Chương 433: Book Eight, Chapter 100: Second Chance

I couldn't actually feel Cassie's ghostly hand as she pulled me. In fact, she wasn't even grabbing at me physically. It was more of a psychokinetic energy type of thing. She ran until we finally met up with the others, scared out of their wits at some dark corner in the middle of this abandoned city. The axe murderer had done his deed and was moving on. His breath was getting quieter and quieter. I couldn't even hear his steps anymore.

When I arrived, Kimberly looked at me, hopeful that maybe Bobby might be right behind, but Antoine seemed to accept the grim truth. Anna would have already known that the worst had come for Bobby because of her ability to sense the emotional state of her allies. Bobby would have none. If only that trope had been a bit more specific, we could have avoided this whole mess. We didn't speak for a while. Even Roxy was still shaken from the encounter. Eventually, Antoine asked, "So what now?"

We still had a storyline to win. Now that we had shaken those tracking threads, it might actually be possible.

"We have about twenty more minutes," I said after glancing at the timer provided by my Call Sheet trope.

"With Bobby's sacrifice, we managed to end that chase scene, so now we actually have a chance to fight back."

"You had a plan," Cassie said, but it didn't sound like she was really responding to anything I was saying. It was more like she was a tape recording that just happened to go off at that moment.

"Don't you remember?" I stared at her, waiting for her to stare at me. It looked like she was fighting to stay with us.

"I have a plan," I said.

"I just couldn't use it."

"You had a plan, and you were desperate, but it didn't work," she said. For a moment, we stared at her. She glowed a light blue, barely perceptible except for the fact that we were in a very dark underground interdimensional city.

"You had a plan, but it didn't work," she repeated.

"It was in your pocket." I reached and grabbed for the empty plastic videotape container I had deep in my pocket, along with several others I had collected throughout the storyline. I had some that we found at the original entrance to the cradle, a product of my Prop Department Requisition trope, and those that had been filmed by Danny, my late cameraman. His equipment now slung limply from my shoulder. I pulled it out and examined it.

"Was this part of my plan?" I asked Cassie, hoping that I could break her out of whatever beyond-the-grave catatonia she was in, but it didn't work. She didn't acknowledge me. For as much use as we had gotten out of her, she seemed very confused.

The trope that was doing all this was called Get Up, and it was only supposed to bring about a quasi-supernatural dream message from the deceased, but with the psychic power built up in the cradle and the presence of the axe murderer, who might as well have been death himself, it was like her trope had exceeded the limitations of what it was designed for. It was actually incredible. She was trying to remember something, trying to say something, but even as she did, her body began to fade.

"It was your memory," she said, "but you don't remember it." I stared at the tape container. It was just a hunk of plastic with the number four written on it in what I assumed was my handwriting.

"My memory?" I asked.

"You had a plan to remember it," she said, "but you forgot."

"I hate when that happens," I said as she faded to sparkling moonlight and disappeared.

"What is going on?" Anna asked.

"The dead get confused," Roxy said, "but that doesn't mean they're wrong." Why in the world would a piece of plastic like this be powerful enough to send us Off-Screen? Even if it didn't belong in the storyline, it wouldn't look out of place. What a strange conundrum. Something that Cassie was tapping into with her psychic powers, perhaps, trying desperately to communicate to us from beyond the veil.

"For whatever it's worth, it did help. Bobby barely got to you in time, even with you going Off-Screen," Roxy said.

"His script had stopped working right whenever his character had finished their role. Funny how that all works." I put the plastic container back in my pocket.

"That's a mystery for another day, I hope," I said.

"Because if it's important now, I'm afraid I don't remember." It felt like there was something right on the tip of my tongue, right at the periphery of my memory. If I could just figure out what it was, it would slip right into place.

"So Bobby's gone now?" Anna said.

"Forever?" I shrugged.

"As far as I know," I said.

"But how much do any of us really know? He seemed to think it wasn't the end for him, and maybe he was right." We spent longer than was wise talking about Bobby and how stubborn he was, along with many other things which were much nicer. The truth was, we felt guilty.

"Maybe if we helped him more, he wouldn't have felt the need to do that," Antoine said.

"I thought we had an agreement. I thought he understood why we were putting it off. I thought..."

"You were never going to prevent this," Roxy said.

"There was nothing you could have said or done to stop him once he got it in his mind to do it." Maybe that was what she told herself to relieve the guilt of her role in all of this. It was all but confirmed now that she had tempted Janet to quit in the first place.

"He had to know what was going to happen," Kimberly said.

"We talked about it all the time." Then she shot me a glance, like she was ashamed to admit that because I had never been a part of those conversations.

"How could he have thought quitting the game would do anything else?" Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

"That's the thing," Roxy said.

"What you know is true stays the same forever. It never grows. It never shrinks. It just sits there gathering dust, while what might be true keeps getting bigger and brighter until, eventually, it's all you can see. Bobby made his choice, and every day you'll have to make yours. That's how the game goes. Now I have to get out of here. I'm supposed to be trapped in an interdimensional prison right now. Sorry again for all the deception.

Next time I run into you, I hope I'm lying about something a little less hurtful." And then she walked away into the darkness, leaving us there. We were silent, and then Anna looked up at me and said, "So if we had managed to end that chase scene without dying to those terrifying cosmic jerks, what were you going to have us do next?"

We only had a few minutes at that point before we were On-Screen, so if we were going to live and make the best use of Bobby's sacrifice, we were going to have to pull off one hell of a hoodwink, because there was no way we were going to beat those shapeless ones in a fight.

"It seems to me that Carousel has virtually limitless power over even cosmic-level horrors," I said.

"It has them running around here clueless. It must like showing how powerful it is compared to beings like that, but what it likes more than that, what it loves, is pulpy, tropey horror that fans like me can't get enough of. So these things may be Lovecraftian entities beyond our understanding, but they're also shapeshifters, and I'm betting that there are a few classic scenes Carousel is dying to see."

I had enough information about these things to know how to beat them on their own terms with as few stat checks as possible.

"So here's what we do. We have to split up, Antoine with Kimberly, Anna, and me on our own."

"Split up?" Antoine asked.

"Isn't that always a bad idea?"

"Well, that's not all I had in mind," I said.

"There's something we need to do that we never could have while they were tracking us with their little threads." I then spent the last few minutes we had going over my plans for the finale, and I was greeted not with awe, but with doubt and downright fear. I should expect nothing less from what I was preparing. - On-Screen. I wandered through a dark hallway by myself, calling for my friends.

We had just escaped the shapeless ones, or at least that's what the movie would show if I could count on Carousel to do some good editing work. I carried Danny's camera under the pretense of needing its bright light to shine the way. Poor guy. He would probably end up dying Off-Screen in the final cut. He deserved better than that. He might have even been alive after the rewind, but I didn't see him anywhere. I jumped at every noise, even if I had to pretend to hear them when they weren't there.

The cradle was silent when you were alone. I ran along, doing my best to look lost. But I was exactly on my mark, and so was Anna. She stepped out of the darkness, lit only by the camera's bright light. We were both happy to see each other, but of course, we couldn't convey that.

"Stay right there," I said.

"Riley, is that you?" she asked.

"Just stay still. Be quiet for a minute. I need to think," I said as I drew out my silver knife in my free hand and held it up so that it would be visible just a little bit to the camera's view.

"It's me," she said.

"I swear it's me. Please, I've been all alone. I barely made it away from those things. I was running with my eyes closed so I wouldn't have to look at them. I got lost."

"I said be quiet," I repeated, as nervously as I could be. We were doing our best, and now all we could hope was that Carousel wanted to play along with our improvisation. Luckily, it did. Another Anna appeared from a different path in the intersection. I only knew she was there because she accidentally kicked a pebble from the crumbling stone statue that had been erected right in the center of the square. I shone the light at her, and then I moved it back to the other Anna.

"I'm Anna," the second one said.

"That is not me. That's one of them." I shone the light back and forth. Both were sweaty and dirty, but only one of them could be real.

"Riley, I swear it's me. I promise," the first Anna said, pleading with me. I quickly put my knife back in my belt and pulled out my firearm, something I couldn't remember if I had even used once in the entire storyline, except to shoot at gunmen on the water so long ago. I quickly pulled out the clip to see how many bullets I had. What do you know? I only had one left. Who could have guessed? The rest, of course, were in my pocket, but it was better to have one for this type of scene.

"Riley, it's me," the second Anna said.

"Where did we meet the first time?" I said.

"The charity auction," the second Anna said quickly, while the first one tried her best to match.

"We both know that," the first Anna said, which was funny since it wasn't even established On-Screen.

"That's not fair. That's not how you can do it. You have to ask about something that happened after that thing was morphed into me." There it was, our code word we had established Off-Screen, using the word "morph" instead of the bespoke verb "shaped," which had been used in most parts of this storyline. And yet, as I looked between them, I still couldn't tell which one was which, because those darn creatures had the Which One Do I Shoot trope, which counteracted gimmicky tricks and played with your mind.

The only way to tell them apart was to look to the lore and to use clever planning. Fortunately, the bar on lore and clever planning was pretty low, so I shone the camera's light down at their shoes. The first Anna had hair and blood all over her shoes from when Ramona had been ripped apart. The second one had dirty but otherwise unscathed sneakers because she had unfolded herself after the explosion and then been reshaped. I fired a shot into the second Anna's head. She fell.

Quickly, I pounced on her and shoved my silver dagger into one of her eyes before she could remember she wasn't dead. I had to leave it there to take her out of the game entirely. I then shone the light back at Anna, refocusing the camera after it had been dangling during my attack. I still acted distrustful, but at least now we had something to build upon as I shone the light back down at her shoes.

"Ramona," I said.

"Ramona," she repeated, looking back down toward my own shoes, which were also decorated with blood and hair.

"How do I know you're you?"

"I'm not sure they could reproduce this so easily," I said, shining the light at the stringy, bloody mass of Alasdair wrapped around my arm. Alasdair had told us earlier that the shapeless ones could not be compacted, so that meant they couldn't be copied. Right on time, the tiny mouth that had once been inside of Ramona's started to speak.

"Ramona," he said.

"She's gone."

"Yes, she's gone," I said.

"And we can't get her back." While there wasn't really enough of a body left for him to cry with, he did try.

"I'm so sorry," he said.

"I couldn't protect you, Ramona." He was still delirious from having been ripped from his host, nucleotide by nucleotide.

"There's only one way you can make up for what happened," I said.

"You have to help us escape this place."

"I will try," he said.

"But it is impossible. My brothers and sisters are everywhere. Don't you understand?"

"More than you know," I said, trying to put as much emotion into my performance as I could.

"And they will stop us if they can. They'll take those monstrous forms again, but there's one way you can help us stop them from doing that."

"How?" Alasdair asked through whatever pain he was in.

"That other part of yourself that's down in the cradle, the one that took on the persona of Dina Cano's dead kid. I need you to send it on a mission." I had used my Insert Shot on a frame of Dina talking to an apparently invisible person from the first movie. We established it was part of Alasdair's form in the shape of Dina's son, who was his descendant. It was time to collect on that backstory.

"To do what?" he asked.

"To free every single human in the cradle."

"No," Alasdair protested.

"I cannot. We never release our forms until we're through with the world. It's against our customs."

"I can think of a few things that have happened tonight that are against your customs," I said.

"But your people, above all else, care about their shapes. They don't want them damaged in case they need a touch-up, right? So you release all the humans. My money says your brothers and sisters will be a bit gentler if all of their shapes are running around." Alasdair seemed to consider this, and then, somewhere in the distance, a part of him began to go about the task I had set for him.

"With all those people running around, how will we know who is an imposter?" Anna asked. I casually let the camera face back toward me under the guise of readjusting it, just so that I could show my smirk.

"We won't," I said.