Chapter 215: Book 4 Chapter 1.1: Rude Introductions

VELL HARLAN AND THE DOOMSDAY DORMS 4

THE LAST TIME

Vell Harlan was going to die today, and that was the least of his problems.

Going back to school for his senior year should’ve been exciting, not terrifying, but Vell was not so lucky. He had a lot of problems, with two of them vying for the top spot. He was trying to distract himself from those two huge problems, and every other smaller problem, by talking to two of the best things in his life.

“So how’s things at Harlan Industries?”

“They’re all going very well,” Lee said. “Production is going smoothly, and-”

“And it’s all going exactly the same as when you asked this same damn question yesterday,” Harley said. “I get you need a distraction, man, but you got to get some new topics.”

“Everything else is too...thing-adjacent,” Vell said. He had a lot of things for topics to be adjacent to. Even talking to Lee and Harley on the phone was a problem. It reminded him that his best friends had graduated, and were no longer on hand to help him with all the problems he’d face this new school year.

“Listen, bud, coping mechanisms are one of my favorite things, you know that,” Harley said. “But it’s day one of the new year. Now is the time to put on your big boy pants and face the music.”

“It’s bad music,” Vell said through gritted teeth. “All this goddess and mystery rune shit was bad enough when it was a secret.”

Just thinking about it made his spine crawl, especially around the rune on his back, just above his waist.

“You’re going to be fine, Vell,” Harley assured him. “You’ve been through weirder shit than this.”

“You put up with three years of us, and you only came out of it mostly insane,” Lee said. “You’ll be alright.”

“I hope you guys are right,” Vell sighed. “Listen, the ferry’s pulling in, so I’ll call you guys later tonight, okay?”

“Yeah man, tell us all about the new loopers and stuff,” Harley said. “Good luck!”

“Goodbye Vell,” Lee said. “And remember we’re only a phone call away.”

“Yeah. Goodbye guys.”

Vell hung up the phone, slid it back into his pocket, and let out a deep sigh as he closed his eyes. He was still getting used to the idea that those two would not be on the island to greet him when he arrived. He still had Hawke, Kim, Samson, and many of his other friends, but the absence of his two best friends still left a void.

A void that someone was trying to fill by loudly clearing their throat.

“Whatever you’re going to ask, the answer is no,” Vell said, without opening his eyes.

“I just wanted to know-”

“I know you want to know,” Vell said, still not opening his eyes. He did not recognize that voice, so he was not paying attention to anything it had to say. “Everyone wants to know.”

Vell would not usually be so rude about it, but he’d run out of patience about two months and sixty-two thousand questions ago. Everyone on earth wanted to know about Quenay, the ten-lined rune, and the search for the meaning of life. On the upside, it had resulted in a lot of interest in the fledgling Harlan Industries, and on the downside, it had resulted in much, much, much more interest in Vell Harlan himself.

The most recent would-be interrogator shuffled off like hundreds of others before him, and Vell took the brief moment of peace to grab all his bags and get ready to disembark. The other passengers aboard were similarly preoccupied, slightly extending Vell’s moment of peace until he could step off the ferry and onto the docks. The familiar expanse of the Einstein-Odinson College campus was a comforting sight, however briefly.

“Hey, Vell, is Quenay around? I want to take some readings.”

“I haven’t seen her since last semester,” Vell said. Though the mysterious Goddess of Life had appeared randomly throughout his third year, she hadn’t shown up at all since giving away all her secrets. That didn’t stop someone from waving some kind of beeping instrument in his face. Vell stepped away and tried to avoid a crowd surge as clueless freshmen wandered their way across the docks.

“Vell! If you’ve got a minute, could I do a comparative spectral analysis on your rune?”

“I’ve already done that, it doesn’t work,” Vell snapped. He waved away a handful of butterflies while he was at it. The last thing he needed was people getting curious about the butterflies that stalked him too. “And even if it did: No!”

“What about a deep tissue scan?”

“Also done that, also no.”

“How about a blood sample for testing?”

Someone held a syringe worryingly close to Vell’s back, and he stepped away.

“I wouldn’t do that in a lab!”

“Yeah, we’re not in a lab.”

The profound disrespect for scientific ethics and safety worried Vell more than the profound disrespect for his personal space. Thankfully, help was on the way.

“Everybody move!”

The booming mechanical voice split the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea. Kim walked through the crowd she’d cut in half, with the faces of fearful spectators reflecting off her polished metal body. She put one heavy metal hand on his shoulder and started walking Vell towards the dorms. Her imposing presence helped keep the curious onlookers away, and gave them a chance to talk.

“Thanks, Kim.”

“No problem,” Kim said.

“You’d think the two of us being together would be even more tempting, though,” Vell said. “You’ve got the rune too.”

Kim gave a digital grunt of frustration. Even though the entire world knew about it now, she still kept her copy of the ten-lined rune hidden inside her metal body.

“People used to bother me about it,” Kim said. “Then I punched someone. You should try it.”

“I can’t punch as hard as you can,” Vell said. Even if he could, he was not the punching type.

“Well then you’re going to have to deal with it, bud.”

“Ugh. Other than me getting harassed, everything going alright?”

“Yeah, Hawke and Samson are taking their turns at the deja vu booth,” Kim said. “We’ll see how it works this year.”

“Let’s hope for a year without a new guy,” Vell said. Most school years came with a new student, or even several, randomly becoming aware of the time loop the entire campus was stuck in. Per Hawke’s suggestion, they set up a booth near the entrance that said “Ask us about your deja vu” on the first loop, to bait in any new loopers, but Vell hoped it’d be unnecessary.

“We both know you’re not that lucky,” Kim said.

“True.”

Acting on instinct, Vell almost made a turn towards the sophomore dorms where he’d lived last year, but Kim elbowed him back towards the senior dorm building. Before they stepped into the halls, Vell took a moment to admire the newly refurbished wall on the exterior. Lee had blown a hole in the old wall last year, and the school had spent the summer break completely remodeling that wall. It was funny, for a moment, and then Vell found himself wondering if that wall would make him think of Lee every time he walked to his dorm for the rest of the year. It stopped being funny.

Thankfully Vell’s dorm was on a different floor than Lee and Harley’s old dorms, so he wouldn’t have to walk past familiar territory every single time. Another potential interrogator made a beeline for Vell while they were in the hallway, but Kim changed her facial screen to display a giant red X, and that scared the interloper off long enough to get to the dorm.

“Here you go,” Kim said. “I’ll check on the other guys and keep an eye out for disasters while you unpack.”

“Thank you, Kim. This is why you’re my second in command.”

“You’re not foisting any leadership bullshit on me that easily,” Kim said. Vell let out a loud groan of despair and slammed through the doorway into his new dorm.

It was spacious, at least. Plenty of room to decorate, not that Vell had many decorations -or much reason to decorating, since this was the first loop and any decorating work would be undone. He could workshop some ideas, at least, find out where things looked good. For his first order of business, he hung a display shelf for the guitar he’d received from Roxy Rocket back in year one. With any luck, he’d actually find time to learn to play it this year. Second priority was setting up a nice spot for Prickly the Cactus. The succulent had grown up a bit, and was no longer quite as phallic as he had been when Lee had first gifted him to Vell, but Prickly was still a valued addition to any Vell Harlan homestead.

While Prickly was beloved, he was also quite pointy, which nearly turned into disaster when someone knocked on his door and nearly made him drop the cactus. Thankfully Vell managed to grab it by the pot and turn to glare at the door.

“What do you want?”

“To kiss you, mostly, but I’m open to other forms of canoodling.”

Vell breathed a sigh of relief. That was no overly curious scientist. It wouldn’t have been the first haranguing hanger-on to offer to kiss him (among other things), but this was a voice he recognized and loved. He opened the door and let Skye in, and happily accepted a long-overdue kiss. Skye kept her arms wrapped around her boyfriends shoulders long after the kiss ended, just to keep him close while they talked.

“How’d you enjoy the summer stuck at home?”

“Well, on the bright side, I got caught up on a lot of books I’ve been meaning to read,” Vell said. “Downside: literally everything else.”

“Everything else, huh,” Skye said, with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, I mean, obviously the calls and texts with you were great, I liked your, uh, you know-”

“I’ll bet you did,” Skye said. She had some very good ‘you knows’. “So, I wager we have two hours left before the curiosity crowd finds out where your dorm is. Got any ideas on how to spend it?”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I know this is incredibly unsexy of me to say but I do just want to do some interior design stuff,” Vell said. While Skye was slightly disappointed, she did help Vell figure out how to best arrange his room, taking a little extra time to emphasize where he should put his bed. Vell did his best to ignore the flirtations. He just didn’t like to do anything sexy on the first loop. It felt weird to sleep with someone who wouldn’t remember it, and it also came with the risk of interruptions.

Prickly fell off the shelf as the entire campus rumbled under their feet. Interruptions like that.

“Was that an earthquake?”

“Hold on,” Vell said, before taking a long pause. The rumbling did not continue, nor did it sound like anything across the campus was shaking. “Hmm, no, too abrupt. Either something very heavy just dropped down, or something exploded below the island.”

“You’d know,” Skye sighed. She didn’t bother asking questions. Vell came with a lot of very weird baggage.

“Sorry about this, feel free to hang out here, or wherever, hopefully this won’t be too big of a problem.”

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“Somehow I feel that this is my fault,” Vell said.

“You say something about it being a ‘big problem’?”

“Sort of.”

“Yeah, this is your fault,” Kim said.

The first daily apocalypse of the year was big in a literal sense. A giant grape had either appeared or been created somewhere in the sophomore dorms, and crushed most of the building. The wreckage of an entire building had pierced the bottom of the grape, and it was leaking sticky grape juice (and no small amount of gore from crushed students) out the bottom, creating an even stickier mess than most gruesome disasters.

“So, what’s our first- fuck,” Vell mumbled. He’d been about to ask Lee what to do next.

“You’re Lee now, Vell,” Kim said, instantly knowing what had just happened.

“Okay, fuck, give me a minute,” Vell said.

“Good news is you’ve got a minute,” Samson said. “The grape ain’t going anywhere.”

The squished bottom was messy, but it meant the grape wasn’t rolling around and crushing more stuff, which was a positive.

“Bad news is, there’s a good chance whatever made the grape is currently beneath the grape,” Hawke said.

“Good point. Kim? Would you mind digging around in the grape and seeing if you can find anything?”

“Come on, Vell,” Kim moaned. “Your first official act as leader is making me dig around in grapes and corpses?”

“Well I’d do it myself but I’d suffocate,” Vell said. “What’s your excuse?”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t going to do it, I’m just bitching about it,” Kim said. With a digital sigh, the robot plunged fist-first into the unpleasantly juicy flesh of the grape and started tearing through it. The other three loopers watched her vanish into the fruit, and then kept staring for a while after she had completely disappeared.

“So, boss,” Samson said. “We just waiting, or should we also do something?”

“I’m not sure we need to do anything,” Vell said. “But also, if we don’t, Kim will probably get mad at us.”

All three began to walk in different directions, intent on looking as busy as possible. Vell made it about three steps before getting bothered again.

“Vell, could you-”

“Not now!”

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After only a few minutes of searching, Samson had identified a potential lead. In a now-abandoned laboratory, some kind of beam device was pointed out a window, directly at the giga-grape. Vell had just arrived to appraise the scene for himself, while keeping Kim and Hawke looped in via phone.

“I can’t find any clue what this is for, but it definitely looks suspicious,” Samson said. “It’s in a biology lab, which I guess could maybe be focused on making things big?”

“We’ve seen stranger,” Vell said. He examined the ray gun cautiously, but it did not appear to be active.

“Does this mean I can get out of the grape now?”

Kim was still digging through the wreckage of the giant grape, and hating it more and more by the second. She’d gone digging through rubble and corpses before, but the fruit juice was adding an unpleasantly sticky new angle to an already bad situation.

“I suppose, but don’t go too far,” Vell said. “This is still just a ‘maybe’. Hawke, you keep searching, and Kim, be ready to go back in the grape if you need to.”

“Adding that to my list of weirdest shit you’ve said to me, but okay,” Kim said. “You better find something, though.”

“We’re certainly going to try,” Vell said. He hung up the phone and took a quick look around the lab. Since it was the first day, the lab was still mostly bare, with not much to investigate. “Okay, I’m going to try and figure out the ray gun, you work on the-”

Vell stopped mid-sentence and stared into the distance.

“Vell?”

“Shh.”

Vell held up a finger and waited, listening to something Samson couldn’t hear.

“Do you hear that?”

“No.”

“It sounds like…fuck!”

Vell abandoned the ray gun and grabbed a desk before pushing it towards the door. He looked more worried about whatever he’d heard than he did about the deadly grape.

“Samson, barricade the other door!”

“What?”

“Do it, it’s-”

Vell never got to finish this warning. It was, unfortunately, too late. Samson recognized the characteristic clip clop of hoofbeats a second before the door slammed open. Vell let out a loud groan of despair as his self-styled “nemesis”, Orn, stomped through the door. The centaur locked his chestnut eyes on Vell in an angry glare almost immediately. Another summer apart had done nothing to lessen his inexplicable vendetta against Vell.

“Vell Harlan, how dare you?”

“I do not need this right now,” Vell sighed. He put his face in his hands as if trying to hide behind them. Orn may have had a childish ego, but not a childish sense of object permanence.

“After every way I have surpassed you, you want to use some kind of ‘god’ as a way to upstage me?”

“Yes, that’s right, it’s all to upstage you,” Vell snapped. “I died when I was twelve specifically to fuck with you, Orn, you’ve figured me out!”

Though he would never admit it, Vell actually found it kind of cathartic to scream about his problems. He’d had the entire story of his death and resurrection bottled up for so long, it felt good to be able to scream about it in public. Not nearly good enough to be worth the trouble, of course, but he had to take whatever small pleasures he could get.

“Well, at least you have the decency to admit it,” Orn said. Vell rolled his eyes as hard as he could. “Now, about this goddess who has mistakenly made you her favorite-”

“Orn, I appreciate that you’re taking a slightly different approach to annoying me than most people,” Vell said. “But I really need you to cut it out. I’m in the middle of something.”

“What, another showboating attempt at pro-bono heroics?”

Orn clopped across the room and examined the mysterious raygun pointed out the window.

“Orn, don’t touch that!”

Unfortunately for everyone involved, Orn never had and never would listen to anything Vell said.

“If this is what you’re so concerned about, have you tried hitting the off switch-”

Vell had thought of that. But the switch Orn flipped was not the off switch.

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Vell was not going to die today. But he still had a lot of problems.

“And now I’m going to have to worry about new club members on top of everything else,” Vell said. Now that Orn’s foolishness had booted him to the second loop, he had to deal with second loop problems, like new loopers, and that all of his actions would now be permanent. At least the first loop came with the bonus that fuckups were temporary.

“I’m sure we said this last time, but you’ll be fine, Vell,” Lee assured him. Again.

“Yeah, you did say that last time.”

“Man it’s fucking weird not remembering stuff,” Harley said. “But whatever, we meant it in both timelines. You got this, Vell!”

“Yeah, sure,” Vell said. “So, anyway, how are things going with Harlan Industries?”

“They’re going fi-”

“Hey, wait a minute,” Harley said. “You already asked us this and are only asking again to kill time, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Good to know you still suck at lying,” Harley said.

“Come on, guys, there’s like thirty people waiting to bother me as soon as I get off the phone,” Vell said. “I’ve got to talk about something.”

“Well, we can always-”

Lee stopped talking when she started to hear a buzz through her phone.

“Hold on, I’m getting another call,” Vell said. “It’s from...Freddy?”

It was not entirely surprising that Freddy would call. They were good friends, after all. But Freddy Frizzle had not called Vell at all on the previous loops, and events from the first loop always repeated exactly the same -unless a looper changed them.

“I’m going to have to call you back,” Vell said. He quickly hung up on Lee and Harley and switched to Freddy’s call. “Hey, Freddy, what’s up?”

“Hey Vell,” Freddy said. “Sorry to get your year off to a bad start, but some chick was bothering me about you.”

“Well, Freddy, that is not exactly a surprise,” Vell said. “I have been getting bothered by chicks, dudes, and several other genders.”

“Yeah, I know, a couple of them have tried to go through me too,” Freddy said. His friendship with Vell was well-known, and people had tried to use him as a roundabout way to get info more than once. “But this lady was like, really intense. And she was asking a lot of questions that didn’t have to do with Quenay or the rune, too, like stuff that happened in past years, and even about Joan.”

“Well that’s uh, more concerning,” Vell said. “Slightly. But I have a feeling it might not be worth worrying about. We’ll talk more later.”

He finished up his goodbye and hung up, as they were about to pull into the docks. If Vell’s hunch was correct, Freddy’s mystery guest was probably just a new looper curious about what the hell was going on. He added that to his list of things to handle, slightly below “stop giant grape from crushing an entire dorm block”. Grape-based goal firmly in mind, Vell shouldered his bag and set out, eyes open for all the would-be interrogators who had ambushed him on the first loop.

“Nope, no, not you, definitely not you, please put that needle away,” Vell said, as he expertly dodged every obstacle in his way. He weaved through the crowd until he crossed paths with Kim going the other way, and gave her a thumbs up. “Good to go, just need to drop off my bags and I’ll be right there.”

Since Vell didn’t need any rescuing, Kim returned the thumbs up and got to work. Vell’s ferry was one of the last to arrive, so almost every other student was already well into their days, and the grape-expanding experiment might be underway already. Vell hustled through his dorm, trying not to notice the wall that reminded him of Lee, and dropped off his bags in his new dorm before turning right back around. On his way out, he crossed paths with Skye, who’d just stepped out of her own dorm, just down the hall from him.

“Hey, you,” Skye said. “I was just thinking about visiting.”

“And I was just thinking of visiting you,” Vell said, before giving her a quick kiss on the cheek. “But I have to go do one of those weird things you’re not supposed to ask questions about.”

“Ah, well, I’d ask questions, but, you know,” Skye said. “It’s not one of my guys this time, is it?”

“Nope, but it probably will be soon,” Vell said. Skye was the one exception among the persistent problems of the Marine Biology department, the school’s most frequently apocalyptic field of study. “See you later!”

Vell continued his quick jaunt down the halls and out of the dorms, towards the biology lab holding the rogue raygun. He was moving so fast Samson, who had been preparing for an hour at this point, barely intercepted him.

“You want to get this right away? We still have like an hour,” Samson pointed out.

“I want to get this over with,” Vell said. “We have a lot of other problems to solve.”

Over the phone, he and the other veteran loopers had discussed a two-pronged plan of attack. With Hawke manning the deja vu booth to find new loopers, Kim was in the sophomore dorms, intercepting every grape she saw, while Samson and Vell took on the cannon. All events from the first loop would repeat exactly as before without their intervention, and Vell wanted to be very thorough about said intervention.

“I’ll do the talking, you look for technical issues,” Vell said. “And remember to be-”

Vell opened the door to the suspicious lab. The room had been turned upside down, papers were scattered everywhere, and the labs occupants were all clustered around one student clutching tightly to the raygun Vell was here to investigate.

“-subtle.”

Both the student being surrounded and the ones surrounding her turned to look at Vell. The one at the center of it all, still clutching the raygun, locked on to Vell with an intense glare that immediately made him worried. She had very dark, piercing eyes, and glasses with thick black frames that accentuated the stare even more.

“Can I help you?”

“No, I think I already have it mostly under control,” the student said.

“She’s holding a year’s worth of experimentation and research hostage,” someone else said.

“Because I have good reason to believe it’s dangerous. And I believe Mr. Harlan will back me up on that.”

She turned that piercing gaze right back towards him. Something about her tone made it feel more like a command than a request.

“Uh…”

Vell did not like being put on the spot. He was bad at improvising and lying, a bad combination in a situation like this. Thankfully Samson was on hand to interject.

“I’m sure we can sort this out,” Samson said. “Maybe we just put all our rayguns down and have a nice, long talk about it.”

“Right,” Vell said. “And, uh, Samson can help you make sure everything’s working correctly, while I talk to, uh, her.”

“Alexandria Gray Hawk,” the raygun-hijacker said. “Call me Alex.”

“Alex. I’ll talk to Alex,” Vell said. “After she gives you back the ray. Right?”

Alex scanned the room, examined the gun, and then looked at the students surrounding her again.

“Why would I do that?”

“It’s their raygun, Alex,” Vell said. “You can’t just take it.”

“Even knowing what will-”

“What might happen,” Vell hissed. He cautiously moved closer to Alex and tried to lower his voice to a whisper to prevent bystanders from overhearing. “Listen, I know there’s a lot going on right now, but give me some time and I can explain everything.”

“Then explain it now.”

“I can’t explain right, and I can only explain why I can’t explain privately,” Vell said, glancing towards the students of the Biology department. Them overhearing anything about the timeloops would be disastrous, and keeping to whispers could only do so much.

“This seems suspicious,” Alex noted, correctly.

“Yeah, most people find it a little hard to parse,” Vell admitted. He’d handled his first time loop pretty well, but only because he’d died once already. “But I promise it’ll all make sense after a quick talk. For now, you’re just going to have to trust me.”

Vell stopped and held out an open hand to Alex. She looked down at his hand, then glanced between the raygun, the angry students, surrounding her, and back to Vell. After a moment of deliberation, she nodded her head, having made up her mind.

“No.”