Chapter 218: Book 4 Chapter 3.1: The Kids Aren't Alright

“Okay, this is a good starter apocalypse,” Vell said. “I like this one.”

“Vell, this is a bomb.”

A large cluster of explosive materials was crudely welded together, all centered around a timer that was rapidly ticking down. Vell tapped the timer and then gestured to the roughly minivan-sized explosive.

“Yeah, and it’s just a bomb, that’s great,” Vell said. “It doesn’t have legs, it isn’t hidden in someone’s chest cavity, it isn’t sentient and begging for its life. Just a plain old-fashioned improvised explosive device. And we’ve got a whole two hours left on the timer!”

Vell stepped away from the bomb and stood between the two new recruits.

“So, how would you two handle this,” Vell said. “Helena, let’s start with you, what’s your approach?”

“A bomb is a mechanical device like any other,” Helena said. “We figure out how it works, we figure out how to make it not work. Easy.”

“Alright, good instinct,” Vell said. “Alex, what about you?”

“If it’s a mechanical device, someone built it,” Alex said. “We find out who built it, we can find out how to turn it off.”

“Also a good instinct,” Vell said. He stepped away and turned around to face both Helena and Alex. “Both of you, great job.”

The two newbies exchanged a look.

“But,” they said simultaneously.

“But, yes, there are some problems,” Vell said. “No offense to either of you, that genuinely was very good. This is just an inexplicable chaotic timeloop. There’s always a but. Sometimes it’s a literal butt, and it’s thirty feet tall and trying to twerk you to death. True story, don’t ask Hawke about it.”

“It was hairy,” Hawke said with a shiver.

“Helena, your answer is that it was a mechanical device, what if it’s not mechanical, what if the bomb is actually an organic being mutated to look like a bomb,” Vell said. “Or what if its interior components are actually a portal to the explosion dimension—real place—and it doesn’t have any vital systems to deactivate? What if the bomb’s trigger mechanism is actually a tiny man and you have to kill him to disarm the bomb?”

Alex’s ears perked up.

“Is that last one a real story too?”

“No, just an ethical dilemma a friend of mine gave me while drunk,” Vell said. “Moving on. Alex, your solution to the bomb problem also works, but we run into the problems of, what if the bomb has been displaced from another dimension? What if it was built in the seventies and some guy found it in a closet and reactivated it on accident, or even something as simple as the person who built it already being dead?”

Alex did not take even the casual criticism well, and Vell immediately deescalated when she started scowling.

“Again, both very solid ideas, uh, good starting points, you just need to remember to keep an open mind,” Vell said. “Anything can happen, and you need to be prepared for that.”

“Alright,” Alex said. “So did we pass or fail?”

“Hmm?”

“This was some kind of test, or evaluation, yes?” Alex said. “Did we succeed or fail?”

“It’s, uh, it’s not a test, just a teaching experience,” Vell said with a shrug. “This is the lesson, the actual test will be, uh, defusing the bomb, which we’re going to get started on now.”

“It won’t explode for another hour and a half,” Alex pointed.

“Yes, but the ideal time for a bomb to explode is never,” Vell said. “Let’s split up, cover all angles, like I was saying. Kim, you take Hawke and Alex and search the area, then go looking across campus for whoever or whatever made the bomb. The three of us will figure out how the bomb works.”

“Can do, boss,” Kim said. “Come on, gang, let’s form our own personal inquisition.”

“Oh, excellent,” Alex said. “I have some interrogation techniques I’ve been meaning to experiment with.”

“No, bad, no torture,” Kim said. Alex kept moving at a brisk pace regardless.

“Alright, while they handle that, we handle the bomb,” Vell said. “I’ll take the lead, since I have the most experience with bombs.”

“My genetic code is a ticking time bomb for cancer,” Helena said. “Does that count?”

“No,” Vell said. “Huddle up, I’m going to check out the wires sticking out of the timer.”

“Yes, great, huddle,” Alex said. She hobbled over and peered over the two boys shoulders, as her crutches didn’t exactly allow her to bend at the waist. “Remember to-”

Vell had already taken his position, crouching uncomfortably at a distance, with his arms fully extended, so that Alex would have a good view from her standing position. He looked up from his odd crouch when she stopped speaking.

“Remember to what?”

“Be careful and don’t cut any wires, obviously,” Alex said. She’d been about to remind Vell to make sure she could see. But she wasn’t about to admit that.

“Obviously,” Vell said. “Luckily for us, this appears to be a pretty bomb-standard bog. Bleh. Bog-standard bomb, sorry.”

He pointed out several red wires connected to the timer.

“Even got the classic wires to cut.”

“Ah, the classic red wire versus green wire,” Helena said.

“They’re both red,” Samson said.

“Oh. I’m also a little colorblind.”

“Noted, no color-sensitive work for Helena,” Vell said. “We’ve still got a two-wire dilemma, though. I think both of these are connected to the detonator.”

He gently tapped on two wires connected to one of the internal mechanisms. He’d disarmed enough bombs to know how the wire problem worked.

“Well, let’s give it a bit for Kim and her team to do their thing,” Vell said. “Close that loop before we cut any wires.”

He stepped away from the bomb and took a seat.

“So. Any hobbies, Helena?”

“I like to count my teeth to make sure they’re all still in there,” Helena said. “Most of the time they are!”

“Okay. For my own recordkeeping purposes,” Samson said. “So far you’ve said there’s something wrong with your spine, teeth, jaw, heart, stomach, blood, lungs, eyes, legs, arms, bones, and pancreas.”

“Yep.”

“Lets make this a little quicker,” Samson said. “Is there any part of you that works right?”

“Left kidney,” Helena said.

“Okay, at least there’s- is it your kidney?” Samson asked. “Like, your original kidney, that you were born with?”

“No, transplant,” Helena said. “That was my eighth birthday present from mom. Her kidney.”

Samson had no idea how to continue the conversation from there, so he shut up. Helena enjoyed his silence far more than his invasive questions.

Vell, on the other hand, found the silence awkward.

“So what’s your degree in, anyway?”

“Programming,” Helena said. “Typing is one of the only things I can do without injuring myself, so it was either programming or try to write a novel.”

“Did you try writing a novel?” Vell asked. “You’re pretty good at black comedy.”

“I’ve barely got a heart, much less the heart of a poet,” Helena said. Samson’s already thin patience for Helena’s antics was running out.

“How much time is left on that timer?” Samson asked.

“It’s right there, Samson,” Helena said. She waved a crutch towards the timer, which currently read one hour and forty-five minutes remaining. “You can look at it.”

“I wanted to ask because I have the follow-up question of ‘how long are we going to wait before cutting this wire’,” Samson said.

“I just want to give Kim and her team time to do their thing,” Vell said.

“We’ve waited long enough already, I think,” Helena said. “Finding out who created the bomb is pointless. We have a binary choice and two chances to make it. We cut the wrong wire right now, we can just cut the other one on the next loop.”

“She’s got a point,” Samson said. “Even if we want to find whoever built it, they’ll probably show up later wondering why their bomb didn’t explode.”

“What kind of idiot do you think built this thing,” Helena scoffed. “Why would they return to the scene of the crime?”

“I don’t know, if I built a bomb and it didn’t bomb I’d be pretty fucking confused,” Samson said.

“Well you can stand by the undetonated bomb all day and see who shows up,” Helena said. “For now, let’s just find out which wire to cut.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“Yeah Vell, let’s shit or get off the pot here,” Samson said. “Let’s cut a wire.”

“Fine, do you want to like, flip a coin, or pick one?”

“I say right,” Samson said. “I always go right first when paths branch out in video games.”

“I say left,” Helena said. Samson rolled his eyes.

“I’m just going to flip a coin,” Vell said. Helena kept a careful eye on him as he fished some spare change out of his bookbag and flipped the first coin he found. “Heads it’s right wire, tails it’s left.”

The coin spiraled in the air, bounced on the ground, and then came up tails. Vell left the coin on the floor rather than put it back in his bookbag right away. There was a fifty-fifty chance he and the coin would get obliterated soon, so he didn’t want to spend the effort to bend down and pick it up yet.

“Left wire it is,” Vell said. He grabbed his wire cutters and isolated the left wire. “And look at it this way, now its not technically Helena’s fault if this gets us blown up.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” Helena said, as Vell clipped the wire.

“Wh-”

Boom.

----------------------------------------

The explosion was ringing in Vell’s ears all the way to the next loop, until it was undercut by a dull thumping at his door. Given that no one had been knocking at his door last loop, and the distinctive, thudding style of knock, Vell could guess who it was.

“Morning, Helena,” Vell mumbled as he sleepily opened the door. Helena shambled in without waiting for an invitation and took a look around Vell’s dorm. It was still bereft of any decorations, short of his scarlet red guitar and Prickly the Cactus.

“Very utilitarian, Vell Harlan,” she said. “I expected more...color.”

“S’only the second day,” Vell mumbled. “I’m not done unpacking. You need something?”

“Just wanted to discuss the bomb situation.”

“Yeah, we can handle that, let me get out of my PJ’s first,” Vell yawned.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Helena said. “I just won’t build it.”

Any trace of slumber got blasted right out of Vell’s body as his heart started to pound.

“You’ll what?”

“Well, not technically build, I got it out of the storage locker and did some rewiring,” Helena said. “You guys have a lot of bombs in there, you should really clean it out.”

“It’s not a problem when people leave the bombs alone,” Vell said. “Why the fuck did you do that?”

“To see if I could,” Helena said. She couldn’t exactly shrug on crutches, but she rolled her shoulders in a good facsimile of one. She’d practiced. “You said the apocalypse happened every day. I wanted to see if I could cause it on purpose.”

“Why?”

“To hack the loop, obviously,” Helena said. “If my hypothesis is correct, now all I have to do is build and detonate a bomb every first loop, and then not build it every second loop. The apocalyptic criteria is met, and we don’t have to worry about chasing down problems on the second loop.”

Vell stared at Helena for a moment, dumbstruck that she would consider that a reasonable course of action.

“I also wanted to see your leadership style in that whole two-wires scenario,” Helena said. “They both would’ve blown us up, FYI, I just wanted to see how you’d pick. Very non-committal, by the way, you should work on your authority.”

Vell shook his head clear and tried to focus on the real problem rather than the uninvited criticism.

“You think you caused the daily apocalypse on purpose?”

“I’m pretty sure, yes.”

“Alright, counterpoint,” Vell said. “What if you just got us blown up before the actual daily apocalypse?”

“I suppose there’s a slim chance-”

Holding up one finger to shush Helena, Vell took his phone out and dialed up Kim.

“Kim, you guys find anything scanning the campus?”

“Yeah, after you dipshits got yourselves blown up we ran into part two of the problem,” Kim said. “School’s going to get attacked by a god damn kraken.”

Vell glared at Helena, who glared right back.

“For all you know that’s unrelated,” she said.

----------------------------------------

“Honestly, I’m as surprised as you are,” Joan said. Vell had texted her about her sisters presence at the Einstein-Odinson yesterday, but this was the first time they were actually speaking about it. “She never mentioned anything about going to school, especially not that school.”

“Well she’s here,” Vell said. In the background, Samson and Helena were having a very intense debate over whether what she did legally constituted murder or not. “And she’s, uh, having a hard time getting acclimated.”

“I’m not surprised,” Joan said. “She’s never actually been to school before, you know, it was all homeschooling or online lessons.”

“I can see why,” Vell said. The amount of health problems Helena apparently had would’ve made it difficult to attend any normal school.

“If she were anywhere else, with anyone else, I’d be worried,” Joan said. “But I know you can take care of her.”

“Yeah, of course,” Vell said. A few meters away, Helena was loudly snapping at Samson about the legal definition of the word murder. “Just, you know, on a non-healthcare related note, she can be, uh, intense.”

“Yeah, that’s Helena,” Joan said. “Don’t hold it against her. Her...condition is a lot to deal with, especially around new people. Just be patient with her, it’ll all be worth it. Honestly, she’s probably even smarter than me, not that that’s hard.”

“She does seem...clever,” Vell said hesitantly. Trying to game the apocalypse was genuinely a clever idea, but only if one made a sharp distinction between “clever” and “smart”.

“Yeah, she’s way better at finding stuff out than I ever was,” Joan said. “You know she’s actually the reason I went looking for that rune of yours in the first place?”

The argument behind him and the phone call with Joan both started to fade out for a second. Vell’s mind was racing so hard his vision almost started to blur.

“What?”

“I know I didn’t exactly handle that knowledge the best way, but, hey, it’s all working out alright,” Joan said. She still sounded a little nervous. Even with their reconciliation, Joan and Vell’s mutual (and murderous) history was a bit of a sore subject for her.

“When did she- how did she, uh, find out about that?”

“Just some online rumors and conspiracy theories she figured out were credible,” Joan said. “I just kind of took the ball and ran with it—and fumbled it—from there.”

Joan took the long silence that followed as a sign Vell was also reminiscing about how she’d both killed and kidnapped him at different points back in first year. In truth, Vell could care less about that history. His thoughts were more focused on the events leading up to it.

Though all events were too far in the past to confirm his theory, Vell had always assumed Kraid was somehow responsible for putting Joan on the trail to Vell’s rune. It would’ve been easy to put a news article in the right place, or send some kind of anonymous message, and let desperation do the rest. The fact that Kraid might have gone through Helena changed things -and added one more layer of suspicion to Helena herself.

“Well, that’s good to know,” Vell said, trying his best to hide his rapidly-growing suspicions. He trusted Joan, but figured it was not a good idea to insinuate her sister might be evil. That would be a long term conversation. “Listen, I got to handle something, you know how it is.”

“What is it this time? Some kind of monster? Somebody going to blow up the school?”

“Would you believe both?” Vell said. “Anyway, talk to you later.”

“Bye Vell.”

Vell hung up the phone on one Marsh sibling and went to face another. Helena was impassively standing her ground against a continued argument from Samson.

“And here comes victim number two,” Samson said. “So is killing Vell just a genetic thing, does it run in the family? Should he be worried if he ever meets your parents?”

“Okay, Samson, that’s enough,” Vell said. “You’ve been yelling about her killing us for half an hour.”

“I’ve been yelling about her killing me for half an hour, I ain’t even started yelling about killing you,” Samson said.

“If it helps, Samson, I had no intention of killing you,” Helena said. “I fully expected Vell would have the four of you split up in pairs to search the campus.”

“That would have been a better decision, actually,” Alex said.

“Don’t take her side!”

“It’s a sensible plan,” Alex said. “Cover more ground.”

“Well suggest it for next time,” Vell said. “But, speaking of good plans, everybody but Helena go find a way to deal with the kraken.”

“Got it,” Samson said. “Enjoy the scolding, Helena.”

“I’m not really a scolding guy,” Vell said, as his friends walked away. Then he pivoted on his heel and turned back to Helena. “Which should make it all the more serious that I am scolding you.”

“Oh come on, you were probably going to die anyway,” Helena said. “Bomb, Kraken, what’s the difference?”

“Intention,” Vell said. “Whoever summoned the kraken didn’t mean to kill me. You did.”

“The experiment required victims,” Helena said. “An explosion with no fatalities isn’t an apocalypse, its just very irresponsible fireworks. I had to kill someone to make it work, so I killed the only people who knew death was temporary. It’s science!”

“It’s a dick move,” Vell said. “And it sort of makes it worse! Why would you kill the only people who’d be aware of the fact they’d been killed by you?”

“Hmm, you know, that’s a good point,” Helena said. “I should’ve just killed some random bystanders, they’d never know the difference.”

“No, that’s not what I- the correct amount of people to kill is zero, Helena,” Vell said. “Doesn’t matter who they are, what they know or don’t know, you can’t just build bombs!”

Helena crossed her eyes contemplatively and then leaned on one of her crutches.

“Sorry, we’re going to have to delay this scolding for a bit,” Helena said. She stopped leaning and sat down on the ground.

“There better not be another bomb,” Vell said.

“No, I’m just having a seizure,” Helena said. She laid flat on the ground and turned her head to the side. “One second.”

Then her eyes went wide, Helena’s body went stiff, and she started staring ahead blankly. Vell also stared blankly for a second, but only due to shock.

“Helena?”

Vell knelt down by Helena’s side and wondered what to do when she suddenly relaxed and took a deep breath. Once her eyes were focusing right again, she looked up at Vell.

“For future reference, if you want to help, hold my head up at a slight angle so I don’t choke on my own tongue on accident,” Helena said. “Other than that, there’s not much you can do.”

She grabbed her crutches and wobbly stood up, swatting away the hand Vell offered to help.

“Other than, you know, solve the secrets of your rune and presumably gain complete power over life and death,” Helena said. “That’d help. But I’ll settle for not choking in the meantime. Do I have dirt on my back? I don’t know how clean you keep the floors in here.”

She turned around. Vell did brush a little dirt off her back.

“Sorry. Haven’t really had time to sweep,” Vell said. “Are you okay?”

“I assume you mean in the micro sense, because-”

“I know,” Vell said. Everything was wrong with her all the time, a fact Helena happily repeated at every given opportunity. “I mean, like, emotionally.”

“I have two to three seizures a month, Vell,” Helena said. “Most of them a lot worse than that one, so I’m actually in a very good mood.”

“You don’t seem like it,” Vell said. “You and Joan both do this weird kind of half-smile when you’re trying to seem happy but you’re really not.”

The weird kind of half-smile dropped off Helena’s face in an instant. Vell backed up with a shrug.

“Maybe I’m just reading into it too much, but you really do have a lot in common,” Vell said. “Aside from the fact you both killed me, that is.”

“I don’t think we’re that much alike,” Helena said. “We do have the killing in common, at least. And the reasons. Partially.”

Helena adjusted her grip on her crutches and the hobbled forward a few steps, to stand face to uneven face with Vell.

“I was trying to help...myself, mostly,” Helena admitted. “I thought if I could control the loop, you could spend less time on growth rays and krakens and more time on that whole rune situation.”

Vell rolled his eyes. It always came back to the rune, one way or another. At least only a handful of people wanted to kill him about it. Everyone else was just annoying.

“It’s...very complicated,” Vell said. He’d been told very directly he was the only human in the universe who could solve Quenay’s question, so he had to be very careful how he went about it.

“I know. Joan trusts you, and so do I. It was about the loop, not you,” Helena said. “And since this failed, I am one-hundred percent done. Won’t ever do anything like it again.”

All Helena got in return was a stony silence.

“Can’t blame you for not trusting me, I guess,” Helena said. “So just trust I’m not going to do anything that’d slow down your work on the rune. Okay? I’ll even help. I’ll trust you, and you’ll trust me.”

The silence continued as Vell kept staring at Helena. She really did have a lot in common with Joan -or at least the younger, far eviller Joan. She wanted to have things like trust without actually earning them. Vell just hoped Helena had a bit more in common with Joan.

“Okay, sure,” Vell said. “I trust you.”

“Good. I won’t let you down.”

“I’m sure you won’t,” Vell said with a smile. “I’m going to go deal with that kraken thing now, do you want to help?”

Helena looked up at Vell, looked down at her crutches, and then back up at Vell.

“You want to bring me to a combat zone?”

“I don’t know if its ruder to ask or not ask,” Vell said. “Plus you made a bomb, I figured maybe you could do something.”

“That wasn’t really a spur of the moment thing,” Helena said. “I haven’t survived twenty years of having everything wrong with me just to die because I can’t limp away from a kraken tentacle, Vell.”

“Alright, fair point,” Vell said. “I’m going to get that handled. See you later, Helena.”

Helena waved a crutch towards the door, beckoning Vell to leave, and he headed off to the kraken fight. Even though no one was around, Helena still tried to hide her smile. She needed to stay in the habit of acting innocent.