Vell did prefer to knock on doors, when given the option. He spent so much time barging his way through to prevent disasters, it felt nice to just be paying a lab a friendly visit for once. While the circumstances were much calmer, the reaction to his arrival was not. The student answering the door took one look at Vell and her heart visibly skipped a beat.

“Oh jeez, it’s you,” Rawya said. “I didn’t make another super-addictive brain destroying game, did I?”

“Not that I know of,” Vell said. “Should I be worried about that?”

“No, I’ve been trying to avoid games,” Rawya said. “If you’re not here to save our asses, what do you need?”

“Well, why don’t I show you,” Vell said. “Alex?”

Alex took two steps up, held up her phone to Rawya, and opened one of her apps. Rather than the weather, the app displayed a horrific distorted face and created a loud shrieking noise. Rawya held up her hand, and Alex closed the app, stopping the video on its tracks.

“You came to the best programmers on planet earth because you got a screamer?”

“Well, you see, the thing is…”

Alex opened another app. The screaming face appeared once again. She tabbed into the next app, and the screamer was there. A third app, a third scream. The pattern continued until Alex had gone through nearly every app on her home screen, and been met with a horrific scream in every single one.

“I see the problem,” Rawya said.

“This is a deliberate attack,” Alex said. “And Kim traced the source back to your laboratory.”

“If I could just take a quick look around, I think I know what’s up,” Vell said. Rawya invited him in, and Vell and Alex made a beeline for the back of the lab. Nobody bothered to look surprised when the two of them found Helena sitting at her workstation, perusing a gallery of horrifying faces.

“Hi guys,” Helena said.

“Helena,” Alex grunted. “Is this your idea of a joke?”

“Well, not exactly,” Helena said. “My idea of a joke was remotely overloading your phone until the battery exploded, but that would’ve gotten me a bigger lecture from this guy.”

Helena pointed at Vell, who was doing his best to look stern and disapproving.

“As is, I think this is a mostly harmless and entirely deserved prank,” Helena said. “Don’t you agree?”

“Just put her phone back to normal,” Vell said. Helena turned around, tapped in a few buttons, and did just that. Alex opened up her phone and tested out the apps, just to be sure there were no horrors lying in wait to ambush her.

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“What exactly did you hope to accomplish with any of this?”

“I thought it’d be funny,” Helena said. “And I was right.”

“But what was the point? I don’t have experiment to conduct today, no important calls to make,” Alex said. “What did disrupting my phone accomplish?”

“It annoyed you for an hour or so,” Helena said. “If my goal was to make you fail at something, Alex, I’d just sit back and let it happen. All I wanted to do was bother you for a while.”

“That’s enough,” Vell said. “Alex, get out of here. I’ll handle Helena.”

“Because you’ve proven so authoritative before,” Alex said. She rolled her eyes and rolled out, leaving Vell to stare down at Helena for a while. He double-checked over his shoulder to make sure she’d really left.

“Okay, she deserved that a little bit,” Vell said.

“Right?”

“You went a little overboard, though,” Vell said. “One screamer is a prank, everything being a screamer is a genuine problem. If you’d gone just one a day, at random intervals, you probably could’ve drawn it out for like a week or something before she got pissy about it.”

“Hmm. Good point,” Helena said. “Aren’t you supposed to be lecturing me, though?”

“A little bit,” Vell said. “Deserved as it is, it’s not always a good idea to harass people you’re going to be stuck working with for the next four years.”

“Oh come on, you really think she’s going to make it that long?” Helena scoffed. “The only reason Alex is still part of this school is because you’re covering her ass. I’ll be surprised if she makes it through a single day after you graduate.”

“I’m hoping she’ll mellow out,” Vell said.

“Unlikely,” Helena said. “And even if she does, the school might run out of reasons to keep her around. You know she’s not actually here as a student, right?”

“What?”

Helena went back to her computer and pulled up a series of records, most of them academic transcripts from schools Alex had attended throughout her life. At a glance, the grades were high, but not nearly as exceptional as the average Einstein-Odinson attendee’s were supposed to be.

“Should you have these?”

“Obviously not, but that’s not the important part,” Helena said. “Look at this, Vell. She’s not here to study, she’s here to be studied. That’s why the magikinesis department was examining her the other day, when Cupid showed up.”

Vell could not deny the logic. He had always seen Alex’s gray magic as a strange oddity, and apparently some other people at this school agreed.

“She doesn’t love anything,” Vell said. “Magic is fueled by the balance of willpower and discipline. No willpower, nothing to balance.”

“Precisely,” Helena said. “Everybody thinks she’s some kind of inexplicable prodigy, but she’s not. She’s just a soulless husk of a person. Once someone else figures that out, no one will care about researching her, and bye bye Alex.”

“That’s...sad,” Vell said.

“On an existential level, maybe,” Helena said. She couldn’t care less about Alex as a person. “Anyway, while I’m in here, do you want to see Samson’s grades?”

“Do you have files on everyone here?”

“Except for Kim, obviously, she’s only like three years old,” Helena said. “But other than that, yes.”

Vell contemplated that for a few seconds.

“Stop doing that,” he demanded.

“Fine. I’ve already seen all the interesting stuff anyway.”

“And, uh, on the note of that screamer stuff,” Vell began.

“Oh, is this where the lecture happens?”

“No. Could you rework that to do something like, say, just rickroll someone?”

“Easily,” Helena said. “Why? You have something in mind?”

“I just want a prank in my back pocket,” Vell said. “In case Orn or Michael Junior pisses me off, you know.”

“Hmm. I happen to dislike those two,” Helena said. “Sure. I’ll send you the code. Just let me know when you drop it. I want to see the looks on their faces.”

“Sure,” Vell said. “You’ll be the first to know.”