Book Five, Chapter 143: The Show Must Go On

Kimberly was surprisingly matter-of-fact as she described what she sensed.

We were back in the loft, and we had already retrieved the players from Ramona’s cabin.

Kimberly had taken the time to walk through every single room in the loft and the adjacent rooms attached to it. She walked around the restaurant downstairs and the stairwells, as well as the roof area, where Bobby was tending to his dogs.

When she started out with this, she was flabbergasted, offended, ashamed. But the more she went along, the more numb she seemed to become.

“They’re everywhere,” she said.
“There’s one circling around this table here in the dining room,” she said. “It can’t see me right now, but it will in just a second.
“There’s one that follows you down the hallway when you walk past all the doorways. Several near the entrance. They’re all over.”

The rest of us just kind of spread out and let her do her work. Bobby rejoined us as we watched.

She had equipped her new Flashbulb Phobia trope that allowed her to see the location of cameras, whether they were On-Screen or Off-Screen.

We were mapping them out.

“This whole dining room area is covered. This one right up above—for an overhead shot,” she said.
“The kitchen—there’s one right here,” she said, walking over to the kitchen counter and placing her hands on it. “It’s like it’s facing down onto the counter, so it can film you preparing food.”

This had gone on for a while. There were cameras in all of the rooms, except for Ramona’s little nook at the end of the hallway, which now became prime real estate.

“There are cameras looking in the windows there, across the street,” she said.

“What about the bathroom?” Avery asked.

Avery had not lost her softer side after coming to Carousel, and she was able to maintain her mental health through self-care, even without a trope. The private space in the bathroom was sacred.

“What about the bathroom?” she repeated.

Kimberly walked from the kitchen over to the bathroom—we only had one. We all stood outside as she made her verdict.

“None on the toilet,” she said.

“That’s the only real surprise so far,” Isaac said. “Did you lift up the lid?”

Kimberly ignored him.

“There’s one in the mirror at the sink that would face you if you were staring into it, and then there’s one that appears right behind your shoulder, pointing into the mirror so it could see your reflection,” Kimberly said.

“What about the shower?” Cassie asked.

We were all nervous about that one.

“There are two,” Kimberly said. “But they only film above the armpit and below the knee.”

We were silent after she said that. But there was something so silly about how she said it in such a serious voice that I couldn’t help but laugh a little. And I wasn’t the only one.

It was mostly the guys laughing—and not because we thought it was funny, but because there was a certain absurdity to it. We knew we had been filmed, but it was always such an abstract thing you could just ignore it.

The girls looked horrified.

“When we said that there are cameras—invisible cameras—following us around,” Logan said, “I always thought it was metaphorical or some sort of omniscient remote viewing. But actual invisible cameras of some sort?”

“Magical,” I said.

“Well, obviously magical,” he said. “But still. They aren’t just clairvoyant—they have them set up at specific locations. Like we’re on Big Brother.”

“‘Big Brother: Carousel‘ does have a ring to it,” Isaac said.

In truth, the cameras probably were just clairvoyant viewports. They weren’t actual floating machines or anything like that. Still, it was a much more mechanical setup than I was expecting.

The confirmation of invisible magic cameras fed into his particular worldview, and he was eating it up. He always hated it when we acted like life could be normal in Carousel, and he loved it when we discussed things like this.

“Did you find a place without any cameras?” I asked.

Kimberly had gone into a sort of trance, sensing all the cameras that were watching her at that moment. The trope was called Flashbulb Phobia for a reason. It was actually making her paranoid. That was the cost—likely meant to prevent her from just using it all the time. It was causing her distress.

“The stairwell leading up to the roof,” she said. “There are no cameras there.”

I let her response sink in.

“That makes sense,” I said. “Stairwells all look the same. No need to put cameras on every single level.”

“That’s where I’m sleeping,” Lila said softly.

“Why do they want to watch us right now?” Antoine asked with righteous indignation. “What do they get out of it? Does the audience need to know every detail of our lives? Why does Carousel care?”

I had not told them about the Manifest Consortium yet.

And they had sensed that I had something to say.

They had been waiting for me to make a move—trusting me to make a move—for quite some time. Bobby might have even let slip that I had sent him a message on the script.

“I want to try something,” I said. “Go along with me.

I looked at everyone, and they agreed nonverbally.

“We need to make a plan for our next storyline run,” I said. “What was the name of the one we said we were going to do next?”

That wasn’t exactly a subject that people were interested in talking about, so it took them a moment to shift gears.

“The one with the sunken cradle in the name,” Andrew said. “It was between that and By the Slice, I believe.”

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“Right,” I said, “because we’re looking for new rescue tropes, and those ones are supposed to get you some.”

“Right,” Andrew said. He started looking at a shelving unit where we normally kept the Atlas, but Camden had already grabbed it and was skimming through it. It was probably a lot easier to manage the big book when he had both of his arms. He was sitting on a couch, not paying too much attention to our conversation about the cameras.

He was wholly absorbed. His efforts to give us the Atlas had paid off big time. He could look through it all he wanted.

“Right,” I said. “We’re looking for more rescue tropes because once we use them, we have to grow like ten levels before we can get them back.”

Dina, Antoine, and I had experienced that.

Dina quietly pulled her rescue trope out of thin air. She had already grown to level thirty and now had access to her rescue trope You Don’t Know Me But… again, which we had used on Itch to rescue Michael, Andrew, and Lila.

Still, we needed more rescue tropes with more variety. Hers had its drawbacks, as we well knew.

“Why are we talking about this right now?” Avery asked. “We have all the time in the world to talk about this. Why do we have to constantly—”

“The cameras are gone,” Kimberly interrupted.

“What?” Antoine asked, gently holding on to her.

“The cameras are gone,” she said again. “All of them.”

“The Planning status,” I said.

I could tell most of them had forgotten they even had it.

“That gets rid of cameras?” Antoine asked, confused.

“Something like that,” I said. “You know, like when we’re in a fight and we’re Off-Screen, and we can talk to each other about what we’re going to do next—and even if the enemy can hear us, they don’t respond to it or even acknowledge that we said it? I think it’s like that. I think the planning status blocks you from being watched when you’re making meta plans.”

They let the idea churn for a moment.

“You mean Carousel can’t see us right now?” Cassie asked.

I smiled just a little bit. I couldn’t help it.

“I think Carousel sees everything. But the others? I don’t think they can see us making plans.”