Chapter 254: Book 4 Chapter 23.1: Die Harlan

“I think we got all of them,” Alex said.

Seventeen eels prompt slithered out of a nearby desk drawer.

“Scratch that.”

She put the eels in a very large bucket she had on hand and then checked the rest of the drawers. Vell and Skye wrangled the rest of the eels in the various buckets around the room and kept them from slithering free.

“A little help here, Michaels?”

Dr. Professor Michael and the lesser Michael both shrugged in the exact same way.

“This is your mess,” the elder Michael said. “You clean it up.”

“You’re the one who didn’t properly coordinate your teleportation schedule,” Freddy said. He was laid up on the desk, nursing an eel bite on his arm. “We set up a whole group chat just to avoid this kind of thing!”

Earlier that day, the Marine Biology department had been teleporting some live eels, unfortunately at the exact same time Freddy and his department had been carrying out a separate teleportation experiment. Due to some crossed streams, Freddy’s lab had gotten an express delivery of a lot of furious eels, which had ended predictably badly. Some of the eels had even gotten fused together in the teleportation accident, resulting in hydra-like eels with multiple heads, all of which liked to bite.

“Our experiments don’t require your authorization,” Dr. Professor Michael said.

“No, they don’t,” Skye said. “But they do require coordination, otherwise this happens!”

Skye held up a seven-headed eel, and all seven heads snapped at Michael Jr’s nose. He didn’t even blink.

“And here I thought you’d be excited to see a mutant freak,” Michael Jr said.

“Ugh. You disgust me,” Skye said, because she didn’t want to admit he was right. Finding a way to genetically de-splice the fused eels would make for a very interesting evening. In theory, at least.

“Let me get those,” Vell said, as he grabbed the last of the buckets. Thanks to some spacial warping magic, they were still small and easy to handle despite containing several hundred mutant eels. “I’ll go put these somewhere safe.”

Since it was the first loop, Skye would never get to see that de-splicing experiment carried out. Vell just wanted to keep the eels out of the way and ensure they didn’t hurt anyone for the rest of the loop.

“I’ll be back to mop up later,” Vell said. There was still a lot of water and eel-slime all over Freddy’s lab. “In the meantime, uh...Alex, why don’t you keep an eye on Freddy?”

Alex turned several shades of red in a few seconds.

“Sure,” she squeaked.

“Good deal. I’ll be back in a bit.”

Vell picked up the buckets and hauled them out of the lab, across the quad to the lair. He stepped inside and faced their extra-dimensional storage locker before putting them down and pulling out his phone.

“Hey, Kim?”

“Vell, what’s up? Got a mega-eel that needs wrangling?”

“No, actually, the whole eel situation wrapped up pretty clean,” Vell said. “No fatalities. Freddy got bit, that’s about the worst of it.”

“Well, he could have some kind of mutant eel disease,” Kim said. Given the apparent low lethality of the incident, Vell had put her and most of the other loopers on the sidelines in case something deadlier happened.

“Maybe, but that feels unlikely even for us,” Vell said. “There might still be something deadly lurking, so keep an eye out. I’m going to put the eels in the locker, so I’ll be out of touch for a bit.”

“In the locker? Can’t you just shove them in your bag? They go to the same place.”

“Yeah, but if I just dump them in there they might fall in the river of molten crayons, or the giant blender, or something,” Vell said. “I want to put them somewhere safe.”

“Vell, they’re eels.”

“They’re still complex creatures, they feel pain,” Vell said. “Look, I’ll be in and out in like five minutes.”

“Okay, just know the world is definitely going to end in that exact five minute span,” Kim said.

“I’ll take my chances.”

Vell stepped inside the locker and slammed the door shut behind him, immediately cutting off the phone signal as he entered the extra-dimensional space. Kim stopped focusing on the dead call and turned back to Hawke and Samson, who were watching out for danger (and playing poker) with her.

“Vell’s going to be in the locker for a few minutes,” Kim said. “He says we might still be in apocalypse territory.”

“Is this you trying to make an excuse to fold?”

“No, Hawke, I’m coming back from this,” Kim said. “Just letting you know.”

“Yeah, with Vell out of the way, we can expect the apocalypse in three, two, one…”

Samson held up his cards as nothing happened.

“Maybe I should have counted down from ten-”

In a blinding flash of light, Kim, Hawke, and Samson were all teleported from their poker game into the middle of nowhere. Kim was the first to get her bearings, and realized they were now several miles out to sea, sitting in some kind of inflatable life raft. She was also the first to notice they shared the life raft with a few dozen other students, with dozens of other rafts and dozens of other students floating not far away. In the distance, the island campus of the Einstein-Odinson campus stood totally abandoned, and surrounded by a dense forcefield of energy.

“The fuck is this?”

Most of their raft-mates had looked to the trio with concern, as if they had the answers. Statistically, they were more likely to know what kind of bullshit was going on, but in this situation they were just as clueless.

“We don’t know what’s going on either,” Kim said. She took a look around and realized all of the faculty were on a nearby raft. “Hey! Hey Dean!”

The decayed head of an also-confused Dean Lichman popped up from among the teachers.

“What the hell’s going on, Dean?”

“What are you- one moment,” Dean said. He lowered his head and had a brief aside with the hydrokinesis teacher, which resulted in his raft moving much closer to Kim’s. “There we are. Sorry, hearing’s the first thing to go when decaying. I assume you want to know what’s happening?”

“I would like to know why I’m on a raft, yes,” Hawke said.

“Entirely understandable. Luckily I’ve been reading up on all the old school systems,” Dean Lichman said. “I believe this is a failsafe designed to get all the students to a safe distance in case of emergencies.”

“We’ve had this the whole time?”

Samson had lived through several hundred “emergencies” by now, and not been teleported away from any of them.

“Well, yes and no,” Dean Lichman said. “It’s been active the entire time, but this particular failsafe is designed to only trigger in the event of a terrorist attack.”

“This whole thing is set up for one specific situation?”

“Yes, well, the principal at the time was American, you know how they got after 9/12,” Dean Lichman said. Samson and Hawke nodded in agreement and carried on.

“From the looks of it, kind of seems like it worked,” Samson said. “Kim, can you do a headcount?”

“Way ahead of you,” Kim said. She’d put her scanners to work and matched the current floating crowd with the total student registry. “Looks like we got just about everyone. Only people we’re missing are some of the Marine Biologists and Freddy’s crew in the lab.”

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“They were probably together when this thing started,” Hawke said. “Maybe that teleportation mishap thing they had going on blocked them from getting auto-teleported.”

“Or maybe they’re the ones who started this,” Samson said.

“Oh, I certainly hope this is some sort of misfire,” Dean Lichman said. “The alternative is…”

Demonstrating a much better sense of dramatic timing than Samson, Dean Lichman trailed off just in time for his phone to ring. Seeing that the call was from an unknown number, he glanced sideways at the loopers before putting it on speakerphone.

“Hello?”

“You are the leader of this school, yes,” said an ambiguously accented and vaguely threatening voice.

“I am. Who is this?”

“A man with lofty ambitions,” said the unknown caller. “Do not worry. Assuming all goes according to plan, no one will be hurt. I need something only you super-geniuses can give me, and once I have it, all will be well. Do not try to stop me.”

The call ended, and Dean Lichman turned to stare at Kim and the other loopers.

“Guess we’re stopping terrorists today,” Hawke sighed.

“This time I do have to stop you,” Dean Lichman said. “For your own well-being, and for the fact that forcefield is borderline impenetrable. Even if I were allowing you to go back in—which I’m not—you likely wouldn’t be able to.”

“Well, that won’t be a problem either way,” Kim said. She glanced over her shoulder at Samson and Hawke. “Remember that headcount I did? I kind of forgot about someone.”

Somewhere far away, Vell slammed a locker door shut and wiped some eel slime off his hands before stepping back out into the hall. The access to their secret lair was a low-traffic area, but even so, it was quiet. Unusually quiet.

“Hmm. Don’t like that.”

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Half an hour later, the scene in the ocean just off-campus was much livelier. An entire aircraft carrier of some sort had pulled up in response to the attack, and the drifting students had been escorted on board -and loudly instructed not to touch anything, after the engineering students had offered some improvements to the ship’s dated systems. Kim walked past a particularly handsy engineer getting put in handcuffs and wandered towards the ship’s control room. A uniformed soldier stepped to attention and placed himself between her and the door.

“Ma’am- uh, robot, uh...you can’t go in there.”

“I can’t go, or you won’t let me go?” Kim said. “Because that seems like a perfectly openable door to me.”

“It’s a secure area,” the soldier said.

“Well, the only security seems to be you, so if you decide not to secure it, it will not be secure anymore,” Kim said.

“I’m not, uh, I’m not going to do that.”

“Right.”

She turned around and looked over the edge of the aircraft carrier, towards the ocean. They were standing towards the center of the ship, on an elevated deck, so it was quite a ways away.

“I could throw you overboard right now, you know,” Kim said. “You’d probably clear the edge by about thirty or forty feet. I’ve thrown people further.”

The soldier froze in place.

“Eh, fuck it,” Kim said. “This is no fun.”

She picked the soldier up by the collar, lifted him up, and set him aside before pushing her way through the door. Dean Lichman was sitting surrounded by uniformed brass, and one very familiar face.

“Oh hey, Agent Fleming!”

“God damn it!”

The elderly secret agent nearly fell to his knees when Kim entered.

“It’s bad enough I got forced out of retirement for this, can’t you just leave me alone?”

As the only agent with field experience on the Einstein-Odinson campus, Agent Fleming had been called in to consult -despite all his many, many protests.

“I don’t really care about you, dude, I just want to know what’s going on,” Kim said. “My friends are still in there.”

One of the generals, a man with a mustache so thick you could use it as a broom, stepped up and put himself between Kim and Agent Fleming.

“Be that as it may, you can’t just waltz in here and-”

“Oh, don’t fucking bother,” Agent Fleming said. “This one and all her friends are unstoppable and inexplicable, just let them do whatever they want.”

“There’s standard operating procedure to-”

Agent Fleming grabbed the general by the shoulder and whipped him around.

“I got nibbled on by an alien barnacle,” Fleming snapped. “There is no ‘standard’ on this fucking island!”

He released the general, who stepped back into line, mustache bristling all the while. Agent Fleming let out a deep sigh and ran his hands along his face.

“So when you say your friends-”

“Vell Harlan’s still there,” Kim said. “He’s the guy with the guns, if you don’t remember.”

“Oh, I remember, no matter how hard I try to forget,” Fleming said. He tilted sideways to address the military brass. “Good news, gentlemen, I’ve found our strategy. We’re going to sit here and do nothing while Vell Harlan solves the entire problem for us.”

“You’re going to let my student take to the front lines of a terrorist attack?”

“Yes, Dean, I am,” Fleming said. “I am the most well-trained secret agent on the planet, and ‘your student’ shot a gun out of my hands before I even had time to aim it. He can handle the terrorists.”

“That is immensely irresponsible,” Dean Lichman said. “Though not inaccurate. But even if we assume Vell Harlan is equipped to handle himself, there are other, less capable students who I can only assume are being held hostage! We need to do something to help.”

“You said yourself that forcefield is near indestructible,” Fleming said. “We can’t even get messages through.”

“Actually, on that note,” Kim said. “I didn’t come up her just to bother you guys. I think I can get us in touch with Vell.”

“How so?”

“Our phones are a little more tricked out than most,” Kim said. Hawke had taken the liberty of modifying them to stay better connected in dangerous situations. “It’s not quite good enough to get through whatever’s in that forcefield, but I think if I used some of your equipment to boost it, I could maybe get through.”

“Robot, this is classified military-grade hardware, I can’t-”

Agent Fleming turned around and glared the general into submission again.

“Do whatever you want,” Fleming said.

“Cool.”

Kim called in Hawke, who took one look at their communications array and shook his head in disapproval.

“God, you’d think a secret spy agency would have better gear,” Hawke said. He sat down and pried one of the face panels off their computers to get access to the guts beneath.

“Hey, that is top of the line tech you’re poking around in.”

“I ‘poke around’ in stuff more advanced than this while doing homework,” Hawke said. “I just need the extra gear to boost the signal.”

Hawke grabbed a few components, rewired them, and then plugged the entire contraption into his phone. The phone rang twice before Vell picked up.

“Hey, Hawke, bud,” Vell said. “Any chance you’re cowering in your dorm right now?”

“Nope. I’m on the aircraft carrier floating offshore, if you can see that.”

“I’m on the other end of the island, but yeah,” Vell said. He was currently standing atop a dorm building, overlooking the island, in search of any friendly faces. So far all he’d seen were guys with guns. “Is everyone else off the island?”

“Excuse me a moment,” Agent Fleming said. He politely placed himself beside Hawke and held out a hand to ask for the phone, to avoid offending the same man he’d threatened with a poison foot knife two years ago. Hawke gave him a dirty look, but handed over the phone. “Vell Harlan, this is Agent Fleming.”

“Oh yeah, the foot knife guy,” Vell said. “Do you know what’s going on?”

“Only vaguely,” Fleming said. “This organization is relatively new, only pinging our radar recently when they began to discuss the application of several meta-materials. Most of their early collaboration was done via forums for old sci-fi franchises, so it’s difficult to separate the actual planning from the sci-fi bullshit they were pretending to discuss.”

“Maybe for you,” Hawke scoffed. Fleming put a lot of effort into not giving him a dirty look.

“The long and short of it is that this came out of nowhere,” Fleming said. “Frankly I’m not all too concerned with their motive, but if you can find out, it can only help.”

“I’ll put it on my to-do list,” Vell said. “Speaking of, is hostage rescue on that list or am I alone on the island?”

“They do have captives, yes,” Fleming said. “From what little we know, they seem to want the students to build something for them.”

“Which students?”

“The ones in the Theoretical Science lab,” Fleming said. Vell was silent for a second.

“All of them?”

“All the ones that were in the building at the time of the intrusion, yes,” Fleming said. Hawke leaned in close to the phone to speak for a second.

“Yes, Vell, that includes Skye.”

“Noted,” Vell said. “I’ll be right back.”

The line went dead, and Fleming handed the phone back to Hawke.

“Who is ‘Skye’?”

“Vell’s girlfriend.”

“Ah,” Fleming said. “Those terrorists are doomed, aren’t they?”

“Very.”

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

The chamber of the revolvers made a clicking noise as they slid back into place. Vell rarely loaded his revolvers manually, as magic usually did that for him, but right now he felt like giving it the personal touch. His guns were cleaned, oiled, and loaded with care, ready to strike.

Having spent the past half hour evading the terrorists, Vell went on the offensive. From his rooftop vantage point, he had spotted a group of about six heading into the dining hall. He made sure the coast was clear and then dashed across the quad to the door, gun raised. He was soon face to face with one of the terrorists -dangling upside down from the ceiling.

“Come on, seriously?”

Vell looked sideways and saw Helena sitting at a table in the center of the hall, with a look of frustration on her face, six terrorists dangled from the ceiling by tendrils of black magic, and a pizza on the table in front of her.

“Can’t a girl eat some pizza and die in peace?”

“Helena? What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Eating pizza, eventually,” Helena said. “If people can finally stop interrupting me.”

“I mean how are you still on the island?”

“Oh, right. Pretty simple, really, I was having my monthly heart attack when all this went down. I assume I was technically dead at the time everyone else got teleported off the island,” Helena said. Kraid had gotten her up to speed on the overall circumstances off the island. “What’s your excuse?”

“I was in the storage locker,” Vell said. Helena nodded understandingly. “So you know what’s going on and your plan was just to sit here and eat pizza?”

“And then die,” Helena reminded him. “All this grease should kill me pretty quick, but I’m going to love it up until then.”

“Any chance I can convince you to eat pizza and die after you help me rescue some hostages?”

“No. I have absolutely no emotional or logistical investment in the well-being of anyone on this campus,” Helena said. “In fact…”

Helena raised a hand and held up a distressingly familiar soulstone. Vell panicked and raised a gun, but found it burning white hot in his palm. He dropped it and then unlatched the two holsters from his belt, letting the rapidly-melting revolvers drop off and onto the floor. He watched three puddles of molten lead form where his guns had once been.

“Seriously?”

“Oh, everyone knows you could shoot your way through this whole thing easily,” Helena said. “Put some work in, get creative.”

Vell kicked one of his fallen holsters in frustration. The only spare revolvers he had on hand fired paintballs, which weren’t much good here. He still had hostages to rescue, so he didn’t waste any more time yelling at Helena, but he did reach out and snatch a piece of pizza off the table.

“Seriously?”

“You’re going to be dead before you get two slices in anyway,” Vell snapped. He took a bite and stormed off.

“It’s still rude,” Helena shouted back.