Book Five, Chapter 136: The Diorama

When I left the Invitations room, I left with my head hanging down.

I knew that all of this stuff existed—I wasn’t a fool—but picturing it as some arcane ritual or the all-powerful will of a cosmic being made it more digestible in a strange way.

The story of our entrapment—it was told on readouts and dials. These people of the Manifest Consortium, they may have been immortal, but they were people. Knowing that their ambitious little hands had some small part to play in our fate completely captured my focus and made it difficult for me to think about my mission.

What was my mission?

To find out if there was a way forward without any traps? I had gotten so distracted with constant revelations that I had forgotten my simple but impossible goal. We needed to figure out what to do next.

Did we follow Carousel’s Throughline, as the framers of Project Rewind seemed to intend (whether they knew that was what they were doing or not), or was there another way?

I didn’t know if a satisfying answer existed to that question. If I was going to die over and over, curing a cosmic hive-mind virus didn’t seem like a waste of time.

As I walked through the fifth floor, being ignored by the janitor, I saw where the storyline was—on a display monitor. There was still time.

I took the tickets out of my pocket that Dr. Striga had given me, and I read through them.

Dream of Your Choosing

From Lumevere Remedies – Purveyors of the Rare & the Necessary

This ticket grants you not just a dream, but the one you long for most. No fleeting half-images, no restless confusion—only a world of your choosing, held steady until morning.

Revisit. Reimagine. Walk through a door that never opened. Stand beneath a sky that never was. Speak to someone you miss, or someone you’ve yet to meet.

You will wake with the memory intact. And for one night, you will have exactly what you need.

Lumevere Remedies – Because Some Things Are Best Left to Dreams.

~

Everyone’s Favorite Casserole

A Gift from Hearth & Home Syndicate

This ticket delivers the meal you have always loved—even if you have never tasted it before.

The flavor shifts to memory, to longing, to the warmth of a home that may no longer exist. It is the dish set at the family table, the scent that fills a childhood kitchen, the bite that quiets an ache you didn’t know you carried.

Perfectly made, perfectly warm. Just for you.

Hearth & Home Syndicate – No Place Like It.

~

The Sieve of Time

Issued by The Bureau of Measured Moments

The world moves on, but you don’t have to—not yet.

This ticket allows you to pause a single moment, not frozen, but lingering. The conversation doesn’t end. The sun doesn’t set. The touch of a hand doesn’t slip away. Not until the last grain of time falls through the sieve.

Stay. Breathe. Hold onto now, just a little longer.

The Bureau of Measured Moments – Because Some Moments Deserve More Time.

~

Getaway Weekend at Elenora Sound

An Exclusive Offer from Lumevere Retreats

Escape the crowds, the noise, the demands of the world—by having a world entirely to yourself.

This ticket grants you a two-night stay at Elenora Sound, a premier interdimensional retreat where the only guest is you. Lounge on untouched shores, roam forests where no path has yet been worn, or bask beneath a sky that has never had to share its stars.

Your world will wait for your return. Until then, enjoy a place where you are the only story that matters.

Lumevere Retreats – Because Sometimes, Solitude is the Greatest Luxury.

~

Refurbishment of _______

Brought to You by The Hands That Mend

This ticket entitles the bearer to the full restoration of a single object, no matter its age, condition, or the hands it has passed through.

A childhood toy, battered but beloved. A book with pages too delicate to turn. A locket rusted shut. A clock that stopped ticking when someone left and never restarted. Whatever it is, however worn, it will be made whole again.

Simply name the item. The rest will follow.

The Hands That Mend – Because Some Things Still Have Life Left in Them.

They were neat. In fact, they were kind of cool.

It was strange to imagine that someone could be awarded a ticket like these that, in some goofy corporate marketing speak, informed them they would be immortal—that they would live long enough to become callous to the lives of others.

Immortality and casserole. The spectrum of the Sweepstakes was immense.

I stuffed the tickets back in my pocket, where they disappeared just as my tropes did. I was numb, and all I knew to do was continue the climb.

And so I did climb, finding the red stairway up ten more levels. I wasn’t even close to tired—all of those buffs to my Grit had practically made me superhuman when it came to simple endurance.

Each level was very similar to the ones before it, covering some small but important aspect of the Carousel experience.

One floor had a bunch of beeping monitors that reminded me of a hospital, where I could see all the stats of the living players. But more than the stuff we normally could see on the red wallpaper—I could see their heartbeats. I could see how worried they were and their level of fear, and there must have been a dozen other things being measured that I didn’t even understand.

The next floor was devoted completely to the marketing department. Just as important. They were working on posters of Kimberly. Guess if you have to fund your spelunking adventures into Carousel in search of fundamental truth, you need to sell some merch.

The floor above that was strange but enlightening. It had what appeared to be the world’s worst hourglass. It was a large vertical tube filled with strange red sand. There was no bottleneck at the middle—instead, much of the sand just floated upward.

I had to stop and try to understand what I was looking at. There were only two workers in the room, and while one glanced at me, they didn’t say anything to me for a moment as I read the various signage near the strange device.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

The gizmo was for detecting tension in a storyline, and there were many other rooms with devices just like it for other storylines when multiple were being run.

Tension—the currency of storytelling. This vague thing that I had been using to try to decide what actions I could take in a storyline. You don’t want the tension to go too low, or Carousel will do something to raise it. It was the fundamental reason why you couldn’t kill the bad guy early on, as Adeline had impressed upon us multiple times.

You had to maintain the right amount of tension for the part of the story you were in.

There it was, being measured by red sand.

It was strangely comforting to realize that this abstract narrative force, that I felt silly for talking about and trying to define, was not only real but had been defined so simply.

Tension.

I must have stared at that red tube for too long because the two workers started to notice me.

At first, I hoped that they didn’t recognize my face.

“Wait, what are you doing here?” one of them said—a shorter one with curly black hair, wearing a lab coat that was yellow with a gold trim.

The other one was wearing a normal white lab coat. He was taller and wore glasses, and neither of them showed up on the red wallpaper.

Strangely, I was so emotionally numb between the storyline and my recent discoveries that I didn’t jump and run immediately.

“Just taking a break,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

The short, curly-headed one looked at his friend and then back at me. Then, as if unsure of his conviction that I was the Riley Lawrence, he asked, “Aren’t you Riley Lawrence?”

I had to hope that my high Moxie would work on these fellows.

“Yep, that’s me,” I said. “Just took a break from fighting old Generation Killer to come talk to you two.”

I tried to play it off as a joke, and it must have worked because I got polite chuckles from them.

They both left their workstations and crept closer to me as if I was a creature being studied.

“Wait a second,” the tall one said. “I thought that Carousel red-tagged all of our non-combatant shapeshifters?”

Luckily, he was speaking English. Unluckily, I just had to guess at what all those words meant together.

“Yep,” I said. “A real pain in the neck if you ask me.”

“Well, you’re not a clone being controlled by the script,” the shorter one said. “The scripting room is off-limits. Carousel’s gone haywire—it’s taken back the pen.”

“That’s just a rumor,” the taller one said.

“No, it’s true. I saw it with my own eyes,” the shorter one argued back. “So then, how do you look like Riley Lawrence? Identity theft wasn’t balanced last time I checked.”

More English words in strange orders. Identity theft wasn’t balanced? Alrighty. He said that with so much attitude, like he was saying something so obvious.

“Potion,” I said, as the word just popped into my mind.

“Potion?” the short one repeated. “You mean a magic potion? I don’t believe it.”

Oops.

“Well, you better,” I said. That was it: double down.

“We’re resorting to low magic now? This is so embarrassing,” he went on to say.