Chapter 92: Book 2 Chapter 16.2: The Great Pizza Heist

The dusty halls of the sub-basement echoed with every footstep. An archway leading the challenge room was half-hidden behind boxes of old textbooks and long-forgotten classroom chairs. Vell and Cane worked together to clear the obstacles while the rest of the group took stock of their journey.

“Alright, we’ve got Lee and Hawke on comms,” Luke said.

“Ready and waiting,” Hawke chimed. While he kept the group connected, Lee would handle keeping them informed, making sure they had the info they needed to overcome any obstacle.

“Everybody’s stocked up. Harley’s got her robot, Freddy has a bunch of gadgets, Kanya has...everything.”

Kanya shifted her grip on one of her tool kits long enough to give a thumbs up. The various pouches and containers she had strapped to herself rattled as she moved.

“Well, not everything,” Kanya said. “I had to ditch my plasma torch, ray shielding apparatus and miniature hydrogen reactor to make room for the grappling hook.”

“Noted. I’m sure the grappling hook will be worth it. You guys cleared that door yet?”

Vell and Cane answered in the affirmative. Luke held up his phone flashlight and examined the newly accessible doorway.

“Speak friend-”

The door immediately began to creak open.

“..and enter,” Luke said. “Huh.”

“Was that supposed to be a challenge?” Cane said.

“Maybe they forgot about the translation spell,” Luke suggested. When a spell across the entire campus could translate any possible spoken word, it was impossible to not say ‘friend’ in the correct language.

Whether it was intended to be a challenge or not, the doorway was open. The elite crew stepped out of the dusty basement and into an even dustier chamber beyond, utterly empty and ordinary but for a sealed doorway on the other side and a single small aperture in the ceiling.

“Let’s see..first challenge is ‘a test of timeless skill’,” Luke said, scanning the schematics of the first room on his phone.

“Timeless for the eighties, though,” Cane said. “So it’s going to be like, pogs or some bullshit.”

“Pogs are nineties, Cane, it’s going to be a hackey-sack,” Freddy corrected.

“I’m pretty sure you got it backwards,” Cane said. “Ten bucks it’s going to be pogs.”

“Deal,” Freddy said.

The aperture on the ceiling rumbled, clattered, and eventually spat out a single yo-yo.

“Huh.”

“Anybody good at yo-yoing?”

Luke’s question was answered by a resounding lack of answer.

“This is a college campus, there’s always at least one crunchy-looking dude who’s randomly really good at doing yo-yo tricks,” Harley said. “I think I know where to find him, hold on.”

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

As the crunchy looking dude executed yet another flawless yo-yo trick, a green light above the next door flashed on, letting them know they had passed the first real challenge.

“Thanks crunchy dude,” Harley said. “We owe you one.”

The man bowed low enough that his over-sized beanie flopped from back to front, and then he retreated, taking his faint miasma of weed with him.

“Okay, next room, what we got!” Harley said. “First room was a test of skill, second room is-”

“A tiger,” Lee said over comms.

“A tiger?”

“What kind of tiger?”

“I don’t know,” Lee said. “The schematics just say ‘a tiger’.”

“Kanya, any chance you have some, uh, raw meat or something?”

“It’s not raw, but I do have some jerky,” Kanya said. Snacks were an important part of any plan, heist or otherwise.

“Don’t worry about it,” Freddy said. He walked through the open door without a care in the world. “The lifespan of a tiger is eight to ten years, if they built this in the eighties it’s definitely-”

Freddy interrupted himself with a shriek as he was pounced upon by a tiger. His assumption that a natural tiger would have died of old age was correct: unfortunately for him the designers of the trap had opted for a robotic one.

“I got you Freddy,” Cane cried before charging the tiger, an act of valor which resulted in him heroically also getting mauled by a tiger. With the tiger ahead by two, the other prospective challengers decided to try again some other time

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

Any difficulty in overcoming the robotic tiger the second time around was prevented by Kanya’s insistence on overpreparedness. If anything, the difficulty had lied in getting her to not stock anti-lion and jaguar materials as well. But thanks to her insistent, if overzealous, stocking of supplies, they overcame the tiger, as well as the obstacle course and lava pits that followed.

“I want to talk to the guys who made this, because they clearly know something about long-term planning we don’t,” Cane said. “How the fuck do they still have pools of red hot lava going like forty years later? That shit should be rocks by now.”

“You want to talk about planning, look at this shit!” Harley said, sounding offended. The rest of the heist team joined her in peering over the edge of a pit that seemed to have no bottom.

“How do they have a bottomless pit?” Luke wondered. “We’re on a floating island, it’s like a hundred yards thick, maximum.”

“Some sort of magical spacial distortion, most likely,” Lee said. “I’d advise not falling in -you’d be falling for the rest of eternity.”

“This school needs a serious health and safety review,” Luke said. “Now I understood why Pierro made us sign those waivers.”

“Right, the waiver signing, something that, like all of our relationship with Pierro, was definitely seen and witnessed by many,” Vell said.

“If you’re done talking about your well-documented relationship with Pierro: Kanya, it’s grappling hook time.”

Kanya sang the words “grappling hook” at the top of her lungs as she hurled it across the chasm. It latched on to the other side and they safely swung across one by one, circumventing a magical spatial distortion trap with some rope and a metal hook.

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

“Any time now, Freddy!”

Cane tried valiantly to push back on the force field that was gradually shrinking around them, but they were starting to run out of room. The bubble that had them all trapped showed no signs of slowing it’s inevitable crushing collapse, in spite of Freddy’s attempts to disrupt it.

“Haven’t you done this kind of thing before?” Vell asked. It came off a little more caustic than intended, but the prospect of being crushed to death made even the gentlest souls a little bit aggressive. Getting crushed was one of his least favorite ways to go, and the fact that he was going to get crushed with company would make it a much more unpleasantly juicy experience than usual.

“Yes but it is very different from inside the bubble!” Freddy squawked. “Please let me focus!”

The urgency in Freddy’s voice, combined with the increasingly limited space available to them, forced the group into silence. Freddy scrambled at the controls to whatever gizmo he was working on, filling the ever-shrinking sphere with the very scientific sound of beeps and boops.

“Could you please stop touching me?” Kim grunted.

“Kim, I respect your desire for personal space but everybody is touching everybody right now,” Luke snapped. He was straddling three different people and still running out of room. “If it’s any consolation I hate this as much as you do!”

“I doubt that!” Kim said.

“Okay, I think I weakened it,” Freddy said. “It’s not down yet, but if somebody hit it really hard-”

“Kim!”

“You know I’m not actually that much stronger than any of you, right?” Having high-tech servomotors for joints gave her a little extra punching power, but not that much more than anyone her size had.

“Well our only other muscle guy is wedged between Kanya’s back and my ass,” Harley said.

“Sorry,” Cane said, his voice slightly muffled by his head’s current unfortunate placement.

“Not your fault you had to play a game of human tetris,” Harley said. “Just get punchy, Kim!”

“Alright, alright,” Kim said. “Luke, duck.”

“I can’t fucking move,” Luke grunted.

“Then this is going to hurt,” Kim said.

In what little space was available to her, Kim drew her fist back and then flung it forward, her knuckles narrowly scraping the side of Luke’s head as she punched. The sharp, intense burst of pressure was enough to disrupt the already destabilized forcefield, and it popped like a bubble, causing the human tetris game to collapse to the floor into a pile. Once they had sorted out which limbs belonged in which direction, the tangled mess disentangled and stood to stretch their cramped bodies -all but Luke, who stayed lying on the ground.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

“I think you punched a chunk of my ear off,” Luke said. He pulled a bloody hand away from his temple, revealing that, sure enough, there was a knuckle-shaped indentation in his ear. Kim looked down at her own fist and sheepishly wiped the blood off it.

“‘Not actually that much stronger’, she says,” Cane scoffed. “Why are you attracted to freakishly dangerous women, Harlan?”

“I am not….Okay, uh, there’s a definite pattern forming, I can see that, but I swear it’s a coincidence,” Vell admitted.

“Glad we’re choosing now to talk about Vell’s self-destructive heterosexuality,” Luke said. That felt a bit harsh, but Vell would’ve let it pass without comment even if Luke weren’t understandably upset by the missing piece of his ear. He didn’t know it was temporary. “Any chance you got a bandage somewhere in those pouches, Kanya?”

“Nope.”

“Of course you don’t,” Luke sighed.

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

“Oh good, something normal,” Kanya said. “As much as I love the grappling hooks and tiger repellent, I was hoping for some more normal heist-type stuff.”

After a harrowing series of robot tigers, compression bubbles, and a labyrinth complete with minotaur, a simple vault door was almost relieving. While it had what appeared to be a complex puzzle lock, a door was comparatively less likely to eat, squish, or gore them. They took nothing for granted, though.

“Kanya, since you’re so excited, do you want to do the honors?”

“Sure, I came prepared for safe cracking,” Kanya said. She walked to the massive vault door -alone- and got down on her knees to open the complicated lock. Everyone else kept a safe distance.

“So, I’m not saying something will go wrong,” Cane said. “But if it does-”

“Door’s going to fall off the hinges and squish her,” Harley said.

“See, I was thinking it’d open but then like, suck her into a vacuum tube or something,” Cane said.

“Obviously it’s going to open and when we walk through into the next room, the floor will drop out from underneath us,” Luke suggested.

“No, they already did a pit trap, remember?” Kim interrupted. “If anything, I think this is a fake ‘final’ challenge, and the next room is going to have a decoy coupon or something.”

“A bit overly sadistic, if you ask me,” Freddy said. “Personally, I think the perfect level of irony would be this door hiding a second, slightly smaller locked door. The rule of threes would dictate another door behind that one, but we’ll see.”

“If you’re going to be ridiculous, could you at least do so off the air?” Lee chimed in. “Besides, the door is clearly going to have a magical barrier behind it.”

“I’m actually going to go with there being some acid involved. We haven’t seen any acid yet,” Hawke added, further cluttering the airwaves. After he spoke, the group as one turned towards Vell. They stared at him expectantly.

“I think it’s a fucking door, you guys,” Vell said. “Not everything in this trial is trying to kill us. Only like, every third thing.”

“He’s right,” Kanya said. Harley jumped as she realized Kanya was standing right in front of her, and somehow had been for several seconds. She’d been too absorbed in the speculation game to notice.

“Bah! When did you get there?’

“A bit ago,” Kanya said. “It only took me like ten seconds to open the door.”

She pointed over her shoulder at the open vault door, which did not hide any pitfalls, magical barriers, monsters, or comically smaller second doors. Just open, empty space.

“I’m very good at heisting,” Kanya said.

With the door open, the crew hesitantly proceeded forward. After poking a few fingers through the door to make sure there no forcefields or acid sprays, they stepped through in full. A single archaic computer dominated the room, towering over a waist-high podium which held a small piece of paper.

“Congratulations on the successful infiltration,” the computer said, in a stilted, mechanical voice. The sudden boom of the computer’s voice caused several of the crew to nearly jump out of their shoes, as they began to fear the worst. “Update: Multiple parties detected. Advisory: Only one of you may claim the ultimate prize.”

The massive machine fell silent, appraising them silently with it’s dusty diodes.

“Do you think it’s legit?” Kanya whispered.

“I think so,” Luke said. “But I also think this might be one final test.”

“Luke might be right,” Vell began. “We only got here thanks to all of us working together-”

“I didn’t do much, actually,” Harley said.

“Well, still. I think this is just one final test to see if we can set aside our greed, and keep our friendship strong in the face of temp-”

“Impassioned speech about friendship detected,” the computer said, interrupting Vell again. “Clarification: It’s just a contest rules thing. Obviously you can share the coupon. We just need a single ‘winner’ for legal reasons.”

“Oh. Uh, in that case, anyone mind if I grab it?”

Answered by an array of nods and shrugs, Vell picked up the coupon. A long-overdue spurt of confetti drifted out from a dust-choked machine behind the computer, bringing a sad end to the chaotic heist. But in spite of the sad scraps of paper launched from a dying confetti cannon, the single scrap of paper in Vell’s hands was enough of a celebration.

“Now we just have to do this one more time,” Harley said.

“Wait, what?”

“Don’t even worry about it,” Harley said. “Because next time we get to do it with style.”

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

True to form, Harley made sure the next infiltration went stylishly. She’d even bought matching black turtlenecks for everyone, giving them a bit of flash to go with their substance.

With the rehearsed guidance of the loopers, the entire crew performed to perfection, effortlessly tackling every trap, test, and (literal) pitfall. The second time around, they didn’t even jump at the sound of the computer’s booming voice.

With the infinite free pizza coupon claimed, the next step was to use it. After supplying Pierro with a sufficient workforce of pizza-making robots to ensure he didn’t break his back, the heist crew put their coupon to work.

Approximately three hours later, Dean Lichman carefully squeezed himself between two waist-high stacks of pizza boxes and found the crew gathered sleepily around a table in Pierro’s, surrounded by a veritable fortress of cardboard boxes, empty or otherwise. Their matching heist turtlenecks were now stained with grease and crumbs of crust.

“What’s up, Dean Lichman,” Harley said. “You want some pizza?”

“No thank you, you are the eighth people to offer me a slice within the past fifteen minutes,” Lichman said. “You’re responsible for finally proving how much pizza is too much for college students, then?”

“Yes sir,” Lee grumbled. It had been an incredible first thirty minutes, followed by two and a half hours of frustration as pizza continued to pile up. The hard-won coupon had promised them infinite pizza, and they intended to use it, but the sheer volume was starting to become distressing.

“I should’ve known from the moment I got a notification someone had won a contest I didn’t even know existed it’d be you lot,” the Dean said. “Good work.”

“That’s us,” Cane grunted. “All we do is win.”

The loopers had not mentioned their half dozen failed attempts, creating a spot of false confidence in those not aware of their trial and error. They kept it to themselves. People needed every win they could get.

“You should know that Kraid has called to let me know he’s abandoning his new ownership of Pierro’s,” Dean Lichman said. “He’s divested all his assets related to Pierro’s and effectively made it an independent franchise.”

Those who were not too deep in the food coma to celebrate let out a half-hearted cheer.

“Hey Pierro, we won!” Harley shouted. In a puff of flour, Pierro emerged from his swarmed kitchen, leaned on a stock of boxes, and took a deep breath of tomato-sauce free air.

“Oh thank god,” Pierro said. “I’d cancel the orders but I’m not sure I can make those pizza bots stop.”

“Yeah, the remote is-” Harley looked around at the various pizza messes. “It’s somewhere around here. I think.”

“I think I’m just going to leave them on,” Pierro said. “And maybe take a vacation. For a while.”

“Sounds well-deserved,” Vell said. He also needed some time away from pizza, and he’d just been eating it, not making it.

“Yeah. You kids be responsible with that coupon, now,” Pierro warned.

“Of course. We’ll be reasonable.”

Pierro retreated, leaving the bloated heist crew to contemplate what to do with their prize.

“Well we don’t really need this, do we,” Luke said. “Lee could foot the pizza bill easy.”

“Maybe we should give it to someone else?”

“Yeah, but how do we decide deserves it?” Kim said. “Anyone I trust with infinite pizza is at this table.”

“Maybe we could put up some trials of our own,” Luke suggested.

“Or just put it back in the basement,” Cane said. It took a few seconds for everyone involved to shake their heads. They wouldn’t wish those tests on anyone.

“I’m sure we can just give it to someone who deserves it,” Vell said. “It’ll be fine.”

THE NEXT DAY: LOOP ONE

“We’ve already lost the dorms,” Lee shouted. “Hawke’s position is about to be overrun.”

A magical explosion rang out from somewhere on campus, not close enough to be a concern.

“We can’t just leave him there,” Vell protested. The bandage over his wounded eye started to slip, letting some blood pour down his face. He paid the pain no mind.

“We have to focus on getting the coupon away from the enemy,” Lee said. “And we’ve already lost contact with Kim’s division. We don’t have any reinforcements to spare.”

Vell looked at his battle-damaged robotic steed and set his jaw.

“We have me.”

“Damn it Vell, don’t be a hero!”

But it was too late. Vell mounted up and galloped across the battle-scarred campus in spite of Harley’s protests.

“Guess it’s just the two of us,” Harley said. The path to Pierro’s, at least, was relatively clear. Despite being centered around pizza, the bloody conflict had mostly avoided the actual restaurant. Harley and Lee worked through way across the ruined terrain, stepping through shattered doors, and finally simply walking into one more door into the kitchen. The advance team that had once been a fellowship of nine members was now whittled down to one member: Cane.

“Cane!”

He stood silent and alone, holding the coupon in his hands and staring at the red-hot fire of the pizza oven.

“Cast it into the fire!” Lee shouted. “Destroy it!”

With a slow, dramatic turn, Cane faced his friends.

“No.”

He then held the coupon in both hands and starting tearing it into small pieces.

“Seriously, that shit’s hot, I’d burn my hands,” Cane said. He dropped the ripped fragments of the infinite pizza coupon like yet another burst of sad confetti.

“Oh. You know, we really should’ve just done that in the first place,” Harley said.

THE NEXT DAY: LOOP TWO

Lee tore the coupon into small pieces and threw it into the trash. The loopers breathed a collective sigh of relief and relaxed in the lair.

“I guess there is such a thing as too much power,” Vell said.

“Indeed. Some temptations are irresistible,” Lee said. “But all’s well that ends well, and I would count this as a major win. Everyone on campus got as much -or more- pizza than they could eat, and Kraid took a significant loss.”

In spite of himself, Vell couldn’t agree.

“Did he though?”

“I think so,” Lee said. “I doubt he’ll be devastated by the loss, but he didn’t get everything he wanted and that’s what matters.”

“Being too nervous about things is my schtick,” Hawke said. “Don’t worry about it.”

Their words didn’t help. Vell didn’t know that one could be too paranoid when dealing with Kraid. He was always playing some angle no one else was even aware of.

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

“Yes Man, is the nanodrone footage done compiling yet?”

“Yes Sir,” the lobotomized servant droned. Carrying out his appointed tasks obediently (as he was mentally incapable unable of doing otherwise), the manservant forwarded the data to Kraid’s phone. He held the small screen in a skeletal grip and reviewed the footage.

“Impressive,” he said aloud, as the group of college students expertly dodged mechanical tigers, popped forcefields like soap bubbles, and effortlessly navigated labyrinths. “Yes Man, you agree it’s pretty unlikely that an assortment of random college students would overcome these challenges without even breaking a sweat, right?”

“Yes Sir.”

“Right. The blueprints don’t provide enough information to it that easily,” Kraid said. He’d reviewed the underground lair and all of it’s schematics before even embarking on this plan. “And most of them don’t even blink when the machine starts talking.”

Kraid replayed the footage, watching Luke, Kanya, Cane, and Freddy jump in fright as the others stayed silent and still -like they knew exactly what to expect.

“Yes Man, I’m starting to think Vell Harlan and friends have a way to tell the future,” Kraid said. “Does that sound about right?”

“Yes Sir.”

“I thought you’d agree,” Kraid said with a chuckle. He put aside the video and started to tap out directions on a map. “I think we need to know a lot more about those students, and I know just who to ask. Yes Man, update my travel itinerary. I have to visit an old friend, and then go make a new one.”