The Cospauper

Christian Miller

Gem Roguestar kicked the door out of her sort-of-Youtube-boyfriend's Volvo Valkyr. The cockpit glass shouted at her in impact font that 'excessive self-inflicted damage may void the warranty', and to please stop.

"Patronizing aircars!" Gem stepped out, kicked the door again in a rage. She checked the tip of her stompy silver Powergirl boots for scuffing, checked her makeup in the mirrored surface of the car's polarized exterior before it flew away. No scuffing, phew.

The crowd was thick as cheap foundation in front of The Fulcrum's immense glass towers, coagulating with cosplay, crossplay, and mashplayers of every star-level and like!-tally.

A genderbent Thor and Loki couple swaggered by, the female Thor looking utterly Aryan. 6'2", perfectly sculpted Miss Universe biceps, disproportionate boobs, tiara that was almost certainly real platinum. Probably a GMO-body grown just for this event. You had to be royalty to afford that kind of costuming swag. Gem was the opposite of that. A cospauper.

"Hey, aren't you... what's her name?" Lady Thor rubbernecked.

"Gem Roguestar? Yes." Gem got up off the ground, did a pose.

"Uhhh... who? No, you're a bit... Nevermind. Good luck in the competition!" The two mythological and literal goddesses walked off arm-in-gauntlet, laughing to themselves about something, looking over their shoulder.

A bit... what? Gem's throat tightened, like the time she'd accidentally eaten a peanut. She'd worked on a small party balloon of self-confidence, making costuming videos and fishing for compliments on the Interwebz all day, and with that little bitchslap of negative human interaction, she felt the balloon deflate.

You're a microcelebrity, Gem. No, you're at least a millicelebrity, just look at your subscriber base! She psyched herself up. With a wave of her Power Glove throwing neon-emerald and ruby holograms against the bright latticed vastness of High City. A virtual coliseum of her Followers erupted around her; mostly avatars of douche-looking guys with names like "Cheetron" and "Warzennegar" with endless drooly comments on her Ivy Valentine cosplay saying things like, 'gawwwwd, marry me baby or I'll seppuku myself', and 'Def SMASH!!! I need moar of DAT a$$!!!!'. Gem felt that rush of pride and validation, like the first time she beat Super Mario, and the confidence-balloon swelled, from the size of an eyeliner brush up to a bronzer.

She scrolled down with her Power Glove's directional pad and found a comment with twenty thumbs down. She yelled at herself not to read it, but then gave in, "IDK what you BBW-lovers are on about. This bitch is too much cottage cheese, and I'm not looking to save the whales. Kind of looks like a shemale too. Stop embarrassing yourself, fatty."

DELETE!!!

But the damage had already been done, the balloon exploded, and she took an aerosolized anti-anxiety spray up her nostril in a futile attempt to combat a downward spiraling rash of negative thought.

FUCK! No crying, Gem! Stupid, stupid! She picked herself up off the floor, retouched the delta of smeared mascara from all her loser crying, and took a walk of shame to the end of the registration line. A long, thousand-person-long, line.

"Hey bootycakes, hows the con going?" It was her sort-of-boyfriend, Lazerfalcon, on the holo-phone.

"Oh, uh, you know. Going. It's great!" She masked the hurt in her voice by calling up her Japanese-schoolgirlish 'customer service' voice she used when working for call centers, before robots ate up that job category globally.

"That's great baby. Hey- I just wanted to check up to see if we're still on for that sub-orbital zero-g after-after-party tonight. I totes can't miss this. Biz, you know?  Connections to keep up and all, and I'm pretty sure D-Vuh will be there."  D-Vuh, as in only the biggest 'webz star in the universe with 20 billion views and 500 million subscribers.

"Oh, yeah! Of course!"

'Don't get your hopes up, Gem,' the little devil on her right shoulder told her. 'Your sort-of-Youtube-boyfriend always has an excuse for why he forgot to pick you up.'

"Next!" A seven foot Juggernaut, complete with helmet head was at the ticketing booth. His hands were the size of wedding cakes. Ok, not really the size of wedding cakes, more like a nutella-snickerdoodle party cake. God, relived-childhood-trauma crying gave Gem such a craving for cake. A cake crush. A cake-on. Yeah.

Gem got on her Power Glove and Twumbled it to her meager hundred followers.

@GemRoguestar: "Relived-childhood-trauma crying gives me SUCH a cake-on. #cakenomnom"

"Ma'am! The walk-in registration for the three-day event is two hundred sixty five dollars." The giant live-action comic book character boomed.

"What! Oh sorry," Gem snapped her fingers, dimming the me-dia hologram. Pulled up her bank account balance.  $214. Fuck.

"I think I read on the I-con page that celebrities get a discount, right? I'm Gem Roguestar, I should be on the list," She put one hand on her hip and crossed her knees in her best pinup pose.

The Juggernaut pulled down ridiculously tiny glasses to read something, "No, sorry, you're not on any of our lists."

Gem felt a rush of desperation.  Desperate times, desperate measures... She touched the juggernaut's hand, making hers look like a first-trimester fetus' in comparison, and gave her most convincing sexy-eye.

"What are you doing?" The juggernaut asked, yanking his hand back and looking around for managerial staff.

"Oh, uh, nevermind. How much is just the one-day thing?"

"One hundred dollars."

Gem sighed, held out her Power Glove to be swiped by the Juggernaut's scanner. A hundred fourteen for food, merch, water, and the contest entrance fee? Ouch... She got back on her Glove as she walked through the nanomagic glass panes of The Fulcrum Convention Center that spread like a derezzing Nintendo boss. Flat two-inch-cubed pixels of crystal-like material, pulling aside.

@GemRoguestar: "Broke as FUCK at I-Con, hate to beg but I could use a donation. Check out my Amazon wishlist." 

@GemRoguestar: "Buy one of my genderbent Magneto pinup prints at my e-store or something and I'll love you 4ever! Wet kisses 2 my awsum fans!"

Gem checked her 'cake-on' post, and it had gotten all of seven likes, and one retweet by a user named 'GaryStuStu'.   Come on Gem, you can do better.

After getting her Spiderman #635 signed by the disembodied, cryogenically frozen head of Stan Lee atop a robot body, Gem entered a Street Fighter 2 Turbo competition. She came in third place, behind a seven year old Japanese girl named 'Kiki' and a five hundred pound man who could've convincingly played Jabba The Hut (but was just in t-shirt cargo pants). The Jabba The Hut guy was nice and congratulated her, but when they stood together for the 'winners' pic where they all held up nano-assembled Ryu trophies, the big guy grabbed a handful of Gem's ass. Gem ended up with a frown in the pic, and they had to reshoot, and it got weird.

Afterward, Kiki's plainclothes tiger-mom took her aside and yelled at her like a drill sergeant, "2^nd place!? What do I do with '2^nd place'?! We are not royals! How will we pay our rent? Stupid loser girl!" Kiki sobbed into her Sailor Jupiter costume as her mom wrangled her to the next competition.

No negativity!

"Hey, um... Can I get a pic of... What are you?" A vanilla male Deadpool that was as skinny as Gem was thick asked, holding up his Appoogle Futurecam.

Yes! Gem celebrated internally, trying hard not to emote how desperate she was, this being her first pic-request in ten minutes of strutting the convention.

"It's a Terminator-Powergirl mashup. I call it, 'Powergirlator'. I actually have a web series and fan fic about the character-"

"Yeah, uh, that's cool."

Gem tallied up about twelve kudos for her costume, although one of them was from a blind man and five were from guys who just wanted Dat Picz of her from behind. But hey, All Attention Is Good Attention!

That's what her idol, Princess Cindercat, said, once, in an interview video at Mars-Con. Cindercat was Gem's favorite ascendancy story, working her way up from lowly Los Angeles Wastelander, living in a crumbling Section-8 suburb, dayjob at a sweatshop and sewing Black Widow jumpsuits by night. A plus-sized player like Gem and without cash for a gastro-bypass, boob job, let alone a vat-grown body, Cindercat had started out the laughing stock of competitions, enduring years of bodyshaming and lecher creepazoids. Cindercat got her big break when she won 'Best of Contest' at Apocacon 2029 with her killer Post-apoc Psylocke-Robocop mashup that involved tattered (scandalously revealing) blue jumpsuit and rusty cyber-prosthetic arms that she'd lathed from the bumper of her own beater Toyota, and later revealed gave her actual tetanus.

Haters claimed that Cindercat had hooked up with the judge, a famous Marvel artist who was a well-known BBW lover, which was never proven, but the flame wars surrounding the controversy boosted both Cindercat's and the judge's social media followings, so it was win-win. After that, Cindercat made it to "America's Next Top Geek", and shortly thereafter married Princess Sarah Gates-Walton, of the Gates-Walton Corpate Empire. Gates-Walton was the first transgender / lesbian / transpecies royalty, with 20% feline genes in her vat-body that gave her literal and not just makeup cat-eye. The utter scandal – not the les/trans part, but the fact that a Royal had married so far below her subscriber level -- took the mediaverse by storm and catapulted Cindercat to cosplay, Youtube and RL superstardom. "Cindercat's beauty came from within," Princess Sarah was quoted saying during an interview at the Transplanetary Academy Awards, which she won, by default, because 80% of the Academy Awards voting members were Gates-Walton family members or employees.

That was Gem's plan. I'm a professional cosplayer, Gem reminded herself. Her destiny was written in the stars. The Cosplay Contest was on. The contest was on?!

"Again, the Contest will be starting in two minutes in Fulcrum Plaza," Gem wished female comic characters didn't wear ridiculously impractical high heels as she struggled to run and ended up tripping, falling, and knocking over a team of hairy bearded men cosplaying sexy-Pikachus.

The Plaza was a stage made literally of gold and jewels and nano-fab quartz, showcasing fabulous cosplayers in laserlight and pop-tart flavored confetti. The crowd was roaring against an 80's-wave techno remix of the Jem And The Holograms theme.

You see? They're playing your song, Gem. "Tonight is my night. Tonight is MY night," Gem subvocalized her mantra. The liquid latex on her right cheekbone was already itching and her hourglass corset had her nearly throwing up her lunch of sugar, carb, fat, and gluten-free cupcakes. Cakes. Cakes. She ate some pop-tart confetti, did one last costume check and soldiered up.

"You are beautiful, you are skilled, you are awesome." Her future was hinging on this. This was her Cindercat moment: judge Prince Charming was somewhere out there, beyond the neon and the spotlights and the douchebags, and she would wow him into submission. She would wow them all.

"Next up we have... Powergator?  Powergirlator?"

Gem strutted out before the cheering thousands, lightning in her step, stomach exploding with butterflies, walking on air – literally, the catwalk was translucent, gave her vertigo. She was almost blinded by the spotlights and nearly toppled off the stage. "Come on girl, get it together!"

The Terminator exoskeleton-under-ripped flesh prosthetic tore off her face again, and she scrambled stress-palsied fingers into her Powergirl Boob Window for the emergency adhesive to fix it.

"FUCK FUCK FUCK!!!!!" She slapped the piece back on. The moderate courtesy-applause of the audience was dimming towards agitated boredom.

"Uhh... What the heck is she supposed to be? Warmachine's girlfriend?" Gem heard someone say.

"I think she's supposed to be some kind of Powergirl fembot. Too much padding though, her body shape is all wrong."

"That's slutty even for I-Con, doesn't she know there are kids here?"

No crying Gem, no crying! But it was too late, she could already feel herself going to the dark place. "You are beautiful, you are skilled, you are awesome, you are beautiful you are skilled-" In her mind she visualized all the skinny mean bitches from high school, the eugenically perfect Thor cosplayer, the avatars of every smug anonymous Interwebz hater, all of them, sitting out there in the audience.

I AM AWESOME!

Gem puffed up her boob window, pushed her sizable rump out, nailed the Powergirl flex and screamed at the top of her lungs,

"HASTA LA VISTA, BABY!"

With the flick of a thumb on her Power Glove she activated her fiber-optic Terminator Eye, that burned ruby red, and simultaneously revved up her custom-machined M61 Terminator minigun, and imagined mowing all of the haters down. Non-fatally, in the kneecap.

The gun flared fake muzzle flashes at two hundred rounds-per-minute, roared like a high-caliber lion, and the crowd roared back at Gem.

"That's fucking awesome! Holy shit!"

"It's Terminator-Powergirl, OMG that is genius!"

"You are MURDERING it, girl! Rock that beautiful curvy body!"

The nexus erupted into standing ovation.

Gem felt her confidence-balloon filling up so big it was pressing up against her chest like some kind of xenomorph chest-burster made of pride. Her heart felt like it was going to explode into a gooey mess of chocolate-maple-bacon-buttercream frosting. Cake. The feeling was pure cake!

Reeling from the high, Gem watched her realtime Interwebz analytics taking off in her hologram. She'd gained a hundred Youtube subscribers in thirty seconds, there were 2,348 notes on her Twumbler dash. The buzz read:

"Who the HELL is this Powergirlator darkhorse?"

"We’ve got an honorary booth at Luna-Con for this Gem Roguestar girl,"

"She was a little too chubby for my tastes-"

DELETE!! BAN!!!

She waited for the depression spiral to start, but Gem felt her confidence balloon had just become a confidence Death Star. She was Mario rocking an invincibility star. The negative comment bounced off of her like a 9mm Beretta round off of a T-800. Or a Powergirl, for that matter.

"Hey, Powergirlator," it was the vat-bred Thor giantess, who stepped in front of her, almost on-top of her as Gem stepped off the stage.

Gem clenched her thunder thighs and balled her small fists. At any other given moment of her life, she would've run away screaming from the uber-intimidating cloned Amazon goddess.

But not today, not now.

If this blue-blood cos-Nazi wanted to start some shit, Gem was certain she was going to cut a bitch, or at least punch her in her pumpkin-sized stem-cell-titties, even if it meant Gem was going to be smashed to a pulp of discount silver-metallic makeup, white jumpsuit, and cos-pauper flesh.

"What do YOU want!?" Gem killed a perfect Powergirl scowl.

The giantess did a mock-pose of the Terminator's thumbs-up and awkward grin.

"Not bad, for a Pleb. Not bad."

"Oh. Thanks. I think."

Gem got a serious popularity bump, and #gemroguestar briefly trended, at it's peak, at 103^rd, just behind #CatPoopingOnRabbit and in front of #USNukesSyria and #RefugeeHolocaust.  Unfortunately, she did not win the competition, but did get an honorable mention as "Best Rookie Commoner" cosplayer. She'd also sold ten of her Sexy Magneto crossplay print putting her bank balance at $210 (cha ching!) and an Amazon drone came flying in through a window with a medium pepperoni meatlovers pizza and a bucket of gourmet chocolate-maple-bacon-buttercream frosted cupcakes. "Courtesy of user MadMaximus34," the drone said in Stephen Hawking voice.

Gem did a quick animated gif of her wetly kissing the screen of her Power Glove, pulling back to a hawt boob window cleavage shot, and beamed it over to MadMaximus34 as promised.

"Treat yourself, Gem, you deserve it!" She plowed face-first into a cupcake.

First place, in fact, went to the Lady Thor, who turned out to be Princess Cindercat herself, who was at I-Con incognito in one of her many ten-million-dollar alter-bodies. Discovering this, Gem felt simultaneously fangasmic that she'd actually gotten to talk to her idol and superceleb, but also betrayed that she'd been basically snipe-dissed by her own idol, and repulsed that her idol had gone from being a sweet lowly street girl to a self-centered, royal fascist bitch.

"Fame will never do that to me, I'm so above all that," Gem said to herself as she unsubscribed from Youtube channels that she'd 'outgrown', who by now had far less subscribers than her.

Princess Cindercat in the body of Lady Thor marched up to the stage to accept her I-Con trophy to raucous applause, and the Hulk / Thing security team had to bodyslam several fanboys and girls who tries to rush the stage.

"I'd just like to thank all of my loving fans out there, and I'd like to say I had an AWESOME time working with Robert Downey Jr. IV and Hugh Jackman Jr. in X-Men vs. Avengers VIII, and you guys should all totally check it out in VR theaters June 7. Also, don't forget to buy my latest platinum album, 'Cindercat On Fire' produced by B-Dreddy.   Oh, right, and don't forget to comment, like and subscribe! If I get to two billion subscribers by 12 midnight tonight, all my fans will get a chance to pre-pre-order my AAA video game 'Creed of Cindercat' and I'll be releasing a new line of this Lady Thor body I'm wearing for all of you to rent to your next con, or use for other fun purposes-"

Princess Cindercat's voice cut out as a flaming arrow whizzed, out of the rafters, into her. Into her kneecap.  Non-fatally.

"WWWAAAAAAAAHHHHH!" Princess Cindercat wailed so loud into the mic it actually blew out one of the speakers. Blood splattered the phonecameras of the first row audience, who kept filming, but tried to frantically bag, bottle or ziplock the blood of the princess like saintly relic fan memorabilia, no doubt to enshrine in their collections or to auction online. Her red cape caught on fire, as did all the blue spandex she was wearing, and Cindercat was soon a mashplay of Thor and the Human Torch.

"GET ME OUT OF THIS BODY!!!!"  She caterwauled, sounding more like a whining toddler now than anything else.  A phalanx of Gates-Walton SWAT proceeded to secure the area, firing rubber bullets, active denial microwave guns, and tear gas into the audience at anyone holding a gun, lightsaber, crossbow, blaster, Chitauri scepter, vorpal blade or other weapon, prop or otherwise, which was a whole lot of cosplayers. The Plaza erupted in screaming, but only a few attendees ran for the exits, and everyone else kept filming the event while trying to dodge the various nearly-lethal munitions. Two Punishers were brutally punished in the face by sonic-boom weapons that blew the spandex off their ripped bodies, and a half-wolf She Hulk who was apparently on some kind of amphetamine, was tased eight times, once in each boob.

Gem (gently) tossed her Vulcan M61 onto a box of Captain America t-shirts so as to avoid being shot at. She dove out of the way of a flying teargas canister, and huddled behind a life-size statue of Colossus fronting the disembodied Stan Lee-head booth. Gem tried to use the burning curtains and costumes ignited accidentally by the microwave gun to get well-lit, focused shots of the havoc. "Oh God! This is crazy! I need a new lens for this camera! It looks like I got buttercream frosting on the lens!" She did, in fact, and wiped the frosting off with a non-T-800 exoskeletal finger, licked it up.

From her vantage point Gem made out a team of neuroscientists, biophysicists and other future-science-looking people in labcoats rushing in, with a Princess Cindercat-original body with tubes and IV's sticking out, an oxygen mask on the face.

They blasted the still-screaming Princess Cindercat-Thor's body with fire extinguishers to put out the flames from the charred flesh and strapped her down, placing a transcranial-consciousness-transfer cap on her head.

"Area secure, ma'am," the SWAT leader declared to the incoherent Princess. She responded with strangulated groans.

A future-scientist injected her full of a lime-green liquid just like Predator blood.

"She's flux-incapacitated, we've got to get the princess' consciousness out, stat!" The scientists activated a giant wheeled MRI machine the size of a Batmobile. After hooking them up to the machine the two Cindercat-shell-bodies were engulfed in lightning arcs and magnetic-resonance wave rays blew out all the cameras in a 30 meter radius, but Gem was smart, had her Power Glove shielded in the faraday cleavage of statue-Colossus' metal pecs.

As they were bringing Princess Cindercat to life in her original-body clone, with all the paramilitary types and other Gates-Walton personnel focused on the corporate dauphine's consciousness transfer, something crazy happened.

Three dozen cosplayers, and a good quarter of the jackbooted, riot-shielded SWAT team tore off their costumes to reveal transgender, transracial, transpecies, mashup cosplays of Katniss Everdeen, Green Arrow, Robinhood and other revolutionary archer characters.  The sudden explosion of red hair, Hunger Games girls-on-fire, and furry red anthro-foxes made it appear as though the entire I-Con convention had suddenly burst into flame.

The guerilla flashmob of rebel archers drew their bows, crossbows, longbows, lightbows, laserbows, and fired a hail of electrified arrows into the Gates-Walton guards, who went into convulsions, like a synchronized dance troupe of glitchcore breakdancers, before toppling to the floor.

"We are Phoenix Uprising, and we represent the many!" the archers raised their bows and shouted in unison.

From the rafters, a Katniss descended, in a simple hand-crafted suit with feathers made of red felt, and a cheap bargain-store Halloween wig. Looking closer, Gem realized that the black jumpsuit was coming apart at the seams.   Her Hunger Games: Mocking Jay militarized bottoms had white leg stripes that were painted on with what looked like whiteout.

"OMG, that is such a crap costume!" Gem thought to herself. Then she thought to herself, "Wait, that girl looks familiar. Isn't that... no, it can't be."

It was Princess Sarah Gates-Walton herself, Princess Cindercat's girlfriend.

ACTUAL old-blood royalty. Daughter of the owner of basically most of Earth and most of the other interplanetary corporate empires. Gem almost passed out.

"Sarah... you bitch!" The newly resurrected (ex?)girlfriend, Princess Cindercat, now in her original body, threw the IV tubes and needles to the floor, and stepped over the charred remains of her Lady Thor body paying it no mind, like it was a molted snakeskin.

"No, YOU bitch, Cinder."  Princess Sarah shot an arrow into the 200-foot runway screen, into Princess Cindercat's projected face. She swung down like a real-life Spiderman, somersaulting onto the convention stage upon a pile of collapsed unconscious SWAT team members.

The two royal (former?) lovers stood off against one another as the Fulcrum Convention center fell silent. The entire world was definitely watching history unfold. It was like that time China misread a hot air balloon festival in Seoul and launched a nuke into Honolulu, and everyone waited for World War III. Like that moment where Galactus has his planet-sized mouth open ready to devour the Earth and the Silver Surfer rockets up to face him in a cosmic standoff for the fate of the world. The livestream of the I-Con event skyrocketed to #1 by a long shot.

Princess Sarah began, "I still remember the day I discovered you. In your mindblowing Psylocke-Robocop costume that you slaved over for months, eating krill paste-flavored soynoodles and junking your rusty beater to put together. I remember that girl who could out-game, out-80's movie, out-Marvel reference any comic book store owner in San Diego, hands down. That beautiful soul who was imperfect, chubby, homely on the outside, but on the inside was the most beautiful, talented, creative soul I'd ever met in my life. The friend who taught me the Konami Code, the confidant who showed me how to fabricate a foam Doctor Doom gauntlet and sew Psylocke boot covers, the lover who stole me out of my Royal shell of privelege and with whom I boldly went to furthest edges of geekdom, where I'd never dared to go before.

"And what are you, now? You've destroyed everything you've ever loved about cosplay. You're a symbol of everything you once hated. Cosplay was a celebration. It was about showing your love for your favorite characters and making friends. It was about creativity and acceptance. Now you've made it about money and elitism and exclusivity. The celebration has become a cut-throat competition, a costuming Hunger Games."

"Yeah? Well, your costume looks like utter shit, Sarah. I mean really."

Gem got really pissed off that she wasn't able to see whether Princess Cindercat was being sarcastic and the two Princesses ended up making up and hugging tearjerkingly, or if Cindercat was serious and they ended up catfighting to the death.

Gem's Power Glove ran out of battery simultaneously as another wave of SWAT exploded in through the roof of the convention center, and chased away / arrested the Phoenix Uprising army, along with Gem and all the other con goers.

Gem thought that Princess Sarah Gates-Walton gave a really great speech, and though she wasn't sure exactly how the speech applied to her, she suddenly felt kind of bad about... she wasn't sure but she felt maybe she might've been an ass to some people, and maybe she might've taken advantage a little of some of her fans. Maybe. But it was all in service of her craft! Gem's heart was in the right place. Probably the Princess was referring to some of the other people.

"Hey, could I get your sig on this? That minigun prop is the sickest thing I've ever seen and you uh... Look amazing," said a beat-up Iron Man. She knew that scatter-eyed, mouthbreath-ey look that meant this guy was into Gem's body, but she appreciated that he didn't like, try to grab anything or make any creepy comments.

"Thanks! You look amazing too, especially that arc reactor with the cyan LEDs. Too bad it got fried..."  Thinking about it now, Gem had rarely if ever given any actual compliments other than to more important people that she wanted to sub or follow or like her back, or give her some kind of celebratorial benefit or buy her meatlovers or donate her rent money in exchange for pics of dildo-in-underboob.

It felt good to do a nice thing.

Gem signed the half-burnt itinerary of Tony Stark whose aluminum foil suit had been microwaved by the active denial gun, which had set his program on fire. Then there was the sonic boomed Punisher, whose program had ripped, but he papier maché'd it back together with Mountain Dew Red mixed with some of Gem's peanut butter frosting (she couldn't eat it anyway - allergies). The Punisher actually turned out to be a girl, but with this weird hormonal condition that made her crazy buff even if she ate tubs of lard all day and lay in bed. Gem didn't realize you could be bodyshamed for being TOO in shape, and found herself relating to the Punisher's life experiences, like a lot. It also felt really great to really have honest conversations with other human beings face to face.

Gem wasn't in the schedule, didn't have a booth or panel or anything, but she sharpie'd her signature over the blurb of one of the no-show voice actresses who played Harley Quinn in the straight-to-Youtube spin-off of Suicide Squad, which Gem thought sucked ass anyway. She pasted her business card over the MIA chick's portrait with her emergency adhesive from her boob window. Both the Iron Man and Punisher girl asked Gem for her pic (photo-reqs at 25, a new record yay!) and also asked her if she wanted to come get a bite and Karaoke and maybe do some retrogaming with them later. The superskinny Deadpool kid was going to be there too. She thought about it, but then remembered her sort-of-famous Hollywood director sort-of-Youtube-boyfriend and all the opportunities he could provide, then turned them down.

Then she remembered something Princess Sarah had said, "Cosplay is costume-play. It's about expressing yourself, geeking out, having fun and making awesome friends." Then Gem thought about what an absolute mega-bitch Princess Cindercat had turned out to be.

"Hey, uh, yo, guys! Wait up! If you guys let me bake you some snickerdoodle-frosted red velvet lollipop cakes, or generally have anything involving cake at some point in the night, I'm SO in!"

© Christian Miller 2016 All Rights Reserved