“Out of the way, excuse us, sorry, coming through, make way,” Harley said, as she elbowed students out of the way, trying to carve a path through the crowded halls. “Don’t want to be rude be we also don’t want to incinerate you, literal hot potato coming through!”

The crowd parted for Harley, and Vell made his way through the cut, holding a long pair of tongs which were tightly clamped to a sizable metal container. The potato contained within burned so hot bystanders could feel the heat radiating from it, even through the shielded containment unit. In an attempt to create the hottest possible hot potato, the physics department had accidentally heated a surprisingly resilient tuber to within a few degrees of the Planck temperature, and now the loopers had to deal with it, fast. A task that might’ve been easier were the hallways not so damned crowded.

“Hey, excuse me, please scooch,” Harley said. “Hot stuff coming through, and I’m not talking about myself this time!”

Harley’s forceful personality pushed their way through one more hallway, and then they had a straight shot to the looper lair. Harley slammed the door open and Vell ran through, making a beeline for a complicated magical mechanism Lee and the others had been building. Vell dropped the containment unit within, and Lee activated the machine, bathing the potato in mountains of coolants and streams of frost magic. The clash of superheated potato and supercooled magic created a burst of steam that forced the loopers out of the room.

“At least it’s working,” Kim said. The burst of steam had fogged up the glass screen that made up her face, and she had to wipe her eyes clear. “Note to self: install windshield wipers.”

“I’ll get you hooked up,” Harley said. As the resident robotics expert, Harley was the point man for a lot of Kim’s upgrades. “But first, I have some bitching to do.”

The crowds swarming from classroom to classroom were still in full force, and Harley angrily gestured to several hordes of students crowding the quad.

“What the fuck is with all these students all of a sudden?”

“The school expanded over the summer,” Kim said. “Didn’t you notice?”

“I noticed,” Harley said. “I’m just wondering fucking why.”

“School got a big donation over the summer,” Kim said. She had stayed on campus over the summer and kept the Dean company, so she was privy to some of the finer details of the school’s renovation. “Couple million to build new dorms and sponsor more students than usual. It was Dean Lichman’s idea to devote some of that money to building non-human friendly dorms.”

“Huh. Guess someone wants to invest in the future of science,” Vell said.

“And I’m glad the dean chose to invest in making the school more accessible,” Lee said. “There’s a delightful gorgon in one of my hydrokinesis classes.”

“A gorgon?”

“Yes. I don’t like making eye contact anyway, so we get along swimmingly.”

“Neat!”

“Are we not assuming something fishy is going on here?” Hawke asked.

“What about diversity is fishy to you?”

“Not that- I don’t- okay, you guys know I’m all about the rich tapestry of life and its diverse people,” Hawke said. “I mean some random anonymous donation of millions of dollars. Dudes who donate that kind of money usually want the buildings named after them, or something.”

Most of the buildings on campus were named after whatever rich asshole had donated enough money to get his name put on a plaque, though few students acknowledged those names, preferring colloquial terms like The Cube or Brick Shithouse. The loopers took a quick look at the crowds scrambling around campus, running between aforementioned Cube and Brick Shithouse. While nothing about the new students themselves was suspicious, the sudden influx of them did raise some questions.

“God damn it, you might be right,” Harley sighed.

“I fail to see a sinister angle to all of this,” Lee said. “What does more students do to- oh, hold on, Vell has his thinking face on.”

The infamous forehead wrinkles of Vell’s “thinking face” were starting to deepen. He was up to three now, which usually meant some very serious thinking.

“Samson, you’re not in the new dorm, are you?”

“Nope. I’m in one of the older buildings,” he said. “I think my brother’s in one of the new ones, though.”

Much to Ibrahim’s chagrin, the twins had been assigned separate dorms and roommates. While Ibrahim was fighting a battle to get reassigned, Samson had quietly accepted the separation. Not living with Ibrahim made it a lot easier to lie to him about what Samson was doing all day. On a practical level, at least. Emotionally speaking, lying to his twin was as hard as ever.

“Maybe you can ask him if anything weird’s going on?” Hawke suggested.

“He hasn’t mentioned anything strange,” Samson said. “As far as he’s concerned, I’m the weird one.”

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“It’s only been a few days,” Vell said. “Speaking from experience, any real weirdness tends to be concentrated around the end of the school year, like-”

Vell froze, and the wrinkles in his forehead faded, as the sound of approaching hoofbeats blasted any coherent thought out of his mind.

“Oh no,” Vell said. “No no no no no, please god no.”

“Vell Harlan!”

The nasally voice of a certain centaur filled the room. Vell would’ve rather had a knife in his ears than the sound of that voice.

“Orn,” he grumbled.

The chestnut-furred centaur trotted into view, with a look of disdain on his hairy face as he stared down at Vell. Another year apart had done nothing to dull Orn’s inexplicable hatred for Vell, apparently.

“Believe me, Harlan, I am no more eager to see you than you are to see me,” Orn said.

“Then why are you even here?” Vell demanded. “Can we not just avoid each other forever?”

“Unfortunately your mere existence obligates me to course-correct for the damage you do to all reality,” Orn said. “However, I am, in this moment, not here to fulfill that obligation.”

“Well then I’ll say it again,” Vell said. “Why are you here?”

“Because I am in the unfortunate position of owing you a debt,” Orn said. His hooves dragged along the ground for a moment anxiously. “The signatures you collected last year were apparently a motivating factor in this school becoming more accessible.”

“Oh right. That.”

Last year, Orn had sought signatures for a petition addressing the Einstein-Odinson campus’s lack of accommodation for non-humans. The petition had been meant entirely in Orn’s own self interest, and his entirely unpleasant, repellent, utterly disgusting and intolerably unlikeable personality had prevented him from getting any signatures, but Vell had decided to take up the coincidentally good cause and collect signatures on Orn’s behalf. Vell had thought very little of it at the time, and even forgotten he’d done it until just now. He actively tried to repress most memories involving Orn.

“Since I regrettably owe my long-overdue presence here to you, I wish to do you a favor in turn and clean the slate between us so that I can go back to holding absolute moral, intellectual, physical, spiritual, and aesthetic superiority over you.”

“Off to a great start there, buddy,” Harley noted.

“Please hold your tongue, small whore,” Orn said. Lee briefly looked up to glare daggers at Orn. “I should inform you, Vell Harlan, that an anonymous source, apparently the benefactor of our new dorms construction, has been contacting residents of the newly built dorms.”

Vell raised an eyebrow and looked at his fellow loopers. That was very convenient timing.

“What about?”

“About you, for some reason,” Orn said. He couldn’t imagine a reason anyone would be interested in Vell Harlan for any reason beyond removing his stain from reality, but apparently someone out there was curious. “You, your group of ‘friends’ here, and any sensation of deja vu.”

The last few words traveled through the group of loopers like an electric shock. Vell looked to Lee and Harley and mouthed one word.

Kraid.

“Thanks Orn, we’re even, and great job, you really are smarter and stronger and better than me, I bow to your superiority,” Vell said. “Also please leave now and never talk to me again.”

“It will take more than that to-”

“Out!” Harley shouted, pointing towards the door.

“This is a public hallway, you can’t kick me out!”

“I can actually kick you,” Harley said. “And I will!”

Harley got her kicking foot ready, but Lee put a hand on her shoulder to hold her back.

“Harley. Equine legs are quite fragile.”

Harley begrudgingly lowered her kicking foot, but Lee shook her head.

“What I mean to say is, aim for the torso,” Lee said. There was an edge of sadism to her voice that even Orn could not ignore, and he cautiously backed away and out of sight.

“I can’t fucking believe that guy actually goes to school here,” Vell groaned. “Thanks for chasing him off.”

“Think nothing of it,” Lee said. “Now, there is something else we should discuss.”

“Right. Hope you’re up for more insanity, Samson, because things are about to get weirder.”

“Oh no.”

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

The mist created by the rapidly-cooling superhot potato had yet to clear, but the looper lair was the only secure place the loopers knew of to discuss such serious matters. The fog in the room should’ve given the tense discussion an air of mystery, but really it just made everything slightly damp.

“So. Kraid’s got an eye on new loopers.”

The dramatic events at the end of last year had revealed that Kraid was aware of the time loops, at least partially. While he didn’t retain any memories of the first loop, he was aware that Vell and the others did. While Vell recapped that, Samson clenched his fists.

“I thought you said anyone who learned about that goes insane?”

‘They do,” Vell insisted. “Kraid was already deranged.”

“The dude goes around buying babies from endangered species and eating them,” Harley said. Kraid was apparently a big fan of panda meat. It tasted terrible, but he just liked the idea of eating something adorable and endangered. “There’s something wrong somewhere in his head.”

“And now he’s fishing for loopers,” Vell said. “He paid to sponsor all these new students so a new looper would be in debt to him.”

“Good thing for us that he missed, then,” Kim noted. Samson was their only new looper this year, and he had no connections to Kraid.

“Yeah, I’m not really on board with the guy who eats baby orangutans,” Samson said. “No worries there.”

“The question remains, however, of what he hoped to accomplish,” Lee said. “Upon acquiring a looper in his employ, what did he hope to use them for? Whatever goal he had, I sincerely doubt he will stop pursuing it now.”

“With any luck, it’ll be impossible without a looper,” Vell said. “But he’s, uh, never really let things being impossible stop him before.”

“Unfortunately,” Lee sighed. Kraid was as brilliant as he was evil, and could find a way around even the most challenging obstacles. In time, perhaps, even the mystery of the campus time loops might crumble before him.

“Well he’s taken one massive loss already, so we got that going for us,” Harley said. Whatever else Kraid might have planned, not having a looper on his side was going to make it that much harder. “I think we can adjourn the meeting for now. Both because there’s not much else we can do right now and because all this humidity is giving me swamp ass.”

“Ha. Pathetic fleshy asses,” Kim said. “Stainless steel cheeks never have this problem.”

“Oh don’t pretend like your face isn’t fogging up, you robot bitch,” Harley said with a chuckle. “Come on, let’s get you a windshield wiper.”

“Please and thank you,” Kim said, before following Harley out of the room. Every other looper was glad to leave the overwhelmingly humid room as well. The thick cloud of steam and fog lingered long after they were gone, though it briefly parted as a mismatched woman moved through the mist.

“So that’s how it’s going to be,” Quenay said to herself. She was always delighted to see what new twists and turns the world could throw at Vell. Nothing too overwhelming this year, at least, which she liked.

It gave her plenty of room to throw some twists and turns of her own.