🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 13:05:12    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

“So, is it safe to assume that right now we’re between events A and B?” I asked.

“I’d hope so,” Camden said. “Seeing as right now, Event A is the most likely Carousel River Valley Meteor Strike.”

That had actually been my insight, but we were going to let Camden have it. There was no way that the meteor had been brought up this many times without at least being one of the major events in this temporal anomaly.

“I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around this,” I said. “You’re telling me that between Event A and Event B, logical contradictions can exist with minimal resistance by reality itself?”

“I’m not telling you that I understand it. I’m telling you that I observe it,” Camden said. “And what you observe trumps what you understand every time.”

That had been something Camden was struggling with. He wanted to understand everything. In movies, that just wasn’t going to happen. I told him to just embrace it.

“So, every copy of this guy has their own fragment of the meteorite, and as long as they have that, they can jump around time and do whatever they want—and it doesn’t matter?”

“It would seem so,” Camden said.

I had to do some quick and dirty exposition, just to patch some stuff. Camden had said there were no paradoxes. When it came to our team’s battle plan we needed that statement to be amended… suffice to say I had to do some damage control to make set it up. This was part of the back-and-forth that came with improvisation.

“But the individual time traveler does appear to have some type of restriction within their own personal timelines,” I said. “I mean, those men that you maimed would disappear and then reappear after healing. They must have been at the same place and time as their past selves but they never tried to help their past selves.”

“Yep,” Camden said. “They don’t try to prevent themselves from getting injured. They just step in after it happens. Gets pretty confusing, doesn’t it?”

The fact that a specific Generation Killer wouldn’t act to prevent himself from getting covered in scalding oil implied that they couldn’t. That meant there was some restriction.

Or Carousel just thought it was a cool way to present things.

“So, outside of this anomaly, time works normal as far as you know? Every decision you make puts you on a different path than the version of you who made the opposite decision?” I asked.

“I have no way of confirming how it normally works, but that is my understanding. Normally, every decision you make matters. But in this group of timelines caught within this time anomaly, only big things matter at all—and they don’t end up mattering all that much.”

“As long as Event B happens,” I said.

“As long as Event B happens,” he repeated.

We had been going back and forth, just feeding lines to Carousel, hoping to give ourselves some flexibility. After all, the decisions we made in the future would depend largely on what we set up in the past.

I had never been more overwhelmed—and that included the werewolf storyline, where there was a trope that made it so the lore could adapt.

I just needed to get it across to the audience that while logical contradictions in the main timelines didn’t matter and would soon be corrected one way or another, logical contradictions in a time traveler’s timeline did matter. That’s why scarred Generation Killers couldn’t prevent themselves from getting injured in the first place. ꞦâꞐȱ𝔟Ěś

I just had to hope the audience would get that point.

Suddenly, there was a commotion on the other side of the door. The Generation Killers had mostly left us alone up until that point.

I quickly moved to a shelf where I could set up the camera to film everything that was about to happen. And if Camden was to be believed, a lot was about to happen.

The door burst open, and I went to stand next to Camden.

Three Generation Killers walked in.

“Do you think that they can help us?” one of them—the apparent leader—asked.

Another one, who carried a handheld camera and a large radio, said, “I hear the whispers of our brother across time. He says that they will guide us on our path.”

The leader looked us up and down.

“Uh-huh,” he said. He seemed skeptical. “And did our brother across time tell us exactly how they were going to do that?”

“Our brother across time speaks when the moment is right and only gives what information is needed,” the cameraman Generation Killer said.

He had an almost religious reverence for this brother across time, and I had to assume he was referring to the Generation Killer on the other side of time who had filmed us in the jailhouse.

The other side of time—the place where Bobby was now trapped.

“Just don’t hurt us, and we’ll tell you everything you want to know,” Camden said.

The third Generation Killer, a slightly beefier one, said, “You said that last time.”

“And you believed me last time,” Camden said. “It’s not like I would trick you twice. That wouldn’t be very smart, would it?”

The beefier one seemed to consider this and started to nod.

The leader was not amused.

“The fact is that you seem to have a knack for all of this, like those of me that came before,” he said, eyeing the timeline and map that Camden had drawn on the wall. “Do you know what it all means?”

Camden was hesitant. “Some of it,” he said. “But I don’t know what it is you want.”

“We want to go home,” the leader said. “That’s all we’ve ever wanted. I had a pretty good setup back home—had a girl named Jasmine. Dumb as a doornail. Pretty as a princess. But here? She was never born. I can’t tell you how inconvenient that is.”

“Look, we’re trying to figure it out,” Camden said. “We just don’t have all the pieces.”

“Give me a minute with him,” the beefy Killer said. “I can convince them.”

The leader smiled and then said, “You know what? Let’s do things your way for a minute,” then dropped down into one of the chairs near the door—just to watch.

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

The religious Generation Killer started to film as the beefy one walked toward us.

He didn’t go for Camden. It was really a 50/50 shot.

He went for me.

He had high enough Plot Armor and likely had very little of that devoted to Savvy or Moxie, so his Hustle and Mettle were enough to stop me from being able to get away.

I felt like a ragdoll.

There was no escaping it. If I got away, they would just hurt Camden.

There was no avoiding what the beefy Killer had in mind.

■ STOP

On-Screen

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the red light on my camera had cut out. So Carousel was likely using footage being filmed by Generation Killer himself. Carousel would likely cut this dialogue down. It wouldn’t want to reveal too much about these enemies. The unknown was scarier than any other force in horror.

It was very clear that these were three distinct entities.

They weren’t just the same person at different ages. Lila was right—they diverged a long time ago.

First, he strapped me down to a chair using duct tape. Camden was helpless to do anything but watch, though he begged from the side for them to just let him work on the problem.

I wasn’t even sure what they expected Camden to do, but these weren’t exactly the type of guys who would think about that.

Even the smart ones seemed thrilled by the idea of cruelty. Carousel sure did know how to pick ’em.

More than anywhere before, this was the introduction of the Killer that the audience would see. As much as I wanted to try to trick my way out of things, slip my hands through the bindings, and run away, I knew this was an important scene.

And my odds of getting away at that moment, with so much attention on me, were low. The odds of Camden and I getting away without a scratch were virtually zero.

After I was affixed to the chair, Generation Killer started pulling implements from his trench coat pockets.

He started with a hammer.

“I bet you’re wondering about the difference between me and my brothers over here—my other selves,” the leader said. “Big G, why don’t you tell him about Grimshaw?”

“Grimshaw?” the beefier Generation Killer asked. “Yeah, I can do that.”

He took the hammer and rested it against my mouth, pressing it hard, flattening my lip against my upper teeth.

“You ever had some old hag try to boss you around? Tell you what to do like you’re some damn dog?” Big G leaned forward, a grin spreading across his face. “That was Miss Grimshaw. My math teacher back in school. Mean, ugly, always yappin’ about rules, about discipline, about how I needed to ‘straighten up’ if I didn’t wanna end up a nobody. Like I cared.”

Holding the hammer to my face, he reached into his pocket and brought out three nails.

Suddenly, I started reconsidering whether or not I could get out of there. Maybe if I made a big enough commotion, Camden could get out, and then…

But my Escape Artist trope did not activate, meaning that plan wouldn’t work.

“Every day, it was the same thing,” Big G continued. “‘Seven times eight, Grant! What’s seven times eight?’ Like that was gonna change my life. Like I was gonna roll over and wag my tail ‘cause she told me to. So I looked her in the eye and said, ‘I ain’t learnin’ nothin’ from you, hag.’”

He chuckled, shaking his head. “She about lost her damn mind. Face went red, hands shakin’, clutchin’ that ruler like she was thinkin’ about usin’ it. And I just sat there. Smilin’.”

“Day after day, she tried to make me listen. Sent me to the principal, made me stand in the corner, kicked me outta class. Thought she could make me do what she wanted. But she couldn’t. I never learned my timeses. My dividedes. Nothing.”

Big G’s fingers tapped against my arm, his grin widening. “And one day, I let her know real clear. She stops me after class, real serious, like she’s about to change my whole life. Like she can control me by being nice suddenly. ‘Grant,’ she says, ‘don’t you wanna be something someday?’

“And I get real close, right up in her face, and I laugh. And I say, I just want to live long enough to see you as worm food.

“She didn’t say a damn thing after that. Just stood there, stiff like a corpse, lookin’ at me like she finally got it. She lost.”

He leaned back, stretching his arms behind his head. “And guess what? Never learned anything that whole year. Not one thing. She thought I was just lying, but I showed her. Too bad I wasn’t there to see her die. Not the first time, at least.”

He started to laugh, with that blank look in his eyes.

Was he trying to scare me?

No.

He was trying to impress me. Sincerely.

“Bossman here,” Big G continued, pointing to the leader in the chair by the door, “he got Miss Johnston for math. Man, she was stacked. So that’s why he graduated. Heck, I probably would have too if I got her instead of that old bat, Grimshaw.”

He was waiting for me to speak.

“It is crazy how the little decisions in life can take us to new places,” I said. “So how about you untie me, and we figure this whole timeline thing out?”

The leader got up from his chair, walked over to me, pointed at Camden, and said, “We have a scientist for that.”

I really didn’t want to get tortured, not that anybody did, so I decided to see exactly how much mileage I could get out of their trope that made them lose every Moxie check.

“But I’m a physicist, too,” I said. “I thought that was why you brought me here.”

Bossman, as Big G had called him, got close and asked, “You’re a physicist, too?”

I nodded. I started thinking up some of the things Camden had said to try to make it sound legitimate.

But Bossman had different plans.

“Well, too bad we only needed one,” he said. It didn’t matter if he believed me. He was a sadist.

Then Bossman nodded to Big G, promptly grabbed my arm, teed a nail up right above my wrist, and drove the hammer down.

Clean through.

Nailing my wrist to the wooden arm of the chair.

I cursed and screamed, struggling against my restraints.

“Remember back when you had your arm still?” Bossman asked Camden.

Camden just watched in horror.

The cameraman filmed.

Big G laughed.

Those few extra points in Grit were a godsend. It hurt, but soon, it became numb.

“What do you want me to tell you that I haven’t already?” Camden asked.

“I told you,” Bossman said. “We want to go home. No matter what we do, no matter which events we travel to, we can never make it back to our homes—to the ones that we left. The versions of us from here don’t know what’s going on either, and we don’t know how to leave.”

“I need more information from you,” Camden said. “You can’t just keep hurting him and expect me to understand the situation better suddenly.”

“We can’t?” Bossman asked.

Then he flashed Big G a look.

I got another nail in my arm.

“All right, all right!” Camden said quickly. “But you have to answer some questions, right? Because scientists take information and then turn it into answers. So you have to give me the information, all right? Can you do that?”

Bossman considered it, then said, “Yeah, ask away. I’m an open book.”

He laughed.

“You said something about there being Grants before you. You mean there were other people like you that you didn’t meet?” Camden asked.

Bossman nodded. “The older ones. They were here first, and they figured a lot out. But then they got found out by KRSL. When I showed up, we were at war. So we hid and did what we had to do. We wiped them out. Killed a lot of them when they were kids—just to make sure that the new version of KRSL would never know we existed. You have no idea how many times you have to kill a person before the universe just gives up on them…”

“Our brother across time told us it was necessary. Told us that time itself wanted them gone,” the cameraman said.

“And what happened to the older ones?” Camden asked.

“We lost many before we found our solution,” the cameraman answered.

Camden thought for a moment.

“So the older ones… they were the ones that drew this? The thing I saw downstairs?” he asked, pointing to his recreation drawn on the wall.

“Yeah,” Bossman said. “They didn’t leave any notes for us.”

“But they had books and research papers on the subject downstairs,” Camden said.

Bossman continued looking at Camden. Perhaps Bossman wasn’t as smart as Big G had advertised.

Meanwhile, Big G drove another nail into my arm. I was starting to think that he actually enjoyed it.

Camden was thinking, and suddenly, I had an idea as I stared at the drawings Camden had made on the wall. I stared at the map and suddenly had an epiphany.

“Back in your timelines, before you started traveling around… was there a meteor that struck Carousel?” I asked. I must have sounded desperate.

Bossman looked at Big G, who looked at the cameraman.

“Yes,” Bossman said.

I looked at Camden, then flitted my eyes over at the map he had drawn of the Carousel River Valley.

He took my meaning.

“Wait a second,” Camden asked. “In your timeline, where did the meteor strike?”

Big G shook his head, not knowing the answer. The cameraman didn’t seem to remember either.

But Bossman did.

“The mountains,” he said. “It struck in the mountains. My father once took me on a hike to see where they excavated it.”

I almost forgot about the throbbing pain in my arm out of excitement.

“So that is what these squiggles were,” Camden said. “In your timelines, the meteor struck different places than it did in ours.”

“So?” Bossman asked. “What does that mean?”

“Before you got stuck here, did you ever travel back to before the meteor struck? Back before the 1740s?” I asked.

The three Generation Killers looked at each other. Then, almost in unison, they said:

“The burning witches.”

“The burning witches?” Camden asked.

“They burned witches back in old Carousel,” Bossman said. “I thought I’d go see it.”

“And after you went to see the witches… were you able to get back home?”

Bossman thought for a while.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “I didn’t go home right after, but next time I tried… I couldn’t.”

Camden looked at me.

We both realized what had happened.

We realized why Generation Killer couldn’t go home.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep