“Fantastic! This is no help at all,” Kraid said.

In their efforts to cut through the confusion of thirty-seven variations of Lee, they had sought out Harley, and they’d found her. All eighty six of her.

“I guess Harley would be in a lot of people’s fantasies,” Vell said. Dozens of people had all made wishes involving Harley, and in order to reconcile all those distinct realities, dozens of versions of Harley had been created. The robotics lab was packed with Harley’s in various shapes and sizes and provocative outfits.

“Now we have to find the real Harley!”

“Nah!” one of the Harley’s shouted from across the room. “Right here!”

“What?”

The apparent prime Harley made her way through the various duplicates of herself and stepped to the front, pointing to herself. She appeared slightly taller than usual, but otherwise unchanged. She also still had a scab on her lip from where Pradav had punched her just yesterday, something most of the other Harley’s lacked.

“I’m the OG.”

“How do you know?”

“We just figured it out,” Harley said, gesturing to all her duplicates. “We talked things over. Not to mention some of these para-Harley’s are pretty obvious fakes.”

“I’m Harley, I like boys,” squeaked one of the duplicates. Prime Harley rolled her eyes.

“I babysit some neighborhood kids during the summer,” she said. “Puberty’s starting to get to them.”

“That’s a little weird,” Joan said.

“Please, at least that one was wearing clothes,” Harley said. “It’s the ones dreamed up by adults you need to worry about. Found more than one of these bitches tied up.”

“If you’re done, we have a reality to reassemble,” Kraid said. “If you’re the real one, I should be able to reboot your memories. If you’re not...well, I don’t know what’ll happen, but it’ll probably be incredibly painful.”

“It’s already incredibly painful,” Joan said.

“Moreso,” Kraid said. “Ready?”

“Wait, what exactly are we rebooting here, I know things are weird, but-”

“I’ll explain after we’re sure this won’t disintegrate you,” Kraid said. “And there’s only one way to find out!”

Kraid grabbed Harley by the throat and hefted her off the ground. Joan and Vell just covered their ears and tried to ignore the screaming.

“Fuck me running,” Harley shouted when she was finally dropped. “That was definitely top ten worst shit that’s ever happened to me.”

“At least you’re not disintegrated,” Vell said. “Speaking of, time to get you up to speed.”

Vell sat Harley down on the far side of the lab and recapped their reality-bending predicament. Harley paid close attention until they got to the part where they’d only come for Harley so they could get to Lee. Her attentiveness snapped into a deep frown.

“So why come to me?”

“You know Lee better than anyone,” Vell said.

“Apparently not,” Harley snapped. Vell rolled his eyes. In all the chaos of having reality rearranged, he’d almost entirely forgotten about their fight last night.

“Look, just...we still need her,” Vell said.

“We are dealing with magic horseshit, so yeah, I guess,” Harley said. “Not that petty. Just shut up and let’s go find her.”

Harley stomped off ahead of the group. Kraid looked absolutely delighted by his discovery of this interpersonal drama and lurked behind Harley, trying to piece together how she was feeling and how he could make her feel worse. At the tail of the uneasy alliance, Vell and Joan walked side by side.

“So that whole Pradav thing turned into a real blowout, huh?”

“Yeah. Harley really didn’t want to do the whole dementia thing. Lee took things into her own hands, I guess.”

“Sorry. If I’d known, I never would’ve told Lee anything.”

“Not your fault,” Vell said. “It’ll work out. Those two are closer friends than anyone I’ve ever seen.”

Joan stepped a little further from Vell and scanned him with her mismatched eyes.

“‘Those two’,” she said. “You know, I never really thought of it as the ‘two of them’. To me, it was always ‘the three of you’. Vell and Harley and Lee.”

“Eh, that’s...I mean, we’re friends, but they’ve also got their own thing,” Vell said.

“If you say so,” Joan said. Vell was once again selling himself short, but they had bigger problems to deal with. Like reality falling apart at the seams. It was very hard to prioritize interpersonal drama over the end of existence, but she had this funny feeling like it would keep happening.

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

“Oh look! Apparently wishes are still getting granted,” Kraid said. “We’re up to thirty-eight.”

Lee’s dorm was bursting with variants of Lee, even more diverse and much more chaotic than Harley’s menagerie of alternate selves had been. Where Harley had been able to reach an accord with her selves very quickly, the Lee doppelgangers were actively feuding among themselves.

“This is fun,” Kraid said. He swept a skeletal hand towards Harley. “Well, go on then. Display your encyclopedic knowledge of Lee.”

“Alright, I just wished to be taller,” Harley said. “Joan, you wished to be healthy and all that. Given what we know, I think we just need to find the version of Lee that’s the closest to what she would’ve wished to be. That in mind, let’s start by filtering out all the Lee’s that have parents.”

Joan nodded. The first thing any real Lee would do in her ideal life would be to ditch her horrible parents.

“Hey, you, Lee in the blue dress,” Joan said. “How do you feel about your parents?”

“They are wonderful,” the Lee said, in a British accent more stunningly posh than anything Joan had ever heard. “And please, my name is XL-X8 C/P Burrows. I do not know where this ‘Lee’ nonsense is coming from.”

“Alright, that’s definitely a fake,” Joan said, scooting blue dress Lee off to the “reject” side of the room. “Must be the one her parents wished for.”

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

Not all of the other alternate Lee’s were so easy to find out at first. Only about fifteen had healthy relationships with their parents. After that, Harley ruled out any that were married to other big business magnates, and then it started to get hard. A handful were eliminated because they preferred studying magikinesis over hydrokinesis, and then a few more based on liking fancy liquors over simple beer. A handful more were rejected for their opinions on the ocean, and then a few more based on whether or not they liked to do dramatic pauses when they spoke. That left only two Lee’s, and ten questions later, there were still two Lee’s.

“Alright...fuck, I don’t know, which one of you argued with me yesterday?”

“I didn’t,” Lee One said.

“Me neither,” said Lee Two.

“Come on, why is every answer the same with you two!”

“Wait, hold on,” Joan said. “Which of you is dating Adele?”

“I am.”

“No, I am.”

“Fuck. It’s Adele,” Joan said. “She must’ve wished for a world where she was still dating Lee. And Lee did the same.”

“So these two are functionally identical, then,” Vell said. Adele liked Lee as she was, and wouldn’t have wished for any changes Lee herself wouldn’t have also wished for.

“Great. So what do we do, then, coin flip it?”

“If they’re functionally identical, why don’t we just bring them both?” Joan asked. “They should have all the skills we need.”

“Because one’s real and one was made by the wish-granters,” Kraid said. “And if they made her, they could destroy her, or change her, at any time.”

“Oh, so we might have a potential evil traitor in our midst,” Joan said. She looked at Kraid and glared. “Again.”

“In the case of potential traitors, two is definitely much worse than one. Besides, I had something I’d like to experiment with,” Kraid said. He had been lurking towards the back of the room, bored out of his mind, but inspiration had gradually struck him. “Could be useful for later, and it could help us find the real Lee now.”

“It’s going to be unpleasant, isn’t it?”

“Deeply,” Kraid said with a smile. He strutted over the first Lee duplicate that had been eliminated, the one in the blue dress. “May I borrow you for a moment, dear?”

“Absolutely not,” the blue dress Lee said. Unfortunately for her, Kraid didn’t really care. He grabbed her throat with one hand, and clutched a soulstone in the other.

“You’re going to want to cover your ears,” Kraid advised. “You’d be surprised how loud people can scream.”

Everyone covered their ears. After the memory-reboots earlier today, everyone had thought they’d heard the loudest a human being could possibly scream, and they were swiftly proven wrong. Black magic coursed through the fake Lee, and ripped her apart from the inside out. Glowing rivers of magic were torn out of her body violently, surging towards the soulstone -but never being absorbed into it. In moments, the fake Lee had dissolved into ash, but the soulstone had absorbed no energy at all. Kraid brushed the ash of the fake Lee off his skeletal palm and examined the black rock in his other hand.

“Well, theory confirmed,” Kraid said. He held the dim soulstone aloft. “Whatever these wish-granters are doing, they still can’t make souls. All these fakes, they’re just simulacrums, convincing forgeries of the real deal.”

All of the myriad Lee’s looked around at each other in a combination of horror and concern, especially the two that were still possibly real. Vell bit his tongue and asked a question he knew was going to regret.

“So..how does that help us find the real Lee?”

Kraid smiled and held up the soulstone again.

“Oh no,” Vell said, before he covered his ears again.

Tendrils of black magic surged through the entire room, grasping at every duplicate of Lee. Most of them ignited instantly, and started burning up -except for one of the two Lee’s up front, who went pale as a ghost. A trace of deep violet energy was pulled out of her body and into the soulstone as the rest of the Lee’s started to collapse into ash. Harley stepped away from the final Lee as she collapsed to the ground, motionless.

“What the fuck!”

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a bunch, I’m going to put it back,” Kraid said. He stepped up, violet soulstone in hand -and then tripped. “Oops!”

Everyone’s heart stopped for a moment as the stone containing Lee’s soul fell out of Kraid’s hand and plummeted towards the ground. They started breathing again when the stone reversed course and jumped right back into Kraid’s palm.

“Just kidding! God, the looks on your faces,” Kraid said, as he chuckled to himself. “You know these things don’t even break, right?”

“Just put her soul back so we can get this over with,” Vell said. He’d probably lost a year off his life watching that soulstone drop.

“Yeah yeah,” Kraid said. “None of you people appreciate good comedy.”

Kraid held the soulstone in his hand for a moment, to reboot Lee’s soul while it was still in the rock. Then he extended his hand and pushed the energy of the soulstone back out, guiding it towards Lee’s inert body. The violet wave washed over it and imbued it with new life, causing her to spring up with a shock. She looked around for a moment, confused, before pulling herself to her feet and standing upright, albeit a very wobbly upright.

“Was that necessary?”

“No, it was entirely unnecessary and probably kind of cruel, but it was fast and I wanted to do it,” Kraid said. “You know what I mean, of course.”

Lee and Harley tried to look at each other without actually making eye contact. Kraid tried to contain his sadistic smile.

“Get her up to speed and get her working,” Kraid said. “I’m going to step out for a bit, I can actually physically feel how much all of you want to kill me right now and that’s not a productive work environment.”

“Oh, right, yes,” Lee said. She had to pretend she wasn’t used to having her soul ripped out from time to time. “Give me a moment.”

After a performatively long rest to let Lee “recover”, Vell recapped the situation -again. Lee nodded along with the entire story, and let out a long sigh when it was over.

“I think I know what to do,” Lee said. “Give me some time and I can enchant a ‘heat map’ of sorts, something that’ll let us trace large amounts of mana. Hopefully that’ll allow us to follow all these wish-granting creatures and put a stop to this.”

“Do you need anything, or can you just get started?”

“I’ll be fine. It might take me a few minutes, though.”

“Cool,” Harley said, before standing up and crossing to the other side of the room. Lee deliberately ignored her and got to work right away. Joan rolled her eyes and pulled Vell aside.

“You still think this is working out between them?”

“Reality’s going to fall apart, Joan, this isn’t really the time,” Vell said.

“Now is exactly the time! If reality was falling apart I wouldn’t want to end it on a feud,” Joan said. “Admittedly you guys are always strangely chill about weird disasters, but still.”

“Because we know we’re going to get through this, and they’ll have plenty of time to talk it out later,” Vell said. Joan just sighed.

“Well we’ve got some time to talk it out now, so we might as well,” Joan said. She pushed Vell aside and headed over to Lee, who was still in the process of inscribing some magical glyphs. “Got time to talk, Lee?”

“It’s a long process, but not complex,” Lee said. “I can talk.”

“Alright. I just wanted to check in,” Joan said. “It sounds like you had a rough day yesterday.”

“I’m having a rough day today,” Lee said. Even though she’d had her soul pulled out before, it still wasn’t pleasant. “But yes. And...I’m sorry for involving you in that. I shouldn’t have deceived you.”

“I can’t say I’m happy about it, but I can’t really judge,” Joan said. “I don’t exactly have the moral high ground there.”

Lee smiled weakly, and Joan continued.

“I kind of want to know what’s up between you and Harley, though,” Joan said. Lee kept her hands steady, but she could not hide her reaction, which only made Joan more worried. “What happened? I thought you two were joined at the hip. It’s weird that you’re fighting like this.”

“I don’t know,” Lee sighed. “I just- she can be so judgmental, and so slow to move on, and forgive and-”

“Lee, no,” Joan said. She looked eminently disappointed. “Please don’t tell me this is about me.”

“It’s not! I mean, it is, but, it’s not,” Lee said. “Yes, it’s about you in the specific sense, but in general, why am I friends with someone who can’t move on and forgive? What happens when other people I care about make mistakes, do I just have to deal with Harley treating them like garbage for the rest of my life?”

“Lee. Not everyone deserves forgiving.”

Lee’s defiant energy deflated in a moment. Joan’s eyes, still their mismatched blue and red, were turned down towards the ground in shame.

“Joan…”

“I appreciate that you and Vell are so forgiving. I do. But I don’t need everybody to get over it.”

“But, you’re getting better,” Lee said. “You’re sorry, and-”

“Sometimes being sorry means accepting that your actions have consequences,” Joan said. “Don’t worry about me, and don’t throw away a good friendship for a bad one.”

“You’re not a bad friend,” Lee insisted. “You’re a friend, and Harley’s a friend, and I shouldn’t need to choose, and neither of you should make me feel like I have to!”

Lee slammed her fists down on the table in a huff, and Joan used her recently-developed critical thinking skills to guess it was time to end this line of thinking.

“Just...think about it, I guess,” Joan said. “Friendships like that shouldn’t be taken lightly.”

“I haven’t removed her from my christmas card list yet,” Lee chided. “But, whatever happens, I’ll be fine. I have you and Vell.”

“Yep. There’s always Vell.”

Good old loyal Vell, who she could really use an assist from right now, and who continued to show no interest in assisting.