Vell rested his head in his hands and idly scribbled on his notebook. He knew that most people were focused on the lecture, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that people were looking at him.

As it was the first loop, Vell had decided to indulge himself in an impulsive decision and magically dye his hair. He had a broad streak of vibrant red running back from his forehead, which seemed all the more colorful for the fact that the rest of his wardrobe was the usual monotone. It felt out of place, and Vell didn’t know if he’d be able to get used to it.

Glad for the chance to think about something else, Vell snatched his phone as it began to buzz.

Lee:

Vell, dear.

In all of our talks about past incidents, have we by any chance mentioned that aliens are real?

vharlan03:

no

wheres the alien

Lee:

On the quad.

vharlan03:

be right there

Vell shouldered his bag and headed for the quad. A large crowd had gathered on the lawn, obstructing his immediate view, but Vell could see a large, domed metal structure towering above the crowd. The UFO, presumably. Or rather FO, since Vell knew exactly what it was.

Elbowing his way to the front of the crowd, apologizing all the while, Vell finally found a better view of the alien in question. It had an egg-shaped body with six tentacles descending from the bottom that held it up, and four more tentacles that seemed to act as arms. It also had one very large, disturbingly human eye right in the middle of the egg.

“Vell!”

Looking away from the alien, Vell spotted Harley, who pushed her way through the crowd and grabbed him by the elbow.

“Sorry for not telling you about aliens earlier.”

“Well I kind of figured, with everything else I’ve seen.”

“Yeah, it tracks, doesn’t-”

She paused mid-sentence and looked up at Vell’s hair. The streak of red had caught her eye.

“You changed your hair.”

“Yeah, figured I’d, uh, try something out on the first loop, you know, give it a test run.”

Harley’s eyes narrowed as she tracked the exact shade of red, and where she’d seen it before.

“Did you dye your hair to match Joan’s eyes?”

Vell looked down at the ground.

“Yeah.”

“You fucking nerd. That’s adorable,” Harley said. She tightened her grip on Vell’s elbow and started to tug. “Come on, we got to deal with this alien.”

Harley blustered her way through the crowd, never stopping to apologize to the people she pushed aside, until they had regrouped with Lee and Leanne.

“You’ve changed your hair,” Lee noted.

“Yeah.”

“It looks good on you.”

Leanne gestured towards the alien with an expectant look on her face.

“We’re getting to it,” Lee said. “Just being polite. Now, it’s been a while since the last alien. If I remember right, we have to…”

Lee trailed off and tried to remember the protocol. As she pondered how to make her third or fourth “first” contact, another figure broke through the crowd nearby. The humans had formed a distant ring around the alien and its ship, not daring to step too close, until someone in a full-body environmental suit broke the line and began to step forward. The thick material obscured nearly all of their body, but nothing could hide the curled mop of red hair that was practically overflowing from the helmets visor.

“Hey, Freddy Frizz!” Harley cried. “What’re you doing?”

Freddy Frizzle nearly jumped out of his hermetically sealed boots at the sound of her voice. He turned away from the opportunity to make first contact with an alien race to chat up Harley.

“Oh, hello, Ms. Harley,” he said. He tried his best to look impressive while wearing a full-body suit that had a built-in toilet. It didn’t work. “Well, I was just, you know, going to go over there and talk to the alien, I happened to have this hermetically sealed suit to prevent any transmission of alien microbes, you know, safety first, and I, uh-”

While Freddy Frizzle struggled to find a flirtatious segue from “transmission of alien microbes”, the egg-shaped alien turned towards the sound of his voice.

“Oh, can y’all talk?”

The crowd gasped and took a step back, except for the four loopers and Freddy Frizzle. The fact that it communicated at all shocked them, and the fact that it communicated with a thick Dixie accent was even more surprising.

“Yeah, we can talk,” Harley shouted. “Welcome to Earth, by the way!”

“Oh thanks,” the alien said. It waved two tentacles in Harley’s direction. “I’m just pleased as punch to be here, but I think I took a wrong turn at one of those big blue pools of liquid y’all have lying around. If one of you funny-looking monkeys could give me direction to where them big feathery things and the giant lizards live, I’ll just be on my way happy as an amoeboid on a protein solution.”

Harley didn’t know how she felt about being called a funny-looking monkey, but she let it slide.

“Giant lizards?” She asked.

“Yeah, the really tall ones, some of them have long necks, some of have two legs, some of them got four, there was this one that had a real big forehead with a bunch of spikes on it.”

After a brief moment of thought, Harley pulled out her phone, made a quick search, and held it out the alien. She pointed to the image she’d found: a triceratops.

“One of these?”

“Yeah, that’s one of them, right there,” the alien said, clearly overjoyed. “If y’all could tell me where those have gone to, my kids and I came all this way just to see them.”

Harley shared a concerned glance with her friends. Lee took the initiative of stepping up.

“Uh, I’m sorry, but that is a dinosaur,” Lee explained. “And they have been gone for quite some time.”

“Well bring them back,” the egg-shaped alien requested. “Or tell me where to find them. I came thirteen point three billion light years already, I can go a few hundred miles out of my way.”

“I’m sorry, I think I was unclear,” Lee said. “They’ve gone extinct. They don’t exist anymore.”

“Well I saw them last time I was here,” the alien protested.

“Was that by any chance sixty-five million years ago?”

“Yes. What, is that supposed to be a long time?”

Putting aside that very concerning mental image of lifetimes on a cosmic scale, Lee chose to focus on the matter at hand.

“Well, I’m afraid that the dinosaurs you’re looking for don’t exist anymore,” Lee said. “There was an asteroid impact, you see.”

“Well why didn’t you stop it?”

Lee had no idea how to respond to that. Harley did.

“Because we were not an extant species at the time, lady,” Harley shouted. Lee bent over.

“Harley, don’t be rude, you don’t know if its a lady,” Lee said.

“It’s a lady,” Harley insisted. “Karen’s are a universal constant.”

A sudden look of panic struck Lee’s face, and she turned to examine the alien and its ship. Three smaller aliens of various sizes were staring out of the domed glass, and there were strange markings on the rear of the ship that Lee now recognized as a set of alien bumper stickers.

“Oh goodness you’re right,” Lee said, with dawning horror. “It’s an extraterrestrial soccer mom.”

“I’m right here, you know,” the Karen Alien said. “Who’s in charge of this hivemind cluster? Y’all are being incredibly unhelpful and I want to file a complaint.”

“Nobody’s in charge!” Harley protested. “We don’t even have a hivemind cluster!”

“What kind of backwards planet are y’all running here?”

“Hey, our planet is very nice. Mostly,” Vell said. The alien waved all four of its tentacles at him.

“I’m not taking sass from someone with a diseased florgon crest,” the Karen Alien said, pointing a tentacle at Vell’s red streak of hair. Vell put a hand on his head and stepped back.

“Don’t insult my friends florgon crest!” Harley shouted. “Look, there’s no dinosaurs, so there’s no reason for you to be here. Why don’t you just take your kids and get off our planet?”

“Fine, I will,” the Karen Alien said. “And I’ll be lodging a complaint with the Galactic Commerce Council for this terrible service!”

“We’re not a business, woman, you’re at a school! Now get out of here!”

With a huff of protest, the egg-shaped alien began to ascend the side of its vessel, clinging to the metal exterior with its adhesive tentacles. Freddy watched it climb away and return to the cockpit with a look of dismay on his face.

“Harley! You just chased off a form of advanced intelligent life!”

“Oh bullshit, there’s nothing advanced about it,” Harley said. “I’ve met hundreds of people like her whining about expired coupons, or asking for free avocado in their salad. Besides, its the first loop, so she’s probably going to-”

A tremor ran through the earth as the engine of the alien vessel activated. Harley nodded as the ground beneath the ship started to curl in on itself, as if reality itself was being scrunched up like a sock about to get thrown in the hamper. She took a close look at the ship and the reality-warping field it was generating.

“Oh, a Holtzman fold-space drive,” Harley said. She looked at her friends. “This is going to be very unpleasant.”

With that warning delivered, Harley cupped her hands over her ears.

“You’re going to want to cover your ears real good,” Harley shouted as the engine of the alien ship started to roar louder and louder. “It’ll keep any sudden pressure differentials from popping all the blood vessels in your brain. Won’t save your life, but it will make dying hurt a lot less.”

Lee, Leanne, and Vell dutifully cupped their hands over their ears. Vell closed his eyes and tried to think about something pleasant before the alien ship activated, folding all of reality, Vell and company included, into an elaborate celestial origami.

“Well that was unpleasant,” Vell noted. He settled into a chair in his dorm and tried to shake off the phantom pain of being put through a cosmic taffy-pull.

“It wasn’t all bad,” Harley said. “For like three seconds before the spacial distortion tore us all apart, I was taller than you guys.”

“I’m glad you enjoyed yourself, dear,” Lee began. “Now, shall we discuss resolving this issue? Anyone have any ideas?”

“Well, uh, easiest solution, why don’t we just show the alien a dinosaur? Somebody on this campus has to have a way to bring a dinosaur back, right?”

“Oh no, not an option,” Lee said. “The Einstein-Odinson college has a very strict anti-Jurassic Park policy.”

“No bringing dinosaurs back. No cloning, no necromancy, no time travel, and absolutely no instigating retrograde evolution in chickens to try and give them dinosaur-like traits,” Harley said. “All banned, never ends well.”

“Yeah, that makes sense, actually,” Vell said.

“It’s all in the student handbook, Vell, you really should have read yours,” Lee said.

“I’ll try to find one after we solve our alien problem,” Vell said. He was still wrapping his head around the fact that he’d met an alien lifeform and it had insulted his hair. He’d decided not to dye his hair red again on the grounds that he’d never be able to forget the “diseased florgon crest” remark. He didn’t even know what a florgon crest was.

“We can’t do a genuine dinosaur, but you might be on to something,” Harley said. “There’s rules about real dinosaurs, but no rules about fake ones.”

“A workable idea, Harley,” Lee said. “What did you have in mind?”

“Well, I figure me and the bitches can probably build an animatronic dinosaur or two before this afternoon, and then Vell can just slap an illusion rune on them to make them look like the real deal. Then the alien bitch and her brats get to see a dinosaur and leave happily instead of spaghettifying us with her foldspace engine.”

“That sounds like an excellent idea,” Lee said. She clapped her hands together and stood up. “I’ll get everything ready to put on a show for our alien visitor while you handle the construction. Do tell the bitches I said hello.”

“Will do,” Harley said. “Come with me, Vell. You should have an idea what you’re working with, and we can introduce you to the bitches.”

“Sounds like a good time, I guess.”

Harley kicked open the door of the robotics lab. Unlike the last time Vell had seen it, where its only resident had been the twitching body of Thomas Edison, today it was crawling with activity. All of that activity came to a halt as the rooms dozens of occupants simultaneously stopped what they were doing to say hello to Harley.

“Hi everyone,” Harley responded. She then stuck her fingers in her mouth and whistled loudly before giving a rallying cry. “Assemble the bitches!”

At her call, three women dropped what they were doing and rushed to Harley with cartoonish speed. They formed ranks shoulder to shoulder and saluted Harley in unison.

“First of all, Lee says hello,” Harley said. The bitches nodded. Harley then stepped back to Vell and pushed him forward, displaying him to her friends.

“Vell, these are the bitches,” Harley said, gesturing to the trio. “The bitches, this is Vell.”

“Hi Vell,” the one on the left said. She was the only person in the room, and possibly on campus, shorter than Harley, though her diminutive size was offset by a massive cybernetic arm strapped to her shoulder. Vell extended his hand, and the cyborg took it in her titanic metal grip and shook it gently.

“That’s Himiko, she used to be my rival in the actual hatred sense but now our rivalry is the sexy kind,” Harley said. Himiko gave a thumbs up and a wink in Harley’s direction. Harley then pointed to the next woman in the lineup, a tall, dark skinned woman with an intense stare. “That’s Kanya, she was one of my roommates last year.”

Vell shook her hand as well and then looked to the last of the women in the lineup. She was wearing sunglasses indoors, and her clothes, hair, and makeup were all exactly the same shade of black.

“And that’s Sarah, I have no idea what her deal is but she’s cool and she’s good at making robots,” Harley said. Sarah nodded in Vell’s direction, imparting the small gesture with significant mystique. Vell tried to nod back with equal mystique, and immediately knew he had failed.

“Anyway, ladies, the order of the day is animatronic dinosaurs,” Harley said. “Hopefully several. What’ve you got?”

“I could upscale some of my animatronic tendrils for a brachiosaurus or other sauropod,” Kanya said.

“I have several bird-like models that could be adapted to pterosaurs,” Himiko said.

“Sarah, tell me about any dinosaur robots you’ve got,” Harley said, phrasing it as a command rather than a question for some reason.

“I have two full-sized tyrannosaur models in my workshop,” Sarah said. Harley nodded as Vell’s eyes narrowed.

“Why do you have those?”

“I do not answer questions,” Sarah said.

“It’s true, she doesn’t,” Harley said. “Watch. Hey Sarah, what color is your hair?”

Sarah said nothing, though she did brush a strand of black hair behind her ear. Harley waited a second to let her silence sink in, and then got back to business.

“We have until exactly 3:32 PM, and, as usual, you cannot ask any questions,” Harley said. “Any questions?”

The bitches remained silent.

“Perfect!” Harley said. “Vell’s gonna be coating these things with an illusion, so don’t worry about the aesthetics, just make it functional. Get us measurements ASAP so Vell can charge up the illusion runes right. If you need anything, I’ll be in my usual spot, building a Utahraptor. Dismissed!”

At Harley’s cry, the bitches disassembled and began to assemble, gathering scattered mechanical components and piecing them together. Harley made a beeline for an empty workbench and assembled her tools, before summoning Botley and instructing him to gather components. Vell had seen the workbench in her bedroom several times, and while it had an impressive array of tools, the industrial grade tools outshined them all -and took up much more space.

“Mind if I borrow a corner of your workbench?”

“Make yourself at home,” Harley said. She pushed aside a partially-assembled Botley body to make room for him. Vell sat down and unpacked a few of his rune-carving tools. He had figured he’d need them soon, and he planned to stick around so he could make adjustments to his carving depending on the projects Harley and her friends managed to complete.

“Hope you don’t mind if I talk your ear off. I like to talk while I work and the bitches are not great conversationalists.”

“You talk too much, we run out of things to say,” Himiko snapped, without looking up from her work.

“Yet another way you can’t keep up with me,” Harley said. Himiko did not offer a retort, and Harley returned her attention to Vell. “So what’s on your mind, Harlan? Got any girl problems this time?”

“Oh, no, things are fine, actually. Great, even,” Vell said. “Good.”

“Good to hear, but that gives me nothing conversation wise. How you handling the revelation that we’re not alone in the galaxy?”

“Honestly I always kind of figured aliens were out there somewhere,” Vell said. “The real surprise is that they speak English.”

“Oh, they don’t,” Harley said. Vell looked up from his carving.

“What? You heard it talking,” Vell said. Harley shook her head.

“You really got to read that student handbook, Vell,” Harley said. She leaned away from her work to shout at her bitches. “Hey Himiko! You speak any English?”

“Not a word,” Himiko said, in English. “Only Japanese.”

“How about you, Kanya?”

“I speak Thai and a little bit of Lao,” Kanya said.

“What about you, Sarah, what languages you speaking?”

Sarah, as was her wont, did not answer the question. Harley let the silence of her non-answer linger for a bit before turning back to Vell.

“This is an international college, Vell, they have a translation spell over the whole campus,” Harley said. “Translates everything. Except Latin, since all the scientific names for shit are in Latin. Even works on alien languages, though fuck if I know how.”

“Huh. Wait, uh, hold on, are you speaking English?”

“I’m from California, Vell, yes I am speaking English,” Harley said. "The way up north part, though, not the sexy LA part."

“Oh, well, I’m from Texas, so I definitely speak English,” Vell said. “And some Punjabi, but not as much as my mom would like.”

“I never did take you for a momma’s boy,” Harley said.

“He looks like momma’s boy to me,” Sarah said.

“Don’t be rude, Sarah,” Harley said. “I know I call you guys the bitches but that’s no excuse to be an actual bitch.”

While Harley and Vell had the hands-on work of assembling and disguising dinosaur sized machines, Lee had taken on the far more difficult task of assembling a cover story. Not only would Lee have to come up with a rational explanation for filling the quad with dinosaurs, she also had to cover up the existence of extraterrestrial life. Even on a campus as strange as the Einstein-Odinson college, there were limits to what people would believe. Thankfully, she had a direct line to a figure of some authority on the campus. With only slight hesitation, Lee knocked on the door of Principal Isaac Goodwell’s office.

It took a moment for the door to be opened, but when Principal Goodwell saw it was Lee at his door, he quickly ushered her in. Goodwell pushed aside a sizable stack of paperwork and sat down at his desk, barely bothering to disguise his eagerness.

“Ms. Burrows, good to see you,” he began.

“Oh please, call me Lee,” she replied. She didn’t like the idea of getting friendly with the strange principal, but she also didn’t like the sound of her last name.

“Lee, then. What brings you here today?”

“Well, uh, before we begin, during your tenure here, did you by any chance ever deal with any incidents from, well, other planets?”

“Oh yeah, all the time,” Goodwell said. He kicked his feet up on his desk. “We had an alien came by all the time, we called him Ros, which he apparently found offensive, but he was an asshole anyway. Oh, why? You just have your first close encounter of the third kind? Looking for some advice on how to handle extraterrestrials?”

“Oh, no, actually, we’ve handled it before, just wondering if we were on the same page, in regards to the existence of alien life,” Lee said. “I just wanted to make you aware we’re going to be causing quite a spectacle this afternoon. You see, an alien is going to be landing on the quad, and we need to show it a dinosaur-”

“Whoa whoa whoa,” Goodwell interrupted. “No dinosaurs. This school has a very strict anti-Jurassic Park policy. Didn’t you read the handbook?”

“I did, actually,” Lee said. “We’re making animatronic dinosaurs, not real ones.”

“Oh, well, that should be fine. I’ll make sure the faculty knows there’s going to be some fake dinosaurs on the quad today,” Goodwell said. “And some fake aliens while I’m at it. So, when are we getting started?”

“Oh, the aliens are landing at about three-thirty, so at least a few minutes before then,” Lee began.

“Perfect. I’ll see you on the quad at three-twenty. Look forward to working with you.”

Lee pursed her lips. She didn’t remember inviting Goodwell to participate -because she definitely hadn’t.

“I wouldn’t want to pull you away from your duties, sir,” Lee said, side-eyeing the massive stack of paperwork the Principal was ignoring. In response, he shoved it even further aside.

“Nonsense. Saving the world from...whatever this alien is going to do to it takes precedence over some silly paperwork.”

“Well, we can certainly handle it, but I suppose you can’t hurt,” Lee said slowly. “If you insist-”

“I just think I could be a great help, is all, I don’t want to impose,” Goodwell said, imposingly. Lee gave a forced smile and excused herself. She doubted anything she could say would truly change his mind. Better to spend her time preparing her teammates for Goodwell’s unwelcome appearance.