Part the First 7/02/1998 The Mysterious Beginning (As told by Oni-chan and Catsy)

The lines had been drawn and soon the WAR that would scar thousands of young minds would erupt on the battlefield that was known as the Annaheim Hilton and Towers.

-"Thursday the 2nd of July turned out to be my little nephew's birthday (who knew?). Baka-chan is a cute lil' guy who was 5 years old that day. He's so precious^_^ and I practically raised him myself (when I wasn't a prisoner in UGAnime's dungeon). I taught the little bugger everything he knows! Catsy and I went over to my brother's house where a party was being thrown in the back yard for the little angel."

-"Neow. That 'little angel' chewed on and almost bit off the end of my tail! Then he flew to the roof and laughed at me and mocked me with the foulest language I've ever heard flow from a mouth since..... well, since Oni-chan when I cut her bangs too short one time. I never felt such pain and humiliation-tcha."

-"He's a very fast learner. Anywho, it was about the time when Baka-chan was going to cut the cake when everybody at the party heard the sound of gunfire exploding from the driveway in the front yard (it turned out to only be backfire from the Tank (TM)). A few seconds later the Rossman came running around the side of the house with a leash in one hand while swinging a lasso around in his other like one of those red neck rodeo people chasing calves for kicks!"

-"It all happened so suddenly-tcha! I saw the Rossman truckin' towards Oni-chan and all I could think of doing was to scream 'By the pricking of my thumb something wicked this way comes!'"
  Before I could even blink though, and before the Rossman could even make it halfway to the picnic table where Oni-chan and Baka-chan were with the cake, Oni-chan yanked the 'wishing knife' out of her nephew's hand and threw it like one of those side-show freaks at a cheesy carnival right smack-dab into the Rossman's heart! The last look on his face was priceless^_^. Then everybody began to cheer 'Ding dong the witch is dead.'"

-"Wow! I actually got my wish :)
  Anyway, it was at that time that Catsy started to act really weird."

-"It was the strangest feeling that I ever had! I went over to the table and I was just sitting there applauding Oni-chan's aim along with everbody else when I noticed a strange looking book with an ancient kind of writing on it on the table right in front of me. Neow. Curiousity got the best of this kitty and I opened it only to be greeted by a blinding flash of light and a wooziness in my stomach as the scenery distorted and warped like a tie-dye nightmare! the next thing I knew both Oni-chan and I were in the middle of a strange adventure and then we ended up in Anaheim California right before Anime Expo 98 was about to begin!!!!"

-"That is not what happened at all! First of all, Catsy doesn't like birthday cake so she smuggled some calamari in her pockets to the party... and apparently it wasn't the freshest it could be. Second of all it was just a book about 'how to curse in kanji' I got for the little angel. Catsy passed out right after the Rossman incident but I didn't notice until after I was done searching his body for any valuables. I couldn't believe what I had found! He had two plane tickets to LAX for a late morning flight and two passes to Anime Expo98!!
  I was going spastic as I ran over to Catsy to show her our luck.... She was (no pun intended) catatonic though, and my nephew who happened to be sitting next to her at the time was covered in puke. I sighed in disgust, gave Baka-chan a hanky and then dragged ole lard butt to the aeropuerto where we hopped the plane in the Rossman's place (I still don't know who else he was supposed to bring.... hmmmmmmm).

-"Nuh uh! That's not what happened! I specifically remember a greedy man who said he only wanted cash but really just wanted to bone me, and a creepy monk who never stopped freakishly smiling with a weird do, and you were there too, Oni-chan! And you hated me and wished I was dead-tcha!"

-"Well, at least you got some parts right. Anyhow, I was glad that Catsy was out of it for the whole flight as she has some weird fear of flying.... and I was beyond joy when she finally stopped up-chucking as we passed St. Louie.
  The in-flight movie was supposed to be Titanic (gotta love that Leo, and the way that old chick just threw that gem away so that that lowsy actor, Paxton, and his friend who looked like Harry Knowles couldn't get it^_^), but without even telling us they popped in a straight to video *ahem* movie called Family Plan or something starring Leslie Nielson (who hasn't been funny since the first Naked Gun) and Judge Reinhold (who's hasn't ever been funny).... It was not a very nice thing to do :(
  Anyway, I ate Catsy's breakfast of eggs and Special K (wasn't that the name of Buckwheat's retarded younger sister?) and soon after that we landed. As we were approaching the runway I tried to point out the Hilton that last year's convention was held at to Catsy, but she just mumbled something about Suzaku no Neko and passed out again. Then I dragged her to the shuttle services.

-"That's where the book dropped us off! I knew it wasn't a dream^_^ Thank Kami-sama above that I didn't let that Chinese kid with the dark blue hair f*** me, or I'd have never gotten my wish and we never would have gotten there!"

-"No comment. Anyway, after the 'magic book' dropped us off in California we had to find a way to get to the Hilton and Towers in Anaheim where the tickets said that AX98 would be. So I got one of those ladies in the red jackets to hail a shuttle for us-"

-"Neow. A 'Super Shuttle'! But I named it 'Franco'^^"

-"I know, Catsy, I know. So we got into Franco and we drove to Anaheim. Apparently only 300,002 people live in Anaheim. Kooky.
  We dropped off a lot of people who sadly couldn't go to an anime convention... they had to go to Disney Land. I still feel sorry for them."

-"Sugoi!!!! I wanted to go to Disney Land too, but Oni-chan grabbed my tail and tied it to a seatbelt so that I couldn't jump out of the van! *Puta!*"

-"It was for your own good, Neko-chan. Had you gotten into that park I bet you would have been felt by Goofy!"

-"Neow. Don't you mean, 'Felt goofy because of my tail and ears'?"

-"No, I mean I've heard stories that Goofy likes to do bad things when people aren't looking! Ecchi!
  So we were finally at the hotel and I handed the driver a bunch of money I found in the Rossman's wallet (Damn!!!! He was loaded for this trip!). We then registered under the Rossman's name at the front desk (if you ever want his Master Card number just give me a call ^_-) and hot-footedd it to our room hoping to God that this year it didn't smell!"

This was our lair for the few days that we lived in California. If I ever meet anybody who worked there during this weekend on the street someday I swear I'm gunna rip out his smelly spleen and feed it to Catsy!

-"I liked the elevators! There were like 20 of them and they all looked like something from out of Robocop-tcha. 'You have ten seconds to comply!'"

-"Yeah... The weird thing about them was that there was no tenth floor stop, but there was a 13th. Zany. And each floor had like 500 rooms on it! That's a lotta otaku!"

-"Neow. At the 12th floor, we ran out of the elevator as soon as the doors cracked wide enough and down the looooooong hallway to room 122 where we kicked in the door and played a quick game of Ro-sham-bo to see who got to use the potty first. I won^_^"

-"That didn't mean that you had the right to take your sweet ass time in there and make a bubble bath too! My bladder almost expoded!!!!"

-"Gomen, gomen. I was just feeling 'not so fresh' and I hate licking myself clean (I leave that up to Mo-chan ^_-). After Oni-chan got out of the potty room we opened the drapes and from our glorious viewpoint we could make out Heaven at about a half mile away!!!!!"

-"That's right, we could see the golden star of.......

The land of heartburn and crispy fries! Carl's, I had returned!!!!!

  CARL's JR.!!!!!!!!!!!!! ^o^ It was a magnificent, splendorous, sublime, superb and gorgeous sight!.... After I put away my thesaurus we ran down to the street and over to Nirvana as fast as our little feet could take us!"

-"Hey! You flew, you cheater! By the time I got there Oni-chan was already at a table eating her burger. I had to wait in line behind some tourist trying to speak Spanglish to the chick behind the counter who (I thought) obviously could speak English but just kept saying 'No comprendo, señor' cause she thought the guy was Mexican! Aaaaarrrrgh! I had heard for almost a year about how delish the big 'C Jr.' was and now that I got this close to tasting it for myself this supah baka gaijin was holding me back!!!!!!! Nooooooooooo! Then it was my turn in line and I got the Jumbo Bacon Burger with onion rings on it and a Colosal Fries and Coke T_T I was so happy that it brought tears to my eyes-tcha."

-"I know what you mean, Catsy. I had the Mega Western Super Sized Excellent Deal, with a lemonade.

I just luv that smiling star^^. Catsy named him Ah-nold.

 And it was good. We scarfed our meals down and I filled up my cup with some more lemonade before we left. After about five minutes the heartburn kicked in. Ahhhhhh, that's my Carl's!"

-"The food was even better than I imagined, and I can imagine a lot!"

-"We know, Catsy."

-"That was the best heartburn I'd ever had^^ It was a good kinda pain and I was happy. We leisurely strolled back to the hotel sipping our third refills. But then I noticed that Oni-chan's smile quickly turned upside down and she started mumbling 'Why, Carl's, why? After all I've done for you...' or something. She then opened up her wings again and flew back to the hotel before I could ask what was eating her."

-"It turned out that the Double Western Burger was eating me from the inside out...I felt like my tummy was on the expressway to hell and it didn't have any brakes! Pain... I felt pain beyond what my little mind was capable of conceiving!!! The horror... the horror.
  Ow, that was not a good pain too. I am still thankful that the front desk had some magic Pepto."

-"Neow. It was about two o'clock when I dragged Oni-chan out to the pool hoping that some skin cancer might cure her belly-ache. We sunned and I flaunted my perfect bod in front of all the California boys hanging around and then an hour and a half later I dragged pink-head's prone corpse back up to the room-tcha."

-"Uh. I was feeling a little better as I layed down on the bed and we watched some Saved by the Bell on TV. Damn that Screech is a fine piece of arse!"

-"You can have him-tcha, as long as I get that hunky Mr. Belding^^ Grrrrrrowl!"

-"After SBTB we caught some Beijing Panda TV (funky), and then left the room to go exploring. We found the staff room, but those bastadges wouldn't let us in! Even after I made a free kick ass page for them last year they refused to give us Staff Badges so that I could at least take good pictures this year! I doubt they even looked the site up! They were nothing but meanies!"

Remember their faces, Catsy, for we must hunt them down and destroy them for their incompetence and oversight!

-"Neow. I think that they did see your 97 trip page but they just understood it to be the crappola that it was. They simply didn't want to be embarrassed again. They just didn't realize that you had help on this year's site-tcha."

-"Do you want another spanking from Mr. Iron Bar?!?!?!"

-"No, not especially."

-"Then QUIET!"

-"But-"

-"No! Not one word!"

-"............"

-"Much better. Soooooo, then we went down to the 2nd floor and saw that they already had a bunch of computer terminals up and were readying them for prereg. It was then that we also saw the line starting to form...... at 6:30!

This is already the line around the first corner and out the first door from the registration desk. This was going to be another looooooong weekend of waiting.

-"Aye caramba! Oops, am I allowed to talk again?"

-"*Sigh* Okay, just watch your filthy little mouth. So, Catsy and I got into the line and watched as everybody else proceeded to either read books, listen to cd's or just plain keep to themselves. Catsy and I played patty-cake for a while before we just sat back and tried to decide which anime characters everybody would look best as. This lasted for an hour and a half...."

-"Neow. After listening to the knuckleheads ahead of us finish a discussion about who they would 'bop' first if they were in Tenchi Masaki's shoes (I don't know where to begin to tell you what was wrong with either them or their topic), the line slooooowly began to move. Slowly."

-"I looked behind us to see just how far back the line was. Damn!

I don't know if you can tell but this sucker was winding around the hallway more than an anaconda around Jon Voight!

  Even though we weren't that far back it still took them about 1/2 an hour to get to us (and all they were did was hand us each a badge and a bag [I was known as the Rossman and Catsy got someone named 'ChiChi's' badge(?)]! I asked the guy how many preregs there were and he told me '1864'. I couldn't believe it! They knew that there were going to be this many but it still seemed that they were unprepared."

They had more than twice the number of terminals as last year, but prereg was still a bitch to get through. Mios dios!

-"We then sat down on a couch across from the line and opened up our bags to see what kinda good freebees we got! Neow. We each got a cool free issue of MixxZine (the Sailor Moon episode in it had an apperance by my idol Sailor V ^_^ She's kewl!), our Industry Award ballots (looked to be the same as the one Oni-chan showed me from last year) and our programming schedules (What a joke!!!!)."

-"You tell 'em girl! The programming this year looked sucky to say the least. There were no huge premieres (I was hoping and praying for a subbed End of Eva, a subbed Giant Robo 7 or a Mononoke Hime) and all the video rooms only had stuff that had already been released over two years ago! They did have one room for 'new stuff', but it was basically anime that had just been released, had been out in fansubs for a while, or was coming out in a week or two in the States for sale anyway. It was pretty sad.
  I remember older AXs back when they premiered Tenchi Muyo in Love, Memories, X, and Ghost in the Shell. What happened?!?!"

-"After we skimmed the programming guide and picked out one or maybe two things that we had to see and we got into the new line being formed for T-shirt sales. I definitely needed me a 'T'. I, however, did not need to wait in a line for another 50 minutes (behind only 24 people) to get one! What the f*** was the hold up?!!?!?"

-"This was growing old muy rapido. Two for two in my book. I just knew that when the rest of the attendees showed up we wouldn't be able to do anything without waiting in an outragiously long and obnoxious line. Aren't you getting tired of hearing about 'lines' yourself? Lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines lines!!!!!!! Grrrrrrrrr.
  Anywhen, we finely got up to the register and we saw the prob.... They had Chim Chim and family running things! I cringed as I asked for an AX98 shirt (they had already sold out of the Misato 'I survived 5 years of AX' one that I couldn't get last year either!) and I tried to hurry and pay for it to get the pace moving. It took them three minutes to tell me that it was $15. I couldn't for the life of me figure out how or why. I just grabbed it and stepped aside to wait for Catsy."

Curious, but considering that Yu Watase was the big guest this year I'm surprised that Miaka wasn't on the official shirt. I would have at least prefered a pic of Shutaro Mendo if they insisted on a Kamiya chara. But that's just me ^_^

-"Neow. I picked up a MegaPoster for myself along with a 98 T-shirt. I was so happy that I finally got a MP too ^_^
  I then looked around at the two long lines that still surrounded us (the prereg and the T-shirt lines) and shuddered to myself. I was terrified of what tomorrow was going to be like when probably another 1800 people showed up! Yikes!"

-"Doobee doobee dooooooo."

-"STOP IT!!!!!!! Don't you ever do that again, puta grandisima!"

-"You're scared of the lint in your belly button, Catsy. I'm not surprised that some 'lines' scared you."

-"By that time it was 9:50P.M. PST. That's 12:50A.M. EST! If we didn't crash soon I'd have to take a catnap to get some strength back-tcha."

-"Catsy had the right idea. We needed sleep. Especially if we planned to fight our own fight. Starting tomorrow we knew that the WAR would begin and there were no POW camps as far as I could see. We would start the onslaught if I had any say in the matter, and we would finish it."

-"10:10, nighty night |-o "

Good night AX! Seeya mañana!

Go back to the beginning of the Mysterious Expo.			Go forward into the next Mysterious Day.

This site (images, design and text) is a trademarked and copyrighted Rossman Production. Do not copy any of it or I will come over there and rip off your sack and feed it to your dog.

If you feel the overwhelming need to get in touch with me (or even Oni-chan), just give the message to Ayeka and Ryoko, and as soon as/if we get it you can be sure that one of us will laugh at you