristband still uncertain, the count sitting at one hundred and eighty-eight, agonizingly close to the cap, close enough that every minute she stood there not moving forward felt like something being physically pulled out of her hands — and Marcus arrived at the food court balancing a tray and a bag stuffed with cards he was already regretting slightly less than he'd expected to, Naomi was nowhere in sight, and none of their combined messages had produced anything at all.

"Her phone's probably just dead," Marcus said, though something in his voice had gone careful, testing the words for how true they actually felt. "She was complaining about her battery on the drive up."

"She was complaining about it being at sixty percent," Mika said. "At nine in the morning. That's not the same as dead by one."

Dana was already scanning the crowd, the particular scan of someone whose whole day had, in the space of thirty seconds, entirely reorganized itself around a different priority, the signing line and its careful rehearsed sentence receding somewhere behind a much louder, more immediate alarm. "Okay. Okay, when did anyone last actually see her, not just hear from her."

Nobody had a clean answer. Mika had lost track of her somewhere around the meetup's photo session, remembering now, with a cold, sinking feeling, the small, questioning look she'd given Naomi across the crowd and the thumbs-up that had come back a beat too fast, too bright, to have been entirely honest. Dana had assumed she'd wandered off with Mika toward the meetup. Marcus, honestly, hadn't thought about her at all since the tabletop hall, assuming, the way you assume about a friend at a convention full of exactly the kind of overwhelming stimulation Naomi had never experienced before, that she was somewhere close by, having the time of her life.

"She gets overwhelmed," Mika said, slowly, something clicking into place with more weight than she liked, the memory of that small thumbs-up sharpening into something closer to guilt. "She told me in the car she was worried about that. About it being too much and not wanting to be the one who ruined everyone's day by needing a break. I saw her step back from the crowd at the meetup and I didn't follow up. I just — waved and went back to posing."

Dana's face did something complicated. "She said that to you and not to me?"

"She said it quietly. Like she wasn't sure she should be saying it at all."

---

They split up to search, the signing line and the tabletop hall and the food court all abandoned at once, moving through crowds that felt, suddenly, considerably less exciting and considerably more like an obstacle between them and one specific, small, missing person.

Dana checked the badge pickup area first, then the nearest first-aid station, her mind supplying, unhelpfully, a dozen small disaster scenarios in quick, unwelcome succession — a panic attack in a crowd with no one to help her through it, a fall, someone's unkind stranger comment landing wrong on a bad moment. She hated how easily her thoughts went there. She recognized, distantly, some of her mother's hospital year in the particular flavor of dread currently sitting in her chest, and pushed the recognition away because there wasn't room for it right now.

Marcus checked the restrooms, awkwardly, standing outside the women's room asking a stranger to check the stalls, then doubled back through the merch line for the booth in Naomi's last photo, describing her to bored vendor staff who had seen several thousand strangers pass their table that day and had no particular reason to remember one more. He felt, moving through it, a specific guilt that had nothing to do with anyone's accusation and everything to do with his own morning spent happily absorbed in cards and demo tables while, somewhere in the same building, his friend had been quietly falling apart.

Mika, moving on instinct more than logic, headed for the quietest exit she could find, the one nearest a side hallway that led out toward a strip of shaded sidewalk along the convention center's exterior, the kind of place a person overwhelmed by noise might instinctively drift toward without fully deciding to. She walked fast, faster than the wings still half-strapped to her back made comfortable, replaying the meetup's crowd and camera flashes and trying to remember exactly when Naomi's face had last been visible in it, hating herself, mildly, uselessly, for how easily she'd let her own joy crowd out the smaller, quieter signal beside her.

She found Naomi there, sitting on a low concrete planter in the shade, knees pulled up, badge lanyard twisted in both hands, looking smaller than she had all morning.

"Hey," Mika said, careful, crouching down in front of her. "There you are."

Naomi's eyes were red-rimmed, though she wasn't actively crying, just holding herself very still the way people do when they're trying to keep something contained. "I'm sorry. My phone died and I didn't want to go find a charger because that meant walking back through everything and I just—" She stopped, swallowed. "I got really overwhelmed. All at once. Like my whole body just decided it was done, and I panicked, and I came out here because it was quiet, and I told myself I'd just sit for a minute, and then it turned into a lot more than a minute."

"Why didn't you just text one of us before your phone died?"

"Because you were all having such a good day. Dana was so close to her signing. You had your whole meetup. I didn't want to be the thing that messed it up. I know how that sounds, saying it out loud. I know it doesn't actually make sense."

"It doesn't," Mika agreed, gently, sitting down on the planter beside her, the wings on her back finally settling still. "But I get why it felt true anyway."

Dana and Marcus found them a few minutes later, Dana arriving first at something close to a jog, and the relief that crossed her face when she saw Naomi sitting upright and unhurt lasted almost exactly as long as it took her to also register, over Naomi's shoulder, the convention center's digital signage cycling past a schedule board that now read SIGNING — WRISTBANDS CLOSED.

Something in Dana's expression flickered, just for a second, grief and relief occupying the same small space at once, before she pushed it down and crossed the rest of the distance to crouch beside Naomi too.

---

Nobody said anything about the signing for the first several minutes. They sat together on the planter and the low wall beside it, four people recalibrating in the shade while the convention's noise carried on, muffled, behind the doors they'd all just come through.

"I'm really sorry," Naomi said again, once she trusted her voice more. "I know I ruined your line, Dana. I saw the sign."

"You didn't ruin anything." Dana said it fast, immediate, and then, more honestly, a beat later: "Okay. It stings. I'm not going to pretend it doesn't sting a little. I've wanted to meet that voice actor since I was fifteen. I had a whole thing I wanted to say to her, and I practiced it, which is a very embarrassing thing to admit out loud. But you didn't do that on purpose, and it's not actually a competition between you being okay and me getting a wristband. Those aren't the same size of problem, even though it felt like it for a second there, standing in that line watching the count go up."

"I keep thinking I should have just said something the second I started feeling weird," Naomi said. "Instead of waiting until it was already this bad."

"Probably," Marcus said, gently, sitting down on Naomi's other side. "Not because you owe us constant updates. Just — we'd rather know you're overwhelmed in real time than find out your phone's dead and spend forty-five minutes convincing ourselves you're fine while actually being kind of terrified."

"I know. I think I just didn't want to be a whole thing. You've all been coming to this for years. I didn't want my first time to be the time everything got derailed because I couldn't handle it."

"You're always going to be a whole thing to us," Mika said, quiet. "That's what being friends means. It doesn't mean we're annoyed by it. I should have checked in properly when I saw you step back at the meetup instead of just waving and going back to my photos. I noticed something was off and I let myself be too happy to follow up on it. That's on me too, not just you."

"I didn't want you to stop having a good time."

"I'd rather stop having a good time for two minutes and make sure you're okay than keep having one while you're sitting alone outside," Mika said. "That's not a hard trade for me. I don't know why it felt like one to you."

Naomi laughed, a little wetly, wiping at her eyes with the heel of her hand. "This is a lot of feelings for a hallway."

"Cons are like that," Dana said, and something in her voice had genuinely settled by now, the sting of the closed signing line receding under the plainer, larger relief of having her friend back in one piece, though a small, honest current of disappointment still moved underneath it, not fully resolved, simply set down for now rather than erased. "Okay. New plan. We stop trying to run four separate days that happen to overlap sometimes, and we just have one day, together, for whatever's left of it."

"You don't have to do that because of me."

"I'm not doing it only because of you. I'm doing it because I already got the one thing I actually needed today, which was you being okay, and the signing was always going to be a bonus on top of that, whether I got it or not. I just didn't know that going in." Dana stood, offering Naomi a hand up. "Also I'm hungry, and nobody's eaten a real meal, and Marcus is holding a bag with cards in it that he's going to have to explain eventually."

"It's a good game," Marcus said, immediately defensive. "It has excellent mechanics and I am, apparently, unnervingly good at it."

"You said this morning you weren't going to buy anything."

"I said a lot of things this morning. I was very tired, and also I did not yet understand the depth of my own talent."

---

They ate together at a food truck parked along the same shaded stretch of sidewalk, sharing a cardboard tray of something that was technically takoyaki and, by Mika's expert and slightly withering assessment, technically a crime against takoyaki, and laughed about it anyway, all four of them, more freely than any of them had laughed since arriving.

"This tastes like someone described takoyaki to a stranger over the phone," Mika said, examining a piece with real suspicion, "and the stranger tried their best."

"I think it's fine," Naomi said, already reaching for a second one.

"It is objectively not fine. I am choosing to eat it anyway because I am hungry and weak."

The rest of the afternoon unspooled without a schedule attached to it at all, and it was in that unscheduled stretch, Naomi would think later, that the day actually became the thing she'd wanted it to be all along.

They wandered Artist Alley together instead of separately this time, moving at Naomi's pace rather than any of their individual plans, stopping when she wanted to stop, and she found herself, without the pressure of keeping up with someone else's agenda, actually able to look at things properly — a booth selling tiny painted clay figurines that took twenty minutes and three separate conversations with the artist to fully appreciate, a print of an empty rain-streaked train platform that had nothing to do with any show at all, just quiet and gray and strangely comforting, that she ended up buying because it looked, she realized only once she owned it, almost exactly like how the last hour outside had felt before Mika found her.

"That's a good one," Mika said, watching her tuck it carefully into her bag. "You have good instincts."

"I don't know anything about art."

"You don't need to know anything about it. You just need to know what it does to you when you look at it. That's the whole job."

Dana, wristband gone, wandered into a smaller, half-empty panel room on a whim after spotting a hand-lettered sign advertising a discussion between two indie voice actors nobody had originally planned to see, dragging the others along with the easy, low-stakes energy of someone with nothing left to lose by trying. The panel turned out to be delightful in exactly the way only an unplanned, lightly attended room can be — two performers clearly enjoying themselves, riffing off audience questions with an ease that came from not being famous enough to have rehearsed careful non-answers, telling a story about a recording session gone catastrophically wrong that had all four of them laughing hard enough that the woman next to Marcus had to wipe her eyes.

"I would not have gone to this on purpose," Dana admitted afterward, still grinning. "And it might be the best forty minutes of the whole day."

"Better than the signing would have been?"

"Different. Not worse. I don't know yet. Ask me again in a week." She said it honestly, without forcing the answer into something tidier than it actually was.

Marcus, of all people, ended up being recognized twice walking back through the exhibit hall — not for anything he was wearing, since he'd worn a plain shirt with no costume at all, but for the card game box sticking out of his bag, two separate strangers stopping him with genuine excitement to compare notes on strategies from a game he'd owned for less than six hours.

"I don't understand how you're already an authority on this," Mika said, watching the second stranger walk away satisfied, having gotten actual tactical advice from a man who'd purchased the starter set at lunchtime.

"I contain multitudes," Marcus said, and then, more honestly, quieter, mostly to Dana walking beside him: "This is the first time all day I've felt like I actually belonged here instead of just tagging along for you guys. I didn't expect that. I thought I'd just be waiting around for the parts that were actually for me to matter."

"You always matter," Dana said. "Even on the days you don't find your own thing. But I'm really glad you found it today."

"Me too," he said, and meant it more than the words let on.

Mika got recognized once more too, near the end of the afternoon, wings repacked but the small enamel pin still clipped to her bag — a stranger's eyes catching it, lighting up, asking if she'd been the Ash-Walker at the meetup earlier, telling her the wing articulation had been the best she'd seen at the whole convention. Mika thanked her, glowing, and caught Naomi's eye afterward, and neither of them needed to say anything about how much that single moment had been worth, on its own, against everything else the day had cost and given back in equal measure.

They ended up, almost by accident, sitting in on the tail end of Marcus's tournament bracket back at the tabletop hall, all three of the others cheering, loudly and with absolutely no understanding of the rules, while he lost a close final match and didn't seem to mind at all, high on the simple fact of his friends actually watching him do the thing he'd found.

"You got second place in a game you learned four hours ago," Naomi said, delighted, as they walked away. "That's insane."

"It's a good game," Marcus said again, and this time nobody argued with him.

---

By the time they made it back to the hotel that evening, all four of them were sunburned along the same unfortunate stripe of exposed neck, footsore in a way none of their shoes had actually been designed for, and thoroughly, happily exhausted in the specific way that only comes from a day spent entirely, completely used up.

They spread out across the two narrow beds and the strip of carpet between them, bags of merchandise emptied out for inspection — Naomi's watercolor print propped carefully against the lamp where nothing could bend it, Marcus's starter set fully unboxed now despite everyone's earlier insistence that he wait, cards spread across the carpet as he explained, patiently, to Mika, why a card she clearly thought was useless was actually the whole engine of his winning strategy. Mika scrolled through the day's photos with the specific satisfaction of someone reliving something already, privately, sure she'd want to look back on for years, pausing on the shot of seven Ash-Walkers against the windows, and, longer, on a candid someone had taken of the four of them at the food truck, mid-laugh, none of them looking at the camera.

Dana lay flat on her back on the far bed, badge lanyard still around her neck, staring at the ceiling with an expression that had settled somewhere well past disappointment into something closer to contentment, though not without a residue of something else still sitting quietly underneath it.

"I didn't get the signing," she said, to the ceiling, mostly to herself.

"You want to go next year," Marcus said, not looking up from his cards. "We all know it. We're already going next year."

"I know. I'm not actually upset about it anymore, not really. I just think it's strange that the thing I built the whole day around isn't even the thing I'm going to remember most, and I don't know what to do with that yet."

"What are you going to remember most?" Naomi asked, quiet, still a little tentative, as though checking that the day's earlier scare hadn't left some lasting mark on how the others saw her.

Dana considered the question honestly, turning her head to look at the three of them scattered across the small hotel room, prints and cards and phone photos and the faint, lingering smell of bad takoyaki still clinging to all of their clothes.

"This," she said, simply. "All of it. Finding you, even though that part was terrifying. The panel we weren't even supposed to go to. Mika getting recognized twice. Marcus somehow becoming a card game menace in one afternoon. You buying a print because of how it made you feel instead of what show it was from." She let her head fall back against the pillow, smiling now, entirely without irony. "The signing would've been nice. I think some part of me is always going to wonder about it a little. But this was its own whole thing, and I don't think I'd trade it, even if I could go back and choose differently this morning."

"I'm really glad you didn't have to choose," Naomi said. "Even though I know I'm the reason you almost had to."

"You're not a reason for anything bad, Naomi. You're just a person who had a hard hour at a very loud convention, same as literally everyone else in this building has probably had at some point today." Dana reached over and squeezed her ankle, the nearest part of her within reach. "Next year you'll know your limits better. That's not a failure. That's just what a first time is for."

"Next year," Naomi repeated, testing the shape of the words, a small, disbelieving smile spreading across her face. "You're already planning on me coming next year."

"Obviously," Mika said, not looking up from her photos. "You're not new anymore. You're just one of us who happened to join a little later than the rest."

Nobody argued with that either. Somewhere outside, faintly, the convention center's noise had already begun to thin as the day wound down toward evening, four hours of driving waiting for them again in the morning, and none of them, for the moment, minded that at all. Marcus eventually turned off the lamp beside Naomi's print, and the room settled into the particular, comfortable dark of four tired people who trusted each other enough to fall asleep mid-conversation without worrying about how it would end, because they already knew: the same way it always did, together, and mostly fine.