“Do you possess the tribute we agreed upon?”

“Yes yes, hold your horses, your overlordliness,” Harley said. “Lee’s got the thing in her purse and she’s on her way. Might get here faster if you called off the soul dragons.”

“I will call off my beasts when you have paid me my due,” said Lord Xoraxixoxexuxyx, fallen king of the Twelfth Realm, keeper of souls, supreme lich-lord of the dead, and holder of more x’s in his name than any other dark lord. The black gaze of his hollow eyesockets stared down at Harley, impassive to any of her concerns.

“I’m just saying, your lichliness, if your goal is to get a soulstone ASAP, you’re only slowing yourself down here,” Harley said.

“If your friend is incapable of conquering even my lowliest soul-wyrms, you are all unworthy of my mercy,” said the many X’d lord. Vell watched with some concern as one of said soul wyrms breathed a lance of fire that cut a hapless fleeing student in half. Lord Xorax(etc) had promised to make the loopers his servants (and, more importantly, tell them how he’d been summoned in the first place) if they retrieved a soulstone for him. They needed the info to prevent him being summoned on the second loop, but Vell still didn’t like playing second fiddle to a Dark Lord. He wasn’t even good at evil chuckling.

The further devastation of the undead army was slightly undercut by the crack of a whip in the distance. With a quick flick, Lee latched on to one of the soul worms and used it to swing over the heads of several skeletal legionnaires. She then dismounted from her arcing swing by hitting the ground hard and falling forward, faceplanting directly into the dirt in front of the lich.

“Almost had it,” Lee mumbled through a mouthful of grass.

“You looked real cool until the last two seconds there, babe,” Harley said.

“It’s better than not looking cool at all,” Hawke said.

“Thank you for trying, but let’s focus on what matters,” Lee said. She brushed the dirt off her cardigan and held up her purse. “Sorry I’m late, your undeadliness, I just happened to leave my purse in the dorm. Today of all days, right?”

“I care for no excuses,” said Lord Many-X’s. “Offer me the soulstone.”

“Of course, sir, just a moment,” Lee said. She stuck her hand in her purse to fetch the soulstone. At that exact moment, the soul wyrm she had hitched a ride on found her, and, having taken offense to her hijacking, blasted a gout of green-black fire in her direction. At her purse, to be specific.

Thankfully the gout of dark fire was intense enough that Lee barely felt her forearm getting disintegrated. She looked down at the empty space where her arm, and her purse, had just been, then let out a soft hum of discontent.

“Well that’s no good,” she said. Hawke let out a scream and nearly fainted. “Oh don’t be like that, dear, the wound’s cauterized and everything.”

Lee displayed the charred stump of her arm, which did not help at all, and then tucked it behind her back for Hawke’s sake.

“The larger problem, as I see it,” said Lee, who was well into her third year of looping and had been dismembered too many times for it to be noteworthy anymore. “Is that our soulstone is now temporarily out of reach.”

“Then let the rain of black fire begin!”

Lord X raised his hands to the skies, and opened up vast black chasms in the heavens, with which to shower the earth in dark infernos.

“No, hold on a moment, no rain of black fire just yet please,” Lee said. “We can still get you your soulstone.”

“Lee, I don’t want to poo-poo the moment here, but we just lost the soulstone,” Kim said. “Also your arm.”

“Don’t worry, darling, my purse is merely a magical gateway to an extradimensional storage space,” Lee said. “Really, did you think I was carrying all those things around in a normal purse this whole time?”

“I...maybe,” Kim said. She then made a sharp pivot away from her own mistaken assumption. “How else can we get the soulstone?”

“There’s another entrance in my dorm, and one in the lair,” Lee said, a bit slower than usual.

“I still think it was a bad idea to tie your pocket dimension to the one you found in the lair,” Harley said.

“It’s not a problem, dear, you just reach in and grab whatever you need, easy as that,” Lee said. Her face was starting to get pale now.

“Yeah, it works that way for you,” Harley said. “But you’re about to hit the shock wall pretty hard and pass out.”

“I’m not- oh, there it goes,” Lee said, her voice suddenly very faint. “Catch me.”

Harley’s hands had been extended to stop her fall before Lee had even asked. She caught Lee and laid her down gently on the ground to ride out the aftermath of her arm’s disintegration.

“Well, it’s fifty-fifty she wakes up from this, to be honest,” Harley said with a sigh. Watching Lee die always hit a little harder, no matter how many times Harley saw it happen.

“If she dies, I can twist her flesh and bone into a mighty carrion golem,” Lord X said, before examining her burnt arm. “Slightly less mighty than most, since she’s missing a bit of flesh and bone, but still.”

“Not exactly helpful, your boneliness,” Harley said.

“Vell, what do we do now?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“I don’t know! You’re basically in charge after Lee, right?”

“I thought you were Lee’s deputy,” Vell said.

“I’m more of a sidekick than a deputy,” Harley said.

“I vote for Vell,” Hawke said. Kim also raised her hand in favor.

“Wow, okay.”

“What, you wanted him to be in charge too.”

“I expected at least a pity vote,” Harley said. She then stopped protesting and ceded authority. “Vell! What do we do?”

“Uh, okay, shit….uh, Harley, you said only Lee would be able to grab the soulstone easily?”

“Yep. Security measure. She can summon anything she wants out of it, but anybody else would have to physically enter the pocket dimension and find what they were looking for.”

“Huh. And the soulstone she has is…”

“Joan’s, yeah.”

Vell cringed. His former lover had sworn off dark magic and entrusted her soulstone to Lee for safekeeping, since destroying a soulstone was just as dangerous and unethical as creating one. Since he was unfortunately familiar with the rock that had once been used to kidnap and murder him, Vell could conjure up a tracking rune to locate it.

“Alright, Kim, Hawke, you go track down the soulstone,” Vell said, as he handed over the rune. “Me and Harley will stay here to look after Lee and make sure Lord Xoraxexexex...ex doesn’t nuke the world before you get back.”

“What is a ‘nuke’?”

“We also have to stop him from finding out what a nuke is,” Vell whispered. “Go get the thingy, asap.”

Kim and Hawke accepted the tracking rune, and their mission, with a quick nod, and set off towards the lair.

“Maybe we should’ve gone to Lee’s dorm.”

“Why?” Hawke asked. “This was closer.”

Kim held up her hands to Hawke’s torso, which was very broad, and then held them up to the locker, which was not so broad. Hawke, reminded of his status as a prodigiously thick lad, nodded in realization.

“Ah, well, this is going to be very uncomfortable then,” Hawke said. “Physically and mentally!”

After roughly three minutes of gut-sucking, shoving, and strained grunting, Kim managed to push Hawke through the locker entrance. Kim had been built slim, and slipped through the pocket dimension’s gateway with ease. She took one step forward, and found nothing to step on. The gateway was apparently hanging in midair. Kim plummeted downwards, landing on the last person to plummet downwards: Hawke.

“Ow.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault,” Hawke groaned. “But you do have a metal skeleton. Please get off me.”

Kim stood, giving Hawke a chance to breath, and took in their surroundings. Piles of scrap and detritus made up an expansive landscape that seemed to have no end, with larger fragments poking up as landmarks occasionally. Across the rolling hills of garbage, Kim could see a skull the size of a building, the husks of an entire robot army, and what appeared to be a mountain of jelly.

“Oh jeez,” Hawke said, as he took in the sights. “That’s a lot bigger than I was expecting.”

“Decades of loopers must’ve used this thing as a dumping ground,” Kim said. The accumulated leftovers of thousands of apocalypses had formed an entire alien landscape in the pocket dimension.

“And Lee attached her purse to this?”

“An extradimensional void is an extradimensional void, I guess,” Kim said with a shrug. “We just have to find the soulstone.”

“Right, the rock that fits in the palm of your hand. In this.”

The expanse of the storage dimension, and all its myriad oddities, spread out before them, wild and incomprehensible. Overhead, a malfunctioning satellite rocketed through the sky, trailing magical sparks behind it. Just behind it’s sparking trail, a cloud of bees the size of elephants swarmed along the sparks, devouring the magic contained within. Hawke let out a deep sigh.

“Maybe somebody shoved a car in the locker,” Hawke said hopefully. “Or the stone’s right on top of that pile of arms over there.”

Kim said nothing. Better to let Hawke hold on to his slim hopes.

Hawke was proven right -someone had shoved a car into the locker. Unfortunately for them, it was a prototype self-driving car, and the onboard AI had turned evil. While Hawke held on to the hood of the murder car for dear life, Kim alternated between scanning for something useful amid the trash, and also running for dear life. Thankfully the random detritus also made it difficult for the car to reach top speed, and Kim could keep ahead of it as she searched.

“Come on, come on,” Kim said. “If somebody threw away an evil car, somebody had to throw away a gun, or something!”

“Left, go left, there’s spears,” Hawke shouted.

“What is a spear going to do?”

“More than nothing!”

The engine of the evil car roared, and Kim was forced to concede that Hawke had a point. Better to try anything at all than keep running in circles. Kim dashed for the pile of archaic weaponry, grabbed a Roman pilum at random, and chucked it in the direction of the evil car.

The spear hit the grille hard, but did not do enough damage to actually stop the car. It did, however, unlatch the hood. The hood Hawke was currently clinging to. The sheet of metal went up, and took Hawke with it, slamming him hard into the evil car’s windshield.

“This is worse!”

“It was your idea!”

Opening the hood had accomplished one thing, at least: it gave Kim a very good view of the engine, and all of it’s many moving parts, belts, and valves. An idea sparked in her electronic brain, and she started picking up handfuls of whatever jagged junk she could get her hands on, tossing it over her shoulders at the car that pursued her. After a few handfuls of detritus had been tossed into the exposed mechanisms, the roar of the engine became a clatter which became a clunk. A random chunk of whale bone proved to be the final straw for the evil car, which spewed out fire and smoke before it’s engine finally shut down and the car rolled to a halt.

It took a few moments of motionless for Hawke to feel safe trying to dismount the demon car. When he did so, he retrieved a spear from the nearby pile and kept it pointed at the car as he backed away.

“I’m pretty sure it’s dead, Hawke,” Kim assured him.

“I’ve been dead before,” Hawke said. “I’m not taking my eyes off that thing.”

“You haven’t really been- Well, technically, whatever,” Kim said. “And put that stick away. Don’t you have the Monkey King’s staff?”

“Oh yeah, right.”

Hawke removed the disguised staff from his pocket and extended it to a weaponized size. He swung the magic rod once and then planted it in the ground. He glanced at Kim, then at the car, then back at Kim. She was no expert in human psychology, but even she could tell what he was thinking.

“Do it.”

“Should I?”

“It’ll make you feel better,” Kim said.

It didn’t take much more convincing than that. Hawke extended the Jingu Bang to a massive length (he still didn’t want to get close to the car) and then hefted the extended weapon over his head. With massive, hammering swipes, Hawke brought the Jingu Bang down on the car, then hit it again, and again, and again.

“Stupid! Fucking! Car!”

Hawke swung again, this time going for a sweeping blow that hit the car from the side.

“Your steering is shit,” Hawke shouted. “And your upholstery! Is! Tacky!”

“That’s your go-to insult?”

“My mom’s an interior designer,” Hawke said. Kim brain-googled that term real quick and then nodded in understanding, as Kim extended the magic staff in her direction. “Do you want a swing?”

“I’m good, I already killed it.”

A few swings later, the evil car was all but completely destroyed, and Hawke was ready to move on. He slung the Jingu Bang over his shoulder and pulled out the tracking rune. According to Vell, the glowing beacon extending from the rune would start pulsing faster the closer they got to the target. Hawke didn’t think it was pulsing any faster than it had been thirty minutes ago.

“When we get out of here, I’m telling Lee to get a new purse,” Hawke said. “We could be in here for hours at this rate.”

“Give or take an hour for a few more incidents,” Kim said.

“Don’t tempt fate.”

“Fate has been tempted, indulged, and tempted again,” Kim said. “This school is a nightmare. It’s a question of when, not if.”

“You ever wonder what this school is like for a normal person?” Hawke pondered aloud. “Just normal studying and labs, occasional glances of weird stuff and a few lunatics running around it all.”

“I don’t think it’s that normal for anyone,” Kim said. “Pretty much everyone saw those jetpacks we left lying around, and every now and then a gorilla shows up.”

“True. Still, though, it’s got to be a lot different, right?”

“I don’t know. I don’t really talk to people who aren’t loopers.”

“Yeah, me neither.”

The duo made it about ten steps before the weight of the situation became too much to bear.

“Okay, I know I’ve said this before, but we really need to join a club or something,” Hawke said. “What do you like, do you like chess? No, wait, you’re a supercomputer, you’d be way too good at chess.”

“I don’t want to join a club, Hawke.”

“I guess making it to scheduled meetings would be a pain in the ass with the way our lives go,” Hawke said. “What about something less serious? Like those guys who get drunk and do Shakespeare in the quad?”

“I don’t want to do that either,” Kim said.

“Then what do you want to do?”

“I don’t know,” Kim grunted. “Nothing? I don’t really get along with people that easily.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Hawke said. “But, even if it were, come on, I need the help. If I go into a club and I don’t know anyone, I’m going to freak out. Help me out here.”

“You’ll be fine.”

“I will not be fine, Kim, I’m already high strung as it is, I need emotional support for-”

Hawke took another step forward, and something beneath his foot went squish. He froze in place, took a very deep breath, and closed his eyes.

“Kim. What am I standing in?”

“Uh...I think it used to be a sandwich,” Kim said. “Decades ago. Now it’s mostly mold.”

The decrepit husk of something that had once been food was now splattered beneath Hawke’s foot. Anything that had once been recognizable as lunch meat or condiments in the long-abandoned lunch of a looper from decades’ past had now become little more than an amalgamation of mold and fungi. In spite of the disgusting circumstance, Hawke actually breathed a sigh of relief.

“Oh, that’s way better than anything I was afraid of,” Hawke said. “I thought I was about get my leg bitten off by-”

“It moved!”

Hawke let out a shrill scream and managed to kick his foot so hard the shoe flew right off. He hopped away on one leg and retreated behind a pile of debris with Kim, peeking over the edge to watch the mold colony.

“Do you think it got, like, irradiated,” Hawke wondered aloud. “What made it come alive?”

“It might have been here for decades,” Kim said. “Maybe mold just does that if you leave it long enough.”

The two of them continued watching the mound of mold from behind a displaced sheet of metal. It didn’t move.

“So, when it moved, did it like, have a tendril, or just writhe, or-”

The motionless mold mound continued to be motionless as Hawke turned to face the oddly silent Kim. She deliberately avoided eye contact.

“Kim.”

“In retrospect it might...possibly...have just been your foot moving,” Kim admitted.

“Uh huh,” Hawke growled. “And did you happen to see where my shoe went?”

“No.”

The two stared at nothing in particular for a long time.

“You’re definitely joining a club with me now,” Hawke said.

“Okay.”