Chương 453: Book Nine, Chapter 10: Odd One Out

Book Eight, Chapter 33: Into the River The river was moving fast, even when we stuck our oars in the water to try to slow ourselves down in hopes of being able to drag our teammates out of the water. But as we went around the bend, passing through dark tunnels illuminated mostly by a single torch Camden carried, we realized quickly that they weren't going to catch up with us. Still, we did our best to slow our passage.

We steered next to the wall to our left, hoping to do what Camden had done before: find some crack or crevice to stick the end of our oars in. But it was useless. These stone walls were covered with slime and algae, and every time we tried to slow down, we would destabilize ourselves and risk going sideways due to the torrent. Even by the firelight, we couldn't see exactly where we were going. As we took twists and turns, the river split off underground at least twice.

All the while, I shone my flashlight behind us every chance I got, looking for any sign of Ramona, Bobby, Kelsey, or Isaac. I didn't see them.

"We have to pull off at the first opportunity," I said.

"Wait for them to catch up."

"Where exactly are we supposed to do that?" Antoine asked as he did his best to prevent the boat from crashing against a rock wall.

"Hold on!" Camden screamed from the front.

"We're about to go down rapids!" I did my best to wrap my legs up under the bench I was sitting on while doing everything I could to keep the boat from turning sideways as we crashed haphazardly from side to side of the river. Then there was the first fall. Not too big, maybe just a foot down, but that was a lot in a boat like this. I had been river rafting before in one of those big rubber rafts. They were much more forgiving of the turbulence. Another drop, about the same size.

I kept turning around, trying to shine my light to see if the others were swimming behind us, if by some miracle they had taken the same path through the dark tunnels as we did. I saw nothing but white water. I needed to devote my full attention just to keeping us from bashing ourselves to bits. Then there was a third drop, and while I couldn't be sure, it felt like we came down five feet before we finally slammed against the river again. I nearly lost my oar, I was so jarred. Forward we went.

The river didn't care if our boat was moving in the right orientation or not; it would carry us all the same. And then the montage began. Not the type of montage that we would see in storylines, because there was no On-Screen or Off-Screen. It was more like a dark ride through the underbelly of Carousel. At once, we entered a passageway that was clearly part of the sewer system. The river slowed, and we saw rats nibbling on the bones of some unfortunate man wearing a frat T-shirt.

Then we were out of the sewers and back in a cave system of some kind, where we saw a sea witch boiling a brew in a cauldron near the river. She didn't pay us much mind, but the young family she had chained up against the far wall noticed us and called out for help. Next, we sailed through an entrance to a cave that we first thought was like the others before it. But we soon realized we were floating through the skeleton of a large snake. I didn't know where we had entered it, but we exited through its mouth.

Its giant fangs were so large that if we had run into them, the boat would have shattered. We continued sailing, and the farther we went, the more we saw. There was a collection of goblins, with one head goblin yelling at all the others. The river was partially diverted off there to help power a large wooden wheel that was used to operate rough goblin machinery, like something out of a fantasy novel.

I didn't know what the lead goblin was ranting about, but it struck me like he was trying to get the others to unionize. I didn't notice until we were already out of their cavern that they wore human bones on their belts, which was scary, yeah, but also kind of tacky. More caves. More monsters. Spiders, skeletons, and mole people all just went about their lives, ignoring us as we passed by them on the river. It made no sense to my eyes, but then I realized my eyes were limited.

I couldn't see the complexity or the scale of the Carousel River, but I understood what was happening to some extent. The river—like Carousel itself—had a role to play in so many stories. And when you were outside of it, it just looked like a river. But when you were inside of it, you saw it all at once, continuous from one story to the next until eventually... We crashed out of a drainage pipe into a large body of water that looked much more like the river we had seen before.

We were outside, with fresh air and sunshine, and the river slowed greatly as we tried our best to steer along its shores. Cassie never knew any of this. She was sleeping soundly in the bottom of the boat with no dreams, no thoughts, no fear. Andrew did his best to make sure she was comfortable, placing his bag underneath her head as a pillow. And just as I thought our trip was about to get normal, the lazy river that we were sailing down stopped being a river at all.

The dark, murky waters abruptly halted, like how rivers do when they meet the ocean, but instead of meeting the ocean… they met swimming pools. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all linked together as if they were built that way. But I was sure that they weren't. And for each swimming pool we passed, there was a house or building near it. These were backyard pools, city pools, waterparks, all kinds, shapes, and functions. From the perspective of the river, it was like they were all next to each other.

I wondered if we were to pull our boat up to one of the pool's sides and get out, would we see the river the way we did now, one thousand linked swimming pools flowing in one direction, or would we see it like a normal swimming pool? And if we did that, would we be able to get back to the river just by reentering the pool? If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it. I had no idea, but I didn't have long to think about it.

Because I heard a scream in the distance, in one of the houses up ahead, a young woman was getting chased around by a mask-wearing, knife-wielding serial killer. But as we got close, suddenly that all disappeared too. The house was still there, but in place of the victim and killer, there was nothing but a window on the back of the house that was left open. It was an Omen for a storyline called Lights On, Nobody Home, and even as I watched the Omen, I could see it being written and built in real time.

The poster was switching around like Carousel was choosing between different options. The more interesting part was that I could see the Omen so easily, despite not having a scouting trope equipped. But then, when all the details about the Omen got settled, suddenly it disappeared, and it became like all other Omens to the naked eye. But that wasn't the only time this happened. All around us were monsters and victims disappearing and turning into Omens in real time.

"What is going on?" Antoine asked.

"What neighborhood is this?"

"I don't think it has a name," I said.

"Not yet." The river ran through everything, including the untamed corners of the world. It ran through dungeons and caves and forests and swimming pools. And then, after we had moved through a few miles of open pool, we moved out of them just as quickly. A large swath of land around us became flooded with around six inches of water. Fields and fields of nothing but water and rice rushed to meet us. The river cut through it all, not mixing and barely disturbing the water it moved through.

Still, we had to do our best to stay on the river and not let the boat flow off onto the flooded land around us. It was a rice paddy, and from the looks of the people working that rice paddy, we were somewhere in ancient China, or some version of it. Suddenly, a large humanoid, dressed in traditional clothing but with a wolflike head, emerged from the woods. It had no entry on the red wallpaper. Not at first.

And when it finally showed up, it did so first written in Chinese, I had to assume, but then its subtitle became English. Something about a minor god. I didn't have time to see. I was more concerned with keeping us on the river so that we didn't accidentally join a storyline we didn't want to.

The giant wolf-man god began chasing the peasants and eating them whole, until eventually they all disappeared like a glitch on a videotape, and all that was left was some Omen in the distance I couldn't see for more than a split second. Eventually, the rice paddy was behind us, but the wetland remained. It was different, no longer farmland. It was bleak, and the trees around us were dead. And the further we went along, the more people we saw. They looked like they were from the 1920s or so.

I couldn't tell exactly, but they were carrying everything they owned on their backs across the wetland, as if some terrible disaster had occurred—families: men, women, and children, elderly people, the occasional donkey or horse. They were walking across the wetland, tired and desperate. And as we sailed by them, they would look up at us, confused, as if the script hadn't told them to ignore the meta things they saw around them yet. Then, and only then, did the river finally let us back out in a familiar place.

We were surrounded by forest again, and in the distance we saw, up on a hill, Halle Castle. Players were standing around the castle walls, watching for us on the river. I looked for Ramona or Logan or Michael, but I couldn't tell from a distance, and they were so close together that when I looked at them, their profiles on the red wallpaper kept jumping from one to another.

I didn't see any of the players we left behind in the dungeons, neither those who had gone down there to escort us nor those who were supposed to have joined us. All around the castle was the circus, just as we had left it. We did our best to stay in the middle of the river as we sailed northeast. Did that mean that everything that we had just seen was physically between us and the castle, crammed in by some dimensional magic I had no understanding of? Who could say?

"It would seem that we are back on Carousel River proper," Andrew said.

"I hope it stays that way." I hoped so, too, but I had no faith in it.

"They're waving at us," Kimberly said with a crack in her voice.

"Do they not know what happened in the dungeon?"

"They're not waving at us," Camden said.

"They're trying to get our attention." I squinted up at them, but they were pretty far away, and we could only see their top halves because of the castle wall that they were walking on.

"What are they trying to say?" Antoine asked.

"They're warning us about something," Anna said.

"Something's wrong." I reached into my pocket and pulled out the radio we had gotten from the Red Woods storyline. I clicked the button and asked, "What's going on up there?" But all I got in reply was static.

"Be on the lookout," I said. Radios didn't work when communication was too convenient or unearned. The radio's failure to work gave us information.

"Keep your eyes peeled," Antoine said.

"I feel it too. Something dangerous." But all we could do was sail forward and keep our guard up. We needed to get out of the area as fast as possible. But we were not fast enough. Right as we had sailed past the meadow near the river that we had spent weeks staring down at, something happened so quickly I barely even perceived it or realized what was going on until it was already done. A man jumped out of the water right next to our boat.

A giant of a man, his face covered in a white cloth mask, his hair wild and dripping. Caleb Rowe had finally found his attack. In his right hand, a samurai sword. He jumped up near the middle of our boat, grabbed onto the side, and came down, cleaving at Camden. But Camden was too quick. He had anticipated this and dove for the floor of the boat before he could even see what he was trying to dodge.

The cut made for him kept going until it collided with Andrew, slicing him from shoulder to hip in one smooth motion because of the way he had positioned his body over Cassie's. The arc of the sword was so big that it was going to hit someone. There was no way we could have stopped it. I barely had time to curse before he was going for another strike at Camden. But before he could, a shot rang out from the distance. Caleb Rowe's hand burst with blood, and he dropped his sword into the boat.

Back at the castle, someone was up in the watchmen's tower with the rifle and had made a crack shot. They would never have been able to kill him; he had far too much plot armor for that, but shooting his weapon out of his hand was easier. Quickly, I grabbed my hedge shears, brandished them so that they would make the sha-shing sound and power up, and then stabbed them full force into Caleb Rowe's eyes. They didn't sink in satisfactorily, but he did let go of the boat as he grabbed his face.

Being a villain of such power, it could never be clear whether or not I had actually blinded him, so he had to hide his wound. It must have been instinct by that point. He dropped off the side of the boat and sank beneath the water, his fate unclear. All we could do was float on in stunned silence as we all stared at Andrew's body. He was dead so fast he didn't even have time to struggle or spit out blood. The cost of every decision in Carousel was great. Right or wrong, there would always be hell to pay.

Those who had escorted us into the dungeons had bought us enough time to escape. Had they been lost in the fray? Ramona and Bobby had volunteered to go with us, but now they, along with Isaac and Kelsey, were treading water somewhere in the folds of Carousel. Andrew had chosen to save his sister just as much as the rest of us had, but he was the only one who had to pay the ultimate price for it so far. Was Carousel punishing us? Or was this simply the cost of avoiding an Apocalypse?

Our journey into the untold depths of Carousel's river system was only beginning.