The first few days of the new semester had been gripped by apprehensive tension. Quenay’s revelation that all were mere players in some unknown game had filled all the loopers with a far-reaching dread that stifled their every impulse -except of course for Harley, whose impulses were far beyond the point of restraint.

“Good news, chucklenuts! And Lee,” Harley said. “I have had a brilliant idea on how we can figure out more of Quenay’s game plan.”

“Elaborate,” Kim demanded. Harley responded by slapping down a schedule for the school’s athletic departments, and pointing to a specific day when a short tournament with several games would be played. Rival schools like Patschke-Puck were all listed on the docket of games, but Harley singled out a match against the Zeus-Stephanides School.

“How’s a sports game help us?”

“Because now that Leanne’s not around to turn every game into a blood bath, they’re actually going to be bringing their team’s entourage,” Harley said. “Including Zeus.”

The god of Olympus himself still eked out an existence, clinging to a fragment of former divinity. His position of authority over the school retained enough of an echo of his former lordship over Olympus that he had reasserted himself as a deity -albeit a minor one. Even a minor deity was still a deity, however, and a possible insight into the one true deity that had made pawns of them all.

“We can ask him if he knows anything about Quenay,” Harley said. “Dude’s been around for a few thousand years, and he was a full-on god for a while. If he doesn’t know anything we’ll at least be able to rule out a lot of possible avenues of investigation.”

“If we want to ask a god, why not just ask Loki? Doesn’t he run this place?”

“Yes, Kim, but he’s also a trickster god,” Lee said. “We can’t consider him a reliable source.”

“Even if we got him to show up in the first place, he’d just say something to mock us and then immediately disappear,” Vell said.

“That does sound like me,” said Loki, before immediately disappearing.

Vell gestured to the empty space Loki had briefly occupied, the perfect illustration of his point.

“Your idea seems like as good a place to start as any, Harley,” Lee said, ignoring that brief aside.

“Hell yeah it is,” Harley said. “It’s about time we got this train moving. No pun intended.”

Vell shrugged. Him dying in a train wreck was a tertiary detail at this point.

“We still have to sit around for a week, though,” Hawke said, pointing out that the scheduled game was a week away.

“Eh, we can kill time,” Harley said.

“And occasionally time will kill us,” Lee said. They were both right.

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

The veteran loopers still knew their way around the underground facilities of the stadium, thanks to their brief experience as players last year. They managed to get to an out of the way storage room that rarely saw use, and took a moment to catch their breath. Lee took a second to lean against a flimsy partition wall and found it surprisingly resistant to being moved, almost as if someone was leaning on the other side of it in the exact same place.

“Alright, now, the only thing we have to do is-”

“Alright, now, the only thing we have to do is-”

Lee paused and looked around the room for a second.

“Is there an echo in here?”

“Is there an echo in here?”

Lee stopped leaning on the partition and grabbed it to pull it aside. The person on the other side of the wall did the same, and their hands nearly overlapped as they both pushed.

Lee stared straight ahead, into the dark eyes of her counterpart on the other side. The stranger had dark skin and wide mane of fluffy corkscrew curls, which made her appear very different from Lee, yet they carried themselves with a similar poise, and had nearly identical slender body types that made them seem alike despite their dichotomous appearances.

“Oh. Sorry to interrupt...whatever you were doing, dear, I thought we were alone,” Lee said.

“That’s alright, love, we thought the same thing,” the stranger said. “Surprised we didn’t hear you coming, though.”

“To make a long story short, my friends and I have become accustomed to sneaking around,” Lee said. “I promise that’s not as suspicious as it sounds.”

“Takes a bit more than that to phase me now, sweetheart,” the stranger chuckled. She then extended her hand in Lee’s direction. “Zee.”

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“Lee,” she said, giving Zee’s hand a slightly awkward shake.

“Lee, are you making new friends?”

Harley walked up to the partition her wall and poked her head around to see the other side -nearly bumping noses with another person doing the exact same thing on the other side. Harley ducked back as her bright-eyed duplicate on the other side did the same.

“Oh, hello.”

“Hi! I’m Holly,” the narrowly avoided nose-bumper said.

“I’m...Harley,” she responded. Then she took a beat and examined Holly’s appearance. She was about as short and about as curvy as Harley herself, and had a similar vibrant energy to her every move. “Oh fuck, are we doing this again?”

Harley took hold of the partition wall and pushed it aside, revealing two more figures -a stocky, muscular young man with elaborate tattoos on his arms, and a steel-plated android. Hawke and Kim waved hello as the two strangers on the other side did the same.

“Well, that’s Jay, and this is K.I.M.,” Zee said.

“Right. This is Hawke, and that’s Kim,” Lee said, indicating the two loopers behind her who were currently staring at their counterparts.

“And I’m Vell,” said Vell, who was once again left without a doppelganger. Zee took in their ranks of their uncanny doppelgangers, and hardly seemed surprised.

“Would you believe this isn’t the first time this has happened?”

“The Patschke-Puck guys, right?”

Zee nodded in agreement.

“It’s weird, yeah? We thought they were our doppelgangers, and they got really upset about it.”

“Oh yeah,” Harley said. Then she turned to point at Holly. “Did Harmony try to murder you too?”

“Uh...no.”

“Huh. Let’s forget I said that.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” Holly said. Harley cracked a broad smile. It was about time someone else said that.

“Guess it’s not a perfect match though,” Zee noted. She nodded in Kim’s direction. “Your Kim is flesh and blood.”

“Yep. Right. All meat here,” Kim said, as she stared nervously at the robotic frame of K.I.M. The robot, not possessed of Kim’s sapience, responded to her stare with a polite, pre-programmed wave.

“I’m also here, but I usually don’t have a match when this stuff happens,” Vell said.

“Hard to find another guy as tall as you, honey,” Zee said. “You Einstein-Odinson students?”

“Of course. In turn, I assume you all are from the Zeus-Stephanides school?”

“That’s us,” Zee said. “ZS all the way, baby.”

Lee stopped for a second to consider the implications of this. It was beginning to concern her that their group -sans Vell- seemed to be repeating itself across space, time, and dimensions.

“Why are y’all in the basement anyway?” Harley asked.

“I don’t know, why are y’all?” Holly retorted.

“Good question,” Harley said. “Lee, how’re we feeling?”

Harley turned to Lee for approval, and Holly turned to Zee for approval as well. The two twinned leaders looked over each other, and then their duplicated teams. Unlike the off-brand doppelgangers of the Patschke-Puck team, the new ZS students seemed to have their own worthwhile, if very similar, qualities. It was more of a Coke vs Pepsi situation than a Coke vs dollar-store brand soda situation.

“I do have to keep things mostly secret, I’m afraid,” Lee said. “Suffice to say we occasionally deal with..situations.”

“Oh. Well,” Zee said. “We have to deal with...situations, sometimes, too.”

Holly and Harley shared a knowing look, and an affirmative nod. They both hated dramatic pauses. While they conspired in mutual hatred of ellipses, Lee leaned in a little closer to Zee.

“Sorry, do these ‘situations’ of yours happen to occur on a daily basis?”

“Sometimes twice, depending on how you look at it,” Zee said. “Yours?”

Lee nodded. Zee’s eyes narrowed, and she started to scan the crowd of doppelgangers again. Knowing eyes met in suspicious stares, both parties trying to analyze the reactions of their counterparts. Except Vell, who, lacking a counterpart, checked his phone and caught up on a few text messages. While Vell got caught up on a few memes Freddy had sent him, realization struck Zee.

“Do any of these situations start to feel a little repetitive?”

“Yes,” Lee said.

The two locked eyes, Lee’s emerald greens locking on to Zee’s deep hazel.

“Oh my god.”

“Oh lord,” Zee said, sighing so deeply her soul rattled. “You can not imagine how relieving it is to meet someone who finally gets it.”

“I know,” Lee said. “Just how many things can possibly go wrong in one school?”

“Right? Why did the universe decide that we get to be the ones accountable for all this?” Zee said. She flailed her arms at the entire world around them.

“And the secrecy!” Holly snapped.

“God, yeah,” Harley said. “Half the people we know would go crazy if they had any idea of the shit we do every day!”

“And none of it makes any sense, right?” Hawke said, pointing to Jay. “You’re with me on this, right, this is all completely crazy.”

“One-hundred percent, man, I am barely keeping up on a good day.”

“Our daily tasks are highly illogical,” K.I.M. droned. “Does the same apply to the students of: Einstein-Odinson?”

“Yes, uh, yeah,” Kim said. “No logic here.”

The mutual surprise and concern turned to mutual relief, as both parties finally had someone they could commiserate with. They had been isolated in their own small bubbles of secrecy so long that having a third party to relate to seemed like a dream come true.

“Okay, okay,” Zee said, bringing some order to the chaotic camaraderie. “We are definitely going to have to sit down and have a talk about this later, but I think we both have something to do right now, right?”

“Of course, I suppose we both came here with similar intent,” Lee said. “Perhaps our goals align? It’d be nice to have some knowledgeable backup for once.”

“Absolutely. I don’t know where you’re headed, but we need to have a private chat with Zeus,” Zee said.

“Lovely, we’re headed the same way,” Lee said. “We did want it to be a private chat, though. Hence the secrecy.”

Lee took a quick glance at Vell, and then over the doppelgangers. In spite of the many similarities, the absence of a counterpart for Vell -and the thoroughly more robotic counterpart of Kim- made Lee wonder if this new group truly was an exact copy. Even if they also experienced time loops, there was no guarantee Zee and her friends had had any encounters with Quenay. She didn’t want to get them involved if it could be avoided.

“Fine by me. I think we’ve both got enough going on without getting entangled in each other’s nonsense, eh?”

“Yeah!” Holly added. “We got your back, no questions asked.”

“Same to you, then,” Harley said. “Now c’mon. I got like five get to know you games I want to play, let’s get today’s disasters out of the way.”

Lee and Zee gave a synchronized nod, and the two matching groups headed out in two rows as doppelgangers paired off side by side, leaving a single, solitary Vell at the very end.