RinthCon Day 3 - Morning Staff Meeting

Forty-five minutes before the morning staff meeting was scheduled to start, Fin entered the room wearing her scarlet hoop skirt and matching chapeau with one wide brim curled to the side. Over the last few years she had trained the rest of the senior staff to arrive at the meeting early so she could hear their problems and outline solutions. Paul usually arrived late and the meeting would shift from the nuts-and-bolts logistics and implementation that Fin dealt with to the things that occupied Paul’s mind, like the reaction of the attendees, the behavior of the guests, and the ticket sales numbers.

Today, Paul was seated at the head of the table, which was already surrounded by the rest of the staff. For the first time ever, she was the last one to arrive, and it put her on her back foot.

“Paul! You’re here already!” she exclaimed, “I just saw you here yesterday. Didn’t you leave this room?”

“Of course I did! That’s a ridiculous thing to say. I just came in early. Wait… do you think I’m not capable of getting to a meeting early?”

“Of course I know you are capable of getting to a meeting early.” Fin said, but she exchanged glances with the rest of the staff and everyone seemed as surprised as she was.

“We have problems everywhere,” said Paul, “Sal was just saying he sent a bunch of volunteers to help out Gaming, but most of the senior staff there have disappeared. Nobody knows where they are. A few of the attendees have stepped up to help and Mordy is trying to get things going, but it’s a mess.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt, but we had a major security issue you need to know about,” said Jair, “It’s going to affect the whole Dresden Files programming track.”

“That’s not good! is there a problem with the Dresden cosplay contest again?”

“Worse,” said Jair, “The Literary track team loaded the Jim Butcher personality AI into the AuthorBot for the book signing and the panel discussions and everything was fine. A little while later the bot was in an argument with one of the Dresden cosplayers. Security tried to eject the guy from the con, but he was like…

“What?”

“He was like… supernatural. Whatever this guy did, we can’t get the AuthorBot working anymore. We’re going to have to cancel most of the track programming. The Dresden fans will riot.”

“That is going to be a disaster. I wish you had been on hand personally to take care of that, Jair,” said Paul.

“I was. We couldn’t make the guy do anything. It’s like he had magic. It was like facing the real Harry Dresden.”

“Get it together, Jair,” said Paul, “This is the 24th century. Magic is for video games and cosplay. Jim Butcher wrote one of the biggest fantasy franchises of all time, but it was fiction. I promise you, Harry Dresden is not at this con!”