“If you ask me, it’s the people who adapt too quickly that we should be worried about,” Travis said as he stoked the fire. He looked up at Bobby Gill, his face warm from the glow of the fire. “They think they’re brave. I think they’re just submissive. Good luck telling Adeline that during your little classroom sessions, though.”

Travis Haley, his brother Vernon, and their teammate José cackled their hyena laughs at an inside joke that Bobby wasn’t in on. They sat around a small fire on the beach of Lake Dyer, listening to the spooky sounds of the campgrounds and waters around them.

“You belong with us,” José said with a crooked smile. “The heirs of Carousel, the slackers. When the others get themselves killed, we’ll be in charge.”

Travis’ team had been in Carousel for years, but they had barely risen above thirty plot armor. They had no intention of trying, either, Bobby had learned.

Ever since he joined their team, their attitude had perplexed him. They saw themselves as rebels, refusing to join the other players' persistent effort to leave this haunted place. They only did enough to earn their keep.

Vernon, the bruiser, was focused on crafting the perfect s'more while Travis and Tory, the Final Girl, got handsy in the sand, leaning up against a giant log.

Bobby couldn’t help but gaze over at the group of players he had come to Carousel with, even if he didn’t know them too well. They were the bright, shining hope the vets clung to. New players brought new possibilities and maybe even new clues to the hellish puzzle they were trapped in.

“I don’t know,” Bobby said as he sat with his knees to his chest in the sand, “Don’t you want to figure out the mystery? Don’t you wonder why we’re here or what this place is?”

Travis laughed forcefully to make sure Bobby knew how above it all he was.

“I already know why we’re here,” he said.

“You do?” Bobby asked.

“Sure,” Travis said. “We’re here to be tortured. Everybody knows that, they’re just afraid to admit it. We are in hell. This is our eternal damnation.”

Tory, a raven-haired spitfire, leaned up from where she was lying in the sand next to him and asked, “You’re in hell right now?” with a devilish grin.

Travis laughed as he playfully grabbed her close. “No. They are in hell. The ones trying to make sense of it all. The tryhards. This is their hell. Look at them over there. How long do you think it is until this new batch figures out that Adeline and Arthur have been here for a decade and have nothing to show for it but crows feet?”

He kissed Tory, pushing her gently back into the sand, and said, “To us, this place is just Purgatory because we know the zen of Carousel."

Bobby stared longingly at the other team. They were zealous and unbroken. They had themselves a Film Buff, and the vets just couldn’t stop talking about it.

“What’s the zen of Carousel?” Bobby asked.

Travis looked up, slicked back his hair, and said, “The zen of—oh, hey, Roxy. You miss me?”

Tory slapped him and wiggled her way free as he laughed.

Bobby looked behind him to see the Eye Candy, Roxy, as she knelt down beside him. They made eye contact. When he saw the darkness in her eyes, he looked away shamefully.

“How is she?” he asked as he stared at the fire.

Roxy hesitated to answer. “She’s maintaining,” she eventually said.

“I should go talk to her,” he said. “Is she asking for me?”

He turned back to her, looking for an answer in her eyes when he didn’t hear one from her mouth. This time, it was Roxy who looked away in shame.

“She was talking about you,” she admitted, “But I don’t think she wants to see you just yet. What she needs right now is time. Time to process, time to adapt. Janet is a strong-willed woman. What she needs right now is to decide to channel that into something productive.”

“To submit, you mean,” Travis said. “She needs time to submit to the steel-toed boot of Carousel.”

Roxy ignored him and said, “Bobby, everyone reacts differently to Carousel. Some people try to solve it. Some people give in to it, and others,” she glanced up at Travis, “Pretend to engage in nihilism. Janet will find her own way to get through this.”

She tenderly patted Bobby on the back and started to walk away.

Before she could leave, Bobby asked, “How do you deal with it?”

Roxy looked back at him. “For me, it’s just a job,” she said. “I get up every day and go to work.”

She started to smile, but stopped herself halfway through. She left them there on the beach.

“It’s just a job,” José said, mocking Roxy’s voice. “I get up every day, put on five pounds of makeup and my sexiest outfit so I can shake my ass for the camera for coins.”

Travis and Vernon found this quite funny.

Bobby’s eyes moved from teammate to teammate. They were all lying. He had seen them in action. In storylines, they were a well-oiled machine. Deadly, brave, and sometimes even clever. Sometimes. It wasn’t the terrors of Carousel that made them put on this show of apathy. It was the waiting, the not knowing.

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

That was the worst part.

“So, how’s your old lady doing anyway?” Travis asked him after a while of bickering with Tory.

Bobby glanced back up the beach toward the cabins where Janet had locked herself in their room and refused to speak to anyone but him or Roxy. Or at least that’s how it had been. Now she wouldn’t even talk to him.

How useless could he be?

“Not good,” he said with a lump in his throat. “She hasn’t played a single storyline since The Final Straw. The vets are worried. It’s been weeks.”

His new team stayed silent, suddenly afraid to chime in.

“Is it true what they say?” he asked. “That if you don’t play the game, you disappear?”

The others didn’t have an immediate answer.

“Disappear?” Travis eventually asked, having found his attitude once more. “No. No one disappears. They die. Their body disappears.”

“You don’t know that,” Tory scolded. “Nobody knows that.”

Travis laughed again. “Somebody knows it,” he said. He looked out across the beach at a crowded picnic table. “Ken! Hey, Ken, get over here.”

A backward hat-wearing fratboy answered the call, sliding off the picnic table and sauntering over with a few of his buddies. Bobby looked at him on the red wallpaper.

He was an Athlete. He had a Scholar on his left and an Eye Candy on his right. They had gone to the University of Florida together, if the emblem on their clothing gave any clue. They were all in their thirties now, of course, so they didn’t quite look the part of college students anymore.

“What’s up, Travis?” Ken said with a happy, drunken slur to his words.

Travis looked him in the eye and casually asked, “The players who disappear, they’re all dead, right?”

Ken’s reaction was sudden and sharp. His eyes shot open, his knees buckled, and sobriety hit him like a train as he threw his hands to his ears. He backed away quickly and tripped in doing so.

His friends quickly caught him, and the Scholar looked back at Travis and said, “Travis, you dick!”

Travis laughed to himself, but Bobby thought he was forcing it. Everyone else, including Bobby, sat upright. It was clear that something unholy had just happened.

Bobby scrambled to inch his way away from where Ken had been standing and asked, “What was that?”

Travis shrugged his shoulders.

“Sometimes when a person disappears, one of their teammates comes back acting just like that. You ask them anything about what happened, they clam up like they just saw the devil. Or maybe something scarier than the devil. They act like they don’t know.”

Tory looked ashamed of her boyfriend. “You don’t know what happens to them,” she repeated. “No one knows for sure, and people go missing in tons of different circumstances. We’ll figure it out one day.”

Travis shook his head. “Maybe you’re hopeless too. There is no mystery here. You guys are torturing yourselves. Carousel likes to play with its food and sometimes, well, sometimes it eats. Then it delights in watching us delude ourselves, hoping that anything other than that happened.”

Bobby glanced back up toward the cabins where his wife was. He stood to his feet and marched all the way back there without turning around to look at the beach.

When he got to his and Janet’s door, he knocked forcefully three times.

“Go away,” Janet yelled with a hoarse voice from the other side.

Bobby was having none of it. He tried the handle.

“Honey,” he said. “It’s me. It’s Bobby. We need to talk.”

“I said go away,” she responded.

“Now that’s not fair,” he said. “Please open up this door. I really need to see you. I’m scared for you, hon, I’m scared. Please, I need… to see you.”

He didn’t expect her to open the door, but she managed to surprise him.

After a few seconds, the lock unbolted, and she let him into their room. She was drained from weeks of constant stress, but he still saw her as beautiful.

Her face was… calm. Well, calmer than it had been.

“Come in,” she said. “I need to talk to you.”

Bobby did as asked. He sat on the end of one of the twin beds and looked up at her expectantly. She didn’t start in with any particular hurry. For a while, they spoke about little things. Weather. The food at Camp Dyer. Small talk. Nothing important.

After a while, though, the unspoken things began to wear on Bobby.

“Have you decided to run a storyline yet?” he asked, holding his breath as he awaited her reaction. 𝗳𝗿𝐞𝕖𝘄𝗲𝕓𝗻𝚘𝚟𝕖𝐥.𝚌𝕠𝕞

Surprisingly, she didn’t react with anger.

“Maybe,” she said. “We’ll see. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Right now, I don’t think I will be playing any storyline. Just hear me ou—”

“Stop!” he said.

Bobby couldn’t hear this. How many nights had they spent arguing to the point of tears over this same thing? He couldn’t hear her say it again. He didn’t know the words it would take to convince her to play the game. He hated himself for that.

“This world is not for people like me,” she said.

“It’s not for anyone,” he said. “It’s not supposed to be, but you can’t give up…”

There they were again in that same old argument. He didn’t understand why she couldn’t see logic. If she was afraid of storylines, shouldn’t she be even more afraid to find out what happened if she refused?

“No one knows what happens if you don’t play,” she said through tears. “It could be the way out.”

“No,” Bobby said. “No! Promise me you will try. Promise m—”

“Maybe there is a place in this world for people who refuse. You have to be brave enough to take the chance,” she said. “I'll go this time. And maybe one day you'll come too."

Bobby could not stand that kind of talk.

“Promise me,” he started to say again to no avail.

"I'll go now. And one day you'll follow,” she said. “We’ll be together again.”

What was she suggesting? That she would quit the game and wait for him wherever Carousel put her? He couldn’t deal with this. He wasn’t built for this kind of confrontation. Janet was supposed to be the one who fought for him. She always had been. People always thought he was an easy mark. Janet was his opposite. She would never let people take advantage of him. She was defiant to her core. She would never submit.

But he couldn’t take it.

“Promise me that you will not do this,” he said. “Please promise me!”

This went on for longer than Bobby could stand, the back and forth. He could never convince her. He could never get her to change her mind. He just needed her to say the words.

Eventually, though, she did say them.

Janet looked at him, tears in her eyes. “I promise I won’t do it,” she lied.

And he knew it was a lie, deep down in his heart, but he sprang up and hugged her then. He wouldn’t let her say another word as he kissed her.

“Thank you,” he said.

Then, with the answer he needed to hear, he left. He hadn’t been fooled by anyone but himself. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if he didn’t hear the words from her, and now he had.

She locked the door behind him.

He ran from her. He ran from his fears for her and his frustration. He ran to the group of players down near the campfire who saw the world so simply. They pretended not to care about anything. Bobby wanted to learn that.

The fire was nearly down to embers, and the conversation had died too.

When Travis and Tory got up to leave, Bobby looked up at him and spoke for the first time since he had returned.

“What is the zen of Carousel?” he asked.

“The what?” Travis asked.

“The zen of Carousel. You said you knew it before.”

“Oh,” Travis said, laughing. “The zen of Carousel is the knowledge that nothing here matters. There is no grand design. Everything here is just meant to make us chase our tails. If you understand that, nothing in Carousel can bother you anymore. Nothing here happens for a reason.”

Then, he and Tory walked back toward their room.

Bobby stared at the dying fire until the cold wind off the lake drove him back inside, where he would sleep on a large couch in the common area. He hoped, more than anything, that Travis was wrong.

Many months later, an NPC that looked very much like Janet would leave him alone just as the real one had.

Her final words before she slipped out the castle gate were, "I'll go now. And one day you'll follow."

It was a message just for him, and he was finally ready to hear it.