Book Nine, Chapter 35: The Fleet

What could you say for someone who had sacrificed themselves for you that we hadn’t said a hundred times? Anna had been put in a position that forced her to choose to enter a rescue storyline by herself, and she had done it. She had compelled Caleb Rowe to leave us alone in the only way she could.

And we didn’t want to talk about it because we didn’t know the right words. Was she dead? Was she dying? Who could say? If she had her The Heart trope equipped, she could instantly enter the storyline and await a rescue that she could participate in the same way she had done with Post-Traumatic.

That’s what we told ourselves, that she was out of harm’s way and simply sleeping. In a weird way, it was like she was better off than we were. She didn’t have to die. She didn’t have to suffer whatever fate Ringmaster held in store. She just got to step out of existence for a little while.

And if she didn’t have that trope equipped, or for some reason she chose not to use it, well, we didn’t want to talk about that.

We didn’t want to talk about anything.

The further we sailed down the river, the louder the circus music got. But then something strange happened. The river opened up, and we were back inside yet another ocean. It was strange how many of those the river seemed to run through.

The thing was, where we were positioned, we probably weren’t more than five miles from southeastern Carousel, where we had run Stray Dawn. And yet we were in an ocean. We knew that the river ran up this direction, and if we kept following it, with a little bit of Carousel’s characteristic nonsense geography, we would eventually float right by the castle.

But the ocean that we just entered was a bit distracting because here we were not alone.

We were surrounded by people. There were hundreds, no, thousands of boats, mostly small vessels, but a few large, from cruise ships to cargo ships all the way up to aircraft carriers. They were just floating in the sea, many of them tied to each other, every single one covered with people.

There were fishing boats and simple rafts as well, lifeboats and canoes, all just floating together. Many of them were playing their own music loud enough that the circus music faded into the distance.

Camden steered the pontoon as well as he could to get through. Even though we were on the part of the water that had arbitrarily been assigned as the river, it still wound through these boats, and they didn’t seem to notice it flowing.

I had to assume these people were NPCs because of the nonchalant way they reacted to us and the situation around them, but I couldn’t see them on the red wallpaper. There was a variety of activity. A group on a pontoon boat just like ours was all huddled together praying, and another group on a yacht was drinking champagne.

It took a while to get heads or tails of what was going on or why they were here. Most of the things we had seen on the river were quickly unfolding disasters or monsters that wanted to kill us, if only they could catch us first, but these just seemed like normal people.

They could see us just fine, and some waved. This place had something that was quite disturbing: an abundance of small children. Carousel, of course, had children, but it herded them around and kept them out of sight because they were not phenomenal actors. These were kids crying in the sun, wearing life jackets, asking their mothers when they get to go home.

More than that, there were no Omens. Even though the circus had not made it out here, having stuck to Carousel proper, this sea of boats didn’t hold one Omen or even anything that triggered my I Don’t Like It Here trope on an anxiety level. That was funny because the sea of boats did make me anxious otherwise. There was no obvious threat here. We even did the trick where we took off all of our scouting tropes and held out the Crybaby, wondering if it would start wailing about some hidden danger.

“So it’s just a bunch of people?” Cassie asked, holding up the doll.

“Why are you asking us? We don’t know anything more than you do,” Isaac said.

“I wasn’t asking you,” she said. “I was asking the doll.”

We moved through the river, flowing in between the boats and watching people as they sat around like they were waiting for something. Our presence was causing a bit of a stir, maybe because we were the only boat that was moving. Were we the only ones who weren’t out of gas?

Right around the time I had that thought, a man called out to us, asking almost exactly that.

“How much for the fuel canister?” he asked.

He was standing aboard something that looked to my eyes to be a tugboat, although I wasn’t sure that my version of Earth ever had anything like it. It was almost a floating tank. The man wore dog tags and was strapped with some sort of rifle, so he was likely a survivalist, if my stereotypes were up to date.

Under most circumstances, we would just ignore him, but we couldn’t tell if he was an NPC, not explicitly at least, and more than that, there was something we needed.

“That depends,” Kimberly asked. “You military?”

The guy looked at her and smiled. He had a Miami Vice mustache. He held out his dog tags with his thumb and then let them fall back to his chest.

“Nobody’s military anymore,” he said. "But I was."

“You got any MREs?” she asked.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Was she actually asking, or was she trying to improvise them into existence? It wasn’t clear.

“I might,” he said, still smiling. “Might just have a whole box of ’em for that fuel canister.”

I didn’t know how many MREs came in a box, but I knew we needed to start collecting food if we were heading back to the castle because our latest intelligence indicated that our friends there had run through their supplies after the apocalypse overstayed its welcome.

Truthfully, I didn’t know how much fuel we actually needed. If Carousel wanted us to run out of gas, we would, and refueling had not been difficult so far. There were marinas all through the river once we were brave enough to actually stop at one, or when Antoine’s montage trope forced us to.

Kimberly looked back at us, and we answered her with a confident shrug.

“Let us see the merchandise,” Antoine called out.

“All right, all right,” the man said.

He walked below deck on his strange tugboat tank and then came back up with a box filled with little brown packages. I didn’t know how many were there, but I suspected there was enough for a meal or two for each of the players once we got back to the castle.

Antoine grabbed the fuel canister that was out on the deck, unstrapped it from the railing, and carried it over to the man. They traded the box for the can. The man quickly moved over to his own canisters and refueled one, and then brought the can back to us.

“You’ve been out to the mainland recently?” the man asked as he handed us our gas can back.

“Not in a long while,” I said. My ears perked up for some sort of clue as to why all these boats were out here.

Antoine started going through the MREs just to make sure that there were as many as there seemed to be. As far as I could tell, they must have checked out.

“I’ve been out here six weeks,” he said. “It’s a miracle my water hasn’t run out. Any clue what happened out there?”

“Not a one,” I said, reverting to my grandfather’s style of speech. It really did feel like we were at a gas station talking up some rando.

The man glanced toward southeastern Carousel and whistled.

“I thought they would be announcing it over the radio, but I haven’t heard anything. Guess those things didn’t want them talking.”

I didn’t know what things he was talking about, but I nodded, and the man walked away, back down into the lower deck of his boat.

“You think he’s talking about the circus?” Isaac asked.

“Who knows?” Camden said as he fired the engine back up and we started puttering back down the river. “NPCs talking about who knows what. Same as always.”

Had all of these NPCs been forced out of Carousel proper and just left on boats? Was that what happened behind the scenes to clear the town out? It would be quite strange.

I suspected that wasn’t the case because there were some issues with time and place. Namely, not all of these boats made sense to be in Carousel proper. One of them was a hovercraft, and not the kind with the big propeller, but an actual hovercraft with sci-fi technology, floating out on the water just like any other boat, the cyborgs on board just as lost and hopeless as any other group.

We moved forward down the river, wondering when we were going to hit the punchline and figure out what all this was about, when we found an island right in the middle of the sea of boats. It was small, with a sandy beach and a few trees, but the most notable feature was that it formed a rather large cove where dozens or more people were busy swimming, mostly young people who inexplicably were drunk, as if this were some sort of spring break vacation for them.

Of course, it could have been. We didn’t know.

We had to pull by the island, and as we did, some of the people on it waved us over like they wanted us to get out and swim with them, like we had just rolled up to a party and they somehow didn’t notice all the other boats stranded in the water around them.

“Is it a trap?” Kimberly asked.

She was looking at me. All I could do was shake my head. I saw no Omens. I felt no misgivings other than the obvious ones. It just seemed like a bunch of people stuck in a perpetual beach party.

“Oh, come on,” Isaac said. “This is obviously some sort of Lotus Eater situation or something weird like that. How could this be normal?”

After he said that, we all waited and watched to see if anything changed. He had just activated his How Is This Normal? trope, which, like my I Don’t Like It Here ability, would reveal things like traps and Omens, but it was much more deliberate, and it could actually cause things to happen, confirming there was something odd going on.

The problem was Isaac didn’t have a ton of Savvy.

“Give it to me,” Camden said after shutting the boat off and pulling out of the river so we floated right next to the island.

We had gotten used to this ever since Camden got his Brain Trust trope. He really liked using all of our Savvy-based insight abilities any time he could. Isaac sheepishly handed How Is This Normal? to Camden.

Camden then said, “Obviously something bad is going on. All these people inviting us to drink alcohol in the middle of a mass refugee migration.”

Again, we stopped and waited to see if anything would happen that would confirm Camden’s observation of the obviously abnormal.

As it had with Isaac’s, nothing happened.

“Checks out to me,” Camden said. “Should I pull up and go grab a cold one?”

“Yes,” Ramona said. “You should absolutely do that.”

She pulled off her T-shirt, revealing that she was already wearing her bathing suit, as most of us were, having been on a river cruise for weeks. She walked over to the railing and opened up one of the hinged doors so she could jump into the water.

She was trying to act carefree, but I could tell she was nervous.

“You’re not gonna do that,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, but there’s no way--"

She jumped off the boat into the water. She came up and looked at me, her arms casually waving in the clear blue sea, pushing her toward the island.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“I’m swimming,” she said. “That guy has margaritas.”

She wasn’t infected, from what I could tell, so this wasn’t mind control.

I must have looked pretty flabbergasted because she called up and said, “Look, worst-case scenario, you can tell Highbrow Hew and his menagerie of nightmares that I got eaten by a sea monster, but if that doesn’t happen, I’m going to have a nice time swimming. I don’t know about you, but I didn’t get to take a lot of vacations in my life, so I think I’ll start now. Might be the last chance.”

She turned and started swimming toward party central, where dozens of twenty-somethings were standing in the shallows and drinking light beer and mixed drinks.

The rest of us just looked at each other. We had experienced a lot of Ramona’s emotional swings, from extreme depression when she first came to join us, to a silent reluctance, to gradually opening up without actually opening up that much.

For some reason, they thought that I had some insight that could explain this. I shrugged.

“She has a point,” Cassie said. “I mean, what could happen here that’s worse than what we’re literally headed toward?”

It was pretty convincing reasoning, and not too long later, Camden had pulled the pontoon up onto the white sands of the island, and the others had gotten out to go join the eternal spring break.

That left Isaac and me.

“What do you think’s going on?” he asked. “Obviously something weird is happening.”

I didn’t much like being reduced down to my most cynical instincts, so I tried to go in the opposite direction.

“I think they realized that we could be dead tomorrow, or worse, and they just want to take a break,” I said.

So I took off my hoodie, and I joined them. If that meant that we were going to miss the apocalypse, well, so be it.