Hawke slammed his bookbag onto the lair’s table and sank into his seat with a massive sigh.

“Hey, bud,” Harley said. “Good to see you back.”

“Were you expecting me not to come back?”

“Not really expecting it,” Harley said. “But there was a chance. Like five percent.”

“I thought about it, honestly.”

During his short new year’s break, Hawke had considered never returning to the school more than once, but decided against it. He was already entangled in a lot of nonsense, he might as well keep hanging out with the only people who seemed to know how to handle it. Hawke could hardly ask his mom and dad for help if a mysterious goddess or an evil billionaire came after him.

“Well I’m very glad you’ve returned to us, dear,” Lee said. “How was your break?”

“I found a nice beach and sat on it for four or five hours a day,” Hawke said. “Excellent reset button for my mental health.”

“And a much needed one, from the sound of it. I’m glad you had some time to yourself.”

“How about you, Lee, how’d you survive break?”

“Barely,” Lee said, as she rolled her eyes. “My parents had me palling around with the son of some business associate of my father’s. No doubt some infantile attempt at matchmaking.”

“Ooh, a man attempting to romance Lee,” Harley said. “Where’d you hide the body?”

“I planned a nice little hole for him in the backyard, just beside the topiary, but thankfully for us both he kept his hands to himself,” Lee said. “I played along, and when the time came to part, I gave him Derek’s phone number.”

“Hah, nice,” Harley said.

“What about you, Vell, dear, how was your break?”

“Got an especially high level of mom-fussing this year,” Vell said. “She’s not super happy I’m still going to the same school I got kidnapped at.”

“I...can’t argue with that, actually,” Lee admitted. Even she had her concerns, though she had long since made peace with them.

“Weirdly, she was also trying to play matchmaker,” Vell said. “Insisted on introducing me to some coworkers daughter. The girl was nice enough, I guess, but we didn’t really hit it off.”

“Not a lucky time for love in the looper community,” Harley noted. “How’s Adele, by the way?”

“Haven’t caught up with her yet, we were going to get dinner later,” Lee said. “And what about you, Harley, what did you do on your break?”

“I did science! Behold!”

Harley threw out her hands and summoned Botley in a puff of smoke. Her machine familiar plonked down on the table and waved hello to all his friends. His diminutive form was shiny and new in every way, though the tiny, round head that formed his core had the same blank stare as always.

“Botley 2.0! He’s kind of been gathering dust so far this year, what with Kim hogging all the robot-related duties,” Harley said. Kim stayed silent, as she had been all morning. “To remind Bottles here I still love him I upgraded him with some new toys, faster processors, the works. He’s at least five percent cooler now.”

“Five percent?”

“Most science is incremental, Harlan,” Harley said. “Five percent increases are considered pretty fucking impressive in the field of robotics.”

“I know, I know,” Vell said. “That was an impressed ‘five percent?’, not a skeptical one.”

“Oh. My bad,” Harley said. “My brothers always asks real dumb questions about robots when I’m home, I get a little testy.”

“Understandable.”

“I’d like to do bigger upgrades, but I can’t really mess with Botley’s hardware too much,” Harley said. “I still don’t understand some parts of him. Pradav didn’t get to tell me all the details of his half of the work before he, you know...”

Harley poofed Botley back to her dorm and then changed the subject.

“So what about you, Kim, what’d you do over break?”

Unlike the rest of the loopers, Kim had no family or home to return to, so she’d elected to remain on campus. With no classes and therefore no loops to distract her, it should’ve been some quiet time to catch up on studies and learn a few things. It should have been, at least. Kim stared up at her gathered friends with a blank, vacant gaze.

“I met Quenay.”

Vell stared down at her, and blinked twice.

“I really feel like you should’ve mentioned that sooner,” he said.

ONE WEEK AGO

Kim stared blankly at the lone figure in her dorm room. She’d never seen them before in her life, not clearly at least, but the mismatched, multicolored clothing, the lopsided hairdo, and most of all, the barely noticeable heterochromia in her eyes all pointed to one person.

“Quenay?”

“That’s what they call me,” Quenay said. “Being honest, that’s not my real name. But you need to call me something, so…”

Quenay deliberately trailed off. Then she stood, strolled across the dorm room, and examined some of the mementos Kim had accumulated in her dorm. She grabbed mementos, when she could, and lined them up along her shelves like a timeline, a physical reminder of all she’d been through. Quenay occasionally brushed fingers along the various scraps of the past, but never disturbed them.

“Why are you here?”

“Just checking in,” Quenay said. She reached the end of Kim’s line of mementos. With a smile, Quenay reached into a pocket and withdrew a single token that looked like a coin, but blank on both faces. Much like Quenay’s eyes, the token was slightly different colors on either side. The rogue goddess placed the token at the end of Kim’s row of mementos, and it stood perfectly on it’s side, balanced between both halves.

“I was due to make a move anyway, and you seemed lonely, so why not?”

Kim had a lot of questions, but Quenay’s phrasing punted them all to the side and took place at the head of the line, stumbling out of Kim’s mouth the minute she opened it.

“Move? What move?”

“Ugh, I knew the coin was a bad visual metaphor,” Quenay sighed. “I thought about doing a chess piece that was white on one side and black on the other, but that seemed way too on the nose, you know?”

Kim stared back silently. Quenay rolled her mismatched eyes and continued.

“Do you think I’m just running around resurrecting the dead, interfering in kidnapping plots, and sparking sapience in robots for no reason? No, Kimmy, I have an objective,” Quenay said. “This is a game in which you and Vell are both pieces and players.”

The two-colored coin spun once, displaying it’s darker side to Kim.

“I brought life back to Vell, and gave new life to you, to give you a unique perspective on life itself,” Quenay continued. “Because I want you -and that’s a royal you, meaning all sapient beings- to understand why I created life in the first place.”

Kim’s eyes went wide as Quenay took a dramatic bow.

“Quenay, Goddess of Life and origin of all that lives, at your service,” she said, her voice brimming with pride. “I’m sure you’re familiar with my work. Hell, you are my work.”

The rogue goddess finished her bow and looked up at Kim. As expected, the android was paralyzed with indecision as ten-thousand different thoughts tried to force their way to the front. She looked ready to fight, run, cry, and scream all at once. Mostly scream. Quenay cut her off before she got to the breaking point. Quenay hated screaming.

“Ever since I created the first protoplasms, I’ve been trying to lead living things to a point where they’d understand why I created them in the first place,” Quenay said. “I’m not stupid enough to think you can independently evolve a higher consciousness, of course, so every couple centuries I pick a few life forms and lay out some clues. A bread crumb trail, if you will.”

Quenay reached out and tapped Kim on the nose, prompting a muffled squeak of distress.

“You and Vell and a few other pieces I’ve put in place are the bread crumbs,” Quenay said. “And a couple other things I didn’t really plan on leaving might be clues too. I’ve had to get way more involved than usual, this school is fucking weird. The kidnapping thing alone was way out of line, I couldn’t help but deus ex machina that.”

Kim was still paralyzed in confusion, but she didn’t look like she was about to scream anymore. Quenay counted that as a win, and gave Kim a pat on the shoulder.

“I’m sure you’re just bursting with questions, Kimmy, but I’ve already meddled enough. All the pieces are in place, I’ve explained all the rules, and now it’s time for you to play the game.”

Quenay stepped back and clapped her hands together, with a bright smile on her lopsided face.

“Good luck, I genuinely hope you win!”

“Wait, why does it have to be a game?” Kim snapped. “Why can’t you just tell us the answer?”

“Why can’t you just ask your friends what it’s like to be human?” Quenay countered. “Some lessons can’t be taught, Kimmy, only learned.”

Quenay waved goodbye, and in the blink of an eye, she was gone. Kim blinked twice at the empty space, then turned to the coin, still standing on it’s side. The lighter face had turned towards Kim now, though the difference was only barely noticeable.

Kim tried to lay the coin down flat, but it sprang up every time, displaying one of the two faces. Even when Kim picked it up and dropped it, the coin always found a way to bounce up to land on its side. It refused to fall until the great game had ended -for better or for worse.

The coin still stood now, dead center in the looper’s meeting table. Any attempt to disturb its perfectly even balance failed. The loopers didn’t take long to cease their futile efforts at disturbing the coin, and fell into silently staring at it.

“What does any of this mean?” Vell wondered aloud. “A ‘great game’? What are the rules? She mentioned chess, are we like the king and queen?”

“If that’s what you guys are, I want to be the horsey thing,” Harley said.

“I don’t feel the comparison will be so direct,” Lee said. “But if it is, I want to be the bishop.”

“What does that make me, a pawn?”

“No, Hawke, dear, you could be a rook.”

“Aren’t we getting off track here?” Kim asked.

“Yes, but the track is an existential nightmare. I don’t want to be on the track,” Harley said.

“It’s called a coping mechanism, darling,” Lee said. “At the rate your life is going, you’re going to need several of them.”