“The circus is in here, but it’s a secondhand story,” Camden said, flipping back through the Atlas, “same as I told you before.”

“All right, well, tell me that story,” I said.

“It’s just a recording of a conversation between two players from different factions,” Camden said, “heavily redacted, by the way.” He flipped to the page in the Atlas and started to summarize what he was reading.

“The other player’s talking about running an apocalypse in order to rescue some teammates,” he said.

“What apocalypse?” I asked.

We weren’t exactly alone as we spoke in the smoking room, but nobody else was in on the conversation. Most people were not soothed by compulsive planning the way that Camden and I were.

“Any apocalypse,” Camden said. “He says he needs to rescue them from the next apocalypse, and apparently, you don’t even need a rescue ticket for that, you just need their poster.”

Rescuing people from the apocalypse was always tempting. We had several Vets from Camp Dyer locked in the purgatory of the missing poster board because of the Black Snow, including Reggie, who had died to save Anna and Camden.

“Okay. So the circus has been run before as an apocalypse, but none of the people who wrote the book remember it?”

“Right,” Camden said. “For some strange reason, whenever the apocalypse showed up, most players don’t stick around long enough to care what kind of apocalypse it was.”

“That makes sense,” I said. “If only we were smart players.”

“If only,” he said. He continued with the story. “This guy is one of the last rogue players around. Most of the other factions have died off by this point,” Camden said as he scanned the text. And then, as he was looking at it, he paused, like there was something there he had never noticed or cared about before.

“What is it?” I asked.

“What did you say the name of this apocalypse was?” he asked.

“Low Top and Co. Presents Ringmaster at the Red Chalk Circus,” I said. Ringmaster was the title. The rest was written in fancy script around the poster.

“For a while there, all of the other Omens were just normal storylines, right? Even after they’d been converted to the circus?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

When the circus first started, any Omen that took place in that part of town had the whole Low Top and Co. and the Red Chalk Circus parts added to their titles, but they were still just normal storylines. That’s why we weren’t even sure if it was part of an apocalypse yet.

“He says the name of the apocalypse is Low Top and Co. Present The Last Show on Earth at the Red Chalk Circus. It’s about a circus that shows up in town one night, and by the end of the night, everyone in town is dead. It moves from town to town.”

“The Last Show on Earth?” I asked.

“Have you heard of it?”

“No,” I said. “It’s just weird for them to use the word Earth. Carousel usually bends over backward not to.”

He shrugged his shoulders.

“That would imply that there are several different apocalypses that can come from the circus,” I said. “Do we still have any mobile Omens that are functional?”

“As of last night, we do not,” he said. “So much for all that hard work. Even the Omens that took place inside a single dwelling switched over after we got surrounded.”

And we had to spend so much time collecting those things. We never envisioned we would need them to stay clear of an apocalypse, and that was good, because they weren’t going to work for this one.

The circus had spread slowly at first, but then, all of a sudden, it picked up pace so fast that it nearly caught us off guard. The circus spread into a nightmarish plane of repeating patterns and nostalgic festivity, almost like a dream.

Cassie still lay on the couch on the other side of the room, staring up at the ceiling.

While we were looking at the book, the others were concerned with her. She was shaking, begging for distraction. People were talking to her, literally shaking her, as she feared getting lost in thought and drifting into memory.

Camden followed my gaze and looked over at me. “We’re going to have to do something about that,” he said.

I nodded. We all knew what that something was.

If Cassie was now a real psychic, and psychics could trigger the apocalypse into full swing, then sending her to a temporary death made perfect sense. It was logical, and there was no way she would argue with us.

Cassie had taken to dying for others very quickly, even though the first few times it was more of an accident when she got carried away using her Anguish trope.

It would be hours before anyone else brought it up, because no one wanted to be the one to do it.

Isaac would normally be the one to cut right through the nonsense and provide a practical, if cynical, perspective. But this was his sister, and he was doing everything he could to keep her distracted, including trying to tickle her feet, which was successful, though it wasn’t helping her mood any.

Andrew wasn’t going to suggest throwing his sister to the wolves either.

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And Logan was bound by his friendship with Andrew. Plus, his role as a true cynic was powerful; his tropes were mostly used to respond to other people’s plans and make them better. From a meta position, I could see why he would not want to be the first to mention it.

But when Bobby eventually did, when he stood in the middle of the room and said, “So now we have to make the sacrifice for the better of the group, right?” with tears in his eyes after having just watched his wife walk away again, not knowing when he would see her face, the whole group erupted at him with anger.

But the anger didn’t last. It fizzled out almost instantly.

“I can’t keep going,” Cassie said after a few people defended her. “Have you ever tried not to remember something? I feel like I’m going to do it by accident, and we’re all going to die.”

If she remembered her character’s ties to the enigmatic clown ringmaster, the Omen would be triggered. Her psychic powers were piercing the veil, somehow pulling those memories out of the ether. I had experienced it myself, the fear, the anxiety. Knowing that one thought could bring about the end.

“Just a second,” Kimberly said as she ran over to her purse and drew out a syringe and a small bottle of a powerful sedative. She looked at me and said, “You said it was a dreamless sleep, right?”

I nodded, although the truth was I couldn’t remember. It had been the recipe of Simon Halle’s father that we had picked up from one of the storylines during our Centennial run. Nothing had necessitated its use until this.

“You won’t feel a thing if we use this,” Kimberly said. She looked like she wanted to offer it to Andrew, because he was a doctor, but unfortunately, it was one of those magical sci-fi objects that wouldn’t work outside of its storyline without a license, and only Kimberly was licensed.

“No, we cannot even discuss this,” Anna was saying. “We can’t really be talking about feeding her to monsters in the basement.”

It was hardly the worst moral dilemma we had ever come across, but it was one of the first that happened outside of a storyline.

If we put Cassie in the basement, she would be killed by one of the many monsters in the dungeons, and after the apocalypse, we could go rescue her from whatever storyline they belonged to.

But I got the worst feeling about it.

Camden talked about how logical it was. He managed to stay calm, and his words sounded kind. We knew it had to happen.

“Give it to me,” Cassie said. “Whatever you’re going to do, just give it to me. I can’t hold it off any longer.”

Her now-real psychic powers had become a liability.

“We will rescue you,” Andrew said. “We will find you wherever you are, and we will save you.”

And that was true; whatever it took, her death would be undone. Assuming that her death actually prevented the apocalypse, because if it didn’t, that would be the end.

Kimberly nodded, looked Cassie in the eye, and whispered something to her that I couldn’t hear as she plunged the needle into her arm. Cassie was asleep in seconds, solidly Unconscious and Incapacitated, hopefully resting in a dreamless sleep where she didn’t have to think about Highbrow Hew, the clown who looked up.

I wondered what his gimmick was, other than the nightmare thing and looking up. As freaky as it was to see him contort his neck that way.

“Leave us for a moment,” Andrew said as he held his little sister’s body. Isaac was right next to him.

It was touching, in a way, to see that death had not lost its power. As many times as we had all done it, even knowing that we might be able to get Cassie back, it still felt dreadful to send her away into the abyss alone.

And it didn’t sit right with me. The logic was airtight, but the logic was based on gameplay.

Gaming the system. Gaming the narrative. Ducking around the rules. Exploiting abilities for unexpected gains. We had all done parts of that, and I had done it more than anyone else. My main gimmick was pretending not to know I was in danger as a meta shield against terrible monsters.

But as I stared down at Cassie, while Kimberly tried to wave me out of the room so that Andrew and Isaac could have their final moments with her before she was sacrificed—

Sacrificed.

That’s what we were doing. We had technically sacrificed each other a ton of times, but only passively. We let each other be killed. How often had we actually killed each other?

“You know when this whole thing started?” I asked.

“What?” Camden asked as he started to leave the room.

“This whole thing started when we turned down Lucky’s throughline. We refused the call to adventure, and then suddenly the circus started spreading like wildfire. It became so big that it was no longer a real circus.,, You have to ask yourself if that’s when Ringmaster became the apocalypse story, and the circus suddenly became like a dream world location instead of a real one.”

“What? Get to your point,” he asked.

I wasn’t quite ready for that yet.

“You remember me talking about Silas Dyrkon and his rambling speech at the end of the Centennial? He said the reason that he wanted to trick us onto his throughline was that innocence, that victimhood, would almost protect us in a narrative sense. That’s the strangest thing, but I guess it makes some amount of sense. The game at Carousel isn’t all of Carousel; that’s not all the magic. It’s just the parts that the Consortium gamified. It’s not the whole thing. Maintaining your innocence has power in Carousel, because story has power in Carousel.”

“Now who’s rambling?” Camden asked. “Have you changed your mind about this? Because you know it’s what we have to do.”

“Yes, it’s very logical to do it. You throw your psychic into the dungeon, she gets killed, no more psychic to trigger the clown nightmare apocalypse. We make sacrifices like this all the time. You know, the whole thing about death being the most important choice you make in this game, or whatever. But if death is a choice, is life one too?”

We had made choices with our arms held behind our backs the whole time we were here. This was the first time we had to make this decision when death wasn’t in the script. It was a real choice.

“What are you getting at?” Antoine asked. The others had stuck around long enough to hear me talk.

“Look at what we’re doing,” I said. “Isn’t it strange? I mean, if you really look at it from a mile away. Up close, it’s logical; it’s basic gameplay. We’re getting rid of a threat. We can save Cassie later, I get that. But look at it from far away, what are we doing here? In its purest form. We are about to sacrifice a woman who hears voices so that the world doesn’t end.”

When I said it out loud, it clicked into place for me. This wasn’t just a gameplay decision. It was bigger than that. When the framers of Project Rewind got blood on their hands, they took themselves off the board. Sacrificing lives was not a heroic act, so they couldn’t be the heroes.

“That is an archetypal narrative that’s older than us,” I said. “We aren’t the first to make that decision, and let me tell you, everyone who does is the bad guy. It’s burning witches to stop satan, it’s tossing virgins into volcanoes, or bleeding them out on the temple steps.”

I couldn’t even say for certain what was overcoming me. Maybe it was paranoia. Maybe I really was just looking for a twist. Could we really sacrifice one life to prevent the apocalypse? It felt like there was some antagonistic force at war against us. Could it be so easily thwarted?

Or was this a trap? I didn’t know. Maybe I really was being dramatic.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had seen this before, this story in a dozen different ways. Sure, I had never seen it in the form of a clown apocalypse, but I had seen it before, and I knew how these stories ended for people who made such sacrifices.

And if the metastory really was a story where your actions mattered, good or bad, where innocence could be powerful, wasn’t it worth just a few moments to think about it?

I wasn’t a psychic, despite what my background trope would say, nor was I a Hysteric empowered by emotion. I was a Film Buff.

My power was that I had seen a lot of movies, over and over again. And in this world, that made me strong.

Because in Carousel, most of the rules were written down on little cards—but not by Carousel, by a bunch of opportunistic sorcerers whose entire culture was driven by nostalgia and wishful thinking.

But it wasn’t the written rules I was concerned with. It was the unwritten ones that I felt we needed to obey, no matter where they led.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep