Vell wasn’t surprised by the headache he had when he woke up. The stress of the last day of school on top of Lee and Harley’s blowout fight was getting to him, apparently. He laid in bed and took a deep breath -and then heard someone else breathing right next to him.

Vell kept his eyes closed and considered the possibilities. There were no classes on the last day of school, so that (hopefully) ruled out some kind of apocalyptic intruder in his bed. He’d definitely gone to bed alone last night. He’d broken off his casual hookups with Harley a while ago, and she wouldn’t be in the mood to sleep with him anyway. It could possibly be Kim. They still had to deal with the inherent attraction between their runes, and the stress could’ve gotten to her enough that she cracked and sought Vell out.

With one final deep breath in preparation, Vell turned to the side and opened his eyes. He catapulted himself out of bed a second later.

“Joan!”

While Vell skidded across the dorm room floor, Joan woke up with a start, let out a shocked gasp, and then rubbed the sleep out of her eyes as he scanned the room.

“What! What’s going on?”

“What are you doing here?”

Joan stopped panicking and stared at Vell with a skeptical squint.

“Sleeping. Until just now. Thanks to you.”

“I mean on the island,” Vell said. He became aware that he was not wearing pants and went looking for pants. He hated doing this kind of thing with no pants on, but it kept happening to him anyway. “And in my bed!”

“Are you feeling alright, Vell?”

“Yeah, I am, what’s-”

Vell briefly paused as he finished putting on his pants. His dorm room had been rearranged. There were two dressers instead of one, both right next to each other. One had some of Vell’s things piled on top of it, while the other had Joan’s clothes strewn on top of it, along with a single framed photograph of Joan and a girl Vell didn’t recognize, but who looked very similar to Joan. They were both smiling brightly.

“Is that...your sister?”

“Uh, yeah? You’ve met Helena, Vell,” Joan said. “Did you hit your head?”

Everything Vell had ever heard about Joan’s sister (which wasn’t much, even the name Helena was new) was that she was deathly ill. But Helena looked perfectly healthy in the photo. Something else about it bugged Vell, and he turned back towards the bed to examine Joan again. She stared right back at him with bright blue eyes.

“Why are your eyes blue?”

“Because...that’s the color they are?” Joan said, gesturing briefly towards eyes that were sky blue instead of bloody red. “Vell, seriously, are you okay? Do you need to go to medical?”

“No! I’m fine, everything else is, uh, out of place!” Vell said. “Give me a minute.”

Thankfully this wasn’t the first time Vell had woken up to find reality all out of order. He drew on what he remembered from the situation with Isabel and the genie earlier in the year. Illusions like this could be dispelled by pointing out the inconsistencies, and Joan’s current existence had a lot of inconsistencies. Vell grabbed the photo of the top of Joan’s dresser and started with the biggest ones.

“Okay, look, this, this is wrong,” Vell said. “You were born blind. You’ve got prosthetic eyes and they’re supposed to be red. Your sister is sick too, and you devoted your whole life to helping her but you got a little crazy with it and ended up kind of murdering me once and then helping save my life from someone else who wanted to murder me, so- let’s not focus on that right now. We used to date but we don’t anymore and you got expelled and- is any of this ringing a bell for you?”

Joan, who had thus far stared blankly at Vell for the entire rant, raised an eyebrow.

“Vell, I think you’re having a psychotic episode,” Joan said. “I’m taking you to medical.”

“No! Seriously, all of that and you didn’t even blink? What is-”

Vell stopped himself mid-sentence. Pointing out inconsistencies was how you broke illusions. But they did nothing if it wasn’t an illusion.

“This is real,” Vell said, as he looked around at the blue-eyed Joan in his bed, the rearranged dorm, and the photo of Joan’s sister.

“Yes, this is real,” Joan said, as he pointed to herself. She threw a shirt on and hopped out of bed. “I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I’m taking you to a doctor.”

“Right, okay, I guess, uh...I’m friends with Lee and Harley, right?”

“Yes.”

“Okay, cool, can we call them too?”

“Of course. They’re experts in weird shit,” Joan said. Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked confused for a moment. “I...I think.”

Vell didn’t like that.

“We should get going,” Vell said. He finished dressing himself, as did Joan, and headed for the door just as someone started to knock on it. “Oh, that’s probably them.”

He sure hoped it was Harley, or Lee, or preferably both. It was not. Not only was it someone else, it was the worst possible someone else.

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“Howdy, Harlan,” Alistair Kraid said, as he pushed Vell aside and forced his way through the door. “Need a moment with your ex.”

Vell didn’t feel like giving him a moment, but Kraid did not care. He stepped up, and before Joan could get a word in edgewise, Kraid’s skeletal hand closed tight around her throat and lifted her off the ground. The green-black fire that suspended the bones of his arm extended across her face and up to her eyes, igniting them with dark magic. It didn’t look pleasant, and judging from the way Joan screamed, it didn’t feel pleasant either.

“Stop it!”

“Relax, Harlan, I’m not hurting her. On purpose,” Kraid said. “Believe it or not, I’m trying to help.”

The fire burned brighter, and the screaming got louder, as Kraid’s grip tightened.

“Admittedly it doesn’t look like it, but long term, this is helping!”

Vell tried to stop whatever Kraid was doing, but the protective wards the evil trillionaire had on himself at all times made it impossible to interfere. Eventually, whatever he was doing to Joan came to an end, and he dropped her one the ground to gasp for breath, seemingly unharmed and unchanged -except for one of her eyes, which had now reverted to its original crimson color.

“What did you do?”

“I put her back,” Kraid said. “Mostly. The spell to revert people’s memories to the original reality is tricky business, considering I invented it this morning.”

“What?”

“Come on, Harlan,” Kraid said. “You remember the way things used to be, right? Joan’s a psychopath, helped kidnap you one time, all that?”

“You remember that too?”

“Yep,” Kraid said. He folded his hands behind his back and took a quick stroll around the rearranged dorm room. “Early in the morning I was tracking magical anomalies popping up everywhere, when a talking rock appeared to me and offered to grant me a wish. I saw the writing on the wall and wished to be immune to other people’s wishes. Looks like the rest of the world didn’t have the same forethought.”

“Wishes?”

“I was surprised too,” Kraid said. “But judging from what’s going on all over, I think the Wish magic’s back on.”

“It is,” Joan grunted. She got to her feet and rubbed her right eye, the one that had reverted to red. “I remember now. There was some tree branch, asked me what I wanted most. I said I wanted my sister and I to have been born healthy, instead of...”

She stopped rubbing her eye and took a look around the room.

“Guess the rest of this is just the aftermath. What life would’ve been.”

“Well, at least you didn’t wish to still be dating Vell,” Kraid said. “That would’ve been really pathetic. On the other hand, kind of sucks knowing you could’ve had a perfectly successful, satisfied life if not for the whole birth defect thing, right?”

Joan grit her teeth. She would’ve punched Kraid in the face if she actually believed it would hurt him.

“If it’s happening to you and me, it’s probably happening all over,” Joan said. “The anomalies you said you saw. People are getting wishes granted, changing their lives, changing reality.”

“And this many people changing reality all at once can’t be good,” Vell said.

“You are correct! Enjoy that feeling, it won’t happen often,” Kraid said. He took a quick stroll over to the nearest window and threw it open, gesturing to the sky above. Multicolored stripes of horizon clashed for space in an expanse of mismatched celestial bodies and weather patterns, as two and a half suns vied for territory with three moons and what appeared to be a large space station. “Even the sky’s getting pulled six different directions. For some reason. I can get the weather, but what fucking moron wished for the sky to be green? One chance to reshape reality and you make the sky green?”

“Everybody wants something different,” Vell said. “More the wishes clash, the more things break.”

“Luckily for us all, you’re immune to that, and all associated side effects, thanks to that magical tramp stamp on your back. Magic can’t affect more powerful magic. Why I came looking for you. That, and I’ll probably need your help getting to Lee.”

“What do you need Lee for?”

“She knows more about the flow of mana and the fabric of reality and all that stuff,” Kraid said. “We need her to help fix this.”

“Smartest guy on earth needs a college student’s help?” Joan said, with an audible scoff.

“I can’t know everything, alright? I usually have a team of guys for this kind of thing, but they all wished to be professional supermodel fuckers or sports car drivers or the King of Bhutan or something. Lee knows about this kind of shit and I figured if I could find you, I could find her.”

“We’d probably get her anyway,” Vell said with a shrug. He didn’t really like Kraid being involved, but right now he was their only way to make people remember the original reality. That alone was not enough to get him fully onboard, though.

“What’s your angle?”

“Why do I need an angle?”

“You always have an angle,” Vell said. “You don’t do anything unless there’s something in it for you. Why the hell should I trust you to help?”

Kraid rolled his eyes. He’d been expecting his memory magic to be enough for Vell. He hadn’t prepared a speech.

“Say what you will about me, Harlan, but I play fair, and-”

“Fair? You cheat at literally everything.”

“I didn’t say by the rules, I said fair,” Kraid said. “Yes, I cheat, and also a lot of other horrible stuff, but I don’t do anything any other person couldn’t do if they were determined, resourceful, and morally bankrupt enough. I play by the rules of life, if no others.”

Vell actually believed that, in spite of his gut instinct to not trust anything Kraid said. He was, if anything, a little too fond of challenges.

“So what does any of that have to do with this situation?”

“Because wishes are changing the rules, Harlan,” Kraid said. “It’s no fun earning billions of dollars if someone else can just wish for the same amount. I want things back to normal so I can keep being the same evil bastard I’ve always been.”

With a quick, dramatic flourish of his skeletal hand, Kraid took a bow, capping off his impromptu speech. Vell thought about it for a moment and glanced at Joan to gauge her reaction. She rubbed a head still sore from a rush of magic, but nodded in affirmation. She knew Kraid better than anyone, and she believed he was telling the truth, in his own fucked up way.

“Fine, I guess,” Vell said. He wasn’t excited about a teamup with the world’s most evil human being, but he was short on options right now. “So, let’s go ahead and get down to business. What about Kim?”

“Ah right, she should be immune too,” Kraid said. “Funny story. I can find your rune’s magical hotspot, but not hers. Think maybe she made a wish and it’s fucking with her existence.”

“Maybe these wish-granters are using her as a battery,” Joan suggested. “It’d explain where they all got the mana power from all of a sudden.”

“An excellent theory, unfortunately it does not change our order of operations,” Kraid said. “We need Lee. Let’s get to it.”

“Hold on,” Vell said. He grabbed his phone and checked his contacts. “Huh. I think our first step should be grabbing Harley, actually.”

“Why? We’ve already got Joan, what do we need another slut for?”

Joan just rolled her eyes.

“Remember what you said about reality getting weird because of all the wishes?”

“Yes.”

Vell turned his phone around and displayed his contact pages, and then scrolled through it. Every single name, through multiple scrolls, was a variation of Lee.

“There are currently thirty-seven Lee’s,” he said. “We’re going to need help finding the real one.”

“See, this is why I came to you,” Kraid said. “Always on top of the weird shit. Alright then, let’s grab the little whore.”