wings through doors. The elevator tried to eat the tip of her impossibly massive sword, Dork Buster.
She eyed the sword darkly. “Someone was clearly compensating.”
The elevator stopped with a ding, the doors slid open, and eight giggling girls spilled into the car with her. They were dressed as the assembled cast of some anime she didn’t recognize, each wearing a different color wig. They all had animal ear headbands and horsetails. Some had strap on wings and others had unicornlike horns. It was like being caught into a sudden stampede of mythical horses.
Pixii might have been a decade older than the girls, and wounded in combat, but they were all four to eight inches taller than her. They were fifteen and sixteen, true innocents, judging by their nervous laughter. None of the cosplay costumes were entirely decent, a fact that was just now dawning on them.
“I told you they’d be shorter once I hemmed everything.” The unicorn seamstress was in a snug white mini dress with three blue diamonds riding her left hip. The costume fit like a kid glove but came to mid-thigh, making it the longest dress among the girls.
“Can you see my panties?” The yellow pegasus had on a diaphanous baby-doll top that matched her wings and ears. It really wasn’t long enough to qualify as a “dress.” She turned beet red as everyone tilted their heads slightly and studied her panties, which matched her pink wig and long tail. She slapped her hand down on the hem of the dress, but it didn’t help much.
“Nope, can’t see them,” the other pegasus with rainbow wings lied.
“There’s only girls here.” The only one of the herd decently dressed was the girl with a cowboy hat. She was wearing boots, blue jeans, and a plaid shirt tied at her waist. “No need to kick up a fuss.”
“Chibi, I told you to wear your bikini bottoms,” a quiet voice said from the back of elevator. Pixii was too short to see the speaker.
“I didn’t bring a swimsuit!” Chibi cried.
The girls exchanged worried looks.
“Do you have shorts?” asked the only girl with both a unicorn horn and wings.
“No!” Chibi pranced slightly in distress. “All I have is my school uniform, and Inkling is wearing that!”
“Just tell people you’re wearing bikini bottoms.” A girl in an even skimpier pink outfit lifted up her skirt to show off what might have been the bottom of a bathing suit. “It’s not like anyone could tell one from the other.”
The red deepened in shade. “I would know.”
“It’s not like they’re thongs,” a unicorn with a mint and white wig said. “Or are they?” The unicorn flipped up the pegasus’ tail and the back of the yellow skirt.
“Lyra!” Chibi grabbed the edge of her hem and moved as far away from her friend as the elevator allowed.
“Your tail covers you in the back, sugar,” the cowgirl noted. “At least, it usually does.”
“What am I going to do?” This was a near-panicked wail.
Did the girls not have an adult riding herd on them?
“There are booths selling cosplay outfits in the dealer’s room,” Pixii said. “The hair, wings, and ears are the main part of the costume . . . ”
“She has to be yellow!” all the girls cried.
“There might be someone selling skirts or shorts,” Pixii continued. “Anything white or black will work, it just needs to cover her panties.”
“What do I do until then?” Chibi wailed.
Pixii doubted the skimpy dress would matter that much during the block-long walk to the convention center, but she was no longer fifteen. What part of her modesty that had survived boot camp was stripped by her first deployment.
A hand reached through the crowd, plucked a big, leather-bound book from the winged unicorn, and handed it to the distressed pegasus. “Hold this in front of your panties.”
The book managed to be in place just as the elevator dinged, announcing their arrival in the lobby. The girls spilled out, laughing.
In the back, the voice of reason was apparently Inkling. Her borrowed Catholic school uniform passed as cosplay. Her deep gold hair had been ironed and put up into impossible pigtails to heighten the illusion that the normal street clothes were actually a costume. She leaned in the back corner of the elevator, writing in a notebook with a retractable ballpoint pen. There was something about her, though, that made her seem luminous in the small confines of the elevator.
Pixii stood in the doorway, staring, feeling like the breath had been kicked out