The room roared with speech, as the silence created from the shock of the murder had now changed into a nervous uproar, everybody worrying about who would be next. David tried to shout through the noise, but to no avail. Finally, he made his way to the intercom system. It was for emergencies only, and if this didn't count as an emergency, then nothing did.

"Excuse me!" he called, his voice echoing throughout the hall

"We have reason to believe that a man in fancy dress..."
"cosplay, actually" Reid corrected from behind
"... Yeah, anyway, anyone who's in fancy dress as a man named ... Ichigo Kurosaki ... can you please come and gather around here. Everybody else move back , and nobody leave the room! Thank you!"

he placed down the mouth piece, and turned to his team

"There, so all the people dressed as this guy will gather around us, we can watch them easier that way, how many of them can there be?"

ten minutes later, there was a small crowd of people dressed in black gowns, carrying swords of different sizes and qualities, some made of metal, some of wood, and some obviously cut out of cardboard and painted the right colours.

David sighed "there are this many people dressed as a single character? He must be popular enough to ..."

he turned around to notice one of the costumed men sniggering to himself

"okay, what's the big joke?" he asked, sharply

"its just ... " the man couldn't speak properly for laughing "... you sound JUST LIKE a guy from the Simpsons, dude!"

David sighed "do I LOOK like the godfather to you?"

he turned back around

"We still have a problem ..." Aaron interjected

"we've got all of his targets into an area where they can all be easily protected, so what if he changes his target? There are so many people here that it would be easy to pick someone else"

"I doubt it" Reid said "He knows the specific point where his targets die down to the volume number and chapter. He's planning it out in advance, just like the manga themselves. I doubt he would change it when he's put so much time into planning it. I wouldn't be surprised if he'd already picked out which one of these people he would take out"

Aaron and David looked over the crowd assembled. There were many different people dressed as many different things, some looked heroic, some more like monsters than anything else. There was no real visual cue to give them any sort of clue as to who the unsub could be. That would be too easy.

There were so many variables. What would they be dressed as? Would they be as a villain to show their true villainy? Would they be dressed as a hero to hide their motives, or did they think they were doing something heroic? Were they even in costume at all? Could they just hate costumes, or the characters they displayed? What connection could there possibly be between them?

All of these questions were constantly going through the heads of all the team members ... until they heard a gunshot in the distance. Aaron, David, and Derek drew their guns and ran towards the sound, with Reid running behind them. Garcia was left to keep an eye on the gathered costumed people, though she was taking advantage of the free Wi-Fi to level up on her new online rpg. It was to die for.

The team ran towards the noise, hoping to catch the unsub in the act. They got to a corner, blocked from the sight of the regular con-goers by a number of stands. There was a dead man slumped in the corner, with a piece of paper attached to him. It had one word written on it.

"Filler"

David looked around for the culprit, but nobody seemed suspicious.

"what's a filler?" Aaron asked to Spencer

"A filler in an anime series is when the animated version of a manga has caught up to the comic, and needs to create new storylines so as to make a bigger gap"

"In other words ... its there to buy time?" asked Spencer, looking back over to the other side of the room

"Hey" said a woman from the sidelines "maybe you should question the security guard. He was the first person here, he checked him over and said he was going to take care of something ... dunno what, but you should definitely talk to him, he might know stuff"

Aaron and David looked at eachother, nodded, and ran through the crowd back to where they had been to start with.

Where they should never have left.

A security guard walked through the mass of Ichigos, looking at them one by one, before grabbing one, pulling him to the wall where Garcia sat. She quickly got up, rushing towards him, attempting a fruitless attempt to stop him before he drew his gun and pointed it at her. He took a strange looking piece of metal from his belt, holding it at the cosplayer's chest. As he did this, the man stopped struggling. One more movement and he would be dead.

"This isnt the way I had hoped to do this but at least i'll manage to get rid of you!" said the security guard, smirking to himself.

Aaron ran through the crowd with Derek, holding their guns pointed at the guard.

"stop right there, let him go and give up!"

the guard laughed "you don't get it ... you've lost this one. The reason you're asking me to give up is because you know that you won't actually win in a confrontation"

Aaron had to be careful, waiting for the right moment. He couldn't get a clear shot at the unsub, and even if he could, he had to at LEAST try and reason with him.

Spencer walked forwards

"You're not in with this, but you have a strong sense of justice don't you? You want to prove something to these people, make a point"

the guard looked at him, his smirk replaced by a nervous smile "how ... did you work out I wasn't one of these people?"

Spencer looked him over "its simple, I worked it out when I worked out what the notes meant. You looked at the volume of the manga to find out what was happening and when exactly the deaths occurred. You COULD just not follow the manga, but then if you wanted to know enough about the series, if you were an otaku you would buy the volumes. You didn't, you just read it and left it. You wanted to find it and that was all, just an excuse for a kill"

the guard looked around at the people watching "but ... cant you see? These kids, spending all their times trying to be someone else! They're wasting their lives ... and if they don't use them properly, they don't even deserve them! Make room for people who wont waste their lives away pretending to be people they're not going on adventures that they can never hope to! I mean, even when I gave them clues, they couldn't even notice it."

"and so you planned it out to kill them in the most ironic way, killing them the same way as their "time-wasting heroes", right?"

"exactly ... their obsession ended up killing them, I'd say its the perfect punishment"

Derek, Reid, and Aaron watched, then looked to behind him

the man looked confused, but couldn't turn around, not without letting go of the gun or the cosplayer.

"what ... what are you looking at? What are yo ..."

there was a thud, and the man hit the floor

David stood behind him armed with a small-ish orange sphere. He handed it back to a Goku cosplayer.

"Didn't see that coming did you? Death in prison at the end of your life sentence, the David Rossi show"

- - - -

Reid sat back on the plane back home, thinking to himself, considering what was said.

Charles F. Kettering once said, "Our imagination is the only limit to what we can hope to have in the future."

The man had his own plan for how people should live their lives, and he considered anything else to be a waste, for them to be following their imagination instead of reality, but it wasn't true. Imagination and fantasy is one of the greatest things to exist. Without it, our lives would be empty, and we would lose so much of what we were. This man failed to understand this, and with his job making him spend so much time with the people he detested, he began to hate them for what they were, for what they did, and every part of their lives. He stopped seeing them as people with imaginations, and started seeing them as massive wastes of time.

Some people cant see. Some people will never see. Some people get effected the hard way ... and they end up coming crashing down.

... its a tragedy, but its why we exist. To stop them.

Reid sat back. He had found and stopped the killer. They had made their moves strategically, and he had fallen into the trap that even they didn't know they had set. He was pleased with himself ...

... plus he'd gotten the Son-Goku figure he'd wanted for a long time, it had been a good trip.

[Writer comments : So, this is the end of my first Criminal Minds fanfic. I hope you liked it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I hope you didnt think the ending was too sudden. To me ... I dunno, it seemed like it worked as a twist ending. if youve got any praise or ideas of how i can make it better please let me know thank you ^^. Ive started work on my next Criminal Minds fanfic, with the working title of "Massively Multiplayer Murder"]