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“Cool name.” I smiled at Laika. “Like the space dog, right? Is that what your costume is?”

Her brown eyes widened slightly. “Uh?”

“Yeah, the first animal in orbit. Kind of sad, honestly. She deserved better.” I realized I was still holding her hand and let go quickly. “Anyways, super cool and original costume.”

“I… yes,” Laika said, looking down at herself. “I’m an original… I suppose.”

“Nice. Cute ears and makeup. Great job on the fluffy tail too.” I praised the cosplayer.

I looked around. She seemed alone, no friends or family in sight, standing in the middle of a crowd looking like a lost puppy. “You here by yourself?”

“I… think so?” She said it like a question, brow furrowing. “I’m a little… confused. About how I got here.”

“Jet lag?”

“Maybe?”

“Where are you from?”

She paused. ”…Moscow.”

“Ah, that’s quite a long flight to Seattle. No wonder you’re out of it. I’m a local. Getting my engineering degree only about thirty minutes away from here.” I gestured vaguely at the line ahead of us. “Want to walk with me? I’m kind of just wandering until I find something interesting. Safety in numbers and all that.”

Her tail wagged and I momentarily appreciated the mechanism involved in its design. It looked almost like a real dog tail. “You… you don’t mind?”

“‘Course I wouldn’t mind.” I shrugged. “Always more fun to experience this stuff with someone else. An extra pair of eyes and nose helps locate the good food hidden in between a million other booths. The pizza here is overpriced garbage, but there’s supposed to be a new ramen booth this year.”

Laika’s smile was small and hesitant, a fragile thing that seemed ready to shatter at the slightest provocation. She fell into step beside me as we shuffled forward with the line.

…

The convention floor was a sensory onslaught of pure, concentrated nerdness.

I noted that Laika had a ‘THURSDAY’ pass tied to a friendship bracelet made from colorful cubes with painted eyes on it entwined with the word “DOGGORRIFIC”.

Dealer booths stretched in every direction across the concrete floor and gray carpet expanse. Glunko Pops formed towering walls at the Pop Culture Collectibles booth competing with waifu pillows.

Colorful fanart and OC art filled rows upon rows of Artists Alley with prices ranging from five dollar prints for an eight by ten page to three hundred dollar hand-crafted weapons. A guy in Professor Doomsday costume posed with kids dressed as Wander Woman and Arachnids Man while their mom dressed as Rikachu took photos.

Laika’s head swivelled left and right, attempting to take in everything all at once as if she was seeing it all for the first time in her life.

She stared for a long time at the Gundai booth selling Gundam model kits inhabiting many rows of colorful boxes with Japanese text. The replica of the Steel Sword Throne at the HBO display surrounded by a roped-off area and a long line of people waiting to sit on it, made her smile. She gasped at the group of the 504th Legion Lightning troopers marching past us, the plastic, white boots thudding against the carpet.

“Wow, they are all so dressed up,” she breathed out. “It’s like a massive… New Year’s costume party!”

“It is sort of like a costume party,” I agreed, “mixed with many merch sales and celebrity appearances. Plus all sorts of panels. I think there’s a panel with the voice actors from Arcane at 12. Then there’s gaming tournaments, anime screenings and tabletop demos. Basically, this place is a theme park for nerds.”

“Nerds?” the dog cosplayer tilted her head in a far too canine way.

“You know… uhm, people who are passionate about specific things like… movies, books or video games,” I explained, assuming that she didn’t know this particular English word. “The kind of obscure stuff that the mainstream used to make fun of us for appreciating. Nowadays nerdom became general pop-culture and everyone’s a nerd about one thing or another.”

“Ah. Humans, passionate about stories,” Laika mused, clearly in character of the space dog. “That seems… nice.”

We walked by a booth filled with handmade plushies. A rainbow-lettered sign declared “CUSTOM CUTIES BY MARTHA AUGUST, STITCHED WITH LOVE!”

Laika froze, staring at the display wall of animal-themed stuffed toys.

“Pretty,” she whispered.

She reached out, clawed fingers pawing at a small brown-white dog plushie with floppy felt ears and brown button eyes tagged as “Sleepy Puppy.”

“You can procure neat, original stuff all over this place,” I said. “If you’ve got the cash. Or, you know, look at it and daydream about buying it, ha ha. I do that a lot, it’s the first day. Can’t rush these things.”

Laika nodded, staring intently at the toy.

The vendor, a middle-aged woman with reading glasses on a beaded chain, and a large button on her cardigan that stated “I Put The PRO In Procrastination,” smiled at us. “Take your time, hon. Let me know if you want anything.”

Laika looked at me with something close to panic. “I don’t… I… I don’t have money.”

“How much for the sleepy doggo?” I inquired.

“Fifteen dollars,” the vendor replied.

“Aight.” I handed my VISA to the woman. “Bill me. We’ll take it.”

The vendor accepted my card, scanning it with her white card reader connected to her phone. “Thank you! You two make quite a cute couple.”

Her words made me feel off for some reason. I was single, right? And yet…

“Urhm, we’re not…” I began, then fell silent, since clarifying to a random salesperson that we just met this morning felt like unnecessary effort for my already rapidly depleting social battery. “Thanks.”

The dog girl smooshed the plushie into her chest, tail wagging, staring at me with wide eyes filled with disbelief. “You… bought me a gift?”

“Yep.”

“Why?”

“Seems like you wanted it.” I shrugged.

She blinked at me with increasingly wet eyes. I became concerned that she was going to cry. “Thank you, Ash,” she finally let out.

“No biggie.” I felt awkward about the unexpected sharpness of her reaction. “It wasn’t THAT expensive.”

“Nobody’s ever… I mean… I really appreciate it!” She squeezed the toy even harder.

“You are welcome,” I cleared my throat uneasily. “Come on. Let’s go check out the rest of the con.”

…

We roamed around for a few more hours across the endless islands of the nerdom sea.

Artists Alley greeted us with colorful vinyl stands and banners of various sizes and original art prints of various size filling portfolios and hanging off cardboard boxes, metal shelves and table sides. Laika was particularly impressed with a watercolor painting featuring a dark forest and a werewolf under a twilight moon.

We stopped at a gaming booth where a guy with a faded, large C4P4 tattoo on his forearm was running demos of a new tabletop RPG called “Echoes of the Abyss.” Laika attentively listened as he explained how dice rolls determined character actions, tail wagging whenever something exciting happened in the sample combat. She rolled a natural twenty on her first try and the demo runner gave her a free set of colorful dice as a prize.

Then, we found a photo op station where you could pose with replica props from famous movies. Laika picked up a toy lightsaber with the reverence of a novitiate handling a religious artifact. The green blade thrummed and lit up when she pressed the button, and her whole face lit up too in wild amazement.

“I’m… I’m not smelling any magic,” she commented, making my mind wobble slightly sideways. “Yet it glows.”

“It’s… you know what, I’ve no idea what Jedi swords are powered by,” I mused, taking her quirky comments as in-character jokes. “The force passing through a crystal… maybe? I’ve read Star Glades lore ages ago. I… think there are special crystals involved or somesuch? K… uhhh, ah, right… Kyber crystals!” It took me a minute to recall the name.

“What’s a Jedi?” she asked.

“Jedi are basically space wizards with laser swords. The good guys, anyway. The bad guys called Sith have red ones.”

“Red because evil?”

“In this context, yep. The color coding makes it easier to know who to root for.”

She nodded solemnly. “I… like the narrative simplicity of such. Knowing who to trust by their blade colors. Usually I sort out the truth with my nose…”

“It’s not always that easy,” I began, regaling her with the Emperor Palpatine backstory.

We kept walking. Eventually, my feet started complaining even more and my stomach reminded me that I skipped breakfast, sustaining myself on a single coffee.

“Are you hungry?” I asked.

”…” Laika paused, “…yes? I don’t have money,” she repeated unnecessarily.

“Let’s grab something anyway as a snack. Even terrible con food is better than passing out from low blood sugar.”

We found a relatively short line at a pretzel stand called “TWIST & SHOUT - Hot Pretzels & Cold Drinks.” The menu listed items like “The Classic” ($6), “Cinnamon Sugar Bomb” ($7), and “Jalapeño Cheese Monster” ($8). I grabbed two classics with mustard.

Laika nommed her meal cautiously, tearing off small pieces and chewing slowly.

“This is good,” she said between mouthfuls. “Warm and salty.”

“Pretzels are definitely a convention classic,” I agreed, “right up there with overpriced pizza and overpriced energy drinks.”

“Conventions have their own food culture?”

“Everything has its own food culture if you look hard enough. There are probably academic papers about it.” I chortled.

Laika smiled. “I like learning new things. Things I never knew existed. There’s so many new, strange things here!”

“Yeah? What’s something you’ve learned today?”

She thought about it. “So many humans here dress up as characters they love. They spend time and money to look like fictional beings on a random day that’s not even a holiday. It seems… silly?”

“It is silly,” I agreed. “Magnificently, gloriously silly. And also… Hmmm… Meaningful. Our way of expressing love for stories we enjoy. Plus, dressing up as your fav character is fun. We tell ourselves stories about who we are, where we came from, where we’re going. Dressing up as a character is like… wearing your favorite story on the outside. You’re dressed up too, no?”

“Uhhm. Yes.” Laika looked down at her own costume. “I’m wearing a story too, I suppose. A very… sad story. Of cold, hunger… betrayal.”

“Sad stories can have happy endings,” I said. “Or at least happier middles.”

“Can they?”

“I’d like to think so.” I shrugged. “In nerd culture if you don’t like the author’s story you go on fanfiction dot net and write your own variation and conclusion to a book!”

“What?” She chortled. “Really?”

“Really,” I said. “Some books get thousands of fanfictions, read by millions. Garry Cotter has something like two million fanfics. Maybe more! I’ve… read far too many of them,” I admitted. “Insomnia is a bitch.”

“Wow,” she muttered. “That’s a lot of book variations. How does one even find the time to read all of the variations?”

“Sort by most liked and then read them by the themes you personally appreciate,” I shrugged.

“What sort of themes do you sort… fanfiction books by?” she asked.

“I like isekais,” I replied.

“What are those?”

“Like,” I began. “It’s when someone, usually an average person, from the current year of our lord gets transported into their favorite story and then they do stuff like prevent their favorite characters from dying, maybe fall in love with one of the people they rescue from certain doom, and…”

…

“Say, who is your favorite character… that the isekai protagonist must rescue from Garry Cotter fanfics?” Laika asked as we walked.

“Uhm,” I blushed slightly at the unexpected question. “I like… Tenksa. She’s a metamorphic mage whose hair and skin constantly changes color. She can turn into different animal-humanoids too, depending on her mood.”

“How did she… die?”

“Werewolves killed her,” I explained. “She fought bravely, but there were far too many of them invading Bogwarts in the last book in the series and…”

A rather curious tent booth appeared at the end of a row in the vendor hall, wedged between a comic book reseller and a place selling custom dice bags, waifu pillows and mouse pads.

A table covered in a black cloth, shined with hand-painted falling stars that looked like stylized fox silhouettes upon closer inspection. Strings of orange fairy lights draped along the edges, blinking in a slow, hypnotic pattern. Behind it stood…

A cosplayer in a full-body costume.

The costume was really well made, professional quality. A cube-shaped head made of cardboard, felt, and hot glue, painted matte black with angular eyes cut out and backed with red mesh. The mouth was a jagged zigzag line of white paint. The overall effect was a blocky, pixelated face that looked like it had crawled out of a PS1-era survival horror game. Her incredibly curvy body was covered in a zentai suit featuring pixels, the arms concealed by long black gloves with clawed fingers.

Hundreds of black shirts hung behind her, featuring drawings of foxes with accompanying meme-text.

A laminated sign on the table read: “PIXXELVIXEN’S MYSTICAL WARES, SELFIES & BATHWATER!” Below that, more colorful text: “FEEL FREE TO PAW AND TRY ON THE MERCHANDISE! CASH, CARDS AND SOULS ACCEPTED!”

“Hey! You! The guy with the face!” the cubehead declared.

“…me?” I asked.

“Yeah you, bro,” the curvy, tall cosplayer added through the layers of cardboard box. “Buy something or get executed! Oversized chainsaw gas doesn’t pay for itself! Have you looked at the Pacific Rim gas prices recently? Like, yeesh, it’s like our cars are powered by teh rarest dinosaur souls or something!”

“Nice Cubehead Executioner Habitat Evil cosplay,” I commented, looking over the shirts.

“I am the Punisher of Sins, yass!” The cosplayer struck a pose, planting the tip of the giant chainsaw on the carpet and leaning against it. “And I demand tribute, Gloom Souls Sun knight! Are you worthy of my wares, traveler? Or are you just another NPC blocking my line of sight to the bubble tea shop?”

I laughed. “I might be worthy. How much for the ‘Emotional Support Human’ shirt?”

“For you?” The box tilted forward, the painted eye-holes staring at me. “Twenty bucks. Or your number, or… soul. I accept all the things!”