We had a nice long while Off-Screen where we could catch up. It was nice to finally stop moving. We had been on Roxy’s private jet so many times and changed settings enough that I had no idea where we were anymore.

We spread out as far as we could in the main room of Anna’s boat and did our best to relax.

“We’ve got three hours,” I said.

“Nap time,” Camden said as he spread out on a nearby stack of pillows and sheets.

Not a bad idea. If there was one person who really needed a nap, it was Antoine. He looked like he was about to collapse. While it was easy to endure strain if you had high enough Grit, the need for sleep eventually won out.

Still, he never properly relaxed, staying seated against a wall as he watched the man tied up in the center of the room, who continued to repeat, in a low voice, the same line he had been chanting since we arrived.

“Bobby,” I said, “we could sure use an explanation. We feel like we’ve been shanghaied into this thing. What happened?”

He swallowed hard as he stared down at the ground.

“We got taken by surprise,” he said. I noticed that he only had five tropes equipped, all of his basics. It must have been a true surprise if he got caught that off guard.

He found a place to get comfortable, and then he began to tell us the story of what had happened ever since he and the others jumped into the Carousel River. He spoke softly, and we all listened as the water gently rocked us. He told us about the storyline they had run and what eventually led to their capture.

“I don’t exactly know how we ended up where we eventually did. After dodging all the Omens and monsters, we ended up getting taken by some random mercenaries. It wasn’t like we could fight them. We were barely able to stay afloat at the end, inside one of those emergency pop-up rafts from an airplane. We floated along the river until we found a dock, and there were no Omens there that Isaac could see, but as we started offloading on the shore, the gunmen arrived, and then Vogler, who was Antoine’s rival from The Sunken Cradle. He shows up in character, acting deranged, and takes us captive.”

“Are the others safe?” Anna asked. “I’m having trouble understanding what’s going on. Ever since the movie started, my trope shows them as lethargic and tired.”

She had obsessed over the readout from her Are You Okay in There from the day she got it. That ability basically always worked, but the cost was that it gave her very vague information. It was useful when something major happened, like death or a traumatic event, but it wasn’t very good at distinguishing between more mundane conditions.

Cassie could see their health status, so we knew they were alive.

“As far as I know, they’re still captive,” Bobby said. “They had us in cages next to a dig site. I was asleep when the movie started.”

“So you were in the setting for the place the movie takes place, like the finale or something?” I asked.

“I think so. It was an encampment, a pretty large one. They were doing an archaeological dig near some ruins, trying to look for a tunnel,” he said. “Pretty similar to the first movie, actually, so I have to assume that’s where we’re going, although I hope that’s not the case. The first one was pretty traumatic.”

He looked over at Antoine. “Do you guys know what happened yet?” he asked. “That wouldn’t be spoilers, right? Not for this movie.”

“We just spent the last eighteen hours getting caught up on the first movie,” Camden said casually. “We have a pretty good idea of what happened. Between our scenes and what Antoine told us.”

“What were your scenes about?” Antoine asked suddenly.

We told them how we had gone back to the setting of the first movie and seen the results of the finale.

“I guess Carousel wanted to make us earn all the documentation that I summoned from the props department,” I said.

“Makes sense,” Antoine said. “Did you ever see what was on those videos?”

“Sure did,” I said. “We’re going to try to improvise a way for everyone to see it later.”

I had been able to watch the tapes when we acquired them in the Choice Phase, but we hadn’t established what was on them in the movie, and no one else had seen them yet. We didn’t have an organic opening. We hadn’t even acquired them On-Screen.

“How about you, Antoine?” Anna asked. “You look like you’ve had a rough time.”

“I look that bad?” he asked, laughing. “I started the movie at the bottom of a well with a bunch of pirate treasure. Suddenly, my guys up top started taking fire. Luckily, whoever it was didn’t know why I was down in the well. I thought I had some action sequence ahead of me, but when I finally made my way out, there was no one there. It looked like they kidnapped whoever I was with. Lucky they didn’t find me. I’ve been on the run ever since. Cops seem to think that I’m behind some string of kidnappings. They arrested me when I made the dumb decision to ask for help.”

“They’re not the only ones,” I said. “Roxy’s whole character subplot is about accusing you of killing her husband, Dr. Andrew Hughes.”

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“Andrew?” Antoine asked. “They’re bringing him into this?”

They were bringing everyone in.

“Wait, Roxy?” Bobby asked as he stared over at the Femme Fatale paragon, as if he hadn’t recognized her before. “Is this the Roxy, like from Camp Dyer?”

She did look kind of different, older maybe, and she wore sunglasses. Her name on the red wallpaper was Roxanne Hughes, but it was still funny that it had taken him so long to figure it out.

We explained to him the revelation that Roxy had been a plant, helping to enact Project Rewind the entire time. He took it pretty well, all things considered.

“She was on the storyline where Janet went missing,” Bobby said as he stared at her.

All she could do was stare back, and if I wasn’t mistaken, she did have an apologetic look on her face, but that wasn’t going to help Bobby much. He pushed in with all kinds of questions she couldn’t answer about whether she was involved in Janet’s disappearance. All I could do was sit and hope he never turned his attention toward me. Cassie told him what she had told us.

“Do you think maybe this has something to do with my thread-pulling?” he asked. “First, the NPC Janet, and now someone who may know the truth.”

I was doing my best not to speak, so I didn’t answer him. Luckily, his question wasn’t directly aimed at me.

“Honestly, at this point,” Antoine said, “anything could be to blame for whatever’s going on here. My money is that we’re on Lucky’s throughline. Don’t ask me for evidence. It’s just a gut instinct.”

It was pointless to theorize just yet.

“With all these paragons popping up, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like that,” I said. “I’m definitely getting flashbacks to the tutorial. Somebody pulling strings and manipulating us.”

“That might explain it,” Bobby said with a worried look. “Do you really think Lucky could do something like that?”

I shrugged. He had always seemed like such a straight shooter, but then that might have just been a strategy to make us trust him. He had acted so strangely the last time I was in the theater, staying away so that I couldn’t talk to him.

We kept running theories back and forth, but I tried not to participate too much. The truth was, there were too many options. In recent storylines, Carousel had been experimenting with giving enemies more and more agency, especially smart enemies. For as much of a big deal as we were making out of this, the answer could be that simple. We could have run into a new kind of enemy, one that could set up elaborate scenarios like the one we were in.

But I doubted that it would be that simple or that easy, that blameless. Something was happening. We had a mystery involving a betrayal. The problem was that we hadn’t really unlocked much evidence that could be moved around to make it work. We knew nothing about the characters in this story, beyond their basic motivations and backgrounds.

Eventually, I was able to get some shut-eye. Not much, but as much as could be expected. When it was finally time to wake up and get ready for the next scene, I was ready, not because of mental fortitude. The truth was, I was a bundle of nerves, anxious to find something to finally sink my teeth into.

On-Screen

Suddenly, after hours of silence, Roxy came alive.

“Where is my husband?” she screamed as she crossed the room and closed in on Antoine.

“Roxy,” he said, feigning surprise. “Didn’t expect to see you here, seeing as this isn’t the opening of a restaurant or some type of exclusive gala.”

“Don’t get smart with me,” she said. “My husband went into the jungle with you, and then you came out with a bag of gold. I know that for a fact. We went there. We saw what happened to those people. Now you have to tell us the truth.”

My cameraman was on the ball, getting the conversation as best he could. Better him than me.

Antoine didn’t respond with anger. Instead, he was silent, with a sadness in his eyes.

“He’s dead,” he said. “I couldn’t save him. No one could have. He insisted on going down into the cradle. How was I supposed to stop him?”

At that point, it had not yet been established On-Screen that Antoine had destroyed the tunnel. The best evidence we had for it was actually the video, but again, I hadn’t had the chance to introduce that into evidence yet. This wasn’t the scene for him to admit to something like that anyway.

“He’s not the only one with some explaining to do,” I said. If we were going to be dramatic and catty, I wanted in.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Roxy asked.

“GPS data,” I said. “Detective Blackwood said that you gave him GPS data, and that was the primary reason he didn’t act on your husband’s disappearance. Do you mind explaining?”

A little bit of the fire went out in Roxy as she backed away in shame.

“If I had told you, you wouldn’t have helped me,” she said. “No one before you did.”

“I understand,” I said. “I knew I wasn’t your first pick. What is so damning about the GPS data?”

Even as we talked, the man we had tied up in the middle of the room continued to repeat his chant, growing gradually louder and louder.

“Two weeks before I came to your office, we picked up a distress signal from Andrew’s life support system, but it was strange. It had to be an aberration, a fluke.”

“What did it say?” I asked.

“It didn’t come from the location where he went missing,” she said. “It didn’t make any sense. The location of the entrance to the cradle was in the Caribbean, in the jungles of Antillara.”

She paused for a moment before continuing.

We had trudged through the jungles of a large island called Antillara that took the place of many of the countries from Cuba across to the Bahamas and down to the Dominican Republic. It was plenty big enough to have remote stretches where ruins of ancient civilizations could be lost in. I found this out after the fact.

At first, I thought that scene was set in Florida.

“The signal came from south of that area,” she said.

“Then why didn’t you have us investigate there?” I asked. “Why have us go to that messed-up bloodbath if you knew he wasn’t there?”

“Because it didn’t make any sense,” she said. “It was two hundred miles south of where he should have been.”

“Two hundred miles?” I asked. “So what is that, the Cayman Islands?”

I braced myself, hoping that my understanding of geography was accurate, although if I was wrong about where the Cayman Islands were, Carousel could just fix it so that I would be right.

“No,” she said. “His location was in the open ocean. It persisted for several hours before finally disappearing again. The police believed that he was on a boat and that he ran off like some sort of playboy. I chartered planes and boats to search the area. There’s nothing there but water. I even sent out a deep-sea rescue vessel to see if maybe a ship had sunk there, but there was nothing. No sign of him.”

“So you figure you won’t tell me, so that I’ll go on your wild goose chase,” I said.

“That’s not what this is,” she said, tears forming in her eyes. “I need to find him. I need to know what happened, and you, you have to tell me,” she said, turning to Antoine. “Both of you,” she pointed to Bobby. “We know you were there. We know you walked away from it, so tell me why he didn’t.”

Antoine was considering how to answer, but he was never going to get that chance, because right after she asked that question, our captive in the middle of the room started to scream at the top of his lungs that same phrase he had been screaming.

Just then, the boat was suddenly rocked by waves, and the sounds of motors could be heard outside.

“I’ll check it out,” Anna said.

She ran up the stairs quickly and was back down just as fast.

“We have company,” she said, “And a lot of it.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep