Chương 208: Book Five, Chapter 111: E Cola

Anna was sitting in a chair, crying, her hand held out in front of her like she was getting a manicure, but she wasn't. Bobby was inspecting her injuries. Kimberly was by her side as Bobby took off the makeshift bandage she had fashioned. The reveal was stomach-churning. She was missing the pinky and ring finger of her left hand. Even with all of her Grit, she was in pain.

"Bobby, get that thing wrapped up now!" Kimberly screamed.

"I'm going as fast as I can," he said, rushed, nervous. We were Off-Screen. We had been Off-Screen for a few minutes. That was not going to work. I hated myself for thinking it. I looked at Anna's fragile, pained expression, her tears, and the blood soaked into her clothes.

"I'm bringing us On-Screen," I said.

"Everyone stay in character!" I brought up my camera and pointed it at Anna; then, I moved to the side to get a better angle so that Kimberly would share the screen better.

"Don't you dare," Kimberly screamed.

"She's in shock." I started to lower the camera, but the sight of Anna's injury reminded me of the stakes. We needed to show the audience that we cared about her and that we were the type of people to help in a crisis. Anna was the main character, and the more we could convince the audience that we cared for her, the more likely we were to succeed. We couldn't skip over this vital character moment. I felt inhuman. I didn't blame Kimberly for wanting me to buzz off.

Normally, we could just blame Carousel for pressing record and bringing us On-Screen at the worst times. Having to do it myself, having to exploit Anna's injury, felt awful. But it had to be done.

"Establish that we care about her. In character in five, four, three, two," I said aloud. 🔴 REC SEP 23, 2018 19: 47: 03 [▮▮▯▯▯ 40%]"Everything is going to be okay," Kimberly cooed in Anna's ear as she stroked her forehead. Anna was not moving. She wasn't dying. She was doing her best to stay calm. The tears rolled down her cheeks. Kimberly glared into the camera.

"Do you have to do that right now?" she yelled. I took a step back and then focused the camera on Bobby. Antoine was handing him some gauze from a med kit. Bobby took it and began wrapping Anna's hand.

"This injury is substantial," he said.

"We need to get you to a hospital. I can't treat you. My background is in animal medicine. I can patch up the wound for now, bu—""No!" Anna screamed. I didn't think she would speak. I just hoped she was ready.

"Not a hospital. Not a hospital. They keep records for years. They'll report it. No hospital."

"Come here," Kimberly said.

"It's going to be okay. No one is going to do anything. Is there a man after you now? A boyfriend?" Anna looked at her, too afraid to say.

"A stalker?" Kimberly asked.

"Is it a stalker?" Anna didn't answer directly. She stared forward, her pain disappearing because of Bobby's healing, but to my eye, it looked like she was lost in a memory. ■ STOP That would work. Stopping on a suggestion that seemed to trigger some response from her. That would be enough.

"Good thinking with the boyfriend/stalker thing," I said. Kimberly helped Anna to her feet and wrapped an arm around her.

"Come on," she said.

"The showers are this way." They walked past me and headed toward the employee bathrooms. I was left with Logan, Bobby, and Antoine. We just stared at each other.

"We needed that shot," I said.

"It'll matter."

"I know," Antoine said.

"Kimberly was just lost in the moment." He started cleaning up the soiled bandage that Anna had come with. Logan, who had stayed out of the shot, was holding the book Anna had brought with her. It was the same Carousel tragedies book I was familiar with. He had it opened and said, "September 29. That's when the carbon monoxide accident happens. Hmm." He shut the book and carried it with him back toward the offices. Bobby stared at me.

"How'd I do?" he asked.

"You did great, Bobby," I said.

"You did great… Anna was talking about hospital records. This guy tracks you down from any record, I guess. He has unlimited time." Bobby bent down and grabbed the newspaper Anna was holding in her other hand.

"That's unfortunate," he said, as he stared at it. He turned it around.

"CRIME MUSEUM UNEARTHS GRUESOME DISCOVERY" was the front-page story. It was the paper from two days in the future.

"Guess he knows we're here with the tapes," Bobby said.

"But the headline hasn't changed."

"Could be it won't change until it is too late for the headline to come true like in Back to the Future," I said. This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

"Or future artifacts are just objects. They don't change at all," he said. I nodded.

"Guess we'll see." Anna had appeared outside the museum minutes before she broke in. Antoine found her while he was waiting for us. When he came in to talk to us, he signaled she was here. It turned out that time had been different for her. Out of mercy or in an effort to preserve production value, Carousel had taken Anna off the board after the dance disaster. She wasn't wandering around in pain for half a day. Antoine only had a few moments to prep her for her introductory scene. She had performed admirably.

I had pictured the moment we saw Anna and Camden again as being triumphant and cathartic. These were my childhood friends: Anna had lived next to my grandparents and me, and Camden had spent nearly every weekend at my house during middle school so that he could get away from babysitting his siblings. It didn't just feel like we were rescuing people—it felt like we were also rescuing my happiest memories. My innocence, in a way.

But as I looked at Anna, and she was crying, all I could think was that there were still so many ways we could screw it up. This was not a victory. It was a tease. We had not saved her yet. But we would. The downside of Anna participating in her own rescue was that she didn't get a break. To her, she had literally just fought for her life across multiple different interactions with a savage serial killer. When she finally got to a place where she was safe—or at least safe-ish—she wept for half an hour.

They were tears of joy, but they still felt so painful to watch. Bobby's healing trope, If you can't see it, it won't bleed, was going to be a real lifesaver.

"It doesn't even hurt," Anna remarked. I knew eventually it would start again, but the instant pain relief was wonderful, as I recalled. The museum had showers and even a locker room that was originally for police officers but now was used by museum staff. Kimberly had brought clothes she had purchased just for the occasion—something she thought Anna would like. We camped out in the office again, like we had on the night when we were making the jailhouse our base, but the atmosphere was different.

It was all for show, all to help Anna adapt, calm down, and get ready. I knew this part was important—I understood that—but what I really wanted, the only thing I thought I could do to help, was to ask Anna about the lore of the story. The sooner we could determine what type of time travel we were dealing with, the better I could adapt our plan. But I knew it was too early to ask. We had time.

"Where's Dina?" Anna asked, after all the casual conversation we could shove her into.

"Is she okay?"

"Not sure yet," Antoine said, "but we have a lot of letters from her stacked up in the courthouse area. Gotta read them sometime." Dina had brought her trope that allowed her to send us letters and receive letters from a mysterious helper. Off-screen, Antoine had pointed out to us that she had sent us about twenty letters. That was just more homework for us. Luckily, we did have time because of Bobby's And That's Lunch trope Lila had equipped.

We could all see that we had fifteen hours before we had to go On-Screen at all. It was a glorious break. For everyone but me. For me, it didn't seem like long enough. They talked a lot about our time in Carousel since Anna had been gone. It was so strange that when we talked about our experiences, they almost sounded fun, like adventures. That was because no one brought up the bad parts. We had talked to ghosts—in fact, many of us had been ghosts.

We got to meet Benny the Haunted Scarecrow (The Early Years), and we fought werewolves. Antoine was a werewolf. We had been to outer space. Antoine went on a whole speech about it. I didn't remember him being that poetic about it.

"It's so quiet up there; you wouldn't believe it," he said, swirling, sipping his drink.

"Not like here, where there's always something buzzing. Up there, it's just… nothing. And the view? Looking at the cosmos, it's—yeah, it's beautiful, sure, but it's also kind of terrifying. Like, you realize how small you are, but also how much you're part of something way bigger. Hard to explain. Oh, and the food? Total garbage, but I guess that's not why you go."

"The wildlife will kill you, though," I said. We all laughed. The way Antoine talked about the Itch storyline made it sound like the most remarkable and magnificent moment of his life: being out among the stars, the infinite potential, the meaninglessness of all of our tiny problems. It wasn't until the end that Anna asked, "So what was the enemy?" —because he hadn't even mentioned the bed bugs or the IBECS. Yeah, it was true. If you didn't talk about the bad parts, Carousel could seem like a wonderful world.

I wanted to keep my game face on, to keep thinking, plotting, and planning because that had always been my way to contribute. It had always been the way that we found victory. But with Anna there, we couldn't help but celebrate. Anna was not ready to celebrate—not really—but she was too nice to spoil the mood. It felt like we were at one of those parties during the Cold War, where everyone nervously talked about how the bomb could be dropped any minute.

We sipped alcohol so that we had something to do with our mouths rather than speak, and we laughed nervously at jokes. We tried so hard to make everything normal. Just an office slumber party. You know how normal people have those. Kimberly and Anna were best friends, and they had their own way of speaking. Unlike me, Kimberly was always ready to play the role she was given, especially the ones that hit close to home. So even though I knew she didn't feel like lighting up the room, she did. She did it for Anna.

Anna was the main character, and we needed her mentally ready. That was going to be rough. What was the last storyline Anna had run? The Subject of Inquiry. That was probably the first storyline where we actually took our roles seriously. But even then, it was so long ago, and we'd had so much practice since then. Asking her to step up to the plate and take the lead felt so unfair. While she and Kimberly talked, I felt myself overcome with the stress of it all.

We had put so much work into planning and preparation that I could almost avoid the reality of our situation altogether. I could avoid the feelings of fear and the certainty of my death. Seeing Anna—cut, bruised, maimed, and terrified, truly terrified—brought it all back. I left the office and went down the hall to a small area that was supposed to be a break room but hadn't yet been finished. One thing it did have was vending machines: one for drinks, one for food.

I found myself lost in thought as I gazed at the options of what to get. Many of these brands were familiar to me from my time in Carousel. E Cola was a favorite at Dyer's Lodge, and Lemon Lye was Antoine's favorite. I found myself mindlessly pressing the buttons to no avail as I thought about this storyline and everything that we had to do.

"It works better when you put money in it," Anna said from behind me. I turned to look at her and mustered the best smile I could, given the circumstances. The question I was mulling over was whether we should tell her how hard this was going to be. She looked at our levels and all our fancy new tropes and thought we were basically superheroes. Should I have told her how big of a risk we took to come get her and Camden?

"Not really," I said.

"This is actually here because of Isaac's Writ of Habitation. Isaac is a Comedian—you'll meet him later. A Writ of Habitation is—ohh, never mind. The point is, sometimes you get free food at your base. At Kimberly's loft, we get saltine crackers and people's leftover food from the restaurant downstairs." I held up my fingers as if I were holding something between my thumb and index finger, but I wasn't. I moved my fingers up toward the coin slot of the vending machine and pretended to slide in a coin.

Suddenly, a sharp clink and metallic chatter could be heard as if I had just dropped a coin in. I pressed the button for E Cola, and one popped down into the bay below. I started to laugh, partially because of how silly I was explaining this at a time like this and partially because it was such a silly thing to begin with. She laughed, too.

"I just wanted to thank you," she said, giving me a quick hug.

"They say that you're a big part of this whole rescue operation."

"You don't have to say thanks until we actually have you rescued," I said, hugging her back. I didn't feel like I deserved any positive feedback yet.

"I can say thanks whenever I want," she said.

"I guess so." I stood there awkwardly because when I didn't know what to say, I usually said nothing.

"We're going to win," she said.

"I can feel it." Our fearless leader. I much preferred it from her than when Antoine was doing his hyper-positivity thing.

"I'll hold you to it," I said.

"Would you like a Lemon Lye soda? Or maybe a Mountain Drizzle Blood Red?"

"I think I'll take a Gray Water," she said, walking over to the machine next to me and miming putting in a coin and hitting the button. Gray Water was a brand of drinking water in Carousel.

"So Camden is…" I said. Broaching the topic no one wanted to talk about. She nodded.

"I saw some stuff through one of my tropes," I said.

"Was it as bad as it looked?" She looked distant. I imagined it was worse.

"We can still save him," she said firmly.

"That's all that matters. He saw it all happening. Talked about it step by step. From the moment we found the Atlas he knew everything that would happen until this moment. Planned it all out. I thought he was just coping."

"Maybe he didn't plan everything," I said. No one had seen the fake tutorial thing. That was out of left field.

"More than you might think," she said.

"Yeah?"

"He said there was a way to save a lot of time researching this storyline," she said.

"Thought you might want to know."

"And what way is that?" I asked.

"We go and get him," she said. It turned out that great minds did think alike. We walked back to the office, reminiscing about Camp Dyer.