I read over his tropes multiple times while he tried to explain himself without actually telling us much of anything.

He had placed Kelsey, Isaac, Ramona, and himself in this storyline, setting them up for the rest of us to run it and hopefully win. But why? Why this storyline? Why choose one of such difficulty? If he had a trope like this, he could have easily used it on the lowest-level storyline he could find and sat there safely, waiting for us to show up.

But how would he know that we were going to show up? Surely the trope wouldn't give him that information. The only way he could know that is if someone told him.

"Have we been running Lucky's throughline this whole time?" I asked, interrupting him as he was apologizing without even explaining what he was apologizing for.

He stopped stammering and looked at me.

"Yes," he said. "Really, I think this storyline was designed to complete the whole thing in one go."

He seemed to hold his breath as he waited for what I was going to say.

"In one go?" I asked. "Why in the world would you think we could survive a storyline that was supposed to effectuate an entire throughline in one go? Did you even think that maybe by agreeing to take Lucky's throughline, you could have made things more difficult for us on the river?"

The magic of Carousel was sweeping yet needling. It was mysterious yet purposeful. Had we been led to Familiar Grounds because of Bobby's actions?

Was he pulling on a thread that we never saw? The tracking device we made from the cue ball changed direction abruptly once. Was that Bobby's doing?

He didn't respond at first, but I let the silence hang in the air until he eventually spoke.

"Of course, I thought it was going to affect you. Everything is about you.”

My face slipped, and I stared daggers at him.

“I'm not being facetious; it's the truth, and you know it. We follow your every command, you know that,” he said. “Your slightest hunch was enough to get us to escape a castle on the deadliest river in the multiverse. You let Antoine pretend that he's in charge, but it's you who's in charge. Anything we do is going to involve you eventually, so yes, I thought that if I pulled hard enough on the thread leading me to my wife, eventually you would get swept up in it. In fact, I was counting on it. So was Lucky. He was only interested in you guys anyway."

I was filled with a rage that didn't exist in me before. Back when I thought the forces leading us to run this deceptively impossible storyline were just bad luck or Carousel messing with us, I could accept it. But looking at the trope that Bobby had equipped, I now had someone to blame, and I was angry. You don't usually get to be angry in Carousel. You usually didn’t have a real target other than the enemies.

He made a deal with a narrator? Oh, right, I could be angry at the Consortium, too.

"Do you have any idea how screwed we are?" I asked. "This is a sequel, right? We've never played the original, most of us, and those of us who did didn't get enough information about it to matter. You brought us here, of all places, out in the middle of nowhere, for what? To get to some sanctuary where everything is hunky dory?"

I stopped short before mentioning his real motivation. I didn't want to mention Janet. I could never have a proper conversation with Bobby because once his wife came up, my lips were sealed. I wasn't able to even pretend that I knew what happened to her.

I couldn't tell them that she had quit the game. I couldn't tell them that she was dead, or that she was killed by the very axe murderer that haunted us in our archetype posters.

I could feel my muscles stiffening with stress just thinking about that topic.

"Why this storyline?" I asked.

Bobby shook his head. It didn't look like he was trying to justify it. Something that enraged me even more: he was acting like he was a victim, too.

"I didn't pick the storyline. I don't even think Lucky did. That's not how this works. You pull a thread, and whatever's on the other end, that's what you get," he said, his voice uneven, his eyes still seeking approval or forgiveness.

I took deep breaths. I wasn't going to let my rage control me. I did my best to conceal how I was feeling, and I failed.

The truth was, I believed him. This storyline had Carousel's fingerprints all over it. It haunted us so specifically, so personally. Antoine's poor decision in how he ended the first storyline, the fact that both Kimberly and Andrew would have been trapped in the cradle by his actions, was all just too perfect.

How could Carousel resist? It must have been looking for the chance to throw this one at us, and Bobby gave it the perfect chance.

I wanted to ask him what he hoped to gain, but I knew already. He thought that after he ran away and abandoned us, he would walk on to some safe, hidden neighborhood and reunite with his wife. How could he possibly be that naive?

That bothered me the most back when he was pleading to go on it. I understood he had to pull his thread, but surely there were safer options first.

"You did all of this so that we could complete a throughline for Lucky, who promised us nothing in return. You risked our lives in the most extreme and terrifying way… That trope gives you access to the script, right? Do you even see how much trouble we're in right now?"

He nodded. "More than you know," he said.

"More than I know?" I repeated. "Great, because what I know is that we've got a movie here without an ending and a bunch of angry cosmic gods roaming around looking for revenge on us. So what don't I know?"

He didn’t answer at first. I thought he was going to say something, but then he seemed to change his mind.

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

"No, that's about it," he said. "Maybe you do know. I hoped that you would find a way to change things. You always do. But after this break is over, the shapeless ones will find you, and they will kill all of you, and we will lose this storyline. I don’t see any other possibility. There's nothing written after that in the script. That's it. Carousel didn't even come up with the rest because it didn't need to."

I didn't know how scripts worked in Carousel. I never got a really good chance to look at them. Most of what I knew was from word of mouth or the Atlas. But the way Bobby talked, this sounded bad.

"How can that be?" I said. "The detective paragon changed the win condition to Expose the Truth. So there is a way to win."

Now I was the one searching his face, hoping to hear what I wanted.

He shook his head.

"They won't let you leave," he said. "As soon as you leave here trying to get that tape out to the public, they won't let you leave. Don't you understand? It's a kill box out there. We all die. You die. I don't know what happens to me. Lucky threw the detective into the storyline, hoping he could shape the ending into something, and he barely scratched the surface. None of it matters. Nothing changes."

Were the shapeless ones so powerful that they had even deceived me about the difficulty of their storyline? It was supposed to be a very high difficulty, but this was on another level.

I wanted to argue, to scream in his face and tell him he was wrong, that he just didn't understand the game enough. But I had no doubts about his understanding of the game itself, of storylines, and how games were won or lost. For everything we had accomplished, for everything we had learned, what ending had we helped to craft?

I stood in silence because I had no response, because I believed him.

"You idiot!" Ramona screamed at him, and she wasn't the only one. Everybody had something to say, although Kimberly and Andrew were mostly just confused. They were very behind. They didn't even know who Lucky was, and we didn't have time to tell them because we were about to go On-Screen in a few minutes.

"I was the only one willing to do anything. None of you lost anything like I did. No, you lost people," he said, "but everyone in the group was all gung ho to rescue those people, to get you home to your loved ones. I was the only one who suffered and couldn't even talk about her. Do you know what that's like? The leader of the group can't even be in the same room as discussions about planning my wife's rescue. Everyone telling me we would figure it out later."

"Your wife is dead," Antoine said, "and not just temporarily dead, but gone."

I froze as he said that. Suddenly, I heard breathing in the far distance. Did Antoine know? The worst part about this curse, about having to keep this secret, was that I had no way of knowing whether the others had figured out the nature of my condition or if they truly were eternally curious.

"You don't know that," Bobby said.

"Everyone knows that," Ramona said, screaming as she grabbed my shoulder like she was defending me. She had noticed that I was incapacitated with fear and paranoia. "That's the first thing people told me when I got here, and I met you, was that your wife was dead, but don't talk about it because he gets emotional. Trust me, everyone knows."

"No," Bobby said, suppressing tears. "Only he does."

He pointed at me, and to his credit, he was right. The others weren’t as clueless as I had once feared, but they didn’t actually know. They suspected. They reasoned. Only I knew for sure.

I had seen her sliced in two by a man wearing a black cloak and carrying a simple, sharp axe.

And now I heard him breathing louder and louder, and I heard his footsteps.

And the next thing I heard was myself screaming.

"Be quiet! Shut up!" I screamed.

"It's okay," Ramona tried to tell me, but that wasn't the thing I needed. Comforting me didn't help because I wasn't supposed to know about Janet’s demise. Acknowledging that I knew was like acid on my skin.

"No, say nothing," I said. "Say nothing."

I took in a deep breath, and I waited, and while I could hear the others growing restless, none of them did speak.

Slowly, the footsteps disappeared, but the breathing, the breathing lingered far in the distance, far enough that I was safe.

I breathed in and out until eventually my mind focused on the red wallpaper, and I saw on my Call Sheet trope that we had less than a minute before we were On-Screen.

My stomach dropped because if Bobby was right, that meant we were about to be killed. We were going to lose the game at Carousel, and there was nothing we could do. If these monsters weren't pretending to be human, then they couldn't be killed like humans. If they remembered what they truly were, then they couldn't be killed at all.

I had less than a minute, so I needed to use the time I had left. But what could I ask Bobby that might have any use at all?

"Are there any other win conditions?" I asked.

He seemed surprised that I was changing the subject. In fact, he looked angry.

"Of course," he said. "It's all about the game, isn't it? Let me see. Well, you could kill them all," he said. "Maybe if they all gave up, but like I said, the script's not done. They have no behaviors planned out, so I guess that's not going to work either. Look, I want you to know that I never meant for any of you to get hurt. That was not part of the plan. I just hope that one day you'll understand."

I didn't even have time to process that comment.

Right after he said that, he slipped back out of the door and closed it behind him because it was showtime, and he didn't want to be caught On-Screen. He clearly hoped to use his Meaningful Sacrifice trope to get out of the storyline now that we were doomed.

On-Screen.

We stared at the door, waiting for someone or something to open it and come devour us. We weren't doing our best acting. We were stunned.

"What is this place anyway?" I asked.

"These are arena viewing lounges," Alasdair said. I knew I could ask him because he was the only one here who wouldn't be shaken by that Off-Screen conversation. "A very long time ago, we used to stage competitions in the arena beyond that window." He forced Ramona's arm up to point at the large black void on the other side of the room, where the entire wall appeared to be a black screen. "We would choose forms from the many worlds and do battle."

He was so matter-of-fact about it. Maybe he didn't pick up on the tension in the room, or maybe he didn't care. He was immortal, after all, and he had other descendants.

Before anyone could respond, a tapping noise echoed throughout the room, coming from the direction of the large wall-sized window that we had just been commenting on.

"What was that?" Kimberly asked as she got to her feet. The rest of us got prepared to run too.

Another tap on the window.

I couldn't see what was on the other side. There was absolutely no light at all. I had no sense of scale, no understanding of what to expect out there. I heard a voice coming from my magically imbued psychic abilities telling me to look away.

If only I had listened.

Because some of the things beyond the window started to emit light.

Not all of them, but it didn't take all of them. In pitch darkness, that glow carried far and revealed much.

On the other side of the window, there were dozens of impossible horrors floating there, each the size of skyscrapers, each staring at us with dozens of different kinds of eyes placed haphazardly around their bodies.

Some had claws like lizards', others like lions', and still others like insects'. Some had mouths like humans, and others had mouths like black holes.

And none of them looked even the slightest bit human, and yet all of them looked angry.

The arena must have been the size of a small town, and they filled it just fine. They had combined their limitless forms from countless lifetimes to create the deadliest, scariest creatures they could imagine.

Yet, the funny part was that nothing was scarier than the parts my brain couldn't understand. A giant mantis claw was far less menacing than the void of fifth-dimensional nonsense it was attached to.

We were all incapacitated as we stared. This was the furthest I had seen any of them unfolded. My It's Just a Puppet trope was whispering to me somewhere in the back of my mind, but it didn't have the muscle to do anything against what these creatures were doing to my mind.

They were the embodiment of cursed knowledge. Staring at them wasn't just seeing things. It was seeing lifetimes all at once crammed into a single space, and my mind was having a tough time coming to terms with that.

I felt the hope leave my body. What tricks or traps could possibly help us now?