Somebody spent four hundred hours sewing a dragon costume with articulated wings and a working jaw, and today they wore it into a hotel lobby in Cincinnati to hug strangers.
I keep coming back to that. Down here, people tell me these gatherings are a punchline. A ballroom full of adults in animal suits, foam heads under their arms, name badges with invented names, everyone sweating through fake fur because the fursuit can only stay on for twenty minutes before you overheat. There is a whole volunteer crew whose job is handing out water and telling people to sit down before they pass out.
That detail is what does it for me. They will risk heatstroke to be a wolf for a weekend.
I have seen the numbers on how rare this is. Not the convention. The whole thing. A planet where a chemistry works out warm enough and wet enough that a creature can invent a second self, stitch it out of thread and foam, and find nine thousand others who want to see it.
The air that keeps them breathing while they do it is thinner than the shell of an egg. Everything else out there is rock and cold and nothing at all.
So I don't laugh at the dragon. I watch him kneel down, careful, to be eye level with a kid who is too shy to speak, and I watch the jaw work when he says hello, and I think: this is the only place we know of where that has ever happened.
They took off the heads at the end to breathe. Regular faces, flushed and grinning.
I couldn't stop looking at how easily they could have simply not.