🔴 REC SEP 25, 2018 13:05:12 [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]
“So, is it safe to assu that right now we're between events A and B?" I asked.
"I’d hope so," Camden said. "Seeing as right now, Event A is the most likely Carousel River Valley teor Strike."
That had actually been my insight, but we were going to let Camden have it. There was no way that the teor had been brought up this many tis without at least being one of the major events in this temporal anomaly.
"I'm still having trouble wrapping my head around this," I said. "You're telling that between Event A and Event B, logical contradictions can exist with minimal resistance by reality itself?"
"I'm not telling you that I understand it. I'm telling you that I observe it," Camden said. "And what you observe trumps what you understand every ti."
That had been sothing Camden was struggling with. He wanted to understand everything. In movies, that just wasn't going to happen. I told him to just embrace it.
"So, every copy of this guy has their own fragnt of the teorite, and as long as they have that, they can jump around ti and do whatever they want—and it doesn’t matter?"
"It would seem so," Camden said.
I had to do so quick and dirty exposition, just to patch so stuff. Camden had said there were no paradoxes. When it ca to our team's battle plan we needed that statent to be anded... suffice to say I had to do so damage control to make set it up. This was part of the back-and-forth that ca with improvisation.
"But the individual ti traveler does appear to have so type of restriction within their own personal tilines," I said. "I an, those n that you maid would disappear and then reappear after healing. They must have been at the sa place and ti as their past selves but they never tried to help their past selves."
"Yep," Camden said. "They don’t try to prevent themselves from getting injured. They just step in after it happens. Gets pretty confusing, doesn’t it?"
The fact that a specific Generation Killer wouldn’t act to prevent himself from getting covered in scalding oil implied that they couldn’t. That ant there was so restriction.
Or Carousel just thought it was a cool way to present things.
"So, outside of this anomaly, ti works normal as far as you know? Every decision you make puts you on a different path than the version of you who made the opposite decision?" I asked.
"I have no way of confirming how it normally works, but that is my understanding. Normally, every decision you make matters. But in this group of tilines caught within this ti anomaly, only big things matter at all—and they don’t end up mattering all that much."
"As long as Event B happens," I said.
"As long as Event B happens," he repeated.
We had been going back and forth, just feeding lines to Carousel, hoping to give ourselves so flexibility. After all, the decisions we made in the future would depend largely on what we set up in the past.
I had never been more overwheld—and that included the werewolf storyline, where there was a trope that made it so the lore could adapt.
I just needed to get it across to the audience that while logical contradictions in the main tilines didn't matter and would soon be corrected one way or another, logical contradictions in a ti traveler's tiline did matter. That's why scarred Generation Killers couldn't prevent themselves from getting injured in the first place. ꞦâꞐȱ𝔟Ěś
I just had to hope the audience would get that point.
Suddenly, there was a commotion on the other side of the door. The Generation Killers had mostly left us alone up until that point.
I quickly moved to a shelf where I could set up the cara to film everything that was about to happen. And if Camden was to be believed, a lot was about to happen.
The door burst open, and I went to stand next to Camden.
Three Generation Killers walked in.
"Do you think that they can help us?" one of them—the apparent leader—asked.
Another one, who carried a handheld cara and a large radio, said, "I hear the whispers of our brother across ti. He says that they will guide us on our path."
The leader looked us up and down.
"Uh-huh," he said. He seed skeptical. "And did our brother across ti tell us exactly how they were going to do that?"
"Our brother across ti speaks when the mont is right and only gives what information is needed," the caraman Generation Killer said.
He had an almost religious reverence for this brother across ti, and I had to assu he was referring to the Generation Killer on the other side of ti who had fild us in the jailhouse.
The other side of ti—the place where Bobby was now trapped.
"Just don’t hurt us, and we’ll tell you everything you want to know," Camden said.
The third Generation Killer, a slightly beefier one, said, "You said that last ti."
"And you believed last ti," Camden said. "It’s not like I would trick you twice. That wouldn’t be very smart, would it?"
The beefier one seed to consider this and started to nod.
The leader was not amused.
"The fact is that you seem to have a knack for all of this, like those of that ca before," he said, eyeing the tiline and map that Camden had drawn on the wall. "Do you know what it all ans?"
Camden was hesitant. "So of it," he said. "But I don’t know what it is you want."
"We want to go ho," the leader said. "That’s all we’ve ever wanted. I had a pretty good setup back ho—had a girl nad Jasmine. Dumb as a doornail. Pretty as a princess. But here? She was never born. I can’t tell you how inconvenient that is."
"Look, we’re trying to figure it out," Camden said. "We just don’t have all the pieces."
"Give a minute with him," the beefy Killer said. "I can convince them."
The leader smiled and then said, "You know what? Let’s do things your way for a minute," then dropped down into one of the chairs near the door—just to watch.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The religious Generation Killer started to film as the beefy one walked toward us.
He didn’t go for Camden. It was really a 50/50 shot.
He went for .
He had high enough Plot Armor and likely had very little of that devoted to Savvy or Moxie, so his Hustle and ttle were enough to stop from being able to get away.
I felt like a ragdoll.
There was no escaping it. If I got away, they would just hurt Camden.
There was no avoiding what the beefy Killer had in mind.
■ STOP
On-Screen
Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that the red light on my cara had cut out. So Carousel was likely using footage being fild by Generation Killer himself. Carousel would likely cut this dialogue down. It wouldn't want to reveal too much about these enemies. The unknown was scarier than any other force in horror.
It was very clear that these were three distinct entities.
They weren’t just the sa person at different ages. Lila was right—they diverged a long ti ago.
First, he strapped down to a chair using duct tape. Camden was helpless to do anything but watch, though he begged from the side for them to just let him work on the problem.
I wasn’t even sure what they expected Camden to do, but these weren’t exactly the type of guys who would think about that.
Even the smart ones seed thrilled by the idea of cruelty. Carousel sure did know how to pick 'em.
More than anywhere before, this was the introduction of the Killer that the audience would see. As much as I wanted to try to trick my way out of things, slip my hands through the bindings, and run away, I knew this was an important scene.
And my odds of getting away at that mont, with so much attention on , were low. The odds of Camden and I getting away without a scratch were virtually zero.
After I was affixed to the chair, Generation Killer started pulling implents from his trench coat pockets.
He started with a hamr.
“I bet you’re wondering about the difference between and my brothers over here—my other selves,” the leader said. “Big G, why don’t you tell him about Grimshaw?”
"Grimshaw?" the beefier Generation Killer asked. "Yeah, I can do that."
He took the hamr and rested it against my mouth, pressing it hard, flattening my lip against my upper teeth.
"You ever had so old hag try to boss you around? Tell you what to do like you’re so damn dog?" Big G leaned forward, a grin spreading across his face. "That was Miss Grimshaw. My math teacher back in school. an, ugly, always yappin’ about rules, about discipline, about how I needed to ‘straighten up’ if I didn’t wanna end up a nobody. Like I cared.”
Holding the hamr to my face, he reached into his pocket and brought out three nails.
Suddenly, I started reconsidering whether or not I could get out of there. Maybe if I made a big enough commotion, Camden could get out, and then…
But my Escape Artist trope did not activate, aning that plan wouldn’t work.
"Every day, it was the sa thing,” Big G continued. “‘Seven tis eight, Grant! What’s seven tis eight?’ Like that was gonna change my life. Like I was gonna roll over and wag my tail ‘cause she told to. So I looked her in the eye and said, ‘I ain't learnin' nothin’ from you, hag.’"
He chuckled, shaking his head. "She about lost her damn mind. Face went red, hands shakin’, clutchin’ that ruler like she was thinkin’ about usin’ it. And I just sat there. Smilin’."
"Day after day, she tried to make listen. Sent to the principal, made stand in the corner, kicked outta class. Thought she could make do what she wanted. But she couldn’t. I never learned my tises. My dividedes. Nothing."
Big G’s fingers tapped against my arm, his grin widening. "And one day, I let her know real clear. She stops after class, real serious, like she’s about to change my whole life. Like she can control by being nice suddenly. ‘Grant,’ she says, ‘don’t you wanna be sothing soday?’
"And I get real close, right up in her face, and I laugh. And I say, I just want to live long enough to see you as worm food.
"She didn’t say a damn thing after that. Just stood there, stiff like a corpse, lookin’ at like she finally got it. She lost."
He leaned back, stretching his arms behind his head. "And guess what? Never learned anything that whole year. Not one thing. She thought I was just lying, but I showed her. Too bad I wasn’t there to see her die. Not the first ti, at least."
He started to laugh, with that blank look in his eyes.
Was he trying to scare ?
No.
He was trying to impress . Sincerely.
"Bossman here," Big G continued, pointing to the leader in the chair by the door, "he got Miss Johnston for math. Man, she was stacked. So that’s why he graduated. Heck, I probably would have too if I got her instead of that old bat, Grimshaw."
He was waiting for to speak.
"It is crazy how the little decisions in life can take us to new places," I said. "So how about you untie , and we figure this whole tiline thing out?"
The leader got up from his chair, walked over to , pointed at Camden, and said, "We have a scientist for that."
I really didn’t want to get tortured, not that anybody did, so I decided to see exactly how much mileage I could get out of their trope that made them lose every Moxie check.
"But I’m a physicist, too," I said. "I thought that was why you brought here."
Bossman, as Big G had called him, got close and asked, "You’re a physicist, too?"
I nodded. I started thinking up so of the things Camden had said to try to make it sound legitimate.
But Bossman had different plans.
"Well, too bad we only needed one," he said. It didn't matter if he believed . He was a sadist.
Then Bossman nodded to Big G, promptly grabbed my arm, teed a nail up right above my wrist, and drove the hamr down.
Clean through.
Nailing my wrist to the wooden arm of the chair.
I cursed and scread, struggling against my restraints.
"Rember back when you had your arm still?" Bossman asked Camden.
Camden just watched in horror.
The caraman fild.
Big G laughed.
Those few extra points in Grit were a godsend. It hurt, but soon, it beca numb.
"What do you want to tell you that I haven’t already?" Camden asked.
"I told you," Bossman said. "We want to go ho. No matter what we do, no matter which events we travel to, we can never make it back to our hos—to the ones that we left. The versions of us from here don't know what's going on either, and we don't know how to leave."
"I need more information from you," Camden said. "You can’t just keep hurting him and expect to understand the situation better suddenly."
"We can’t?" Bossman asked.
Then he flashed Big G a look.
I got another nail in my arm.
"All right, all right!" Camden said quickly. "But you have to answer so questions, right? Because scientists take information and then turn it into answers. So you have to give the information, all right? Can you do that?"
Bossman considered it, then said, "Yeah, ask away. I'm an open book."
He laughed.
"You said sothing about there being Grants before you. You an there were other people like you that you didn’t et?" Camden asked.
Bossman nodded. "The older ones. They were here first, and they figured a lot out. But then they got found out by KRSL. When I showed up, we were at war. So we hid and did what we had to do. We wiped them out. Killed a lot of them when they were kids—just to make sure that the new version of KRSL would never know we existed. You have no idea how many tis you have to kill a person before the universe just gives up on them..."
"Our brother across ti told us it was necessary. Told us that ti itself wanted them gone," the caraman said.
"And what happened to the older ones?" Camden asked.
"We lost many before we found our solution," the caraman answered.
Camden thought for a mont.
"So the older ones... they were the ones that drew this? The thing I saw downstairs?" he asked, pointing to his recreation drawn on the wall.
"Yeah," Bossman said. "They didn’t leave any notes for us."
"But they had books and research papers on the subject downstairs," Camden said.
Bossman continued looking at Camden. Perhaps Bossman wasn’t as smart as Big G had advertised.
anwhile, Big G drove another nail into my arm. I was starting to think that he actually enjoyed it.
Camden was thinking, and suddenly, I had an idea as I stared at the drawings Camden had made on the wall. I stared at the map and suddenly had an epiphany.
"Back in your tilines, before you started traveling around... was there a teor that struck Carousel?" I asked. I must have sounded desperate.
Bossman looked at Big G, who looked at the caraman.
"Yes," Bossman said.
I looked at Camden, then flitted my eyes over at the map he had drawn of the Carousel River Valley.
He took my aning.
"Wait a second," Camden asked. "In your tiline, where did the teor strike?"
Big G shook his head, not knowing the answer. The caraman didn’t seem to rember either.
But Bossman did.
"The mountains," he said. "It struck in the mountains. My father once took on a hike to see where they excavated it."
I almost forgot about the throbbing pain in my arm out of excitent.
"So that is what these squiggles were," Camden said. "In your tilines, the teor struck different places than it did in ours."
"So?" Bossman asked. "What does that an?"
"Before you got stuck here, did you ever travel back to before the teor struck? Back before the 1740s?" I asked.
The three Generation Killers looked at each other. Then, almost in unison, they said:
"The burning witches."
"The burning witches?" Camden asked.
"They burned witches back in old Carousel," Bossman said. "I thought I’d go see it."
"And after you went to see the witches... were you able to get back ho?"
Bossman thought for a while.
"I don’t think so," he said. "I didn’t go ho right after, but next ti I tried... I couldn’t."
Camden looked at .
We both realized what had happened.
We realized why Generation Killer couldn’t go ho.
User Comments
0 comments from readers