Book Five, Chapter 135

I briefly worked at my university's football stadium during my freshman year of college.

I was selling sports memorabilia, and I was bad at it. It didn't really matter—all I had to do was stand there and restock. It was a student job, not a real job. I had no ambition to stick around longer than I was contractually obligated to.

But still, I remembered my amazement at realizing exactly how massive our football stadium was—not just the field or the stands, but the area behind the stands where the stores and concessions were. It was like a giant tunnel that went on forever, and on game days, it would be filled with people walking shoulder to shoulder.

And yet, there were more tunnels that even the sports fans didn't know about—the ones we could walk through in the back to load goods or just hang around. I worked that job for three months, just one semester, and I dreaded every single game day. But I will credit that experience for giving me a fascination with the internal workings of massive buildings.

The last time I had been in tunnels underneath a stadium, I had gotten stabbed half to death, so I didn't really get a chance to appreciate how big it was.

Walking into the massive crescent-shaped building before me made the stadium from my college days feel tiny and cramped.

The lobby was at least the size of three football fields, and it was abuzz with people who I had to assume were fans or tourists. And although I could not hear, it did appear as if they were being separated into tour groups.

Many of them wore my hoodie or had a Walkman like mine. The girls had scrunchies in their hair, and there were so many baseball bats in the hands of those tourists that you would think we were at Yankee Stadium. It wasn't just stuff that my friends and I wore—I saw someone wearing Arthur's hat, which he rarely took off.

There was a store that sold memorabilia on the left side of the lobby, and once I realized that people weren't noticing me, I decided to go scope it out.

Not only was this store huge, but it had pretty much every outfit that Kimberly had ever worn for sale. For 500 tokens—which I had to assume were the same coins we won at the end of a storyline—you could buy your own copy of The Atlas, although the shelf had it labeled as The Survivor's Bible. Not that I heard anyone call it that for the longest time.

Gizmos, swords, guns—all claiming to have been used in various storylines—were lined up. Masks like those at the masquerade ball of The Strings Attached  were for sale, with one being modeled by one of the enemies from that story. There was a whole wall of clothing for the University of Carousel Fighting Torsos.

All of our experiences and torments had come to this.

I wondered how Carousel felt about how its hellish world had been commodified and turned into a theme park.

Maybe it didn't care. Maybe it was incapable of caring.

I didn't spend much time inside the souvenir shop. I didn't need souvenirs. The workers there barely noticed me. They were busy with real customers—or, as I had done when I worked at the stadium as a student, the employees here were avoiding eye contact and hoping no one would talk to them.

Some things were universal, I guess.

I needed to find a way to the main part of the building—up into the tower at the center of the crescent. I knew that if I ended up backstage again, I would get lost.

Fortunately, this building was not designed like a maze, unlike many of the structures in Carousel. It was pretty straightforward. There was a sign with an arrow that said Offices, leading up a large row of red stairs. Or, of course, I could have taken the elevator, which had the exact same fixtures and design as many of the things I saw on the red wallpaper.

I decided on the stairs, and while I wasn't the only one traveling up, no one seemed to notice me.

Maybe they simply didn't expect me, so they didn’t care to look. Once someone glanced inside the theater and realized I wasn't there, they would likely raise alarms. Or maybe the bureaucracy was just tangled enough that no one would know what was going on, and when they saw the empty theater, they would just assume I wasn't supposed to be there.

I was playing it by ear.

On the second floor, there was a flock of what I realized were reporters standing in front of a row of desks where people worked tirelessly.

They were the Carousel Press Corps.

I knew that because there was a big sign on the ceiling that said so.

This world had many different news outlets—I had to expect as much. For all I knew, it had many times the population that Earth did, but I couldn't say. All I knew was that I saw a lot of attractive, well-dressed people holding microphones, and yet, I didn't see a single camera person.

Amazingly, they didn't notice me either. I was just another person wearing souvenirs in a massive room with lots of distractions.

Did Hustle help me be unnoticed? I knew it was good for sneaking, but this felt a little bit too much.

I listened to the scuttlebutt as I passed by them to find another set of stairs on the other end of the room.

There was a person—presumably someone who worked for the Company and not the news outlets—giving remarks about the current storyline.

"At least one member of the Party of Promise will be tortured," she said.

Yeah, I thought. Me.

I continued on. As much as I wanted to hear how they talked about us, Dr. Striga had mentioned something about a control room.

And so, when I got to the other end of the room, I found another large red staircase—this time going toward the right, which I assumed meant the stairs wound upward with each set turned 90 degrees until you got to the top.

Maybe I should have taken the elevator. Oh well.

Fortunately, the next set of stairs was nearby after I got to the top of the set leading away from the press corps. But I didn't immediately start ascending.

Because the third floor only had one room—if my reading of the map on the wall was correct.

Scripting.

That was all it said.

There was a large, beautiful door—not the kind you would normally see in an office building, more like something that would open up to a ballroom.

Scripting… was that exactly what it sounded like?

There was a red velvet rope stretched across the front of the door, and a sign was stuck on it that said:

DO NOT ENTER UNTIL WE FIGURE THIS OUT.

There was no way I could resist peeking after reading that.

I snuck around one of the stanchions holding up the red velvet rope and tested the door. It wasn't locked. Were these people that trusting?

The massive door creaked open just enough for me to slip through. Then, I found myself in a room bigger than any I had ever seen before, filled with desks, typewriters, and hundreds of different screens with live feeds of the storyline.

The typewriters were clicking away—with no one sitting at them.

And yet, they weren't normal typewriters. They didn't have single pages inside of them. Instead, they ticked away on long, unending rolls of paper that spread out and littered the entire room.

No wonder they didn't want anyone in here. The place was covered in scripts—typed onto long rolls of paper.

I looked up at the live feeds. Generation Killer had not yet made it into the museum, but he was bombarding them with rocks, breaking windows, and it was clear they were going to try to ram the building with a stolen car.

I went to a typewriter close to the screen where I saw one of them revving the engine and looked down at what was being typed.

Stay on your mark.

That was the message to the Generation Killer behind the wheel.

They were waiting for the right timing. Were the others aware of this? I wasn't sure. They would be eventually, though.

Could I just type something like Turn off the car and go jump off a building? Would they do it if I did? These were the scripts, after all. Would that be a legitimate move for me? After all, everything about my being here was an extension of one trope or another.

Would that be a permitted action to make?

I had my doubts.

I continued to look around the room. There were so many typewriters, most of which were not in use. Even with all the Generation Killers, they didn’t need all of these typewriters—especially since there was only one storyline being run.

As I read through them, I realized that some Generation Killers were being controlled by one script as a group, while others got their own script. Interesting.

It was an amazing and awesome sight, this giant room.

I found some typewriters up at the front. They were for Bobby and Lila, who, as Wallflowers, were capable of viewing the script—or at least a version of it.

I could roughly track what they had done. Lila had done her best since being killed—or at least since her character was killed—but there wasn't much she could do without appearing On-Screen. Though the script did track her trip to go recruit Michael, while showing her everything she had seen along the way. The script must have been really useful—surely Film Buffs would get access to it at some point in time.

Bobby’s script was so long it formed a stack of paper at least a foot high in front of his typewriter. There was a viewfinder of sorts right at the place above where the letters were being typed, and I had to imagine that the area inside the viewfinder was what Bobby could see at any given time.

While instructing the Generation Killers to stand down was certainly something Carousel would frown upon, talking to Bobby didn’t seem like it would be.

I took a risk. I had to assume that if I wasn’t allowed to do this, I would be stopped.

“Car set to ram eastern wall. Be ready. –RL,” I typed.

Bobby couldn't communicate easily with the others, but it was still possible. He had been coordinating between the rest of us ever since he got stuck on the other side of time, after all.

Up on a nearby display, on a camera that was currently Off-Screen, I could see Bobby standing inside the museum but on the other side of time, with a surprised look on his face as he stared into his mind’s eye at the script.

"Riley?" he asked aloud.

It was strange being able to hear his voice after spending so much time playing charades with him.

The camera followed him as he traversed—fourth- or fifth-dimensionally—outside until he saw the car himself.

I didn’t dare say anything else.

As interesting as this room was, I didn’t think there was much else for me to learn.

I left the way I came.

Luckily, there was no one in the hallway because, at least then, surely they would notice that I wasn’t just someone wearing a Riley hoodie—I was Riley himself.

The nearest person had passed by and was headed up the stairs, and I decided to follow.

The fourth floor held many things, and the map was complicated. It looked a lot more like a normal office map, at least. In fact, I could see a bullpen with stressed workers handling something or another as I passed by. There were too many people on that floor for me to dare explore around, and they weren’t distracted like all of the reporters had been.

I decided to go up to the fifth floor.

While the control room was not on that floor, something else that interested me was a large room simply listed as “Invitations.”

This entire floor seemed largely abandoned. There was a man cleaning sweeping, wearing a copy of my Walkman, listening to music that I had to hope was not from Carousel.

“Invitations” could be an innocuous designation, or it could be exactly what I feared it was. Dr. Striga had said that the company didn’t invite players themselves, and yet I knew there was something called an “Invitee,” which is what Dina and Logan were.

Curiosity compelled me to check it out.

I snuck across the polished stone floors until I found the room that matched the one I had seen on the map—the room labeled “Invitations.”

Like the “Scripting” room, this one was closed off with a red velvet rope, though there was no sign on the door.

Luckily, red velvet ropes were no match for my curiosity.

I simply unhooked the rope, opened the door, and moved inside.

The room was dark, so I reached around and found a light switch—one of those old-fashioned ones that had a loud click when you turned it on.

For such an advanced, magical society, their basic technology was stuck in the past.

It took me a while to understand what I was seeing in the room.

It largely consisted of one desk with a microphone—an old-timey microphone, at that. The kind where you could see springs attached inside, hooked up to two large machines that could have been power generators for all I knew, but might have also been some sort of antenna. They were the size of a car.

Beyond that, there were rows and rows of filing cabinets.

Something I had not noticed until now was the pneumatic tubes that ran along the walls inside of the building. I had assumed that they were electrical conduits of some kind, but I had yet to be inside of an office. There were rows of tubes, all leading from different places around the building.

Some letters that had clearly come from inside of the pneumatic tubes were laying out on the desk next to the canisters that they had been retrieved from.

I examined the large machines more closely. They had dials, bulbs, and all kinds of controls. I felt stupid looking at it—there was so much I didn’t understand, just down to the basic terminology.

There was a printer on one of the machines that spat out a stream of paper that dangled down from the side of it, almost reaching the floor.

Being as nosy as I was, I grabbed it up and looked at the end of it.

I didn’t understand what I was looking at.

Not at first.

It was an exchange of direct messages on Instagram between Kimberly Madison and some influencer named rachelbee_something.

Kimberly had reached out to her.

I glanced at a few of the important messages.

Rachel (@rachelbee_something):
Kimberly?! I haven’t heard from you since you said you were taking a break from social media! I saw those pics you uploaded from that weird masquerade ball. Have you been in Europe??

~

Kimberly Madison (@kimberlymadison_official):
Honestly, Rachel? This past year has been exactly what I needed. No pressure, no expectations—just time to breathe. I feel like I finally know what I want, and I’m ready to start the next chapter of my life.

I’ve been thinking about creating something different. A content house, but not like the ones you see all over L.A. This would be something exclusive, private—where we actually control the narrative. No managers pulling the strings, no brands treating us like products. Just real creators, working together on our own terms.

They went on to discuss the idea for dozens of messages over weeks. The exchange included phone calls and emails.

Rachel (@rachelbee_something):
Okay, Kim… I’ve talked to a few people, and they’re in. Even Kevin says he’ll come, though I’m not sure why you would want him. We’re heading to the Ozarks next week.

I can’t wait until people find out what we’re planning. This is going to change everything.

There were a few more exchanges until finally, another came.

~

Damon (Instagram Security) (@instagram_support):
Hello, this is Damon from Instagram Security. We need to inform you that the account you’ve been communicating with has been compromised. Please disregard any messages from this user.

We apologize for any confusion and appreciate your cooperation as we work to resolve this issue.

Strange.

This whole setup was exactly what I feared. This machine, somehow, was sending messages through Instagram back in the real world. That wasn’t what I pictured.

What did I picture?

Immediately, my mind turned to the rows of filing cabinets. They were not arranged, I came to find out, by alphabetical order but rather by chronology, which made it easy to find a certain exchange with an Antoine Stone.

I couldn’t make myself read it.

Instead, I went to find the letters on the desk that had been sent through the pneumatic tubes.

One letter placed prominently on the desk explained that a man named Damon was instructed to disrupt any attempt by Carousel to attract new players.

MEMO

From: The Office of the Proprietor
To: Damon Fleming, Invitations
Subject: No New Acquisitions

Mr. Fleming,

Per the Company-wide Memo regarding flagging prospects of the Party of Promise, I have this command:

Shut it down. All of it. No new players. No exceptions. If Carousel tries tries to recruit, cut it off at the knees.

Without players, the beast will be quelled.

Handle it while we finalize strategies for a proper reset.

The Proprietor
Vincent St. Vane
Dictated but not read.

The level of arrogance these people exuded was unbelievable. I had seen the awesome and horrifying power of Carousel. Were they really that confident in their ability to contain it?

Flagging prospects of the players… They didn’t think we were going to win.

I had assumed that the warning I had received in the theater was about us being abandoned was about the audience.

What if it wasn’t?

What if it was about the Company?