Chương 434: Book Eight, Chapter 101: Go along to get along

We went Off-Screen shortly after Alasdair agreed to do his thing and release all of the human prisoners. Right at that moment, an old friend decided to drop by.

"He he he, you won a ticket," Silas, the mechanical showman, said, popping into existence right next to Anna and me.

"Step right up! Two for the price of one, if you don't mind which one." So he wasn't going to talk about how he had just saved my life from the axe murderer. What humility. His glass was fixed from where it had shattered, and the wood had been repaired, though I could still see where the axe murderer's blade had struck it. His paint was new in that area. He had gotten all patched up. I knew the drill. It wasn't often that you won a ticket in the middle of a storyline, but it happened.

In fact, it had happened to me in my first storyline. I pressed Silas's red button and grabbed the ticket that came out of his dispenser. Anna did the same right after me. We both got the same thing. Apologies, Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle Part II This pass entitles one (1) guest to early dismissal from the above feature, with our compliments. Please present to an usher before the final reel. Concessions non-refundable. We apologize for any inconvenience.

We hope a fellow patron's sacrifice on your behalf has not soured your evening. Please come again. The next picture is sure to be a thriller. If dismissal from the above film is not to your satisfaction, don't hesitate to bargain for a substitution. Warmest regards, Management I read through it. It dripped with the dark humor I came to expect from Carousel.

Bobby had a trope called A Meaningful Sacrifice, which would have allowed him to leave the story as soon as his role was finished, but by sacrificing himself, he gave us the same option. Although I doubted that this situation was the intention of the trope when it was first made. Well, maybe...

"So what do we do?" Anna asked.

"I'm staying," I said.

"If we leave, Ramona and Camden won't be revived."

"But are you certain your plan is going to work?" she asked.

"Sure," I said casually, trying to sound confident.

"It seems like we're being taught a lesson here about how important it is to play the game, even when unprepared and outmatched. We just have to show we learned our lesson." Now I was talking like Bobby had. Anna didn't seem sure, but she pocketed the ticket the same as I did. Neither of us activated it. Silas, the mechanical showman, had one last word of advice before he left.

"Step right up, step right up! Remember folks, the best seats in the house are always the ones somebody else paid for." And then he simply vanished as quickly as he had come. We were still Off-Screen for a few minutes before Carousel was ready to move on to the next part of the fun. This one I hardly had to do any setup for because it was so inherent to the situation.

There were a bunch of innocent people running through the cradle as we made our way back toward the shaping machine, and because of them, we got to play a game of find the imposter, and Carousel refused to disappoint. It was dark and silent. We would find more people around every corner, scared and panicked. Some of them looked off, like maybe they had unfolded a bit. Not much, of course.

That would ruin the game, but just enough to make us question every single bulging muscle that might be in the wrong spot, or if their arms were too long. A woman with wild hair ran past me. She seemed perfectly normal for someone who had been trapped for a period of years in a timeless void. Then a man with a long neck. Was it too long to be a real person? It wasn't clear, but we didn't attack them, and they didn't attack us. Then Roxy came by, mixed in with a crowd, not stopping to say hello.

Next, a man missing a hand. The very man who had unfolded that hand into my face to try to suffocate me. He appeared in a crowd of people moving about, running as they panicked, looking for a way out. I let my eyes move from one side of him to the other, never showing that I suspected him even a little bit. It was pretty easy. I had been using Oblivious Bystander for so many of the storylines, it was second nature to look none the wiser. Anna was doing her part.

"Sir, are you okay?" she asked after he lingered on us for a little too long, waiting for us to notice his missing hand.

"What's your name?" That question took him aback, and he sputtered out, "Julio," in a way that almost sounded like a question, like he was asking if it was okay for him to respond civilly when Carousel had him scripted to be spooky.

"Well, Julio, we can't panic now. We need to find a way out. Can you do that? Can you help us find a way out?" The shapeless one eyed us suspiciously, wondering what game we were playing, thinking we must be crazy or stupid, but whatever he decided, he chose to play along.

"I'll look for an exit," he said.

"We need to get out of here." A smile began to form on the edges of his lips as he ran off with another group. More people were finding us in the darkness as we moved toward the shaping machine. Some of them looked strange, stretched out or compressed. But did we ever notice the impostor? No, of course not. We said hello, and Anna asked their name. Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation. They loved their names, or at least the names of their shapes.

They seemed very proud of them. More people, more faces. Camden's soldier NPCs came by, but didn't stay. Roxy's bodyguard stood head and shoulders over a group running through the dark city like kids playing laser tag. It was a montage of faces, a Where's Waldo in real life. The crazed Nord we had found trying to dig his way into the cradle was there, or at least his shape was. Hosea Greenside ran through in one direction. It was a surreal, spooky collage. Among them, I saw a familiar face, and she saw mine.

It was Janet, NPC Janet, being led through the dark by Jules, who gave me a wink before they disappeared into the inky black, never to be seen again. Dozens of people appearing from darkness and disappearing again in an endless loop. New faces. Old faces. So many people, NPCs, enemies. It was a dizzying, mad dash run orchestrated for maximum terror and confusion. We ran across a woman whose hair was made of folded light. Not human. Obviously, a shapeless one. There was no way we could guess wrong here.

"Are you okay, ma'am?" I asked. She looked at me in frustration, wondering what I was up to. We were On-Screen, and I should have been acting frightened, but I didn't. I laid it on thick. It wasn't me acting. It was my character who was pretending not to be afraid. Anna asked for her name, and she said it was Makena. And like earlier, Anna said, "Makena, you don't have to be afraid. We're going to find a way out. Try looking around, and then meet back here when you're done."

The shapeless one didn't know what to make of how we were acting at first, but then a look of understanding came over her. Our plan was working. Carousel sent us through a few dozen more people running around, screaming in the dark, trying to find a way out, and among them were more shapeless ones who had taken the forms of ordinary people. And with each of them, we took turns greeting and ignoring whichever features were abnormal, and Anna would always ask for their name.

Because we weren't trying to identify impostors. We were treating them the same as we would any other human, because wasn't that what they wanted? Eventually, Carousel had gotten all the footage it wanted of us, and we went Off-Screen for a bit, but not for long, because we found where the cameras were pointing. Antoine and Kimberly were doing their job. It was the final cliché shapeshifter scene. The face-off, the mirror match. Antoine versus the Antoine-Shape.

While it was easy to tell them apart visibly because our adventurer was not doing so well physically, the fight was a miserable back-and-forth. The very sight of Antoine set his doppelganger off in a fit of rage.

"You don't deserve what you have!" he repeated from the monologue he had given before, tears streaming down his face.

"All we wanted was to live normal lives. We just want it to be normal." The Antoine-Shape looked up into the inky blackness above as he continued to beat on the real Antoine, lashing out in the most human way possible. And then Antoine did the thing I asked him to. He stayed down. I had to assume that the footage they had captured before we showed up was good enough. It was time to seal the deal.

"Antoine!" Anna cried out as she ran to hug the apparent victor. Antoine-Shape recoiled at her touch, clearly aware that she must be up to something, but when she had no weapons, he refrained from attacking and instead looked at her, confused.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"You're my friend," Anna said.

"You're Antoine Stone. We've known each other for years." She had to say his name. Her Final Callout trope gave narrative power to names in the Finale. He looked at her with a visceral skepticism. Next, Kimberly came in, grabbed him, and kissed him. I would never not be impressed by how good of an actress she was. I almost believed it for a second. He was breathing fast and nervously.

"Antoine," she said, "I'm pregnant, and it's your child. We need to escape this place to go live our lives out in the real world. Please, you're the only one who can help us."

"No," he said nervously.

"I… I can't."

"Yes, you can," Anna said.

"You're Antoine Stone. You are the most famous explorer in the whole world. There is not a man, woman, or child who doesn't know your name or your adventures. Don't you want to go with us?" The Antoine imposter looked afraid. Worse than that, he looked almost hungry to say yes.

"Glad we finally caught up with you," I said. I reached down into my belt and grabbed a knife. Not the silver one with the trope, but the large knife that Antoine had thrown to me before he was completely retconned as a shapeshifter, a knife that had been empowered by his Sentimental Outfitting adventurer trope, fueling it with narrative weight. As soon as I took it out of my belt, the Antoine-Shape prepared to defend himself, as if I was about to stab him or something.

But then I flipped it over, grabbed it by the blade, and held the handle out toward him.

"Now don't lose this again," I said. He looked me in the eye, and I looked back at him as he grabbed the knife. There was a moment where our lives rested on the choice that this shapeless one made. We weren't fooling them. They weren't stupid. They might have had shaping sickness, but it wasn't like we could just gaslight them into submission. No, we were making an offer. We were tempting them with the promise of a human life. It was the thing they wanted more than anything.

There was no secret to beating unbeatable enemies in Carousel. The rule of thumb was that if an enemy looked too hard to beat in a fight, it probably was. Whether it was a cosmic shapeshifter or a sorcerer who looked like Fabio, there was no use fighting gravity. The trick was to find the game, the puzzle, of these enemies, and for the shapeless ones, Carousel had given us no shortage of clues.

One of the first things we had learned about the shapeless ones, even though we didn't know it, was that they really didn't want to be themselves. We had found a man who had apparently handcuffed himself to a tree and swallowed the key to avoid reentering the cradle. I had no idea what it meant at the time, but now I did. These cosmic entities would rather die human than live forever as emotionless, many-dimensional horrors.

Heck, even the Antoine imposter I was talking to had wanted to escape his life so badly that he had blown up the original entrance to the cradle. He didn't want to be here. Carousel had wanted the shapeless ones to be its cliché shapeshifting movie monsters, and then it wanted them to be its cosmic horrors. But what the shapeless ones wanted more than anything was to be human, to have no forbidden knowledge of the universe. The Hosea Greenside we had met before the storyline had said it all, in a drunken scramble.

We didn't understand it at the time. Well, I still wasn't sure about some of the stuff, but it was clear he was a shapeless one who drank to forget. We had to offer them an out. We had to give them permission to do what they wanted anyway. None of my other ideas compared, and I had thought of things like shaping more of these creatures into the bombs that Camden had brought and using them to blow up the shaping machine.

I thought about turning Alasdair into some of the videotapes Danny had filmed and asking him to travel fifth-dimensionally out of the cradle to get the news out, to fulfill one of our win conditions. There were plenty of options, but I chose this. And all I could do was hope. Antoine gripped the knife firmly, pulled it from me, stared at it intently, and then he put it in his belt, right back in the sheath where it belonged.

"I'll try to hold on to it this time," he said with a smile that only someone with Antoine's face could give. We all exchanged glances. It wasn't just Anna, Kimberly, and me. No, it was the real Antoine playing dead on the ground. It was the crowd of shapeless ones who had mixed in with the freed humans. We all looked at each other slyly, and we knew what we were all agreeing to. They were giving up on their race, for a time at least. They were giving up their post, and they were thrilled to do it.

"All right, folks, let's find a way out of this place," the Antoine-Shape said as he grabbed Kimberly by the waist and began leading us all out of the Sunken Cradle. The needle on the plot cycle moved from Finale to The End, where it would stay for some time. I had no idea how Carousel would edit all of this into one cohesive narrative. I did know one thing. It was going to have a lot of footage.