I didn’t remember pushing the red button.

I didn’t even remember Silas the Mechanical Showman being there.

Where was I?

My character’s studio apartment. Or… a copy of it.

Before I even took my hand off the button, I found myself staring out the window. It was dark outside, but not nighttime. The darkness was a physical thing, almost like fog, and some things, like the road, were lit up with spotlights. The shadowy darkness was everywhere else.

I pulled my hand off of Silas’ button as a ticket emerged through his dispenser. I looked at him as if I expected him to explain, but he didn’t even play a prerecorded quip. He stared blankly, uncaring. Even his smile didn’t make him look interested in me.

I reached for the ticket, and just as I had it pinched between my fingers, Silas disappeared.

Had the bad guys won? Had the world ended? Was this the place where you went when you lost? I really thought my time skip would work.

The ticket would be the only explanation I would ever get.

Greetings from the Props Department!

Don’t panic. You’ve been here before. Please take a deep breath and try to think it through.

You have initiated a Props Department Continuity Assignment. That means your current storyline or subplot requires your unique touch to ensure authenticity, consistency, and dramatic flair in upcoming sequences. To maintain narrative cohesion, we’ll need you to compile research, create supporting documents, or record footage that will later appear On-Screen in your handwriting, voice, or style.

You are free to explore the Props Department in whichever way you may wish, but remember, there is a time limit based on your Savvy and Narrative Positioning! If you fail to create the assigned materials, you will be without them in future sequences. This is dangerous, as you will not get to retain any knowledge or memories from your time in the Props Department.

Task: “Collect a body of research related to the Night Stocker cult and the mysterious entity it serves, while documenting your infiltration of the cult on behalf of your friend Kimberly.”

Thank you for your cooperation.

We literally couldn’t do it without you. Carousel won’t let us.

—The Props Department

The Props Department? I… I didn’t remember having been to this place before.

I looked around the room. There were boxes and boxes like those used to store files. They didn’t contain files. I walked to the nearest stack and pulled out a handful of pages.

It was a script.

All of it was, almost every box. Filled to the brim with stacks of pages.

I read through it as fast as I could.

INT. SECRET TUNNEL: DAY

Tom leads Riley down a long, hidden corridor carved straight from the concrete foundation of the Eternal Savers Club and the earth itself. Strings of Christmas lights line the path, casting a faint, colorful glow.

TOM

We found this corridor by accident, almost. The rock was wearing away like ash. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to haul it away.

RILEY

Probably not.

I flipped through the pages, astonished at what lay before me. This was the account of my character being brought into the cult—thousands of pages of it.

I glanced around the room. There were other objects, other boxes, some that didn’t contain paper. The first one I grabbed had a familiar set of canisters in it. They were the kind used to store film. I had seen them before in Stray Dawn. My character had filmed them before I entered the story. I ripped one canister open and peered down at the film, which depicted two people, one of whom was me, in an interview about werewolves.

Suddenly, I understood.

These film reels, created for use in my character’s documentary, had not just been made out of nothing. I created them.

Carousel or the Consortium must have left these here so I would understand.

Around the room, there were blank diaries, post-it notes, red yarn for a conspiracy board, stuff like that. Everything I needed to prepare myself for the rest of the storyline was here.

I just had to assemble it.

I had improvised a time skip so that my character could get research done and be more prepared for the finale.

I had no idea the price that would entail.

–

Terrified of the unseen time limit, I spent several days working through the boxes, reading the script for every encounter I would have over that year, relevant to the plot.

That added up to fifty meetings with the cult, a dozen nights out at the local bar, and two baseball games during which my character would bond and get to know Tom and the other cultists as I gathered information to eventually defeat them.

Most of it was useless.

The script wasn’t cinematic or tight. It was a shot-for-shot account of these hypothetical encounters. There were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of small talk.

I searched through them just to find little nuggets of useful information. Time passed. I grew exhausted and weary.

When I was tired, I slept in my character’s bed. When I was hungry, I ate from the scant, poorly stocked but self-replenishing pantry.

The first few weeks, I really thought that the timer would buzz any second. I worked my tail off building a proper conspiracy board, outlining the hierarchy of the cult and building binders of handwritten notes about the lore of the cult, what little I could find.

As time wore on, I realized how lonely my existence had become.

Every day, I worked on the evidence surrounding the plot. I diligently documented and classified information. I made plans in my character’s journals. I created an accurate timeline of every relevant event.

And then, I slept for days, unable to summon the energy needed to open my eyes.

Time didn’t exist here. There was no sunrise or sunset. There was no obvious indication of the passage of time other than the movement of the file boxes from the to-do stack to the done stack.

I wasn’t just bored. Boredom would have been a nice change of pace. I was practically catatonic.

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I lay on my character’s couch with a stack of documents. These, for a change, were about Antoine’s show and my plans for that. I wasn’t reading them. I was hoping to absorb them into myself through skin contact or something.

How long had I been there? How many weeks did my Savvy buy me in this purgatory? How many months?

I had asked for a year-long time skip. Was that the price? A year? More?

I stared at the board I had created with all the known information.

It was full of info on the cult, but shockingly scant on information about He Who Walks Behind the Aisles.

How strange. The cult itself knew so little. They relied on information given to them by the prophets in their group, who could hear the deity’s whispers cloaked as the voices of their loved ones gone too soon. Beyond all credulity, even they did not have a name for the underground god. If anything, they liked to pretend he wasn’t part of the deal.

They liked to talk about the new world as if it didn’t involve an arrangement with some sort of cosmic shadow god to get it, like it was the result of them hoping and praying. They even expressed guilt about sacrificing people for their goals, and spent many nights contemplating how, in the new world, those sacrifices would be born anew as better people.

I was getting nowhere.

I left my character’s apartment for no particular reason.

I had spent so much time staring out into the darkness that eventually, my fear gave way to a powerful curiosity.

What terrible secrets did the Props Department have to offer?

There were no warnings about going outside, and, logically, some storylines would require me to have gone outside to gather information. One day, I couldn’t be in that room any longer.

I found myself walking down the only section of street that was visible. My theory was that all of the locations in the scripts would be places I could go. After all, how else would I be able to write an accurate accounting of what had happened?

My theories were validated as I found the bar the cult liked to hang out in. No one was there, but the jukebox was always on. They had food orders sitting in the window hot and tasty.

The tables were set up for trivia night.

I grabbed a few answer cards. I could include them as props for the evidence cache. I was supposed to make it look real for the movie, and one of these trivia answer sheets would be great for my corkboard.

There was nothing else to see there, though.

Eventually, I found myself walking through the darkness again, following a path that I didn’t recognize from any of the locations in the scripts.

There was no sky, no stars. Only a road and, eventually, the library. That was where I had been walking unknowingly.

I ran up the large stone steps and entered the building to find… it was almost empty.

Almost.

Most of the books were gone. Only a few hundred books remained in the whole building. I quickly realized that these books were the only ones compatible with the reality of the storyline I was in.

So, I dug in.

Every day, I would come to the library and grab a new batch of books to read through for information. Every day, I would find nothing useful. Well, that wasn’t true. I got a strong indication that the world of the story was polytheistic. That was hard to tell from the veneer Carousel added to most storylines.

There were many gods and many accounts of those gods. Were they real? Well, probably. I knew magic existed in this universe.

On the fourteenth day, I had piled together a new stack of books when I heard a voice, curt but polite.

“You can only check out five books at a time, you know,” a woman said.

I knew who it was before I even looked up at her. Truthfully, I had been alone for so long that I was thrilled to even see another human. She was a stern woman with a clever smile and a conservative skirt and blouse, which fit the librarian look very well if it hadn’t been so bright blue.

It was Constance Barlowe, the Researcher Paragon.

I smiled wide. She didn’t stay for long, but continued past my table toward her desk on the first floor.

“Wait,” I called after her. “What am I supposed to do? I can’t find anything on this deity. Please help.”

Constance turned and looked at me. I immediately recognized her meta-aware gaze.

“Welcome back, Mr. Lawrence. It’s been a while. What can I help you with?” she asked. Her voice was soft and sure. It didn’t even echo in the vast, empty library.

“This god that’s central to the plot,” I said, feeling myself start to well up with tears from frustration. “I haven’t found anything on it at all. I don’t know when my time here ends, and if I don’t find anything, all of this will have been for nothing.”

Constance looked at me softly. She pitied me.

“God is a word used by believers,” she said. “But a god with no believers, and only the accounts of enemies to carry their name, well, what might they be called?”

She promptly turned to leave.

I thought for a moment.

This entity was clearly some type of deity. According to Cassie, he wanted to be “released.” He was captured or imprisoned. From what I could tell, that had happened eons ago. What information could have been passed down about him? Who got to tell his story?

I immediately grabbed a stack of books I had just been through. Instead of scanning for deities that fit the description I had seen, I searched for something else. This guy was buried. What if no one knew he was a god at all? What would they call him? What legends might grow up about him?

The dead.

Every single prophet, including Dina, had been called to serve through visions or memories of the dead. Even Tom came into the service of this guy because of his dead brother. Technically, so did Bobby. So did I.

Were there legends of the dead whispering in the ears of the living?

It took me ten minutes to find. I was so excited, I read it aloud.

“The superstitious townsfolk called them vocira… spirits that wore the faces of the dead. They whispered, ‘Release me,’ a promise of reunion, but those who listened were led to ill fate.”

I dropped the book down on the table. Laughter pushed its way up from my chest. I had been looking for a god, but a forgotten god could not be found in history books. His pale attempts at salvation might be, though.

I quickly got to work researching vocira. There wasn’t a lot of information. They were unpopular folklore spirits, but there were a few choice entries.

Pilgrim Out of Silver Isle was a story I found about them. It went like this:

In the days when the gods walked the earth, a pilgrim traveled from temple to temple seeking guidance and blessings. One night, a vocira appeared to the pilgrim, claiming to be his father. He said his name was ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ and beseeched the pilgrim to release him, but that name was foreign to the pilgrim. He never knew his father, but doubted such a name belonged to the man. The pilgrim traveled to the nearest temple and waited months to pray to the god, whose height was like that of mountains and whose temper was like the sea.

The pilgrim asked about ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ , expecting no response, for gods rarely answered prayers. However, as soon as the name ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ was uttered, the mountain god stood in anger from his throne on the hill and declared, “We do not speak of him.” The god’s voice echoed many towns away.

So the pilgrim moved on to the next temple, and the next, asking who ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ ‎ was and receiving, always, the same answer: We do not speak of him.

And that was the end of the story. Except for one line at the end:

The pilgrim never consumed oblation, for he drew comfort in the presence of the vocira and still relished its sickly promise till his dying days.

I thought as I read that account. Even in the days of that legend, they never seemed to realize that the vocira was just the crying of an imprisoned god.

The pilgrim never consumed oblation, I repeated. A quick search revealed that an oblation was an offering to a god. Consuming oblation was a common exorcism ritual for vocira and many other spirits.

I asked Constance why the god’s name was blank.

“In faraway lands,” she said, “many cultures believed there was power in a name. In Carousel, perhaps there is power still.”

And then she walked off, all pleased with herself.

A name so powerful even Carousel didn’t want players to know it. Interesting.

I wrote this down in my journal. Later, I would be able to use it, gods willing, to beat the storyline.

But, even as my job was done, my time in the Props Department was not.

I got braver and braver and eventually decided to travel down to the underground lair of the cult. Their tunnels led in many directions, and I did not actually know the way to the veil where the unnamed god might be found.

I didn’t need to know. I heard a voice calling me, a voice promising me reunion, if only I released them.

But it wasn’t my parents’ voice.

Startled, I quickly left.

Two weeks later, an alert appeared on the red wallpaper. I had five minutes.

I didn’t have to change anything. My research was prepared for the movie. It was strange. I had been there for months, maybe a year. I had yearned for freedom the entire time.

But in the end, as my time was drawing to a close, I was afraid. Whoever I had become in the Props Department, I would never be again. The memory of this time would cease to exist.

How many versions of me had there been?

I didn’t know. All I knew was that when I was in the tunnels underneath Eternal Savers Club and I heard the voice calling out to me for release, it wasn’t my parents’ voice.

It was mine.

The version of me that could have existed, the version that died metaphorically the day my parents died literally.

What a breakthrough. The death I mourned the most was the death of my innocence, of the person I could have been.

What a waste.

It was the middle of the day when Kimberly and I decided to check my character’s apartment.

“Is there a chance that our characters just didn’t do any research all year?” she asked. “I mean, it does seem like we are asking for a lot.”

“No,” I said as I turned the key for the apartment. “It’ll be here.”

I wasn’t sure, but I tried to sound like I was.

I did breathe a sigh of relief when I opened the door and found an entire wall of research, along with several journals and printouts from the library. It was mostly in my own handwriting.

“Vocira,” I said, reading one of the bookmarked journal entries. “Interesting.”

“Looks like you were busy,” Kimberly said. “Not busy cleaning, but busy.”

“Yep,” I said. As I looked around the apartment, I couldn’t help but feel lonely. Desperately lonely. Luckily, Kimberly was there. “I think it’s a fair price. We’re not getting something for nothing. I mean, we do have to read all of this stuff. Look at it. This will take hours.”

Kimberly laughed in agreement.

It was time to find out what this god was all about.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep