"Quick, hand me her bag," I said as Ramona lowered Anna down from the temporal prison she had been locked in.

Ramona quickly took the bag from Anna, pulling it roughly over her head and shoulder. She threw it to me, probably glad to be rid of it.

I was hoping that when I opened the satchel, I would find the original bomb that Camden had put inside, with a convenient off switch, so I could use it later. But what I found was that the explosive he had hobbled together had no such convenience. By my recollection, it would blow up in about two minutes. I tried not to inspect it too closely because I suspected that the wires and fuses Camden had used to construct the munition might not actually work in real life, and I didn't want it caught on camera.

As gently as I could, I slid the bomb onto the floor of the dimensional compactor, which I assumed was the correct term.

"Can you make this thing work?" I asked.

"Certainly," Alasdair said as he unfolded himself into nearly invisible strands that engaged with the machine in a way I didn't understand and caused the compactor to instantly activate, trapping the bomb in a nearly timeless void.

The crack in space-time quickly moved over onto the pedestal near where Anna had been.

I helped grab Anna and bring her to her feet. She had only been stuck in that lower-dimensional trap for minutes, and yet she seemed disoriented and worn out. As I pulled her up, her eyes floated to the ceiling only for a moment. I could practically feel the pain she experienced as that single glance incapacitated her.

Out of sheer stupidity or habit, I also glanced up, but luckily, my eyes skidded from one side of the abyss above to the other because of my It's Just a Puppet trope.

"What about them?" I asked. "Are they going to cause a problem? Can they… I don't know… Can they see us? Do they have eyes?"

Ramona looked at me and opened her mouth a bit so I could hear her cosmic passenger's voice.

"In our shapeless form, we do not experience time or space in a way you would understand. They do not perceive this moment with the gravity that you do. Their minds are expansive, contemplating stimuli from dimensions you know not. They give no more care for us than you would a single leaf in a forest blowing in the wind. It is a numb, depersonalizing existence."

I glanced once more at the collective of impossibility above me.

"No wonder they prefer being human," I said.

"It is no wonder at all," he said simply.

Who knew that cosmic entities of vast, godlike power were capable of feeling sorry for themselves?

"Let's get out of here," Antoine called. "They're starting to reform."

I looked one last time back up at the crack in space-time that Anna had been trapped in, which had now largely been displaced by the one the bomb was trapped in. Hers was fading, filling in like how water that had just broken through a dam might fill a valley.

I made sure that there was a shot of me staring at those prisons and contemplating, because if I ever got put inside one, if I ever had to find a way to escape it, Carousel would need a shot of me looking up at them. It would need to be able to show that the gears were turning in my mind.

When Alasdair had pulled Anna from the prison, it almost looked like he was breaking a seal between two dimensions. Mostly, I just hoped that I would never get put in one. I wasn't sure I would ever get out again.

We ran as best we could, following Antoine. Andrew's mechanism couldn't move him very fast. It was more of a brisk walking speed. We went Off-Screen. I assumed Carousel would know how silly it looked, us trying to run away from cosmic horrors at a leisurely pace, accompanied by the click-clack of metal feet.

Antoine walked ahead of Andrew, but Ramona and Anna stayed behind next to him. I decided to move up and talk to Antoine.

We were Off-Screen now, so if my theory about the shapeless ones not being meta was true, then this Antoine wouldn't be able to break character if he was a copy.

"Riley," he said, "just a heads-up. Kimberly is back at the hiding spot."

"Kimberly?" I asked. "Does she remember...?"

"No," he said. "She doesn't remember anything that happened after running The Sunken Cradle Part One. She and Andrew both. They think that you're here running a rescue. They think that we failed that storyline."

"Oh, great," I said.

"And that's not the half of it," Antoine said. "You wouldn't believe what happened to me after we were caught."

I was ready to believe a lot of things, but I let him explain it to me. It didn't take that long.

As I had already figured out, it turned out that his character had been captured before the first movie even took place, so when he was retconned after we were captured outside, Antoine woke up months ago, being rescued from his dimensional prison by Andrew, much as they had explained.

It turned out he had been busy over the last few months doing everything he could to set us up for success.

"The thing is, most of what I did was Off-Screen. I know this sounds ridiculous," he said, "but I swear it's true. There was this machine that they had that was going to destroy the world, and I had to sabotage it, and Carousel didn't film any of it."

At least he was being productive. 𝐟𝕣𝕖𝐞𝐰𝕖𝚋𝐧𝗼𝚟𝐞𝕝.𝗰𝐨𝐦

"Sounds about right," I said. "I had a similar experience once. I had to electrocute a conglomeration of demonic restaurant furniture."

That caught him off guard. He actually managed to laugh.

"So what's the plan?" he asked. "How do we win? Is it just a straight-up escape? Because I don't know if that's possible, man. The way out is so much longer than the way in."

I glanced back at Anna and Ramona. They should really have been a part of this conversation. I was hoping to have a plan by the time I had to talk about it, but we were already in the finale, and I felt like we were merely reacting to the enemy. Still, I didn't have a plan that I was confident in.

"We have a while before we go back On-Screen," I said. "Let me get my bearings, and then we'll have a talk."

The place that Antoine and Andrew had been holed up in was the same kind of place that Ramona had taken me to before, a large two-story apartment that had long been left to rot. Apparently, the shapeless ones never took the shape of a night watchman who could check on the abandoned property within the cradle.

When Antoine opened up the door just a crack, but somehow still enough for us to walk through, Kimberly was there to greet me almost immediately. She hugged me and started telling me how glad she was to see me when I noticed something strange.

She was Infected.

I panicked, fearing she might have the off-brand rage virus coursing through her veins.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I’m not really infected,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything to infect us in this storyline.”

I didn’t even have time to celebrate getting to see her again.

Unlawfully taken from novelbuddy, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

“Explain the red wallpaper then,” I said.

“I’m… I think I’m pregnant,” she said.

I looked down at her stomach. I didn’t see any indication of pregnancy.

I was absolutely dumbstruck because, as far as I knew, no one could actually get pregnant in Carousel. My heart raced because horror and pregnancy were ugly bedfellows.

I was at a loss for words.

"How are you freaking out more than Antoine was?" Kimberly asked with a smile. "When we were running the storyline, I used my pregnancy trope to try and buff my Grit, that's all. I guess Carousel took me seriously."

I found the least trashy pile of furniture to sit down on as the revelation washed over me. That really was just like Carousel. This storyline took place less than a year after the first. If Kimberly had been in one of those timeless voids for a while, that would explain why she wasn't further along.

“Does pregnancy cause the Infected status to go off?” I asked. It had never before.

“It showed up when I got morning sickness,” she said. “There’s nothing to worry about. Carousel is having its fun.”

Honestly, I wasn't sure why it overwhelmed me so much, but I felt like I was feeling the stress of so many consequences. How many choices had we made that were finally coming back to bite us? And now this little, seemingly innocuous trope was the final straw of Carousel’s grand mockery.

We sat and talked for a while. I was afraid to tell them the truth, that this wasn't a rescue, that they hadn't lost the storyline, and that whatever they were, they weren't real. They couldn't be real. Carousel wouldn't let us have our friends back for free. This was just to mess with us. That's why it only chose Kimberly and Andrew when weaving its story, the two players we had just lost.

It was amazing to see all the random things that had come into play all at once. Was this storyline specifically chosen because Andrew and Kimberly had participated in it, or was that a happy coincidence for Carousel?

It at least made some amount of sense now. We lost Kimberly and Andrew once we hit the river, and now we had found them again, but not in the way we wanted. Andrew was a terrifying amalgamation of technology and biology. Kimberly was stressed and worn ragged, and now with child, which was not a blessing in a horror movie.

And there were other reasons that Kimberly's presence stressed me out, reasons that I couldn't say because I didn't want the others to panic. Kimberly, while not having her true plot armor since this was a snapshot of her from months ago, still had her tropes, including one called The Hall of Fame. That made her the Center of Attention when it came to the story's meta elements.

So I had to factor that in. Would her presence harm whatever plan I made? Was my narrative prominence going to be diluted because we had a Celebrity Eye Candy in the mix? And at the same time, I felt guilty for being so upset about seeing an old friend again, even if it wasn't truly her.

Luckily, the conversation had been pretty light, even optimistic, while I was sitting on that pile of trash panicking inside.

"We have food and water if you need it," Antoine said.

"It looks like you need it," I said.

"Yeah, well, we didn't know how long we were going to be down here, so we had to ration."

He gave me some sort of preserved military food that was better tasting than it looked and a bottle of water. It was no surprise that they would find supplies in the cradle. The shapeless ones were collectors of many things, after all.

"Have you seen Isaac or Kelsey?" I asked.

"No," Antoine said. "I've seen a lot of people my character supposedly knew, though, but it was all shapeless ones in disguise, it turned out."

We discussed things further, and it became clear that the three of them had learned a lot about the shapeless ones, but not nearly as much as the rest of us had. We had to fill them in. They didn't have a walking exposition parasite like we did.

"Who's Kelsey?" Kimberly asked after we had finished discussing the lore of the interdimensional creatures.

Anna, Ramona, Antoine, and I all exchanged glances. At some point in time, Anna and Ramona had figured out that Kimberly and Andrew weren't exactly up to speed, and we had all silently agreed not to tell them too much. How would they react to know that they were nothing but vestigial echoes of their real selves?

"She's just a character in the story," Anna said eventually.

This version of Kimberly had not yet met Kelsey, who was rescued about two storylines after the original Sunken Cradle storyline was run.

After that, we rested as best we could. I wanted so badly to talk with Kimberly, and even though her personality was the same and she recognized me the same, I couldn't bring myself to see this person as Kimberly. I couldn't let the fire inside me go out to eventually rescue her.

Was this whole thing about Carousel teasing us? Why else would Kimberly and Andrew be here?

And better yet...

"Are there copies of you two running around?" I asked after a long silence.

"Who?" Antoine asked.

"Kimberly and Andrew. I mean, they did kidnap you. Did any of them take your shape?"

Kimberly and Andrew exchanged awkward glances as Andrew had to reposition his entire body in order to see her.

"When I was captured, they took one look at me and dismissed me," Andrew said, with a tinge of anger in his voice as he recalled the memory. "They didn't even try to kill me. They simply let me loose in the darkness of the cradle, assuming I would die."

I looked over at Kimberly.

"They froze me inside one of those things, but I don't know if they copied me," she said. "I haven't seen another version of myself anywhere. The one who captured me said he wished I weren’t pregnant. I thought he was being gross, but I don’t know now."

I was a little annoyed at those answers, not because they weren't useful, but because they were, which meant that all the anger I had felt toward Carousel showing us our dead friends just to be cruel deflated instantly.

Kimberly and Andrew weren't here to mock us. They were here to teach us something.

"They didn't like your shapes," I said.

"I would hope not," Andrew said.

Andrew was basically a very early-in-development android with none of the quality-of-life features one might hope for from being fused with a machine. Why would any of the shapeless ones want to turn into that when they had alternatives?

Kimberly, well, she was beautiful and talented, but she was also pregnant, something that the shapeless ones might be able to perceive immediately. And from what I knew of their people, turning into a pregnant woman as your base shape would probably be a nightmarish situation.

The shapeless ones couldn't actually heal from physical damage. That wasn't their ability. All they could do after being injured was revert to the original shape they stole. They would never pick a pregnant woman as a shape simply because if they ever needed to reshape themselves, they would turn back into a pregnant woman. And if they had already had their child, which would just be an extension of themselves, how strange would that be?

I spent the rest of the break doing my best to ignore our circumstances and just get to spend a little more time with our friends. That piece of information was valuable. The shapeless ones don't want injured shapes. It seemed obvious, and I guess on some level I knew it before, but I hadn't thought about the implications. That's why they hadn't shot their guns at us, because they didn't want to give us an injury that they wouldn't be able to heal.

Now, how could I incorporate that into a solution for the storyline?

That was the question.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't get much time to think about it because not long after that, the door of the apartment opened and someone stepped through. We were still Off-Screen, so we were safe, and the person who stepped through turned out to be one of us, or at least I hoped he still was.

"Hello," Bobby said as if he didn't have a lot of explaining to do. "We don't have long."

He looked nervous and stressed out of his mind. He was holding his right arm like it had been injured, possibly from dodging an explosion that he might have seen coming in the script.

"Where have you been?" I asked. "Please tell us you have something we can use to win."

"I hope so," he said. "I hope."

He continued to talk, stammering about something or another, but I wasn't listening. I was far more interested in looking at the red wallpaper because suddenly I could see that he didn't just have five tropes, as he had seemed to before. He didn't just have eight, as he had claimed. I could see all ten and his background trope.

"Bobby," I said, interrupting him, "what did you do?"

It took the others a moment to realize what I was talking about. He was our ally, so we could see his tropes, and they all took a moment to read through them.

He stood there as we all stared vacantly at him, reading.

"I'm sorry," he said, but I could barely focus on talking to him. I heard a ringing in my ears, and pressure was building in my head.

Most of his tropes were quite normal, but two of them gave up the game entirely.

I had assumed that the enemy had a trope that stretched out the Choice Phase. It turned out it was always him.

The Quiet One

Type: Rule/Insight/Debuff

Archetype: Wallflower

Aspect: --

Stat Used: --

It’s easy to tell when a character is about to do a heel turn when they can’t keep their mouths shut, but who could expect it from someone who was rarely in frame, whose lines were never the focus of the story, whose motivations were never the priority?

Typecast: The player must stay in character as a [secret villain] or else all of their tropes will be unequipped.

Setup: The user can enter storylines to manipulate their starting position in a manner related to their role.

The user will be cast as a minor antagonist. Their schemes succeed or fail based on the true antagonist's stats in addition to their own. Before the storyline begins, the user may circumvent the omen and manipulate the setup to include fellow players as victims, or otherwise placing protagonists at an extreme starting disadvantage. The Omen must be triggered by other players.

The more difficult the startup for the players, the lower all enemies’ Plot Armor and stats will be debuffed to.

The user receives direction from the script to enact the antagonist's will. Allies will have reduced Insight into the user while this trope is in use.

The true measure of a protagonist isn’t that they do good or bad, but that they push the story forward. Just don’t push it further than you can handle.

~

A Meaningful Sacrifice

Type: Rule/Buff

Archetype: Wallflower

Aspect: Recast

Stat Used: Moxie

Sacrifice without lasting stakes is not enough.

If the user has fulfilled their On-Screen role as it was originally written before they were recast in that role, they can leave the story without any ill effect or risk of death. They can just walk away.

If they stay instead, any character they sacrifice themselves for will not die even if the storyline is failed, and will have buffed stats for the rest of the storyline.

Trust is difficult to earn and easy to lose.