The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG Book Five, Chapter 121: A Barrel of Monkeys

🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 08:08:25    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

When we landed, we were standing in a large industrial complex, right in front of sothing that could have been a cent factory or a nuclear silo. I had no idea—all I could see were giant tal structures jutting into the sky. It had that generic quality—it could have been anything.

Imdiately, Generation Killer let go of Camden and started running along the a path into the structure.

"Co 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 lt 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 ti we caught up, all I could see was him smacking a button on the wall—constantly.

Suddenly, alarms started to blare around the building.

"I told you there was no stopping him," Camden said.

Generation Killer ca back out to us.

"That was a close one, wasn't it, bucko? You almost tripped 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 wasn’t really his MO.

"Yes," Camden said. "But they weren’t supposed to be saved."

I looked at him funny—but that, of course, didn’t show up on film.

Then sothing possibly even stranger than ti travel started to happen.

I realized that I could suddenly see the stars. The blue sky was gone. It didn’t get dark—the light was still shining on things, and everything even had shadows—but instead of a blue sky, it was space. With no light pollution at all. R̃𝖆Ｎ𝐎𐌱ĘȘ

"What in the world..." I muttered as I fild the sky above.

Red streaks—cracks—started 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 cara, so I didn’t get the best shots. Still, it was better than losing the cara. 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 that—one is missing a hand!" another Generation Killer said.

So 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.

"Shouldn’t we run?" I whispered.

"There wouldn’t 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 factory—or plant—was supposed to explode, have a ltdown. But it didn’t," he said.

"Okay, but shouldn’t that just put us on a different tiline? One where the plant never exploded?"

"Normally," Camden said. "But this isn’t normal."

I didn’t want to press him. Instead, I just turned off the cara.

■ STOP

🔴 REC    SEP 25, 2018 08:24:25    [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

The Generation Killers led us to their hangout in this broken world—it 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 ti.

It was a large casino, and despite the Generation Killers being there, there were also NPCs—who weren’t completely oblivious but still didn’t 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 so way to open it—but there clearly wasn’t. That was fairly realistic; in the real world, casino hotels often don’t have windows that open.

"Back in room 1304," Camden said.

He was legitimately upset. He was scared.

I couldn’t bla him, and I didn’t want to seem too jaded, but I knew our best way out was to stay proactive.

He needed a pep talk.

■ STOP

We were silent at first. I had trouble reading what was going through his mind, so I didn’t want to say anything.

I didn’t want to assu that he had trauma he didn’t have, and I didn’t want to ignore him if he needed to talk.

Finally, he spoke.

“Plot Armor 36, huh?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Suddenly, I’m a hard worker.”

We made our way to the couch in the room and sat down.

“How long has it been?”

I could tell that he was afraid of my answer.

“A year, plus or minus a few ti skips,” I said. Then, after thinking for a mont, I asked, “How about for you? What do you rember?”

He looked up at and said, “Everything.”

For a mont, he didn’t 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.

“I had to do it all twice,” he said. “They 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 plan—we were going to get the Atlas and send it to you guys. I managed to escape and et up with Anna, and it worked. We found the Atlas. Then she escaped as they caught up with . I took out a few, and then they killed .”

“That’s what Anna said,” I said.

“And then I woke back up. Right back here. With both my arms again. But this ti, everything was different. This ti I was in a suite and not a basent. This ti, the rules were all switched around, and there were dozens—maybe even hundreds—of Generation Killers instead of the twelve I originally had. I thought that this was what death was going to be like—that 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 ti, I researched—and everything had changed. They were filming things, and the rules are bigger, grander. And this ti, you showed up before they killed . It hurts my head to even think about. Like the mories are raw and touchy.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on the original website.

I had not considered that Carousel might go that route. Anna had a trope that allowed her to perform in her own rescue. Camden didn’t, and though the chanics of ti travel allowed him to, there would have to be a price.

“Well, I don’t think we were originally supposed to rescue you,” I said.

“Probably not,” Camden agreed. He drew inward when he was upset.

“You’re a scholar, and you were set up to have a lot of knowledge, but then all of the facts changed," I said.

“So I had to do it again. That was my punishnt. You know, as soon as I said to Anna that you should try to rescue before the storyline was done, I knew it was going to be trouble. I really hate these guys, Riley. It’s like they intentionally try to creep you out with their weird sense of humor.”

I nodded. “They have a trope for that,” I said. I must have had an awkward manner or sothing.

He took a deep breath.

“You know, for , it’s only been a couple of weeks. Maybe a little more. You don’t have to talk to like we’re at a funeral. You’re the one that’s been missing .”

He didn’t like pity. He was the first of our group to die. He hadn’t handled that well and he hated when people tried to comfort him.

“And you’re the one who’s been on vacation,” I said.

He smiled. “Exactly. So I don’t need any more pity, all right?”

“I didn’t an to pity you,” I said. “It’s just… rescuing you has been on my mind every waking hour in recent mory. It can be a little hard to rember that you have been taking the ‘nap’ part of ‘dirt nap’ seriously.”

He was being tough.

“Oh yeah, sure,” he said. “It’s all fun and gas. They even let gamble. No one wins or loses, but they still do it because they’re insane, and ninety percent of them are idiots.”

No wonder they had such limited dialogue.

“So what’s their story?” I asked.

“Discovered ti travel. Sohow, they got trapped in our group of tilines, and they don’t like it. They’re really mad about it, and they want to destroy things just because.”

Standard ti travel serial killer stuff. Or at least it would be if that was a common thing in movies.

“The one I talked to said he wanted to go ho,” I said.

“Oh yeah? And did you know that it’s our fault that they can’t go ho? That anyti you beg them to stop hurting you, they’ll bring that up as if it’s justification? The pain is one thing, but the fact that you can’t even debate with these atheads is worse," he was working to contain not just trauma, but rage. He took a deep breath. "Luckily, they’re easy to trick.”

“They have a trope where they fail every moxie check, but it ends up coming back to bite you.”

“You get the willies,” Camden said. “They’ll apologize for that. They’ll say, ‘Sorry if I gave you the willies, I was just checking in.’”

I started to laugh.

“As soon as we get out of here, we’re going to find a serial killer who’s actually well-adjusted and articulate,” I said.

“Yeah, soone you could have a conversation with,” Camden agreed. “A Hannibal Lector.”

We laughed and continued with the small talk for a little while longer.

But we had work to do.

“So, about this ti travel thing… I hear there are no paradoxes. Surely, I misunderstood sothing.”

Anna had tried to explain it, but she didn't get the finer details.

“That is a whole barrel of monkeys,” Camden said. “That’s what they call it—a barrel of monkeys. Every ti you try and work on it, one will walk up, look at what you’ve been researching, and they’ll say, ‘Oh, that’s a whole barrel of monkeys.’ One after another.”

He really hated these guys.

“That sounds like torture,” I said.

“And I can’t even cover up both of my ears,” 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.

“If you want to know how ti travel works, look behind you,” he said.

And I did.

What I saw was a drawing on the wallpaper of the hotel room.

“You did this?” I asked.

He nodded. “They wanted 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 ss with you. The dumb ones don't get it but pretend they do.”

“Well, it is a whole barrel of monkeys,” I said.

Straining, he got up from the couch and went over to the diagram he had drawn, trying to walk 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 tiline illustration you would see in any ti travel movie. The only difference was that, eventually, these branches started to converge at one point—Event B.

Any of the branches that did not lead to Event B were crossed out.

“All right, so buckle up. We need to practice this so I can say it on film,” Camden said.

“I’m all ears,” I said.

“Good. Event B will happen. Always,” Camden said. “There is nothing that can possibly prevent it. Any reality where Event B is no longer possible ends up like this.”

He pointed out the window to the stars in the sky, despite the daylight.

“Broken. Set aside. The rules don’t matter anymore. These guys made it into their own little kingdom. This is their hideout.”

“A place out of ti,” I said. “So if the plant doesn’t lt down, Event B can’t happen?”

“Right, but hold off on calling this a place 'out of ti.' The place out of ti is sothing else. You might have seen it when we were traveling to get here.”

“The Shores of Ti,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “How did you know that?”

“Oh, Dina has this whole subplot where her teenage son—who was your friend, Gabriel—got lost on the other side of ti at the sa ti that you guys left the roller rink.”

“Gabriel…” Camden muttered. “I’ll have to make note of that,” he said.

“Yeah, she’s got her own thing going. As always,” 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, here’s the thing about Event B—if it doesn’t happen, that is the paradox of all paradoxes. That’s what I ant when I said there were no paradoxes. It’s because… Oh great, I don’t know how to explain this to the audience."

"Well, just try to explain it to , and then I'll work with you on it. We did the sa 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?"

"It’s because we’re just friends," I said.

"Oh, haha. What I’m talking about is—why does this couch not gravitationally attract to that table over there?" he paused, but not long enough for to answer. "It’s 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 paradox—the forces of physics that we can’t even begin to understand—work substantially the sa way."

He paused for a mont 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 don’t an anything in their wake, right? They’re not causing any problems because they’re in the—I don’t know—paradoxical field of Event B… I already lost the audience. This doesn’t even make sense, but it’s how things work here, I swear."

I thought for a mont.

"I understand," I said. "So it’s like—if you’re 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."

"That’s… That’s good," he said. "Anyway, that’s why you can go back in ti and do pretty much whatever you want. You won’t 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 Ti," I said.

"That’s it," Camden answered.

"You’re right; that is confusing. Maybe we shouldn’t try to explain this to the audience. Just leave vague so that the nerds can pretend to understand it for clout. The word ti anomaly will co in handy."

He shrugged.

"So what happens if you go back in ti and kill your grandfather?" I asked.

"You and your jewel enter a tiline where you were never born. When you leave, that tiline just kind of stops existing and the main branch tilines are all that are left. For so reason, there are only a finite number of stable tilines. A big number, but not actually infinite. Though, if you kill your grandfather in a lot of different tilines, you might be able to change sothing. You might change a whole branch. These guys ran a lot of experints but weren't exactly geniuses."

"It’s a teorite," I said. "Not a jewel."

"teorite," he repeated. "Even if you can change a stable tiline, the forces at play are so strong that causality will just stitch together so alternate reason for everything that needs to happen to happen… That’s why only mass death creates perceptible tiline branches…”

He stopped and thought for a mont.

"We view ti as being this delicate thing, where a butterfly can flap its wings and cause a hurricane—but that’s just not true. Ti is powerful. It’s all-consuming. It’s inevitable."

He looked at seriously.

"Riley, I think it’s the real monster of this storyline."

"Yeah, but that’s cheating," I said. "Ti is the enemy in every storyline."

"No, I an it," he said. "Here, there is one rule: Event B happens. Always. And these guys? They’re scared out of their minds about it."

"Go more into that," I said.

"They’re different ages because when they ca to this group of tilines, so of them stopped ti traveling as much—so they aged in whatever year they were left in. A lot of them took a while to figure out how ti travel worked in the first place. But any of them that lives past the year 2025? Never cos back. So that is when Event B is supposed to happen."

“2025,” I repeated. “Massive inevitable event that must happen.”

"They think it’s the end of the world," he said. "I just don’t know."

"What do you think they an when they say they’re trapped and they want to go ho?" I asked.

"I’m still working on it. There are pieces of information I haven’t had ti to sift through. Look at this," he said.

He pointed to another illustration he had made—this 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 don’t know what these squiggles are. They’ve got this map inside of their little study area. I got a good look at it, and I have it on the red wallpaper—but I don’t know what they an. This wasn’t there the first ti. In fact, the wall that it was on was just blank—which leads to believe that it was supposed to be there, but maybe we didn’t do sothing, so we didn’t get that information."

"We’re learning a lot about how stories work," I said. "If you don’t activate a subplot, it just isn’t going to be there. And so subplots are really necessary."

"So, what do you think the squiggles are?" Camden asked. "There are more—I could draw them all day."

I looked at the map.

"Well, this squiggle here is right on top of the original Carousel settlent," I said. "You can tell because it’s right there where the river hooks."

I stared at it a little longer. I still wasn’t sure.

We tried our best to co up with theories, but we were running short.

The good news—if you could call it good news—was that we were technically not part of the main character group, which ant we had a lot of Off-Screen ti.

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 didn’t seem aggressive or an—just curious. Almost friendly.

Maybe they were playing good cop, bad cop. Or maybe they weren’t antagonists, which would be wonderful. It made sense that they would arrest Logan—not 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 barking—a lot.

And I recognized the dogs.

Bobby’s two hounds were leading him around on the other side of ti. 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, I’d let them eat at the dinner table.

I stared at the diagrams Camden had made and asked myself how important an understanding of the ti travel rules was for us to win.

Event B… sothing that occurred in all tilines but would not occur in this one because the plant didn’t lt down. Curious.

It was a whole barrel of monkeys.