“Do the braids make it more powerful?” I asked as Cassie tied a makeshift bracelet to my wrist.

“In fact, they do make it more powerful,” she said, “The braids are important because if something ends up tugging on this thing, the more layers of cording, the less likely it is to cut your hand off. However, the beads are the real source of power.”

“I noticed I didn’t get so many of those,” I said as I looked around at the others’ wrists.

“Anna needed them more than you did,” Cassie explained.

“Fair enough,” I said as I examined my new friendship bracelet that she had made from fishing line, an old T-shirt for ribbons, and fishing weights.

“But you know that these plumb weights are made of lead, right?” I asked.

“I do. That’s why I chose them,” Cassie said without missing a beat. “Lead is a powerful spiritual metal, known to the ancients for its properties as an anti-ghost and anti-demon charm.”

I looked over at Camden. “Did you hear that? This thing will fight off ghosts and demons because of the lead.”

“It makes sense,” he said without looking up. “Why do you think the old lead pipes groan so much in haunted houses? It’s because the ghosts keep running into them.”

Even Antoine laughed at that one. He hadn’t been talking much because he had the stressful job of steering while Camden watched the radio receiver to make sure we were following the cue ball that would lead us to Ramona and the others. We could still see it in the distance. It hadn’t outpaced us that much. Still, practicing with the radio tracker while there was still daylight was important.

While the pontoon probably was not the fastest boat to navigate a river with, it just so happened that a long while ago, Anna had picked up a trope called Along For The Ride, which imbued any vehicle she traveled in with extra Grit and Hustle. We were already performing maneuvers I was confident could not have been done outside a movie, such as drifting around tight corners whenever the bag we were chasing made a sudden left.

I examined the bracelet Cassie had put around my wrist. It was probably a good idea in general for us to wear those. She had a trope called Wards of Affection that allowed her to give gifts to people that would help defend them against spiritual powers, and that had become very relevant on the boat because spirits haunted the river as much as any other monster. Sure, I expected the occasional pirate ghost, but it was much more than that.

We found that out when the spirit of a drowned man attempted to sink the boat. We withstood it well enough. It turned out that Antoine’s Willpower Is Magic trope had effects outside of storylines that we had not yet experimented with. It didn’t exactly allow us to manhandle ghosts. No, it just allowed us to interact with them and resist them using Grit, which was to say we could ward them off, but the pain would be extreme. That was always the downside of that trope. Being able to resist things by Grit essentially gave power to pain.

We figured Cassie’s method would be preferable.

“Got some more up ahead,” Anna said. She was lying down on the top deck of the boat above the cockpit, holding on to the rail for dear life. It gave her a little bit more height so she could see further down the river, but I couldn’t imagine how scary it was to not have a seat to sit in.

I looked ahead of us. I could still see the bright orange water wing inside the bag with the cue ball and tracker, but I also saw the women on the riverbank. They were mostly women, the ghosts that haunted the river.

They wailed and cried for their own reasons, and while most ignored us, those who saw us passing often became angry.

They were women and a few men from all different time periods and cultures, many of whom I did not recognize. They wore long dresses and black dresses and occasionally nothing at all as they cried. Many of them walked on the water. Others walked through it. They were not all from the same type of movie, but they did match the theme.

Mixed among the ghosts were others. NPCs who didn’t seem to notice the ghosts but who were doing essentially the same thing, mourning loved ones. It was the saddest part of the Carousel River, and it had been going on for hours. We hadn’t even seen an Omen in a while.

“These poor women,” Anna said. “Is this their whole afterlife, always mourning their loved ones?”

They did seem to have Carousel’s patented stuck-in-a-loop behavior.

No one answered her because no one wanted to think about it.

“Carousel must like grief,” Cassie said, “to collect them all here like this.”

One woman who wore a black veil walked over the water in our direction, but she wasn’t aiming for us. She couldn’t really see us from what I could tell, not until she got up close, and she looked Cassie in the eye as we passed.

“There are enough of these ghosts for an apocalypse,” Camden said as we passed on through, watching the rich and the poor alike work through their grief. “Maybe that’s exactly what they’re for. You think maybe that’s why it keeps them all here together on this part of the river?”

I looked out at the women. Even those who looked back at us with anger didn’t always try to attack us. There were so many different types of grief going on around us. Grief that became rage, grief that became tears, and grief that ended in hopelessness.

“A river symbolizes washing things away, right?” Anna said. “Maybe that’s why they’re here, washing away their pain.”

That was a beautiful take, that these people were eternally working to overcome the pain from their lives. I wanted to believe that was the case, that Carousel really cared about that. I just couldn’t.

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“You have to wonder why there are so many women,” Camden said. “What is this, like an eight-to-one ratio?”

“Everyone processes grief differently,” Cassie said. “Maybe whatever it is that Carousel was looking for was something found in women more than men.”

Why was it that lady ghosts were usually grieving and male ghosts were angry?

“Yeah, maybe,” I said, “and maybe there’s a haunted pub somewhere with all the ghostly men.”

I wasn’t trying to make light of the pain around us. If Carousel grouped its ghosts together like this, there must be some place with the grieving men.

It was such a depressing section, and yet there was beauty in it too, because many of the ghosts could see each other and they would hold hands, some of them. Those who had not turned dark by grief comforted each other.

“Some of these ghosts could kill us without even thinking about it,” Cassie said. “Look at their levels. Grief is so powerful here.”

Indeed, it was.

“Useful too,” I said. “If you need a character to do something irrational, there’s no better way to coax them into it than grief. The audience will understand.”

A grieving woman can be powerful in a horror movie, whether she was living or dead.

“Yeah, well, I think the Carousel is just taunting us,” Antoine said, “showing us a bunch of weeping women because of Kimberly.”

For as much as I didn’t like that interpretation, I couldn’t deny it as a possibility.

Unlike the man who tried to drown our boat, the women kept their distance, possibly because of the bracelets Cassie had given us.

We sailed on through until eventually we didn’t see any more ghosts on the side of the river, eternally caught in a loop of weeping and mourning and worse.

Eventually, it was Camden’s turn to drive, so Antoine got to take a break. Only then did he start speaking his mind, and it wasn’t about the river or the ghostly apparitions we had seen on it.

“Can you believe that fishing storyline gave me two whole points toward Adventurer?” he asked.

He didn’t seem particularly excited about it, but the curiosity he had developed through his own grief and tiredness came out in the form of a lackadaisical question not aimed at any particular person.

We had all gained at least one point in the Adventurer AA on the through line tracker. Antoine had gained two.

“That puts you up to seven now, doesn’t it?” Camden asked.

“Yep,” he said. “Almost there. You know, it’s strange how this thing works. The tracker. Was that fishing story really such an adventure?”

“We explored a new place,” I said. “Found the unknown. I would say we battled the monster, but that was more of a monster hunter type thing, huh?”

It was an adventure, strictly speaking.

“Yeah, it’s strange,” he said. “And not a pip on Monster Hunter. How does that work?”

It was true. The whole advanced archetype tracker system was quite bewildering. By logic, any given storyline that we entered might cast us into a role that was relevant to any number of advanced archetypes, and yet the tracker didn’t show us any of that. It seemed to reveal progress for the different archetypes arbitrarily.

“I have a theory on all of it,” I said. “I think it’s tracking tons of different things at once, but it only shows us things in a cinematic way. Right now, we’re on the river, literally adventuring out into unknown lands, and there’s some force that wants to encourage you to keep going, so it shows progress on the Adventurer archetype. That’s my theory, at least. It’s Carousel trying to push us one way or another, to encourage us to keep pulling a thread.”

“That’s well and good,” Camden said, “then explain to me about that mystery advanced archetype.”

He was referring to the advanced archetype that showed only three question marks. I had already completed seven out of ten pips, and I still only had guesses about what it was.

“That’s why I said it was a theory,” I said.

“You may be right,” Anna said. “Maybe the reason that you can’t see what it is is that Carousel wants you to keep moving forward. Maybe it will end up being whatever it is you choose, what you interpret it to be.”

“Yeah, maybe,” I said.

I didn’t want to believe it worked like that. I wanted it to all mean some specific thing, because the alternative seemed arbitrary and pointless.

But we didn’t have time to discuss that. Up ahead of us, we heard a roar long before we saw the waterfall that was causing it.

“Be careful up there, Anna!” Cassie cried out with great concern, giving her best performance, which triggered her Empathic Shield ability, buffing Anna’s Grit, which in turn increased the power of Anna’s Along For The Ride trope, which in turn increased the Grit of the boat we were riding in as part of a large chain reaction.

“I’m holding on,” Anna said as she wrapped her arms around the short rail that ran along the upper deck.

We had stowed everything that could possibly fall off the boat. All that was left was to make sure that none of us got knocked off. That was easier said than done. We’d used anchor rope to create a system of loops through the railing so we could use them as rudimentary seat belts on the benches we sat on.

“How big is it?” Antoine asked.

“I can’t see,” Anna said.

We had ridden over several small falls that had been harmless, but I could tell from the sound of this one that it was going to be large.

We probably should have tied Anna down to the pontoon, because if she got knocked off, her trope would stop buffing it, and the boat might just fall apart.

Up ahead of us, the bag with the cue ball tracker went off the falls, which meant we had to follow right after.

All I could do was hold on as we approached what could be our doom. We would have to go off the edge, not knowing whether we were going to survive.

And so we did.

First, the front half of the boat got to the edge of the raging waterfall, and the pontoons underneath us caught on the rock of the riverbed as we tilted forward like some sort of demented roller coaster ride, giving us a look at the fall we were about to take.

For some reason, we were each overcome with the uncontrollable urge to scream, “Hold on!” as if no one else had figured that out. I must have screamed it at least twice as the pontoon tipped and began moving forward down the waterfall at a higher speed than I felt comfortable with.

Camden gunned the engines just to get us off the last little bit with enough momentum that the motors might not hit the rock below, and his maneuver worked. Now we were free-falling downward at a straight angle that seemed impossible, almost as if we were riding the falling water as it fell.

And fell.

And fell.

Well, it fell forever. It fell until the roar from the water quieted. We didn’t hit the water below.

“What is happening?” Cassie eventually screamed, as if we would know the answer.

It was a while before my brain started working enough for me to piece it together.

The waterfall wasn’t on the river.

The waterfall was the river.

Just like the river had been composed of various water pipes, dungeon canals, and swimming pools, it was also composed of an unending waterfall.

We weren’t falling down into a pool below. We were sailing down water that never stopped falling. We went past the cliff the initial waterfall had poured over, until eventually, all around us, there was nothing but sky, and we rode the falling water deeper, further, for what felt like forever, as if it was just part of the river.

The water fell through clouds where little imps played and sprayed us. The water fell past airplanes caught in eternal free fall, with passengers on board screaming. Dozens and dozens of planes were going down without ever hitting anything.

Just like the ghost women who mourned those they had lost in life, and Carousel had stored these things on one segment of the river, we were at a part of the river that Carousel stored the falling airplanes, and the people falling off buildings, and the people caught in the jaws of flying creatures I could hardly describe, with bodies longer than the Empire State Building. I knew that because we fell past that building, too, along with a few dozen sorry souls who fell forever with us.

The river went onward even through the air, and all we could do was sail along with it.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep