Book Eight, Chapter 35: Keep Swimming

“Is Ramona there?” I asked from a distance, keeping an eye out near the water tower.

I didn’t get an answer. Maybe I didn’t ask loud enough. Antoine was quickly climbing up the fence the posters had been stapled to because the newest posters were at the top.

I looked out in the distance. I could see large yellow tents, but the circus wasn’t close enough for the psychic effect to start triggering yet. Our problem was not going to be clowns. It was going to be Omens and free-range enemies fleeing the apocalypse.

And those were all over.

Killers, mutants, disgruntled housewives—standard enemies.

There was a herd of possessed toys running in the distance. They hadn’t noticed us yet, and they didn’t have a particular destination in mind. They just followed their leader, a child-sized stuffed bear, as it ran for cover. I didn’t know what they were worried about. The circus seemed like a fine home for such beings, but with the way they were running, it appeared that wasn’t the case.

Antoine jumped down from the fence, holding two posters. Only two.

“Just Andrew and Kimberly?” I asked as he ran back toward me and we began our run to the river.

“That was it,” he said.

“No Ramona or any of the others that jumped into the water?”

He shook his head. “Maybe they got out.”

The situation had looked impossible when we floated away. I was certain that by the time we got to the water tower, we would find all four of the players who had been forced into the river had been postered, and perhaps Logan, Michael, or Lorne among them.

But in truth, it might have been too early. Those left behind on the platform could easily be hiding up in the rafters, doing their best to bide their time, their fate all but sealed once they finally had to make an escape.

I worried those who had jumped in the river might have gotten trapped in a storyline that had not yet finished. I could use Coming To A Theater Near You to check, but I would need to run a storyline to reset it for new storylines.

I had to push those thoughts out of my mind, as difficult as it might be, and focus on our survival. Because if we survived, then all of the fallen would have a chance. That’s what I had to tell myself.

The path back to the river was less than a mile. We found Anna and Camden there with the boat pulled up on shore. They looked scared out of their minds, but because neither of them had a scouting trope, that meant that the crybaby would detect Omens for them.

We jumped back in the boat before any of those living toys found the river.

~

Being that the waterway wound through all parts of Carousel, those that made sense and those that didn’t, once we left Carousel proper, it was hard to gauge how much distance we were actually getting. We must have floated for miles, but then I would look up at the shore and see parts of town that I recognized.

I had long lost track of time when Cassie woke up.

She had been at the bottom of the boat, her head resting upon Andrew’s jacket just as it had been. But when she awoke, she started to weep immediately.

She sat up and looked around at us in disbelief.

“I’m alive?” she asked.

I nodded.

She took a few deep breaths and tried to manage the tears. When she had fallen asleep, she didn’t expect to wake up, not for a long time, not until after death.

“Did you rescue me?” She moved her hands around her body, looking for injuries, looking for… I didn’t know what, some sign of what had happened.

“Cassie,” Anna said, “we decided to take you on the river instead of sacrificing you. It’s been about three hours since you were put to sleep.”

Cassie reached out and hugged Anna before looking around the boat.

“No Isaac or Andrew?” she asked. “How did you convince them to stay behind?”

For as much as they teased her, she knew it was a given that they would do whatever it took to protect her.

When we didn’t answer at first, her eyes narrowed.

Kimberly would have already stepped in by now. Anna was more timid, especially after having been killed and rescued. But with Kimberly gone, Anna would have to step up, because I certainly didn’t know how to tell Cassie that her brothers were dead or missing, all because they wanted to save her.

But that is what Anna told her, directly, in almost those exact words.

“Isaac ended up jumping into the river to escape,” Anna said. “There was no missing poster for him, so he must still be alive. But Andrew… we were attacked by a rogue enemy, and Andrew didn’t make it.”

It was only then that Cassie looked down and saw Andrew’s jacket, where he had left it rolled up underneath her head. And then from there, her eyes went to the red tinge of blood that we hadn’t been able to wash out of the bottom of the boat.

Cassie jumped up onto the seat next to Anna.

“I told you that I was okay with dying,” she said. “Why didn’t you just do that? It would have been painless for everyone.”

Why didn’t we put her sleeping body in the dungeon so that she would die before waking up and triggering the apocalypse with her psychic powers? Because I had a hunch that the meta-narrative wouldn’t like it. I had been so certain of it back at the castle. But now that I was going to have to explain that to Cassie, when her brothers’ fates were so dire, I didn’t feel certain at all.

The theory was one thing. Reality was another.

But I did explain it as best I could, and Cassie could only repeat that she had been a willing sacrifice, that we should have gone with her wishes.

Truth be told, I practically blacked out for the whole conversation, and all I could do was nod, because whether I was right or wrong, I was the reason that Andrew was dead and Isaac was treading water, for all I knew. And if Cassie was going to be upset with someone, it had to be me.

We didn’t even tell her about Kimberly yet.

We rode on the river, avoiding Omens that I saw, like whirlpools and any logs that looked suspiciously like sea monsters, which was all of them, pretty much, when you were scared.

Anna kept her up to date on the status of Isaac and the others to the best of her ability. Her trope, Are You Okay In There was powerful, but limited. She could tell their emotional state. Basically, everyone was worried, and some were panicked. Maybe it wasn’t the most useful trope outside of a storyline. That being said, panicking was better than being dead.

Cassie had cried herself to a state of numbness, meaning she was on the same page as the rest of us.

“Bridge ahead,” I said. “No one look up when we pass underneath.”

A man was standing at the top of the bridge, and if you looked up, he was going to drop some cursed object down and hit you smack in the face, which would trigger a storyline. It was one we could handle, but we hadn’t had the conversation about which Omen we were going to trigger yet.

But we would certainly trigger one of them. We needed somewhere to sleep, and many storylines had some relatively safe place for you to stay temporarily after you beat them, as we had done with The Strings Attached.

“It’s weird,” Camden said, after we had crossed under the bridge and passed right by that potential disaster. “There was supposed to be a turnoff over there, right under that bridge.”

Camden had an exact copy of the map drawn up by Lucky’s team on the red wallpaper because of his Photographic Memory trope. It would seem we were floating down a part of the river that he remembered.

Looking back, I could confirm that there was no fork in the river, no inlet or outlet of any kind. It was just a grassy shore, a little bit too high to pull the boat up next to.

“But there was an Omen,” Camden said, thinking out loud.

“So the Omens are the turnoffs?” I said. “That’s how you sail the river, right? Triggering Omens to open up new parts of the river.”

“It would appear so,” Camden said. “The map wasn’t so clear.”

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“That means we might need to trigger a storyline at a moment’s notice,” Antoine said. “How are we supposed to prep for that?”

Prep? We didn’t have that luxury.

“High Savvy general strategy,” Camden said. “With Antoine and Anna as melee, the rest of us are Insight. Cassie, go defensive tropes. Riley, you stick to the side.”

I knew that once he had the opportunity, Camden was going to be able to take some of the leadership burden. We all had to take part in that burden.

For the next few moments, we put our oars in the water to try to slow ourselves down, but we quickly learned that while you can speed up, slowing down was a little harder, unless you could find a lazy part of the river.

We each equipped a set of tropes that we thought would be flexible, regardless of the storyline we ended up in.

Luckily, we had always been invested in Savvy. Camden and I were high Savvy, and Antoine, Anna, and Cassie all had great support tropes for Savvy-based players.

Still, we had come to rely on scouting out storylines and coming up with specific strategies. We were going to have to learn to be a lot more flexible.

We sailed along the river, and it was the same old story: dodge the monsters, dodge the Omens, feast your eyes on all the grandeur and beauty that Carousel had hidden horrific things inside of. Pretty much every direction you went in Carousel ended up in mountain ranges, but where the west had Dyer’s Lake and the south had canyons and eventual deserts, the north had a much greater variety. It had an unfinished quality. There were small lakes here and there, high mountains, and secluded forests.

And that was just in Carousel proper. On the occasion that we rounded a bend and ended up in some strange fold in Carousel’s hidden dimensions, we ended up seeing things even more fantastical.

As we went along the river, we found ourselves careening down a thinner and thinner path until eventually the river turned into nothing but a large pipe, so big that the boat and all of us could fit in it easily, and the pipe flowed through some kind of chemical plant with workers who didn’t pay us any mind.

And then we went out the drainage hole for that building, and we were back out in a real river.

The only difference was that we were incredibly tiny, like FernGully tiny, and the plants around us were enormous. Giant bugs were now enemies, and even the slightest disturbance in the water felt like the world was blowing up beneath us.

After we went through some river rapids, the world turned back to its normal size again, and we sailed on.

“There’s supposed to be a turnoff up ahead,” Camden said. “I think this route is part of the one Lucky’s team went on.”

“How far ahead?” I asked.

“It’s hard to say. None of this has been making sense. Maybe a few miles.”

“Are we taking that route?” Antoine asked. “Do we have any reason to?”

We certainly weren’t ready to commit to Lucky’s throughline, but maybe familiarity itself would make it worth it.

“What do you know about it?” I asked Camden.

“They camped there for several nights,” he said. “There are actual campgrounds.”

“That’s what we need,” Antoine said. “A place to stay and wait out the apocalypse. We have tents from Eternal Savers Club.”

The tone he struck wasn’t excited or encouraging. The most he could muster was resolve. A hardened look on his face told me that he was doing everything he could to stay strong.

The loss of Andrew and Kimberly was particularly problematic for him because Andrew was his literal psychiatrist, with plenty of tropes to help keep him in his best state of mind, and Kimberly had become his rock.

Whatever problems lingered from his time in the Straggler Forest had been well hidden for quite a while due to their efforts.

I had to hope he could stay strong until all the wrongs had been righted.

We sailed on until I found the Omen that Camden interpreted to be the turnoff to the campsite we were after.

The storyline would take more than moderate effort from us, but we had seen worse.