After a few minutes of ruminating on the possibilities, Vell had realized he had one fact that was very likely to distract Isaac Goodwell.

“So did I tell you I met Lijia Mian?”

“What?”

“Yeah, it was some time travel stuff, you know,” Vell said. “I went back, she tried to convince me to plagiarize something for her, I refused, she threatened to kill me with a sword, there was a cult to David Bowie involved. The usual stuff.”

“That...you’re lying to me,” Goodwell said. He turned away from his monitor to look at Vell. He did remember a day where everyone had been screaming about David Bowie, but that had to have been a coincidence.

“Nope, completely true,” Vell said.

“She would’ve told me,” Goodwell insisted. “Lijia trusted me.”

“Uh...not really? She didn’t like you, man,” Vell said. “Like, at all. She sent you on fake tasks just to get away from you. Even had some other looper dress up in a rubber suit to keep you distracted.”

Goodwell’s eyes narrowed. “Roswell” the alien had always looked a little rubbery. His fingers hovered over the keyboard for a second.

“So maybe you really did go to the past,” Goodwell said. “But you’re wrong about Lijia.”

“Hey, don’t worry, I’ve, uh, been there, you know?” Vell said. “You think you have something with a girl, then they turn out to be willing to kill you. I know how that feels.”

As he spoke, Vell angled his head towards the monitor. Goodwell was still keeping his distance, letting Vell get a peek at his work. He could only see the edges of a few words and phrases, but he could see that “rune” and “change” were repeated more than once.

“You...you’re not planning on trying to bring her back, are you?”

“I would if I could. Maybe I will, someday,” Goodwell said. In the end, Vell got what he wanted, though not on purpose. Goodwell leaned entirely away from his monitor and spun in his chair, giving Vell a clear look at the monitor as he gloated. “Thanks to you, I’m going to have all the time in the world.”

He looked at Vell, to find that Vell was not looking at him. Goodwell did a double-take and realized Vell was scanning the monitor, looking more and more concerned with every word. The rogue principal scooted back in front of the screen a second too late.

“You want to swap brains with me?”

Vell didn’t know whether to be horrified, confused, or amused. Goodwell wanted, by some means or another, to exchange his consciousness into Vell’s body.

“Not brains, necessarily. Personality, soul, whatever you want to call it,” Goodwell said.

“I call it a bad idea! That’s saturday morning cartoon bullshit, Goodwell, not science!”

“I know what I’m doing,” Goodwell said, echoing Joan in a very unfortunate way. “Your body’s more acclimated to surges of magic, it’ll endure the transfer.”

Vell gave the deepest, longest sigh of his life. Everywhere he turned there was some other lunatic trying to do the impossible, and expecting him to pay the price.

“Why do you even want to do this, Goodwell? What do you possibly have to gain?”

“I want my life back,” Goodwell grumbled.

“No, it sort of seems like you want my life,” Vell snapped.

“Your life should be my life,” Goodwell said. “In the loop, getting a second chance at everything, having the chance to do things right!”

Isaac Goodwell had been out of the loop for nearly half a century, but he still missed it every day. After experiencing a life free of consequence, the real world seemed intolerable by comparison. All his cuts and scrapes were permanent, every mistake he made could never be undone -it was exhausting. Goodwell wanted to recapture his past, the idyllic chaos of his college years -those perfect, perfect days of the past.

Vell, on the other hand, saw a very clear problem with his plan.

“You realize your whole plan hinges on me not getting a second chance at today, right?”

Goodwell paused for a moment.

“It’ll be enough second chances to manage,” Goodwell grumbled. “To avoid the worst of what happens to me.”

“I hate to break it to you Goodwell, but it won’t change anything,” Vell snapped. “You think if you had do-overs you could’ve avoided hitting your wife, or losing your old job, or whatever, but it won’t work.”

“It will work,” Goodwell snapped back.

“It won’t! Because those things didn’t ‘happen to you’, you did them!” Vell said. “You can get all the second chances or steal all the lives you want, you’ll never stop making mistakes! No one ever does! The only thing you can do is learn from them.”

“Are you sure you’re studying runes, because you seem to want to play therapist today,” Goodwell noted. He stood up and started digging through his gathered supplies.

“I’d be more than happy to sit down on a couch and talk about your issu- mmph.”

Vell managed one last grunt of displeasure as Goodwell slapped a piece of industrial duct tape over his mouth. Goodwell made sure it was stuck and breathed a sigh of relief.

“Don’t know why I didn’t do that at the start,” he mumbled. Vell grunted in agreement.

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

“It’s just down this way,” Joan said. Since she’d been appointed as an “assistant” to Principal Goodwell several days ago, and Lee was an RA, the faculty building staff didn’t question their passage into the basement of the building.

“Great, underground,” Harley said.

“Do you have to comment on everything?” Joan said.

“Just need to get it out of my system,” Harley said. “I got a lot of very negative opinions.”

“I get that you’re angry, and I understand why,” Joan sighed. “Lee told me what I did to Vell.”

“Hold on, what?”

“I told her about how I can see the future,” Lee said, giving Harley a stiff elbow to the shoulder. Luckily Joan was too busy being despondent to notice the exchange. Harley rubbed her sore shoulder and tried to play it cool.

“Okay, fine, you know about the future,” Harley said. “So you know exactly how bad you fucked up.”

“Yes, I know I hurt Vell-”

“Oh, ‘hurt’, is that what Lee told you?” Harley snapped. “‘Hurt’?”

“Yeah, I -christ,” Joan said, as the full weight of Harley’s taunt hit her. Of course Lee had been softening the blow. Of course she’d done something so much worse than just “hurt” Vell. Joan stopped and leaned against the wall for a second. While she moped, Harley hissed at Lee

“You told her about that?”

“She asked,” Lee said. “And it...it felt wrong, Harley. As far as she knows, we were all friends one day and then everyone hated her the next. She deserved to know.”

“Does she?”

“Harley, stop it, she feels bad enough already.”

“Does she? Because she should feel pretty bad,” Harley said. “I know you like her because she hates your dad almost as much as you do, but come on. She killed Vell.”

“It was an accident,” Lee protested.

“Oh, and was the kidnapping and experimenting an accident? Do you not see the irony in Joan trying to save Vell from the literal exact thing she did to him in the first place?”

“I don’t see it as ironic,” Lee said. “I see it as a second chance.”

“Some things you don’t get second chances on.”

“Harley.”

Joan stopped leaning on the wall and took her hands away from her face. There were tears in her eyes, welling up amid the anger.

“Shut the fuck up,” Joan demanded. “I fucked up. I get it. I’m not asking for a second chance on that. I’m asking for a first chance on this. So please just shut up and let me at least try to do something right for once in my life.”

“I can’t promise I’ll shut up, but I’m not going to stop you,” Harley said. “I get talkative when I’m nervous.”

They weren’t far from the lab that Vell was held in. Rather than arguing the point with Harley any further, Joan chose to focus on the mission.

“We’re here,” Joan said. She gestured to the massive metal door in front of them. “Once we’re in, only Goodwell can let us out. He should still trust me, so I’ll try to distract him long enough for you guys to sneak in and get Vell out, okay? You guys ready?”

Harley took a deep breath. She looked at Joan, the person on Earth she trusted the least, and at Lee, the person on Earth she trusted the most.

“Yeah, we’ll be fine.”

Harley took a deep breath, and both of them followed Joan past the point of no return.

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

“I think we should bring the helmets,” Cane said. “They can shield you from most neurological magic.”

Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.

“I’m aware of that, but they are very heavy and obvious,” Freddy said. The two helmets contained a thick layer of shielding, as well as a personal generator that created a minor distortion field, shielding the mind from any unwelcome attacks. “I kind of feel like this is a stealth mission?”

“I’m going to be real with you, Frizzle: I am not sneaky,” Cane said. “And you stick out like a bright red, very fuzzy thumb too.”

“Good point. Bring the helmets.”

“I’ve only got three. One for you, one for me, and this one for Vell, since he’s the one most likely to get his head messed with. Everyone else is just going to have to deal with it, I guess.”

Freddy and Cane strapped their helmets on, looked at one another, and nodded. Their bulbous helmets bumped and made a sound like two coconuts hitting each other.

“You two look ridiculous,” Harley noted.

“Bah!”

Cane and Freddy both struggled to take off the ludicrous helmets and play it cool. The helmet hair they both suffered from didn’t make them look any less silly, though.

“Harley? Aren’t you supposed to be with Joan?”

“I mean, yeah, but I was looking for an excuse to ditch her,” Harley said. “Also, I needed to tell you something. Goodwell’s just using tech, not magic, so you can ditch those helmets.”

Cane shrugged and tossed aside the bulbous helmets.

“You are going to need a way through the door, though,” Harley said. “There’s an ‘open’ rune in the second drawer on the left of Vell’s desk. You’re going to need it to dispel the magical barrier around the room.”

“How do you know what’s in Vell’s drawers?” Cane asked.

“He tells me stuff, obviously,” Harley said. “I got to go. See you at the rescue!”

Harley sped off back into the halls, leaving the two behind. They headed for Vell’s dorm to pick up the promised rune and found it exactly where Harley had said it would be.

“This must be pretty serious,” Freddy noted. “You said ‘what’s in Vell’s drawers’ and Harley didn’t even make a dick joke.”

“She’s just worried,” Cane said. “Even she can’t giggle at innuendo at a time like this.”

Freddy agreed, and the two moved on.

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

“And that doesn’t strike you as odd in the least bit?” Luke asked.

“The principal is just doing research,” the receptionist said. “That’s sort of something that happens here.”

“In secret underground basements with no witnesses?”

“Yes.”

“Right,” Luke said. He actually wasn’t surprised by that. Just another way his plan had hit a speed bump. Goodwell had, unsurprisingly, gotten to the faculty first, and prepared them for this exact situation. He’d made all the necessary excuses and preparations, gotten a handful of permits and permissions, all to divert suspicion from himself.

“We could try my cooking professor,” Renard said. “He likes me.”

“No offense, but I don’t think your culinary teacher has much clout.”

“But I know who does,” Lee said. She rounded the corner and pulled the duo away from the faculty building receptionist to conspire in secret.

“Aren’t you with Joan?” Renard said.

“I just thought of something important to tell you,” Lee said. Renard watched her carefully as she spoke. “Vell mentioned that one of his professors, Nguyen, didn’t trust Goodwell very much. If she’s already suspicious, you’ll have a much easier time convincing her.”

“Makes sense to me,” Luke said. “Come on, Ren. I think I remember where those offices are.”

“You go ahead. I’m going to talk to my culinary professor,” Renard said. “The more the merrier, right?”

“I guess. Do your thing,” Luke said, before turning off towards Nguyen’s office.

“I’d better be off as well,” Lee said. As she likewise turned away, Renard stuck his foot out in her path. She deftly sidestepped his attempt to trip her -a suspiciously nimble bit of footwork for someone who often tripped over her own feet, much less someone else’s.

“What was that for?”

Renard stared back at Lee with an unusually insightful glare, and said nothing.

“If you’re done messing around, I need to get back to helping Vell,” Lee said.

“Do you?”

Lee paused and crossed her arms, taking a moment to stare right back at Renard. Their eyes met, and Renard stared intensely at the slightly mismatched shades of green in Lee’s eyes.

“Yes, I do,” Lee said. “It’s why I’m here, after all.”

“Okay,” Renard said. Lee turned and took a few steps away. “But ask permission next time you borrow my friend’s face.”

“Lee” stopped in her tracks, taking just enough time to look over her shoulder and smirk at Renard before she stepped around a corner and vanished.

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

“Welcome back, Joan,” Goodwell said.

“Sorry it took me so long,” Joan said. “You know how this school is.”

Goodwell hadn’t looked up from his monitor at her return, which was good. Joan signaled for Harley and Lee to sneak in, and they took cover behind one of the many workbenches in the underground lab.

“I do know,” Goodwell said. “Do you have everything you need now?”

“I do,” Joan agreed. She tried to resist the temptation to glance over her shoulder and check on Lee as she approached Goodwell’s workstation. “Are you ready to go?”

“Of course. Put your data into the computer and we’ll be ready to begin,” Goodwell said. Joan knew that this was more than just an “aggressive examination” of Vell’s rune, but she complied without question to avoid suspicion. Vell tried to mumble a warning, but the duct tape over his mouth impeded any protests from him. His muffled warnings came to a sharp halt as Harley crept to his side and tapped him on the shoulder.

While Vell gave a light squeak of surprise, Harley made a “shush” gesture and then started examining the table he was strapped to. The initial prognosis was “not good”. The complicated mechanisms all bore the same K-shaped logo of Kraid Tech: borderline impossible to hack even under the best circumstances, and right now circumstances were pretty fucking bad.

With her technical prowess a no-go, Harley turned back to Lee and silently gestured for her to try her magic. Lee immediately shook her head. She had tried her magic as an experiment and found the sparks of mana would not respond to her. Goodwell had likely enchanted the space to be protected from magic he didn’t personally cast. While Lee’s simple gesture could not explain the nature of the enchantment preventing her from casting spells, the message was clear: no magic. Harley bit her lip. Their rescue was off to a shit start.

And it was about to get worse.

“That should be it,” Joan said. All of her hypothetical research, and the cursory examinations of Vell she’d done earlier, were plugged in and ready to be processed.

“All done?”

“I might do a review if we’ve got the time,” Joan said. Vell was still strapped to the table, which means her distraction wasn’t going well. She’d tried to draw it out, but she could only type so slow without looking suspicious.

“We don’t have much time, actually,” Goodwell said.

“What’s the rush?”

In response, Goodwell reached into a drawer and withdrew a single handgun, which he immediately pointed in Joan’s direction.

“Oh.”

“Harley, Lee, you can come out now,” Goodwell said. He’d made sure the barrier around his lab warned him about every possible uninvited guest -especially Vell Harlan’s meddlesome friends.

“I’d rather not, actually,” Harley shouted from her hiding place. Lee was halfway through standing up and became paralyzed with indecision momentarily before ducking back down. Joan reluctantly stared down the barrel of a loaded gun all by herself.

“Unfortunately for you, Goodwell, you really can’t finish this project without me,” Joan said.

“Please. I have everything I need from you right there on that computer,” Goodwell said.

“Come on, Isaac, do you really think I’d betray you and still be be dumb enough to type down everything I know?” Joan said, while staring at the computer where she had definitely typed down everything she knew. She hadn’t exactly thought that part through.

Back on the table, Vell started making insistent humming noises and nodding down towards his own chin. Harley eventually got the hint and pried the duct tape off his mouth.

“Joan, get away from him,” Vell snapped. “His plan isn’t what you think it is. He wants my body!”

Harley giggled at the innuendo, even at a time like this, and Vell rolled his eyes.

“I mean he wants to take his mind and put it in my body,” Vell clarified. “He doesn’t need you to do that.”

Lee’s mind was racing for several reasons, but the stupidity of that idea was another one entirely. It was ludicrous, and would almost certainly get Vell killed. They couldn’t let Goodwell proceed, but any attempt to stop him right now would get Joan shot. Lee could not fathom trading one friend for another, so she stood paralyzed by indecision.

While Lee’s brain raced with panic, Harley’s raced with possibility. After looking around the room for a few seconds, she had spotted Vell’s glasses and phone stored on a nearby table, then looked back at the Kraid Tech logo on the experimentation table. Kraid Tech was hard to hack because of it’s soul-based security measures, but Vell’s soul was in a bit of grey area. If Harley routed her hack through Vell’s phone, she might be able to break the security measure and get Vell free. After that-

She had no idea what happened after that, actually. But Vell would be free, and maybe his cowboy bullshit would let him dodge bullets again. Harley got her phone out and got to work. She just needed everything to stay calm for a minute or so. Hopefully Joan wouldn’t do something stupid.

That proved to be too much to hope for.

“So that’s the plan,” Joan said. “I figured you were hiding something from me, Goodwell. Now that all the cards are on the table, how about you and me make a real deal?”

Goodwell said nothing, and kept the pistol trained intently on Joan. She tried to ignore the gun pointed at her, failed, and then proceeded anyway.

“I want the rune,” Joan said. “Everything and everyone else is expendable. So long as I get to study the rune afterwards, I’ll help you do whatever.”

“And why should I trust you again?”

“Because I’ll kill those two for you,” Joan said. Harley shot an angry glare at Lee, who shushed her. Harley got back to work, pounding away at her phone with renewed vigor.

“You wouldn’t.”

“Alright, not Lee, I like her too much,” Joan admitted. “But I’ll kill Harley, and you can do Lee.”

Harley shot another angry glare at Lee, and got no response this time.

“You first,” Goodwell said. Joan looked over her shoulder at Harley, shrugged, and reached into her pocket. Goodwell allowed her to reach down and grab the soulstone she had hidden away. She pulled the crackling black stone out into the light, clenched it in her fist, and focused all of the malignant energy within on one target: Isaac Goodwell.

To no effect.

Joan squeezed her fist one more time. Still nothing.

“Oh. You shut off the magic, huh?”

“Yes.”

Isaac Goodwell lifted his pistol again. Harley kept pounding away at her phone. She just needed a few more seconds...

“Well-”

In the background, Joan was vaguely aware that people were screaming or asking for Isaac to stop, but the voices really didn’t register. All she could do was look up and shrug.

“-I tried.”

She wasn’t sure who she was talking to, but it felt good to say. At least she’d been trying to do a genuinely good deed, in the end. From all the inexplicable luck Vell, Lee, and Harley seemed to have, Joan had sort of assumed there was some divine force looking out for the good guys. But apparently that wasn’t the case.

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

“Okay, we’re here, are we late?”

Luke and Renard hurried into place, with the stoic Professor Nguyen in tow. Freddy and Cane were already waiting.

“Well, uh, about being late,” Freddy said.

“We might’ve busted our only way in,” Cane admitted. He gestured to the door. In their hurry to rescue Vell, they had already used the rune that “Harley” had guided them towards. It was currently attached to the door, lightless and inert.

“We tried to use that ‘open’ rune to open the door and, well, it didn’t open,” Freddy said. “I don’t know what we did wrong.”

“Well, there’s got to be another way in, right?”

“I don’t know! Magic’s not my specialty, but this barrier is pretty airtight,” Freddy said. “I don’t think anything could get through it without making a lot of noise.”

“A door’s a door,” Cane said. “Maybe we could take it apart.”

“You got tools, Cane?”

“We’re at a school for super-scientists, someone around here has to have a fucking screwdriver we can borrow!”

While the young men fell into a tense argument about the availability of power tools, Professor Nguyen stared intently forward and stared at the rune Freddy had used. After a momentary examination, she held up her hand for silence, and the argument immediately ended. Nguyen’s frigid attitude overpowered even the most hotheaded arguments, and all fell silent.

“This is not an ‘open’ rune,” Nguyen corrected. “This is a rune for ‘entry’.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Subtle, yet meaningful, Mr. Fennel,” Nguyen said to Luke. “And judging by the dispersal of energy patterns, this rune has fulfilled it’s purpose, and allowed entry.”

“Well we’re all still out here,” Renard said.

“Precisely. But the rune has done its work.”

“Okay, so if not us, who got ‘entry’ into the room?”

Nobody, not even Professor Nguyen, had an answer to that question -until Renard remembered his encounter with Lee’s doppelganger.

“Uh oh.”

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

Inside the lab, Goodwell’s finger brushed the trigger of his gun, and everything went silent. Even hearts stopped beating to let a moment of absolute quiet slip in. Then the silence ended, not with a bang, but with a quiet, gentle whisper.

“Isaac.”

Goodwell froze in his tracks. Vell froze too, though he hadn’t been moving much in the first place. The rogue principal’s gun hand started to tremble, and turned away from Joan as he turned to face the mystery voice on the other end of the room. While he turned away, Joan all but collapsed backwards, managing to stumble far enough to be caught by Lee and held upright.

“Lijia?”

The silence in the room redoubled as the shadows parted, and Lijia Mian stepped into the light.