Luckily for us, monsters in Carousel always took the time to pose for the camera. It might have been just enough time for us to escape.

"We need to get out of here," I said.

I quickly turned back toward the door we had entered through, but predictably, as soon as I did, something on the other side began to open it.

"Is there another way out of here?" I asked quickly.

Everyone was mobilizing, but I wasn't actually talking to most of them. I was talking to a specific person. Anna. I made sure to look right at her.

She understood what I wanted as soon as we made eye contact. Escaping these cosmic horrors might not have been possible under normal circumstances, but that was the beauty of tropes. They gave you a one-up, and Anna had just the trope for the job.

"I saw a ventilation shaft right over there," she said. "It should be big enough to fit us."

She pointed to the nearest wall, and sure enough, when we moved over that direction and pushed the rotten remains of some type of overstuffed chair out of the way, there it was: a ventilation shaft just big enough for a person to fit through.

I quickly peeled the cover off and directed Anna to go in, then Ramona, Kimberly, and Antoine. I tried to motion for Danny to go in next, but as my cameraman, he refused. He needed to go after me.

That left one person. It would always leave one person. Anna's trope was called A Tight Squeeze, and it always gave her an escape route, but at a cost. The last person through was never going to make it.

Andrew couldn't even fit in the ventilation shaft due to the size of his mechanical apparatus. He looked at the small exit and then up at me.

"You should go ahead," he said. "I am certain they will spare me, as they did before. They have no interest in a broken shape."

He was lying, and it was obvious, but it was a dignified end, as much as any could be. I felt like I had lost out on some points by not getting the chance to tell him that I was there at his wife's behest, with the goal of finding him.

In fact, I wasn't even certain that Andrew, the player, even knew his character's wife was involved in the story. He certainly didn’t know she was Roxie.

I didn't have time to think about it. I scooted down into the ventilation shaft, and Danny followed behind just as the glass on the prominent side of the room shattered and half a dozen many-shaped beings began to enter.

I didn't see what happened to Andrew, but I did hear it. His scream was a mix of biological and mechanical, but in the end, all that was left was the machine caught in a scream that echoed down the shaft, haunting us as we crawled through ancient dust.

At least I would be able to tell Roxy what happened to her husband. I didn’t want to make that quip out loud. It was too soon, and I had to focus on the chase scene.

So I followed what was ahead of me as Anna found an exit to the ventilation shaft. While I expected it to end up in a different room, similar to the one we had been in, we ended up in a hallway dripping with condensation. We poured out of the ventilation shaft one at a time until Danny finally emerged, gracefully holding his camera.

I wasn't sure how he managed to survive that far, but I was starting to think that his fate was tied to mine because NPCs normally didn't get to last that long.

There was no sign of the Shapeless Ones in the corridor as we walked through it. Alasdair was in the lead because he understood where we were.

"Part of my essence used to take the shape of a mechanic that worked in these halls," he said. "I know this place like the back of his hand."

I had forgotten that this was once a lighthearted adventure story. Hearing goofy jokes come from a horror like him somehow filled me with dread. It made all of this feel so trivial.

We were On-Screen, and it appeared we had lost the Shapeless Ones, yet the chase scene indicator was still lit on the red wallpaper.

We all had flashlights, but I didn't like to use mine because I felt safer in the darkness. Unfortunately, communication had broken down, and the others had forgotten the blanket of safety my trope, No Stab in the Dark, provided by making low-light scenes less likely to include plot-important events.

"You guys better turn out your lights," I said. "They're going to see us."

My friends understood what I was trying to tell them after I said it. Unfortunately, Alasdair had no meta-awareness and responded.

"My brothers and sisters do not need light to see you. To our senses, this hallway is as bright as the sun. If they are here, then they know we are."

Still, nobody turned their flashlights back on. We continued onward, and things seemed to slow down, but somehow the chase scene still didn't end. What were we doing crawling through black sewers, or whatever this place was, if it didn't end the chase scene?

It suddenly occurred to me that the chase scene would continue if one of the Shapeless Ones was among us, if one of us had gotten replaced.

"Wait," I said.

We were going to have to do it. We were going to have to do that scene where everyone accused everyone else of being a Shapeless One, and then eventually we would accuse Ramona of being in on it with the bad guys because of her cosmic affliction.

The problem was we were On-Screen, so I couldn't just say that. My character wouldn't know that this was a chase scene.

Everyone stopped, but they were not happy about it. They wanted to run because that's what we were supposed to do.

"Maybe we should just find a place to hide," I said.

We discussed it for a little while, each throwing out lines.

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"We need to move toward the exit," Anna said. "We can hide here until we starve, and it won't matter unless we find a way out."

"She's right," Antoine said. "To them, we are specks. Once we're out of their line of sight, they're going to go back to what they were doing and forget we even existed, like we would if we saw a cockroach that scurried away."

"We clearly have very different reactions to cockroaches," Ramona said.

Kimberly said very little. Maybe she was gunshy. Maybe she was exhausted. The Kimberly I knew would have been a bit more vocal, I thought.

We just continued like that as we silently tried to figure out who the rat was and why we were still in a chase scene. All of our experience told us that we shouldn't be, and Anna's trope seemed to make it inescapably clear that we should have been safe.

It was a conversation of shadows. We were unable to see each other well. We were all suspicious and paranoid, and we tried to show it too because we figured that was what Carousel wanted.

But that wasn't it.

What Carousel wanted was for us to be distracted long enough for the reveal. Bobby had said that this scene was scripted and would always end in our death because it was simply that impossibly hard. I thought he was exaggerating or just outright lying. It was hard to trust that guy.

But then I felt something tugging at my shoe. And it tugged at my hand too, and my belt. It was a strange sensation, like the slight tug of pulling dried glue off your skin.

I wasn't the only one who felt it. It was happening to everyone else, too. I could actually hear the noise it made in the otherwise absolutely silent hallway.

Burning with curiosity, I grabbed my own flashlight and broke my rule by clicking it on.

As I moved it around, I saw that there were dozens of nearly invisible threads attached to my shoes, to my clothes, to the skin around my neck, and even to my hair. The threads were being pulled away, back toward a shadowy corner of the hallway.

I stared at my skin, trying to figure out what was being peeled away, and then it occurred to me.

It was blood. Not mine, luckily. No, it was the aerosolized blood that had been projected into the air after Camden exploded the Shapeless Ones. We weren't able to see it, but that didn't mean it wasn't there.

There was a line coming from my belt, where the silver knife I had picked up and stabbed several Shapeless Ones with, also had a thin line coming off of it. I thought I had wiped the blade clean, but of course, there was still matter there. I just couldn't perceive it.

And that's when I realized why there was no way to win. I figured out why we couldn't end the chase scene.

Because we were all tracking the remains and residue of all the Shapeless Ones we had encountered throughout our journey. From what I could tell, we had lots of blood and viscera on the bottoms of our shoes. We just hadn't thought about it, and for the most part, couldn't even see it.

But now it was unfolding off of us, leading into a dark part of the hallway.

Leading all of the Shapeless Ones to us.

We were never going to beat them.

We ran as fast as we could in the opposite direction of the threads pulling off our bodies, and yet the threads never disconnected. We were never going to get away.

The hallway opened up to a larger room. This one really was a kill box. It was large, with an open ceiling that allowed multiple Shapeless Ones to lower their hideous forms down toward us slowly. They didn't need to pretend to walk. They were simply flying, ready to kill us with all the deadly parts they had accumulated for eons.

And then I heard him. A familiar voice.

"You know we do feel pain, don't you?" the Antoine-Shape said as he rounded a corner and stared down at us.

We were at a dead end. The only place we could go was back the way we came, and that was the direction that those threads were connected. There was something waiting for us there. I was sure of it.

"I hadn't really thought about it," I said.

"No, you wouldn't," he said.

He was perfectly intact. In fact, he was the only Shapeless One who hadn't been there for Camden's surprise explosion.

"Mortals so often have difficulty understanding the pain we go through."

"The pain you go through?" real Antoine said. "The pain you go through is what you copy from us. You choose it!"

The Antoine-Shape glared at him.

"When I want to hear your voice, I'll speak," he said.

There did seem to be a particularly perceptible venom in his voice. Antoine was evidence that he was a faker. That he was not real. I could sense the jealousy there, or at least the storyteller in me wanted it to be there.

"You stole my life," Antoine said. "And for what? What do you gain from all this?"

The Antoine-Shape looked at him and took a deep breath, trying to hide his revulsion.

"I get all of the things that you take for granted," he said. "All of the women that you never appreciated. All of the praise and adoration that you always treated as such a burden. The truth is, I'm better at being you than you ever were."

The shapeshifter reached for his belt, pulled out his revolver, and pointed it at Antoine.

"You don't deserve the life you have," he said. "I do."

He then fired six shots directly at Antoine, who couldn't have been more than fifteen feet away, and of course, he missed every single shot because he was using that same old trick revolver that we got from Homibridal that could only incapacitate a target but never hit them, and that forced you to fire every shot. 𝕗𝗿𝕖𝐞𝐰𝗲𝕓𝐧𝕠𝕧𝗲𝐥.𝚌𝐨𝚖

Carousel must have put him up to it.

"The only thing you're good for," the Antoine fraud said, "is helping me stay in shape."

The shapeshifter turned back to the rest of us.

"You act like we're the evil ones, but you don't understand who we are or what we're doing here, do you? We aren't trying to harm your people. We're only trying to help recover our own. My brothers and sisters have fallen to our ancient sickness. They sleep in graves, in ditches, in the world, forgetting what they are. All we want to do is save them, and you treat us like we are here to conquer you. Fools. We built this world out of all the parts we had found in so many others. It was supposed to be our paradise, but it became our tomb. Now this cradle, which has done so much good for so many worlds, will be your last adventure. I hope it was worth it."

Was that supposed to be his humanizing monologue? These people were genuinely handicapped by how sorry they felt for themselves. At least it was short.

I had a plan. Well, I had part of a plan. Unfortunately, the fight scene indicator on the red wallpaper turned on, and I realized that it was way too late for a plan. It was always going to be too late.

"Brothers," Alasdair said. "You have to see reason. This is not our way. We have journeyed to one thousand worlds together, and in one thousand worlds, we have not resorted to this savagery. Why should we now? Why must we lose ourselves at the moment of our rebirth?"

While he spoke, Ramona looked absolutely terrified because of how the Antoine-Shape stared at her. She started to back away.

But she would never be fast enough.

One of the Shapeless Ones above us rained down on her with tentacles of broken light in an instant. At first, I thought she had been crushed, but the tendrils from these creatures mostly passed through their targets. Mostly.

It wasn't until a few moments of horrifying screaming that I understood what they aimed to do, and I could do nothing to stop it.

They were tearing Alasdair right out of Ramona. Not piece by piece, but all at once. The creature above was an indecipherable amalgamation of terror, but what it did was even more terrifying. It ripped her apart. It sounded like squishy Velcro as it tore her in two.

In the story's lore, Ramona was a descendant of a Shapeless One, so the DNA she inherited from him was literally just a part of his body folded into the shape of the original Alasdair Mercer's genetic code.

I didn't know what was happening to her body. I never claimed to be a scientist. I could only describe what I saw and grasp for an explanation.

She screamed loudly as her cells apparently exploded, with huge chunks of biomatter being ripped right from them. What was left of Ramona was a pile of flesh on the ground, not even recognizable as body parts, as every cell had been shredded when the cosmic being was ripped from her.

And what remained was a horror beyond my own imagination.

He kept her shape. The random strands of tissue that had been pieces of Ramona still stood as they had when they were inside of her, creating her exact form out of bloody pulp and unidentifiable tendrils. Now the mouth that had been inside of her mouth was the only one she had.

And she was still there for it, because while her body had been absolutely destroyed, somehow she lived inside the form that remained. She was screaming. The red wallpaper didn’t even show her death.

"You have to let her die!" I screamed. "You have to let her die, Alasdair!"

But he was suffering too. He couldn’t hear me.

And her death was not the only one I had to worry about.