Chapter Fifty-Five: The Unknowable

As I dropped into the crack in the wall, I immediately found myself sliding down a steep incline. The rock was slick and wet. My feet scrambled against the stone, seeking to stop my fall or at least slow my descent, but years of erosion had rendered the surface smooth.

I reached out my hands as I fell, clawing for even the slightest ledge to grab hold of. All I managed to do was catch a fingernail against a small bit of rock, which pulled my nail backward until it snapped off.

That should have hurt, but by the time I realized what had happened, the pain was drowned out by something else.

As soon as my feet hit the water, my body became overcome with an intense sensation of fear. I don’t mean to say I was simply afraid in the way one would normally be in that situation. I felt a palpable reaction all over my body. If you have a fear of heights, you’ll understand how your body shuts down when exposed to a steep fall. It was like that but a hundred times more intense.

My stomach quivered. My legs turned to jelly; my arms felt like they were no longer under my control. The water was only knee-high, yet I was fighting for every breath. I couldn’t stand; I couldn’t swim.

I felt it on my skin like sunshine bearing down on me. Except it wasn’t a bright light. It was the darkness itself that pressed against my skin. The force was coming from something in the darkness to my right. My body refused to even breathe in that direction.

But what was it?

I could feel a power radiating from something in the darkness. I couldn’t even look in that direction with my eyes closed the feeling was so intense. Luckily, being able to feel the direction it was coming from meant that I could move away from it.

I struggled. I couldn’t walk, not at first. I was stumble-falling in the direction away from the pain, from the fear.

But why was I running?

A dark clarity rose from inside me. Thoughts were being put in my head.

Why was I splashing through the water so pathetically? Why not just stay and be consumed?

I had nothing to live for. My family—Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa—they were gone. My death would mean nothing. What was I fighting against?

The others needed to escape to get back to their families, but I didn’t. I could give up. Just stop. What joy. I could just stop fighting. I was unimportant in the grand scheme. Heck, I was unimportant even in the lesser scheme. I was of no help. I was useless.

These thoughts rushed through my mind. I was powerless against them. I felt a crushing weight on my chest. It was like I would never be able to move on from this moment. I kept waiting for each thought to be my last.

And yet, my feet kept moving.

Why?

Stripped of my human desire to live, what was left that kept me moving away from the inevitable?

I struggled forward, tears in my eyes. I breathed only when I remembered to. Why was I even trying?

With every inch forward I trudged through the water, my mind cleared a little more. The pain, the fear, they began to ease. They didn’t disappear, not by a long shot. They became distant. They wormed their way back down where they had come from.

As I made it further from the area of influence of the darkness, I realized that I heard voices in the distance, back the way I had come from.

“I don’t know what to do,” Anna screamed. “Tell me what to do!”

“Anna!” I screamed. She didn’t answer me. I don’t think she even heard me.

“I can’t keep going,” she said, “I can’t keep going.”

“Follow my voice!” I screamed. She didn’t show any sign of hearing me. She kept muttering to herself.

I heard weeping further in the distance. It was Camden. The sound was interspersed with splashing as he struggled to move in my direction.

“Sean?” Dina yelled. “Where are you? Sean?’

Dina was talking to her dead son in the distance.

Even with my eyes closed, I could see my close allies on the red wallpaper. All of our statuses were lighting up like a Christmas tree. Every single status was flickering on and off. Not just the obvious ones like Unscathed or Incapacitated. Mutilated was flickering. So were Infected, Hobbled, Fight Scene, Off-Screen, and the rest. Even our Dead status flickered.

Being near the thing in the darkness was completely short-circuiting the very magic that made Carousel run.

We were all in a Chase Scene, but with what? An invisible force? An emotion?

“This way,” I screamed. “Come this way!”

I was still afraid to open my eyes. Whatever lurked in the darkness still held such power over me, even from a great distance.

“Why won’t he look at me?” Nicholas sobbed. “Why won’t he look at me?”

He was still back where we had been dumped out by the sound of it.

I heard splashing, someone fighting the water.

Did I dare attempt to go back and save them?

No. I limply rested on my knees. Tears rolled down my face. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t.

“Sean, don’t run away from me like that. You can’t run away from Mommy.”

There was a pause like she was waiting for a response. I swear, in the distance, I thought I could hear the chains of a swing set.

“I know baby, but what if I can’t find you?” she asked. It sounded like she was reliving a memory or something like it. Her voice was soft, motherly. Nothing like the Dina I knew.

For a few moments, she was silent. I didn’t know what was happening in her mind, but it sounded better than what was happening in real life.

I sat and listened to the others struggle. I couldn’t bear to go back and find them. The radiating fear and pain were something I could never take willingly, as ashamed as I am to admit. Even from a distance, my Incapacitated status flared just by thinking about walking back in that direction.

“Sean! Don’t go, baby.” Dina screamed through tears. “Don’t go.”

Then there was silence. Whatever daydream she was caught in was over.

“I’ll find you,” she said quietly.

Her status on the red wallpaper was cleared. No Incapacitation, no injuries, nothing. Her Encouragement from Beyond trope appeared to be enough to snap her out of the mental panic that had befallen us.

She had stood up. I could hear her walking through the water.

“Hello,” she screamed.

“Over here,” I yelled back, forcing myself to remember to breathe.

“I’m here,” Anna said weakly. She had made it as far away as I was. She must have been twenty feet to my left.

“I’m okay,” Kimberly said softly. She was near Anna. I hadn’t heard her speak since we got down there.

“Come on,” Dina said. She was near Camden. He had gone from weeping to whimpering. For as close as he was to the force emanating in the distance, I couldn’t blame him.

I could hear Dina lifting him up.

“We’re not going to die here,” she said.

She was guiding him toward me in the darkness.

“Riley?” she said as she got close.

“Right here,” I said.

She brought Camden close. He had started breathing normally. I grabbed onto him when he got near and helped lower him down beside me.

“My brothers and sisters are going to come here looking for me,” he said to me as soon as he realized it was me. “There’s nothing I can do. They’re going to get stuck here too. What do we do?”

I didn’t know what to say.

Dina waded back in the direction she had come and retrieved Nicholas, who still repeated “Why won’t he look at me” over and over even for a few minutes after he had gotten to safety.

As Dina went back again for Corey, our long-hair hippie NPC companion, I started looking around the cavern.

It took real bravery to even be able to open my eyes. I know that makes no sense, but it felt like life or death.

I looked in the direction I had been crawling. There was darkness. Behind me, the terrifying force emanated toward us.

I heard splashing. Dina had found Corey the NPC. I heard him take a deep breath as she brought him above water. That was a close one.

“I was almost there,” he said in a strange, uneven voice.

Anna and I had barely made it on our own. Dina had managed to help the others. That was good news, though by helping us she lost some Outsider buffs for the finale. Oh well.

“How was this supposed to be a simple fun storyline?” I asked. Chris had described it that way. Fun. He used the word fun.

No one answered me.

There is no way that this was the same storyline he was talking about. Our group almost drowned in two feet of water because we lost the will to live. Something was different. Something was wrong.

Storylines could change from one iteration to the next. In the Delta Epsilon Delta storyline, the killer changed every time you played it. What had happened to make this storyline like this?

We were Off-Screen again.

Judging by the sounds of sloshing water in the distance, the cave system was huge. Hundreds and hundreds of feet in every direction.

“What is an Unknowable Host?” Anna asked.

I didn’t know what she was talking about at first, but then I realized that I had worked so hard not to look in the direction of the terrible force that I had not looked it up on the red wallpaper.

Unknowable Host (Deceased)

Plot Armor: 150

Tropes

Evil Never Dies

It only changes form.

Not Yours to Control

Characters who encounter this being’s power will misunderstand it in their attempts to harness it, to disastrous ends.

Minion Maker

This creature is able to summon or create low-level monsters to do its bidding.

Dark Aura

This being has an aura with wide-ranging affects, from fear to some combination of status ailments. Bypasses stats on first exposure.

This entity in front of me must have been massive. I mean the size of a skyscraper. If the revolting feeling in my mind when I looked at it was any indication, it was hundreds of feet from one side to the other. I couldn’t see it in the darkness, but I could still feel it.

“It’s dead,” Dina said.

It sure was.

I told them about its tropes. Truthfully, there were many more that I couldn’t read because of our level differential. I could only imagine what this thing could do or could have done when it was alive.

Off-Screen, NPCs usually stay quiet. There are cases where they continue to play their parts like the paramedics after I got stabbed. You can speak freely around them Off-Screen and they will just ignore you. They rarely try to interact with you.

This broken storyline was an exception. Almost all of our interactions were Off-Screen. Even then, nothing prepared me for Corey the eco-warrior. He continued to ramble off about pollution and nuclear waste and who knows what as soon Dina dragged him away from the Unknowable Host.

“He has not stopped talking since the story started,” Dina said. Corey ignored her.

His theory seemed to be that the thing in the darkness was radioactive waste dumped by the company. Maybe he was rehearsing his lines. Maybe he just really loved his job.

“We’re going to have to have a talk with Chris,” Camden said.

No kidding.

“You have any idea what’s going on?” Anna asked.

“Well, Hesper Sr offered his kid to the dead thing. I’m guessing he doesn’t know much about it. I assume he gets something as a reward. Maybe health, money, I don’t know. Could be he owes the thing already and is paying it back, but… I’m not sure.”

It felt like Hesper didn’t know what was going on down here. The entity’s tropes suggested that Hesper misunderstood something crucial.

“Could explain how they pulled so much gold out of this place,” Camden suggested. “Assuming that part was even true.”

It could. Given the uncomplicated nature of the storyline so far, I could believe it was that simple.

The Off-Screen status started to flicker again, never staying lit for more than a few seconds. What was going on?

“I need to look at it,” Corey said as soon as the camera returned. “We need proof of what they dumped down here. If it’s radioactive they’ll go down for good.”

“If it was radioactive, we would be cooked by now,” Camden said. “We wouldn’t even make it out of the cave.”

“I need to see it,” Corey responded.

“No!” Several of us screamed. We were all terrified to look at the creature.

Corey ignored us. “I lost my flashlight. Does anyone have one I could use?”

He wasn’t just being stubborn. There was something wrong with him. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the tropes to learn things about NPCs.

“How much water did you drink?” Dina asked.

“I need to see it,” he said. I could hear him digging through his pockets. He grabbed onto something.

I could hear him operating some mystery object in his hands. He was winding it.

A camera! He must have had one like we did.

“Close your eyes!” I screamed.

I warned everyone in the nick of time too because a few seconds afterward, I heard a flash go off as a camera snapped a picture.

Corey dropped the camera in the water as he let out a yelp of pain.

“Oh, dear god,” Dina yelled. I wasn’t sure why at first, maybe it was just a reaction to his behavior.

No. It was something else.

She had noticed it before me.

Corey the NPC had changed. He was now Corey (Possessed). Plot Armor: 3.

He was an enemy. Unlike most possessed enemies, he had no trope that would disguise him from us on the red wallpaper.

Corey (Possessed)

Plot Armor: 3

Tropes

Eyes of the Host

This creature is a scout for the enemy.

Hive Mind

This creature’s mind is linked to that of similar creatures.

Immortal Servant

This creature will not die of natural causes

Gradual Infection

After this creature is infected, it can take several scenes for them to completely turn.

Truthfully, he was likely infected when he almost drowned, but he was still an NPC then. We would not have been able to tell. Now that he had laid eyes upon the creature, he was a full-on minion. The Plot Cycle clicked to Second Blood. We still didn’t know what First Blood was. In this broken storyline, there may not have even been one.

“Corey,” Dina said. “You okay?”

He took a moment before answering.

“Yes,” he said. “This isn’t so bad.”

His voice was dreamy if slightly monotone.

Corey was definitely gone. His Gradual Infection trope oversold how gradual the infection would be.

“We better go,” Anna said. She sounded like she was feeling better. Not perfect, but better.

We had to let Corey come with us. Our characters wouldn’t know he was an enemy, not until he attacked us, of course. Then he would have to get the chop.

Exploring a cave in utter darkness was one of the most nerve-wracking things I had ever done. The water made things even worse than the darkness. I could hear splashing in the distance. Was that simply the water flowing down the sides of the cave or was there something over there?

Eventually, we turned a tight corner and, as we did, we saw light.

There was a small round beam of light shooting down from overhead. The hole in the ceiling was perfectly round. It was manmade.

“Is that-“ Anna started to say. She didn’t finish her sentence because as we walked closer, it became exceedingly clear what we were looking at.

It was an old-fashioned well. The kind you get water from.

The lighting was like something out of a movie. The bright light did not diffuse through the darkness, no, it stayed a beam all the way down to the ground. It looked like a spotlight shining in the darkness.

A long, thick rope hung down from the center of the hole, stretching fifty feet down until it ended at a small, wooden bucket. The bucket hung right over the water, hovering right about it without touching it.

In this small circle of light, the water was clear and blue.

“That rope looks brand new,” Dina said.

She was right. This wasn’t an old rotten rope. This had been replaced recently. The bucket also looked well-maintained.

“Oh lord,” I said, “Look.”

I pointed to the ground beneath the bucket.

Glistening in the spotlight, were countless coins. Thousands of them. Coins of all shapes and sizes. Gold, silver, copper. Most were old, some were even older. Most were the kind Carousel gave away, though one or two looked much older. Their lettering had mostly worn away, but they were not modern or written in English.

There weren’t only coins. There was jewelry with rubies, diamonds, and emeralds.

“Treasure,” Nicholas said. That was the first thing he had said in twenty minutes.

“It’s a wishing well,” Kimberly said.

That made sense. I looked up toward the circular hole at the top. I couldn’t see through to the other side. What I could see were roots. Hundreds of wispy roots poked through the ceiling above. I could only see near the well, but I was sure they were all over.

“I think we’re under the forest,” I said.

Camden retrieved his character’s folder, now soaking wet and falling apart. He found a map of the cave and estimated our location.

“Yeah,” he said. “We should be right under the forest on the west side of the property.”

Anna, Dina, and I looked at each other. We knew what that meant: Stragglers.

“We could climb out,” Nicholas said. “This rope looks sturdy.”

“Maybe you can,” Dina said. “I couldn’t.”

We knew why we shouldn’t climb that rope. It would lead to the forest with the Stragglers. We didn’t want a repeat of the last storyline. Our characters didn’t have any idea. Luckily, not being able to climb a fifty-foot rope is a pretty good excuse.

“Yeah,” Anna said. “Let’s find another way.”

Nicholas kept his eye on the rope. “Okay,” he said hesitantly.

It just dawned on me that he was still wearing his climbing harness from earlier that day. The first story with the Stragglers took place in nine or so years. He was wearing the exact same outfit he wore in that story when he escaped with us in the truck.

That reminded me.

“I get this feeling like we aren’t alone,” I said. “I feel like we’re being watched. Whatever that thing in the darkness was, I don’t think it was here alone. We need to get out of here.”

Cinema Seer couldn’t buff my allies if I didn’t make predictions.

The others nodded. They suspected we weren’t alone too.

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