Prologue.
Before I begin the story of our trip to the same convention the following year. Here is a little run-down of our adventure at SheVa Con in between.
Joon and I entered the HoJo (if I remember correctly), I could only afford a day pass, but Joon gets a weekend pass. We get our badges, and event schedules, and sure enough there is a costume contest starting soon. That will be worth a few chuckles. No super amazing costumes, but some were interesting.
And then the belly-dancers show up.
The best way Joon described it was “one of the evolution-progression posters”, you see, the four women were chained together, the first one was astoundingly beautiful, the next…not so much, then she was followed by a hippopotamus, and then an ancient woman. Need I remind you that these were belly-dancers? No? Pretty horrifying stuff.
That night Joon and I played in a card game tournament; there were only four players, so naturally we left with a fuck-ton of prizes. This was also the year of the Dalek cake in the Con Suite. I have to say that that was the tastiest cake I ever had.
Oh, and the day passes and weekend passes are exactly the same except for like the date, but that's in small print, and nobody bothers to look at that.
Beginning of Volume 2.
So the year is 2009. The players are Myself, Joon, J, Tood, and K. But this is time, Tood and K bring along two more of their friends. Tyler and Gloria, appearance wise I would describe Tyler as Alan from The Hangover, but he’s a real cool cat. Gloria…she is one of those anime girls, you know, the chunky ones.
This time, we got a Suite. Fuck. Yeah.
But this time, Joon and J agreed to split the bill for me. In the original agreement, we agreed that they would cover me, in exchange for me driving, and us taking my car. Needless to say, 1 hour into the drive down, they change the agreement to where they cover my hotel stay, food, and some gas. Of course, me thinking of not wanting to spend too much, I leave most of my money at home. Taking $35 to spend on souvenirs, and Joon owed me $30.
This greatly angered J. In his retardation, he believed that I had no money to go, and refused to pay for anything, including gas. So now in his mind, I had to use my $65 on things like gas, and a weekend pass to the convention, before he would pay for his share of gas, or the hotel room.
Oh, and I had to sleep on the floor, and I wasn’t allowed any of the pillows.
I still have not retaliated properly for this treachery.
So already, this is being set up as a bad trip.
We had a sleeping arrangement where the people would rotate (except me of course) spots. The first night, Joon gets a nose bleed and gets it all over his half of the Queen Bed. I said to everyone that he probably punched himself in the nose and bled on it on purpose so he would get the bed the whole trip.
* Think about Joon, and his fist hitting a nose. This will be important later.
The next day consisted of playing video games in the game room, I think we went to a couple Q&As like a “How to survive a zombie apocalypse” presentation (which sucked) oh and an “Unofficial 4chan Seminar” (which also sucked). This was also the night of the big Super Smash Bros. tournament where we all sucked. The main reason we were there, and none of us made it to Top 4. In singles, or doubles. Fuck you Ike.
Joon, J, and I were hungry. We went to the room, nobody else wanted to go. So we head to the car.
Before I tell you the rest, I have to tell you that J is an avid Tae Kwon Do participant, I’ve been to a few of his belt-graduation-things. I know what he can do.
While in the parking lot, he says to me. “Hold this bottle out, and I’ll kick it out of your hand” DANGER! DANGER! BOJAC, DON’T DO IT! “Alright” I say. My reasoning being that I have seen him do his stuff, I know good and well he can do it. I take the bottle and hold it out.
He then proceeds to kick me, full force, right straight in the middle of my forearm. With steel-toed boots nonetheless.
It hurt. Like a mofo.
So now on top of being broke, I know have a very badly hurt arm. I am not a happy camper.
*Editor's Note* J has since admitted that he intentionally did that as he “wondered if I would let him kick me in the arm”. Oh boy, one day…it’s coming.
So I’m pissed, in excruciating pain, riding shotgun. J is in the back, Joon is driving since I can’t clench my left hand. I forget what they were talking about, but Joon goes to insult me about something. I react, I go to punch him in the face, but midway I realize that we are currently going 45mph, and a sudden jolt to the driver’s face would be a bad thing. I stop myself. Kind of. I stop the force, but my hand still lightly slaps Joon’s face. (And I mean lightly) He starts insulting me, I’m apologizing, saying I didn’t mean to, that I honestly tried to stop. We get quiet. Thinking it’s over. I turn my head and point to where we need to be turning. But I don’t finish my sentence.
I am promptly cut off with his fist, meeting my face.
The first thing I think is “Oh shit, he broke my nose”, thankfully he didn’t. Nor did it start bleeding. We all get quiet again. I tell him to pull off into a Rite-Aid. I buy (with my credit card, since the fuckers made me spend all my money) some ibuprofen for my arm and now my aching face.
We stop at a Ruby Tuesday for dinner, Joon says I can get whatever I want. I go to bathroom to splash some water on my face and compose myself. *Editor's Note* Joon has later admitted to saying that was the greatest day of his life and that he has never been happier, to the point that he took his shirt off in the Ruby Tuesday while I was away, and if you know how sensitive he is to people seeing him without a shirt...yeah.
Thankfully that was the end of my personal troubles for the day.
But all is not well.
This is Friday night, we went up on Thursday. The Con is over on Sunday, we have a hotel reservation until Sunday. J, Joon, and I sleep in our beds Saturday night. These are the events leading up to our untimely departure.
We return to the room, all sleepy, I was still in shock from the last 2 hours. I take my spot on the floor. J and Joon have been sharing the Queen sized bed. Tood and K have a spot in the main room for themselves (also on the floor, they’re weird like that). Tyler slept on the floor too, and Princess Gloria had the pull-out-couch-bed. J closes the door between our room and the other’s. Now these doors, I can best describe them as shitty-closet-doors, with no lock. Tood keeps opening the door and throwing shit in our room. Mostly complementary cookies from the hotel. This goes on for like 3 hours, easy. Joon has long since been asleep, snoring through all of it.
J does not like this.
He gets mad and goes to the lobby to try and sleep there. Tood then follows him out there and continues to bug him. This was the last straw for J.
Now while J was gone from the room, I took his spot on the bed. It was fucking awesome. Joon later told me that he “went to sleep with a J next to him and in the morning he had turned into a Bojac”.
That morning, everybody goes to this Voice Actor Q&A. They have some chick who I don’t remember, Jeff Muthafucking Nimoy, and Sonny Muthafucking Strait. I think like around the 3rd question, I got the microphone, but the idiots running the thing had multiple microphones going around, and they didn’t get to me until around question 10. I said something like “Thanks for voicing Krillin, the only man who could knock up a robot” crowd laughs, Sonny says something along “She’s essentially a sophisticated blow-up doll” more laughter. Now my question “Would you do my voice-mail?” but no! Sonny reacts too soon! He only hears “Would you do my voice?” so he then proceeds to do an impersonation of me, and apparently I mumble a lot. Crowd goes nuts. I play along, but secretly inside I am crushed; I am cringing now typing this, nearly a year after the fact. Joon gets to ask a question and he asks “Are you guys good enough to have conversations between your characters” first thing they do is get all uppity at “Are you good enough” but we did get to hear Tentomon and Wolfwood talk to each other, which was fucking cool…then they jumped right into some Yaoi shit. Buncha sickos.
So after that, J comes to Joon and I and asks “Do you want to stay for the rest of the trip?” I could care less, things haven’t been going too well for me. You see, J was so pissed that Tood kept him from getting any sleep so he wanted the fuck out of there. “I’ll give you guys $50 if we leave today” so a deal was struck.
We talked to Tyler who would act as our man on the inside. He told us where Tood, K, and Gloria were, so we could pack up and disappear and get as far away as possible.
Just leaving wasn’t enough for J. He wanted more. The 4 of us feags go to the room, we pack up our stuff, and J grabs a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos. He dumps them all over the place (except on Tyler and Gloria’s stuff), he crunches them up all over the Queen Bed. He dumped some other things on Tood and K’s sleeping place but I forget what. Then he eyes Tood’s favorite jacket, the one that Joon says he threw a shit-fit about the last time something got spilled on it. J then grabs the jacket, throws it in the shower, and turns the water on, but not too much to where you can hear it from the outside.
We then went back to the Con, dropped off Tyler. We went to Sonny Strait’s autograph session, got him to sign a DBZ Card, and got some pics with him. Cool dude. But I still slightly hate him for ridiculing me because of miss-hearing me.
Immediately after we got to meet Sonny, we got da fuck out of Dodge. (Or Tennessee to be more precise)
But Karma wasn’t done with us.
As I am sure you know, in the South, we looove our Crack’r B’rr’ls (or Cracker Barrels as you Yanks say). I kept track and we passed no less than 10 on our journey back. But after a couple hours of driving, we got hungry and stopped at one of these establishments. Afterwards, we get back on the highway, headed home.
Or so we thought.
Turns out that I accidentally got turned around at the Crack’r B’rr’l and sure enough, for 45 minutes…we were going in the wrong direction. Karma, as they say, is a bitch.
Not only that, but we’re running low on gas, and none of these exits were saying “Gas”. The empty light clicks on, shit we’ve got 10 minutes tops. Thankfully we got to a gas station. J was even more pissed that not only did we go in the wrong way for almost an hour, but it was his turn to fill the car up. J, as you can guess, would kill Scrooge for a chance to get a free penny. So I take the back seat while Joon drives, and I take verbal assaults from J the whole way home. But screw it, I got home, slept in my bed, and got a hug from my mommy (Call me a wuss if you want, but after all that shit I put up with, I needed it).
Needless to say, we never saw a nickel of that $50.
*Editor's Note* Oh, you want to know about the aftermath of our trashing the room, and bailing on them?
Tyler has some video recordings of them reacting to the mess, but the only person who really reacts at all was K. She has been quoted as saying "What's Joon's cat's name? Herbie? I'll kill that cat." (don't worry, the cat is safe) But it's all good in the hood, in fact mere months later, Tood and K moved in (and subsequently moved out of) a trailer owned by Joon's dad. (They barely paid rent, or kept the place clean, oh and K had two jobs to pay rent because Tood to this day does not have a job.) But we are all buddies again, J later apologized, and so did Joon.
I however, have not, I like to think of it as I was in the morally gray and excused from any consequences. From what I hear, K is still angry at me and awaiting that apology.
And that my friends, is the end of Con-Men Volume 2. There are many other Con stories left to tell, and many more yet to happen. But I think 4 pages is plenty for now.
- Tune in next time, where I will tell you a tale about ships, and whales. (Ok not really, but it won't be about my Con experiences)
Until next time, Bojac.
