Chapter 86: Book 2 Chapter 13.1: Twenty Questions

Vell stood in line at the dining hall, perusing the school’s options. Today, he had a particular target. As fast as he could, Vell reached out and snatched the last grapefruit out of a tray of assorted fruits.

“Aw man, I wanted that,” the next student in line whined. Another nearby student echoed his sentiment.

“Sorry guys,” Vell said. “I’m sure they’ll bring out more later.”

Vell put his grapefruit on the tray and headed towards the usual breakfast table. The other loopers examined his bounty carefully.

“That’s what started a blood feud?”

“If I understood the chain of events, I would explain it to you,” Vell said, as he began to peel the belligerent fruit. “But I don’t.”

He popped one slice of the grapefruit into his mouth and held out the rest.

“Anyone want some?”

“I do not want your murder grapefruit, Vell Harlan,” Harley said.

“The fruit’s not murderous, it’s just a good source of vitamin C,” Vell said. “Hawke?”

Hawke actually did take some, in spite of being a casualty of the first loop’s bloody conflict. It tasted like ordinary grapefruit to him.

“Kim?”

“No thanks,” Kim said, without even looking in Vell’s direction. She ran a finger along the empty space in the table in front of her.

“Are you going to eat anything at all, dear?”

“I don’t see why I would,” Kim said. “I don’t really ‘need’ to eat, and I don’t have any reason to pretend around you guys anymore, so…”

“You can still taste, can’t you? You complimented my cooking before,” Vell said.

“Yeah, I mean, I guess,” Kim said. She didn’t want to address her unspoken fear that she’d only ever complimented Vell’s cooking because of the strange magical bond between their two runes. “I just don’t feel like eating ‘recreationally’.”

“If I didn’t eat recreationally, I’d eat half as much,” Harley said. “But you do you, Kimbo.”

“Right. I’ll just, let you guys eat, I guess. I’m going to go get ready for class.”

Her stiff exit made goodbyes awkward enough as to be impossible, and the other loopers just waited silently until she was out of earshot.

“She’s been out of sorts lately, hasn’t she?” Lee said.

“Recent events have been a lot to deal with for anyone,” Harley said. “Especially someone who’s only been alive for like five months.”

“I think talking like that isn’t helping,” Hawke said. “She wants to feel more normal, not have her differences pointed out.”

“Hawke’s got a point,” Vell said. “She wants to fit in and she just took a move that really makes her stand out.”

“Not really,” Harley said. In the grand scheme of things, she didn’t see being a robot as that weird. “But I guess she doesn’t-”

The lightbulb went off inside Harley’s head, filling her eyes with sparkles.

“Oh my god I know what we should do,” she buzzed. “We need to do twenty questions.”

“Like the animal, vegetable, mineral thingy?”

“No! It’s a really dumb thing me and my friends did in grade school when we made a new friend,” Harley said. “Everybody sits in a circle and asks each other questions. You have to answer truthfully, but every person can only get asked twenty questions.”

“That actually sounds rather nice,” Lee said. “A good icebreaker, I think.”

“Yeah, and it’ll be even better since you know that truth spell,” Harley said. “And we’re adults, so we can be drunk while we do it.”

“True on both counts,” Lee said. “Hawke, do you agree? I think it’d be good for Kim to know the only other newcomer is involved.”

“Sure, that sounds good,” Hawke said. He still had a lot of questions about what was going on around here, and it’d be good to get those questions answered.

“Alright, Vell, be a dear and help me set up the ritual circle, would you? Harley, I’ll leave convincing Kim to participate up to you and your sparkling charisma.”

Harley smiled broadly, demonstrating the literal sparkle of her teeth, and sped off to find her prey.

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

Kim had agreed to the game of twenty truths, but an explanation of her robotic condition had added one caveat. As she had revealed that she could not get drunk, the other participants agreed to stay sober as well. It affected the atmosphere slightly, but not enough to dissuade anyone.

“Alright, so here’s the mechanics of the truth spell,” Lee said. She gestured to a small ceramic bowl she’d placed in the sandy beach, next to a small firepit. The surface was engraved with strange ebony paint, and five small tokens carved with the same pattern sat in the bowl. “When you take a token from the bowl, you are compelled to speak the truth until it is returned. If you all want to go ahead and grab one now.”

Each person dutifully took a token from the bowl.

“My name is b-bi-b-b-” Vell said. The others gave him an odd look as he started babbling. “Sorry. Just trying to test it out.”

“What? Are you saying my constant anxiety that everyone around me constantly doubts my abilities and talents is true?”

Lee clutched her stone a little tighter and went a bit pale.

“Wow, these things really work,” Harley said, looking at the token in her palm. “And for reference, Lee, I never doubt you and I love you very much.”

The color returned to Lee’s cheeks as she blushed. Harley didn’t leave her much time to bask in the afterglow of the compliment.

“Come on, pop a squat and let’s actually get this party started,” Harley said. “So, just to establish the baseline we’re working with, Kim’s a robot, Vell’s technically undead, Lee’s parents are billionaires and she hates them, and me and Hawke are...decided outliers in weirdness factor, admittedly, but I think my general vibe compensates for my lack of fucked up backstory. I don’t know what Hawke’s got going on other than being trans.”

“No, that’s pretty much it,” Hawke said. “And even then, like, I’ve been lucky enough to only ever spend time in pretty accepting communities, so it hasn’t been much of a ‘thing’, you know?”

“Got you. So, we’ve laid out our groundwork. Anyone want to get us started?”

“I, uh, kind of had one, yeah,” Hawke said. Harley gave him a nod, and since she was presumably in charge, he took that as a go ahead and turned to Vell. “So...you died.”

“Briefly,” Vell said.

“Right, and you were apparently dead for a while, you didn’t just, you know, wake up on the next loop, the way we do. Do you, well, remember what it was like? Being dead?”

Harley glanced skeptically at Vell. Long ago he had told her that he didn’t remember his death at all, and she was curious to see if that was true.

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“Sort of. It’s vague, and I don’t know if it’s what being dead is really like, since, you know, uh, I came back, so that maybe messes up the process, but...uh...there wasn’t anything there.”

Nobody had been expecting to start the evening with existential dread. Hawke was starting to wish he hadn’t asked and/or that he had alcohol.

“You saw the other side and there was nothing there?”

“I can’t really speak to the metaphysical, but that’s how it was for me,” Vell said. “Like I said, maybe it’s a special case, maybe it was just some kind of limbo I was in between dying and coming back. Don’t go getting nihilistic on my account.”

“I’ve got another one for you,” Harley said. She could see this was getting existential and wanted to veer in a slightly different direction. “Why did you tell me you didn’t remember anything about it when we met?’

Vell nodded. He’d been anticipating that question, to be honest.

“I don’t like to worry people. People get existential crises. Like Hawke’s having right now.”

“No, I’m good, just reckoning with the inescapable maw of oblivion,” said Hawke, between hyperventilating breaths.

“I know I should’ve corrected myself after we got to know each other, and if you asked again I would’ve told you, but it’s just, uh, very hard to bring up unprompted.”

“‘Hey Harley, lovely weather today, your butt looks nice, and by the way, have I mentioned the infinite void of nothingness that awaits us after death?’,” Harley said, doing her best mockery of Vell’s voice. “Yeah, I totally get you not bringing that up. Go in peace, my son, I absolve you of your deception.”

“Hawke, dear, if you’re done staring long into the abyss, I do have a question for you,” Lee said. The prospect of a distraction, any distraction at all, suited him just fine, and he returned to Earth mentally. “I was just curious if you had any family. We haven’t had much time to talk about those kinds of things.”

“Oh, yeah, there’s well, me, mom and dad, and I got an older brother who goes to college back home in Auckland, and there’s, well, a couple of cousins, if you care to hear about them.”

“Perhaps later,” Lee said. She liked to hear about families, normal, happy ones especially, but her curiosity was sated. “For now I’ll open the floor to anyone else.”

“I suppose I could ask one for Harley,” Kim said. “Unless Botley counts as his own person and can answer for me.”

“Botley doesn’t talk,” Harley said. She summoned her familiar to her side and pointed his little round head in Kim’s direction. “Unless you and him establish some kind of weird robot telepathy.”

Kim stared at Botley, and Botley stared back. This went on for exactly twenty seconds.

“Nope.”

“Alright then, guess questions will have to go through me,” Harley said. “Shoot.”

“You said he was sort of like me. Like, alive, a little bit. But you couldn’t make another one like him. Why not?’

“Because I had a partner the first time I built him,” Harley said. “We didn’t compare notes very often.”

“Why not?’

“Because I hated that old cunt and he hated me,” Harley said. “We only worked together because I knew something he didn’t and he knew something I didn’t...Have you ever heard the name Pradav Peyang?”

“Peyang?” Kim said. “The guy who designed the war drones?”

“The very same,” Harley sighed. As the inventor of the first fully autonomous armed drone, Pradav Peyang was likely among the top ten deadliest human beings of the 21st century. “He used to come around to this cafe I waitressed at for years. He was a rude bastard and everyone hated him. I only studied robotics to piss him off, because he thought there was no way I could do it right.”

“Little did he know what you would become,” Lee said. The idea of Harley surpassing the very person who had denigrated her satisfied Lee to no end.

“Yeah, I got to rub his nose in it for a while there, when I was at my peak and before he was-”

Harley grabbed on to Botley’s head and stopped herself mid-sentence. The change did not go unnoticed.

“Harley, dear, what happened to him?”

Harley bit her lip for a second.

“That counts as a new question,” Harley said. “And don’t tell anybody else about this, but...Peyang’s dead. Has been for a while.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He didn’t want people to know. Because he was too fucking self-absorbed to let people know he had dementia, and just self-aware enough to know people were going to line up to piss on his grave,” Harley said. “He told me because dying at least made him humble enough to realize he needed help to finish his next project before...You know.”

“Wow. It must’ve been rough.”

“You know, I would’ve been happy to watch that dude get hit by a bus,” Harley said. “But seeing him lose himself, just bit by bit, it was...I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.”

For a moment, Harley looked into the fire, and Vell saw, for the first time in their long friendship, a moment of genuine silence from Harley. Even at rest, her head always seemed to be buzzing with a maelstrom of thoughts, her eyes always intently focusing on something, even if that something was an immaterial idea. For but a moment, that infinite extroversion turned inwards, and Harley took a single second of silent self-reflection.

Then she snapped back to herself, and looked up to Vell with a perk of her eyebrows.

“So, Vell, when and how did you lose your virginity?”

“Wow. That was fast,” Vell noted.

“I got to keep myself on the up and up, because I’m the emotional babysitter here and if I start sinking into existential confusion the rest of you guys are fucked,” Harley said.

“Do you ever resent the fact that you feel like you have to take care of us?” Lee asked. She knew that the burden of her and Vell’s complicated problems -and now Kim’s as well- might very well start to bog Harley down.

“Never. It can be...tiring, sometimes, I admit, but it’s the good kind of tired. Like after you work out and your muscles are sore but you know you did good work, that kind of thing,” Harley said. “Vell! You haven’t answered the question.”

“Fine. It was my senior year of high school, we were on a field trip for an academic competition, my girlfriend at the time and I snuck out of our hotel rooms and had awkward, unsatisfying sex in the back of my car while a Roxy song played.”

“Fan-fucking-tastic, every word of that is a surprise and yet exactly what I expected,” Harley said. “Same question for everyone, except obviously for those of you who are still virgins, on whom no judgment is passed.”

Lee remained silent while Kim pointed awkwardly at Vell, and Hawke gave a very heavily abridged version of a college escapade. Both answers did not satisfy Harley’s demand for titillation, but Hawke cut her off before she could go further.

“So, in fairness, same to you, Harley,” he said, flipping the script.

“Alright, only fair,” Harley said. “It was with Garret. Yes, that Garret. I got my cherry popped by Garret Geist, Ghost Getter.”

“There are worse ways to do it,” Vell said. “At least you and Garret are still on good terms. That girlfriend I mentioned ended up calling me a zombie. Haven’t talked to her since.”

Vell delivered the fact in stride, almost too casually. He forced it to sound like it was something he had moved beyond, but he hadn’t. Harley cataloged that fact for a better understanding of Vell’s approach to relationships, and then, as she so often did, moved on.

“So, for equal opportunity embarrassment here, Lee! What was your sexual awakening?”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“What made you realize you were into girls?” Harley clarified. “Your childhood was obviously a repressive environment, it had to have been recent, right? Recent enough for you to remember?”

The slow rise of red in Lee’s cheeks was obvious even in the orange firelight. For a moment, she eyed the bowl, and everyone could tell she was seriously considering turning in her token to try and escape having to answer this question.

“Come on, Lee, you got to stick it out,” Harley said. “No judgment here.”

Lee grit her teeth and closed her eyes.

“You have to promise not to laugh,” Lee said.

“I’ll do my best, I promise,” Harley said. “But come on, it can’t be that bad. Was it a cartoon character? A lot of people got turned on by that lady lion in The Lion King, it’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“No. Not, it-”

Lee curled in on herself. It almost looked like she was in pain.

“It was-”

When she actually forced the word out of her mouth, it came out as a quiet, embarrassed squeak of a word.

“-you.”

Absolute dumbfounded silence washed over Harley for a moment. Then her face turned bright red and she had to bite down on her thumb to keep herself from laughing. In spite of herself, her body still shuddered with poorly-contained giggles.

“You said you wouldn’t,” Lee whined.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Harley said, still gnawing on her own thumb for a semblance of self-control. “I promise I’m not laughing at it, I’m just laughing about it.”

“It is a little funny,” Vell said.

“It’s not funny at all,” Lee protested. “Everyone around me -the few people I had- my whole life everyone around me was insufferable, or only interested in me because of my money, or- or…”

Lee looked out at the waves and folded her hands. The nearby sound of shifting water helped settle her soul, in spite of the waning spasms of Harley’s giggling.

“I spent a lifetime swinging between being my parents puppet and being filled with rage at all the strings holding me,” Lee said. “Coming to this island was the first time I had any freedom. Any chance to figure out who I was.”

The somber attitude of her best friend helped quell Harley’s giggle fit. She scooted through the sand to be a little closer to Lee and rested her chin on Lee’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry I laughed,” she said.

“It’s alright, darling,” Lee said with a smile. “I should’ve known better than to expect you not to.”

“Mhm. I am very giggly,” Harley said. “One more thing, though.”

Lee turned her head to look at Harley, and knew from the mischievous smile that her forgiveness had possibly been slightly premature.

“It was the red one piece, wasn’t it,” Harley said, less of a question than a statement of fact. “With the little sash that had strawberries on it.”

Lee sighed and nodded.

“Yes. Our first time on the beach. You stood in the waves, bent over to pick up a shell, I...glanced, and boom,” Lee said, pointing a finger to herself. “Lesbian.”

“You can ‘glance’ at me any time, Lee,” Harley said. “That is blanket permission, by the way. This body is a temple and like all temples it exists to be gawked at by tourists.”

“Okay,” Hawke said, unsure how else to respond. “Uh...Who’s next?”

A few questions sailed through the air as curiosity flew in every direction, and the night continued.