Book Five, Chapters 24, 25, and 26 (Patreon)

I will post their stats and trope with the next chapter.

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I stood in the living room area of the loft next to Antoine and Kimberly. We had taken days off, but knowing the task that lay ahead, there was only so much relaxing that we could do.

The storyline, Itch, taunted us.

No matter how much work we put into it, we never felt like we were learning enough. But at the end of the day, we were never going to escape Carousel without taking risks.

"Right now," I said, "I see Itch as being a science fiction movie."

"So you don’t think the werewolves are involved?" Bobby asked. " Werewolves usually aren’t strictly science fiction. Itch does sound like the title of a werewolf movie."

I was in agreement with that; I imagined that growing fur would be very itchy.

"I don’t think so," I said. "I have a few reasons. First, we have no explanation for what happened to the remaining two members of Andrew Hughes’ team. Our working theory is that they were killed by whatever lies in the monster's lair, which we think are werewolves. So, if they were killed by the werewolves, and the werewolves are a part of Itch, then they should show up as potential rescues for that movie, but they don’t."

The Atlas was clear that if you got killed by monsters outside of a storyline, you could be rescued from the storyline those monsters were originally from.

"Also, the poster for Itch was some kind of control panel, like for a computer from the ’80s. I don’t know what that means, but that doesn’t seem like werewolves. But most of all, right now, we're pretty sure that the base story of Itch doesn't allow psychic powers, and I have a hard time imagining a werewolf story where psychics couldn’t exist."

Of course, it was always possible that there was just a very powerful psychic trope that canceled out other psychic powers, but there were a million possibilities. I just had to make my best guess.

"Well then, that opens back up the question of how science fiction works in Carousel," Bobby said.

This type of subject was something that Bobby liked to talk about. We had both been working to try and find our way through the Carousel Atlas as best we could. When it came to things like genre, the problem wasn't that there wasn’t enough information—it was that there was too much information, and it was spread out all throughout the Atlas.

The first thing we wanted to know was exactly how technology lined up with the year the storyline was supposed to be set. We were aware that Carousel was more or less organized by date. We had been hauled up and down time enough to know that.

The period that was supposed to look like 1960 was called Carousel 1960, and sure enough, all of the stories from that era looked like they took place at the appropriate time.

But then, how would science fiction work?

Would we have to wait until 2198, when technology really started to pop off?

The answer was no.

Science fiction seemed to be the biggest counterpoint to the charade of Carousel’s timeline. The Atlas referenced things that just did not exist in the time periods their stories were set.

We found references to ray guns and teleportation, as well as genetic advancements like those we had seen during our fake tutorial, that just could not possibly exist in our world, even in modern times, and yet they existed in stories set in the ’80s, ’90s, or even further back.

If Itch was science fiction, we had no way of knowing what to expect.

"Another point for Itch being science fiction and not werewolves," Antoine added, "is that there were no forests or woods, right?"

I looked at him for a moment and nodded. My location scout ability had not given any locations that involved a natural landscape of any kind. It appeared that the story took place inside a building with hallways, control rooms, and storage areas.

Of course, Antoine intentionally pointed out that there were no woods because he wanted to go on this rescue, and he knew I was hesitant to support him if there was a chance he would have another episode.

"The whole thing takes place inside, right?" he asked.

I reluctantly nodded. "It would appear that way," I said. “Noting explicit, at least. Of course, I am missing information because Location Scout wasn’t giving the best information.”

My Savvy was good, but it wasn't exactly my dominant stat; it was more tied with Moxie and Hustle.

"So, what else is there to discuss?" Dina asked. "We have literally talked ourselves around in circles on this subject. We either need to do it or move on to something else."

Dina was never really big on discussion or talking things through. When we talked about going on Itch, her contribution was, "When are we leaving?"

I gazed around the room at our little group of friends. We still looked like squatters because we had no furniture, and yet we had all made ourselves comfortable on the floor or in fold-up chairs.

"We need to figure out who's going," I said.

In the pit of my stomach, I knew there was no good answer, but I was hoping someone would come up with one.

"We know that because of Dina’s rescue trope, we’re all going to be background characters,” I said. “We don’t know if that means we’ll be off-screen the entire time—we just have no idea. And we also know that because it’s a rescue story, some tropes just basically won't work. So that needs to go into account for who we bring, what tropes we bring."

Antoine took in a big breath and walked forward.

"I know that Cassie and Isaac were hoping to go," he said.

He looked at them, and they nodded.

"We need to save Andrew," Cassie said.

This was one subject that Isaac didn’t joke about.

"So, I think what we have to do," Antoine said, "is bring everybody. We have to bring all of our top players, and we can't leave anybody behind. I know you were talking about only bringing five players," he said, looking at me, "but I just don’t see how that could work."

Of course, there were problems with bringing everyone.

I had lain awake the night before, counting them all. If we brought everyone, Bobby would have to bring his dogs, too.

If we brought everyone—all eight of us—and it turned out that there was a player limit, say six players, that meant that two of us at random would just suddenly…

What? We didn't know.

The Atlas said that you just wouldn’t be in the story if it had met its limit, but then what did those players do? What if none of them had scouting tropes, and they were trapped at the power station alone?

What if we got punished for bringing too many players?

Antoine stood and argued his case very convincingly, but the truth was, I already agreed with him—but not for anything he said. He talked about how rescues were never going to get easier. This would literally be the easiest one we ever did, so it was the ideal one to bring the lower-level players on.

He was only saying that to rile them up and get them enthusiastic. I wasn’t going to poke holes in his argument.

Finally, he got to his last and best argument—the very one that I had come up with myself and agreed with.

"The fact is," he said, "we don’t know how long this storyline lasts. It could last weeks—we don't know. Even if we could leave behind three players, we don't know how long they would be left here waiting. With only three players, they wouldn't be able to run any storylines safely. And whatever happens to players who don’t run storylines could happen to them."

It was the same old problem. We didn’t have enough players to split up yet.

There was a palpable tension in the air as he said that.

In fact, I was the only person who allegedly knew what happened to players who didn’t run storylines—or, more specifically, I knew what happened to players who quit them. But I wasn’t going to explain the nuance.

"I agree," I said. "Now, let’s get to planning our loadouts."

Antoine was surprised that I agreed so easily. He had clearly been expecting me to argue against it. After all, he knew what I had seen. He knew what liability he represented.

But that was just one more risk we had to take.

 ~-~

We were going to use pared-down tropes across the board. A rescue trope was volatile and could change stories tremendously and in unpredictable ways. The Carousel Atlas spoke of rescue tropes and advanced archetypes as carefully balanced chemical mixtures that could create chaos with the slightest bit of contamination.

Even the vets knew that, and I doubted that they had the section of the Atlas that I was reading. When I had gone on my run with Arthur, and he used his advanced archetype to help change the story into an action-oriented monster-hunting story instead of the psychological horror that it was originally, all of the other vets had chosen tropes that were neutral—useful in and of themselves, but that didn't have huge effects on the rest of the story.

They didn't even use their aspect tropes. You don’t want to step on the toes of the guy who’s disarming the bomb, so to speak.

In this case, Dina’s rescue trope would take the lead, and we would let it.

"So we’re not trying out my new trope?" Kimberly asked.

"Right, not this time," Antoine said.

She had just gotten her aspect trope for Celebrity, called The Hall of Fame, and it promised some story-altering and emphasis-changing effects that would normally be really great for a strong player. But we didn’t know which elements of that trope would even be taken into account in a rescue. Story alterations were canceled out across the board.

We focused on ourselves and our backgrounds and tried not to think about hedging our bets or relying on improvisation because, if we were background characters, we probably wouldn't have the time to set up the improvisation, to begin with.

That ruled out tropes like my Raised by Television ability or Cinema Seer, which required early access to the on-screen.

We even debated whether Bobby would use his trope to swap into the role of a background character because we didn't know if that would be duplicative or cause problems. Then we decided that he ought to use it because that was the ability that allowed him to see the script, and truthfully, that was a very powerful ability for a run like the one we had ahead of us.

The newer players had an easier time. They left behind the tropes that they shouldn't bring on a rescue and didn't have many left to go through.

As far as weapons went, we brought all we had, including Antoine’s baseball bat, the sawed-off shotgun with a trope, and even my hedge shears, even though I didn't know if they would come up organically.

Bobby, of course, brought his gaggle of dogs—five dogs, varying in size from gigantic to mid-size. They all had names, but I had not learned which belonged to which. It wasn’t that I’m not a dog person; it’s more that I wasn’t sure they were dogs—not on the inside.

I could understand that people could be under the influence of mind control and still be people at their core, trapped by the script, not knowing why or how.

But was a dog under mind control even really a dog?

I didn’t bring up these questions with Bobby because he loved those dogs.

After much discussion, Kimberly moved to the kitchen and said, "Tonight we feast. All perishables get eaten."

"What?" Isaac asked. "I’ve been eating those gross sardines because I didn’t want them to be the only thing that was left so we wouldn’t have to just eat sardines, and now we’re going to eat everything but the sardines? What was the point of that?"

"We never asked you to eat them," Antoine said.

And then we began preparing our feast because when we left, we didn't know when we would be back.

Or if we would be back.

~-~

Walking into the unknown, forced to lead the way because I was the only one who could see omens—what a life I was leading.

As I walked down the long stretches of gravel roads toward the mountain where the power station was, I had no idea what was in store.

“They really put it all the way out here, didn’t they?” Bobby asked as he wrangled his dogs, who were mostly obedient but still acted like dogs and tugged at interesting smells.

I felt nauseous in the pit of my stomach. I tried not to think about what was coming up—all of the unknowns. We passed by the strange junkyard, but this time, we didn’t stop to stare; we pressed forward.

“Bobby, watch out. We’re approaching the forest with the monster lair,” I said as we approached the compound of the power station.

“Roger that,” he said.

I didn’t know if the dogs would react, but I noted that they became very vigilant as we passed it.

I noticed that Isaac and Cassie were silently encouraging each other behind me as they stared at their brother's missing poster.

They were lucky in a way—to get answers so fast and to rescue their loved one so soon. I was jealous, but at the same time, I was happy for them because I was ready for people to start having wins.

Other than the sound of our footsteps, one probably couldn’t hear us as we approached the compound.

We nervously looked over the entrance.

“It’s so big,” Cassie said under her breath.

It was. It was a huge campus with tons of buildings, and none of them were small, other than the booth where you could buy a tour for 5 dollars—if only someone were there to accept your money.

“What do we do to trigger it?” Antoine asked.

“We walk toward the spray paint on the wall over there and then past that through the alley. Do not touch or interact with anything else. Stay close to each other,” I said.

The spray paint read: “Death to Scabs.”

Isaac read it aloud. “What can that mean?” he asked.

It could mean several things, I thought but didn’t answer. Perhaps scabs were the enemies we were facing. It would certainly make sense for a storyline called Itch. I envisioned zombie-like creatures with large claws and swollen tumors all over their bodies. I immediately stopped myself from picturing that because I really didn’t want to confront a creature like that.

We got to the spray paint.

“It’s fresh,” Antoine said, noting that it looked like it had just been painted.

And then we walked further down through the alleyway. The plot cycle appeared, and our choice was made. We were on to the Party Phase.

I could see that we had successfully triggered a rescue because the word Rescue was on the red wallpaper along with all three of the missing posters for players who had died in Itch.

Behind us, we started to hear screams and taunts, and fear rose up in me because I worried that those scabs I made up were about to start chasing us. But when I looked behind us, I saw that the screams were not coming from inhuman parasites but from ordinary humans holding up signs and pickets, screaming “Death to Scabs,” and other phrases that I couldn’t quite make out.

“Oh,” Isaac said. “Scabs. I think we just crossed a picket line.”

“Scab” was a mean way to describe a person who worked the job of a striking worker, preventing the strike from having an effect.

We continued walking forward, and the campus that we had seen before—the desolate place filled with creepy, abandoned aesthetics—had changed to a beautiful campus with bright green grass, statues, and large towering buildings that didn't look like they contained nuclear bombs as before, but instead looked like they held the wonders of science. There were banners and balloons.

We approached a red carpet where an NPC named Tripp was waiting for us. He was clapping his hands, excited as all get out. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a piano-key necktie.

“Oh, joy,” he said as we approached. “Today is an auspicious day, don’t you think?” he asked.

“Took the words out of my mouth,” Isaac said.

All around us, NPCs were busy with hustle and bustle, wearing hard hats and shiny uniforms that scientists would wear in movies to keep themselves sterile. And yet, bewilderingly, they were wearing them outside.

“As our seven lucky winners, you are certainly in for a treat,” Tripp said. “But really, this is bigger than just one experience. This is about giving other people the confidence to explore without fear. Did you like that slogan—‘explore without fear’? My bosses say we shouldn't be putting the word ‘fear’ into people's minds, but I think it suggests courage. ‘Explore without fear,’” he said as he opened and closed his hands, letting his fingers splay out.

He shook his body as if that phrase was just so good. We all just kind of nodded because we noticed, first, that we were not on-screen, and second, we still had no idea what was happening.

Luckily, our ringer, Bobby, had already been taken off to his place somewhere in the storyline, and when we found him, he could fill us in on anything we missed along the way. His dogs were gone, too.

Then again, it quickly became apparent that everything we had brought had been confiscated, and without our noticing, we were each holding a small duffel bag with “KRSL Astronautical” on the side. As I read those words, I stopped breathing automatically and had to force myself to take a breath.

We all looked at each other with clear alarm. Even Ramona looked properly hysterical as we realized that this was not an ordinary power station.

“Where's the power generator?” Antoine asked. “Isn't there a power station around here?”

“We're pure nuclear,” Tripp said, “I know, I know. It’s old fashion, but you should see the project we got going on on the other side of campus. Fusion reaction. Who thought we'd get that in Carousel, huh? Finally catching up to the rest of the world.”

Exactly how advanced was this storyline?

“Now, if you'll follow me, I'll take you to the flight deck.”

~-~

He led us into a large building, bigger than a football stadium, with a covered dome that began opening as we walked inside.

This gave us a beautiful view of the sunset-colored sky.

“The stars are coming out to say hello,” Tripp said. “Don't you worry; you'll be meeting them soon enough.”

As he led us into the building, we realized that the entire ground-level floor was mostly carved out, and there were multiple lower floors beneath us. At the very bottom was a white object the size of a large airplane. As we stared over the side of the railing down at the object, none of us could speak.

We were off-screen, so we didn't have to worry about breaking character, so I just went for it.

“Can you explain exactly what our duties entail?” I asked.

“Just enjoy yourself,” Tripp said. “It's testimonials from ordinary people like you that keep us in business. Trust me, if we could get space tourism to be as big as deep-sea tourism was 20 years ago—why, just imagine the possibilities.”

“What year is it?” Antoine asked as he stared at the white object down on the ground beneath us.

“I know, right?” Tripp asked. “It feels like we're living in the future, like we somehow beamed that ship right out of the year 2000.”

“Yes,” Isaac said. “Who knows what they'll come up with in the year 2000.”

“Who knows, indeed,” Tripp said. “Just know that in some small way, your feedback could help decide that very question.”

“It looks like the ship from 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea,” Dina said quietly to me.

She was right. It looked just like the Nautilus, the ship from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

Except it was eggshell white, and the edges were all rounded, but it definitely had the spherical porthole windows and an aquatic animal look to it. Of course, it also had the obvious thrusters and wings that made an X shape when we looked down on it from above, but it didn't really look like a rocket.

It looked organic.

And it didn't fit in with anything else in the building. While it was white and rounded and looked like a 1960s vision of the future, all of the tech around it looked brutalist and early cyberpunk.

The computers looked like props from a 1980s sci-fi movie, and all of the partial rockets and other spacecraft that surrounded the white ship had exposed metal features.

“It doesn't quite look like it belongs here,” I said under my breath, without really understanding why I felt that beyond basic aesthetics.

“Oh, she's state-of-the-art,” Tripp said. “You're so lucky to be able to go up on her.”

Tripp led us forward, but truthfully, all of my muscles were numb as we made our way through the facility and over to an elevator with glass panels that would lower us down.

It didn't feel real.

We passed by blinking and beeping machinery that looked very much like the control panel I had seen on the movie poster.

Were we really about to go in a spaceship?

The vets had said that Carousel plays its role too. That's how we explain that sometimes small-town Carousel had skyscrapers, and other times, the river that ran east to west instead ran northwest to southeast.

But a space program?

A corporate space program that KRSL seemed to run from their mountain hideaway. What the heck?

While most of us were increasingly nervous, Antoine seemed to be getting excited. It was almost like he liked the idea of going up in space. What a freak.

“In space, they can't hear you scream,” I said to him.

“I don’t plan on screaming,” he answered. I wasn't sure if he got the reference.

I really wanted to take a break and contemplate what we were about to do, but there was no break to be had.

We were off-screen, and we were background characters. Everything seemed to be running at top speed to get us to our positions, and little things like stopping to reflect didn't fit into that time frame.

“All right, if you'll walk through there, you'll be given your uniforms. In a few hours, you'll be looking back down at us from up there,” he said, looking up.

He pointed us in the direction of what appeared to be locker rooms—but not the kind of locker room I preferred, which usually had walls to stop people from peeking at you. As we looked over there, we saw NPCs getting dressed right out there in the open in front of their lockers.

Men and women.

“Oh my God,” Kimberly said as she realized how little privacy we were going to get. “I bet it's going to be even worse on the ship,” she added.

“Well, you don't get rocket ships and fusion energy without coed locker rooms,” I said. “It's the rule of science fiction.”

Because we were off-screen, NPCs didn't stop to talk to us or give us information. That was going to be a problem.

We were basically Wallflowers without the tropes to go along with it, but even worse, people who had used this rescue trope made it clear that you were not going to be directed to scenes where you could interact with the story. You would have to find your openings on your own.

This was going to be work.

And Antoine got right on it.

“Hey, buddy,” he said to an unclothed, hairy guy who had no shame standing in the locker room.

The man turned to us; his name was Rudy, and he had a big, wide smile.

“You must be the prize winners,” he said. He stuck out his hand for Antoine to shake, and Antoine did.

“I was just wondering,” Antoine said, “what were all those people protesting outside?”

“Happiness,” he said. “A bright tomorrow, you know, the normal things that people like that protest.”

I didn't know what -ism was going on in this story, but it was one of them. Whether it was fascism or corporatism, something was up.

“No, really,” Antoine said.

“I'm telling you,” Rudy insisted. “They were too picky, didn't want to go up, and now they don't get to.”

He continued getting dressed.

The problem was that Antoine did not have a whole lot of Moxie.

I had plenty, though.

“Come on, man, give me the dirt. Don't trash-talk them without letting us in on it,” I said.

“Okay, okay,” Rudy said. “Those sad suckers out there, they would have been rich, but they went to their union over some minor issues and got replaced.”

“I didn't realize that astronauts could unionize,” I said.

“Them? Astronauts?” Rudy asked. “No, those are miners.”

“I guess they couldn't get their parents to sign their permission slips,” Isaac said.

Rudy laughed generously. “They're space miners, supposed to be professionally trained, but apparently, they weren't too enthusiastic about keeping their jobs, so they've been picketing us for the last 18 months or so if you believe it. If they don't have to work for 18 months, then they must not need jobs.”

“Space mining,” Antoine said, impressed. “Will we be seeing any of that?”

Rudy shook his head. “No, no, that ship already sailed about 13 months ago. We will probably be doing a quick flyby of the ship they're on, but I doubt that we're going to be looking at the new mining colonies. There's not much to see, just a bunch of mindless robots.”

“Wait,” Isaac asked as he started to change his clothes. “If you have robots who can mine, why do you need people?”

“Well, the humans aren't mindless, technically, but they're still basically robots if you ask me. There are some things that AI just can't figure out yet, like what to do when everything goes wrong.”

Rudy finished getting dressed and said, “I'll see you on the ship.” As he left, he wore a gray uniform with orange stripes. The uniforms we had been given were very similar, except ours had black stripes.

I quickly changed, hoping that none of the NPCs got a peek at me.

~-~

Words couldn't convey the feeling coursing through me—excitement, wonder, and abject fear—but they were all there.

I knew that horror movies could take place in space, but I still never pictured myself traveling there. I thought that the small town of Carousel would be the limit of our exploration. As I walked up to the giant ship, I almost forgot that I was in a horror movie, and I was thrilled.

But that feeling quickly left me because, in space, small mistakes could become big mistakes, and whatever lay in the stars waiting for us would be deadlier than I could imagine.

"So, what's the story, you think?" Isaac asked nervously. It was on everyone's mind as we were waiting to load onto the ship, which was leaving much sooner than the tour guide Tripp would have seemed to suggest.

"Are we going to fight aliens?" he asked before I could answer. “In space, they have a home-field advantage."

"Well, to them, we'll be the aliens," Antoine said, "which means we have the home-field advantage in space."

Isaac laughed.

"I don't know," I said. "Aliens are likely, but there are other possibilities, like robots—which got name-dropped. We could be dealing with something like interdimensional demons, but I haven't seen any clues for that yet. Of course, there are always environmental disasters in a closed space like this. Maybe we hit an asteroid field, or we get stranded on a moon. But yeah, aliens seem most likely."

No one was comforted, but then I wasn't trying to comfort them.

As they stood and waved, I approached Ramona and pulled her aside.

Something had occurred to me.

"This is the worst time to bring this up," I said as we got away from the others. "I've put off asking you about this, but I just have to."

"Okay," she said. "So ask."

"We're about to be in outer space in a little metal box. I have to wonder whether or not your friend is coming, too."

"My friend?" she asked.

"The Mercer poltergeist," I said. "We know about that. We didn't want you to feel excluded, but I just have to know if we're in danger because, if so, you may need to just stay behind."

Even if it meant she was written off, we couldn't risk her family's genetic curse appearing on a spaceship.

"Well, I haven't had an attack since I was a little kid, and that was before I remember, so I doubt one is coming now," she said. "I didn't realize you guys knew so much about that."

"Yeah, I've met him before. Great guy," I said.

"That's not my experience," Ramona said. "It only starts to act up when you're in contact with other Mercers, or at least normally. Honestly, I haven't had it happen in my entire adult life. I don't think it's going to happen right now. I don't think Carousel would like that."

She made a good point. Carousel itself might step in to prevent any unscripted visit from the poltergeist. At the end of the day, Carousel wanted a good film. Strangely, that was comforting to think about.

Maybe she would even need tropes to use him.

"Is that why you guys look at me the way you do?" she asked. "Because you know?"

"No," I said. "It's the whole being born in Carousel and the strange relationship with Silas Dyrkon that does it."

"Oh," she said. "Right."

I realized she might have been hurt by that.

"I was trying to make a joke," I said. "We’re good with you. You're fine. Now, let's go kill some aliens."

She nodded, and we returned to the group. I wondered if I could have handled that any worse.

As we walked back, I saw a large transparent cube sitting on a desk in the distance. Inside the cube was a floating hologram of a ship, or at least its blueprints. I noticed that large rubber gloves were attached to the cube so that you could stick your hands through and manipulate something inside.

As I approached it, it became clear how it worked.

I put my hands into the rubber gloves and started moving the hologram around in three dimensions. The device seemed both high-tech and low-tech at the same time. I could almost imagine something like this existing in the real world.

The thing was, the hologram that I was manipulating was not the ship that stood before us. In fact, I could hardly think of it as being a ship. It looked more like a giant barge, an interconnected labyrinth of high-tech structures in the 1980s style, like everything else other than the white ship in the building.

I read closely:

I.B.E.C.S. 

Integrated Behavioral and Environmental Control System.

As I played with it, the others approached.

"It looks like Legos," Isaac said, "or like hamster tubes but with more metal."

He was right. The design was modular in that there were lots of different units that looked like they had been connected to each other, and there were many places where additional units could be connected but were not.

"Uh, the IBECS system," one of the NPCs said as she approached. Her name was Flannery. "Old technology," she said, "but charming. You could attach new modules to suit your needs. I always wished they hadn't scrapped that one."

"Why did they scrap it?" I asked.

"Oh, who knows," she answered. "A million reasons, but mostly quality control. They used to make a big deal out of bringing in clients and letting them design their own special ships that would meet their unique specifications. CEOs loved these because they could make their ship without having to consult a scientist or engineer. Of course, there were inefficiencies and an overreliance on automation to keep the ships running. If you're interested, we'll probably get a good look at this one while we're up there."

"The one that left 13 months ago?" Antoine asked.

She nodded. "Our ship’s faster. We're supposed to meet up with the captain of the IBECS so you can shake his hand, either virtually or maybe even physically. That should be a fun experience, don't you think?"

I did not predict it would be a fun experience, but I smiled and nodded.

So we were going up in an advanced spaceship to meet up with a far less advanced spaceship with noted problems in its engineering.

Since we were off-screen, Antoine didn't have any problems asking, "Do you think that's where the main characters are?"

That hadn't occurred to me yet because I was playing with the hologram, trying to memorize things, but now I definitely did.

There were a lot of miners on that ship if the number of sleeping bays was any indication.

We needed to be on the lookout for three NPCs who would represent the players that we would be rescuing. Keeping those NPCs alive was how we accomplished the rescue. Now, we just needed to find them.

There were so many things lying about that room and so many NPCs shuffling to and fro. We were in the very early part of the Party Phase, and it felt like there was so much to learn, so we all just spread out and tried to discover things. But ultimately, the NPCs were too busy, and it was looking like we had already reached our limit for what we were going to learn here in Carousel.

It was time to take off and fly into outer space, which was also in Carousel somehow.

~-~

After much more searching and not much finding, other than a few scraps of details here and there, we found the names of some of the officers who would be on the ship we were headed toward—the IBECS.

We also found the name of our ship, the Helio.

Then, NPCs, including Flannery and Rudy, ushered us onto the white ship and showed us where we would be sitting during takeoff. The design of the ship was strange; it oddly reminded me of a racquetball court with a walkway wrapped around so that people could look down at the players.

It was an odd description, but it felt right. We would sit down in the place where the court would be, and up above, on the walkway, was the bridge.

Was it possible that “bridge” had been mentioned by Location Scout and I had not realized what it meant? I didn’t remember.

Other than that, there weren't a lot of other shooting locations on this ship. There were a couple of hallways and a few rooms here and there, but not enough to account for all the locations I had seen.

The rest must have been on the IBECS.

Whenever we lost gravity, we would be able to float from our seats all the way up into the bridge to see what the pilot and the various crew members were doing—if we wanted to, at least. This assumed they had not yet figured out artificial gravity, which was a staple of space horror.

I was so nervous I couldn't stand it.

All of the surfaces were white, and the only colors were a sort of desaturated orange and a desaturated blue. There was beeping, and there were lights flashing on machines all around the main room. They didn't fit with the aesthetic of anything I had seen so far, but I was not going to complain.

As I sat on the ship, I became certain that this ship was not from this story.

It didn’t fit. It was too advanced.

It was from somewhere else. Somewhen else.

We all strapped in. Kimberly sat tucked into her seat—which looked like a big white egg—with her eyes closed, clearly not thrilled about what was about to happen.

They did not take their time or walk us through it, which frustrated me to no end. I wished that someone had talked to us and told us what was happening, but they just didn't—because none of it was on-screen.

"Take off in 5... 4... 3... 2…"

Beneath us, thrusters started to come to life, and our strange egg-shaped chairs seemed to adjust to the vibrations.

"Lift off."

We were in the air, rising quickly. Around us were portholes with bubble-shaped windows so that we could see outside. The biggest of those were the ones above us, which were so large that they took up much of the front of the ship.

I don't think I breathed once the entire time we were rising.

I heard the others screaming, but I didn't really register it.

The turbulence increased, and the chair tried to counteract it, but I still felt it. The G-forces pressed down on me as I sunk back into my seat, and it felt like my skin was being pulled down over my face. Then, just as I couldn't take it anymore, it all stopped.

"Congratulations," a voice sounded over the intercom. "You have officially made it to space."

The feeling of weightlessness overcame me for a moment, but only for a moment. As I predicted, the artificial gravity kicked in.

But strangely, it was dragging us toward the blank white wall in front of us instead of toward the back of the ship. I felt like I was about to fall forward—except I didn't because my egg-shaped seat, as well as all of the other objects in the room, started to move forward along lighted paths in the ground.

We moved forward until we reached the wall, which had a curved corner instead of a sharp 90-degree turn. Then, our chairs just kind of moved along the wall until the wall became the floor beneath us, and the artificial gravity suddenly made sense.

Everything in this room had done that, including the bridge, which now stood before the large portholes that were at the front of the ship so that the pilot could now see out—and so could we.

We could see the stars.

We were in space.

My sense of wonder was on overdrive, but the longer we moved along, the more my sense of dread kicked in. Kimberly might have passed out in her seat; I couldn't tell because she just sat there with her eyes closed. Isaac looked like he was dizzy, and Cassie was crying.

Antoine was still excited and was hooting and hollering.

I wanted to throw up or pee my pants.

Maybe both.

They say space is dangerous. They say that it's unforgiving. They say that everything in space is trying to kill you.

But hey, we were used to that.