Chương 404: Book Eight, Chapter 71: Remains

The further we went into the jungle, the more carnage we saw. It was like watching a three-dimensional slideshow, a crime scene spread over miles. There had been a great battle here, but not between two righteous armies. It had been brutal and bloodthirsty. Six or so had been shot. Two had broken necks, and several had been stabbed. We were only On-Screen for some of these revelations, and we didn't go through the act of burying everyone we found. There were just too many of them, and it was all for show anyway.

The thing was, some of the bodies had rotted to the bone without being touched by scavengers. Others had been torn apart. Why would animals only eat some of them?

"I don't understand," Roxy said.

"These were my husband's men. I knew some of them. Why would they turn on each other?"

"Some kind of madness," Camden suggested as we arrived at the encampment, which was still set up just as it had been six months ago. The weather and time had taken some toll. For the most part, it was unchanged.

"You say madness, I say greed," I said as I pointed to a wagon cart that was half loaded with gold ornaments in large wooden boxes.

"If they killed each other for the gold, then why is the gold still here?" Camden asked. Good point. I probably looked foolish right there.

"I imagine they took as much as they could carry," I said quickly.

"If the reports are accurate, that's what Antoine Stone did."

"Then why not come back and get the rest?" Roxy asked. We looked around the encampment. It felt like a ghost town. People had just dropped what they were doing for reasons we knew not, and then they never returned.

"That is the one-million-dollar question," I said. Camden got his men to start burying any bodies we found around the camp, just so that they would look busy in the background of the footage that Carousel occasionally deemed worthy of filming. The two of us worked through the camp, finding all the documentation that I had used my trope to ensure would exist. It was easy enough. It wasn't exactly hidden from us.

When we were Off-Screen, we had gathered up as much as we could find, and then Camden looked at me and asked, "What are we missing?"

"The footage," I said.

"The film." Roxy wasn't talking out of character. The rules for when paragons could do that or not weren't exactly clear, but she was definitely in there and aware of what was going on. Maybe it was for the best, because if she could talk meta, all I would want to do was interrogate her.

"Alright, so if there's footage," I said, "there would have to be cases that they would keep their cameras in, right? So spread out and look for the tent where someone's got a setup like that. There might even be a camera with one of these bodies." After all, the footage I had received as a result of using the Props Department Requisition trope had to have been shot by someone, and it wasn't like Carousel to forget the details. Someone in this encampment shot that footage.

Whether they were still there was the question. We spread out, looking all over, and found nothing. Not one reel of film, no camera, no extra batteries, nothing.

"Maybe he went further," I said, "toward the cradle." Camden surveyed the area while thinking.

"Well, we know that you found his film, so he couldn't have gone into the cradle, right? How many layers of meta are we trying to keep straight here?"

"Best not to think about the meta," I said.

"I like your logic, though. It's gotta be around here somewhere." So we kept looking, moving further and further in the direction of the ancient ruins where the climactic end of The Sunken Cradle Part One had occurred. We continued walking, finding the occasional corpse rotting on the jungle floor, but no cameras or footage. As I walked forward, I just so happened to see a tree with a large knot in it, the kind that would get hollowed out over time.

There was a mark on it right next to the knot, three faint lines that looked like they could have been left by bloody fingers six months earlier. I walked closer to the tree, expecting to go On-Screen but knowing that I wouldn't because of my Call Sheet trope. The closer I got, the tighter my chest felt. I found myself not breathing as I crept closer.

"I think they're in here," I said.

"Where?" Camden asked.

"That hole? I don't see anything." Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. Somehow, I felt I knew that tree. I ran my fingers along the marks where, months ago, blood had been spread. Then I reached into the dark hole and felt something hard and square, covered in a cloth. I pulled out the four videotapes, the whole time my heart was beating out of my chest. We had received three tapes the night before. Not four.

It wasn't a mistake, though, because one of the tape containers was empty. For some reason, that empty tape container really freaked me out. I couldn't explain to Camden why I felt this way, but he clearly saw something was up.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said.

"I think I'm sensing a character's emotions, as silly as that sounds. You know, like Kimberly does. But it doesn't make sense because there shouldn't be a character, you know? This was done by a trope, not a real person." But that was what it felt like, that I felt this character the same way I felt my character when fighting against the Homibride. The only thing this character felt was primal fear, and he wasn't even my character. He would have been some random NPC cameraman on the previous expedition.

I was fortunate, however. I had equipped the It's Just a Puppet trope, which was miraculous in a way that was difficult to describe. Not only would it reduce the fear you felt when facing a terrible monster, but it also worked to reduce fear in general. It was like a mental trick where, every time I thought about whatever it was I was afraid of, my mind would get deceived into thinking it was fake. I could actually feel the change.

Every time I focused on the deep, dark, antagonistic force of this storyline, the calm thought that this isn't real entered my mind and was just convincing enough to soothe my fears, even though it wasn't true. Carousel's mind magic was beyond my understanding.

"Well, you found the videotapes," Camden said, "so does that mean we can go home?"

"This is your home," I said.

"You run a paramilitary group in the jungle, remember?"

"Yeah, my life choices are suspect," he said, "but I meant getting out of this place." He paused and looked around.

"Are you feeling the aura of whatever enemy we're supposed to be fighting? Because I don't feel anything."

"I feel something," I said, "but it feels distant. The way Antoine talked, by the time they were halfway through the journey, they were feeling the aura. Maybe it's because this is just footage gathering and not really part of the plot."

"Yeah, maybe," he said, "or maybe it's because the entrance got plugged."

"I like that explanation," I said.

"I like it a lot." We added the videotapes to the other documented evidence in Camden's pack and then went to find Roxy and all the NPCs that had trailed after us. My cameraman and producer were doing their best to get good footage that we would probably have to use later, which was probably why the rest of us weren't On-Screen. I could see the countdown on the red wallpaper.

Either Carousel expected us to do something, or it was just gathering more footage, or perhaps something was about to happen even though nothing had for quite a while. It turned out that option three was the winner. We went On-Screen and immediately jumped into character, instructing NPCs to do busywork, just trying to play the part, when suddenly an explosion rang out in the distance from the direction of the cradle's entrance. My heart leapt because I really didn't expect much action on that front.

We were supposed to go to the second entrance. This first one was supposed to be sealed. As the story moved forward, so did we. We took off toward the explosion, trying to figure out what was happening. That's when we got to the end of the forest and found what remained of the ruins where the entrance to The Sunken Cradle allegedly lay.

And what we found was nothing but a giant chasm in the earth that looked almost like a gravel pit, like a large mountain had fallen and left nothing but broken rocks where it used to be. Camden was quick to go through the documentation we had found and grab some photographs of this area. He raised them so that the cameraman could get them.

"This whole place looks like it imploded," he said.

"There was a whole pyramid structure over here that's just missing, and look at this. There's supposed to be a mountain there. It looks like it's dropped a thousand feet." What exactly had Antoine used to blow up that tunnel, a nuclear warhead? Needless to say, the entrance to the Sunken Cradle, wherever it was supposed to be, was sealed extraordinarily well. But no one remembered to tell that to the strange, crazed man at the bottom of the pit. Smoke was clearing from a hole he was staring into.

"What's he doing?" Camden asked.

"He's digging," I said.

"Look at the tools. He's got a pickaxe and a shovel. Is that dynamite?"

"Someone should tell them that there's a cart full of gold up here. He's wasting his time," Camden said. Except we knew that he wasn't wasting his time because he wasn't just some treasure hunter down on his luck. He was an enemy. His name on the red wallpaper was simply Torsten Dahlberg. His plot armor was thirty-five, but I could only see one of his tropes despite outleveling him. The trope was called The Unseen Hand, a pretty common one in eldritch situations like this.

It meant that this enemy is guided by a greater force. There were nine tropes not perceptible. There must have been a trope that was hiding his other tropes from me, or else the big bad was doing it, but it was pretty clear what this guy was. As we watched him, it was clear to see that he was crazed. Despite the fact that he was wearing himself to the bone, he kept working doggedly, doing whatever he could to dig further and further.

He must have been there for weeks, but there was no telling how far he would have to dig to find the tunnel that Antoine had collapsed.

"He may know something," Roxy said.

"We should go down there and interrogate him. You've interviewed people before, right?"

"Let's be cautious about this. We need to find a safe route down to him." So we sent the soldiers out looking for a path. It didn't take long for them to find one, but a path was not the only thing they found. In a clearing not that far away, we found a tent, one that didn't fit with the others, which had been military grade. This one looked like a tent you would buy at a normal sporting goods store. But that wasn't the most remarkable part. There were people at the campsite.

We stared at them from a safe distance, making sure they didn't see us. A young woman was cooking something over a fire. Her name was Ylva Dahlberg on the red wallpaper, but she was an ordinary NPC, not an enemy. In fact, none of the people there were enemies. There was a young man named Vidar Dahlberg who was chained to a tree and unsuccessfully gagged. The young woman looked at him apologetically as she tended to the food over the fire. None of them looked like they were doing well.

The final person was a woman lying down inside the tent on a cot. She looked very sick, even from a distance. All the signs were there. She had an IV, and there were tons of medical supplies scattered around the bottom of the tent. She must have been injured at some point in time. Her name was Solveig Dahlberg. When we went Off-Screen next, Camden asked, "What do you want to bet this is a little family outing?"

"Your family outings were a bit different than mine," I said. What in the world was happening here?