Someone else finds the portal device...

Marigold didn't seem to realize exactly where she was, or the kind of attention that a busty blonde cosplayer would attract toward herself at any given moment. She still believed that no one would be looking at her, that she was just another face in a crowd. She was wrong.

Bill was waiting nearby. He didn't really care about the cosplayers, or the fandoms, or the guests. Last year, Bill and his wife had separated, after he had caught her in bed with another woman. Well, that hadn't done him any good at all. He had soon found that the girls he liked-- pretty twenty-somethings-- weren't into guys like Bill. Bill didn't realize how much he had changed over nearly thirty years of marriage, that now he was a gross man with a beer belly in his fifties, and he didn't have the money to be a sugar daddy. For Bill, SAX was nothing more than a chance to gawk at the girls with low self-esteem showing off some skin in their ridiculous costumes. Girls like Marigold.

Bill had watched Marigold as she had fiddled with the portal device and as she had been bumped. He had seen the way she panicked when her fingers slipped inside it-- even thinking for a second that they had been chopped off! But he quickly realized what had happened when he saw the furious, uncomfortable look on Lynn's face not far away, one he recognized from the many times he had come onto his wife with two in the pink and one in the stink, only for her to reject him because she wasn't in the mood.

Marigold had dumped the portal in the garbage bin and washed her hands of it then and there, ignoring the possible dangers of leaving such a device in such an open area. Possible dangers like Bill. He didn't even pretend to be sneaky like Marigold had. As soon as she was clear of the area, he ran over to the garbage can, snatched it up, and disappeared. He looked it over, imagining the infinite possibilities that he would have to explore with this strange and mysterious device.