Carmella Nguyen prodded the captive Akua in the back, pushing her towards Vell and Leanne. This time, Leanne took a firm hold of the dangerous looper. Nguyen’s timely appearance had probably used up all their luck for the day.
“Your stunned silence implies you have difficulty trusting me. An understandable reaction based on the behavior of the student body as a whole,” Nguyen said. “If I may elaborate upon my reasons for-”
“No, actually, we, uh, I trust you,” Vell said. “I’m just a little surprised. By your timing, mostly.”
“Convenient, yes, I agree, but I believe the universe must throw at least a few coincidences in my favor,” Nguyen said. “Lijia certainly benefits from a great deal of good fortune.”
Vell and Leanne exchanged a quick glance, and then shushed Akua. Nguyen noticed their odd behavior, but did not bother asking for an explanation.
“The very pliable Akua tells me you are looking for something,” Nguyen said. She gave a cold glare to Akua, who withered beneath the chilling gaze. Akua didn’t seem to have much of a backbone when separated from both her guns and her evil overlord. “She has also told me that what you are looking for is currently in Lijia’s possession.”
“Okay, I guess we’re going after the crazy bitch with the sword,” Vell said.
“A concerning statement under ordinary circumstances, but your armaments seem to be slightly less outdated,” Nguyen said, with a critical glare at Vell’s cowboy-era firearms.
“I know my way around these things,” Vell said.
“Your skill, or lack thereof, is not my area of concern,” Nguyen said. “Do you not have superior armaments in the future?’
The sentence hit Vell like a brick in the head. He chose to direct his sudden confusion at Akua in the form of outrage.
“You were gone for like three minutes,” Vell snapped. “How did she get literally everything out of you?”
“That one was an estimation, actually,” Nguyen said. “Akua was surprisingly recalcitrant to explain your origins, given how easily she gave up every other relevant factoid. Thank you for confirming my theory.”
Leanne gave Vell a gentle slap on the head. He rubbed the sore spot on his scalp and tried to cover his own mistakes as best he could.
“Right, well, we can’t like, answer any questions or anything,” Vell said.
“I assumed. Time paradoxes are not to be trifled with,” Nguyen said. “I am willing to let the matter lie while we focus our joint efforts on Lijia Mian.”
“Cool. So, uh, do you have a plan? Because I’m going to be honest, we don’t,” Vell said. The stare Nguyen gave him contained an entire novel’s worth of scolding. Not just some light airport reading, either, but an old school Russian novel’s worth. A veritable War and Peace of Vell’s own stupidity.
“Lock the minion in a bathroom and follow me,” Nguyen ordered. Leanne threw Akua into the bathroom and barred the door with a chair, then followed Nguyen and Vell back out of the dorms.
“The plan is as follows: we will appeal to Lijia’s ego, taking advantage of her desire to prove herself superior, and bait her into a confrontation without the massive mob which she has at her back,” Nguyen said. “At this point- My apologies, we did not properly introduce ourselves, my name is Carmella Nguyen. And yourselves?”
“You can call me Bill, and that’s Jane,” Vell said, sticking to their initial, panic-inspired aliases.
“Ah, after Wild Bill Hickock and Calamity Jane,” Nguyen noted. “Fitting, given your armaments. As I was saying, after Lijia has been drawn into a solo confrontation, Bill will shoot her.”
“Uh, what?”
“You have a gun. When she renders herself vulnerable, you will use it.”
“I mean, I don’t want to kill anyone,” Vell said.
“An admirable, if not pragmatic stance. I am not asking you to kill, however, merely incapacitate her long enough for us to retrieve the item you seek.”
“I guess I can do that,” Vell said.
“And you will,” Nguyen said. “I appreciate the faith you have placed in my plan. I assure you it will not fail.”
----------------------------------------
It failed.
Nguyen’s proposed duel of wits was cut short by Lijia snapping her fingers and demanding the crazed mob of students to surround them. Lijia herself cut through the swarm of bodies and strutted in front of the trio of would-be assassins with cocksure pride.
“You really should communicate better,” Lijia taunted. “What good is appealing to my ego if no one here is going to remember me backing down?”
Nguyen turned to Vell and Leanne for clarification. They shrugged.
“If you really need a decades-old freshman to come up with your plans for you, I shudder to think of what stupidity your time holds,” Lijia said. “I think I’m going to do the future a favor by getting rid of you.”
“You don’t even know you’re getting rid of us,” Vell said. “We’re going to be waiting for you in the future, you know.”
“If your performance today is anything to go by, I’m not worried about what you can do,” Lijia snapped back. “And from the way you recognized me, I’d wager I’m someone important in the future you come from. Someone with resources.”
Vell tried his best not to make a face. He didn’t want to give Lijia any hint that she’d be disappearing mysteriously sometime in the next few days.
“I think I’ll do fine,” Lijia said. She turned her back on the trio and faced the mob. “Tear them apart! But do it slowly. It’s what Bowie would want.”
The mob brandished a surprising amount of torches and pitchforks for a college campus and began to close in. While Nguyen and Leanne backed away and prepared to fight for their lives, Vell started to grab his phone.
“Wait a minute, this is all about Bowie?”
“You have insulted one of our generations greatest rock artists,” the lead of the mob shouted. “Ziggy Stardust demands blood!”
“Alright, hold up with the cries for my blood for a second,” Vell said. He held up his phone close to his face to eliminate background noise. “Play Heroes by David Bowie!”
Vell cranked the volume as high as it would go, held up the phone, and hoped for the best. The dulcet tones of legendary rock musician David Bowie had a way of cutting through even the violent rage of a bloodthirsty mob. The roiling mass of bodies halted in their tracks as the song continued to play.
“This is a trick, I’ve never heard this song before,” someone said.
“Silence! The silky smooth baritone and rhythmic bass backings are beyond question! It must be the work of Bowie!”
“That’s right,” Vell said. “I am a, uh, Prophet of Bowie, sent from the future, I guess, to deliver the truth of David Bowie’s iconic musical career.”
The violence of the mob turned to reverence. Some of the people at the front even started bowing to Vell, which he did not like at all.
“Uh, no bowing, please, that’s weird,” he said. “I am, you know, just the messenger here, guys, Bowie did all the hard work.”
“But what of this one,” the mob’s now de-facto leader (by virtue of being the first one to talk) demanded. He pointed at Lijia. “She claimed you were a liar, a heretic to the universal truth of Bowie!”
“Wow, you guys really get into this cult stuff, huh?” Vell said. He was far from comfortable with this situation. “She was just, uh, trying to silence the voice. Of Bowie. I guess.”
“Heretic!”
In an instant, all the mobs wrath became focused entirely on Lijia.
“Oh shit,” Vell said. “Phone, play everything by David Bowie!”
He then held up his phone, which had started broadcasting a new song, and waved it tantalizingly towards the crowd, the way one waved a treat at a hungry dog.
“You guys want more Bowie?” He asked. The mob cried out “yes” in unison. Vell tossed the phone to Leanne and mimed a throwing motion. “Go get it!”
Taking the hint, Leanne cocked her arm back and then chucked the phone across the quad. The music faded into the distance, as did the stampeding footsteps of the mob that chased it, as the phone flew through the air. In an instant, Lijia, Leanne, Vell, and Nguyen were alone. Lijia was starting to sweat.
“So...” Lijia said. “When can I expect Bowie’s next album?”
“As if,” Vell said. “Leanne?”
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It took two steps for Leanne to close the distance, grab Lijia by the wrist, and start shaking her down for the pen. While she did so, Nguyen turned to Vell.
“That was unorthodox,” she said blankly. Vell really couldn’t tell if it was praise or an insult.
“Yeah, probably,” Vell said. “I’m just glad I checked my playlist earlier. I forgot I even had that much Bowie on my phone.”
“You have a portable phone that stores music?”
“Boy am I glad you aren’t going to remember I said any of that,” Vell said. He avoided further time-paradox-causing interactions with Nguyen by walking in Leanne’s direction “Leanne, you find it yet?”
Leanne nodded and dropped Lijia to the ground. As Vell stepped up, she handed over the pen. He examined the generic object and sighed.
“Now we still have to figure out where this belongs,” Vell said. “How do you figure out where a single pen belongs on a huge college campus...”
“Oh, where did you find that?” Nguyen asked. She snatched the pen from Vell’s hands. “I’ve been looking for my pen all-”
Vell and Leanne felt a brief electric tingle, then looked. Cane waved to them from across the quad -the modern quad.
“Well all righty then,” Vell said. “I guess that works.”
----------------------------------------
Vell checked the time on his phone. Leanne would be leaving practice -and the time-traveling pen would be dropping from the sky- any second now. He kept a watchful eye towards the skies and towards the surroundings. Leanne stepped off the field and looked up as well. She caught the glint of light as the pen started to fall. She then looked to Vell and gave a conspiratorial nod.
With a dull thud, the pen hit the ground. Vell stepped up to examine it.
“So...do you want to touch it?”
Leanne shook her head.
“Well I’m not going to touch it,” Vell said. “Last time we touched it we both time-traveled. Let’s go get some, uh, pliers or something. Maybe that’ll do it.”
Leanne nodded, and they both put on a dramatic show of turning their backs on the pen and walking away. Vell had had a few hours to rehearse his lines, so his acting was slightly better than usual. He just hoped he had an audience. This whole routine fell apart if Dr. Akua wasn’t watching. Thankfully, they had correctly estimated her level of inept evil.
With a triumphant cry, Dr. Akua emerged from the bushes and nabbed the pen from the dirt. Vell and Leanne looked on in mock confusion as Dr. Akua cackled.
“It’s been a long time, ‘Bill and Jane’,” Dr. Akua said.
“Been about, uh, thirteen hours for us, actually,” Vell said. “I see old age has done nothing to mellow you out.”
“Oh no, ‘Bill’, I’ve been waiting a long time for this,” Akua said. “I never forgot you.”
“Right. Exactly what are you holding a grudge for, anyway? Lijia’s gone. Has been for a while.”
“I know,” Akua said, venom dripping from every frantic word. “And it’s your fault. It’s all your fault! You beat her! She lost, for the first time in her life, to you, and because of you, she pushed herself harder, she went further, and then one day she was gone!”
“Look, I’m sorry about your friend, but-”
“I don’t want your apologies,” Akua said. She reached into her purse and grabbed on to something.
“Then what do you want?”
“I want you to grab on to this pen,” Akua said. It took two or more loopers grabbing a time-displaced object to create the necessary quantum bullshit to cause time travel. “So we can fix what you broke, and I can have Lijia back.
“Well that’s obviously not going to work,” Vell said. “If it did, you’d already remember us going back to the past, and Lijia never would’ve vanished in the first place.”
“I’m not here to discuss temporal mechanics,” Akua said. “Grab the pen.”
“Why would I do that?”
To answer Vell’s question, Akua removed a gun from her purse.
“Ah,” Vell said.
Leanne’s eyes went wide at both the gun, and the fact that Vell jumped between it and her. The gun had barely left Akua’s purse before Vell placed himself directly in front of it, shielding Leanne to the best of his ability. Leanne didn’t know whether to consider it stupidity or courage.
“Twitching around won’t save you this time,” Akua said, in spite of the fact that Vell had stopped moving. “I’ve been practicing.”
Akua, who had been obsessively practicing her revenge for more than forty years, easily tracked Vell’s every move. Before she could pull the trigger, however, her blood ran cold. Not because of any psychological reasons, as Akua was absolutely down to commit a double homicide and had in fact been looking forward to it for several decades, but because everything about her hand went cold. Mavis Akua looked down to see that her hand had been completely encased in a block of ice.
“Bitch!” Harley shouted. She had been planning to shout something more clever, but seeing the gun pointed at her friends had blasted all the comedy right out of her mind. Harley hurled the “weapon” she’d brought -a bag of expired flour borrowed from Renard- in Akua’s direction, and it exploded across the would-be murderer’s head. She had initially just thought it would be funny to see the bag pop on Akua’s head, but the fact that the powder blinded her added another layer of security, in case Akua broke the ice Lee had formed around her gun-wielding hand.
“What the-”
“Surprise, asshole, there’s four of us,” Harley said, stepping fully out of her hiding place. “Congratulations on having forty years to not fuck this up and fucking it up anyway.”
Lee stepped into view as well, as their trap had already been fully sprung. Despite having forty years to prepare for this reunion, versus Vell and Leanne’s thirteen hours, Dr. Akua had been wholly caught off guard thanks to the reinforcement of the two other loopers. Lee concentrated intensely on keeping Akua’s hand frozen, focusing especially on the gun.
“We might’ve been content to leave you with a warning-”
“And a head covered in flour.”
“Yes, and a head covered in flour, but you have taken it much too far, Dr. Akua,” Lee said. “Harley, please contact campus security, inform them we have a lunatic wielding a gun on campus.”
“You got it boss,” Harley said. She made a call and then wandered off to help nab the nearest security bot. Akua stared at the frozen gun in one hand, and the pen she held in the other. A smarter person might have tried to use the pen to break the ice, but Akua was the opposite of a smarter person. With her safely disarmed, Vell stepped away from his place between Leanne and the gun. Leanne stayed right where she was.
“So,” Vell said. “Forty years of grudge-holding, huh?”
“Shut up,” Akua snapped. Vell shrugged and stuck a hand in his pocket.
“I’m just saying, was it really worth trying to steal a handful of Professor Nguyen’s notes?”
“What do you mean, trying? We stole them anyway,” Akua said. “Dozens of them. More than we planned on, even. I took credit for hundreds of hours of Nguyen’s work.”
“Okay, cool, thanks for enunciating that very clearly,” Vell said. He took his phone out of his pocket and hit the button to stop recording. “Have fun with that confession playing in court.”
Akua stared impotently at the phone. She hadn’t even mentioned the loops, something that might’ve rendered the “confession” unusable.
“Again, you had like four decades to prepare for this,” Vell said. “I understand the phone throwing you off back in the 70’s, but smartphones have been a thing for a while now. What have you been doing?”
“Scheming, mostly.”
“Was it worth it?”
Akua looked down at her frozen hand, and the thick covering of flour over her upper body. She chose to say nothing, if only to deny Vell the satisfaction of hearing her admit defeat.
----------------------------------------
A day later, after Professor Nguyen’s class wrapped up, Vell lingered for a moment. Once again, the ironclad professor didn’t look up from her desk as she spoke to him. Vell found that significantly less off-putting now. He had assumed, once, that there was some deeper meaning behind her stern demeanor, some emotional wound she still bore, but his travel to the past had proven that wrong. Carmella Nguyen was just a natural hardass. It was comforting, in a way.
“Mr. Harlan, what can I do for you?”
“I was just wondering how that thing with Dr. Akua turned out?”
“She was summarily stripped of her credentials. The school, and several academic institutions, have granted me retroactive honors for the discoveries she stole credit for,” Nguyen said flatly. While no institution had been able to explain exactly how Akua had plagiarized Nguyen’s work, the recorded confession, and Akua’s own bumbling nature, had allowed them to establish a solid case.
“That’s good to hear,” Vell said. “I’m glad you’re finally getting the credit you deserve.”
“The plaques I received went directly into the trash, Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen said. “I have never pursued knowledge out of a desire for fame and acknowledgment. Ambitions of that nature are what led to Lijia Mian’s inevitable downfall -as well as the unfortunate fates of her cohorts.”
Over the past few days, Vell had spent more time looking into the fates of the loopers from the early 70’s. Lijia had disappeared mysteriously, Isaac’s life had fallen apart, Akua was now disgraced and headed to prison, and the as-yet unseen Jason had apparently died in an easily preventable accident shortly after leaving college -an act of carelessness Lee theorized might have been born from his repeated deaths and resurrections affecting his self-preservation instincts. Over all, the loopers of the past seemed to have met grim fates. A pattern which starkly worried the loopers of the modern day.
“Well, uh...I guess it’s nice that Akua got what she deserved, then?”
“Without access to my notes to steal, Akua’s scientific career floundered, Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen continued. She still had not looked up from her paperwork. “She was stuck in a dead end laboratory position, doing tedious work in service roles. She had suffered plenty of indignity already, by my estimation.”
“I guess that’s one way to see it,” Vell said.
“Fishing for praise is not becoming of you, Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen said. “You jumped in front of a gun for the sake of plagiarism done half a century ago. Courage and virtue are admirable qualities, Mr. Harlan, but not when separated from wisdom. Your life is worth more than doing the ‘right’ thing once.”
With a stiff motion so momentous Vell’s heart skipped a beat, Dr. Nguyen looked up from her paperwork and glared at Vell.
“I firmly believe you have the capacity to make the world a better place, Vell Harlan,” Dr. Nguyen said. “Do not disappoint me.”
Vell stood in place for about ten seconds and contemplated what to say. Nguyen didn’t wait for him to get a word in edgewise before returning to her paperwork.
“I’ll do my best,” he said. “Not to. Not to disappoint you, that is.”
“I understood your meaning,” she said. “You are dismissed, Mr. Harlan, you’ve put me behind on my paperwork.”
Vell took the excuse to leave. As he’d left later than every other student, the hallways were empty, other than one lone figure leaning against a wall on the opposite end of the hallway. Vell waved at Leanne as he passed by.
“Hi Leanne.”
“Hey.”
Vell stopped in his tracks and turned around. Leanne pointed at herself with a smile on her face.
“Yeah, I figured, it’s just, uh,” Vell said. “I thought you were kind of…”
“I figured if I never talked to you again I couldn’t say thanks,” Leanne said. “You sort of jumped in front of a gun for me, Vell. That warrants at least one more conversation.”
“Oh, I guess, yeah,” Vell said.
“And I guess I owe you an apology for flipping out on you in that hallway,” Leanne said. “I get it.”
While Vell, in his own way, acted just as insane as every other looper Leanne had ever met, she was starting to understand that he did so for very different reasons. She’d known a lot of people who would do crazy, reckless things, but only because constant death had made them forget their fear. When Vell did something crazy and reckless, he did it so someone else wouldn’t have to.
“Alright. Well, I’m still sorry for scaring you,” Vell said. Another point in his favor. Vell actually apologized. Unlike some people Leanne knew.
“Cool. Talk to you later, Vell.”
“Really?”
Leanne shrugged.
“Well, maybe. I’m still kind of the quiet type.”
“Understandable.”
“I have at least one more conversation loaded up, though,” Leanne said. She followed along at Vell’s side as he continued walking to his next class. A question had come to mind. “In all of this, did you find anything out about what happened to Lijia?”
“Oh, now you’re curious,” Vell said. Leanne had tried to gesture him out of investigating Lijia when all this had started, and now she was the one asking questions.
“The bitch tried to stab me, I want to know if she’s in some kind of pocket dimension waiting to jump out and ambush me,” Leanne said.
“Great, now I’m afraid of that too,” Vell said. “But I don’t know. I tried to ask Akua before she got arrested, but all she knew was that Lijia went ‘looking for someone’.”
“Hmm. That’s ominous.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, Vell, it’s always been weird here, but it’s gotten a lot more ominous since you showed up.”
“I’m sorry.”