Chương 230: Book Five, Chapter 134: The Barker

"It feels so silly to have to tell someone about the Barker," Dr. Striga said.

"It is quite hard to conceive of a world that does not know the Sweepstakes, but you'll find we do dream of such a place. Perhaps our obsession with worlds like yours stems from some subconscious desire for the lives we were never allowed to live—the blissful ignorance… but to understand the Manifest Consortium, you must understand the Barker." We sat on the bench, and as she spoke, the cold air stopped bothering me. I felt a gravity in what she was saying even before she got to the details.

I instinctively knew I was hearing something important. She grabbed my hands.

"He appears in places you would not expect," she said, her eyes drifting off into a memory.

"Places that are not quite themselves in the moment, that do not have their usual soul—schools after hours, condemned hospitals, malls that have closed down, areas of transition. Sometimes, a place can lose its spirit for a moment and appear completely alien. Have you ever noticed the liminal spaces where a piece of your mind wakes up—a piece that senses something strange?

"My first time, it was a street in the middle of the city where I grew up, normally bustling with people day and night. It had just snowed, and I was out trekking my way to work at a diner. I was a young woman, and the gift of long life had not yet made me wealthy.

"I saw him there. No one else was around. Snow had painted the entire place white—it was an entirely new world that would only last a night. I breathed deeply lungfuls of air that belonged to another plane." She had told this story, before, whatever she claimed. She knew it well.

"He calls out to you," she said, "and he speaks to you like he's known you your entire life. And you think maybe he has? You can't help but get close. It isn't merely because you've heard rumors of his existence. My entire family legend started when my grandfather met him back in my home world. For a moment, you forget what you know about him, and you're struck with an overwhelming curiosity. You feel you were meant to be at this place, at this time, and he's been waiting for you here.

This place and this time will never exist again. A strange realization, but it feels visceral as you walk nearer.

"He smiles warmly, the Barker, apparently not even able to feel the cold though he is dressed for a summer carnival, and he tells you the price. For me, it was all the money I had in my pockets. Not much, but still precious. They say that he will only ask a price that he knows you will eventually pay, but I'm not certain that's true. It's just that if you've seen what he offers, there's hardly anything you wouldn't give."

She paused for a moment to reflect, and then I—perhaps because of my innate immaturity—felt the need to interject and ask a question.

"Did you give him your soul?" I asked. That was definitely the vibe.

"He has never asked for it," she said, as if considering whether she would. She let go of my hands and produced a small stack of tickets from nowhere. She was using the same trick we used to make our tropes disappear and reappear—except the tickets she brandished were not tropes at all, though the design was somewhat familiar. She handed one of them to me. It was red with gold leaf and thick stock.

I could hardly read the calligraphy, but when I made out what it said, I handed it back to her, not quite comfortable holding something I didn't understand. The Quiet Mend From Lumevere Remedies – Cures for the Heart & Unruly Soul This ticket does not erase love or loss, nor does it dull what mattered. It simply lifts the weight, eases the tightness in your chest, and lets you wake without the ache pressing in first thing. One day—sooner than you think—you'll laugh, and it won't feel borrowed. No side effects.

No forgetting. Just the quiet relief of moving forward. Lumevere Remedies – Because Some Hurts Need More Than Time. There were others. Some for little things, like a traditional feast from some culture I didn't recognize and a pair of glasses fit to your vision needs. Some were for big things, like an apartment in a box or five years off your face wrinkles. They were products. Magical products, but products all the same.

"I don't understand," I said.

"This is the Sweepstakes? I thought that was for immortality. The posters of the narrators made it seem…" She studied my eyes.

"You aren't impressed? My rare tickets are in safekeeping. They are very valuable. They are the backbone of our commerce."

"I've already had my quota for surprise today," I said. But somewhere in the back of my mind, anger started to form as a picture of this society began to develop.

"Go on with the rest of your story. I didn't mean to interrupt."

"The Barker came to my world in the late 1800s. Until then, our worlds were sisters. My grandfather won my family near immortality. That made us famous, also. We left when I was five years old. I don't even remember my first language. After the destruction of my world, there were so few left to speak it.

"I ended up on a world that diverged from yours in the 1980s—that was when the Barker had found it. It was a wonderful place to grow up, a place where the Sweepstakes was still mysterious and exciting. I loved it, but eventually, those of us who lived long lives realized we had more in common with each other than we did with the people of the places where we were raised. So, we found our way to the Manifest Consortium with others like us.

"I was educated in the Consortium and decided to pursue what many thought to be a silly area of academics—the hard sciences. Why would you ever need to understand the fabric of reality when you can manipulate it so well with MBW or with tickets won or bartered? No, it seems there is a very real lack of curiosity for the pure sciences in the Manifest Consortium, and many worlds where such inquiries were valued are long gone." Yes, I was confident that she had given this exact speech before.

Perhaps to players of games past.

"So I came to the one place where I might find like minds, even if they had been lost to time," she continued.

"I seek to understand the nature of reality and of consciousness—cures for every disease that don't rely on luck of the draw. I want to understand what happened to my people and to perhaps get a grasp of multiversal travel down to its physical roots, not just granted through magic." Her cadence picked up. She spoke from her chest of her grand ambitions.

"I knew Carousel's potential when I first stepped into this world. We found it alone, broadcasting its nightmares to an audience we knew not. Attempting, we think, the very thing it hopes to accomplish with its new Throughline."

"To an audience…" I said, interrupting.

"So you're not the audience." She looked at me like I was stupid—though I was certain she didn't mean to.

"We are part of the audience now. But asking who the audience is… You might as well ask who founded the Sweepstakes."

"Okay," I said, or at least tried to say. I couldn't make my voice box work.

"I spent years trying to understand what happened to my home world," she said, getting back to her speech.

"The Consortium had no answers. MBW had no answers. But on the very first day I stepped into Carousel, a song started to play over the radio—one I had not heard in 2, 000 years. It took Carousel less than a day to find my world and to mock me with it." If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

"I have some experience with that part," I said.

"Yes," she said.

"Carousel is filled with wonder and promise. For many years, we tried to understand its aptitude with MBW. It is able to do things that should not be possible. The magic between worlds is not magic in and of itself—it is a practice designed for enforcing and balancing rule sets. And yet Carousel, which bursts forth with MBW, seems to have no need to balance things." It took me a moment to realize that what I heard as "imbue" was her pronouncing MBW, the Magic Between Worlds.

A bit obnoxious but maybe it would grow on me.

"Well, there's balance in its narratives, from what I can tell," I said.

"Yes, its rules are balanced to some degree, but its power appears not to be. Did you know that in the very storyline you are running, Carousel is using real time manipulation in order to simulate make believe time manipulation rules?" Oh, right, the storyline.

"I had some idea," I said, though I was very disappointed to know that jumping between mass casualty events using bodily injuries to dislodge you from the time stream was not real time travel.

"How does it use time travel with such ease? Low world time travel is but multiversal travel blindfolded, but Carousel is more adept. We have been fascinated for some time. These secrets are valuable, and Carousel holds the answers," she said. The way she spoke about it—it was pure fascination. I didn't feel like she was deceiving me because if she was trying to pull the wool over my eyes, she should have known better than to speak about Carousel with such a dreamy tone.

"Carousel is bloodthirsty," I said.

"It's a torture world. A death game." In much the same way that she couldn't ever imagine having to explain who the Barker was, I could hardly imagine having to explain why Carousel was a bad place.

"Every world is bloodthirsty," she said.

"You're too young to know that." I wasn't here to argue. That was pointless.

"What is Carousel trying to accomplish, and why are you helping it?" I asked. Again, that look—as if she couldn't believe how it wasn't obvious. Maybe it was, but I was just too narrowly focused, too oblivious to understand.

"Carousel's ends appear simple. Ours are more practical and honorable. When you meet the Barker the first few times, he tells you the price. But if you live long enough to see him more than that, he stops naming the price, and you have to start naming your offer."

"Offer?" I repeated.

"And this is what we offer," she said. From the stack of tickets she had produced, she pulled one that I hadn't yet seen.

"You offer tickets to play the game at Carousel," I said, guessing where she was going with it.

"That's how you guys acquire all your magic coupons for your economy? You sell trips to a horror world? I can't imagine people cash those in too often, though. I guess you could also just sell… wait." She handed me a ticket. Admit One: A Special Engagement of "The Strings Attached" A Featured Selection from The Town of Carousel with Behind-the-Scenes Exclusives with the Party of Promise.

The Strings Attached follows five intrepid gossip reporters as they infiltrate the most exclusive masked ball of the season—an event glittering with power, beauty, and secrets no outsider was ever meant to uncover. But when an impossible murder shatters the evening's façade, the Society turns its masked gaze inward, searching for intruders. The rules of the night have changed. The dance has begun. And those who do not belong must play their part perfectly… or be unmasked.

Starring Christian Stone, Kimberly Madison, Antoine Stone, Riley Lawrence, and Grace Varga as The Detective, this selection captures one of Carousel's most elegant and sinister games yet. Will they get the truth out, or will they become part of the story forever? Your seat is reserved. The curtain rises with the punch of this ticket. My heart started to race, and I had trouble breathing. It wasn't that this was a surprise—we obviously knew that this was happening.

But we thought it was done purely by some dark, demented, cosmic voyeur, and we had come to terms with that horror. But this was different. This was mundane exploitation. This was somehow darker. Whatever evil Carousel was, whatever unknowable audience it served, I was prepared for that. But this was different.

"So what exactly are we talking about here?" I asked.

"I know that you're clearly helping Carousel—we'd been told that even before we knew who you were. At first I thought you were like... servants or slaves. Postered players, missing Film Buffs, NPCs, something, but you're doing this so that you have something to offer the Barker... in exchange for magic tickets?" Why did "The Barker" sound familiar? I couldn't shake the feeling I had seen him somewhere.

"Yes," Striga said.

"Funding for our research was limited. But once the Proprietor came up with the idea of actually helping Carousel instead of merely observing it, this operation became far more profitable." Two decades' worth of hiding my feelings had trained me not to show what I was feeling on my face, but I was really struggling. In Carousel, I had felt emotions like desperation or despair or abject terror, but I was rarely angry at Carousel.

I conceived of it as some cosmic being that saw me as nothing but a source of enjoyment—something beyond my mortal comprehension. I might as well have been mad at God or the universe itself. But these people… were people. Immortal, but still human. Perhaps I wasn't hiding the emotions on my face so well.

"You know, we never force any players to come," she said.

"And we didn't bring you here. That was Carousel's doing. We help with the logistics to keep the game running. We added the red wallpaper so that players could stand a chance at survival. We made physical tickets to make the spells easier to understand. There was a time when they had to hunt and find all of the information—if they even knew to do so. It couldn't have been called a game when we arrived, what Carousel did. But now you and the others have a fair chance. This is how you repay us for that."

I was staring at the building. I didn't want to look at her.

"By starring in a movie of me beating myself to death to rid my body of a sorcerer who was possessing me?" I asked.

"That's how we repay you? Have you ever slammed your face into the ground so hard your teeth broke just because you wanted your friends to live? Have you ever forced your arms to twist until your tendons snapped?"

"Calm down," she said.

"All players are like this at first. Just think rationally."

"Did you never think to try to rescue the players trapped here when you arrived?" I asked. She looked so offended.

"Dear boy, those poor souls trapped here when we arrived could hardly be called players. And if we were to curse them with the ability to remember the trials and tribulations they had been through, it would be a greater evil than anything Carousel had done to them. We couldn't save them. You understand that, do you not? Carousel's rules are quite clear. We couldn't just sweep in and rescue everyone—even we aren't powerful enough to do that. Not here. Not until we understand Carousel's system better."

Carousel did have its rules.

"Deus ex machina," I said. She was right. You can't be saved by random outside forces in Carousel. You have to save yourself. Or get friends.

"Yes, exactly," she said.

"We even presented the idea of Paragons—those who exist in both worlds, both players and observers who could intercede. We broadcast your films to expand the audience. We do help." She truly didn't understand why I might not be on board with this whole arrangement.

"Simply watching the films you're in and paying attention is an act of service toward you. Do you know how much of an uproar our world is in right now? You and your friends are all anyone talks about. They know that if we can't find a way to rescue you, the company's stock is practically sunk. We may have to shutter our Carousel operations permanently. That's why we have spent years away from our families to come here and resolve this crisis.

If you die, it would do damage to our image—even after we've got these problems fixed. We won't be able to continue our explorations into Carousel's origin or any of the wonders it contains. Our fates are tied together in many ways." Toward the end, I could tell that she realized her version of logic wasn't quite working. And to her credit, she did hold out five of her tickets to me.

"Take this," she said, "as a token of goodwill." I was angry, but I knew my mission. And a friendly Narrator—even one so calloused that she couldn't see the evils of the system she had become complicit in—was a valuable asset. I grabbed the tickets and put them in my pocket without even reading them.

"Thank you," I said.

"I hope this won't affect your decision," she said.

"Decision?" I asked.

"About joining my Throughline and helping find the answers to questions hidden throughout the many worlds," she said.

"Right," I said. My mind was a million miles away from that.

"I have to talk to my teammates." She nodded.

"I assure you, Mr. Lawrence… Riley, we are not responsible for your situation, and we have only helped you."

"I understand," I said. There was a pause. Nearly twenty seconds of silence. Then I said, "I came here to explore this building, to try to see if there are any solutions for my people. I went through some trouble to get here, and I can't waste this opportunity. There's narrative momentum being wasted."

"Yes," she said.

"You should find the control room. If you really want to understand the nature of your existence—or at least confirm what I suspect you've already deduced—a trip there will help you. But be warned: you have one of the most famous faces in the many worlds. It isn't likely you'll get far without being noticed."

"Well, I have to try," I said.

"Please promise me you won't tell anyone."

"Oh, I won't," she said.

"We don't have any specific rules about this situation. It's never happened before, so I am under no obligation to report you by company policy."

"That's great to hear," I said. How generous. I walked to the entrance of the building, which consisted of a large row of glass doors. My hood was pulled up. My sunglasses were on. And for the first time in so long, a white-hot fury burned through me.