Chapter 81: The Props Department

I didn’t remember pushing the red button.

I didn’t even remember Silas the Mechanical Showman being there.

Where was I?

My character’s studio apartment. Or… a copy of it.

Before I even took my hand off the button, I found myself staring out the window. It was dark outside, but not nighttime. The darkness was a physical thing, almost like fog, and some things, like the road, were lit up with spotlights. The shadowy darkness was everywhere else.

I pulled my hand off of Silas’ button as a ticket emerged through his dispenser. I looked at him as if I expected him to explain, but he didn’t even play a prerecorded quip. He stared blankly, uncaring. Even his smile didn’t make him look interested in me.

I reached for the ticket, and just as I had it pinched between my fingers, Silas disappeared.

Had the bad guys won? Had the world ended? Was this the place where you went when you lost? I really thought my time skip would work.

The ticket would be the only explanation I would ever get.

Greetings from the Props Department!

Don’t panic. You’ve been here before. Please take a deep breath and try to think it through.

You have initiated a Props Department Continuity Assignment. That means your current storyline or subplot requires your unique touch to ensure authenticity, consistency, and dramatic flair in upcoming sequences. To maintain narrative cohesion, we’ll need you to compile research, create supporting documents, or record footage that will later appear On-Screen in your handwriting, voice, or style.

You are free to explore the Props Department in whichever way you may wish, but remember, there is a time limit based on your Savvy and Narrative Positioning! If you fail to create the assigned materials, you will be without them in future sequences. This is dangerous, as you will not get to retain any knowledge or memories from your time in the Props Department.

Task: “Collect a body of research related to the Night Stocker cult and the mysterious entity it serves, while documenting your infiltration of the cult on behalf of your friend Kimberly.”

Thank you for your cooperation.

We literally couldn’t do it without you. Carousel won’t let us.

—The Props Department

The Props Department? I… I didn’t remember having been to this place before.

I looked around the room. There were boxes and boxes like those used to store files. They didn’t contain files. I walked to the nearest stack and pulled out a handful of pages.

It was a script.

All of it was, almost every box. Filled to the brim with stacks of pages.

I read through it as fast as I could.

INT. SECRET TUNNEL – DAY

Tom leads Riley down a long, hidden corridor carved straight from the concrete foundation of the Eternal Savers Club and the earth itself. Strings of Christmas lights line the path, casting a faint, colorful glow.

TOM

We found this corridor by accident, almost. The rock was wearing away like ash. You wouldn’t believe how long it took to haul it away.

RILEY

Probably not.

I flipped through the pages, astonished at what lay before me. This was the account of my character being brought into the cult—thousands of pages of it.

I glanced around the room. There were other objects, other boxes, some that didn’t contain paper. The first one I grabbed had a familiar set of canisters in it. They were the kind used to store film. I had seen them before in Stray Dawn. My character had filmed them before I entered the story. I ripped one canister open and peered down at the film, which depicted two people, one of whom was me, in an interview about werewolves.

Suddenly, I understood.

These film reels, created for use in my character’s documentary, had not just been made out of nothing. I created them.

Carousel or the Consortium must have left these here so I would understand.

Around the room, there were blank diaries, post-it notes, red yarn for a conspiracy board, stuff like that. Everything I needed to prepare myself for the rest of the storyline was here.

I just had to assemble it.

I had improvised a time skip so that my character could get research done and be more prepared for the finale.

I had no idea the price that would entail.

–

Terrified of the unseen time limit, I spent several days working through the boxes, reading the script for every encounter I would have over that year, relevant to the plot.

That added up to fifty meetings with the cult, a dozen nights out at the local bar, and two baseball games during which my character would bond and get to know Tom and the other cultists as I gathered information to eventually defeat them.

Most of it was useless.

The script wasn’t cinematic or tight. It was a shot-for-shot account of these hypothetical encounters. There were hundreds upon hundreds of pages of small talk.

I searched through them just to find little nuggets of useful information. Time passed. I grew exhausted and weary.

When I was tired, I slept in my character’s bed. When I was hungry, I ate from the scant, poorly stocked but self-replenishing pantry.

The first few weeks, I really thought that the timer would buzz any second. I worked my tail off building a proper conspiracy board, outlining the hierarchy of the cult and building binders of handwritten notes about the lore of the cult, what little I could find.

As time wore on, I realized how lonely my existence had become.

Every day, I worked on the evidence surrounding the plot. I diligently documented and classified information. I made plans in my character’s journals. I created an accurate timeline of every relevant event.

And then, I slept for days, unable to summon the energy needed to open my eyes.

Time didn’t exist here. There was no sunrise or sunset. There was no obvious indication of the passage of time other than the movement of the file boxes from the to-do stack to the done stack.

I wasn’t just bored. Boredom would have been a nice change of pace. I was practically catatonic.

I lay on my character’s couch with a stack of documents. These, for a change, were about Antoine’s show and my plans for that. I wasn’t reading them. I was hoping to absorb them into myself through skin contact or something.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

How long had I been there? How many weeks did my Savvy buy me in this purgatory? How many months?

I had asked for a year-long time skip. Was that the price? A year? More?

I stared at the board I had created with all the known information.

It was full of info on the cult, but shockingly scant on information about He Who Walks Behind the Aisles.

How strange. The cult itself knew so little. They relied on information given to them by the prophets in their group, who could hear the deity’s whispers cloaked as the voices of their loved ones gone too soon. Beyond all credulity, even they did not have a name for the underground god. If anything, they liked to pretend he wasn’t part of the deal.

They liked to talk about the new world as if it didn’t involve an arrangement with some sort of cosmic shadow god to get it, like it was the result of them hoping and praying. They even expressed guilt about sacrificing people for their goals, and spent many nights contemplating how, in the new world, those sacrifices would be born anew as better people.

I was getting nowhere.

I left my character’s apartment for no particular reason.

I had spent so much time staring out into the darkness that eventually, my fear gave way to a powerful curiosity.

What terrible secrets did the Props Department have to offer?

There were no warnings about going outside, and, logically, some storylines would require me to have gone outside to gather information. One day, I couldn’t be in that room any longer.

I found myself walking down the only section of street that was visible. My theory was that all of the locations in the scripts would be places I could go. After all, how else would I be able to write an accurate accounting of what had happened?

My theories were validated as I found the bar the cult liked to hang out in. No one was there, but the jukebox was always on. They had food orders sitting in the window hot and tasty.

The tables were set up for trivia night.

I grabbed a few answer cards. I could include them as props for the evidence cache. I was supposed to make it look real for the movie, and one of these trivia answer sheets would be great for my corkboard.

There was nothing else to see there, though.

Eventually, I found myself walking through the darkness again, following a path that I didn’t recognize from any of the locations in the scripts.