Chương 420: Book Eight, Chapter 87: The Conduit

I noticed that Ramona had strapped herself down with several sharp slivers of wood. We were still On-Screen, so I thought I would be the gentleman and return the two pieces she had used to save me to her. So I bent down and began removing one jagged stake from the neck of the man who had just tried to impale me with his multidimensional essence.

"Stop that," she said.

"Don't take it out." She slapped my hand away from the wood before I could remove it.

"We might need it later. There are tons of these guys," I said. She shook her head and stared at me as if formulating what she was trying to say. Her dark hair covered her face, making it hard to read.

"If you take the weapon out," she said, "they might forget they're dead. Look, I know it doesn't make sense, but it's true. These things are only held back by what they can't remember about themselves." I looked down at the men. The forms were still largely human, but the one who had unfolded his hand, it simply looked like he was missing a hand. I remembered how Vogler had talked to Antoine, insisting that he remember the truth. I had assumed that Antoine's character had suffered amnesia or an identity crisis.

It was a plot mechanic worthy of an adventure story, the ancient being taken with the human way of life, choosing to forget what it really was. But what Ramona was suggesting was something more, something I wasn't familiar with.

"Are you saying that they're playing dead?" I asked, glancing up to see that Danny was back with his camera. Good timing on that guy.

"Everything they do they're pretending," she said. I looked at her curiously for a beat. Off-Screen. As soon as the cameras went off, she jumped into my arms, and we embraced for a while without saying anything. She had picked up the cue ball from the ground where it had rolled after tripping one of the shapeshifters and held it out to my face, rubbing it against my cheek as she kissed me.

"Imagine my surprise when I finally make my escape, and I see a bag with this floating in the water, following me along as I go with a note from you."

"So that's where that went," I said. We had abandoned it so long ago, it seemed, but it had stayed on its mission, traveling the Carousel River until it found her. We had a lot of catching up to do, and from what I could tell, we had about 30 minutes Off-Screen, but we had to walk and talk. We didn't want to be here when a fresh group of shapeshifters showed up.

"I thought we were just going to die," Ramona said.

"Honestly, I was a little annoyed that they kept drawing it out. I didn't even know that you could be kidnapped into a storyline without it triggering."

"Yeah, we're learning a lot these days," I said.

"We have a lot to go over, but it might be wise to just stick to story-relevant stuff." In fact, it wasn't until that moment that I realized there was a real chance that she herself was a shapeshifter. She looked perfectly fine on the red wallpaper. If my theory about shapeshifters not being meta-aware was correct, she had to be safe. But of course, how could I know for sure? I might just have to go on trust for a while.

She had saved me, after all, and if I didn't extend her just a little bit of rope, she might never forgive me for it. We left that place together. The deep-space parking garage transitioned to something that looked like the inner workings of a giant, abandoned airport. She kept dragging me further forward.

"Bobby was acting weird," she said.

"I thought maybe he was affected by some trope or something, but he wouldn't talk, and he was not reacting appropriately to the guys pointing guns at us."

"Yeah, I'm going to have to have a chat with Bobby," I said.

"He was cast as one of the bad guys. Heck, I think he might be playing one of the shapeshifters. I'm not exactly sure how it works. How do you know so much about these things anyway?" She stopped, grabbed onto my arm, and looked me in the eye again.

"The weirdest thing happened to me a little while after the plot cycle hit First Blood. It's like something woke up in me. It goes away when I go Off-Screen, but in the next scene, I'm pretty sure he's going to want to say hi."

"He?" I asked. She nodded her head.

"It's Alasdair Mercer," she said, "or at least that's what he calls himself." This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience. On second thought, maybe I trusted her too soon.

"And you said it was inside you?" All she could do was nod her head slowly, throw her hands in the air, and continue leading me toward her hideout.

"Where are we going?" I asked.

"A place he thinks they won't find us," she said.

"He's one of them, kind of. It's, I don't fully understand it. He'll be able to explain it better." I was in for an awkward conversation, that was for sure. It just so happened that it took us almost exactly 30 minutes to get to Ramona's hideout because we went On-Screen as soon as she opened the door.

And the phrase "opened the door" in this instance was used to mean she turned a knob that looked like the kind of knob you would find on a porta-potty, the kind with little finger indents, and pushed a little against a large old stone wall we had arrived at somewhere deep in the compound. And while the wall only moved an inch or two, I swear the crack that opened up was about the size of a doorway. It should have only been enough to peek through, and yet the closer I moved to it, the bigger it got.

If I moved my head away from it, it became a crack again.

"Are you getting this?" I asked Danny as he followed us.

"I'm getting it," he said, doing the same trick where he would get close and then back away.

"Try zooming in," I said. He zoomed in, and as he closed in, the footage on the crack in the doorway didn't get bigger because we weren't actually getting physically closer to it. I looked up at Ramona, who was still standing near the doorway.

"Are you done playing?" she asked. Dumbfounded, I said, "Sure," and I followed her through the doorway into a room that looked to my eyes like some sort of loft apartment filled with furniture that had long since rotted, and that had never looked like normal human-oriented furniture to begin with. The room was dimly lit, but I couldn't see any light sources. Danny followed me inside, and Ramona shut the door behind us.

The entire wall opposite the one with the door was made of glass like a window or maybe a tv screen, but either way, it was dark. I couldn't see anything on the other side, and in my gut, I didn't want to.

"Is this some sort of sleeping quarters on an alien spacecraft?" I asked.

"I don't know, maybe," she said.

"I haven't thought about it. You can ask Alasdair." Since she had not brought up the concept of Alasdair On-Screen yet, my character wouldn't know about it, so I looked around the room, which had two stories with a ladder that connected them.

"Who's Alasdair?" I asked. I waited for her to respond, but she didn't.

"I am Alasdair Mercer," a voice came from Ramona. It wasn't her voice. It was deep, gravelly, and eerie, with the ghost of a Scottish accent to top it all off.

"Or at least I once had his shape."

"Who said that?" I asked, because of course I had to ask.

"My name is Alasdair Mercer," the voice repeated.

"I am Ramona Mercer's ancestor. You have nothing to fear." I got closer and closer to Ramona as I noticed she kept her mouth open whenever Alasdair spoke.

"Where are you, Alasdair?" I asked.

"I'm right here," he said, and since I was close enough now to look directly in Ramona's mouth, I could see that there was another mouth in there, right behind her teeth, speaking when Alasdair did. I didn't have to pretend to be freaked out. I immediately jumped back so fast I almost hit Danny. She had just kissed me with that mouth.

"It's okay," Ramona said.

"Honest. Everything is okay. Surely you've heard the rumors about my family." Everyone knows about those Mercers.

"Rumors that your family is haunted by a ghost?" I said, still freaked out.

"Yeah, I heard that, but this is something else."

"The Mercer Poltergeist," she said.

"It was always this inhuman force that protected us, but when I got near the cradle, well, it turned out that it wasn't just a force. It was something else." Oh, great. Now we were getting competing backstories for the Mercer Poltergeist. This was not the invisible death machine I remembered. Ramona opened her mouth, and Alasdair began to speak.

"As soon as Ramona drew near to the cradle, I remembered that I was not simply DNA. I was not the sinews and flesh that made up her body, not simply the guardian of my descendants. I remembered who I was and what my kin had set out to do. I had tried so hard to forget." This was going to need a bit of explaining. I got brave so that I could get close again, and this time, when I saw the mouth inside Ramona's mouth, it didn't look exactly human.

It had teeth and a tongue, maybe it was Ramona's tongue, I couldn't tell. The fleshy tissue was black, as black as night. But it did read on the red wallpaper: Shapeless One as Alasdair Mercer AKA The Mercer Poltergeist He was a level 100 NPC. I stared at the red wallpaper for a few seconds, and maybe because I was freaked out or lost focus, I whispered the words "Shapeless One." Alasdair gasped, which made Ramona gasp.

"Where did you hear those words?" he asked. Oops. It was an accident on my part. I wasn't perfect at staying in character, but I was a little psychic and pretty quick on my feet.

"I heard them in my mind," I said.

"Is that your title, the Shapeless One?"

"I am a shapeless one," Alasdair said.

"My people do not remember our true names any longer. We do not remember what we were called, but we cannot forget what we call ourselves." The room was gradually getting darker. It wasn't something happening in the plot; it was Carousel setting a mood, I was sure.

"Shapeless ones... So you come here to Earth looking for shapes?" I said.

"I heard what they were saying. That's what they called us: shapes." Alasdair was silent for a moment.

"I apologize for what my people have done to you and yours. I assure you that the vast majority of my kind are a peace-loving and considerate folk. Under normal circumstances, we would have left your world long ago. We evolved past the need for a physical body. We used our shaping technology to give ourselves form for the purpose of research and exploration. We always returned the shapes we took back to their natural place of origin once we were done with them. This is disgraceful."

I was really freaked out about the mouth in a mouth thing, but mostly, I was curious. I needed to nail some things down. They called us shapes. Were they possessing people, or were they just copying people? It was a distinction that I thought I had straight until I saw the mouth in Ramona's mouth.

"So what does it mean to steal someone's shape exactly?" I said, motioning for Danny to zoom in on Ramona's mouth.

"What have you been doing to my people?" The room darkened as the shapeshifter prepared to speak.