For some reason, she wasn’t trying to kill me. It wasn’t that I wanted to die, but it did have to happen.

Her hovel, or whatever it was, was pretty small, all things considered, and though it was quite messy, there was no way Carousel could fit enough cameras in there to shoot a scene without capturing me in the background, huddled in the cage with her past victims.

My character was supposed to be dead, even though I wasn’t, and that created a conundrum. I knew that the way for the others to win was to find a map and put it inside her broadcasting spell within the cauldron. That much was clear from what Camden had found, combined with her trope that made it so she could not exist in “known” places. As soon as this area was mapped out and that map was distributed, she would be defeated.

But how were they supposed to get in here with the cauldron if this room refused to go On-Screen because I was in it? Worse, what if it did go On-Screen and I was somehow punished for not being dead? Would I have to just lie really still so no one knew?

No, that wasn’t enough. I needed her to kill me so that I could go be in the theater without any pain, without any distractions. I needed to see the final cut of the movie so I could help fix it if things went wrong.

So I had to provoke her.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked. Not that I expected a useful answer, but I couldn’t let her treat me like furniture, even though she treated my body like it was one of those indoor planters that people grow herbs in and cut little sprigs off of when they need them.

She ignored me at first.

But she couldn’t do it forever. Every time I would make a noise, she would look over at me without turning her head, and her bulging eyes would bid me to quiet down.

But I wasn’t going to do that.

“What are you doing? What is your goal?” We weren’t On-Screen, so I didn’t have to try to find a nice way to say it, so I went ahead and asked, “Why do you lure humans here if you’re not even trying to eat us?”

That had been one of the more puzzling aspects. While we were waiting for Antoine and the others to catch up, multiple in-story days had passed with me sitting in that cage. Even though she cooked up many brews in her cauldron filled with meat, they were all meant to be spells, not food. I never saw her eat anything.

If only I had brought my Method to the Madness trope, I could force her to talk to me in character Off-Screen. As it was, I was relying on her discretion, and she willfully ignored me like I was a noisy ice machine.

“Why?” I asked again.

All I could do was sit and hold my remaining limbs and try to ask questions until she killed me. After a few hours, I truly did not expect her to answer.

But eventually, after I asked her a dozen times or more, she crawled over toward the cage she had put me in and then stared at me eye to eye. Maybe she was angry, but I felt she was truly curious.

“Light,” she eventually said. Her voice was strangely soft and innocent, like how you might expect a forest critter to speak if it’s suddenly learned how. It was a little different than the sing-songy spellwork she had done over the cauldron earlier. This wasn’t a spell. She was actually using language. “There was light forever and ever, and then you stole it.”

She pointed one crooked finger at my mind, and it didn’t even have to touch me for me to understand her on a deep psychic level. She was talking about my psychic ability, but not just that. She was talking about my soul, about the human soul.

“You stole the light,” she said again. “I steal it back to make magic. I reached for the girl, but I grabbed you instead. Don’t know why. Don’t know how. Spell not work. Reached for her, and her head of shining light. Grabbed the boy. Not as shiny. Not as light. The stars lie here. The light ain’t right. Ain’t as magic. Ain’t as bright. Why, why, why?”

She wanted me to answer her, and we were Off-Screen, so why not?

“This isn’t the real world. We’re captured here,” I said. “We’re forced to do this, to play through a story. Don’t you know that?”

For a moment, there was a flicker of fear in her eye, as if she had spoken to a piece of furniture and it had unexpectedly spoken back. But then she was resigned to the truth, like she had been expecting it, dreading it.

She thought to herself for a moment as she looked into my eyes, watching what she called the light. For a moment, I didn’t see her as a monster or a hag, but more as a creature, something I didn’t understand, something just realizing its insignificance in the vast nexus that was Carousel.

“You’re supposed to kill me,” I said. “Don’t you know that?”

She took in my words and thought for a moment. And then, as if whispering in fear, she said, “But you are dead, ain’t you?”

It was so bizarre to hear a question like that, almost innocent in a strange way, from such a powerful entity as the hag. She had been forced into Carousel like so many, and she did not understand what was going on. It was as I suspected. Carousel probably didn’t want her to know what was going on. A powerful magic user could be trouble.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

It wasn’t like Cristobal from The Strings Attached, who went along with Carousel’s game, it seemed, because he enjoyed the life even though he regretted his choice to come.

If the hag knew why she was really here, would she just let Carousel continue feeding her NPCs? Would she choose ignorance?

She was clearly an intelligent being, but she wasn’t human, so how was I going to explain the concept of me being forced to portray a character?

Escape wasn’t an option. I didn’t have hope that she might let me go, but I might be able to convince her to kill me and send me to the theater.

“I am pretending to be a character. You need to kill me so that I can go somewhere else,” I said.

Why was I talking to her like she was a child? Even though human speech was something she was unpracticed at, it wasn’t because she was stupid. It was because it was beneath whatever she was. The same way fireflies doing their mating dances in the dark is beautiful to us, but we don’t understand the language. Our words to her were just birds chirping.

“Need your light,” she said, as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, that someone would ask her to kill them. “Won’t be long.”

She was still staring at me like I was a strange, dead thing that refused to be dead, but she went back to work on her next potion, and I had the strangest feeling that I was going to be the main ingredient.

To her credit, she was very gentle in the end. Maybe those few bits of conversation humanized me, although that probably wasn’t the right word. She reached into the cage, and before cutting me again. She snapped my neck. And even though I fought against her as hard as I could, there was no stopping her. There was no escaping.

Once she decided to kill me, that was all that was going to happen. My many attempts at using Escape Artist had confirmed that.

There was only one way out of that cage, and with a crack, she set me free, so to speak. All I had to wonder was what she planned to do with the light that had been in me.

As she turned from the cauldron and looked at me one last time, I knew what was about to happen, so I used the Insert Shot on the cauldron while she was right next to it, so that my allies could get a good look at it and her.

I had to hope it would be enough.

–

The truth was, I didn’t know if I would end up in the theater. Cutaway Death allowed me to use deathwatch on the red wallpaper, but I didn’t know that when my body really died, if I would still go to the theater.

Luckily, I did. I got the impression that this fake version of me was there the whole time, from the moment my character died, and it was his view I was seeing on the red wallpaper.

Unlike my initial experiences in the theater, I could move around and turn my head to see all the other people watching the film along with me, though as soon as I started moving, it was me they were watching for quite a while.

They were dressed to the gills for a night out at the movies. The place was packed, except for the seats around where I was sitting.

On the screen, Antoine and the others were sorting through the wreckage in an old library. Most of the books had been taken over by mold, and many could only be recognized as books because the mold colonies had formed in those shapes when eating them.

But it wasn’t the books they were after.

“Found it,” Cassie said. “These are just like back at Culver’s Bay.”

She held up an old plastic box, unlatched it, and revealed a dozen or so canisters of microfilm.

“How many boxes?” Antoine asked.

“A ton of them,” Cassie said. “Pretty much everything the place had. What is all of this?”

Anna walked over to her, grabbed a box of her own, and started sorting through microfilm within it. Time passed, and they continued to search.

“I don’t understand. Is all of this just old news briefings? Why would they save it like this?” Anna asked. It was mostly images of old newspapers.

“Because they wanted to record the truth,” Cassie said. “They never wanted to forget it. They knew a time would come when people didn’t care about the truth, so they hid it in these plastic boxes so no one could ever find it.”

Carousel grew humorous as it lifted the camera to reveal an old sign reading “Public Library.” It was a funny joke by Cassie that her character simply wouldn’t understand what a library was and would assume all this information was supposed to be hidden.

“I can barely tell what’s on this,” Anna said as she pulled open the microfilm and squinted at it.

“Check this out,” Antoine said. He had taken off his ArGIS and placed it on the table, then rolled out microfilm in front of it, projecting the image onto a nearby wall. It was just a newspaper clipping, but it would be better than trying to see what was on the microfilm with the naked eye.

I was fifty percent sure that that setup would not create a functional projector, but that was movie magic. It seemed like it should work just enough for it to work, and Antoine’s savvy wasn’t exactly low after he became a Health Nut.

He quickly began moving through the images on his microfilm canister until he found something phenomenal.

“It’s a map,” Cassie exclaimed.

And it sure was a map. But it was an advertisement for a fast-food franchise called Guppies. It showed all of their franchise locations in the area, but the map was good enough. It listed several cities by name. It showed the major roads and the water.

“Look,” Anna said as she pointed up at the map. “That’s where Culver’s Bay is.”

It was just a little knob of land sticking out into the ocean, and she may have been just guessing, but I felt she was right. Even though the maps we were given were very zoomed in, that did look like the place where Culver’s Bay was supposed to be, the place we started our journey.

Except it wasn’t called Culver’s Bay, obviously.

“Charlesport, Aresca,” Antoine read. “Do you think that’s the original name of Culver’s Bay, you know, back before they turned it into a terradome?”

“I don’t know what an Aresca is,” Anna said. She looked at the map for a few moments. “All right. If this is where we started and this is where we are, all that walking, we didn’t get very far, did we? Those circles really added up.”

“This is exactly what we needed,” Cassie said. “I told you I was dreaming about maps. She doesn’t like maps. She doesn’t want people to know where she is. She wants to live in the great unknown, and this is her weakness.”

Cassie had been the one to send them on this mission to find the map, largely because of Camden and my various messages. It had been everything they had done for the beginning of the finale.

They continued on, finding more maps and more documents.

“Look at this, another map,” Cassie said. “But this one is exactly the same. The towns are all in the same place. The coast is the same. I think these are true maps, the originals.”

They each took turns acting amazed.

Somewhere outside, the wind picked up and carried with it a sound like a howl of a tomcat. Antoine, Anna, and Cassie quickly gathered all the relevant microfilm they had collected and prepared for whatever it was they had heard outside.

A fight was ahead of them. The finale was almost halfway over, and there was no way they were getting to that cauldron for free.

It was funny to think that whatever it was the hag was sending after them now was summoned using “light” she managed to get from me.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep