Book Eight, Chapter 39: Overboard

“It’s no use,” Antoine said, “We’re on a leash.”

He tried to power the little trolling motor forward. The vegetation that had ensnared the propeller of the main engines was still attached, and try as we might, we couldn’t pull away from it.

“What did you do to this lake?” Cassie asked Camden. “What were you trying to cover up?”

“Cover up?” Camden asked. “KRSL wasn’t trying to cover up anything. We were just cleaning up after ourselves. We weren’t even forced to. We did it of our own accord. I don’t know what’s going on here, but it has nothing to do with us.”

“Listen to the water,” Cassie said. “Do you hear any engines? Sound travels fast at night. There are no boats on the water right now, none that are running at least. We may be the only ones left on the lake. The rescuers are probably…”

She couldn’t even force herself to say the words.

The sun had set while we attempted to make any forward progress toward shore.

Whatever that thing was that didn’t show up on the red wallpaper, it was some sort of monster, not a ghost, and as a result, Cassie’s role as a psychic shifted. We figured she could stir the pot and create some antagonism.

We needed to work at making her more relevant in non-supernatural stories.

“Why are you asking me? All we did was leak some heavy metals in it,” Camden said. “It was before my time. We cleaned them up, and we restocked the lake. That was it. What I wanna know is why that thing looks like your sister,” he said, looking at Anna.

“That wasn’t Joanne,” Anna said. “Maybe I hoped… I don’t know what I hoped, but it wasn’t her. You saw it.”

“I saw that it bore a remarkable likeness to your dead sister. If anyone here has to explain what’s going on, it has to be you,” Camden said.

All I did was sit back and film the person who was talking. Occasionally, another copy of Joanne would pop up in the water, and I might film her, but beyond that, we were just busy giving Carousel some lines to work with.

Those fake drowning victims were some of the freakiest monsters I had seen in Carousel.

As far as I could tell, we were trapped, and trapped good. We were at least twenty meters from shore in any direction, and I had no doubt that whatever this plant creature was, it could pick us off before we got there.

“This is useless,” Antoine said. “It doesn’t matter whose fault it is. We don’t know what this thing is. Let’s start there. Now, you said that your team was gathering plant samples. What did they find?”

Camden gave Anna one last glare and went to where he had stored the samples from his team.

“They were bladderworts. I told you that,” Camden said.

“A shot of penicillin should fix them up real quick, then,” I said. Was it too late for a little humor?

“Bladderworts,” he said again angrily, trying not to laugh. “The plant with the little yellow flowers.”

We had seen them all over the lake. We thought nothing of them. They didn’t show up on the red wallpaper.

“Bladderwort is not an explanation,” Anna said. “Tell us what it is.”

Camden huffed and puffed, but he answered anyway.

“It is a small carnivorous plant that lives in water or mud,” he said. “Actually, it is a fairly interesting plant, despite how common it is.”

“Carnivorous?” Antoine asked. “Like a Venus flytrap?”

Camden shrugged. “That is another carnivorous plant, but personally, I find the bladderwort far more interesting. It has the most sophisticated structure of any aquatic plant. Heck, of any plant. You see, it’s got a little trap, a bladder. To our eyes, it might look like a tiny bean casing, but it’s completely hollow. And I don’t mean filled with air. I mean, it’s pulling a vacuum underwater. When small aquatic animals trigger the trap, it opens a door, and everything nearby is sucked in by negative pressure. The trap closes, and digestion begins.”

He was holding a book on aquatic plants in his right hand.

Antoine and I looked at each other, lit up by the boat’s deck lights.

“You have to be making this up,” he said. “How come I’ve never heard of this? That sounds absolutely crazy.”

Camden rolled his eyes. “Because the plant feeds on microbes, you know, tiny shellfish that you can’t even see, bacteria, detritus, maybe some mosquito larvae. It’s tiny. That’s why I was telling you that this has nothing to do with what is happening right now.”

We kept bickering back and forth, and it felt like we were going nowhere.

Eventually, we went Off-Screen.

“What we’re doing isn’t working,” I said. “Camden, we need you to switch tack here.”

He paused for a moment. “So you want me to say that this is definitely what’s at fault, like a mutant?”

“Well, if excluding it as a suspect doesn’t work, then maybe that is the way to go about it,” I said. “The needle on the plot cycle hasn’t moved forward in an hour of discussion.”

He nodded.

“All right,” he said. “Let me get this set up.” He took out the samples that he’d collected from the pontoon across the cove and set them out. Then he took out a magnifying glass, ready for the next moment he went On-Screen.

“It would seem that the evolutionary pressures of the pollution, combined with the need to adapt and find new food sources, may have triggered a mutation or adaptation beyond our imagination,” he said.

“You’ve got five minutes before you’re On-Screen,” I said.

“I’m practicing,” he said.

We had narrowed down the possibilities. We had given Carousel all the lines it needed to tell the story of some sort of ancient plant lost to time, or perhaps a strange cryptid, or a plant-based mermaid. Mutant was the next angle. We would have gotten there a lot faster because of the pollution detail, but the fact that it looked so much like Anna’s sister complicated things. The mutant angle didn’t explain that.

At that point, I was ready to point a finger at Anna’s dad having rigged up some sort of submarine monster designed to imitate his daughter and trap the people he believed caused her death, but that theory was a long shot, and we were all out of Scooby snacks.

On-Screen.

“It’s strange,” Camden said as he held up a light and a magnifying glass to stare at the plant samples. “I see much of the plant structure is identical to what you would expect, but I can’t find any of their bladders anywhere.”

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

I bit my tongue to stop myself from telling a joke.

“What are the implications of that?” Anna asked, really trying to get some mileage out of her Lead-In Line trope to give narrative weight to the information Camden was revealing.

“The implication is either that they have evolved to no longer have their bladder, which would be absurd because it is one of nature’s finest mechanical feats, or the structure is simply located elsewhere on the plant. We may be looking at a completely new kind of bladderwort.”

I had to bite my tongue again. I had already done a bladderwort joke.

Besides, I was a little distracted because the moment he said that, the moment it left his lips, the little piece of plant matter that he was looking at appeared on the red wallpaper.

Utricularia (Mutant)
Plot Armor: 40		__________
Tropes
Undiscovered Species	This creature is unknown to man. Until its status as a novel species is recognized, no meta-insight can be gained from it. Its powers can grow until they are defined.
Intelligent Adaptation	This creature has several abilities, making it ideal for hunting players and undermining their efforts. Continue Reading You are reading a free preview (50%). Log in to unlock the full chapter and join comments. Log In to UnlockCreate Account Related chapter tags #thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgchapter39#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgchapter40#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgchapter41#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpglatestchapter#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgreadonline 0 chapter views Related Novels Chrysalis Unbound Elder [OP MC LitRPG] Null Diver Accidentally Crowned the Demon Lord's Landlord 0 Comments You must be logged in to comment. Bookmark Quote TTS Link Play Pause Stop Skip Scroll Settings Note DMCATermsPrivacyContact 1 online