“It’s no use,” Antoine said, “We’re on a leash.”

He tried to power the little trolling motor forward. The vegetation that had ensnared the propeller of the main engines was still attached, and try as we might, we couldn’t pull away from it.

“What did you do to this lake?” Cassie asked Camden. “What were you trying to cover up?”

“Cover up?” Camden asked. “KRSL wasn’t trying to cover up anything. We were just cleaning up after ourselves. We weren’t even forced to. We did it of our own accord. I don’t know what’s going on here, but it has nothing to do with us.”

“Listen to the water,” Cassie said. “Do you hear any engines? Sound travels fast at night. There are no boats on the water right now, none that are running at least. We may be the only ones left on the lake. The rescuers are probably…”

She couldn’t even force herself to say the words.

The sun had set while we attempted to make any forward progress toward shore.

Whatever that thing was that didn’t show up on the red wallpaper, it was some sort of monster, not a ghost, and as a result, Cassie’s role as a psychic shifted. We figured she could stir the pot and create some antagonism.

We needed to work at making her more relevant in non-supernatural stories.

“Why are you asking me? All we did was leak some heavy metals in it,” Camden said. “It was before my time. We cleaned them up, and we restocked the lake. That was it. What I wanna know is why that thing looks like your sister,” he said, looking at Anna.

“That wasn’t Joanne,” Anna said. “Maybe I hoped… I don’t know what I hoped, but it wasn’t her. You saw it.”

“I saw that it bore a remarkable likeness to your dead sister. If anyone here has to explain what’s going on, it has to be you,” Camden said.

All I did was sit back and film the person who was talking. Occasionally, another copy of Joanne would pop up in the water, and I might film her, but beyond that, we were just busy giving Carousel some lines to work with.

Those fake drowning victims were some of the freakiest monsters I had seen in Carousel.

As far as I could tell, we were trapped, and trapped good. We were at least twenty meters from shore in any direction, and I had no doubt that whatever this plant creature was, it could pick us off before we got there.

“This is useless,” Antoine said. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. We don’t know what this thing is. Let’s start there. Now, you said that your team was gathering plant samples. What did they find?”

Camden gave Anna one last glare and went to where he had stored the samples from his team.

“They were bladderworts. I told you that,” Camden said.

“A shot of penicillin should fix them up real quick, then,” I said. Was it too late for a little humor?

“Bladderworts,” he said again angrily, trying not to laugh. “The plant with the little yellow flowers.”

We had seen them all over the lake. We thought nothing of them. They didn’t show up on the red wallpaper.

“Bladderwort is not an explanation,” Anna said. “Tell us what it is.”

Camden huffed and puffed, but he answered anyway.

“It is a small carnivorous plant that lives in water or mud,” he said. “Actually, it is a fairly interesting plant, despite how common it is.”

“Carnivorous?” Antoine asked. “Like a Venus flytrap?”

Camden shrugged. “That is another carnivorous plant, but personally, I find the bladderwort far more interesting. It has the most sophisticated structure of any aquatic plant. Heck, of any plant. You see, it’s got a little trap, a bladder. To our eyes, it might look like a tiny bean casing, but it’s completely hollow. And I don’t mean filled with air. I mean, it’s pulling a vacuum underwater. When small aquatic animals trigger the trap, it opens a door, and everything nearby is sucked in by negative pressure. The trap closes, and digestion begins.”

He was holding a book on aquatic plants in his right hand.

Antoine and I looked at each other, lit up by the boat’s deck lights.

“You have to be making this up,” he said. “How come I’ve never heard of this? That sounds absolutely crazy.”

Camden rolled his eyes. “Because the plant feeds on microbes, you know, tiny shellfish that you can’t even see, bacteria, detritus, maybe some mosquito larvae. It’s tiny. That’s why I was telling you that this has nothing to do with what is happening right now.”

We kept bickering back and forth, and it felt like we were going nowhere.

Eventually, we went Off-Screen.

“What we’re doing isn’t working,” I said. “Camden, we need you to switch tact here.”

He paused for a moment. “So you want me to say that this is definitely what’s at fault, like a mutant?”

“Well, if excluding it as a suspect doesn’t work, then maybe that is the way to go about it,” I said. “The needle on the plot cycle hasn’t moved forward in an hour of discussion.”

He nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Let me get this set up.” He took out the samples that he’d collected from the pontoon across the cove and set them out. Then he took out a magnifying glass, ready for the next moment he went On-Screen.

“It would seem that the evolutionary pressures of the pollution, combined with the need to adapt and find new food sources, may have triggered a mutation or adaptation beyond our imagination,” he said.

“You’ve got five minutes before you’re On-Screen,” I said.

“I’m practicing,” he said.

We had narrowed down the possibilities. We had given Carousel all the lines it needed to tell the story of some sort of ancient plant lost to time, or perhaps a strange cryptid, or a plant-based mermaid. Mutant was the next angle. We would have gotten there a lot faster because of the pollution detail, but the fact that it looked so much like Anna’s sister complicated things. The mutant angle didn’t explain that.

At that point, I was ready to point a finger at Anna’s dad having rigged up some sort of submarine monster designed to imitate his daughter and trap the people he believed caused her death, but that theory was a long shot, and we were all out of Scooby snacks.

On-Screen.

“It’s strange,” Camden said as he held up a light and a magnifying glass to stare at the plant samples. “I see much of the plant structure is identical to what you would expect, but I can’t find any of their bladders anywhere.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I bit my tongue to stop myself from telling a joke.

“What are the implications of that?” Anna asked, really trying to get some mileage out of her Lead-In Line trope to give narrative weight to the information Camden was revealing.

“The implication is either that they have evolved to no longer have their bladder, which would be absurd because it is one of nature’s finest mechanical feats, or the structure is simply located elsewhere on the plant. We may be looking at a completely new kind of bladderwort.”

I had to bite my tongue again. I had already done a bladderwort joke.

Besides, I was a little distracted because the moment he said that, the moment it left his lips, the little piece of plant matter that he was looking at appeared on the red wallpaper.

Well, at least that gave us some answers. It wasn’t a supernatural threat. It was a super predator. Its tropes were a who’s who of creature feature carnage.

Animals Are Psychic effectively eliminated the plant’s need for Savvy by endowing it with instincts that made its actions seem intelligent. It was Thoroughly Dispersed, which meant it didn’t need any Hustle, or at least it didn’t need to chase us.

While the others didn’t see the tropes, they definitely saw that it was an enemy all of a sudden.

I wished that we had had time to discuss things Off-Screen, but now that Camden had moved the plot forward by establishing that this was a mutant, an entirely novel species, Carousel deemed it time to move forward with Second Blood.

The beast, which before relied on people hanging over the edge and grabbing onto it in order to hunt its prey, suddenly adapted.

The boat shook so hard I almost dropped my camera. Luckily, I had clipped it to my life vest.

Unluckily, no one was holding on to Cassie when it happened, because she fell off the side of the boat before anyone could grab her.

“Help!” she screamed as she surfaced in the water.

Behind her, an imitation of Joanne Reed appeared, flailing about as if it were waiting for Cassie to reach out and grab it.

“Help!” she screamed again as she swam toward the boat, grabbed onto the side rail, and tried to pull herself up.

The boat shook again, sending her back into the water.

This time, two more imitation Joannes popped out of the water, flailing desperately, looking like really convincing drowning women, hoping beyond hope that Cassie would reach out for them.

The boat drifted away from Cassie as the flailing plants surrounded her.

“Why isn’t it attacking her?” Anna asked.

“Because it doesn’t know how,” Camden said. “That’s not how it targets its prey.”

There was something so deeply disturbing about a creature that could imitate a human without having any notable intelligence. Surely whatever mechanism allowed it to pull fishermen out of boats would allow it to grab onto Cassie as she panicked in the water, but it simply hadn’t evolved that hunting method yet.

It lured its prey into its mouth. It didn’t grab it.

It kept Cassie surrounded as it continued to knock around the boat with some unseen appendage.

Antoine grabbed a fishing pole and tried to hold it out toward Cassie to help pull her aboard, but she was too far away now. The knocking of the boat had let us drift.

It was time for Second Blood. Maybe the reason the plants weren’t attacking was that Cassie wasn’t next on death’s list. After all, I had the lowest effective plot armor, and for as good and flexible as our setup was, we didn’t have much blood control.

I stood up, grabbed a fishing pole, and held it out toward Cassie like Antoine was. I really reached. I wasn’t even trying to film it because I knew that wouldn’t be believable. I let the camera rest on the boat next to me. It was still clipped to my life jacket.

Cassie was trying her best to swim between the flailing figures that blocked her off, but was finding limited success.

The flailing stopped. Suddenly, one of the imitators started moving closer to Cassie.

The thing was learning. Adapting.

I didn’t like what was about to happen, but I knew my job. I reached out as far as I could, trying to hand the pole to Cassie, but then, as if by accident, I touched one of the imitation Joannes with the pole. Suddenly, the humanoid creation lurched and latched onto the end of the fishing pole, pulling it and me into the water.

I didn’t know what I was expecting. I hadn’t gone through a lot of water-based horrors.

The first thing I noticed was that I could see remarkably well underwater, even though it was dark outside. Even my camera was picking things up well. Its clear plastic case kept it waterproof.

The next thing I noticed was that holy hell, there were giant pods underneath us. Pods was the only term I could think of. There were things inside them. Half-digested things, including one or two of Camden’s assistants, if I had to guess. Jezebel and Dieter were done for.

I didn’t get to look at them for long because, with a slurp, I was sucked through a hole and crammed into one of them.

Camden had called them bladders. What a terrible way to die. It just so happened that not all of me fell into the pod. My right hand and the camera were crammed outside, but it didn’t matter. It felt like I was trapped inside a wrestling mat.

I used the Insert Shot on the camera in my hand, panning it around to make sure it cut good footage, but not in a super deliberate way, as if maybe it was catching footage on its own, dangling from the cord that connected it to my life jacket. It was a hard feat to pull off.

And then, as the bladder started to crush me, I realized I had to hurry up and take off my life jacket, because otherwise I was not going to be able to get it off. I squeezed my hand down and unclasped it, and then, in an effort that felt like wrestling with a python, I managed to wiggle it off my upper body. My lower body and guts were being squeezed so hard I felt like I had a bad case of the bladderworts.

My lungs screamed for air, but I told them to shut up.

With great effort and a whole lot of finesse, I managed to push my life jacket out of the bladder, where it and the camera attached to it began to float to the surface of the water.

I did all of this while holding my breath. Months ago, I had devoted far more points to Grit than made sense for my build so that I could use Willpower Is Magic to go on a walking tour of the theatre out west.

As a result, I could hold my breath for a very long time.

But not forever.

Luckily, I also had my Cutaway Death trope equipped, so as soon as I got sucked into the water, my character was dead. In fact, I started being able to use Deathwatch on the red wallpaper before I even began to drown.

I didn’t plan on going out that way. My character may have been dead, but I still had some use left in me.

I reached into my hoodie pocket and pulled out one half of my hedge shears. In a perfect world, I would have been able to pull out both halves and then assemble them, but being crushed and digested by a bladder was not a perfect world.

Unfortunately, my Mettle wasn’t so good. The hedge shears, however, had the Sha-Shing trope that buffed Mettle, but in order to trigger that, I had to brandish them like in the movies, where they flick a weapon, and it makes a sharp, high-pitched sound before cutting down foes left and right.

Brandishing half a hedge shear while being crushed by a bladder was harder than it sounded, but I did my best. I moved that thing around, trying to make it look even the slightest bit cool, like it was a katana or something.

I moved it with all my might. Then I reached it outside the small crack of the opening of the bladder where I had shoved the life jacket, and then I flicked my wrist, and even though I was underwater and Off-Screen, I heard it.

Sha-shing.

On the red wallpaper, I watched as Antoine and the others recovered my life jacket and the camera attached to it, just as I had planned.

But I had other things to focus on.

I had to trim some hedges.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep