Chapter 175: Book 3 Chapter 22.1: The Butterfly Guy

Vell dug his heels into the dirt and pulled on the rope as hard as he could. His lasso work, as always, was impeccable, but a simple lasso wasn’t much good against a raging cyclops.

“Sit the fuck down, Polyphemus,” Harley shouted. She had a Botley drone restraining one of his arms, while Lee kept the other frozen in ice, and Vell lassoed one of the blind cyclops’ massive legs.

The unexpected arrival of the legendary cyclops had actually been a very calm affair, at first. He had shown up, proclaiming to be searching for something, but in an entirely nonviolent fashion -until a student had told him “Nobody will try to stop you”. Polyphemus, who had a poor history with “Nobody”, had taken that as a threat and gotten punchy, so the loopers were getting punchy right back.

As he endured another flaming blow from Kim’s fists, Polyphemus swatted her away and then plucked one of Samson’s crossbow bolts out of his shoulder. With his massive size and impressive durability, Polyphemus was proving surprisingly hard to take down.

“I will not stop,” Polyphemus roared. “I will have what I want!”

“Well what the fuck do you want?”

“An eye!”

Kim froze mid-punch.

“Wait, an eye? Like, a prosthetic?”

“Yes. I have heard you can make eyes that give sight to the blind,” Polyphemus said. “I want one!”

“Dude, you could’ve just asked,” Kim said. “Those are super easy to make.”

With the violence temporarily on pause, Kim looked up at Polyphemus’ scorched eye socket.

“Well, might take a little longer to make one your size, but still,” Kim said.

“Yeah man, that’s not a big deal at all,” Harley said. She knew a few students who would be happy to experiment with a prosthetic in his size, for free even. “You should’ve said something sooner.”

“If you’d been blind for two thousand years, you’d be sensitive about it too,” Polyphemus protested.

“Alright, fine, that’s fair,” Lee said. “Can you please sit down and wait while we get you sized for a prosthetic?”

With a huff of displeasure, Polyphemus took a seat. Lee unfroze his hands, and Vell loosened his lasso.

“Well. So long as nob-”

Polyphemus blind gaze snapped in Lee’s direction.

“So long as no one around him mentions a certain word, I think we can mark the incident with Mr. Polyphemus concluded,” Lee said. She then lowered her voice. “And so long as we greet him with an eye in hand tomorrow, I believe this should be an easy apocalypse to prevent.”

“Thank god,” Samson said. “Even more time to relax.”

The cyclops attack would be their last apocalypse before the school’s new year break, and two weeks without an apocalypse. Samson was excited to have a few weeks of relative normalcy, if only because it meant Ibrahim would have nothing to complain about.

“Hate to break it to you, Samson, but things are going to get weird first,” Harley said. “We’ve got a lot of spare time, right?”

“Oh boy.”

“That’s right,” Harley said. “Butterfly Guy time. Kim, you got the thingy?”

“It’ll be ready to go in a minutes,” Kim said. She’d removed a few critical components from the Theta Beam teleporter to ensure it didn’t get used on accident, but it was a quick fix.

“Cyrus has the space suits ready,” Vell said. He’d started texting the minute Polyphemus had been dealt with. With no habitable planets anywhere near their destination, the gang would need some space suits to survive, and Cyrus and his connections in the rocketry department had come through for them.

“Seems we’re prepared as we’re going to get,” Lee said. “We’ll get suited up and see you in the lair in five minutes.”

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“That was ten minutes,” Kim said.

“It is surprisingly hard to walk in these suits,” Lee said. The spare space suits Cyrus had acquired for them were closer to the old school moon landing space suits, which meant they could only move in a very awkward waddle. Lee had been more than a little embarrassed shambling around in the clunky suit. Thankfully the visor did a good job hiding her face.

“And we had to shake like five of the damn butterflies off Vell’s suit,” Harley said. “I don’t know if we want those guys coming along with us.”

It felt odd to chase off the butterflies while actively seeking out where the butterflies had come from, but the impossible butterflies had a tendency to create wormholes when captured, so nobody wanted to see what happened if one got sent through a different kind of wormhole. They were already dealing with enough unknown variables without introducing possible spacial paradoxes on top of the experimental interstellar travel.

“We’re all suited up and ready to go, though,” Vell said. “Everything ready on your end, Kim?”

“Good to go,” Kim said. She had plugged herself in to the teleportation device, connecting it to the nigh-limitless power of her rune. “Seal those helmets and I’ll hurl you into the cosmic void on the count of three.”

Vell dropped his spacesuit visor, gave a thumbs up, and stood in place, flanked by Lee and Harley. Lee tugged nervously at the bulky sleeve of her spacesuit as Kim prepped the teleporter.

“You know, it occurs to me I’ve never actually done this Theta teleportation,” Lee said. “Is there any discomfort I should be aware of?”

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“Not unless Kim does something wrong,” Harley said. As she spoke, Kim finalized her preparations and started the countdown.

“Three, two, o- oops.”

“Oops?”

Harley’s protested ended there, as she disappeared in a flash of light and heat. The enclosed space of the looper’s lair gave way to and endless expanse of black emptiness. Vell stared at the endless void and felt very small and very alone for a moment, adrift in a weightless expanse.

“Everybody here?”

“Yup.”

“Present.”

“Good,” Vell said. “Everyone got all their limbs and organs in the right place?”

“Seems like it,” Harley said. “Can’t be one-hundred percent sure. I don’t know if I’d notice if my liver was in backwards or something.”

“You would,” Lee said. She had experience with that sort of thing.

“So Kim was probably just messing with us, then,” Vell said.

“Or maybe she zapped us to the wrong place,” Harley said. “I don’t see three suns.”

Lee grabbed Harley’s suit by the bulky backpack and flipped her around.

“Ah.”

Three massive blue stars drifted in the void, their surfaces churning with ancient flames. Bursts of sparkling coronal mass ejections swirled through the cosmos before getting caught in the overlapping gravity of the three stellar titans and spiraling into a sapphire hurricane. The swirling blue cyclone faded and pulsed as old fires died and new life was thrown in by the orbiting suns.

“Damn I wish we could take pictures of this,” Harley said.

All three paused to take in the sights. A lance of cosmic fire hurled forth from one of the three suns and into the stellar cyclone, making it grow so massive and bright its edges scraped the suns that had borne it.

“God, that is incredible,” Vell said.

“But it isn’t butterflies. Business time,” Lee said. “We have roughly six hours of oxygen to work with, so we need to move.”

Lee was all in favor of stopping to enjoy the view, but only after she got what they’d come here for. After that, they didn’t even have a way to get back home and would be stuck here anyway. Better to save sightseeing for afterwards, when they needed to kill time.

“On it, boss,” Harley said. She had a tablet strapped to her space suit’s arm, and she started punching in numbers as fast as her bulky gloves would allow. “Not getting much of anything except lots and lots of cosmic radiation. If not for these fancy suits we’d probably be one-hundred percent tumor already.”

They had opted to put a little extra radiation and thermal shielding in their suits, since they might be diving straight towards a sun. Not everything was so thoroughly shielded, and Harley’s tablet was starting to get a little twitchy thanks to the background radiation. Luckily, Lee’s magic suffered no such side effects. She finished casting a spell and drew her fingers back just in time to dodge the backlash of incredibly powerful magic.

“That is a lot of chronurgy magic,” Lee said. “It’s on par with Quenay.”

“She did say they’re roughly equal,” Vell said. “Where was it?”

“Where do you think?”

Lee pointed dead ahead, into the center of the sapphire hurricane spiraling between the suns.

“Shouldn’t have even asked,” Vell said.

“I’ve got the heading,” Lee said. “Grab on to me.”

Vell and Harley grabbed on to Lee’s arms, on either side, and held on tight while Lee used the rocket maneuvering pack on her space suit to send them drifting forwards. They all found it surprisingly easy to ignore the imminent risk of death by radiation exposure, or by getting caught in the gravity of one of the three suns. They faced such deaths on a regular basis already.

“So, while we’re slowly drifting through the void of space,” Harley said. “What’s our plan when we get to Mr. Guy, first name Butterfly?”

“Ask him as many questions as he’ll answer,” Vell said.

“And what if he answers none?”

“Then I will not be in the least bit surprised,” Vell said. “But we’ll have done everything we can, and we move forward without wondering what could have been.”

“That sounds therapisty.”

“Yeah, I was talking with Joan about this stuff the other day and she quotes her therapist a lot.”

“Good for her.”

“If I could politely request silence for a moment, we’re getting into the tricky bit,” Lee said. “This is where the gravity starts to overlap.”

As they approached the gravitational flux, Lee slowed her speed and went for precision instead. The slightest deviation from course would send them careening into one of the suns. A readout on Lee’s visor fed her dozens of datapoints about gravitational influence, momentum, and propulsion, and she carefully monitored each and every one of them.

Until she didn’t have anything to monitor. All her readings zeroed out in an instant. Harley’s tablet even started working again, as background radiation went from immeasurably high to zero. Below them, the chaotic cosmic spiral stabilized, and spun one direction at a constant rate. In the center of the endless spiral, a blank space formed -the eye of the storm.

“That is...odd.”

Harley let the dramatic pause pass without comment. Some situations warranted them.

“I think he’s trying to invite us in,” Vell said. “Should we be more or less worried about that?”

“We’ll play it by ear,” Lee said. She turned on her jets and got them moving forward yet again. With the gravitational influence and solar winds put on pause, simple momentum carried them to the center of the storm, and beyond. Even as the cosmic hurricane surrounded them on all sides, Harley’s devices could sense no radiation -though Lee’s fingertips tingled at the sheer amount of chronurgy in the air.

“It’s stopped in time,” Lee said. “Everything but us.”

“Hmm. Don’t like that.”

The apparent eye of the storm was not a natural phenomenon, but an artificial isolation tunnel, a hole bored in the fabric of space-time by unknown powers.

“Nothing’s forcing us to move forward,” Lee said. “If anyone wants to go back-”

“Fuck no,” Harley said.

“Nope. Already here, already doing it,” Vell agreed. “Let’s go.”

They had never stopped going, but Lee continued on the path. The absence of any celestial interference was allowing them to move towards the center of the storm even faster than before, and within moments, Lee could see some sort of disc-shaped platform taking shape at the heart of the cyclone.

“We’re coming in fast,” Lee said. “Harley, turn around and help me decelerate.”

Harley turned around and used her own maneuvering jets to provide some brakes. They’d come too far to go splat on impact now. A few quick bursts of acceleration killed their momentum and let the trio drift to a safe halt atop a the floating platform.

Were it not for the sapphire cyclone surrounding them on all sides, the three of them might have missed the all-black platform against the abyssal backdrop of space. The dark disk of unidentifiable material devoured all of the swirling sapphire light around it, providing a bastion of stable nothingness amid the chaos. The storm of solar wind above was centered on the space above the platform, with the swirling cyclone funneling into a single tornado-like spiral just above the center. Where that cosmic funnel cloud came to a point, a massive disk of blue dust flared out in every direction, slowly fading out into nothingness, while a single nearly invisible line of blue light, almost imperceptibly narrow, stretched downwards into infinity.

Floating a few inches away from the disk, with a blue cloak obscuring his massive frame and a dozen butterflies perched on his shoulders, was a single humanoid figure. The area where its face should’ve been was obscured by darkness, but it seemed fixated on the single thread of blue light that was stretching down into the infinite darkness.

The three loopers looked at the odd cosmic spectacle, back at each other, and then all fixed their gazes on the figure in the cloak. After a moment of staring at the thing that was nothing, Lee and Harley turned towards Vell. He took a deep breath and braced himself.

“Okay. Incomprehensible cosmic entity overseeing the conflux of all of time. No pressure, Vell Harlan.”

He took a step forward, towards the center of the disk, and faced off with the Butterfly Guy.