Simon gestured towards the replicator monolith in the corner of the room. “Ask that thing. So far it’s provided strong black coffee of a considerably better vintage than the hotel offerings. That might do, for starters.”
Liam eyed the machine curiously. “The Star Trek McGuffin, is it? Interesting… But hey, speaking of Andie Mae… did Xander find you last night?”
Simon hesitated. “He, uh, yeah,” he muttered. “He told me… uh… Apparently she hit it off with the android — in — chief…”
“What did you do?”
“Me? Nothing — what was I supposed to do? I prowled around in the corridor outside her room for a bit — but I couldn’t exactly bust down the door and demand that she be unhanded… or whatever was going on in there… I couldn’t exactly hear — ”
“You were eavesdropping in the corridor?” Liam demanded incredulously.
“At the door, actually,” Simon confessed, looking vaguely ashamed of himself. “Look, I just wanted to make sure that she was okay…”
“And you did that how? By eavesdropping?”
“All I heard,” Simon said defensively, “was the Rebel Yell.”
“The what, now?”
“YEE — HAW!” Simon said, demonstrating, and Liam jumped, almost knocking over a teetering pile of paper on a nearby table.
“Ow,” said Xander, who had just walked in, wincing and putting his hands up over his ears. “Please don’t. I’m going to find whoever made those vicious cocktails up in Callahan’s last night and shoot them. Slowly. Ow.”
“You can’t shoot someone slowly,” Liam said.
“Stop trying to make sense,” Xander said in a pitiful voice. “I don’t understand. I am not even remotely capable of rational logic this morning. Is everyone okay?”
“Here,” Liam said, handing Xander a steaming cup of strong black coffee which he had just retrieved from the replicator. “You look like your need is urgent. And I’ll have another one of these, thank you,” he said conversationally, turning back to the replicator.
“What do you mean, is everyone okay?” Simon said, frowning.
“Well, I’m not. Exactly.” Xander took a sip of his coffee, shooting a grateful glance at Liam. “I kind of feel like that disco — ball Moon last night dropped off its chain and landed on my head. Ow. So what’s the status this morning, then?”
“Of what status do you speak?” Simon said, turning back to glance at the still mostly empty corridors surveilled by the cameras. A few brave souls had risen and wandered the halls in search of breakfast, in the hotel restaurant where staff had bravely reported for duty that morning at the appointed time, but the hotel as a whole still had the air of Sleeping Beauty’s castle just before the Prince came upon the sleeping princess.
“They were too busy being excited or weirded out last night to care, but this morning… they’re going to want their entertainment,” Xander said. “They’re going to want something to take their minds off things.”
“You’re still thinking about programming?” Liam said incredulously. “After everything that’s happened? How much luck did you have with actual scheduled programming yesterday?”
“Well, the panelists mostly turned up,” Xander said. “And yeah, we had some audiences. Not everyone could go stare at the freaking Moon every waking hour. And besides, this morning we’re supposed to have the star turn — the Guest of Honor panel — and that’s supposed to be starting…kind of… in an hour!” The last was more of a yelp than an actual coherent utterance as Xander took his first real look at a clock and realized just how late it was. “I’d better go see if anyone relevant is up and about! Where’s Andie Mae?”
“She’s, uh, I think she may still be indisposed,” Simon said, raising an eyebrow.
Xander’s face changed as the memory flooded back. “You mean I didn’t just dream that?”
“If you did, then you told me a tall tale last night,” Simon said. “But I have reason to believe that things did indeed transpire…”
“Oh, can it, Simon,” Xander said. “Simple words, please. No more than three syllables and that only if you have to. Where’s Dave…?”
“No idea,” Simon said, shrugging.
“Great,” Xander muttered, gulping the last of his coffee, and taking refuge in his beloved Babylon 5 again. “Our hotel and guest liaison deserts his post without a word, and the con Chair picks the most breathtakingly inconvenient moment to explore new career options.”
“She’s hardly going to do a Delenn and sprout butterfly wings,” Simon muttered as he turned away.
“Neither did Delenn,” Xander snapped, smacking his empty cup down on the nearest counter. “Dammit. I’d better go look for Dave. If Andie Mae does show within the next hour or so, send her down to the ballroom. I’ll go find my panelists, if they’re still alive and able to string together a sentence in public. It might be Sunday but we’ve still got a con to run. This was damned good coffee, by the way. I’ll have another to go, thanks, black, no sugar.”
“Whose idea was it to schedule a GoH panel on a Sunday morning anyway?” Simon grumbled. “Even at a normal con, Sunday is the Saturday night morning after…”
“Exactly,” Xander flung back as he was exiting the room. “She thought… we both thought… it might just be the thing to wake the convention up on the Sunday rather than letting it wend its weary way into oblivion like it usually does until the most jumping thing on a Sunday is the Dead Dog Party.”
“Good luck,” Simon said, yawned mightily, and turned back to the monitor.
Xander, cursing to himself at the inability to use his currently non — functioning cellphone to contact the people he needed instead of having to bodily chase them down, took the charmingly empty and available elevator (for which, on Saturday, there was usually a crowded and lengthy wait) up to the seventh floor of Tower 1, where the GoH suites were. The first one on his path was Rory Grissom’s quarters, and even as he raised his hand to knock he realized that the door was not quite closed… and the room beyond was silent.
Instead of rapping sharply as he had intended, Xander tapped rather more gently and called out, “Hello? Rory? You in there? Everything OK?”
There was no response. Xander bit his lip, clenched and unclenched the hand not curled around his coffee cup, and pushed the door open, sticking his neck out like a wary turtle, and craned his head to peer into the room without being intrusive about it. The opening that led to the vanity area and then the bathroom beyond showed a counter covered in a messy pile of things like hair gel and a couple of half — squeezed travel — sized toothpaste tubes; the door of the bathroom itself was open, and the bathroom, although the light was on, appeared to be empty. Reluctantly, Xander pushed the hotel room open a little more and took a step inside.
“Hello?”
All the lights were on, but the suite was deserted. The sleeping quarters, a smaller room opening out of the large sitting room area, contained nothing more than a king — size bed which looked as though it had been slept in, or at the very least disturbed relatively recently, the bedclothes tangled up into a knot of twisted sheets and coverlets in the middle of the mattress — but there was no sign of anyone who might have perpetrated this. The sitting area was cluttered with dirty glasses, an empty wine bottle, a half — empty bottle of a different wine on the coffee table, and a mostly — empty bottle of tequila with just the barest dregs sloshing around the bottom of the bottle tucked away by the side of the sofa, which was itself a pyramid of tumbled cushions.