Arc II, Chapter 82: The Narrator Part One

We stood there as the words from the tape echoed in each of our minds.

“Featured” Throughline? That had to mean that there was more than one. The tone of the tape, the way it was phrased, it almost seemed like there were lots of Throughlines that players could go on. It was hard to separate reality from the strange, game-like façade that obscured everything in Carousel.

Had we nearly signed on to Silas Dyrkon’s own personal Throughline in his “employ,” whatever that meant? It certainly seemed so.

Where did the colorful language end and the hard facts begin?

As I pondered this, Silas the Mechanical Showman repeated his spiel in the background as the sounds of the Centennial Celebration grew quieter.

A voice called out from behind us.

“So,” it said, “You figured it out at the last minute. I’m not surprised. I did get a little greedy there, didn’t I?”

We all turned to see Silas Dyrkon, the man in the flesh. He was tall and well-dressed, though his collar had been loosened, and his suit jacket hung over his shoulder. His hair and eyes were dark. He could have been a movie star in his youth. Now, he looked hollow, tired.

“Yes,” he continued. “I am not surprised that the script was altered to give you a fighting chance at discovering my ruse; I just want to know who actually acted on it. Who did the deed? Was it Celia Dane, that old viper? It was, wasn’t it? Don’t tell me it was The Strang—”

“It was me, Silas,” Moonlight Morrow said, appearing out of nowhere as far as I could tell, along with all of the other Paragons we had met during the Tutorial (if that really was a Tutorial).

Silas turned to look at him. Moonlight stood firm.

“After all that talk about how players just need to learn their place in the story, you helped them?” Silas asked.

Moonlight stayed silent for a moment and then said, “You know it’s funny. Narrators are the only people in Carousel who believe they aren’t a part of the story.”

Silas looked at him curiously, but his curiosity turned to dread as Silas the Mechanical Showman appeared next to him.

He stared at the red button on the machine’s front and then back at Moonlight.

“No,” he said weakly.

“See for yourself,” Moonlight said.

I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

Silas contemplated his actions for a moment, then reached out his hand and pressed the big red button.

As he did, a large ticket dropped from the machine’s receptacle.

He slowly reached down and picked it up.

He didn’t take a single breath as he read the ticket. Whatever blood was left in his tired face drained.

“I see,” he said after he had finished reading it. “It is nice to finally have an answer.”

I would never know what that ticket said, but whatever it was, it put the fear of Carousel into Silas Dyrkon.

He reached into his pocket and retrieved a small silver tool that I recognized as a hole puncher. He lifted it up to the ticket, but before he clicked it, he looked back at my friends and me and said, “I suppose I will need to explain some things first.”

He lowered the hole punch back into his pocket and then swirled the ticket in his hands. He was thinking to himself.

While most of us were silent, Isaac leaned over and gestured toward Silas Dyrkon and his mechanical twin. He said with a grin, “I think I’m seeing double.”

Before Isaac could laugh at his own joke, Silas said, “Really? Because I don’t think they captured my roguish features.”

His words were a jokey retort, but his tone was even as if his heart wasn’t in it.

After a deep breath, he asked, “What does the term ‘through line’ mean?”

No one answered. It wasn’t that we didn’t know the answer; we were all a little frazzled.

“You do have the term ‘through line’ back in your world, don’t you? When I say through line, do you register it as an existing term? You didn’t hear it here for the first time, did you?”

At first, I thought he was being an ass, but the way he said it, it was like he was asking a genuine question as if it was entirely possible through line was an alien concept to us.

“We know the term,” Antoine said.

“Good. What does it mean?” Silas asked.

“A connecting theme in a story,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a common term, but we had heard it.

Silas nodded. “Players always have trouble with Throughlines. They treat them like they are some sort of movie series or overstory. I always wondered how much the architects of Project Rewind actually knew about what they were doing. When you brought that Atlas of yours onto my Sound Stage, suddenly, I realized how little they knew about anything. Remarkable to have been beaten by a group of players who didn’t even understand what they were doing.”

He took a breath and said, “A Throughline is not just about storylines connected to each other. It is about the thing that connects them and that connects every action players take in one singular effort.” He looked back at the ticket in his hands and said, “How will I explain this?”

He thought for a moment.

“What connected the storylines I sent you on?” Silas asked. “What were you doing the entire time you were attempting my Throughline?”

There was certainly a plot that connected all of the stories, but that seemed obvious. The plot was about Lillian Geist’s paradoxical premature death. That couldn’t be what he meant.

Summoning all of the courage I could, I said, “Just tell us. We’re too tired for this patronizing lecture.”

Silas almost looked relieved to hear that. “Very well.”

He snapped his fingers.

Suddenly, we weren’t at the Centennial anymore. We were standing in a large crowd next to a stage. It was the first Miss Carousel Pageant if the large glittery banner was to be believed.

Up on stage, an eighteen-year-old Lillian Geist was accepting her tiara and sash.

There were NPCs around us, but they didn’t seem to notice us. Lillian was breathtaking. She accepted her award with a smile, but there was nothing behind it. She seemed almost wary of the crowd.

“Lillian Geist is always beautiful. Every single version of her. Whether her name is Lillian or not, she is always known for her looks. Look at her. She thinks her father paid the judges off for her victory, but he didn’t. She won it on her own merits. A sad thought that she never knew that.”

Another snap of his fingers, and we were back at the Centennial. The monstrous version of Lillian Geist’s body lay before us.

“Lillian Giest, no matter if that is her name, will always be disfigured by the time of her death. It doesn’t matter what the Narrator does. It always happens. To be fair, my version ended up a touch crueler than I had hoped, but then I did leave her in the hands of a mad scientist. One more bad deed I will have to live with.”

He looked up at us and said, “Carlyle Geist always enjoys making movies or writing books or telling tales around the campfire. He always dies being betrayed by a friend.” Silas looked up at me as he said it. “You see, there has always been a town and there has always been a family. The town was not always called Carousel, and the family was not called Geist, thank heavens, but it has always been this place, and it has always been these people.”

This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

He took a moment to catch his breath.

“You see, I built this version of Carousel on this Sound Stage myself. Built for the Throughline of my own design. Every step along the way, I forced you to seek the hidden history of the Geists. To seek, but not find. Because the answers about the Geists always change, but the questions stay the same. Understanding the Geists by watching them in modern Carousel is like watching shadows on the wall to learn about who cast them.”

He snapped his fingers, and Carousel changed. The modern town was gone, and all that remained was a road leading up to a mansion on a hill. Lighting flashed in the background. A gate had a sign that read, “Geist Manor.”

It was not the Geist Manor I knew.