Chapter 228: Book 4 Chapter 7.2: The Elephant in the Room

Hawke paced back and forth. Mae Noi had calmed down, and Vell had used that to convince Dr. Chanthara and the other faculty to give him and his fellow loopers some space, and some privacy. Hawke finished one more lap, and froze in place.

“Alright, let me recap the situation,” Hawke said. “Part one: we live in kookoo fucking crazy world.”

“Yep,” Kim said.

“And part two-”

Hawke spun in place and gestured towards Mae Noi with both hands.

“The fucking elephant is a fucking looper!”

“The fucking elephant has a name, Hawke,” Vell said. “She’s right there.”

“Hello,” Mae Noi prodded.

“Right, yeah, I should be polite, especially since she’s apparently my teammate now,” Hawke said.

“Help,” Mae Noi said. Samson stared at her for a few seconds.

“Is it weird how fast she got on board with this?”

After connecting the dots (and shooing all non-loopers out of the room) Vell had spent some time trying to break down the time loop and the nature of the apocalypse in elephant-friendly terms. There was no way to be sure, but given the fact Mae Noi had calmed down, they assumed she got the gist of it. She had even mashed the “sorry” button whenever someone brought up her killing Vell on the previous loop. She did not press the sorry button when Alex brought up her own death.

“Elephant. Smart,” Mae Noi said. She swung her trunk proudly and swayed from side to side.

“Okay, sure, yeah, fine, whatever,” Samson said. “Universe wouldn’t make my twin brother a looper, but the elephant gets to be one!”

“If you people are done whining, can we get a move on?” Alex grunted. “The universe has decided to tell a bad joke, we don’t need to waste our entire day over it. Just shove that seagull in an airvent, tell the staff the elephant was panicking because of that, and let’s go.”

“That is still a viable way to cancel the experiment,” Kim said.

“No.”

All eyes turned back to Mae, who started pressing buttons again.

“Experiment. Good,” she tapped. “Experiment. Help.”

“You still want to do the experiment?”

“Yes.”

“After it turned you into a monster?”

“Yes.”

“Even knowing you kind of killed Vell?”

To her credit, Mae Noi hesitated slightly before hitting “yes” again. Vell didn’t seem bothered, in any event.

“The only reason we needed to cancel the experiment is because we had no idea what went wrong,” Vell said. “Mae Noi saw everything. She can tell us the problem, and we can solve it.”

“Yes. Help.”

“This is ridiculous,” Alex said. “There’s no benefit to this experiment. If it were pioneering some new technology, maybe, but this is just adapting a treatment technique we already use on humans to help elephants. We’re helping no one.”

“We’re helping Mae Noi,” Vell said.

“She’s an animal, Vell.”

“A smart one.”

“Smart by the standards of other animals,” Alex said. “I don’t put stock in the intelligence of any species that hasn’t invented a toilet.”

Alex crossed her arms and let the silence, and a very pungent scent hanging in the air, make her point for her.

“Look, everybody poops, we all read that book when we were kids,” Vell said.

“I didn’t,” Kim said.

“You were never a kid,” Vell said. Kim stepped back while Vell got back on topic. “We need to try to help.”

“How? Even with all her ‘intelligence’, Mae Noi’s ability to communicate is limited to about a hundred words, several of which are dedicated solely to a bad pun,” Alex said. “What happens when she completely fails to-”

A faceful of alfalfa cut Alex off mid sentence. She spat out a few stalks as Mae Noi let out an aggressive trumpet and then curled her trunk around another load of alfalfa.

“Well, Mae’s smart enough to not like you,” Samson said. “So I trust her.”

“We’re figuring this out with Mae,” Vell said. “You can help, or you can leave.”

Alex left.

“Okay then. Let’s puzzle this out,” Vell said. He set his bookbag on the table, setting aside their seagull plan for now, and then returned to Mae. He had certainly done stranger things over the past four years, but talking to an elephant still felt weird. “Mae, we want to fix the experiment.”

“Good.”

Mae reached out with her trunk and patted Vell on the head gratefully, mussing his hair in the process. He avoided fixing it, no matter how messy it looked. Mae seemed to like him, which made communication much easier, and he wanted to keep it that way.

“Alright, Mae: Why did experiment go bad?”

He wanted to keep things simple, to reduce the risk of error. Mae Noi spent some time looking over her pedestal, as if contemplating the best options.

“Sharp. Food. Bad. Big.”

“Sharp food bad big,” Vell repeated. He turned to his teammates. “Ideas?”

“Well, for ‘sharp’, the obvious thing is syringes,” Hawke said. “Somebody jabbed her with a mutagen or something and that’s what did it.”

“What does food have to do with that, though?”

“Mae used to live in the wild,” Hawke said. “She probably associates any kind of puncture with getting bitten.”

To verify his theory with their only firsthand source, Hawke picked up an empty syringe and held it up in front of Mae.

“Was this the bad thing?”

“No.”

“Are you sure?” Vell asked. “None of them before bad?”

“Zero,” Mae said. Apparently she understood numbers too. Vell wondered if she knew how to count to ten, but kept himself on track.

“Well if it wasn’t a syringe, then what is ‘sharp food bad’?”

“Don’t forget big,” Hawke said.

“I wasn’t- oh wait, Mae likes pumpkin,” Vell said. “Maybe there was something in a pumpkin she ate. Mae, did you eat pumpkin before experiment?”

“No. No. Pumpkin. Experiment,” Mae said.

“Shit, right Chanthara said no food before the experiment,” Vell said. “What does ‘food’ mean, then?”

“Human. Bad. Food. Elephant.”

“And now there’s a human involved,” Vell said.

“There was always a human involved,” Samson said. “Probably. Somebody had to fuck up whatever got fucked up.”

“Hold on. Mae, do you know how to point?” Vell asked. “Point at me.”

Mae Noi extended her trunk and pointed at Vell’s head, to an approving nod.

“Okay, now point at what made experiment bad.”

Mae thoughtfully tapped a trunk to her forehead and drifted sideways. After a moment of pachydermal pondering, she turned to the right side of the room and pointed a trunk squarely at the wall. Vell asked if she meant the cabinets, or one of the equipment tables in that direction, and Mae said “No” each time.

“Do you mean...the door?”

“Yes,” Mae said, with an almost frustrated push of a button.

“So somebody came from outside,” Vell said. “Okay, that explains a lot. Can you point to, uh...damn, do you know how to describe a person? Point to thing that bad human looked like.”

“Don’t understand,” Mae said. Apparently that was a single button.

“Shit,” Vell said. “Uh...what bad human color?”

“Brown,” Mae said.

“Oh good, that’s something,” Vell said.

“Yeah, we’ve narrowed it down to a whopping two-thirds of the campus,” Kim said.

“Well let’s narrow it down,” Samson said. He grabbed Hawke and stood side by side with him. “Brown like me, or brown like him?”

“No,” Mae said.

“Then what kind of brown?”

Mae reached out, plopped the end of her trunk on Vell’s head, and clamped down on a chunk of Vell’s shaggy hair. She pulled it up and down a few times as if to emphasize it, and then let go. Vell did brush a hand through his hair this time. The last thing he needed was a bunch of elephant boogers in his hair.

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“Brown like Vell’s hair, okay, so just his hair was brown,” Kim said. “What color was the rest of the bad human?”

“No,” Mae said. After emphatically pounding her button, she reached out to Vell again, grabbing a clump of his hair, and the started probing further with her trunk. Vell held his breath and tried to endure the scent of alfalfa and mucus on Mae’s breath as she poked him in the face over and over, then prodded her trunk into his shoulders and chest.

“Is this part of the problem-solving or is Vell just getting molested by an elephant?”

“Well that’s just distasteful, Samson,” Kim said.

“I think she’s trying to say whoever did this had hair like mine all over,” Vell said. “Like, maybe he had a really big beard or something.”

“Don’t understand.”

“It’s alright, Mae, we’re figuring it out,” Vell said. “We still need to figure out what ‘sharp food’ means, though.”

“Maybe the bearded guy was eating something, and it caused some kind of chain reaction of bullshit?”

“Mae, was the bad human eating something?”

“No,” Mae said. “Bad. Human. Food. Elephant.”

“Did the human feed you something?”

“No.”

“Did the human do something to your food?”

“No.”

“Did you feed the human something?”

“No.”

“Hawke, why would Mae feed a human anything?”

“I don’t know,” Hawke said. “She threw her food at Alex earlier. Maybe something got chucked around on accident.”

“At this point I think we need to try throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks,” Kim said. “Let’s just treat it like a game of twenty questions.”

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The game of twenty questions had become a game of two-hundred questions, and was well on its way to becoming a game of two-thousand questions. Mae’s limited comprehension of human speech, and her even more limited ability to respond, was proving an almost insurmountable communication barrier. Across dozens of question, they were still stumped by Mae’s repeated insistence of “food”, and she had even managed to find a new incomprehensible phrase to repeat.

“Human. Elephant,” Mae said, for what felt like the hundredth time. “Sharp. Food. Elephant.”

“I am losing my mind with this god damn ‘human elephant’ thing,” Samson said. “Can we just set the seagull loose and get this over with? We’re running out of time anyway.”

They were now down to about half an hour before the presumed started of the apocalypse, a point helpfully illustrated by a large clock ticking down on one of the laboratory walls. Vell glanced across the lab at his bookbag, where their emergency seagull was stored, but shook his head.

“Let’s just stop with the questions and think about this for a second,” Vell said. “Give me a bit.”

Vell took a seat, took a deep breath, and started going over their hundreds of questions in his head. Most of their recent questions were complete junk, so Vell went back to the beginning.

“Sharp food bad big,” Vell said. “Human elephant, sharp food elephant.”

Vell’s brow furrowed, and the famous forehead wrinkles began to take shape. As he began his brainstorming, only two wrinkles appeared.

“Human elephant,” he mumbled.

He thought back to the very start, to their earliest attempts at deciphering what Mae meant by “food”. Hawke had drawn the connection that Mae would associate any kind of puncture with being bitten, and therefore food. A third wrinkle folded into existence on Vell’s forehead.

Vell took another deep breath. The smell of elephant breath still clung to his clothes, from the time Mae had prodded him all over to indicate how much hair their suspect had. She’d slapped her long trunk over as much of Vell as she could reach. The fabled fourth wrinkle manifested, and vanished, in an instant.

“Oh, son of a bitch,” Vell said. He stood up and went to a nearby desk to grab a pen and paper.

“You got something?”

“I sure fucking hope I don’t,” Vell grumbled. He picked up his tools and started drawing a picture. His artistic skills were crude, but he managed to create a passable sketch and turn it towards Mae Noi. “Is this bad elephant human?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes,” Mae said, slamming her button repeatedly. She stopped long enough to bray triumphantly and then went back to mashing buttons. “Yes. Bad. Elephant. Human.”

“You figured it out?”

“I think so,” Vell said. He turned his sketch around to show it to his teammates. The crude sketch showed a humanoid figure with a jagged outline meant to represent fur, and small tusks and a broad nose on its face.

“Vell,” Kim said. “What the fuck is this supposed to be?”

“There’s a few things it could be, but if I had to guess, I’d say it’s a-”

The side door Mae had pointed to earlier slammed open, and a single figure walked through. Mae Noi trumpeted belligerently at them, and pointed her trunk in the direction of the door.

“It’s a that, probably,” Vell sighed.

Their new guest stood more than seven feet tall, coated head to toe in a thick layer of dark brown fur. Just like in Vell’s drawing, they had two broad tusks jutting from the edges of their mouth, and a long, elephantine nose that stretched down past their chin.

“Oh, okay, elephant human, I get it now,” Samson said. The mammoth man seemed confused to see them, and even more confused by their nonchalant attitude.

“Are you guys not shocked? Scared?”

“Brother, you’re not even the first animal-human hybrid I’ve seen this month,” Kim said. “And the last guy was part horseshoe crab, so you’re going to need a little more than tusks to scare me.”

The hybrid stared at them for a few seconds, not sure how to process any of the information he was currently taking in. Before he had a chance to put his thoughts together, Vell stepped up, tactically placing himself between the mammoth man and Mae Noi.

“Hi, nice to meet you, uh, what are you up to?” Vell asked. “Anything we can help with?”

“What am I up to?” I’m freeing myself,” the mammoth man declared. “For thousands of years I’ve been stuck in this cursed form, and now I’ve finally found a descendant of the mammoth that bit me!”

The mammoth man laughed, and pointed at Mae Noi.

“Once I return the favor and bite her, I’ll finally be free!”

“Oh, so you’re a weremammoth,” Vell said.

“Yes, technically, I guess,” the weremammoth said.

“I thought elephants didn’t evolve from wooly mammoths?”

“They didn’t, but they had a common ancestor,” the weremammoth said. “I got bit by one of those. This was a really long fucking time ago.”

“Oh, damn,” Kim said. “You must be old as shit.”

“Yes, I am,” the weremammoth said. “You’re all being very casual about this, by the way.”

“We deal with werewolves now and then,” Vell said.

“We have one in our bocce club,” Hawke said.

“We even thought my girlfriend was a werewolf, for a little bit,” Vell said. “See, you’re on an island where this kind of stuff happens a lot, so, if you want to take a seat and wait a bit, I can call up a friend of mine who’s removed all kinds of curses, we can probably get you cured without having to hurt an innocent elephant.”

“Huh. Really?”

“Yeah, we’ve removed loads of curses,” Vell said. “Might take a day or two to set up, depending on the nature of the curse, but we can have you sorted out in no time.”

The mammoth man put a hand on his chin and contemplated the offer. Mae glared at him from across the room.

“You know what? I think I’d really rather get revenge on an elephant.”

Kim dropkicked him across the room.

“Kim!”

“What? Last time you tried talking you got squished,” Kim said.

“Sorry,” Mae said.

“It’s fine,” Kim insisted. “But this time I’m doing the squishing.”

The weremammoth got back on his feet, grabbed Kim, and slammed her into the floor. He then picked her up and threw her at Vell, and he barely dodged in time.

“Okay, some violence is warranted,” Vell said, as he helped Kim off the floor. “But he’s a werecreature.”

Vell dodged out of the way as Kim rushed forward and intercepted the weremammoth, preventing him from biting Mae. She threw him to the ground and hit him with a punch that should’ve caved his ribs in, but the weremammoth barely flinched.

“He can’t be hurt by anything but his weaknesses and the bloodline of the thing that cursed him.”

“Can’t Mae hurt him, then?”

“Yes, but we can’t let him near her,” Vell aid. If the weremammoth managed so much as a nibble, the curse would be transferred to Mae Noi, and then they’d be dealing with a cursed elephant all over again. They needed to find a way to hurt him just enough to get him locked down and ready for curse treatment.

“Well he’s not weak to titanium,” Kim said, as he punched him with titanium fists. “Werewolves are silver, and werehorseshoe crabs are cadmium.”

“Great,” Samson said. “Only most of the periodic table to go!”

“We’ll figure it out,” Vell said. He looked across the room, towards his bag. “Let me get our weapons out of the-”

The weremammoth escaped Kim’s beatdown, then scrambled across the floor and grabbed Vell by the ankle before tossing him across the room. He slid into a corner and tried to right himself as he shouted.

“Get the bag!”

Hawke and Samson both made a run for it, as did the weremammoth. Samson, the slower of the two by far, figured he’d be better off trying to delay the weremammoth, and went for a tackle. He got swatted aside, but managed to delay their foe just long enough for Hawke to grab the bag -if only barely. Hawke snatched the bag, and then the weremammoth snatched him. Hawke began to shriek as the weremammoth pinned him to the ground.

“You idiot,” the beast taunted. “There’s nothing in that bag that can hurt me!”

Hawke stuck his hand in anyway, and then ripped it out, along with a blinding blur of white feathers and squawking fury.

“Seagull!”

The absolutely furious seagull vented several hours of captive rage directly into the face of the weremammoth, who stood up and tried to swat away the angry bird. The gull was as relentless as it was angry, and continued to peck at the weremammoth despite his flailing.

“Why -agh! Why do you have a seagull in your bag?”

The only answer he got was a staff to the gut, as Hawke drew his weapon from the bag and slammed it into the weremammoth. The impact knocked him across the room, but did not appear to injure the hybrid.

“Alright, we know his weakness isn’t...whatever this thing is made of,” Hawke said. Instead of trying to ascertain what the Jingu Bang was made of, Hawke focused on diversifying. “Samson, catch.”

A crossbow and a handful of bolts sailed through the air. Samson caught the crossbow and dodged the rain of bolts that followed it. He shot a quick glare at Hawke to let him know he did not appreciate having sharp things lobbed at him, and then shot a quick bolt at the weremammoth. The small projectile embedded in his hairy skin and then fell out seconds later, as the beast’s magical regeneration regrew flesh and pushed out the foreign body.

“Not weak to whatever that was either,” Samson said.

“Let’s try lead,” Vell snapped. Reasoning that it was probably a bad idea to be tossing guns across the room, Hawke had dashed across the lab to hand Vell his guns personally and safely.

The characteristic click of a revolver being cocked sounded out just before Vell began to fire. A flurry of expertly-aimed bullets pierced the weremammoth’s shoulders, but they barely made him flinch.

“Not lead either,” Vell said. Unlike Hawke and Samson, he actually knew what his weapons were made of. While the mammoth man shrugged off the bullets, Kim came from the side with a solid punch to the jaw, to equally little effect. He knocked Kim aside and went for a diving tackle at Vell, absorbing a few more bullets before the guns were knocked out of Vell’s hands and went skidding on the floor.

“You’re being a real asshole about this,” Vell grunted, as he struggled to free himself from the weremammoth’s grip.

“You try living for thousands of years and see how friendly you feel!”

“I know several immortals and they’re a lot nicer than you!”

Vell jammed his thumbs into the weremammoth’s eyes (always a good self defense tactic, even against regenerating prehistoric pachyderm-hybrids), and managed to slip free of their grasp. The weremammoth took a few steps back, rubbed burning eyes, and listened to the familiar click of a revolver’s hammer.

“You already tried that.”

The weremammoth opened his eyes just in time to see Vell’s completely empty hands.

“Wh-”

A single gunshot rang out, and a single hole appeared in the weremammoth’s chest. This one did not close.

“Oh.”

The weremammoth collapsed forward, and laid there, dead still. Vell looked up from the dead hybrid and saw Mae Noi with a single revolver clenched in her curled trunk. The barrel let up a single wafting line of smoke as the loopers stared in quiet horror.

After one of the longest and most unpleasant moments of his life, Vell took a cautious step forward and held out a hand towards the gun.

“Mae, could I have that back, please?”

Mae dropped the gun, prompting everyone in the room to flinch, but it did not misfire on impact. Mae returned her trunk to the pedestal to press the “yes” button, and then, after a few seconds of contemplation, added a bit more commentary.

“Bad. Elephant. Human. Stop.”

“Yeah, Mae,” Kim said. “He fucking stopped alright.”

The weremammoth continued to be stopped, except for a puddle of blood underneath him that was rapidly getting larger. The angry seagull landed and gave him one final indignant peck on the head.

“Okay,” Hawke said. “Anyone got any ideas how to explain to Chanthara that we taught his elephant to murder?”

“Give me a minute,” Vell said. This was a whopper of an abnormal situation, even by their fucked up standards of normal.

“Actually, we could try to explain this,” Samson said. “Or-”

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“It’ll take a few weeks of observation to get a conclusive result,” Dr. Chanthara said. “We’ll be taking Mae back to the sanctuary so she can rest up with her children.”

“May you rest well and eat a lot of pumpkin,” Dean Lichman said, as a somewhat groggy Mae was led back on to a boat. “Sorry again about the delay in your experiment. I keep trying to proof our buildings against seagulls, and the damned things keep getting in anyway.”

“No worries at all, Dean,” Dr. Chanthara said. “Take it from someone who runs a sanctuary: animals will always find a way to get themselves in trouble.”

Dr. Chanthara stepped aboard the boat as well, and waved goodbye to the dean, and to Vell, who was standing on the shoreline as well. Mae waved her trunk at him in a lazy goodbye, and then vanished into her pen to return home. Vell had already checked with Dean Lichman to ensure she was off the roster of students. Starting tomorrow, she’d be back to being a normal elephant. Mostly normal. Vell would wager the average elephant had never shot someone.

As Mae’s ship vanished over the horizon, Samson approached from behind and nervously tapped Vell on the shoulder.

“We’re all done with the, you know,” Samson began, before lowering his voice. “Hiding the body.”

“Great! Let’s never talk about this again.”

They never did.