TRUE BELIEVERS: Chapter 20 — Missed Connections

True Believers is a full-length novel by Thom Dunn, based on his play of the same name. It’s a satirical tale of star-crossed lovers, aspiring comic book creators, crazed fanboys, cybernetically enhanced humans, women in refrigerators, real-life superheroes, and girls who dress like Slave Leia as their lives intertwine over a whirlwind weekend at a comic book convention in the early 2010s.

The book will be serialized on Medium throughout the month of April 2020. Here is the first chapter. Check back every day for more chapters!

Comic conventions are synonymous with standing in line. That’s part of the experience, something you learn to accept. But then you find yourself queueing up on line to use the bathroom, and it’s only then that you truly understand the abject torture of stupid people en masse. Nine times out of ten, the holdup is caused by a cosplayer who previously neglected to factor in an easy escape route in his elaborate outfit, which leads to a slow, tedious process of disassembling and re-assembling whatever plastic armor crap they’re wearing, and then having to fix themselves in the mirror like a night out at the nerd club.

That’s why it’s always worth it for Chad to find the most remote bathroom possible. It doesn’t matter that he has to walk up three floors and half a mile out of his way while…