Jake tosses his fork at Ryder's face. "Think fast!"

Ryder doesn't even have to think; his arm instinctively reaches up and snatches the fork out of the way. Ryder doesn't even look surprised at his arm's reaction, though he certainly looks affronted.

"Hey!" he barks. "I haven't exactly finished telling you the entire secret yet!"

Jake grabs Ryder's left arm and inspects it closely. "This is seriously synthetic? It looks ridiculously real."

Ryder pulls his arm free. "It's called automail," he murmurs. "And though it's linked to my peripheral nervous system, it also has its own little smart processing system that reacts lightning-fast to situations that need those reflexes."

Jake snatches his fork out of Ryder's left hand. "And you said there was more secret to this?"

Ryder rolls his eyes. "Yeah, Jake. It's been malfunctioning lately; sometimes I lose control of it altogether. Which is why you should have waited till I'd told you the entire thing before trying to spear my eyeball with a fork."

Jake tries to hide his enthusiasm behind a sheepish mask. "Oops."

"Right. So you said that the Guild could fix anything?"

"Well… sorry man, but I was talking about everything from our time. You know, where most of us are from?" At Ryder's look of confusion, he elaborates, "You know you're from our future, right?"

Ryder nods slowly.

"Brody and Sugar are also from the future," Jake expounds. "I'm pretty sure Sugar is half-alien too—"

"Definitely," Ryder confirms. "Deep Medusa Cascade, by the looks of it."

"Oookay. The Guild can only fix it if they know how to make it in the first place," say Jake thoughtfully. "Before, it'd always been just the problem of Brody not having the instant-food-moleculizer there for the Guild to analyze, but…" His eyes drift to Ryder's arm.

"This is actually a part of my biology," offers Ryder. "This automail is directly based off of and woven into the DNA of my body. It is me, and that's probably why it's still here with me in this afterlife."

A wide grin splits its way across Jake's face. "So it shouldn't be a problem then," he laughs. "The combined powers of Artie and Joe should probably be able to fix your arm."

After the secret-spilling of that afternoon, Jake and Ryder spend the rest of the day finding harmless pranks to pull—things to ease their minds off the crazy stuff. He teaches Ryder how to most effectively ignore teachers in class; in home economics, he even gets around to showing Ryder how to play mahjong (the four-player game, and not the weird pyramid thing he'd seen online).

Then there's the crazy stuff about technology that Ryder considers ancient, like swiping his student ID card in the scanner to access his dorm room, or signing up for time slots to access the internet (and don't even get Jake started on teaching Ryder how to use a computer), or using hard currency to buy private water tickets.

Because yes, there is a public bathhouse. Showers for everybody wastes tons of water, so this is what the Japanesy side of this afterlife boarding school came up with. Ryder is not at all adverse to this concept, though Jake figures that maybe the American concept of privacy is wildly different in the future than it is now.

Brody ambushes Ryder in the locker room, leading to a high tension evening runaway wearing only their towels throughout campus. Tina saves their asses—Jake's always liked that girl, even though Blaine already seems to have a claim on her—so Jake and Ryder spend the entire night planning on how to retaliate.

The next morning, they sneaking peanuts into Brody's protein shake. This quickly turns into a desperate sprint for their lives when Brody, swelling up like an allergic balloon, still manages to throws his hammerspace collection of katanas at them with ridiculous accuracy.

Ryder not-dies once. Jake has to haul his ass to the medical bay, laying him down in the only hospital bed left intact after Brody's rampage two days ago. By the time that the bloody hole in Ryder's chest seals up, Jake's back with a new, clean uniform for the new guy to wear.

Ryder takes stock of the demolished medical bay as he sheds his dress shirt. Damn, the guy is ripped. Jake can see every single muscle standing out in stark contrast.

"Yo, Jake? Listening?"

Jake's eyes snap up to Ryder's face. "Dude, get me that bodyguard job," he chuckles.

Ryder's expression turns dark. "One day on the job and you'd want out," he puts simply before quickly changing topics. "So, you never told me why the school just doesn't replace its own hospital equipment. Doesn't anybody ever get sick?"

"Nah, bro. That's the thing. Nobody gets sick, because everybody's dead." Jake spreads his arms wide. "If we get hurt, it's like this world just considers that a less intense version of dead. In other words, we heal up pretty quickly. You saw Tina, right? Perfectly fine after an hour or two. And I think it's also why Kitty can smash Sam's skull in with her frying pan, yet Sam can go straight back to being obliviously annoying within five minutes."

"So, if nobody gets sick or hurt, why is this medical bay here in the first place?"

Jake shrugs. "Who knows. Maybe it was just built into the school template."

Ryder raises an eyebrow as he pulls on a clean white dress shirt that's not splattered in blood. "So you think this is a video game?"

"Man, I couldn't tell you. Sometimes it just feels… like everything's programmed. All the NPCs still feel like real people; the concepts taught in class sound like real learnable stuff, even if we don't pay attention; the food is amazing. It's like the perfect boarding high school." Jake pauses. "This can't be really real, can it?" A pause. "It's… this is going to sound so cheesy, man, but this is like heaven. This is what I wish my high school experience had been. No guilt over not doing anything more for Kitty, no principal threatening to kick me out for failing all my classes, nobody taunting me for doing football and ballet at the same time. This place is perfect."

Ryder stares at Jake for a long moment. "Except for the Reapers?" he finally poses.

"See, that's the thing," Jake responds. "Maybe it's… maybe it's because it's so perfect, and because we've overstayed our due, that the Reapers are coming for us." He suddenly realizes what he's just said and backpedals. "I mean, I don't know how you're feeling now, but I know that I… I'm pretty happy here in this high school heaven. So… maybe that's what the Reapers are up to. Coming to take the people who are better off out of this perfect afterlife, to clear room for those who deserve it more."

Ryder begins buttoning up his shirt, though again, he seems to be having trouble controlling the movements of his left hand. "Food for thought."

Jake shakes his head and gets to his feet. "Yeah, enough of that emotional bullshit," he laughs off.