‘Welcome back to the chaos, Mr. Harlan,” Harley said. She grabbed Vell in a tight hug and latched on to him for a good ten seconds. “You enjoy your break?”

“Relatively speaking,” Vell said. It was hard to chill when a butterfly-themed time god had just dropped a cosmic truth bomb on him, but he’d managed to slightly decompress from that particular incident. “How about you, Samson, how’d a taste of regular life treat you?”

“Not as great as I was expecting,” Samson said. “I was kind of hoping Ibrahim would finally give me a break about all this shit, but he still brought up loop stuff every damn day. I swear, sometimes I think bro knows more about you guys than I do.”

“I doubt that,” Kim said. Even in the best case scenario, Ibrahim could only be aware of half their overall activities. “Is Lee running late? Where’s she at?”

“She got to the island early, actually,” Vell explained. “Apparently she’s in her lab.”

“She has a lab?”

The Einstein-Odinson campus had underwater pods that seniors were free to claim and use for independent experimentation, though neither Lee or Harley had made much use of the privilege. Their experiments tended to be more socially involved, and the Senior Labs were fairly isolated and difficult to bring groups to.

“She claimed hers at the start of the year ‘just in case’,” Harley explained. “And apparently the case is just in. She had her dad pay to bring in a bunch of stuff early, herself included.”

“Well now I want to go see what she’s working on,” Samson said. Everyone else agreed, and so they headed out.

As they had very few friends who made use of the Senior Labs, Vell and the other loopers rarely visited the underwater complex unless it was for daily apocalypse related purposes. Vell had to restrain himself from jumping at every strange noise and sudden movement, of which there were many. The experiments down in the labs got weird. Harley held her breath as she walked past a lab she knew contained toxic gases and hurried on her way.

The laboratory Lee had claimed was about halfway down the spiraling pillar of underwater pods, and from the sound of things she was already hard at work. A flash of brilliant purple light blasted out from under the door as Harley was punching in the keycode. Apparently Lee was doing something magical, and had a poorly sealed door. Kim put in a work order with the school maintenance team while the loopers stepped inside.

“Ah, hello everyone.”

Lee set aside her work for a moment, lifted some goggles off her eyes, and waved hello. Harley crossed her arms and examined the messy workplace.

“Got to be honest, I was hoping for something a little more dramatic,” Harley said. Lee’s workshop was filled with very mundane mana harvesting equipment, along with a few raw parts and the tools to work with them.

“Appearances can be deceiving, darling,” Lee said. “It’s not about what I’m building, but what I intend to do with it.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“It’s an oceanic ley harvester, right? You’re going to harvest ley from the oceans.”

Harley had not forgotten the unfortunate visit from Noel Burrows at the start of the year. He wanted to harvest magical energy from the ocean more than anything, and since he was an idiot, he was placing the burden of that discovery on Lee.

“Well, yes,” Lee said sheepishly. “But I’m also going to do something else with it!”

She put her goggles back on and got back to assembling her device, with a sly smile on her face all the while.

“Over break I did some mingling with my fathers associates—willingly, this time—and put together a plan. You see, while my father wants this ley harvester, so does everyone else.”

Lee briefly paused to solder two parts together and charge a battery with mana, and then lifted her goggles up once again.

“After a little good old fashioned conspiring, I put together a plan with some majority stockholders in Roentgen,” Lee said. “I get this tech working, I get them record profits, and they help me oust my father.”

While most of the board at Roentgen weren’t much better than Lee’s father, even that slight difference was enough that some could recognize Noel Burrows for the idiot he was. They were tired of having a manchild with a messiah complex tanking their stock prices on a whim, and it only took a few carefully placed words for them to see Lee as a preferable alternative. With a miraculous technology to keep them afloat during a difficult transition, the board would be all too eager to see Lee in charge, blissfully unaware she would use her newfound power to dismantle the entire empire in an instant.

“I am tired of sitting around and waiting for my father to get too old and frail to run the company,” Lee said. The incident with the Butterfly Guy had instilled in her a new appreciation for the singular nature of time, especially all the time she was wasting in the name of inheriting her father’s company one day. “I’m not going to wait for the power to do the right thing to be handed to me. I’m going to take it myself, grasp my destiny with my own two hands, grip it by the tiny, pathetic neck and squeeze the life out of-.”

“Lee I think you’re fantasizing about strangling your dad again.”

“And speaking of strangling your dad,” Vell said. “This was plan A, right? There weren’t any other plans involving violence?”

“Yes, of course, this is plan A,” Lee said.

“Right, and plan B, does that involve violence?”

“Not ‘physical’ violence,” Lee said, with stiff sincerity.

“Mental violence?”

“Yes.”

“None of that.”

“Okay, that’s plan B off the table...and plan C.”

“Plan D?”

“How do we feel about faking a terminal diagnosis,” Lee said. “Hypothetically?”

“No.”

“Well scratch that, then,” Lee said. Her friends started to ask about plan E, and she cut them off by holding up a hand. “I’m going to save you all some time, plans E through Z are assassination. Just top to bottom murder through the whole alphabet.”

“Lee.”

“I only came up with Plan R,” Lee said. “The rest of them were the shareholders.”

Vell sighed and rubbed his temples while the rest of the loopers rolled their eyes.

“Alright, good thing plan A is so good,” Vell said. “How can we help?”

“I’m just starting out, but I’m sure there’s something,” Lee said. “I’ve already consulted with Skye for some Marine Biology knowledge to filter out living things, but the mechanics of how to actually do so are beyond me. Any ideas?”

“I might have something,” Harley said. “You got any sensors in this pile of junk?”

“Yes, I believe over there...and there, and over there,” Lee said, pointing to disparate piles of equipment handed over by various deliverymen.

“Not to sound like a square,” Vell said. “But how about we start by organizing the lab a little?”

“That sounds reasonable.”

Vell grabbed the nearest piece of loose material and took it wherever Lee told him to. The rest of the loopers followed suit, and got to work.