Chương 443: Book Eight, Chapter 110: A Glimpse Forward Part II

Every eye looking at the screen at that moment was wide with surprise. The word "hunger" carried strong connotations within the Manifest Consortium.

"Get me Rose right now," St. Vane said. Aldric Rose was standing right behind him.

"Right here, sir," the meek man said.

"Explain this," St. Vane commanded.

"Explain what?" Doctor Rose said.

"It can't be the Manyfold Hunger. There is no way that he could have been infected. We haven't seen any signs of it among the refugees we've taken in. We haven't been able to get within ten possibilities of the Hunger. This has to be some sort of coincidence." As far as I understood, the Manyfold Hunger was some sort of hive mind disease that wormed its way through the multiverse, searching after its quarry. Doctor Rose had a throughline designed specifically to find a cure for it.

He talked about it as if it were a pathogen to be researched and eliminated. Lucky, however, talked about it like it was a common cold to be ignored. It was starting to look like neither of them was correct. Before long, Jim made it into the forest, and after that, all I could hear were screams from within the trees. But the thing was, they weren't exactly screams of horror. They were more like the kind of thing you would hear from someone riding a rollercoaster, mixed with a woman giving birth.

The cameras changed their focus. It was apparent that they couldn't follow Jim into the forest, or at least Carousel didn't let them. Our next view was of the townsfolk as they prepared for what was about to happen. Nothing did happen for a time, but soon, Jim was running out of the forest on all fours as his body sprouted hair, his teeth got bigger, and his face formed a snout. Was he suddenly a werewolf? If so, this wasn't the same kind of werewolf we had fought against before.

While its face was definitely more carnivorous looking than a normal human, it didn't have the proper wolf head, and while it did run on all fours, it was awkward as its arms weren't quite long enough, so its back legs had to sprawl out as it ran. Jules was on top of one of the houses down in the sanctuary with a pair of binoculars and a radio. She pushed the button and said, "Give it a silver bullet."

Soon, the platform I had seen built under the water tower let off a flash, and a bullet tore through Jim's chest as he fell down onto the ground. The silver bullet appeared to be effective. Jim was left dying.

"Treehouse," Jules said.

"Keep eyes on him." But there was something strange because the Jim I had just seen transform into a werewolf wasn't wearing a shirt, and he also wasn't wearing the jeans he had been when he walked into the forest. He had on shorts. Had he changed clothes for some reason?

"We got another one," Jules said over the radio. And she was right, because another werewolf Jim emerged from the forest already further into its transformation. This one was dressed like a fisherman, literally wearing rubber waders as if he had just been in a river.

"What the hell is going on?" Camden asked. Of course, no one knew the answer. Not the players, certainly. Not even the Manifest Consortium had an explanation.

"I thought you were tracking this, Rose," Lucky said as he jumped into action, sitting down at one of the strange quasi-steampunk machines and looking at readouts.

"We are still in our early stages of understanding the Manyfold Hunger," Doctor Rose said.

"It wasn't given priority. I don't see how any of this has to do with it, though. Our best estimate was that it was a hive mind. This can't be the Hunger." Some analysts began discussing their failed attempts to "desync" any hivemind.

"Look at the trees," one of the analysts said. Doctor Rose followed her gaze and saw what looked to me to be a very beautiful but otherwise uninsightful view of the forest. A realization came over Rose's face. I remembered the first time I saw Doctor Rose. We hadn't met officially. I was sneaking around, and he was explaining how the Manyfold Hunger seemed to have the strangest ability to curate and bolster ecosystems on worlds that didn't have humans.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation. Is that what I was seeing? That whatever this force was, it was somehow improving the forest? But what did that mean for Jim? The second werewolf was dropped shortly after the first. The silver bullets were effective. As soon as they died, they turned back into Jim. Three more wolves emerged from the forest shortly after, but they were dispatched just as easily. Again, they were all dressed differently, but they all appeared to be the same man.

And then Jim himself reemerged. Or at least a Jim did. This man was wrapped in bandages. At first, I thought that he was some sort of mummy, but that wasn't it.

"Analysis," St. Vane called out.

"It's leprosy, sir," one of the immortals called back as the bandaged Jim emerged from the forest and did his best to run back toward the sanctuary with a look of terror upon his scarred face. No one knew what to do, not in the command center at least, but Jules had a very strong opinion of what to do.

"Put him out of his misery," she said. And that's what her people did. Another shot rang out, and this version of Jim fell to the ground dead. I couldn't see him or any of the others on the red wallpaper, so while I was fairly certain the wolves had been enemies, surely a man with leprosy was not. But it was all the same to Jules, a risk she couldn't take. And then the flood came down.

Not a metaphorical flood, but a flowing stream of water that defied physics as it flowed out of the forest, almost like a living thing, and within it was a drowning Jim. He was wearing a swimsuit and struggling to put on a life jacket. Jules didn't do anything about this because the water simply spilled out over the field, and whatever force had created that river died down as a drowned Jim fell to the ground. Another wolf came out afterward and was quickly dispatched. But then Jim followed. The real Jim.

I could tell it was him because he was wearing the same clothes he had been wearing earlier. He wasn't running, but he did stare up into the sky like he had had some sort of cosmic revelation. Tears were streaming down his face. And then he flickered. Not like a TV flickered, which was an effect that Carousel liked to do. It was more like an optical illusion. There was one Jim, and then there were two. The second one had already died, but that didn't keep him from walking forward. His face rotten.

His teeth exposed because his lips were gone. He was a proper zombie. Jim saw his undead doppelganger and gasped. Zombie Jim didn't seem nearly as perplexed at seeing his double. He simply attacked the original. Luckily, whatever type of zombie this was, it was a lightweight, and the real Jim was able to push it down, where it slipped in the mud from the river that had flowed through there moments earlier and had trouble getting back up. Our Jim pressed on back toward the sanctuary.

Unfortunately, that was not the only zombie version of himself to slough off. Jim flickered three more times and was encumbered by three more zombies.

"Take them out," Jules said.

"The original?" a voice called back to her on the radio. She thought for a moment and then said, "Let's give him some time. He doesn't look like too much of a troublemaker." A few moments later, a squad of three NPCs, dressed like suburban crusaders, wielding baseball bats and a shotgun, and covered in improvised armor, ran out onto the field past the original Jim and proceeded to beat down his zombie pursuers. The original Jim didn't seem to notice them all that much. He was very distracted.

I watched all of this in bewilderment and horror, and some gears began to turn in my mind. In Carousel, the midpoint isn't always the biggest or most important part of a story. In fact, it usually comes and goes without the players realizing it, and they only figure out what it was on reflection. Sometimes it's the revelation that the person you thought was the main character was secretly and unknowingly an ancient shapeshifting cosmic horror.

Other times, it was the simple realization that what you thought was a sci-fi post-apocalyptic adventure was actually a simple fairy tale that happened to take place in the future. It could tell you what the enemy was. It could tell you more about the plot. But whatever the midpoint revelation was, it was important to pay attention because it would tell you the nature of the story you were in.

Bobby had said that his efforts to revive his wife had led us to the midpoint by bringing us out here, and while I wasn't exactly certain he was correct, it was difficult for me to deny him completely. His foolhardy plan had dragged us out into the middle of nowhere to a battlefield that we didn't understand, and in doing so, he had accidentally introduced us to a species of shapeshifters so far beyond our understanding that Carousel had to weaken them just so we would have a chance at beating them.

A species that just happened to be going extinct before they came to Carousel and were placed in this exact location. If this really was the midpoint of whatever twisted tale Carousel was trying to tell, then I had to wonder if Carousel was giving us a glimpse of the monster it had cast for its Big Bad. Jim fell to his knees before he made it back to the sanctuary. His face was red. His body bloated. The occasional zombie seemed to spawn from him, only to be dispatched quickly by the team that Jules had sent out.

He looked up to the sky, and what he said I would never forget.

"It's bigger than you think," he said through a raspy voice.

"You don't know gravity until you hit the ground. You don't know satiety until the Hunger comes. It wants. It searches. But not for me. From many worlds, it will make One, and the One will rejoice." And then, Jim, a brave and noble man, fell to the ground, but before his face hit the dirt, he disappeared entirely. The dead wolves, too, were gone. As were the zombies, the drowned man, and the leper. The camera cut back to the forest. Standing at its edge were hundreds of Jims, dazed and lethargic.

Werewolves, zombies, even creatures I didn't even recognize, mixed with every variation of injured man I could think of. Jims in hospital gowns. Jims in his funeral suit. A Jim splattered in a skydiving rig, but still standing. Jims who reached old age. All one man, all vanished in an instant. The big and beautiful trees were replaced by the normal ones soon after. Whatever had curated them receded back to where it hid. Is this what Carousel wanted us to see?

An invasion from something that might be as big and unknowable as itself? I didn't know how Carousel came to be, but I knew Carousel. I knew the town, the place. It was a world of terror, a world of injustice, of suffering. Yes, Carousel was an evil entity with power and scope beyond all mortal understanding. Its magic was inscrutable, its motives indecipherable. It could kill, destroy, and create all without any known restriction. It was a terrifying force, a plague upon the Many Worlds…

But it was not the only one.