Book Nine, Chapter 36: Apocalypse Sea

Jell-O shots did nothing to ease our existential dread, but to be fair, this wasn't an environment where anyone could easily overcome it. The people here weren't as lighthearted or as much of a good time as they first appeared. They were playing out the end of the world, each and every one of them.

I didn't know how true that was until I took a few moments to sit back and listen to the NPCs speak to each other. At first, I was mostly concerned with the unlimited supply of diagonally cut bologna sandwiches inside one of the coolers on the beach near the keg collection. We stocked up the boat with those as soon as I found them, or at least Isaac and I did. Bologna tasted good after a day at the beach.

The others were mingling or swimming. We didn't have anything in particular to do except relax and take a load off, which was impossible.

When you let yourself think for too long here, you could hear the circus music in the distance, even over the loud boombox playing early 2000s pop rock.

Ramona let herself float out into the middle of the swimming area, staring up at the sky. Kimberly and Antoine slipped seamlessly into a group of partiers. I couldn't imagine for a moment what they would be talking about. Sure, they were pretty good at talking to strangers, but these were people from another world and experiencing the worst day of their lives.

Beach volleyball wasn't a cure for anything except for general malaise. I found myself a spot on the beach underneath a tree and simply watched. It was like we were trying to speed-run relaxing at Camp Dyer. I didn't really see the point, but it was a welcome break from planning for the apocalypse.

For as long as the NPCs allowed me to take a break from it, at least.

One young woman, probably college-age, probably much more dignified when she wasn't wasted, was stuck in that moment of comprehension where she couldn't get past the narrative of her life until she found a way to phrase it, to really capture it and reduce it down to an idea.

"This is the end of the world," she said. "This is... Can you believe that's where we are? Everyone else is dead by now. Shouldn't we say something? Shouldn't we make a memorial or write out some sort of obituary for the human race? Those bastards, whatever they are, they killed us. They made us extinct, and we're just stranded on this island without any gas, with no way of knowing what happened. How were we supposed to defend ourselves against those things? I saw one of them kill two people by throwing a brick through them. What am I supposed to think of that? What conclusions are we supposed to draw about our place in the universe?"

Maybe she just wasn't a happy drunk.

I had a hunch she was not talking about Ringmaster. I didn't know what sort of monster was strong enough to throw a brick through two people, although I could speculate.

It really made me focus on the fact that I didn't know what lethal danger Ringmaster actually posed. How was I considering triggering the apocalypse when I didn't know what kind of mortal peril we were facing? Wasn't that the most mysterious thing about Highbrow Hew? He couldn't just be a psychological horror. He had to be a real, deadly threat, along with his menagerie of horrors. They had to be real, not just a dream.

Despite being told repeatedly that our goal was to simply survive and that things like plot manipulation and lore discoveries were of minimal importance, I couldn't help but wonder exactly how this doomsday clock would tick.

Another woman tried to comfort the first by saying, "You just have to believe they're in a better place now. That wasn't really them. It was the virus that took them over. They died the moment they got infected, don't you understand that? Even if they looked like them and talked like them, that was the vampire that did those terrible things."

Ah, vampires. They were strong enough to throw a brick really hard. It was my first guess. Surely a vampire apocalypse could account for the morbid destruction the first woman described. It was also easy to understand how they could become apocalyptic. Not every vampire wants to build a life in the Pacific Northwest and marry a teenager. Some just want to spread and destroy.

To each their own.

"It was like we were insects to them," the first woman said, nodding her head to the second. "Like they just stopped at our planet for the entertainment value of wiping us out. They didn't even take anything, not that I saw. They just wanted to kill us."

Wait. Alien vampires? It looked like Carousel might have been double-dipping. I sat under the tree, continuing to listen to the conversation of the women a few feet away from me, until a third NPC showed up to join the conversation.

It was some guy. Nothing about him stood out until he started to speak.

"Look, the way I see it," he said, "there was no way for us to win. Not against those things. I mean, they kiss you, and then you just sit down and wait to starve to death. How are you supposed to fight against that?"

This guy had clearly decided that if the world was going to end, he wasn't going to see it happen sober. He was putting on a veneer of apathy and nihilism, but mostly he just came off as tone-deaf to the women, who had been a lot more philosophical by comparison.

Also, alien vampires that kissed you until you died of starvation sounded a bit convoluted, even by Carousel standards.

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"Wait a second," I said, interrupting them.

They looked at me like I was the rude one, even though I was there first.

"What monster caused all of this?"

They looked at each other, then at me like I was an idiot for not knowing, but at least they were decent enough to answer.

"Vampires," one said.

"Soldiers from outer space," another answered.

"Busty demons," the guy replied.

They all said different things, and none of them seemed to realize that they were contradicting each other.

"By any chance, do you guys know who Highbrow Hew is?" I asked, looking from face to face, searching for recognition.

They shook their heads and laughed at me for even saying such a silly name.

"All right, this is gonna sound weird," I said. "Is there some sort of circus involved in the end of the world? I mean, from your perspective."

"What do you mean, a circus?" the first woman asked. "Do you think that they came down here for their own entertainment, like they were broadcasting it? A circus... I don't know, but it sure would explain some things."

"No, I mean like an actual circus."

I had gone too far and lost them. I suspected their scripts had them neatly divided so they couldn't tell that each of them was telling a different story. They also couldn't know much about the actual apocalypse bearing down on Carousel proper at that moment.

I had wondered why these people were here. I toyed with the possibility that Carousel had simply put them on boats and sent them out into the ocean-shaped part of the river, just to get them out of Carousel proper so the apocalypse could take place.

I was beginning to suspect that all these NPCs in the various boats weren't from storylines in Carousel, not exactly. They were from apocalypses.

I scanned the horizon. Hundreds of boats filled my view.

It made sense. If the world was about to end from most causes, whether they be vampires or zombies, at least some survivors would flee to the ocean hoping to find salvation, but actually finding nothing but the same existential dread that my friends and I were experiencing.

I got up, dusted the sand off my shorts, and ran to find Antoine, Kimberly, and Camden.

"We need to see if there's anyone in all these boats that came here fleeing Ringmaster," I said.

"I thought we agreed that all of them were here fleeing Ringmaster," Antoine said.

"No," I said. "I think Carousel brought all these NPCs together here because these are actual survivors of all the various apocalypses. They fled to the sea. Somewhere in here, I bet there are people who know information about Highbrow Hew that can help us."

"Well, there's only one way to find out," Kimberly said, sipping from a margarita.

With her massive Moxie, she walked out to the most public area on the beach and then asked, "Has anyone here heard of Highbrow Hew?"

One person raised their hand: some random dude in office wear he had apparently been wearing for days.

After a few moments, another also raised her hand. She was a middle-aged woman who had been crying the entire time we were there.

We looked out over the sea of boats and people. We needed to get as many witnesses as we could. So that's how we spent the next few hours, going around the island and all the nearby boats, searching for anyone who was familiar with Mr. Tall, Dark, and Contorted.

We found six total. They were just random people from different walks of life, and like the other NPCs, the script prevented them from really understanding their situation beyond the base concept that they were adrift at sea, hoping to survive some apocalyptic scenario on land.

"Where did you meet Highbrow Hew?" I asked one. "What is his deal?"

"I never met him, I swear," one woman with a Minnie Mouse-style bow in her hair said. "Or at least I don't think I did. My whole childhood is a blur because I had a head injury when I was in my twenties, and then I took some prescription medicine that was supposed to help me with night blindness, but it really messed me up..."

She went on for a while about her medical issues. We had to cut her off.

"I can't say I remember meeting him," a man said to the same question, "but I do remember him. When I was a child, something terrible happened at my sister's slumber party. I've been trying to remember the full story ever since."

"Yeah, that sounds right," several of the others said when we described the dream. "My sister's slumber party."

"I was walking my dog outside when he attacked a slumber party," a third one said. "I don't know why I didn't do anything. I can't remember. I'm not even sure it really happened."

And it just kept going on like that. Of the six, four of them had been in the house in the dream. Two of them were the party girl's brother. Two had been friends of the party girl. One was the dog walker who happened to be walking by the house when something disastrous happened, and the last was playing cards down the street when she heard the screaming.

It was the same dream. It took us a while to iron it out, but it was the same dream that the others and I had experienced. The only change was who was who.

"Just a second," Camden said. "Were there like six different slumber parties, or do you remember each other from them? And why does no one know what happened to the missing girl?"

"That's the tricky thing," the first man said. "I don't even have a sister."

These weren't the people from the dream. They were simply people who had the dream.

We huddled off together and let the NPCs wait.

"What is going on?" Kelsey asked, having listened to most of our interrogation. "Is this some sort of mass delusion or what?"

No one had an answer, and as always seemed to happen when no one had an answer, they looked to me to answer.

"I think it's a memetic nightmare," I said. "Highbrow Hew probably isn't real. The entire nightmare might not be either. I think it's like a disease that passes from person to person, and they all have it. It's Freddy Krueger but probably with a twist. That's basically what's been happening so far. That's what we're supposed to understand. We thought that we were being cast in roles for a storyline, but we're not. We were just experiencing the same dream that everyone does inside the story."

I wasn't going to play a little boy whose sister's slumber party got ruined by a man standing outside below the window. I was going to play someone who had that memory planted in their head.

That helped me understand a discrepancy that I couldn't get past. This storyline felt so personal because in the dream I had some limited access to the kid's memories, and yet apocalypses were supposed to be strictly survival. No plot for the players to worry about, at least no complications.

This made it all make sense. Everyone in the world was about to have the same nightmare, and it was all starring the same guy, Highbrow Hew, the Freddy Krueger-It hybrid, the man who I somehow knew but never got to perceive, who was standing under the window when a kid went missing.

Was old Hew a fake creature from a nightmare, or was this whole story a nightmare about a real creature?

We would have to find out which. We went back to the survivors and began questioning them about the end of the world.