Sunday, April 16th, Afternoon

As I made my way back to the main area, I noticed Rigel hanging at the fringes of the crowd. Though he’d changed out of his stage outfit, he let his performance coat hang around his shoulders like a cape, tinged with streaks of red and black.

He wasn’t hard to spot, to say the least. And not just because he was tall.

“Rigel!” I slowed to a halt in front of him. “Have you seen Mint?”

“Mintaka?”

“Yes.”

“Of all the people you could’ve asked, why would I know where she is?”

Okay, that was a good point. “Whatever. Just answer the question.” I figured she would be at the Chess Club’s table, but I also figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask Rigel. He was on the way.

“No,” he said. “I don’t.”

“Alright, thanks.” As I ran past him, Rigel tugged at my hoodie. The fabric yanked against my throat. “Gack-”

“Whoa! I just, uh, was going to ask if you wanted to walk around Galileo Fest with me for a bit. There’s a booth I want to check out.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve got somewhere to be right now.” I was at least a little miffed that he couldn’t tell I was in a rush.

“Oh. Okay,” Rigel said. He jammed a hand into a jean pocket, and looked away. “Right. You need to find your guitarist.” Rigel spoke with traces of vitriol. I placed my hands on my hips.

I knew it bothered him, how quickly we’d replaced him with Mintaka. This is despite, you know, Rigel quitting and leaving that vacancy in the first place. While I got where he was coming from, this particular contradiction never failed to bother me.

It was a few weeks ago when he first complained about it to me. I remember being particularly irritable on that day. In an incredibly poor lapse in judgement, I’d started to point this apparent contradiction out to him.

He changed the subject, and never spoke about it again.

“By any chance,” I said, “were you going to ask me to check out the Arcade Club with you?”

His form stiffened. “How did you know?”

“Women’s intuition.”

Rigel raised an eyebrow. “Really.”

“Recent obsession?”

“Now I’m wondering if women are just psychic.”

“Nah,” I said. “Just me. If it doesn’t take too long, I can spare a minute.” I already knew where Mint would be, and if nothing else, I did already know who the killer was. I have just over seven hours… but I’m still on the clock. But I really didn’t want to leave Rigel hanging. I sighed.

“At 1:30, I gotta bounce.”

He nodded, slowly. “You don’t have to.”

“For you, Beta Orionis,” I said. “Let’s go. You’re on a time limit here.”

“Beta Orionis?”

“Come on, let’s move!”

I let Rigel lead me down the path to lower plaza, where the Arcade Club was. We walked mostly in silence, at least until we passed the performance area.

“By the way,” he said. “Learn to tune.”

Okay, that was uncalled for. “I’m surprised you noticed.”

“I tune to the bass,” he said. “Of course I would.”

I trailed behind him. My gaze was pushed to the side, down at my hands. As I pushed them into my pockets, I thought I saw my arms coated with splotches of red.

I blinked. Nothing.

“Is something wrong?”

“No… it’s nothing.” I took a deep breath. It’s probably nothing. Back to the subject at hand. Despite his lack of tact, though, it felt nice that someone cared. “Well, whatever. I was distracted.”

Rigel looked over his shoulder. After staring at my face for a second, he turned away, and shrugged.

I wondered if I could, or really, should, confide in Rigel. He’d done the same to me, plenty of times, dating all the way back to shortly after he first joined the band. I joked in one of the previous loops that my social circle extended beyond the band… but sometimes, I wonder if that’s really true.

Or really, if that’s even true for someone like Rigel. Does he confide in anyone other than me?

I’m sure he has friends outside of Ireilas… but anyone that he’s close to? Honestly, can he really even say that he’s close to Sirius, or Antares? I know Anna’s too intimidated to speak to him, and Rigel doesn’t care enough.

I don’t know. And now I’ve gotten myself all worried about him, again.

“Hey, Rigel.”

“Yeah?”

“Give me your thoughts,” I said. “I’m in a bit of a bind.”

“What is it?”

While I hesitated, we approached the Arcade Club’s tent. He held open the flap as I ducked under his arm.

“Hey there! Cory 235, Saturdays at 4PM.” It was the same club member as before, the baby-faced boy with a purple scarf around his neck. He shoved a flier in my face.

Hold on… I could’ve sworn--

“So, what do you want to try first? Donkey Kong? Space Paranoids?” The boy leaned against one of the machines.

“Let’s do… Tempest,” Rigel said.

“Ah, good choice,” the boy said. “Let me get that fired up for you.”

As he did, Rigel turned back to me. “You were saying?”

I turned away from the Tempest cabinet as the lights on the screen flickered to life. “This…” I can’t tell him everything. He won’t believe me. Or... is it that I don't trust him to believe me?

It didn’t matter.

“This is a hypothetical situation,” I said. “Purely hypothetical.” I waited for him to reply. No response. Okay, fine. “Say that you knew your friend was going to die at the end of the day. By murder.”

“Murder by death. Riveting.”

“Shut up,” I said. “Anyways. What would you do?”

Rigel took his place at the controls, and thought for a moment. The arcade machine loaded the next stvage. “Hm…. that’s tricky. How do you know that a murder’s going to happen?”

“This is just hypothetical.” I paused. “It’s for a book I’m writing.”

A familiar display loaded, a ship flying around a spiraling core. Rigel fiddled with the joystick and the buttons. “Okay… but how?”

I watched him shoot the little enemy pixels rapidly filling the screen. Maybe it doesn’t matter what I tell him. He, and the Arcade Club boy, won’t remember anyways. “Time travel. Say that--, no, the main character of my book is living in a time loop. And her friend is going to die at the end of the day. What would you do?”

Right when the words ‘time travel’ exited my mouth, his ship made a near miss. “Hooh! Okay, so… Well, that’d depend on how hard you want the time travel to be in your story.” He turned to look at me. The display faded a bit. Rigel completed the first level. “For example, is it like a stable time loop?”

“Stable time loop?”

“Yeah, like… in trying to change it, you cause the future. Like… you ever seen Terminator?”

I shook my head. But he had since looked back to the screen. “No, I haven’t.”

“Okay, so… shit!” He barely dodged an enemy. “Spoilers enter public domain after eleven years.”

“No, they don’t.”

“Surely, after thirty. Whatever. You don’t watch my recs anyways, so…” The way he mashed at those controls, it seemed like he wasn’t fighting the pixels, but the cabinet itself. “In that movie, John Connor sends his friend back in time to protect his mom from the Terminator, but in the process, his friend ends up fathering him.”

“Wait, that’s gross.”

A smirk crossed his face. “But yeah, that’s what it means, the stable time loop. Your efforts to change the past always happened and were accounted for.”

I nodded, slowly. “In other words… the future won’t change, despite what my protagonist does.”

“Exactly.”

Hm… my endgame hasn’t changed, but it’s not like there haven’t been pretty significant changes between the loops. For starters, Sirius, Anna, and I all died on the first loop. But in the second, Sirius made it out without a scratch. Anna’s stab wound didn’t look as lethal as it had the first time.

Not that it made a difference, though, since I still died both times. To the same person, too. Perhaps that was all that mattered? That didn’t sit well with me, though.

“Is there an alternative?”

“Aren’t you better off asking like, Antares about this, or something?” His fingers were flying. “I’m a history major. This is some quantum mechanics shit.”

“You seem knowledgeable enough,” I said. And on some level… I wanted to be able to say to myself that I trusted his opinion.

He cleared another level and stretched his fingers. “Alright, whatever. The other one is that nothing is set in stone. Each time you go back, it’s like reloading a new save. Or starting a new game.”

“So you can do anything.”

“Yeah.”

“Which one do you subscribe to?”

Rigel grabbed the joystick and buttons again. “Pfft. The first, of course.”

“Why?”

“Because I can tell myself that it doesn’t matter how hard I try.” He snuck a glance over his shoulder. “If it’s predestined, then it doesn’t fucking matter.”

This is definitely about Sirius.

“Hey…” I said. “Come on. It’s only been a month since you left. It’s not fair for you two to be competing like that.”

“Shut the hell up!” His eyes were glowering. Rigel slammed a hand on the arcade cabinet. I jumped. With his other arm, he grabbed my shoulder, uncomfortably close to my neck.

My heart rate skyrocketed. For a full minute, I was actually scared of what he might do to me.

“R-rigel,” I managed, somehow.

His hand fell away. I flinched. When I opened my eyes again, he was looking away from me.

“Sorry,” he said.

I couldn’t say anything. I wanted to say that it was okay, that it was fine… but I couldn’t.

“You know,” the arcade club boy said, “it’d be so much easier if it were just an arcade game.” He looked at Rigel’s screen, as it flashed ‘game over.’ “In those, you shoot them, or they shoot you. It’s that simple.”

The boy jabbered on, but I wasn’t listening. I didn’t want to be here.

“S-sorry,” I said. “I need to go. Find Mint.” I backed away from him, and pushed through the tent flap.

Rigel grabbed my arm.

“L-Let go of me!”

He did. I backed away. “Lyra, wait.”

I kept backing away. Slower, now, though.

“Your main character,” he said. “Try having her talk to the killer.”

“Huh?”

“If she’s anything like you… I think her words will get through.”

I wasn’t sure what to say. And I really didn’t want to keep talking to him. It was… in that moment, I’d been legitimately scared. For all his anger issues, Rigel’s rarely raised his voice at me. And he’s never laid a hand on me before.

Time to go.

So I just said, “Okay. Thanks.”

He nodded. I left.