Anyway…

Friday
Friday I headed over about 3 o’clock because I had finally finished repainting my stupid whiffle bat. (I had to go to 5 stores to find a freakin’ whiffle bat. Everything else was those stupid wussy foam bats. C’mon, I want some sting when I bonk people.)

First things first, I checked out the Artist Alley. To me, it was kind of boring because there was still a lack of fun crafty things, thanks to Katsu’s stupid rules. I don’t want yet another print of someone’s fanart, kthxbye. However, the hall o’ webcomics was much more entertaining, and seeing as it was still early, no crowds (yay!) I chilled for a bit with several artists and discovered that quite a few of them were teaming up for an epic Team Fortress 2 group at Otakon. w00t!

The arcade portion of the video game room was neat, with lots of old school cabinets. The console portion was made of fail. I was not impressed with the Halo boxes (can play that at home, thanks) and the array of games wasn’t all that interesting. I can sit at my own apartment and play Portal, that’s not what I paid for a $50 badge to do.

There was very little I wanted to see in the way of anime, either. Most of it was rather mainstream and I had pictures to take.

I’d first like to point out that Katsu is not a good con for pictures. The lighting sucks and if you don’t have a decent flood flash, you’re screwed. I have a rinky-dink Powershot. Good little camera, but it didn’t fair well with the horrible yellow lighting. Also, tiny hallways are tiny. You couldn’t really stop in them for a shot, so you had to head for one of the horribly placed photoareas.

Of course none of this stopped me from coming home with over 150 pictures, and that’s just from two days.

On one of my many laps around the con, I ran into the rest of BLU team.

Notice I look scared, as well I should be. To make a long story short, I ran into them later that night and we hit the hotel bar, where I did my best impression of a Demoman. I will not be doing this again.

Saturday
I was supposed to be part of a Sailormoon group. Unfortunately, I got stuck on the Metro for an hour.
At least they still looked good.

Well, now I had the rest of the day to myself to take pictures. Yay! But first I staggered into the Cosplay Plus panel because I met the ladies running it the night before. It was interesting, I just wish more of the target audience had attended.

After lots more picture taking, I ended up at the Geek Comedy Tour 3000. I had actually seen them before at T-Mode, but they were just as funny this time around. If you spot them near you, go see them!

Lots more picture taking ensued, and then the massive Phoenix Wright shoot showed up.
There’s more of them, but I couldn’t cram them in the picture! I was going to follow the shoot outside, but got distracted.

Finally, Mike spotted me around 7pm. He’d been looking for me all day (he should have just followed the people screaming “MEDIC!” after me.) We grabbed some grub and then wandered into the video game room again, but weren’t impressed. Shortly thereafter, I gave up on Katsucon and staggered home.

—

I didn’t do Sunday, because I was tired. >_< Next year I think I am only going to do Saturday unless I get an Artist Alley table. While I had fun, it was nothing to do with the programming of the convention and everything to do with the people I met there. $50 was way to much money for attending 1 panel and 1 main event.

Anyway, here’s the entirety of my pictures. BewareofNinja.com

Related posts:

1. Katsucon 2007
2. Otakon 2007 Con Report and Pictures
3. Katsucon 2007 – Part Deux

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1. Anime Mid-Atlantic 2007
2. Otakon 2007 Con Report and Pictures
3. Katsucon 2007 – Part Deux

As always Maura and I were amazed that people line up for their badges early in the afternoon on Thursday. I took the 6pm MARC out of Union Station here in DC and Maura nabbed me at the BWI station on the way back from work. We waltzed in around 8, got our badges in 15 minutes and ran out again in order for me to finish my costume.

From past experience we learned that it’s not necessary to show up at the ass crack of dawn on Friday to set up our Artist Alley table. Maura and I managed to stagger in around 11:30 and Gerry got there at 1. They don’t let the monkeys in until 2, so we were happy not to have sat there for the full 5 hours Otakon recommends.

Business, as usually, was good so we were stuck at the table until 4:45, when Gerry came so I could wiggle into Frost to head for the Mortal Kombat shoot. We had a sweet turnout.

We hung around for a bit with the ninja trio before wandering back to the convention to save Gerry. By the time Maura and I escaped from the con, it was pretty late, but I demanded IHOP since I hadn’t actually eaten all day. We ended up driving all over hell’s half-acre looking for the damn thing, and it turned out it was in a ghetto-tastic part of Baltimore, so we kept driving to the next one. On the way back, a cop decided to give us a heart attack by pulling us over for a broken tail-light.

We had to be at the Phoenix Wright shoot at 10:30. It was a hell of a lot of fun, but we had to wander back to the table fairly quickly, but not before kidnapping a little time for a private photoshoot.

After I frantically sewed Princess Sailor Moon back together. We did pick up Mike, Curtis, and Kiera for dinner.

And afterwards Maura and I ran off to our table, but decided we were tired of sitting there. Instead we kidnapped a Minuki and a Phoenix and stood around looking pretty for more pictures.

It was also one of the few times I got to take pictures of other cosplayers.

Sunday, I had to be at the con at 8:30 for our panel, which Otakon forgot to @#$%ing put in the @#$%ing schedule. My laptop hard drive decided to fail right then and there, so unfortunately we couldn’t show our clips for PGSM. What a pain.

I think the panel went well enough anyway, but that’s just my opinion. We didn’t really stay on Sunday because we were kinda tired and cranky, but we did find time to make it to the Dealer’s Room (finally) and I picked myself up a signed copy of “The Art of ReBoot” because it is awesome and Mainframe announced that they are interested in producing more movies!

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Max dragged his feet as his mother invited Regina and himself inside. As much as he loved his family, they had an innate talent for doing everything in the exact way that would most drive him absolutely crazy. Regina burst through the door, as perky as ever, but came to a sudden halt. Her eyes went wide and she blinked a few times as they glazed over. Max didn’t need to follow her gaze to know what she was staring at.

Despite his daughters’ pleas, Pa Johns refused to take down what was affectionately known to friends and family as the “Wall O’ Deer.” Even with the assortment of hats and scarves that someone added, Max had to admit the collection of mounted and stuffed buck heads was a macabre sight.

“Are those real?” Regina asked in a small voice.

Uh oh. “Of course not, sweetie,” Max answered with an extremely fake sounding laugh. His mother gave him a sharp look, but he maneuvered Regina to sit on the well-worn sofa facing the opposite side of the room. He started to plop down next to her, but another glare from his mother as she seated herself and he sat down in the matching armchair instead.

A strawberry blonde head popped through the doorway to the kitchen as the three sat in awkward silence. “B.B!” his older sister said excitedly. “Should I put up a pot of coffee?”

“No thanks, May, we’ll probably just go straight to bed,” Max said.

“And this would be Regina?” May came around Max’s chair to greet the guest. “Nice to meet you, sugar.”

“Princess, this is my big sis’, May,” Max said.

“Princess?” May asked with a slight smirk. “You sound like you’re whipped, boy.”

A forced cough from his mother brought that conversation to a screeching halt. “Y’all are staying her tonight, right?” the pink-haired matron asked imperiously.

“Actually, Mama, we have a room in town…” her son trailed off as he received ‘the look.’ “I’ll go cancel that now, then,” he said. After digging around for a few moments, he pulled out his rhinestone covered cellphone and wandered into the kitchen to make the call.

When he came back into the sitting room, Regina was grinning cluelessly as his mother did her best impression of a police interrogator. “Mama, Regina’s probably as tuckered out as I am. Why don’t I just show her where we’ll be sleeping and you can get to know her in the morning,” he suggested hopefully.

Regina piped up with a perky, “I’m not tired,” but it was his mother that took his attention.

“You will be sleeping with DJ in your old room. We’ve made up an extra bed in May and June’s room for Regina.”

“But Mama, it will be too crowded with May and June and Rose,” Max argued.

“Would you like to sleep down here on the sofa with DJ?” Ma Johns asked.

“No Mama, it’s just…” he sighed dramatically. This was why he had gotten a room in the only hotel in town after all. He was probably lucky that his Ma wasn’t demanding that his Princess sleep in the next town over. He briefly thought about sneaking out to the hotel once everyone was asleep, but he didn’t even want to think about the aftermath of a stunt like that.

“Max and I could sleep on the couch,” Regina reasoned. Max cringed as he anticipated her next remark. “We like sleeping together.”

His sister snickered quietly as his mother slowly turned the color of her hair. “She means it literally, Ma,” Max said quickly. “We’ve got separate boys’ and girls’ wings in the circus dorms.”

His mother’s white knuckled grip on her rocking chair told him that the damage control wasn’t working, so he tried to change the subject to his youngest sister, Rose. Instead of the desired effect, bringing up Rose only made his mother turn so purple that he was afraid she was going to have a stroke right there in her chair. Regina was staring at the enraged woman like a deer in headlights, so he decided it would be a good idea to take her to the girls’ bedroom.

May decided to follow them, leaving their mother to calm down before she spat fire. “Way to go, B.B.,” she whispered as they headed up the rickety old stairs to the second floor.

“It’s not my fault she’s stuck in the last century,” Max said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Damn. Our bags are still in the car.”

May looked back down the stairs at the unmoving form in the living room. “If I were you, Billy-boy, I’d consider sleeping in my underpants. It’s plenty warm enough. Regina here can borrow some of our old things.”

Upon hearing her name, Regina spoke up. “Is she always like that?”

“No, sugar, she wasn’t half this bad until Rose came home and…” May trailed off.

“And what,” Max demanded, but May busied herself with getting some towels from the linen closet.

“Oh, and I’d catch as much sleep as I could, B.B. Ma will want you to help with the chores,” she said as she handed each of the other two a towel.

Max rolled his eyes, but the effect was lost as May led Regina away to point out the bathroom and her bed. He slung the towel over his shoulders and climbed the aging ladder to the share the attic with his brother.

–

It was hard, but Max decided that there just wasn’t going to be time to get fabulous before breakfast, especially not if DJ was going to continue letting him do all the work. He had resigned himself to the fact he was going to be woken up before dawn, but he had managed to retain some hope that he might be able to sneak in a shower before Ma Johns tried to force feed him pancakes.

As he scraped the cow pie off of his boots, he tried to ask his little brother about Rose, but DJ was decidedly mum on the subject. Instead, his brother merely pointed out that Max’s hair was looked decided less than fabulous and more like a bright pink version of The Bride of Frankenstein. Unfortunately, Ma walked in just as he smacked the little trouble-maker upside the head and he got an earful of ‘respect for one’s siblings’ and ‘proper decorum for adults’ before he even managed to wash up for the table.

Ma was in a decidedly foul mood and over the course of eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, muffins and pie, he got a lecture on ‘not eating enough’, his ‘unchristian like costume’, ‘proper table manners’ and ‘close the door young man, you weren’t raised in a barn.’ Pa Johns was conspicuously absent and Max could only imagine that he was getting only a small fraction of the pent up rage that his mother was saving for her husband.

Out of the corner of his eye, he caught Regina pushing her eggs around the plate in an attempt to disguise their existence from the tyrannical chef. As soon as his mother paused for breath, he pushed his plate away and announced that he and Regina were going to go for a walk.

“Walk? You aren’t even dressed yet,” his mother protested, but he was spared the ‘keeping up appearances’ lecture by the timely appearance of one stumbling-drunk Pa Johns.

Before Regina could ask what was going on, Max had his Princess halfway up the stairs. “Maxie, I still need my things,” she pointed out over the banging and screaming in the kitchen.

“You can borrow something of mine, darlin’. You do not want to go back downstairs if you can help it.” The rest of the Johns siblings were joining Max in a mass retreat.

“Thanks, May,” Max replied. He correctly himself when he heard her sigh. “Sorry June, you know I can’t tell you apart.”

“If you wore your glasses once in awhile it wouldn’t be a problem,” June chided him. “Honestly, we don’t even look that much alike anymore.”

“Pssht… B.B. wouldn’t let a little thing like near blindness get in the way of his vanity,” May added.

Max was about to retort, but he caught sight of something he hadn’t seen under the kitchen table. “Damn Rose, what happened to you?” Either Mama was over-feeding her youngest, or she was going to be a grandmother soon.

Rose merely turned her namesake color and hurried past the crowd to the powder room.

May kicked out and caught Max in the shins. “Real smooth there.”

“Seriously, what do ya think happened to our baby sister,” DJ said from the back of the group.

“That little shit from down the road knocked her up, didn’t he?” Max stared down his little brother. “Why isn’t his head on a stake in the front yard?”

“Pa hasn’t caught him on our property yet.” DJ shrugged. “And everything Pa talks about going after him, the waterworks start.”

“What’s going on?” Regina asked curiously, obviously not following the conversation at all. “Who did what to Rose?”

Max kissed the top of her head. “Nothing you have to worry about, sweetie.” DJ pretended to gag, but June elbowed him shortly in the rips. “Why don’t you get dressed and then I’ll show you around the farm.”

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And the companion shot.

Maya horrified … I guess Edgey got caught by Gant.

He’s finally lost it.

Put ‘em up!

I has a pole.

Long night out, I guess.

Edgey is ashamed.

Yea, this one is just kinda boring.

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Max had never been so terrified in his life. He’d been scared quite a few times in his life (these things happened when you put on a harness and jumped off of things for a living,) but this surpassed even the time he spent waiting to be acquitted for the murder of Russel Berry.

There were no streetlights along the dirt road, and he was thankful that he’d decided to rent an SUV. He had driven over pot holes that he swore would have swallowed up a smaller car. Luckily there were no tell-tale circles of light that heralded a deer caught in his headlights. Although he wouldn’t feel to bad about the effects of a two ton vehicle on the local wildlife, he was certain his passenger would be traumatized.

Regina was barely illuminated by the lights on the dashboard, but he could see her twirling her hair absentmindedly as she stared out the passenger-side window. He would have liked to point out some of the smaller animals likely to be out at this time of night, but he was afraid of driving into one of seemingly bottomless pits along the road while he was distracted.

A particularly violent bump nearly made him let go of the wheel and Regina let out a startled squeak as she bumped her head on the window. “Sorry, Princess,” Max muttered as he squinted ahead at the ridiculously winding road. It had been bad enough when they had been passing through the thick cornfields, but now the ride up the mountain was downright treacherous. Sure, he’d done it before, but it had been in a sturdy pick-up truck and not a fabulous, new SUV.

“Are we there yet?” his passenger asked plaintively.

He didn’t blame her, they’d been driving for almost eight hours, and the last time they’d even seen another car had been over an hour ago. It was now well after midnight and he wanted nothing more than to get to their destination and pass out on the nearest, soft surface. Even stopping the car to take a nap in the backseat was starting to sound good, but stopping a car on the side of a near deserted road, in the middle of the night, with an attractive young lady seemed like a good way to attract one of the few police cars the county owned.

“Almost there, sweetie,” he said, looking for the sharp turn at “the big pile of tires” that he knew was coming up soon. The words were barely out of his mouth when he spotted the mound of rubber and took the hairpin turn up onto an impossibly steep driveway. His sense of dread grew exponentially as the pitch of the slope increased. He could, theoretically, turn around and go find a motel somewhere.

Unfortunately, Regina had spotted the light ahead. “Oh, we’re here!” she announced cheerfully, suddenly perking up.

He pulled up into the light of the porch, carefully parking behind a station wagon with no wheels.

Regina hopped out, heedless of the dusty ground and hooting of a lone owl. Max was less gungho, and he reluctantly got out of his escape vehicle and stared up at the house ahead. The white paint was peeling slightly off of the full wraparound porch, and he could just make out the new addition that had been added off the side. He carefully made sure he had locked the car, twice, and dragged his feet as Regina hopped up the front stoop.

The front door swung open and he blinked into the light streaming out. He could just make out a mass of pink hair pulled back into a severe bun. “Hi, Ma,” he said with little enthusiasm.

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Part One – Part Two – Part Three

Phoenix gulped audibly as he stared at the airship floating peacefully above LazyTown. It seemed to be staying in place despite the lack of an anchor or tether, making him wonder if it had some kind of sophisticated auto-pilot.

“Ladder,” he ordered, but nothing happened.

“Ladder!” he said more firmly, this time directing his voice towards the airship.

“Ladder!” he shouted at the top of his lungs, only to be answered by an explosive pain in his nose. When the pain had dulled enough that his vision cleared, he could see that the ladder had indeed come down.

I’m supposed to climb 100 meters of this? He shook the rope and rung ladder experimentally, and watched as the whole thing swung in an elegant wave.

He grabbed a run just over his head and tentatively stepped onto the bottom. He hung, swallowing nervously until he worked up the courage to up another two feet. The ladder did not suddenly buck or twitch or otherwise try to throw him to the ground, so he slowly continued the ascent.

Contrary to his original belief, the airship wasn’t entirely stationary above the quiet town. It was being carried on the breeze that go stronger as he climbed higher. The ladder, in turn, was undulating in a gentle yet nauseating way.

Despite the churning of his stomach, Phoenix’s climb was relatively uneventful until he took a break midway up. In a move that he would later pinpoint as the direct catalyst of the resulting disaster, he glanced down at the tiny buildings and people scurrying below.

–

“And that’s how you ended up in LazyTown?” Maya asked.

“Yes,” Sportacus confirmed.

“Do you plan on going to any other town, are were you thinking of staying here?”

“I-” the above-average hero glanced down at his chest as his emblem began squawking at him.

“It looks like Stephanie will be busy today,” the Mayor remarked, “and I’m not even doing any handy-work with my power tools today.”

–

The little people on the ground were congregating around the bottom of the ladder as Phoenix let out another startled yelp. He thought he could recognize the small pink figure of Stephanie and the yellow body of the young kleptomaniac. The two, and four others, seemed to be having a conference and if he could convince himself to let up his death grip, he could have gotten a better look.

Just as he was about to move his left leg from where he had tangled it in the rope in his terror, her heard the word “catch!” called from below. He looked down just in time to receive a face full of something fist-sized and hard. Gravity took it before he could examine it.

“What are you doing?” he yelled down, but some sort of yellow boomerang came at his head. He jerked away and as it passed through the empty space between the rungs, he identified the UFO as a banana.

Fruit? Why the f- “Ow!” Another apple had collided with the side of his head. He was going to yell down for them to stop flinging produce at him but they appeared to be holding another conference.

As he watched with a growing sense of dread, four of the little figures ran off and came back with a large disk of some sort. Unfortunately, he was so busy watching the disk that he didn’t notice what the other two were doing until the ladder jerked heavily. It swung back with greater force and he realized what the kids were attempting to do.

–

“Where does Mr. Rotten live?” Maya asked over the screeching of Sportacus’s emblem.

“No one really knows,” Sportacus said. “We think his house is by the big billboard at the edge of town, but no one has ever seen it.”

“That won’t make it easy to search for clues there.”

–

Another scream escaped Phoenix’s lips as the ladder swung violently. Luckily his limbs were so stiff with fear that he was incapable of letting go even if he wanted to.

Below him, the kids ran back and forth with their trampoline, trying to judge the trajectory of his fall. Looking down while swinging gave him a horrible case of vertigo and he felt his grip slip as he swallowed a mouthful of bile. The world was whirling viciously and just then there was a particularly nasty lurch of the ladder.

Just before he came crashing onto the trampoline he heard a familiar little voice squeal, “It’s Mine!”

–

“Mr. Nick?” The blurry figure of Pearl filled his vision as he slowly opened his eyes. He was flat on his back on a small grassy patch in the center of LazyTown.

“Oh good, for a minute there I thought I’d be channeling you,” Maya said off to the side.

“Ow…” was all he could get out as every nerve in his body seemed to scream in pain.

“Anyway, I learned where Mr. Rotten’s home is,” Maya announced.

“You did?” Phoenix croaked out. Hopefully Robbie lived someplace safe, like a bubble wrap lined room completely devoid of ladders, stairs or anything else he could fall off of.

“It’s somewhere near the big billboard.”

“That’s… it?” Phoenix asked. That’s real helpful. But at least looking for Robbie’s house would probably not involve testing the laws of gravity. “Let’s go there next. I think the airship can wait.” Now where’s that little klepto. I’d like to give him a piece of my mind, and a good kick in the pants.

“Oh, I learned something too!” Pearl said suddenly.

She seemed very proud of herself, so he decided to humor her. “Okay, what did you learn?”

The next thing he knew, he was staring at her Pink Princess underpants as she performed a very wobbly headstand. “Stephanie taught me!”

“That’s…great,” he tried not to sound distressed as he stared at his shoes, Maya’s hair, the sky, anything but the Pink Princess. “Maybe you should stop doing that, you don’t want all the blood to stay in you head.”

“Pearly, maybe you should ask Stephanie if you could borrow one of her outfits if you’re going to do that.” Just as Phoenix was going to congratulate Maya on being a voice of reason for once, she added, “You don’t want to mess up your channeling costume.”

With a groan, he managed to drag himself to his feet. “Let’s just go. Please.”

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With Anime Mid-Atlantic and my Edgeworth costume looming, it was only a matter of time until this happened.

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The picture doesn’t do the attorney badge justice. If you are not a convention go-er and want one of these buttons for some reason, it’s $1.50 incl. shipping.

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