“You asked about Simon Halle,” he said. He was in bad shape. Not dead, but it was clear that the fall had injured him severely. “How do you know that name?”

I had asked Off-Screen. He had not answered me at the time. I suspected that the script had been the reason. Now, both of us Written Off in a dark tunnel, the script didn’t appear to be stopping him.

“I met him a few months ago,” I said. “At Halle Castle.”

Dr. Halle leaned his head back. I saw despair on his face. He didn’t speak for a moment as he took it in.

“They brought that damn castle too. How could they resist?”

I didn’t know what to say. I was afraid that one wrong utterance might make Halle less likely to talk to me or, worse, he might decide to attack.

He looked me in the eyes. I could see him breathing deeply through his nose.

“Is he… like me?”

“Yes,” I answered. “He’s a… scientist.”

“They brought him to Carousel. How could I have missed it?”

I thought for a moment. I remembered looking at the map Grace had set out to show how Carousel grew over the years.

“The castle he lives in,” I said. “It got brought here in 1999. But you would call it Carousel 1999 because that’s something different, right?”

I had noticed that when the Paragons spoke of dates, they often put the word Carousel in front of it as if they were not just talking about a year.

Halle nodded. “This story takes place in Carousel 1995, but I expect the real year is something different.”

“2022,” I said.

“Amazing,” he said. He thought for a moment. “Carousel 1999. I’ve never been cast there. They kill me off in Carousel 1995, as you’ve just seen. But Simon, is he well?”

I didn’t know what to say.

“Come out with it, boy,” Halle said.

“He’s still trying to bring back his dead wife. He can disconnect his soul from his body. I don’t know what to tell you.”

Halle nodded. “Astral science. When he was young, he showed much interest in the subject. I had hoped he would grow out of it. A waste of a brilliant mind. If only I had not gotten stripped from my family, he might have fared better.”

He tried to keep an even tone in his voice, but I could hear him struggling to remain composed.

“You were taken from your family?” I said.

Halle nodded, strangely ashamed. “When my experiments were prematurely uncovered, they tried accusing me of all manner of malfeasance. They could never understand how important my work was. Most of my patients rallied to my side at the trial; they testified on my behalf. They knew that once my methodology was perfected, I could correct previous mistakes.”

He swallowed hard. “Of course, that was never to be.”

“Did you get an offer to come here?” I asked after he paused.

“By correspondence in my jail cell. An offer of amnesty. A job offer to work for a rich and influential family and all of the finances and subjects to continue my research. Given what I was facing, I hurriedly wrote back, accepting. A mistake, perhaps. I don’t even remember arriving.”

There were a million things I wanted to ask. I tried to sort through them, to find the ones he would answer, the ones he would know about, but the more I thought, the more I feared ruining the conversation. All I could do was keep him talking.

“So you didn’t know anything about how things would be once you got here?”

“I got everything I was promised, but not in the way I expected.”

“That doesn’t sound fair,” I said.

“Don’t pretend to be concerned about my treatment,” he said. “I know you would have killed me had you the opportunity or ability.”

“It was a courtesy,” I said. “Something you’re supposed to say.”

“True enough,” he said. “You’ll find that the working definition of fairness is very warped in this place.”

“The illusion of fairness.”

He nodded.

“You would not be able to understand this,” he said, “But I didn’t notice that anything strange was happening for many years. My sense of the ordinary was taken from me. It all felt reasonable. The killings. The shadowy borders beyond understanding. I didn’t question it.”

Shadowy borders?

“Wait,” I said. “Were you brought here before the game was created?”

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Constance had told us that the actual “game” at Carousel wasn’t always here.

Halle nodded. “I will say, Dyrkon, despite his deceptions, did keep his every word. He was a very reasonable man whenever you found a moment to speak with him.”

“Is he still around?” I asked.

He ignored my question. More than that, it was like he didn’t even hear it.

“When I woke up for the first time. I was a victim of a loathsome creature. I realized that I had not aged in decades. The Geists and their scandal were ever-growing then. I was always their family doctor. I realized I had not seen my family in all the time I had been in Carousel. I just hadn’t noticed they weren’t here. I was perfectly oblivious. I asked Dyrkon about it, and he was, again, very reasonable. He gave me my complete consciousness. All of my memories. At that moment, I knew exactly what kind of place this was. It was a kindness on his part. I’ll never forget that.

“And then he asked me. Would I still want him to bring my family here? Of course, I said no. I begged him not to involve them, to let me be enough,” he said. Tears flowed from his eyes. “He promised he wouldn’t. He assured me. I should have got it in writing. They brought my family here anyway, it seems.”

“Do you still have the clarity he gave you?” I asked. “Do you remember what he showed you?”

Halle shook his head. “I heard it said somewhere that we only remember that which makes us better at our roles. I do not remember where I heard it. That became even more true when the game began. No longer was the world in chaos. It was organized, you see. The horrors were tamed. They could not have things the way they were before. Everything needs to be separate. Everything needs to be locked away in its place.”

“They put everything in a script,” I said. I didn’t know who “they” were, but I would get to that.

“Yes. Speaking of the script,” he said. He looked up. His eyes glazed over for a moment. “I am afraid to say that your friend’s wife character has been killed. I assume you weren’t close?”

I shook my head.

He could still see the script even after being Written Off.

“The rest of my group is okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “The soldier is very skilled at motivating people to run faster.”

“Tell me about the game,” I said. “Please. I need to know.”

Halle nodded. “I can only tell you what I know. You do understand that, yes, and what I know is tightly controlled?”

I nodded.

“Carousel 1946,” he said. “The year I arrived both before and after the game was built. I was the family doctor to the Geists. I was a pillar of the community. I did my experiments in a rarely visited storyline outside of town in the newly built Carousel Hills—of course, it hadn’t been named yet. The hospital was named for me. I was important.”

That made more sense. More than just his timeline with his son, his accent was dated for 1995. He had the manner of a man from an earlier time.

“I am not bothered to join tedious storylines for quite some time. In Carousel 1964, that changed. My age was a problem. I was too young, and getting older would make me less effective in my role. My history was changed. I was given an additional storyline at a cocktail party in one of the Geist Estates. I checked the pulses of murder victims and was occasionally the murderer myself. They changed the name of the hospital. They made me less prominent in the community. Still, I tended to the Geists.”

“In Carousel 1976, I take a break from my easy life and must voyage on a river expedition in search of a rare species of amphibian that is said to have a toxin that could work as a revolutionary sedative. This is nonsense. I did not get my sedative nor my Ichor from a frog. They were having fun with me when they wrote that. I was a side character. The boat ends up surrounded by giant crocodiles. Terrifying.”

I listened intently to everything he was trying to tell me. Any detail might prove critical.

“Carousel 1995. I am cast as a shadow of my original story. I am stuck in the sewers operating on frogs. Someone had decided that was to be a theme for me. How juvenile. This role is for the Throughline. It is of the utmost importance. Unless I am needed in Carousel 1946, Carousel 1964, or heavens forbid, Carousel 1976, I am tending to the remaining Geists, Jedediah, and Lillian. I die quietly and am forgotten.”

“Needed in Carousel 1946?” I asked. “Time travel?”

“No, nothing of the sort,” he said. “You’ll learn soon enough that Carousel has restrictions, seams in its construction; as much as they try to hide them, they cannot. The storylines are set in the past. They are the only way to find out what happened at the center of it all.”

“The center of the story,” I said. “The birth of Carousel.”

“That too.”

Time was layered in Carousel. It was not linear.

I had so much I wanted to know, but there was one question that I needed answers to above all others.

“You say ‘they’ a lot,” I said. “Sometimes you talk about Silas Dyrkon; other times you talk about someone else. Who are you talking about when you say ‘they’?”

I had heard people talk about Carousel as an evil entity and a town, Bartholomew Geist as its founder, and Silas Dyrkon as both a partner of Geist and something else altogether. I also heard a ‘they’ being referenced by both Halle and the Paragons.

He spoke of Dyrkon with reverence. He spoke of ‘they’ with disdain. They must have been different people.

“They don’t like to be brought into the story,” Halle said.

“It’s Geist's partners from the founder’s tale, right? It says he needed help building the town, so he brought in partners.”

Halle shook his head. “Geist's partners in the Throughline are characters like yours truly, founder of the hospital. Though I suspect there may be some symbolic overlap. I don’t remember.”

“Oh,” I said.

“They,” he began, “Helped build the game at Carousel. They are insidious enemies. They recruited many of the current residents and ever so playfully defiled my backstory. To top it off, they brought my son here against my wishes. Tell me,” he said, changing his tone, “Does my son succeed at bringing back the dead?”

“No,” I said. “Not in the way he hoped.”

He nodded his head.

“He toils and is ultimately unable to take the final step,” Halle said. “I did the same, you know. My treatment worked the first time. They took it from me. They locked it away. I don’t remember it. I suspect they did the same to my son. Surely, he succeeded in his obsession.”

That made some sense. The senior Halle said that NPCs only remember things that make them better for their roles. I wasn’t sure. I had seen NPCs trembling at the memory of their fate. But it did make sense in general.

“Can’t really be a mad scientist if you have the cure,” I said.

Halle chuckled, then coughed.

“Mad science and obsession,” he said wistfully, “The Hahlbeck family curse. And Carousel does love families.”

I heard something stirring in the water behind me. I panicked. One of the frogs must have been back despite the heavy flowing stream.

I did my best to scuttle against the wall next to Halle.

“Fear not,” Halle said. “I believe I have spoken out of turn. Carousel always gets upset when I talk about them. It’s not even against the rules explicitly.”

“What?” I asked as something crawled up onto the concrete from the stream.

I could barely see it in the glow of Halle’s lighter.

But I heard it growling.

It moved closer.

Not a frog, no.

It was a crocodile.

“I will see you again, perhaps in Carousel 1946,” Halle said. “I would advise you, though. If I ever offer you a drink, you might want to accidentally drop it before imbibing.”

The crocodile snapped up Halle's right leg and drug easily down into the water.

I was left alone.