Chapter 144: Book 3 Chapter 1.2: How Much Would

The gang of strangers made a good first impression, at least. They had their own secret lair. Lee asked Samson if he wanted a cup of coffee before they got started, which he managed to refuse. The last thing his nerves needed right now was caffeine.

“Very well then. No one else seems to be showing up, so I think I can get started.”

Harley and Vell were currently taking their turn manning the deja vu booth, but none of the other new students had shown any inklings of awareness of the loops. Samson was their only new looper this year, it seemed.

“To make a long story very short, Samson, this school is in a time loop,” Lee began. “Every day that classes are in session, some event of apocalyptic scale happens, and mass death and destruction follow. Then, time loops back to the beginning of the day, and it’s up to the small handful of us who remember to prevent that disaster.”

She paused in her explanation for a moment to let Samson’s brain process things.

“Every day?”

“Every day of classes, yes,” she confirmed. “Though some apocalypses are less apocalyptic than others. Sometimes it’s only a handful of deaths, or even just one.”

“How- What is- When-”

“Give it a minute, dear, it’s always a bit shocking,” Lee said. “To answer some of those questions you half asked, no, we don’t know what causes it, nor do we know why students seem to be randomly selected to be aware of the loops. What we do know is that if we don’t actively endeavor to change things, the world will repeat the exact same events of the first loop.”

Samson nodded along. That was the first thing he’d heard that made sense, at least.

“And, perhaps most importantly, especially to you, those who aren’t randomly selected to be aware of the loops, cannot, ever, under any circumstances, be made aware of the time loops,” Lee said. “We’ve seen the consequences firsthand, and they are disastrous. Any non-looper who becomes aware of the loops is inevitably driven insane by the knowledge.”

“So...my brother...”

“Can never know,” Lee said. “I’m sorry.”

“Well, what do I do? Can I just say ‘no thanks’, opt out?”

“Only by leaving the school,” Lee said. “As far as we know only students can be aware of the loops, so once you’re no longer a student, the awareness ends.”

“Hell no. I worked too hard to get here,” Samson said. He and Ibrahim had spent hundreds of hours studying as hard as they could to ensure they got to go to the best school on the planet together. Neither would be walking away from that.

“I understand. Then you’re going to have to embrace the oddity, and the secrecy,” Lee said. “Do you have any questions?”

“Not right now, but once my brain catches up, probably,” Samson said. It was a lot to take in all at once. “Is that all you know about the loops?”

“Yes. Though, well, as you might’ve guessed from the fact that we have a robot among our number, there’s a bit more going on here than just the loops,” Lee said. “Things get very complicated very fast around here.”

“More complex than the literal apocalypse on a daily basis?”

“Yes.”

“Well shit,” Samson said. “Like what?”

“For my part, I’m the daughter of Noel Burrows, and I might have some mild psychotic issues in relation to my father,” Lee admitted. “I’ll leave others to explain their own personal issues in time. Both for the sake of their secrecy and the fact your eye is twitching a bit.”

The tide of information and strange circumstances had left Samson a bit twitchy -along with the fact the clock was still ticking.

“Could we deal with the rodent problem? I think I’d be able to cope better if I didn’t have that hanging over my head.”

“Of course. I believe Hawke and Kim—the two you met at the booth earlier—should be dealing with that as we speak,” Lee said. She withdrew her phone to get an update and put it away just as quickly. “Let’s catch up and help them handle it. Seems the zoologists are being touchy.”

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By the time Lee and Samson had caught up to Hawke and Kim, Harley and Vell had also joined the party. A party which currently was attended mostly by rodents.

“Okay, I get the experiment,” Vell said. “Make a woodchuck able to chuck wood, reference the old tongue twister, score a few, uh, science journal headlines, I guess, and some easy publicity. But why so many?”

“Yeah, it’s ‘how much wood would a woodchuck chuck’, not ‘how much wood would three-hundred and fifty-seven woodchucks chuck’.”

The zoology lab was currently full to bursting with hundreds of woodchucks in cramped cages, nestled between piles of loose timber and planks of wood. Samson kind of wanted to interrupt this experiment just for the sake of getting those animals out of the cages. They looked cramped.

“The essence of science is repetition,” the lead scientist said. “To properly determine how much wood a woodchuck would chuck, we’re going to need to establish a mean quantity of wood chucked.”

“Well you’ve definitely got a mean quantity of woodchucks, but not the kind of mean you’re thinking,” Harley said. “Maybe you should stop wondering what a woodchuck would chuck and start wondering what a woodchuck should chuck.”

All this rhyming was starting to give everyone involved a headache.

“We know what we’re doing, thank you,” the lead scientist chided. “We’ll have these woodchucks chucking wood in no time.”

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

“No one doubts that, we just doubt whether giving rodents ballistic properties is a good idea,” Lee said.

The zoology team lead refused to yield, and Lee didn’t feel like pressing the issue. As they so often did, the loopers were just going to have to sabotage the experiment. Lee called for the retreat, and the loopers, Samson included, returned to the lair. Samson did get a cup of coffee this time. It turned out to be damn good coffee, too.

“For those of you who haven’t been properly introduced, this is Samson, our newest looper,” Lee said. The other loopers gave a few awkward waves.

“Oh, uh, shit, are we doing introductions,” Samson said.

“Well, not officially, as we do have a bit of a deadline,” Lee said. “We’ll have to grab dinner and chat later, but right now we should focus on the woodchuck issue. We do have just three hours now. Ideas?”

“We could do like, an actual animal rights complaint or something,” Hawke said. “All those animals in cages have to be breaking some kind of rule, right?”

“Possibly, but the Einstein-Odinson can be a bit lax about those kind of things, frankly,” Lee said. “Innovation requires risk, so they say, including to animals.”

“Fuckers. Before we go further, new guy,” Harley snapped. Samson stopped sipping his coffee and sat at attention. “Any chance you got a super specific bit of knowledge or something that would help us with this?”

“Uh, I don’t think so. I’m in computer engineering,” Samson said. “Should I have some kind of superpower?”

“Nah, you’re good, I was just hoping,” Harley said. “Sometimes the day does get saved by us knowing a random piece of trivia, though, so speak up if that ever happens.”

“Will do.”

“Can we use Botley to sneak in, cut open a few cages, and sneak out?” Vell suggested. “It’d probably only take a few loose woodchucks to cause chaos.”

“Been a while since I did a prison break,” Harley said. “I like it! Can we chalk that up as Plan A?”

“Sounds perfectly sensible to me,” Lee said. “Samson, why don’t you go with Vell and Harley? You can get to know them, and Botley while you’re at it.”

“Works for me,” Harley said.

“Just don’t sit on him like you did me,” Vell said. “Or at least ask first.”

Harley did ask, but Samson turned her down.

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“So she’s just-”

“Out cold,” Vell said. Harley had started manually piloting Botley’s body, a process that involved her physical body effectively being put into a coma. Samson seemed a lot more confused about than Vell had been on his first day. At least she was lying in bed instead of on top of Samson.

“Isn’t this only supposed to work with like, animals and stuff?”

“Botley’s technically alive. Like Kim.”

“Right. And how does that work?”

“If I knew, I would tell you,” Vell said. “Get used to hearing that, it’ll happen a lot.”

“Is it that bad?”

Vell lifted his shirt slightly to expose the circular scar around his waist. At this point, he knew the secret would get revealed sooner or later, so he decided to just get it over with.

“When I was twelve I got cut in half by a train accident,” Vell said. “A secret Goddess named Quenay resurrected me by putting a weird rune on my back, and in my first year two people here kidnapped me trying to study it. It gets weird.”

Samson spent a solid thirty seconds staring at Vell like he’d just grown a second head. Vell turned to showcase the glowing rune on his back, just to confirm his own story.

“What the fuck?”

Vell nodded along with the expression of shock. It was nice to get a new person’s perspective on his circumstances now and then. Helped him stay anchored in how truly insane it all was. Samson hadn’t even heard the finer details yet, like how one of the people to kidnap him had been Vell’s girlfriend at the time. Or how he was being stalked by chronologically impossible purple butterflies, like the three flocking on a windowsill right now.

A longer, even more chaotic explanation was briefly staved off by the return of Harley’s consciousness. She woke up, and shortly after, the tiny mechanical body of Botley appeared next to her in a poof of smoke. She rubbed his round head and congratulated him on a job well done before turning her attention to her human guests.

“Caused a little chaos, but no guarantee of anything,” she said. She took a look at Samson’s face before continuing her debrief. “Oh, I know that look. You tell him about your rune already?”

“Hiding it’s never done us any good, so why not?”

“Honesty is the best policy,” Harley said with a nod. “Except for all the lying and secret keeping we have to do about the time loops. Honesty is the best policy except when it would drive people literally insane, how about that?”

Hearing that only reminded Samson that he would have to lie to Ibrahim about all of this very soon, and that made an already confusing day even worse. He lied to his brother all the time, of course, but about dumb things like stolen snacks and misplaced video games. Never about anything important.

“Looking rough, Samson,” Harley noted. “Can I call you Sam? Sammie?”

“Samson, please,” he said. Harley nodded.

“Well, Samson, let me tell you about a little thing called a coping mechanism,” Harley said. “Food, booze, sex- pick your poison and have as much of it as you want, because there’s no consequences for anything you do on the first loop!”

“That sounds...unhealthy.”

“It is! But long term mental health is a slow process, and having some easy stress relief in the meantime sure helps you get there,” Harley said. “A bandaid ain’t much, but it’s better than bleeding.”

“Harley knows what she’s talking about,” Vell agreed. “Uh, both in the sense that she’s pretty good at the whole mental health thing, and that she has a lot of sex as a coping mechanism.”

“Open invitation to join me in that, by the way,” Harley said. “Just ask.”

“I’ll think about it,” Samson said flatly. He didn’t know what to think about that offer, or anything else he’d heard from these ‘loopers’ so far today. All this chaos would have been overwhelming in the best of circumstances, and being far from home and separated from his brother was far from the best circumstance. Possibly the worst circumstance, even.

For now, Samson bid Harley and Vell goodbye and tried to track down his brother. As they were unused to being separated in the first place, it took a while for them to track each other down.

“There you are,” Ibrahim said, as the two finally crossed paths. “What have you been doing all day?”

For a brief second, the phrase “helping a bunch of lunatics in a time loop disarm three-hundred rodents” flitted through Samson’s head, but he never dared to say it out loud.

“Just got wrapped up in some school stuff,” Samson said. “You know how it is.”

“I don’t, actually, what-”

“Duck!”

In spite of the warning, Ibrahim didn’t duck, so he got a log to the head. A loose woodchuck chittered madly and than grabbed a stick, chucking it in a random direction, before running off. Apparently some of the woodchucks Harley had set loose were already chucking wood.

“What the fuck was that?”

“A woodchuck.”

“Yeah, I could tell,” Ibrahim said, as he rubbed a sore head. “What animal was it?”

“It’s a woodchuck. That’s what it’s called. Also a groundhog, I guess.”

While Ibrahim continued to wonder what the hell was going on, Vell sprinted around the corner, looked around, and spotted Samson.

“Samson, hey, did you, uh, see-”

Samson pointed in the direction the woodchuck had fled, and Vell went running that way. Ibrahim watched the quick exchange and squinted at Samson.

“What the hell is going on with you, Sammie?”

“It’s...it’s nothing,” Samson said. “Don’t worry about it. Also, duck again.”

This time, Ibrahim listened, and the stick went sailing over his head.

“Do I need to start wearing a helmet?”

“Probably not,” Samson said. If the apocalypses were even half as bad as described, a helmet wouldn’t do much good.

In the background, Vell snatched up the wood-chucking rodent and started carrying it away before it bit him. Samson tried to ignore the tiny rodent screeching in the background as Ibrahim tried to talk about his day. He began to wonder if he’d survive a year of this.