The trap didn't make sense, or at least I didn't think so at first.

What was the goal of having all of those things that looked like people pretending to be prisoners in the cages? What was the point of having all those gunmen on the boats pretending to shoot at us but not actually trying to hit us? Why kidnap everyone that Antoine Stone knew or worked with?

I mean, I knew the answer, didn't I?

We had gotten a note delivered to us, pinned to a tree with a knife, telling us this was all about Antoine. Maybe it was revenge. Maybe they just needed him for some archaeological puzzle. I could accept that.

But the theatrics went beyond that.

I didn't have time to think about it as we ran through the foliage, zigzagging our way toward the helicopter. It wasn't that we intended to use it, but we knew that most of the mercenaries were to the east, so we had to go west. We did our best to avoid exposing Bones Ibarra as he prepared the chopper, but we didn't really have anywhere to go.

And we didn't end up making it very far anyway.

Men began emerging from a large crack in the middle of the stone basin where a tunnel had been dug, presumably down to the cradle.

We could run, sure, but I had a feeling this scene wasn't about running. It could only be resolved in a different way.

The man, Ernst Vogler, emerged from the tunnel, flanked by two inhumanly large guards whose faces were covered in wraps. A man I recognized followed right behind him. It was Bobby. He wasn’t a prisoner. He was one of them.

Vogler turned to us and smiled. He was tall and ruggedly handsome, as you would expect an adventurer to be, but he had an aura of darkness around him. I didn't know if my eyes were perceiving it or if my mind was. His plot armor was 53, and he was an enemy just like the others. All of his men were similar, though their plot armors were lower.

In fact, Bobby was the sole exception. He continued to appear as a player. Maybe he was cast on the enemy’s side to give us clues or help us Off-Screen.

"Antoine Stone, it has been quite a while, hasn't it?" Vogler said.

He seemed strangely friendly for a generic German bad guy. In fact, he almost sounded like a German good guy, a much less common variation in the genre. The way he talked to Antoine was like greeting an old friend, not with anger or vengeance. He genuinely looked happy to see him.

"Ernst," Antoine said after we stopped running because we had nowhere left to go. "Didn't expect to see you again."

Gunmen surrounded us from the west and most of the east.

"I'm certain you didn't. What has it been, two maybe three months? We thought you went off the reservation there for a moment, but it seems you only needed a proper incentive," Vogler said.

He walked toward us with his arms behind his back like he was some kind of aristocrat. His men followed him, but at a distance.

The thing was, the events of the first movie happened six months prior, so the two-to-three-month thing didn't make sense.

"What are you talking about?" Antoine asked, having picked up on the same discrepancy I had.

Vogler looked Antoine over intensely, a look of uncertainty in his eye.

"Tell me, am I talking to Antoine Stone, the famous explorer, or am I talking to my old friend?" Vogler asked.

Antoine was confused, and so was I, but I decided to inject myself into the conversation anyway.

"Is this one of the guys you buried in that tunnel?" I asked, just to add some element to the conversation that Antoine and I knew about.

"That's him," Antoine said, "but I don't know how he survived."

Vogler looked disappointed. He pursed his lips, but then he took a deep breath and continued talking, ignoring me completely.

"My old friend," he said, "remember our days of glory, our triumphs in a thousand worlds. Remember our people and our mission. I know you do, because you've brought us another batch, haven't you?"

At that moment, Antoine lost his composure. He turned to me, beyond confused, but also strangely unnerved. His incapacitation indicator was going off, flickering quickly.

"I don't know what you're talking about," he said, trying to sound confident.

Vogler stepped forward, close enough that he could put his hand on Antoine's shoulder.

"You must remember why you're here," Vogler said. "The sickness has never taken you, though it has tried. You must remember, or else you wouldn't have brought us all these new shapes."

He gestured over toward my cameraman and me.

Shapes.

That's what we were. Any nerd could piece together what was happening with that little piece of information. Isaac and Kelsey had looked exactly like the players I knew, had the exact tropes, but they weren't them.

This text was taken from novelbuddy. Help the author by reading the original version there.

The man on the boat had unfolded into an interdimensional monster. I supposed that meant he lost his shape.

These were shapeshifters, eldritch shapeshifters at that.

I looked over at Antoine, and somehow only then did I think to ask about one of the most obvious holes in his character's backstory, something I hadn't even thought to ask about because it wasn't in any Sunken Cradle movie, part one or two.

"I don't know what he's talking about, Riley," Antoine said, struggling as his incapacitation indicator started to light up almost solid.

Was Antoine one of them? How could that possibly be true? When could he have been infected or taken over? We had been given tons of information to indicate that Antoine had destroyed the tunnel down into the cradle in the first movie. That, combined with the fact that they won the storyline, should have told me that even if these were shapeshifters, Antoine couldn't be one of them.

"You said you've never been into the sunken cradle," I asked Antoine, suddenly feeling the need to take the reins of the film.

"I haven’t," Antoine said. "I couldn't even make myself go down there. I blew up the tunnel. I told you that."

"Yes," I said, "but that was the second time you went to the sunken cradle, right? Andrew Hughes hired you to lead him to the cradle because you had been there before, didn't he? You never told us whether you went down into the cradle that first time."

It was possible that Antoine didn't even know. It was also possible that this was a complete retcon from the first film. I remembered from the trailer for the first movie that Antoine’s character had definitely endured harrowing experiences during a doomed mission to the cradle some time previous to the events of that story.

When he looked at me, terrified and confused, I didn't see any deception in his face.

"Brother," Vogler said, "even this mortal admits the truth. When are you going to give in?"

"I don't know what you're talking about," Antoine said. "I never went into the cradle, I…"

Antoine seemed to realize that his character must have entered it at some point in the past.

"Of course you have," Vogler said. "Many times, when you brought me all of these wonderful shapes."

He gestured toward all the people who had been acting as prisoners, all of the people from Antoine Stone's adventurous life, all the people who had gone missing.

The narrative told us the truth from the beginning. Antoine Stone, the character, if not the player, had absolutely caused those disappearances. Carousel practically told us to our faces what was going on, and we never realized it because we thought we knew what was happening already.

At some point in time before the first movie, Antoine Stone went to the sunken cradle and got infected or replaced, depending on how the lore worked, which is why in the first movie, he was afraid to go back down there. He was having some sort of existential crisis.

If I understood it correctly, he had led more and more of his compatriots to the cradle since the first movie. That’s why they went missing. Detective Blackwood was right. Heck, Roxy was right, too.

I had never seen anything like this before, not even in Homibridal, where we were mind-whammied into believing that an enemy was one of the players. The concept that a storyline would completely invalidate the main character using nothing but narrative was impossible for me to accept, but I had to accept it.

They said that the hardest storylines at the higher levels aren't difficult just because the monster level goes up. They become difficult because the combinations of situation, plot, and tropes are terribly hard to navigate.

And this must be a taste of that, because in a film called Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle Part II, it turned out that Antoine Stone wasn't actually the main character.

I glanced back at the waterfall, knowing that Roxy and her bodyguard were sitting there. It was all starting to make sense, everything clicking into place. Why had the femme fatale paragon shown up? Why had the detective paragon shown up? It wasn't to make things more difficult. It was to shift the story just enough to change who the main character was.

Not the explorer, but the investigator.

Not Antoine, but me.

They knew, and Cassie, on some level, must have known.

That's why we had the mystery subplot and the betrayal subplot. It was all leading to this realization, so that when Antoine's true nature was revealed, we would at least have a leg to stand on.

I started to back away from Antoine as his appearance on the red wallpaper began to flicker.

Was it ever our Antoine, or was it always the copy?

I had to believe that this really was Antoine Stone, the man, my friend, not the character, at least at first. Carousel wouldn't invalidate an entire player from the beginning, surely, especially one who didn’t have low plot armor.

Antoine looked over at me, suddenly starting to realize what was going on the same way I was. He could feel himself changing, or perhaps he could feel himself being retconned.

He quickly reached into his camera bag that he was using as a satchel and grabbed up the knife that had been used to pin the letter we had received and used as an omen for this storyline.

He quickly threw it at me, but it missed and hit a tree right next to me, sticking with a thud.

And with that final act, he stood straight, and the flickering of the red wallpaper ended. Antoine, the player, had been written out of the story as far as I could tell, and Antoine Stone, the copy, was in control. Within the narrative, he had always been a copy, but within the game, he had just been shifted over, like Kelsey and Isaac. His infected status wasn't lit up.

It felt like we were doomed to fail from the beginning. Bobby looked at me, almost remorsefully, as if he knew we were doomed.

I backed away until my back was against the tree he had thrown the knife into. I quickly grabbed the knife. It was a final gift from a friend, a gift that had been powered up because of Antoine's outfitting trope. I quickly stashed it in my character's bag.

"Antoine, tell me I'm wrong," I said. "Tell me that this is all a lie."

And I knew I wasn't talking to Antoine anymore when he said casually, "I really wish I could. You know, it would have been quite an adventure. I wish I had been left to it," he said as he glanced over at Vogler. "You know how much I hate being reminded."

He and Vogler began to laugh as they embraced.

"Yes, yes, brother," Vogler said. "And when the job is done, you'll forget again. We all will. Now let's gather up these shapes you've brought us."

I turned to run, and my cameraman was right on my heels. Somehow, he could turn the camera back toward the bad guys as they were chasing us without losing speed. I thought the whole thing was quite silly, but as long as he didn't get in the way, I was all for it.

How did I not realize I was the main character when I literally had a cameraman following me around?

I ran, and as I did, I picked up my radio from my pocket and said, "We've been compromised. Trust no one. Make an escape as best you can, and do not maintain your prearranged positions. I repeat, change your location and do not get caught. The enemy wears our faces."

I thought that sounded cool, but it might come off as corny. It didn't matter as long as it was useful.

I ran through the thick hedges and vegetation, knowing that no matter how fast I tried to travel, I would always end up going the other direction, back toward the tunnel, back toward the sunken cradle.

I would return there in the end so I could learn about the beginning.