Saturday 7.01.00 

Today was total cultural immersion - the Miss Klingon Empire contest and the Masquerade Ball. Besides being incredible costume showcases, they were each their own talent shows, performances with skits and "inside" humor that left me reeling, trying to assimilate and understand all I'd been exposed to in one fantastic day.

I've been to Grateful Dead shows, college, and Burning Man. Dragon*Con could be the most thorough consensual hallucination I've ever been a part of.

And after all that was over, it was our last night - time to party. There was a party sponsored by Whitewolf at some place called the Succubus club. It was clearly a re-purposed space: a mostly abandoned office with plans and schedules up on the walls. There were discarded plastic syringes with no needles strewn about the floor. Between the workaday office materials, the syringes, the darkly clad people drinking wine out of goblets, and the strange contact lenses, I began to feel as though this party was just a front for something far more complicated. Maybe it was all part of an elaborate live-action role-playing (LARP) adventure. I tried asking people at the party if they were a part of a large LARP, but they were too firmly in character to let me in on the backstory.