Chapter 167: Book 3 Chapter 17.1: Unfriendly Competition

“Samson, hand me a wrench,” Harley said.

“What kind?”

“I’m not picky, anything will do.”

Samson put his phone down, reached into the tool kit and handed her a blue wrench with a circular head, one blade edge, and a curved handle. Harley stared at it for a second.

“This will not do,” Harley said. She tossed the wrench over her shoulder, and the bladed edge embedded in the wall behind her. “Why do I even have that wrench?”

“That alien left it behind after we helped fix his spaceship,” Lee said.

“Guess I figured having it around couldn’t hurt.”

“Couldn’t hurt anything but the wall, I guess,” Samson said, as he looked at the wrench embedded in the plaster.

“We’ll fix it later,” Lee said, looking at the far side of the lab, where other students were still waiting. The experimental automobile engine Harley was in the process of fixing could burst into flames at any moment, and most of the crew was cowering far away from the fire hazard.

“I could get on it right now,” Vell said.

“Let’s wait until the potentially flammable situation is resolved before we break out the spackle, Vell,” Harley chided.

“Okay.”

“Typical shoddy workmanship from the has-beens!”

“Excuse me?”

Harley looked up from her work, across the room. One of the cowering students ceased cowering and started walking towards the engine.

“Is this really the kind of work ethic you want handling things that go wrong?”

The student posed theatrically towards the engine, and Harley’s work on it. The loopers exchanged a skeptical glance as the mystery student continued their spiel.

“For nearly three years, when things go wrong, these completely useless imbeciles were the only people to turn to.”

Harley grabbed the bladed wrench out of the wall and held it tight. Lee grabbed her by the wrist and stopped her before she had a chance to throw.

“But what if I told you there was a better way?”

Vell peered past the engine at the crowd of confused-looking students.

“Is he even in this class?”

Every student shook their heads. The student carried on heedless to their dismissal of him.

“My name is Shareef, and I’m here today to talk about the Einstein-Odinson Tactical Intervention And Emergency Response Team.”

“The EOTIART?”

“Correct!”

Vell and Harley looked at Lee.

“The school doesn’t have a marketing class,” Lee said with a shrug. Nothing in the school’s curriculum taught people how to make a catchy acronym.

“The EOTIART is here to solve all your campus emergency needs, with fast response times, reliable service, competent professionals, and most importantly of all, the complete absence of Vell Harlan.”

“Hey,” Vell said. Then he grit his teeth. “Wait-”

“Here to showcase our skills is our team’s founder and leader-”

“Wait,” Vell said. “No no no no no no!”

“Orn!”

“Fuck! No!”

Vell’s desperate plea to the universe went unanswered, and Orn the Centaur galloped through the door. He circled the engine with theatric aplomb, heedless to the fact that no one looked impressed, or even all that interested. He had on a bright red tracksuit jacket with the letters EOTIART emblazoned on the back. The hype man who had preceded Orn also produced such a jacket and put it on, to match Orn -and the four other students following him into the room.

“Thank you, thank you,” Orn said, even though he had nothing and no one to be thankful for. “Myself and the entire EOTIART team are so proud and happy to be here to serve all your problems solving needs.”

“Can you solve the problem of your bad name?”

Orn glared over his shoulder at Harley, but brushed off the question. He trotted over to Vell instead, who stared at the floor in the hopes that Orn might go away if he didn’t make eye contact.

“This school deserves a more competent class of problem solver, and I intend to give it one,” Orn said. “Starting with this engine.”

“Nope.”

Harley bonked her hand on one of the engine’s cylinders, producing a dull metallic thud.

“Already done.”

She took her wrench and played a quick tune by tapping metal on metal. The highly unstable internal combustion engine stayed stable even when used as a musical instrument.

“You fixed it already?”

“Yep. Did it while I was sassing you,” Harley said. “I’m very good at fixing things. And sassing people.”

She bonked the engine one more time just to prove her work was solid. Orn turned a critical eye to the engine and grunted in frustration.

“Anishka! Double check her work.”

One of the red-jacketed students broke away from the pack and turned her attention to the engine, poking and prodding it for any sign of weakness. Vell raised an eyebrow.

“Anishka?”

“Yes?”

“Huh. Did you used to date a guy named Cyrus?”

Anishka rolled her eyes and focused on the engine again. Vell took that as a “yes”. While he contemplated whether or not to inform his buddy Cyrus of this particular revolting development, Lee stepped forward.

“Orn, what exactly are you hoping to accomplish with this stunt?”

“To showcase my own superiority, of course,” Orn said. “Anything Vell Harlan does, I can do better.”

“You literally did this worse,” Harley said.

“No matter! You may have showed up first this time, but we will prove ourselves with the next disaster. Let’s move, EOTIART.”

The red-jacketed squad moved out, with Shareef bringing up the rear.

“Here’s some business cards, and a few promotional pamphlets, and I’ve got additional reading material available on request,” Shareef said. Most of the students he handed things to politely tucked them into their pockets, but a few simply dropped them on the ground. Heedless to their disapproval, Shareef gave two thumbs up and backed out the door. The room stayed quiet for a few seconds after they left.

“Oh my god, they’re really going to be back, aren’t they?” Vell said. The horror was only just now sinking in. Interacting with Orn once in a lifetime was too often, interacting with him once a day would be maddening.

“To fail again, no doubt. They don’t have our, shall we say, ‘resources’,” Lee said, casting a wary glance at the non-looper bystanders. “They’ll get frustrated and give up eventually.”

“We keep saying shit like that and it just keeps getting worse,” Harley said.

“I don’t know, I can see it,” Samson said. “Granted, I have no idea who any of those people were, but they didn’t seem very patient.”

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Samson was right about their patience. What he underestimated was their persistence.

“Why are you still here?” Vell demanded.

“We have not been bested yet,” Orn said, in spite of the fact that all five of his teammates had already been smacked across the room by a giant crocodile-human hybrid.

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“Motherfucker, you have been bested, worsted, and averaged,” Harley said. “Now get the fuck away from Kyle.”

Kyle was a decent dude when he wasn’t accidentally genetically hybridized with a crocodile, and Harley didn’t want him getting hurt by Orn’s misguided attempts to help. She tried to shoo the centaur away from CrocoKyle, but he persisted.

“Don’t worry, Mr. Lyle-”

“Kyle!”

“-the EOTIART is on the case to provide the best possible care for you in this dire time!”

“Move, Orn,” Kim said. She knocked the centaur out of the way with a metal elbow and kept running towards Kyle. “I got the cure.”

Since this kind of thing happened so often, the loopers kept a stockpile of genetic de-hybridizing solution on hand. Prior generations of loopers had perfected the formula, and it had saved the day multiple times, which usually made hybrids an easy apocalypse to deal with. This time, though, there was Orn.

“Hold on a moment!”

Orn grabbed Kim by the arm and examined the syringe she held.

“Are you going to inject an Einstein-Odinson student with a completely untested substance?”

“Uh. No. This is- it’s very tested,” Kim said. It really was, but she didn’t know how to explain that it had been used on mutant students over a dozen times.

“A likely story,” Orn said. “This so called ‘cure’ will have to be submitted for peer review before it can possibly be used.”

“And what do you propose we do about the rampaging mutant crocodile man in the meantime?”

CrocoKyle whipped Vell off his back and snapped at him. He lost his bookbag to the snapping jaws of the hybrid, but managed to escape unscathed.

“You can keep him distracted long enough for me to produce an actually working cure,” Orn said. “And we can always let him eat Vell.”

“Oh for fucks-” Vell gave up midway through his insult, as he knew it would accomplish nothing. “Let go of Kim, Orn.”

“I do not take orders from you.”

“That’s not an order, that’s a warning,” Vell said. “She’s flammable.”

“Huh?”

The flames were already starting to creep up Kim’s arm. Orn let out a high pitched shriek of distress and released Kim. She flicked a few embers his way to really chase him off, and then turned her focus back on the CrocoKyle. She dodged a thrashing tail and snapping jaws, then jammed the needle into Kyle’s arm to inject the cure. The crocodilian abomination writhed in confused agony, and Kim jumped away, landing next to a cowering Shareef and Anishka. She looked over her shoulder at the other three EOTIART “team members”.

“Those aren’t even the same guys from last time!”

“We believe in the value of a diverse and varied work force-”

“You’re just grabbing new people to match our team’s members, right?”

“How are we supposed to compete without matching manpower?” Shareef asked. Anishka rolled her eyes. “There’s six of you, there need to be six of us.”

“You’re not competing anyway,” Kim said.

“We would’ve had this situation under control if not for you roaring in here with your flaming hands and unproven medical experiments!”

Kyle was already slowly shifting back to his human form, but that wouldn’t stop Orn’s complaining.

“You think you guys were all prepared to undo a transformation?”

“Yes.”

“Okay then,” Kim said. “Where’s your towel and bucket?”

“Towel and bucket?”

“Yep,” Kim said. She crossed her arms and waited. “Well? Did you bring them?”

“Why on earth would we need a towel and a bucket?”

Kim gestured over her shoulder at Kyle, whose return to humanity was nearly complete. Just as he was finishing his return to humanity, Harley swooped in and wrapped a towel around his waist, hiding his now fully human genitalia from view. In defiance of what decades of Hulk movies and comics had said, pants were always the first casualty when someone transformed into a giant monster. A towel was a handy tool for modesty purposes.

“Okay, but what about the bucket?”

Vell stepped forward, used a rune to summon a large bucket, and deposited it in front of Kyle. As soon as his transformation back into a human was complete, Kyle doubled over and began to vomit profusely into the bucket.

“Conservation of mass,” Kim said. “All that extra crocodile biomass has to go somewhere.”

Adding the bulk necessary to become an eight foot tall crocodile was a relatively clean process. Getting rid of it, less so. The loopers and their would-be competitors both took a step back as Kyle purged the extra mass.

“And this is the kind of messy aftermath you could avoid with the professionals at-”

“Can it, Shareef, there’s no one around to sell to,” Anishka snapped. Every student bystander had long since fled the room.

“Salesmanship is a skill, and like every skill, it needs to be practiced,” Shareef said. Anishka rolled her eyes for what felt like the fifth time today.

“Come on, let’s get out of here,” Vell said. The sooner he got away from Orn, the better.

“Not so fast! We need to discuss your-”

“We do not need to discuss anything, Orn,” Vell said. “Ever again. Please.”

“Why do you hate Vell so much anyway?” Kim asked. “Is it because he’s a cowboy and you’re part horse?”

“He’s what?”

Vell seized on Orn’s momentary confusion to start poking around with the rune-summoning function of his phone.

“He’s a cowboy,” Kim said. “He rides horses, you’re half horse, is that where all this comes from?”

“I had no idea Vell Harlan chose to waste his time on such frivolous nonsense, and I don’t particularly care,” Orn said. “I am not part horse. Horses are part me.”

“Is that how that works?”

“Don’t know don’t care,” Vell said. He finished his summoning and a small spherical object appeared in his hand. “Smoke bomb!”

The smoke bomb hit the ground and detonated into a cloud of obscuring gas. By the time Orn and his teammates had stumbled their way out of the smoke, Vell and company were long gone. They had much more experience in making quick getaways.

“Always love a good smoke bomb,” Harley said.

“Next time I’m just throwing one right away,” Vell said. “Maybe at Orn’s head.”

“Sounds like a plan, my man.”

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Vell didn’t throw anything at Orn next time, as his hands were full of neutron reflectors. Luckily they had someone else running interference.

“No no no, absolutely not,” Lee said. She snapped her fingers and summoned a wave of water that coalesced into freezing ice around Orn and all of his teammates. “Stay right there, do nothing, say nothing, don’t even think.”

“But-”

“But nothing! Do you know what that is?”

Lee pointed behind her, at two metal half-spheres being carefully handled by Kim and a team of drones, operated remotely by Harley.

“Two mixing bowls?”

“No, Orn, that is a demon core.”

“I’ve handled demons before,” Orn said.

“First of all, no you haven’t,” Vell said. “Secondly, not that kind of demon!”

“What we are dealing with is a subcritical mass of plutonium, kept only barely out of criticality by a carefully balanced set of safeguards,” Lee said. “If anything in this room so much as twitches in the wrong direction, everyone inside—that means the six of you—will be subjected to an acute radiation burst and die a slow, horrible death from radiation poisoning.”

Shareef and Anishka stopped struggling against their icy prisons. Orn made a few more attempts to get loose, and Lee refroze his prison.

“Sit still and stay quiet until we are done.”

It was an order, not a request. In ordinary circumstances, Lee and the rest of the human loopers would not even be in the same room as the demon core, but having to intercept Orn and his “team” meant they needed to have extra security and safeguards in place. Lee did not appreciate having to endanger herself and her friends on account of their stupidity.

“This is blatant interference with-”

Lee froze Orn’s mouth shut. Then she froze Shareef’s mouth shut too just for good measure. He hadn’t said anything yet, but she felt like he was going to.

With all potential distractions frozen and muted, the loopers managed to take the demon core to a safe location and seal it within a properly secured radiation-proof tomb. Lee let out a deep sigh of relief the moment the lid latched shut.

“Alright, while subcritical the core shouldn’t have been giving off any harmful amounts of radiation, but there are detoxing chambers down that hall,” Lee said. Hawke hurried off that way before she even finished talking. “As for you all-”

Lee turned sharply and looked at their still-frozen competitors. Once again, Orn, Shareef, and Anishka had picked up three random hangers-on to their group, just to have matching numbers with the looper crew.

“You three can go,” Lee said. She unfroze them and let the anonymous trio skedaddle. Shareef glanced sideways at the fleeing crowd and then tried to smile, but his mouth was still frozen shut.

“Personally I think they make good ice sculptures,” Harley said.

“I agree, dear, but there is the risk of hypothermia,” Lee said.

“Let’s just get by the door and you can free them while we run away,” Vell suggested.

“Brilliant idea, Vell.”

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“I genuinely had no idea any of this was happening,” Cyrus said. “Sorry Vell.”

“No worries,” Vell said. “I didn’t think you’d know, but there was a chance.”

“Not everyone is as in-touch with their exes as you, Vell,” Harley said.

The loopers had been hoping that Cyrus might have some insight into what Anishka was up to, but he had barely interacted with his ex-girlfriend since they’d broken up. While those scarce interactions had given him no clues as to what she was doing, he did have an inkling as to why.

“So, I don’t know what the hell she’s up to, but we did talk over the summer break,” Cyrus said. They lived in the same small town, so some cursory interactions had been inevitable. “I think things went bad with someone she was dating, and she ended up asking if I wanted to get back together. I turned her down, told her I was dating Isabel now, and I may have mentioned that we kind of got together thanks to you…”

Cyrus went red in the face and trailed off. Vell could put the pieces together himself. He put his head in his hands and sighed.

“Why do so many people end up with random grudges against me?”

“I think subconsciously people can just sense how important you are,” Quenay said. She appeared in a flash to drift over Vell’s shoulder. “It makes them fixate on you for even the most trivial reasons.”

“Thanks, Quenay, very helpful,” Vell said. As always, his other conversational partners had no idea Quenay was even there, or that he was talking to her. He turned his attention back to Cyrus and Isabel. “Thanks for the help. If Orn and his buddies don’t get us all lethally irradiated we’re going to hang out at Lee’s, drink some wine and watch shitty movies this saturday. Feel free to stop by.”

“I think we’re free then, yeah,” Isabel said. “Good luck...not getting irradiated.”

She liked Vell, but some of the things she had to say to him occasionally unnerved Isabel.

“That invitation applies to you too, by the way,” Vell said, glancing in Quenay’s direction. “Not that you couldn’t just show up anyway.”

“Still, it’s nice to be invited,” Quenay said, before disappearing in a flash. Vell put his bag on his shoulder and headed out the door to regroup with the other loopers. They were in the lair, huddled around one of the computers while Harley pecked away at code.

“Not much luck on my end,” Vell said. “You guys get anything?”

“Nothing so far,” Harley said. “Doesn’t look like any of our phones have been tracked, and none of our texts are being monitored. I’ve got no idea how they keep showing up wherever we are.”

“The stuff we’ve done lately hasn’t exactly been subtle,” Samson said. Giant mutant crocodiles and unstable nuclear materials tended to attract attention.

“Still, if they were relying on simple word of mouth, they wouldn’t be able to show up so consistently, or quickly,” Lee said. “They must have some other means of knowing what we’re doing.”

“I guess,” Samson said. He returned his attention to his phone and continued texting. A spark fired in Vell’s brain.

“Hey Samson, who are you texting?”

“Ibrahim.”

“You’ve been texting a lot lately,” Vell said.

“Yeah. He’s been extra worried lately so I just calm him down by texting him-”

Samson looked up from his phone with a thousand yard stare.

“-what we’re doing,” Samson said. He took a deep breath and then got out of his chair. “Yeah. I’ll go talk to him.”