🔴 REC    OCT 18, 2018 07:02:45    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

We put a lot of planning into this storyline, but there was only so much we could do before we actually entered it.

Even the best plans could be rendered moot the moment you entered a story, and sometimes the best plans couldn’t be made until you got there.

One observation I had made—one that would end up being crucial—was that there were only two main cameramen in the entire story.

Yes, sometimes we would go On-Screen through security cameras or something like that, but the bulk of all screen time was recorded on either my camera or on the camera of the Generation Killer on the other side of time.

Ever since I figured that out, all I could think about was how I might be able to use that knowledge to our advantage. And as Second Blood approached, I was confident I had found an opportunity.

Another observation I made—or perhaps a connection I made—was that as long as you were watching for the Generation Killer on the other side of time, filming from his untouchable oasis in your memories, you would always be able to find him immediately.

It was a quirk of the underlying system.

The moment he entered a scene, you could pick up on it—assuming you were willing to do what it took.

And what it took was trying.

It was natural to me because I brought in a background trope that made me kind of psychic, and that was a big part of being able to see him. In this storyline, psychic abilities meant being able to perceive the time nonsense going on better than normal people.

Psychic abilities, both in trope form and in lore, were Moxie-based.

Generation Killer always lost Moxie checks. He had a trope for it.

Normally, that trope was designed to ensure that if you tried to interrogate him, you’ll end up getting freaked out by how weird he is, but it still applied to psychic powers.

All of this to say: if you tried to sense him psychically, by continuously scanning your memories, you would always succeed. Because he always lost Moxie checks.

So, the moment he started standing in the doorway filming us, I knew about it.

I signaled the others.

“One of us has to get injured,” Logan said. “That’s the only way to get out of here.”

Moments later, banging could be heard from all around the building as Generation Killers fought to get inside. The place was boarded up, but they could still break windows, they could still try to break through the shutters, the locks, the doors.

Eventually, they would get in, and we didn’t many weapons here to fight them.

I slammed the door to the office closed, and we started piling desks up in front of it. There were two large street view windows on the side of the office that had luckily been shuttered, but we could hear Generation Killers on the outside, banging on them, striking them with tire irons or some other metal implement.

“We have to stay and fight,” Antoine said. “How else are we going to survive? Even if we go to the past, they’ll just follow us there. We need to take some out and hope to lose them.”

“No. They won’t follow you,” I said, speaking as confidently as I could.

“What? Why not?” Kimberly asked.

Looking over in the direction of where the Generation Killer on the other side of time was standing and filming, I said, “They know I lied to them. They know I didn’t tell them the real way to go back before the meteor struck.”

After I said that, the room was silent, but in my memory, I could see Generation Killer talking on his radio.

“What are you saying?” Kimberly asked.

“I think they want to punish me more than they want to punish you. Plus, they have all the time in the world. Maybe I can give you a head start,” I said.

■ STOP

On-Screen.

I turned off my camera, knowing that Generation Killer had his camera running. I quickly opened it up and pulled out the memory card.

I handed it to Kimberly.

“Take this,” I said. “People need to know what happened.”

I didn’t want to say why. I didn’t want to give Generation Killer even more motive to chase down my friends. But I really, really needed an excuse to take the memory card out of my camera.

I needed an excuse to stop filming altogether.

Because if I wasn’t filming, someone else had to be, and the only other cameraman was Generation Killer himself. And if he was filming me…

He couldn’t be following my friends around to see where they went. Even if he could travel on the other side of time, I knew he wouldn’t be able to get to them right away, otherwise Bobby would always be where we needed him.

There would be a delay. He would have to search for them. I wasn’t sure how it worked but… it would.

I stuck my camera in the pocket of my hoodie.

“Go,” I said. “Go now.”

The best part about this was that I didn’t have to act very well—because it wasn’t me acting. It was my character laying a trap. And Generation Killers… well, they tend to fall for traps. Always.

Over in the corner, in my peripheral vision, I could see our phantom cameraman talking on his radio.

Around us, the banging continued. We heard glass breaking, boards being busted.

“There’s no time,” I said. “I wish we could come up with another plan, but maybe—if I can help them get back before the meteorite hit—maybe they’ll just leave you alone. They’ve got no need to hurt you.”

Maybe I was playing it too naïve.

“Riley, what if it’s a trick?” Camden said. “What if they don’t actually care about that and they just want to torture you? They could just be messing with us. These guys… they’re crazy.”

“I’ll just have to risk it,” I said. “Just go now.”

From a storytelling perspective, I knew that this was a little weird. My character hadn’t been set up as a hero, or as someone who would fall on his own sword.

Or at least, that was what it seemed.

The others gathered around each other.

“What’s the one rule?” I asked, looking at Camden.

“Event B happens,” he said.

I nodded.

I didn’t look at them as they left. I didn’t see who drew the short straw and got injured enough to trigger their jump into the past—back into 2018, where they could trigger Event B and eliminate all of these Generation Killers.

But as soon as I stopped seeing the red glow of Anna’s necklace, I looked directly at the spot where the Generation Killer on the other side of time was. I made eye contact with his camera—to show that I knew what I was doing, that my melodramatic acting was all for show.

The Generation Killer himself didn’t seem to notice or care. Despite being older, he still had that blank look in his eyes. He still had that strange half-smile—so polite it made you wonder if he was just enjoying freaking you out.

After all, whenever he failed a Moxie check, it would send a jolt of fear so strong it could incapacitate someone.

How much of his behavior was an intentional ruse? How much was scripted? And how much of it was just… him?

It didn’t matter.

We were only standing there for seconds before they started breaking in.

It was almost sad to hear them destroying it.

The building was old, but many of its features were really interesting. Maybe I was just nostalgic for a past I was never a part of, but there were standing columns in the center of the room—a relic of the past, but kind of cool, actually. They weren’t aesthetically beautiful, but they were old, and it looked like you could see the building’s bones directly.

I’d seen them so many times, in so many different eras… I almost felt like I knew this building, like it was an old friend.

They were in the building now, running down the halls. There must have been dozens of them.

The shutters on the windows broke, and I could see legs and arms reaching in, squeezing through the splinters and the shards of glass—just to get to me.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

I grabbed onto the column nearest to me with all my might, keeping the jewel from my necklace in one hand.

“Hey, ya fella,” one of the Generation Killers said as they burst through the door, shoving the desks like they were cardboard. And despite them all being virtually identical, I recognized him as the mastermind of my torture.

Of course he was.

“You know, we weren’t done talking to you,” he said.

He had said something similar to Camden.

“Yeah, I know,” I said. “What are you going to do? Take me back to your little hideout?”

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said cheerfully, causing a shiver to go down my spine.

I looked over to where the Generation Killer on the other side of time was still standing, filming us. He was unable to leave, unable to track down the others.

He had to stick around. After all, Carousel could never miss Second Blood and he was the only person around to film it.

I hoped I was buying my friends time.

There were seven or eight of them in the room already. At least a dozen more in the halls outside, waiting to come take me. More and more were piling in.

I supposed they would all fall for this trick—entering the building and sealing their fate.

All of them… except the ones who had seen Camden’s similar trick back at Camp Dyer.

I knew there were a finite number of these guys, even if that number was still huge. So the longer I waited, the more of them there were—the better all of this would work out for my friends.

Finally, as the Generation Killer approached me slowly, letting me savor this last moment with all of my major limbs intact… I knew it was time.

I looked back at where I knew the cameraman to be.

And I laughed quietly.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out that small revolver—the one that had been in the museum as a set piece, the one we had decorated the jailhouse with, the one we had bought from the pawn shop.

I aimed it at one of the Generation Killers and shot him in the head.

“I hope you brought a lot of bullets,” another one of them said. It wasn’t the ringleader. But the more of them there were, the more they all started acting in unison.

“No more bullets,” I said. “Would you believe we didn’t keep a lot of ammo around the museum?”

But I only needed one.

The red jewel in my hand started to glow.

Generation Killer—the ringleader, the one who had overseen my torture—said, “Wherever you go, we’re going to follow you. You can’t escape us.”

I nodded and said, “You have no idea how right you are.”

I held onto the column with all my might as the red light began to envelop not just me, but the entire room. Then it spread further—until the entire building, maybe even part of the street outside, was swallowed in the crimson glow that permeated everything.

For the first time, a look of worry washed over Generation Killer’s face. It reached his eyes. He was truly caught off guard.

“You see, to go back in time, you need a document of a past tragedy,” I said. I started to laugh. “And did you know that this building was built on the exact same cornerstone as the original jailhouse of the Carousel settlement? There’s a plaque on the side of the building that says so.”

For a moment, Generation Killer and all of his clones just stared at me. Then realization struck his face. He grabbed inside his coat for his book, his fingers clutching desperately at his own jewel, hoping to activate it.

But by then, it was too late.

Normally, they might have stood a chance. Normally, he could have used the exact same death to trigger his amulet as I had.

But this wasn’t the normal storyline.

Because in this storyline, Willpower is Magic.

And willpower was based on Grit.

Suddenly, the entire building began to shake as pain radiated through my stomach, yet I held onto the column with all my strength. The building was slipping through time, taking all of its inhabitants with it.

I wasn’t going to let them go.

I looked over at the cameraman, who was now visible to the naked eye—if a little bit transparent.

He was getting the best footage he possibly could.

This time, since I was inside a building, I didn’t expect to see the Shores of Time. I didn’t expect to see the different rivers running around us. I didn’t expect to see the event horizons on either side of the time anomaly.

And yet, despite being inside—I could.

The fourth dimension was weird that way.

And as I looked, I could see all that ever was. All the sad endings. All the miserable people trapped in Carousel, whether they knew it or not.

And I was left with one final question:

How do you beat the game at Carousel?

A question I was intent on finding the answer to.

Around me were all the possible timelines my character could have lived. Hell, I could see my own real timeline. I saw myself as a kid again. I saw myself growing up.

The many worlds of Carousel were raw, visible to anyone who knew how to look.

And there were too many. They were too vast for my mind to comprehend.

Staring into the immensity of it all turned my legs to jelly, yet I held firm to the column.

Finally, the building stopped moving.

It wasn’t on level ground anymore. I could hear wood snapping as the foundation began to break.

There were screams outside.

I ran and jumped out of the hole in the window—one of the very windows the Generation Killers had broken.

Around me was a simple wooden palisade. Old-timey buildings stood neatly, not just lean-tos and shacks but stone structures—the kind that would normally stand the test of time and become landmarks.

We were in Town Square, Carousel, in the 1740s.

I could tell it was Town Square because of the public gallows.

Townsfolk began to surround us, some bearing firearms, others holding pitchforks.

As soon as I landed upright and started to stand, I noticed the Generation Killers pouring out of the building.

I must have gotten two dozen—maybe more.

“What did you do?” Generation Killer asked.

“You know what I did,” I said. “I took you back to before the meteor.”

Then I pointed up.

A glowing red light filled the sky. And any second now—I would simply stop existing.

The Generation Killers started panicking, fighting with each other, trying to trigger a time jump to escape back to the future.

They weren’t going to have time.

Even the townsfolk had stopped paying attention to the building that had just appeared out of nowhere. They, too, stared up at the sky, at the red light consuming everything.

My Grit jumped five points.

Dead Man Walking boosted my Grit whenever my death became inevitable.

There wouldn’t be many traces of us left. Certainly not anything that would tell people what had really happened.

Because when the meteor hit—

I woke up sitting in the theater.

Back again.

The Generation Killer on the other side of time must have found his way back to my friends. He was filming them. It appeared they were several hours into their twelve-hour wait for the signal to broadcast.

I had gotten them the head start they needed. I also took out some of the horde too. Not too bad.

I smiled, having waited for that moment ever since I started planning it after the end of Stray Dawn.

It all came down to this.

I watched the screen for a moment.

Michael had made an appearance.

I really wished I had been around for that. He was dressed in a security guard outfit, wielding a giant gun on his back and a confused look on his face.

We had set him up to be a security guard who had gotten fired, and it just so happened that the Finale we planned occurred before his character got fired. So whenever Lila had gone to get him, and he was allowed to join our storyline because of his new Aspect trope—which permitted him to join fights in other storylines—he had joined the fray, bringing with him a lot of firepower.

See, the beauty of time travel is that we could plan out exactly when and where the Finale would be. Funny how things like that worked out.

Everyone was busy setting traps.

They were in for a long night, and while the odds weren’t perfect, I would never bet against them.

In fact, I had bet everything on them.

And they, by trusting me, had bet it all on me too.

I couldn’t see any other people inside of the theater. I didn’t hear anyone behind me.

Weeks earlier, I had told the others that I could overhear the strange employees at the theater, and I told them in detail the things I had heard, all in hopes that when I came here the next time, maybe the employees wouldn’t be here.

And it had worked, as far as I could tell.

But that wasn’t really the only thing I needed to work.

Around my neck was a magical ticket that somehow gave me a temporary fake body but also froze me in place, so I couldn’t use it for anything but watching the movie. The magic was so powerful it felt completely uncontestable, like it was just a rule of reality, and I would never have thought otherwise—

Except for the last time that I was in the theater.

I had somewhat accidentally used my Insert Shot ability on a hole puncher carried by one of the employees here, and it occurred to me that my tropes would work in the theater but not just in the way they were meant to.

Insert Shot was supposed to allow me to get a close-up shot of some MacGuffin or useful item in a movie and send that image to all of my allies while also increasing the narrative power of that object.

It should never have worked on an object that wasn’t in the movie.

And yet, it did.

Kimberly had seen the hole punch and had dismissed it at the time but still remembered it later, though I never really wanted her to talk about it.

Had to keep a low profile.

So if that trope worked in the theater… what others might?

I took a deep breath, and my Hustle jumped up two points.

If I could have laughed, I would have.

My Escape Artist trope had activated. It gave me extra Hustle whenever I came up with a plausible plan to help escape bondage. For the most part, it wasn’t that useful for the act of escaping.

I didn’t really need the extra Hustle, but the confirmation that my plan would work was very convenient.

And with that, I started to push against the magical restraint that held me perfectly still, and I started to plead with my muscles to just work.

And something strange started to happen.

Where normally I didn’t even seem to have control of my muscles, suddenly I felt them tense. I felt my bones start to ache as my muscles and tendons pulled, at first without success, to get my body to move.

I paused for a moment, listening intently.

Not for the employees—no, I was listening for heavy breathing.

Because surely this was against some rule.

And there was a Rule Keeper, right? An axe-wielding maniac who would cut you in half if you tried to leave the game?

And yet, I heard no breathing.

I hadn’t heard breathing when I had planned this either, which intrigued me.

How could this not be against the rules?

If these were the people in charge, how could what I was planning not get me a death sentence?

Because if it would, I would hear breathing. My heartbeat would quicken. I would start to hear him walking toward me.

And yet, I heard none of that.

I started pushing and pulling again, getting my limbs to move. It felt like I was encased in invisible concrete, but I didn’t let that stop me. I had gotten as much Grit as I could, choosing tropes and stat point assignments in preparation for this one moment.

This one moment where the rules that bound me were not the dominant force in my destiny.

Because in this storyline and in this theater: Willpower is Magic.

Antoine’s trope was working here too.

And it was a match for whatever forces the people of the theater used to keep me still.

I pushed and pulled and forced my muscles to respond to me, and in one burst, I ripped up from the seat, and all at once, the spell that had kept me still had shattered.

I bounded forward and tripped over the row of seats in front of me, landing on the ground beneath them.

I lay looking up at the ceiling in amazement that my plan had worked as I saw smoke rising from something on my chest.

I quickly moved my hands to see what was happening.

The ticket that they had placed around my neck, that made all of this possible, had a small cigarette-burn-like hole right through a word written in fancy lettering.

The word was Attention.

There were other words on the ticket too—like Illusion, Disillusion, Vacation, Flattery—and other random words that I didn’t have context for, other than to know that Disillusion would send my soul back to my real body at the end of the movie, just as it had in The Die Cast.

I didn’t have time to worry about that just yet.

I poked my head up above the seats to see if there was anyone in the back of the theater.

There wasn’t.

My plan had worked.

But I couldn’t stay there.

Because this room, despite being fascinating in its own way with its old-fashioned style and faint popcorn smell, did not hold what I needed.

What I needed was answers, and those lay beyond one of the several doors leading out of the room.

I looked back up at the screen.

My friends were still prepping for a fight.

I could not fail them.

We had spent so long trying to figure out a way forward, afraid we were going to fall into another trap, or that we were going to do something stupid without knowing it.

I had to get answers.

I needed answers for them.

I needed answers for myself.

I stood up and found a door leading out into an empty hallway. It looked like a fire exit of some kind. It led backstage, behind the screen. There were many other doors in the hallway, which meant I should be able to find another way out into the main part of the structure without attracting too much attention.

I just had to play it cool.

I took one last look at the theater.

And then, I walked out to the other side.

To find the answers.

Whatever they may be.

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