Chương 169: Book 3 Chapter 18.1: You Are What You Eat

Vell looked up from his breakfast to see Quenay hovering over the table, looking down at his french fries. He rolled his eyes as the other loopers continued their lunch in blissful ignorance of a Goddess's presence.

"What's up?"

"Just here to watch," Quenay said.

"Watch me eat breakfast?"

"No, I do that all the time," Quenay said.

"Today'll be a first, though. I've never actually watched you two interact."

"The two of- oh no," Vell said. The other denizens of the dining hall were being shocked into dead silence. Only one visitor inspired that level of dread. The chilling presence of Alistair Kraid caused several of the students in the dining hall to flee outright, and those that did not run put their heads down and avoided even looking in the direction of the evil billionaire. Though Kraid delighted in their terror, he did not linger to enjoy it.

He had an objective, and made a single-minded march towards it, until he came to a stop just across the table from Vell.

"Harlan."

"Kraid." In spite of Kraid's attempts to look terrifyingly imposing, Quenay was floating in circles around his head, occasionally poking at him or making rude gestures in his direction. Apparently even his impressive magical skills were no match for the Goddess's ability to disguise herself. Vell tried to hide his amusement at Quenay's antics. Though Kraid sensed Vell was entertained by something, he had no idea that Quenay even existed, much less that she was making insulting gestures right next to his ear.

"You look chipper," Kraid noted.

"It's been a good year so far," Vell said.

"Then you showed up." Kraid was visibly delighted by the idea that his presence alone could ruin a year, and then lost interest in Vell, for the moment at least. His eyes glinted as he looked in the direction of Kim's metallic body.

"Kim! The upgrades look good," Kraid said.

"Do me a favor and give me a quick punch. I want to see if my wards against machine magic hold up." Kim deactivated her face screen to avoid showing any signs of frustration. Her unique ability to perform magic as a robot had let her get the better of Kraid in combat during the chaos at the end of last year, but it looked like that trick would not work twice. She had looked into attempting an ambush over the summer, but Joan had advised against it.

Kraid had more security than just his personal protective wards, and catching him off guard was unlikely. Now it seemed the opportunity had passed. The quiet frustration was well hidden, but Kraid sensed it anyway. He looked around and did a quick scan of the group for new vulnerabilities and new targets to torment, and his eyes settled on Samson. The newest looper put his head down and stared at his lunch as Kraid walked around the table.

"And here's a new face," Kraid said. He circled like a vulture until he was standing at Samson's side, and put a skeletal hand on his shoulder. The necromantic fire suspending Kraid's bony hand did not burn, but Samson still flinched at the slightest touch as exposed bone and black fire rested on his shirt sleeve.

"So who are you, kid?"

"I'm just the new guy," Samson mumbled.

"I don't know anything."

"Nobody at this table knows anything, that's no surprise," Kraid said. He released his death grip on Samson's shoulder.

"I'll see you later. All of you." As Kraid walked away, Quenay mimicked putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger. She regretted it when she saw the curious look on Vell's face. He was actually thinking about it.

"No can do, champ," Quenay said.

"I can't just kill people when I feel like it."

"You have a surprising amount of restrictions for a Goddess," Vell said.

"Oh, I'm sorry, would you like it better if capricious omnipotent entities could kill whoever they wanted whenever they wanted?"

"Not whenever, just this one time!" Quenay shook her head disapprovingly and vanished, leaving Vell to rejoin the normal conversation. His friends were chatting about what Kraid might want on this visit -after Lee magically checked for any listening devices nearby.

"I think his interest in Samson made it pretty fucking clear," Harley said.

"He sponsored a lot of new students to try and fish for a looper, and since that didn't work he's trying to poach our new guy." Samson let out a quiet grunt of distress. He didn't want to be poached by anyone, least of all Kraid.

"A regrettably viable theory," Lee said.

"Don't worry, Samson, he won't pressure you too hard. He's too smart to invest in a losing battle."

"Just tell him to fuck off enough times and he'll leave you alone," Harley said.

"He can't come down on you too hard or he'd reveal he knows about the time loops."

"And he doesn't know that we know that he knows."

"And we want to keep it that way," Lee said.

"Yeah, we can't let him know that we know that he knows that we know th-""Stop that."

"Sorry," Harley said.

"Just let me know if Kraid ever gives you trouble," Vell said, giving Samson a reassuring pat on the shoulder. His hand certainly felt better than the scary skeleton one.

"He's got a weird hyperfixation slash vendetta with me. I can distract him."

"Yeah. Thanks, I appreciate it," Samson said.

"I'm going to go hide in my dorm for now, though."

"Valid." The gang waved goodbye as Samson stumbled off. He checked over his shoulder every few steps to make sure Kraid wasn't sneaking up on him.

"Samson!" The sound of his name made Samson freeze in place, until he realized it was only Ibrahim calling him. Then he froze all over again when he realized Ibrahim was calling.

"What gives, man? We were supposed to be studying today," Ibrahim said, as he stormed up to his brother's side. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Right, yeah. Don't worry about it. We'll study later." A full loop later. Samson fully intended to spend this one hunkered down and hiding from Kraid. Even had Kraid not been there, Samson would've been looking for excuses to get out of the study session. The daily loops also came with a bad case of deja vu: everything he studied on the first loop, Samson would have to study again on the next loop. It got boring fast.

"You're already late, man," Ibrahim said.

"I've got other things going on right now," Samson said. Only in the vaguest sense, but he did.

"I'll catch up with you when I'm free."

"You got to take studying more seriously than that whatever club of yours," Ibrahim said.

"Our grades are dropping."

"My grades are fine," Samson said. While he'd taken a small hit initially, time to acclimate and a little help from Lee had helped him get back to his old standard.

"Wait. Are your grades dropping?" It took a suspiciously long time for Ibrahim to say "no".

"Ibrahim."

"A little," Ibrahim lied. Samson saw right through him.

"Ibrahim, what are your grades at?" It took a lot more cajoling, and a threat to call mom, before Ibrahim relented and showed his grades off. Samson's concern grew deeper and deeper the more he saw. Ibrahim's grades were hovering in the fifty to sixty range -well within expulsion territory.

"What's going on, Ibs?"

"Well my brother's been abducted into a cult to do weird shit, for starters."

"I'm the one in the cult—it's not a cult, by the way—and I'm the one doing the weird shit," Samson said.

"How are you the one with grade problems?"

"I don't know, maybe because you actually know what's going on," Ibrahim said.

"I just get to sit on my ass and worry about things."

"It's not that bad," Samson insisted. A shockwave made Samson's hair stand on end, and he then found he had no hair to be standing on end. He didn't have much of anything.

"Samson."

"Yeah."

"Why are we food?"

"I don't know," Samson said. He wasn't sure how he was saying it, since he was a pile of chicken nuggets, but he was saying it.

"I really don't know." He sure hoped somebody else did.

"So. Let's appraise the problem," Lee said.

"The problem, Lee," Harley said slowly.

"Is that I am spaghetti!" She was, in fact, spaghetti. She was slowly leaking marinara sauce all over the place too. Lee, as a cucumber sandwich, was slightly more cohesive, but no less edible.

"I meant on the large scale, dear," Lee said.

"Obviously being food is a problem. But why are we food?"

"Can we contemplate that while Kim puts me in a bowl? I'm worried what'll happen if all my sauce leaks." The two women had been spending some time in the looper lair with Kim when they'd been foodified, yet Kim had not been. Making use of her intact anatomy, Kim fetched a bowl for Harley and tried to scoop up as much of the spaghetti she'd become as possible.

"Alright, I'm intact," Harley said.

"And yet I can still feel the saucy bits of me on the floor. That's weird."

"You can still talk, too," Kim said. She wasn't sure where the sound was coming from, or even how it was being made, but Harley's voice was definitely still coming from the spaghetti.

"We can usually talk," Lee said.

"Whether we've been turned into teacups, bricks, Kareem Abdul-Jabar's carpet collection, or any number of other inanimate objects, we always retain the ability to talk."

"Why?"

"I imagine it would be boring otherwise," Lee said.

"If the universe has demonstrated anything, it's a sense of humor." Kim finished putting the Lee sandwich on a plate, just in case, and silently agreed.

"Now, we all appear to have been turned into what we ate for lunch," Lee said. Though Hawke and Vell had left the lunch table not long after Samson, the transformations of herself and Harley gave Lee a good idea of what was going on.

"I had a cucumber sandwich for lunch. Based on this, we might assume we've been turned into the last thing we ate."

"Well I wonder if that's really true, because-""Harley, if you say anything about eating pussy I'm putting you down a garbage disposal," Kim threatened.

"I wasn't going to! Jesus," Harley said. She'd been thinking of saying it later, but not right now.

"I was going to say 'why hasn't Kim turned into anything?'."

"Well, technically, this body has never eaten anything," Kim said.

"I ate stuff in my old human-looking body, but I've swapped out most of the parts I had back then."

"I guess that tracks," Harley said.

"The theory is sound. Let's get the rest of the gang together and see what our food brains can come up with."

"Oh that's viscerally unpleasant." Compared to many apocalypses, the fact that the entire campus had been turned into food was mildly amusing, or it would have been under ideal circumstances. Any comedy in the situation was torn away by the presence of seagulls on campus. Discarded sandwiches, pizza slices, and snacks of all sorts were being torn to pieces by the voracious birds, and the student's were screaming the entire time.

Lee began to feel like their ability to speak was born not out of a sense of humor, but a sense of sadism.

"Just keep us covered and get sprinting towards the rune labs," Lee said.

"We can't deal with all these birds right now." With the consent of the other loopers, Kim had put some tracking devices in all of their phones and linked them to her own brain, making them easy to find in emergencies. All the phones were no longer pinging, presumably vanished in the same way that people's clothing and accessories had disappeared when they'd been foodified, but she could still track where the last pings had come from. Vell's last known location was in his lab, with Hawke and Samson not far away.

The sprint across campus managed to scare off a few seagulls, but they quickly returned to the feast after Kim had passed. She ignored the screaming of a gazpacho and hurried past to the labs.

"Wait, who's that guy?" Harley asked.

"That is a good looking cheesecake."

"Focus, Harley."

"I am focusing! On the cheesecake. I like cheesecake. Kim, go over there and ask them where they got the cheesecake before the seagulls eat all of them."

"How can you even see that?"

"Spaghetti works in mysterious ways," Harley said.

"But yeah, we got everything. Hearing, sight, smell. I think I might technically be some kind of spirit that's haunting spaghetti."

"That would explain things," Lee said.

"But it'll require further experimentation."

"And experiment we will! Once we have the crew together, obviously," Harley said.

"Kim, kick the door down, I'm feeling dramatic." The rune lab door got kicked down, though not for dramatic purposes. Kim's hands were full. She set Lee and Harley down on a workbench and searched around the room for whichever bit of foodstuff Vell had become. Moments later, she returned with a handful of french fries"Okay, here's Vell," Kim said.

"I'm running out of hands to carry you guys with, so I'm just going to leave you here while I go fetch Hawke and Samson. Try not to get eaten."

"I'll try," Vell said. The other two were just in the next building over, and Kim was fast, so the trip would not take long. The food loopers didn't have much else to do but talk to kill time.

"Harley, how are you holding up?"

"I'm feeling fine," Harley said.

"Just contemplating the nature of the self."

"How so?"

"Well I'm wondering," Harley said.

"Right now, if I ate myself, would I get smaller or stay the same size?"

"Huh."

"You haven't got a mouth, dear," Lee said.

"I know, but just in theory."

"In theory you could eat yourself at any time," Vell said.

"And you'd get smaller."

"Oh, right. Sometimes I forget I'm made of meat."

"It's hard to forget, with the way Kim talks sometimes," Vell grumbled.

"Oh, she's not that bad." Kim kicked the door down at that moment, with a bowl of curry in one hand and a plate of chicken nuggets in the other.

"What's up, meatbags?" Vell didn't have any eyes, yet Lee could still feel him giving her a knowing look.

"Or should I say carb-bags," Kim said. As spaghetti, a sandwich, and french fries, the three veteran loopers were heavy on the carbohydrates.

"Got the guys."

"Samson, I'm still very disappointed in you," Harley said.

"Now that we've actually been turned into our lunches I'm even more upset you didn't go with the dino nuggets."

"I'm feeling a little uncomfortable about dinosaurs after the whole nazi zombie dinosaur thing earlier," Samson said. The incident had been weeks ago now, but it still haunted him.

"Fair play," Harley said.

"Alright, now that we're all united, let's get down to business. Kim, we'll have to leave the footwork to you, for obvious reasons," Lee said. She was the only one with feet.

"The rest of us will put our heads together and theorize what might have caused this."

"Sounds good to me."

"Start with the culinary department and work your way outwards," Lee said.

"And do be sure to close the door behind you. Seagulls, you know." Kim saluted sharply and exited the lab, making sure to close the door behind her. A seagull very nearly swooped through the open door in the brief second she had it open, but Kim managed to close it in time.

"Fucking sky rats," Kim grumbled.