What had Riley been talking about? Bobby Gill pondered as the plane’s twin propellers pulled them across the sky. No one remembered the finale of The Sunken Cradle Part I? Not a single player? How could that be possible?

Bobby remembered, didn’t he? Or were those really the monster's memories?

The monster whose memories went back as far as Bobby was willing to look, to when the earth was nothing but a dirtball. Best not to think about that. He couldn't risk it. He couldn't take a chance of getting lost in his mind again. The creature had such a treasure trove of knowledge, of history, of advanced alien technology, of science and math and wonder, but a trip down memory lane could cost Bobby dearly. One false thought and he could get lost forever.

It had never been like this before. As a Recast wallflower, he was used to being thrown into minor roles all at once without warning and having to draw on an assortment of his character's memories and the script. He had to investigate who he was, and what his character's function was in the movie. In those storylines, searching for his character's thoughts took work. It was like trying to remember your friend's name from third grade. Possible, but difficult.

But this was something else altogether. The Shapeless One Bobby was cast to play remembered so much, an endless eddy of flowing knowledge, both technical and intimate, alien and human, that he felt he could so easily drown in.

Carousel was really putting him to the test. He expected no less on his quest to recover Janet.

As if it wasn't enough to be squeezed into this tin can of an airplane, listening to the others theorize and ferret out the truth, he had to deal with the real possibility of falling into his character and never getting back out.

He reminded himself that he was Bobby Gill, husband of Janet Gill, and his mission was bigger than this story.

The finale of the first Sunken Cradle movie. What had happened? Bobby began to remember stumbling out of the darkness and seeing his friends struggling against a litany of enemies, fighting across a battlefield of ancient mechanisms like something out of a steampunk adventure story. He could have so easily gotten lost just staring at it, but he wasn't in control, was he?

No, Bobby had been replaced. These memories weren’t from Bobby at all. An alien had stolen his shape, and he had lost his ability to help the others. He was nothing but a set of memories held in the mind of an ancient, unknowable thing, and yet it was that very cosmic being that was obsessed with Bobby’s life.

He could feel it pushing through his memories, pushing through his thoughts, his heart's desire, until it eventually found his mission, until it found Janet.

After that, Antoine had realized the game was lost and decided to blow the tunnel, curtail the natural ending, and save the story, sealing the fate of his character's friends without ever knowing the nature of the danger itself.

But Bobby, or the thing that carried Bobby's memories, had already run out of the Sunken Cradle looking for Janet, confused at why it couldn't find her, at how it didn't even know who she was or how she fit into this little fake reality. The monster wasn’t meta-aware, but his love for Janet had still overwhelmed it.

Bobby's love for his wife had literally overtaken a great eldritch horror and turned it into a lovesick puppy, so how could Bobby blame himself when that same love held him captive?

But that memory was from another time and another film.

After Antoine beat the story, Bobby woke up back in his real body, not a shapeshifting ancient entity but just a man with no memory of the final battle, standing out in the jungle waiting to collect his tickets. And while he had no recollection of his shape being stolen, he did remember looking at the script and noticing one subtle change. 𝘧𝘳𝘦ℯ𝓌𝘦𝒷𝘯𝑜𝑣𝘦𝓁.𝒸𝘰𝓂

It said simply "bonus sequel" in the same place where it would normally list the name of a possible scene that could be unlocked for an endgame that could be chosen.

At the time, the words bonus sequel had meant nothing to him. There were always strange words like that all over the script in his head, and if he focused on figuring out all of them, he would be useless to his team.

But now he understood that when he, Antoine, Kimberly, and the others had run the Sunken Cradle, they had left it unfinished, in a way. They had left an unanswered question, and now narrative forces were pulling them toward that conclusion.

And Carousel was the one to blame.

Bobby was certain. At first, he had given credit to Lucky for masterminding this devious trap, for taking him up on his offer to help finish the sanctuary throughline. It had seemed such a deep cut to go all the way back to the Sunken Cradle.

But that wasn't Lucky's doing at all. Bobby could see them, the rapid changes to the plot, all the rewrites. He could see Lucky and the other narrators trying to fix what Carousel had done.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

He had never possessed such a powerful ability to access the script as the version The Quiet One had given him. He could go backward and forward. He could look at every detail, shooting scripts, NPC scripts, drafts, and rewrites. All of it was accessible to him in his mind.

Wallflowers really were quite powerful in the endgame. Bobby wondered if he'd ever find a way to actually earn a trope like this instead of taking a shortcut.

Probably not.

Lucky had been employing paragons to try to mitigate the difficulty of The Sunken Cradle Part II, to change the main character. What a cheat that was. Carousel had retconned Antoine as the main villain as a punishment for fleeing the first film. That reveal would destroy most teams. The main character being revealed as the villain… This would have been a fun twist under normal circumstances.

He looked up at the others. Antoine was doing breathing exercises, and Riley was chitchatting with the pilot, one of Lucky's paragons. How hard had they worked to worm him into the story through a companion trope that was meant for NPCs? It must have been all hands on deck if the scribbling on the script was any indication.

Bones Ibarra would occasionally glance back, and Bobby swore he was looking right at him, but he couldn't be sure. Even if he knew what Bobby was, he couldn't say it.

It was funny. They always thought the paragons were somehow secretly in control of things, and while that view had diminished since the discovery of the Consortium, none of his friends could ever guess that they were hardly more than message board moderators in the scheme of things.

They could not prevent what was going to happen. They could not save the team from the dangers of the Sunken Cradle.

Only Riley could. And if he didn't figure out how to pull a win, then nothing Bobby could do would be able to help them.

Riley Lawrence was Carousel's little pet project, and the narrators knew that, too. That's why they worked so hard to make him the main character. And Cassie must have known something about it, sacrificing herself in a storyline that naturally had a fate worse than death so that her tropes could help empower him.

How had she figured it out after being given so little information from her Soul Read trope? Cassie was plenty clever, but all of that usually got thrown away the moment she had a chance to sacrifice herself for someone. Luckily, that habit had come in handy for this storyline, and she'd been able to create a prophecy that might just help Riley get to the end of the story.

Bobby gave her a silent thank-you as he looked around the plane's cabin and hoped the others would be willing to do their part.

Bobby was willing to do his, no matter how gruesome it turned out.

He went On-Screen as the plane started to descend toward the second entrance to the cradle, to the place where he had led the others as part of his betrayal.

There was going to be a sequence where the landing was difficult, and they would lose the plane. It was natural. If there were too many exits, the storyline would be too easy.

Except the darnedest thing happened. They didn't wreck. Bones landed it on the river. Bobby flipped through the pages of the script in his mind and tried to get as much information as he could before it was rewritten, when all the subtleties would be erased.

It became clear that Bones Ibarra had just activated a trope that allowed him to pull off a feat of great skill, but guaranteed his death the very next time he attempted something similar. The trope was simply called One Last Trick. Adventurers had such a variety in their trope selection.

They began disembarking the plane, and Bobby hung back, unsure of what to do. He was forced to continue playing the antagonist. So what would a bad guy do here? Well, these bad guys were shapeshifters, so that implied a basic enemy among us style betrayal. The problem was, he wasn't actually a shapeshifter himself, and he was afraid that if he feigned being one, Carousel might just give him a hand, or a tentacle.

So Bobby pulled back as the others lay down on the edge of the cliff to spy on the encampment below.

He flipped through the script looking for something for his character to do. It wasn't a long list. He was just a minor character in the end. His role was completely redundant. In fact, it was practically finished. He didn't have to appear anywhere else in the film after his status as a shapeshifter was revealed.

And once his role was complete, he would have the ultimate insurance, the ability to activate his A Meaningful Sacrifice trope, allowing him to leave the story altogether and even find the Sanctuary on his own if he was brave.

He was Off-Screen, so he pulled out the ticket and stared down at it.

Some of the flavor text said: "Sacrifice without lasting stakes is not enough.”

That was the conceit of the trope. Bobby was given an out when his role was through, but he could pass it along to someone else if he chose to. It was a heavy choice to make.

When this was all over, Bobby knew the others would hate him. He had put them at risk, a far greater risk than even he knew. What had he really done, though, but pull a simple thread?

He put the ticket back into his pocket as he continued flipping through different subplots and hazards listed in the script until he found one that concerned him. It was perfect.

The very plane that they came in on was a hazard. If the players tried to escape in it, anyone on board was guaranteed to die. The script had a whole list of reasons, of movie logic, of why this had to be so. Apparently, the plane had had too much screen time. Its narrative tank was empty.

It was a fascinating line of logic, but Bobby didn't have time to worry about it. The reason it was so interesting was that it gave him an opportunity to help the players while also seeming to harm them.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a stick of dynamite that he had taken from Anna's weapons stash on her boat. He quickly lit it by smashing two rocks together near the fuse, which worked wonderfully even though he was Off-Screen. Another benefit of being a wallflower. Carousel didn't demand so much footage from your activities.

He quickly wedged the dynamite between two pieces of metal on the plane's frame and quickly ran to his next necessary scene.

It would be difficult to help the players in this storyline. If he got caught doing it, all of this might be for nothing. He would have to be sparing.

Even if he couldn't help them in the story, that didn't mean he could just run off to Lucky's sanctuary just yet.

He had one move left to make, and it would only work once.