“You were right, Harley,” Kim said. She’d connected to the school’s security network with just her head. “Spotted Undedison on campus a couple hours ago.”

While Kim had never personally seen the resurrected Thomas Alva Edison in the flesh, his distinct appearance, and partial decay, were hard to miss.

“Camera’s can’t track him everywhere, but he was definitely in the general area of my body and the robotics lab around the right times.”

“Oh, that bastard,” Harley grumbled. “When I find him I’m going to tear- I’m going to give him a piece of my mind!”

“What?”

“Don’t think you need to restrain your aggression on my account,” Lee said. They’d had a small, minor, potentially world-ending tiff about Harley’s aggressiveness last year, and neither had any desire to rehash the argument. “I don’t like Edison either.”

“It’s not you, I’m just trying to be better about it in general,” Harley said. “It’s not exactly healthy behavior to say you want to rip someone’s arms off.”

“Excellent point. Well, I’m all for it, we could both use some improvement in that regard,” Lee said. She had some aggression issues dealing with her parents as well. “But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. If he’s stolen Kim’s body and some weapons, we may yet need to get aggressive and fight Undedison.”

“A process which might, at our discretion, involve ripping off arms,” Vell said. “But not for personal reasons.”

“I don’t think it’s possible to rip arms off in an impersonal way,” Hawke added. “You’ve got to be very deliberate and intentional about it. Like the exact opposite of a hug.”

“Speaking of hugs, I’d really love to have arms again,” Kim snapped. “Could we prioritize that?”

“Sorry. Kind of in unfamiliar territory here,” Lee said. “Usually when we lose a body it’s a rather more permanent arrangement.”

“Understandable,” Kim said. “Another failing of your meat bodies.”

“One of those meat bodies is currently lugging you around,” Hawke said.

“Which I assure you I appreciate,” Kim said. “Now can we haul these meat bodies and my non-meat head in the direction of my non-meat body?”

“We don’t know the direction,” Lee said. “The magic trail went cold after we left the robotics lab.”

“You can track other things, can’t you?”

“Yes, but it’s a much more complicated process,” Lee said.

“Well, hold on, this is Edison we’re talking about,” Vell said. “The man never had a good idea he didn’t steal. He can’t possibly be that hard to catch up to.”

“Oh, right,” Lee said. “We’ve spent so much time facing seemingly insurmountable foes and unsolvable puzzles I forgot what it’s like to face off against an idiot.”

“Man’s got a body with no head, and a bunch of weapons he presumably plans to stick to it,” Harley said. “But for what purpose? Even if he gets the weapons attached, they’re useless without something to move the body.”

“Did we miss any lost parts in the robotics lab?” Samson suggested. “What if he got a replacement head?”

“No, nothing like that was missing. The only replacement head he could have would be-”

Vell, Harley, and Lee all locked eyes simultaneously.

“Neurology lab would be the only place for it,” Harley said. “Let’s go.”

The three veteran loopers sped off, leaving the newbies to trail in their wake for reasons unknown.

***

The Neurology lab was between classes at the moment, so no one was there to react when Harley slammed the door open and thundered into the laboratory.

“Undedison you slimy fuck! We know you’re in here!”

“Uh...Edison is-o no-o here-o.”

In spite of the terrible Mexican accent, the voice echoing around the empty lab was all too familiar.

“That’s stupid, and kind of racist,” Harley said. “Give us Kim’s body back.”

“And do it quick, or I’ll have Hawke throw me at you,” Kim said. “My head is heavy! It’ll hurt!”

This time Edison offered no response. The loopers split up and started to scan the walls for any signs of disrupted equipment, or just Undedison hiding under a table. The faint sounds of machinery buzzed throughout the lab, but the loopers saw no sign of Edison, until it was far too late. On the farthest side of the lab, a faint laughter could be heard, as the buzzing machine’s finally stopped.

“Uh...Undedison?”

“Undedison is no longer!”

A large, casket-like machine at the far side of the room opened up, billowing out a thick blanket of cold fog. A single humanoid silhouette emerged from the icy mist, standing triumphantly in the fog.

“Now begins the age of...Unheadison!”

The mist cleared, revealing the robotic body of Kim, now with weapons crudely strapped to it by rubber bands and old belts, and atop it all, the severed head of Undedsion, plugged into the empty socket where Kim’s head should go. The ramshackle body placed hands on its hips in a defiant stance.

The loopers made it approximately eight seconds before they all started to laugh.

“Unheadison? Did you rehearse that?”

“Stop it,” the newly-christened Unheadison said. “Stop laughing!”

“I absolutely will not,” Lee said, managing to squeak out a response between giggles.

“You absolutely will! I am now the most advanced lifeform in existence,” Unheadison shouted. “I am as unto a god!”

“You’re in a stolen body, with a bunch of guns with no ammo strapped to you by belts,” Harley said.

“One of which I think is mine, by the way,” Samson said. He’d been wondering where that belt had gone to.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

“Silence! You will all bow to your new undead cyborg overlord!”

“What part of ‘not loaded’, did you not understand?” Vell asked. “You can’t really-”

Unheadison cut Vell’s jab short by delivering a swift and devastating punch to the chest. Vell flew across the room, slammed into a shelf full of lab equipment, and then slumped to the floor.

“Ow. Two to three of my ribs,” Vell grunted. Repeated apocalypses had made him very good at estimating how many ribs he’d just broken.

“Hey!”

“Oh yeah, probably should’ve mentioned I’ve been enhancing the servomotors,” Kim said. Hawke watched Unheadison pick Harley up and throw her across the room, where she landed on top of Vell.

“Mm. Definitely three ribs now.”

“Okay, body has super strength, not good,” Lee said, as she rapidly retreated. “Kim, any insights?”

“Don’t get punched, try to knock the head off?”

“How profoundly useless!”

Lee ducked out of the way of another swinging fist. Thankfully, Edison was still clumsy and uncoordinated in his new body, and without the element of surprise his blows tended to go wild. Though him punching his way through a table did involved a lot of scrapes from the shrapnel. Lee covered herself with a shield of ice and tried to retaliate with a quick strike of water. Edison was far too uncoordinated to dodge, but the connections holding his head in place held strong.

“Ugh, why is he always just smart enough to be a pain in the ass,” Harley grumbled. She (carefully) extricated herself from Vell’s lap and got up, ready to rejoin the fight. She was swiftly removed from the fight again when Unheadison hurled a chair in their direction. Harley could’ve dodged, but then Vell would’ve been down a fourth rib, if not more, so she took the blow for his sake. The chair impacted her head and put her back on the ground with a nice dash of severe head trauma for her trouble.

“I appreciate that,” Vell groaned.

“Love you, bud,” Harley grunted back.

While they commiserated in shared affection and intense pain, the mobile loopers kept up the fight. Lee tried to lasso Edison’s head with magically controlled water, while Samson latched on to the robotic body by the waist and pulled the other way. Something metallic went pop, but before they could make any real progress, Edison grabbed Samson’s arms, pulled him away, and hurled him at Lee. She dutifully caught him, but had to break concentration on her lasso to do so.

“Hawke,” Kim said. She couldn’t see the fight, owing to the fact that Hawke had hidden behind a table, but she could still tell it wasn’t going well. “We have to do something.

“You’re a head, and it’s my job to hold the head,” Hawke snapped back.

“Put me on a table, and go hit my body with something heavy,” Kim said.

“I don’t take orders from you, I take orders from Lee.”

“Lee just got pile drivered by a geriatric undead plagiarist who hijacked my body!”

“That doesn’t affect the chain of command.”

“Hawke! I am asking you as a friend,” Kim said. Hawke rolled his eyes and set Kim’s head down.

“Alright, I’m going.”

“Hawke!”

“What?”

“Turn me around,” Kim said. “I want to watch the fight.”

Hawke dutifully rotated Kim’s head so that she was facing the violence and went to work. That work consisting of summoning his Jingu Bang staff and whacking Edison on the head with it as hard as he could. Lee saw Edison’s head swing hard to the right from the impact, and got an idea.

“Do that again, Hawke,” Lee shouted. “On my mark! Three, two, one-”

The countdown ended, and Hawke swung his staff as hard as he could. Lee locked the stolen body in place with a prison of ice, holding it fast as Hawke swatted the head aside. The conflicting forces added a little extra oomph to Hawke’s already mighty swing, and the rogue head finally popped free from Kim’s stolen shoulders.

“Got it!”

“Quick, grab Kim,” Lee said. “I’ll get the body.”

Grabbing the body went off without a hitch. Unfortunately, the body grabbed back.

“Oh dear.”

“Hah! Idiot children,” Edison’s severed head said. “I have mastered the unfathomably advanced technologies of ‘Bluetooth’!”

“That was made in the nineties, it’s- oh no.”

Lee’s spine made a very loud and very unpleasant popping noise as the stolen body squeezed down hard, then tossed her limp body aside.

“Oh boy,” Kim said. “So much for chain of command. Samson! Grab the bad guy head!”

“What?”

“Bluetooth is short range! Grab Edison’s head and chuck it out a window or something!”

“Oh, right, I can do that,” Samson said. He could do it in theory, at least. The stolen body intercepted him and chased him away from Edison’s head. The chase lasted all of two seconds before the body tripped over a piece of debris and fell flat on the ground.

“Damn this shoddy angle,” Edison said. He still had to control the body from his own point of view, which was currently on the ground and behind a desk. He could hardly see anything from down there, which made it much easier for Hawke to sneak up on Edison and punt him across the room. The undead plagiarist hollered loudly as he soared through the air, into Samson’s waiting hands.

“Two years of goalie practice paying off,” Samson said, as he proudly clutched the head he had deftly caught. “Told Ibrahim it was a good idea.”

“Less gloating, more throwing,” Kim ordered.

“Right, shit, okay, here goes,” Samson said. He hefted the surprisingly dense head of Edison, aimed for the nearest window, and hurled it with all his might. The careening cranium soared through the air once again, hit the glass, and promptly bounced off.

“Ow!”

“Shit, sorry.”

“Apology not accepted!”

“I wasn’t talking to you,” Samson said. He walked over, opened the window, and picked up Edison’s head once more.

“Wait, no, please! Don’t kill me!”

“We’re on the first floor, asshole,” Samson said.

He then chucked the head out the window, where it landed in a bush, before slamming the window shut behind it. Bereft its treacherous controller, Kim’s stolen body finally stood completely still.

“Fucking finally,” Kim said. “Hawke, plug me in. Then we can, uh, clean up the bodies, I guess.”

“Still alive, actually,” Harley mumbled. “Severely concussed, but alive.”

“Still alive here too,” Vell grunted. Talking hurt his ribs.

“Here as well,” Lee said. “I can’t feel my legs, but I’ve ended some apocalypses without legs, so that’s not so bad.”

“Oh, okay, cool. Guess we...take you to a medic, then?”

“Please.”

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

Early in the morning on the very next loop, the undead and fully intact Thomas Edison watched from the bushes as Kim’s headless body wandered it’s way across campus. He chuckled to himself and readied himself to pounce, slowly creeping up on the unsuspecting body from behind, until he was close enough to reach out and touch it.

“Boo!”

The torso of the machine sprang open, and Kim’s metallic head popped out of it’s hidden chamber. The thoroughly spooked Edison jumped away from the body, turned tail, and ran, his screaming trailing into the distance. Kim stayed behind and laughed to herself until Harley emerged from her own hiding place.

“Told you it’d be worth it,” Harley said. The hidden head had been her idea.

“Eh, pretty good,” Kim said. “Not sure it was completely worth three hours of work.”

“Learn to commit to a bit, Kimmy.”

One of the few regrets Kim had about having an entirely digital face was that she could not physically stick her tongue out. Any variation of the “:P” emoji just didn’t have the same effect.

A few seconds later, Vell and Hawke walked over, dragging Undedison between them, one to each arm. He wasn’t very spry, or very good at dodging obvious traps, so they’d been able to snag him quickly.

“Hi there, you undead fuck,” Harley said. “Glad to see you’ve finally moved on to stealing someone else’s shit.”

“I won’t dignify your attempts at inane banter,” Edison said.

“Cool, then just tell us how you were going to steal Kim’s body.”

“You’ll never get me to talk! I defy you and your-”

“He had this in his pocket,” Vell said. He tossed a small handheld device to Harley. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s got a Kraid tech logo on it.”

“Well, that explains a lot,” Harley said. There was no way Edison was smart enough to pull off such a stunt on his own, but Kraid’s patronage made it all make sense. “Alright, get the fuck out of here, Edison. God I’ll be glad when I graduate and never have to see you again.”

“You’re...graduating?”

“Yeah. Can you not count? One, two, three, four years of you harassing me, four years of school, my degree is done after this year!”

“Then...after all this time…”

“Oh, don’t try to get sentimental on me,” Harley scoffed. Fortunately for her, there was little chance of that.

“I will finally be free,” Edison said, as he threw up his arms in triumph. “Without you to impede my progress-”

“Stop you from stealing shit.”

“-there will be no one to prevent me from taking-”

“Again, stealing.”

“-What is rightfully mine!”

“What is very much not yours,” Harley said.

“I will once again be the world’s preeminent genius!”

“Preeminent plagiarist,” Vell mumbled. “I’m out.”

“Good call, he’s probably going to keep ranting,” Kim said. Edison did, in fact, continue to rant, screaming triumphantly long after his entire “audience” had left. “That guy’s going to be my problem from now on, isn’t he?”

“Unfortunately,” Harley said. Kim put on a frowny face.