The Game at Carousel: Book Four Stubs July 17th (Arc II Chapters 1- 85)

“You told me that your people let your captives go,” I said the moment I was next On-Screen after seeing Detective Blackwood reduced to nothing but a small slit in space-time. “That means that we can release people from those prisons?”

“Any shapeless one would be able to release them simply by creating a pathway between this dimension and the dimension that they’ve been stored inside of,” Alasdair said, as if he were talking to a child. In a way, he was. He was trying to calm me because I wasn’t hiding the fear in my voice as well as I hoped.

That meant rescuing Anna and Camden didn’t require an all-out assault against the group of shapeless ones that had taken them captive. I would have to wait, to bide my time until I could release them, or at least until Ramona’s cosmic hitchhiker could.

Vogler was very businesslike as he instructed his followers to place Anna into the same compactor that Detective Blackwood had disappeared into. There was nothing that could be done.

She took it bravely, or at least as well as could be expected. Camden was angry and fighting against those who held him, but even when they were pretending to be measly humans, the shapeless ones could hold him back pretty well. He did manage to hold on to Anna for at least a few seconds, grabbing on to her character’s small satchel before they yanked it out of his hands.

It took less than a second for Anna to be reduced down into the space of an unfolded newspaper, but unlike with Detective Blackwood, she didn’t disappear afterward. Instead, the crack in reality she was shoved into was shifted onto a sort of pedestal on the larger array of the machine.

They had plans for her. They must have had plans for Camden, too, because he was shoved into the compactor right after her, and suddenly, there was silence. The men who had sounded like rowdy mercenaries just moments earlier had gone eerily quiet as they turned toward the gigantic crystalline funnel a few meters away from the compactor.

There was an open space at the bottom of the funnel, with a large white circle that appeared to be frosted glass rather than the normal stone flooring that covered the rest of the inner cradle.

The whole setup looked more like an altar than a piece of technology.

One of the mercenaries operated the machine's controls simply by holding out his hand and unfolding it into a vast network of moving light, not unlike the tendrils that had been shoved into my face by a shapeless one earlier.

Moments later, the unmoving mechanism came to life as energy flowed through the funnel's crystalline structure, and something began to happen that my eyes refused to see and my mind refused to process.

But I understood well enough what was happening.

The funnel was bending space-time as one of the creatures in its natural form began to move down from the heart of the cradle into the crystalline funnel, a process that looked like a cross between going hyperspeed in a sci-fi show and one of those time-lapse videos of slime mold solving a maze.

One of the eldritch creatures was being reshaped right before my eyes. I had seen these creatures pull themselves together to heal wounds and restitch the fabric in their copied clothing, but this was different. This was cosmic origami. Whatever these shapeless ones were composed of was being folded over and over again, and it took a long time for me to even confirm what shape was being made, until that shape started to look like a human.

It was Anna.

At first, she looked like a cartoon or caricature that was mostly two-dimensional, but as the folding continued, her proportions filled out until she was mostly human, then mostly Anna. It copied everything from her, every strand of hair, the cut-off jeans, and the blouse tied in a knot that her character wore. It copied the satchel she wore too, and the shoes on her feet. For a while, at least, it copied the position her body had been in when she was shoved into a lesser dimension.

Her hands were outstretched, her mouth wide in terror, her eyes darting about looking for someone to save her.

But then, as the folding continued, the shapeless one took over her form more completely and gained control of her facial muscles. As the transformation completed, finishing her limbs, making sure they were all three-dimensional like they should be, the look on her face was one of pure ecstasy.

I could see her laughing before I could hear her, as if her lungs hadn’t finished being formed in time, but once the job was done, I heard laughter. Anna’s laughter. It wasn’t a cruel or clever laugh. It was pure joy, unmitigated happiness.

Once the process began to wind down, the shapeless one moved her hands across Anna’s face and through her hair and down over her breasts, past her waist, grabbing at her thighs and her knees. This cosmic entity was completely enraptured by her new form.

And the other shapeless ones cheered her on like we might cheer for someone who won a beauty pageant or beat cancer.

The copy of Anna blushed and smiled and walked off the frosted glass platform, joining her fellow shapeless ones in their revelry.

But that wasn’t something I could afford to pay attention to, because something had changed while the shapeless one was being shrunk down into a human from their infinite form.

Their plot armor fluctuated. It didn’t just go down. It went to zero. It disappeared altogether, and as it did, my Trope Master ability, for the first time in this storyline, started to kick in.

I saw them, one or two at a time, flashing on the red wallpaper, never all of them at once. I read as many as I could. These creatures were cosmic-level, which meant they had dozens of tropes. The fact that they were shapeshifters and could adapt to a wide variety of narratives probably added to that number.

In the end, I managed to catch a glimpse of quite a few. I had good practice reading quickly. Normally, when I used Trope Master, I might only get a glance out of the corner of my eye.