Chapter 253: Book 4 Chapter 22: One + One = Vell

“So Alex is actually behaving, huh?”

“For the most part,” Vell said.

“I’m beginning to think someone should study your powers of redemption, Vell,” Lee said. Vell leaned back in his beach chair and shrugged off the compliment.

“No, no, I’m not really doing anything,” Vell said. “Most people want to do the right thing, sometimes they just get confused on how to do that.”

“Still, you play a role,” Lee said. “Perhaps if you’d been here we wouldn’t have to fire Markus.”

“Why’d you fire Markus?” Vell asked. “Also, who’s Markus?”

“One of our manufacturing line managers, with a nasty habit of coming in late,” Lee said. “And he could set his own hours, so him managing to be consistently late is an achievement. That was a failure on several levels.”

“Sounds like he definitely deserved the firing, at least,” Vell said.

“Harley was still surprisingly nervous about it,” Lee said. “She -oh, well then.”

“Lee? What’s up?”

“Oh, can you still hear me, dear?”

“Yeah, why would I not be able to?”

“Well it’s just that my phone has turned into a potato,” Lee said. “But apparently it still functions as a phone.”

“Well at least you’ve got that,” Vell said. “Sounds like it might be loop time. I better go.”

“Off you go then,” Lee said. “I’d hang up, but, well, potato.”

Vell did the hanging up for her, then hopped off his beach chair and promptly splashed into the sand as if it were liquid. After resurfacing and taking a deep breath, Vell swam forward towards the hopefully solid land, an act which caused him to move straight backwards into the water. He slid atop the ocean’s surface and then stood up on the now motionless, entirely solid water.

“Well, this is definitely wrong,” Vell said to no one in particular. The water was still as transparent as ever, and he could see fish frozen in place far beneath the surface. He could also see an entire grand piano and what appeared to be eighty-seven left shoes. He ignored that and focused on getting back to land. He took a step backwards, confirmed his hypothesis that trying to go backwards would make him go forward, and then took a running jump over the beach, towards solid ground. He leapt off the not-water, over the liquid beach, and over the ground -then kept going.

Vell twisted in the air slightly and watched as the ground slid past his feet. His height, and momentum, never changed as he drifted across campus. He sailed back towards the populated areas of the quad, where several students and a strawberry with legs were panicking about various other mishaps, not the least of which was that the school’s clocktower now had a giant eyeball in place of the clock face.

“Little help here,” Vell said, as he drifted past a student who appeared to be moving at twice the usual speed. “Anybody?”

“Got you!”

Something slapped into Vell’s ankle and he stopped drifting, then got dragged back to the ground.

“Thanks, Kim,” Vell said. “You- Kim?”

He had recognized Kim’s voice, and her peculiar strength, but he did not see Kim.

“Kim, are you invisible?”

“No, why- oh, right, one second.”

With a quick shift on her axis, Kim appeared as if from nowhere, looking flatter than any piece of paper Vell had ever seen.

“Apparently I’m two-dimensional now,” Kim said.

“Yikes. You feel alright?”

“I’ve been worse,” Kim said. “Just have to be very careful how I grab stuff. Hit my doorknob at the wrong angle and sliced right through it.”

“Thanks for grabbing me the right way, then,” Vell said.

“I was real careful,” Kim said. “Now, can you put your intact legs and your mostly intact brain to work and figure out what the fuck is going on?”

“I think somebody broke...everything,” Vell said. A nearby door opened, and someone walked out and instantly fell into the sky, plummeting up at varying speeds. Even terminal velocity wasn’t consistent.

“That much is obvious,” Kim said. “The question is how.”

“I’m tempted to blame the physics department,” Vell said.

“Things are getting fucky in the physics sense, yes, but some of this seems unrelated to the laws of gravity and whatnot,” Kim said. “Look at that.”

“Look at what?”

“The thing I’m pointing at, Vell.”

“I can’t see your hand, Kim, it’s two dimensional.”

“Fucking hell,” Kim grunted, before adjusting her hand to a more visible angle. “That.”

Vell managed to follow her flat finger to see an airborne whale slowly falling apart into perfect puzzle pieces, scattering the angular shapes back onto the solid water.

“I don’t think there’s any laws of physics that make whales not puzzle pieces,” Kim said.

“That we know of,” Vell said. “The average guy still thinks time travel is impossible, remember?”

“Time is different than -ah, fuck it, why not,” Kim said.

“I’ll call Luke,” Vell said. He stuck a hand in his pocket and pulled out a potato. “Okay, guess we’ll walk. Or slide, or float, or whatever happens.”

***

They ended up doing all of the above, plus some extra. An entire building vanished on their walk, and space closed in around it as if it had never been there in the first place. About halfway through the walk, Kim got her third dimension back, but then she got a fourth dimension, which was worse. Vell’s left hand also turned into a black hole and spaghettified his entire arm, but he shrugged it off and kept going until they reached the physics lab.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“Vell, thank god,” said a collection of tetrahedrons that had Luke’s voice. “I tried to call you, but my phone’s a potato.”

“Yeah, they’ve been weirdly consistent about that,” Vell said. “Just to be sure, you are Luke, right? I don’t know if voices are getting mixed up along with everything else.”

“Yes, it’s Luke,” he said. “I know I’m made of cubes now, but-”

“Pyramids, actually,” Kim said.

“Shit, we better hurry,” Luke said. “Look, it’s a long story, but: somebody broke math.”

Vell hesitated long enough that Luke briefly worried time had broken too.

“Math?” Vell said, finally. “As in one plus one equals two?”

“One plus one actually equals twelve now, hard to explain,” Luke said. “Anyway, yes. We were doing some hypothetical models on how to make faster than light travel work, and somebody-”

The collection of pyramids that made up Luke’s head turned to glare at an upside-down skeleton in the corner of the room.

“Thought that if they used magic to nudge some imaginary numbers, they could make their model work,” Luke said. “A little snappy finger action and some wizard bullshit later, here we are.”

“How does math being broken make gravity not work?”

“Gravity is math! Everything is math,” Luke protested. “Math is just our expression of the underlying truths of reality! Fudge the numbers a little and the building blocks of existence come apart!”

“Well how do we un-fudge the numbers,” Kim said. “I’d ask that guy, but he’s a skeleton.”

“I can talk just fine, actually,” the upside-down skeleton said. “Also, my pronouns are she/they.”

“Sorry, you’re a skeleton.”

“I get it, just clarifying,” the skeleton said. “Anyway, I already tried undoing what I did, but the universe falling apart has also affected magic. I’d have to start from scratch, and the rules are probably changing as we speak.”

“So what, we’re just fucked?”

As he spoke, the pyramids that formed Luke’s body snapped into two-dimensional triangles.

“Oh that can’t be good,” he said. “We’re definitely fucked.”

Luke’s theory was validated by part of the wall dissolving, revealing an inky blankness stretching out into infinity. The inverted skeleton reached out a hand to touch the darkness and immediately began dissolving as well.

“Okay, just for the record,” they said. “I fucked this one up real bad.”

The skeleton vanished, and Vell, Luke, and Kim began to back away from the rapidly encroaching dissolution of reality.

“Okay, maybe things are so frayed we can brute force it,” Luke said. “Just think about math real hard, try to imprint your will on reality.”

They all thought about math real hard, and while Vell’s concentration did summon a few mathematical equations floating above his head, it did not do anything to slow down the collapse of all existence. Luke’s body collapsed into a set of thin black lines, rendering him almost entirely one-dimensional.

“Shit. Vell, no pressure, but-”

One-dimensional collapsed into zero-dimensional, and Luke blinked out of existence.

“Maybe I should try punching it,” Kim said.

“You think that’ll work?”

“No, but I’m all out of ideas,” Kim said. She raised a four-dimensional fist and charged the wall of blackness that was consuming reality. “Cowabunga!”

While her battle cry was radical, her punch was still ineffective. The wall consumed her, and then Vell, dissolving what was left of reality around them and leaving them floating in an inky black void, with nothing around them.

“Well, at least my last word wasn’t ‘Cowabunga’,” Kim said. She looked down at her hands, and found she’d been reverted to her three-dimensional self. “And I’m back to normal, at least.”

“Me too,” Vell said. His arm had been un-spaghettified, and was back to its normal length.

“And me,” Alex said. The other two spun in the void to stare at her.

“Alex? When’d you get here?”

“I’ve been here a while, actually,” Alex said. “I was just very small. I managed to grab on to Vell’s shoe and hold on.”

“Oh. Sorry for not noticing.”

“It’s fine, I was microscopic.”

Alex drifted around and looked at the emptiness.

“Do you think we’re dead?”

“Probably not,” Vell said.

“Well, you’re closer than most,” Kim said. “But you’re not exactly the authority.”

But I am.

The group’s second skeleton of the day came in the form of Death, bearing his usual scythe and robe. Alex and Vell turned to face him, and Kim drifted in that same direction just to feel included, since she still couldn’t see the reaper.

“Oh, shit, we’re dead, aren’t we?” Alex moaned. “I didn’t even get to-”

Please don’t list out your regrets, Death said. I get quite enough of that already, and while I’m sympathetic, it’s entirely unnecessary. You’re not dead.

“Thank god,” Alex said. “But if we’re not dead, why are you here?”

Tech support.

“If you’re here to help, I’d appreciate it,” Vell said. “We have a pretty big glitch going on, if you haven’t noticed.”

I noticed.

“Then, uh...please?”

Thank you for being polite about it, Death said. He raised his scythe slightly, and held it there for such a long time that Vell realized he probably wanted someone to ask him about it. For dramatic purposes, naturally.

“What are you going to do?”

What we do to solve most glitches, Death said. I’m going to turn it off and on again.

Death tapped his scythe against an invisible floor, and in an instant, the entirety of reality reappeared, with Vell, Kim, and Alex popping into existence on the floor of the looper lair.

There you go, Death said. Good as new.

Vell checked his phone, which was a phone again and not a potato. It was 12:01 AM of the same day, presumably on the second loop. He showed the time to his friends, and Alex’s brow furrowed.

“Off and on again,” Alex mumbled. “Did you just...reboot the universe?”

Yes. Easiest way to put everything back where it was.

“Wait. Doesn’t that mean you destroyed everything and recreated identical copies?” Alex said. “I’m not ‘me’, I’m just a duplicate of the original me you created to replace the version from the previous reality.”

That’s not how it works.

“But ontologically, you-”

Death leaned down, black hood arched low over his skeletal brows, to stare at Alex with his infinitely deep blue eyes.

That is not how it works.

Alex managed to hold eye contact for exactly zero point three seconds.

“Right, thank you very much for the help.”

You’re welcome, Death said. And really, don’t worry about the reboot, I’m quite good at this sort of thing. After all, I’ve done it seventeen times.

Death tapped his scythe again and vanished. Alex’s frown got wider and wider with every second that passed.

“Seventeen times?”

“Don’t think about it,” Vell said.