Sorry I took so long – I've spent more time reading than writing. Isn't it sad that this website doesn't allow Anne Rice fics? (I'm reading The Vampire Lestat.)

IcySunset: O.O You…don't…like…the fedora? I adore his fedora! I just…never knew what it was called. So I just called it his hat. But when I read 'Erik's fedora' like, ten times in one fic, I got annoyed and decided to look it up. Heehee. Er – when authors/authoresses…what?

Han Futsu, Anti Normal: Well, the costume shop was supposed to be enjoyable, but the cashier was a jerk.

MetaChi: (gasp) I forgot about that! Grr…but the cape is still awesome. Anyway, I don't think Erik is too much in danger of getting caught in a plane engine or anything. (sniff) I like Sailor Moon. It was my first anime. Oh, and I just felt like sneaking in a LesMis reference. I can't really see Erik as Javert. I do think he'd make a good Saruman though.

PenelopeBlack13: O.O Sorry. Guess I missed that. Yeah, that was you. Autumn is prettier though.

Raveene: Yeah, but first I need the money to make the shirts.

Eat-drums: Yes! That's my fave verse too! The strings, and the 'dun DUN' right before he starts singing again. And it's odd…that seems to be everyone's favorite Javert line…probably why I used it. (shrug)

Kianra: I haven't seen the LesMis play either (yet), but I read the book (long is right) and I have the two-disc soundtrack. Aw, poor you, suspended. Oh, and remember you once told me 'Let the Phantoms sing in the elevator'? Well, I couldn't let this fic end without taking your advice. Heehee.

Kojinka: I walked by a 21-and-over bar once (couldn't go in), a few weeks before Christmas, all in the spirit and stuff, and they were playing the title song on the piano and singing along. Totally got me OUT of the spirit – I hummed Phantom for the rest of the day.

SummerSong: Aw, thankies! I'm so glad you think so. I should do a sequel someday…hmm…is that too much of a good thing?

Spaci Ireth: Yup, sure. And you're my second Australian! Yay! (I like Australia. Would love to visit!)

Lackaz: Sure, you can have a cameo. To coin a phrase my friend Lessa uses, there will be a 'boatload' of cameos in the second to last chapter. I just decided a second ago. Wow. My fic's popular in Australia, isn't it?

Lendlaer: I defined 'glomp' in the last chapter, but that's okay. It's actually a term that mainly anime…people use, so I'm not surprised you don't know it. It means to pretty much jump on someone, hugging them to the point of suffocation. :) Fun to do, and shows a lot of affection, but not very enjoyable.

Now here's a nice long chapter for you!

…………………………………

Erik gazed happily at his new costume. He wasn't wearing it at the moment. It was just lying on the bed. The sun was barely rising, and he was now in a very LesMis mood. He was considering ransacking Aislin's backpack until he found her soundtrack, but as he reached for it, she turned over and woke up.

"Erik?" She rubbed her eyes. "Why're you up so early?"

"No reason." He jerked his hand back.

"Okay, well, if you're ready and all, I can give you your information now. I'm still trying to go easy on you, so you're going to the bookstore."

"The BOOKSTORE?!"

"Oh, please, keep your hypnotic, sensual voice down, I just got up." She flumped forward onto Erik's chest. Some indistinct mumbling came from her.

"Sorry?" said Erik, pushing her upright.

"I said meet her downstairs by the hotel gift shop – not the Disney one – around nine."

"Nine o'clock?" That gave Erik about three hours to do whatever he wanted. "Alright then. And what are you going to do?"

"I'm going back to sleep, and then I'm going with you when you meet her."

"You're coming with me?" What now? A chaperone? Like he needed one?

"There are just some books I want to pick up. And a CD I ordered a couple of days ago." She snuggled back into her covers and was soon muttering happily deep in her dream. Erik turned away, planning to go down for breakfast, and maybe to find a video rental store.

"Oh, Erik…"

He turned back to Aislin. "Yes?" But she was still asleep. She was dreaming. Not daring to think about what was going on in her dream, he carefully put away his precious Javert costume, picked up his new fedora, and left the room. (A/N: At Party City today – the place where I got my mask – I found a hat like Erik's! I was dancing around the empty aisle singing, "Sing once again with me our strange duet! Etc.")

Erik rode down in the elevator happily. No one stopped it to join him, as he was up even before the Disneyland parks opened. All of a sudden, the elevator shuddered to a halt.

Somewhere between the fifth and sixth floors.

Erik stood still for a moment, then pummeled every button on the panel that he could reach. He jumped up and down, trying to get it to move. Nothing happened.

Great. Well now he was stuck here.

Erik sank down to the tiled floor of the elevator. He might as well just wait to see what happened. The horrible elevator music continued to play from the speaker in the high corner. Erik clamped his hands over his ears. It kept coming, seeping through his fingers, as if it was trying to torture him. He could hardly take it.

"YOU HAVE COME HERE…IN PURSUIT OF YOUR DEEPEST URGE…" He broke out randomly into song. Anything to shut out this horrid music. What was wrong with elevator composers?

He sang his verses, and when he reached the end, he sang Christine's verses too. By then he was really into it, doing it more for enjoyment than for distraction. Erik's versatile voice rang high in Christine's soprano notes, and he walked round and round the little room, gesturing and putting all his emotion into the lyrics.

"We've passed the point…of no…return…"

A faint sound seeped through the floor and ceiling, seemingly coming from both the fifth and sixth floors between which Erik's elevator was stuck. It sounded like rushing water.

"Oh God, now the hotel's flooding," he thought wildly. But, no, the elevator shifted a bit, going down to the fifth floor, and the doors opened.

Erik was greeted by a large group of hotel guests, all crowded around the opening, applauding. Hands reached in to pull him out. "Wait, I need to get to the lobby!" Erik cried, but no one seemed to hear him.

"Brilliant!" shouted a young woman. "You should be on the stage!"

"I've never heard such singing!" cried one astonished old man.

"Where's the woman who was singing with you?" wondered a small boy.

"We would have opened the elevator for you before," explained the old man, "but we all wanted to wait for the song to end. The sixth floor guests really enjoyed it too."

"We've booked you a night in the hotel lounge!" piped another young man.

"What? No! I –" But the guests wouldn't take no for an answer. Apparently he was to spend an hour or two in the hotel lounge tomorrow night singing. No one cared to listen to Erik now that he'd stopped singing, so, with the reflexes he'd developed avoiding the managers in the Opera, he quickly slipped out of the mob, found a working elevator, and went down to the lobby.

He gratefully ate his long-awaited breakfast, but now only had one and a half hours until he was to meet his date. That didn't leave him enough time to find a video store which he wasn't even sure existed within hotel range, so he decided to explore the lower levels of the hotel.

Going downstairs, he found a gym, an ice cream parlor, and some other things he didn't think anyone on vacation would ever need. Like a live-in lawyer. He made a mental note to check out the gym later, and strolled into the ice cream parlor.

Mmm…vanilla. He'd been needing something like this for days. Erik paid for his cone, and sat at one of the small round tables to eat it.

A scary looking girl came into the ice cream shop. She was short, with short black hair and bangs dyed purple. Piercings glittered all over her body, and tattoos ran up her arms. She wore black pants and an artfully ripped black shirt. In other words, she was the very picture of gothic.

Not bothering to take her headphones off, she just pointed at the flavor she wanted, then paid and sat down near Erik. She looked up and found him staring at her. "Hey, Erik!" she said loudly. She moved to sit at his table and, finally taking off her headphones, shook his hand. "Didn't think I'd meet you until later. I'm Mimi."

Seriously? Erik continued to stare. Her name's not…Spike or something?

She continued eating her ice cream, still smiling in a much friendlier way than one would have expected from looking at her. "We're going to the bookstore, right? Not the kind of action I'd hoped for, but then, I'm not in charge." She frowned. "Don't know how that Aislin girl got in charge, come to think of it."

After half an hour or so of attemped conversation, in which there was much licking of ice cream and not much talking, Erik and Mimi stood up together.

"Well, I suppose we ought to get going," Erik said lightly. They made their way back up to the lobby, where they started into a taxi.

"WAIT!"

Aislin came running out of the hotel, her backpack swinging off her shoulder. "You're early! We aren't supposed to leave for another thirty minutes!" But she climbed into the front seat anyway, allowing Erik and Mimi the back. She remained respectfully silent, pretending that she wasn't there to disturb them.

Not as if there was anything to disturb. Both Mimi and Erik seemed to be naturally introverted, and did not spend much time talking. The taxi pulled up in front of Barnes and Noble, and the three of them went inside.

"Meet me here in two hours. You can buy whatever, just make sure you can carry it, I'm not helping. I won't be hanging around you." She started off to the music section of the store, and promptly got distracted by a large display Erik couldn't see.

"Come on." Mimi led him off to the side, where there was a large shelf of horror novels and classics.

Picking through the books, after about twenty minutes of searching, she selected four or five – Dracula and Frankenstein among them – and settled down on a squashy chair to read. When she was settled, Erik left to find something to interest himself.

There didn't seem to be anything much he felt like reading. He made his way over to a small shelf with very colorful books. He scanned the titles. Some were really odd, and others nigh unpronounceable.

"Angel Sanctuary," he murmured, pulling it off the shelf.

To his surprise, he discovered it was a well drawn, black-and-white comic book. Erik rushed through the first half of the story in ten minutes, and found it to be one of the darkest, most fascinating things he'd ever read.

Erik had discovered manga.

He loaded himself down with the first three books in the Angel Sanctuary series, and then began to explore other titles. He took the first two or three books from every series he started, in case he couldn't find them later. Along with Angel Sanctuary, he now had Inuyasha, Yu-Gi-Oh, Naruto, Rurouni Kenshin, and Trigun. Struggling to keep the stack of twenty or so graphic novels steady, he staggered back to Mimi.

"Manga, huh?" she said calmly, closing her book and getting ready to leave with him. "I can see you've never read any before. Good for you!"

Erik and Mimi paid for their books, and waited by the doors for Aislin.

"Where is she?" muttered Erik, straining to look at Mimi's watch. "She should have been here by now."

Just then, a large stack of books with legs came running up to them. It was Aislin, skillfully holding her stack in place. "Here I am!" she said proudly.

"Do you do this often?" wondered Erik, examining the pile of books she'd set lovingly on the floor.

"Only when I have money," she replied, shrugging, as Erik perused the titles.

"Cracking the Da Vinci Code…Working with Your Chakras…The Vampire Lestat…Angels and Demons…Queen of the Damned…Wow, you really got busy. And CDs?

"Yup. The Michael Crawford one I ordered is out of stock," she said disgustedly, "but they had my L'arc-en-Ciel CD."

"Who?" said Erik and Mimi together.

"A Japanese band," said Aislin shortly. "Come on, let's go."

They got into the waiting taxi to head back to the hotel, all three of them opening a book to begin reading. Mimi closed hers when she got out of the car, and Erik closed his when he walked into the glass door with it. But Aislin maneuvered around the hotel with her book in front of her nose with all the years of practice of a bookworm.

Mimi said goodbye to Erik with a smile, and got into the elevator with Aislin. She looked around it, and laughed.

"Hey, Erik, I heard you're doing a show tomorrow night."

Erik blushed.

…………………………………….

Well, that was officially my longest chapter yet. Hope you're happy now, Hilary. Review!