The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

🔴 REC    SEP 24, 2018 14:02:47    [▮▮▮▯▯ 60%]

There was an uproar in the office as we all reacted to the tape of Lila being murdered for the audience. We needed this to be the moment things got real.

The bad guy had yet to reveal himself to us in person. It might be difficult to justify extreme reactions by the characters until they can no longer deny the situation. The fact that Lila was killed Off-Screen didn’t help.

“I’ve got family out of town,” Antoine said. “I’m packing a bag and getting out of here.”

“No,” Anna said firmly. “They will always get you. What do you think the first thing we tried was? Leaving town.”

Kimberly stared in disbelief at the tape, having just witnessed one of her employees and friends being murdered.

Logan was also in disbelief.

“We didn’t actually see her get killed, right? So she might be fine,” he said, grasping for hope. He really played the “this could all be an elaborate prank” angle very well.

“Well, what are you suggesting?” Antoine asked.

“We run from them through time,” Anna said. "Camden said they are very particular about how they travel through time. We can slip away."

“Why do we have to keep hearing about what Camden says?” Antoine asked, frustration in his voice. “Everything he knew didn’t manage to help him.”

“He sacrificed himself for me,” Anna said. “Don’t you understand that? He was held captive by them for days. He studied them. He understands what’s going on better than we can.”

“So let’s just go ask him,” I said.

“What?” Kimberly asked, incredulous.

“Let’s go ask this guy, Camden,” I clarified. “I mean, we have a magic time-travel jewel. Time travel seems to work on bonkers rules, but we know enough to use them, so why not?”

There was a pause as everyone seemed to consider

“You can’t be serious,” Logan said.

“I am serious,” I replied. “Don’t you get why they want these tapes? I mean, there are a lot of reasons, but why would they make the tapes in the first place? They need them to see who’s time-traveling with them. The tapes will change, right? That’s how this works—that’s what happened with the newspaper. The tapes change to show who arrives at each event. They don’t have the tapes, and for some reason, they can’t just go back in the past and grab them before we do, or else they would have done that already. So let’s take the tapes, run to the past, and they won’t be able to follow us.”

“You don’t know that,” Logan countered. “They could very well have other copies of the tapes. They just don’t want us to have them too. They might be worried that we’re going to expose them—which we totally should do. Surely there’s someone who will care that time-traveling serial killers exi— Oh dear God, what am I saying? Surely someone will care that some deluded murderer is running around, regardless.”

“Maybe Camden knows who will care,” I said. “Because I hate to break it to you, but our original selves did go to the cops, and they got murdered for it.”

Logan was at his limits, trying to deal with his unbelievable circumstances.

“Okay, there’s something else you didn’t think of,” he said. “Do you know how this time travel works? In order to travel, you need to be near a tragic event where a lot of people die, or you need to maim someone. That's what the girl says. Did you think of that? Are you ready to maim someone because you think you can travel through time? What if it doesn’t work? What if this is all just a lie, and we end up hurting someone thinking we’re going to prevent the Kennedy assassination? I, for one, don’t want to be in that predicament.”

He was good at this part.

“Stop arguing,” Kimberly said, holding up the newspaper. “According to this article, we are only hours from getting killed.”

I grabbed the newspaper from her and sat down to read, keeping the camera on and facing me while the others continued their conversation.

Antoine lamented having gotten caught up in this for no good reason. He sat against the wall, wide-eyed in disbelief.

“My name isn’t in that paper, is it?” he asked. “They don’t even know I’m here. Why don’t I just go home, and you can call me and tell me how things go?”

“If you believed that, you wouldn’t be here,” Logan said. “You would have run the first time you saw one of those tapes.”

He sat on a desk, trying to project some kind of apathy or calm, but his leg was swinging under him in a nervous gesture.

I read through the paper, glancing over the article about our murders, and then decided to peruse the rest of it—because, after all, who wouldn’t want to read tomorrow’s paper today?

“Who are we even going to hurt?” Logan said. “Do we have a volunteer? Someone who wants their fingers chopped off because somehow the magic gemstone demands it? What are we even talking about here?”

Anna had her hand on her hip and was doing her best to stay strong. She stood between us all.

“It’s about making a disruption in the timeline,” Anna explained. “It’s not that crazy if you think about it. A serious injury will create huge ripples in the time stream. That’s what Camden said.”

“This Camden fellow better be the smartest bastard that ever lived,” Antoine said. “The way we’re trusting our lives with him.”

No kidding.

“We could draw straws,” Bobby suggested, in a demeanor that suggested he wasn’t all that bothered by our situation. “Loser takes the sacrifice; the rest of us travel back in time.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“No, everybody gets to travel back in time, even the injured,” Anna said. “They just have to be touching each other.”

“Oh, well, that’s not as bad as I thought,” Bobby said.

“Not as bad as you thought?” Logan repeated, standing up straight. “One of us is going to have to get permanently injured, and we don’t even know why.”

“I told you,” Anna said. “It’s because an injury creates a disruption in the timeline. Time wants to kick you off the timeline whenever you change the way things are supposed to be, and with the amulet, you can leave and go anywhere.”

“No, you can only go to some preselected place where the enemy is sitting and waiting with videotape,” Logan said. “According to the rules you gave us.”

“Wait,” I interjected.

I stood up with the paper, careful to make sure I stayed in the shot. “What if we didn’t have to injure ourselves to go back in time?”

That caught them off guard. This was a new idea I had just come up with.

“But you have to,” Anna said. “You either have to cause an injury that wasn’t supposed to exist, or you have to be at the location of a huge disaster where lots of people die, causing the timeline to branch.”

I held up a hand in acknowledgment.

“Okay,” I said. “Just hear me out. If causing an injury creates some weird jumping point in time so that you can go somewhere else, wouldn’t preventing an injury do the same thing?”

Anna thought for a moment. “It might,” she admitted. “But how are we going to prevent an injury that’s already supposed to happen?”

I flipped open the paper and put it down on the desk in front of me. “Well, we could just read tomorrow’s paper.”

FALLING BRICKS GRAVELY INJURE AD EXECUTIVE was one of the articles in the paper.

Kimberly looked down at it and said, “That’s about two hours from now.”

Logan grabbed the paper and read through it.

“You don’t know if that’ll work,” Logan said.

“Just tell me,” I said, “because I’ve forgotten—do you believe that this is all real or not? For someone who doesn’t believe in any of this, you seem to be policing the rules. If this doesn’t work, we can fall back to our option of drawing straws to see whose fingers get chopped off.”

Everyone sort of looked at each other, gauging each other’s reactions.

“Granted,” Logan said. “But there’s one thing you haven’t thought about.”

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Say we do travel back in time to rescue this Camden kid. Won’t we just be traveling to a point in time where the bad guy has already traveled? Not only will he be there with a camera waiting for us—”

“There are way more events in the book than there are films,” I interrupted. “We can just find one that wasn’t filmed.”

“Hear me out,” Logan said. “We don’t know anything. Shouldn’t we take a moment to think about where we’re supposed to be traveling to in time?”

Logan was using his Voice of Dissent trope left and right, bolstering our plans and giving us friction so we could have a lively debate.

“We need to go to a point after Camden had escaped capture from the time clones. That way, he knows all the information we need,” I said. “What was the sequence of events?”

Anna opened the book and pointed to a disaster involving college kids recklessly—and accidentally—harming themselves in the woods. The bizarre event left cops scratching their heads and disrupted some citizens working on their vacation home.

“That’s where we went,” Anna said. “It gave us a couple of days to prepare. Then there was another accident, but I think it was a houseboat… I can’t remember. That’s where the killers came. Camden called him Generation Killer.”

“So it’s easy,” Antoine said. “We just show up at the same time Anna and Camden did, and we get two Annas and one Camden.”

“Now we’re back to the question of whether paradoxes exist,” Logan said. “If we show up at the same time that Anna and Camden originally did in 2010 after they escaped the Generation Killer, then Anna can never hide the tapes, and we never find out about them.”

I was not sure we should point that out. Forcing Carousel to use actual logical time travel would not be in anyone’s favor.

“Camden talked about paradoxes not existing, but I don’t know the details,” Anna admitted. “He might have meant something else.”

There was no way that paradoxes didn't exist in some form. What kind of time travel movie had no consequences for creating logical contradictions in the timeline? I had to ask him what he meant by that.

We paused and thought for a moment. I sensed they were waiting for me to speak.

“Well, we can’t risk it,” I said. “It might be true that these meteorite fragments prevent a time traveler from disappearing after they create a grandfather paradox, but that doesn’t mean a time traveler can’t create a paradox at all. After all, we’re using the exact same jewel that you and Camden did. It’s possible that there would be a paradox.”

I hated this rules guessing game.

“If only we could ask Camden,” Antoine said.

“We can’t arrive at the same time they do,” I said. We need to find a way to rescue Camden without preventing Anna from escaping, which led to the event where we discovered the tapes.”

“Do we?” Antoine asked under his breath, loud enough for others to hear.

We needed people to be skeptical, but we didn’t need to give that line of thought more oxygen than necessary.

“Well, we have two options,” Kimberly said. “We either show up after the college kids die in the woods, or we show up after the houseboat sinks.”

“We assume,” Logan said.

“Huh?” I asked.

“We don’t know if that’s the only disaster that happened around that timeframe. All we’re going off of is, well, this book—which I’m going to guess Generation Killer wrote himself, though he never put his name in it…”

Logan ran over to his workstation and got on his computer.

“All I have to do is search for some sort of disaster or other buzzword similar to that during the same period,” he said.

“Well, he was born in the ’40s,” I said. “He probably isn’t up to date on Boolean search methods. He could have missed a disaster.”

Logan typed into the computer several times, which took him a few minutes. In reality, he had already made the search and had it waiting in another tab.

“Nothing,” Logan said. “No other mass death incident in that time period in 2010. Sounds like we’re back to square one.”

It was starting to look like Carousel was rejecting our rescue Camden plan.

“Wait a second,” I said. “Why can you only travel to moments where lots of people died?”

Anna shook her head. “Because those are points in time where timelines diverge harshly, creating turbulence, like in a river. Camden had a whole speech about it. Mass death is so significant that it splits a timeline in two more than normal events.”

I looked at Logan, and he looked back at me. We smiled.

I picked up the camera and walked toward him. “If you can’t find a mass-death event that Generation Killer didn’t list in the book or film…”

“…we find a near miss,” Logan said, finishing my thought.

“Exactly,” I said.

“Wait, what?” Kimberly asked.

“Well, timelines are complex,” I explained. “If the only points at which timelines split in a meaningful way are moments where lots of people die, then they must also split at points where lots of people almost die.”

“That makes sense,” Bobby said, standing up and following us. "Just because we are in the timeline where the people didn’t die doesn’t mean that the branching never occurred.”

“Exactly,” I said. “The split would still be there. We’re just on the better side of it.”

Where was a dry-erase board when you needed one?

“Can we be sure that would work?” Antoine asked.

“No,” I admitted. “But we can always have a backup plan. If this doesn’t work, we could go to another mass-death event—something that isn’t where we’re trying to go, but that also isn’t inside his book.”

“Good thinking,” Logan said. “Here, look at this. The day before the Red Hills Massacre in 2010 with the college kids, a drag racer nearly plowed into a crowd at an illegal street race in southern Carousel. There were as many as 50 people in the crowd, and the driver’s quick thinking and expert maneuvering prevented what would have surely been a disaster. The driver died, but he managed to avoid hitting anyone.”

It was exhilarating—like we were chasing Carousel around a tree, trying to find some way for our plans to work. And we might just have found it.

“I’ll also look up a backup,” Logan said. “Some disaster where people did die, but Generation Killer didn’t know about. Are we sticking with ‘Generation Killer’ as a name? I feel like we could pick something better.”

We made our plans, and Carousel made countermeasures. With time travel as a weapon, I shivered at the thought of all the terrible consequences it could dream up.

We would surely find out soon.

■ STOP

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