As I briefly alluded in Day One of my Otakon 2017 con report, in late September I ended up in the hospital with a fairly serious calcium deficiency. I still don't know how it happened, and I'm pretty much entirely better now, but by the time New York Comic Con rolled around, I had only been out of the hospital for two weeks, and I hand only been back on my feet for...wow, one. It was a really, really stupid idea for me to attend New York Comic Con. But, I had spent a really, really significant amount of money on tickets. Plus I had made it through my first ever Ren Faire the previous weekend; I had to take a lot of breaks and sit down a lot, but I survived. I had too many people depending on me to back out--and I knew I had just as many people ready to help me should I need it.

After being Ravenclaw students together the year before, Mike and I had talked about being original Star Trek characters on Thursday of this year. I was game, as it hit a lot of my cosplay preferences: I'd get to rewear a costume that hadn't gotten much love, and it was pretty simple outfit. I straightened my own hair again (I so love that I've learned how to do that now), did my best '70s makeup, and even "upgraded" the costume by buying a replica phaser and communicator, and wore a pair of big gold hoop earrings. Unfortunately,a little before the con Mike texted me to let me know that he had run into issues with his costume so it wasn't ready to debut yet, but I didn't see any reason to change my plans, so I slipped a pair of comfortable shoes in my bag, and hit the road to the con.

There were all sorts of changes at the Javits Center this year; the first I ran into was that they were having regular ticket holders (as opposed to press or exhibitors and what have you) sort of loop around the con, go down by the water on 12th Avenue, and then loop back up to queue up for the bag check outside the convention center before you even got in. (I'm not knocking this--in today's day and age, a bag check is an absolute necessity.) So there was a LOT of walking even before you made it into the convention, and a long line, although it moved really pretty fast.

For another, because the north wing was closed, the Artist's Alley needed to be relocated--and to my way of thinking, it ended up in a much more prominent place, being down the first flight of stairs you saw when you went in through the regular ticket entrance. (Although, on the other hand, for the life of me I can't remember what used to be down there before. Just panels, maybe?) I do have to say, though, that it was weird to walk from one end of the con to another, and see the hallway that used to lead to the north wing boarded up. It messed with my personal flow, but to be honest I don't think it had a big impact on foot traffic or crowd issues in general.

I wanted to see how I'd handle walking the con floor, so I didn't text anybody when I first arrived, but just did my usual little loop that I always do...and it was tough. The Javits Center is roughly six city blocks long, and I had to rest at least three times--so say every two "blocks". That might not sound unreasonable, but I'm a New Yorker; we don't take the subway for less than ten. But my body had new (thankfully temporary) limits and I had to respect that. I just didn't have to be happy about it.

Now that I knew what I was up against, it was time to text my friends. Mike and his fiancée Julie were in the Artist's Alley, so I headed back the way I had come to meet up with them. Mike and I lamented his lack of costume, Julie and I exchanged pleasantries (and I congratulated them on their engagement; it was the first time I had seen them in person since they had gotten engaged), and we tried to find James O'Barr, who had been listed as attending, but I never actually found him all weekend. Julie had to bail early, because she had classes to teach the next day, but she was fine with Mike staying a little longer, so after we were done with the Artist's Alley we decided to head to the Dealer's Room.

Mike got a text from another of my Staten Island boys, Artiga, saying he was in the Dealer's Room, so we figured out what aisle he was in and met him there. We didn't have a lot of time before the boys were schedule to head out, so we spent some time catching up (luckily, I had seen Artiga at Otakon only two months before, and we had actually gotten some quality time in), reviewing each other's pictures (they were doing a *lot* better at chronicling the con than I was; calcium brain kept making me forget), and just generally shooting the breeze.

Not long afterwards I got a text from my friend Cheezburger--we had actually seen each other literally in passing on the street, as I was getting on the line for the general entrance, and he was looking for the special line where press such as he gets to go. Lucky stiff. He had gotten in touch with the rest of the Basement Boys, how about we all meet at J. Scott Campbell's booth? Fine by me, so I said goodbye to Mike and Artiga, and headed deeper into the Dealer's Room.

It's mildly disturbing how quickly I slip into "assistant" mode when people need me to; pretty soon I found myself holding Pete's comics while he hunted for the one he needed, and then playing camera man when he got J. Scott Campbell's signature. Well, it's nice to feel needed. And it's not exactly like they're asking me to sew them all costumes the night before the con or anything. I can handle a little light administrative work from time to time.

Pete I'm used to of course, but I want to say every time I see Ramón is an absolute delight. He's one of those guys that hits the perfect balance between utterly harmless and extremely pervy, and he never fails to make me laugh. I keep trying to rope him (and, let's fact it, everyone I know) into cosplay--one of these days I will get himt o be Kingpin. It may take me being Elecktra to make it happen, but there are worse things I could do.

Once Pete had his signature it was time to wander the con a bit. I was really pleasantly surprised by how many other Trekkies were dressed up! It still feels a little "off" for a comic con (I don't know why, when anime and video game costumes don't, or at least not as much) but I think we've all come to accept that NYCC is as much a celebration of geek culture as anything else.

Going was a little slow because, again, of how often I needed to stop to rest. The boys were concerned; they'd known me for a long time (I met Pete over twenty years ago!) and they had never seen me so pale and out of it. I mean, okay, I'm naturally pale, but not so...I don't know, clammy. And I'm usually full of energy. They were really great about clearing a space whenever I needed to sit down, and didn't complain once about how I was dragging them down. Cheezburger in particular turned out to be a bit of an Italian mother, making sure I ate and took my pills on time all weekend.

Luckily there are a few vendors aside from the food court (which is almost always packed) sprinkled around New York Comic Con; I ended up living on soda and sandwiches from the Concourse Cafe across from the 1C meeting rooms. It was expensive, the way any kiosk in any airport is expensive, but necessary, and still way less crowded than the food court. (And better food, too, but I may be the only New Yorker in existence who prefers sandwiches over pizza.)

And, naturally, I slowed us down by stopping to take pictures every time I remembered and felt up to it. This actually annoyed the Basement crew less than it has some of my other friends, as they also take pictures of cosplayers to post on their social media. There's a lot of anime that interests me that they don't recognize, and there are a lot of comic book characters that they geek out over that I can't identify, but enough of our favorites overlap that we don't annoy each other too much. Plus, even if I'm not familiar with a character, I can still usually appreciate a good costume.

There was also as usual lineup of new merch on display, once again most of which I really didn't recognize, except for the Yuri on Ice stuff, which I photographed for friends of mine who are WAY more into it than I am. I didn't see a single YoI cosplayer all weekend, which was a vast change from Otakon. To be honest, I think the most popular costume I saw all weekend was one-armed Georgie from IT, which was...disturbing, to say the least. I don't think I took any pictures of any of them.

By far, however, the best random encounter of the weekend was running into the cosplayer my friend Skye and I had dubbed "smiley-eyed Thor" between ourselves after photographing him on Day One of NYCC 2016. I recognized him again immediately because he looks SO much like Chris Hemsworth, especially the aforementioned "smiley eyes". This time, whether because repetition made him seem less daunting, or whether because as I said calcium deficiency was making me even more lackasadisical than usual, I actually told him I remembered him from last year and handed him once of my cosplay cards. Best decision I could have made--we're now friends on Facebook, and he is awesome. I love this stupid hobby.

Randomest random encounter of the weekend--possibly of all time--however, has to belong to Louis. I haven't really gone into it because this clearly isn't the appropriate venue, but Louis and I split about four years ago, as civilly as humanly possible, and while we share spiritual custody of my incredibly moronic younger brothers, we haven't really seen or talked to each other much since. And we'd never run into each other at Comic Con. But as my group and I were traversing the halls, I saw a very familiar looking Luigi sitting crosslegged on the floor, deep in conversation with a friend, eating a pizza and leaving the crusts on his plate.

I dropped out of the flow of traffic and plopped in front of his plate. Helping myself to the pizza crusts, I said, "I'll eat these, you never do anyway." The look on his face was *priceless*. Thankfully, we always have and apparently still do share a love for the absolutely absurd, so he burst into laughter. He introduced me to his friend (a coworker, apparently, she was super nice!), I told him about my calcium deficiency (which in retrospect, might also be to blame for my impetueous decision) , and actually spent a few minutes catching up, before I left to catch up with my other friends. It's much better to be chummy with an ex you share so much history with if you can manage it; I highly recommend it.

Back on track, while trying to catch up with the rest of the Basement Boys I ran into my friends Nick and Frances dressed as Robin and Raven respectively--I know we're not supposed to have favorites, but I think Nick is my favorite Robin. :) Frances looks amazing no matter who she's dressed as, but I have never seen her as Raven before (she's an *amazing* Harley) and she looked phenomenal. I never ran into them again for the rest of the weekend, but, spoiler alert! They got engaged and I am SO sorry I missed it!

"Great costume," Nick said. "Did you get your picture taken in the captain's chair?"

Ex-squeeze me, what?

Turns out CBS had a setup downstairs where a lot of the panel rooms are, where you could get your photo taken in a replica of the new captain's chair they'd be using in the new Star Trek show, Discovery. Rarely has anything ever been so relevant to my interests. I was already starting to fade already, but I didn't want to leave the con before getting my picture in that thing.

I didn't catch up with Pete et al again, but I did manage to find Doc and Linwood, so at least I wasn't wandering around the con brainless and unsupervised. Federation knows I wouldn't have been able to find the setup on my own, not in that state. Between the three of us, and after asking for directions once or twice, we managed to find the green screen. CBS was good; I think I had my picture in about 24 hours or so. Doc's and Linwood's shots came out awesome, and I was pretty pleased with mine--which I have to admit is more because I Googled the "Kirk pose" than due to any sort of satisfaction with my appearance. I WANNA BE A CAPTAIN, DAMMIT.

With my silliness over, we were now free to roam around the con again. And once again it was slow going; despite my best efforts to eat, take my pills, and take it easy, as the hours went by I was flagging more and more. My memories of the second half of Thursday are even fainter than the morning; I *think* we just walked around, talked, and took pictures? I'd like to think I'd remember if anything particularly special happened, like meeting a celebrity? (Or that one of us--Doc, our resident photographer, at the very least--would have had the presence of mind to snap a picture?) But I can't swear to any of it.

Nevertheless, I was either determined, or not bright enough to go home (or both) so with my two swains at my side, I struggled onwards. We thought it might be better to explore the underground a bit, both because we hadn't seen it, and because it was bound to be less crowded than the hallways upstairs. Mainly I think there were just panel rooms and lines to get into them--I'm almost positive we passed the place where David, Skye, and I had waited online to meet Stan Lee the year before. But I got to see some cool costumes I probably wouldn't have otherwise, so it was a worthwhile trip.

It was great just getting to hang out with Doc and Linwood, too; Linwood in particular was super jazzed, both because he was dressed as Gideon Graves from Scott Pilgrim--he looked fantastic and he knew it--but becaues he had just passed his driving test earlier that day! First try, too! I was super proud of him--learning to drive in New York City is an entirely different beast from anywhere else on the planet (well, possibly D.C. is worse) and it's a major accomplishment. Even if you never use it (and really, with there being absolutely no parking anywhere, and subway stations just about everywhere, you really rarely do), a driver's license is such a convenient thing to have.

Once we hit the end and emerged upstatirs, we ran into our friend Carrie outside of the Artist's Alley, who I hadn't seen since AnimeNEXT 2015, despite the fact that she used to be the person I ran into first at almost every con. Granted a large portion of that is because she works more than she cosplays these days (completely understandably), but I still miss getting into shenanigans with her. And almost as if summoned by just the mere thought of shenaningans, her husband CHris joined us not long afterwards. CHris and I are planning a Constantine and Zatanna photoshoot sometime in the near future, so it was neat to get to meet up and chat about that in person rather than just through text.

Somehow (I'm sure texting was involved, but again: calcium brain) Doc and Linwood and I ended up finding what was left of the Pete's Basement crew, who were joined by Usagi Seion and Rich who was still on his quest to get an autograph of every name that's in the Skyline cover of Amazing Spider-man #700. Apparently there are 317 names, he's been at this for four years, and I don't know how many he has versus how many he has to go, but man am I impressed. This is exactly the sort of crazy thing that I'd attempt.

I was just about done in, and grateful for the opportunity to sit. I know this is about the time coherent thought ceased--as evidenced by the fact that I don't have any pictures of Usagi Seion. I remember sitting down. I *vaguely* remember talking a little at first, but less and less--it was just too hard to complete sentences, or even start them. I think most of my time was spent just looking at everyone, the way you watch the scenery roll by on a long bus trip. You can't really interact with the scenery in any meaningful way, but you can at least appreciate it.

Sooner rather than later, my friends realized how bad off I was. I believe a vote was taken and it was decided it was high time for me to be heading home--I don't know, I really don't remember, other than a few looks of concern. I vaguely remember Pete putting his hand down my collar to feel my back, because it was soaked with sweat, and I *never* sweat, even when I'm working out. Doc and Linwood decided to walk me out to make sure I got at least as far as the train station safely. (They were all for putting me in a cab, but do you know how difficult it is to get a cab in New York? Especially up by the Javits Center?)

I know we stopped to take a few pictures before I left, because I really didn't have many in this, considering it's only been worn on Halloween before. It just goes to show you don't have to be particularly intelligent or even functional to be a model; you just have to do what you're told. Although I think the quality of the pictures that were produced are due far more to Doc's skill than to my modeling talent. I mean people take pictures of landscapes all the time, and that's about where my mental capacity was by that point.

But, I made it home safely. Not only did I have another, good Lord, three days of con left, but I was about to have a very special visitor...

Sailor Mars

Sailor Mercury

THE TINIEST SAILOR MOON EVER OH MY GOD

Black Lady

J. Scott Campbell signing Pete's comic

The Women Of Star Fleet

He's trying to minimize the height disparity, but it's a lost cause

So happy to run into other Trekkies there!

She had a tricorder! I need one.

So glad I ran into him again!

I *love* that she had the basket weave!

The final version of this is on the Original Star Trek "Red Shirt" page.

Carrie, Chris, and me

Linwood and me