Chapter 235: Book 4 Chapter 11.1: Grim Repair

“Oh, yeah, before I forget, one of Freddy’s friends said he’s interested in a job,” Vell said. “Do we have any need for an expert in...nuclear refrigeration?”

“As in refrigerating nuclear stuff?” Harley asked. “Or as in fridges powered by nuclear energy?”

“I have no idea, honestly, probably both,” Vell said.

“Either way, I guess we can look into it,” Harley said. Harlan Industries was preparing to branch out into other avenues of research, and maybe nuclear refrigeration had potential. Maybe. “Text me his number and I’ll do all the interview horseshit.”

“Will do,” Vell said. “Next loop, I mean.”

“Ah, right, I won’t remember any of this shit,” Harley said bitterly. “Okay, you have fun with whatever blows up today, Vell, I’m going to go do something incredibly sexy I won’t even remember.”

“Have fun,” Vell said. “Love you, Harley.”

“Love you too, dingus,” Harley said, before hanging up and turning her attention to hedonism. Vell put his phone away and headed into the lair to take a seat. He was the last to arrive, as he often was.

“Nothing to report,” Vell said, as he took a seat. The moment his butt hit the seat, everything in the room went cold.

Hawke let out a shrill scream and nearly fell out of his chair as he crawled backwards, and Samson only resisted the urge to do the same because he was completely frozen with terror, staring wide-eyed into the space behind Vell’s chair. Even Alex was visibly terrified -though Helena and Kim didn’t seem to be reacting at all.

“Guys,” Vell said flatly. “What’s behind me?”

The End.

“Oh, hey,” Vell said. He turned around and leaned on the back of his chair. “Long time no see.”

He looked up and into the skeletal face of Death itself, staring down at him with twin pinpricks of blue light amid the abyss of the empty eye sockets. Vell’s reflection glimmered in the scythe briefly as Death adjusted his stance.

Not a sentence I hear often. As you might imagine.

“Yeah, I figure,” Vell said.

“Why are you talking to it?” Hawke screamed. Kim just looked around in confusion.

“What are you talking to?”

Vell did a quick glance between Kim and Death.

“Can she not see you?”

She is a machine. Death means something different to her.

Death’s stare passed over Kim and focused on Hawke.

Meanwhile, your easily frightened friends appear to see me as some horror, Death said. Which feels a bit rude, frankly.

Everyone who saw Death perceived him differently. Thanks to a lot of experience with death, and to a lot of Terry Pratchett novels, Vell saw him as a skeleton in a robe with a habit of speaking in small caps. He could imagine that someone like Hawke perceived him very differently.

And of course, Miss Helena and I are previously acquainted, Death said, with a polite nod in her direction.

“Good to see you again, D,” Helena said. “Am I having another close call?”

Not at the moment, Death said. Though one can never tell with you.

“Then, at the risk of being rude, why are you here?”

Because many years ago, you and I made an arrangement, Vell Harlan, Death said. The time has come to pay the debt you owe me.

“Wait, what?”

Hawke got off the floor and braced himself against the table’s edge.

“What are you going to do to him?”

Mildly inconvenience him, I imagine. Vell is a far cry from the frightened twelve year old I escorted back from the other side, Death said. A rare service, and one which requires significant and unusual arrangements to be allowed.

“It’s just part and parcel of coming back,” Vell said, tapping the scar on his waistline from his bisection. “I was fully dead, and then I had to be not dead. Death allowed the exception on the basis I owed him a favor.”

“That is...a lot to take in, vis a vis human mortality.”

You’ll have an entire lifetime to think about it, Death said. But Vell is correct. I am here on business.

“Well, a deal’s a deal,” Vell said. “What’ve you got, Death?”

I have this, Death said, holding his scythe out flat in two skeletal hands. Vell took the hint and held out his own hands, and Death dropped the scythe into his outstretched palms. And now you have it.

“Uh, just so I’m fully clear on this,” Vell said, as he clenched Death’s scythe. “Am I the Grim Reaper now?”

You are a reaper, at least. I shall leave the grimness up to your discretion, Death said. A particularly troublesome soul has refused to begin its journey to the other side, escaped my scythe, and found its way to this island in its desperate attempts to cheat death. You will find this lost soul and reap it, and our deal shall be fulfilled.

“Oh, okay,” Vell said. “I can do that.”

“Yeah, we already got that frog guy to move on,” Samson said. “We can handle that.”

An excellent job, but I must caution you that this lost soul is not a ghost, in the proper sense, Death advised. Ghosts are those who have made the choice to linger, and do so with my permission. This renegade has refused to cooperate, and is bound by different laws than ghosts. He is also, notably, rather rude.

“Guy trying to cheat death has to have some kind of issues,” Vell said. He rested the scythe against the table. “So, who are we looking for?”

You are looking for a man who has defied death and sought to do the impossible, Death said. You are looking for…

He paused, to focus cosmic blue eyes on Vell.

Slippery Jimbo.

Vell tapped his fingers against the chair.

“Slippery Jimbo.”

Sometimes he goes by Jim.

“What about James?”

Never James, Death said. Good luck.

Without so much as a flutter of his robe, Death vanished, and the warmth returned to the room. Samson finally released his white-knuckle grip on the table.

“Wait,” he said. “Do we have to kill a guy?”

“Technically he’s already dead,” Vell said. “We just have to get him to be all the way dead.”

“How do we do that?”

“I hit him with the scythe, I guess,” Vell said, putting a hand on Death’s scythe once again. It felt cold to the touch, and though the material of the handle felt impossibly dense and sturdy, it was virtually weightless. Vell resisted the urge to test his fingers against the edge of the scythe. “I’ll focus on finding, uh, Slippery Jim. The rest of you keep an eye on campus, look out for other problems.”

“Vell, you’re right in the middle of this,” Hawke said. “There’s no way this isn’t the daily apocalypse.”

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Vell sighed.

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

“Oh, Vell, there you are,” said someone Vell did not know. “I was wondering if-”

Vell turned around. The random student finally noticed that he had a scythe on his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

The student kept staring at the scythe for a bit.

“Uh, nevermind,” she said. She shuffled off awkwardly, and Vell admired his reflection in the scythe.

“Huh. Turns out this thing has benefits,” Vell said. Something about the scythe’s magical properties made it impossible to fit in his extra-dimensional bookbag, so he had to carry it around in full view of everyone.

“Maybe Death will let you keep it,” Hawke said. “Or you could just buy a real scythe.”

“I don’t think Dean Lichman would approve,” Vell said. As another person who had a history with Death, Dean Lichman had signed off on Vell’s temporary reaper status, and his right to carry a scythe around campus, but he didn’t usually allow weapons being hauled around in full view.

“He’s got to owe you like thirty favors by now,” Hawke said. “Cash in, get a scythe.”

“Not likely. This thing’s not very heavy, but it’s still huge and awkward,” Vell said. He had better things to do than haul around an archaic farming implement all day, no matter how much unspeakable cosmic power was contained within.

“I could carry it for a bit, if you want.”

“I’m pretty sure if I handed it over, it’d just poof back into my hands. Actually, let’s test that out,” Vell said. He handed the scythe over to Hawke, and as soon as it hit his palms, it reappeared in Vell’s hands. “Yep. Typical.”

Vell shouldered the scythe once more and walked through the door to the Freddy’s lab. The usual shuffle of weird science experiments were in full force, and Vell carefully navigated his scythe between them. He passed through the crowd without incident, as a scythe was far from the strangest thing Vell had carried around this department. He kept the blade carefully shouldered until he saw someone he recognized.

“Goldie, hey.”

“Hi Vell, you- you have a scythe.”

“Yeah, I got deputized by the grim reaper,” Vell said. “Long story short, there’s a rogue soul on campus that needs reaping. Anyone around here spotted anything weird?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Goldie said. “But Wataru is into that creepy afterlife stuff. Hey, Wataru!”

Not more than a second after his name was called, Wataru appeared, rounding a corner as if he had been lurking just out of sight the entire time. Which was entirely probable. He had a pallid complexion, and sunken eyes with dark circles below them, and Vell noted a disturbing resemblance to the skeletal face of Death.

“What do you need?” Wataru said, in a voiced just as hushed and chilling as one would expect, given his appearance.

“Uh, maybe. Hi, Wataru, I’m Vell-”

“I know who you are,” Wataru said. “You’ve crossed the border of death and come back. I’ve been observing you with great interest.”

“Cool,” Vell said. That statement would’ve been a lot more concerning if he weren’t already getting observed by several different people and a handful of cosmic entities. “Short version of the story is I’ve been deputized by Death to go reap a lost soul, you know anything about that?”

“Hmm. No,” Wataru said. “Most cases of a soul escaping Death are so ancient as to be apocryphal. As far as information, I can provide only rumors and legend, nothing substantial.”

“Any useful advice in those legends?”

“Not unless a cave of magical death candles is involved,” Wataru said.

“Nope, but we’ll bank that info for later,” Vell said. “Thanks for trying Wataru. We’ll get out of your hair.”

“Wait. While I am lacking in information, I do possess several thanatological implements which may be useful to you,” Wataru said. “I am willing to offer them to you. For a price.”

“Okay, what kind of price?”

Wataru lifted his hand and extended an almost skeletal finger.

“I want to touch your scythe.”

It was an already uncomfortable statement, and the way Wataru said it made it even worse. Vell grabbed the scythe and held it at arm’s length.

“I mean, I can’t let you hold it-”

“I am aware,” Wataru said. “The scythe’s ownership can only be controlled by Death himself. I would merely like to feel the edge of the soul-taking blade.”

“Well, go for it, I guess,” Vell said. “Just watch your fingers, I assume it’s sharp.”

He had been studiously avoiding actually touching anything with the blade for now, but if Wataru was intent on breaking that streak, Vell would not stop him. He extended pale fingers towards the silvery blade of Death’s scythe, and gingerly tapped his fingers against the cutting edge.

Two of his fingertips made a soft plop as they hit the ground. Hawke screamed.

“Oh my,” Wataru said. “Sharper than I expected.”

“What the- are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Wataru said. He bent down to pick his own fingertips off the ground. “I have very low blood flow to my extremities. Goldie, if you would be so kind as to show them to my workbench, I believe they will find all that they need. I must go get my fingers repaired.”

Luckily for Wataru, the school had a designated finger-repairing device. He shuffled off to go get his hands put back together while Hawke regained his composure and took a step away from Vell and his scythe.

“I wonder how often that guy gets invited to parties,” Vell wondered aloud.

“We tried,” Goldie said. “He sat in a corner reading sonnets. We mostly just let him do his own thing nowadays.”

“As long as he’s happy,” Vell said. “And mostly intact.”

Goldie led the way to Wataru’s workbench, which was arranged (and smelled) like a mortuary. Vell choked on the strong scent of formaldehyde and looked through Wataru’s shelves and drawers full of tools, which were helpfully labeled.

“Necrotic dowsing rod,” Vell said. “That seems relevant.”

He opened the cabinet and was greeted by a human skull on a the end of a stick. Vell picked up the stick and noted that no matter where he held it, the skull always turned to face Death’s scythe.

“Alright Hawke, you take that and go somewhere else, see if it points to anything but the scythe,” Vell said. Hawke reluctantly grabbed the stick and looked at the skull attached to it.

“Goldie, do you know where Wataru got this skull?”

“Of course,” Goldie said. “I gave it to him.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Skull store.”

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“And where’d they get it?”

“Fuck if I know,” Goldie said. “You track where every hammer you buy at a hardware store comes from? I needed a skull, I bought a skull.”

“Everything you say just raises further questions,” Hawke groaned.

“Then stop asking,” Goldie said. Hawke took her advice. In the meantime, Vell had found a scanning device labeled “Eye of the Veil”. After prodding at the settings for a bit, Vell figured out it was meant to measure recent spectral activity in an area.

“Where was this a few weeks ago?” Vell groaned. “Let’s get going. Let us know when Wataru gets back, Goldie, I want to know if I’m using this stuff right.”

“Will do,” Goldie said. “Have fun killing a guy.”

“I’m not killing him,” Vell said. “I’m just making him be dead correctly.”

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

Hawke followed the dowsing rod, hoping it would lead him to something useful this time. So far his necrotic tracker had led him to Vell, then to Dean Lichman, then to a vampire, Vell again, and a student doing an apparently school-sanctioned necromancy experiment, which Hawke had verified when the dowsing rod led him to Dean Lichman again. He had seen neither hide nor hair of Slippery Jimbo in all his wanderings. What he had seen was Kim, meandering across campus with nothing shown on her digital face. At first he had taken that as her searching campus as well, but after crossing paths were her again, Hawke realized her wandering was directionless. Something was going on inside her metal head. The next time they crossed paths, Hawke stopped her in her tracks.

“Hey, Kim. Are you feeling okay?”

“I’m feeling a lot of things,” Kim said. “Not sure any of them are okay.”

“This whole Death thing is really getting to you, huh?”

“Of course it is! ‘Death means something different to her’, I mean, what the fuck,” Kim said. “What does that mean? Am I not going to the same place as you guys when I die?”

“Assuming there’s a place to go to,” Hawke said.

“Please let me tackle one layer of the mortal dilemma at a time,” Kim said. “I know I don’t have a soul the way you guys do, but I’ve got something in here, right? Is there a place souls go and a place whatever I’ve got goes?”

“It’d feel really weird if the afterlife was segregated like that,” Hawke said. “Like, good and bad, believer or non-believer, that kind of makes sense, but having different afterlives for robots and non-robots? Feels a little bigoted.”

“It’s not really the bias I’m worried about, Hawke,” Kim said. “What’s going to happen to me when I die?”

“I wish I could tell you, Kim, but I don’t even know what’s going to happen when I die,” Hawke said. “I mean, the last time. If I died right now I’d just wake up in my bed, because, you know-”

“Time loops, yes, I am also part of that,” Kim said. “I mean the big one, light’s out, no time loops, no runes to bring us back. What happens then?”

Hawke shrugged broad shoulders and made the bewildered grunt that universally translated into “I don’t know”.

“I got no clue,” Hawke said. “Neither does anyone else. Objectively, I mean. There’s a lot of religions-”

Kim cut off another tangent by grabbing Hawke by his tattooed cheeks.

“How the fuck do you not know?” she demanded. “I’m not even three years old, I don’t know shit, but there have been billions of you people living for hundreds of years each, and none of you have figured it out? You can figure out space travel and nuclear fusion and teleportation, but nobody’s figured out dying? The one thing literally all of you do?”

“Kim, take a deep breath and- you don’t breath,” Hawke said. “Do whatever it is you do when you need to calm down.”

“I don’t need any meditation techniques, I’m in complete control of my emotions,” Kim said, as she used the internet in her head to simultaneously watch eighty-seven videos of cats falling off of things.

“Okay, well, look,” Hawke said. “Yeah, we haven’t figured out the afterlife or whatever. But we have figured out how to deal with the inevitability of death while we’re alive.”

“Good. Spill it.”

“Okay, option one: come up with a lie and delude yourself into believing it,” Hawke said.

“I’m not sure that’s going to work for me.”

“Okay then,” Hawke said. “Option two: deal with it, pussy.”

“That doesn’t feel helpful,” Kim said.

“Well then deal with it, pussy,” Hawke snapped. “Welcome to being alive! You don’t know what’s going to happen to you when you die? Join the club! Neither does anyone else. Everyone here has got maybe eighty years in them, if they’re lucky, meanwhile you’re effectively immortal, and yet you’re the only one freaking out about it.”

The shaming was surprisingly effective. Kim felt embarrassed for freaking out so much already.

“Kim, you’re not wrong, but you’ve got a lot of time to worry about it,” Hawke said. “In the meantime, I would kind of like my normal best friend back. I was thinking of asking Vell if we can throw things at Death’s scythe and watch it slice them in half later, and I would really like to do that with you.”

“That does sound fun,” Kim admitted.

“Exactly,” Hawke said. “So let’s just get this over with so we can all go back to quietly ignoring our inevitable death like mature adults.”

“Okay,” Kim said. “I think I can do that.”

She queued up as many videos of cats falling off of things, just in case she needed the distraction. Luckily, there were a hell of a lot of them. She played a few right away, just to take the edge off, and then got back to business.

“Your skull thingy is moving, by the way,” Kim pointed out. Hawke looked down at the dowsing rod and watch the skull shift back and forth slightly, though it was always pointed in the direction of a nearby building.

“Ugh, this thing’s useless, it’s probably just picking up Vell’s scythe again,” Hawke said.

“Nope,” Kim said. She pointed to the east, in the exact opposite direction of the skull was pointing. “Vell’s that way.”

On top of the natural resonance that still existed between the identical rune inscribed on her and Vell’s bodies, Kim also had GPS tracking on all the looper’s phones -except for Alex, who still stubbornly had her own security system in place. Hawke looked the way Kim pointed, then back in the direction the skull was facing.

“Could be Dean Lichman.”

“He told me he’d be in his office the rest of the day,” Kim said. The faculty building was also in the other direction.

“Well, there go all my excuses,” Hawke said. “Let’s go investigate.”

In compliance with Hawke’s general cowardice, Kim took hold of the necrotic dowsing rod and took the lead. She followed the skull’s directions and soon noticed that they were headed towards familiar territory: the cloning lab.

“I really don’t like where you’re going with this, skully,” Kim said. The skull continued to turn in silence. Unlike some other skulls they’d dealt with recently, this one did not talk.

In spite of how much she disliked it, Kim kept heading into the cloning lab, until she had reached the desk of its professor and patriarch, Ernest Ervine, and all the cowboy paraphernalia that came with him. The progenitor of modern cloning technology had an obsession with western life that bordered on the psychotic, even though his personal cowboying skills were average at best.

“Professor Ervine,” Kim said. “Has anything, uh, undead, been happening here lately?”

“Well, yes, I suppose so,” Ernest said. Kim tilted her head.

“And...are you at all worried about that?”

“Well, I will admit, the fellow looks strange at first glance, but that was just my own bias talking,” Ernest said. “That man has his head on straighter than a horseshoe, I’ll tell you what.”

“Aren’t horseshoes curved?”

“Well, in shape, yes, but you’ve got to put them on correctly, you know,” Ernest said. “Look, don’t worry your shiny head about it. Jim’s just looking for a solution to a mighty unfair problem.”

“Well, maybe we can help,” Kim said. “We do solve problems.”

“That you do, ma’am,” Ernest said. He and Vell had some history, and Ernest admired Vell’s cowboy nature, so any friend of Vell’s was a friend of Ernest’s. “Right through the door, third experiment room on the left.”

“Thanks, professor.”

Kim led the way to the indicated door, with an increasingly nervous Hawke just behind her. His knees started shaking as she opened the door, and that shaking got upgraded to a full on tremble when they saw what was behind it.

A humanoid glob of semi-transparent ectoplasmic slime stood over an experiment table, skeleton and organs fully exposed by the gooey flesh-substitute their body was formed of. Two eyeballs visibly rotated inside their exposed sockets as the man’s slimey face turned towards them, gelatinous lips parting in what might have been a winning smile, were all their teeth not already bared thanks to see-through lips. Hawke let out a quick yelp at the mass of bones and organs in front of him, but regained his composure.

“Eh, sorry,” Hawke said. Even a horrific ooze-person was still a person. There were presumably some feelings lodged in that gelatinous bod alongside the organs.

“Quite alright, you’ve actually screamed the least of anyone who’s seen me today,” the ooze man said. “You’ve got an iron will, that’s for sure, friend.”

Hawke’s will was closer to soggy cardboard on a good day, but he took the compliment anyway.

“So, I assume you’re Slippery Jimbo?” Kim said.

“That’s what they call me. On account of my slimy appearance, I’d wager,” Jimbo said, as he held up a slick arm. “It’s actually not all that slippery, though. Mostly intangible.”

He pressed a few of the buttons on the console in front of him, and his slimy “flesh” passed right through them. The buttons were only actually pressed when the tip of his skeletal finger hit them. Hawke shivered a little at the sound of the bony scrape.

“Terribly inconvenient, really, your muscle memory gets really thrown off when you don’t have muscles anymore,” Jimbo said, as he continued to push buttons. “You know what I’m talking about, eh metal lady?”

“Sort of,” Kim said. She’d never had muscles in the traditional sense, but there’d been an adjustment period after ditching her fake flesh for a full metal chassis. “What’s with your look, anyway?”

She was not really all that curious, but she’d already notified Vell of Jimbo’s presence, and now she just needed to keep him talking while Vell brought the scythe.

“Ah, well given my unique circumstances, there are obviously unique changes,” Slippery Jimbo said. “I’m not legally a ghost, you see, only partially. Apparently, since ghosts are fully transparent, and I am only mostly ghostly, I am only mostly transparent.”

“That almost makes sense,” Kim said.

“Really should’ve made it the other way around,” Hawke said. “Nobody would’ve noticed if all your organs were see-through.”

“I’m afraid I didn’t have much choice in the matter, my good man,” Slippery Jimbo said. “Even if there were customization options, I was under a bit of duress due to my near-death experience.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it near-death,” Hawke said.

“You are fully dead, Jim,” Kim said. “You know that, right?”

“Fully dead for the moment,” Jimbo said. “Much like a patient whose heart has briefly stopped before being defibrillated, my death is a temporary arrangement that will soon be remedied by the power of modern science.”

Jimbo capped off his sentence by pulling a lever with a dramatic flourish, and some of the lights in the room flickered. In the back of the chamber, a tank of blue goo started to hum.

“Uh, Jimbo, what’re you doing?”

“Solving the age-old problem, of course,” Jimbo said. “I’m preventing death!”

“Oh, shit,” Kim said. She’d assumed he was up to something like this, but now she had confirmation. “Are you trying to clone yourself a new body?”

“Precisely, excellently observed,” Jimbo said. “The failing was only in my physical body; as you can see, my spirit is still full of vim and vinegar.”

“And intestines,” Hawke said.

“Plenty of guts too, young man, you and I are alike in that,” Slippery Jimbo said. “Guts in the sense of courage, of course, that was not a commentary on your weight.”

“It’d be more accurate, though,” Hawke said. He was fatter than he was brave, and he was not ashamed of that ratio.

“I think brains matter more than guts right now,” Kim said. “You know people have tried cloning themselves new bodies before, right? It doesn’t end well.”

Even the most advanced human clones usually came into existence braindead, and the few that didn’t always suffered rapid neurological decay. Attempts to transplant brains into the cloned bodies were also doomed to failure, due to the spiraling complexities of the human nervous system.

“I’m aware, but innovation requires risk, as they say,” Slippery Jim said. “I am a new type of undead, who’s to say I cannot perform a new type of possession? If I can perform this successfully, it’ll be a boon to every soul who comes after me!”

Kim and Hawke shared a quick and skeptical glance. The more they heard of Slippery Jim’s grandiose promises, the less they believed them. They’d both hung out with Vell enough to know what sincere good intentions sounded like. Slippery Jim was a little too much bluster to be believable.

“And I suppose it’s just a coincidence the first person it’ll help is you, right?”

“The benefits are great, I’ll admit, but so is the risk,” Jim said. “I’ll do what I must, rather than let someone else take the risk.”

“Hmm. Yeah, sure,” Kim said. “Maybe don’t-”

The blade of a scythe slipped through the door effortlessly, while the handle impacted with a soft thud. Slippery Jimbo gasped in terror and took a step back.

“Sorry, sorry,” Vell said, as he stumbled through the door and pulled the scythe out of it. “I lost my grip for a second trying to get this thing open. Everyone okay, nobody hurt?”

“No, Vell, no one was standing directly in front of the door,” Kim said. “Who does that?”

“You never know,” Vell mumbled, as he shouldered his scythe again. Slippery Jim cowered at the sight of the blade, but was confused by the sight of the Vell.

“Are you...Death?”

“Not really, but in practical terms, sort of?” Vell said. “I’ve been deputized, I guess, uh, and I’m sort of specifically supposed to reap you.”

Slippery Jim’s semitransparent face briefly flicked into partially visible panic, but he recovered quickly.

“Well, you seem like a much more reasonable fellow than that other Death. Happy to have a fellow mortal handling my case, much better you than some omniscient cosmic taskmaster,” Jim blustered. “Listen, you’re- apologies, I haven’t caught your names, who are you, Deputy Death?”

“Vell Harlan.”

“Well I’ll be damned if this isn’t fate in the making,” Slippery Jim said. “You’ve been in the news, Vell Harlan, you’re the man who beat death!”

“I didn’t really beat him, someone else sort of- that’s why I’m here, actually,” Vell said. “I, uh, owe him a favor for, you know, being alive.”

“And when I am done here, my boy, I will owe you a favor for me being alive,” Jimbo said. “As surely as two stars have ever crossed ours are crossing now, brother, the first man to escape death here to witness the second man to do so.”

“Look, I, uh, I don’t know,” Vell mumbled. “I don’t really want to be the reason anyone di- completes dying, but I really have to do this.”

“Certainly you do! Eventually. Did Death ever specify a time you had to reap me?”

“Well, there was the implication…”

“If it’s not explicitly stated, there’s no force on heaven or earth binding you to any time limit,” Slippery Jim said. “Look, Vell Harlan, I am not asking for you to let me wander off into the sunset, slime and all, I’m just asking for one or two good-faith attempts at a second chance. Just like you got. Isn’t that fair?”

“I don’t, uh…”

“Hey, Vell, just a quick aside here,” Kim said. “How do you think a guy gets a nickname like Slippery Jim?”

“Well, it’s because of the gelatinous-”

“Uh, yeah, no buddy, it’s not because you’re a walking jello: you were called slippery when you were alive,” Kim said. All the time Jimbo had spent time talking had given her plenty of chances to look up records of his life. “Let’s run the numbers, shall we? Twenty-seven counts of tax evasion, thirty six counts of fraud, nineteen counts of defrauding the elderly or disabled, ten counts of identity theft-”

“That’s not reflective of-”

“You’re a serial con artist, Jimbo,” Kim said. “Everything you’ve said to us was a lie.”

“I died,” Jim said. “Is that not impetus enough for a man to take stock of his life and-”

“Don’t believe anything he says,” Kim snapped. “Just reap him, Vell.”

“I- yeah, I should,” Vell said. He gripped the scythe in both hands and held it tight.

“Please, Vell Harlan, just a few minutes,” Slippery Jim said. The scythe in Vell’s hands trembled.

“Vell, this is only going to get worse the longer you hesitate,” Hawke said. “You got to rip the bandage off.”

Vell grit his teeth. Hawke was right, this was getting worse every second.

“If not for the sake of a second chance, give me time to call my loved ones,” Jim pleaded.

“He stole his own mother’s credit card,” Kim said. “He hasn’t got loved ones, he’s just trying to slow you down.”

“This back and forth is not helping,” Vell said, through gritted teeth.

“I’m not happy about this either, Vell, but this guy is not worth breaking a deal with Death,” Kim said. Were it an innocent soul, she might be tempted to give some wiggle room, but Slippery Jim had used his life to lie, steal, and cheat at every turn. She didn’t want to give him even more chances to do so.

“Still not helping,” Vell grunted.

“Vell Harlan, you’re a good person,” Slippery Jimbo said. “I know I’ve done wrong, I’ve made my share of mistakes, but I’ve never hurt anyone, really, never caused anything more than some financial stress. Is that so wrong that I deserve death?”

Vell grit his teeth and held the scythe tight.

“No,” Vell said. Slippery Jim’s slimy lips parted in an easy smile. “But you already died.”

The smile died faster than Jim had as Vell hefted the scythe off the ground, and held it over his shoulder.

“I’m sorry, but-”

The console in front of Jim made a dinging noise.

“Oh, soup’s on,” Jimbo said.

Before Vell could even question what Jimbo meant by that, the tankard of blue good in front of him popped open, and a fully grown man catapulted out of the tank and directly into Vell. The ballistic and fully nude man was soon followed by another, and another, as Jimbo turned a dial with slimey fingers and kicked the cloning machine into an unstable overdrive.

“Good try, folks, but I stay slippery,” Slippery Jimbo hollered, as he ran out a side door and out of sight. Kim tried to follow, but was caught up in the tidal wave of cloned bodies as they kept sweeping forth.

“Why does a cloning machine have a turbo setting,” Kim screamed.

“Just turn it off!”

“I can’t,” Kim said. In spite of her vastly superior strength, the river of meat flowing the other direction kept her away from the control panel. The bodies had hit the rear wall and were now starting to pile up, nearly crushing Hawke and burying their only viable exit.

“Vell,” Hawke snapped. “Cut through them with the scythe!”

Vell tried holding the infinitely sharp blade in front of him, and the tidal wave of flesh turned into a wave of blood and viscera.

“Never mind, that’s way worse,” Hawke said. “What do we do?”

Vell planted the scythe downwards for some extra stability as the rising tide of cloned bodies became waist-high.

“Uh. Try again next loop?”

Kim had something to say about that, but a cloned body buried her before she could say it.