Book Five, Chapter 126: The Nearly Deserted Facility

🔴 REC    OCT 18, 2018 02:15:48    [▮▯▯▯▯ 20%]

My meteorite necklace slowly stopped glowing, and I fell to my knees.

A thousand feet in front of me, I could hear the muffled cries of a construction crew being burned alive by molten asphalt that had fallen into the pit they were working in.

I couldn’t look. I had seen so much casual death in this storyline—it was wearing on me.

Beside me, Camden appeared, looking at me with a quizzical expression.

“What was that about?” he asked. “Where did you go? What happened to you?”

I looked him in the eye and grabbed the shoulder of his good arm.

“What’s the one rule?” I asked. “What’s the one rule of time travel?”

“What?” he asked, clearly confused.

I pulled him closer. “What is the one rule of time travel?” I asked again. He must have heard the edge in my voice—it caught him off guard.

“Event B happens,” he said.

I hugged him, then pushed him back and started trying to film the scene.

“That’s right,” I said. “That’s right.”

None of the other rules mattered. We were in the middle of a time anomaly that spanned uncountable timelines and hundreds of years within each of them.

And all that mattered was that one thing:

Event B must happen.

With that single piece of knowledge, I began trudging away from the construction accident—away from the sounds of all those poor souls whose deaths were so impactful that they disrupted time.

I looked around.

There they were—Antoine, Kimberly, and Anna. They had been through their own troubles. While we had gotten more than our fair share of exposure to Generation Killer, he had stalked them through time, testing them at every turn.

I could almost laugh, knowing that our entire time inside the broken dimension—inside the casino hotel—would probably only be a few clips in the final movie. Eh. The gripes of a minor character.

In a way, things were headed in a good direction. We had complexity on par with Primer, a time travel movie that the truest nerds pretend to understand. But it wasn’t our complexity that made the story work.

In the end, it would be the heart.

Every time travel movie could be placed somewhere on a spectrum—between completely logical and overtly sentimental.

In some movies, time travel seemed to care about human events, to revolve around true love and the tiny happenings of human life. Interstellar, anyone?

When we were planning for this storyline, I knew that our best bet was to mold the rules of this setting to be sweetly sentimental. And it just so happened we had a secret ingredient for that.

We had Dina.

Dina—whose entire schtick was about losing someone and being haunted by it. Being able, in some way, to communicate with the person she had lost in a story. It was a setup she had gotten when she first came to Carousel, because of her real-life story—seeking her son, even in death.

And in this story, she was seeking her NPC son across time.

Yes, Dina was the secret sauce. The rules of this storyline had to be sentimental just so her subplot could work.

But we still had things to do before that came into play.

“Riley!” Kimberly screamed as soon as she saw me. She, Antoine, and Anna came running. She hugged me—we were old friends, after all.

“I don’t know what to do,” Kimberly said. “He’s everywhere. There’s nowhere to go that he won’t show up. What do we do?”

They had been stalked by the camera-wielding Generation Killer on the other side of time. He had filmed their part of the story and still did.

I held onto her. “Everything’s going to be okay.”

“How can you say that?” she asked, eyeing my left arm. The scars from the nails were pink, but the scabs were gone, and even my ear was well into being healed.

Kimberly seemed to notice this but didn’t have the words to describe it.

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“What did they do to you?” she asked.

“Nothing compared to what we’re going to do to them,” I said. “We need to get to KRSL. They have some of the answers we need… They must.”

“We haven’t figured anything out,” Antoine said. “We haven’t had time to rest—they just chase us constantly.”

I panned the camera over to where Camden and Anna were embracing as old friends.

When Camden realized he was On-Screen, he turned away from Anna’s hug and said, “We learned more than we ever wanted to know.”

“Let’s go,” I said. “We’ll explain on the way.”

■ STOP

Was there ever a more powerful phrase in storytelling than “We’ll explain on the way”?

Even without a camera, you could go Off-Screen to relay information if you earned it. You could take a break and make a plan. Of course, if you took too much advantage, Carousel might get angry.

It turned out that Camden and I weren’t the only ones who got physically damaged.

Antoine had a broken hand—something about getting it caught in a door. Kimberly had some superficial cuts on her abdomen—ugly but not too dangerous. All of it was to protect Anna, and their stats reflected that. Protecting Anna gave you a buff; it was right there in her Heart trope.

Yes, Anna was also the heart of the story, but I wasn’t sure if it would turn out that way. The truth was, better actors surrounded her. That was dangerous, though, because as the official main character, all the drama would aim toward her. Kimberly was there to help deflect it, but at the end of the day, Carousel was going to make us earn every inch.

Luckily, we knew exactly where the KRSL facility was.

And Bobby—the rock star he was—had been scoping the place out for an amount of time that was literally not measurable given his current state.