“Poor Vell. He does seem to be unlucky in love.”

After weeks of inexplicable romance, Vell had taken the leap of trusting Kim with the knowledge of the rune on his back -and paid the price for it. Then, as he so often did, Vell had gone to Harley to bare his heart, and now, with Vell’s permission, Harley passed that info on to Lee, completing their very odd information loop.

“It’s not a full Joan, at least,” Harley said.

“Is Joan our benchmark for relationship disasters now?” Lee said, mildly offended.

“Yes,” Harley insisted. “But the point is, I think Kim’s just weirded out. You’ve heard her talk about wanting to be ‘normal’. She’s just a bit freaked out, is all, she can get over it.”

“Perhaps, but Kim has her own elements of strangeness,” Lee said. “Call me a conspiracy theorist, but with everything that happened last year, I can’t help but look for connections.”

Since the existence of Quenay had drawn a direct line between Lijia Mian’s disappearance and Vell’s own rune, Lee couldn’t stop trying to connect the dots in all the other mysteries of their lives. The odd attraction between Vell and Kim, and Kim’s own strange behavior, was one such dot, though it still lacked a solid connection.

“You’re probably right, I’m just hoping you’re not,” Harley said. She knew very well that Kim had multiple layers of weirdness of her own.

“Fair.”

Lee reached down and grabbed a shard of broken glass. Today’s apocalypse had come in the form of a supersonic burst, and while it had been relatively casualty-lite, it had also been messy. She took a moment to clear the walkway of some glass, so that anyone who came through this way wouldn’t have to risk getting cut. While she did so, Harley scanned the quad. Most of the survivors had bunkered down for the remainder of the loop, hiding from possible after-effects of the sonic boom -which made the two figures running across the far side of the quad all the more odd. One seemed to be carrying something while the other gave frantic chase, until they tripped and fell flat on their face. The fleeing figure got away while the chasing one curled into a ball on the ground and clutched their shoulder. Harley looked at the broken glass Lee was pushing aside and made an unpleasant connection.

“Ah shit, I think somebody just got shanked,” Harley said. “Come on. We better help.”

While the injuries were temporary, thanks to the time loop, Harley didn’t want anyone bleeding out if it could be avoided. Her generalized benevolence became much more specific as she got closer and realized they knew the person who now had a shard of glass sticking out of their shoulder.

“Adele!”

Vell’s former classmate was still quite deaf, so Adele did not react to Harley’s shout, though she did eventually notice their approach and breath a silent sigh of relief. She allowed Lee to bandage her wounded shoulder. It was a relatively small cut, luckily, but it was not the extent of her injuries. She also had several bruises on her face that seemed to be too well-formed to have been from something as recent as her fall.

“What’re you running around for?” Harley asked. “And what happened to your face?”

“Same answer to both,” Adele signed. Her sign language’s cadence was highly stunted by her injured arm, but she signed on in spite of the pain. “I was helping clean up the mess in the faculty building, then some guy came through and started grabbing files and documents from teacher’s offices. Test answers and stuff. I tried to stop him and he clobbered me.”

“Wow, fuck that guy,” Harley said.

“Are you alright, dear?” Lee asked.

“I’ve been better. Less punched,” Adele signed. The blood running to her blushing cheeks every time she looked at Lee didn’t help the bruising. “But he was kind of shitty at punching honestly. Limp wrists.”

“Do you know who did it?”

“I don’t know, he was smart enough to cover his face at least. But not smart enough to deal with all the other stuff the teachers do to protect their documents. We should know who he is soon.”

Lee nodded along. The school went to great length to prevent any sort of cheating or tampering with their lesson plans and test preparations. Most of them were magically warded and marked.

“It’s a slow process, though,” Lee said, with a knowing glance at Harley. “It may take a day or two.”

“We’ll catch him eventually, though,” Adele signed. She gingerly tested her wounded shoulder and found it didn’t hurt too much. “In the meantime, thanks for coming to my rescue. Can I get you some dinner, or something?”

It was an open ended offer, but Adele was staring quite pointedly at Lee as she made it. Unfortunately for her, Lee was not staring back.

“Thank you, dear, but I think there’s something we need to deal with. Harley?”

“Right behind you, bestie,” Harley said. The duo set out, leaving the slightly battered -and slightly disappointed- Adele behind.

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

“Derek!”

Harley slammed the door open, sending a thunderclap through the room. The sound of scrambling from one of the side rooms was self-evident, and they barged their way in to find Derek once again scrambling to hide some paperwork.

“How do you keep barging in here?” He demanded. “I changed the door codes!”

“Please, Derek, I can hack any door in this place,” Harley said. Though she was careful not to abuse the knowledge, multiple apocalypses had forced Harley to learn how to get into places she was not wanted. Dorm room doors were especially easy.

Invading Derek’s privacy even further, Harley stomped forward and pulled out the papers Derek was trying to hide. Sure enough, she saw a syllabus lying atop a stack of test formats and lesson plans.

“What exactly do you think you’re doing, Derek?”

Even Derek wasn’t stupid enough to try and deny it at this point -though only because he’d already been caught lying once.

“I’m just...using the first loop to get a leg up,” Derek said. “You guys do that too, right? You’ve told me so.”

“Making use of extra time to study and cheating are two very different things,” Lee said. “And it is wildly different from hurting my friends.”

The steely edge of genuine fury made a rare appearance in Lee’s voice. Harley knew the caustic tone well, and knew something was about to pop off. Derek, on the other hand, decided to push his luck.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“She’ll be fine,” Derek insisted. “By next loop it’ll be like it never happened.”

“It will. And then for every loop after that it will never happen again,” Lee said, injecting as much venom as her voice could muster into her words. “You are done. If I ever catch word of you cheating, or hurting anyone, ever again, I will-”

Lee’s words caught in her throat a moment. She was no stranger to anger, but punishment -for anyone but her parents- was a different beast. The moment of hesitance did not go unnoticed by her opponent in the war of words.

“Or you’ll what?” Derek taunted. “Starting next loop, there’ll be no proof I’ve done anything wrong.”

“We’ll remember,” Harley said.

“Yeah? You want to stop it so bad?” Derek said. He started to stare at Harley in a way she was all too familiar with. “I got a few ideas on how you can keep me occupied.”

“Any part of you touches any part of me, you’re going to lose it,” Harley hissed. Derek didn’t back down, but he did choose to direct his efforts elsewhere.

“Well then I guess I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing,” he taunted. “Because from where I’m standing I don’t see a fucking thing you can do about it.”

“You don’t know everything there is to know about the loops, you little fucker,” Harley said. “We’ll get something on you.”

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

“Yeah, we got nothing on him,” Harley said.

The loopers, obviously sans Derek, had gathered in the lair -and changed the locks, to keep Derek out- to discuss the matter of their AWOL teammate.

“Well we have to do something about it,” Kim insisted. Her anger had briefly defused the awkwardness that existed between her and Vell, if only by giving her something else to focus on -quite intensely. “He can’t just run around doing whatever he wants to whoever he wants.”

“On that we’re agreed, but what recourse do we have?” Lee asked. “Other than finding some way to lock him in his room at the start of every loop, I don’t see any way to prevent him from running amok.”

“I don’t want some half-measure bullshit like that to begin with,” Kim said. “I want him out of this school. For good.”

“Ugh, why’d Goodwell have to go and get his brain fried,” Harley groaned. “He could’ve helped us with this.”

“Dean Lichman seems reasonable,” Lee said. “The school would take any allegations of cheating seriously.”

“Maybe, but we still need evidence,” Vell said. “Real evidence.”

“It’s a shame we can’t record him,” Lee said. “He was all but bragging about his cheating. It would be quite easy to catch him saying something self-incriminating. On the first loop, at least.”

“Well that doesn’t do us much good,” Vell said. Electronic devices, like everything else, got erased when time looped.

“You on board with turning him in like that, Vell, or did you want to talk with him like Elijah?”

Vell shook his head. Leanne’s old boyfriend had been a dick, but he’d hadn’t been physically harming people. While he would still prefer to have Derek see the error of his ways, Vell valued the safety of potential victims over Derek’s hypothetical ‘redemption’.

“What about that little robot of yours,” Hawke suggested, looking at Harley. “He’s like, connected to you, right?”

Harley summoned Botley both for demonstration purposes and personal comfort. The mechanical familiar sat on the table for a second before retreating to Harley’s lap. Kim tracked every motion the machine made and continued to stare as Harley started to rub his round head.

“Doesn’t work like that, unfortunately,” Harley said. “Botley’s...technically alive, but he’s not a looper.”

“What do you mean he’s ‘technically alive’?” Kim demanded.

“Like how I’m technically alive?” Vell asked.

“Wait, what?” Hawke asked in turn. Vell cringed. He’d forgotten Hawke didn’t know yet.

“Okay let’s handle one thing at a time, please,” Lee said. “If we attempt to untangle every problem in this room right now we’ll be here all century. Harley, to your point: There’s no chance Botley could be used to record evidence from the first loop to bring to the second?”

“No. I actually tried it out a few weeks after I first got to school. Didn’t work,” Harley said. “I poke at it now and then and I still can’t crack it. I think theoretically a machine could keep it’s memories of the first loop, but it’d have to be ‘chosen’ the same way all of us loopers are.”

Kim sank deeper into her seat while the others continued to discuss the dilemma at hand.

“Which is to say,” Lee said. “Randomly and with no apparent internal logic or consistency.”

“Maybe we could build a whole bunch of Botley’s and hope that one of them gets ‘chosen’?” Hawke suggested.

“First off, we could build five thousand Botley’s and nothing would be guaranteed,” Harley said. “Secondly, I couldn’t build even one Botley if I tried. I never even built this guy, really.”

“You didn’t?” Lee asked. That was news even to her.

“I did most of the work, but somebody else put in an important piece of the puzzle,” Harley said. She gave Botley a pat on the head. “But we’re digressing again. The Botley angle is a stretch. Any other ideas?”

“Maybe we could, uh, create a fake first loop,” Vell said. “Use some illusions and magic stuff to make Derek think he can get away with anything and catch him in the act.”

“Possible, but it’d take quite a lot of effort,” Lee said. “And we’d have to make sure he didn’t hurt anyone during that fake loop.”

“Okay. Well, we could just beat him up real bad,” Hawke said. “Just kick him in the dick every first loop until he gets sick of it and leaves on his own.”

“That’s...oddly violent, Hawke.”

“I don’t like it either, but if I have to choose between innocent people getting hurt or Derek getting hurt, I’m choosing Derek.”

“Understandable, we’ll file the daily dick-kicking under ‘maybe’,” Harley said.

“Seriously?”

“Okay, Vell, fine, we’ll save it for a last resort. But the last resort is also the first resort until we have another resort.”

She didn’t hear a better idea. Out of anyone, not just Vell. The time loop dilemma created more obstacles than opportunities in this case, as they had to tread the fine line of exposing Derek without also exposing the existence of the time loops. As the other loopers debated, Kim stayed silent, and stared at Botley. The beady round eyes of the diminutive robot stared right back at her.

“Kim?”

“What?” she said, snapping to attention immediately.

“You’ve been awfully silent, are you alright?”

Thinking that he might be the problem, Vell stayed silent and kept low. He was quite wrong. In the moment, Kim was not thinking about anyone or anything but herself, and Botley. The spherical head of the familiar tilted sideways as it stared at her. After breaking eye contact, Kim took a deep breath and clenched her fists.

“I think I might know what to do,” Kim mumbled. “But it’s- it’s a long story. And it’s hard to explain.”

“We’re all ears,” Harley said. “We could use a good idea.”

Kim tapped her fingertips on the table. She wasn’t sure it was a good idea, for a multitude of reasons. But from her perspective, they had no other options. She looked at Vell, and recalled his confession from the previous night. He’d expected his explanation of his death and resurrection to make Kim feel normal by comparison. Instead it had only made her feel stranger.

But she was strange in strange company, at least. She kept that in mind as she spoke.

“The first thing you need to...to understand, is, well, that I’m not a...’real’ woman.”

“Don’t say that,” Hawke said.

“No. It’s true.”

“It’s not,” Hawke said. “Believe me, I know.”

“You really don’t,” Kim said with a firm shake of her head.

“No, I do. When I was transitioning, it took me a long time to clear my head and realize I was a real man, and not some-”

Hawke stopped himself mid-sentence when he saw Kim’s eyes go wide and turn to him with a shell-shocked stare -a stare everyone else at the table matched. Hawke leaned back and tried to disappear into his seat.

“You...aren’t talking about being trans, are you?”

“No,” Kim said. Her voice cracked as she tried to speak and cringe at the same time. “No I am not.”

“Okay, well, I am just going to sit here and be quiet,” Hawke said. “For the rest of my life.”

“Alright, well, that’s fun, Hawke, just so we’re not totally glossing over this, thank you for trusting us and we’re all totally cool with that,” Harley said. The table gave a sharp nod as one. “But I also really want to know what Kim is talking about.”

The brief detour had managed to pull Kim back from a precipice, and now she had to stare it down and prepare to jump all over again. She bit her tongue and started again.

“I should say I’m...not real...because- I don’t have-”

Kim sighed and slammed her head down on the table.

“Fuck me.”

After picking up her head, Kim sighed.

“It’s easier just to show you.”

Kim grabbed her arm by the wrist, and ripped the bandaid off -by ripping her flesh off.

While Hawke screamed in anticipation of a gruesome scene, no blood or gore arrived. The patch of flesh Kim grabbed peeled away like a rubber glove, exposing what should have been a skeleton. What lurked beneath her odd, bloodless flesh was skeletal, at least, but rather than white bone there was a bare, blue-grey construct of metal bars and multicolored wires. Kim held up her machine hand to display it better as all her friends stared.

“I’m a robot.”