I was part of the staff of an anime convention all the way through college. We held our meetings on monday nights, and every monday after the meeting, most of us went to taco bell. We would get our terrible garbage food and sit at the tables and hang out until the wee hours of the morning, and sometimes Pat Rothfuss (who lived nearby) would drop by and blow our little nerdy brains. It was a beloved tradition.
One of our staffers was referred to as the Dapper Man, because he could frequently be found wearing a three-piece suit as he went about his daily business. A button-down and waistcoat was his casual attire, and on truly formal occasions, he would produce a tailcoat, tophat, and monocle. Somehow this worked incredibly well for him. Dapper Man was much lauded for his sartorial choices.
When Halloween rolled around, we held our meeting as usual, but with the addition of a bit of ridiculous cosplay holiday-garb. Since Halloween was not actually on a monday, only a few people were in costume. Dapper Man was.
These were the days before the rubber horse mask phenomenon went mainstream. They had just started to be available. Until Dapper Man arrived as a Formal Thoroughbred, I had never seen one.
He was quite dashing, though, with white gloves, a black tailcoat, and a monocle on his wide, staring, rubber horse-eyes. There was a strange but alarming dignity to the look.
We made it through the meeting with the usual chaos expected of ninety nerds left unsupervised with a twenty-thousand dollar budget, and progressed posthaste to TBell.
The local taco bell had a real problem with keeping staff on–for some reason, drug use was prolific among their employees, and they struggled to find consistent workers. But they knew we would be there every monday, and even though we were a big group we were patent and polite, and they generally liked us. So we rolled into taco bell with our usual aplomb.
We straggled into line and started placing orders, and I watched idly as the employee in back began assembling “tacos.” He was visibly blitzed; if he’d been any higher he might have floated off entirely.
He stuck his gloved hand into the tub of shredded lettuce, drew out a handful, looked up and caught sight of Dapper Man: the Equine Gentleman.
He did a double-take and then froze entirely.
You could see the whites of his eyes all the way around. It was very clear that he had absolutely no ability to comprehend what he was seeing; probably he assumed some sort of genteel victorian old god had come to wreak hoofed vengeance upon his taco-y demesne. Possibly he was just grappling with the possibility of reverse centaurs.
Either way, he had become a lettuce-bearing statue.
Taco production ground to a halt. He stood, trapped by the medusan gaze of Dapper Man’s rubber horse mask, until his manager came to yell at him.
At that point he dropped the lettuce and fled the taco bell.
I can only assume he could hear the sound of dress-shoe shod hoofbeats thundering behind him.
For all I know, he may still be fleeing Dapper Man’s dread fursona. We never saw him at the taco bell again.
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