As it turned out, Harley and Lee had already concocted a plan for the wasps before Vell’s ‘recruitment’. Lee was an RA, and had already tracked down some students in the entomology department who knew about an experiment happening today. From there it was a matter of concocting an excuse to take a look around their lab. Lee had an idea, but she needed at least a partial cover story.

“Now, what’s your degree in?”

An odd question to ask a freshman student, under normal circumstances, but the students of the Einstein-Odinson College were no ordinary students. The school was so prestigious it actually required you to have a two-year degree from a second, slightly less prestigious school before you could even apply.

“I’m studying rune tech,” Vell said. The ability to inscribe spells into stone tablets was relatively new, and still a very expansive and profitable field of stufy. Vell had a more personal interest in runes, but the commercial applications were a nice side benefit.

“Rune tech, very modern,” Lee said. “Any possible applications on entomology?”

“Uh, almost none.”

“Very well, we’ll say you’re considering a minor,” Lee said. “Just play along and ask about wasps when it seems natural.”

“Sure.”

Harley apparently acted as Lee’s usual sidekick on these operations, but Vell had been given the ‘honor’ of field duty to celebrate his new membership. He tried to avoid questioning too many decisions to avoid slowing down the process. The top of his priority list was currently “avoid getting killed by wasps” with “ask questions” significantly further down the list. He’d always been better at learning by doing anyway.

Lee led the way, pretending to be giving Vell a tour of the school. She pointed out some mundane features of the school’s hallways before bursting into the entomology room.

“And this is our entomology department,” she said, gesturing broadly to the room. It was packed to the brim with terrariums and plastic containers, as well as glass display cases displaying pinned insects. “Take a good look around, but be careful not to touch anything. Unlike most of our class subjects, these ones do bite.”

“And sting, and excrete toxins, and some of them spray acid,” one of the room’s residents said. “But don’t worry, we keep those ones in especially sturdy containers. Like this one!”

The woman reached below her desk and pulled up a container with a hole melted in the side.

“Uh oh.”

Vell stared at the melted box while Lee gave a polite, yet forced, chuckle.

“Oh, Dr. Boniventure, that never gets old,” Lee said, in a way that implied it very much did get old. Dr Boniventure’s style of humor wore out its welcome fast even for people who didn’t live every day twice. The Doctor set aside her prop with a laugh and stepped up to reach out a hand to Vell.

“Dr. Boniventure, but you can call me Dr. Bon. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“Well, this is Vell, he just started today,” Lee said, before Vell got the chance to make his own introduction. “He’s just touring our different departments, trying to see what he might want to take a minor in.”

“I asked to come here because I’m really into wasps,” Vell said. Lee gave him a look, as if he was jumping the gun. Vell, however, felt that “as soon as possible” was the best time to ask about the murder wasps. “You ever do any experiments with wasps?”

“Why yes, as a matter of fact, we’re going to start one this evening,” Dr. Bon said. “You’re probably not going to like it, though. Some idiot imported a wasp hive into west Africa and now the newly introduced species is tearing up the local ecosystem. We’re trying to invent a way to kill off the invasive species en masse.”

“Ah, well, you know, sometimes the ecosystem needs balancing,” Vell said. “I’ve never let my passion for wasps get in the way of understanding sometimes they need a good genocide.”

“You have a very interesting perspective on bugs, young man,” Dr. Bon said with a squint.

“If I may, Dr. Bon, how do you plan on executing your plan?” Lee said, trying to salvage the conversation. “Maybe a glimpse into the method of the College’s brilliant minds will help Vell decide where he belongs.”

“Well, I suppose I could share some details,” Dr. Bon said. “What we’re planning to do is introduce a targeted chemical agent that will attack the wasps brains and basically cause them to shut down. Like a modified version of what we use to exterminate mosquitoes in plague-heavy areas.”

“It must be hard to target a specific species of wasp, though, I imagine there’s some complicated chemistry at work,” Lee said. Dr. Bon nodded to a nearby shelf, stocked high with bottles. Vell turned around and examined it.

“Yes indeed, took us a long time to collect everything we needed.”

The bottles were all labeled, but as Vell was not a chemistry major, they were labeled in varying degrees of gibberish. He took a pair of glasses out of his pocket, tapped the edge of the lenses, and put them on as he did a second scan of the shelves.

“Incredibly interesting, Dr. Boniventure, is there any chance I could observe this experiment happening?”

“Sorry, Ms. Burrows, but this one’s off limits,” Dr. Bon said. “We’ll be sealing the lab at eight pm tonight.”

Vell looked up from the shelves, and Lee met his gaze. While his stare bore a note of vague panic, Lee barely registered the new complication. In her experience, minor complications like changing schedules rarely amounted to much. She’d once had to disarm a nuclear bomb in thirty seconds, having to stop a wasp attack in a few hours was barely worth mentioning.

“Sorry for the quick interruption, Dr. Boniventure, I just have to talk to Vell real quick,” Lee said. “We need to discuss something. We might be back, so don’t lock us out just yet.”

Dr. Bon nodded as they hurried off back into the hallway. Lee grabbed her phone, as did Vell.

“I need to call Harley and let her know we have to advance our timetable,” Lee said. Vell held up a hand to slow her down.

“Hey hey hey wait, are Harley or Leanne chemistry majors? Ask them if they know about pheromone stuff,” Vell said.

“Why?”

“Because I scanned the bottles and one of them is labeled wrong,” Vell said. “It says it’s a pheromone that induces mating, but it’s actually a pheromone that induces aggression.”

Vell held up his phone. An itemized list of every bottle he’d looked at was displayed on screen, including details about the contents.

“How do you know it was labeled wrong?”

Vell removed his glasses and displayed the edge to Lee. There were small runes carved into the sides of the frames. Vell put his phone away so he could point at runes.

“There’s some runes here that see, identify, then search, combined with some ciruitry to link them all together in the right way,” Vell explained. “And then I’ve got a chip in the glasses that connects to my phone, and the phone connects to the internet, so basically I just look at something and the glasses tell my phone to look it up.”

“Yes, I’m aware of the system,” Lee said. A sudden edge of skepticism cut into her voice. “Isn’t that a Kraid Tech copyright?”

“Technically,” Vell said.

“And you’re using them?”

“Uh, well yes,” Vell said. “I’m not connected to Kraid Tech or anything if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“Then you stole them?”

“No! Not, uh, literally, at least. I sort of stole the idea of them. I just saw some Kraid Tech guys using them and then I made my own later?”

“You rebuilt a mechanism that complicated from memory?” Lee asked.

“It took more than one try.”

“Still, it’s as impressive as it is concerning,” Lee said. “Aren’t you worried their copyright will still apply?”

Kraid Tech’s copyright department, like their founder Alistair Kraid, had a reputation for being merciless -some of their magical copyright protections left a mark on the offending thief’s soul.

“I’m not worried,” Vell said. He had a bit of a loophole when it came to certain legal punishments, even -and especially- ones aimed at the soul.

“If you said so,” Lee said. “For now, those will be very useful. I think that mislabeled bottle may be our culprit.”

“Do you want to just go in and tell Dr. Bon she’s got a bottle out of place?”

“Oh, it’s never that simple,” Lee sighed. “Remember what I said about the Butterfly Effect not really applying? The universe will move towards the events that already happened. Even if we told her, she’d just forget, or the bottle would get misplaced, or something. We have to neutralize it more permanently.”

“So what, do we walk in there and pretend to trip and knock over the bottle or something?”

“As a last resort, perhaps,” Lee said. “But causing trouble like that would give us a bad reputation and make our job far more difficult in the long run. Breaking things is a specialty of Harley’s, however. I’ll stick around and be ready to make a distraction, you go help her set up.”

Vell nodded, and after receiving directions, headed off to Harley’s room.

“While getting you in the bedroom was always on the agenda, this is a bit ahead of schedule, so pardon the mess,” Harley said. True to her word, the room was disorganized, though mostly as part of her unpacking at the start of the semester. The detritus around the room consisted mostly of clothes and electronic components. Harley started digging around for some of the pieces she needed, mumbling under her breath about things like actuators and steppers.

“So I take it you’re a tech major,” Vell noted, looking at the electronics scattered haphazardly across her room.

“Yep, specifically robotics!”

Harley stood and triumphantly displayed a small mechanical body -noticeably absent a head. With a flourish of her hand, a small orb bearing two mechanical lenses appeared in her palm.

“This is my familiar, Botley,” Harley said. The golf-ball sized head glanced side to side. Vell glanced right back at the tiny head.

“Your familiar is a robot?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought they, uh, couldn’t do that,” Vell said. He wasn’t an expert in magic, but he knew enough to be pretty sure a familiar had to be a living thing.

“Don’t worry about it,” Harley said. “Look at all the cool stuff Botley can do!”

Demonstrating one such instance of cool stuff, Harley plugged the disembodied head into the spiderlike frame, and the limbs began to move. She dropped Botley on the floor and he immediately started scuttling in the direction of the entomology lab. As a school for advanced tech, a few scuttling robots were to be expected, so Botley didn’t draw any attention as he traveled. Every few seconds, Harley pressed a palm to her fingertips to her head to share Botley’s sight.

“Hmm, I have to replace those servo’s, the left leg is a bit sticky,” Harley noted. “Botley’s almost in position. I’m going to need to take manual control soon. You know how this works?”

“Yep. Keep your body relatively still and the environment relatively silent to maintain synchronicity, and don’t let any physical harm occur to the body.”

While transferring one’s consciousness to a familiar was a useful process, it came with the risk of psychic backlash if the original body was disturbed. It was almost never harmful, but it was a major headache. Harley nodded in approval of Vell’s understanding, and pointed towards a nearby chair.

“Take a seat and keep an eye on me while I’m out,” Harley instructed. Vell carefully removed a bra from the appointed seat and sat down.

“Alright, where are you going to be lying down?”

In answer, Harley turned around, sat on Vell’s lap, and went limp. He grabbed around her waist and held her tight to avoid disrupting the psychic link. He questioned whether or not to ask whether this was a joke, but even noise could disrupt the link, and he didn’t want to be responsible for her headache.

As seconds dragged on to minutes, Vell started to realize it wasn’t a joke.

Lee gave a nod to Botley as he approached. It was time to start the distraction. She opened the door and let Botley slip into the entomology lab by creeping around her ankles.

“Oh Dr. Boniventure, could I bother you one more time?”

“Of course Ms. Burrows, I have some spare time before the experiment,” Dr. Bon said.

“Well, I was actually discussing that experiment with my father over the phone earlier, and he seemed genuinely interested,” Lee said. She restrained a sigh as she saw Dr. Bon’s ears perk up the way any professor’s did when she mentioned her father.

While Dr. Bon began brown-nosing, Botley scuttled into position. Through their now-shared mechanical eyes, Harley appraised her climb. Lot’s of plastic and glass on the way up, thanks to all the terrariums. She hadn’t packed Botley’s adhesive footpads. This was going to be slow work.

Carefully wedging Botley’s pointed legs into whatever solid footing she could find, Harley ascended the shelves, moving limb-by-limb up the slipper shelves. With one final pull from Botley’s forelimbs, the machine ascended to the top of the shelf. The rack of chemicals, and the presumed source of today’s doomsday, was just a few steps away. Harley guided the bot one step forward, and then down, as a mesh roof to a tank gave way under Botley’s weight.

“What was that?” Dr. Bon said, at the sudden noise.

“Sorry, my fault, I think I slipped a bit and kicked the edge of your desk,” Lee said. She then veered the conversation back towards the experiment, hoping to distract Dr. Bon from Botley’s shenanigans.

The arachnid in the tank Botley had fallen into did not take kindly to the intrusion. The scorpion emerged from it’s hiding place and expressed it’s displeasure in the traditional scorpion manner, which consisted mostly of showing that it’s stinger was ready to sting and it’s pincers were ready to pince. There was also a bit of mandible action, for those looking closely.

Harley tried to mimic the scorpions threat display as best she could with Botley’s significantly less pointy limbs. The scorpion was duly cowed by the strange display of the odd robot that had stumbled it’s way into its home and backed off. Harley scanned the terrarium for a way out, and settled for the mesh that had collapsed. Part of it still clung to the lid of the terrarium, and assuming it held under the weight, Harley could climb it back to the top. She cautiously set Botley’s limbs to crawl up the loose mesh grate and managed to begin her ascent, the mesh wobbling below her borrowed body all the while.

Halfway through the climb, the ascent became much more stable -suspiciously so. Harley turned Botley’s head down to see that the scorpion had latched on to either side of the mesh with it’s pincers and was holding it steady. As Botley’s examined the scorpion, Harley would almost swear it’s tail bobbed twice in the direction she was traveling, goading her further out of the terrarium.

Harley made the executive decision not to think about that, and continued climbing.

The minute she was out of the tank and up on the shelves once again, though, she turned back to look at the scorpion -who was itself now climbing out of the tank and finding it’s footing atop the shelves. The scorpion turned and gave a wave with one pincer that mimicked a salute before dropping off the shelves and scuttling away.

Harley briefly considered the issue of a hyper-intelligent scorpion on the loose, and decided it was a problem for a different time and a different person. She set her own skittering limbs towards the mislabeled bottle.

Botley’s spherical head turned to Lee to check on her distraction. Dr. Bon was wrapped in a rant about the virtues of her experiments, and barely noticed as Lee turned to check on Harley’s progress. Seeing that Botley was in position, Lee winked. Harley tried to wink back, but the borrowed body of Botley didn’t have eyelids. She settled for reaching out one metal limb and knocking the bottle off the shelf. She waited until she heard the crash to poof her robotic familiar back to her physical body.

Botley reappeared by Harley’s body with a puff of smoke, and the link broke almost immediately. Back in her own body, and still sitting in Vell’s lap, she quickly stood to stretch out tired limbs. Vell also stood, though in a much wobblier manner. Both of his legs had fallen asleep.

“Looks like mission accomplished, bud,” Harley said. “Good job keeping me steady. You get handsy with anything while I was out?”

Vell looked down at her and squinted.

“What? No,” he said, vaguely offended.

“Good on you,” Harley said. “Just because I like to bang doesn’t mean you can disrespect my boundaries. That said, how about you and I meet up on the first loop tomorrow for a ‘successful first mission’ celebratory screw?”

Vell considered the offer very intensely but very briefly. While the idea of consequence free sex by exploiting a time loop had it’s appeal, there were other factors at play.

“Thank you for the offer, but I think I’m going to spend most of tomorrow consumed by existential dread that I’m going to die at an unknown time for an unknown reason.”

Harley gave an understanding nod.

“That’s fair. You take all the time you need to get used to it,” Harley said, patting him on the shoulder. “It’s an open invitation.”

“I will keep that in mind,” Vell said.

“So that’s all, huh? One broken bottle.”

“Well, the loss of the bottle has delayed the experiment, and I persuaded Dr. Bon to be more careful the second time around, so I’d say yes, job well done.”

The team of time-loopers had regrouped to debrief -although Leanne, who was both uninvolved and uninterested, was merely looking at her phone. Harley had assured Vell that Leanne took her responsibilities seriously, when she had them, but her brand of talents leaned more towards the physical.

“We usually get these things on the first try,” Harley assured Vell. “Don’t worry too much about it.”

“We have been an exceptionally efficient unit so far,” Lee said. “As one can obviously tell by the fact the world hasn’t ended, this group has never failed in it’s mission, and I believe we have everything we need to carry on that winning streak.”

“Yeah, we’ve got my tech, Lee’s magic, Leanne’s muscles, and, well, whatever you bring to the table,” Harley said. “Not trying to be rude, it’s just as far as I know the only thing you’ve done is get sat on.”

“I get it,” Vell said.

“He has some rather interesting glasses, and a very masterful grasp of rune technology,” Lee said.

“Yeah! See, that’s a thing! We’re going to be a great team,” Harley said.

“Indeed,” Lee said. She clapped her hands together. “Now, decorum would naturally suggest having a celebration of your first success, but given our circumstances I’d wait until tomorrow, when you can really cut loose.”

“Oh, yeah, I think I’ll be fine, I’m kind of still coping with all this,” Vell said.

“I already invited him to our own personal celebration and he turned me down,” Harley said, giving a dramatically exaggerated sigh of disappointment.

“Really, Harley, first day?”

“Summer break is a hell of a dry spell to go through,” Harley said. “I apologize for nothing.”

“Well, however you choose to celebrate, Vell, do it fast and do it recklessly. You have literally nothing to lose, after all,” Lee said. She stood and curtsied at the newest member of her team. “We’ll see each other tomorrow, and then again tomorrow.”

Lee winked at Vell and strode off. She’d barely made it around the corner before Vell heard her trip and fall to the ground. He then heard Leanne sigh, the first noise she’d made around him at all, and walked out of the room to check on Lee. With them gone, Harley turned to Vell and took a long look at him.

“So, you seem to be taking this all in stride,” Harley noted. Vell nodded in agreement. He was probably being remarkably cavalier about the whole “daily apocalypse” scenario, but then, this was not his first brush with the inexplicable.

“Yeah, well, you know, to tell the truth, this is uh, not my first time dying.”

For the first time since Vell had met her, the radiant smile on Harley’s face vanished.

“Wait, what?”

With some hesitation, Vell lifted his shirt. Hidden beneath the fabric, just below his navel, sat a large, pinkish-red scar about half an inch wide, circumnavigating his torso at an odd angle.

“I was sort of in a maglev train accident when I was ten,” Vell said. “Launched me into a metal wall at five-hundred miles an hour. I got cut in half.”

He looked up at Harley’s face to try and gauge her reaction. Luckily, she was not being subtle in her sheer confusion, and she stared down at Vell’s scar with wide, curious eyes.

“What the fuck,” Harley said, before deciding she had not said it with appropriate horror and going for another try. “What the fuck! How the fuck are you alive? We can’t do that!”

As far as Harley was aware, their advances in medical technology had yet to solve death -at least in a way that didn’t involve brains in jars or becoming a lich. Vell had far too much skin to be a lich, leaving Harley baffled as to his apparent resurrection.

“Uh, I don’t know,” Vell admitted. “They put both halves of me in the morgue and a couple hours later, I guess I unzipped myself from the body bag with this on my back.”

Vell turned slightly, to reveal a symbol on his spine, just below the scar, situated directly on his sacral chakra. It had the look of a rune, but Harley didn’t recognize it as any rune she’d ever seen -nor had any of Vell’s years of research on runes revealed a match for it. Vell lowered his shirt and turned around again.

“It’s not so bad, honestly,” Vell assured her. However it had happened, he was not dead, which was good on it’s own. He was also immune to all of Kraid Tech’s soul-marking copyright magic, since his soul was technically marked as “dead”, despite his currently-alive status.

Harley looked down at his midriff, back up at Vell’s face, then down at his midriff again. As Vell had expected, she took the strange revelation better than most. Her life was already weird enough that Vell’s resurrection was not that far from the baseline -although still far enough to be a concern.

“Vell I’m going to be honest with you I don’t think I can cope with this shit right now.”

“You have a lot on your plate already, I understand,” Vell said with a nod. Harley stood up, clapped her hands together, and bowed at Vell.

“I promise I will help you deal with this later, but right now I need to go lie down,” she said. She turned on her heel and left the room at an unsteady pace, leaving Vell alone with his thoughts -for a second. Harley peeked back through the door momentarily.

“Oh, and you being undead does not affect my offer to have sex,” Harley said. “I do not discriminate for any reason.”

“Thank you,” Vell said, for some reason. Harley waved goodbye and left Vell alone with no company but the rapidly-growing cloud of unanswered questions that surrounded him.