Chapter 240: Book 4 Chapter 14: Slightly Easier to Track

“Have you considered a new mascot?” Hawke demanded. “Maybe a less pointy one?”

He was wearing heavy gloves and other protective gear, but jabbing beaks and talons still hurt even through the thick cloth. He managed to wrangle another cloned eagle into a cage, and a man who looked suspiciously similar to him slammed the cage shut.

“Not really my call to make, bud,” Jay said. “No matter how many times I’ve begged.”

Jay, much like his counterpart, was not a particularly courageous man. Thankfully, at the Zeus-Stephanides School, he had a lot less to be afraid of. Unlike the Einstein-Odinson, which dealt with an apocalyptic time loop every day, Jay and his fellow ZS students only ever had to deal with an escaped eagle. A relatively manageable problem, even with the talons, at least on most days. Kim slammed another eagle into a cage, and scanned the lab.

“Okay, I think that was the last of them,” Kim said. She glared at a nearby cabinet for a second, then got back on task. “Not picking up any other lifeforms.”

“Oh jeez, thanks,” Jay sighed. “I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.”

“Probably let the clone swarm grow out of control until it consumed the entire island,” Samson said. Vell elbowed him in the shoulder. That had happened the previous loop, but nobody outside their group of loopers needed to know that.

“I sure hope not, but god, maybe,” Jay said. “Thanks for the assist. I am really not handling this well.”

“I can see why,” Vell said. In year’s past, these groups of doppelgangers had had between four and five members, as they had a counterpart for every looper barring Vell himself. This year it was just Jay and Moses, Samson’s counterpart, along with the robot K.I.M. Zee and Holly had graduated, which was only natural, but for some reason no matching counterparts for Alex or Helena had appeared to join the group.

“We’re getting by,” Moses said. He and Samson worked together to shove the cages into an orderly row.

“Now we just need your friends to get back with that spell.”

“Friend,” Samson said. “Singular. Freddy is our friend. Alex is not.”

The not-friend burst through the door mere seconds later, followed shortly thereafter by the friend. Alex was already beginning the motions of casting a spell, while Freddy held on to an odd-looking machine and a feather. Vell let Alex do her thing, but he grabbed the feather from Freddy.

“I take it you figured out what to do?”

“If everything goes according to plan, we should be able to identify which of these is the original, yes,” Freddy said. “Took some very elaborate mana extraction techniques, though. Alex had some very good ideas about filtering out the unique magical signatures of a living individual.”

“Mostly incorrect ideas,” Alex said. “Freddy’s the one who actually made it work.”

“Any correct theory is built on a few dozen incorrect ones,” Freddy said. “All part of the process.”

Alex finished casting her spell, and a beacon of gray light started to shine from her palm towards one of the cages. She waved her hand back and forth just to be sure she was really targeting the right one, and then confidently separated the cage from the rest.

“There you are, your original eagle,” Alex said. Moses put his hands on the cage and immediately drew them back when the eagle inside tried to bite him.

“Yeah, that’s definitely Aetos,” Moses said. “Thanks, guys.”

“Any time,” Samson said. “You want any help getting your bitey bird back on the boat?”

“Nah, we got him from here,” Jay said. “You guys have done enough. Go watch the games, do some homework, you don’t need to clean up our messes.”

Another round of school sports had led to the Einstein-Odinson hosting other schools yet again. Vell was starting to wonder if he’d ever get to see any of his “rival” campuses. The other groups of students had come to visit the EOC campus several times now, but he’d never been invited to go to any of their islands.

“Before anybody goes anywhere, one more thing,” Kim said.

She grabbed a large cage from a nearby wall and swung it around to the center of the floor, with the door on top. Kim then walked over to the wall, grabbed the cabinet she had been eyeing early, and gave it one mighty shake towards the open cage. Two young men and a woman in a cardboard costume tumbled out of the cabinet and into the cage. Kim slammed the door shut before they could wriggle out.

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“Ugh, you losers again,” Moses sighed. The crowd from Patschke-Puck bristled at the insult in spite of it being completely accurate.

“We are not losers,” Cain snapped. Moses and Samson took a step back from their doppelganger. While every other pair of doppelgangers were passively accepting of the situation, Cain didn’t enjoy sharing a face with others.

“You lose literally everything,” Kim said. She rapped metal knuckles against the cage to startle her “doppelganger”. Some of the cardboard pieces of Leanna’s robot costume came loose as she struggled to get free.

“We win lots of things,” Leanne protested, before remembering she was supposed to be a robot. “Uh, beep.”

“Yeah, we came in second place in that ping pong tournament we hosted,” Cain said.

“You didn’t tell anyone about the ping pong tournament,” Samson said. “You were the only people competing!”

“We got excited and started bouncing the balls off the wall.”

“You people are ridiculous,” Jay scoffed. Vell nodded in agreement. They were two members down and still just as insane as ever.

“Hey, by the way,” Vell said. He turned to Hawke’s caged counterpart, the one he had only ever known as Chicken. “What’s your name?”

“What do you mean, you know my name.”

“Leigh only ever called you Chicken,” Vell said. “What’s your real name?”

“That is my real name.”

“Your parents named you fucking ‘Chicken’?”

“No,” Chicken mumbled. “Leigh made me change it. Legally.”

“Well at least it’s accurate,” Hawke said. No matter how cowardly he got, at least he wasn’t as spineless as his counterpart. “Kim, do something cool.”

Kim kicked the cage towards the wall, away from the rest of them.

“I’ll be back to let you out when it’s time to leave,” Kim said. “Try not to kill yourselves until I do.”

The Patschke-Puck students proved they might have some difficulty with that by immediately banging their heads against the metal walls of the cage. As the two other groups of students exited, caged eagle in tow, Leanna ceased her thrashing long enough to shove a cardboard-coated fist through the bars and shake it.

“We’ll get you next time, Einsteins!”

“You probably won’t,” Vell said. He was last through the door, and slammed it shut behind him. “I am not going to miss those guys when I graduate.”

“What are you complaining about, you don’t even have doppelgangers,” Kim said. “I have to see a halfassed mockery of myself every time these guys show up. No offense, K.I.M.”

“I am incapable of being offended,” the robot said.

“Still pays to be polite.”

“You know, for all your claims of perfect duplicates, I haven’t noticed a copy of myself yet,” Alex said.

“Probably better not to question it,” Samson said.

“I question everything,” Alex said.

“Yeah, we know,” Samson sighed. He’d been trying to get her to not make any dumb theories.

“Well, we know Vell’s unique because of that whole death and resurrection thing,” Jay theorized. Vell nodded. For as many problems as it had caused him, everyone knowing his secrets had made some conversations easier. “You ever have a near-death experience, Alex?”

“I was in a car accident when I was nine, but I’d hardly describe it as near fatal,” Alex said. “So it’s unlikely that my counterpart has died.”

“Yeah, but speaking of Vell,” Samson said. “Hey Moses, at your school, was there a really loud troublemaker who got themselves expelled on the first day of school?”

“Yeah, I think I heard about someone getting expelled, actually,” Moses said. “Riley? I think?”

“And there we go,” Samson said. He pivoted on his heel to point at Alex. “Vell doesn’t have a counterpart, and with no Vell, there was no one to bail out your counterpart when they got themselves expelled.”

“I suppose if the Zeus-Stephanides Dean is as overbearing as Lichman, that makes sense,” Alex said. Kim briefly considered punching Alex for insulting the dean, but decided against it.

“I wonder if the Patschke-Puck kids also had someone get expelled,” Hawke said, deliberately changing the subject. “I mean, they’ve tried to murder us on a pretty regular basis. What would someone have to do to get expelled from there?”

“I don’t know, actually being smart?”

“Having manners?”

“Murder but they actually get away with it?”

“Maybe we can ask the guys in the cage,” Jay said. He paused briefly to lean on Aetos the Eagle’s cage, and nearly got a fingertip nipped off for his trouble. “Ow! Man, you’ve been a real bitey bastard ever since Zee graduated.”

“I miss them too, bud,” Moses said. He patted the cage reassuringly and also nearly got a finger bitten off. “Nevermind, fuck your feelings. We’re putting you back on the boat.”

They had K.I.M. haul the cage, since its fingers were metallic and therefore immune to eagle beaks. That did not stop Aetos from trying, and the loopers got treated to some frustrated eagle squawks and frantic pecking noises as their counterparts from Zeus-Stephanides waved goodbye and returned to their boat.

“However it happened, I’m glad there’s less of those guys this year,” Samson said. “Makes keeping track of things a lot simpler.”

“Things never actually get simpler, they just get complicated in different directions,” Kim said. “We still don’t know why there’s no Helena counterpart.”

“Have you seen Helena?” Samson said. “How many other people in her condition do you think lived this long?”

“That’s...accurate,” Vell said. “If slightly uncomfortable.”

“It’s not much different from you,” Kim said. “Someone who’s supposed to be dead but isn’t.”

“That makes it more uncomfortable,” Vell said. “Not less.”

“I gotta say, it is super weird to just be on the sidelines of shit like this,” Freddy said.

“Oh! Jeez,” Vell said. “Sorry. I thought you left already.”

“Yeah, no, I’ve just been in the background,” Freddy said. “No clone, so not a lot to contribute.”

“No, you’ve got a clone,” Vell said. “I think someone mentioned him one time. Franky, I think?”

“Oh.”

“You want to go find him?”

“I kind of feel like I have to, now,” Freddy said. “If only for morbid curiosity.”

“He’s your counterpart, he should be nice.”

Franky did turn out to be a little weird, but not bad overall. They deliberately avoided seeking out Freddy’s Patschke-Puck doppelganger, as it could only go downhill from there.