“I knew we should’ve scheduled this for a day without a loop,” Harley muttered to herself. She checked the pressure on the pipes again and nodded approvingly. At least the plumbing exploding was a new kind of apocalypse. She didn’t know if Lee could handle the stress of dealing with old foes like the Marine Biology department right now.

Though Lee was doing her best to contact her co-conspirators, it seemed that the plan was doomed to fail, a victim of time’s inevitable habit of repeating itself. What she had assumed to be a cohesive conspiracy had revealed itself to be a mess of infighting, carelessness, and selfish behavior -every “ally” she had spoken to so far had been very adamant in wanting more than what they were getting out of the deal. Lee cursed herself for not assuming such selfishness in anyone who dealt with her father. Each of the shareholders she’d gotten in touch with were practically tripping over themselves to be the first to betray the others. So far, no hint of her own involvement in the scheme was showing, and Lee was confident in her ability to cover her tracks, but she was more concerned with the plan failing than her part in it being discovered. Or she should have been, at least. To Vell, she didn’t look concerned at all.

Vell had been by Lee’s side through every conversation, and he had fully expected more screaming, maybe some crying. But she was making tea. They were nearing the moment where they would have to relive the absolute failure of Lee’s plan, and Lee was just making tea. After wrapping up their apocalypse prevention, Harley arrived just in time to see the water start boiling.

“So, what’s happening?”

Vell didn’t know how to answer that. He glanced sideways at Lee.

“We’re going to have a meeting with my parents, and negotiate the best possible scenario for ourselves,” Lee said, as she stared blankly at a teapot. “Under the circumstances.”

“Yeah, but the plan, and everything-”

“Would have been nice,” Lee said, with only the barest traces of a sigh. “But I only came up with the plan a few weeks ago. I’ve spent most of my life resigned to a long wait. I can endure the idea again.”

“You shouldn’t have to,” Harley said.

“It’s for the best,” Lee mumbled. Unseating her father as CEO would make the world a better place for millions of people. Eventually. Lee had to do what was right. No matter how many years of her own life she had to sacrifice.

Her parents arrived, and the meeting repeated as it had before, as Lee sat down on the couch and went through the mechanical motions of serving and then consuming the tea. Her stiff routine never faltered, even as her father repeated the revelation that her plan had failed, and she was doomed to spend decades, not weeks, waiting to inherit her fathers position.

“On the bright side, I think I’m going to use the salaries I would’ve paid them to buy a new beach house,” Noel said. “How do you feel about Malibu, XL-X8?”

Lee raised the teacup to her lips and completed another set of her inhumanly stiff motions.

“We already have a house in Malibu, father,” she said.

“Oh, right.”

Noel and Granger laughed about their largess while Vell struggled to comprehend how Lee could keep a straight face.

“Uh...Are you feeling alright?”

Vell had to restrain himself from saying Lee’s name, but she still gave him a dismissive shake of the head.

“No, no, I’m fine,” she insisted. “I was...feeling a little different before, but I’m fine. Everything’s just back to normal now.”

Her plan to more rapidly free herself from her father’s shackles was no in shambles, but the old plan remained. The old plan that required decades of obedience to a pair of narcissistic monsters. The old plan that would only allow her freedom when her parents were old and frail, and most of Lee’s life was already behind her.

Lee went through another set of the teacup routine. She’d spent the better part of her life committed to that plan. She could commit again. She had to commit again. She had to.

“She’s perfectly healthy, Vell, don’t interrupt,” Noel said. “We still have a few details to iron out about that harvester of yours. You’re consistently below that one-percent threshold, right?”

“We average a solid zero point eight,” Lee said. “Though we usually operate as low as zero point five.”

“Excellent, and you’re working on improving that, right?”

“Harley believes we can get it to a consist maximum of zero point five, yes.”

“Okay, cool, we’ll call that the show floor model,” Noel said. “Now what about riding that one percent line?”

Harley set down her own teacup and raised an eyebrow as Lee continued her own clockwork tea motions.

“Excuse me?”

“Yeah, the one percent line,” Noel said. “That’s the bare minimum we can get away with, we want to be riding that line.”

“We’re already below it,” Harley said. “We’ve sailed past that goal already.”

“No, no, you’re not getting this, listen,” Noel said. “When the mana harvester is killing those planktons or sponges or whatever gets in there, they’re not just vanishing into thin air. It’s absorbing the mana from them. That’s more mana harvested for us, more power, more profit.”

“Oh, right, improving your margins by harvesting mana from living things,” Vell said. “Just like you did to Joan Marsh. The one who regularly sues you for millions of dollars.”

“Yeah, that bitch,” Noel said. Lee’s eyebrow twitched. “But plankton can’t sue us! They’re just free money sitting on the table.”

“We put a shitload of work into getting this thing right,” Harley said. “We’re not going to make it worse just so you can squeeze an extra two cents a year out of it, or however much.”

“Now, you’re thinking in cents, but when you add up thousands of units operating for years on end, it really adds up.”

“I don’t give a fuck how much money it adds up to, Burrows,” Harley said. “I’m not killing anything for your profit.”

“It’ll be our profit, technically,” Noel said. Mostly his, but a small portion would still end up in Harley’s pockets.

“I’m with Harley,” Vell said. “We’re not making our invention worse, and especially not killing more things so you can make money.”

The two of them glanced guiltily at Lee, who was currently mid tea-sip. Her clockwork routine had never been interrupted, not even by this argument.

“Sorry.”

“No worries at all, darling,” Lee said.

“XL-X8, talk some sense into your friends,” Noel pleaded.

“Have you told them how nice Lamborghini’s are?” Granger said. “We could buy them one. Or two!”

“That won’t be necessary, mother,” Lee said. Vell and Harley didn’t like sports cars anyway. “Father, even if they pursue what you’re asking for, that kind of refinement would take time. Why not simply accept the deal as is and give them time to work on your request later?”

She was hoping that Noel would simply forget the matter over time, as he so often did. Once the checks started getting cashed, he would be more concerned with buying fancy toys than squeezing every possible cent out of his projects.

“I suppose I could consider it,” Noel said. “But I want it in writing they’re going to work on it.”

A surprisingly canny caveat from a usually clueless man. Typical. He was only ever intelligent when it came to making things worse.

“Don’t you think a contract saying your employees have to make things worse would look bad for you?” Vell asked.

“Only if the person signing the contract leaked it,” Noel said, with an accusing glare. Vell could not possibly hope to play the evil capitalist game better than Noel. He matched eyes with Noel anyway.

“No deal,” Vell insisted. Harley shook her head as well. Lee stayed stone still and sipped at her tea while her father rolled his eyes.

“See, XL, this is why I wanted you to socialize more,” Noel said. “Your friends are useless.”

Over years of being caught in apocalyptic loops, Vell and Harley had developed a keen sense of what Harley liked to call “pre-sasters”. They were the quiet, tense moments when disaster had yet to strike, but was just about to. It was like a tingle on the back of their necks before lightning struck, or the fizzle of a fuse reaching its end. They both felt the precursor to disaster often, and they both felt it in that moment, when Noel Burrows called them “useless”, and Lee’s teacup came to a dead halt.

In the moment of silence that followed, Lee’s expression of placid, inflexible tranquility started to bend, and she glared over the edge of her frozen teacup at her father.

“Useless?”

Lee set her teacup down on a platter, and the quiet clink of ceramic against ceramic sounded deadlier than any gunshot Vell had ever heard.

“Exactly what do you mean,” Lee hissed. “Useless?”

Entirely unaware that he was currently the target of an amount of sheer, vitriolic hatred that could’ve killed a more self-aware man on the spot, Noel shrugged and rolled his eyes.

“They’ve got no sense for profit,” Noel said. “Sure, you’re both very smart, you two, but if you haven’t got the common sense to make money off them, all the ideas in the world are useless.”

Vell and Harley did not respond, as they had pressed themselves against the couch and were holding on for dear life. The teacup Lee had set aside was starting to boil.

“I see,” Lee said. In spite of everything, the false voice she used around her parents remained intact. “So, the fact that they make me smile, that’s useless?”

“Well, not entirely, obviously, but lots of things can make you smile,” Noel said.

“I smile when I buy new lipstick,” Granger said.

“And money can buy a lot of lipstick,” Noel added.

“True,” Lee said. Her smile was actually getting a little wider now. “And the fact that Vell and Harley have been there for me every time I needed them, is that useless?”

“Oh, Excy, baby, you know we’d always be there for you too.”

Granger might have actually believed what she was saying, which was the saddest part. Lee’s smile wavered for a moment, but held firm.

“Of course you would,” Lee said. She folded her hands together in her lap. “Just one more question.”

Granger and Noel nodded. Lee offered them one last polite, daughterly smile.

Then she broke.

“What about the fact that they do more good in a single moment than either of you two worthless, narcissistic parasites have in your entire miserable lives?”

Lee bolted out of her seat and slammed two fists down on the table between them, rattling the tea set so hard that boiling hot tea spilled all over. The spilled tea vented steam into the air as Lee continued to vent her fury and scream at the top of her lungs.

“Is that useless?”

Caught off guard by the unrestrained rebellious rage in the daughter they had only ever known as an obedient little princess, Noel and Granger Burrows were both stunned into silence. For a moment, they were almost a matched pair with the equally stunned Vell and Harley across the table. Unlike Lee’s friends, they had no clue where any of this rage had come from.

“What has gotten into you, XL-X8?”

Lee had already snapped, but the sound of her “name” made her snap all over again.

“That is not my name,” she screamed. It was a verbal scar left by her parents idiocy, not a name. She’d spent twenty-one years of her life without a proper name, a fact that fueled even more rage as she pounded a clenched fist against her chest.

“I. Am. Lee,” she shouted, punctuating every word with a fist tapped against her heart. It felt right to spit the truth into her parents faces, to leave them stunned and confused by her true self. But she wanted to do more. Her magic switched gears, and the boiling tea around her froze into jagged blades of ice. “And you-”

Something behind Lee shifted, and her mind was pulled away from a lifetime of fury bursting forth, for only the briefest moment. Long enough to remember that Vell and Harley were behind her.

“You-”

Lee clenched a fist, and the knives of ice twitched. Then she relaxed, and the frozen blades melted.

“You are going to say it. Say my name. Lee.”

She had to give them a chance. She had to be better than they were. Her parents did not deserve mercy, but Lee deserved to be merciful.

“And thank my ‘useless’ friends,” Lee said, pointing a finger at Vell and Harley. “And all of the kindness and patience that they have taught me, that you are getting this one chance. One chance. To say my name.”

Lee glared daggers at her parents, daring them, challenging them. In some ways she wanted them to fail. But some small part of her wondered if there was any part of them that could acknowledge her, accept her, as who she was. As Lee.

It took a long time for her baffled parents to rise to the challenge. Noel Burrows adjusted the lapels of his expensive jacket, took a deep breath, and then held a hand out towards Lee, palm down, as if she were an animal to be placated.

“Now listen, XL-”

“Chance wasted,” Lee said flatly. Her parents were going to be leaving no matter what they said. But now they were leaving her way.

“You think that meeting’s going well?”

Himiko picked at her lunch with one hand, and glanced towards the Senior dorms.

“Probably,” Kanya said. “I mean, not ‘well’, but Lee knows how to work-”

Boom.

Kanya ducked as the wall of the senior dorms exploded into a spray of rubble and ice shards. The burst was not violent enough to cause any damage to anyone or anything except the wall that been exploded, and it soon became clear why. The subject of the violence had been inside the wall, not outside.

Noel and Granger Burrows screamed as they plummeted through the air, and continued screaming as watery tendrils snatched them out of the air just before impact -and then slammed them into the ground anyway, at only slightly less damaging speeds. Lee descended behind them, born aloft by the roiling currents of water that comprised the watery tendrils. She dragged her former parents behind her as she headed for the beach. Noel grasped desperately at the soil, and only succeeded in carving finger-sized trenches in the dirt.

“What are you doing?”

Lee ignored him, and continued dragging both of the psychopaths who had once ruled her life towards the docks. They had parked an ostentatious yacht right off shore. Perfect.

“Listen to me!”

The lasso of water that held Noel Burrows by his angler whipped around, swinging him through the air, and brought him to a halt dangling upside down on front of Lee’s face.

“No! I have done enough listening to you for ten lifetimes,” Lee snapped. “I am done throwing away my life for a chance to clean up your mess.”

Lee’s amalgam of lashing tendrils stomped towards the beach, slamming both her parents into the ground one more time she did so. She dragged them through the dirt and then held them upside down, dangling them in front of her face like fish on hooks.

“I was the one who tried to steal your company,” Lee spat, shaking her former father slightly as she did so. “I have been waiting for the chance to take Roentgen and tear it to pieces for decades, but I am done!”

Lee whipped the tendril holding Granger toward the boat, launching her bodily into the yacht. She landed with a crash and skidded out of sight as Lee focused all her vitriol on Noel Burrows.

“I am not like you. I am not a parasite that has to take from other people to do anything worthwhile,” Lee snapped. “I have enough- I am enough to make the world a better place. Starting with my world. Now-”

The tendril whipped backwards and then snapped forward, launching Noel through the air and onto his ostentatious yacht.

“Get off my island-”

Lee swept her hands, manipulating the water below the boat, and the yacht turned towards the horizon.

“And get out of my life!”

With a single mighty push, Lee moved the ocean currents and set the yacht blasting away from the shore at reckless speeds. It skipped across the waves and shrunk until it, and Lee’s parents, were nothing more than a dot on the horizon. And then all three were nothing.

Lee stared at the blank horizon for a while. Time didn’t really matter at the moment. Reality only started to sink back in when she felt two very familiar presences at her side.

“Lee?”

She turned to her right, and saw Harley watching her intently, then looked left, and saw Vell doing the same.

“I- I’m-”

Lee’s mouth failed her for a moment.

“I did it,” she mumbled. “I told them everything. I threw them out, I-, I-”

Her face went pale.

“I wasted several years of my life maintaining a facade that was ultimately meaningless,” Lee said. “Excuse me for a moment.”

Le collapsed forward, stuck her face in the sand, and screamed so loud the beach vibrated for a solid minute. Harley gave her a pat on the back.

“Alright, we’ll cope with that later,” Lee said, as she sprang back to her feet and brushed some sand off her face. “For now, bright sides!”

Lee started pacing in circles, listing off all the incredible potential of the new life she had just blasted herself into.

“I’m free! I can date as many women as I want, I can drop this fake British accent, I can get a tattoo, I can punch anyone who calls me XL-X8, I can, I can, I can…”

Lee’s enthusiasm faded away, but the happiness lingered, in a different way. She sat down and rested on the beach, staring outwards at the endless horizon of the ocean. Vell and Harley sat down on either side of her. For her first official act as a brand-new Lee, a Lee with no restraints, restrictions, or regrets, Lee chose to sit on the beach with her friends, and silently listen to the waves.