There were tens of thousands of us climbing out of the cradle. Carousel wanted its big impact shot, and that was it. Or so I thought.
I spent my ti filming with the cara I got from Danny. While the storyline had ended and we had won, that didn't an the filming was over. Not for a storyline like this, where the win condition was sothing other than a traditional happy ending.
Eventually, we found Isaac and Kelsey. Multiple tis, actually, because they had been copied. But the real versions of them, I had to assu, stuck with us as we moved along.
They were emotionally and ntally drained. Tilessness was a real drag, as I understood it.
The whole escape was an absolute ss, with very little coordination, and most of it was On-Screen.
In the masses of non-player characters, I eventually found one I had not seen in quite a while. Bones Ibarra, who had never even entered the cradle and gotten written off because of it, stared at us in amazent as soon as he found us.
We went Off-Screen for this eting.
“I sent you in there to save two or three little players, and you co out with all this?” he said.
“What can I say? I'm an overachiever,” I said.
Antoine Stone, or at least the one being played by a shapeless one, ignored Bones completely. He wasn't ta-aware.
Bones pointed to him and said, “Well, you're not that much of an overachiever. I believe these things were supposed to stay inside.”
“My job was to get to the end of the story,” I said. “No one said I had to actually beat the enemy, although I'm sure we'll get docked points for being anticlimactic.”
Bones shrugged his shoulders.
“I'm telling you, sothing's brewing on the script,” he said. “It might not be so anticlimactic after all. Not for the audience, at least.”
“Yeah, well, I feel like we're just along for the ride at this point,” I said.
“Story of my afterlife,” Bones said. “If you have need of a river guide or treasure hunter, I hope you'll think of . Dark days are ahead.”
Weren’t they always?
He left us and went to find the actual Antoine to have a chat with, adventurer to adventurer.
To think, my plan for him, had I not co up with a better one, was to have him crash his helicopter into the entrance of the cradle in order to seal it. Yes, we had certainly gone a different direction from that.
It was ti for Carousel to show us exactly how different.
The red wallpaper was suddenly overtaken by video footage projected onto it. The footage played so loudly in my mind that it was hard to see anything else.
I saw a news anchor seated at a desk with a serious look on his face.
“The Peruvian governnt tonight is calling it the largest civilian recovery operation in the country's history,” he said. “At last count, over four thousand, I'm sorry, that's fourteen thousand people have now been pulled from the rainforest after suffering what is reported to be so sort of prolonged captivity. Peruvian authorities are coordinating with the Red Cross and multiple NGOs in an effort to untangle what must be one of the most perplexing mysteries, or viral stunts, in the history of the modern world.”
The footage suddenly cut away. We were in a montage. Overhead, a news helicopter fild us all. We were a sea of silver, as we all wore those ergency blankets that were supposed to keep us warm. Their silvery color reflected all the various light sources in the dark forest as the cara captured all.
It was only then that I realized that I, too, was trying to cover up with one of those ergency blankets to keep off a light trickle of rain as I continued to film. Carousel was playing with us now, teleporting us around like it was nothing. Heck, it might have simply been blanking our mories to make it seem like we were teleporting. It was getting that last bit of footage, and for whatever reason, it didn't want us to have much agency in the matter.
That sa news anchor's voice continued. “Officials have not yet released a coherent account of how so many people ca to be captured in one location, or what criminal organization or military might be responsible. Survivors themselves are giving accounts that our network is still working to verify.”
Rapid cuts between footage of random people being interviewed about their ti in the cradle flickered onto the screen, with each sound bite crazier than the last, as they claid interdinsional invaders and shape-shifters were to bla.
The news anchors and reporters always scoffed or acted incredibly skeptical, but only at first.
The next piece of footage was of two news hosts. They were arguing about so of the claims made by survivors.
“And this is how you know it's legitimate, Tom,” the woman was saying. “We have well over ten thousand survivors, all of whom give different stories of their abduction, its circumstances, and its culprits. But they all use the sa two words: shapeless ones.”
“Diana, lots of mass trauma situations create a shared vocabulary. We've had experts on who will…”
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringent.
But then he was cut off as the first host said, “With nearly nineteen thousand people from different ethnic groups and eleven different language groups all repeating the sa two words?”
The other host threw up his hands with no response.
Next was footage from what I first assud was a podcast, but then realized was probably talk radio because of the ti period, where the host was talking to an alleged survivor.
“Now tell us, if you can, about these shapeless ones. What do they look like?” the host asked.
His guest was shaken. “I know this is going to sound ridiculous,” he said. “I know it does. But they looked just like us when they wanted to, but sotis they unfolded themselves like, I don't know, like maybe they were made of millions of little threads. I saw one of them get shot in the back once, and the hole, it looked normal at first. There was even blood coming out of it. But a few seconds later, it just kind of undid itself, and suddenly the hole didn't look like a gunshot wound. It looked like… I can't even explain it, like so sort of giant hallway twenty miles deep right in the guy's back. I know it sounds ridiculous, but these things, they don't make any sense if you see them. When you see the real them.”
The next piece of footage was the title of a docuntary titled The Sunken Cradle: A Film by Riley Lawrence. It was the docuntary my character must have made from all the footage I took from the cradle.
The neat part was that, as the montage skipped through the docuntary, much of the footage was the sa I was filming at that very mont of our escape through the jungle. The footage changed as I moved my hand. It was little things like that that let you know Carousel had a wonderful AV specialist on staff.
Not much of the docuntary was shown, but its content was clear. Footage of the shapeless ones in their many forms was shown as the storyline’s credits rolled.
I even saw my na: Riley Lawrence as Riley Lawrence.
The footage ca interspersed with several news pundits arguing. It was basic bickering, and then it shut off as the credits continued. So believed the accounts of the shapeless ones. Others said that this Riley Lawrence character was clearly off his rocker after a distinguished career.
Then the footage cut to a talk-show set, with a man delivering a monologue. What was funny is I had actually seen him before, but I couldn't rember his na. He was one of the characters from the Eternal Savers Club storyline, one of the ones who got kidnapped at the very beginning, which told that he probably was a talk show host in real life. Carousel sure did love to recycle.
“We need to straighten our backs and take a deep breath,” he said. “Listen to what we're talking about. Yesterday, I had a man sitting on my couch debating with the difference between an extraterrestrial and an interdinsional threat. Is this really the reaction we have to what must be a hoax? These so-called shapeless ones—what a lazy moniker, by the way. They ca here to do one thing: to copy our shapes. Of course, they did. It's a good thing they didn't call themselves brainless ones, or they'd be taking our brains. Either way, the result seems to be the sa.”
The audience gave him a polite chuckle.
“This Lawrence fellow,” he continued, “clearly a hack, uses his docuntaries as his personal travel fund, and now he wants us to believe that we are beset by creatures beyond our understanding. That they have been here throughout all ti. And governnts around the world are latching on to the story. News organizations, corporations. And why is that? It's because of fear. Scared people don't ask why their taxes are high, and their grocery prices are even higher. They want us afraid. Now, I don't know where we get these twenty-so thousand refugees, most of whom were never reported missing. But I will tell you one thing: the mass hysteria will die down, and so of us will retain our self-respect, and others of us—"
Sothing must have happened in front of the speaker that disturbed him. So sort of sound.
“What's happening? Turn on the house lights,” he said.
Soone listened to him, and then one of the caran for his show turned to film a mber of the audience.
She was standing up, clearly straining and struggling.
“Ma'am, are you in distress? Soone help her.”
But before anyone could, suddenly her body burst apart, parts sloughing off like wet waterlon. What remained was sothing that looked a lot like what was left over of Alasdair. It was a red mass shaped like shredded veins and viscera.
The audience started to scream and scatter.
anwhile, the shapeless one, who had for a very long ti been in the shape of that poor woman's DNA, and probably so of her ancestors', too, had suddenly rembered that it wasn't DNA at all. It was sothing much greater than that.
It turned out that no matter how little DNA was stripped from your body, you pretty much turned to soup. The building blocks of life were finicky that way. You can survive with your DNA cooked by radiation, for a while, but when it bursts out of your cells, death cos quicker.
The being continued unfolding itself until, eventually, it disappeared.
The cara turned back to the host, who was absolutely flabbergasted and at a loss for words until a producer sowhere said, “Cut to comrcial.”
And so the montage changed. Instead of skeptical news hosts, there were dozens of clips of people doing exactly what the woman in the audience had done: liquifying. Rumors of the shapeless ones had begun waking up all the slumbering pieces of themselves they had left over. Sotis they woke from within the genetic code of their descendants; other tis, in places you would never think of.
I certainly had gotten the news out.
So shapeless ones must have gotten eaten by various decomposers, bitten by mosquitoes, or swallowed alive in oceans and beco part of the food chain. Since the creatures were basically infinite, even one drop was enough to cause a massacre whenever the shapeless one would wake up and decide to stop being whatever it had pretended to be. Entire parts of forests fell as trees just collapsed.
Society went into unrest as entire family lines just kind of stopped existing. Ancient shapeless ones in the form of corpses began to rise from their graves when little, distant pieces of themselves sohow heard the story of what happened at the sunken cradle.
It was a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.
In The End, one final line was sent out over a black screen as the credits ended.
“We always believed that we were alone in the universe,” a man said, whimpering over a radio. “And now we are.”
Suddenly, the red wallpaper show stopped, and I found myself standing outside the entrance to the cradle. The tens of thousands of escapees were gone, and all who remained were players. Even Camden was there. That saved him quite a walk.
Kimberly had disappeared, but then we expected that. I didn’t know what she was, but she wasn’t the Kimberly we lost. I hoped that the real Kimberly would have here mories, though. Carousel had done sothing similar when hundreds of Dina's from different tilines helped us kill an army of ti-travelling serial killers.
“Where's Bobby?” Isaac asked.
But I ignored him as Antoine and Anna were forced to tell him that they didn't know where he had gone.
They were going to have to get used to that, never being able to acknowledge that they knew the truth.
I had been reset. All of the sweat, dirt, and blood that had covered were now gone, and I had my old, familiar hoodie back.
The thing was, I wasn't the only person wearing my hoodie.
Standing in the entrance of the cradle was an exact copy of . My na, my plot armor, my tropes. All of it checked out on the red wallpaper. The only thing that revealed his true nature was the fact that, for whatever reason, his right hand morphed and elongated as it seed to fuse with an object. It only took a few monts to realize what that object was.
It was a videotape.
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