Chương 376: Book Eight, Chapter 43: Keep Your Eye on the Ball

I was so excited that I ran all the way back to the boat. The others were trying to figure out how we would all fit inside one pop-up tent, squeezed between the padded benches on either side of the pontoon's back deck. The truth was, as afraid of being ambushed on land as we were, we were also afraid of being ambushed on the water. There was no winning. No safe option. Staying on the boat made a quick getaway possible. The tent was one more layer of protection so that nothing could touch our feet in the night.

I ran down the dock, jumped onto the boat, and said, "How exactly do those trackers work?" Camden popped his head out of the door of the pop-up tent.

"The fish trackers?" he asked.

"Yeah, those. Do you know how to operate them? I assume you got some training or read a manual, maybe." He looked over at the cabinet with all of the equipment for the lake research vessel and then crawled out of the tent to go find the trackers themselves.

"What exactly do we need these for here?" he asked once he had found them. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cue ball.

"I might have a way for us to find the others," I said. He glanced at the ball, seemingly reading its trope and remembering what it did, and then he looked back at me and opened up the bag of trackers quickly.

"So what are we saying? We throw this and hope it rolls to them? Maybe toss it in the river?" he asked.

"I figure we build a sort of floating system for it, like a bag filled with air, maybe some cushioning. Throw in that tracker, this ball, and then we tell it where to go and to come back to us afterward." It was a perfectly normal plan.

"Wait, what are we talking about?" Antoine called from inside the tent, where he had dragged the fabric up onto one of the benches so that he could sleep off the hard deck. I explained my plan, with everyone else listening. I was excited. I had no idea whether or not it would work. There was a bit of a difference between using a magic cue ball to trip a monster and using it as a tracking device across the vast dimensional chaos of Carousel.

"Just think about it," I said.

"It's an exploit, sure, but that's nothing new to us. I mean, Oblivious Bystander wasn't designed to let me Mr. Magoo my way out of all danger, and yet I can use it that way. I think this will work too. It's savvy-based." It was rare that I was this excited, but it felt like I was onto something. It fit our circumstances so well; it gave us a way to fight for the people we cared about. We discussed it for a while.

"First thing in the morning, we test it out," Camden said.

"Well, sure," I said. It was dark. We needed to sleep. As excited as I was, I worried I wouldn't be able to sleep the natural way, but I could always use Out Like A Light. I took the tracker that Camden had grabbed and the cue ball and put them in my pocket. There wasn't exactly a lot of room in the pop-up tent, but it felt safer than any other place we could be. I had to unequip my scouting trope so that the crybaby would be on full alert for Omens.

In the morning, we would test my plan out, and if it worked, that cue ball might be one of the most valuable items we ever acquired.

"Test thirteen," Camden said.

"Freezer bag with reflective orange water wing and duct tape, commence. Go to Antoine and then come back to me." He tossed the bag, which included the cue ball and the fish tracker, into the water.

And there it floated for fifteen to twenty minutes, as the slow moving currents of the lake moved it under the docks, where it bounced from piling to piling, until eventually it landed right on the ladder in front of Antoine, before getting swept up in some wake from a ski boat and finding its way back to Camden on the shore a few hundred feet away. It was working, at least for a short distance.

A trope like Boomerang Physics relied on having lots of kinetic energy and things to bounce off of, and what could have more to bounce off of than a river? The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

"That pretty much proves it, right?" I asked.

"Yeah," Camden said.

"It's the world's slowest remote control boat."

"Fate is a slow motor, my friend," I said. He waded out and grabbed the bag.

"All right, so that's what we do," I said.

"We just add a note inside of it, and they could probably send a note back to us, and it goes back and forth, and the whole time we can be following it in the boat, getting closer to where they are." Camden wasn't as enthusiastic as I was. He threw the bag back into the water, sending it on its slow journey down the shore toward Antoine.

"Look," he said, "we don't know if this is going to work. For all we know, this thing might go a mile and then the magic will cut out, or maybe it can take a path because of its size that we can't follow, or maybe it will get eaten by a sea monster with such high plot armor that my Savvy can't match it, or maybe it goes so fast that we can't chase it in the boat."

"Yes, but if none of that happens," I said, "it'll work." He laughed. There was something that Camden wasn't taking into account. Heroes, as in protagonists, have one responsibility in a story: to be proactive, to push the story forward. As much as I agreed with Camden about the flaws of the plan, I thought there was a larger force at work: Carousel wanted to see what happened enough that we would make some level of progress.

Sure, there was no easy way to find Ramona and the others, but it would be a step in the right direction. It would be a pull of the thread.

"All right," Camden said, "but now we have to test the radio tracker, and I can already tell it's going to be a pain." After about an hour of figuring out how to set the thing up, it turned out that his prediction was correct. The problem wasn't so much tracking the floating bag as it was figuring out how the radio interface worked. There was a small antenna, and in order to check for the radio signal, it had to be turned.

In real life, it might have been simpler, but the Carousel version required someone to manually turn the antenna to search for the strongest signal, which corresponded to the direction we had to go. The technology was designed to guide a boat on top of a fish in a lake, possibly with the goal of using electro-fishing equipment to cause it to float to the surface, paralyzed. It was not designed to chase a floating object down a river.

We tried the obvious things, like tying the bag with the cue ball in it to the front of the boat. Would it lead us where we wanted to go? The answer was no. As long as it was under our control, the cue ball would not activate, and it would just float aimlessly.

"Okay, so what happens if the left turn we need to make to steer closer to the others means that we have to activate a powerful storyline?" Anna asked.

"First," I said, "we hope that won't happen. And second, we consider running the storyline if at all possible. Otherwise, we just let the ball go. Eventually, it'll come back to us."

"And we're supposed to just wait it out?" Camden asked.

"If it fails, we give up," I said.

"I'm not going to ask us to endanger our lives here for an experiment. Maybe it's a bit of a gamble, but that's something we're used to."

"All right, hey, I'm just asking questions," Camden said.

"I think it sounds like a good idea. No way it could go wrong. I don't know why we're still waiting here." Maybe there were some logical disadvantages to my plan. I couldn't blame him for expressing doubts, but I felt the pros outweighed the cons. There was a good reason to stay. The campgrounds so far had been a safe place to wait out the apocalypse. But it still wasn't ideal. We were vulnerable. Things could change in an instant.

Still, if we were on the river and needed to rest, we would have to find a place without any Omens or lairs, or else we might even have to run a storyline. I couldn't blame the others if they wanted to stay as long as Carousel let us.

"You think this can help us find Isaac?" Cassie asked.

"You tested it, right? It seemed to work. It went to Antoine, so it can go to Isaac." With one of her brothers dead, it was not a hard sell to convince her to try to save the other.

"I can't make any promises, but I can tell you that this is the way forward if we are going to find Isaac, Ramona, Bobby, and Kelsey," I said.

"Well, I say we do it," Antoine said.

"Besides, so what if we run into a strong storyline or two? The plan is to level up, right? We have fast zombies to kill."

"That's right," I said.

"That needs to be our attitude." In Carousel, a growth mindset meant something different than on Earth.

"Hey, I'm not complaining about running more stories," Camden said.

"I didn't even get hurt in the last one." That was three and a half votes for yes. All that was left was Anna.

"They're still alive," Anna said, "Scared and stressed, but alive. That makes this urgent. We have to do it." Anna never had a problem with bravery, but it still sounded like she was trying to convince herself. Heck, it sounded like we were all trying to convince ourselves, except Antoine. He had a fire in his eyes. After what happened to Kimberly, he just wanted to feel like he was fighting for her. So after replenishing our food supply with lake marina convenience store food, we headed out on the water.

There was no way to look cool driving a pontoon boat. It was almost as if the seats were designed to resist the notion of cool. It certainly didn't have the speed we needed to set the aesthetics of a rescue mission, but that wasn't an issue. By triggering the Omen for Breathing Deeply, we had found ourselves in a basin lake. Now there were several other directions we could go. This was like a four-way stop for the river. The path we would choose wouldn't be determined by us, though.

It would be chosen by a cue ball. Camden threw the bag with the ball and the tracker into the water and said, "Find Ramona and then come back to me." The bag floated, but didn't move in any particular hurry.

"Quick, follow that bag," Antoine said as we floated alongside it.

"Did we lose it on the radar?" I asked, pretending that I couldn't see it any longer. The bright, reflective orange water wing made it very visible against the water. We could at least try to make jokes. It took us nearly an hour to get off the lake, and we never lost sight of the bag, but eventually it floated ever so slowly toward an outlet that wasn't even on a map for the lake. And once we set sail to follow it, the water got faster, and the bag moved swiftly, bouncing off every rock and log on the way.

We had to chase it now, knowing that if it ever took a turn down a shallow creek, it was as good as lost. I didn't even know what would happen if we needed to trigger a storyline to open up the right path. We followed the bag, and the bag followed the river. Where it would take us, we did not know. But the journey, some said, was more important than the destination. But then, it was also more dangerous.