Book Six, Chapter 26: Ravel

If I never went to hell again, it would be too soon.

I managed to make it to bed by noon the day we got back, and I didn’t wake up again until noon the next day. Even then, I didn’t want to get out of bed. I didn’t have to. No one was going to make me.

But as I lay awake in my empty room, I got a sudden burst of loneliness and wanted to go see people.

I knew they would be around there somewhere. It wasn’t like they could easily leave the Loft without me.

Ruck had run off before we even got our rewards the day before, but as I walked from my room into the kitchen, I saw something sitting on the table. It was the mixtape he had made for Avery.

I called out her name. No response.

She wasn’t in her room either. That meant she was either down in the restaurant or up on the roof.

Camden was in the living room, reading the Atlas, as he often did. I had gone through a phase like that. There was something very comforting about a big book of secret knowledge.

“Where’s Avery?” I asked.

“Don’t know,” he said.

“Thanks.”

I guessed the roof. I took the tape with me.

“We need to talk about By the Slice,” he called after me as I walked away.

I responded with a wave to let him know I’d heard him.

Truthfully, I didn’t want to talk about that storyline yet. I was still digesting it. It was so easy to undersell how upsetting my voyage, technically voyages, to hell had been. Even if it was just a surreal pizza parlor down there, there was a hopelessness that came with it.

Being hopeless in Carousel was corrosive because you couldn’t really use logic to crawl out of that hole. Logic would only lead you further in.

But avoiding the problem until you’d forgotten enough of it, or become numb to it? That was a great option for lesser ailments.

Avery was, indeed, up on the roof.

She was up there with Cassie and Anna. It was a lazy day. I realized I didn’t know what day of the week it was, but it was a lazy one.

I held up the tape and asked, “Do you mind if I listen to this?”

Avery shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t care,” she said. “Russell gave it to me.”

She must have gotten to know him pretty well in hell to be using the name his mother gave him.

“Was this a Token of Affection?” I asked. Was that what it was called when you received an object from someone romantically interested in you in a storyline? I couldn’t remember. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time.

She nodded. “I got a ticket for it,” she said.

That meant when I had asked her yesterday about all the tickets she had won, she had either neglected to tell me, forgotten, or not really cared. It was my job to assess my team’s capabilities. How could I do that if they hadn’t told me what tickets they had won?

This was madness. Anarchy. Tomfoolery.

Of course, even if she had told me, it wasn’t like I knew exactly what we were supposed to do with these tokens.

I had received a Dear John letter, if that was the right word, from a masked sorcerer who had feigned interest in me so she could ask about the black snow showing up earlier than it was supposed to.

It had also been a Token of Affection. But what use was it? Supposedly, some tropes used them as resources, but I wasn’t exactly the type to attract tropes like that.

Kimberly also had one, a handful of mixed seeds given to her by Benny, the Haunted Scarecrow.

Between the letter and the seeds, I would have preferred the seeds. Maybe when she got back from the jungle, I could convince her to let us grow them on the roof. Then we would get some use out of one of the tokens, and we could taste exactly how sweet love was.

I took out my Walkman. As I started to set it up to play the tape, Avery, Cassie, and Anna gathered around. I unplugged the headphones so that the sound would play through the little speakers.

And I hit play.

Suddenly, Ruck’s voice came to life as he nervously said, “Avery, I just want you to know that every time I see your face, it makes me feel exactly like the guy in this song feels.”

Then a song started to play. It was a typical 80’s ballad. Maybe. I wasn’t exactly an expert.

“This is real music,” Cassie said with sudden excitement.

“Well, let’s not get carried away,” I said. “It’s… okay.”

“No,” she said. “This isn’t Carousel music.”

It was funny how Carousel music had taken on an entirely different meaning. Far from the carnival sounds it had meant back home, “Carousel music” was what we called the weird, slightly off-brand music that could be heard over the radio in the Carousel. The lyrics were always a little odd, and maybe a bit ghoulish, so it was best to ignore them.

Cassie was right. This wasn’t Carousel music.

“He got you music from his world, I bet,” Anna said.

They oohed and ahhed, as if that was a super romantic thing to do. And I had to admit, it was a pretty good gift.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The first song was all right. Something meant to hype you up while cruising around town in your Trans Am.

After it was over, Ruck came back on.

“Back off,” he said, speaking to someone. “I’m recording a tape for my ladylove… Avery, I’m sure you get this a lot with your trope that makes people fall in love with you, but I just wanna say how special I think you are. You may not remember this, but we actually met at a party at Delta Epsilon Delta. It’s been over a year, maybe even two. Time flies in Carousel, but not in a straight line, you know. You were trying to pump me for information about the storyline we were in, and you didn’t realize that I was always going to be an obnoxious jerk, and you kept trying to be kind and flirty in hopes that you might get through to me and learn something. And the whole time you were talking to me, I wanted so bad to break character. I still dream about that moment. Well, here’s another song. This one is a bit more romantic. And older. My parents played it at their wedding. I should know. I was 14 at the time, and I drank a bunch of champagne. Gramma chased me around with a fly swatter for that. They waited so long to get married because procrastination runs in the family. It has to run, because we’re always late. I’m the latest of them all.”

A romantic song started to play, something from the ’50s or ’60s, in the vein of Elvis, but the singer didn’t have the projection. His sound was smaller, more vulnerable. He sang, “Love can’t wait.”

It was one of those songs that’s a happy song if you’re with someone, and a sad song if you aren’t.

I went back and forth on it.

We continued listening. Occasionally, Ruck would chime in, but for the most part, the remaining songs were just normal music, not particularly romantic, but always authentic.

His world must have been pretty similar to ours.

“I’m gonna have to cut this out here,” I said. “Batteries aren’t cheap.”

That was true. We could steal anything from the Eastern Carousel General Store, but it was set in the ’70s, so they didn’t have the battery the Walkman needed. I would actually have to buy those.

I took the tape out and told her I’d put it back on the kitchen table.

As I walked back downstairs, those who remained upstairs were discussing how we needed to find a music player so we could have that playing nonstop to drown out the sounds of Carousel.

It was good enough music, but I didn’t know if it was something we needed to play on loop.

Back in the living room, Camden was still on the couch reading the Atlas, and Isaac had joined him. Someone had switched on my little TV and was watching something on Carousel public access.

“Is that Ravel?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he responded.

Ravel was a children’s show. We didn’t know why it was called that. It was about a puppet who got caught in an extra dimension of some sort and was unable to interact with the real world, but would constantly get stuck behind people’s walls and be forced to watch them, and react, as terrible things happened to them.

There were also little shorts with different puppets who would teach you things like letters. Today’s letters were C, P, and R, and they even did a little skit where one of the puppets needed CPR.

Poor thing didn’t make it.

You could hear the puppeteers whispering in the background, but you couldn’t tell what they said.

Super creepy show. But entertaining.

“Do you think Ravel is going to get caught behind our walls?” Isaac asked. “I think this is just shot by some guy who went crazy and pretends he’s shooting a puppet show, but really he’s just stuck in a different dimension,” he added.

That theory made sense, if it wasn’t for the cutaways with the puppets teaching letters and numbers. Today’s numbers were 187A, which was the Carousel police code for attempted murder.

“But A isn’t a number,” Camden said drolly.

“Give him a break,” Isaac said. “The guy’s stuck behind walls. It can be a number today.”

“I don’t think Ravel is actually his name,” Camden continued. “That’s just the name of the show.”

“Then what’s the puppet’s name?” Isaac asked.

“How would I know? No one can tell he’s there or see him, so they don’t call him by his name. You’ll never know what it is.”

In today’s episode, the puppet, whether its name was Ravel or not, was crossing through the dimensions trying to escape, when he got stuck behind the walls of a young woman who found a very ornate box in the attic. Inside that ornate box was a dark, broken knife. It looked like most of the blade had been snapped off.

But the girl could feel a blade there, even though it appeared to be missing.

She took it down into the kitchen and chopped a carrot with the invisible knife blade.

Lo and behold, half of the carrot turned invisible, just like the knife blade. The thing was, the carrot didn’t actually get cut. The knife passed right through it. She demonstrated this by picking up the carrot and noticing that the end was still on it, it was just invisible from the point she cut it. She took a bite of the invisible part.

“Shut this off,” I said, realizing what was about to happen.

“What? Why?” Isaac asked.

“She’s got a big wart on her nose,” I said.

“Ohhh God no,” Camden said, looking up from the Atlas.

We couldn’t look away.

The girl went to give herself some cosmetic surgery, but in the most predictable twist, when she took that invisibility knife up to her nose to try to make her wart disappear…

The wart was all that was left.

The rest of her turned invisible, and she became nothing but a floating wart.

The puppet, whatever his name was, was freaking out the whole time. He didn’t get used to his situation at all, and he was always seeing messed up crap like this.

“Now, how do we get that knife?” Isaac asked.

The truth was, the knife probably did exist, and we probably could find it if we looked hard enough, even if we had to start our own mini-throughline to find it. If we pulled the thread, it would eventually appear, just as we had found the werewolf storyline.

I went up to the TV and shut it off.

“I was watching that,” Isaac said, but he was joking. He was just as disturbed as I was.

After the television turned off and its glow faded, I turned to Camden and asked, “What about By the Slice did you need to talk about?”

He looked up at me, then started flipping through the Atlas, back to the restricted section, the part that contained spoilers.

“I’ve been reading the things they’ve written about this story, and it doesn’t add up,” he said. “The version we ran seems really different. I just don’t know what we could’ve done to account for that. We didn’t have tropes that were designed to mess with the narrative that much. We played into it.”

“What was the original story like?” I asked.

“Well, according to these accounts, the pizza parlor itself is kind of a nightmarish place you can’t leave, and I can’t find anyone talking about there being a hell inside the mouth of Hot Head, although that character does exist. Mostly, his role is that when you’re chased, somebody’s going to get forced to crawl through his mouth and hope that his other mouth doesn’t close before you get to the other end. But I can’t see anything about going to hell.”

That was interesting.

“I talked to the lead demon lady,” I said. “The way she tells it, it seemed like she had a lot of agency. The whole hell subplot was supposed to be a red herring, so maybe she tried to separate out the different plotlines in hopes that people would be distracted from the devil’s deal.”

That made sense to me.

“I think Carousel is still finding itself,” Isaac said, slipping into an exaggerated guru voice. “Deciding which kind of cosmic entity it really wants to be. Mixing things up.”

He might have been hamming it up, but he wasn’t wrong. Giving more agency to intelligent enemies could be a potent change to the mix.

“We’ll have to check in on this. Did you enter our experience into the Atlas?” I asked.

“Well, yeah,” Camden said. “But it’s kind of hard to write when I don’t know what caused the deviation.”

Stories in Carousel were largely static, sure, they were a choose-your-own-adventure type of deal where your choices mattered greatly, but they were always a game without an opponent. Predictable. Enemies were set in stone, given tropes to limit them. The idea that Carousel might be loosening the reins was… quite scary.

Not only did that mean that smart enemies would be even tougher, but it meant that a lot of the information we had in the Atlas would only be accurate to a point.

“We’ll see,” I said. “No need to freak out just yet. It’s possible she changed up the story to the best of her ability because I was there.”

“You’re that special?” Isaac asked.

“Well, I was a very over-leveled meta player,” I said. “And she did seem to fixate on me for no particular reason, so… yeah. I think that might have been the reason. But who knows?”

Who did know?

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