Chapter 82
They turned the lights off in the auditorium a good ten minutes before the presentation started, but it didn’t bother Bran since he’d been herded backstage by Morgan and the woman with the big headset. The lighting there, while not great, let him see enough to know that this event was a big deal, much bigger than he’d even imagined.
Not including all the people filing in with pamphlets and lanyards (with presumably their names on them) there had to be at least a hundred photographers and videographers babysitting giant cameras on tripods and darting around with much smaller ones on handheld gimbles.
Just the amount of people would have already made Bran want to take a nap, but the noise was something else and it made him want to go touch all the equipment he could find just to cancel the whole thing.
Why was he even here?
He spotted Morgan talking to a few lanyarded up people so he took the opportunity to glare at him while fiddling with the energy sapping band around his wrist. He’d tried covertly cutting it with the box cutter during a bathroom break earlier, but either the band was made of something special (it probably was) or the box cutter was just that bad (also probably true).
Bran let his gaze roam elsewhere to see if any potential escape routes had opened. Nope. At every exit were discrete security guards and he knew from personal experience that they could recognise him on sight and had been told to not let him leave.
Bran sighed. It was going to be a long day.
But not as long as he thought.
Almost as soon as he’d resigned himself to spending the rest of the day (and maybe even a few days) in boredom, the lights at the edge of the stage out front suddenly lit up and the whole auditorium buzzed louder.
Bran sat up on his folding stool and looked around for some indication on what was going on and as he did, he noticed that, perhaps to not distract from the main event, the lighting backstage had been turned down. Perhaps this was his chance to slip away and get lost in the crowd and maybe make his way out when everyone left later.