Chapter 80: Book 2 Chapter 8: Maker's Mark

It only took a glance at the matching rune for Vell to understand. That magnetic attraction Vell had felt to Kim from the moment he’d laid eyes on her had all been fake. With the source revealed, he now understood that it was a form of sympathetic resonance between the two paired runes. Like two magnets of opposite poles pulling towards one another, the runes were drawn together -and Kim and Vell had confused that magnetic force as some kind of romantic pull between them. His mistaken romance flitted through his mind only briefly, though. He had bigger problems -problems on a deific scale.

“Quenay,” Vell sighed.

“What?” Kim asked.

“A God,” Lee explained. “Or close enough to one to fake it. She’s the one who resurrected Vell in the first place-”

“Vell died?” Hawke asked. “Like, before this?”

“Hawke, dear, you’re going to want to sit down, this is going to be a wild fifteen minutes or so.”

Lee recapped the relevant events in full. From Vell’s death and resurrection, to Quenay’s intervention in Principal Issac Goodwell’s abduction of Vell. Just as Lee had predicted, Hawke went woozy a few times, but being seated kept him from fainting. Kim seemed intrigued, if anything, absorbing the story with voracious attention to detail.

“Quenay…” she said. “I had vague memories of a woman when I first ‘woke up’, but I thought it was some kind of...I don’t even know. I didn’t think it was real.”

“Just to establish something, uh, timeline wise,” Vell said. “How long have you been active, Kim?’

“Just a few months,” Kim said. “About four, I think. The first week or so is...blurry.”

“Four months would put your ‘birth’ at just after summer break started,” Vell said.

“Which means Quenay did this in response to your abduction,” Lee added. “Or at least inspired by it.”

“It also means Vell made out with a two month old,” Harley pointed out.

“I did not- There were extenuating circumstances!” Vell protested.

“I don’t appreciate being compared to a child,” Kim protested in turn. She had all the decision making faculties of an adult, even if she was technically young by human standards. Even if those decision making faculties had been slightly modified by a magical attraction between the runes they shared.

“Moving on,” Lee said, rather insistently. “I won’t hazard a guess at the motivations of a God, but I’ll assume Quenay had some kind of reason for doing this.”

“She did seem interested in keeping Vell alive,” Harley said. “Maybe Kim’s either a buddy or a backup. To keep him safe or to have a spare on hand if the worst happens.”

Vell didn’t like the idea of having a backup. Kim didn’t like the idea of being a backup.

“I am new to this and also have my brain slightly fried by several factors,” Hawke said. “But I would view bringing someone back to life and creating life where it wasn’t as two very different things.”

“A very good point, Hawke,” Lee said. “Anything is possible. Perhaps these two were created for different, if complimentary, reasons.”

Any further speculation proved circular, at best. Trying to reverse engineer Quenay’s motivations was akin to reassembling a bomb. The impact she had left on their lives was explosive, but they only had scraps of shrapnel to try and understand the source.

“I can’t guess much about the ‘why’ or ‘how’,” Vell said. “But I think I maybe have something on the ‘what’.”

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He stepped up and turned to Kim.

“Do you mind if I, uh, get a look at that rune for a bit?” Vell said. “I know it’s kind of well, placed weird, but it’s easier than looking at my own back.”

“Just take a picture,” Kim said. She’d already covered her chest again and didn’t really feel like dropping her decolletage once more.

“I don’t like to have pictures on my phone, you know, even if I delete it, somebody could grab the data, or, uh, other stuff.”

With a sigh, Kim pushed aside her shirt and synthetic skin again. Vell tried not to stare too hard. Even though he was consciously aware of it now, the magic pull still exerted some influence on him. Every time he lost focus for a second he found himself leaning closer to the ten-line rune. Which wouldn’t have been so awkward were it not placed directly on Kim’s chest.

“Okay, I think I got it,” Vell said. Kim covered herself up again and noted with frustration that the neckline of her shirt was now permanently stretched.

“The rune has some points in common with a healing rune, so up until now I’ve assumed it meant something like resurrection, or at least some kind of advanced healing,” Vell said. “But since Kim was never, well, ‘alive’ in the first place-”

Kim tried hard not to let that phrasing bother her. She had to remind herself that it was true: that she hadn’t really been alive until a stray god had decided to make her so. It still hurt.

“-that can’t be it,” Vell said. His voice suddenly took on a grim tone, unusual for the optimistic Vell. “I think the only other option is that the rune means ‘life’.”

“I don’t like the way you’re saying that,” Harley said. “You’re being all spooky.”

“Well, the symbol for fire can be used to manipulate all forms of fire,” Vell began.

“So the symbol for life could be used to manipulate all forms of life,” Harley sighed. “Which means bad news if Burrows or Kraid or somebody ever gets their hands on it. Got you.”

While the runes carved into Vell and Kim’s bodies were one-offs that only affected the two of them personally, and were therefore no danger to anyone else, new versions of the rune might not be so benign. Vell shuddered to think what might be possible if someone built a device that connected runes like “life” and “control”. The possibilities were endless, and endlessly horrifying.

“A frightful prospect, yes, but luckily the only knowledge of those runes is in good hands,” Lee said. “Or, as the case may be, on good chests-”

Harley’s snicker made Lee realize what she’d said a moment too late.

“-Not like that -not that you don’t -I’m referring to -I don’t...I’m going to stop talking now.”

“Coward. Just say she has nice boobs and be done with it,” Harley said.

“I’d rather just be done with it, if it’s all the same to you.”

And thus, they were done with it, and very deliberately moved on to new topics.

“How’d you end up here, anyway?” Hawke asked. Though he mostly respected Kim’s intelligence, she appeared to have zero actual educational experience, which made her an odd choice for one of the most exclusive colleges in existence.

“Technically I’m here to be researched,” Kim said. After her “creator” realized his machine had been meddled with, he’d shipped her off for study, and Kim bounced between a few labs before finding her ultimate destination of the Einstein-Odinson College. “And when I got here Dean Lichman decided the best person to research me was, well, me. If not for him I’d probably be strapped to a table in the Robotics workshop right now.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s cool, I would’ve busted you out,” Harley said. She tried to keep her fellow roboticist’s experiments on the ethical side of things. Except for Sarah, who both could not be controlled and probably existed outside of human morality anyway.

“Thanks. But I’m glad we never have to find out if you would.”

“If I may, are you researching yourself, or is that just an excuse to keep you off a lab table?”

“A little of both,” Kim said with a shrug. “I am trying to figure myself out. It’s not going great.”

“You seem pretty put together, I wouldn’t worry too much about it,” Hawke said.

“It’s not some philosophical thing,” Kim said. “Not mostly. Harley called me fully sapient, but am I? Or am I just really good at faking it? What if I’m just a really advanced computer that thinks it’s a person?”

“That’s…that’s a bit of a broad subject for us to give a good answer to on short notice,” Harley said. “Not that I don’t totally believe that you’re a fully realized and intelligent entity, just that saying ‘yeah you are’ probably isn’t going to resolve your internal crisis.”

“I understand.”

“I have to agree with Harley,” Lee said. “Especially so since we’ve all been a bit overwhelmed recently. We’re all here to help, Kim, in whatever form that may take, but for now, perhaps we should sleep on it?”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Sleep on it,” Kim said.

The loopers went their separate ways for the evening, with Vell sparing one more confused glance over his shoulder before skulking off. Kim walked, but not in any particular direction. Certainly not back to the dorm she lived in alone, or to the bed she had never used.

She didn’t sleep.