Vell opened the door of his dorm. It had taken an unusual amount of time for their pizza to be delivered, and movie night was already well under way. Since everyone else was enthralled in trying to decipher the plot of the strange art house flick Hawke had recommended, Vell had volunteered to be pulled away from the indecipherable plot long enough to greet the pizza delivery robot. To his surprise, Vell found a flesh and blood human being holding the pizzas they had ordered. He had his head tilted downward, examining the order details, hiding his face behind the brim of the uniform hat he wore.

“Huh. Something happen to the delivery bots?” Vell asked, as he took the pizzas.

“Nope,” the delivery man said, in an unfortunately familiar voice. “Just a change in management.”

Lifting his head to reveal his face, Alistair Kraid also removed his uniform hat and bowed with a flourish. Vell nearly dropped the pizza’s, but his pizza-preservation instincts stayed strong, even when faced with his longtime nemesis.

“Kraid!’

“The one and only,” Kraid said. He waved with the blackened, skeletal arm that was his trademark. “Good to see you again, Harlan.”

“Bad to see you, ever,” Vell said. “What are you up to?”

“Just diversifying my portfolio,” Kraid said. “Figured I’d get involved in food.”

“Probably a bad idea, considering how distasteful you are,” Vell snapped.

“Just tell Mr. Toastybones to fuck off and close the door, Vell, you- Why are you tipping him?” Harley demanded. Vell caught himself about to hand ten dollars to Kraid and snatched his money back just in time.

“Sorry, force of habit,” Vell said. His natural instinct to appropriately compensate service workers and delivery men had made him forget he was dealing with Kraid.

“Oh, I see how it is, just because a guy commits some unethical human experimentation he doesn’t deserve a tip,” Kraid said.

“Yeah, you unethically human experimented on me,” Vell said. “It takes a lot to get me to not tip, but that is definitely over the line.”

“Fine, keep your ten dollars,” Kraid said. “Enjoy the pizza. I think you’ll like the changes we made to the recipe.”

With another wave of his scorched bone arm, Kraid turned away and walked down the hall. His generally sinister aura was slightly undercut by the delivery boy outfit, but he still managed to seem a little imposing. Vell kept an eye on Kraid until he was out of sight, and then turned to face the pizza. Vell withdrew his glasses that had scanning runes built in, and the movie was paused in anticipation of his analysis of their dinner.

“So what’d he do to it?” Luke asked. “Is it like, poisoned, or is the pepperoni made from human flesh, or what?”

“No, nothing like that. It seems perfectly edible. Great, even,” Vell said. “High quality meat, imported Italian cheeses, heirloom tomato sauce...this is a fancy as hell pizza.”

“What kind of evil plot involves making really good pizza?”

“Lee, you foot the bill for pizzas,” Luke said. “What did this cost?”

Pizza was such a small expense that Lee rarely bothered to check what she’d paid. In this case, however, it turned out to be quite important.

“One-hundred forty seven dollars?” Lee said, aghast. “For two pizzas?”

“Holy hell!”

“Sure, that’s expensive, but I still don’t know what Kraid wants,” Kim noted. “Lee can afford it. What do we care?”

“It’s not about us,” Luke said. “What about everyone else on campus who wants pizza?”

While Lee had the benefit of billionaire parents who would fill her pockets on a whim, not every student was so lucky. Most were attending on scholarships, or just scraping by on tuition, unable to afford luxuries on top of their already exorbitant academic costs. Yet rich and poor alike were united in the joy provided by pizza.

“That motherfucker’s gentrifying pizza,” Cane protested. “We can’t let him get away with this.”

“Cane’s right. We have to do something,” Harley said. “Quickly! To the pizzeria!”

----------------------------------------

Harley pushed open the double doors to the dining hall offshoot that served as the campus pizzeria: Pierro’s Pizza, a place they had definitely been many times before and which was a recurring element of their daily lives. The burly proprietor stopped preparing a pizza and stroked his curled mustache as he examined the faces he well recognized.

“Pierro, who we’re very familiar with and have seen many times before! What’s going on?”

“Ah, Harley, it’s good to see you and your friends, who have visited me and interacted with me regularly enough that I feel comfortable sharing confidential business information with you.”

“Yes, Pierro, you are truly among the most valuable and well-established of our many on-campus friendships,” Lee said. “Could we please make use of our trusting long-term relationship to ask why Kraid is suddenly involved in your business?”

“Well, okay, but only because of that time you saved me from the yeast monster,” Pierro said.

“Ah yes, that incredible and entertaining adventure that every spectator here definitely saw happen,” Vell said.

“Exactly,” Pierro said. “Anyway, Kraid bought out the franchise. Made an offer the higher-ups couldn’t refuse. Not really much we can do about it on our end.”

“Shit,” Harley said. “Lee, can you talk your dad into re-buying the franchise?”

“Not likely,” Lee sighed. “You remember he tried getting involved in pizza a few years back, yes?”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

Harley nodded. Noel Burrows had thrown his hat into the ring with a new pizza franchise around four years ago. The self-driving delivery drones had killed thirty-seven pedestrians before the franchise was ultimately shuttered due to too many complaints about pizza arriving cold.

“Then what can we do? If it’s franchise level, that’s above our pay grade,” Freddy said. “Very literally!”

“We could petition the board of directors to reverse their sale,” Kim said. Harley laughed openly at her.

“God, you really are naive. Kim, petitions only exist to make armchair activists feel like they’re contributing something without actually having to leave their comfort zones,” Harley explained. “If you want to get something done, you take direct action.”

“Direct action, I see. Than we should…” Kim paused as she did some google searches in her head. “Send Kraid to a guillotine?”

“God, I wish,” Harley said. “Dudes probably warded like seventeen different ways, we couldn’t hurt him if we tried. We can only hit him where it hurts -his money.”

“I don’t know, I think Kraid planned to lose money on this,” Vell said. “He’s not, you know, stupid enough to think expensive gourmet food is going to fly on a college campus.”

“And a boycott only costs us pizza,” Lee said. “The school bases it’s dining options on demand. If no one is buying pizza, they’ll replace Pierro’s with something else.”

“Hmm. We need to find a way to drain Kraid’s money while still keeping Pierro’s in business.”

“Well, he’s buying super expensive ingredients, apparently,” Hawke said. “Maybe we just buy so much pizza he can’t keep up.”

Pierro put a hand on his bristled chin.

“Hawke, that’d require a preposterous amount of money,” Lee said. “It’d raise an eyebrow even for my parents.”

“Preposterous money,” Pierro said. “Or a very good coupon.”

Somehow managing to make the word “coupon” sound ominous, Pierro brought the conversation to a halt. He vanished into his kitchen and returned with a large, dusty tome which he cracked open on one of the countertops. Pierro looked at the pages for a moment before glaring up at the students around him.

“Much that once was is lost, for none go to school here who remember it.”

Pietro turned the page, revealing a set of schematics and a list of prizes -all of them crossed out.

“It began with the creation of lifetime prize coupons. Three were given to the sophomores, young, naive and longest tenured of all students-”

“Did they skip the freshmen?”

“A third of you guys don’t even make it through your first year,” Harley said. “Why would they give you a ‘lifetime’ prize you might only get to use for a year?”

“Excuse me, I was prologuing.”

“Sorry Pierro.”

Pierro cleared his throat and continued.

“-Seven to the juniors, great scholars and academics of the dorm room halls. And nine, nine coupons were gifted to the seniors, who above all else, desire pizza. For within these coupons was a discount on pizzas, sides, and drinks to satisfy each grade. But they were all of them deceived, for another coupon was made. Deep in the halls of the school, in the sub-basement of the auditorium, the principal at the time forged a master coupon, and into this coupon he poured a lifetime of free pizza.”

Pierro closed his book, sending a cloud of dust into the air.

“One coupon to rule them all.”

“Why’d they put the coupon in the basement?”

“There’s a shitload of traps,” Pierro said. He chucked the dusty book back behind the counter and continued. “The coupons were prizes for some challenges they were doing, the Master Coupon was supposed to be the hardest to get. No one ever actually found a way to it, and I guess eventually people stopped trying and sort of forgot about it.”

“So all we need to do is find that coupon and we can claim an unlimited supply of free pizzas,” Lee said. “Either bankrupting Kraid or forcing him to sell the company back.”

“It won’t be easy,” Pierro said. “Those defenses pushed back some of the best and brightest the school had to offer.”

“Then we’ll need the better and the brighter,” Harley said. She leaned forward and put her palms flat on the table. “We’re going to need to put together a team.”

“Wait, is this turning into a heist?” Vell asked. “I thought it had more of a Lord of the Rings ‘quest’ vibe.”

“I’m sure it’ll come back around, Vell,” Harley said. “For now: we heist.”

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Harley had left only a single light on in her dorm, giving it an odd, conspiratorial air as she threw pictures down on the table. Vell stared at the first two; headshots of himself and Harley.

“Alright Harlan, if you and me are going to crack this pizza heist we’re going to need the best this school has to offer. Here’s who we got.”

Harley flicked her wrist and tossed down a photo of Lee and Hawke. The stiff smile and Hawke’s outfit told Vell this photo had been taken maybe fifteen minutes ago.

“Our command team is going to be helmed by Lee, with Hawke Hughes running comms,” Harley explained. “You’re familiar with Lee’s expert leadership, and Hawke’s a master of long-distance communication tech. He’ll keep us connected no matter what happens. That leaves us with our boots on the ground.”

Harley threw out two more names and two more photo’s.

“Our field command is going to be handled by Luke Fennel and his right hand man, Cane Beukes. Luke’s level-headed and smart, and Cane’s got just the right amount of fire in him to make sure Luke can be bold when it counts.”

Vell nodded, as if he hadn’t spent an entire year living with those two.

‘Then we’ve got Frederick Froilan Frizzle,” Harley said, tossing down a photo which mostly consisted of fluffy red hair. “He doesn’t look like much, but he’s got a gadget for every situation.”

Harley added one more photo to the pile.

“And last but not least, the most important element of any team: the muscle,” Harley said. “I know you and Kim have a...complicated history, but I need you to put that aside for the sake of the team.”

“Uh, Harley?”

“Yeah?”

“This isn’t an elite team, this is just people we know,” Vell said.

“Maybe the people we know are elite, Vell!” Harley squawked back. “I happen to think very highly of them. And...I...wanted to do a montage.”

“I get it.”

“Also Kanya’s coming but she doesn’t like having her picture taken so she didn’t really get an intro,” Harley said.

“Okay, cool,” Vell said. It had been a while since he’d hung out with Harley’s former roommate. “What’s her role in the ‘elite team’?”

“Not sure, really, I just told her what we were doing and apparently she’s super into heist movies and wanted in. I’m sure she’ll make herself useful.”

Now that she was done montage-ing, Harley led the way to their temporary headquarters. As they didn’t want any non-loopers in the looper lair, Lee’s dorm was their base of operations for now. Hawke was just finishing up the fine-tuning on his communications relay when Harley and Vell walked in.

“Right on time, you two,” Lee said. “We just got a delivery. Pierro found some of the old trap schematics in his filing cabinet.”

The crew assembled around the table as Lee unfolded the various blueprints. The detailed plans gave them an overview of the traps ahead, but the challenge of overcoming them remained -and there was a lot to overcome.

“What’s this, twelve, thirteen rooms? Multiple traps in each?” Cane said. “We’re going to have to memorize these schematics before we head in.”

“Or we could take pictures,” Luke suggested, as he held up his smartphone and snapped a shot of the nearest blueprint. Cane kept his mouth shut.

“Most of these contraptions were assembled in the late eighties, so I’m hoping modern tech and magic will be able to get us past,” Lee said. “There may also be some disrepair, but we shouldn’t count on it.”

“We can handle anything a bunch of dudes from the Eighties can throw at us,” Harley said. “Everyone take some time to get prepared. Lee will make the call for when we strike.”

The elite team took some final pictures and notes to help them prepare for the heist, and then broke off to get back to studying, as they still had schoolwork to do. The loopers remained behind to make one much more specific preparation.

“Alright, so the real plan is that we’re going to make repeated attempts at this every loop until we figure out a way past all of the traps,” Lee said. “There’s going to be some trial and error involved, so prepare yourselves.”

“I’ve died for worse things than infinite free pizza,” Harley said.

“And we can help save Pierro’s,” Vell said.

“Dying is unlikely,” Lee said. “This is still a school sanctioned challenge, it can’t be that lethal...on purpose, at least.”