by Justin Coke
Mad Hatter just cutting to the chase and telling her she was making an ass out of herself was a brutally painful relief. She just hoped Jason could forgive her for being so ridiculous.
[138] Only because Facebook had made it easier to scale Everest than unfriend someone.
[139] Tick Tock’s mother had somehow found out that she was going to be in the turkey suit for the pep rally. She’d only agreed as a favor to the theater teacher, who had to produce the skits. Tick Tock suspected Jane Emerson, another Jehovah’s Witness, had someone gotten wind of it and ratted her out. If Jane had known that Tick Tock knew she was blowing Billy Paut in the bathroom during lunch hour, she might not have dared inform on her. But in any case, her mother had shown up on a rascal scooter half an hour before the show and thrown a screaming fit on the gym floor because Thanksgiving was a pagan holiday. Tick Tock had left just to end the embarrassment. Of course Kathy saw the whole thing, along with a hundred other kids. Tick Tock had not planned on thinking about that humiliation today, and the others sensed her mood shift.
[140] One might argue that Kathy expanding her horizons once she had escaped the tight cultural confines of her religious small town was hardly a bad thing, but Tick Tock had bled for her nerdhood. She had opened a vein with Glamdring and let the blood drip on the Altar of Gygax. She had prepped for D&D games in the margins of the Watchtower as a brainwashing resistance strategy. She put anime films in innocent looking .zip files beneath five or six layers of directories, then gave it a password the NSA would take a century to crack. She had hidden books in dark and dusty places like a Cathar renting a room from the Inquisition. She had resisted interrogations and learned to lie like like the Cambridge Five. To be at this con now was the work of a lifetime for her. For Kathy, it was a fun thing to do this weekend. The contempt she had for those who came into nerdery the easy way was basically the same contempt a person finishing a marathon feels for someone who took a cab and wants to be treated as an equal since they both went a long way that day.
[141] Not really. Tick Tock would spend the next couple of days envisioning cooler stuff she could have said.
[142] Hayes was personally responsible for the West Memphis Anime Blockade, which lasted from 1995 until the Blockbuster went out of business in 2013. The three West Memphis weeaboos hated Hayes.
[143] Con things, Hayes was starting to realize, was about 80% waiting in line for the things you wanted to do, or wandering through retail booths strategically placed to maximize foot traffic between the places where you waited in line.
[144] The precise amount of body fat where you’re looking ripped but don’t look like you’re trying to be ripped. Focus groups have shown that it was the ideal body fat percentage to appeal to teenage girls. Six percent was too aggressive and 12% was getting a little tubby (by the unrealistic body image standards as applied to male sex idols).
[145] Kid Twist had been eight, and had spent New Years Eve 1999 thinking about the stock market crashing; he’d fallen asleep sometime around eleven and woke up just after midnight. Seeing the clock was still on, which meant the power was still on, and taking that as proof civilization was not imploding, he’d drifted back to sleep. However, Kid Twist is using the phrase in an ironical, intentionally corny way unrelated to how he personally had actually partied in 1999.
[146] They were in fact at the Star Trek: Discovery panel. Or, it would be more accurate to say they were in line to go to the panel. The valet, or line wrangler, or cockblocker, or whatever you call the guy who stops letting people in, was watching them. He’d been doing this so long he could subconsciously do the math and know exactly who he would be getting into a fight with when he brought down the Velvet Rope of Doom and let them know they’d wasted their time. But seriously, who shows up only six hours early for the new Star Trek show panel? Was this their first con? Half an hour later, Tick Tock looked at Mad Hatter.
“Daniel,” Emily said.
“Yes?”
“Do you even care about this show?”
“I thought you did.”
“Kid Twist is the one dressed like a Klingon.”
“Let me text him,” Mad Hatter said.
“He says don’t be idiots we’re not getting in, come have tacos before Pablo leaves.”
“Who is Pablo?”
“Unclear.”
“I could ravage some tacos,” Emily said.
“...”Mad Hatter said, his brain miraculously popping his tongue’s clutch long enough to rethink the juvenile banter. “Yeah. Tacos sound good.”
And so they left the line and headed towards the foot court.
[147] Mad Hatter possesses the OR6A2 gene, which made him gave him the ability to smell the aldehyde chemicals in cilantro; i.e. cilantro tasted like soap to him. Kid Twist’s cilantro and chorizo-oil drenched taco wrappers still lay on the table, giving everything a too-faint-to-quite-articulate taste of soap, which didn’t do Pablo any favors. Mad Hatter didn’t hate them, but the faint whiff of soap meant he just didn’t see what the big deal was.
[148] Kid Twist gasped at this, shocked and offended at the suggestion that MacGyver was “dopey.”
[149] Amsodeus, King of Hell, Lord of the Ninth, Prince of Nessus. Lawful evil; he carries the Ruby Rod, a shard of pure evil, that will smite the shit out of anybody it touches. Not that he needs it; by the time Asmodeus appears, his plans to destroy you have been in motion for ten thousand years. He’s just there because smiting is fun, not because he actually needs to lift a finger to defeat you.
[150] Kid Twist was, at that moment, acutely aware that Hayes was from a town where being a bit goth got you the death penalty.
[151] He was picturing the look on some noobs face when he used two mana to exhume Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite, (4/7, Vigiliance, +2/+2 to your guys and -2/-2 to his guys) and proceed to automatically destroy that swarm of sentient trees or fire imps or whatever garbage time Zerg rush that noob had on the battlefield like the asteroid that had killed the dinosaurs.
[152] Tick Tock had stayed away from collectible card games because they were a) too expensive and b) the whole “collect ’em all” thing conflicted with the “hide them all” thing and c) her mom would take one look at any Magic card and go into a full on Satanic panic. So she had zero interest in any of this and figured she’d go find a Call of Cthulhu campaign or something.
[153] Asshole was intentionally discarding powerful monsters he could never afford to deploy the right way and then using cheap resurrection spells to bring them onto the battlefield. Asshole was entirely within his rights within the rules. It was just a bit advanced for a tournament where most people were trying to wrap their heads around tapping land for mana. To put it another way, it was a poker tournament for people who had to check a cheat sheet to remember what a Full House was and whether it was better than four of a kind, while Asshole was a World Series of Poker regular.
[154] AKA DragonRyderofPern, Asshole was ranked 58th in the world in Magic: The Gathering Online. He was, to put it mildly, a cheating shit. But Asshole was in the newbie tournament because he needed to feel like a winner and his inability to crack the top fifty had been really weighing down his self-esteem.
[155] He was right about that.
[156] A ten-year-old boy named Jackson saw him throw the cards away and retrieved them from the trash. He’d heard of Magic, but his parents refused to buy him a deck. Ten years later, after his dog had pissed on $60,000 worth of Magic cards, Jackson would come to regard the day he found that Journey into Nyx Intro Pack in the trash as the day his life went off the rails, a lot like how an alcoholic remembers his first drink. Which wasn’t entirely fair, since if he hadn’t been at the Friday Night Magic tournament at Level 8 Games on June 13, 2025, he would have died in the carbon monoxide leak that tragically killed the family dog (not the card pisser, that was the replacement dog) and no one else. But he had no way of knowing that, sans Magic: the Gathering, he would have decided to stay in that night and catch up on “L
ucifer the Lightbearer,” a really awesome HBO show about early 20th century anarchists having orgies and blowing up Wall Street that you haven’t heard of because it doesn’t exist yet but is totally going to rock when it premieres in 2023 (call me, HBO), so he would come to view his Magic obsession as a slightly embarrassing piece of personal history, like how a 90s kid views their Jncos. Also, “off the rails” was really dramatic, since he was making enough money in IT to have $60,000 worth of Magic cards lying around where dogs could pee on them, so he was doing just fine, really, even if that turned into a really difficult conversation with the home insurance people.
[157] “qaStaH nuq jay’,” Kid Twist shouted, bat’leth held high.
[158] Right past the Sqooshers, actually, which made the Sqooshers whole day even before they found out they were kidnappers fleeing from the scene of their crime, which made it into the most erotic thing that had happened to either one of them in their entire lives.
[159] The traditional Klingon victory chant.
[160] Except Mad Hatter, who, through a Leicester-esque series of improbable victories, actually made it to the final round of the newbie tournament, where he was soundly thumped by the same asshole who had ruined Hayes day and inadvertently saved Tick Tock’s life. He had no idea anything had happened until, frustrated his friends weren’t responding to his texts, he had gone out to see if they were pigging out on those stupid tacos and heard someone recounting the incident. Freaking the fuck out, he blew up their phones until Kid Twist finally answered, told him to get a cab back to the mansion, and hung up on him.
[161] It was both, actually.
[162] Sic.
[163] He suddenly remembered being a child, so young his mother’s Boston Terrier could put its front paws on his chest and lick his face, and they’d taken him to some science museum somewhere. There’d been cobras in aquariums, and one of them lashed out, trying to bite him, again and again, hurling itself against the glass so hard it must have hurt. He’d cried, not because he was scared the snake would hurt him—he knew the glass was there. He cried because he realized that snake hated him and wanted to hurt him for the sake of hurting him, and he’d never imagined that feeling existed in the world until right then and who wouldn’t cry, realizing something like that?
[164] Spectacular time management, being in fantastic shape as part of his work week instead of a thing he had to cram in during his spare time and after he’d exhausted himself adjusting actuarial tables or whatever normal people did for a living, and also trenbolone, a steroid intended for use on cattle that is basically the way fitness models got really impressive shoulders and a V-taper body shape, both things that are pretty much mandatory in the modern boy band era. The time when you could look like George Harrison and still get a job in the boy band industry was long, long gone. Hell, the era where you could look like you had a double digit body fat percentage was long gone. Sixty percent of N’SYNC couldn’t get an audition in today’s industry. The doctors who managed his PED use were excellent and had a great deal of experience with football players, body builders, and MMA fighters. Compared to the demands of those users, Kid Twist’s drug-test free, slightly super human yet not aggressively masculine aesthetic was pure cake.
[165] Kid Twist knew a thing or three about cutting weight and gaining muscle, and a body as maltreated as Mad Hatters was longing to improve, like a withered plant in the shade suddenly getting sunlight it wanted to grow. Training Mad Hatter was easy mode.
[166] Terry had to restrain himself from commenting on how the two people who could walk outside and pass the Marine Corp PT test (a bar that had been reduced to being about as hard as qualifying for a payday loan in Terry’s opinion) were getting eggs, meat, and vegetables, while the three people who probably couldn’t bench the bar were eating like they were going to go out and lay brick all day. But he was a professional and kept his mouth shut. Mad Hatter had ordered the French toast out of habit and was too stubborn to change to the omelet just because Kid Twist got one.
[167] Strictly speaking she had lightly modified an EvilAP attack tool she had gotten off the TheRealDealMarket, a Darknet site that specializes in selling zero day exploits to hackers. It was expensive, but Kid Twist didn’t balk at spending the bitcoin.
[168] Tick Tock had to bite her tongue not to make a “that’s what she said” joke.
[169] Nerd stores are total sausage parties.
[170] The fact that it was literally true that Hayes had had the shit kicked out of him, but he had thought they hadn’t known that, meant this remark really cut him.
[171] Making this remark far more mature and calm than it looks in transcript form.
[172] Recognizing a good rationalization when he saw it, he jumped on the IT train.
[173] A dying accent, it incorporates British English with Gullah, French, and Sephardi Jewish influences. Charleston is pronounced Chahlston, for instance.
[174] He’d moved from Charleston at the age of 10, but his accent, if anything, had become exaggerated since then. He never liked doing things just because everybody else was doing it.
[175] US Senator, South Carolina.
[176] Linen cabo shorts.
[177] Cerulean, specifically.
[178] Middle Earth’s Annual Mordor Fun Run. “One does not simply walk,” it said.
[179] Kid Twist discarded the following metaphors as being too offensive: Golda Meir at a Nuremberg Rally, Malcom X at a Klan Klavern, Trump at a Mensa meeting.
[180] Sea foam, specifically.
[181] Red Velvet.
[182] Mutton chops.
[183] GURPS: Generic Universal Role Playing System. He knew nothing of GURPS except that he’d always found Generic and Universal to be redundant and thus slightly annoying. But he was feeling full of beans and figured that once he was in, he’d be able to wing it, or at least they wouldn’t kick him out.
[184] Name redacted to avoid getting sued, but you know exactly who I mean.
[185] The names were picked by a random name generator after Mad Hatter refused to settle on a name besides “Max Fightmaster” and Hayes had claimed every name they came up to be “way too gay for Birkenstocks.”
[186] It was both.
[187] The pun was intentional. And yes, Jim knew that the pronunciation was identical and that no one could possibly know he was making the pun. But by God, Jim loved bilingual homophonic punning even if no one else did, and if you didn’t get it that was your problem.
[188] They had come from the auction of a bankrupt telemarketing firm, so this was essentially accurate; Hayes found them oddly soothing, as if he’d accidentally returned to a place he’d treasured as a child and his conscious mind had forgotten. If he had fully understood the psychological implications of that reaction, he would have fled the building, joined the first cult he found (not a tall order in Florida), and spent his days doing whatever they wanted him to do. But he didn’t, so he decided to play a round of Call of Battle 17: Modern Warsault 5. Mad Hatter, who had the ability to sense the emotive artifacts that impregnated objects the same way that the reek of microwaved fish impregnated the break room carpet at the bankrupt telemarketing place (thanks, Keith), considered the dreary gray workstations as proof positive he had been right to avoid employment as a soul-wearying curse imposed on the human race by Mammon.
[189] His research into lock picking had extended beyond the pure geometrical proofs of Mundis into real locks, so he was experiencing a bit of humiliation as he realized he hadn’t understood a single damn thing he’d watched about real lock picking except that it sometimes involved bobby pins, which he was pretty sure he learned from Scooby Doo.
[190] http://jeffsitarsafecracker.net
[191] Jim wasn’t actually suspicious at all, he was just cursed with a major case of resting bitch face.
[192] Tab-targeting and hand eye coordination don’t go together.
[193] For those unfamiliar with First Person Shooters, this is abysmal; it’s like Hamburg
at Allianz Arena, Patriots 59, Titans 0, Rangers 30, Orioles 3, Mike Tyson v. Stephen Hawkings abysmal.
[194] It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, S12E8. The Gang Tends Bar.
[195] The fast food place, not, you know, an actual castle that happened to be white, where she would actually fit in really well.
[196] Mad Hatter was still on a fitness kick.
[197] Hayes was not.
[198] His hearing was excellent for a person who made their living standing in front of 60000 watt speakers. His custom made in-ear monitors cost more than a Honda Civic and were worth every penny.
[199] Jason Angel Cruising Orlando Game Stores for Bathroom Sex? Cf. Betteridge’s Law of Headlines.
[200] By they, he meant the men in the group. Tick Tock had agreed under protest and was still fairly pissed about it.
[201] In addition to a love of bilingual puns, he felt compelled to correct minor inaccuracies.
[202] Jim didn’t believe a word of it, partially because he thought BLU was too stupid to be a real band name. (Jim was willfully and gleefully out of touch with modern music. He thought one of the few perks of getting old was that nobody expected you to give a shit about Captain & Tennille or whatever the modern equivalent of Captain and Tennille was, don’t ask him, he didn’t give a shit.) But it was a gaming store and not the Pentagon so he didn’t worry too much about it. Worst case scenario they tried to steal some Warhammer figurines. Pathological liar money spent just as well as an honest man’s dollar. But he did use one of those counterfeit pens on the twenties Mad Hatter handed him. When the bills turned out to be genuine, he grunted, put the cash back in the till, and went back to browsing /r/sqooshing.
[203] Champagne drunk was the most dangerous kind of drunk. You get whiskey drunk you get sick, puke it out, and get on with your life. Wine drunk, you get a little queasy and lay off. Beer drunk and you spend too much time pissing to get in too much trouble. Champagne drunk had no built in ceiling like other booze, and you would go to bed with your head swirling, only to wake up a few hours later so dehydrated you felt like you’d been mummified, even drunker than when you’d gone to bed.