Book Nine, Chapter 2: Wanderings |
The rain doesn’t start on Saltspar Island until just before five o’clock in the afternoon. Before that, there’s light cloud cover in most places. The south side of the island is different. It gets sun.
We found our way to a picnic set up on a large blanket, ready for whoever got there first. It was there every day. A covered basket filled with food sat unattended, ready for us to find it. In Carousel proper, this might have been a trap. On Saltspar, this was our best lunch option.
We had to get used to the changes. We were stuck on the island until we found somewhere better to be, or the Consortium sent for us. On our fourth day there, we were starting to worry the latter would never happen. Still, we didn’t leave. Finding a new place to stay meant running another storyline. That was the only way we could guarantee our safety.
We didn’t want that. The Sunken Cradle Part II had drained us all, and most of our efforts were devoted to planning Kimberly’s rescue. We took the refuge given to us, but we never lost caution.
The rest of our energy went, ironically, into trying to relax. What good was our layover in Saltspar if we didn’t at least take some time to recover?
NPCs swam on a nearby beach while sharks periodically patrolled the area, vigilant and hungry. Occasionally, one of the swimmers would disappear for an hour or so before reemerging from the waves to rejoin the beach fun like nothing ever happened.
Antoine sat on the picnic blanket, staring out at the waves like he was contemplating running off into them. I could see his eyes glaze over as he stared at the shark fins, getting glimpses of their plot armor levels and wondering what their Hustle might be, their Mettle. Ever since Kimberly had been bitten and infected with Carousel’s version of the rage virus, it was like he was sizing up the world and wondering if he could beat it one-on-one.
So far, he hadn't tried. Soon, when we had everything prepped, he was going to get his chance to fight for her, and he wasn't going to do it alone.
He grabbed a small stone and threw it out into the water as far as he could. It went far enough that I couldn't even tell where it hit as its splash blended in with the rolling waves.
We were terribly worried about being stuck on this island with nowhere to go that we knew was safe. So far, we had been able to borrow boats from the docks on the other side of the island, where we found our way to the river, which, it turned out, was on our path no matter where we traveled. We would find new settlements, new little glimpses into Carousel’s various exhibits, but at the end of the day, we would always travel back to the island.
The river was scary when you were forced onto it. It was even scarier when you didn’t have to be on it at all.
Today, we weren't even setting sail, not physically at least. Camden and Isaac had scrounged up some books from around the inn and other places in town. They looked through them for maps. The idea was, if we could find Saltspar Island on a real map, or at least a map that was real in its world, we could use that map to travel to other parts of that world that Carousel had brought in, maybe someplace out from under the thumb of the Manifest Consortium.
I didn't want to discourage them, but deep down, I knew that even if they found such a map, we weren't going to use it for the same reason that we hadn't used the map that we had made ourselves. There was a very real chance that no matter where we went, we might pop up in Carousel proper and find ourselves victim to the circus apocalypse that still roiled there.
But as long as it kept their minds busy, it was probably a useful exercise.
The sunlight was never golden here. At its peak, it was a silvery gray. I didn’t mind. It was peaceful.
Our attention was diverted from the beach by giggling and screaming from a nearby forest. We each turned our heads to see a group of five people our age running out of one of the trails, being chased by a man wielding a large saw. The man's face was covered, and he was dressed like a lumberjack.
The group was obviously made up of immortals, members of the Manifest Consortium, and they were all cosplaying as characters from a cheesy slasher. Somehow, they managed to get the outfits all wrong, mixing and matching apparel so bad it looked like the Scooby gang had just visited a thrift shop.
Still, they appeared to be genuinely enjoying themselves as the man with the saw chased after them.
What a terrible weapon for a slasher to have. Maybe if he had some buddies to hold you still while he sawed back and forth, it would be usable, but on its own, even the sharpest saw was only going to give some scrapes and cuts if swung wildly.
It didn't matter because he wasn't a real enemy anyway. He was just an NPC dressed up to play the part of a killer.
The group of LARPers gave us a wide berth as they ran past us toward the beach.
The saw-slinging slasher followed them, and when he got to us, he raised his saw high and screamed like Tarzan.
He stared at us, waiting for a reaction.
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“Go away,” Kelsey said bluntly, which caught the man off guard. Apparently, he didn't have anywhere in the script that prepared him for someone who wasn't going to play along. That was a tremendous oversight.
He did understand what she said, though. He passed right by us and continued chasing his previous quarry.
Kelsey was completely done with this misadventure on the river. She was never even supposed to come with us, but when it came time for us to make our way down to the dungeon of the castle and escape, she volunteered to be a guard so that we would have time to get the boat ready and set out.
She had paid a price for that.
Weeks had passed, and she had been swallowed up by the river, half-frozen, betrayed by a fellow player, and then, to top it all off, she was stuck here on this attempt at a tourist trap that mocked us every step of the way.
I knew that all she wanted to do was to get back on the river and find a way back into the castle so she could rejoin her team, but she was smart enough to know that was impractical with the apocalypse making its way well into its second month of operation.
She tried not to show any emotions. She had modeled herself after Buffy the Vampire Slayer, after all. She wasn’t going to show emotion unless it involved a dreamy manpire.
“We should do the maze,” Ramona suggested shortly after the masked sawyer had made some distance.
The trail that the cosplayers had just left had been some sort of forest maze, which was where they picked up the serial killer on their tail.
“No,” I said. “I make it a point to never go into mazes unless I have to, and in Carousel, it feels like I almost always have to.”
I've been in numerous mazes, some of which were actually called mazes. The hedge maze from Eternal Savers Club and the corn maze from The Final Straw II came to mind, and I remembered that there were actual killers in each of those. I highly doubted that we were going to find Benny the Haunted Scarecrow on Saltspar Island.
Not all mazes looked like they were mazes, not to the audience, at least. They felt like it, though.
“Come on,” she said. “It would be good to exercise. Have you all noticed that most of the physical activity we do is in storylines, and all of that gets undone at the end of the story? It's like we don't exercise at all.”
It was a funny observation. In storylines, we had to perform all sorts of athletic feats of strength and endurance, but once we succeeded, we would go back to our base and celebrate. From our body's perspective, it was nonstop alcohol and dessert some weeks.
“Not sweating when I don't want to is one of the few forms of control I have left,” Isaac said. His sister Cassie whispered a sassy comeback to him, which started them bickering.
Antoine stood up from his place on the blanket.
“I need to get my steps in,” he said. “Keep my Savvy up.”
He had a trope called Blood to the Brain, which gave him a Savvy buff if he regularly exercised. With his Health Nut aspect and new Adventurer advanced archetype, his Savvy was going to become more and more important. He couldn't get by on physical stats alone like most Athletes.
And so it was agreed more or less. When half of us started walking toward the forest maze, the other half begrudgingly followed.
-
After we were almost through, I found myself bursting out laughing. It was just a maze, no different than what you might find on Earth.
There was absolutely no movie magic involved at all. Sure, there were a few NPCs in there dressed as killers and some scary props, like a fully functional gallows that could hang up to five people at once, but other than that, there was no evidence that this was even in Carousel.
Normally, when you ran through a maze, Carousel was one step ahead of you, making sure that there was drama happening. There was always a narrative to your pathing, whether you were running through a burning hospital or some creepy basement. It never felt dull, and even if you were lost, you were still finding things.
There were plenty of shrubs and trees that made up the barriers between the paths. They were all overgrown, but at one point in time, this had been a manicured, professional garden maze. It probably wasn't on Saltspar Island originally. There was no telling where the Consortium had grabbed it from when they tried to imitate Carousel and build this place.
We were in and out of it in twenty minutes, and while nothing in there was capable of scaring us, it was still a good time to laugh and to distract ourselves from our situation.
It opened up to a different cove that must have been on the far side of the island from the inn, and it was probably the first truly interesting thing that we had seen.
It was the town. The town we had just come from… well, kind of.
Surrounded by looming forested mountains was the town of Saltspar. In many ways, it was identical to the one on the other side of the island that we had been exploring for the last few days. The difference was that this was the real one.
Before us was a small seaside port that had been destroyed by a large storm. It wasn't clear if the whole sharks-moving-into-the-flooded-town part was true or not. I doubted that, but the horrors of nature’s wrath were real enough.
The buildings had been built on stilts in anticipation of flooding, and many of them were connected by walkways, like it was one big elevated fishing dock. Back in the version we had spent time in, there was lots of natural life living beneath the walkways, crabs and other sea creatures whose lives revolved around the tide that came in and out.
The buildings here had been largely destroyed, and the walking paths, miraculously, were among the few structures still standing.
“It looks like it just happened minutes ago,” Anna said after we had gotten a good look at the destroyed version of Saltspar.
There was no rot. This wasn’t an ancient version of the town on the other side of the island. It forever looked recently destroyed.
“We really shouldn't be here,” Camden said. “I have a feeling that this has something to do with the magic they're using to keep the island safe.”
Camden had gotten into MBW in a big way. The magic between worlds was a fascinating subject for him, and I could understand why, now that we had the ability to partially understand the words that bound the rules of our tropes.
And while he himself had said that we shouldn't mess around with this place, it didn't stop him from inching closer and closer.
There were no Omens, no bad vibes (no psychic ones, at least). This wasn't a trap by Carousel, as far as I could tell, and yet, as we got closer, it became evident that this place was full of its own kind of narrative horror. It told the story of a town that died, and as we got closer, we saw that their bodies were still there.
I had to wonder if the innkeeper and the caretaker were somewhere in these waters, trapped in a collapsed building somewhere, perhaps.
“If they did this with MBW,” Camden said, “then some kind of writing must be around here somewhere. Surely they wouldn't try to bind this all on a paper ticket. There's writing on the wallpaper back at the other inn. I was trying to decipher it yesterday. It's really complicated.”
Antoine and I made eye contact, both sensing Camden's fascination and wondering whether we should be worried.