Chương 418: Book Eight, Chapter 85: Into the Cradle

Racing through the labyrinth of shrubbery and vines was easier than I was used to because I wasn't really being chased. Technically, they were after me, but they weren't really trying to catch me, even though they probably could have, simply because of how well surrounded I was. It was Carousel's magic doing it, of course. They were very frustrated at their inexplicable inability to pin me down.

I was technically in a chase scene, but I didn't want to get too far away from the tunnel that would lead down to the cradle, so I was mostly going in circles. If someone saw it from above, it would probably look humorous, but the footage my cameraman captured likely looked intense because the bad guys were shooting at me, though I noticed, like before, they were not aiming directly at me. It was like they were trying to flush me out like I was some sort of bird hiding in the bush.

I got tired of running, so I found a hiding place in some thick underbrush where vines hung like walls woven together. My cameraman slid in after me, and soon after that, I went Off-Screen. From what I could tell, it was a scene change, but it was difficult to gauge from my vantage in the leaves. I took out my radio and switched it to the channel we had decided to dedicate to Off-Screen communication.

"Riley, are you there?" a voice called out as soon as I clicked it over.

"This is Anna. Riley, are you receiving this transmission?"

"I'm here," I said.

"Finally. What happened?" she asked.

"It was just revealed that Antoine's character was actually a shapeshifter the whole time," I said. There was a pause.

"Is that a joke?" Camden asked over the radio, his voice a bit staticky. The way I had said it, so matter-of-factly, it probably did sound like a joke, especially since it was so unorthodox compared to how storylines usually went. Typically, you found out you were inundated with shapeshifters before you had to worry about one of your own being one, but there were exceptions to every rule.

"Honest to god, it was some sort of narrative trap," I said.

"Maybe even a retcon. It was like he was some sort of alien shapeshifter, but he didn't remember, and he only thought that he was Antoine Stone until he was reminded. Something like that." There was a pause on the other end. I looked up at my cameraman as if I was wondering what he thought about the situation, but of course, he thought nothing because we were Off-Screen, and it was like he couldn't hear me.

"Can we trust the channel?" Camden said.

"Antoine has a radio." I honestly didn't know if these enemies were meta-aware.

"I'll get back to you on that," I said.

"All right. What's the plan?" Anna asked.

"We managed to ditch them in the jungle trails, or maybe they just turned back." I thought for a moment. We had worked through a lot of contingencies on the flight, and I wanted to think about which one was closest to this situation. Strangely, they usually involved Antoine prominently because we thought he was the main character.

"Guys," I said, "I don't know how this happened, I bet it was the paragons, but I think I'm the main character." I waited for them to push back on it.

"Makes sense," Camden said.

"You're the investigator."

"That I am," I said, "and in that vein, I think I need to investigate the cradle itself just to move the plot forward. We can't avoid this, but we need to keep players on the outside as an insurance policy. That's the plan they used in Part One, and I agree with it, so you two need to somehow push forward the Detective Blackwood subplot from out here. Do you think you could do that?"

"The jeep I'm in has a big radio. I think I could try to reach out to somebody and contact him," Camden said.

"We'll think something up. You just be safe and call us when you need us, assuming you have reception down there."

"Will do," I said. I put the radio back in my pocket and took a deep breath. I was hoping to have a whole posse to go down into the cradle with, but that wasn't what my character was about. He was an investigator. Going in light might be to my advantage. It was just my cameraman and me, but that meant it was time to try to bring him into the fold as more than just an accessory. I looked up at him. His name on the red wallpaper was Danny. I had to wait to be back On-Screen.

Luckily, that didn't take too awfully long. After a while, some of the armed guards crept back by, not standing a chance of finding us. As soon as they were gone, I looked up at him, and he was filming me directly, which felt a little extra invasive in those close quarters.

"I think I have to go down into the tunnels," I said.

"I need to find out what this is all about. I need to see what has been happening, what these people, if they really are people, are up to. You don't have to follow me if you're afraid." Danny quickly turned the camera as best he could to catch his face, probably the first time he had for the entire film.

"That's where they took Justine," he said.

"Down under the tunnel. We need to go save her." This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report. I almost asked who Justine was, but then I realized that was my personal assistant's name, who had been grabbed up a few minutes earlier.

"This is stealth," I said, "and we have to be quick. There's no telling what happens to us if we get caught."

"Sounds like my kind of mission," he said with a smile. It was great and all that he was willing to go down into the earth with me, but we still needed a way to get there. There were so many of those guards out there. They weren't exactly trying to stop us from going down into the tunnel, but they were in the way. We snuck out of our hiding place and went from running through the labyrinth to sneaking, something that we were also pretty good at.

We never even triggered a chase scene, but at the end of the day, there was a large clearing between us and the large stone tablet that had been broken open to reveal the hole dug into the earth. It would be hard to sneak out in the open"Make a break for it?" Danny asked. Now that he had started talking, he wasn't going to quit.

"If only we had a distraction," I said. But unfortunately, I didn't have one. Anna and Camden were already on a mission, and Bones Ibarra was in hiding somewhere, and I wasn't sure whether we could count on him or not. I didn't know how his trope worked. After all, he was a companion NPC, technically. Did he just fade away since his player got retconned?" I feared it would be far worse than that.

"Follow me," I said. There were no bushes in the clearing, but large tents were set up for various paramilitary activities. It was all set dressing, but it was just enough that we might be able to make some or all of the distance to the giant hole in the ground without being seen, or at least not being identified. Most of the shapeshifters, if that's what they all were, including Bobby, had congregated in a large field having some sort of debrief meeting between the hole and the large pool beneath the waterfall.

The men were pretty much distracted except for the one giving the pep talk in a foreign language, maybe far more foreign than I could imagine, so it was possible most of them wouldn't be looking in our direction. It would have worked most of the time. The problem was that even the lowliest of shapeshifters was pretty darn high leveled, and I had no idea what the sensory capabilities of this species were. We snuck from tent to tent, quickly making our way toward the hole.

"The coast is clear," I said.

"Just twenty yards. We have to run like hell." We both had flashlights. Camden had equipped us with all the basics, so even if the tunnel was dark, we would be fine. One last sprint and we would be good. So we ran, and just as we did, I saw a man with a clipboard who had been just out of my view walking toward me. All he had to do was lift his eyes from the clipboard, and he would see us and sound the alarm. But he didn't, because something caught his attention.

There was loud splashing coming from the pool by the waterfall, and it had to be loud to not get drowned out by the sound of the waterfall, even as far away as it was from the raging stream. I looked up and over. It was Roxy, and she wasn't just splashing up toward the clearing where all the men were. She was screaming at them.

I couldn't quite tell what she was saying at that distance, but it had something to do with her husband, or possibly offering them as much money as they could imagine to explain what was going on. She was saying something about Antoine as well, but he wasn't there, and neither was Vogler. From what I could tell, she was being a spoiled, thoughtless, entitled woman, something that probably only existed as a caricature, and she was doing it for us.

From her vantage point, she must have realized we needed a distraction. She was sacrificing herself, getting all the men to look her direction, including the clipboard guy. I didn't know if she was scripted to do that, or if she was doing it out of the goodness of her heart, or if she just wanted to win, but I could have hugged her just then despite the betrayal. Danny and I skipped right across the clearing and down into the tunnels without getting seen. And then we began to descend, and it took forever.

There was clearly some sort of mechanized platform that would lower someone into the earth, but it was already at the bottom, so we couldn't use it. We ran downward. It was actually quite easy. We even went Off-Screen while we were doing it, and for a very long time, all I saw was dirt, no sign of any ancient civilization or alien technology or whatever this storyline was about.

When we were On-Screen next, we were still moving quickly, and I figured we needed an explanation for why we were throwing caution to the wind, running downhill in the dark, so I said, "If it's like with Justine, they're going to take Roxy down here, so we need to get to the bottom of this tunnel and find a place to hide once they do."

"If this thing has a bottom," Danny said in response. He had a point. It took us another five minutes to even find the next level. I turned on my flashlight to look around, and once there, I saw the platform, which was just a simple flat standing area surrounded by guardrails. It was probably quite useful. I looked around and saw tons of crates with stamps on them from where they had been imported from. I didn't know what they were, and I didn't have time to search because we heard voices.

"Over here," I said as we jumped behind some of the crates. Overhead lights, which hung from the ceiling, suddenly turned on, so I clicked off my flashlight. Antoine and Vogler were walking toward the tunnel with a map in their hands when a voice came over a loudspeaker installed in the ceiling of the room. Again, it didn't speak a language that I understood, but I understood what it meant. They were reporting on Roxy.

Quickly, Vogler folded up the map as he and Antoine got onto the platform and pressed a button to start it moving toward the top. It was such modern technology for ancient aliens, if that's what they were. The problem was, which I was too late to spot, that as the platform began to rise, Antoine could see over the crates we were hiding behind and see us. Normally, when hiding in Carousel, you could play it fast and loose, but not always, it would seem.

He whipped out a revolver from his camera bag, aimed it at me for a moment, and then began to shoot rapidly. I quickly ducked down as the bullets began to fly. He had emptied the barrel before Vogler stopped him.

"His shape could be useful," Vogler said.

"Yes," Antoine said, "but so could his death." What was that about? Did we have some sort of antagonism between us, or was it all for show? Antoine looked down, bewildered, at the gun in his hand, wondering how he had managed to miss every single shot. Or if the missing was on purpose, as with the others, why did he fire all of his bullets uncontrollably? Of course, the answer was obvious to me.

It was the revolver we got from Homibridal Part II that had the Blind Fire trope, which prevented you from ever hitting your shot and forced you to fire all the rounds at once. I had felt its effects as it forced me into incapacitation, but that was the worst of it. The question was, why did this copy of Antoine use it on me? Did he not realize it was a gimmicky gun with a meta ability that would keep me safe, or did he know what it was and simply want to get a nice little scene for Carousel?

By the way he looked at his gun, I thought it was the former, which told me two things. First, these enemies were not meta-aware, so they couldn't see the tropes on weapons, and second, leading from that, when a player got copied, it was actually the player's character being copied, not the player themselves. But hey, all I had was my best guess. The next time I was Off-Screen, I made sure to radio that to Camden and Anna. The funny thing was that the radio only worked down here on our special Off-Screen channel.

Even Carousel felt it needed to throw us a bone.