The South Florida Offshore Tourism Redevelopment Zone #2
There were eventually men, some she saw only for a night and others that became temporary boyfriends, but Lilly never gave much of herself to them.
She met them at pubs, late at night, when it was dark and they could never see her well.
Most were forgettable, less charming even than Glenn.
For a few months she dated a doctor, an endocrinologist named Charlie, who was funny and smart and caring, and seemed interested to learn more about Lilly even though she spoke very little.
He was the nicest person she had ever dated and it creeped her out.
Why was Charlie so genuine? Who was Charlie to be with someone like Lilly, poor and sad and lacking in any prospects?
He didn’t know she had a doctorate, had been a scientist. He thought she just worked at a grocer.
Wasn’t that strange? The mere fact that someone could be with Lilly was evidence that Lilly should not be with them.
Charlie was too good, and so she broke up with him and went back to being alone.
Lilly spent time on message boards and in chat rooms, discussing Malicarn lore, the latest releases, rumors of what was happening on set.
She picked an anonymous moniker, “WizardGirl26,” and started posting, parlaying her own theories and ideas.
Sometimes she drew on what she knew from her time there, sometimes it was just speculation, but she never told anyone who she was or what she used to do.
The fans did a lot of heavy lifting justifying ruptures in continuity, trying to explain how the prequels could ever line up with the original films. There were multiverses, they theorized, or the original movies were de-canonized, or there was time travel.
Lilly never reminded any of the commentators that it was all made up.
There was a big, heavily marketed anniversary rerelease of all the Malicarn films, one a week for several months.
Lilly decided to go see a recent one—The Malicarn: Demon Spawn, a horror-like film featuring a few minor Council members and barely any Gregorian.
She went on a Saturday afternoon. One of the accounts she followed shared a post about a London-area Malicarn fan group that would be assembling, in costume, to watch the film, and Lilly wanted to see them.
To meet, in person, another group of Malicarn fans, people who thought the ongoing travails of a living land of make-believe actually mattered.
She took a bus to Croydon and walked to the theater.
The fans were not hard to identify. They were dressed in homemade costumes of robes and capes and mail.
Even from far away they looked cheap and fake, nothing at all like the clothes Lilly remembered from the Malicarn set.
The fans sat together, over a dozen of them in the front rows, hooting and hollering throughout the whole film, quoting lines and clapping at every minor moment.
When the credits rolled, they gave a standing ovation.
In the lobby afterward Lilly walked up to one of them, a girl dressed in a white simulacrum of Heloise’s traveling gown.
“Are you guys Malicarn cosplayers?” Lilly asked.
“Oh yeah! Do you cosplay?”
“No,” Lilly said. “But I’m interested.”
“Oh, you should come to our meetings! We’re the Reapers, we meet once a month.”
The girl gave Lilly information on their next meeting, and two weeks later Lilly found herself back in the back of a pub, with a group of very motivated, excited Malicarn fans. They played trivia and Lilly won, instantly endearing her to her new loud and opinionated friends.
There weren’t really her people, of course. But they were something.
Hilton-over-the-Beach had an open-air balcony that wrapped around the front of the hotel.
Lilly walked out onto it while she waited for the convention to open.
It hosted a wide promenade with grass and trees, much like the parks Miami Beach once had.
Hardly anyone was out here except for a few landscapers and maintenance staff.
From the southernmost tip, Lilly leaned over and could see a mass of dust and debris rising over the edge of the hotel.
She heard the buzz of helicopters circling the fallen building on the mainland.
Hilton-over-the-Beach was one of a dozen resorts, hotels, and privately owned golf clubs that had been erected above the water after Hurricane Jason.
The State of Florida gave the land away for nearly nothing, as long as the developers promised to bring in some tourist dollars.
The land was barely even land anymore, except for a few hours a day when sand emerged from the low tides.
But the development deals didn’t work as the state had intended.
Without the ability to leave their hotel, any tourist’s money was just going to a single corporate owner.
And it didn’t take long for businesses to get a special tax exemption so that each sky palace operated as its own individual fiefdom.
Some were geared toward families, some honeymooners, and some to rich guys who wanted to get away from their wives and have a prostitute pretend they were good in bed.
Hilton-over-the-Beach was the largest resort and the convention hub.
People came by boat or flew into the new floating international airport.
Some even took water taxis from the mainland, though the high crime and poverty of what remained of southern Florida made it an option only for the most frugal.
From the southern edge of the promenade, Lilly looked down at the layers of balconies and hotel rooms. Ten down, three to the left. She had studied the architectural plans thoroughly, knew exactly which window it was. As long as they hadn’t misidentified the correct room in the first place.
Lilly walked back into the main lobby. It was nearly nine, and the room was filling up with con attendees waiting for the exhibition hall to open for the morning.
Lilly was moving through the crowd slowly, counting security guards and cameras, when she noticed a man in a blue windbreaker leaning against a column, chewing gum.
Without his usual suit and pipe combination he looked almost normal.
“No tea this morning?” she asked Roger.
He shrugged. “Trying to cut back. Makes me jittery.”
The doors to the exhibition hall opened and the crowd began moving inside.
“We should line up at Hall B early,” Lilly said.
“Not too early. Easier to leave when we are toward the back.”
“Well, let’s do a loop. And try to seem interested, okay?”
Roger shrugged again, and they walked together into the convention hall.
There was a large plastic castle constructed at the entrance, and beyond that a fake cobblestone path that wound between the aisles of booths.
There were hundreds of stalls, filled with writers or comic book artists, C-list actors from old TV shows, retailers hawking T-shirts and tote bags.
Large studios had bigger booths with more interactive features.
The smaller guys had a table and maybe a few posters.
They walked up to the largest booth of them all, with elaborate decorations and life-size cutouts of characters. The Malicarn exhibit always gave out free swag. Lilly walked up and took a pen, the end of which was shaped to look like a wizard’s staff.
“I think they are setting up a resurrection storyline, definitely,” said a fan standing behind Lilly. He was a young man, barely out of school, talking excitedly to a friend. “You can see it because of the Easter egg from the last movie, with the face in the lake.”
“Oh, who was that face?” Roger asked, inserting himself into the conversation.
“What do you mean?” the young fan asked. “It was Prion, obviously.”
Lilly turned around. “Where are you from?” she asked the fan.
“Uh, Dublin.”
“See, they reedited that scene. They always include some bit that still seems like magic in the international releases, even though they’re not supposed to. But that wasn’t in the original cut.”
“Ah,” the young fan said. “Bummer. I wish they could make all these timelines match up somehow.”
They wandered away and Lilly turned to Roger. “You sounded like an idiot.”
“I dunno, you told me to be enthusiastic.”
“It’s easier to actually be enthusiastic than it is to fake it.”
“Hey, I’ve seen every one of these movies.”
“But you don’t remember any of it.”
“I remember things that are important, okay?”
“Don’t be snarky. This is your idea.” She pointed to a video screen hanging from the Malicarn booth. “Look. You can’t even get the time right.”
The screen had a picture of several characters from the Malicarn. Underneath the photo were the words:
Secrets of the Malicarn. New Time: 11:00 AM, HALL B.
“Now we’re going to be late,” she said.
Lilly had attended meetings of the Reapers for years and never told anyone a thing about her past. They knew that she was from America, of course, but Lilly didn’t want to divulge any more than that, and no one asked.
Then Roger showed up. Tall, superficially handsome, and amiable, his accent a very studied Received Pronunciation.
Roger began coming to meetings even though he didn’t know anybody and never explained how he discovered the Reapers’ existence.
The more he hung around the more it seemed that he had absolutely no interest in the Malicarn at all.
He never talked about the movies, shows, or books directly, and when others brought up iconic scenes or characters, he seemed annoyed.
It was as if he joined the club just to learn what the Malicarn Expanded Universe was, though in all his time at club meetings and events he seemed to be growing actively more ignorant.
The other Reapers liked him but he made Lilly nervous.
She avoided talking to him whenever possible.