Though it’s a beautiful late-summer evening outside, you’re glad to get out of the sticky humidity of downtown Atlanta and into the cool, dry air of the Marriott Marquis lobby, where the first real evening of Dragon*Con is about to take place. Everywhere you look, people are rushing about happily wearing amazing and bizarre costumes…Imperial Boxtroopers, Mega Man, Faye Valentine, even a few people who apparently still think The Matrix is cutting edge. You look down at your jeans and sneakers, suddenly feeling very conspicuous in your ordinary attire. Well, you’re not hanging around tonight, anyway…you’re just here to buzz through the art show real quick, see if there’s anything you like, maybe go downstairs and look through the DVDs on sale…then home.
     As you walk past the various information tables representing local orders of poets, gamers and hobbits, you become aware of a corpulent, sweaty man tromping hurriedly by. He wears a long, rough black cape, leather gloves with silver buckles at the wrist and a rather unconvincing, threadbare toupée. It seems odd that this one person would catch your attention, given the immense number of peculiarly garbed people swirling through the lobby, to say nothing of the high percentage of corpulent, sweaty, becaped men among them. But something about that one guy had seemed strangely…authentic. As you’re musing on this, your eyes fall downward to see that fat cape man has dropped something. A Dragon*Con map, with hotel room 4-D circled, and the words “Science Exhibit” scrawled on it in periwinkle crayon. Funny…all the regular exhibitors are on the lower floors, in various conference rooms and parts of the lobby. You look about but fat cape man has blended into the crowd like a fat phantom.