Arc II, Chapter 80: The Lillian Scorned Contingency

What had the Stranger said to us? What truths had we been forced to be skeptical of?

I remembered he said this was a trap. He said it was a trick.

He said those things to our faces.

He said a lot of things. Which ones were truths masquerading as inane rantings I couldn’t say.

We thought we weren’t affected. We believed we knew what he was talking about, that Carousel was a trap, and that we had been tricked.

Suddenly, the veil lifted from my eyes, and I realized that The Stranger was telling us that we were currently being trapped—that some other trap was in the works.

But what?

Isaac started to laugh. “Does that mean that Project Rewind was bullshit?”

“Don’t say that!” I screamed. I got up and paced around. “No, why would it be a trap? It already had us. What was the point of Carousel tricking us again?”

Isaac continued to laugh. He laid back on the grass.

“For the fun of it,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious? To give you hope and watch it melt away.”

I couldn’t believe that—I wouldn’t believe that.

No.

The Geists didn’t fit the Throughline described in the Atlas, and the “tutorial” was askew in some way I could not determine.

That was the trap. I refused to believe that this thing–Project Rewind–so many of us had put our hopes in had been a ruse from the beginning. That didn’t make sense. Carousel was harsh and evil, but rarely mean.

I sat and thought for some explanation that would make the world upright again. None came.

Not at first.

“Hello, boys,” a man said. I hadn’t noticed him arrive.

It was Moonlight Morrow.

Even as a ghost, my blood froze in my veins.

He stood among us in the patch of grass surrounded by fog. He was still alive.

“See,” Isaac said, pointing to Moonlight. “He can talk to ghosts, but he has no trope for that on the red wallpaper. He’s been deceiving us this whole time.”

Moonlight watched my eyes as if looking for a reaction. He had been wearing a hat, but he took it off to talk to us.

When I gave no response, he spoke. “I do have tropes for communicating with ghosts. I am the Departed Paragon, after all. I hate to disappoint you, Isaac. I don’t need a trope to speak to the dead. Trust me when I say I earned my Archetype the old-fashioned way.”

Part of me wanted to theorize on that, but I had bigger fish to fry.

“Death,” I said. “It frees us from tropes that controlled us, didn’t it?”

Moonlight looked at me with a small smile. Was he happy with what I had said? Was he messing with me?

“Not all death frees you from what bound you in life, but this one did, yes,” Moonlight said. “You never really know yourself until you’ve seen the other side, I’ve found.”

Death. Were we set up to die precisely so that our existence as spirits could give us the clarity to see through the deception?

“So that’s the game, huh?” I asked, seething. “We discover the truth too late. Just soon enough to know that something was coming, some grand humiliation.”

Moonlight shook his head.

“You’re the player. In Carousel, the player chooses the game,” Moonlight said. “This scheme, using Paragons to manipulate players… It was artless. Carousel would know better.”

I froze.

“What?” I asked. “Carousel would know better… Does that mean?”

“Yes,” he said before I could finish my sentence. “This was not done by Carousel, but Carousel is no man’s fool.”

Moonlight started to walk. The fog cleared a path for him.

“Project Rewind, what a wonderful ploy,” he said. “Powerful. So much narrative force your homeworlders created with that plan. So well executed. By the time the Narrators figured it out, it had so much momentum they couldn’t stop it. Truly, a thing to behold. I thought the glory days of the players of the Game at Carousel were behind us. It turns out, they may just be beginning.”

Wait.

“Project Rewind,” I said. “It’s real? Please…”

I felt my throat clench as I waited for his answer.

“A group of players defying the heavens and… other forces to give themselves a second shot at the impossible? Under the noses of every Narrator who might seek to stop them? It is something worth believing in. I give you my word. That was not the trap, but there was a trap.”

I felt a surge of emotion well up in me. I cried just at the words. I needed to hear that. I couldn’t help it. I needed to believe he was telling the truth. Why lie at this late hour?

Even if everything is a lie, that couldn’t be the lie. I wouldn’t believe it. Camden and Anna had died giving us the Atlas so we could learn of Project Rewind. It couldn’t be a lie.

But what was the lie?

Isaac was awfully quiet. He kept a smirk on his lips. He needed to doubt what Moonlight was saying. He felt more comfortable in a world where he had a fix on things.

“What is going on?” I asked.

Moonlight looked at me with pity, but he did not answer my question.

“I’m supposed to ask you to accompany me to my death scene. You see, Roderick Gray sees that some camp counselor is putting a certain flask into the time capsule. He makes a move to steal it, thinking he will summon that curse again, but I catch him in the act and what do you know, the flask activates itself, as has been foreshadowed. In the ensuing chaos, he kills me and stuffs me in the one place he thinks no one will look for a hundred years.”

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“The time capsule,” I said. “Your body was in the time capsule.”

The storylines of the supposed “Tutorial” had happened in reverse chronological order. Everything we saw was time loop shenanigans. The real truth was in the past, that much was clear. Now I wondered why all of the theatrics. Why was any of this done?

“You already figured that out, did you? He will be pleased you took his little throughline so seriously.”

I had thought about this a lot.

A whole lot.

“I didn’t know specifics. I knew you were in there, your body. The scene we were forced to watch of Mayor Gray opening the capsule with his whole confused and terrified act. That was because he knew that in the true course of events, he was the one who buried it, right? Time was broken. The loop kept rubbing it in his face, haunting him. Three years from now in 1995, when the flood happens for the second storyline—the real version, the time capsule is unearthed and warped by the water. Your soul escapes and possesses him again. That’s the actual end, right?”

Moonlight smiled.

“I suppose that means you don’t need to come see what happens to me. There are more pressing places for you to be.”

He waved his hand and a path opened in the fog.

I stared in the direction the path led.

“Why would you be helping us?” I asked.

Moonlight thought for a moment.

“You see, they went too far. Tied your strings too tight in hopes of achieving their ends. Carousel didn’t like that. That’s why I could lend a hand. Help you help yourself. I am the Mayor of Carousel. I serve the people, not the Narrators. Death does not pick favorites.” He began to walk away. He was not bound by the fog like we were. As he left, he said. “The train is not yet at the station, Mr. Lawrence. You still have time, if just barely. Good luck.”

Isaac and I ran. The Plot Cycle was moving again and we were certain that the Final Battle was underway.

“What are we doing?” Isaac asked. “You’re trusting him just like that? Have you learned nothing?”