Chương 238: Book Five, Chapter 143: The Show Must Go On

Kimberly was surprisingly matter-of-fact as she described what she sensed. We were back in the loft, and we had already retrieved the players from Ramona's cabin. Kimberly had taken the time to walk through every single room in the loft and the adjacent rooms attached to it. She walked around the restaurant downstairs and the stairwells, as well as the roof area, where Bobby was tending to his dogs. When she started out with this, she was flabbergasted, offended, ashamed.

But the more she went along, the more numb she seemed to become.

"They're everywhere," she said.

"There's one circling around this table here in the dining room," she said.

"It can't see me right now, but it will in just a second.

"There's one that follows you down the hallway when you walk past all the doorways. Several near the entrance. They're all over." The rest of us just kind of spread out and let her do her work. Bobby rejoined us as we watched. She had equipped her new Flashbulb Phobia trope that allowed her to see the location of cameras, whether they were On-Screen or Off-Screen. We were mapping them out.

"This whole dining room area is covered. This one right up above—for an overhead shot," she said.

"The kitchen—there's one right here," she said, walking over to the kitchen counter and placing her hands on it.

"It's like it's facing down onto the counter, so it can film you preparing food." This had gone on for a while. There were cameras in all of the rooms, except for Ramona's little nook at the end of the hallway, which now became prime real estate.

"There are cameras looking in the windows there, across the street," she said.

"What about the bathroom?" Avery asked. Avery had not lost her softer side after coming to Carousel, and she was able to maintain her mental health through self-care, even without a trope. The private space in the bathroom was sacred.

"What about the bathroom?" she repeated. Kimberly walked from the kitchen over to the bathroom—we only had one. We all stood outside as she made her verdict.

"None on the toilet," she said.

"That's the only real surprise so far," Isaac said.

"Did you lift up the lid?" Kimberly ignored him.

"There's one in the mirror at the sink that would face you if you were staring into it, and then there's one that appears right behind your shoulder, pointing into the mirror so it could see your reflection," Kimberly said.

"What about the shower?" Cassie asked. We were all nervous about that one.

"There are two," Kimberly said.

"But they only film above the armpit and below the knee." We were silent after she said that. But there was something so silly about how she said it in such a serious voice that I couldn't help but laugh a little. And I wasn't the only one. It was mostly the guys laughing—and not because we thought it was funny, but because there was a certain absurdity to it. We knew we had been filmed, but it was always such an abstract thing you could just ignore it. The girls looked horrified.

"When we said that there are cameras— invisible cameras—following us around," Logan said, "I always thought it was metaphorical or some sort of omniscient remote viewing. But actual invisible cameras of some sort?"

"Magical," I said.

"Well, obviously magical," he said.

"But still. They aren't just clairvoyant—they have them set up at specific locations. Like we're on Big Brother.""' Big Brother: Carousel' does have a ring to it," Isaac said. In truth, the cameras probably were just clairvoyant viewports. They weren't actual floating machines or anything like that. Still, it was a much more mechanical setup than I was expecting. The confirmation of invisible magic cameras fed into his particular worldview, and he was eating it up.

He always hated it when we acted like life could be normal in Carousel, and he loved it when we discussed things like this.

"Did you find a place without any cameras?" I asked. Kimberly had gone into a sort of trance, sensing all the cameras that were watching her at that moment. The trope was called Flashbulb Phobia for a reason. It was actually making her paranoid. That was the cost—likely meant to prevent her from just using it all the time. It was causing her distress.

"The stairwell leading up to the roof," she said.

"There are no cameras there." I let her response sink in.

"That makes sense," I said.

"Stairwells all look the same. No need to put cameras on every single level."

"That's where I'm sleeping," Lila said softly.

"Why do they want to watch us right now?" Antoine asked with righteous indignation.

"What do they get out of it? Does the audience need to know every detail of our lives? Why does Carousel care?" I had not told them about the Manifest Consortium yet. And they had sensed that I had something to say. They had been waiting for me to make a move—trusting me to make a move—for quite some time. Bobby might have even let slip that I had sent him a message on the script.

"I want to try something," I said.

"Go along with me. I looked at everyone, and they agreed nonverbally.

"We need to make a plan for our next storyline run," I said.

"What was the name of the one we said we were going to do next?" That wasn't exactly a subject that people were interested in talking about, so it took them a moment to shift gears.

"The one with the sunken cradle in the name," Andrew said.

"It was between that and By the Slice, I believe." You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"Right," I said, "because we're looking for new rescue tropes, and those ones are supposed to get you some."

"Right," Andrew said. He started looking at a shelving unit where we normally kept the Atlas, but Camden had already grabbed it and was skimming through it. It was probably a lot easier to manage the big book when he had both of his arms. He was sitting on a couch, not paying too much attention to our conversation about the cameras. He was wholly absorbed. His efforts to give us the Atlas had paid off big time. He could look through it all he wanted.

"Right," I said.

"We're looking for more rescue tropes because once we use them, we have to grow like ten levels before we can get them back." Dina, Antoine, and I had experienced that. Dina quietly pulled her rescue trope out of thin air. She had already grown to level thirty and now had access to her rescue trope You Don't Know Me But... again, which we had used on Itch to rescue Michael, Andrew, and Lila. Still, we needed more rescue tropes with more variety. Hers had its drawbacks, as we well knew.

"Why are we talking about this right now?" Avery asked.

"We have all the time in the world to talk about this. Why do we have to constantly—""The cameras are gone," Kimberly interrupted.

"What?" Antoine asked, gently holding on to her.

"The cameras are gone," she said again.

"All of them."

"The Planning status," I said. I could tell most of them had forgotten they even had it.

"That gets rid of cameras?" Antoine asked, confused.

"Something like that," I said.

"You know, like when we're in a fight and we're Off-Screen, and we can talk to each other about what we're going to do next—and even if the enemy can hear us, they don't respond to it or even acknowledge that we said it? I think it's like that. I think the planning status blocks you from being watched when you're making meta plans." They let the idea churn for a moment.

"You mean Carousel can't see us right now?" Cassie asked. I smiled just a little bit. I couldn't help it.

"I think Carousel sees everything. But the others? I don't think they can see us making plans." No one spoke. No one interrupted. They were waiting for me to tell them everything. And I did. Finally, I could talk about everything—short of the axe murderer.

"The reason I buffed my Grit for Post-Traumatic wasn't the torture," I said.

"It was because I wanted to be able to use Willpower is Magic to break out of my seat at the theater after I got killed. In Stray Dawn, I realized that tropes affect the theater in ways that they shouldn't, so I thought I would break out of that spell and go take a look around." I even had Camden's attention because what I was talking about wasn't listed inside the Atlas.

"You explored the theater?" he asked. We had talked about it at length before he was killed. It was the biggest news at the time.

"I explored as much as I could," I said.

"I was at the building on the other side of the mountain, out west—the one that the Vets were trying to get to."

"Oh my God," Anna said. This was a huge development for everyone, but for Anna and Camden, it would be much bigger.

"Make sure we're still not being seen," I said.

"As best you can." I didn't know if Kimberly's trope could truly keep us out of view of the Manifest Consortium, but it was our best bet. And somehow, I thought they would underestimate us. I told them about my exploration of the backstage area—what little of it I had done—and then I told them about Dr. Masha Striga, the scientist. There was so much I learned in so little time. I was afraid that I would forget something.

"Wait—so the Sweepstakes is what now? How does that fit in?" Logan asked.

"Apparently, it's some sort of multiversal lottery where you can win anything," I said.

"You can even win a ticket to watch one of the movies that we made. I saw a ticket to watch The Strings Attached —the one that we played through—with my own eyes." I tried to explain to them everything I knew about the Manifest Consortium because I wanted them to feel the same way about those people that I did. And I was so frustrated because I didn't believe I had the storytelling ability to do it.

"They helped Carousel become what it is today, and they film us here. That's what they offer to the Sweepstakes."

"So that's why they work for Carousel?" Kimberly asked.

"That's not how they see it. They think they control Carousel. They think that it's a symbiotic thing. Somehow, they think they can stop Carousel from hurting them —but they can't stop it from hurting us." I reached into my pocket and pulled out the newspaper I had collected and threw it down on the dining room table. The headline read: Time Running Out for Trapped Souls in Carousel That created an uproar, as so many different people tried to grab onto the newspaper.

"The reason they think that we're doomed is because they think we can't win. They're trying to come up with ways to justify abandoning us—or making it look like we won—so that no one will notice when Carousel eats us alive," I said.

"They're doing damage control for their reputations. To them, this is a PR crisis. And I swear to god, they don't care about us. Not really. They're entertained by us. They're selling merchandise from the stuff we've used in movies—people were wearing my hoodie, or Arthur's hat, or Kimberly's scrunchie, or Kimberly's leg warmers, or… Kimberly's basically everything Kimberly owns."

They tore through the newspaper like piranhas, passing around every page, reading each unbelievable, out-of-touch, low-key horrifying article.

"Riley," Anna said.

"Riley, look." She was holding up one of the inner leafs of the newspaper, pointing at an article that simply stated: An Interview with Anna Reed's Mother.

"Those heartless…" I started to say as I skimmed the words. They had used magic to call Anna's mother and ask her about her missing daughter. Riley Lawrence: Cinematic Hero or Carousel Plant? Ramona read the title of another article.

"They're onto me," I joked.

"What are we going to do?" Kimberly asked, after we had passed around the pages of the newspaper and I had finished my story.

"Well," I said, "the reason I realized that the planning status gets rid of cameras is because they didn't know about our strategy in Post-Traumatic. They didn't know I was going to go to the Finale first. They were shocked as hell. They literally thought we were about to lose."

"So they must be enemies," Camden said.

"Whether they know it or not," I said.

"Whether they would call themselves that or not. They say they're not characters in this story—but I think Carousel wants them to be." I let that thought hang in the air. Then I said, "Carousel's Throughline is about escape. And suddenly, I think I know why that is." They understood what I meant.

"Are you talking about doing Carousel's Throughline?" Isaac asked, almost scared at the idea.

"Every moment we don't pursue something, we're digging our own graves," I said.

"Unless any of you has a better idea, I say we start trying to get the heck out of here." I quickly pulled my five tickets from the Sweepstakes that Striga had given me and threw them down on the table so the others could look through them. And, of course, they all had questions—questions about what the people were like. They couldn't seem to grasp the idea of immortal wizards so similar to us, yet so different. Immortal Business Wizards were a bit out of our experience.

"The script is written on magic typewriters?" Bobby asked.

"Well, yes it is," I said.

"What could the normal entrance for players be for? Are people coming here willingly?" Antoine asked.

"I wouldn't say willingly exactly," I said.

"I think the people that come here either have no choice… or no other choice. But it's hard to tell. The Consortium talks about this like it's some sort of fun game, and we're just down on our luck. Trying to figure out the truth through that filter can be kind of hard."

"They talk about us like this is reality television. Big Brother wasn't far off," Logan said as he read through the tabloid.

"The worst part is, their sales are through the roof—whatever that means for an economy that runs on magic tickets."

"So you said Carousel tried to invite Kevin?" Kimberly asked. I nodded. She had a strange look of disgust on her face.

"And it posted pictures from the masquerade ball on my Instagram?"

"Yes," I said.

"Did you see them?" she asked, trying not to sound vapid.

"I saw printouts of them, but they were really small."

"But… they looked good, right?"

"Like prom photos from a rich school," I said. I couldn't quite parse how she took that.

"So Carousel was just some evil death world that brought in help to turn it into a death game, and now we're going to help it do… something ambiguous? Is that what I'm understanding?" Camden asked.

"Yeah. Basically," I said. They asked about MBW, the magic between worlds, but I had so little to tell them. We continued until the planning status turned off. Eventually, we just ran out of steam. There were so many revelations that we couldn't take it. Before this, we had celebrated every little scrap of information, analyzed it, and theorized about it. And here we were, with some semblance of a solid heading. We ended up on the roof, drinking some sort of hard liquor out of plastic cups.

The Manifest Consortium could see us if they chose to—though, from what I understood, they could pretty much just fast-forward past all the boring stuff, given the time differential that they could control more or less. We raised our glasses, and we toasted to one word: Escape. Whatever that meant. Whatever it took. We would die here, however many times it took— But we would not stay here. We were going home.