“You told me that your people let your captives go,” I said the moment I was next On-Screen after seeing Detective Blackwood reduced to nothing but a small slit in space-time. “That means that we can release people from those prisons?”

“Any shapeless one would be able to release them simply by creating a pathway between this dimension and the dimension that they’ve been stored inside of,” Alasdair said, as if he were talking to a child. In a way, he was. He was trying to calm me because I wasn’t hiding the fear in my voice as well as I hoped.

That meant rescuing Anna and Camden didn’t require an all-out assault against the group of shapeless ones that had taken them captive. I would have to wait, to bide my time until I could release them, or at least until Ramona’s cosmic hitchhiker could.

Vogler was very businesslike as he instructed his followers to place Anna into the same compactor that Detective Blackwood had disappeared into. There was nothing that could be done.

She took it bravely, or at least as well as could be expected. Camden was angry and fighting against those who held him, but even when they were pretending to be measly humans, the shapeless ones could hold him back pretty well. He did manage to hold on to Anna for at least a few seconds, grabbing on to her character’s small satchel before they yanked it out of his hands.

It took less than a second for Anna to be reduced down into the space of an unfolded newspaper, but unlike with Detective Blackwood, she didn’t disappear afterward. Instead, the crack in reality she was shoved into was shifted onto a sort of pedestal on the larger array of the machine.

They had plans for her. They must have had plans for Camden, too, because he was shoved into the compactor right after her, and suddenly, there was silence. The men who had sounded like rowdy mercenaries just moments earlier had gone eerily quiet as they turned toward the gigantic crystalline funnel a few meters away from the compactor.

There was an open space at the bottom of the funnel, with a large white circle that appeared to be frosted glass rather than the normal stone flooring that covered the rest of the inner cradle.

The whole setup looked more like an altar than a piece of technology.

One of the mercenaries operated the machine's controls simply by holding out his hand and unfolding it into a vast network of moving light, not unlike the tendrils that had been shoved into my face by a shapeless one earlier.

Moments later, the unmoving mechanism came to life as energy flowed through the funnel's crystalline structure, and something began to happen that my eyes refused to see and my mind refused to process.

But I understood well enough what was happening.

The funnel was bending space-time as one of the creatures in its natural form began to move down from the heart of the cradle into the crystalline funnel, a process that looked like a cross between going hyperspeed in a sci-fi show and one of those time-lapse videos of slime mold solving a maze.

One of the eldritch creatures was being reshaped right before my eyes. I had seen these creatures pull themselves together to heal wounds and restitch the fabric in their copied clothing, but this was different. This was cosmic origami. Whatever these shapeless ones were composed of was being folded over and over again, and it took a long time for me to even confirm what shape was being made, until that shape started to look like a human.

It was Anna.

At first, she looked like a cartoon or caricature that was mostly two-dimensional, but as the folding continued, her proportions filled out until she was mostly human, then mostly Anna. It copied everything from her, every strand of hair, the cut-off jeans, and the blouse tied in a knot that her character wore. It copied the satchel she wore too, and the shoes on her feet. For a while, at least, it copied the position her body had been in when she was shoved into a lesser dimension.

Her hands were outstretched, her mouth wide in terror, her eyes darting about looking for someone to save her.

But then, as the folding continued, the shapeless one took over her form more completely and gained control of her facial muscles. As the transformation completed, finishing her limbs, making sure they were all three-dimensional like they should be, the look on her face was one of pure ecstasy.

I could see her laughing before I could hear her, as if her lungs hadn’t finished being formed in time, but once the job was done, I heard laughter. Anna’s laughter. It wasn’t a cruel or clever laugh. It was pure joy, unmitigated happiness.

Once the process began to wind down, the shapeless one moved her hands across Anna’s face and through her hair and down over her breasts, past her waist, grabbing at her thighs and her knees. This cosmic entity was completely enraptured by her new form.

And the other shapeless ones cheered her on like we might cheer for someone who won a beauty pageant or beat cancer.

The copy of Anna blushed and smiled and walked off the frosted glass platform, joining her fellow shapeless ones in their revelry.

But that wasn’t something I could afford to pay attention to, because something had changed while the shapeless one was being shrunk down into a human from their infinite form.

Their plot armor fluctuated. It didn’t just go down. It went to zero. It disappeared altogether, and as it did, my Trope Master ability, for the first time in this storyline, started to kick in.

I saw them, one or two at a time, flashing on the red wallpaper, never all of them at once. I read as many as I could. These creatures were cosmic-level, which meant they had dozens of tropes. The fact that they were shapeshifters and could adapt to a wide variety of narratives probably added to that number.

In the end, I managed to catch a glimpse of quite a few. I had good practice reading quickly. Normally, when I used Trope Master, I might only get a glance out of the corner of my eye.

Shapeless One

Plot Armor: Variable

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

__________

Tropes

Hidden in Plain Sight

This villain will appear as an ordinary NPC until they don their disguise.

Which One Do I Shoot?

Players will not be able to differentiate this creature from other players by use of Tropes or common sense. Clever plans and lore understanding are viable alternatives.

Evil Never Dies

It only changes form...

Ghost in the Machine

This entity will reform as long as there is any vessel within which it is able to.

Carousel’s Uncertainty Principle

This villain’s lore and weaknesses only become true once they are discovered.

Dark Aura

This being has an aura with wide-ranging affects, from fear to some combination of status ailments. Aura will bypass all stats on first exposure.

Your Blood Runs Cold

Seeing this enemy will cause great mental distress. Debuffs Moxie and Savvy.

An Affront to Nature

This creature is revolting to see for the first time. One glance will leave the viewer Incapacitated with revulsion. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

Hostage Taker

The villain will not outright kill the player in combat until the Final Battle, instead attempting to take them hostage for his specific purposes.

Fungible Enemy

This enemy is composed of countless largely interchangeable units whose numbers will not diminish until the scene is concluded.

The Unseen Hand

This enemy is guided by a greater force. This guidance may be a part of the lore or the meta.

Humanizing Monologue

In the Final Battle, the villain will attempt to gain sympathy by revealing his backstory or motives. Players not resilient to this will be debuffed. Villain’s Moxie is buffed during this speech.

Bottomless Bag of Tricks

The villain has so many different in-universe abilities that they can employ new abilities in the Finale without needing to establish them in the narrative.

Fate Worse Than Death

This creature does not want to kill its victims, though they will wish it had. Victims are Written Off.

It’s All Riding on This!

The players will win or lose in the Finale. They cannot be definitively defeated until then.

Self-Restraint

This villain intentionally limits their own power for this storyline.

Relatable Need

Despite this enemy’s inhuman nature, their true motivation is not beyond human understanding or manipulation.

Live and Let Live

This enemy does not need to kill you to get what it wants.

Eventually, all I could see was Anna, a player with a bunch of grayed-out enemy tropes. But while I was able to stare at the deluge of information, I did my best to try and understand what narrative weaknesses they might have, because surely they had no other kind.

There were so many plots inherent to these creatures, things that they had excelled at, I could hardly fathom a straightforward plan of attack. Usually, you could look at an enemy and understand the inherent gameplay of their design just by looking at their tropes, but these creatures were prepared for anything.

The thing that jumped out at me the most was the Relatable Need trope. At the end of the day, these were individuals with hopes and dreams and desires, and what I had just seen from both the tropes and from the look of pure joy on Anna’s face was that these creatures did care about something. Maybe they cared about it enough that I could use it.

It was only a few moments after looking at all of the tropes I could find that I noticed that my incapacitation status had gone off. Just one little glimpse into their tropes, and I had nearly overloaded my mind. I felt a wet trickle move down my lips and quickly realized that my nose was bleeding.

I had to hope that the information was worth it.

Camden was next. One of the shapeless ones in the heart of the cradle was moved down from that place above and began to be folded into the shape of my childhood best friend. Interestingly enough, the process looked a little different. It was done in a different order. That was strange. I figured all humans must be alike, but maybe to the machine, there were fundamental differences in how to fold a Camden Tran versus an Anna Reed.

His body formed first, but then it stopped abruptly when it came time to fold his hair, his fingers, and his lower limbs.

Then his mind seemed to kick in. His eyes began to move around as the rest of his body continued to take shape around him. His military fatigues and all the various weaponry that he carried on his person were being folded, unfolded, and rearranged as the cosmic entity became him.

But then something unexpected happened.

This unfinished copy of Camden opened his mouth wide in an attempt to scream, not out of pain but of equal urgency.

He started trying to walk across the platform to get off the frosted glass, but he found himself unable to move in the same way that Detective Blackwood had been unable to move in space when he was in the compactor.

Camden's copy was trying to signal something to his comrades. He was moving his mouth, but no sound was coming out. His eyes were darting around as if they contained some message that no one could understand.

“Is there a malfunction?” Vogler asked.

The man who was operating the machine had no clue and simply raised his arms in confusion.

All that could be done was to wait for the transformation to be completed, and so they did wait. Ten, fifteen, twenty seconds.

They waited until the silent screams of the Camden clone started making noise.

“Epooodabuminherbag!” the cosmic being screamed through its unfinished face, its vocal cords not yet formed enough to make good speech.

But now this version of Camden had feet and shoes and could walk forward slowly as the machine allowed him. His eyes were still wide, and he screamed that same unintelligible phrase again.

What was he trying to tell his men?

The process was almost finished when I could finally understand what was being said. It came out clear and obvious. How had I not understood him before?

“He put a bomb in her bag!” the Camden lookalike screamed, his eyes locked on the cosmic copy of Anna.

As soon as she understood what he said, she reached into her satchel, opened it up, and pulled out an amalgamation of a Mason jar duct taped to several sticks of dynamite, along with a few other things I didn’t recognize that looked like improvisations on Camden’s part to make the bomb look more deadly.

Camden, the real Camden, had snuck an improvised explosive device into Anna’s bag. She must not have even known about it, because if she had known about it, the shapeless version of her would have too. That was why the clone of Camden was acting with such urgency. At some point in time in the shaping process, he received the memory of Camden putting the bomb in the bag and was trying to inform the others.

The bomb, as near as I could tell, was made out of the shapeless one’s own matter, and yet that didn’t seem relevant to its potency at all.

It triggered with perfect cinematic timing.

The explosion rang out fast and in complete devastation, shredding the fake Anna as well as most of the mercenaries around her and blowing the others away at such a speed that their pretend human bodies would take considerable damage.

The shockwave moved through the room, spreading carnage over a wide distance.

If they were human, they would all be dead, but because they were only pretending to be human, they were also only pretending to be dead. In fact, I saw the Death Delusion trope appear for a second during the explosion, which was usually for ghosts who didn’t know they had passed on.

Soon, they would remember that they were not blood, guts, and viscera painted on ancient cosmic machinery. I needed to capitalize on the time Camden had bought me.

It was time to act.