“We never harm our shapes,” Alasdair assured me. I detected defensiveness in his voice. Maybe I had offended him.

I couldn’t afford to be too gentle. I was the private eye in this story, after all. This was my first real lead on the story's core mystery. No more disguises or tricks. I needed to get information, partly for me and partly for the audience.

“Your kind chased us down with guns, kidnapped people from their homes, and you’ve done something to them. Taken their shape. What does that involve exactly that you would need to use such force?”

I was breathing hard from a fear way down in the pit of my stomach. I tried to play it off as anger.

“The tactics used recently by my brothers are appalling, yes,” he said. “But I assure you, your people are resting in the gallery, safe from violence, safe from time. We only borrow their shapes. When we are finished with them, they will be freed. It is our most dearly held custom.”

“Safe from time?” I asked. “How does that work?”

Alasdair didn’t answer for a time. Ramona did instead.

“He’s showing me images,” she said. Her eyes glazed over as she stared ahead. “The people… They’re frozen. Not in ice, but frozen still.”

Suspended animation. That could change some things for the plot. It meant that this mission might have quite a few rescue targets.

“This is a lot to take in,” I said. “The age of the ruins connected to this place, heck, the age of the cradle itself. It must be tens of thousands of years old. What have you been doing here?”

“We spread life,” Alasdair said. “Not for tens of thousands of years, not for thousands of thousands of years. For eons, since our cosmic genesis allowed us to.”

I felt my voice catch in my throat as I said, “You spread life to Earth?”

At that question, Alasdair began to laugh. The sound echoed around the large empty room until it was lost in the darkness.

“Why else would we call this place the Cradle?” he asked. “We spread life to Earth, to many Earths. We build colonies of life wherever we go. Sometimes the shape is human, sometimes not.”

This story was multiversal. That meant we needed an explainer for the audience.

“Many Earths?” I asked. “You mean planets? Like in outer space?”

“No, child,” he said. “One planet, many worlds. I envy the simple lives of your kind. To know nothing about the world, to be capable of happiness. That is my people’s flaw, after all. Envy. We desired to live lives different than our own, if only for a little while. It was that core desire that ruined us, in time.”

“Yeah, well, ignorance is bliss,” I said. “But if you don’t mind, I could use a little less of it. I saw a man I knew to be Antoine Stone, who, without warning, suddenly seemed to realize he was one of your kind. I want to understand what happened.”

“Shaping sickness,” he whispered.

“I heard that mentioned,” I said. “What is it?”

More importantly, how could we use it to our advantage?

“As we explored the many versions of this planet and all of the life that inhabited it, we took many shapes and lived many lifetimes. Our abilities, combined with our shaping technology, are perfect. When we take a shape, we take every bit of it. We are folded down until we replicate every neuron, every strand of DNA. All of that shaping, though, takes a toll. Over millennia, our memory began to fade. This is what we call the shaping sickness. It is to forget what we truly are. We would forget that we had taken the forms of humans and other species. We would live lives, die, rot, or be turned to ash, all the while forgetting that we were not humans, we were not rot, and we were not ash. Many have fallen to the sickness, forgetting to return home. My brother, who took Antoine Stone’s shape, fell as well. He does so constantly. They must always remind him.”

Receiving exposition in a dark room could be creepy sometimes. I needed to think.

I turned my back to Ramona and put my face in my right hand as I processed what I was being told.

“So all of Antoine Stone’s contacts, his past partners and fellow explorers. Were they kidnapped, too, or...?”

Ramona shook her head.

“Alasdair has watched Antoine Stone,” she said. “He would bring groups back to cradle a few at a time. Scientists, benefactors, even royalty, if he could. He would trick them back to the Cradle so their shapes could be taken.”

I had to show a physical reaction to this. While I had figured a lot of this out, it would be pretty mind-bending for my character.

“Then why blow up the other entrance to the Cradle?” I asked.

“He didn’t want to return,” Alasdair said. “I watched him then. I am watching him now. He wanted to fall to the sickness and find happiness. When he left, he had to be lured back. None could find him if he didn’t want to be found.”

That explained the convoluted chase and kidnapping schemes. But it also introduced new questions.

“How were you watching?” I asked. “If you’ve been stuck in the shape of DNA or whatever for generations, how do you know what’s happened at the Cradle?”

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Alasdair chuckled. “My form can exist over great distances in shapes your mind cannot comprehend. Part of me resides in the cradle, a remnant of one of my descendants. My eyes and ears.”

There was no good place to stare at on the cosmic being hidden within Ramona. I tried my best to give him an intense look anyway.

“I saw footage from the other entrance to the Cradle,” I said. “There was a woman who appeared to be talking to herself, a woman who refused to enter the Cradle. Would you know anything about that?”

Both Ramona and Alasdair were quiet for a moment.

“She was the mother of one of my descendants,” he said. “She brought his ashes to the cradle after he died, hoping he could be brought back. The material in those ashes that came from me awoke like a spirit when she neared the cradle and answered her, forgetting they weren’t her son. I couldn’t help it. I wanted her to be happy. He, I wander the cradle still. I can see some of your companions through him now.”

There it was. Ramona said that Alasdair had appeared to her after First Blood, which would have been right around the time I used the Insert Shot on the film reel of Dina talking to her son. Had I been responsible for Alasdair’s inclusion in the story? That was such a powerful trope when used early in the story.

“Who do you see?” I asked.

“One of them is Anna Reed. I recognize her,” Ramona said.

“Can you talk to them?” I asked.

“If they are of a mind to listen,” Alasdair said.

Something told me they would be.

“Tell them how your kind work,” I said. “About the shapeshifting, the nature of it, so that they can understand. Tell them you are with me.”

“I will do as you’ve asked,” he said, “but you ought to know that their capture is imminent, and my brothers have in fact captured another group that appears to be law enforcement.”

Detective Blackwood wasn’t as sneaky as I thought he should be, but then he might not have been trying to sneak.

“If they’re captured,” I asked, “where would your people take them?”

“I’ll show you,” Ramona said.

And then we went Off-Screen. Somewhere in the distance outside, I knew that Anna and Camden were getting the focus of the story.

“We’re going to have to spread the rest of the exposition out over the next few scenes,” I said.

“We can, if you want,” she said, “but I already got a lot of it On-Screen when he told me, but I’m not sure it looks right.”

“It’s probably a tough acting job, having a conversation with the man in your mouth,” I said.

“Yeah, we kept speaking over each other,” she said. I would have laughed, but I was emotionally raw.

“So the next place is the gallery?” I asked, gesturing for her to take the lead.

She nodded. “I haven’t seen it yet, but I know where it is.”

Good enough.

“Is there any chance that your passenger is a bad guy?” I asked.

She looked at me, not quite sure how to answer. “I wouldn’t press him on it,” she said. “He’s better than these other guys, but only a bit.”

“Great,” I said.

“Yeah, I know what that means,” she said. “You may have to leave me behind if he tries to interfere.”

She quickly moved to the door, opened it a crack, and we both slid through, followed by Danny and his camera.

“He’s not an enemy. He’s a non-player character, so there’s no telling,” I said.

“It’s no big deal. I understand how it works,” she said as she started leading me down a giant, dark hallway. “The inner part of the cradle is this way. You can kind of feel it.”

She was right. I could feel it. It was a dark, pressing aura, something that I found difficult to describe but similar to some past experiences. 𝒇𝙧𝙚𝓮𝙬𝙚𝓫𝒏𝓸𝓿𝓮𝒍.𝓬𝙤𝓶

We carried on nonetheless.

It might have been forty-five minutes to an hour before we were back On-Screen. Whatever Carousel had been paying attention to, it had gotten a lot of footage for it.

Eventually, we went back On-Screen.

As we approached the interior of the cradle, time and space stopped making sense. Not that they were on their best behavior beforehand. I can only report on what I understood to be true, not on what I perceived, and what I understood to be true was that although we walked down one hallway through a gargantuan city of an underground compound, there were actually dozens, if not hundreds, of other halls, streets, and pathways in that exact same location. My mind was only capable of perceiving the one we were walking on, but I heard other things, and I could see the edges of reality in the corner of my eye, like one thousand paths converging on one.

“Try not to trip,” was all Ramona said about it.

“I think I’m already tripping,” I said.

“Is your camera picking this up?” I asked Danny.

“It’s picking something up,” he said. “I’m trying not to look at it.”

We were on the outer edges of a kaleidoscope that wouldn’t stop spinning. Not only could I see fragments of other dimensions popping up all over the place as I walked forward, but I could also feel them and even smell them.

“What is this?” I asked finally.

“Many worlds, one cradle,” Alasdair answered.

And I understood what he meant immediately, because the large glowing building at the center of it all did not have fragments sticking out of it. It was a complex of great hallways and giant buildings that strangely reminded me of a museum, but much bigger. The ceiling was made of glass, and all the rooms must have had walls that were hundreds of feet high and even more feet across.

I could see the top of it like I was above it, but I wasn’t above it. I was on a flat road walking toward it. I tried not to worry about it.

It was not built for humans.

“We need to hide,” Alasdair said abruptly. “They should be right behind us.”

It was easy enough to find somewhere where they couldn’t see us. While I did recognize this place as being a city, a massive city, it was, for the most part, deserted, an appropriate setting for an archaeological story. The walls were mostly barren, but I could tell that they had once been painted in vibrant colors. Most other signs of life had passed too, literally crumbling to dust in the streets of the cradle.

Still, the impression upon me could be felt tangibly. This was a city of gods. I could almost imagine Zeus and Poseidon walking past each other here.

We hid behind piles of rubble from some long-forgotten construction project.

“These walls are made of marble,” I said. “How in the world would they move these slabs in here?”

I didn’t get an answer because right around that moment, a small group of shapeless ones in the form of mercenaries was leading Detective Blackwood and three of his officers through the very same street we had been walking through. In fact, it looked like they should have been able to see us when we were walking earlier, but they apparently couldn’t. The path we took and the path they took overlapped in space and time, but they weren’t the same.

That was going to make a chase scene that occurred here impossibly confusing. I had a feeling that if we ran down the wrong path, we might not only be lost, but we might not even be on our version of Earth or Carousel, rather.

Detective Blackwood took his captivity on the chin. He didn’t look afraid, and he did the best he could not to be freaked out by the place he was walking through.

“Your friends have been captured too,” Alasdair whispered. “I did my best to assist them, but it was inevitable.”

I stared at the group of shapeless ones who marched Blackwood through the streets. One of them was having trouble maintaining his shape. He was stretching out down the middle right where his spine should be, and if I caught myself staring, I noticed that my vision went on for a great distance straight into his body. That hole in his back was hundreds of feet deep.

As he walked, he continued to unfold, the crevice that had replaced his spine getting wider and wider, his human face paralyzed in fear.

His plot armor was ticking up by the second.

No wonder I wasn’t able to see any of their tropes.

It looked like they had plot armors close to ours, forties maybe fifties. I thought this story would be manageable. But their plot armor, like everything else about the shapeless ones, was only for pretend.