Book Eight, Chapter 43: Keep Your Eye on the Ball

I was so excited that I ran all the way back to the boat. The others were trying to figure out how we would all fit inside one pop-up tent, squeezed between the padded benches on either side of the pontoon’s back deck.

The truth was, as afraid of being ambushed on land as we were, we were also afraid of being ambushed on the water. There was no winning. No safe option. Staying on the boat made a quick getaway possible. The tent was one more layer of protection so that nothing could touch our feet in the night.

I ran down the dock, jumped onto the boat, and said, “How exactly do those trackers work?”

Camden popped his head out of the door of the pop-up tent. “The fish trackers?” he asked.

“Yeah, those. Do you know how to operate them? I assume you got some training or read a manual, maybe.”

He looked over at the cabinet with all of the equipment for the lake research vessel and then crawled out of the tent to go find the trackers themselves.

“What exactly do we need these for here?” he asked once he had found them.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cue ball.

“I might have a way for us to find the others,” I said.

He glanced at the ball, seemingly reading its trope and remembering what it did, and then he looked back at me and opened up the bag of trackers quickly.

“So what are we saying? We throw this and hope it rolls to them? Maybe toss it in the river?” he asked.

“I figure we build a sort of floating system for it, like a bag filled with air, maybe some cushioning. Throw in that tracker, this ball, and then we tell it where to go and to come back to us afterward.”

It was a perfectly normal plan.

“Wait, what are we talking about?” Antoine called from inside the tent, where he had dragged the fabric up onto one of the benches so that he could sleep off the hard deck.

I explained my plan, with everyone else listening.

I was excited. I had no idea whether or not it would work. There was a bit of a difference between using a magic cue ball to trip a monster and using it as a tracking device across the vast dimensional chaos of Carousel.

“Just think about it,” I said. “It’s an exploit, sure, but that’s nothing new to us. I mean, Oblivious Bystander wasn’t designed to let me Mr. Magoo my way out of all danger, and yet I can use it that way. I think this will work too. It’s savvy-based.”

It was rare that I was this excited, but it felt like I was onto something. It fit our circumstances so well; it gave us a way to fight for the people we cared about.

We discussed it for a while.

“First thing in the morning, we test it out,” Camden said.

“Well, sure,” I said.

It was dark. We needed to sleep. As excited as I was, I worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep the natural way, but I could always use Out Like A Light.

I took the tracker that Camden had grabbed and the cue ball and put them in my pocket. There wasn’t exactly a lot of room in the pop-up tent, but it felt safer than any other place we could be.

I had to unequip my scouting trope so that the crybaby would be on full alert for Omens. In the morning, we would test my plan out, and if it worked, that cue ball might be one of the most valuable items we ever acquired.

“Test thirteen,” Camden said. “Freezer bag with reflective orange water wing and duct tape, commence. Go to Antoine and then come back to me.”

He tossed the bag, which included the cue ball and the fish tracker, into the water.

And there it floated for fifteen to twenty minutes, as the slow moving currents of the lake moved it under the docks, where it bounced from piling to piling, until eventually it landed right on the ladder in front of Antoine, before getting swept up in some wake from a ski boat and finding its way back to Camden on the shore a few hundred feet away.

It was working, at least for a short distance. A trope like Boomerang Physics relied on having lots of kinetic energy and things to bounce off of, and what could have more to bounce off of than a river?

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“That pretty much proves it, right?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Camden said. “It’s the world’s slowest remote control boat.”

“Fate is a slow motor, my friend,” I said.

He waded out and grabbed the bag.

“All right, so that’s what we do,” I said. “We just add a note inside of it, and they could probably send a note back to us, and it goes back and forth, and the whole time we can be following it in the boat, getting closer to where they are.”

Camden wasn’t as enthusiastic as I was. He threw the bag back into the water, sending it on its slow journey down the shore toward Antoine.

“Look,” he said, “we don’t know if this is going to work. For all we know, this thing might go a mile and then the magic will cut out, or maybe it can take a path because of its size that we can’t follow, or maybe it will get eaten by a sea monster with such high plot armor that my Savvy can’t match it, or maybe it goes so fast that we can’t chase it in the boat.”

“Yes, but if none of that happens,” I said, “it’ll work.”