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

Being confused about the nature of Carousel and my purpose in it was not a new thing, but usually, that was because I had too little information and very few solid facts to work with. Suddenly, I felt overwhelmed with a litany of details and an entirely different type of confusion.

I knew a scripted encounter when I experienced one. There were things that the shapeless version of me wanted to say but was not allowed to, and they had nothing to do with this storyline we had just run. I was left feeling like I needed to sift through everything I had experienced since before setting sail on the Carousel River.

If only I had a minute of peace.

Bobby seemed to think that Carousel had used all of its tricks to get us out here into the middle of nowhere for some purpose that even he didn't know, but he was probably just telling himself that. He had clearly constructed some elaborate justification for the choice he wanted to make. He wanted to blame his actions on Carousel, essentially.

Just because he was lying about his motivations didn’t mean he was wrong.

I walked back toward the others, and as I did, a familiar voice popped into existence.

“He he he, you won a ticket,” Silas, the mechanical showman, said. The faintest scars from the wounds the axe murderer had inflicted on him were still visible.

All the players lined up to see what we had won. I noticed that Ramona was pretty shaken up, so I decided to go grab her arm and guide her toward him. I didn't know how much she remembered, but from the look on her face, it was too much.

She wasn't even speaking. In the storyline, her body had been host to a cosmic being, which had somehow allowed her to survive injuries that should have killed any person. A big chunk of her DNA had been ripped out of her, causing her cells to basically explode, and yet she lingered on.

She was still just lingering.

Everyone was exhausted. It was hard to describe how tiring the Sunken Cradle had been, with its constant psychic debuffs echoing in your mind even after we were returned to our pre-storyline state. That mental fatigue was still there. The memories were painful, like lumps of burning coal in our minds.

I pressed the red button. Maybe all of our suffering had been worth it.

We got all the usual things: tropes, stats, money, but we got a few extras too.

I got two licenses.

One of them said that it authorizes the use of [“The Videotape Case #4”] from the movie [--]. It didn't describe what that videotape case was supposed to do or how it worked into this mysterious plan that I supposedly made in the props department, but it did have a message: “Just because you made a plan doesn't mean you earned it. Maybe one day you will.”

I was glad that one day there might be answers to my questions, but to be honest, I would have also accepted having all memory of that plastic video case erased from my mind. I already had enough to juggle.

The other license was for Bobby's dogs. It was much simpler than the one that he got. It had no rules or restrictions. It didn't even call them the Cole's dogs, which it probably should have, since they were the original owners. It called them Bobby's dogs.

Honestly, I was shocked that he was even acknowledged after going missing. That was a thread that I wasn't going to pull anytime soon. If Bobby died for nothing else, it was proving that sometimes the thread you're pulling is actually a noose.

I got five stat tickets, and I wasn't afraid to say that I was proud of it. In the end, the storyline could only be beaten with an incredibly risky gambit of simply giving the bad guys what they wanted. Honestly, even thinking about it as I looked at those tickets, I almost felt my bowels go watery.

All the adrenaline had helped me sharpen my decision-making and make the call that let us win, but looking back, that was crazy. We didn't beat them with a single stat check, at least not in the finale, once they had basically infinite plot armor. How could I have taken that risk?

In another sense, however, the solution was obvious. If you can't beat ‘em, join ‘em.

I would continue to wonder for many weeks whether or not my plan to give in would have worked without Bobby's sacrifice. Theoretically, we needed that chase scene to end, but maybe my lingering, unresolved emotions with Bobby forced me to theorize about whether his death was needed at all.

The truth was, I was angry at him, and I was angry at myself, and I didn't know if that would ever end.

Anyway, I got three tropes.