Page 69 of Turnabout Is Fair Cosplay
“I’m picking up a shift. Adam said you were swamped. Something about Customer Cosplay Night?”
“Right. Try to embrace the ‘immersive’ in our experiential entertainment because I don’t have the energy to handle customer complaints in character tonight.”
I press my lips into an unamused smile. “I’ll do my best.” And I try—I really honestly try—not to smirk when I see the other employees dressed in cosplay scurrying around. But come on, they’re grown adults wearing superhero outfits and a lot of spandex.
Stacey looks up from her tablet and does a double take when she sees my costume. “No,” she says, gesturing to myStarship Cruiserinsignia. “Absolutely not.”
“Excuse me?” Is this what happens when you smirk at spandex?
“Vanessa!” she yells.
A spunky young woman with red and blue pigtails appears. “S’up?”
“Can you help Bea with her cosplay?”
“On it!” Vanessa pulls me into the break room.
She looks me up and down. “This I think we can work with.” She pulls off my lab coat. “Not this, though,” she says of my fatigue jacket.
“Starship Cruiseris cool,” I say.
"Cool is the new Ohio. What you need is sigma." She shoves a green bustier and a new pack of green fishnet tights at me. “I think we can salvage the rest between your black skirt and boots. Is your skirt stretchy?”
“What?”
“It’d look cuter if you hiked it up past your navel.” She tugs the waistband of my skirt up higher. “See? Now you have legs.”
“What sort of self-respectingStarship Cruiserofficer would I be in a skirt this short?”
Vanessa grabs a box of safety pins and is transforming my pencil skirt into a high-waisted, formfitting mini. “You wouldn’t. This is a licensed AJ Comics venture. If you work here, you have to represent. Lucky for you, Dr. Penelope Rose Hemmel is just your size.”
“Who?”
“Poison Hemlock. You know, the botanist who becomes a plant-woman hybrid?”
I freeze. “Is she into cacti?”
“Most comics have her with like tropicals and skibidi, but sure, they’re plants, right?” Vanessa stands back and tilts her head, staring at me. “Better. But you’re going to need a mask and glitter.”
“Better? I won’t be able to walk.”
“Yeah, well, you should have worn spandex. Spandex stretches.” Vanessa grabs a pair of scissors, and before I can stop her, she cuts a thigh slit into my skirt. “There. Now you’ll be able to walk.”
Well, I’m definitely never wearing this skirt in a courtroom again.
Vanessa pulls a fire-engine red wig from the closet, looks at me, and tosses it back in. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?”
“The ladies’ room. You gotta change into the rest before I do your makeup and streak your hair.”
Twenty minutes later, I cannot believe who I am in the mirror.
My eyes are covered in dark green glitter, and so are my lips. My hair has taken on an auburn glow, and ivy vines—actual ones that Vanessa pulled from a wall outside—are in my messy topknot that for once looks absolutely sexy and not at all sloppy. My green metallic bustier stops just an inch above my altered miniskirt. Vanessa told me to put the green fishnets over my sheer tights, and I have to say my legs have never looked better.
“Hold still,” Vanessa says as she affixes a black mask to my skin. “Come find me at the end of the night when you want it off, K? There’s a right way and a wrong way to remove these things.”
She helps me into my lab coat, which she’s pinned into a completely different shape with a cinched waist and more vines spiraling artfully down the sleeves. She looks at me and nods. “Perfection.”
