Chapter Seventy-Seven: Corporate Rat Race

As the truth of our situation was revealed, a lot of things started to make sense. The ease with which we had gotten employment, the requirement for head scans, the questions about my “psychic” grandmother, the strange job descriptions and schedules. We weren’t employees at all. We were test subjects. We had so readily assumed that all the weirdness was because we were in Carousel.

Figuring that out was my job, wasn’t it? I knew the corporation was hiding something, but I didn’t figure out what it was. I thought being spied on was just a clue that the corporation was shady. I knew that they were likely antagonists, but the twist still smacked me in the face.

I would have to do better.

Now I knew that something else was about to drop. In the hours since First Blood, the plot needle had started moving faster, rapidly increasing the pressure on the players. The revelation at Rebirth had come and gone. We were only a handful of scenes from Second Blood.

I needed to think.

Obviously, we needed to escape, but any progress we made would be illusory. It was too early to escape. Something else was yet to be revealed. For as much as we had learned about the Distortion, we still didn’t know everything. We didn’t even know what it was. Somehow, this creature would find a way to assert itself as we tried to escape. I had to be alert.

I pondered all of this as I watched the screens. Dina was almost to the Mercers. She had taken a long route on her own. I wasn’t going to help guide her. Antoine, Camden, and Kimberly were currently checking on an area of the floor for a hidden exit. Even with the monitors, the exits were hard to find.

On-Screen.

“Are you sure there is nothing there?” Anna asked them from beside me. She had stayed behind with me for protection—my protection. Not that either of us could necessarily do anything against the Distortion.

“I pulled on all of the furniture,” Antoine answered. “There’s nothing else to do short of breaking through the drywall.”

Anna looked at me.

“Let’s save that for later,” I said. “The next possible room is three doors further, Room 327. If it’s not there I’m going to have to send you over to the southwest corner to try there.”

I flipped the microphone off.

“As soon as we find a way out, trouble is coming our way,” I said.

“You’re so sure of that?” Anna asked. “You saw it in a movie?”

“I just have a feeling. And yes, anyone who has seen a movie would know there is no way we get out of this without even seeing this… thing… again.”

“Did those movies tell you how to fight it if we do see it?”

I had no answer. If there was a weakness… surely we would have seen some hint of it. Unless we missed it. We had already spent an hour at least searching this floor for a pharmacy or wherever it was that they kept the medicine for the patients. That location had eluded us; it was probably on a different floor.

We had discovered sleeping quarters—enough to house all of the supposed day-shift employees. It was all fake. Whoever these scientists were they lived here and worked here and apparently never left. They devoted their lives to studying the Distortion. They devoted this week to studying us.

“I think our best bet is to make sure we don’t have to fight it,” I answered.

Carousel had given us Antoine’s baseball bat but I was confident that that was just because he brought it not because it would be an effective weapon. Still, he held it ready to take a swing at anything he came across. I wasn’t going to tell him it was useless.

I hoped it wouldn’t be useless despite my better judgment.

The plan was to get Antoine, Camden, and Kimberly to the highest floor and then Anna and I would follow them. There were a lot fewer rooms up there so we could probably just brute force the search once we got there.

The way we saw it, there were two viable strategies. We either needed to be so spread out that it couldn’t hop from one of us to the next or we needed to be in one group that was so far away from the Mercers that it had no chance of getting to us.

Choosing to be in one big group was literally putting all of our eggs in one basket but in the end, we decided that spreading out would be difficult to coordinate and that if we failed it would be able to leapfrog from one of us to the next all the same.

Antoine was our backup plan. His character wasn’t highly intelligent like Camden’s nor did he have latent psychic abilities. Theoretically, on his own, he would only have to contend with the weakest version of the Distortion. Still, that might be deadly. He was our last resort. If everything went to hell, Antoine would lure the Distortion as far away from the rest of us as possible.

“She’s there,” Anna said, staring at the monitors that covered the Mercers’ holding area. I could only hope she knew what she was doing.

For whatever reason, she didn’t want to tell us why she insisted on saving them. Obviously, her character had motivations, but surely she knew the risks.

Dina had arrived at her destination. She was quick to start unlocking her children and husband. She wrapped each of them in a deep embrace as they cried with joy.

“You heard us!” Bethany Mercer screamed. “I knew you heard us. I knew you would come.”

Dina started to cry. It didn’t look like she was acting.

“Of course I heard you, baby,” she hugged her fake family even tighter.

So that was the information Dina was operating under. Her psychic kids had reached out to her. It was also possible that her Encouragement from Beyond trope was flexible enough to work with kidnapped psychic kids and not just dead kids.

I suppose that was the information that she didn’t want to try to explain. When a player arrives in a storyline, NPCs will often point you in the direction you were supposed to go. Sometimes they were subtle, like when everyone was being rude to me in Delta Epsilon Delta. Sometimes it was explicit like the woman in The Astralist literally telling us everything we needed to do.

In this storyline, it looked like Dina had been given her instructions in the form of her psychic kids reaching out to her telepathically or something similar. I could only hope that meant her path would somehow lead to our escape. I couldn’t imagine how releasing the Mercers could ever be a good thing.

“Please don’t release the rest,” I said over the loudspeaker. “There is no telling what might happen. You saw what the consequences were the last time.”

Dina didn’t respond.

The other Mercers could see from the windows on their doors that Dina had released her family. I could hear them begging to be released. With a glance up at the camera, Dina ignored them, dragging her children and husband out of the cell area and back the way she came.

It would take a long while for them to get to the floor we were on with the path she was taking. I would have to watch out for her.

“Room 327 is a bust,” Camden said.

“Alright,” I said. You need to take the corridor to your left. It circles around for a bit. Then you have to go through the employee barracks and out the other side.”

“I really hope this one works,” Kimberly said. “I feel like we’ve been walking for miles.”

I kept track of the needle on the plot cycle. We were really burning through our time limit. The audience might not notice a difference. To them, the Party Phase had been chopped up into an easily digestible sequence of events. To us, it had lasted days. Rebirth was only going to last hours at the rate things were going.

I guided Antoine, Camden, and Kimberly as they made their way to the next area that I thought might have a secret elevator or stairway leading upward.

“Why would they design it like this?” Anna asked. “Why hide all of the exits like this?”

My first instinct was to say that it was designed like this so that it would be really hard for us to escape and they could make a tense movie out of it. But in-universe, there was another reason it was designed this way.

“For this exact scenario,” I said. “I think they want it to be really hard to get out of here if you don’t know the way. Mercers, test subjects, whoever.”

If that was the case, it was working.

We waited for ten more minutes and then I saw it.

It wasn’t on Floor 2B. Somehow, it appeared on the floor we were on. It had manifested directly above the Mercers’ containment area. Just over 100 feet above, in fact. That was a huge increase in range.

Its manifestation range appeared to be much further than its tethering range.

We had planned on it entering through the stairs somehow. We never expected it to just appear on this floor. This entire facility was designed with that assumption. Without their medication suppressing their psychic abilities, the Distortion was clearly more dangerous.

It probably didn’t help that the remaining Mercers were really upset right at that moment, having been left behind in their cells.

“Look alive,” I said into the microphone. “The Distortion is seventy feet to your left. I’m gonna have to guide you around it. Pick up your pace.”

Based on the video from the night before, uts tethering range was a dozen or so feet. I needed to get them away from it fast. It could easily have a longer range after the medication started wearing off.

I needed them to listen to me very carefully. Unlike the floor below us, 3B had far fewer electronic doors. There were no test subjects or Mercers on that floor, after all. It would be much more difficult to keep the creature away from them.

“I need all of you to run down the hallway on your first right. Antoine are you up for what we talked about?”

“Yes!” He yelled.

He was ready to make the sacrifice.

“Keep running down the hallway. All of you.”

The Distortion wasted no time in pursuing my friends. It was hopping from monitor to monitor. Its path was remarkably efficient as if it somehow knew exactly where they were headed and the fastest way to cut them off.

It was going too fast.

I searched for some path to send Antoine on, to use him as a lure for the Distortion so the others would be safe. Antoine was willing. He was the best suited to outrun the entity. He was also likely the one safest from its wrath because if it tethered to him it would be in its weakest form.

But I couldn’t find a path to make it work.

They were essentially in a big corner. There were no paths I could send Antoine down that would not eventually lead back to them. If I tried, I might be able to pull it off, but failure would mean losing them all.

“Stick together,” I said. “Straight ahead. Run as fast as you can.”

They started to sprint.

This wasn’t good. Antoine and Kimberly had fairly good Hustle, but Camden’s was only at 2. He could hide, but I wasn’t sure that would work with this enemy.

I switched on one of the speakers nearest to them. I had to speak quickly because soon they would run out of range to be able to hear it and I didn’t want them slowing down.

They couldn’t afford to slow down.

“Left at the water fountain but then a quick right at the very next hallway. Close the door behind you.”

They got to the water fountain and quickly found the door next to it. Antoine opened it and closed it behind them. I quickly reactivated the electronic lock.

“Now you’re going to run straight.”

The hallway that the Distortion was moving along was parallel to the one they were running down. If the Distortion caught up to them, I was certain it would be able to pass right through the wall and tether to someone.

“Faster!” Anna screamed into the microphone.

Things weren’t looking good. The needle on the plot cycle wasn’t close enough to Second Blood that I was confident that a death would count for anything. If they died too soon, they would be dying for nothing.

“You have hairpin turns coming up.”

After that, they would enter a large room that looked like it might have been a recreational area with a ping pong table and arcade machines. There was a humongous fish tank in the center that was long and narrow, dividing the space in two. When they got to that room, the fish tank would be all that was between them and the Distortion until they could get down the hallway.

They entered the room.

“Take a right. It’s behind you!” I screamed.

There was a loud crash.

The Distortion might not have been able to get through a door in its weakened, hostless form, but it could make it through a glass fish tank. A flood of water poured out onto the ground as the invisible stalker crashed right through the glass.

“It has… footsteps,” Anna said under her breath.

It did have something like footsteps. As the Distortion trudged through the water, ripples were made in strange, irregular patterns. Doctor Mentes had said that this manifestation had a physical form. He was right. Even without a host. There was one large set of footsteps and a bunch of other disturbances in the water I couldn’t explain.

“Now run like your life depends on it!” I screamed into the microphone.

They somehow found an even faster speed. Antoine was literally pulling Camden along as Kimberly ran in front.

They were coming up on a T-junction.

“I’m unlocking the door to the junction you need to take a left and then keep running; it’s going to get more complicated from there—a lot of twists and turns just go through the open doors.”

They got to the junction and made a sharp left.

I didn’t lock the door behind them. This thing seemed to understand whether it had an open path. I needed it to think it could follow them.

The Distortion was close. I had to hope that it wasn’t close enough for a tether. I held my breath as they slowly made their way across the monitors.

As soon as the Distortion entered the junction area I closed all three doors, trapping it inside the intersection. The only way it could get through those doors was if it had someone to tether to.

Antoine, Camden, and Kimberly were one room away.

Two rooms away.

Three rooms and a hallway.

Still, I couldn’t be sure what range this thing had.

For a few tense minutes, I watched the Distortion just to make sure it was really trapped.

I could see that there were audio spikes inside the junction where I locked it in. I flipped on the speaker and heard it faintly knocking against the metal door.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t going anywhere.

After ten minutes, the Distortion started to blink on the screen and soon it disappeared.

As it faded from the screen, I frantically looked at every monitor in the room.

Was it gone, or had it simply manifested elsewhere?

It could clearly be summoned at a much further range than before. I needed to keep my eyes on the monitors.

I watched the screens with Antoine, Kimberly, and Camden. There was no Distortion.

“It worked?” Anna asked.

“I think so,” I answered. “We might actually have a way to keep this thing away from us.”

I flipped a switch on the monitor for the room the others were running through and said, “Coast is clear. You can proceed to the southwest corner.”

I started figuring out a route for them to take.

Once they got to the level above, it would only be one more floor until I could get them out of the building.

But nothing could be that easy.

A red light began flashing on several of the monitors—those relating to the Mercers’ cells.

HQ OVERRIDE.

The words appeared on the screens of the affected monitors. KRSL was remotely leading the fight to us.

I knew we were due for some bad luck. We couldn’t escape before Second Blood or the Finale. That wasn’t how these things worked.

“And there it is,” I said. “Dammit!”

The Mercers’ doors all opened, as did a line of doors leading them to the same staircase we had taken to get up here.

Even with the staff here dead, KRSL would not let us leave. They were watching us still, hoping to see the results of Dr. Mentes’ efforts.

We were nearly to Second Blood.

Experiment 17 was still underway.

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