The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG
Book Five, Chapter 121: A Barrel of Monkeysđ´ REC âââSEP 25, 2018 08:08:25 âââ[âŽâŽâŽâŽâŻ 80%]
When we landed, we were standing in a large industrial complex, right in front of something that could have been a cement factory or a nuclear silo. I had no ideaâall I could see were giant metal structures jutting into the sky. It had that generic qualityâit could have been anything.
Immediately, Generation Killer let go of Camden and started running along the a path into the structure.
"Come on," Camden said, grabbing my shirt.
So I followed him.
"You want us to follow him?" I asked. "We need to run."
"There's no use," Camden said. "You need to see this."
So I continued to run as a strange smoke started to rise from the top of the industrial building next to us.
"Camden, what's going on?" I asked.
"That building's about to melt down," he said, trying his best to keep pace with the Generation Killer in front of us.The killer was on a beeline toward a smaller building that kind of looked like a payphone vestibule. He rushed in through the door, and by the time we caught up, all I could see was him smacking a button on the wallâconstantly.
Suddenly, alarms started to blare around the building.
"I told you there was no stopping him," Camden said.
Generation Killer came back out to us.
"That was a close one, wasn't it, bucko? You almost tripped me up," he said.
Suddenly, the doors around the building started to open, and workers began to evacuate en masse.
Steam was rising up in the place where the smoke had been, and the workers who were coming out were gawking at it.
One said, "Oh, thank God."
Guess again.
"Wait a second," I said. "Did he just save all those people?"
That wasnât really his MO.
"Yes," Camden said. "But they werenât supposed to be saved."
I looked at him funnyâbut that, of course, didnât show up on film.
Then something possibly even stranger than time travel started to happen.
I realized that I could suddenly see the stars. The blue sky was gone. It didnât get darkâthe light was still shining on things, and everything even had shadowsâbut instead of a blue sky, it was space. With no light pollution at all.
"What in the world..." I muttered as I filmed the sky above.
Red streaksâcracksâstarted to spread around the sky.
And suddenly, we were not just dealing with one Generation Killer.
Multiple showed up.
"What did you bring them here for?" one of them yelled out.
I started filming from my pocket, trying to hide the camera, so I didnât get the best shots. Still, it was better than losing the camera. If they saw it, they didn't care.
"Interrogation. Just followin' orders, fella," the Generation Killer that had brought us said. "Could use a hand, if you're handy."
The other killers laughed.
"Did you hear that? He said he could sure use a hand! You see thatâone is missing a hand!" another Generation Killer said.
Some of them laughed. Others rolled their eyes.
I looked at Camden, and he looked very annoyed.
"They have the worst sense of humor."
No wonder Carousel only showed glimpses of them On-Screen.
"Shouldnât we run?" I whispered.
"There wouldnât be any point," he said.
I really wanted Camden to start explaining what was happening, but he looked numb. Tired. Still, I needed an explanation.
"What is going on?" I asked.
"That factoryâor plantâwas supposed to explode, have a meltdown. But it didnât," he said.
"Okay, but shouldnât that just put us on a different timeline? One where the plant never exploded?"
"Normally," Camden said. "But this isnât normal."
I didnât want to press him. Instead, I just turned off the camera.
â STOP
đ´ REC âââSEP 25, 2018 08:24:25 âââ[âŽâŽâŽâŽâŻ 80%]
The Generation Killers led us to their hangout in this broken worldâit just happened to be the Carousel Casino.
As we were shoved through the entrance, I saw that there were dozens of Generation Killers gambling on slot machines, just passing the time.
It was a large casino, and despite the Generation Killers being there, there were also NPCsâwho werenât completely oblivious but still didnât seem to care about what was going on around them.
So, normal degenerate gamblers.
We were led to the elevators and then brought up to the 13th floor of the hotel.
They took us to one of the rooms, shoved us inside, and closed the door, where two of the Generation Killers guarding the door.
I ran to the window, just to see if there was some way to open itâbut there clearly wasnât. That was fairly realistic; in the real world, casino hotels often donât have windows that open.
"Back in room 1304," Camden said.
He was legitimately upset. He was scared.
I couldnât blame him, and I didnât want to seem too jaded, but I knew our best way out was to stay proactive.
He needed a pep talk.
â STOP
We were silent at first. I had trouble reading what was going through his mind, so I didnât want to say anything.
I didnât want to assume that he had trauma he didnât have, and I didnât want to ignore him if he needed to talk.
Finally, he spoke.
âPlot Armor 36, huh?â he asked.
âYeah,â I said. âSuddenly, Iâm a hard worker.â
We made our way to the couch in the room and sat down.
âHow long has it been?â
I could tell that he was afraid of my answer.
âA year, plus or minus a few time skips,â I said. Then, after thinking for a moment, I asked, âHow about for you? What do you remember?â
He looked up at me and said, âEverything.â
For a moment, he didnât say anything more, but then he elaborated, leaning back on the couch and setting what remained of his arm across his chest as if to relax it.
âI had to do it all twice,â he said. âThey cut off my arm. I fought like hell. I learned everything there was to know about what was going on. I had a whole battle planâwe were going to get the Atlas and send it to you guys. I managed to escape and meet up with Anna, and it worked. We found the Atlas. Then she escaped as they caught up with me. I took out a few, and then they killed me.â
âThatâs what Anna said,â I said.
âAnd then I woke back up. Right back here. With both my arms again. But this time, everything was different. This time I was in a suite and not a basement. This time, the rules were all switched around, and there were dozensâmaybe even hundredsâof Generation Killers instead of the twelve I originally had. I thought that this was what death was going to be likeâthat we were just going to repeat over and over again until rescued. It all happened over again. They cut off my arm again. And this time, I researchedâand everything had changed. They were filming things, and the rules are bigger, grander. And this time, you showed up before they killed me. It hurts my head to even think about. Like the memories are raw and touchy.â
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I had not considered that Carousel might go that route. Anna had a trope that allowed her to perform in her own rescue. Camden didnât, and though the mechanics of time travel allowed him to, there would have to be a price.
âWell, I donât think we were originally supposed to rescue you,â I said.
âProbably not,â Camden agreed. He drew inward when he was upset.
âYouâre a scholar, and you were set up to have a lot of knowledge, but then all of the facts changed," I said.
âSo I had to do it again. That was my punishment. You know, as soon as I said to Anna that you should try to rescue me before the storyline was done, I knew it was going to be trouble. I really hate these guys, Riley. Itâs like they intentionally try to creep you out with their weird sense of humor.â
I nodded. âThey have a trope for that,â I said. I must have had an awkward manner or something.
He took a deep breath.
âYou know, for me, itâs only been a couple of weeks. Maybe a little more. You donât have to talk to me like weâre at a funeral. Youâre the one thatâs been missing me.â
He didnât like pity. He was the first of our group to die. He hadnât handled that well and he hated when people tried to comfort him.
âAnd youâre the one whoâs been on vacation,â I said.
He smiled. âExactly. So I donât need any more pity, all right?â
âI didnât mean to pity you,â I said. âItâs just⌠rescuing you has been on my mind every waking hour in recent memory. It can be a little hard to remember that you have been taking the ânapâ part of âdirt napâ seriously.â
He was being tough.
âOh yeah, sure,â he said. âItâs all fun and games. They even let me gamble. No one wins or loses, but they still do it because theyâre insane, and ninety percent of them are idiots.â
No wonder they had such limited dialogue.
âSo whatâs their story?â I asked.
âDiscovered time travel. Somehow, they got trapped in our group of timelines, and they donât like it. Theyâre really mad about it, and they want to destroy things just because.â
Standard time travel serial killer stuff. Or at least it would be if that was a common thing in movies.
âThe one I talked to said he wanted to go home,â I said.
âOh yeah? And did you know that itâs our fault that they canât go home? That anytime you beg them to stop hurting you, theyâll bring that up as if itâs justification? The pain is one thing, but the fact that you canât even debate with these meatheads is worse," he was working to contain not just trauma, but rage. He took a deep breath. "Luckily, theyâre easy to trick.â
âThey have a trope where they fail every moxie check, but it ends up coming back to bite you.â
âYou get the willies,â Camden said. âTheyâll apologize for that. Theyâll say, âSorry if I gave you the willies, I was just checking in.ââ
I started to laugh.
âAs soon as we get out of here, weâre going to find a serial killer whoâs actually well-adjusted and articulate,â I said.
âYeah, someone you could have a conversation with,â Camden agreed. âA Hannibal Lector.â
We laughed and continued with the small talk for a little while longer.
But we had work to do.
âSo, about this time travel thing⌠I hear there are no paradoxes. Surely, I misunderstood something.â
Anna had tried to explain it, but she didn't get the finer details.
âThat is a whole barrel of monkeys,â Camden said. âThatâs what they call itâa barrel of monkeys. Every time you try and work on it, one will walk up, look at what youâve been researching, and theyâll say, âOh, thatâs a whole barrel of monkeys.â One after another.â
He really hated these guys.
âThat sounds like torture,â I said.
âAnd I canât even cover up both of my ears,â he said, straining against the pain in his butchered arm.
We laughed again, and laughing hurt his stump, so he tried not to do it for too long.
âIf you want to know how time travel works, look behind you,â he said.
And I did.
What I saw was a drawing on the wallpaper of the hotel room.
âYou did this?â I asked.
He nodded. âThey wanted me to explain it to them. Just to check their understanding. And they have none. The smart ones get it but pretend they don't just to mess with you. The dumb ones don't get it but pretend they do.â
âWell, it is a whole barrel of monkeys,â I said.
Straining, he got up from the couch and went over to the diagram he had drawn, trying to walk me through it.
It started out pretty simple. On the far left, there was a node labeled Event A.
On the far right of the diagram, there was another node labeled Event B.
Between them was the typical diverging branches timeline illustration you would see in any time travel movie. The only difference was that, eventually, these branches started to converge at one pointâEvent B.
Any of the branches that did not lead to Event B were crossed out.
âAll right, so buckle up. We need to practice this so I can say it on film,â Camden said.
âIâm all ears,â I said.
âGood. Event B will happen. Always,â Camden said. âThere is nothing that can possibly prevent it. Any reality where Event B is no longer possible ends up like this.â
He pointed out the window to the stars in the sky, despite the daylight.
âBroken. Set aside. The rules donât matter anymore. These guys made it into their own little kingdom. This is their hideout.â
âA place out of time,â I said. âSo if the plant doesnât melt down, Event B canât happen?â
âRight, but hold off on calling this a place 'out of time.' The place out of time is something else. You might have seen it when we were traveling to get here.â
âThe Shores of Time,â I said.
âYes,â he said. âHow did you know that?â
âOh, Dina has this whole subplot where her teenage sonâwho was your friend, Gabrielâgot lost on the other side of time at the same time that you guys left the roller rink.â
âGabrielâŚâ Camden muttered. âIâll have to make note of that,â he said.
âYeah, sheâs got her own thing going. As always,â I said.
"I copied this diagram directly from what the smart ones already had written," Camden said.
He had a trope that allowed him to copy visual information onto the red wallpaper directly. It was quite the cheat code.
"So, hereâs the thing about Event Bâif it doesnât happen, that is the paradox of all paradoxes. Thatâs what I meant when I said there were no paradoxes. Itâs because⌠Oh great, I donât know how to explain this to the audience."
"Well, just try to explain it to me, and then I'll work with you on it. We did the same thing with Anna," I said.
"Okay," he said. "You know how gravity works, right? How everything puts off a gravitational field? This couch and that desk over there are both putting off gravitational fields. You and I are both putting off gravitational fields. So why are these things not attracting to each other across space?"
"Itâs because weâre just friends," I said.
"Oh, haha. What Iâm talking about isâwhy does this couch not gravitationally attract to that table over there?" he paused, but not long enough for me to answer. "Itâs because of the Earth, right? The Earth is so massive and has such a big gravitational force that all of these other gravitational fields are basically canceled out."
"Yes," I said. "Robin Williams explained that in Flubber. Go on."
"Right. Well, I think that this paradoxâthe forces of physics that we canât even begin to understandâwork substantially the same way."
He paused for a moment as if struggling to put it into words.
"The physical forces that work to prevent the paradox of Event Bnot occurring are so massive that other paradoxes basically donât mean anything in their wake, right? Theyâre not causing any problems because theyâre in theâI donât knowâparadoxical field of Event B⌠I already lost the audience. This doesnât even make sense, but itâs how things work here, I swear."
I thought for a moment.
"I understand," I said. "So itâs likeâif youâre at a river and you throw a giant rock into it, it could cause all kinds of ripple effects. But if the river is about to go off a waterfall, nothing ends up mattering."
"Thatâs⌠Thatâs good," he said. "Anyway, thatâs why you can go back in time and do pretty much whatever you want. You wonât trigger a real paradox because the forces pulling all causality toward Event B will fix anything that you break more or less."
"Like when you kill a copy of the Generation Killer, and he gets washed away to the Shores of Time," I said.
"Thatâs it," Camden answered.
"Youâre right; that is confusing. Maybe we shouldnât try to explain this to the audience. Just leave vague so that the nerds can pretend to understand it for clout. The word time anomaly will come in handy."
He shrugged.
"So what happens if you go back in time and kill your grandfather?" I asked.
"You and your jewel enter a timeline where you were never born. When you leave, that timeline just kind of stops existing and the main branch timelines are all that are left. For some reason, there are only a finite number of stable timelines. A big number, but not actually infinite. Though, if you kill your grandfather in a lot of different timelines, you might be able to change something. You might change a whole branch. These guys ran a lot of experiments but weren't exactly geniuses."
"Itâs a meteorite," I said. "Not a jewel."
"Meteorite," he repeated. "Even if you can change a stable timeline, the forces at play are so strong that causality will just stitch together some alternate reason for everything that needs to happen to happen⌠Thatâs why only mass death creates perceptible timeline branchesâŚâ
He stopped and thought for a moment.
"We view time as being this delicate thing, where a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a hurricaneâbut thatâs just not true. Time is powerful. Itâs all-consuming. Itâs inevitable."
He looked at me seriously.
"Riley, I think itâs the real monster of this storyline."
"Yeah, but thatâs cheating," I said. "Time is the enemy in every storyline."
"No, I mean it," he said. "Here, there is one rule: Event B happens. Always. And these guys? Theyâre scared out of their minds about it."
"Go more into that," I said.
"Theyâre different ages because when they came to this group of timelines, some of them stopped time traveling as muchâso they aged in whatever year they were left in. A lot of them took a while to figure out how time travel worked in the first place. But any of them that lives past the year 2025? Never comes back. So that is when Event B is supposed to happen."
â2025,â I repeated. âMassive inevitable event that must happen.â
"They think itâs the end of the world," he said. "I just donât know."
"What do you think they mean when they say theyâre trapped and they want to go home?" I asked.
"Iâm still working on it. There are pieces of information I havenât had time to sift through. Look at this," he said.
He pointed to another illustration he had madeâthis one was a map of the Carousel River Valley.
He grabbed the marker from his pocket, took off the cap with his teeth, and started drawing little squiggles all over the map. Then, taking the cap out of his teeth, he said:
"I donât know what these squiggles are. Theyâve got this map inside of their little study area. I got a good look at it, and I have it on the red wallpaperâbut I donât know what they mean. This wasnât there the first time. In fact, the wall that it was on was just blankâwhich leads me to believe that it was supposed to be there, but maybe we didnât do something, so we didnât get that information."
"Weâre learning a lot about how stories work," I said. "If you donât activate a subplot, it just isnât going to be there. And some subplots are really necessary."
"So, what do you think the squiggles are?" Camden asked. "There are moreâI could draw them all day."
I looked at the map.
"Well, this squiggle here is right on top of the original Carousel settlement," I said. "You can tell because itâs right there where the river hooks."
I stared at it a little longer. I still wasnât sure.
We tried our best to come up with theories, but we were running short.
The good newsâif you could call it good newsâwas that we were technically not part of the main character group, which meant we had a lot of Off-Screen time.
I spent a lot of it wearing my headphones and listening to what other people were doing.
Logan was sassing a KRSL agent who was interrogating him.
Interestingly, the agent didnât seem aggressive or meanâjust curious. Almost friendly.
Maybe they were playing good cop, bad cop. Or maybe they werenât antagonists, which would be wonderful. It made sense that they would arrest Loganânot only did he have a criminal background, which would make for a good back-and-forth, but he was the one who activated the KRSL subplot by talking to his museum scientist friend.
When it cut away from him, it cut to Anna. They were mostly in a hideout phase right now, planning how to rescue the rest of us.
I also heard dogs barkingâa lot.
And I recognized the dogs.
Bobbyâs two hounds were leading him around on the other side of time. And he was so polite to those dogs. When he talked to them, it was like he thought they were people.
Heck, if they helped us win this story, Iâd let them eat at the dinner table.
I stared at the diagrams Camden had made and asked myself how important an understanding of the time travel rules was for us to win.
Event B⌠something that occurred in all timelines but would not occur in this one because the plant didnât melt down. Curious.
It was a whole barrel of monkeys.
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