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River said nothing, apparently embarrassed, though he did seem genuinely disappointed that a long, hard ride on the Waboombas express wasn’t in his future. The rising front of his loincloth was a dead giveaway.

“Dude,” Morgan said to him. “Put that thing away.”

“Mmm,” Waboombas purred and gave it one last tweak.

Then, smiling a final, sad grin at River’s actual face, she silently backed away, melting into the crowd of wildly dressed, fantastically colored fellow conventioneers.

Morgan and Sophie had decided to wander a bit while I did my business. Morgan said he couldn’t bear to see me sell my comics anyway. They had become like old, dear friends to us both, and I’m sure, for him, it was akin to a dog lover having a favorite pet put to sleep. He would miss them, and he might cry when I sold them.

Morgan also seemed anxious to be seen with Sophie in all her sartorial splendor, delighted as hell that the woman on his arm was drawing so many stares. For him, that was the height of status: a hot chick drawing attention to herself, and parts of him.

So Wisper, River, and I toured around looking for High Plant, and fortunately for River’s state of mind, found it more quickly than I had expected. Just as we were about to step into their booth, I saw a place selling videos—the kind that has everything, both legal and illegal—when something caught my eye.

Me.

Me and Mervin Wosserman.

Kissing on the cover of something called ’Boys Gone Wild’.

“You’re not allowed to sell this!” I yelled at the guy in the booth.

“I just work here,” the guy said.

“You cannot sell this!”

“It’s not my area,” he whined, stepping to another side of the booth and pretending not to see me any longer.

“Take them off the table!” I screeched, my voice getting louder and more hamster-like as people turned to stare, Wisper included.

“Oh, my GOD!” she said.

“What?” I gasped. “What?”

“It’s true. You and that guy from Men’s Briefs…?”

“Sssh! You’ve seen the video. Manschingloss said he showed it to you!”

“I never saw this!”

“Oh, my God.”

But now the onlookers were starting to glance back and forth from me to the cover of the box, and were—I had to hope—having difficulty noticing the resemblance between myself and the grainy cover photo that had been captured from the video. On the cover, my face was all puffy, sweaty, and reddened from excessive alcohol and misdirected lust, whereas live, and in person, my face was all puffy, sweaty, and reddened for entirely different reasons.

I stopped wheezing in anguish and saw that Wisper was also glancing back and forth from the cover to me, uncomfortably.

“So what?” I demanded. “You’re a nudist!”

Her eyes snapped wide and she threw on a look of horror, hurt, and astonishment. But she quickly returned that look to the ‘expression closet’, and tried on something more in the winter family—something sterner and darker, and delicately laced with a bit of the angry reds.

“Yes,” she said. “I am. But I’ve never made love to a member of my own gender before…”

“There was no lovemaking.”

“…and would understand my companion’s discomfort at seeing a picture of me doing so!”

“There was no lovemaking!” I said definitely. “I’m pretty sure!”

“Pretty sure?”

“Well…I never actually watched the tape all the way through.”

“Ooooh, there’s lovemaking,” the dealer said, showing a sexual predilection that hadn’t been quite clear till that point.

I glared at him, trying to explode his brain. But I still hadn’t developed that particular superpower, or any others come to think of it.

“But that’s not my area,” he said, frightened by the murder in my eyes, and backed away.

As he moved off, I realized I could solve this whole, thorny problem, easily, and began snatching tapes off the table.

“Hey,” he said. “You can’t do that!”

“Yes, I can. And I am.”

“That’s one of our most popular sellers!”

“What? It’s what?”

“It’s one of our…”

“It was one of your most popular sellers,” I seethed. “Was!”

I took all the tapes I