Whatever had been done to Alasdair had turned him into a feeble, crawling mass, an impossible shape of endless torment. And while he struggled to stay on what was left of Ramona's feet, she continued to scream garbled words of a woman in so much pain that even cosmic horrors stared at her in shock.

Perhaps the script was forcing them to stay still so that the camera could focus on the horror of Ramona's situation.

That meant it was time to act. I put all my shock and terror into a box in the back of my mind and took action.

I began to run as fast as I could, grabbing onto what remained of Ramona, a bloody pulp shaped like wet yarn. Alasdair was having difficulty with his form, so he wrapped around my arm, and finally, the screaming stopped. His mouth came to rest on the top of my hand.

I knew it was callous, but having a Shapeless One as an ally was too useful. I couldn’t leave him behind.

Ramona had just been eviscerated in front of me. Despite that, she was still clinging to life in this mess. I could actually see her on the red wallpaper when I looked down at the bloody strands wrapping my hand. Her dead indicator was just blinking; it wasn’t fully lit.

I needed to end this quickly because I could tell she was in pain, although I couldn't fathom what was left of her to even be in pain. A nervous system? Maybe she had an altered anatomy because of her heritage, or maybe Carousel was just being cruel.

The others followed me as if I knew where I was going. I quickly ran wide of where the Antoine-Shape was standing, watching with a stony look on his face.

It didn't matter where we ran because the threads connected to us continued to unravel. We couldn't go anywhere that the Shapeless Ones couldn't follow, and the fight scene was still ongoing, as was the chase scene from before.

If I had a month to prepare for this storyline, knowing everything I knew now, I might have come up with a strategy to be prepared for this scripted event. But I had no prep time, and I had no strategy.

I should have known. It was right there in their tropes. They had made things easy until the Finale, where everything escalated immediately. Whatever hope we thought we had was built into the story. As soon as these things were let off the leash, they became impossible to beat. The moment they stopped pretending to be humans was the moment we lost. I was blindsided.

All it took was finding one dead end, and it was over. We found it soon enough. I knew it immediately. We literally ran into a wall.

We all had a moment to react to what we knew was about to happen. It was infinitely frustrating that we had to do it On-Screen. We had a habit of never breaking character, and though we knew we were about to lose this storyline, we still kept to it. We were well-trained little dogs in this parade.

Kimberly and Antoine embraced. Anna looked nearly catatonic. She would be the last to die. She would have to watch each one of us suffer.

Me? When I died, I would go to the theater, and maybe I would never leave. I would be a sideshow attraction so that all my fans could come take pictures of me as I sat, possibly paralyzed, in my theater seat.

I had thought about it so many times that I almost managed to laugh now that it was about to happen. Almost.

I just needed to end this chase scene. If only we could get away to regroup, I felt I could win this thing.

In the end, Camden got the best of it, didn't he? He was frozen in space-time, or at least nearly so, when he was killed. Some guys get all the luck.

They caught us with ease.

They killed my cameraman Danny first.

That's how I knew I was in trouble. I wasn't going to need anyone filming me anymore. But ever the professional, he managed to provide a cushioned blow for the camera itself, and somehow, all the tapes that he had been filming just happened to fall out of his pockets as his top half was run through by the claw of a giant mantis attached to one of the Shapeless Kaiju floating above us.

But a quick death was not the fate Carousel had in mind for the rest of us. No. We would have to suffer. The funny part was, it didn't even fit the story. When you lose, the monsters stop being themselves and start doing cleanup.

The needle on the plot cycle jumped to The End. They were going to kill us and be done with it.

What little finale there was left was gone now. We hadn't managed to overcome this scripted obstacle, just as Bobby had predicted, and now we would die.

The Antoine-Shape grabbed Antoine and started unfolding his hand straight through the real man’s mind. Here I thought that he would never kill Antoine, but character motivations fall away in a storyline fail state.

I could hear the screams in my mind, but luckily, they were drowned out whenever my own personal Shapeless One grabbed a hold of me, and I heard the voice of Hans Vogler say, "There you are," in a garbled speech from wherever his mouth was on the abomination before me.

He said it as if we had some kind of rivalry or rapport. Had we even shared any lines?

He started unfolding straight through my mind, and suddenly I understood why they did that. The first time it had happened, the Shapeless One was trying to choke me, maybe, or make me pass out so he could take me as a hostage. He wasn't trying to kill me.

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But Vogler was.

Each of us was picked off by one of them.

I finally got to know what it was to be a Shapeless One, if only for a moment.

I understood what they were in a way I never could have predicted. They were metaphysical, literal living memory, and as Hans moved his tendrils of light through my mind, I could see it all. I could see so many of the lives he lived all at once. I felt he wanted me to see it.

He had been human so many times. Sure, there were other species that dominated this planet in other timelines, but it was clear that the Shapeless Ones were fond of humans. They loved us. I could feel it. I could feel his love for humanity as he killed me. Was that ironic?

Everything began to go white as I began to die, and my thoughts slowed down. My mind could not take all of the memories he was pumping through it. He was too powerful.

But then humans had a power that the Shapeless Ones didn't.

"Riley, you have to get up!" a voice screamed to me from the void. "Riley, you have to grab for it. You know what to do. You have to go Off-Screen."

Grab for it? What was she talking about? Who was it? My mind was on the brink of death from cosmic overload, which had to be the smuggest way to be killed by a Lovecraftian horror.

Cassie. It was Cassie. Her Get Up trope was so simple, but in this storyline, where psychic power literally radiated through the cradle created by all those trapped souls; it was at its peak.

And I saw her in my mind.

"Riley, you have to get up. You made a plan to beat them before. You just don't remember," she said. "You can do it again. Grab for it. You have to."

I… ignored her. I didn’t mean to. It just happened.

In my mind, I saw Camp Dyer again, and I was flooded with joy. I never would have predicted that when I was there. I was standing out on the beach, overlooking the lake, and Cassie was there in the crowd of other players, trying to get my attention. We weren't even On-Screen.

Was this some kind of afterlife?

Antoine and Kimberly sat on a picnic blanket, whispering secrets to each other in between kisses, while Anna was playing volleyball with some of the vets. Camden read a book in a folding chair.

But there were people there I didn't recognize. So many people were mixed among all the ones I knew. So many faces, all looking at me, all begging me. Who were these people? There were hundreds of them spread around the campground.

Cassie screamed at me, but I still ignored her.

I didn't mind it there. Not at all. It was a peaceful place. I stared out over the water, and I thought about all the decisions that had led me to where I was. I thought about losing the game at Carousel, and the truth was, I didn't mind it so much.

"Riley, you had better listen to me," Cassie said. She was right in my face.

I looked at her and couldn't speak.

"You have to grab it," she said. "It's right in your pocket. It should help."

What was in my pocket? I did a quick mental inventory, and then I remembered.

Somehow, through the haze and the fog and the pain, I managed to remember I had an arm. I reached it down into the pocket of my jacket, which had replaced my hoodie, and I grabbed onto it. The puzzle piece that I had never found a place for.

I pulled it out of my pocket, and as I did, the pain stopped.

Vogler had removed his cosmic presence from my mind. I woke up to find myself on my knees.

The others, too, were still alive. How much time had even passed? How long had I been there in that dreamy place my mind sent me as I died? I didn't know.

A quick check of the red wallpaper told me that we were Off-Screen, and my Call Sheet trope said that we had five minutes.

I looked down into my hand at the object I had pulled from my pocket, and I saw that empty plastic videotape container. The one that I had found inside the hole in the tree at the original entrance to the cradle. The one that Carousel would never let me bring up On-Screen or talk about.

When I pulled it out of my pocket, I had paused the scene.

Cassie had said it was part of my plan, and even though I had no memory of how that could possibly be true, I believed it. I had put that there in the tree, but when had I done it? For what reason?

"Come on," Antoine said, struggling to get to his feet. He moved to Kimberly to try to help her up.

Anna too managed to get to her feet, and she came to help me. All of us together stood up and tried to leave while we were Off-Screen.

But while the cosmic horrors above us weren't going to kill us without the cameras rolling, they weren't going to let us go either.

One of the beings came down from on high and posted himself up in the only exit.

We were trapped with less than five minutes to live because when the scene resumed, death was certain. Nothing had changed. My little trick, whenever it was that I had come up with it, had only bought me five minutes of life.

"Well, thanks for trying, Cassie," I said.

She had been buffing us and trying her best to keep us alive while we went through that cosmic torment, but it was all for nothing. My mind was numb, and my will had left me.

"So what now?" Anna asked. "What do we do next?"

I didn't have an answer for her. I was sapped of energy, and I could really use a nap, even if it was a permanent one. I was desperate enough to consider using one of the Sweepstakes tickets I had been given. There was one that was supposed to instantly put me on a nice vacation.

It wasn’t going to happen. None of them would get me out of this.

The writhing mass of bloody tendrils wrapped around my right arm continued to struggle. Ramona, through no choice of her own, was still alive in this mass, though her dead indicator was blinking faster, which meant her torment would not be eternal.

That was nice.

In those last few minutes, we didn't talk. We hugged. That's all we could do. Antoine and Kimberly said their goodbyes. I wasn't sure this was the real Kimberly, but I wasn't going to voice that opinion in front of Antoine just then.

We waited for the clock to tick down. Anna suggested trying to use her escape trope again, but I doubted it would work as well twice, and even if it did, we would just get tracked down again.

One minute left, and I prepared myself for that terrible pain again. Dread overcame me, and though a spark of rage existed still, I could never ignite it into a fire.

Thirty seconds left. The hug became tighter, and we said our goodbyes.

Were we always hopeless? It seemed like Carousel was always going to find a way to show off its prized collection of cosmic horrors. There was no preventing this. Had we simply entered a storyline too strong to beat?

How many other teams had this exact same moment? We had never had one. That was remarkable. We never had the team death huddle. In a way, that was a mark of how good we were. An odd thing to be proud of at that moment.

There were so many mysteries of Carousel left to unravel, and I mourned them. I would never get to know why we were here or why we were chosen. I would never get to rescue all the people I had pledged to save.

Ten seconds left, and the Party of Promise was about to be broken.

And when there were almost no seconds left, that was when he arrived out of breath like he had been running.

Bobby squeezed past the Shapeless One who had blocked us in.

He stared at me directly, tears running down his face.

I expected him to be long gone. He had an out. Why would he ever come back?