Book Five, Chapter 123: A Mid-Torture Lesson

“I’m going to explain this one more time,” Camden said to the room full of Generation Killers.

They were all paying attention—at least that could be said of them. But unfortunately, the bottom forty percent of Generation Killers were just not getting it.

The only thing these guys had in common with each other was DNA and psychopathy.

The smart ones figured it out as soon as Camden enlightened them. The dumb ones didn’t figure it out, but they were too proud and egotistical to ever admit it. They just stared at you with those blank eyes.

We had been Off-Screen for at least an hour, and I was still nailed to the chair while Camden tried to explain things.

In horror movies, the less you see of the bad guys, the scarier they are. And in this horror movie, that went double—because while these men were individually terrifying due to lacking a sense of right and wrong, listening to the dumb ones trip over basic logic for hours ruined the mystique they’d had at the beginning of the movie.

Carousel wasn’t going to use footage that showed that part of them.

“All right,” Camden said. “In order to travel in time, you need what? Anybody? Does anybody know the two things you need to time travel?”

Some of the smart ones were in the back of the room, smirking as Camden struggled to get the big, beefier ones to understand.

“You need a piece of the meteorite, and you need a physical record of past tragic events, right? You guys use that book, but you could use a newspaper or something like that, right?” Camden asked.

They seemed to understand that really well. They had to, or else they wouldn’t have been there.

“And the physical record of past events—it changes every timeline you go to, right? It changes to match the historical events of that timeline, right? It becomes the version of itself from that timeline. You’ve seen that happen, haven’t you?”

They nodded.

“So when you were in your home timelines, you traveled back to a common event. An event that happened in both your timeline and ours. Something that happened before the meteor strike, right? You went to see the witches burn. But when you left that event, you didn’t go back to your home timeline—you came to ours for some reason.”

He was getting close. I was wondering if he could land it. The ten or twelve Generation Killers who still weren’t understanding sat in the room, their full attention on him.

“But in our timeline, we don’t know anything about the witches burning because the meteor strike wiped out all traces of the past. Because in this group of timelines, the meteor hit dead center at the original Carousel settlement, right?

“And because we don’t have any historical evidence of the past before the meteor strike, all of your books got rid of those references when they came here. And now, you can’t travel back to the common event, because we don’t have records of it here.”

Our timeline was a roach motel for time travelers. They traveled back before their Event A and could never return.

Silence spread among the crowd.

In the back of the room, one of the smart Generation Killers cackled with laughter.

If I hadn’t been nailed to the chair, I probably would have laughed too—but not out of sadistic pleasure. I would have laughed out of the pure absurdity of watching Camden struggle to teach our captors time travel.

“So, you can’t go back to that common event because we have no record of it happening. And you need a record. So, you need to find a piece of paper or a history book with a description of a disaster that happened before the meteor wiped everything out. The Carousel settlement existed for years before it was destroyed. Surely, there is some record of what happened there. You just have to find it.”

That’s where he was wrong.

In our timeline, we famously had no idea what happened before the meteor strike.

Still, we needed to get them out of the room so we could escape. This was a great trial run for when we were On-Screen.

Finally, the last remnants of Camden’s eager students claimed they understood what happened and left the room.

Camden didn’t quite understand why there were so many dim Generation Killers.

Since we were Off-Screen, I thought I would spare him the frustration.

“This is how Carousel handles hordes,” I said. Grit made my arm injuries less painful… but I still wanted to puke when I thought about them.

“What?” Camden asked once his students had waddled out into the hallway.

“From a gameplay perspective, Carousel only needs a few smart Generation Killers—because they can give orders and make plans. Putting points into Savvy on the others is a waste. That’s just how the game works out. Normally, in hordes, you’re dealing with things like zombies, so it’s not as obvious. So when Carousel filled out the ranks of its horde, it mostly picked versions of Grant Leitner that were physically strong rather than witty.”

There were still Generation Killers in the room who could hear me, but they didn’t acknowledge my meta-speak. I was using Method to the Madness, which allowed us to speak to the enemies in character Off-Screen.

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Camden needed practice for later. He was improving, I thought.

When Carousel wasn’t scripting them, they didn’t come across as mysterious and all-knowing—not most of them, at least. Instead, they came across as cruel and arrogant and devoid of any emotion other than anger.

Still, Camden did a great job at teaching.

Because Lila had the And That’s Lunch trope equipped, we had an extended break where no one was On-Screen. And that would have been great—if I wasn’t literally nailed to the chair and unable to become unnailed, because the torture scene wasn’t technically over.

My whole left arm was numb. I hated this storyline. Why did Anna and Camden have to get trapped with these goons?

Camden came over to me once we were finally alone again.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Not until we’re On-Screen,” I said.

He nodded.

“I find the dumb ones creepier than the smart ones,” he said.

“Yeah. You like to think that serial killers are smart—that they won’t take unnecessary risks because they don’t want to get caught. Once you meet a dumb killer, that’s terrifyi—”

I stopped talking because I saw something out of the corner of my eye.

Well, technically, I didn’t see it. I remembered it.

“What is it?” Camden asked.

“Bobby’s here,” I said.

I explained to him how he could teach himself to see the other side of time by checking his own memories.

Once he finally figured it out, he said, “That is super freaky.”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “That probably would have been a lot better of a mechanic in a smaller story. Why the hell did we have to try and travel around through time? Ohh, I could be sleeping inside the jailhouse right now.”

I closed my eyes and tried to remember what was in the corner of the room. And I remembered Bobby being there with his two dogs. He was holding up a thumbs-up. It looked like everything was going good elsewhere.

“Bobby,” I asked, “how is Dina?”

I waited a moment and then tried to remember.

Another thumbs-up. He was nodding his head. He was also saying something—but I couldn’t tell what, no matter how many times I tried to focus on lip-reading or hearing.

We sat and talked for a while, with Bobby basically observing, because communication was so hard between the planes.

Eventually, I found out what Bobby had been trying to tell me.

Someone was coming. And I didn’t know who—until she opened the door and scooted in past the guards.

It was Lila.