Chapter 41: Chapter 29.1: May Contain Quantum

Vell went looking for Harley as soon as he was off the boat. Harley, predictably, found him first. She announced her presence by grabbing him around the waist and trying -and failing- to lift him off the ground in a bear hug. She grunted with exertion for about fifteen seconds while Vell waited patiently for her to give up.

“Does that rune make you super heavy or am I just crazy weak?” Harley asked, as she finally relented.

“I’m actually underweight for my height,” Vell said. He turned around to face Harley. Her massive smile was a comforting sight, even after just two weeks apart.

“Oh shit. Let’s get you some exercise then. Here, catch me.”

Harley jumped up, and Vell caught her, if only barely. She squeezed him tight enough that his back popped and then let him go.

“How you been, Harlan?”

“Pretty good. Rode a lot of horses, got fussed over by my mom a lot, didn’t get disemboweled by a humanoid crab at all,” Vell said. Harley shook her head. Fucking marine biology department. “How about you?”

“About the same, but with no horses,” Harley said.

“Cool. So where’s Lee?”

“She does a bunch of administrative bullshit at the start of every semester, she’ll be at it most of the day,” Harley said.

“Oh. What about Leanne?”

“Fuck if I know. Probably doing sports things. You know how she is.”

“Well, I thought I might say hi anyway,” Vell said.

“Do your thing my dude,” Harley said. She took a step away. “I gotta do school stuff now. Tell your roomies I said hey, and we should totally plan a welcome-back get together.”

“Will do,” Vell said. “See you when the world ends.”

A random passer-by stopped to stare at Vell when he said that. Vell stared right back for a second and then walked away. He made it halfway across the quad before something else demanded his attention.

“Mr. Harlan.”

Professor Nguyen had never actually said the word “stop”, but her tone communicated it clearly. Vell paused mid-stride and rotated on his heels to turn and face the professor. She nodded in approval of his obedience and then gestured towards a short black woman in a labcoat at her left, who was staring at Vell with an eerie smile.

“Mr. Harlan, this is Doctor Akua, an old schoolmate of mine,” Nguyen said. Dr. Akua stepped forward and extended her hand in Vell’s direction with surprising speed.

“Lovely to meet you,” Akua said, with a too-broad smile on her face. “Carmella speaks very harshly of you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Vell said. “Uh, did you mean ‘highly’?”

“No,” Akua said. “But the fact that she talks about you at all is a compliment, technically.”

“I will also add that it is not, in fact, ‘nice to meet’ Dr. Akua, Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen said. “This is not an introduction, it is a warning. You would do well to avoid her.”

“Oh, Carmella, you old coot,” Dr. Akua said. “You and your dry humor.”

Vell looked Professor Nguyen in the eyes. She stared right back. If there was any humor at all in Nguyen, it was about as dry as the Sahara.

“Please address me as Professor Nguyen in front of my students, Dr. Akua,” Nguyen said. “If you must address me at all.”

“Oh of course, ‘Professor’,” Dr. Akua said. She gave Vell a quick once-over and then bowed towards Professor Nguyen. “I should be off. Have a lovely day, you two.”

Vell waved goodbye. Dr. Nguyen kept her hands firmly in her pockets, and her expression never changed. She didn’t move either. Vell waited for Dr. Akua to be out of earshot.

“So, uh, Professor-”

“The warning was sincere, Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen said. “Dr. Akua is tolerable in small doses, but there are enough toxic influences in your life already. I assure you the world has no shortage of wasted potential, there is no reason to add yours to the pile.”

“Thanks?” Vell said.

“Don’t bother thanking me,” Nguyen said. “Somehow, Vell Harlan, you attract the attention of individuals such as Isaac Goodwell and Joan Marsh. It is my obligation, not my pleasure, to counteract their negative influence where I can.”

Vell raised a hand and parted his lips to speak, then thought twice about what he was about to say and said something else.

“Uh, Professor Nguyen, can I ask, are you complimenting me or insulting me here?”

“I will see you in class, Mr. Harlan,” Nguyen said, before marching off in the direction of her office.

“Bye,” Vell shouted at her back. “Nice to see you again. Hope you had a good break.”

He never got a response. Still baffled for several reasons, Vell moved on and headed towards the Ballball field. He still wanted to say hello to Leanne, and she tended to make slightly more sense than Nguyen.

The spherical Ballball field bobbed in the breeze as Vell approached. It looked like the team was holding a meeting that just started to break up as Vell got close to the field. He took a stroll to the back side of the field, towards the player’s exit, and caught Leanne going the other way.

“Hey Leanne.”

Leanne nodded at him, then checked the time on her phone and mimicked an explosion with her hands, looking at him questioningly.

“Oh no, nothing apocalyptic yet,” he said. “Just wanted to say hi. Haven’t seen you in a bit, didn’t want to be rude.”

Leanne rolled her eyes with a smile and gave Vell a thumbs up. Her smile seemed to glimmer in the mid-day sun. Seemed to, at least. Vell instinctively ducked when he realized what was doing the actual glimmering.

A small metal object sailed past Leanne’s head and embedded itself in the dirt in front of Vell. After a short period of cowering, Vell assumed it wasn’t going to explode (yet, at least), and decided to examine the metal object more closely. Leanne watched from her own cowering place as Vell reached out and touched the glittering object.

“Huh.”

He lifted the object from the dirt it had become embedded in and shook off some grass and topsoil.

“It looks like a pen.”

Leanne stopped hiding and stepped forward to examine the supposed strange object. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to look like a pen by virtue of actually being a pen. A very nice one, at that. After brushing the dirt away, the metal shell started to glitter more brightly in the sunlight. Leanne took a look around. The team had all left, and nobody else was around to have dropped or thrown a pen.

“Weird,” Vell noted. “Looks pretty old school, right?”

Leanne nodded at the vintage design and then held out her hand, gesturing for Vell to hand over the pen. He held it out to her by one end and she took hold of the other. The moment both of them gripped it, what felt like a lightning bolt traveled up each of their arms, the electric sensation briefly blinding them as it overwhelmed their senses.

As the blinding lightning left their systems, Vell dropped the pen and rubbed his eyes to clear his blurred vision. When he looked up again, he saw an empty, cloudy sky. Doubly suspicious, since the sky had been sunny a moment ago, and also obscured by a giant levitating novelty sports field. Vell looked down at the ground, and saw that the modern stadium and facilities of the Ballball field had been replaced by a rickety wooden fence and some collapsing wooden bleachers, all of which were overgrown by weeds. Weeds that someone was hiding in as they stared right back at him.

“Uh. Hi,” Vell said.

A young Chinese woman in a light woolen sweater and a long khaki skirt emerged from the weeds and stepped up between Vell and Leanne. She gave them a long, analytical glare from behind the thick glasses she wore.

“And what are you doing here?”

“We’re a bit lost,” Vell said. He looked to Leanne for support, and she predictably stayed silent, but at least nodded. Vell turned back to the woman who’d been lurking in the weeds. “What are you doing here?”

“Nothing. You don’t get to ask questions here, sir, you and your half-naked friend are the odd ones out.”

Leanne looked down at her exposed midriff. Her exercise outfit was pretty modest, by most standards.

“We’re just out of place, we should probably go-” Vell looked over his shoulder to point towards the freshmen dorms. They weren’t there. Most of the campus wasn’t there, to be exact, or at least wasn’t in the place it should be. “Hmm.”

The stranger gave them another once over with her piercing glare. She put a hand to her chin.

“Are you two time travelers?”

Vell followed Leanne’s example and stayed silent. The stranger continued staring at them.

“Does the word ‘loop’ mean anything to you?” she asked.

“Oh thank god,” Vell said with a sigh of relief. “This is going to be so much easier if we’re on the same level of crazy.”

The stranger laughed. She shook a little dirt from her hands and then extended one in Vell’s direction.

“Always nice to meet someone who understands,” she said. “Who are you and when are you from?”

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“Uh, why don’t you tell us when right now is first?” Vell asked as he shook her hand. “In the interest of, uh, dodging time paradoxes and whatnot. For now, why don’t you call us...uh...Jane and Bill.”

“Sounds good to me. Nice to meet you, ‘Jane’ and ‘Bill’. Welcome to 1973.”

Vell froze in place. He knew a few things about the loopers of the early 70’s.

“My name is Lijia Mian.”

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

Vell and Leanne stayed in Lijia’s dorm room while she fetched some period-appropriate clothing for them. They had to stop sticking out like sore thumbs before they could try and get everything and everyone back to their proper timeline. Vell used the brief privacy to rant at Leanne.

“What are we supposed to do?” Vell said. Leanne shrugged. “That’s Lijia Mian! The person Goodwell is obsessed with for whatever reason! And this is like a few weeks before she disappeared. Maybe days!”

Leanne clapped a hand over Vell’s mouth and made a shushing gesture. She drew one hand across her mouth in a zipping motion, spun her hands one over the other for a bit, mimicked the motion of a clock ticking, then mimed opening and shutting a door and made a shushing motion again.

“Yeah, I get it, we could just go through the motions, get back to our time period, and then pretend nothing ever happened, but-”

Leanne clapped her hand over his mouth again. She shook her head “no” again, then pointed to her own butt.

“Very clever way to say ‘no buts’,” Vell said, as soon as Leanne took her hand off his mouth. She nodded in appreciation of the compliment. “But-”

Leanne raised her hand again, and Vell raised his own hands to cut her off.

“But don’t you think it’s, you know, weird that we were sent here, specifically, to her?” He said, speaking through his own hands. “I mean, this has got to be connected to something, right?”

Leanne emphatically shook her head no. She struggled for a gesture to illustrate her point, but came up empty-handed. She continued to shake her head and turned away from Vell. He took a seat and examined some of the scenery of the vintage dorms.

“Okay, I’ll be cool,” Vell relented. “But there is one thing we have to figure out. This should be when Principal Goodwell was a looper, right?”

Leanne nodded.

“But he didn’t recognize us when we went to his office,” Vell said. “So he can’t see us today.”

Leanne continued nodding. Vell’s theory was sound. She didn’t believe Goodwell had the acting chops to feign ignorance of their identities. That meant they somehow had to avoid him today. Vell put a hand to his chin.

“I don’t know if those disguises Lijia’s getting us are going to be good enough for him to not recognize us...”

Whether they were effective or not, Leanne was eager to give them a try. She gestured broadly to the various 70’s magazines scattered on Lijia’s desk (though there were more scientific periodicals than fashion articles) and then clutched at her heart.

“I never figured you to be into retro stuff,” Vell said. Leanne responded by pointing to him, then pointing to her head and shaking it “no”. There was a lot Vell didn’t know about Leanne, and that was an intentional choice on her part.

Before Leanne could move forward on her makeover plan, Lijia returned, with armfuls of clothing for the both of them.

“Sorry it took so long,” she said. “You’re both pretty tall.”

Following in Lijia’s footsteps, a diminutive young African woman tottered in with a pile of clothing towering high enough to block her view. She dropped the clothing on Lijia’s bed, exposing her face, and nearly caused Vell to bite a chunk out of his tongue as she did so. Though it was more youthful now, Vell could still recognize the face of Dr. Akua.

“What’s with that look?” Lijia asked. Vell had hidden his panic poorly. Lijia made the quick realization and gasped. “You know her!”

“I, uh, no, well, not exactly, that is,” Vell said. “I saw her, uh, earlier today -my today, not this today- it was a pretty quick face to face thing, I don’t really know anything about her, uh, you.”

“Oh my god,” the eventual Dr. Akua said. “Was I a lecturer? Ooh, am I the principal of the Einstein-Odinson?”

“I am not going to answer that,” Vell said. “For several reasons.”

“Yeah, yeah, time paradoxes,” Lijia said mockingly. “As if time hasn’t been shattered enough already just by you being here.”

Lijia tossed them some clothes and directed them to her dorm’s bathroom. Leanne took the first opportunity to change, mostly to avoid the awkward conversations that would ensue.

“Well, this does simplify one thing, at least,” “Lijia said. “Mavis might be an element of the time distortion that caused you to be catapulted into our timeline, since she’s physically present in both your time and ours.”

“Right. Um, just in the interest of avoiding any future surprises, are there any other loopers you can tell me about?”

“Well, there’s Isaac and Jason. Any of those names ring a bell?”

“Possibly,” Vell said. “Would it be too much to ask that we not get them involved?”

“Sure, why not,” Lijia said.

“I’ll take any excuse to not be near Isaac,” Akua said. Lijia laughed.

“Yeah, sometimes we come up with completely fake apocalypses just to keep him out of our way,” Lijia said. “The other day we had him repaint the entire storage room because of ‘demons in the concrete’.”

Vell frowned. He didn’t like Principal Goodwell, or at least the version from his time period, but that sounded cruel.

“Oh, oh, tell him about Roswell,” Akua said. Lijia laughed again, even harder this time.

“Oh, yeah, our favorite way to distract him is to have him babysit this ‘alien’ named Ros, but it’s just Jason in a rubber suit!” Lijia said, struggling to talk in between giggle fits. Vell gave a few stiff chuckles just to fit in. Lijia got over her giggling and wiped a few tears of joy from her eyes.

“Fucking pervert,” Lijia said under her breath. “I guess you don’t get it, but he’s a creep. I catch him staring at me too many times to count. If he were here he’d probably be trying to peep on your friend right now.”

Lijia gestured to the bathroom where Leanne was changing just in time for her to step out of it. The bright red t-shirt and pastel bell-bottoms fit her surprisingly well, and she actually seemed happy to be wearing them. Vell wasn’t quite so enthusiastic about changing into his button-up shirt and high waisted khaki’s. With their two time-traveling guests disguised, Lijia got down to business.

“Mavis, go tell Isaac to, I don’t know, dump a bunch of beer into the ocean to appease an angry water demon,” Lijia said. “Have Jason babysit.”

Mavis Akua saluted and trotted off to carry out her leader’s orders. Lijia clapped her hands together and turned back to her two time-traveling acquaintances.

“Now we can focus on the real problems!”

“Aren’t we the real problems of the day?” Vell asked. “I thought possible irreparable damage to the timeline was the apocalypse.”

“You’re definitely part of the problem,” Lijia said. “But you’re not the whole picture. I was already on to something before you all showed up. Follow me.”

Lijia ordered, and they obeyed. She led them through the unfamiliar halls of the retro dorms out into the more familiar spaces of the quad. The trees were much smaller, but they were all in the same place, which gave Vell some anchor points in the College of the past. The faculty building and the clocktower that decorated it were also identical, being one of the few buildings on the campus that was not regularly renovated.

“If I’m correct, she should be here...there she is,” Lijia said. She gestured to a young woman crossing the quad to sit on a park bench. The mystery student unpacked several binders and began perusing notes she had taken. She then double-checked her bags, searched it more thoroughly, and started to look frustrated as she returned to her notes empty-handed.

“She has been involved in some seriously nasty experiments lately,” Lijia explained. “One of the reasons I was hiding in the bushes earlier was to try and see what she was up to. I think I caught her lurking around the isotope containment labs, but then you showed up, so…”

Lijia waved her hand towards their unsuspecting target. Leanne narrowed her eyes suspiciously -at Lijia, not the girl they were spying on.

“I suppose it can’t hurt to stake her out,” Vell said. Lijia raised an eyebrow in his direction.

“How much time do you feel like wasting, Bill?” Lijia asked. “Just grab her notes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Walk up to her and grab the notes,” Lijia said. “We give them a quick once over and see what she’s up to, stop her, and then move on.”

‘That seems, uh, bold.”

“It’s the first loop, no one will remember what you do,” Lijia said. “Come on! We do this all the time.”

“Then you do it,” Vell said.

“I’m kind of a big deal around here, if I just snatch and grab people know my face and know where to find me,” Lijia said. “It’ll be a lot easier on everyone if you grab them.”

Vell’s head bobbed back and forth between Lijia, the unsuspecting student, and Leanne. He knew he definitely didn’t want to steal anyone’s notes, but he also wasn’t ready to actively oppose Lijia. He’d told Leanne he wasn’t going to go digging into explanations for Lijia’s disappearance, but he was also hoping to passively find some information by working with her.

“I’ll go talk to her,” Vell said. He stood and left their hiding place, trying to act casual as he walked up the woman they were spying on.

“Hi there,” Vell said. The young woman looked up at him with a severe glare that seemed to cut right through him.

“I don’t recognize you as a student here,” she said. “You have three minutes to justify your presence before I call campus security.”

“I’m a, uh,” Vell stammered. The fact she’d called him out so quickly had blindsided him, and now he knew he had to come up with a halfway convincing lie or she’d see right through that too. “Well, you got me. I’m a recruiter for Burrows Industries.”

“Ah yes,” the woman said. “In that case you may take your leave immediately. Your employers are unethical and dangerous, and it is my obligation to counteract their negative influence where I can.”

The phrasing set off a light bulb in Vell’s head. He confirmed his theory by glancing down at the woman’s papers and seeing a sheet of familiar handwriting, marked with the initials “C.N.”. Carmella Nguyen. Vell was looking at his future professor. Who Lijia claimed was up to something.

Vell took quick stock of everything he knew about Professor Nguyen, and matched it against everything he knew about Lijia Mian.

“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” Vell said. He turned on his heel and left, not wanting to interact with his future teacher any further. She would not remember this meeting, at least, so it didn’t risk changing the timeline. Everything else Vell was about to do might, though.

“You’re lying to me,” Vell said, as soon as he was face to face with Lijia again.

Lijia appraised the look on Vell’s face, and the tone of his voice. She didn’t bother denying his accusations, choosing to focus on facts that were of more interest to her.

“You know her too,” she said under her breath. “And you know me…”

“Not the point,” Vell said.

“Maybe not, but it is informative,” Lijia said. Her casually caustic tone reminded Vell a little too much of Kraid. “What happens in the future that makes you trust her more than me?”

“What’s happening right now is the real problem,” Vell said, trying to keep her on track. “Why do you want to steal her notes?”

“Borrow, not steal,” Lijia said, more for Vell’s benefit than her own. “Her research and my research have some overlap. I want to reference her theories to advance my own.”

“So, just some mild plagiarism, then,” Vell said. Leanne stood behind Lijia and crossed her arms as Lijia shrugged.

“I won’t take credit for any of her work, just build up my own,” Lijia said. “Call it what you will.”

“I’ll keep calling it, you know, plagiarism, which it is,” Vell said.

“Okay, you’ve called it that,” Lijia said with a shrug. “Now what? I’ll take what I want anyway as soon as you’re gone.”

Since Vell was only here for the first loop, nothing he did today could be permanent. He could not warn Nguyen or tell the principle about Lijia’s academic fraud. He looked to Leanne for support. She slapped her knuckles into an open palm repeatedly.

“That’s true, I guess, you could kick their asses,” Vell said. “Wouldn’t, uh, solve anything long term, though.”

Leanne pointed to her heart.

“It’d make me feel better too, yeah, but still,” Vell said. He wanted a more permanent solution to this problem. He gazed at the only icon of familiarity -the clock tower on the faculty building.

“Long term, huh,” Vell mumbled to himself. He then sighed and shrugged dramatically, turning to face Lijia again. “You’re right. Can’t do anything about it today. Guess I’ll just have to do something about it tomorrow. Or, you know, the day after, or exactly however many days in the future I’m from.”

“What’s your angle, ‘Bill’?” Lijia said, as her eyes narrowed. She could tell Vell was doing a bit. His improv skills hadn’t improved in the slightest since the day he’d started looping.

“Well, you’re in the past, but I’m in the future,” Vell continued. “You can build your career up on lies all you want, but one day I’ll show up and bring it all crashing down.”

Lijia didn’t know that she was going to disappear soon -as far as she knew, she had a long, successful future ahead of her. A future Vell could very easily sabotage. Lijia paused and contemplated the future she thought she had, and the ways in which Vell might threaten it.

“You have a point there,” Lijia admitted. “So what’s your proposal? I stop borrowing notes and you don’t sabotage me in some hypothetical future?”

“The, uh, that’s the idea,” Vell said. Lijia did not let his slip of the tongue go unnoticed. She seized on his lack of confidence like a lioness spotting a wounded zebra.

“Allow me to make a counter proposal, then,” Lijia said. “You let me do whatever I want, today and in the future, and I’ll leave you alone in both time periods. A sort of cease-fire, and believe me, you’re getting the better end of it.”

“I don’t know, uh, seems like we kind of have the advantage,” Vell said. “We know more about you than you know about us.”

“True, however, your greatest weapon is that you’re going to tattle on me,” Lijia said with a smug certainty in her voice Vell didn’t like. “My greatest weapon, on the other hand-.”

Lijia then extended her hand, quickly flicking her fingers through the gestures of a summoning spell. A magical glyph glowed in her hands for a second, and a sword appeared in a flash of light.

“-is an actual weapon,” Lijia said as she brandished the blade. “I will fucking kill you.”