Chapter 112: Book 2 Chapter 28: Not Fully Topical

Vell fired a few shots at the barrier of green fire, to no effect. He cursed to himself and wished he’d packed more magic bullets as he reloaded his mundane ones.

“I am really starting to dislike dark magic,” he mumbled.

“Because of this specifically, or because Kraid uses it, or because of that one time Joan killed you-”

“All of the above!”

Vell snapped an answer at Harley and returned to shooting at the barrier. Dark magic drew power from the abuse of soul energy, but it still had limits, and every bullet fired pushed a little closer to those limits.

“Shoot all you want, little man, your bullets are all wasted!”

The rogue student responsible for this dark magic disaster did his best version of an evil laugh from behind the barrier. It didn’t have Kraid’s manic cackle, but it was half-decent for an apparent amateur. His roughshod barrier and kitbashed supercomputer equipment showed he was a bit of a newbie when it came to being evil.

“Hey, I don’t want to be rude,” Harley shouted. “But you’re like seven minutes overdue for an evil monologue.”

“What?”

“Yeah, the part where you explain your evil plan to the heroes,” Harley said. “You got to do that.”

“I’m not falling for that,” the rogue dark mage said.

“I’m not joking, it’s in the Supervillain’s Union handbook,” Harley said.

“I’m not falling for that either! The Supervillain’s Union doesn’t have a handbook, they have a charter!”

“Shit, he did his homework,” Harley mumbled. “Can you explain your plan to us anyway? For gloating purposes?”

“I won’t need to explain it! You’re about to witness the culmination of my efforts!”

The rogue student made a few keystrokes on his console and then raised his hands in triumph. After a bit more evil laughter, he held up the soulstone he had wired to his computer and set it alight with green fire.

“Now, all of your souls belong to me!”

With one final maniacal chuckle, and a more dramatic surge of green flames, the rogue student’s magic took effect, and did two things: jack and shit.

Vell tapped his chest, and the rune on his lower back, a few times each. He didn’t feel particularly soul-owned. Neither did anyone else.

“I don’t want to rain on your parade, sir, but are you sure you did it right?”

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“I- Everything should be in order,” the rogue student said. He lowered his apparently defunct soulstone and returned his attention to the computer screen. “I don’t know why it’s not working.”

“Did you try turning it off and on again?”

“Do you think a mastermind like myself would forgo such basic troubleshooting?” the student snapped back, as he subtly double-tapped the power button. The reboot did nothing, and he let out a grunt of frustration.

“What exactly were you trying to do here, man?”

“Oh, like I’d tell you! You’re just trying to stop me.”

“Dude, it’s already not working,” Hawke said. “What are we going to do, make it work less?”

The rogue student mumbled a few curses under his breath and gave one final grumble of frustration before relenting.

“This should be working. I minted every student’s soul as an NFT-”

He had barely rounded out the “T” in NFT when Harley burst into raucous, unrestrained laughter at his expense. Nobody else among the loopers knew enough about technology to understand why she was laughing.

“Aren’t those those things with the ugly monkeys that made a lot of people go bankrupt?”

“Right, yes,” Lee said. “‘Biggest scam of the century’, ‘Dutch Tulip Mania 2.0’, all those headlines?”

“Shut up! It’s a viable form of digital asset authentication!”

At this point, Harley stopped laughing at the rogue long enough to tell him he was an idiot.

“Even if that were true, which it isn’t, you can’t apply a digital proof of ownership to an immaterial soul,” Harley said. “Or any other kind of asset, for that matter, since an NFT has no intrinsic value whatsoever. The only thing’s you’ve ‘minted’ are a bunch of unique web url’s.”

“But it’s proof of ownership!”

“You’d have to have actual ownership before you can have proof of it,” Harley said. “And you don’t, you crypto crap-for-brains.”

The rogue student looked at his workstation and restrained himself from tearing it to pieces in frustration. He diverted his attention from rage at his own failure to escaping the consequences of his own failure.

“Well, then...All I’ve done is some poorly thought out web encoding, and legally, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said defensively.

“I suppose not,” Vell said. “You should definitely run, though.”

The rogue student complied abandoning his makeshift crypto rig and his soulstone as he sprinted off. Knowing there was no point to chasing him now, the loopers stayed behind and examined his setup. Since he’d left the computer logged in, Harley indulged her curiosity and checked his browser history, finding exactly what she’d expected: absolute mountains of hentai.

“Yeah, that tracks,” she said aloud, before closing out the window. She didn’t want Lee to see any of that. “Dude’s been stealing computer equipment and shit for this, so it should be as simple as reporting him to Dean Lichman on the next loop. Might get him suspended, might get him expelled, either way, apocalypse prevented.”

“Is this really the apocalypse?” Kim wondered. “It usually has to hurt at least one person, doesn’t it?”

“Well, perhaps there are some far-reaching consequences we have yet to realize,” Lee said.

“Like global warming,” Vell suggested. “Those monkey things generate a lot of pollution to make, right?”

“They’re not all monkeys, Vell,” Harley said. “But yeah, they take a lot of energy-”

A spark burst out of the computer in front of Harley. She ducked, got her ponytail singed, and then looked up to see more of the computer equipment starting to spark.

“And speaking of energy, our friend here has overloaded the power grid,” Harley said. “We’ve got thirty seconds, tops.”

“Oh, dying of electrocution again, just like your first day,” Lee said to the two newbies.

“Excuse me if I don’t feel nostalgic,” Hawke said.

“You know, this might be a good time to admit this,” Kim said. She pointed at herself. “Robot. Did not actually die that time. Probably won’t this time either.”

“Oh, you lucky bi-”

Harley never got to finish her sentence, but Kim could guess the rest easily enough.