Book Five, Chapter 1̵̙̔͗̀2̴̦̕6̴̤̪͙̀

🔴 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 infinite 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.

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.

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.

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 healing.

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

“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 we 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—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.

As soon as we arrived at the giant facility, he was there in my memory, waiting for us.

In the same way he had helped us escape the hospital, he was going to help us break into a quasi-governmental facility where nerds in white coats studied meteors, or time travel, or something.

🔴 REC    OCT 18, 2018 02:39:02    [▮▯▯▯▯ 20%]

“This way,” I said, ushering everyone toward Bobby.

We got to him, and he raised one hand, gesturing for us to stop.

As we did—stopping right there on the sidewalk next to the facility—a group of guards passed by us. They weren’t too dangerous, I assumed, because they were NPCs.

It was exhausting, constantly scanning the area and trying to remember what I had seen. But I had to. I didn’t know when Bobby was going to usher us to the next place.

His dogs were clearly very happy to see us. They had grown fond of us, and apparently, the script wasn’t keeping them in line. Even though they existed on the other side of time—whatever that meant—they really wanted pets.

Shasta could take being ignored, but Doughboy? It was breaking his heart. While in this storyline, they were semi-psychic, in their hearts, they were dogs.

Eventually, Bobby’s plan became clear. We had to hide inside a large container that was about to be loaded into the building and lowered down to the basement level—but only after it had been inspected.

The place also had a security system with cameras everywhere, so our chances of sneaking in seemed very slim at first.

Luckily, someone was willing to act as a distraction.

Down the street, I could hear a horn honking—probably from a large van. I couldn’t see exactly what happened, but I heard it crash through a fence.

“Who was that?” Kimberly whispered, though she already knew.

It was an ally we had—someone who cared deeply about helping her son, lost in time.

We all looked at each other, realizing our opportunity.

At first, we scurried behind the large container as guards ran past it to check out the noise.

Then, on Bobby’s signal, we ran inside the container and hid in the back behind some large wooden crates.

Not too long after, I felt the container shift. It was closed up and then hauled by a ceiling-mounted crane. We were set down on what seemed like an elevator built into the floor, lowering us deep into the KRSL facility.

I knew this was where the plot was supposed to go, but dang—did it not feel any safer.

When we finally reached the destination, we had to wait around until the doors opened again. Bobby signaled that the coast was clear.

When we stepped out of the container, we found ourselves in a massive storage area—probably within spitting distance of the Ark of the Covenant. Towers of wooden boxes filled the giant underground warehouse.

Luckily, there weren’t many guards.

The area was dimly lit, and we did some sneaking—mostly for the footage—until we found a door that was supposed to lead to the actual facility.

Wouldn’t you know it? Bobby knew the password.

It was only numbers. If they had mixed in some letters, we might’ve been in trouble.

I simply glanced in Bobby’s direction and then remembered the numbers over and over again until I had the ten digits I needed.

“How are you doing that so quickly?” Antoine asked.

“A lifetime of daydreaming has made me powerful,” I replied.

After we got the door open, we left the dimly lit storage area and found ourselves in a classic white-walled underground facility.

I almost commented on how similar it looked to the facility in The Subject of Inquiry—before realizing it probably was the same place, just repurposed.

I didn’t bother narrating what we were doing. The audience would know, and I doubted we’d spend much time in this scene—unless, of course, we failed and died here. But that was true of every scene.

Bobby led us through a maze of tunnels, hallways, and doorways—none of which required any identification to pass through. They were basically begging to have their security breached.

We kept following him until...

We found where they were keeping Logan.

He was in the staff lounge—sitting on a couch, having a heated discussion with a couple of scientists. He wasn’t bound or locked up.

As we entered the room, he noticed us. “Look! This is them,” he said.

On a giant dry-erase board behind him, he had written out everything he knew about time travel.

The two scientists turned to look at us. Their names were Doctor Black and Doctor Sweets. Doctor Black was an older woman with gray hair and a fierce look. Doctor Sweets looked like he might’ve been younger than me.

Perched in the corner of the room was someone named Agent Locke, the detective I had heard interviewing Logan, I assumed.

“You told them everything?” Antoine asked.

“No, look,” Logan said. “They’re on our side. They’re not the enemy—they want to help.”

“How do you know that?” Antoine asked. “Being locked up here for the rest of our lives isn’t any better than—”

“We don’t have time for this,” I interrupted, stepping further into the room.

It was true that KRSL weren’t the good guys. In fact, the red wallpaper labeled these two scientists as enemies. But they also had a trope—The Enemy of My Enemy—whose description text read simply: Is my friend.

It quickly became clear that KRSL weren’t the primary bad guys in this story.

If anything, they were just here to help with the body count.

■ STOP