Chương 440: Book Eight, Chapter 107: Sanctuary from a Distance

It wasn't a long trek across the fields and along stony paths around the distant hills. There were, however, some obstacles. The first was a large boulder that had fallen across the trail we were following. Only one person could pass it at a time, and doing so was still dangerous because the path was already a narrow ledge that dropped off into a canyon. One misstep could kill a person. I didn't know what it would do to the immortals, but they clearly didn't want to risk it.

"Mortimer," one of the narrators, Dr. Aldric Rose, said, "Why don't you show us some of your quick thinking?" A man wearing a wool cloak and gloves stepped forward. He took out a pad of paper that looked like a checkbook and began writing on it for a few moments. Then, he tore out the page and punched a hole in it with a silver hole puncher.

Ahead of us, some of the very same men I had seen building the cabin earlier appeared, and a time-lapse began as they widened and cleared the path forward around the edge of the canyon. They installed a railing and left a trail of gravel as they worked.

"It's starting to look like magic is just the strategic use of other people's work," Camden said.

"Just be happy they aren't making us do it," I said. The group followed the construction of the path with great excitement. I got the feeling that this feat of magic was rather complicated, despite how quickly it had been accomplished. I had to wonder what "rule sets" MBW was being used to enforce and balance here. It didn't seem very balanced at all. Not only did the builders enhance the path around the hill when they came upon a rickety old rope bridge, but they also began fixing it immediately.

They brought out new ropes and boards, making the structure bigger and sturdier than ever. This was seen as a truly impressive addition to the magic by the other sorcerers. To me, it was all amazing, but what did I know? After the bridge was complete, the workers paused on the other side of the gap, faced us, and tipped their hats just as they had previously. This time, I was close enough to see that some of these men were crying. They weren't tears of sadness, but more like reverence or awe.

The workers flickered out of existence, and the journey continued forward. Some of the worker bees were using magical instruments made of brass and wood, doing their best to detect danger, as far as I could tell. I watched one in particular as he worked. He dressed like a young sailor setting forth on a steampunk adventure, but he acted like an IT guy. After his machine finished its reading, the man pulled a ticket from the slot it had been inserted into and read it to one of the higher-ups.

His boss seemed to like what he heard, and he shouted, "This way. We're safe to move forward." I wish I had a safety tracking machine. All I had to detect danger was a trope that gave me supernatural anxiety. I was able to use it to confirm that there were no Omens in the direction we were heading. This continued for about a mile until the little machine eventually spit out a ticket that said, "Don't go any further," or something to that effect. The immortals were very careful not to disobey their little machine.

But the path had opened up, and there was enough room to see where we had arrived. Down below us, in the valley, not too different than the one that our last storyline had been set in, was a small neighborhood that seemed to start from nowhere and end abruptly on the other side, as if Carousel had literally cut and pasted it from whatever world it grabbed it from. The rest of the area was populated by fields scarred by battle.

The immortals began clapping each other's backs until someone grabbed Lucky, and they all brought him in for the back-slappingest group hug I had ever seen. It was an odd sight to see the immortals like this, men in suits, women in dresses, some of them, none of them matching by the standards of the world I came from, most of them completely ignoring us puny mortals. I looked out over the neighborhood that we had unknowingly worked so hard to get to, and I didn't know exactly what I was supposed to be looking for.

The sorcerers were abuzz with discussion, much of which intrigued my friends and me.

"Tension seems to be holding steady at 3. 5," one of them said.

"That would support the Sustained Danger Theory." Several of them concurred. Others argued that the mythical "Recursive Throughline Model" had not been disproven, nor did they have sufficient information to come to a conclusion on the "Ambient Momentum Conjecture." Though the "Unresolved Act II Hypothesis" had been soundly rejected, as no ongoing storyline had been detected. All we could do was watch as one of the bickering wizards began construction of a watch tower on the vista where we all stood.

The magic was different here, as it seemed to flicker into existence rather than be built to fit the scene. As I watched, I noticed that the sorcerer known as Mortimer had stepped back from the pack, clearly unimpressed with the new watchtower. We had been standing around for half an hour at that point, so I decided to close in and ask the man a question. My friends followed me. He didn't turn his head when I arrived, but he seemed plenty aware of my presence. This book was originally published on Royal Road.

Check it out there for the real experience.

"If you seek to learn the art of the magic between worlds, please take no lesson from this," he said. I drew on all my memories of MBW.

"Is it not balanced?" I asked, hoping not to sound like an idiot.

"For now it is," the man said, gritting his teeth.

"If they desire to build upon that structure or shield it from Carousel's trickery, they might find difficulty." Only then did he look at me and extend a gloved hand.

"My name is Mortimer the 304th. I have been a devoted observer of your exploits. Pleased to make your acquaintance." Mortimer the 304th? How long did that family line go, and what convinced them the name Mortimer needed to stick around? I decided not to question him on it.

"Where do the workers come from in your spell?" I asked.

"They are real people, aren't they?"

"My flock, yes," he said.

"It is advanced MBW. Preceptuism. They build their monuments to us as instructed in exchange for otherworldly recompense. Of course, the real struggle is building a loyal and capable congregation to begin with. That takes time and patience. Don't tax your mind with the particulars. It is beyond you in more ways than one." We said our goodbyes and backed away. Trying to cut through the man's manner of speaking was difficult enough.

"He's saying that those people he got to build the road and the bridge are his worshipers," Camden said.

"He's their god."

"No," Anna said.

"That can't be." I laughed.

"It doesn't contradict a single thing I know about them," I said. Did this Mortimer the 304th really have some group of followers stashed away somewhere in the Many Worlds whose sole purpose was building things for him? It sent a chill down my spine as I looked at the men and women as they argued about the sanctuary. Did they each have their own cult somewhere whose only purpose was creating mundane convenience? We didn't have much time to think about it.

The reporters we had seen earlier had made their way down the path to us and finally got their chance to get their scoop.

"Party of Promise," one woman whose hole puncher I had once used held a microphone toward me and asked, "Now that you've finished Lucien Graves's Throughline, what are you going to do next?" I looked over at Antoine, and then at Camden, Anna, and the others. I turned to the reporter and said, "We're going to rescue our leading lady." They liked that. Kimberly was popular, as I remembered, and it seemed her sudden demise had been bad for ratings.

It was sickening to talk about her like she was a basketball player who would have to sit out a few games because of a twisted ankle. We did what we had to. Antoine even proclaimed his love for her when put on the spot. Did these reporters also have devoted cults at their beck and call? I had to hope not. The gaggle of journalists had more questions. They mostly asked us about the storyline. We gave our answers. Almost all of it was lies. They didn't want to hear about the terror. We didn't want to tell them.

Somehow, playing these heroic versions of ourselves made us feel like we weren't so insignificant. That's the power of make-believe. Eventually, we were able to get away from them and go stand next to the other members of the Manifest Consortium as they stared down at the neighborhood and talked about all the good they could do for the refugees across the many worlds. It certainly looked like a beautiful place, but it was too perfect. My eyes had become keenly aware of how Carousel made traps.

There had to be something wrong. I could see people down in the neighborhood walking their dogs and working in their gardens. Something was wrong, but I didn't know what. I found Lucky and managed to ask him something that I had been wondering for quite a while.

"You said that your team managed to tell you about the sanctuary, but you never told us how. If they never came back once they discovered it, and you'd never been here, how did they get a message to you?" He seemed to think my question reasonable, so he reached into thin air and pulled out a ticket and handed it to me. It was about as big as your average concert ticket, with the outsides covered in the words of MBW and the inside blank filled with handwriting.

A simple hole had been punched in it sometime in the past, and the word "Instant Telegram" was watermarked over the background. The writing was crude but very straightforward, and it explained everything that Lucky had told us: a neighborhood out in the middle of nowhere where meta-aware NPCs lived in peace, occasionally fighting rogue monsters. There were a few extra details, but nothing substantial. Lucky couldn't stick around too long.

He needed to go off somewhere else to get a pint of beer forced into his hand. I looked back at the neighborhood and saw things I hadn't noticed before. There were barricades set up on one side of the neighborhood, where the roads abruptly cut off. The water tower, which had been upgraded with a platform beneath it, appeared to be occupied by someone looking through a telescope. It was peacetime down in this sanctuary neighborhood. I wondered what would happen when the peace ended.

"We need to set up our escape plan," I said, looking at Camden. He nodded.

"Antoine's trope would be ideal since we don't have my boat," he said.

"Trouble is, we don't have a map of where we are." Antoine had gotten one of the most iconic Adventurer tropes there was, Map Travel Sequence. As Camden had pointed out, you needed a map for it to work. We had maps of Carousel proper, but not of… wherever we were.

"Maybe we can draw a map," I said.

"We know most of the landmarks we covered on the river. I'm not saying it would be perfect, but we can try." We argued back and forth.

"Can I see the ticket?" Anna asked, interrupting us. Antoine gave it to her. She then started walking back toward Mortimer the 304th. It was just like a woman to ask for directions while the men argue about a map.

"Can you tell us whether this works with hand-drawn maps that aren't exactly perfect?" she asked in her sweetest voice. Mortimer didn't look particularly interested in us, but he wasn't going to miss a chance to show his command of MBW.

"I can take a look at it," he said.

"You must remember that this ticket only encapsulates a magic that already existed in Carousel's MBW. We translated it as best we could, but when you need a mortal to understand something, no translation can be perfect." We already knew the rules on the tropes were not exact explanations of the tropes they described. In our dealings, plenty of our tropes worked beyond the written text. For instance, the Insert Shot implied it only worked in the Party Phase, but in truth, that was only when it was most powerful.

"Well, could you explain it to me?" Anna asked, playing up her mortal ignorance.

"We're totally confused." Mortimer smiled.

"I suppose it couldn't hurt," he said.

"First, you must learn to read the MBW, which is hidden here as marginalia cloaked from view. However, by simply reading these words placed randomly around the perimeter in the right order, you will be able to see what was obscured before." He showed us that words were scattered throughout the various decorations on the trope. While there were many such words, only a handful were used.

"Power lies at the end of these words." As I followed him along, suddenly, I could see much more writing. I could see the MBW. That was the end of our lesson, however. From there, he began studying the magic that bound the trope to the ticket.

"Yes," he eventually said, "It is quite simple. A hand-drawn map will do. Carousel only cares that there be enough for a montage visual to play out." He tossed the ticket back to us and tipped his hat, which he had not been wearing previously nor had on his person. It seemed like he summoned it from within his glove. With that, he left us like we were dorks he didn't want to be seen with.

With that information, we began constructing a map of all the landmarks we had seen on our way to the cradle, both within and outside the storyline. It was crude, but we had to hope it would work. I had a feeling that the immortals wouldn't have planned for our survival as diligently as I might hope. When danger came to bear, we would be ready.