Book Nine, Chapter 38: The End of the Loop

As I stared down into the dark waters of the Carousel River from the side of the boat, I saw what I believed could be the shadow of a great beast down beneath the surface.

Suddenly, I was brought back to a childhood trip to go tubing on a lake. To be honest, I couldn't say whether it was before or after my parents were killed, which was funny. Most of my life seemed to be divided between those two states of existence. Now it was divided before Carousel and after.

I remembered seeing the water churn from atop the inflatable tube as a ski boat my grandparents had rented pulled it across the lake, and in my imagination, I saw sea monsters lurking under the rough water ready to eat me.

I must have held on to that tube so tight just because I was afraid to end up in the murky depths, but I knew it was inevitable. My grandfather, or was it my father, was driving with the pure intent of knocking me off. That was the point of tubing. The ride could only end when I fell in the water, and yet it was that very ending that compelled me to hold on with inhuman strength as the little winged tube jumped over every single ripple.

When the boat would turn, I would go skidding out from behind the boat's wake into the dangerous waters that hadn't yet been tamed by the motor. There were big waves out there, and yet I don't actually remember falling off. I don't remember the ride ending. At some point, I must have been flung into the water, and that sea monster I had imagined hadn't eaten me.

But in this river, when you think you see a sea monster, you probably do.

The one I saw now had whiskers like a catfish, along with some shrunken vestigial wings that could not possibly have supported flight and were mere decorations on its serpentine body. It came up near the surface, questioning whether or not it should flip our boat and kill all of us.

I stared down into the water, and it looked back up at me, and we made eye contact. It might as well attack us. We were headed into the maw of the beast anyway. In a way, I would prefer an actual beast.

As a kid, I wished I had actually seen a sea monster, a dragon, a Gyarados, anything to let me know that the world was bigger than I could know and filled with mystery. I eventually got my answer.

The whiskered sea beast slithered back down into the impossibly deep waters of the river, perhaps scared away by the circus music that got louder and louder as we found our way back to Carousel proper.

"Thinking of jumping in?" Ramona asked me as she caught me staring into the water.

Neither she nor anyone else had seen the sea serpent. It was a good thing it didn't attack. I certainly didn't prepare them for it.

"No. If I was going to do that, I already would have," I said. She reached out and held my hand. The last thing I wanted was connection. I wanted to be a million miles away.

I felt like a little boy again, hanging on for dear life to the handles of a water tube, summoning strength from fear in the hopes that he never had to go into the water.

But here we were, headed to the water anyway, even though we knew there was something there, down deep, waiting to eat us.

Carousel needed its show. Once upon a time, a giant storyline at the end of a river voyage, a throughline no less, would have been enough to satiate Carousel's appetite for quite some time.

Why did it want us to run the apocalypse? I was certain that it did, but I didn't understand why. Was it pure bloodlust? Carousel had always hungered for carnage, but I had to wonder if that was just part of the game.

Lucky had told us that the apocalypse engine was designed to help reshape Carousel back to its base form after thread pulling had gotten it out of shape. Carousel had taken over that engine now, and it must have had a plan for it. But running an apocalypse, or at least spreading one out, wasn't enough. It needed us to trigger it. That was so odd.

Lucky and his player Darlene made it seem like apocalypses ran on autopilot and you joined in just for the thrill of it, or perhaps for some massive rewards, or, if you were Darlene, because your narrator told you to. But this apocalypse wasn't running on autopilot. It was waiting.

If this were the Black Snow, it would be as if the storm clouds had grown over Carousel without dropping a single black flake.

Carousel wasn't using apocalypses for their designed purpose. It had something else in mind. It wanted to reshape Carousel proper, and it finally had the tool to do it. Was that the purpose of its hosting the Manifest Consortium to begin with, for the toys they could make it?

As I stared at the circus tents growing ever larger downriver, I grew to like that theory.

-

Ironically enough, southeastern Carousel was the place most likely to have its own circus tent even before the apocalypse, but now that it was covered in them, it looked somehow even more tacky than normal. All the NPCs forced to join in on the festivities looked happy enough, and maybe if we never triggered the apocalypse, they would get to go on being that way. It probably wasn't the worst role they'd ever been in.

We sailed west until we passed the area where Witherhold Manor had been with its werewolves, past the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, where we had taken a trip into space, and eventually we kept sailing until we saw a castle in the distance.

"How do we get back inside?" Kimberly asked.

It was a fair question, and all we could do was theorize. It was a real head-scratcher. When we were in the dungeons, the river flowed underneath the castle easily enough, and then it let out in various places that didn't physically exist in Carousel proper, or at least not that I could see. The question was, how did we get into the castle through the other side?

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There was literally nowhere we could go. The castle itself was up on a hill that jutted out over a valley right in front of the river. It made no logical sense for an underground river to exist right beneath it. By my estimation, that river should have been floating about 20 feet above the valley where the circus had spread now.

Maybe whatever place the castle was actually from was on ground level, where having some underground plumbing of that nature and position made sense, but here it didn't.

"Right over there," Isaac said.

He pointed toward a bridge that crossed the river. We had once seen the Astralist manhandle some murderous hill people and carry them across it. Nothing about the bridge called out to me.

"What are you talking about?" Camden asked.

"That ledge right there," Isaac said, pointing to a rock wall underneath the bridge that had some wooden posts one could tie their boat to. "Those are the same as the ones under the castle."

He was right. The dungeons under the castle had stonework canals that looked exactly like that little ridge.

The problem was, the ridge was about 6 feet across, and it didn't seem to have an entrance to anything.

But we had been on the river long enough to know that navigation was more art than science, more feeling than logic.

"All right, hold on," Camden said as he steered the boat toward that little stonework ledge.

We got closer and closer, and no portal opened up to take us in. I looked for something in the shadow of the bridge, cast out over the ledge, but saw nothing.

But then we just kept getting closer and closer.

Literally, we were five feet away, and then about 10 feet later, we were still 5 feet away.

"Good call, Isaac," I said.

And it was. We kept moving toward that ledge on the side of the river until eventually it became all we could see, as more and more of the ledge seemed to be unveiled. It was as if the separation between the shadow of the bridge and the light on the other side was a curtain, and all we had to do was aim to go behind it.

Sure enough, after about ten minutes of physically impossible locomotion, we managed to make it to the other side of that light curtain, where darkness consumed us. We all took out our lights in various forms, waiting for some monster in the dungeons to jump out at us.

It was no different than we expected. Fortunately, most of the monsters we saw, from trolls to shadow demons to the occasional mutant human, didn't seem to notice we were there. They just kept playing out their little stories.

"Everybody keep an eye out," Antoine said. "We need to make sure that we go in the right entrance, or else this could get messy."

I was pretty sure we would recognize the entrance to the dungeon that led up to the castle. It had been baked into our memories. I just hoped that a swarm of fast zombies, with or without the mimicking quality of the last ones we saw, would not be waiting there to greet us.

And they weren't.

"Here I thought we'd never see you again."

Logan's voice echoed through the dungeon. They must have seen us coming. He, Michael, Nicole, Kelsey's brother Kyle, and Dina were all there waiting for us, ready to escort us up to safety, if that's what the castle was. Safe.

"Kelsey!" Nicole called out.

She had tears in her eyes. The last they knew, Kelsey, Bobby, Ramona, and Isaac had fallen into the water and been swept away.

Kelsey, being herself, jumped off the side of the pontoon onto the stone platform before we even got to the wooden dock and ran to greet her aunt and brother.

After we tied up Camden's pontoon, hoping it wouldn't float away, they quickly shoved us through the path back up to the castle.

Once we knew everyone was safe, the hard part began.

_

When we presented Logan and Nicole's teams with our plan to trigger the apocalypse, I wished that we had something more to offer them than some sandwiches we had found in a cooler.

"I thought we did all of this so that we didn't have to trigger the apocalypse," Logan said as he stood up from the dining hall table and tossed a pewter cup across the room. "Andrew died helping you escape this damn circus, and now you tell me you should never have left?"

"We didn't say that," I said. "We accomplished a lot on our trip. But we won't get real safety until we beat this apocalypse. I thought we explained that."

"Maybe I was distracted by the part where you said that we were going to beat an apocalypse," Logan said. "An apocalypse, a part of the game where we have never seen any survivors. They were the only thing that made Arthur and Adeline shiver in their boots, and they were higher level than you, by the way."

The levels would certainly be a problem.

I had no illusion this would be a simple conversation.

"We aren't asking you to join us," Antoine said. "Those of you who wish to leave can take the boat and head out on the river. Find a safe storyline, beat it, and settle down for a few weeks. Might have to run more than one, but there's plenty out there. Don't even have to go that far."

Camden gave him a look. We hadn't discussed offering up his boat, but we assumed he would be okay with it. We couldn't honestly ask all these players who hadn't been through what we had been through to willingly enter an apocalypse.

Logan, though, seemed to take the offer well enough.

"It might work. If the only way to get rid of this apocalypse is to trigger it, then maybe we should have a team make the sacrifice," he said.

I really hated that he was reducing our plan down to a sacrifice play, but he might not have been wrong. This wouldn't be the first time that Carousel led us to great danger. I wasn't exactly feeling confident. I was simply resigned.

Sometimes the end of a thread is in a grave. Bobby had learned that the hard way.

"Look, if we are going to get out of here one day," I said, "we need to clear the apocalypse. It has to be done, and Carousel clearly is having fun with its new toy, so we have to play along. If you want to view it as a sacrifice, go ahead. I really do hope that you guys make it out okay. We have to do this."

Nicole sat silent through most of the conversation, which was not like her. She was smart and a planner. I never expected her to try to run the apocalypse with us, and in the end she wouldn't. Her team was finally back together. I expected her silence was meant to keep it that way.

We didn't know who we were taking on the apocalypse and who would flee in the boat, a complete reversal of what had happened the last time we were here in this castle together.

"How does this work, anyway?" Logan asked. "Is it like a normal storyline? One person survives, then everyone does? Do you need..." He had a look on his face as if he hated himself for asking the question. "Do you need our numbers, or will you be okay on your own?"

The dining hall was a weird place to have conversations. Just one big long table, and we nearly filled it with all of our players.

Camden sat down at the end, and he decided to speak up. I didn't think he'd mind missing out on Logan or Nicole because they were both insight-based leaders, which was kind of his shtick.

"It's not clear," he said. "When you go into the apocalypse, you're a part of a party, but we don't know how big the party can be before it gets split, so who could say. Maybe it would be smarter to tackle it with a group less likely to be divided. Might increase our chance of survival overall."

I smirked at him. He was trying to encourage them to go.

To be honest, I didn't want them to join us either, even though they would have been useful. I could hardly stand leading my friends into this disaster, but to lead others would be too much.

We discussed the apocalypse and our plans and what we would do afterward, when we all survived without a scrape, naturally (because who wanted to discuss the alternative).

We could meet back up at Kimberly's loft and have dinner at Grain Matter downstairs, and we would laugh and reminisce on our adventures just like in the days of Camp Dyer.

At least we managed to end it on a happy note, even if we were all faking it.

When night came, the Ringmaster Apocalypse would be triggered, and all who stayed in Carousel proper would have to play.