Page 41 of Dragon Chaos Around

“Not in full villain armor with a wig and stage makeup, they won’t. The beauty of cosplay, Crystal: you become someone else. That’s the entire point.”

“The beauty of cosplay,” Giselle said, not looking up from her gauntlet, “is that you get to be the villain. Everything else is logistics.”

Alani grinned. Went back to her wiring. The afternoon light shifted as the sun tracked west, and the workshop’s shadow patterns rearranged themselves across the workbenches, and the playlist cycled through three more villain themes, and the costumes grew closer to completion with every stitch and wire and painted line.

And then the buzzer rang.

NINETEEN

ALANI

He stood in the workshop doorway like a man who had taken a wrong turn through a dimensional portal.

The afternoon sun poured in behind him—Brooklyn light, warmer and more diffuse than Manhattan’s sharp angles. He wore dark trousers and a charcoal henley with the sleeves pushed to his forearms, and this was the most casual she had ever seen him, and it was devastating. The henley clung in ways his suits only suggested. The exposed forearms⁠—

Do not look at his forearms. You are holding a soldering iron. You will burn yourself and it will be humiliating and Giselle will add it to the incident log.

“Welcome to the workshop.” She set the iron down. Waved him in. “Mind the foam scraps on the floor. And the paint cans by the door. And the—” She followed his gaze. He was staring at the costume mannequins lining the back wall—twelve finished cosplays from previous competitions, displayed on adjustable forms. Villain after villain, each one handcrafted, each one a small act of devotion made wearable. “Those are mine. Previous builds.”

He stepped inside. His eyes moved across the mannequins with the same focused, systematic attention she’d watched him apply to convention logistics—each costume assessed, cataloged, filed. He stopped at the third mannequin. A Maleficent reinterpretation she’d built two years ago: structured horns in lightweight resin, a gown constructed from seven different fabrics layered to create the illusion of living shadow, hand-embroidered thorns climbing the bodice in metallic thread.

“This won the National Cosplay Championship,” he said. Not a question.

“You looked me up.”

“I research all personnel associated with my convention.” He moved to the next mannequin. “This is the Hela build that placed second at Dragon Con.”

“You looked me up thoroughly.”

“I’m thorough by nature.” He turned from the mannequins. His gaze landed on her workstation—the half-wired breastplate, the armor pieces in various stages of completion, the reference boards pinned above her bench showing the character from every angle. He crossed the room and stood before the breastplate. Studied it. His head tilted three degrees—the angle she’d learned to read as genuine interest, distinct from the two-degree tilt of polite acknowledgment and the zero-degree stillness of disapproval.

“The LED integration,” he said. “Walk me through the circuit design.”

Alani blinked. Behind her, Crystal’s sewing machine paused. On the floor, Giselle’s paintbrush stilled.

“You want to know about the circuit design?”

“The breastplate appears to use individually addressable LEDs wired in parallel with a microcontroller for pattern sequencing. The power source is—” He leaned closer to the bench, examining the exposed wiring. “—a rechargeable lithium polymer cell, hidden in the spinal brace. The heat dissipation design is elegant. How long does the charge sustain the full light pattern?”

The workshop went quiet. Even the playlist seemed to lower itself in deference.

“Four hours,” Alani said. “Six if I drop the pulse sequence to static glow.”

“And the structural load? The LED housing adds weight to the chest piece. How does that affect range of motion during the competition walk?”

He understands circuit design. He is asking about structural load distribution in cosplay armor. The eight-hundred-year-old dragon king is standing in my workshop asking technically competent questions about LED integration in villain costumes.

Behind her, Giselle whispered to Crystal: “He’s asking about load distribution.”

Crystal whispered back: “I heard.”

“I’m having an emotion,” Giselle whispered.

“Same.”

Alani walked Chaos through the build. Not the simplified version she gave interviewers or the glossy overview she presented at panels. The real version. Watt-hours per LED segment. Thermal management in the chest cavity. The structural compromise between dramatic silhouette and competitive mobility—the way every cosplay build was an argument between beauty and physics, and the best builders won by making physics beautiful.

He listened the way he listened in creative-direction meetings—completely, with the stillness that she now understood was not absence of engagement but its most concentrated form. He asked questions that revealed a mind comfortable with engineering principles. When she explained the cape’s internal wire armature—how she’d designed it to hold three distinct dramatic poses using a system of tension cables hidden in the lining—he examined the mechanism and said, “This is analogous to early aviation wire-bracing. The tension distribution follows the same principles.”