221B Con . . . Into the night.

Well, it's been a helluva night folks. I put on the Victorian duds, threw on the top hat, and the good Carter and I headed down to S. Moran's Invisible Tigress Speakeasy, the big Saturday night event hosted by the Baker Street Babes.

Now, you know the Babes can throw a party. But do you really expect to find yourself all hot and sweaty and crawling around the floor to do their bidding? Along with forty or so other people?

Well, with all the Irene Adlers at 221B Con, it's not really that surprising. And after the Babes' devilish Dancing Men demands to get in, we should have seen it coming. And like all the most devious plotters, they also offered up one's heart's desire to get you to do their bidding. What's my heart's desire, you ask? We'll get to that.

The coded messages found all over the Con today instructed us to tell them something about Rupert Graves to gain admittance to the Speakeasy, and the good Carter was ready with a Graves tidbit good enough to get us both in. (Currently watching Rupert in V for Vendetta as I write this.) The ballroom we entered was full of balloons, which seemed festive enough . . . except for the strict instructions not to pop those balloons.

We divided up into teams of five. The good Carter and I split off from our familiar neighbors and joined Matt and Clay, two rare gentlemen at the con whom I'd met earlier in the day. Also on their team was Laura, whom I knew as "Victorian Irene Adler" and the internet knows as Timestitcher. (Her costume was one of the winners of the big costume contest earlier.) Our assignment: find the balloon with the answer to a question on it. On the back of that balloon would be another question. The answer to that question would be on another balloon with another question. And on and on, answering questions and finding balloons before the other teams. Our questions started with "What was the first story Mycroft appeared in?" and ranged through writers, Rathbone movie years, Eve Titus, and Anderson's supposed love of dinosaurs. On and on, finding and answering, until we finally found someone holding on to our final balloon for some reason.

We dragged all our balloons up through the balloon grabbing chaos and had them validated by the Babes, only to find we were the first to complete the task. The prize for that little achievement?

Did I mention one's hearts desire? Well, I don't know what it meant to my team-mates, but about a year ago I realized that there was one more Sherlockian thing I had to do before I considered my resume in this hobby of ours complete, and that was accomplish one thing that would get me on a BSB podcast. I didn't know what that thing would be . . . a book, maybe? Something new I hadn't thought of yet? Complaining about Elementary in a blog week after week certainly wasn't going to do it. But I didn't expect it to be crawling around on a floor looking at balloons.

The first prize was a guest spot for our team on an upcoming podcast about the con.

After that came some Sherlockian pictionary, but I had gone to the bar with Clay to get some celebratory refreshment. And the party started moving out into the larger atrium area. Once the pictionary was done, I got to help give away a whole lot of books and deerstalkered stuffed toys at the turn of a playing card. (Remember that mini-library I blogged a picture of? With so many Con attendees on flights, we decided to parcel the books out bit by bit.) And I think it worked out nicely.

After that, a little relaxation, one more panel on Holmes and Jack the Ripper, one more late night conversation, and back to the room for some blogging and that plotter of revolutions, V.

Bill Mason and I, as much as we disagree on Elementary, both agree that something revolutionary happened to Sherlock Holmes fandom as we know it this weekend. Something we couldn't have imagined ten or twenty years ago. Most of the attendees don't probably see it, as they're just having a good time enjoying Sherlock and other people who enjoy Sherlock. But as representatives of the old world of Sherlock fandom, Bill, Marilynne, Regina, Jacquelynn, Howard, David, Rich, and anyone else I haven't run into yet are certainly seeing it.

And we still get one more day of it.