Chapter 154: Book 3 Chapter 8.2: Skye's the Limit

“So, while I was in your dorm, I did take a peek at that guitar Roxy Rocket autographed,” Skye said. “Pretty sick. You ever play it?”

“I don’t actually know how to play,” Vell mumbled.

“You’ve had that thing for like two years and you haven’t learned?”

“I’ve got a lot of stuff on my plate,” Vell said. “And I burned my fingers pretty bad a few times. Long story. What about you?”

“I learned a while back. Not much else to do while out on the boats. Will you let me play it?”

“Maybe.”

There was no amount of attraction that would make Vell casually hand over Roxy’s guitar. Skye would have to earn the privilege of even touching it, much less playing it.

“Understandable,” Skye said. “Well then, how about we talk-”

“Vell!”

Skye cut herself off as Harley and Lee scampered into view. The duo came to a screeching halt by their side and stopped to catch their breath. Over the years, Vell had seen those two run from nukes, giant squids, and nuclear giant squids, but he’d rarely seen them run quite so fast as they had been running just now.

“Harley, Lee, what’s going on?”

“Hi Vell,” Harley said, once she was done gasping for breath. “There’s...uh…”

They had failed to properly formulate a cover story while running at top speed. It came down to improvising.

“There’s a thing.”

Improvising was bad. Harley improvised upon her improvising.

“Lee, tell them what the thing is.”

Still bad, but better. Lee took a moment to think of a cover story while she caught her breath.

“We have a...situation, that would benefit from...a rune,” Lee said. “And Vell is the master of runes, so, we need him.”

“To do...the thing,” Skye said.

“Yes. The thing.”

Lee didn’t blink. Skye didn’t blink.

“Alright then,” Skye said with a shrug. “Have at him. I didn’t call dibs.”

“Thank you dear,” Lee said. “Harley, why don’t you escort her somewhere safe. Maybe make some light conversation about our hairy situation.”

“Can do, boss,” Harley said. She made a sharp salute and quickly walked away with Skye in tow. Skye cast a glance over her shark-tattooed shoulder and winked at Vell, making him go red in the face. That blush faded as Vell walked away with Lee, who was moving a little too quickly for his liking.

“Lee, what’s the deal?” What did you mean by that ‘hairy situation’ comment?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Lee. Do you think Skye has something to do with this Sheeple situation?”

“Not at all, actually,” Lee said. “It’s just an...odd idea Harley had. It’s probably nothing.”

“Lee, I don’t like this lack of communication. I refuse to be a part of a sitcom subplot.”

“God, you’re right. I will not be a daytime ABC comedy character,” Lee mumbled. There would be no thirty minute plotlines that could be resolved in two seconds of healthy communication on her watch. “We have a mild, threadbare string of hare-brained ideas that, with a few moderately sized leaps in logic could maybe, possibly, be pieced together to reach the conclusion that...Skye might be a werewolf.”

“Skye. You think Skye is a werewolf?”

“We think there’s a chance,” Lee said. “We just want to be absolutely sure you’re not stumbling into another mishap. You deserve better than that.”

“Alright, fine, I appreciate it,” Vell said. “Do you have, like, a plan, for finding out exactly what her deal is?”

“Not really.”

“Okay, well, we have the whole first loop, so-”

“Vell!”

“What, you have an idea?”

“No, Vell, you-”

Vell didn’t get to hear the end of that sentence, but the very sharp pain in his lower back, and the abrupt sound of baaing, gave him some clue what she had been trying to say.

As Vell snapped awake in his bed at the beginning of the second loop, he rubbed a sore back. Getting his spine broken always stuck with him.

“Okay, really got to remember to prioritize loop shit over personal life shit,” Vell mumbled, to an audience of zero.

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“Alright, priority one, stop Sheeple,” Lee said. “And only after that is accomplished do we move on to this whole werewolf scenario.”

With Vell already cracked in half by a rogue Sheeple, (and Lee soon to follow), Harley had opted to put her priorities in order and figure out the Sheeple situation before focusing on any werewolf business. They still didn’t know Skye’s lupine status, but they did know which lab the Sheeple originated in, which gave them something to work with now that they were on the second loop.

“Alright, good news: we know it starts in the Zoology lab,” Kim said. “Bad news: it starts soon, and with the creation of an uber-mutant Super Sheeple.”

“I thought we were calling it the Megoat?”

“That’s just a worse Mega-Goat,” Samson said. “We’re calling it the Great Goat.”

“Megoat.”

“Super Sheeple.”

“This has been going on for a while, hasn’t it?”

The trio of newer loopers sheepishly paused their argument and tried to avoid eye contact.

“Yes.”

“Perfectly understandable,” Lee said.

“But obviously, it’s the GOAT,” Harley said. “Greatest of all time, GOAT. Easy.”

“Damn, that is better,” Samson admitted.

“This is why they’re in charge,” Hawke said.

“We’re also in charge because we remind you to get moving to the Zoology lab,” Lee said. “And accept no distractions whatsoev-”

“Hey guys!”

Skye gave a friendly wave and cheer as she crossed paths with the loopers. Her friendly smile faded and died as the loopers came to a dead halt and tried to look anywhere but in her direction.

“Uh...guys?”

“Vell, you’re up,” Kim said, unceremoniously pushing him to the front of the group. “We got the other thing.”

“Okay, okay,” Vell said. “I got it.”

Harley and Lee gave matching thumbs-up and then retreated with the rest of the loopers, leaving Vell and Skye alone again.

“What was that about?”

“Uh…”

Vell managed to stretch out an “uh” for a record thirty five seconds before his brain spat something out.

“We might have to cancel the date tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Maybe! Just maybe! Nothing guaranteed,” Vell said. “There might be a thing it conflicts with, just, you know, long term plans we forgot about.”

“Okay. If you, uh, you do have to cancel, could we…?”

“Reschedule? Yes! Absolutely, definitely. Maybe as soon as tomorrow, if it comes to it.”

Vell’s already poor improv skills were hampered by the intensely awkward circumstances he found himself in. Thanks to Harley’s werewolf theory and his own (mostly justified) paranoia when it came to dating, Vell’s mind raced with images of fur and fangs.

Much to Vell’s surprise, however, Vell found that didn’t bother him all that much. That meant he was either a furry, which was possible, or that he just really liked Skye, which was very possible. Or both. Also very possible. He would do some thinking on that later.

“I want to make this work,” Vell said, no longer spouting pure bullshit. “So...maybe I don’t have time later, but do you have time to take a walk now?”

“Yeah, I can do that,” Skye said. “My next lecture will probably start with a ten-minute self-aggrandizing monologue anyway.”

Skye extended her hand, and Vell reached out to hold it in his. It felt nice. Not at all like a paw.

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“Please do put a bandage on that finger before proceeding with the experiment,” Lee said. “Goat DNA and Human DNA doesn’t mesh well.”

“Right, right, sure,” the wounded student said. The cut on his finger from a glass slide was small and barely noticeable, but large enough to have a small rivulet of red blood forming. Lee had managed to find the source of their Sheeple incident and hopefully isolate it. As soon as that was done, she snatched Harley.

“Alright, we should go,” Lee said. “We have a theory to verify.”

“Let’s text first,” Harley said. “Maybe Vell already asked and it’s all cool and they’re in the middle of making out or something.”

“Or he could be in the middle of getting mauled,” Lee said.

“Well that’s overly dramatic, Vell could totally beat a werewolf in a fight,” Harley said.

“Yes, you’re probably right,” Lee said. “Let’s just text. I can-”

“Uh oh.”

Lee had just barely grabbed her phone when she heard the muffled cry of distress from behind her.

“Sir,” she said coldly. “Did you actually put a bandage on?”

“Uh. I was just going to do the first slide and get it processing,” they mumbled. “It’ll be fine, we can just throw out the -oh fuck there’s accelerated growth hormones in this one.”

The sounds of microscopes breaking and tables bending filled the room, muffling Lee’s heavy sigh.

“We really must prioritize better,” Lee said.

“You’re in charge, lady,” Harley said. “Come on.”

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“She did tell me off for inter- for meddling,” Vell said. “And in retrospect I probably should’ve found a less intrusive way to do things, but uh, it worked out in the long run.”

“Wow. That’s a lot of trouble to go to,” Skye said. The fact that Vell had gone to so much effort to reveal the lies of Leanne’s ex-boyfriend was impressive in several ways. “And you nearly pissed off Leanne enough to beat your ass. You sure you knew what you were doing?”

“Oh, yeah, she actually punched me really hard one time,” Vell said. “I was wearing a helmet and I still felt it. Long story, but yeah, I knew exactly what I was getting into.”

“You really cared about her, huh?”

“Well, yeah, but that was just a shitty situation for anyone to be in,” Vell said. “People deserve better than that kind of treatment.”

“Oh. So it really is true what they say about you.”

“That I got kidnapped? Yeah,” Vell said.

“Not that.”

“That I went on a date that summoned a ghost army once?”

“No that either.”

“That I dated a robot for a while? You know that one’s true, you’ve met-”

“Not that either,” Skye said. “And apparently they need to start saying you’re terrible at guessing too.”

“Those three things are most of what people say about me,” Vell said.

“Well, that’s entirely true, but also,” Skye said. “Somewhere in between all those fucked up stories, people do occasionally mention the fact that you’re a good person. You care about people.”

“Huh. Well,” Vell said. He turned a bit red in the face. Skye did too, but for very different reasons. They had long since surpassed the mark of her being late to her lecture, and she did not care in the slightest. Now that students were no longer hustling to and from classes, they had a stretch of the beach mostly to themselves. Unfortunately Vell could not use that time to focus solely on Skye.

“Uh, speaking of people I care about, one second,” Vell said. He held up his phone, set to call Harley. “I want to check up on the thingy for tonight.”

“Go ahead.”

Vell took two steps away and tried to keep his phone speaker covered, to mute his conversation better.

“Harley, what’s the situation?”

“Oh man it got weird real fast,” Harley said. “We tried to fight the GOAT but it was basically unkillable, we were just about to call you when the guy whose DNA made it stepped up to the plate.”

“Really? Then what?”

“He took responsibility for bringing it to life and accepted his role as a father,” Harley said. “Turns out the GOAT was just desperate for a family and it had a whole redemption arc in like fifteen seconds.”

“Aww, that’s sweet.”

“Oh, shit, uh, not a happy ending here, sorry bud,” Harley said, cringing and speaking through her teeth. “Turns out the GOAT needed more DNA to stabilize himself and he refused to harm his father to obtain it, so he’s wasted away into nothingness already.”

“Oh damn, that sucks,” Vell said, mourning the death of a hybrid goat-man he’d only known existed for about thirty minutes and who had been an immediate threat to the human race for most of those thirty. He put his hands on his hips, and started to walk around the beach. “He had a whole existential arc in like five minutes.”

“Yeah, it was wild,” Harley said. “Lee’s still crying a little.”

Not Harley, though. Harley never cried.

“Anyway, how’s the thing with Skye?”

“Great! Honestly, she’s a lot of fun,” Vell said. “I think I should just do the date tonight, you know? Forget everything else.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Whatever happens happens,” Vell said.

“If you’re that confident, maybe just get it over with,” Harley suggested. “Play it off as ‘haha, can you believe Harley was dumb enough to think you were a werewolf, how funny’. I’ll take that hit.”

“That...might actually work,” Vell said. “Might as well, right?”

“Shoot your shot, champ,” Harley said. “And when this works out and you bed her, remember what I taught you about cun-”

“Thanks Harley, got to go,” Vell said, before hastily hanging up. He shoved his phone back in his pocket and returned to Skye.

“All clear?”

“All clear,” Vell said. “Pretty simple, really. Harley just had to make a few cracks at me about this running gag of hers.”

“What’s that?”

“Well, considering my run of bad luck with dates, she’s decided you’ve got to be a werewolf or something.”

A blossoming flower of optimism had been growing in Vell’s heart, one that was trampled under a potentially clawed foot as Skye’s pleasant expression turned into a sharp frown.

“Why would she think that?”

“Uh…”

“Vell, you and your friends have been acting weird around me, and now you’re tossing around this ‘werewolf’ theory like it’s a joke, but I can tell it isn’t,” Skye said. She wasn’t dumb enough to think their awkward stares and bad excuses were just coincidences, but she’d been able to chalk them up as some unrelated weirdness in their lives until now. “Does she actually think I’m a werewolf?”

“Well, not like, one-hundred percent,” Vell mumbled. “But she just noticed this, uh, string of stuff like you liking red meat, not touching metal that might be silver, and not hanging out with us on the full moon...that kind of stuff.”

Skye raised her eyebrows in one of the most skeptical glares Vell had ever seen, and then let out a heavy sigh, covering her face with one hand as she did so. Vell took the time to take one step backwards as she shook her head.

“So...uh...are you a werewolf?”

Skye uncovered her face and locked eyes with Vell.

“No, I’m not,” Skye said. Her voice had a bitter anger in it that Vell did not like one bit. “Red meat is a dietary staple and a very common thing to enjoy, I have a nickel allergy, and, not that it’s any of your business, I had period cramps that night. Does that explain things?”

“Well, uh, yes, actually,” Vell said. Those were all entirely logical explanations for every circumstance Harley had been suspicious of. He felt kind of stupid now, in fact.

“Okay, now you explain something to me,” Skye said, no less bitterly than before. “Why would it be a problem if I was a werewolf?”

“It wouldn’t be,” Vell said with a lazy shrug. “It was just something we wanted to check out.”

“No, you were acting all weird, you were ready to cancel dates. This was an issue for you.”

Skye’s temper was clearly flaring now, and the accusatory finger she had pointed at Vell wasn’t doing wonders for his mood either.

“After everything I heard about you I would never expect you and your friends to be such bigots,” Skye said. “Werewolves are perfectly-”

“Hey, this is not bigotry, definitely not from Harley or any of my friends,” Vell said. “Or, you know, me.”

In retrospect he should’ve jumped to his own defense sooner. But Vell always put friends first.

“It’s a justified caution based on past experience-”

“With what? I know you got kidnapped, Vell, but ordinary humans did that. If anything you should be less suspect of werewolves, they’ve never hurt you.”

“You would be surprised at what has hurt me,” Vell said. “Werewolves, admittedly, not on the list, but it’s a long list, and I feel like I’m justified being wary about anything sharp and pointy, which werewolves are in abundance.”

Vell’s frustration at Skye’s accusation of bigotry was starting to draw out his sarcastic side. On top of that, she was inadvertently calling to mind the long list of often-fatal incidents in his life, frustrating him even more.

“Being preemptively terrified of things like that is bigotry,” Skye said. “Like I said, ordinary people did terrible shit to you first, were you scared of me when you thought I was some ordinary person?”

“Yes, a little, actually, I had just gotten over that when the werewolf thing happened,” Vell said. “And before you start, I have a long list of things I’m very justified in being slightly suspicious of, I mean, I have died- Oh, shit.”

Vell realized his slip up a second too late. Skye’s faced flitted to concern briefly before jumping back to anger.

“Okay, no no no, you are not distracting me with-”

Vell lifted his shirt, exposing the circular scar on his torso, tilted at a slight angle just below his navel. He was already in, at this point, he might as well go all in.

“Oh.”

“Yeah. Maglev crashed at a few hundred miles an hour, I get cut in half, put in a bag, couple hours later I wake up with this fantastic new tattoo,” Vell said. He turned around to expose the glowing rune engraved above his tailbone for a moment. “Long story, lots of bullshit, evil billionaire tried to dissect me, my first girlfriend called me a zombie freak, an entirely different girlfriend tried to experiment on me, our old principal kidnapped me and tried to steal my body, lot’s more bullshit happened and it turns out there’s a mystery Goddess and a temporal butterfly from the other side of the universe on my case.”

The more Vell talked, the less Skye believed it, until she actually came around the other side and started believing it all over again. Considering Vell’s earlier awkward attempts to improvise excuses, he could not possibly be spewing bullshit so confidently on such short notice now. The glowing rune also helped. The magic aura emanating from it was palpable even from a distance. Skye felt like she was standing a little too close to a live electrical current.

“The more you talk, the, uh, more that werewolf thing sounds reasonable,” Skye said. If she’d already died once she’d probably be a little paranoid too.

“That’s the cliff notes version, lady, wait until you get to hear the full story,” Vell said. His frustrated sarcasm was still going strong.

“I have a question,” Skye said. “If you don’t mind.”

“No, go ahead, by all means, just, be advised I don’t actually know the answers to anything important,” Vell said. “Why me, what am I supposed to do, what happens if I-”

Vell cut himself off again when Skye put a hand on his cheek and forced him to look at her. Any frustration left in her eyes had long since vanished.

“Are you okay?”

Of all the infinite possible questions she could have asked, Vell was least prepared for that one. He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and relaxed slightly, letting his face sink into Skye’s hand.

“Not completely,” he admitted. “But mostly. I’m...getting through it.”

“Can I help?”

Vell opened his eyes and looked up.

“Can we call it a clean slate? And let me buy you dinner tonight?”

“Hmm...no,” Skye said. “I’m buying. And you are talking. I want to know how I can really help.”

“This is really helping,” Vell said, chuckling as he spoke. “You have no idea how much this is helping.”

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“Well, that’s the last text from him for a while,” Lee said. Vell had just started his first official date with Skye, and he had high hopes. “Oh, I hope everything goes well. We nearly threw quite a wrench in the works there.”

“Don’t be too harsh on us,” Harley said. “Even Skye agrees it was kind of reasonable, all things considered.”

“Yes, I know, it just feels ridiculous in hindsight. A werewolf, really! With everything we know...about...her…”

Lee trailed off slowly, and her eyes took on a distant, faraway look.

“Lee. Bud. Don’t do me like this,” Harley said. “What’s going on?”

“Oh dear,” Lee mumbled.

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“It’s not as safe as you think,” Skye said. “I nearly lost a toe to an icicle once.”

“Once,” Vell said. “I’ve set myself on fire fourteen times now. Pyrokinesis is definitely more dangerous.”

“I’m not arguing that, it’s just, none of it is really safe if you do it wrong.”

“Well nothing’s safe if you do it wrong enough,” Vell said. “You can kill yourself sleeping wrong. Statistically, hydrokinesis is a lot safer than most things.”

“Alright, alright.”

Skye relented the point and picked at their dinner. They had settled on a nice beachside picnic for a first date, and it was going very well. So far.

“So, just the one accident, in how many years? When did you start studying hydrokinesis?”

“Oh, just last year.”

Vell’s eyes narrowed. They were both in their third year of classes. Students usually studied their major for all four years of classes.

“Just...last year?”

“Yeah. Picked it up to fill out my schedule.”

“I thought it was your major.”

“Nope,” Skye said. “Just something I picked up because I thought it’d help.”

“Wait. What is your major, then?”

Skye looked absolutely baffled by the fact that Vell didn’t already know the answer to that question.

“Really? You should know my major, Vell, you’ve come through the lab a few dozen times.”

Vell felt a moment of silent horror as he finally realized where he had seen Skye so many times before, and all the other puzzle pieces suddenly snapped into place.

“I’m a Marine Biologist.”