“So much of the human psyche is built on top of lies,” Hosea Greenside said as he stared blankly over the rim of his lager. “We tell ourselves that we’re thinking apes, that we’re above the animals, but that’s all pride and wishful thinking. Perhaps we are altogether incapable of estimating our own intelligence, our place in this world. The truth is, most people do whatever their baser instincts urge them to, and the true function of the human mind is to convince our top-level conscious selves that our actions are our own, that we acted out of intellect, that we planned things out, that we used higher reasoning. To know the mind of an ape is to know the mind of a man, but with far fewer excuses.”

This dude was really bumming me out. All I wanted to do was talk to Roxy and figure out what her deal was, but we needed to listen while this guy was willing to talk.

Something had broken in him, and he was taking it out on the rest of us with long nihilistic speeches. These rants went far beyond the typical sentiments of your average misanthrope and settled somewhere comfortably in the range of antinatalism, accelerationism, defeatism, and a complete and utter disdain for the future of the human race.

But not, like, in an aggressive way. He was just a sad sack. Given the context that he had clearly just walked out of some Lovecraftian universe, he was downright chipper. Optimism is graded on a bell curve, and the fact that this guy ended up being nothing more than an alcoholic with some bad memories meant he was doing just peachy, if I were to guess at his backstory.

And I would have to guess, because he would not talk about it in detail. Not just in the way that NPCs wouldn’t give you information you hadn’t earned, but in the sense that if he tried to talk about it, he was at the risk of a true psychotic breakdown.

We had learned it when Antoine asked, “So you actually lived it, huh? What happened when you first went to the Sunken Cradle? I was afraid to find out.”

It turned out that the phrase “Sunken Cradle” was enough to send old Professor Greenside right off the cliffs of insanity.

“Please don’t make me go back there,” was what he would say as he curled up in the booth while all of the paragons watched, some rolling their eyes.

Bones Ibarra, however, was different. As an adventurer, he had a trope exactly for this called Demented Mentor, which allowed him to soothe Doctor Greenside, whispering about what had to be fake memories between the two of them.

It worked like a charm. Five minutes after freaking out, he would be back to his old depressive self, ready to drink another lager.

“A man believes he has control over his wits, but that is only because he always has,” he said as he stared at the suds formed at the top of his glass. “But when you find out that your mind is a machine, wholly incapable of understanding itself, it’s only then that you realize we never had control. We were always along for the ride, with our deep instincts lying to us, telling us that we were men, that we were enlightened. But the part of my mind born in that place was stronger, more powerful, more innate, and more natural than anything I could imagine myself to be, and I do not wish to return. I wish to forget. I wish to be a man who lives out his days and then is rewarded with eternal slumber.”

He took a long gulp of his drink.

“Although I delude myself, for I fear that I am still connected to it forever. Am I a man bound or a man free? The conclusion taunts me from the recesses of my mind. I fear I will never leave the Sunken Cradle.”

He paused for a moment as a tear rolled down his cheek.

“Do I sound like a madman to you?” he asked.

“No,” Antoine said. “You don’t.”

We were all seated in chairs crammed in around the open side of the booth, and had been for a long while by this point. We had been served food and drinks, and were doing our best to try to dredge out any information we could from Hosea Greenside, but all we were getting was an impression, a shadow on the wall of a cave, and the more he spoke, the less I wanted to know.

Carousel had lots of horror, and the marketing department always made you think it was beyond human understanding, but I could count on two hands the things I had already seen beyond human understanding, and I walked away more or less fine. I might have been lucky, but still, the old scary stories of people seeing something that changed them forever had largely been disproven by my experience in this cursed world.

But when the man in front of me spoke, I started to believe again that there were things in Carousel so far beyond my comprehension that it was only the protection of movie magic that kept me sane. That was the exact protection that this man never had.

Greenside looked at Antoine. “I know they’ve brought me here so that I could help you go where I’ve been, but all I can do is warn you that when you walk into the cradle, whatever purpose you may believe your life holds, it disappears and is replaced with something much older. Whatever understanding you have of love or hope or science, it fades down to nothing, like a child’s understanding of the world, because that’s what we are, children that never grew to our true purpose and could never imagine what that purpose was until it is thrust upon us.”

Antoine leaned close and asked, “How do we protect against whatever it is you’re afraid of?”

Professor Greenside thought for a moment and then said, “First, you choose not to pursue the cradle. Second, assuming that you pursue it despite what I’ve said, you never descend into the earth beyond the arcane doors. And third, if you do pass the arcane doors, prepare to contend with the madness, for the forces in the earth seek to transform you into what they believe you ought to be.

“So if you are the master of your soul, better than I am the master of mine, maybe you’ll journey there and back again, but you may find that when you grasp the ancient truth, you won’t have it in you to leave again with your faculties intact. I nearly didn’t. When you find out your true purpose in life, it can be hard to settle for another, even if that purpose was terrible and unthinkable. There’s something seductive about absolute truth. Most men go through life never knowing anything true, never with a certainty as ironclad as you will learn in the cradle. You’ll find that when you learn an ironclad truth, a greater truth, it intoxicates you. In fact, it just so happened that I escaped because of a different sort of intoxication.”

He took a drink of his beer.

And suddenly my immersion in his little story was broken, because it sounded like he was saying that the only way he avoided the effects of some sort of dark aura that overcomes the minds of men was that he was drunk.

Which wasn’t a bad explanation. I liked it when common things countered darkness and magic. It made it all the more real.

Greenside’s head began to droop as the liquor took its toll, and he seemed to fall asleep.

“What do you say, Party of Promise?” Bones asked us, trying to lighten the mood. “Are you ready to go spelunking?”

We stayed at the bar for quite a while after that. We had to prepare ourselves mentally for the journey ahead, and the longer I was around them, the more I started to see the paragons as a certain kind of safety net. Not that they would protect us, but I didn’t think they would hang around here if there was danger.

I also had a lot of questions for a certain femme fatale, so while the other paragons stretched their legs, we five players and Roxy stayed at the booth with the sleeping professor to finally get answers.

What we weren’t expecting was that Roxy actually gave them, in her own way.

“As best I can see it,” I said once we had her to ourselves, “is that you were brought on as a helper for Project Rewind. You infiltrated Camp Dyer and helped the framers of the project, or the insider, finish their plan.”

I had not considered that she might have been a paragon before. It never even crossed my mind, even though it should have after the deception of Silas Dyrkon, but as soon as I knew what she was, it was like all the tumblers in my mind moved into place, and the truth became obvious.

“A girl’s gotta make a living,” she said playfully as she sipped from her martini.

It quickly became clear that once she was revealed as a femme fatale, she was magically obligated to talk like one, or maybe she just enjoyed it. She still had that secret in her smile, like she was ready to seduce and deceive and betray the whole world.

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“I hope you won’t hold it against me,” she said. “I really did like you guys, and I am so happy you finally succeeded where so many others failed. As much as I loved slumming it at Camp Dyer, it wasn’t exactly the accommodation I signed on for.”

Paragons, to my knowledge, had all agreed to be part of Carousel. They were sought out for the lives they lived, for the archetypes they represented.

“So you made a deal, huh?” Antoine asked. “That’s how it works, right? You ended up in a pinch, and Carousel was your only way out.”

“I always know my exits,” she said. “If it makes any difference, I turned down the offer the first time, but they just kept calling. Carousel is the ultimate escape plan after all.”

“So how exactly did it work?” I asked. “Did you know the players who cooked up Project Rewind, or was it the insider, our friends in high places?”

“You all have got to learn the art of conversation. I feel like I’m in an interrogation room with a rookie cop. Whatever the case, my communication with your insider was words written on a script in my head,” she said. “Don’t get me wrong, I got to know them as best you could under those circumstances, but we weren’t exactly chums. I got my marching orders, and I did whatever I could to fulfill them. Lead a few players in the storylines they couldn’t beat, manipulate situations, and tell the occasional white lie. In a way, my duties as a paragon aren’t that different than what I used to do back in my world. They don’t pay as well. Though eternal life does have its perks.”

She leaned forward like that was the only question we were going to ask, and energetically said, “But enough about me. Let’s talk about you, how well you’ve done. Honestly, I thought as soon as all the veterans died, you would be right behind them, but look at you doing better than ever. Biting off way more than you can chew, sure, but it’s exciting. You have yourself in quite a situation now, don’t you?”

She watched us as she spoke, looking for a reaction. It was as if she thought we had a playful relationship, and maybe we did at one point in time, but unfortunately, I had mourned her and dozens of other people. It was hard to pick right up where things left off after that.

“Do you know who the insider is?” Anna asked, not willing to play cat and mouse.

“Just because I’m mysterious doesn’t mean I know all the answers to the mysteries,” Roxy said. “I know more than you and less than I’d like to. I figure if the insider wants to keep their identity concealed, they probably have a good reason for it, don’t you?”

The others asked her other questions and got similar answers. Paragons had a dozen different ways to say I don’t know, but what it all meant was that they weren’t going to tell us either. The script wouldn’t let them divulge the truth, or it wouldn’t let them remember it. They were, after all, the perfect narrative tools for puppet masters and schemers, and Roxy was probably the best tool of them all. As a femme fatale, she likely had dozens of tropes that could help her conceal the truth.

I thought about asking what a guide was, as we knew our team needed a guide, a secret keeper, and an invitee, but Antoine asked first, and she avoided answering altogether. It made sense. A secret keeper was someone who knew about the axe murderer, and she couldn’t talk about that any more than I could.

Antoine was digging through his bag and grabbed a stack of missing posters. We had all the old ones from before we even went on the river. He searched through them quickly and then pulled out the missing poster for Roxy.

“Don’t point that at me like it’s some sort of accusation. I already told you that I deceived you. Once you know someone’s willing to lie to you, there’s no point in shaming them for it,” she said.

“I suppose there’s no coincidence that you just happen to be on the same storyline where Janet went missing,” Anna asked, giving an apologetic glance in my direction.

Roxy reached into her pocket, pulled out a cigarette, lit it, and started smoking. I doubted that the staff at the Speakeasy would care.

“I suppose it is a coincidence,” she said as she held the cigarette seductively. I couldn’t see that she was using a trope on the red wallpaper, but I still assumed she was using one, something involving the cigarette to help her lie better.

And it worked. It was a sort of mind whammy, because none of the others brought up the subject again. Even I didn’t, and I was semi-aware that a trope was working on me.

In truth, I was thankful. Roxy knew about the axe murderer, and I had to assume that, despite her air of confidence, she would be terrified to talk about him the same way I would be.

We asked other questions with a similar level of success. Maybe we thought that because we had a prior relationship with her, we would get more answers out of her than we did other paragons, but we were sorely mistaken. Questions about the specifics of Project Rewind and what she did to take players off the board got dismissed and excused, and even when she fessed up to it, she had no shame. She used the same “it was on the script, so I did it” excuse, which probably wasn’t an excuse, but still felt that way with the way she said it.

After a flurry of questions, I finally had one left that I wanted to ask her in front of the group.

“So your presence here means that someone’s going to betray us, doesn’t it? Isn’t that the reason that Bones Ibarra brought us here, so we could get an idea of the different types of things going on in the storyline by examining the paragons? Femme fatales are all about betrayal, moral grayness, and bleak social connections.”

“You really think that low of me?” she asked. “I’d like to think that I do what I want for myself, and anyone who expects me to do anything else was fooling themselves, but you can read into my presence however you want. Maybe you really can’t trust anyone in this storyline.”

“See, here’s the thing I don’t get,” I said. “Paragons are the tools of narrators to help enact their throughlines. Is that what’s happening right now?”

I had looked that companion trope up and down, and there was nothing in the text that would explain why it was being this helpful. All it should have done was let us have a companion for the story, but here we were in the presence of a room full of paragons, a firsthand source on the lore of the storyline, and a reunion with an old, friend.

“What do you think?” she asked.

Never a straight answer.

“Say, Riley, have you ever played darts before?” she asked. “There’s a dartboard right over there, and if you beat me, I’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”

She got up from the booth and waved me over.

Anna tried to follow, but I held out my hand. I needed to talk to Roxy alone. I also suspected that there was no way I was going to beat her at darts, and I didn’t want people to see.

As soon as we were alone and she was handing me three darts that looked like they were made from scratch, I thought about asking her about the axe murderer.

Just the thought of it would have sent me into a panic with the others, but suddenly, alone with her, it didn’t bother me at all.

One of the strangest rules of this infohazard was that while I couldn’t talk about it with people who didn’t know about the axe murderer, I could talk about it with people who did. Although Arthur, Roxy, Reggie, and Valerie avoided such conversations back at Camp Dyer, even when I wanted more than anything to talk about it.

“Did you trigger the Grotesque storyline?” I asked.

“Yep,” she said.

It almost caught me off guard how open she was. How about that?

She threw one of her darts across the room, and it hit the bull’s-eye. Two more darts each claimed high points. Games like this were trivial when Hustle allowed you to have near perfect aim, unless you were trying to hit something with a higher Hustle.

“I’m guessing you may have put a certain earworm into Janet’s head too,” I said.

I threw a dart, but it sailed right and didn’t even hit the target.

I looked at Roxy, confused.

“You may think that you’re good at this game,” she said, “but you still haven’t figured out the basics.”

Had she found a way to turn this game of darts into an actual stat comparison under Carousel’s rules, or was she using a trope? Back when we would go bowling, everyone would score incredibly well. It wasn’t really a test of skill like it was in the real world because a lot of people had high Hustle, except for, ironically, the bowlers team, which is why they enjoyed it so much. It was more like a real game to them.

I threw another dart and managed to hit the board this time, but I wasn’t exactly going to beat her on points.

“You know, they say there was once a very powerful team of players from your world who probably could have beat Carousel’s throughline, by the way, but they convinced themselves through paranoia and overthinking that the secret to leaving Carousel was to quit the game. Of course, this was back before Project Rewind, but you can imagine why the insider needed to make sure that didn’t happen again.”

I figured it was something like that.

“You needed a secret keeper,” I said.

“And I got one,” she said. “So sad about Janet. Technically, though, it was going to happen anyway eventually. I just needed it to happen with you watching. The unfortunate truth is some people aren’t built for this world.”

“And some people are built too well for this world,” I said.

“Are you talking about me or you?” she asked.

“Both,” I said. “You tried to do the same thing to Lila White, didn’t you?”

I remembered that Lila had hinted that Roxy mentioned a secret way out of the game.

“Never got around to it, though. Unfortunately, that whole team never really took off. I blame myself,” she said.

“What happened to her?” I asked. “What happened to Janet? Is she really dead, or is there some other thing that you’re not telling us?”

When Janet had quit the game, the storyline stopped until a hooded axe murderer chased her down and cut her in half. It wasn’t a fake death. It seemed to be permanent. Never being able to talk about it had been a real drain on my mental health, especially as her doting husband searched for her fruitlessly.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t. But the worst case scenario is that she’s dead, right? And, well, I hate to tell you this, but people die, and normally they only have to do it once. It really was a mercy, in some ways.”

“Not to her husband,” I said.

She gave me a look like she was thinking about what to say.

“Yes. He really was a loyal guy, wasn’t he?” she said, as if she were telling some silly joke.

“Maybe you should have made him the secret keeper.”

“I would have,” she said. “He was away on another storyline. I’m not a monster, although I do play one in some storylines.”

We continued playing darts and she continued to beat me, but my mind wasn’t really in the game. I was deflated. How much time had I spent pondering the questions that Roxy was now answering so nonchalantly?

“So, do we stand a chance in this storyline that we’ve got coming up?” I asked.

“Not really,” she said, “but you didn’t really stand a chance in a lot of the storylines you’ve played so far, and here you are. You do have a lot of narrative momentum built up, more than you could know. You just have to cash in those chips at the right moment.”

“I’ll try my best,” I said.

She put her darts down on the table near where we were standing.

“That’s what we’re all counting on,” she said, before walking away.

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