Penelope Lawrence unlocked the door to her own comic book shop. It was mid-summer in Covington, Kentucky. She forgot how bright these mornings could be, especially when one greets such a morning with a gigantic hangover. It was seven in the morning, and while the early rays of daylight were still beginning to peek over the eastern hills on the other side of the Licking River, her eyeballs and stomach screamed at her to put an end to her misery. This was something Penny knew she was going to have to work through, somehow. Luckily, she was able to snag a thermos full of dark roast, no sugar, no milk or cream, from Shiner’s coffee shop up the block on her way in. She knew it made her breath smell like shit by lunch, but she just couldn’t get started without it. Better smelling like shit than feeling like shit, I guess. “Whatever” she replied out loud to herself. Shiner’s was one of the few blessings she had discovered within her first few days in Covington, Kentucky.
The sound of the rest of the world making its way to work was suddenly silenced once the door closed behind her. She stopped for a beat to steady herself. There were few things more precious to her than a moment of silence before diving into her routine, especially in her current condition. She took a slow sip of her coffee to punctuate the moment. Now it was time to get ready for Marcus, even though he had a funny habit of strolling in late, just like faulty clockwork. She headed to her office in the back.
Comics-in-Law was the latest in a small band of comic bookstores in town. There were a few more nearby across the rivers, but this one had the benefit of being at the confluence of several bus routes. So, she got all sorts into her store, thumbing through the bins of comics that filled the central space of the shop.
Comics-in-Law’s office was a small room, barely this side of a closet, tucked away off to the side of the Holy of Holies, which what she named the room that held all the rare and expensive collectible. The office was a cliché of a small shop’s office. It had a messy desk with a computer, a phone, a box of keys, a filing cabinet, sticky notes scattered all over a calendar that hung on the wall. There was even a safe that sat behind the desk. Penny eased herself down into the requisite creaky old office chair that sat between the desk and the safe. Penny, we got something Saturday night. We actually got a lead! This safe, however, held more than just cash and important paperwork. On its own shelf was a binder of something one wouldn’t normally find in a business owner’s safe.
This binder was the summation of her research on her mother’s disappearance five years ago. There was a lot more material upstairs, shoved away in boxes up in her hallway closet, but the pages in this binder represented her hottest leads and clues. It would be better to describe them as lukewarm or even tepid since the case was so cold. Penny hadn’t stopped her search, but it had slowed down significantly in the last year. Every so often, maybe once a week, she would reflexively pull it out and thumb through it as though on some sort of autopilot. At this point it was more of a habit as opposed to a pursuit. There was emptiness to it these days. She was so far away from it all, figuratively, literally, and temporally that it hardly felt real anymore. The urge to give it up seemed more ever-present these days.
Was diving straight into work going to be the best way to not think about the pounding her brain was taking? Only one way to find out. She logged into her computer and immediately opened her email. In the middle of all the newsletters, messages announcing free Viagra, and threats to reveal to her wife that she was caught on webcam viewing porn sites, unless she pays two thousand dollars in cryptocurrency, she saw the familiar delivery order for Mr. Weaver. Once a week, every week ever since shortly after the shop opened this order came in, Unlike Marcus, it was something she could set her watch to. It began to be comforting. The thought of a customer trusting her business to take a few minutes out of the day to bring a package brought a warm smile to her face. It was an old-fashioned touch that she decided to add because it differentiated her shop from the others. There was another delivery request from a name she did not recognize, and it was for the rarest item in her collection, [name of something rare]. This one was too precious to be walking around in the light of day. She would take care of this one personally after hours, if she could make it that far.
Penny. We need to get Saturday night in the binder and we need to do some more digging. Imperial Adventures had something going on.
Occasionally, something would come up that would lend a tiny spark to her search but would fade as quickly as it came into her mind. She compared the experience to solving world hunger in those seconds just before one falls asleep and makes a rapid short note of it only to wake up the next day to not be able to make any sense of it at all.
Penny turned around, punched in the combination to the safe, swung its door open and stared at the contents for a long moment. She reached for the binder, but this time the events of this past weekend were percolating up, and she needed extricate it. There was a convention in town that featured a panel that included a couple of writers that she recognized as names scrawled into the margins of a page in her binder. It was in her mother’s handwriting, so it must’ve had something to do with what she was working on before she disappeared. What did these men know? Did they know her? What was their relationship to another marginal note scribbled in the same page, “MM”? She felt that it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to kick over a rock that might have a little more than dirt under it. The voice in her head agreed with her. Maybe she would disturb a couple of worms and attract the attention of something bigger.
Although the panel turned into an embarrassing fiasco that she knew she would soon regret in the worst way, it did not yield any satisfying answers, just more questions. She was no farther along in her quest than when she unloaded her U-Haul into self-storage nearly six months ago. What she had achieved was the attention of the crowd in attendance. As the convention security guards dragged her out of the hall, she could see from the corner of her eye that many of the attendees had their phones out. The record was set; the consequences were guaranteed. If they would only have answered her direct questions with direct answers, instead of pivoting like some politician she wouldn’t be sitting here dreading what the force of the creative mind of the world would be making of her antics. She only had two hours of unplugged bliss before Marcus would show her the fertile imagination of the internet[GM1] .
“Why do I keep doing the bad cop? Fucking assholes. All of them.”
Something will break soon, Penny. Don’t worry about it. Let’s get back to work.
For a bit, it worked. Penny was in the zone, flipping through pages, even jotting a few notes onto some sticky notes and slapping them in her binder, joining the family of older sticky notes. It was a state of flow she rarely shared with the binder these days. Then she landed on those names again, Peter Wright and Donald Stevens.
Why couldn’t those corporate shills show some spine and tell us what MM stands for? They must be under a gigantic NDA, those two. It did not help that you called them a pair of geriatric cucks. Where did that come from?
“That’ll be enough out of you, Echo,” Penny quietly muttered to herself.
Shortly after nine o’clock a hand jammed a familiar phone into her field of vision, between her nose and the notebook, in which she was furiously scribbling. It played a frantically edited video of her action at the weekend’s convention panel. It was mean. It was rough. It was catchy. It was funny. It was super embarrassing.
A ringed index finger with a green fingernail tapped to the next video. It was a conventional vlogger style video reporting of the weekend’s events at the convention. From there, it got worse. The finger swiped again and mashups of her final moments in the hall played one after the other. These people did their homework, too. They tracked down her high school senior yearbook picture. One video even mentioned the disappearance of her mother, showing an old blurry staff photo of her from when she worked at the paper. A pair of podcasters did a “parasocial vibe check” and flashed hearts and sparkles across images of her. People duetted recordings of her last moments on TikTok. They interviewed people that she didn’t know, claiming to have dated her at some point. One guy even said that she wigged out at him once when he put a third finger in her. It would be a gross violation, if it were true. The last clip of her froze on her face right when they dragged her out of the convention hall as she was screaming for some truth out of those two old men. “The power of truth compels you!” No more Exorcist on gummies for us anymore. Across the frame they slapped the words “Comic-Com Karen.”
The familiar finger finally stopped the madness.
“My boss is internet famous!” exclaimed Marcus.
“Goddammit, Marcus! I was trying to forget about that. Plus I feel like shit. I don’t want to see any more of that.”
“Don’t you see? This is a perfect opportunity!”
“For what?”
“This is going to bring so much business to the shop.”
“How? I didn’t go there promoting the shop. We had no booth.”
“Yeah, but you wore the shop shirt. The one with big assed QR code on the back.”
“Shit.”
“Yup, and they’ve figured it all out and they are coming.”
At that moment, loud and impatient banging began on the front door of the shop.
“And here they are”
“If anyone asks for me tell them I’m not here, or I’m in a meeting and I cannot be disturbed.”
The banging intensified.
“Hurry up and open the door before they knock that thing down! Oh and it’s Monday. Mr Weaver’s order is in the system. Take care of that.”
“Right, boss.” Marcus winked at her and left the office. That did not fill her with confidence. She threw the binder into the safe and slammed it shut. She didn’t have much time. She knew what was coming and there was nothing she could do about it. Here we go, Pen. You wanted a successful shop, time to pay the piper.
She got up, left the office, and made her way onto the shop floor. Two brand new adoring fans, cosplaying as her from the video greeted her with shrieks of joy and ecstasy.
“There she is!” They both hurried over to her and clasped their hands and phones in the form of prayer. “You are our hero! We are totally in love with you. You are the voice of our generation.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Yeah, uh can we get a picture of you with us?”
Penny looked up at Marcus in hopes that he would step up an interfere and pull these brats away. He just stood there behind the counter giving her an enthusiastic double thumbs up. What else was I expecting?
“Alright, but you better buy something.”
“Sure. No problem. Thanks!”
They took a couple standard pics, one landscape, one portrait complete with big smiles and goofy hand signs. Then one switched to video and spoke “Hey fam! We are here with Comic-Con Karen herself IRL at Comics-in-Law in Covington, Kentucky, and yes, she is the true all gas no brakes real deal hero of our generation. Not all heroes wear capes, as you can see. But we just want to hear one thing from you, alright?”
“Ok” Penny replied warily.
“We’re going to repeat the mantra of the new revolution!”
“What’s that?”
Don’t play dumb!
The other new fan whispered in her ear “You know. The power of…”
“Oh yeah! Right. Sorry. I’ve slept since then.” Playing dumb was just going to make these instances last for far longer than she could stomach today.
“Alright, fam, here we go! One, two, three…”
Together they yelled into the phone “THE POWER OF TRUTH COMPELS YOU!” The three voices at such a loud and piercing volume hit Penny’s brain like a spike and nearly made her vomit right there, all over her two new adoring young fans. The risk of doing something that would extend her fifteen minutes of fame to something longer made her reconsider and fight the urge to expel her precious coffee all over these two dorks.
“That’s perfect! We’ll catch you all in the next one. For part two, like and follow us.”
The one new fan put the phone away. “Thank you so much! We tremendously appreciate this and will love you forever.” They stood in front of Panny, waiting for words of encouragement from their new hero of the moment.
“Thanks. Now please feel free to look around and buy as much as you like.” Penny gestured to the rest of the store.
“Oh, yeah. Totally.” The other new fan said as she looked around. Penny wondered if they even noticed that they were in a functioning store and not just a background.
They milled around and clumsily thumbed through random volumes in their sleeves. They even sniffed a couple pieces of merchandise, Penny recognized that look of feigned curiosity meant to mask bewilderment and confusion. It dawned on her. This might be a long day.
Finally, they grabbed one of the Super Man branded packs of gum next to the register, paid with their phone, and gleefully bounced back out into the world outside of the shop.
“Yes, this is going to be a long day.”
“Who are you talking to?” asked Marcus.
“Myself.”
“Right.”
The door swung open and a new group of adoring “lifelong” fans rushed into the store, once again casting live to their adoring fans. Their screens flooded with hearts floating up the screen. Again, they asked for Comic-Con Karen’s catch phrase. Again, they bought something small after wandering around the store for a perfunctory few minutes and left.
Penny lost count of the number of times this repeated with their own unique variations before lunch. The good thing about all the chaos was that she eventually forgot she was supposed to be hungover. The headache left her, the queasiness dissipated and the rush energized her a bit. As much as she dreaded what was destined to happen, it turned out to be beneficial to her psyche.
As the noon hour crept upon the store, Penny remembered that Mr. Weaver’s delivery needed to be made.
“Marcus, I almost forgot. Get Mr. Weaver’s package together.”
“Right, boss. But I don’t want to miss all the fun.”
“Marcus, now.” Marcus stopped where he was, crossed his arms and stared straight into her eyes.
Penny stared back at him for a moment, then gave in. “Please. Ok? Please get Mr. Weaver’s package together and take it to him… Please?”
Marcus played the role of the diva perfectly, but also quickly and relaxed his posture. “Ok. I’ll be back after lunch. I want a full report of what happened after I get back.”
“Yes. Yes, now go before we piss off our best customer.”
“That’s not us?” one of the latest new “life-long” fans piped up from the other side of the shop with a tone of feigned indignation.
Penny snapped back with “Can it. You know who you are.”
Marcus grabbed the items Mr. Weaver requested from around the shop and stopped by Penny, who was now manning the register. “Can I get a hug?”
“Fuck off. Now get going.”
Marcus left the shop with the delivery in hand. As he left a new group of fans filed in before the door could close.
“Excuse me. Are you Comic-Con Karen?”
[GM1]Add in her activity on various websites like Reddit, Discord or SM groups.