“What do you mean it wasn’t there?”

“I mean it wasn’t there,” Ateela lied. “Has the meaning of that expression changed? Does it also mean sex?”

“No, it doesn’t- that one means the same thing,” Vell said. “It means I’m just surprised that it could get lost. Are you sure you looked in the right place?”

“Yeah, did you assume there was some kinda future storage bin that’s just a regular sock drawer?” Harley asked.

“You have entire drawers just for socks?”

“Focus, Ateela,” Daveed commanded. “It can’t have just disappeared.”

“It very well could have, actually,” Lee said. “It’s happened before, you know.”

“True, but Daveed still has a point. The crazy daily bullshit at least usually happen one at a time,” Vell said. “It feels odd that some weird vanishing act would happen alongside a time travel...thingy.”

Ateela put her hands down on the table with an emphatic clap. She noted to herself that slapping the table made a different noise in the past. Fascinating.

“Spending time theorizing gets us nowhere!” She snapped. “We need action! If the belt buckle went somewhere, I’d bet it ended up where there’s a lot of people. We should check out crowded places like the lunchroom or the screaming chamber!”

“Screaming chamber?”

Daveed planted a palm firmly on his face and sighed heavily.

“Do you guys not have those yet?”

“Well, Lee does, but it’s just her bedroom pillow,” Harley said. Lee shrugged. She took her catharsis where she could get it.

“Whatever! The point is we need to split up and find that belt buckle. I’ll go with Vell again!”

Ateela all but teleported to Vell’s side and latched on to his arm again. While he silently accepted his fate, Lee had her own protests to file.

“That won’t be necessary, dear,” she said. “I’m familiar with the belt buckle, and we know who the owner is, so it should be simple enough to prepare a dowsing spell. It shouldn’t take long.”

“Oh. Hm. That’s a thing,” Ateela said. “Out of curiosity is there anything in campus that could interfere with a dowsing spell? So I can check them out. Just in case.”

“Well, any Faraday cage would do it. There’s some in various labs, or even a common microwave would do it -do you know what a microwave is, dear?”

“Yes! It’s a device from this era you use to make food hot on the edges and cold in the middle,” Ateela said.

“That’s unfortunately correct,” Lee said. “But you can’t possibly-”

“I’m going to search all of them, bye!”

Ateela’s voice faded around the corner as she dashed off to her own devices. Lee shrugged as she ran off.

“Okay, Daveed, I suppose you can collect her later. Would the rest of you mind helping me set up the spell?”

Vell checked the time. Oddly enough, only about three minutes had passed since they’d talked to Freddy. It had felt like longer, but Vell supposed his attention had been elsewhere.

“We should have plenty of time,” he said. “What do you need?”

“Just some spell components,” Lee said. “Vell, if you happen to have a ‘find’ rune on hand, that would be love. Kim, I’ll have to take that spellcasting book back from you for now, and Hawke, I need you to grab me a bone, and Hawke, I need you to grab me a bone, and Hawke, I need you to grab me a bone.”

Vell restrained himself from raising an eyebrow as he turned back to the group.

“Why did you say Hawke three- ah fuck.”

Three distinct Hawkes stood side by side, staring back at Vell curiously.

“What’s up?” All three said at once, in slightly different tones.

“Uh, Hawke, don’t be alarmed, but there are three of you,” Vell said.

“Alarmed” was a nigh-perpetual state for Hawke, but all three of him braced themselves and looked side to side regardless. After scanning the area, the trio of Hawke’s turned back to Vell and shrugged.

“I don’t see anything.”

“What? How can you not- Does anyone else see this?”

Kim and Daveed nodded while Lee and Harley shook their heads.

“Okay, so either half of us are hallucinating or there’s some fuckery going on,” Harley said. “I’m inclined to think it’s the former remrof eht s’ti kniht ot denilcni m’I.”

As soon as she had finished speaking, Harley appeared to move in reverse, tracing her steps backwards to the beginning of her sentence. Daveed and Kim shared a very concerned glance.

“Alright, now Harley just moved -and spoke- backwards.”

“Oh, I see what’s happening,” Lee said. “I think our time traveling friends have overstayed their welcome, we’re-”

Mid-sentence, Lee flickered. Her posture, clothing and even the length of her hair changed in an instant.

“Yes,” Lee admitted. “Something like that.”

The flicker passed, and Lee was back to normal.

“-experiencing temporal distortions. The timeline is beginning to fall apart, unfortunately.”

“Oh, we better find Freddy’s belt buckle quick kciuq elkcub tleb s’ydderF dnif retteb ew ,hO”

“Yeah, Harley, you keep sliding backwards through time, so you might want to stay out of this one,” Vell said, as Harley’s personal timeline reversed on itself once again. He looked at Hawke, who now had four alternate versions of himself crowding the room, and Lee, who momentarily flickered into a past version of herself that appeared to be in the middle of doing her hair.

“Maybe all three of them should stay out of the way,” Kim said, as she appraised the four Hawke’s. “I could see this being...problematic.”

“Maybe you three focus on the spell,” Vell suggested. “And the three of us will go boots on the ground.”

“Sounds like a workable idea -Be her knight in shining armor- Vell,” Lee said, briefly skipping into the past. She examined Daveed, then Vell and Kim. “Since Daveed is himself a time anomaly and the two of you are...well, you have special circumstances, you should all be immune to the anomalies.”

“Then that means Ateela should be too,” Daveed said. “We should find her.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Vell said. “Can you find her with that weird techno-brain thing you have?”

“Within a small degree of accuracy,” Daveed said.

“Lead the way, then,” Kim said. “And hurry. Hawke seems to be multiplying more rapidly.”

There were seven of him now, each more alarmed than the last. Kim was no mathematician, but she estimated that at the current rate, the entire island would be covered in Hawke’s within an hour. She liked Hawke, but one of him was already almost too much.

“Follow me,” Daveed said. “And stay close. I think the architecture’s starting to time-slide.”

“What makes you say that?”

Daveed pointed to the left, at a section of the hallway that had shag carpeting. Vell cringed.

“Oh, yeah. That’ll do it.”

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

“Alright, so she was looking for Faraday cages in the form of microwaves, so she’d probably be in either my dorm or the dining hall,” Vell said.

“Probably the dining hall,” Daveed said. “If I know Ateela, she searched two microwaves and then got distracted by someone in bell bottom jeans.”

“Wrong time period,” Vell said. “At least I hope.”

“Dining hall it is,” Kim said. “We should hurry. This time nonsense is probably going to cause problems. I’ll be very surprised if I haven’t fought a dinosaur before the day’s over.”

“Well, statistically speaking, ninety-nine percent of the universe’s history is empty space,” Daveed said. “Anything that did get displaced would probably be-”

A pack of Comanche warriors rode past, hollering in terror as a horde of megatherium chased them down. Kim and Vell turned to Daveed as one.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Daveed said. “This is statistically unlikely!”

“According to Terry Pratchett in his 1987 novel Equal Rites, ‘Million to one chances crop up nine times out of ten’,” Kim quoted.

“I appreciate the witticisms of Mr. Pratchett as much as any sane man, but, uh, we should go,” Vell said. “Those giant sloths are coming back around.”

Having abandoned their chase of the horse-riding warriors, the megatherium were now taking the time to examine their surroundings and be very upset about them. Prehistoric Central American megafauna had very little to like about the high-tech campus, and they expressed this displeasure by starting to tear it to pieces. Vell led the way as the trio fled, leaving the megatherium to demolish the benches in relative peace.

“Do you have a weapon, Daveed, or do you want to grab one, or something?”

“A weapon? Are you insane?”

“What, do you not, like, fight things in the future?”

“Some people do,” Daveed said. “Not me.”

“What do you do in fights, then?”

“Run away, usually,” Daveed said, as he nervously eyed the megatherium. “Then die, shortly afterwards.”

“That’ll happen, yeah,” Kim said, as she summoned her bow. “Maybe you stay behind us.”

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“That was always the plan,” Daveed admitted.

“Do you want to hold on to a gun, or something?” Vell said. “Just for safety’s sake?”

“No, I’m good.”

“Are you sure? Because the dinosaur I was talking about just showed up.”

Kim pointed across the quad, towards a towering theropod on the other end of the open field. Vell had seen enough dinosaurs to know it wasn’t a T-rex, but he couldn’t identify it beyond that. Whatever specific species it was, it would be trouble. The dino was headed right for them. Or it was, until someone threw a chair at it’s head.

“This campus has a very strict no dinosaur policy!”

The declaration of the rules was followed by another chair lobbed in the dinosaur’s direction. Dean Lichman stepped onto the field and stared down the dinosaur. He had no chairs, but he still possessed an unshakable supernatural compulsion to enforce the rules of the school, and that meant no dinosaurs allowed.

“I knew I liked that guy,” Vell said, as the Dean and the dino squared off. The past and future loopers moved on as fast as they could. While the Dean’s battle with the dinosaur was admirable, it would probably be short, and they needed to get out of there as soon as possible.

The dining hall was, predictably, in chaos, as misplaced items and entities from past and future alike wreaked havoc. Matters were further complicated by more unconventional temporal anomalies like students moving backwards in time, or large zones of temporal distortion. Sitting on the sidelines of it all, examining a microwave, was Ateela, idly pressing buttons as a futuristic robot sentry chased a group of freshman across the room.

“Ateela!”

“Oh hi Daveed,” she said. “Did you know most technology in this time period still required buttons?”

“No! Also, no! That’s not important right now,” Daveed said. “Did you not notice the time distortions?”

“No, I noticed,” Ateela said.

“Then why are you messing with a microwave?”

“Because this stuff happens,” Ateela said with a shrug. “World ends, we stop it from ending next time, no big deal.”

“Hi, Ateela, listen, I kind of get where you’re coming from, but that attitude moreso applies to, like, big rocks crushing everybody or, uh, everybody’s spines getting turned into snakes,” Vell said. “We’ve already had a pretty close call with the integrity of reality itself this year, we need to be taking this one a little more seriously.”

“Did you find the belt buckle already or no?”

“No.”

Ateela tucked her arms behind her back in an entirely non-suspicious manner as a man on a jetpack roared overhead.

“Well, shit,” Kim said. “We should hurry.”

“Yeah, the longer we wait, the more fucked up time is going to get, and I don’t know about you guys, but, uh, there’s a couple things in my past I don’t really want to-”

Vell would have said “don’t want to see again”, but he did not get to finish his sentence, as one of the things he didn’t want to see again caught up to him.

The other three loopers stepped back as a time-displaced train car sailed out of a portal and slammed into Vell. A small red smear remained on the ground where had once stood, alongside a few train-wheel shaped ruts in the floor.

“Vell!”

“Eh, he’ll be fine,” Kim said. “This isn’t even the first time he’s been killed by a train.”

“But I had so many more questions I wanted to ask him,” Ateela moaned.

“Then you’d better hope one of these holes in time spits out another one of him,” Kim said. Then she turned back to the matter at hand. “Daveed! We still need to find that belt buckle. Any ideas?”

“No! Ateela, you know things about the past, where would a belt buckle be?”

“Other than on someone’s pants?”

“Not helpful!”

Ateela carefully fiddled with the belt buckle still stashed in her pocket. The chaos was making it hard to enjoy the past the way she wanted to, and now Vell Harlan was dead too, but there were still so many things she could do, things she could see.

“Isn’t there any other way to find it?” Ateela said. “Running around campus looking for one piece of metal can’t be a good plan.”

“Well, Lee’s still got the dowsing spell going,” Kim said. “Barring her getting decapitated by Genghis Khan or something.”

“Dowsing spell?”

Ateela was no magic expert, but she knew that dowsing spells cast a magical glow on whatever object they were attuned to find. In this case, that magical beacon would fall on her pocket, illuminating her guilt for all to see. Ateela’s mind started to race with possibilities.

“Well, maybe we should go someplace high up,” Ateela suggested. “Like the clock tower. Then we can see the whole campus and find the buckle easily once the spell lights it up.”

Or, more specifically, allow Ateela to throw it out of the tower when no one was looking and pretend it had been on the ground somewhere the whole time. Daveed looked to Kim for approval on Ateela’s shame of a plan, and she gave a resigned shrug.

“We’re kind of running out of options,” Kim admitted. “Guess we head to the clocktower and hope for the best.”

The remaining loopers set out again, cutting through the chaos of the quad once more. Kim tried very hard to ignore the puddle of primordial ooze evolving into a hominid before her very eyes and focused on getting to the clocktower intact. The tallest structure on campus was also the most enduring, having been relatively unchanged from it’s creation all the way through to Daveed and Ateela’s future. The tower’s relative ubiquity throughout time made it a fairly safe haven amid the temporal storm. The same logic did not apply to the area immediately around the clocktower, however.

“Ooh, a Qianzhousaurus,” Ateela said.

The battle of Dean versus Dino had gone exactly as one would expect. Badly. For the dean, of course. The dino would have said it went very well, were it one of the surprisingly large number of talking dinosaurs. This one merely roared in Kim’s direction.

“Well, at least I saw this coming,” Kim grumbled to herself. “Up the tower, now. I’ll handle the dinosaur and keep anything else from following you.”

Any attempts at protests were drowned out by a bellowing roar from the Qianzhousaurus, and Kim shouting back. The wounded beast charged, and Kim dashed away, leading it away from Ateela and Daveed fled as they fled. Ateela had some fight in her, but Daveed did not, and she respected his immediate instinct to run. The two dashed into the clock tower’s base and slammed the door behind them as the sound of dinosaur-on-robot violence filled the quad they’d abandoned.

“Gronglo,” Daveed muttered under his breath.

“Whoa, no call for that kind of language.”

Daveed repeated the future curse under his breath and found the staircase, taking the lead as they ascended the dusty tower.

“Kim will be fine,” Ateela assured him. “Qianzhousaurus are one of the smaller members of the Tyrannosauridae family.”

“Why do you know that but not how microwaves work?”

“Dinosaurs are cooler than microwaves.”

There was no arguing with that. Daveed just shook his head and kept climbing the staircase.

“I can’t wait to get out of this school,” he mumbled. Past and future were equally chaotic in every way.

“You still got about three more years in you, Captain Drake.”

Daveed often fell silent after Ateela spoke, especially after she called him “Captain Drake”, but the silence that descended on him this time was different. It was the kind of silence filled to the brim with the unspoken, and the unpleasant. Like the silence of a doctor after someone asks if a patient is going to make it, or of a parent whose child has asked them if they can go to Disneyland.

“You...you do have about three more years, right?”

Roughly fifteen seconds of awkward flailing later, Daveed resigned himself to admitting the truth.

“No. After this semester is over I’m transferring to the Zeus-Stephanides school.”

“What? Why?”

“Why? Because today alone I’ve had to hunt for cowboys, run from dinosaurs, and watch everyone who knows what they’re doing either get trapped in a time anomaly or die!”

The climb up the clocktower stopped as Daveed turned to face Ateela, and he put his hands to his temples as he did so. Just thinking about all this was giving him a headache.

“That’s not true,” Ateela insisted.

“You were there!”

“Yeah! So I know you’re not dead or time anomaly’d, and you know what you’re doing.”

Daveed froze in place.

“I don’t,” he mumbled. “I really don’t. I’m just flailing, and panicking, and trying to keep my head on straight long enough to not die. Any new looper that replaces me would be better. You don’t need someone like me.”

Daveed turned his back on Ateela and started up the stairs again, leaving her a few steps behind. She stood in place and burned through a thousand thoughts a second, none of them good.

“I do!” She protested. “I do, because I’m stupid, and I’m selfish, and I’m the reason everything is going wrong!”

Punctuating her confession with proof, Ateela reached into her pocket and pulled out the belt buckle, jamming it into Daveed’s hands. He looked at it in abject confusion, and then stared up at Ateela.

“You had this the whole time? Why were you hiding it?”

“Because, I’m stupid and selfish,” Ateela said. “And because I’m obsessed with the past, I mean now, because I’m miserable in the present, uh, future, you know what I mean.”

The belt buckle was fairly heavy by buckle standards, but it felt like a lead weight in Daveed’s hands right now. He didn’t know what to say. Thankfully, Ateela usually didn’t know when to stop talking.

“I’m really dumb and I have more energy than I know what to do with and I don’t have any friends and I never know what I’m doing,” she said. “You’re the smart one, and the responsible one, and the only reason I ever know what’s going on. I need you, Daveed.”

Another very loud silence settled into the clock tower. Daveed looked down at the tacky scrap of metal in his hands once again.

“And come on. You let me go off on my own for like fifteen minutes and I nearly made time fall apart,” Ateela mumbled. “How long do you think I’m going to last without you?”

Daveed turned the belt buckle over in his hand. In spite of the ostentatiously patriotic design on the front, the back side was just a blank slate. Someone looking at it from the inside might have no idea how strange it really was.

“Well, when you put it like that,” Daveed sighed. “Guess I have to keep an eye on you, huh?”

“Yes, sir,” Ateela said with a smile. She could actually see Daveed’s spirits rising in real time. “Now give me an order, quick, before I make time fall apart again.”

“My first order is don’t call me sir,” Daveed said. “My second order is, if we have the belt buckle, we need to find Freddy Frizzle.”

“I’m up here, actually,” Freddy’s voice called, from further up the clocktower.

“Freddy! What are you doing in the clocktower?”

Daveed wanted to know just as much, but he was also a little mortified that Freddy had apparently been in a position to overhear their entire conversation. Freddy also chose to gloss over his accidental eavesdropping and started in on some technobabble.

“Well, due to common theories of psycho-arcanic association resulting in concentrations of related magics, a clocktower is usually a good place to be during temporal distortions. The collective perception of a clocktower as a reliable way to tell time shields it from any time distorting effects, so I set up here to try and-”

Freddy then launched into a tangle of complicated technical terms that were still considered advanced knowledge in the far future. Daveed shook his head and tried to tune out the technobabble.

“Ateela, just give him the belt buckle,” Daveed sighed.

“You got it, s- Daveed.”

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

Ateela started the second loop the same way she had the first: with a whole lot of pods. After barreling through her various pods, Ateela headed for the lunch room and found the table that had been a mainstay of looper operations for centuries, making only one small detour on the way. She had something she needed to pick up.

“Morning, Ateela.”

In response, Ateela placed a small cake on the table, which read “Sorry I Almost Blew Up Time” in pink frosting. Daveed examined the cake and absorbed its message. He didn’t know if a cake was proper penance for the near-destruction of the space time continuum. Unless-

“Is this chocolate?”

“Yes.”

“Okay we’re good,” Daveed said.

“Yes! Thanks Captain Drake.”

“Don’t call me Captain.”

“Okay…”

“My friends call me Dave,” he said, with a faint smile. The touch of faint subtlety was lost on Ateela, however, who squealed with delight and grabbed him in a massive bear hug.

“Okay, okay, please stop,” Daveed said. Ateela was surprisingly strong for being so small. “Let me breath.”

“Sorry.”

“Ahem.”

The awkward hug was already ending, but came to an even faster end when somebody cleared their throat and called for attention. Ateela ducked underneath the table for reasons she didn’t entirely understand. It just felt like the right thing to do when a mysterious person showed up at your table.

“Are you Ateela and Daveed?”

“Yes.”

“Wow, okay, I just lost a bet,” the courier said. “We’ve had this sitting around for decades, at least.”

The package he handed over certainly looked like it was a few decades old. Despite some fraying around the edges, the name signed on it was still clearly legible: Vell Harlan. Daveed briefly wondered how on earth Vell had ensured a package would get delivered at an unknown time to two people he didn’t know that well, and then decided it wasn’t worth thinking about. He didn’t get much time to think on it either way, as Ateela all but tore the package from the courier’s hands and started ripping it open. Her attention was immediately drawn to two large books, while Daveed reached for an envelope tucked between them.

“Dear Ateela and Daveed,” he read aloud. “Hope this package actually gets to you. The timeline for delivery is a bit wonky. Since we haven’t seen you again, I’m assuming everything went fine on your end. Thanks for not letting time get destroyed, and sorry I got run over by a train without doing much to help.”

“He did his best,” Ateela said. She dug through the package again and found a photograph of all the 21st century loopers, smiling happily. It had been signed by the entire crew.

“Daveed, Lee put together a book of some helpful advice and tips on surviving the loop. She hopes it helps. Ateela, I put together a scrapbook of some cool 21st century stuff. I hope you like it. Enjoy the future, and hopefully we’ll make it a better place for you,” Daveed read. “Your friend, Vell Harlan.”

“Aww, we’re his friends,” Ateela said. “I went from having no friends to six in one day! Shame five of them don’t live in the same time period.”

Daveed looked away from his book of advice, towards a belt buckle lying on the table. So long as the two of them didn’t touch it at the same time, it would remain inert, and not cause any time anomalies at all. But if they did…

“You know, Ateela, we could always just...give it a quick tap. Say hello, hand it over to Freddy, be gone in ten minutes.”

Ateela also looked at the belt buckle for a moment, and Daveed could see the longing in her eyes, but she ultimately shook her head.

“I think I’ve casually played with the fabric of space-time enough for one day,” Ateela said. “And...I’m okay. I’ll be fine right here.”

The past was interesting, but trying to live in it was a recipe for disaster -as recent events had quite literally proven. The present wasn’t so bad. It had Daveed in it, and Daveed had cake.