Chapter 120: Book 2 Chapter 32.1: Never Had a Friend Like Me

Vell jotted down a few notes on the runic construct Professor Nguyen had put on the board. There wasn’t much scholarly application to knowing how to make a golem nowadays, but Vell’s daily life involved a lot of esoteric bullshit knowledge. He’d saved the world by knowing how to make a croque monsieur last week, golem-making might be useful. And even if it wasn’t useful, Vell just liked to know things.

“For the remainder of this week’s lectures, we’ll be focusing on the works of modern rune scientists,” Nguyen said, in her usual stern monotone. “I will expect a four-page written essay about a modern rune scientist of your choice. ‘Modern’ referring to the past twenty years, in this case.”

Vell jotted down the assignment in his notebook. He had a few ideas for a candidate already in mind. While he jotted down his idea, Professor Nguyen twitched slightly and then continued.

“And regrettably, I must ask you to refrain from writing about our own Isabel del Campo,” Nguyen said, in a voice a million miles removed from her usual monotone. Vell looked up. “While she is without a doubt our most accomplished scholar, her works need no further praise.”

The oddly out-of-character moment was met with a rousing chorus of groans and sighs, from everyone except a very confused Vell. He knew the name Isabel, at least, but he sure as shit didn’t know about any of this ‘accomplished scholar’ stuff. She was just a freshman who took a few of the same classes as Vell -this one included. He glanced down at her seat and found it empty.

With the Isabel-oddity brought to an end, class went back to seemingly normal. Vell couldn’t shake that brief interruption, though. Class wrapped up, and Vell immediately pulled out his phone.

vharlan03:

think I might have an eye on some funny business

does the name isabel mean anything to you guys?

HARL33:

uh

yeah?

smartest, prettiest girl on campus?

supergenius, everybody’s best friend?

vharlan03:

what

Lee:

What about her, dear?

vharlan03:

what do you mean what about her????

how do you guys even know who she is

Lee:

Vell, darling we went to her party last week.

Are you feeling well?

vharlan03:

i feel fine!

and i didnt go to any parties last week!

none of us did!

burdbrain:

uh yeah we did!

do you not remember

kim got super wasted and tried to do a backflip?

KIM:

Hawke.

What the FUCK are you talking about.

I can’t get drunk.

And I CAN do a backflip.

vharlan03:

oh thank god, kim, you see how weird this is right?

KIM:

I have absolutely no idea who Isabel is.

Or why everyone here seems to love her so much.

So yes?

HARL33:

ok so maybe 2days apocalypse is someone wiping out memories of isabel cuz theyre jealous of her or something

KIM:

>_>

vharlan03:

meeting in the lair

now

Ten minutes later, all five loopers had gathered to discuss one important topic: Isabel del Campo.

“Yesterday she was some random person I shared a few classes with,” Vell said. “And today she’s the most important person in the school, apparently?”

“Vell, I don’t know how to tell you this, but she was pretty popular yesterday too,” Harley said. “And the day before that, and the day before that, stretching back to pretty much the day she got here. Isabel’s always been awesome.”

“No, she’s- Well, I’m sure she’s great, probably, I don’t really know her that well,” Vell said. “But not so great the entire school starts praising her out of the blue. Kim, you get me, right?”

“Yeah, obviously,” Kim said. “I’ve never heard of Isabel before today.”

“Okay, so definitely something fishy going on.”

“Yeah, with you two,” Harley said. “Something’s mucking with your memories.”

“Memories,” Vell said. The word sparked an idea. “Okay. We all went to a party with Isabel last week. Who else was there? What did we eat? Harley, who’d you hook up with? Hawke, what made you want to go to the party, when you’re usually too anxious to go? Lee, did you bring Adele with you or not?”

The barrage of questions didn’t accomplish much, in spite of Vell’s hopes. False memories didn’t usually hold up under close scrutiny, and a flurry of questions often revealed imperfections in illusions. Harley and Hawke, however, barely blinked while being bombarded. Lee started to show a look of confusion, though, and Vell latched on to that.

“Come on Lee, think,” Vell commanded. “If Isabel is your friend, how did she react when you and Adele got together? When did you tell her about your dad? What’d she get you for your birthday?”

With every question, the confused frustration on Lee’s face grew and grew. She felt like she should know the answers, but she didn’t. Vell pressed the advantage while he had it. He had one more question he was pretty sure would put the final nail in the coffin.

“And hey, Lee: what does Isabel actually look like?”

Already confused by the earlier bombard, the final question shattered the false memories to pieces by reminding Lee she’d never actually seen Isabel. Lee reeled for a moment, shook her head, and then straightened her posture.

“Ugh, that never gets any more pleasant,” Lee said with a shudder. “Illusory memories are a pain. Thank you, Vell.”

“Any time,” Vell said. He turned to the other two, who didn’t seem fazed by Lee’s revelation. “What about you two? You get it yet?”

“I ‘get’ that whatever’s making you guys weird is contagious,” Harley said. She grabbed Hawke by the arm. “Come on, Hawke, we got to get out of here and figure out what’s wrong with them.”

The two fled the lair in a hurry, leaving the three sensible loopers behind.

“Should we try harder to convince them?”

“Tragically, it would likely be wasted effort, darling,” Lee said. Having broken the magic affecting her firsthand, she now knew exactly what she was dealing with. “This is an illusion -an active attempt to deceive our senses and memories. Whoever is maintaining the illusion will be much more vigilant to protect it now that’s been broken once.”

“So we’re probably stuck with the three of us, then,” Vell said. “Because if it affected you guys and my entire rune class, it probably affected the whole campus.”

“A sensible assessment,” Lee said.

“Why didn’t it affect us, then?” Kim asked, pointing to herself and Vell.

“The runes make you two something of a magical outlier,” Lee said. “Magic can only be altered by a more powerful source of magic, and since there’s probably not any sources of magic more powerful than Quenay...your personal realities can’t really be altered. Just like last week’s toddler incident.”

“Don’t go thinking it’s invulnerability, though,” Vell said. “You can still get knocked out, paralyzed, trapped, brain-exploded, turned evil-”

“I get it,” Kim said. “Now what?”

“Now we find the source of the illusion and un-illusion it,” Lee said. “So, Vell, what do you know about this Isabel?”

“Not much more than her name, honestly,” Vell said with a shrug. “She’s in a few classes with me, so I hear her name now and then. That’s about it. She’s from Ecuador, I think?”

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“Well, we have an incredibly vague cultural touchstone, at least,” Lee said. “We’ve stopped apocalypses with less.”

“On the bright side, since literally everyone on campus is obsessed with her now, she probably won’t be hard to find,” Vell said.

“That’s the spirit.”

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

“I know this is sort of what I said would happen, but it still seems like a bit much,” Vell said. Kim and Lee nodded in agreement.

The art department had apparently showcased their devotion to Isabel by painting a full-sized mural of her on the dining hall. Surprisingly quickly, in fact. The student body’s predilection towards cult behavior and their newfound obsession with Isabel was overlapping quite nicely.

“We should hurry,” Lee said. By her most generous estimations, they had about seventeen minutes before things got murdery.

Following the trail of devoted Isabel fans, Lee led the trio of loopers towards the dining hall, where the bulk of the school’s students had congregated around their new object of devotion. Somebody had constructed Isabel a throne, which she currently lounged on, with some sort of manservant standing at her side attending to her every need. Students were being invited one by one to ‘bask in her presence’, as well as shower her with affection and gifts.

“Well, if standing in line is our plan, we should probably start now,” Vell said. The line for an audience with Isabel stretched outside of the building and on to the outskirts of the island.

“I don’t think we have time for that.”

The gathered students were already starting to construct effigies of their new queen, which didn’t bode well. Lee bumped a few minutes off her timeline to cult murder.

“We could always cut in line,” Kim said.

“I’d wager that comes with a roughly fifty percent chance of getting stabbed, dear,” Lee said.

“I’ll do it,” Vell said. “Maybe Isabel recognizes me. Might bump my odds of getting stabbed down.”

“I was going to suggest doing some aetheric analysis and arcane inquiries,” Lee said. “That comes with an almost zero percent chance of getting stabbed.”

Nothing on the island ever came with a zero percent chance of getting stabbed.

“I’ll take my chances,” Vell said. “I’m the closest thing we’ve got to an ‘in’ with Isabel. We should probably try to use that.”

“Alright, just be safe,” Lee said. “You know what to do if the knives come out.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve dodged knives before.”

Kim had only barely been in the loop long enough for that to be a normal conversation, so she stayed quiet as Vell walked towards Isabel’s throne.

“Hi, uh, hello,” Vell said, as he elbowed aside admiring onlookers. “Sorry, let me just- gotta just squeeze through here, do you mind. Isabel!”

Vell tried to lift his voice above the clamoring crowd of Isabel worshipers, with little success. Eventually, the man standing at Isabel’s side noticed Vell in the crowd and pointed him out. Isabel took a break from doting on her adoring public to point out Vell and call him forward.

“Vell Harlan, there you are,” Isabel said. “I’ve been hoping to see you.”

“Me? Uh, I’m flattered, obviously, but, uh…why?”

“Lady Isabel has very few potential collaborators,” the man at her side said. “You are one of the few with an intellect which scrapes at the heels of her towering supremacy. Lady Isabel is not so arrogant as to ignore the value of peer-reviewed work.”

“Oh, stop it,” Isabel said, trying to appear wave away the towering praise even as she basked in it. “I value the opinions of my peers.”

“Moreso than they deserve, perhaps.”

“Okay, uh, do I know you?” Vell asked the man. He was short and dark-skinned, with an elaborately curled mustache and a colorful turban that Vell thought looked very memorable. He had no memory of the mustache or the turban, however.

“I am adjunct and assistant to Lady Isabel,” he said. “My name is Dave Jim.”

“Dave Jim?”

“Yes.”

“Is that like a first name last name thing, or do you just have two first names like Neil Patrick Harris?”

“None of your business,” Dave Jim said.

“Fair enough,” Vell said. He shuffled over to Isabel’s side to focus on her. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

“Oh, I don’t want to get ahead of myself, but I might have cured cancer,” Isabel said, with the same casual cheer in her voice one might use to talk about a good cup of coffee. “I just want other people to see it, you know, this could be such a big deal for so many people, I have to have it reviewed and checked out before I move forward, you know?”

“Yeah, I get it,” Vell said. A surprisingly benevolent move for someone who had apparently used illusion magic to make themselves queen of the island. “Isn’t, uh, all of this kind of distracting, though, if you’re working on something that important?”

Vell gestured to the crowd -some of whom were now looking at him with murderous jealousy in their eyes- to emphasize the noise they were making. Isabel waved the concerns away with a shrug.

“Well, I can’t say I want any of this attention, but if cheering for me makes them feel better, well, who am I to deny them?”

In spite of her professed disinterest in attention, Isabel preened her curly hair and flashed a beaming smile to the crowd. A few people fainted as Vell tried not to roll his eyes.

“How about we see that work, huh? I’d love to help you out.”

“Of course, one second,” Isabel said. She started digging around in her book bag, which was covered in metallic pins of flowers, cartoon characters, and rainbows, then pulled out her laptop, also covered in a menagerie of various cutesy stickers. “There you go.”

The screen was filled with a complex diagram of interconnected runes as well as notes on their function. Vell, ordinarily a man of slow, methodical analysis, only spent about ten seconds looking at the diagram. It only took ten seconds to know bullshit when he saw it.

“This...this is the cancer cure thing?”

“Yes,” Isabel said, with a dainty nod.

“This is...This won’t work,” Vell said, waving his hand towards the screen. “I mean, this, this here, this is the sequence we use to make water purifiers, I can see how you’re trying to link it to blood, but it doesn’t apply, that won’t work. And this sequence over here, I see what you’re going for, but they’re all out of order, and-”

Mid-explanation, Vell realized that everyone and everything had gone silent. All of Isabel’s admirers were staring at him with cold, quiet malice in their eyes. Isabel, on the other hand, was trying to look anywhere but Vell, and she looked hurt. Vell had very little time to contemplate that before he was grabbed on the shoulder by a very firm hand.

“I think you need to leave,” Dave Jim said. Isabel took a moment to glare at him instead.

“You said-”

“We can talk about it later,” Dave Jim hissed, before tugging on Vell’s arm. “This one needs to go, now.”

“I’d be more than happy to stay, you know, there are some flaws, but this is workable,” Vell said. He still wanted a little more time to examine the situation and learn more about Isabel. “It’s not correct now, but it just needs a little polish, like that bone fracture sequence you made back-”

“Oh,” Isabel mumbled, as her proud posture deflated. “I see.”

“Oh, no, I didn’t-”

“You need to leave,” Dave Jim repeated, more insistently. He started dragging Vell towards the crowd with surprising strength, pulling him away from Isabel. The man with two names raised his free hand towards the crowd to rile them up. “You heard what this man said! How he insulted lady Isabel!”

The crowd let out a resounding and bloodthirsty cry. Vell sighed deeply and relaxed in Dave Jim’s grip. He’d been beaten to death by a bloodthirsty mob before, and knew that tensing up only made it worse. A few steps later, he was right a the maw of the crowd, and a few hands reached out to grab him, digging nails deep into his skin, ready to rip and tear.

“Stop!”

The hands released their grip on Vell, and he slumped to the ground, hitting his butt hard as he fell. Going limp had backfired in the end. He rubbed a sore ass and looked up at the crowd -and at Isabel, who had risen from her throne.

“Don’t hurt him,” she demanded. “Don’t hurt anyone. Just let him leave.”

Isabel and Dave Jim glared at each other silently for a moment, before the mustachioed manservant gave a subtle nod. Isabel sat back down to sulk, and the crowd parted. Vell took the hint and scrambled through the parted mass of bodies, ignoring the bloodthirsty stares and hissed threats coming at him from all sides. He grabbed Kim and Lee on his way out and fled the dining hall entirely, scrambling back to the looper lair, and safety from the mob.

“Well, that was a narrowly avoided disaster,” Lee said. “Thankfully Isabel is apparently a merciful magic abusing god-queen.”

“Yeah, about that,” Vell said. He rubbed a sore shoulder from where Dave Jim had latched on to him. “I don’t think Isabel did this. Not on purpose, at least.”

“How is it not?”

“Well, I don’t know, it just doesn’t really add up,” Vell said. “Like you said, she spared me, and she was trying to like, cure cancer, and help people. It’s kind of hard to see her doing anything to make herself a queen, or anything.”

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions, Vell,” Lee said.

“Yeah, I get it, but there was also that guy hanging out with here, Dave Jim.”

“Dave Jim?”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought too, weird name,” Vell said. “But he was talking to Isabel like he had something to do with all this.”

“Who would go to all that trouble to make someone else queen of the world?” Kim asked. She doubted such an undertaking was easy, certainly not easy enough to be worth creating on someone else’s behalf.

“Perhaps he’s some sort of supernatural entity,” Lee suggested. “A devil, perhaps, making a deal with Isabel that he’s distorted for his own ends.”

“Okay, maybe,” Kim said. “How would we tell?”

“Supernatural entities always have some sort of giveaway,” Lee said. “Something that clues you in to their true identity. Not even Quenay is immune to that obligation.”

Every entity had some kind of “tell”. The goddess of life was well-hidden, with her mismatched eyes only barely noticeable to the most careful observer, but most lesser entities had much more obvious giveaways, no matter how hard they tried to disguise themselves.

“Alright, Vell, you’re up to bat again,” Kim said, since he’d had the most firsthand experience with Dave Jim. “Though if you ask me, it’s in the name. That’s way too weird to not be some kind of supernatural joke.”

At Kim’s suggestion, Vell’s brow furrowed, and he adopted his famous thinking face. Kim and Lee stayed on the sidelines while the wrinkles in Vell’s forehead went to work.

The lair had a few mostly unused whiteboards and markers tucked into a corner, and Vell pulled one out just to create a visual diagram. He wrote down the name “Dave Jim” in black marker, and then started mauling it. First, he erased every letter but “D” in “Dave”, then he sliced the “m” in Jim in half vertically, leaving behind just one word.

Djinn.