Chương 442: Book Eight, Chapter 109: A Glimpse Forward Part I

Sometimes when I think about my interactions with Carousel, I feel a pang of guilt. Maybe what I feel is actually impotent rage at being forced to play the game, to witness so much suffering. To cause some of it. Being part of an evil system numbs you to your core. Was there any part of the game I wouldn't shrug off at this point? There was no choice but to play, after all. Bobby found that out the hard way. My friends claimed that I understood Carousel better than they did.

I always thought they were just being nice. What else are they going to say when they see how comfortable I am navigating a death game like I was born to do it? Despite how devoted I was to understanding Carousel and its horrifying game, I never forgot the underlying truth that Carousel is an evil place. It is an evil thing.

It's funny that when something is powerful enough to be unbeatable, you think of it more as a law of nature than some thinking entity with the ability to make choices, and maybe that was for good reason. Carousel did present itself as a set of laws, rules that must be abided by, a balance that must be kept. You may not like the tornado ripping your life apart, but you accept it.

The problem is that if Carousel is just a set of rules, a terrifying horror nexus where the laws of the universe simply work differently, then can you say that it is actually evil? I mean, obviously, you should. You would be dumb not to see the inherent cruelty inflicted upon non-player characters and player characters alike. Most people would be sickened by the audience that exists somewhere out there watching us, presumably for pleasure.

But all these musings aren't worth anything when you have to get up every day and play the game regardless. It seemed that whatever game Carousel was playing that day, it wasn't playing with us. It was playing with the Consortium, those egotistical immortals who seemed to think of Carousel as a phenomenon to be studied. Surely the punchline was coming as they exercised unbridled hubris. Their test subject, Jim, was getting the full rundown of the risks he was about to take. I could at least credit them for that.

They could have lied to him, but they didn't. I didn't know what I was supposed to do, honestly. I didn't want myself or any of my friends involved. I didn't want to be complicit in yet another horror in Carousel. I wanted to believe I could really be an oblivious bystander. That I could just watch this one. Cassie had different opinions. From the moment she started playing, she was instantly willing to die for others. It was no coincidence that one of her first tropes gave her the ability to do that easily.

"You can't let him go!" she screamed eventually as it became clear that this refugee, Jim, was about to be sent out toward the sanctuary neighborhood on a scientific expedition of sorts. I couldn't help but compare it to those scenes where one member of the group would go out into the darkness with a rope tied around their waist, and then when they came back, all that would be left was their bottom half. Cassie screamed again. More warnings. More admonitions.

"Don't do this, please." She was talking to Jim this time, hoping to reason with him. One of the immortals that was working with him said something to him softly, something like, "Just ignore those silly players. They don't know what they're talking about." And Jim obeyed. After all, we couldn't do magic tricks. The Consortium had us there. Cassie screamed. Jim ignored.

She warned him of the danger he was stepping into, and that there was no way the Manifest Consortium could possibly be prepared to save him, that Carousel was obviously setting a trap. The immortals ignored her, and Jim did too, for the most part. One of the analysts, a young woman who couldn't have been more than fourteen years old when she gained her immortality, said suddenly, "He has plot armor. Look at this. Is this Carousel's doing?" Another analyst looked at her screen and then started to laugh.

"Oh, look. The psychic just used a trope on him," she said.

"She gave him Grit." The little circle of immortals all laughed at our puny efforts. Cassie had used her Empathic Shield trope. By showing concern for the man, she gave him a better chance of surviving. It wouldn't be enough, but she wasn't the type to sit still and watch someone die. Before long, it was time for Jim to go, and the moment he stepped out of the control room, a giant screen came to life on one of the walls. It looked like the AV department had done its job.

A series of cameras captured every move he made, like he was in a movie.

"We can do cinematics once he moves past the barrier," one of the analysts told St. Vane.

"No cinematics," St. Vane responded.

"I want to see raw footage. Be ready to pull him back at a moment's notice." It really was like that scene where the character goes into the unknown with a rope around his waist, but apparently, it was a magical, invisible rope. Jim talked as he walked. He seemed to want to explain himself, not to the Manifest Consortium, but to us, the players. Maybe even Cassie herself after the big scene she had made.

"I know what I'm doing," he said.

"There are millions like me. Hundreds of millions. And the things that chased us out of our homes still chase us. If there's even a chance we can find safety here, and I can help us do it, then I'm going to try my best." He walked along. Whatever bravery he had set out with was fading from his voice. He was afraid, but he marched forward anyway. I had to hope that perhaps his innocence would save him. After all, in his mind, he was doing a noble thing. Maybe not just in his mind, but it was hard for me to see it.

It was hard to watch a man walk to his doom and pretend it was a good thing. This book is hosted on another platform. Read the official version and support the author's work. The trail down to the sanctuary was very steep. Getting to the bottom was dangerous enough, but having to get back up would be time-consuming. As I watched the video, it was clear there was an established footpath, so it wasn't exactly uncharted territory.

He made it down the hill into the valley easily enough, and we followed him as he walked. All I could do was watch. After that was a simple walk down routes that weaved between vegetable patches and fields of grain. It looked like these people had to grow their own food, or perhaps it was more of a hobby. Who knew? Ten minutes after he left, he was walking on pavement as he climbed over one of the weaker fortified streets that seemed to cut off out of nowhere.

There were some sandbags and some cars lined up to create a barrier, but it was nothing he couldn't pass. It didn't take long for people to notice him. They were non-player characters, and I could get glimpses of them on the red wallpaper as they appeared on the raw footage, but I couldn't see much information. It was clear they were very powerful NPCs, not your average background fodder.

For the most part, they were dressed like the normal people you would see in Carousel, though some signs of their situation did show. Some of them carried shotguns or large knives. Some even had proper military fatigues, but they were rare. That wasn't all too surprising. In Carousel, looking like a normal person didn't mean you weren't prepared for a fight, and in some cases, it could actually help, depending on what tropes Carousel had given them. I had never actually learned much about NPC tropes.

That was high-level Wallflower information. I scanned through the crowd until one of the townsfolk stepped forward. It was an aging biker chick, one of the people openly carrying a gun, and the first person I noticed who wasn't an NPC. She was a player. Her Plot Armor was 84. She was an Outsider Criminal named Darlene. She might have been in her mid-fifties, maybe a little younger, given the wear and tear she had been put through. The immortals watching the screen reacted differently to her appearance than I did.

They started gasping. Some of them even clapped. Others found Lucky where he stood watching and gave him even more pats on the back. Lucky himself was honestly quite emotional. He was actually crying, even as he tried to hide it. He looked overjoyed. I watched him, looking for any sign that this was all an act, that he was doing it for my benefit, somehow fooling us into thinking he actually cared about his team. I didn't see any deception, though. He seemed genuinely relieved.

Back on the screen, there was very little progress occurring. The townsfolk were wary of Jim, and he was trying to explain to them what he was doing there and who he was with. The people were on edge about it; though, they didn't seem confused about the mention of the Manifest Consortium whatsoever, which made sense since Darlene was there.

"Can we get a message out?" Lucky asked.

"I mean, is there a way we could do it without undermining his agency?"

"I'm sorry, my friend," St. Vane said.

"We can't risk it. Every ounce of control that we exert over him has the potential to backfire. Even something as simple as communication."

"Not directly to him," Lucky said.

"How about a message to her?"

"That's still complicated. At the moment, we didn't even register her as being there. Carousel hasn't pulled back the curtain completely yet, I'm afraid," Mortimer the 304th said. Lucky paced back and forth. He seemed to accept their responses. Back in the sanctuary, everything seemed perfectly calm and mundane as Jim explained what he was doing there. In fact, it was a little too mundane for my taste. A little too calm. A feeling of dread overtook me as I watched what was sure to be a slow-moving train wreck.

But then I heard a voice I recognized.

"What the hell are you doing out of place? You people need to get on your marks. We have a strategy, and we can't lose anyone else just because you're lollygagging. Oh, hell, what is this?" The people immediately began dispersing.

"Is that Jules?" Anna whispered. It was, and soon she moved into frame, giving us a good look at her. Jules had been an NPC that Bobby could summon through his companion trope, The Bickering Duo, yet here she was, apparently in a leadership role at the very sanctuary that Bobby's betrayal and sacrifice had led us to. My friends and I were shocked because we knew that was too much of a coincidence.

"Get this bag of blood out of my town," Jules said as soon as she somehow found the nearest camera and stared straight into it like she knew she was talking to the Manifest Consortium directly. She was dressed for battle or some sort of suburban kickboxing workshop, whichever came first. It was almost as if she were undercover. It must have been part of their strategy. Maybe playing their part as a realistic neighborhood helped them fight against whatever was coming.

"Back on your marks, people. And you, whoever you are," she said.

"Jim. My name is Jim."

"Jim, go back up that hill before something far worse than death happens to you."

"Yes, ma'am," Jim said, and then he turned to leave. But he didn't leave quite fast enough. In Carousel, I had often found myself at a loss for words when describing the terrors that I had seen. I had seen a cartoonish, yet somehow sadistic version of hell in the basement of a pizza parlor that had defied my understanding of base reality. I had seen the shapeless ones and had completely given up on truly understanding what my eyes were seeing at any given time.

When this enemy came, I had no such problem because whatever it was refused to show itself. But there were signs. The valley was bordered on one side by a large, verdant prairie where the residents apparently did their gardening, but on the other side was a much smaller field pockmarked by battle and bordered by a large forest that disappeared into a wall of mist. This was a standard practice in Carousel borders. It must have learned from playing Silent Hill.

You could walk into the mist, but you probably wouldn't walk out of it. The forest looked quite standard at first. Only after I stared at it intently, when the camera zoomed in on it, did I understand what was going on. It was growing. No, that wasn't the right word. It was morphing. Changing. The trees were becoming bigger, greener, healthier. The shrubs became thicker. They flowered. They bore fruit. The forest was alive with transformation. It was becoming prettier. It was becoming hardier. Healthier.

But the strangest thing was that all the while it was doing it, I could see limbs falling from the canopy, and I heard cracks as entire tree trunks were broken in two. Was something walking through the forest toward us? No, that wasn't right.

"My kids," Jim said suddenly, as if he heard something coming from the woods beyond.

"It's my kids." He quickly began to run through the neighborhood in the direction of the forest, which loomed over the neighborhood that rested at the bottom of the valley.

"What is he talking about? Kids?" St. Vane asked.

"I thought he was childless."

"He is childless," one of the analysts said.

"We double checked." Well, somebody must have been wrong, because Jim was running toward the forest as fast as he could, concerned with his children.

"Man your stations!" Jules was yelling. The screen had split into several angles so we could get good footage of what was happening. Jules, the NPCs, and Darlene were all getting ready for battle.

"Pull him back," St. Vane said.

"Pull him back right now."

"We can't," someone on the control platform said.

"It's not working."

"Mortimer," St. Vane said, finding the sorcerer in the crowd.

"What is Carousel doing?"

"It's not Carousel," Mortimer pleaded as he analyzed some fancy readouts.

"I promise you, she is not behind this. Nothing has changed. If anything, she's fighting it."

"Clearly not," St. Vane said.

"Figure out a way to get him back right now."

"We went over this with him countless times," Dr. Striga said.

"He would not depart from the mission parameters. He is clearly being manipulated." Jim was running as fast as he could. He was already out of the neighborhood, and he was halfway across the field when he mumbled a word that sent a chill down the spine of every single immortal in the room.

"…Hunger," he said, as if trying to explain something to us. It was loud and clear, echoing through the command center. Every soul who heard it seemed to hang on it, hoping they had misheard.