Book Five, Chapter 57: Baby Steps
We gently wrapped the crybaby’s arms around the coat hooks at the entryway to the loft, both for convenience and practicality. Not to mention style.
If something came along that we needed to know about, we hoped that the baby would cry and tell us. But that was actually a point of confusion—ever since we had gotten the baby, it had yet to cry even once, and we had come close to some tremendous dangers in Carousel since obtaining it.
We did that every day, just walking around.
As I sat eating cream of wheat, one of the only breakfast cereals available at Eastern Carousel General Store, I stared at the baby as it hung from its hooks and wondered what exactly the trope was supposed to do. Fear of the Unknown activated around dangers the user was not aware of, seemingly a catchall.
I scratched my head while I thought about it because I had a theory about why it wasn't working. If it only worked on dangers you weren't aware of, that implied that if you were aware of the danger, it just wouldn't do anything.
I wasn't the only one who was confused, but I was the only one who was thinking about it that morning—the day after we had purchased it. Everyone else was preoccupied.
We had decided to postpone our journey to the Speakeasy for a day because we wanted to get there around midday, as we had been told that we needed to leave at closing time, whenever that was. So, the sooner we got there in the day, the more time we would have to explore, and more importantly, the longer we would get to put off doing the dangerous endeavor of going to the Speakeasy itself.
We knew, in theory, that this was how Carousel often worked back before the days of Camp Dyer—before everything started coming apart at the seams. You find a problem, you go to a Paragon to get an answer, and you follow their directions, continuously chasing clue after clue until you get your answer.
In a way, our mission was almost mundane by Carousel standards.