Chapter 201: Book 3 Chapter 36.1: The Shareef Redemption

“I’ve talked to some of my acquaintances in the Hydrokinesis classes, I have a few people who might be interested,” Lee said. “But there’s only one in particular who I really think we need, if we end up with a limited budget.”

“Limited would be a generous word for our budget right now, babe,” Harley said. The burgeoning Harlan Industries was already getting slammed with the cruel realities of the corporate world, and it only barely existed.

“I have a phone call with a clean energy firm in New York later, maybe we’ll get good news.”

“Sounds like a plan.”

Harley looked up from her paperwork. That was not Lee’s voice. Lee also looked up from her paperwork, as that was not Harley’s voice either. They both looked to their right and found an unfortunately familiar face.

“Shareef!”

“The one and only,” Shareef said. He reached out and grabbed both of them by the shoulders, and was entirely unperturbed when both pulled out of his grasp. “Good to see you two, couldn’t help but overhear some business plans-”

“Go away, Shareef.”

“Ladies, no need for hostility, I come as a friend-”

“You are not our friend, you are very explicitly our enemy,” Lee said. The last time they’d seen Shareef, he’d been trying to supplant them as the campus’s resident problem-solvers. “You repeatedly tried to sabotage us!”

“And it didn’t work,” Shareef said. “It was never anything personal, I just saw a good business opportunity!”

“We’re not a business,” Harley snapped. “I mean, we are a business now, but that’s unrelated. And we weren’t when you tried to sabotage us.”

“I know. I was deliberately and maliciously misled by Orn, and I am truly sorry for that.”

Shareef bowed apologetically, head low and hands clasped together in contrition. Every movement and every gesture was a deliberate, performative act, utterly lacking in sincerity. Shareef was a salesman, and right now he was trying to sell his own apology. Lee didn’t buy it.

“Shareef, whatever you want out of this shameless display, you’re not getting it,” Lee said. “Come on, Harley.”

The two grabbed their paperwork and prepared to set out. They made it exactly three steps before Shareef came careening around and slid to a halt in front of them.

“Wait wait wait please stop,” Shareef squeaked. “I know I fucked up the last time we met but I kind of sort of need your help.”

“Whatever mess you’ve gotten yourself into, you can get out of it without our help,” Lee snapped. She shoved Shareef aside and kept walking, ignoring as Shareef trailed in her footsteps.

“Okay, seriously, please, I’m completely dropping the act here,” Shareef said. “I need your help for like, one hour, and then I’ll never bother you again, please.”

“I said no, Shareef,” Lee said. “If you keep this up I’m calling security.”

‘That’s a bit harsh, ain’t it?”

“No, Harley, that’s the nice option,” Lee said. “The harsh option is me dealing with him myself.”

A spark of purple mana flared in Lee’s eyes, and even Shareef was smart enough to see the implied threat.

“Okay, bye,” Shareef whimpered. He spun around and started skulking the other direction at a brisk pace. Lee huffed with satisfaction at his cowardly retreat and then got back on track. Harley looked over her shoulder at Shareef and felt a twinge of regret.

“Do you think maybe we should’ve just heard what he had to say first?” Harley asked. “What if his thing ends up causing the apocalypse today?”

“Then we’ll find out about it either way,” Lee said. “I see no reason to tolerate him any more than I have to.”

“I know he nearly got us irradiated that one time, but you seem to have a weirdly personal Shareef beef,” Harley said. He had been an annoying but ultimately small part of Orn’s weird attempt to usurp the loopers, hardly worthy of the level of scorn Lee was currently aiming at him.

“He’s a marketer,” Lee said, with an audible gurgle of disgust in her voice. “At least other businessmen have the decency to actually create something. A marketer exists to exaggerate, lie, and parasitize other people’s projects.”

“You know, we’re going to need a marketing department eventually,” Harley said.

“And we’ll staff it with better people than him,” Lee said. She adjusted her purse on her shoulder and continued walking, chin held high. Harley recognized a lost cause when she saw one -and she also recognized that Shareef was making a beeline for Vell’s dorm.

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“Vell Harlan, when are you going to learn how to play this thing?”

Skye idly brushed her hands against the perfectly smooth shell of Roxy Rocket’s guitar. After dating Vell for several months, she had actually earned the right to touch the prized guitar, though apparently even he didn’t have permission to actually play it. Vell just shook his head.

“You don’t learn how to play violin on a Stradivarius, alright?” Vell said. “I’ll get a practice guitar when I actually have time on my hands.”

“You know, I have a regular, non-Roxy blessed guitar you could borrow,” Skye said. “I could give you some lessons tonight.”

She joined Vell on the couch and leaned on his shoulder.

“Just say the word,” Skye said.

“A guitar lesson sounds nice, actu-”

The sound of frantic knocking at Vell’s door was unfortunately familiar and very unwelcome. Vell rolled his eyes and sighed, as did Skye, and she pivoted around on the couch to free her boyfriend.

“Guess it’s that time of day,” Skye said.

“Maybe,” Vell said. People knocked on his door for a lot of reasons. He checked his phone to see if he’d missed some emergency, and the knocking continued.

“Just answer it,” Skye said, as the knocking continued. “They’re obviously not going away.”

Vell got up (reluctantly), and walked to the door to open it a crack. He peeked through with one eye and immediately rolled both eyes when he saw Shareef.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, please, very much, I need help,” Shareef said.

Vell’s face went through thirty different expressions of concern as he cataloged everything he knew about Shareef -mostly negative.

“Is Orn involved?”

“I haven’t spoken to him in months,” Shareef said.

“Okay, fine,” Vell sighed.

“Oh thank god, you-”

“Ah, hold on just a second,” Skye said. She walked up to the door and cracked it open slightly wider, to shove her own head through. “Hi, nice to meet you, you tried to irradiate my boyfriend?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘tried’, it was more of a possible consequence of-”

“I try to stay out of semantics when radiation is involved,” Skye said. “Anyway, just curious, did you by any chance already ask Lee and Harley for help earlier?”

Shareef very suspiciously said nothing. Skye gave his boyfriend a chiding shove to the shoulder. She admired his trusting nature, but some people warranted a little more scrutiny.

“Right, and I think we can probably assume what their answer was,” Skye said.

“If they said no, I’m saying no,” Vell said. He had no reason to mistrust Lee or Harley’s judgment -at least not on this matter. Harley had questionable opinions on explosives handling.

“Come on, they didn’t even hear what I needed help with!”

Vell pursed his lips, and Skye stared at him until he blinked.

“He at least gets to say what he needs help with,” Vell said.

“Fine. One sentence,” Skye said.

“Fine,” Vell said. Both halves of the couple turned to look at Shareef. He wisely took a moment to think about it, but the more he thought, the more he deflated.

“I need to...have a really good business opportunity...or my dad’s going to be really disappointed?”

Vell stared at Shareef for exactly seven seconds, then took two steps back and slammed the door in his face.

“Come on!”

Skye popped the door open again to stick her head out and glare at Shareef with almost the same level of intensity that Lee had. He once again took the hint, and Skye slammed the door shut again.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“There, see, now we can take the whole day to do our own things instead of helping some jackass we barely know,” Skye said. “A girl could get used to this ‘not helping people’ thing.”

“Don’t count on it,” Vell said.

“Ah, that’s true, I like being nice,” Skye said. “Just not to him.”

“We all have our limits,” Vell said. He didn’t exactly feel great about it, but Shareef was only reaping the rewards of his own incompetence. Sometimes people had to learn the hard way.

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“What about that guy?” Hawke said. He pointed to a random student crossing the quad between sips of his smoothie.

“Hmm. According to Lee, he was part of a team that made a multiverse tear back in her first year,” Kim said.

“Weird.”

Kim was using her supercomputer brain to help Dean Lichman update student files, and in so doing, was cross-referencing the student info with records of past apocalypses to see who caused the most trouble. As expected, the Marine Biologists popped up more than anyone, followed shortly thereafter by the advanced general-knowledge group of students that Freddy and Goldie were a part of.

“Anyone in our bocce club?”

“Ralph the Werewolf blew up the sophomore dorms that one time,” Kim said.

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.”

“You were one of the guys who got blown up,” Kim said.

“I’ve been blown up a lot!”

Hawke set his smoothie down to gesture more emphatically, and for the first time noticed that something had changed.

“Kim,” Hawke said. “When did my shirt change color?”

The once plain brown t-shirt Hawke had been wearing was now bright green, and had a cartoonish logo in the center advertising Mini-Mike’s, a type of fruity candy. Hawke enjoyed candy from time to time, but not enough to wear a shirt related to it, and certainly not enough to spontaneously manifest one on his body.

“I think that’s a recent development,” Kim said. “Look.”

She pointed at the very same student they had just been appraising. He was also looking down at his shirt, baffled by the sudden change to a green Mini-Mike’s t-shirt. Behind him, dozens of students who had been crossing the quad were also examining their newly changed garb.

“Oh shit, it’s everyone,” Hawke said.

“And it gets better. Wait for it.”

One of the students turned around in confusion. The seat of their pants was also emblazoned with the Mini-Mike’s logo, and everywhere Hawke looked, every other butt was also branded with the candy logo. He reluctantly put a hand on his own rear and sighed when he felt the texture of an embroidered logo.

“I have a candy logo on my ass.”

“Hah! That’s what you get for wearing clothes,” Kim teased, as she turned around to examine his new, embarrassing attire.

Hawke failed to stifle a giggle as she turned.

“I don’t think you’re much better off,” Hawke said.

“Hm?”

Kim held up her forearm and examined her reflection in the polished metal. Her facial display had turned a bright green, and was blaring the Mini-Mike’s logo.

“Son of a bitch,” she mumbled. No matter how hard she tried, she could not make the screen change.

“I’ll call the guys,” Hawke said. He thumbed through his phone and was immediately met with a green glow. “Oh, look at that, it’s on my phone too. Fuck this.”

Hawke joined the group chat and found that everyone else was suffering from the same wardrobe malfunction. While not lethal just yet, the shadow of the daily apocalypse hung firmly overhead.

“This will find some way to spiral out of control,” Lee said firmly. “This kind of mass transmutation never ends well.”

“Speak of the devil,” Harley said. “Good news, gang. I think we all have matching tattoos now. Check your shoulders.”

Hawke checked his own shoulder and found it bare, but he did catch a glimpse of the Mini-Mike’s logo on his forearm instead.

“This is already in the running for one of my least favorite apocalypses,” Kim said, as she stared down at a logo welded into her chestplate.

From within her dorm, Lee found a mirror and glared at her own reflection -and the curved logo now emblazoned across her forehead like a billboard. Like an advertisement.

Like marketing.

“Shareef.”

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“Anyone found the little rat yet?”

“He might be less inclined to hide if you phrased things a little bit less like we’re hunting him for sport,” Vell suggested.

“We are hunting him,” Lee said. “But there’s nothing sporting about it.”

“Okay, see, that kind of phrasing is exactly what I’m talking about,” Vell said.

“I have a candy logo on my forehead!”

And a few other places too, at this point. The epidemic of Mini-Mike’s advertisements was still spreading. There was now one floating in the ocean just offshore, and a few on every cloud that rolled by. Every article of clothing they wore and every object they carried, even their own skin, bore the same green, black, and white logo.

“Yeah, we’re all having problems here, Lee,” Harley said. She was utterly furious about being forced to wear green, but she bottled up that anger for the sake of the mission. “Focus on solving them.”

“Fine,” Lee grunted. “How is your search going?”

“I found Anishka,” Vell said. “She very rudely told me she hasn’t spoken to Shareef in months. She also called me a homewrecker, among other, ruder things.”

“What’d Cyrus ever see in her?”

“Good question,” Vell said. “Kim, you manage to make it through a conversation with Orn?”

“Barely,” Kim said. “Between the insults and self-aggrandizing statements, he managed to mention he also hasn’t seen Shareef since their whole teamup thing. Harley?”

“Nobody else he worked with seems to know what he’s up to,” Harley said. “Or anyone else, for that matter. Nobody seems to know this guy like, at all.”

“He’s utterly friendless, how shocking,” Lee said.

“It’s actually kind of sad,” Hawke said. “Like, even shitheads are at least supposed to get along with other shitheads.”

“I’m not particularly interested in his social life,” Lee said. “This magic is infectious, so it’s difficult to trace back to the source.”

Whatever was causing the logo to appear was doing so through a sort of magical virus -it infected one surface, which then passed it whatever it was in contact with. The initial spell had only affected their shirts, but by the time Lee had prepared her spells to trace the magic back to the source, the web of magic was too tangled to be traced.

“This is all a huge pain in the ass,” Harley said. “And you know what really sucks?”

“What?”

“All this advertising is actually kind of working,” Harley said. “I would devour a box of Mini-Mike’s right now.”

“God, same,” Vell said.

“That goes without saying, dear, they’re delic- wait a minute,” Lee said. “I hate Mini-Mike’s.”

“How can you hate Mini-Mike’s?” Hawke asked. “They’re bursting with explosive fruit flavor and oh god they’re in our brains!”

“Shit,” Lee said. Even as she tried to focus on her distaste for the candy, her mind was filled with thoughts of crazy sweet, juicy fruit flavors. “Everyone split up and find Shareef before we lose our minds!”

In a credit to the self control and discipline the loopers had developed, it took them all about ten minutes before they went insane. Unfortunately the other students were not so disciplined, and they spent most of those ten minutes running from and/or dying to do a candy-crazed mob.

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Lee and Harley sat at the same picnic table as they had on the prior loop, this time joined by Vell, and this time with no light discussion of the future of their burgeoning company. There was also a very significant difference in Lee’s facial expression.

“Lee, I’m not going to tell you to smile or anything,” Harley said. “But you do at least need to not look like you want to kill yourself.”

“I have spent too much of my life pretending to tolerate people who only want to exploit me for money,” Lee said. “I will not do it again.”

“Okay, respect your life choices,” Harley said. “Maybe just don’t talk and we’ll say you’re grumpy because you haven’t had your coffee yet or something.”

“Maybe go with a hangover,” Vell said. “She’s got a bit of a scowl.”

A scowl that only deepened when Vell talked about it.

“If, uh, that’s alright with you, Lee.”

“Do what you have to do,” Lee sighed. “Just don’t expect me to participate in this any more than I have to.”

Lee was only putting up with this plan because, as far as they knew, it was the best way to stop the advertising apocalypse. With no information on what had happened last loop, the only way to prevent it was to cut it off at the source. It had taken some persuasion from Vell to get her on board, but she was on board. Barely.

“Of course,” Harley said. “Okay, he’s coming, places everybody.”

While Shareef had managed to weasel his way to their picnic table unseen on the prior loop, this time they were being more vigilant. Lee glared at Shareef as he approached, and her cold stare almost made him stop in his tracks.

“Hey...guys,” Shareef said. He paused to recover and then switched in to salesman mode. “Long time no see, right? How’ve you been?”

“I’ve been better,” Lee said.

“Don’t worry about her, she’s just hungover,” Vell said. “Did you need something, Shareef?”

“I don’t need anything, Vell Harlan, what I want,” he began, stressing the word “want” far too much. “Is to discuss a mutually beneficial arrangement with all of you.”

Lee rolled her eyes. This had all been more tolerable when Shareef was desperate and begging for help.

“Hey, so, quick refresher: Why should we help you?” Harley said. She didn’t want to go too easy on Shareef, both to avoid looking suspicious and because he didn’t deserve it. “Last time we met you were trying to sabotage us nonstop.”

“Yes, and I am so sorry,” Shareef said, with the same overly dramatic bow. “I was deliberately and viciously misled by Orn, and I apologize.”

“Cool, so what’s this mutually beneficial relationship thing,” Vell said. “What’ve you got?”

“Well, you guys have started a company, right? Super cool, by the way, love what you’re working with,” Shareef said. “You’ve got a hot product, everybody wants it, and I know how to advertise it.”

“If our product is hot and everybody wants it, why do we need to advertise it?”

“Because you’ve got to establish yourself as the first, best, and only source of those mana-harvester thingies before someone like Kraid comes along and starts selling them cheaper,” Shareef said. “Exactly like he did with that phone case Vell made.”

Vell crossed his arms. He had invented a phone attachment that could summon runes on demand through an app, and then had Kraid steal that invention and sell it at half the price. But that had all happened before Shareef had even attended the school.

“You’ve been doing research.”

“Yeah, learned that from Orn: Always do your research,” Shareef said. “Look, you guys have a really good, innovative product, but it’s only a matter of time before someone starts making it faster, cheaper, or better. You got to build a massive and loyal customer base before then. Can’t just rely on word of mouth.”

“That’s...actually a pretty good point,” Harley said. Lee was not so impressed.

“And that marketing is supposed to come from what, you? The genius behind names like EOTIART and DORC?”

“Those are just the names that Orn liked, I came up with different ones,” Shareef mumbled. “Look, you wouldn’t just be working with me, you’d be working with the entire Najafi Group.”

Shareef paused and waited for a reaction he didn’t get.

“The Najafi Group,” he repeated.

“Oh,” Harley said. “You mean those guys I’ve never heard of?”

“They’re the fourth most successful marketing firm in Saudi Arabia!”

“I’m not even sure most Saudi Arabians would be aware of that,” Vell said.

“Okay, whatever, the point is we’re very good at marketing and very well-connected,” Shareef said. “We can get you to the middle eastern market, plus connections in Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America.”

“What about South America?”

“My dad’s banned from South America, long story,” Shareef said. The story actually wasn’t very long, but admitting his dad had killed and eaten an endangered Amazon River Dolphin was embarrassing.

“Your father, hmm? Tell me, Shareef, is this actually about a business opportunity, or an opportunity to impress your father?”

“Well, you really do need a marketing te-”

“Be honest, Shareef,” Lee scolded. The fact she already knew the truth made it that much easier to put the pressure on.

“Okay, god, fine, I need to make some important business connection or my dad’s going to kick me out, and he’s been obsessed with you guys lately,” Shareef said. “You don’t even have to actually hire me, or sign a contract or anything, just pretend you’re super interested in working with me for like an hour, then we’re done, okay? Please?”

“I suppose it can’t hurt,” Harley said.

“Can’t it?”

Harley elbowed Lee in the side.

“It’s fine, Shareef,” Vell said. “But let’s maybe keep it on the short side.”

“Okay, yeah, for sure, just in and out, handshakes, business cards, move on, no problem,” Shareef said. “But while I’ve got you geniuses here, I had this idea for a way to advertise something, say, candy-”

“No!”

“Absolutely not.”

“Don’t.”

“Okay, okay,” Shareef said. “We’ll stick to the meet and greet. See you guys at the docks in an hour.”