“So, I got good news, Kim,” Vell said. Kim pressed the phone to her ear and made the obvious guess.

“You found what turned everybody into toddlers, right?”

“Yep.”

“And the phrase ‘good news’ implies there will soon be bad news, right?”

“Yep. You know how I was going to check out all our usual suspects?”

While Kim had headed for labs related to medicine that might have de-aged everyone, Vell had started with some of the departments that caused trouble more frequently than others. First on the list: the Marine Biology department.

“Oh no,” Kim said.

“Oh yes.”

“Well, at least it was fast,” Kim said. “What the fuck did they do?”

“Apparently they were studying the properties of something called-” Vell stopped for a second to squint at the discarded paperwork. “Turritopsis nutricula? I think I’m pronouncing that right. Anyway, it’s a type of jellyfish that can revert back to its juvenile form after reaching adulthood.”

“Oh, I get it,” Kim said. “Sort of.”

“Yeah, it’s better if we don’t question it,” Vell said. There was at least a plausible foundation for why all the adults at school had turned into toddlers, albeit a flimsy one. It was more of an explanation than he’d gotten for some apocalypses.

“Is there any way to undo it?”

“Not that I can tell,” Vell said. “It’s all magical stuff. That’d be Lee’s field of expertise, except I don’t think she can count to twenty right now, you know, much less tell me what a Howl Field Conversion spell does.”

“I don’t know, she seems like a smart kid, I bet she could make it to twenty,” Kim said.

“Only one way to find out,” Vell said. “Unrelated news, it turns out there’s at least one Marine Biologist with taste. Somebody here has a Roxy Rocket poster on their workstation.”

“How nice for them,” Kim said. “Are you done, or do you plan on staring at the poster for a bit longer?”

“I might,” Vell jabbed.

“I really don’t know why you’re so obsessed with that chick,” Kim said.

“And I’m sorry you don’t understand musical genius,” Vell said. “Meet you back at the dining hall.”

Kim groaned, but agreed. With the apocalypse solved, now they actually had to ride out the rest of the day. There were ways to get to the second loop faster, of course, but they all involved dying on purpose. Kim wasn’t ready to go that far yet, but a few hours of screaming kids might do it. She’d play it by ear for now.

The shrill sound of shrieking children shortened Kim’s already thin patience, and she decided to wait outside the dining hall until Vell showed up. If he was around he’d doubtlessly handle most of the hard work. Or maybe all of it. Maybe Kim could talk him into babysitting solo while she went back to her dorm to sleep through the rest of the first loop.

“Kim? Have you just been standing around here?”

Vell rounded the corner and walked up to the doors with no hesitation. Kim reluctantly followed him.

“For obvious reasons, I don’t really ‘get’ kids, Harlan,” Kim said.

“Uh, I understand that, I just figured you’d be interested in like, studying them or something,” Vell said. “Got to understand kids to understand being human.”

“I want to understand actual humans, not the tiny shitty versions of them,” Kim said. “They can’t even walk right.”

As Vell and Kim walked into the dining hall, a thin cord of various ribbons and strings pulled tight in front of them. Vell walked into the makeshift tripwire and immediately kicked it in half, as the poorly tied knots came loose under the slightest pressure.

“They apparently can’t make tripwires right either,” Kim said.

“It’s impressive they even understood the concept, though,” Vell said proudly. “But-”

“It didn’t work! Get them!”

The dining hall exploded into a screaming torrent of toddlers, all of them running directly towards Kim and Vell. They barely had time to wonder what the fuck was going on before several dozen children collided with their thighs and started to push and pull in different directions. Vell grabbed his belt loops to make sure his pants stayed up, as the mass of attacking toddlers didn’t seem to be accomplishing anything other than a slight risk of pantsing.

“Hey, hey! What is going on? Shoving is not playing nice!”

The toddler army had no interest in playing nice, though, and neither did Kim.

“Get off me, you little sh-”

“Kim! Language!”

“I’m pretty sure they’re trying to kill us, Vell!”

“You don’t know-”

One of the toddler horde stabbed Kim in the thigh with a plastic fork taken from the dining hall. It broke on impact, but Kim still swatted away the hand of the would-be stabber.

“Hey!” Kim snapped. “All of you cut it out right now or I’m calling the security bots.”

“Your robots are broken, stupid!”

Vell looked up and glared at Tiny Harley. She was flanked by a still bashful looking Lee, who peeked out over Harley’s shoulder to stick her tongue out at Vell.

“Harley! What are you doing?”

“We don’t need grown ups,” Harley declared loudly. Aside from chasing off Lee’s parents, the toddler horde had soon realized numerous other benefits to a world without grownups. “We want to eat whatever we want, and have no bedtime, and play on the whole island!”

The reminder of what was at stake rallied the diminutive army, and some of them jumped up to try and grab Vell’s arms. He managed to avoid the awkward leaps, prompting the toddlers to try other offensive measures.

“Ow! Shit, Vell, they’re biting!”

“I noticed,” Vell said, as one of the tiny students tried to dig their baby teeth into his thigh. He just wished people could direct this kind of energy at actual forces of oppression and not the person trying to make them go to bed on time.

“Cut it out, you little twit.”

Kim raised her hand and balled it into a fist. Vell reached out and grabbed her by the wrist before she could even think about which direction to swing it in.

“No,” he demanded. “Absolutely not.”

“Tell them that!”

“I’m trying!”

Vell tried to shake off the toddlers clinging to his thighs and take a few steps forward towards Harley, whoch mostly resulted in him wobbling slightly in a forward direction. One of the toddlers whacked him on the butt with a styrofoam plate, and Vell snatched it out of their hands and tossed it like a frisbee, which distracted at least a few of the kids long enough for him to wobble forward.

“Harley, you need to stop this,” Vell shouted. “We can talk about the snacks and you guys having to go to bed, fine, but you have to stay in the dining hall. You’ll hurt yourselves.”

“Okay.”

The toddler army loosed their grip on Vell slightly.

“Oh. Uh, alright,” Vell said. Harley was demonstrating surprising restraint for a four year old at the helm of an army.

“And you have to go get us all the toys we want,” another toddler demanded.

“Okay, collective bargaining, I dig it,” Vell said. “There’s, uh, there’s not a lot of toys on the island, I think? I’ll do my best, though.”

“And she has to go away forever!”

The mass of toddlers pointed at Kim, who seemed entirely indifferent to the prospect of her banishment. Tiny Harley had no strong feelings on Kim one way or the other, but she was the mouthpiece of the toddler democracy for the moment.

“Guys, you can’t just banish her because you don’t like her,” Vell said. “She lives here.”

“She’s mean and scary and we don’t like her!”

A chorus of voices from the tiny horde muttered in agreement. For reasons Kim didn’t quite understand, the sudden outpouring of hatred hurt her feelings.

“Get rid of her and her stupid scary robots,” another kid demanded.

“Sure. Fine. I’ll go,” Kim grunted. She tried to hide the mounting frustration in her voice and failed.

“Wait, stop. Just, let me talk to her for a second, okay?”

“No. Take her away and put her on a boat and make her go away forever,” Harley demanded.

“And bring back a TV. I want to watch a movie!”

It took roughly five minutes for the toddler horde to stop shouting out different movies they wanted to watch, and once they were done shouting about Disney, Vell continued the negotiations.

“Look, just give me a second to talk to Kim,” Vell said. “We’ll be right back. And put all those forks away! You’re going to poke someone’s eye out.”

Harley called off the army, and some, but not all, of the kids dropped their plastic forks. Vell took what he could get and slowly backed out of the lunchroom with Kim. He made sure to lean on the doors to keep them closed, just in case any of the babies got any ideas.

“Okay, have fun babysitting,” Kim said. She started to walk away almost immediately.

“So you actually want to leave?”

“They tried to stab me, so yes, Vell, I do not want to be there!”

“Oh, you’ve been stabbed before,” Vell said. “That’s not it.”

“I- fuck,” Kim said. “Why do you care? And why are you so fucking patient with those little monsters?”

“Because they’re kids, Kim,” Vell said, as if that explained everything. Then he explained it anyway. “They’re too young to know any better. They’re smart enough to know they want things but not smart enough to understand why they can’t have them. We can’t do anything about it, we just have to be patient with them.”

Kim went very silent for a suspiciously long time.

“Oh, sorry. I, uh, didn’t mean for that to hit quite so close to home,” Vell said.

“No. My fault. I didn’t even really think of it that way,” Kim said. She was so caught up on the physical differences between herself and all those tiny, lumpy children she had never seen how alike they were. Just like Kim, they were naive and unprepared, dropped into an unexpected and unwanted situation, and instead of being helped, they’d been treated like a problem. “Man I’m a fuck up, huh?”

“Well, it’s not like you had a lot of good examples,” Vell said.

“Maybe I should just leave them alone,” Kim said. “They’re all scared of me now.”

“You could do that,” Vell said. “Or you could try again.”

“How do you do it, then? What’s your secret?”

“I don’t know,” Vell said with a shrug. “I just, uh...try to remember what it felt like to be young and confused, and try to say the things I wish someone had told me then.”

Kim was struck by the surprisingly insightful comment, and Vell immediately ruined the moment.

“Oh, and snacks,” Vell said. “We’re lucky, because this being the first loop means we can really go hogwild on the snacks.”

“I’ll let you handle the snacks,” Kim said. “But...maybe I’ll give it another go.”

Vell nodded approvingly, and the two returned to the dining hall. The disorganized mob had mostly lost interest in their attempt at revolution and returned to various noise making activities. While Vell had originally intended to stay by Kim’s side, he spotted a bunch of toddlers breaking the plastic cutlery and throwing the jagged shards at each other, and was immediately compelled to intervene before someone lost an eye.

Undeterred by her lack of backup, Kim found the miniature versions of Lee and Harley and sat down. Harley was currently tugging Lee’s hair into various disorganized “pigtails” held in place by rubber bands, but stopped long enough to glare skeptically at Kim.

“Hello. Uh, Hi, Harley,” Kim said. “I’m...very sorry I was mean earlier. I didn’t know what I was doing, and I did things wrong. Can you forgive me?”

“I guess,” Harley said with a shrug. The moods of a toddler were as intense as they were capricious.

“Thanks.”

Harley then proceeded to completely ignore Kim’s presence and focus on making an eighth pigtail in Lee’s hair. After some moments of awkward silence, Kim stepped up her game.

“So, Lee...Vell and I were wondering if you know how to count to twenty.”

“Nuh uh,” Lee grunted, before holding up ten fingers.

“You can count to ten? That’s really good,” Kim said. “Can you show me?”

Lee nodded and mumbled her way from one to ten, although she had to double back to five after forgetting six and pronounced eight wrong. Kim pretended to be impressed anyway.

“Super cool! Do you want to learn how to count to twenty?”

Lee nodded, which cause two of Harley’s carefully pulled pigtails to come apart.

“Okay. So after ten comes eleven,” Kim said, trying to explain it slowly. “How to count” was a very basic question, but it was a question Little Lee wanted answered. Even the simplest of Kim’s questions had gone unanswered in her first days of life, and she wouldn’t put that fate on anyone else. “Can you say Eleven?”

“Leven.”

“No, like this. E-lev-en.”

“Leven.”

Kim bit her tongue.

“We’ll work on it.”

Lee produced the stolen sample of Turritopsis Nutricula from her purse and placed it on the meeting room table. Without that tissue sample, the Marine Biology lab would be unable to carry out their experiment, and all the adults on campus would remain adults.

“Mission accomplished,” Lee said.

“Oh, great. Thanks for taking care of that, guys,” Vell said.

“Not a problem,” Harley said. “We owe you one for the babysitting.”

Hawke elbowed Harley in the side.

“And...also, for organizing a toddler coup against you,” Harley said. The loopers had retained even the memories of their infantile selves, so they knew everything they’d done on the previous loop. “Sorry.”

“It happens,” Vell said. “I turned evil and blew us all up with a banana nuke once, I can forgive getting nibbled by a toddler.”

“True.”

“You did an excellent job of childcare, all things considered,” Lee said.

“Yeah! You’re going to be a kickass dad someday, Vell,” Harley said. “Whoever you end up impregnating will be lucky to have you.”

“Uh...thanks.”

“And you did very well too, of course,” Lee said to Kim. “Eventually.”

“I had some coaching,” Kim said. “And speaking of coaching: do you still need to do some work on ‘sebenbeen’?”

“I’d rather we didn’t,” Lee said. Her younger self had proven completely incapable of pronouncing the word “seventeen”. “I have long since mastered the art of counting, thank you very much.”

“I don’t know, I’ve never actually heard you count to twenty,” Harley said.

“Oh stop it,” Lee said. “We’re complimenting Kim here.”

“Yeah, it’s good you learned to like kids,” Vell said.

“‘Like’ them? No no no,” Kim said. “I learned to be patient with them. Kids are slimy, screaming little monsters, it’s just not their fault they’re slimy, screaming little monsters.”

The level of affection Kim felt -none- had not changed, only her level of sympathy. Kids couldn’t help being horrible screaming monsters, and they didn’t deserve to be scolded for something out of their control.

“Oh.”

“Yeah, children are terrible,” Kim said. “In fact, I’m going to go check if my body has uterus, and if it does, I’m taking it out with my bare hands.”

“That seems drastic,” Lee said.

“Do me next,” Harley added.

Kim gave a thumbs up and left the lair. Thankfully for everyone, Kim’s creator had not opted for that level of anatomical accuracy and spared her an impromptu hysterectomy.

“Now, I should get to class,” Lee said. “The only thing I learned yesterday was how to count to twenty, so I have some catching up to do.”

“Thanks again for the babysitting, Vell,” Harley shouted.

“Indeed. It’s nice to have some pleasant childhood memories,” Lee said. “Albeit in a roundabout way.”

“And we get to be roundabout childhood friends too,” Harley said. She gave Lee a kiss on the cheek and then tugged her towards the door. “Come on, sooner we get done with class the sooner I can do your hair again.”

“No rubber bands this time, though.”

“I promise nothing.”