Giant Purple Griffin-Con

[Swindle]

Earth, Month 3, Week 3, Day 4, Open

Wyvern-Con¹ is the largest gathering of its kind on the eastern coast of the United States. For one long weekend, Atlanta, Georgia becomes a Mecca for geeks, nerds, fans, gamers . . . and the people who profit off of them.

And where there is money to be made, there is Swindle. He arrives in style, at the helm of the Onward to Profit, his personal spacecraft. It's in good repair, and it's been painted in his own colors, but otherwise it looks very familiar to his intended clientele. You'd think finding parking would be hard, but through the magic of storytelling, the convention center happens to have a flat roof that's just the right size, along with an open-air rooftop plaza that could easily be converted into a merchant stall by a clever Decepticon.

Thursday morning, as the doors open, there's a press of people trying to get to the roof. When they get there, Swindle will be there to greet them. "Good morning, folks! My name is Swindle, and I'm here to sell you fine people some high-quality memorabilia! I've got blasters, phasers, ray guns, energy swords, lightsabers, battle armor, vibroswords, staff weapons, guns with chainsaw bayonets like from that one videogame, anything you could possibly want from any conceivable franchise, American, Japanese, or otherwise, at reasonable prices! Pictures with me are ten dollars. Pictures with the ship are twenty. Tours of the ship are one hundred. Anyone dressed as me gets a ten percent discount."

Swindle is probably not the only vendor here selling replica sci-fi and fantasy weapons. He is almost certainly the only vendor here selling replica sci-fi and fantasy weapons that actually work.


^{1. Any resemblance to real conventions, living or dead, is purely coincidental.}

[LongCat]

Shortly after the crowds sally forth onto the rooftop to flood Swindle's market stall, a pair of twitchy goldish ears peek cautiously up over the edge of the roof, followed by a rust colored mane, and, finally, two bright gold optics clear the parapet to peer at the assemblage. A moment later, Longcat hooks his front paws over the edge of the roof, pausing to watch ala Killroy, his ears twitching this way and that.

// Ummmm... Swindle's in mah convention, squeein' da fanboys. 'Zat cool? // he broadcasts to the Autobot channel.

While waiting for an answer, he ducks his head down long enough to consult the schedule on the back of the all access badge clipped to the tip of his tail. Yup, dealer's room's open. It's cool.

At that, he peeks back over the roof edge and then hauls himself up, being extra careful not to leave claw marks on the side of the building.

"Mah associates has informed me that you has mah bukkit."

[Swindle]

"I has your bukkit, but you can only has it if you give me monies. I need monies to buy cheezeburgers," Swindle responds to Longcat, garnering confused looks and a scattering of laughter from the crowd.

"So it's . . . a LOLcat?"
"Is this being staged?"
"I get it!"
"I can't see! What's going on?"
"This is so going on reddit."

"I'd like to buy a zat, please," says the woman at the front of the line, distracting the arm's dealer's attention away from Longcat with a shiny credit card.

"Those are the ones from Stargate, right?" Swindle responds, turning around and fishing around on his shelves. "I warn you, they're expensive. The whole 'stuns on the first shot, kills on the second, disintegrates on the third' thing is difficult to replicate. Each one of these things has an energon micro-capacitor in it that . . . you know what, just don't shoot anything under 500 kilograms with it three times if you ever want to see that thing again. That'll be one thousand dollars, please."

[LongCat]

Stargate? Stuns on first shot? Disintegrates on third!!

DIS NAWT SAFE!

LC whips a pair of thick black glasses frames and a red bowtie out of subspace and pops them both on.

"If you mix these items improperly, it could be a cat-astrophe."

[Swindle]

Swindle gives Longcat a look when he does his Junkion thing. For a minute he thinks he's going to do a CSI 'Yeeeeaaah' when he's putting the glasses on, but he is proven wrong.

"It's the responsibility of the customer to use the merchandise responsibly. I just sell it. Don't these people look responsible to you? They look responsible to me," the merchant opines, looking over the crowd and noticing an overweight man dressed up as a skimpily clad female video game character surreptitiously picking his nose.

"Totally responsible."

[Hellbender]

A somewhat hefty youth with curly black hair who was standing in line said rather loudly, "Oh, get real! The third shot disintegrating things was so bogus that they dropped it after the first few seasons. They even made fun of the idea in the 'Wormhole X-Treme!' episode."

He looks around smugly. "Now what I want to know is do your lightsabers duplicate the interiors, too, with the power crystals and all?"

[Swindle]

OOC: Skipping Longcat due to timeout.

Swindle gives the hefty youth a look somewhere between pitying and confused, head tilted to one side. "I was personally selling weapons of mass destruction to intergalactic warlords when your species still thought flint-lock firearms were pretty cool. Also, I have known the intimate touch of a female of my species. If you want to buy ray guys, you are in the right line. If you want to be pedantic about ray guns, there are thousands of other people here who I'm sure would be willing to oblige you," he says, wearing his sweetest customer service smile.

"And no, my merchandise does not duplicate the fanciful made-up inner workings of the fictitious weapons it imitates, because it has to actually work," he says, picking up a human-sized replica of Darth Maul's double-bladed lightsaber and twirling it between his fingers the way a bored student twirls a pen. He had to practice this manuever extensively to keep from slicing his fingers off.

[Crankcase]

OOC: Slugslinger's involvement okayed with player.

---

"I told you the whole crystal thing was completely unworkable," says a gawkier lad behind the doubter. He self-consciously adjusts the empty gunbelt of his rather snug-fitting trousers. "A blaster's better anyway."

Elsewhere at the convention…

Crankcase owes Slugslinger a beating. And petty assault isn't something Crankcase typically includes in his repertoire, but Slugslinger can be a special case for ditching him in the middle of this morass of smelly, oddly dressed humans. They keep gawking at him.

Really, it's the staring that makes him uncomfortable. Being deep in what amounts to enemy territory is nothing new and hardly worth blinking; he isn't meant to be the centre of attention, however, and he never was. He is supposed to remain hidden and obscure. He is not supposed to need to duck away from humans with cameras trying to snap pictures. Yet here he is, trying to look nonchalant about staying behind pieces of architecture or keeping to stands of trees on the convention grounds where he's harder to photograph.

Swindle is supposed to be here somewhere. Maybe he'll let Crankcase take refuge in his ship. Or behind it. But before Crankcase can put out the call, he turns a corner and comes knees to face with a rather large specimen of human dressed in something loosely resembling gear the Decepticon remembers seeing on NEST soldiers. Weapons Crankcase assumes are replicas polish off the look.

He has no idea what to do about this.

[Hellbender]

The hefty kid rolls his eyes at his friend, and quotes, "'Not as clumsy or random as a blaster; an elegant weapon for a more civilized age.' Besides," he adds, "lightsabers are just cooler than blasters. All you can do with a blaster is shoot holes in things--do you know what kind of cool stuff you can do with a lightsaber?"

His face is almost aglow with awe at the thought of having his own, and he watches Swindle twirl his double-sabre with rapt attention. "Whoa! You got the single-blade kind, too, right?" he asks Swindle. "Does it have any limitations on what you can cut with it? How long does the power source last, and can I recharge it?"

[Swindle]

Swindle rolls his eyes yet again at the human, but smiles indulgently. "I'll sell you whatever you've got the money for, sir, but take it from me, swords may be cool, and they may be badaft, but guns let you kill people without having to be close enough for them to kill you. And close enough to see the lights go out in their eyes when they die. And yes, I do know what kind of cool things you can do with a lightblade. You can perform elective surgery and rebuild your enemies into crocodiles."

So saying, the arms dealer reaches under his counter and pulls out a display case of lightsabers, in various styles, each replicating a saber seen in the Star Wars movies. "It's a superheated plasma field contained between two magnets. There is a limit on what you can cut with it, but as far as anything on this planet, nothing man-portable can stop one. So be careful when you use it. If you cut off someone's arm while you're horsing around, that's on you. The power source lasts for one year of continuous use, assuming you're cutting through steel one inch thick. In practice, it'll last longer, since you won't be using it continuously. You can recharge the energon power cell but your electric bill is going to be through the roof. I suggest taking it to a place with free WiFi and surreptitiously plugging it in next to your laptop."

[Crankcase]

"You can flail it around trying to block blaster shots," says the rangy youth with a derisive smirk that doesn't do his freckled face any favours. After all, the merchant has just sided with him in the old blasters versus guns debate.

Meanwhile…

The human stares at Crankcase. Crankcase stares at the human. Neither seems to have anything to say. All around them, cameras flash and people murmur, but mostly, silence reigns and Crankcase has to struggle very hard to suppress the urge to squirm uncomfortably under the attention. Or just take off running. But that would be cowardly given that he's only facing humans. Then again, he's also considering hiding behind Swindle's ship.

Finally, suddenly, the man in paramilitary garb shakes his head.

"You are one ugly–" A passing car's horn and the screaming teenagers leaning out the back window drown out his low voice.