“I don’t like it here,” Ramona said as we snuck through the halls of the inner cradle, following along as best we could. The group escorting Detective Blackwood had gone up ahead, and now there was another group of shapeless ones who had grabbed Anna and Camden. We followed them.

“I don’t like it here,” Ramona repeated.

“Calm, child,” Alasdair whispered to her, loud enough for me to hear.

We continued onward. We didn’t have time to talk about our feelings, but I could see the effects of this place wearing on Ramona as she walked forward. The cosmic being bound in the shape of her DNA was leading her well enough that she could close her eyes as she walked, and I followed her with Danny the cameraman on my tail.

This isn’t real. This is a movie set.

The thought repeated over and over in my mind. It was a thought that didn’t belong to me, but I clung to it nonetheless. I was thankful I had brought my It’s Just a Puppet trope, and somehow the fact that it was activating so often, without me understanding why, was itself distressing.

What was it that my human mind was struggling with? What was the trope helping me avoid?

We went On-Screen sometimes, but only enough to establish that we were following along. The architecture eventually stopped imitating the kinds that humans made. The outer area of the cradle had been magnificent, as if every street corner held another wonder of the world that would make the Great Pyramids seem mundane.

But here in the interior, the laws of physics were breaking down, and I was afraid to look.

“What are those things?” Ramona asked when we were On-Screen next. She couldn’t ask me because I couldn’t possibly know. She was asking the shapeless one inside of her.

“That is our vast collection,” Alasdair said. “We have gone through great lengths to preserve life from the many worlds we have visited.”

I looked around at the great expanse around us. Nothing but a stone floor and white walls could be seen anywhere. Next, I followed the direction Ramona’s eyes kept darting to.

She was looking at the walls themselves in horror. They were hundreds of feet high, and I noticed that as I looked at them, my eyes would skip over from one end to the other. I had difficulty focusing.

It was that same trope trying to stop me from being afraid. It wouldn’t let me see.

This is not real. It’s just part of the set design.

The thought echoed in my mind, and it was working as best it could in the circumstances, but now I felt like I was walking blindfolded through a house of horror. It felt cowardly. There was information here, and I was missing it. I needed to see what was causing Ramona such pain, what was causing my trope to trigger with such intensity.

I forced myself to focus on the walls. I didn’t allow my eyes to dart away before they could comprehend what I was looking at.

It took me several minutes to break down what I saw, and even then, I didn’t really perceive it so much as I simply understood it. I had to create some abstraction. I had to boil it down into a more digestible form for my mind to be able to wrap around it.

It was only then that I realized that the giant white walls stretching hundreds of feet into the sky weren’t made of any material that I was familiar with. They weren’t marble or slate. They certainly weren’t painted white.

In fact, there were no walls at all.

My brain was tricking me, that and the trope I had equipped. But if there were no walls, what was I seeing?

This is not real. This is just a set design.

Look at it, I screamed to myself. Look at the walls. What is that?

I forced my eyes to focus and my mind to sort through what I was seeing, giving me some semblance of information.

Those weren’t walls at all. They were cracks. Like glass breaking, but with no glass, sharp shards of nothing, thousands of them, millions of them, like the gaps in knowledge that happened when I saw the shapeless ones transform, where they seemed to go in and out of reality. These walls did the same thing.

Because they weren’t walls. They were tears. And inside of them were living things jammed in like a kid shoved into his locker.

I cursed the moment I understood what I was looking at.

These walls were filled with people, squeezed into cracks in reality, their faces pressed up against nothing so thin I could barely understand them as being people, packed in so much that my mind could barely sort out what it saw. They appeared both flat and bent out of shape with no regard for comfort.

“What is this?” I asked when we were On-Screen. “Are those living things?”

Hadn’t Ramona asked that herself?

All I could call them were things because while my brain recognized some of those shapes as being human, they weren’t exactly human-shaped anymore. I could see organs. I could see blood. I could see tissue wrung out and turned the wrong way. I could see bone and brain matter, and yet there were no injuries. As I moved my head from side to side, my view of these poor things packed into the walls shifted, as if I were looking at a hologram. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

Inside those interdimensional cracks, even a whole, complete human would look inside out and mixed around from the wrong angle. I was seeing through their skin.

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

“This is our collection,” Alasdair said, as if it were obvious.

“Collection?” I said. “There are people in there and...”

“There are all manner of living things in the Gallery,” he said. “Humans and other intelligent species. Plants. Animals of all kinds. Preserving life is one of our most noble duties.”

I moved my head from side to side so I could take in the full breadth of what I was looking at, and as I did, my viewpoint changed, and my ability to see the living things packed like sardines into singular places in space improved.

They had built the architecture of the inner cradle out of their collection.

“They are stored in pocket dimensions, which have no time,” the voice in Ramona’s mouth explained. “They do not feel pain, nor do they perceive their circumstances.”

I continued to look, and the more I did, the more I understood the jigsaw puzzle of living things, stacked and crammed into a space that should not have been enough to contain them.

This is not real. This is just a movie set.

The voice of my trope rang out in my head again, and this time I chose to listen to it.

I couldn’t look at them anymore. Their faces were frozen in anguish and fear, preserved for eternity as part of the collection of these horrifying creatures.

How had I forgotten that Carousel would do this, that it would attempt to take creatures of great dread and turn them into pulp fiction monsters? I couldn’t believe that it had stuck this terrifying species in a lighthearted adventure movie.

“I can feel them,” I said, unable to stop myself. “I can feel them crying out their last thoughts, frozen in the air like I’m walking right into them.”

The aura of terror that exuded from this place wasn’t just from the cosmic entities, not just the shapeless ones. It came from their captives.

The more we moved forward, the less able I was to ignore it. Every step I took, it was like I was being slapped in the face by the psychic pain that these captives were feeling. I could almost hear it. My brain kept listening, as if it expected words, as if it expected screams, but none came.

Alasdair had said there was no time in the pocket dimensions the captives were trapped in. But if there was no time, light would be frozen too, and they would be invisible. If there was no time, how was I feeling their psychic anguish?

The pressure was beginning to be too much.

These are not real. It’s just a movie set.

I had to tell myself that over and over again. The storyline didn’t stop just because I wished it would. We had to move forward.

A funny thing happened once I realized what these white walls actually were. Suddenly, the glowing building we were in didn’t appear to be glowing anymore. The light I was seeing was an optical illusion created from thousands upon thousands of cracks in space-time.

The room got darker, and all I could do was try my best not to stare at the walls as we walked through the gallery toward the center of the cradle.

Eventually, the space around us began to close in as all things converged on one final destination at the center of everything. The walls, which weren’t walls, moved closer together, and we found ourselves having to work harder to hide from the groups we were pursuing.

Luckily, we found a great many stone benches set around that area, almost as if this were some sort of church with room for millions to attend. The benches were too big for a human, but they were perfect for hiding behind.

As we moved closer, keeping an eye on everything that was happening, I noticed that the sky above opened up. I was conscious of the fact that there had to be a stone ceiling; we were underground, after all. Once we got to the center of the cradle, that notion seemed to be disproven.

Above us was the bottom of a bottomless hole, and while I couldn’t see the creatures that swam inside of it, I could feel them in my mind, and I could feel the wind coming off of them.

“Do not stare into the heart of the cradle,” Alasdair said. “My brothers and sisters maintain their true forms above us. If you catch sight of us when we are shapeless, you will not be able to see us truly, and what your mind cannot see with your eyes, it will attempt to see with your imagination instead, and the horrors you will inflict upon yourself as you attempt to reconcile the sight will drive you mad.”

I gave one last glimpse up at the empty space and realized that my eyes simply moved from one side of the heart of the cradle to the other without picking up any information in between.

It was the same thing that had happened with the walls. Something was there, and my It’s Just a Puppet trope was forcing me not to look at it, but unlike with the walls, I wasn’t going to insist on seeing it anyway.

Ramona could barely look up. She could barely keep her eyes open.

Danny had one eye closed and the other firmly locked inside the viewfinder of his camera. Funny enough, that was probably great protection against whatever cosmic horrors floated above us.

My nerves were raw. My body was about done in from the stress of simply existing in this place.

But I had work to do.

Ahead of us, there was a large platform with a crystal funnel above it. There were probably better ways to describe it, but that’s what it was. It was a large funnel-shaped crystalline structure directly beneath the heart of the cradle.

The shapeless ones in the forms of mercenaries, including Vogler and Antoine, were down below. Bobby was there too, at the back of the group. They were operating some sort of technological interface that was so advanced it didn’t even look like a machine. They were interacting with it on a level I couldn’t even perceive, and I was too mentally tired to try.

I couldn’t say what the parts of this machine were, but I understood well enough, and as we moved closer, I could hear what was being said.

“You can’t get away with this,” Detective Blackwood was saying in his fiercest voice. Even as cool, calm, and collected as Blackwood had always been, this place was wearing on him, and he wasn’t just acting. The psychic trauma of existing in the cradle was destructive even to paragons. “The truth will get out one way or another,” he declared as his voice broke.

On the red wallpaper, a small plaque with the words Win Condition: Expose the Truth appeared.

So that was his entire role: to give us a winnable win condition.

It wasn’t like he was going to be able to do much more than that because soon after he declared that the truth would get out, he was shoved into what I could only describe as a sort of cosmic car crusher. It was big enough for a cement truck. Its components were honed from metal, but there were no moving parts.

He took a moment to look around. There wasn’t a lot of information to be had there. He immediately tried to get back up and walk out, but even as he did, something strange happened. Every step he took forward appeared to be canceled out.

Even as he broke into a sprint, his ability to leave the area was nullified as space itself began collapsing around him, at first from the front and then from the sides, until all he was was a crack in space-time, frozen, nothing but a psychic scream that the shapeless ones couldn’t hear.

Moments later, whatever was left of Detective Blackwood appeared to stretch and phase through space itself until it was somewhere else in the gallery. I couldn’t say where.

I didn’t manage to breathe the entire time it was happening.

These entities that we were up against, dressed like mercenaries and explorers for the benefit of Carousel’s little homemade movie, were unstoppable. The technology was incomprehensible.

I couldn’t imagine how we were going to win. All I could do was watch as the needle on the plot cycle moved to Second Blood after Detective Blackwood was sealed away between the dimensions.

But the needle never moved on, because Second Blood was not over.