Chapter 163: Book 3 Chapter 14.2: The Telltale Chirp

Samson was reading up on cricket behavior when Ibrahim waltzed into his dorm and sat down on the couch.

“So. Heard one of your crazy friends is even crazier now.”

“Vell’s just going through some shit,” Samson said. “It’ll get handled.”

Someone nearby screamed as a large gout of red light streaked across campus.

“Samson.”

“Yeah.”

“What is Vell doing right now?”

A roaring sound and another surge of red light sped past the window of Samson’s dorm.

“He’s...trying to burn down all the bushes on campus so the cricket has nowhere to hide,” Samson mumbled.

“Does that sound like sane behavior?”

“He hasn’t slept in a while.”

“It’s been two days!”

The already irrational behavior seemed even crazier from the perspective of every non-looper. They were now on their second day of no sleep for Vell, which meant roughly four days from Vell’s perspective, thanks to the time loops. Most recently, Vell had managed to acquire the flamethrower they’d used to stop the sentient super-tree and was now trying to burn down every possible cricket habitat. The other loopers were alternating between trying to stop him and researching slightly less flammable solutions to the cricket problem.

“He’s stressed out. Shit happens.”

“Crazy is crazy, man,” Ibrahim said.

“He’ll be back to normal with a good night’s sleep, it will-”

“Vell! Put the flamethrower down!”

Harley’s shout was answered by a weak gout of red flame, barely sputtering to life before it faded out.

“Yeah. Yeah you’re right,” Vell said. “This is too much. I need to-”

Chirp.

A loud scream of fury presaged another gout of fire. Ibrahim stared at his twin brother in judgmental silence.

Far below, Harley managed to wrestle the flamethrower away from Vell and remove the fuel tank before he could burn down more bushes. Dean Lichman was giving them a surprising amount of leeway given Vell’s condition, but arson was pushing the envelope. And setting the envelope on fire.

“Vell, look at me,” Harley said. She grabbed on to Vell’s head, tried not to worry about the black circles under his eyes, and forced him to listen. He nearly passed out mid-sentence, but a loud cricket chirp snapped him back to consciousness. “Me and Lee have been working on something. We think we can get you some peace and quiet.”

“Please,” Vell whimpered. He didn’t have the energy to do much else.

“Come on, champ,” Harley said. “Come with me.”

Harley wasn’t actually strong enough to put Vell on her back, but she at least let him lean on her shoulder as they walked. He leaned in close enough that Harley could feel his worryingly slow heartbeat, and feel it spike to equally worrying levels every time the cricket chirped.

“Alright, just hold on bud,” Harley said. “We got you.”

The promised salvation came in the form of a large black box of reinforced metal. Lee was currently casting the last of many magical spells woven into the structure, and gestured to the tomb-like construct with pride as soon as the spell completed.

“Here we are,” Lee said. “The most soundproof chamber in existence.”

“Noise canceling foam, silence spells, active noise cancellation, and end of the day, it’s just plain old fashioned dense,” Harley said. She rapped her knuckles against the metal shell, and even that impact made almost no noise. “No way in hell any noise is getting through here.”

“It may not be the most comfortable place to rest, but you’ll at least be away from the cricket noises,” Lee said. “You can at least de-stress, if not sleep.”

“Yeah. Yeah. Please.”

Vell desperately pawed at the door of the soundproof chamber until Lee opened it, helped him inside, and then quickly slammed it shut behind him. The chamber had everything Vell needed to survive at least twenty-four hours in absolute silence, so Lee stepped back, checked the soundproofing one more time, and then reconvened with Harley.

“Have you found anything that leads us to the cricket?”

“Not a fucking thing,” Harley said. “I’ve done full spectrum scans, electromagnetic imaging, I even busted out an old sonar and tried to backtrace the soundwaves. No dice. You?”

“Magical means have completely failed as well,” Lee said. No scrying, tracking rituals, or divination had been able to locate the cricket. “This is no random insect. I believe we must turn our attention to the man who sent it.”

“Kraid,” Harley growled. They’d been suspecting it for a long time, but never mentioned it around Vell for fear it might focus his sleep-deprived insanity in a homicidal direction. Not that Kraid didn’t deserve homiciding, but that wasn’t a fight Vell could win. Kraid wasn’t just more powerful in general, he even knew about Vell’s presence in the time loops -probably the reason he was opting for psychological torment via the cricket.

“Only he could be depraved enough to put this much effort into magically shielding a bug and sending it after Vell,” Lee said. “The thing’s been following him so closely-”

“Wait.”

Harley held up a hand and clamped it down over Lee’s mouth, then put a finger to her lips. For a moment, the two stood in silence, listening to absolutely nothing. Harley eventually removed her hand, but Lee whispered anyway.

“What are we listening for?”

“There’s nothing,” Harley said. “Vell’s right over there, but there’s no -oh no.”

Both women turned their attention to the soundproof chamber, which was now visibly shaking.

“Oh no no no no.”

Lee sprinted over and flung the door open. No sooner did she do so than the sound of a chirping cricket echoed out, followed shortly after by a lunging Vell. He had torn a piece of soundproof paneling off the interior wall and was using it swat randomly at everything that might possibly contain a cricket. Harley narrowly dodged getting swatted herself, and then chased after Vell.

“Vell, stop!”

“It got inside! It! Got! Inside!”

“I know, I know, but you have to calm down!”

“No no no no,” Vell said. He threw aside his failed cricket-swatter and dug his phone out of his pocket, fumbling with the keys long enough to make a call. Even sleep-deprived to the point of madness, Vell wasn’t dumb enough to not make obvious connections, and he found himself calling a number he’d blocked long ago.

“Kraid!”

“Oh, hi Harlan,” Kraid said. The smugness in his voice was unmistakable and insufferable. “I was wondering when you’d call.”

“Get rid of it!”

“No can do, my friend, that cricket was a pretty significant investment,” Kraid said. “US Military contracted me to make an undetectable weapon for psychological warfare, but they ended up passing. Figure I’d get their money’s worth.”

Vell didn’t muster a coherent response, and just roared angrily at his phone.

“Got to say, must be pretty bad for you over there,” Kraid said. “You’re getting hounded by something that was too evil for the guys who used Agent Orange. Can you imagine?”

“What do you want?” Vell demanded. “What are you after? I’ll tell you anything, just please, god, get rid of it!”

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“Now I know I’ve said this before, but genuinely this time, no ulterior motives here,” Kraid said. “No hidden schemes, no secondary objectives. I’m actually catching up on Squid Game right now. I definitely should have watched this sooner, I totally get the hype now.”

“Sang-Woo kills Sae-byeok before the final game!”

“Hey! Spoilers!”

“Call off your fucking cricket or I’ll tell you how the last game ends,” Vell snapped.

“Harlan, I know I’m subjecting you to military-grade psychological torture, but spoilers are just being a dick.”

“Get rid of it!”

“No. This is a phone call, moron.”

Kraid hung up, preventing any further spoilers from Vell. He screamed at his phone anyway, before tossing it to the ground, and turning his attention elsewhere.

“Quenay!”

His scream to the heavens went unanswered. He tried again. Only on his third attempt did the mismatched goddess finally appear, hovering hesitantly in front of Vell.

“Hey Vell,” Quenay said. “You’re not going to like what I have to say.”

It took a few seconds for Vell to parse the meaning of that. His eye started to twitch.

“You’re a god and you can’t get rid of a fucking cricket?”

“I still have rules to follow, Vell,” Quenay said. “I can’t do any deus’ing your machina unless someone would die without my intervention.”

“Do I look like I’m surviving this?”

Vell tried to reach out and grab Quenay’s shoulders, but fatigue had ruined his depth perception, so he just toppled forward and hit the ground instead. Once on the ground, he passed out for exactly seven seconds before the supercricket chirped and woke him up again. He screamed in frustration as the mismatched eyes of Quenay stared down at him with pity

“Vell, I really wish I could help, but there’s another solution here,” Quenay said. “You just need to find it.”

“Where, where, where, where,” Vell chanted.

“Being specific would count as machina deus’ing,” Quenay said. “But...crazy problems require crazy solutions.”

Quenay vanished, leaving behind nothing but her incredibly vague hint and an incredibly frustrated Vell.

“What is that supposed to mean,” Vell said. “I am crazy! I’ve been crazy! I’m not sure how to get crazier! It’s all crazy crazy crazy!”

“Vell!”

Cane slapping him in the head got Vell almost back to his senses. He looked around and saw Luke staring at him too.

“Weren’t you Lee and Harley a second ago?”

“You’ve been chanting the word ‘crazy’ for twenty minutes, Vell,” Cane said.

“Oh. Have I been doing that?”

Yes,” Luke said. “The girls couldn’t move you so they got us to drag you back to your dorm.”

“Oh. Did you do that already?”

“No.”

Vell looked down at his hands for a second. All three of them. Three turned to fifteen for a second when the cricket chirped again.

“I think my brain is not working so great anymore.”

“Not really,” Cane said. He ducked down and dragged Vell to his feet. Luke took the other arm and the two started to pull him back towards his dorm.

“Hey Can, you’re pretty strong, right?”

“Cane. And I like to think so.”

“Do you think you could punch me hard enough to knock me unconscious?”

“Let’s not try that,” Cane said. “I think you’ve got enough brain damage going on.”

“You don’t even know how damaged my brain can get, man.”

“Are you trying to brag or just falling apart?”

“I can do both,” Vell snapped. He could even use his eyes, sort of. He was reasonably sure a few of his friends were walking with him while he was dragged back to his dorm.

“Hey Freddy. That is Freddy, right?”

“I am not the Frizzle boy,” Sarah said.

“Oh. I didn’t know you dyed your hair red.”

“Red is not the color,” Sarah insisted. “Your eyes are failing to perceive light spectrums in the correct way.”

“Oh. That’s bad.”

The cricket chirped again, and Vell twitched so hard he slipped free from Luke’s grip. Cane managed to keep him up long enough for Luke to get a hold on him again, and their journey continued. Sarah, seeing no way she could help, stayed back, along with a few other spectators.

“I hate seeing Vell like this,” Lee said. “He deserves so much better.”

“There’s got to be something we can do,” Harley said. “Kraid’s not unbeatable.”

“Wait.”

Skye had been silently pitying her boyfriend for a while, but the name of his tormentor snapped her to attention.

“Kraid’s doing this?”

“Yeah.”

Skye’s thin brows furrowed into an expression of intense thought, and then relaxed into an expression of wicked glee.

“I think I got it,” Skye said. “I might have a solution to the cricket problem.”

She began to dig around in her purse, as Harley began to ask questions.

“What kind of solution?”

“The scientific kind.”

“Hate to say it, Skye, but we’ve already tried ‘science’.”

“Not my kind of science,” Skye said. She seemed to find what she was looking for in her purse.

“And that is?”

With a broad smile on her face, Skye removed her hand from her purse, and lifted a pair of goggles to her head. She snapped them on, hiding her eyes behind the glinting black lenses, and started to chuckle maniacally.

“Mad science.”

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Vell had been banging his head against the wall for about twenty minutes now. Or maybe two hours. Or maybe three days. He’d lost all sense of time at this point. However long it had been, it took him even longer to realize someone was knocking on his door. Between him bashing his head against a wall and the music he had blasting in his headphones to drown out cricket noises, he could hear almost nothing. After three attempts, his legs cooperated long enough for him to stumble his way to the door and open it.

Opening the door nearly knocked Vell off his feet, and Skye stepped in to grab him and hold him up. She tried talking, too, but Vell couldn’t hear a word she said.

“Hi Skye, good you’re here, I was just...I forget what I was just doing,” Vell said. Thanks to the red spot on his head and the dent in Vell’s wall, Skye could guess what he’d been doing. She said another sentence that Vell couldn’t hear, and then pointed at her ears.

“Oh. Nope, no, no, nuh uh,” Vell said. He stepped out of Skye’s arms and wobbled backwards, away from her. “I cannot take these off.”

The music roaring in his ears prevented him from hearing anything Skye said, but it was also the only barrier between Vell and cricket chirping.

“I have maybe an atom of sanity left,” Vell said. “And if I hear even the teensiest tiniest little chirp, that’s gone! That’s all she wrote! No more brain, bye bye Vell!”

The tiny portion of his brain he lad left devolved into half-hearted giggles that were only barely not sobs. Skye cupped her hands around the headphones Vell wore, gave a gentle tug, and mouthed two words, enunciating very clearly so Vell could read her lips.

“Trust me.”

Haggard eyes could barely focus on Skye’s face, but Vell managed regardless. He put his hands on top of Skye’s, squeezed them for reassurance, and then removed his headphones. As soon as they were removed he winced, bracing himself for-

Nothing.

But he’d been disappointed before, and Vell held his breath as he waited for-

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

“It’s quiet,” Vell whispered.

“Yeah. I-”

Skye stopped herself mid-sentence as Vell fell forward in a limp mess. She caught him and put him upright once more as Vell snapped back to semi-consciousness.

“Sorry,” Vell mumbled. “I think my body tried to turn off all at once there.”

“Yeah, totally understandable,” Skye said, as she struggled to support Vell’s weight all on her own. “Let’s just get you to the couch, at least, come on.”

Skye shuffled her significantly heavier boyfriend towards the couch, with Vell doing his best to help, all while his body and mind begged to give in to fatigue.

“What’d you do?” Vell mumbled, while he was still conscious.

“Don’t worry about it,” Skye mumbled. “Just focus on sleep.”

“Is that an eel?”

The shout from outside Vell’s dorm drew his attention as Skye managed to get him to the couch. She sat down and laid Vell flat, putting his head in her lap.

“Eel?”

“Just something I whipped up to work against the cricket,” Skye said. “Nothing you need to worry about.”

“Ow! It shocked me!”

The sound of surging electricity outside his dorm kept Vell awake for a moment.

“Electric?”

“I used an electric eel as the base,” Skye mumbled. “They use a method of electrolocation that bypassed Kraid’s stealth on the cricket.”

It took mad science to defeat mad science, and Skye had bested Kraid’s monstrous cricket with an abomination of her own. Kraid had only planned for the capabilities of humans and their technology, not the oddly-specific electrolocation organs of south american freshwater eels.

“Oh. That’s smart.”

Vell closed his eyes and enjoyed a brief moment of blissful silence and rest.

“Wait,” he said, as his eyes snapped open again. “Eels is water animals. Crickets are land bug. How the eel-”

“Oh god, why does it have legs?”

Skye pursed her lips and said nothing, but the continued screaming outside Vell’s window said enough. He kept his eyes open long enough to stare up at her.

“I dabble in a little genetic engineering on the side,” Skye mumbled.

“You are crazy,” he mumbled. Skye went red in the face.

“It’s not, uh…”

“That’s okay,” Vell mumbled. “I like it. It’s good crazy. That’s what I need.”

Vell closed his eyes again, and his head started to roll to the side as sleep finally overtook him.

“Everything’s crazy,” Vell mumbled. “I just need...good...crazy…”

His words faded off as Vell faded into a long overdue sleep. Skye ran a hand through Vell’s hair as he finally rested. She also checked his pulse a few times. Just to be sure.

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After hours of tension, the loopers were relieved to see Vell arrive at their usual table in the dining hall with a smile on his face and no dark circles under his eyes.

“Morning everyone,” Vell said.

“Evening,” Harley corrected. “It’s six-twenty three.”

“Oh.”

Vell did a quick check of the time just to see if it was true, then put down his phone.

“I have been asleep for twenty hours.”

“We noticed,” Lee said. “And you deserve it.”

“I fucking do,” Vell said. “And you know what? After I get something to eat, I’m probably going to go right back to sleep.”

“Hell yeah motherfucker, sleep squad twenty-four seven,” Harley said. “What do you want? Let me grab you dinner.”

Vell politely requested a turkey sandwich, to load up on some tryptophan. Harley fetched the quick dinner while Vell relaxed in his chair.

“I see you’re feeling much better.”

“Pendulum has fully swung the other way,” Vell sighed. The past few days had been utterly miserable, but he now felt more rested and relaxed than he had in years. “I didn’t sleep this well when I was dead.”

His sudden relaxation almost made Kim wish she could sleep. Samson had other things on his mind.

“But on the other hand, how’re you coping with the fact your girlfriend is a mad scientist?”

“Technically not a mad scientist,” Vell clarified. They had talked over this point in private. “Skye failed her Mad Scientist licensing exam. Mad science is something she does, not who she is.”

“Okay, failed mad scientist,” Samson said. “Is that a red flag or a green flag?”

“Samson, buddy, sometimes a flag is just a flag,” Vell said. Harley returned with the promised sandwich, and Vell shoved it in his face as fast as his mouth would allow. With a rumbling stomach sated, Vell bid his friends goodbye and returned to his hibernation, leaving a bemused Samson behind.

“A flag is just a flag,” Samson said. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“He’s still technically sleep deprived, dear, don’t think about it too much.”