KD twisted its arm until it was as taut as a rubberband. “Then I shall forcibly seize the Wave Wobble Modulator from you!” And whipped a spinning fist at Brian.

However, Brian snapped his attention toward KD and the attack was frozen while midflight.

With the psionic focus shifted away to stop the strike, Haru suddenly regained control of her body and stumbled forward, almost planting her face in the dirt.

“This is foul play! This is dishonourable!” KD protested.

Brian simply shrugged, then nodded up. KD was sent flying up. Gone within a blink. And seconds later, a black dot appeared in the bruised purple sky. Followed by a yell that grew louder and louder as it gradually approached the ground.

“You have to save it!” Haru said. As tough as KD was, a drop from orbit might cause a considerable amount of damage. Possibly even death.

Brian shrugged. “Sorry. Can’t have you taking the Wave Wobble Modulator.”

Haru was a nervous jackrabbit, her heart in her throat. KD’s long undulating arms were fluttering, its black body crashing ever closer to earth. Soon a splattered stain in a crater if she did nothing to stop the fatal impact.

“Why not though!”

“It helps us stay calm, keep the Brainy Folk on the down-low. Keep me on the down-low. With it gone, this whole place will be in total chaos again.”

“Well if that’s the case, then I promise we won’t take it for you all. We didn’t know that you needed it. I swear!” Haru pleaded. The KD was plummeting fast, a comet out of space. “Please save KD! You have my word, yo!”

And just as KD was about to violently kiss dirt, the collision course was averted at the last second.

“Thank you.” Haru wiped the sweat from her palms onto her overalls.

Brian righted KD onto its feet. “I expect you to hold your promise.”

“Oh we will. Right, KD?” Haru eyeballed it adamantly.

“Wh… what?” KD was still trying to find its footing after its journey to the stratosphere.

“We promise not to take the Wave Wobble Modulator unless we find some way to replace it. That is, if that’s okay with you?” She asked Brian.

“You can certainly try. I’m okay with that, yeah. But if you try to pull a fast one on me, I’ll send you two in the vacuum of space. Got it?”

Haru and KD nodded vehemently.

For a supposed ruin, the Science Department of the AIT was surprisingly intact. The floors were clean of debris. Glass fixtures on offices and rooms were an unshattered pane. And aside from the flickering fluorescent tubes that mired parts of hallways and atriums in partial darkness, the building was close to untouched. Normal, even. Like the way it used to be in the past. It was sort of nostalgic for Haru despite not having lived a life within these walls. More so a longing for a future that could have been. An entirely different world had the Folding never happened.

Haru and KD followed Brian down a spiralling staircase of steel and stone, descending deeper into the department. It was eerily quiet. Their footsteps echoed through the empty floors. The building felt abandoned, barren of any indication of life, until Haru peered into the offices with her flashlight.

Goosebumps raised like a rash on her arms.

Brainy Folks were everywhere. Within the dim rooms, the darkest corners, tucked away into crevices like a book on a dusty shelf. They looked worse for wear, far more maladjusted in comparison to Brian. They hovered about in a perpetual loop, mumbling wordlessly, biting their nails. When Haru stopped to look at one of them, a Brainy Folk twiddling its lengthy thumbs, something animal was provoked and they raised up walls from the floor.

“Please, excuse them.” Brian smiled apologetically. “The dread has made them rather territorial and… anti-social.”

“You’re not, though,” Haru noted.

“That’s because I’m around the Wave Wobble Modulator all day, keeping it running, and my territory is outside on the quad. Usually I’d shoo strangers away or throw them into space but…” He scratched his saggy head. “This is the most I’ve talked in a very long time, actually.”

“You don’t talk to the other Brainy Folks?”

Brain shook his head. “Too stuck in their own heads for a conversation. Or a good one, at least. So was I. The most that we’d ever do together is play video games except those are silent affairs. Just wanted to numb the brain. And when the last console went extinct on campus, everybody just kept to themselves.”

At the bottom level, evidence of chaos was pitted and scarred onto the floor and walls. Slabs of marble were torn in places. Light fixtures dangled shattered from the ceiling, plunging whole areas into pitch black. An oppressive coldness beared down upon Haru from all directions. She stuck close to KD.

“The people that got stuck in here when the Folding started, they all became Brainy Folk. Like me.” Brian shook his head as though to get a memory loose. “Those thoughts, the dread. It was awful. It crippled everyone. Talking was virtually impossible without breaking down into depressive ramblings. The only way to stop the spiral was with video games. And it worked for a while too. The problem is, our consoles only lasted so long, and when one of us had no games to play… well…” He gestured to a broken table. It was caved in at the centre, its edges splintered into a serrated row of wooden teeth. The legs were torn off, and they looked sharp as stakes. “I didn’t want to end up like one of them when my console broke down. I searched for spare parts, anything that could fix it. That was how I found the Wave Wobble Modulator. I’ve rigged it in such a way that it keeps all the Brainy Folk pacified on campus.”

“Do you think there’s a spare that we can have?” Haru asked.

“I don’t know. I haven’t investigated the lab any further since the last time I was down there. Why do you need it anyway?” Brain glanced back.

“We need it to trade for a console.”

“Oh. What game do you like to play?”

“Atomic Shock III.”

“No way. That’s my favourite! Who do you main?”

“Leifa.”

“That’s sick. I usually main Cobolt but I do like to play as Leifa from time to time,” Brian said as he lifted up a veil of loose cable wires.

As Haru ducked under to go through, she looked behind and saw that KD was gone. Alarm set in as she feared that they had snuck away to steal the Wave Wobble Modulator. Much to her relief though, they had only wandered off to a nearby display.

Strung up in a glass case was the skeleton of a long-necked creature with paddle-shaped limbs and a broad set of ribs akin to the hull of a ship. The long rounded skull reminded Haru of a reptile.

“What is this confounding creature?” KD asked.

“That’s a dinosaur,” Haru said.

“A di-no-soar?” KD enunciated.

“A plesiosaurus to be exact,” said Brian. “Those bad boys used to swim in the ocean during the Triassic Period. Eating mainly fishies.”

“Hehe. Fishies.”

“Must be a worthy opponent. One’s battle prowess is always measured by the length of their limbs.” KD turned to Brian. “May I stay here to study this deadly specimen further?”

Brian eyed KD like a criminal. “I don’t know, friendo…”

“Can we trust you to stay here?” Haru glared.

As much as she wanted to grab the Wave Wobble Modulator and run, a jab of sympathy kept her hands in her pockets. For a long time, the video game console was the only thing she had to dull the pain of loneliness. The dread of existence, those lonely nights in her room. She was lucky to have KD as a Player Two, somebody to share a controller with. The Brainy Folks had none of that anymore. The Wave Wobble Modulator was the only thing that kept them sane, and Haru did not have the heart to take that away from them. There had to be another way.

KD placed one hand on their chest and raised the other. “Upon the honour of the Ratioli clan, I swear that I will do nothing foolish.”

Brian pursed his lips, considering. Then thick metal shutters fell in the hallway, cutting the passage back to the surface. “Just in case.”

Leaving KD behind with the plesiosaurus, Haru and Brian continued farther down the hallway. Eventually they were funnelled into a corridor with white-bricked walls and a grand double door. Brian pushed open the doors with its psionic abilities and they stepped through.

Upon entering, the lights flickered on. The whole laboratory had a soft green glow. Cables of various colours snaked all throughout the stark white floor, plugged into plexiglass cabinets slotted with rows of motherboards, computables covered in a film of dust, some even hanging from the ceiling like vines in a jungle. At the centre of the laboratory, amongst the menagerie of old world technology—which would fetch a high price on the market—stood something like a pedestal. Robotic arms with pincers for hands stared at it intently, forever poised with open jaws to grab something that was no longer there.

Brian pointed. “That’s where I found it.”

Haru wandered over to a workbench with shiny metal pieces, electrical parts and curious tools. They laid there like puzzle pieces, and it made her head spin.

“Do you think you can slap another together with the parts here?”

“Not without a blueprint. And it’s too risky to take apart the Wave Wobble Modulator to reverse engineer it. I’m sorry.”

Haru frowned. “No more Atomic Shock III, I guess. I really wanted to play with KD too.”

“Maybe I can offer you a board game instead?”

“No thanks. The rules are too confusing for KD, anyway.”

“I feel you. When I tried playing Taverns & Trolls with my friends back at the office, they gave up after the first session because it was too—”

A violent shock had rattled and jolted the Science Department. Haru steadied herself against a computable. Her hand brushed over the console and it suddenly booted up. The home screen flashed on. It displayed the picture of a group of researchers, all dressed in white lab coats, close and friendly as they stood proudly with the Wave Wobble Modulator. Amongst the researchers was a woman with square-framed glasses, a puffy top knot, and an awfully familiar face. Haru could recognize that dimpled smile anywhere. It was her mother. And to her immediate right was a stout man with a neatly trimmed beard and frizzy beard. He looked like Trash Wizard except clean cut and normal. She wanted to inspect the picture further but pieces of the ceiling started to fall overhead. However, it broke apart harmlessly on the psionic dome that Brian threw over her.

“What the heck was that, yo?”

“I don’t know. But whatever it is, I’d rather not stay here to find out. Let’s go.”

Together, Haru and Brian deserted the laboratory and hurried back to KD at the plesiosaurus. Worry bubbled in Haru’s throat, that maybe they were pinned under a hunk of rubble and laid helplessly unconscious on the floor. When they returned to the dinosaur bones though, KD was gone. Nowhere to be found. She wondered where they could have gone. The shutters were down, the way back to the staircase to the surface blocked. She glanced up: a hole was in the ceiling. Punched through, most definitely.

It went straight to the surface.

A horrific possibility dawned upon Haru. “You don’t think…”

Brian thought the same too. With his psionic powers, he rocketed them both through the floors. Each level was a glimpse of anarchy as Brainy Folk flung anything and everything around like children in a psychotic tantrum.

The glare of the purple sun was diffused by the patchy fog miring the campus. The air was crisp after her time underground, yet she struggled to pull in a full breath. Her skin prickled from a strong chill. Which was odd, considering that the afternoon was fairly warm before they went into the Science Department. That was when Haru realised the surrounding glassy towers were gone.

A flock of birds sailed overhead.

“We’re up in the sky,” Brian confirmed.

And, as the floating campus rose through the clouds, Haru saw KD, holding the Wave Wobble Modulator that they ripped from the metal sculpture.