The cafeteria bustled with its usual lunchtime chaos as Lance joined the serving line, his stomach growling after a long morning of classes. The glare of fluorescent lights cast sharp shadows over metal serving trays piled with the day’s offerings, their surfaces reflecting distorted silhouettes in the sneeze guards. The menu board announced "Classic Meatloaf" as the daily special, and Lance wrinkled his nose at the grey-brown slabs swimming in questionable gravy, their edges crusted from hours under the heat lamps.


    Metal chairs scraped against linoleum, voices overlapped into a dull roar, and the clatter of plates and utensils formed a familiar lunchtime soundtrack. His eyes lingered on Maya Chen, seated at a secluded corner table, laptop open, fingers flying over the keyboard. A blue strand of hair caught the light as she tucked it behind her ear, consulting a thick reference tome at her elbow. Even from across the room, Lance sensed her focus—calm, intent, self-contained.


    That’s when he spotted the other guy. Tall, broad-shouldered, wearing a letterman jacket that signaled some athletic affiliation Lance didn’t recognize. His hair was meticulously styled, and he moved with a cocky stride. Lance didn’t know him, but the aura of entitlement radiated from the man’s every step. He approached Maya’s table like it was his right, placing both hands on its edge and leaning in too close.


    “Hey, come on, just give me your number,” the guy’s voice cut through the din. “We’d have fun. You’re always buried in that laptop—I’ve seen you around. Let’s get you out of there.”


    Maya’s shoulders stiffened, her eyes still on the screen but no longer typing. “I’m busy,” she said, voice steady but edged with annoyance. “Please leave me alone.”


    Lance’s heart sank. He had seen scenarios like this before: pushy, persistent, crossing lines. He gripped his empty tray, debating what to do. He wanted to help, but he had zero confidence in handling confrontation. Maybe Maya could handle it—she seemed self-assured. Or maybe stepping in would escalate things.


    The guy persisted, sliding into the chair opposite Maya with a screech of metal legs. “Don’t be like that. I’m trying to be nice. Most girls would love the attention—”


    Maya snapped her laptop closed. “I said no,” she repeated, more forceful now, though a tremor in her hand betrayed nerves. She looked around, maybe hoping to catch someone’s eye. Lance stepped forward, intending to intervene, but his courage faltered. The guy grasped Maya’s wrist, and a hot surge of outrage flooded Lance’s chest—


    A familiar pressure built behind his eyes. Colors smeared together, sounds twisted, and reality yanked him backward as though hooked by a giant fishing line.


    He blinked. Back at the start of the serving line. The meatloaf waited, unchanged. Maya was safe again, focused on her laptop, unaware. The letterman-jacketed stranger hadn’t entered yet. The entire confrontation reset.


    Lance steadied himself. This wasn’t the first time reality had rewound, but this scenario felt more charged, more personal. Now he had a chance to intervene before it even began. After what felt like hours, though it was only about half an hour of looping, he took his meal quickly—ignoring the cafeteria server’s chipper comment about the meatloaf—and weaved between tables.


    If he reached Maya first, maybe his presence would deter the guy from approaching at all. He made it halfway there before someone crashed into him—an eager freshman sprinting to greet friends. Lance’s tray soared, meatloaf cartwheeling through the air before splattering on the floor. Shocked laughter rippled through nearby students. He braced for embarrassment, but before he could react, time looped again, slingshotting him back to the line.


    Again. Same meatloaf, same stale smell of gravy, same buzzing lights. He clenched his teeth, the nausea from repeated failures settling in. This time, he tried another approach. He went straight to a cafeteria staff member, a stern-looking woman in a gray uniform scanning IDs.


    “Excuse me,” Lance whispered urgently, “there’s going to be a problem at that table—” He pointed toward Maya’s spot.


    The woman barely looked up from her phone. “ID first, then food,” she droned, unmoved.


    Lance swiped his ID card with shaky fingers. “No, you don’t understand, a guy is going to harass—”


    Too late. The letterman guy entered right on schedule. By the time the staffer bothered to look, Maya was already tense, the guy leaning in too close. Another reset.


    He tried texting Reid: “Emergency in cafeteria. Guy harassing Maya. Need backup.” He sent it immediately after the loop began, giving Reid ample time to respond. But Reid was in class and didn’t check his phone often. By the time a reply bubble appeared—“What’s going on?”—time folded again.


    Loop after loop, Lance tried different strategies:


    Direct Confrontation: He marched right up to the guy and told him to leave Maya alone. “I won’t let you harass her.” The result? A swift punch to Lance’s jaw and a messy scuffle that ended with Maya upset and Lance sprawled on the floor. Reset.


    Pre-emptive Warning to Maya: He approached her table gently, reasoning, “If I warn her early, maybe she’ll believe me. Maybe I can earn her trust enough to avoid the confrontation.” But she eyed him warily, probably assuming his warning was some kind pf weird pick-up. She left before the guy arrived, which should have solved the problem—but as she stepped away, she bumped into the letterman guy and he persisted outside the cafeteria anyway. Reset.


    Alerting Security Directly: He tried to find the campus officer often stationed near the main entrance. But the officer was always on a break at that crucial minute. By the time Lance dragged him inside, the situation had escalated. Reset.The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.


    Drafting Allies: He tried grabbing a group of students he’d seen laughing over meatloaf. He explained there was going to be trouble, begged them to help. They looked at him like he was insane—what was he talking about? Reset.


    Each solution spawned new problems, like a temporal puzzle box that refused to yield. The meatloaf became an ironic landmark of his failures. Each loop, it appeared on his tray, a mocking constant in a world where time refused to move forward. By the eighth or ninth loop, he couldn’t even look at it without feeling nauseated. He started skipping the meal altogether—just grabbing a drink and attempting to help before the confrontation began.


    But skipping the meatloaf didn’t stop the loops. Nothing did.


    He tried subtle interventions: “Accidentally” spilling water near Maya’s table so they’d both move; creating a distraction across the room to draw the guy’s attention; slipping a note onto Maya’s table warning her about the man’s approach. Each tactic unraveled differently. Sometimes Maya left early, only to be harassed in the hallway. Other times the guy got suspicious and approached more aggressively. Reset.


    With each iteration, Lance cataloged new details:


    - A girl by the window dropped her fork at exactly 12:17 PM every time.


    - At 12:19 PM, the coffee machine beeped three times.


    - At 12:22 PM, someone’s phone alarm played “Sweet Caroline.”


    - At 12:15 PM, a guy in a red baseball cap declared, Meatloaf looks better than usual,” and Lance started mouthing the words along with him.


    He began finishing other people’s sentences, predicting when someone would sneeze, reciting the day’s gossip before it spilled from another student’s lips. His behavior drew strange looks, which mattered little since everything would reset anyway. But it made him feel more unhinged. He was becoming a mad prophet in a sealed bubble of time, foretelling events that no one would remember once the loop ended.


    At one point, Lance tried addressing the letterman guy directly, long before he reached Maya. He intercepted him at the entrance, pretending to be part of some campus survey. The guy brushed him off, annoyed but not deterred, and still ended up at Maya’s table a few minutes later. Another time, Lance tried bribing a group of jocks to intervene, offering them whatever he could think of—but they just shrugged him off as a nutcase. Reset again.


    The mental fatigue weighed heavily, even though his body reset each time. He felt a persistent ache behind his temples and a phantom pressure in his muscles from repeated confrontations. His eyes felt gritty, his thoughts sluggish. He couldn’t shake the feeling of having lived through countless lunch hours without progress. Time had become a quagmire, and he was sinking deeper with each failed attempt. Self-doubt crept in—Was he really meant to solve this problem, or was he missing something fundamental?


    He experimented with ignoring the scenario entirely. What if he just let events play out, eating his meatloaf quietly and pretending not to see? The result was a nauseating blend of guilt and frustration as Maya ended up leaving, upset and possibly frightened, and Lance’s regret pounded in his ears until the reset yanked him back.


    In desperation, he tried confiding in Maya mid-loop, telling her he was trapped in a time loop and that a dangerous encounter was about to happen. Predictably, she looked at him like he’d lost his mind. She fled the cafeteria, and the loop still restarted after the inevitable confrontation happened outside his line of sight. No escape.


    As the loops marched on—twenty, thirty, maybe more—Lance lost track. He started focusing on tiny variables: Could he approach Maya with a different tone? Offer her something that would make her stay put or leave earlier in a safer direction? Could he spill his drink on the letterman guy before he reached her? That just provoked him sooner and more violently. Could Lance get Maya to trust him enough to leave with him before trouble started? She was too guarded, suspicious of his sudden interest and odd behavior.


    He even tried humor, staging a ridiculous distraction—a fake pratfall, juggling fruit stolen from the salad bar, humming loudly to draw attention away. These attempts only earned him weird looks and minor mishaps. The letterman guy remained laser-focused on Maya, as if the universe demanded this confrontation play out unless Lance found the correct key to unlock a different outcome.


    What stung most was the knowledge that someone else—Maya—was at the center of this loop’s crisis. While previous anomalies had been unsettling, this felt more personal. He couldn’t bear watching her discomfort and fear over and over. Each time she struggled to maintain composure, each time she tried to reject the harasser with dignity, and each time Lance failed to prevent the confrontation from escalating to that awful wrist-grab and her panicked eyes.


    Eventually, he slumped at a table during one iteration, letting the minutes tick by. The plate of meatloaf sat in front of him, as always. He refused to eat it. It had become a symbol of his impotence. The gravy’s sheen taunted him with its constancy. Students chatted around him, living their single timeline while he cycled through dozens, maybe hundreds, of variations. He wondered if he could lose count entirely, if he’d reach a point where reality frayed and he couldn’t remember what he originally wanted to do.


    Maya typed at her laptop, blissfully unaware that Lance had seen this scene a hundred times. The letterman guy would arrive soon. Lance could count down the seconds by heart. He checked his phone—12:13 PM. In one minute, everything would begin again: the guy’s swagger, the awkward lean, the insistence that Maya give him her number. The loop would end in regret and frustration, rewinding the clock to torment Lance with another chance to fail.


    Why? Why this scenario? Why no resolution? He had learned nothing that helped. No perfect solution revealed itself. Each attempt ended in disaster—big or small—leading to another reset. Was the universe punishing him? Had he done something wrong or not learned the intended lesson?


    He felt the pressure building behind his eyes again, the warning sign of another imminent reset. The cafeteria around him shimmered at the edges, like heat haze on asphalt. The clock tower outside, he knew, would still be stuck showing different times if he bothered to look. His entire existence felt trapped in amber, and he had no chisel to break free.


    The meatloaf stared back at him, congealing under the lights. Its silent judgment weighed heavily on him. He wondered if Maya would understand if he ever got out of this. Probably not. Who could?


    Students talked, oblivious. The letterman guy was about to walk through those doors. Lance counted down in his mind: ten seconds, nine, eight... He felt a sharp ache in his side, a lingering remnant of prior confrontations, reminding him that his mind bore the toll even as his body reset. He clenched his fists, resigned to another failure. Maybe he would try something else this time—yell at the top of his lungs, cause a massive scene. But would it matter?


    In three seconds, the loop’s drama would begin anew. Lance sighed, closing his eyes briefly. The fatigue was bone-deep, his sense of self fraying. He wondered if he would ever escape this looping lunch hour. Or maybe this was his new forever, stuck in a cycle of meatloaf, maybes, and unending failure.


    Two seconds. He opened his eyes. Nothing had changed. The cafeteria remained the same, students laughing, Maya typing, the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead. He was still here. Still trapped.


    One second. The doors pushed open. The letterman jacket entered Lance’s peripheral vision. He swallowed hard, feeling the familiar weight of destiny pressing down on him. The loop would continue. He was certain of it.


    The second hand on his watch ticked forward, and Lance braced himself for another round, caught in the inescapable grip of time’s cruel repetition.