Chương 232: Book Five, Chapter 136: The Diorama

When I left the Invitations room, I left with my head hanging down. I knew that all of this stuff existed—I wasn't a fool—but picturing it as some arcane ritual or the all-powerful will of a cosmic being made it more digestible in a strange way. The story of our entrapment—it was told on readouts and dials. These people of the Manifest Consortium, they may have been immortal, but they were people.

Knowing that their ambitious little hands had some small part to play in our fate completely captured my focus and made it difficult for me to think about my mission. What was my mission? To find out if there was a way forward without any traps? I had gotten so distracted with constant revelations that I had forgotten my simple but impossible goal. We needed to figure out what to do next.

Did we follow Carousel's Throughline, as the framers of Project Rewind seemed to intend (whether they knew that was what they were doing or not), or was there another way? I didn't know if a satisfying answer existed to that question. If I was going to die over and over, curing a cosmic hive-mind virus didn't seem like a waste of time. As I walked through the fifth floor, being ignored by the janitor, I saw where the storyline was—on a display monitor. There was still time.

I took the tickets out of my pocket that Dr. Striga had given me, and I read through them. Dream of Your Choosing From Lumevere Remedies – Purveyors of the Rare & the Necessary This ticket grants you not just a dream, but the one you long for most. No fleeting half-images, no restless confusion—only a world of your choosing, held steady until morning. Revisit. Reimagine. Walk through a door that never opened. Stand beneath a sky that never was. Speak to someone you miss, or someone you've yet to meet.

You will wake with the memory intact. And for one night, you will have exactly what you need. Lumevere Remedies – Because Some Things Are Best Left to Dreams. ~ Everyone's Favorite Casserole A Gift from Hearth & Home Syndicate This ticket delivers the meal you have always loved—even if you have never tasted it before. The flavor shifts to memory, to longing, to the warmth of a home that may no longer exist.

It is the dish set at the family table, the scent that fills a childhood kitchen, the bite that quiets an ache you didn't know you carried. Perfectly made, perfectly warm. Just for you. Hearth & Home Syndicate – No Place Like It. ~ The Sieve of Time Issued by The Bureau of Measured Moments The world moves on, but you don't have to— not yet. This ticket allows you to pause a single moment, not frozen, but lingering. The conversation doesn't end. The sun doesn't set. The touch of a hand doesn't slip away.

Not until the last grain of time falls through the sieve. Stay. Breathe. Hold onto now, just a little longer. The Bureau of Measured Moments – Because Some Moments Deserve More Time. ~ Getaway Weekend at Elenora Sound An Exclusive Offer from Lumevere Retreats Escape the crowds, the noise, the demands of the world—by having a world entirely to yourself. This ticket grants you a two-night stay at Elenora Sound, a premier interdimensional retreat where the only guest is you.

Lounge on untouched shores, roam forests where no path has yet been worn, or bask beneath a sky that has never had to share its stars. Your world will wait for your return. Until then, enjoy a place where you are the only story that matters. Lumevere Retreats – Because Sometimes, Solitude is the Greatest Luxury. ~ Refurbishment of _______ Brought to You by The Hands That Mend This ticket entitles the bearer to the full restoration of a single object, no matter its age, condition, or the hands it has passed through.

A childhood toy, battered but beloved. A book with pages too delicate to turn. A locket rusted shut. A clock that stopped ticking when someone left and never restarted. Whatever it is, however worn, it will be made whole again. Simply name the item. The rest will follow. The Hands That Mend – Because Some Things Still Have Life Left in Them. They were neat. In fact, they were kind of cool.

It was strange to imagine that someone could be awarded a ticket like these that, in some goofy corporate marketing speak, informed them they would be immortal—that they would live long enough to become callous to the lives of others. Immortality and casserole. The spectrum of the Sweepstakes was immense. I stuffed the tickets back in my pocket, where they disappeared just as my tropes did. I was numb, and all I knew to do was continue the climb. And so I did climb, finding the red stairway up ten more levels.

I wasn't even close to tired—all of those buffs to my Grit had practically made me superhuman when it came to simple endurance. Each level was very similar to the ones before it, covering some small but important aspect of the Carousel experience. One floor had a bunch of beeping monitors that reminded me of a hospital, where I could see all the stats of the living players. But more than the stuff we normally could see on the red wallpaper—I could see their heartbeats.

I could see how worried they were and their level of fear, and there must have been a dozen other things being measured that I didn't even understand. The next floor was devoted completely to the marketing department. Just as important. They were working on posters of Kimberly. Guess if you have to fund your spelunking adventures into Carousel in search of fundamental truth, you need to sell some merch. The floor above that was strange but enlightening. It had what appeared to be the world's worst hourglass.

It was a large vertical tube filled with strange red sand. There was no bottleneck at the middle—instead, much of the sand just floated upward. I had to stop and try to understand what I was looking at. There were only two workers in the room, and while one glanced at me, they didn't say anything to me for a moment as I read the various signage near the strange device. The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

The gizmo was for detecting tension in a storyline, and there were many other rooms with devices just like it for other storylines when multiple were being run. Tension—the currency of storytelling. This vague thing that I had been using to try to decide what actions I could take in a storyline. You don't want the tension to go too low, or Carousel will do something to raise it. It was the fundamental reason why you couldn't kill the bad guy early on, as Adeline had impressed upon us multiple times.

You had to maintain the right amount of tension for the part of the story you were in. There it was, being measured by red sand. It was strangely comforting to realize that this abstract narrative force, that I felt silly for talking about and trying to define, was not only real but had been defined so simply. Tension. I must have stared at that red tube for too long because the two workers started to notice me. At first, I hoped that they didn't recognize my face.

"Wait, what are you doing here?" one of them said—a shorter one with curly black hair, wearing a lab coat that was yellow with a gold trim. The other one was wearing a normal white lab coat. He was taller and wore glasses, and neither of them showed up on the red wallpaper. Strangely, I was so emotionally numb between the storyline and my recent discoveries that I didn't jump and run immediately.

"Just taking a break," I said.

"Sorry to bother you." The short, curly-headed one looked at his friend and then back at me. Then, as if unsure of his conviction that I was the Riley Lawrence, he asked, "Aren't you Riley Lawrence?" I had to hope that my high Moxie would work on these fellows.

"Yep, that's me," I said.

"Just took a break from fighting old Generation Killer to come talk to you two." I tried to play it off as a joke, and it must have worked because I got polite chuckles from them. They both left their workstations and crept closer to me as if I was a creature being studied.

"Wait a second," the tall one said.

"I thought that Carousel red-tagged all of our non-combatant shapeshifters?" Luckily, he was speaking English. Unluckily, I just had to guess at what all those words meant together.

"Yep," I said.

"A real pain in the neck if you ask me."

"Well, you're not a clone being controlled by the script," the shorter one said.

"The scripting room is off-limits. Carousel's gone haywire—it's taken back the pen."

"That's just a rumor," the taller one said.

"No, it's true. I saw it with my own eyes," the shorter one argued back.

"So then, how do you look like Riley Lawrence? Identity theft wasn't balanced last time I checked." More English words in strange orders. Identity theft wasn't balanced? Alrighty. He said that with so much attitude, like he was saying something so obvious.

"Potion," I said, as the word just popped into my mind.

"Potion?" the short one repeated.

"You mean a magic potion? I don't believe it." Oops.

"Well, you better," I said. That was it: double down.

"We're resorting to low magic now? This is so embarrassing," he went on to say. Yes, low magic potions. How embarrassing. But what were we going to do? Identity theft wasn't balanced.

"Okay, but why do you need to look like Riley Lawrence?" the taller one asked.

"It's painfully obvious," the shorter one said before I could explain, looking at his friend like he was an idiot.

"If it's so obvious, then what's going on?" the tall one asked. He looked at me, but I redirected his gaze back at the short one, hoping for an explanation myself.

"This is our exit strategy," said the one in the yellow lab coat.

"I told you that we were working on one. We're going to give them a happy ending—or at least make the audience think they had one—and then we're going to let nature take its course so we can get a fix on our little problem." Listening to him saying that hit me right in the gut.

"No," the taller one said.

"That can't be what we're doing. Upstairs said we were supposed to continue helping the players as long as they were making progress. We're just going to do our best, and if they die, they die."

"Of course, they're going to say that," the shorter one said.

"That's what they're going to say right up until the moment they reveal the real plan. They aren't going to let people see players die from our screw up. We'd lose our commission. And there is way too much work to be done in Carousel to risk that." And then, as I had feared, they both looked at me. I had very little preparation for this type of conversation. I had not really worked in a corporate hierarchy, let alone a magical one. But my grandfather had, and he always had a sense of humor about it.

"Well, you know what they say," I said.

"If you think you know what Upstairs is thinking, wait five minutes." I had to hope that joke existed in their culture. For a moment, they just looked at me. But then, as the meaning of the joke dawned on them, they started to laugh.

"Isn't that the truth?" the shorter one said.

"Well, unless you've got any films that need buffed, I gotta go upstairs," I said.

"Need to get this show on the road." I smiled and waved as I walked away toward the red stairs. They kind of laughed and stood there like they thought I was leaving too soon, but I didn't care. As soon as I made it to the stairs, I continued my way up. Those guys seemed friendly. It was strange what you could get away with when no one was on the lookout for deception. I continued my way up. Heck, I even took an elevator once I realized that no one was on the lookout for me. No one had figured out I was gone.

There was only one explanation in my grasp—my Savvy. I had made a plan. Savvy helps your plans work, though I had assumed it would stop having an influence once I actually got here. But was it possible that Carousel's magic was helping me along the way? That felt too easy. I didn't have time to think about it, but if I made it out of here, I knew it would be a constant topic of my meditations. The floor I ended up on was called Creative, and it was roped off and abandoned.

As I walked in, something immediately caught my eye in the center of the room. There was a giant glass dome, almost as tall as I was. There was a large machine at its base with lots of dials and readouts, though the control panel had… exploded. There was also a series of desks or tables that wrapped around the perimeter of the room, which also had lots of little glass domes lined up neatly. I thought maybe they were crystal balls or strange tube television screens set into the tables. I just didn't know.

They all contained lights inside that immediately attracted my eyes. I started with the glass dome in the center and casually stared down into it. My blood ran cold as I saw what appeared to my eyes to be a miniature version of the bed and breakfast from Permanent Vacancy. They were looking at the piece of Carousel from my world. I didn't know if it was fake or real. It was very detailed. As far as I was concerned, it could have been a live aerial feed.

I broke my attention away from the dome and started looking around at all the desks, which were covered in devices with dials and knobs, like many of the other devices I'd found. If the dome in the center of the room contained the bed and breakfast, the glass that covered much of the tables surrounding the room contained—well, something very similar. They contained aerial views of eastern Carousel. The desk that surrounded the room was divided into sections, with little plaques hanging from the side of the table.

All those plaques said were Carousel 1825, Carousel 1826, Carousel 1827, and so on and so forth, until finally, it got to Carousel 2025. Each year had a small dome of its own. I glance at them from above. All of them showed the same aerial view. But of course, the aerial view of eastern Carousel changed as the years went by. More and more different buildings popped up. More and more different features—like hills and ponds—arose.

What was once forest and tall grass became farmland, and what was once a dark edge of nothingness on the far east became... It became a parking lot. And a bed and breakfast. And a little building for employees only. And it became all of that in 1989. It took me a moment to figure out what I was looking at—because of the enormity of it all and because of my racing heartbeat. This was where they had done it. This was where they had decided to incorporate my world into Carousel proper.

I found a little note, written on a piece of paper covered in dust. The words Permanent Vacancy were circled, while several other options—such as Bed and Bedlam—were crossed out. Silas Dyrkon had told us about this, pretty much. He had been telling the truth. The Manifest Consortium had been in the middle of adding things when they lost control. Samantha had done her best to tell us about this, though the script fought her. But seeing this giant room, with its giant diorama of eastern Carousel—it felt real.

I stared down into Carousel 1989 and saw something I hadn't noticed before. There were little colorful dots moving on the ground. The view was too high up for me to notice at first. They were people. As I continued to explore the room, I found a dial labeled Dilation. It was a few notches above zero. It sat on a control panel in the center of the room—the one that appeared to have exploded. But some of the other dials caught my attention, too.

One looked like it could be used to input coordinates, and another seemed to be used to input year. As I let all of the little details play around in my mind, I started to question an assumption I had made. I reached into my pocket and took out the newspaper I had found in the trash. They said the Manifest Constortium had experienced nearly 70 days since Carousel rebelled. But to the players, it had been 34 years. I looked at the little knob that said Dilation again. That must have meant time dilation.

Were they able to adjust how much time passed relative to those of us trapped in Carousel so easily? The turn of a knob and they could zoom through days of our suffering? How did they do that while still helping make storylines work? The level of control they had over the timeline of Carousel proper was awe-inducing. Staring at it all made me feel so small. And just as I was about to leave, I noticed something on the tables along the wall that marked Carousel 1989 through Carousel 2025.

I noticed there was a strange sort of old-fashioned light that lit up from 1989 and stopped at 2023 and nowhere else. The only label for the lights said: Reverberation. The lights lit a path from 1989 all the way to the current year—or at least, what should have been the current year in my home world. Reverberation. I stared more closely at Carousel 2024 and Carousel 2025. There was no parking lot. There was no bed and breakfast. The road ended in a dead end, with some trees—and beyond that, there was nothing.

When they added the bed and breakfast so that they could get their perfect Damsel, that change in 1989 didn't instantly change the future. It reverberated—slowly. The change moved forward as the players from earth did. Had they been watching us from this place on the other side of the mountain? Striga had said they spent years trying to help us. Maybe they did. But did they spend the same 34 years that players from my world had been trapped here? I was starting to think not.