“Samson, good to see you. What’s the situation?”

The amateur looper actually did know the situation, but something else took priority.

“Why do you have a lady in a bubble?”

“This is Joan, I told her about the time loops and now she’s insane and aggressively trying to kill herself,” Lee said. “Stop bashing your head against the magic dome, Joan, it negates force.”

Joan kept bashing her head anyway. Samson decided not to ask any more questions about that. He could only handle so much lunacy at once.

“Moving on,” he said. “Have you ever heard of the paperclip maximizer?”

“I got crushed by a giant paperclip once, but I assume it’s unrelated.”

“It is. The paperclip maximizer is an AI thought experiment saying that any AI assigned to a task without the right logical restrictions and whatnot in place would pursue its goal with lethal efficiency,” Samson said. “Like a machine designed to produce paperclips would eventually reason that the human body contains atoms that could be turned into more paperclips, or that humans could turn it off and prevent it from making paperclips.”

“Ah, so we have a murderous AI producing infinite paperclips, then?”

“Well, no, that was just me explaining the theory behind it,” Samson said. He didn’t get to flex his computer engineering knowledge much. “It’s actually something the robotics and archaeology departments worked up together, designed to identify and excavate fossils. They didn’t define the boundaries very well, though, so-”

Samson cut himself off and covered his ears as a blood-curdling scream rang out, followed shortly thereafter by a hideous slurping noise.

“Oh, so it’s sucking people’s skeletons out,” Lee said.

“You can tell that just from the sound?”

“It is quite distinctive, darling,” Lee said. The combination of tearing meat and bloody churning had left an impression on Lee’s psyche that no amount of time or therapy would ever heal. “If you’ve eaten lately I would advise finding a bathroom and vomiting now, rather than mid-incident.”

“All good on that front, it got one of my classmates right in front of me and I am emptied out,” Samson said. He had already been overwhelmed by the horrific display and was now trying to ride his shocked numbness for the remainder of the skeleton-devouring incident.

“Feel free to use me as bait,” Joan said.

“Stop that,” Lee scolded. She jostled the magic bubble Joan was contained in and stepped out into the quad. In the center of the open field, a large, tank-like machine with an array of bloody tools and hoses on the front of it was caught in a violent melee with Leanne and Kim. In the background, several more of the machines were moving from building to building, with students fleeing in front of them and loopers pursuing behind them.

“Hey Lee,” Leanne shouted. “Mind blasting something sensitive?”

The skeleton-sucking robot was already down a few limbs, but Leanne was sorely limited by the fact that it was a skeleton-sucking robot and she had a skeleton. Kim had no such restrictions, but she was still struggling against the much larger robot.

“Stop just yanking on it with your arms,” Leanne snapped. “Crouch down, plant your feet, get a firm grip, and lift from the legs. It uses more of your muscles.”

“I don’t have muscles!”

“You still have gears, or servos, or whatever,” Leanne said. “Use those. Lee!”

“One second,” Lee shouted back. It was much harder to conjure up a second spell while still maintaining the first one. Luckily for them all, Lee knew two entirely different kinds of magic, which made it slightly easier. With some effort, she managed to call up a blade of ice that sliced through one of the machine’s limbs, depriving it of one skeleton-stealing appendage. Leanne used the opening to position herself right above the robot’s core and kick it so hard she knocked a hole in its power cell. The machine collapse, and Leanne dismounted gracefully while Kim stumbled away from the toppling robot.

“It’s better if you lean into it,” Leanne said. “Land on the heel and roll forward on the first step, don’t try to walk right away.”

“Oh. Thanks.”

Leanne gave Kim a firm pat on the back to straighten out her posture and then made a beeline for Lee, keeping her eyes on the bubbled Joan while she did so.

“Why’s Joan in timeout? Did she try and kill Vell again?”

“Leanne! Could you punch me hard enough to kill me?”

Leanne was taken aback by the question, and looked to Lee again, who sighed.

“I could, but I’m not going to,” Leanne said.

“Kim?”

“Also could, also not going to,” Kim said. Joan let out a brief groan of despair and bonked her head into the magic bubble again.

“I did end up telling her about the time loops, and, well,” Lee said. “She’s become a bit self-destructive”

“Yeah, about that, I think she’s trying to bite her own wrists open,” Kim said. Lee gave the bubble a quick jostle to stop Joan gnawing on herself.

“We warned you about this,” Leanne said. “This was never going to end well.”

“I don’t know, this feels like one of the better possible outcomes to me,” Kim said. She poked the bubble Joan was trapped in. “At least she’s only trying to hurt herself, instead of like, melting the universe.”

“The ideal amount of people to try and kill is zero,” Lee said. “Even if the one is yourself.”

“You’re the one who told her,” Leanne said. “Find a padded room to put Joan in and let’s get going.”

“I’m not letting her out of my sight,” Lee said.

Leanne briefly contemplated reminding her that it was the first loop and any deaths, even Joan’s were effectively pointless, but decided against it. Lee was being unusually stubborn when it came to Joan, and Leanne wasn’t going to remember any of this either, so it didn’t matter to her in the long run.

“She’s your problem,” Leanne said. “Come on, there’s still like fifty of those damn robots.”

Leanne closed her eyes as another loud scream and a sucking noise echoed from around a nearby corner.

“Man, I did not miss this part,” she mumbled to herself.

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

“We told you this would happen,” Vell said.

“I know, it does not bear repeating,” Lee said. “Talk less, shoot more!”

“I’m already shooting as much as I can shoot,” Vell said. His hands were a blur of gunfire and smoke.

“Vell’s doing his thing, Lee,” Samson said. “You’re the one who isn’t bringing your A-game!”

Even as the loopers fought off three of the skeleton-sucking archaeological robots at once, Lee was still diverting her attention and power to Joan’s protective bubble. It was not a complete waste, since the resilient sphere was something to take cover behind, but her allies would still rather have that power focused on blasting robots.

“We’re supposed to be the good guys, we don’t just let people die,” Lee said.

“Lee, we have let at least eight people die today,” Harley said. In the distance, a robot made a very loud sucking noise. “Nine. We’re not heartless, we just have priorities.”

The loopers generally did endeavor to save as many lives as possible, but on the first loop, getting information on how to stop the apocalypse took precedent over preventing what were, ultimately, meaningless deaths. Every victim would be alive on the next loop anyway, with no memory of their horrific skeleton removal, so the loopers focused on making sure those deaths did not get repeated.

“Well we don’t know those people,” Lee said.

“We actually did know one of those guys,” Hawke interjected.

“Yeah, Hector’s in our bocce club,” Kim said. “He’s nice.”

“Well you made the choice to let him get deskeletoned,” Lee said. She paused to blast a robot, and found herself starting to sweat with exertion. “And I am choosing not to let Joan meet the same fate.”

“You should let me, though.”

“Shut up, Joan,” Lee snapped. Her irrational suicidality had gone from pitiful to annoying after the fiftieth request for death. “I am not letting you die.”

A hopeful sentiment which was immediately an aggressively complicated by the arrival of a fourth robot. The murderous archaeological machine grabbed Leanne by the waist, prying her off of one of its comrades, and positioned a skeleton-sucking appendage in front of her face.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Leanne!”

“Man am I glad I’m not going to remember this.”

She closed her eyes and waited to wake up all over again, which did not end up happening. Instead of a skeletal suction, Leanne felt a blast of heat in front of her face that scorched her nose. She opened her eyes and saw that the tendril had been sheared off, and the severed end was glowing white-hot.

The seared limb went limp, as did the arm grasping on to Leanne, as the entire robot collapsed downwards. A few holes blasted through the robot were still smoking, and Lee’s hands were still glowing with purple light as more of the robots collapsed around her.

“Damn,” Leanne said. “You got even better at magic.”

“Not good enough,” Lee said. In her flurry of panicked retaliation, she had lost focus on Joan’s protective bubble, and Joan was already running away. “Get back here!”

“Lee! Priorities,” Leanne shouted, as Lee sprinted off after her death-seeking friend. Harley grabbed Leanne before she too gave chase.

“I think we’ve invested enough of our limited brains into this problem,” Harley said. “Don’t go and throw our brawn at it too.”

Leanne relented, and turned around.

“Also one of these skeleton-suckers isn’t completely dead,” Harley said. “Please punch.”

And punch she did.

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

“Joan! Joan, get back here,” Lee demanded. Joan did not heed her words, and made a beeline for the nearest skeleton harvester, only stopping to throw her arms wide as she reached the horrific machine.

“Come, sweet death!”

The grasping tendrils of the machine turned in her direction, and were immediately swatted away by a magical blast. Lee grabbed Joan by the ear and dragged her away from the robot.

“This is just childish at this point, Joan.”

“Well it would’ve been better if I’d died as a kid, so-”

“Stop that!”

Lee grabbed on to Joan’s shoulder and shook her.

“Why are you so upset about this? Vell already forgave you and everything.”

“That barely counts, Vell would forgive anyone!”

“Mostly true, but still,” Lee said. “What about Harley? She’s far more judgmental, and now she’s your friend.”

“She doesn’t like any of my movie recommendations,” Joan wailed. “She still hates me.”

“She’s just not into horror films, Joan,” Lee said. “We get enough blood and gore in our daily lives already. Speaking of, one second.”

Lee looked away for exactly five seconds to blast a skeleton harvester, and by the time she turned back around, Joan was already wandering away.

“I am getting very close to giving up on you, dear!”

“Okay, please do.”

Lee had, of course, been lying, and immediately sprinted after Joan to catch her again.

“Stop stop stop stop stop,” Lee said. “I’m sorry I was rude, please stop.”

“Nope! I’m an irredeemable monster and I deserve death.”

The upbeat attitude with which Joan expressed her desire for death was starting to get unnerving, even to Lee.

“Joan, please, you’re not irredeemable, you’re completely redeemable,” Lee pleaded. “You’ve been redeemed already, by most standards!”

“Wrong standards!”

“Joan, I am not just going to sit back and watch you die.”

“Then don’t watch!”

Right on cue, two more of the skeleton-sucking robots appeared. Lee rolled her eyes and turned to shield herself from the sudden strike of a skeleton harvester, while one more approached from the opposite direction. Joan stepped up to one of its extracting appendages and all but shoved her face into it. Momentarily confused by the compliance of its target, the skeleton harvester hesitated slightly to perform its namesake task. A bolt of energy from Lee made it hesitate even longer, but had no other effect.

Still focused on a magic shield to protect herself from one harvester, Lee could not muster the energy to properly attack the second. She had overexerted herself with her aggressive display earlier and was still struggling to recover, leaving her with no good way to keep Joan safe. So she went with a bad way.

“Come on, big guy,” Joan said, shoving her face further into the tendril. “I got a skeleton in here with your name on it.”

“No you don’t!”

The tendril was just about to activate when Joan was forcibly pulled away, by hand. Lee spun her friend around and tossed her away from both the harvesters, getting Joan out of reach -and leaving herself well within reach. Lee let out one more exasperated sigh as she was lifted off the ground.

“Oh, this is ridiculous,” Lee said. It was hardly the first time she’d lost a skeleton, but she still didn’t enjoy the process. She took a deep breath and stared down at Joan. “Do try to stay alive for at least a few minutes, would you?”

At the very least, keeping Joan alive was out of her hands now. Best case scenario, she could probably count on Vell to keep her safe. Worst case scenario -well, she was probably already in the worst case scenario, given the skeleton-remover currently being positioned above her sternum. She took a deep breath and tried to go limp. Muscle tension only made the skeleton removal hurt more.

Going limp also made falling a bit more awkward, which Lee soon found herself doing. She hit the ground ass-first, no doubt resulting in a bruised bottom, and rubbed a sore behind as she appraised her new situation. The robot that had latched on to her was sparking randomly, partially on fire, and sprouting mushrooms from several joints, and its partner half-melted and spraying confetti everywhere. A sonic burst exploded near the robot’s heads, knocking components loose, and the two skeleton harvesters collapsed in a heap.

After taking exactly three seconds to contemplate the seemingly random confluence of destruction, Lee turned and looked over at Joan. Her hands were alight with a reddish-purple glow.

“What did you do?”

“I panicked and cast every spell I could think of,” Joan mumbled. Lee stood, brushed some dirt off her skirt, and stepped towards Joan.

“What happened to you wanting to die?”

“Nothing, I do, and I should,” Joan said matter-of-factly. “But...I don’t want you to.”

In different circumstances, Lee might have blushed, but two melting skeleton harvesters and a bruised butt made it slightly harder to appreciate the sentiment. It at least gave her something to latch on to for the time being.

“Joan. Do you want me to be happy?”

“Yeah.”

“Then stay alive,” Lee scolded. “Because you make me happy. In spite of your flaws, and your mistakes...I care about you. You’re my friend.”

Joan looked down at her feet for a few seconds.

“But what if-”

Lee slapped her in the face.

“No buts,” Lee said. “We’re friends. End of story.”

“Okay, okay, I’m listening,” Joan said. “No more trying to off myself. But can I take a nap or something? If I’m going to be alive I want to be unconscious.”

“That sounds like a plan,” Lee said. Maybe a difficult plan, given the persistent screams and squelching noises of the skeleton snatchers, but a plan. “And...I’m sorry I put you through this. It was selfish of me.”

“Hey, I said I wanted to know,” Joan said. “Though for reference I do regret that, please don’t tell me about this again next time. I mean, fuck, the fact there even is a ‘next time’, what the fuck? How do you put up with it?”

“Having friends helps. That’s why I told you, in part,” Lee said. “I just want people I know I can count on. And who know they can count on me.”

Lee silently cursed Kraid for introducing any doubt in the first place -and the universe for creating such an insane situation in the first place.

“I’ll find some other way to ensure your trust,” Lee said. Joan let out a low groan of discomfort as she contemplated having to go through something like this again, until an idea occurred to her.

“There is, uh, one thing you could say.”

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

“What’s with that look?”

Joan tried to drink her tea and relax, but Lee had a very confused expression on her face, as if she was trying to piece together some puzzle in her head. Even considering all the confusion between them at the moment, it was a concerning level of consternation.

“Just...thinking about something,” Lee said. “So. I know that you are having some doubts after I lied about being able to see the future.”

“Save it,” Joan said. “There’s a lot going on in your life. I don’t need to know every detail of it.”

“But you should,” Lee said. “And though it’s unfortunately not possible for you to know everything, you should know that there is a very good reason for that. So good, in fact, that under circumstances I cannot possibly explain, you told me...I should know about Helena.”

Joan practically choked on her tea. Once she was done gagging, she slammed her cup down and cleared her throat.

“Ugh. I always assumed Vell told you about that, but-”

“He didn’t,” Lee insisted. “A very convoluted and inexplicable version of you did. You also said that if I doubted that, I should bring up the third grade field trip closet inci-”

“Okay that’s enough I trust you,” Joan sputtered. She all but lunged out of her chair to close Lee’s mouth for her. “Stop talking shut up never speak of this again!”

While Vell had deduced the existence of Joan’s sister Helena on his own, he had absolutely no clue about the closet incident. Considering how much effort Joan had gone to to keep it a secret, erase any clue to its existence, and even scrub it from her own memory, only she could possibly have shared that knowledge. Or five of her third grade classmates and one zoo janitor. But that was unlikely.

“About Helena, or the third gr-”

“The second thing,” Joan said. “Also, about Helena, I guess, but mostly the second thing. How much did I tell you?”

“Not much beyond the term ‘closet incident’, despite all my questions,” Lee said. “I assume the same principle applies now.”

“Yes. We never speak of this again,” Joan said, in a voice that bordered on threatening. Lee would be curious about the closet incident for the rest of her days, but she could hardly fault Joan for keeping a secret.

“Very well then, not speaking of it,” she said. “That does leave the topic of Helena, however.”

“Did you really not already know?”

“I truly have no idea,” Lee said. “If Vell is aware of whoever this person is, he’s not given me the slightest hint.”

“Huh. I always kind of assumed the reason you were so patient with me is because you knew the whole story.”

“I am patient with you because you deserve patience, dear.”

“I don’t know if that’s true,” Joan chuckled. “But I suppose the full tragic backstory helps a little. The short version is...I have a sister. Helena.”

For some reason, a tightness in Lee’s chest unwound. She’d been speculating on who Helena could possibly be and why she was so important to Joan for hours now.

“She’s a lot worse off than I am,” Joan said. She gestured to her own eyes, now deep violet instead of red. “I just got this, but she...she...The fact she’s even alive right now is more luck than anything else. I do what I can to help, but it’s all short term bandages, nothing that actually fixes the real problems. I...got a little desperate, looking for real solutions.”

Lee had always been sympathetic to Joan’s desires, misguided as they often were, but having the full story made everything make even more sense. Joan’s fervent search for the restorative powers of Vell’s rune wasn’t just a general desire to help, it was a personal crusade to save someone Joan loved. While the approach she’d taken was still too extreme, Joan’s desperation made more sense now.

“I’m sorry,” Lee said. “I know it means much less now that I don’t have millions at my disposal, but I’ll do anything I can to help.”

“It’s fine,” Joan said. “I appreciate it. Money’s not really the problem anyway. Thanks to Kraid Tech healthcare, I already get her the best care money can buy. Problem is you can’t buy a cure that doesn’t exist.”

Lee nodded along. That also explained why Joan still chose to work for Kraid. Though perhaps she didn’t have to.

“Joan, what about Harlan Industries?” Lee suggested. “You could work with us, with Vell, and prepare something to help.”

“I love you guys, but I don’t think your employee healthcare plan is going to be quite up to the task,” Joan said.

“You’d be surprised by our budget,” Lee said. “We actually had the Prime Minister of Norway express interest in the mana harvester not long ago, and we-”

Joan pressed a few buttons on her phone, displaying Helena’s most recent medical bill, and turned it around to show it to Lee. She froze mid-sentence.

“Ah.”

“Yeah. Say what you will about Kraid, he’s got a big budget,” Joan said. “I know he only does it to fuck with us, but...it keeps my sister alive. What can you do?”

Lee gave a quick nod of understanding, and a tense silence settled in on their conversation.

“Alright,” Joan said, unsettled by the long silence. “Now what?”

“Now I have to go help my friends bother an archaeologist,” Lee said.

“I assume I shouldn’t ask why you’re doing that?”

“Nope. You’re free to help us bother them, though.”

“Hell yeah, I’m great at bothering people,” Joan said.

“I don’t think that’s true, dear.”

“That’s very nice and very incorrect of you to say, Lee.”