Adventures at ACen, Part 2

Last weekend Aaron, myself and five of our friends made the yearly pilgrimage to Anime Central (ACen), an anime convention in Rosemont, Illinois. 

Saturday:

Saturday began much like Friday, with new costumes to perfect in front of the room's giant mirror. Also just like Friday we started the day in the merchant room, a place we spent a rather large amount of our time, despite the empty nature of our wallets. This was not a fruitless trip, however. I managed to get my corset tightened by a gruff but hilarious pro and Aaron discovered a pack of his own kind.

Merchants all around let out a simultaneous tinkle

But to our group Saturday can mean only one thing: Drunken Mech battles.

A company called Virtual World provides the playground for every Gundam fan out there in the form of six giant robot cockpit pods. Inside there's all the controls you need to control your very own murderbot, which you get to pick from the dozens of choices available in one of the four size categories: Light, medium, heavy and assault classes.

So we all got good and liquored up. When we finally made our way to the mech room it was already about 10 or 11 pm, with another hour to wait our turn. I naturally picked the Arctic Wolf mech, because damn that's an awesome name, then I sat down on the floor and waited. And waited. Have you ever waited for something while drunk? It's torture. So I got bored and asked for a piece of paper.

Don't drink and draw, kids, mkay?

Sadly my illusions of victory were just that, illusions. I got last place.

Sunday:

It almost looks good enough to eat. Almost.

Alas the con cannot last forever, and it was now time to pack up the room and head for home. We threw our belongings and freshly acquired swag into the van and hit the convention center one last time. Aaron and I squeezed in one last panel (on self publishing), laughed at the poor suckers in the Full Metal Alchemist line (which was so big it had to be broken up into like eight other lines just to be managed), then met back up with our friends. We finished our weekend with a group selfie (minus Mat and John) taken by a horse.

Back at the van we discovered someone had graciously gifted us with an entire submarine sandwich, deposited on the wall directly in front of our van. Sadly we had already planned on having lunch at Wendy's, so we left the sandwich for a hungry pigeon, or perhaps a less discerning cosplayer who may have eaten nothing but ramen and pocky for three days.

Halfway to Wendy's we discovered part of the sandwich had decided to hitch a ride, with a single tomato elegantly draped upon Aaron's side mirror.

That tomato stayed there the whole way home.