Chương 102: Book 2 Chapter 22.1: The Witch is Back

Lunch in the lair was usually a noisy occasion. Whether it was discussion of the daily apocalypse or just Harley chattering, the secret hideout was usually full of conversation. Today, things were dead silent. Lee and Harley were taking their lunch in Lee's dorm, leaving it to just be Hawke, Kim, and Vell. Kim and Vell were still hashing out what exactly their dynamic was, now that they were no longer psychotically in love with each other.

They'd been able to dance around the issue for a long time thanks to the friend group and the frequent distractions of the doomsday cycle, but a quiet lunch made it hard to ignore -and made Hawke a very unfortunate third wheel to their awkward tension. A brief break to the quiet standoff came when Vell's phone pinged. He brought up his phone, looked at it with concern, and went "hm".

"What's up?" Hawke asked, desperate for a reprieve from Kim and Vell avoiding eye contact with each other.

"Doomsday already?"

"Oh, nah," Vell said.

"Just a payment notification."

"Why the concern, then?"

"Oh, just less than I was expecting," Vell said.

"Not a big deal." The rune-summoning phone case Vell had invented last year had been selling well, given the circumstances. To avoid handing out any money to a shithead like Lee's dad, Vell had given the production rights to a fairly small company. Supply was low, but demand was high -until recently, apparently. His most recent profit payout had dropped substantially. He'd never made more than a few thousand dollars a month anyway, and he wasn't concerned about money anyway, so the loss didn't bother him.

Vell thought nothing of it, and returned to awkward silence, until his phone beeped again. This time it was a text from Luke. LFen10: Hey vell, bud. Hate to be the bearer of bad news. vharlan03: don't worry about it I get a lot of bad news somebodys gotta bear it LFen10: I have no idea how to respond to that. Just go check out the quad. Vell put his phone away and did just that.

"Come on guys, I think the apocalypse might be starting." Kim and Hawke were glad for any excuse to end the awkward lunch, and trailed Vell out of the lair and onto the quad. He led the way until they reached the door, then stopped in his tracks with a heavy sigh.

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."

"Oh shit," Hawke mumbled.

"If even you're saying that it must be an especially bad apocalypse."

"It's not the apocalypse," Vell said, though he wished it was.

"It's Kraid." Kraid Tech had set up an entire booth on the campus quad, complete with banners and a dancing mascot in a foam costume. Vell's skeletal-armed nemesis was nowhere to be seen (for now), but his corporate presence was bad enough. Vell started marching to the booth to examine what was going on. Closer examination revealed that the booth was less of a demonstration and more of a pop-up sale.

The product being sold, in this case, being phone cases with a slot capable of summoning runes -an almost identical design to the one Vell had patented and sold. He let out a heavy sigh and examined the knock-off version of his invention.

"Well, it was only a matter of time," Vell said. As he shrugged off the loss, Kim and Hawke came up behind him to examine the merchandise.

"Did he steal your design?"

"Possibly," Vell said. Alistair Kraid could and would commit any crime possible for any reason, much less to ruin Vell's life. His desire to claim the secrets of the rune on Vell's back made him all too eager to torment Vell, by any means necessary. Vell retaliated the only way he could -by not letting the attack bother him.

"Isn't this like half the price you sell yours for?" Kim said. Vell nodded along to that as well.

"Yeah. He can probably afford to manufacture them much cheaper, you know, with the sweatshops he owns," Vell said.

"That, and he's probably undercutting my price specifically to torment me."

"Would he really do that?" A banner above the booth unfurled, emblazoned with the words "The Specifically To Torment Vell Harlan Sale". Kim said nothing as Vell pointed to it.

"My point," Vell said.

"Come on, let's get out of here." A surprisingly underwhelming effort, all things considered. Kraid was usually much better at psychologically tormenting his enemies. The only person really suffering right now was whatever poor sap was being forced to dance in the mascot costume. From the way they'd stopped dancing, they were probably exhausted. Vell resolved to bring them a bottle of water later, just in case. Vell made it about three steps away from the booth and the dancing mascot before freezing in his tracks.

The entire display was pathetic. Too pathetic. There was something else going on. He took three steps back to the booth. The mascot resumed dancing, in a very half-hearted fashion. Vell tilted his head and looked at the phone-shaped foam suit. There was an opaque mesh mask where a face would be, but careful attention to detail -and a certain sense of intuition- told Vell everything he needed to know. A few seconds of examination later, he let out one of the deepest sighs of his life.

"Joan?" The mascot stopped dancing, slumped forward, and gave a slow, tortured wave hello. Vell waved back, and tried to force himself to smile. Joan had politely requested a chance to get out of the mascot costume before they tried to play catch-up. The group had obliged, mostly for the sake of having a slightly longer delay before they had to delve into a conversation with Joan.

Having both murdered Vell and saved his life on separate occasions last year, feelings surrounding his ex-girlfriend were complex at best. For all but one person. Having washed the stench of the mascot costume off of her, Joan stepped out of Lee's shower and prepped herself for whatever she was about to walk into. She dried her black hair and tried to groom herself to the best of her ability. She wanted to make a good impression, and of course, to continue delaying this conversation.

She wasn't exactly eager for this reunion either. After putting it off as long as possible, Joan scanned her red-eyed reflection one more time and stepped back into the dorm. Lee, and a freshly brewed pot of tea, were waiting for her.

"Lee."

"Joan." Joan took a seat and accepted a silently offered teacup. They each took one sip before Lee finally broke the wall of silence.

"Everything else aside, Joan, it's good to see you again," she said.

"It's good to see you too," Joan said. Out of everyone she'd come to know at the Einstein-Odinson, Lee had been perhaps her best friend -and the only one to not lose faith in her after all her mistakes. Joan didn't know if she had deserved that trust, but she certainly appreciated it.

"I really wished we lived the kind of life where we could just sit here and talk about classwork, or pretty girls, or something."

"We can spare a few minutes for small talk," Lee said.

"We don't have to live in chaos all the time." Joan sipped at her drink and examined Lee carefully. A sly smile parted her lips.

"You've got something you want to tell me, don't you?"

"Well, perhaps, I just thought it worth mentioning, you know, last year you expressed interest in my, well, dating life," Lee stammered. Joan's smile grew wider and wider the more Lee stumbled her way through the sentence.

"Oh god. Is it Adele?" Joan begged.

"Please tell me it's Adele."

"Did everybody else- yes, it's Adele," Lee sighed.

"It was pretty obvious, Lee, she was going to ask you out sooner or later," Joan said.

"But seriously, that's cool. Have things been going well?"

"It hasn't been that long, but I like to think so," Lee said. She was turning red in the face now.

"Well I hope it keeps going well," Joan said.

"And also that you text me about this stuff next time! You tell me about fancy lunches but not you getting a girlfriend?'

"I didn't want to get ahead of myself!" Lee protested.

"A fancy lunch is a thirty minute commitment, tops. Relationships can last a long time, and things can go wrong, you should-" Lee stopped herself mid-sentence, but the damage was done. Joan's excitement vanished in a second.

"Yeah. Boy. Hoped we could've danced around that for at least thirty more seconds."

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be," Joan said.

"I got the ball rolling." Joan's tendency for obsessive behavior had soured more than a few things. Finding out the rune she'd been chasing her whole life was engraved on her boyfriend's tailbone had driven her to make a lot of mistakes, accidentally killing Vell (albeit on a first loop) chief among them. She'd been trying to course-correct for months now, but she had a lot to make up for.

"Come on," she sighed.

"We already shit on the casual conversation, might as well try and get the bad stuff out of the way now. Where is everybody?"

"Harley's dorm," Lee said.

"Lead the way." Lee did so, leading Joan across the campus towards Harley's dorm room. Her passage caused no small commotion on campus. Most people had heard the story of a student getting kidnapped at the end of the previous school year, and they especially knew that their previous principal had been rendered catatonic. The truth of what they knew ended there. Nobody knew that a mystery goddess had been responsible for Principal Goodwell's collapse, as Joan had taken the fall for it.

It kept people from asking unpleasant questions, but it also earned Joan a lot of scornful stares -something she was, unfortunately, used to. It felt better knowing she didn't technically deserve these stares, at least. This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author's consent. Report any appearances on Amazon. Joan kept her head up and her crimson eyes forward until they arrived in Harley's dorm. Vell, Harley, Kim, and Hawke were all waiting, along with Luke and Freddy Frizzle. And Botley.

Botley being notable because he had laser guns attached to his frame.

"Is that really necessary?"

"You know, Joan, I might have actually been okay with you being here," Harley said.

"Except you're coming here working for fucking Kraid."

"Okay, fair point," Joan said. That was not a good look.

"It's not like I want to work for him."

"Then why do you?" Luke asked.

"Because he wants me to work for him and he's an evil trillionaire. Or quadrillionaire, or however much money he has now," Joan said.

"I was all set and applying to this pharmaceutical place back home, and as soon as I finish my new hire paperwork he swoops in -literally swoops, he'd been levitating- and buys the place out from under the current owner."

"So quit."

"So he can what? Swing in and buy out another place? He'll just keep doing this as long as I live," Joan said.

"At least this way I keep the same contract I signed with the original company. Decent pay, benefits, and he can't ask me anything about my personal life."

"Okay, that sort of makes sense," Harley said.

"Botley, put the guns away." Botley complied, folding the lasers back into his frame with a mechanical click.

"All the guns," Harley said tersely. Botley titled his round head and a series of muffled clicks emanated from several hidden places through out the room. After a second of silence, one of the two guns popped back out of Botley's frame with a decisive click.

"He's says he's keeping that one," Harley said.

"It's not personal, he just likes to feel powerful." Joan squinted at the diminutive yet heavily armed robot, and his beady black eyes stared right back. She decided she really didn't have the energy to argue with a tiny machine right now and got back to the topic at hand.

"So that's what's up with me," Joan said.

"How are you guys?"

"Oh we're not actually done with the Kraid topic yet, I just put the guns away," Harley said. She shrugged in Botley's direction.

"Most of them. There's really no workaround?"

"If you've got one, I'm all ears," Joan said.

"But I'm pretty sure I could go work at a McDonald's and he'd buy that out too."

"Well, you know, there is, uh, one company even Kraid can't afford," Freddy said. He nodded in Lee's direction. Joan picked up on his meaning and immediately rejected it.

"Not Burrows," she spat.

"Never them." The crimson prosthetic eyes Joan wore flared with an anger so familiar Vell took a step back. Roentgen, the company Lee's parents owned, was the reason Joan had been born blind -and why her sister was in much worse condition. She would sooner die than work for them -and it probably wasn't an option either way. Joan's stance softened as she moved on from her brief bout of spite.

"Also, my family has been suing them nigh-constantly for the last twenty years, so," Joan said.

"Would not really expect my resume to make it through the review process."

"You vastly overestimate how much attention my father pays to things, but you may have a point," Lee said.

"Still, I'm all ears on exit strategies here," Joan said.

"Now that he doesn't need to pretend to like me anymore, Kraid is genuinely fucking terrifying. Believe me, nobody wants me out of here more than I want me out of here. I don't know where he gets them, but I'm ninety percent sure he has a brand new human skull on his desk every time I see his office." Someone screamed very loudly.

"Well I'm not sure it's that scary, it's just a skull," Joan said.

"That wasn't us." Everyone paused for a second to allow a second, more distant scream to ring out.

"Okay, guess it's time for that, then," Vell said.

"Oh, okay, good to see you're all still being disturbingly casual about weird bullshit, I was worried that would change while I was gone," Joan said, as Vell summoned a pair of cursed pistols and Lee fetched her whip. Harley rearmed Botley and scoffed at the very notion that things would ever stop being crazy.

"Did you think it would get less weird around here after everything that happened last year?"

"Good point," Joan said. Watching a literal God descend to help rescue her undead ex-boyfriend had shattered her baseline for weird stuff.

"How can I help?" Harley glared at Lee, Lee stared pleadingly at Harley, and Vell tried his best to look at nothing and no one.

"Okay, fine," Harley said. Another scream echoed in the distance, sounding even further away than before. Widespread disasters called for widespread attention.

"You're with me, Joan."

"Kim, you should go with them too," Vell said.

"Why?" Vell pulled Kim away for a quick aside, and to whisper something in her ear. Usually, being this close together would give Vell the urge to kiss Kim, but Joan being in the room made that idea so awkward it overcame the power of a godly runic attraction through sheer force of cringe.

"Joan's probably the second or third most knowledgeable person on the planet when it comes to that rune," Vell whispered. He wasn't sure how much Kraid knew, but it was definitely less than him.

"If she knew, she could…"

"Pass it right along to Kraid?"

"It's your call," Vell said.

"I'm obviously a bit biased, since we dated, she murdered me, then rescued me."

"Biased in which direction?"

"Honestly I'm not sure," Vell said.

"That's why I'm leaving it up to you. Now come on, people are screaming." Vell stepped away from the whispering session and clapped his hands before pointing to the door.

"Lee, where are we headed?"

"I'm taking Hawke to mission control, you'll be taking Luke and Freddy to patrol the quad, and Harley and her group will be going to the dining hall," Lee said. Hitting all the major hotspots was the first step in ascertaining the nature of a vague disaster such as this.

"Unless of course we take two steps out the door and the problem is staring us in the face." Vell took the lead of the somewhat reluctant Luke and the highly reluctant Freddy and headed for the outskirts of campus. He noted the hesitation of his assigned partners and voiced his usual supplication.

"This isn't mandatory, you know," Vell said.

"If you want to head back to Harley's dorm, the password for the automatic defense system is 'Botley Ball'."

"No, I'm fine, thanks," Luke said. Freddy had nearly turned around, but was inspired/shamed into staying by Luke's courage.

"Can't leave you out here to be brave all by yourself."

"It's not really bravery, we'll probably be fine," Vell assured them, falsely.

"Oh, whatever's going on here is not what I'm talking about," Luke said. He pointed at Vell.

"Three women who've all slept with you in the past year are having an extended, private conversation right now."

"Oh. Fuck." Thankfully for Vell, Harley, Kim, and Joan were all complex individuals with a bevy of interests and personality traits that extended beyond their relationship to him, so their conversation was of a more Bechdel Test-passing type.

"So, I get that you don't trust me, Harley," Joan said. She then took a deep breath and recalled some of the mindfulness lessons she'd been learning over the past few months.

"I understand you have good reasons for that, but I'd like to change how you feel about me. What can I do to prove I'm the one of the good guys?"

"Look, it's- See, talking like that is part of the reason I don't like you," Harley said.

"You don't just get to be 'one of the good guys', like it's a switch you can flip." Harley opened the dining hall doors and looked in. There were a few panicked crowds huddling at tables and having hushed conversations, but no sign of what they might be panicking about.

"Being 'good' isn't a one time thing, it's a decision you make every minute of every day," Harley said.

"Every situation you're in, you have to try and be your best self, and do what's best for others. And you, Joan Marsh, do not exactly have a stellar track record in my book."

"Okay, totally understandable, yeah," Joan said.

"I've not always been the best at decision making, but I've been working on it!" Joan held up her phone and displayed an app entitled "10, 000 Logic Puzzles".

"You've been playing games on your phone and that's supposed to help?"

"They build critical thinking skills," Joan said defensively.

"That's my big problem, you know, I don't analyze cause and effect well enough. I've always had good intentions, I just didn't really think things through and things got... really, severely, entirely off the rails." Joan's confident defense of herself slowed into mumbling as she had to directly confront her long litany of failures. Her ego was still its own obstacle, and nobody made phone apps for being less self-centered.

"I guess I respect that you're trying, Joan, but this isn't really the kind of thing that changes over the course of a conversation," Harley said.

"I'm rooting for you or whatever, but let's just focus on the task at hand." Harley stopped in her tracks and pointed out the nearest group of worried students in the dining hall.

"I'm just going to talk to people and see what's going on," Harley said.

"I'd say both of you should recon too, but... well, most of the school thinks Joan brain fried our old principal, and Kim, you just don't like socializing." Both nodded. Neither were well-equipped for social reconnaissance.

"Hang out and get to know each other, I guess," Harley said.

"You're both irrevocably entangled in the clusterfuck of our collective lives, going to have to get acquainted sooner or later." Harley waved goodbye and headed for the unsuspecting civilians. In spite of her orders, Joan and Kim did not talk to each other. Occasional side-eyed glances were exchanged for several seconds before Joan tried to break the ice.

"So... what do you study?" Joan asked.

"A couple things. Runes. Robotics. Neurology." Kim's struggle to thread together the fragments of her own odd existence had made for a varied field of study. Joan, who didn't understand the underlying logic that connected them, just thought Kim was casting a wide net.

"Really getting into everything, huh, just like Freddy," Joan said.

"Hopefully you're less accident prone than him."

"Maybe."

"First day I met him he was in trouble with a broken anti-gravity generator," Joan said.

"I've heard."

"Don't get me wrong, though, he's still probably the smartest guy on campus," Joan continued.

"Yep." While Joan continued to chug away at a one-sided conversation, Harley made much more progress. Her ability to communicate like a normal human being got results quickly. She was soon back to Joan and Kim's side, giving them a welcome reprieve from their "small talk".

"Apparently a few people just like, stopped working all of a sudden."

"Stopped working how?"

"Like their brains turned off," Harley said.

"Nobody knows anything more than that. Hold on, let me get Lee and Hawke on the line before I say anything else." Harley dialed up their mission control, connected to everyone necessary, and restated her very basic understanding of the situation. Lee checked a few readouts in their lair and reported what she could gather.

"No surges of magical or mundane energy, so we're likely not dealing with a centralized incident," Lee said.

"Vell, you're closer to the medical labs, maybe you can check on the condition of the student's who've been affected?"

"Can do," Vell said. He signed off for now and took his squad to the medical labs.

"People are just dropping into coma's randomly?"

"Something like that, apparently," Vell said.

"Any guesses what the cause is, Freddy?"

"People could faint for a lot of reasons, but all the most common ones are still too rare for it to be affecting this many people at one time," Freddy said.

"It'd have to be something unnatural."

"Maybe the neurology department nuked everyone's brains again," Vell said.

"What do you mean again?"

"Uh, never mind," Vell said.

"Just a running joke I used to have."

"I've literally never heard you say anything like that before," Luke said.

"It was a running gag I... I had with Joan," Vell said, managing to come up with a half competent lie.

"It's back on my mind for obvious reasons. Come on, less talking, more disaster appraising." Vell threw open the doors to the labs to further distract from his verbal slip-up. They were more crowded than disaster areas tended to be. The relatively mundane nature of today's apocalypse meant that people weren't running and screaming from it, as they often did, but gathering around it to try and solve the problem at hand. Vell hoped all the extra people would turn out to be a boon, and not an obstacle.

"Excuse me, sorry, could I check on someone?" Vell said.

"A friend of mine is here."

"I'm sorry, I can't allow that," said the doctor overseeing the lab. While most of the minute to minute operations were handled by a fleet of medical robots, there had to be a few actual human doctors on staff.

"Why not?"

"It'd be an absurd breach of medical protocol, for one thing, and I don't even-" Halfway through his sentence, the doctor slumped over in his seat and then slowly slid to the ground, motionless and braindead.

"Well, that's both convenient and distressing," Vell said.

"Luke, you want to help me get this guy in a bed?" Freddy would've also contributed, had he not been busy hyperventilating. Once the doctor was in a bed and Freddy had caught his breath, their attention turned to science.

"No overt symptoms other than being, well, unconscious," Freddy said.

"No immediately apparent commonality in the students either."

"Maybe they all had a class together and got exposed to something?"

"How do you explain the doctor, then?"

"Secondhand exposure," Luke guessed, before hesitating.

"I'm going to put a mask on." Freddy did likewise. Vell had no reason to fear exposure to anything, since this was the first loop, so he didn't bother taking precautions.

"Anybody recognize any of these guys, maybe if we know something about them we can-" Vell stopped himself mid-sentence. He did recognize at least one of the students. He'd seen them just earlier today.

"Oh, fuck," he mumbled.

"Listen guys, I'm going to go through the unconscious people's pockets real quick, I promise I'm not looting anything."

"Okay, thanks for the heads up." Vell went through with the very morally uncomfortable act of pickpocketing the braindead, and felt very glad that nobody would remember this. Thankfully, his efforts were not in vain.

"Well, in retrospect I should've guessed this from the start." After picking five pockets, Vell had found five phones with brand-new phone cases, all bearing the same Kraid tech logo.