“Nothing here either,” Cupid said.

“Excellent,” Dr. Professor Michael Watkins said. “Now leave us be, you cherubian freak.”

“Gladly,” Cupid said. Their investigation of the Marine Biology department had turned up nothing. Vell had not considered it very likely that they were the suspect, but he’d been surprised before. If nothing else, Michael Watkins seemed like the kind of guy who’d become a black hole of love. That actually reminded Vell of something.

“Hey, Cupid, you said you know what everybody loves, right?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s he love most?” Vell asked, pointing at the Doctor Professor.

“Himself,” Cupid said.

“And second place?”

“Fish. Wait, maybe his kids. No, definitely fish,” Cupid said.

“Dad!”

“Silence, Junior,” Michael said. “There are thousands of varieties of fish, and I have only two children. Simply by law of large numbers, there is a greater amount of love for fish in my heart than there is for children.”

“Oh. That makes sense.”

“It actually kind of does,” Vell admitted. “Huh.”

He left the lab anyway. It’d take more than almost-decent parenting for Vell to put up with the two Michaels. Skye finished up organizing her desk and followed behind.

“Where to next, Vell?”

“I don’t know,” Vell said. “Let me pop in the group chat and see if anyone’s headed down to the senior labs yet.”

“Wait wait wait,” Cupid said. “Hold on. I’m feeling something.”

“What? Where is it?”

“Give me a minute, let me focus,” Cupid said. “Hmm. Doesn’t feel like the same Love void from earlier. Feels kind of like...chains, maybe, something dragging me down...binding- oh shit!”

A chain of bright pink light manifested around Cupid’s ankle and started dragging him through the air. Vell and Skye turned around just in time to see Cupid get latched inside a magic birdcage, held aloft by a smiling Renee.

“Renee? What the fuck,” Vell said. “What are you doing?”

“I am taking this pathetic excuse for a god of love,” Renee screamed, practically frothing at the mouth as she screamed at Cupid’s cage. “And I am going to do his job right!”

“What do you mean?”

“None of your god damn business,” she snapped. Renee actually was frothing at the mouth now, in a very literal sense. “In fact...it’ll be even better if you’re out of the way. She’ll have even more time for me, me, me!”

Renee clenched the chain holding Cupid’s cage tight, and held her other hand out towards Vell. He knew that look all too well. Renee was somehow draining Cupid’s magical energy -and aiming it right at him and Skye.

“Get down!”

Vell jumped to grab Skye and push her to the ground, throwing himself on top of her just as Renee fired a blinding blast of hot-pink light. The violent blast surged overhead for a few seconds before stopping. Skye stayed on the ground, pinned beneath Vell, until the rattle of a chain fading into the distance indicated Renee had backed off.

“Vell, are you okay? Vell?”

“Yeah, I’m alright,” Vell grunted. “Mostly. Feels like...second degree burns. Yeah, second.”

Vell gingerly stood up, careful not to bend his back muscles any more than he had to. Cupid’s power was mostly light-based, apparently, but it still generated enough heat to burn right through his shirt and sear his skin. Skye ran around to check on him and gasped at the bright-red, blistering skin.

“We need to get you to medical, now,” Skye said.

“Yeah, I’m going, I’m going,” Vell said. Second degree burns were will within his pain tolerance by now, but it still sucked. A lot. “Could you grab my phone real quick? I can’t bend my back or move my shoulders at all.”

“Yeah, sure, of course.”

“Good. Could you text Hawke, Kim, and Samson to meet me in medical, too?”

“Yeah,” Skye said. “And uh, Vell? If Cupid hadn’t been kidnapped, he’d be saying I love you a hell of a lot more now. Thanks.”

“Yeah, don’t mention it,” Vell said. She wouldn’t mention it either way, long term. One of the few downsides of time loops: the loss of brownie points.

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

Vell got out of the med lab bed and stretched his rejuvenated back. It still stung quite a bit, but nothing that would hamper his combat skills. They didn’t have time for a lengthy treatment right now.

“Good to go?”

“Good to go,” Vell said. He summoned his three cursed pistols and strapped the gunbelt to his hips. “Let’s go find out why Renee’s crazy.”

“Do we want to call in any more cavalry?” Hawke said. “We already have most of our friends on standby anyway.”

“They’re not exactly fighters,” Vell said. “Plus, we need them to search for the Love Void anyway.”

“Are we not assuming Renee is the problem?”

“No, I think she’s actually unrelated,” Vell said. “Cupid said it’d be easy to detect the Love Void near me, but Renee was around me twice and didn’t ping anything for him.”

“She could still be brainwashed by it, or something,” Samson suggested.

“Maybe, but, uh, it doesn’t feel right,” Vell said. “It would’ve drained the love out of her too, and Cupid should’ve noticed something like that.”

“Whatever you say,” Kim said. “Only one way to find out, and that’s to find her. Isabel and Cyrus were near the magikinesis labs, so I asked them to peek through a window, and apparently it’s empty, no sign of her. I pulled up her dorm number, though.”

“Time to break and enter, then,” Vell said.

“I’m real good at that,” Kim said.

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

Five minutes later, Kim proved just how good at that she was. She barreled straight through the locked door, splintering the wood into pieces.

“Renee! Where are- oh, fuck, that explains a lot.”

“What explains- oh, yeah, that’ll do it.”

The entryway to the dorm—and every wall beyond it—was visibly wallpapered with photographs of Lee, most of them candid shots of her in class or walking between buildings. Some of them contained other people, often Vell or Harley, but any face except Lee’s had been meticulously cut out or scribbled over with a frantic scrawling of black marker.

“What the fuck,” Samson said. “Lee has a psychotic stalker?”

“Are you surprised?”

All things considered, this was not the weirdest thing they had experienced. Vell was being stalked by cosmic time butterflies nigh-constantly.

“No, in concept it’s completely predictable,” Samson said. “I’m just surprised this didn’t come up sooner. You’d think it’d have been a daily apocalypse while Lee was actually here.”

“Maybe getting separated from Lee made her even more deranged,” Hawke said.

“Maybe. I’m kind of glad Lee isn’t here for this, though,” Vell said. “This is already uncomfortable enough with her a few thousand miles away.”

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

“Have fun recapping this adventure for her, bud,” Kim said. “Let’s get to the part of the story where we whoop her stalker’s ass.”

Kim thundered down the Lee-covered hallway and then ripped the bedroom door off its hinges. She immediately saw three things: Cupid in a cage, Renee frothing with rage, and a life-size effigy of Lee with disturbingly realistic hair.

“Oh no.”

The disturbing scene made Kim hesitate just long enough to get a blast to the face courtesy of Renee. The magic she’d stolen from Cupid was not strong, but channeled through her own obsessive fury, it was enough to knock Kim across the room and right through the opposite wall.

“Get out,” Renee shrieked. “I’m almost done!”

“She’s really not,” Cupid screamed. “I keep telling her I can’t actually change people’s feelings-”

“Shut up,” Renee snapped. “If you were any good at your fucking job, Lee’d already be in love with me!”

“Uh, hi, Renee,” Vell said. He kept his back to the wall, trying to ignore the fact it was covered in pictures of his best friend. “Vell here-”

“Didn’t I already fry you?”

“More of a light sear,” Vell said. “Back on topic: I’m kind of Lee’s brother, and I can say pretty confidently she would not love what you’re doing right now.”

“I wouldn’t have to do this if she’d just fallen in love right the first time,” Renee screamed. “I did everything right! I smiled at her, I let her borrow notebooks, I said good morning every day…”

“Ma’am, you are describing being an acquaintance at best,” Samson said.

“Shut up!”

A beam of light shot into the wall and nearly set the dorm on fire.

“It would have been perfect, except she was too busy with you people, and your stupid games, to notice me,” Renee continued. “And then you tricked her into falling in love with that psychopath Joan Marsh? Like someone as perfect as Lee could ever fall in love with a girl who’d kidnap and torture an innocent person?”

“At risk of getting a beam fired at me, I think you should take some time to self-reflect on what you just said,” Samson shouted. He ducked in advance, and let a beam hit the wall right where his head had just been.

“Renee, this is not healthy behavior,” Vell said. “You need psychiatric help, not a caged deity.”

“Vell, I really appreciate you have a little love in your heart even for your enemies,” Cupid said. His voice sounded strained. “But I think this bitch is killing me! Shoot her!”

“One second,” Vell said. “Kim’ll be mad if I don’t let her get her punch in.”

Renee turned her attention to the hole she’d blasted Kim through. There was no sign of motion. She put her back to the wall and readied her blasting hand anyway.

In a burst of shattered drywall and timber, a metal fist ripped through the wall Renee was leaning against. The hand closed around her throat, held on tight, and pulled, dragging Renee backwards through the dorm room wall in a shower of dust and splinters.

“You put me through a wall,” Kim shouted. “I put you through a wall.”

After getting blasted out of the room, she had opted to walk around and approach from the opposite direction, even if that meant going through the wall. It had been very distressing for both of Renee’s neighbors, but they’d forget the trauma, while Kim would remember the satisfaction.

While Renee was still dealing with the trauma and confusion of being pulled through a wall, Kim brought a heavy metal foot down on her blasting hand. The new bout of pain kept her crippled long enough for Kim to grab the magic chain holding Cupid’s cage and try with all her might to break it. The glowing chain resisted even her incredible strength.

“Vell, I think this cage is magic,” Kim said. “You got any dispel runes on hand?”

“A couple, yeah, hold her down,” Vell said. He got his phone ready to call up runes and walked through the Renee-shaped hole in the wall, while Kim grabbed Renee by the shoulders to pin her down.

“No, stop it, I need this,” Renee said.

“You need some lithium pills, you manic bitch,” Kim said. Vell put a dispel rune on the chain, which failed to take effect. He started summoning more, relying on the additive effect to eventually work.

“Stop it,” Renee screamed, as she struggled against Kim’s ironclad grip.

“This is unhealthy,” Vell said. “Once this is over, we’ll get you the help you need.”

“I don’t need help! I need love!”

Renee’s efforts to escape redoubled. Kim had more than enough strength to wrestle dragons, much less one crazy stalker, but Renee’s fervent struggle held other risks.

“Hey, watch what you’re pushing against, you’re going to break something.”

Almost perfectly synchronized to the end of Kim’s sentence, Renee’s arm snapped loudly. The broken bone gave her a little extra wiggle room. Not much, but just enough to reach out with her other hand and grab the magic cage.

“Fuck.”

Vell and Kim got a face full of the entire rainbow, and this time it burned a lot hotter.

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

“And that’s how we all got incinerated,” Vell said. “Thanks, Kim.”

“I’m sorry I don’t anticipate that lunatic breaking her own arm,” Kim said. “Who does that?”

“Fascinating,” Helena said. She had been left out of the combat portion of apocalypse prevention, but the story was intriguing. “Somehow I’m always surprised how depraved people can become. What do you plan on doing about Renee?”

“What do you mean ‘doing’?” Hawke said. “We’re already done. We called the fucking cops.”

Hawke pointed towards the docks. A large grey vessel was docked, and a few uniformed officers were milling about after hauling Renee aboard.

“Stalking is a crime, Helena,” Samson said.

“I know that! You just usually do elaborate bullshit.”

“Not taking any risks with this one,” Vell said. He’d also warned Lee, and helped her get started on a restraining order. “Now we have to see if that solved the Love Void problem or not.”

Vell still wasn’t convinced Renee had any connection to Cupid’s initial concern. He waited for proof of his theory, and found it when Cupid started plummeting towards campus once again. This time they did not run from the careening comet, or even flinch when it came to a halt just in front of their table.

“Hey.”

“Hi,” Vell said. “Just out of curiosity, are you supposed to be some weird ball of light?”

“Oh, right no, one second.”

Cupid took on his cherubic form, and recapped his need for Vell’s help. Vell sat through the explanation and plea for help.

“I’m sure with a little help, we can get to the bottom of- hold on a bit,” Cupid said. Vell sat up straight for the first time in the lecture. That hadn’t happened the first time. “I think...holy shit.”

Cupid ducked behind Vell and grabbed on to his shoulders.

“It’s coming! The love abyss is coming!”

“What? Right now?”

“Yeah! It’s that way,” Cupid said, pointing towards a nearby building. “I can feel it getting closer! It’ll be here any second, any- Ah!”

The love abyss rounded the corner, and glared at them with intense eyes partially hidden by thick rimmed glasses.

“What’s the baby screaming about?” Alex asked.

“Gah, Alex, you- wait,” Vell said. “Alex?”

“Yes, obviously,” Alex said. “Apparently you got one of the students I was supposed to test with arrested, so my experiment for today was canceled.”

She wandered over and took a seat with the rest of the loopers. Cupid clung to Vell’s shoulder, staring at her with wide-eyed terror as she approached and sat down.

“Alex, this is Cupid,” Vell said. “Cupid, this is...Alex.”

Cupid stared at Alex, who stared right back with a look of intense disdain.

“What are you?” Cupid whimpered.

“I’m human,” Alex said. “I should be asking you what you are.”

As Cupid’s fearful staredown continued, Alex glanced sideways at Helena. She was red in the face again.

“Going to fake cry again?”

“No,” Helena said. Her voice was strained with exertion. “I’m trying not to- not to-”

Her “trying” became “failing” as Helena burst out laughing. It was a strained, choking laugh, given her weak lungs, but still obviously a laugh, and a laugh of mockery, at that.

“What’s she laughing about?”

“You,” Helena said. “I’m laughing at you! You’re the Love Void!”

Helena slapped the table a few times and then started holding back her laughter at least long enough to talk straight.

“Cupid, Cupid, tell me,” Helena said. “Love is when something makes your life better, right?”

“Sort of…”

“And there you go! You’re the Love Void, Alex. You’re the black hole that all joy disappears into,” Helena said. “Because you make everyone’s life worse. Everyone around you is less happy because you exist.”

Helena went back to her giggle fit. Alex didn’t seem bothered by her comments at all, even though everyone else did.

“Cupid, is that true?”

“I think it might be,” Cupid said. He peeked a little further over Vell’s shoulder at Alex. “What’s your name? Who are you?”

“Alex. Alexandria Gray Hawk, in full. From the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana.”

“Alexandria...Grey Hawk...Hold on,” Cupid said. He focused intensely, digging into past records of historical love. His eyes snapped back into focus as he appeared to find what he was looking for. “Wait. Didn’t you die when you were seven years old?”

“Obviously not,” Alex said. “Why?”

“Because that’s the last time you show up in my records,” Cupid said. “That’s the last time you loved anything. Or anything loved you.”

Helena was still laughing, but all the other bystanders felt a cold chill in their hearts. Alex merely rolled her eyes.

“Love is a romanticized notion of our biological imperative to reproduce,” Alex said. “It doesn’t exist, and you, ‘Cupid’, are just a psychosocial manifestation of humanity’s collective delusion that ‘love’ is real. It’s a common phenomenon, lots of seemingly magical creatures are born from it.”

Cupid started to return Alex’s disdainful stare.

“Starting to see why no one loves you,” Cupid said.

“You’re two steps removed from being a figment of my imagination, I don’t care about your opinion,” Alex said. “Now, was there an actual problem to deal with, or are we all sitting here listening to the imaginary cherub?”

“No one’s keeping you here, Alex,” Samson mumbled.

“And quite provably, no one wants you here either,” Helena said. She interrupted her giggle fit just to throw out one last barb.

“Right. I’m going to go see if I can salvage anything of that experiment you ruined,” Alex said. She didn’t bother to say goodbye before walking away.

“I don’t know how to feel about that,” Kim mumbled.

“If anyone ever deserved to be unloved, it’s her,” Samson said. He glanced at a still-giggly Helena. “And you.”

“Benefits of having a sister, I suppose,” Helena said. “She must be an only child. And an orphan.”

“She’s not,” Cupid said. Helena stopped giggling.

“Not what?”

“Not an orphan,” Cupid said. He’d checked his registries. “Her parents are alive. They just...don’t love her.”

Even Helena fell quiet at that one.

“I...I should go,” Cupid said. He flapped his wings and alighted from Vell’s shoulder, taking to the skies.

“Is that it?” Vell asked. “Do you not need to do something about the Love Voi- Alex?”

“Not really. When I came here, I thought it was some kind of monster, or freak magical anomaly,” Cupid said. “She’s just a person. An unlovable, unloving person. She’s not going to destroy the concept of love, or anything, she’s just going to be miserable her whole life, and make everyone around her miserable too.”

Cupid started flapping skyward, towards the sun.

“Sorry to bother you guys, and...good luck,” Cupid said. “Remember to love each other.”

Cupid returned to his ball of light form, and rocketed back into the sky, leaving behind five very somber students. Helena was the first to regain some semblance of herself, and she looked skyward.

“You know, flying around like that, he kind of looks like a gay meteor.”