“One at a time,” Madam Celia said firmly from the doorway of her shop. She had been waiting for us. The elegant dress she had been wearing in the town square was gone. Instead, she was in a purple cloak and frock that looked absolutely pedestrian by comparison. Wrapping herself in her cloak, leaving only her skinny, bejeweled fingers exposed, she said, “Take a ticket and wait your turn. I will reveal the truth of your heart’s desire.”

Isaac was the first to enter the shop. “I was just saying this morning how I wished I knew the truth of my heart’s desire.”

Madam Celia and Cassie both rolled their eyes. “Sorry about him,” Cassie said.

“Ah, child,” Madam Celia said, “You have the gift. I know this.”

It would have been more impressive if Cassie’s Psychic Archetype hadn’t been on the red wallpaper for all to see.

We walked in one at a time. Something was different about the place from the last time we had gone. Her stock of items had been changed out, and none of them registered as Omens on the red wallpaper. The most significant change, however, was that the Silas, the Mechanical Showman machine she had against the back wall, was far from broken. It was turned on and moving around in short bursts like a similar machine might do in real life.

“Step right up and get your ticket for the marvelous Madam Celia!” Silas said. “Get a glimpse of your future while you still have one!”

Antoine was the first to make his way to the machine and press the red button.

Nothing happened.

“Ten dollars,” Madam Celia said as she moved past us to the back room where she did the readings.

Antoine looked taken aback. “I forgot we even had money,” he admitted. He looked at Kimberly expectantly. She was holding his money in her bag.

“Those are like theme park coins,” Isaac said. “Where did you get those?”

We hadn’t received any money for completing the Tutorial stories. In fact, we hadn’t needed money so far, not even for room service. We had forgotten to even explain it.

“If this costs money and players can’t get money in the Tutorial,” Bobby said, “That might mean we aren’t meant to come here yet.”

He had a point.

“There are other ways to make money,” Antoine said. I got the impression he didn’t want to hear that this plan wasn’t right. “This could be an incentive to sell any loot you walked out of a story with. Maybe that’s why Tar was in the cut scene from before, so that we would know about his pawn shop.”

I thought it was possible Carousel had made it impossible to complete the storyline entirely on the first time, so putting advancement behind a financial barrier made sense enough. Either way, I was excited to see that the game anticipated us coming here.

I fished into my hoodie pocket and withdrew twenty dollars. I had little left from the storylines before the reset.

I handed ten to Cassie.

Bobby and Dina chipped in to get Isaac a ticket as well.

We had never actually put money into one of the Silas machines before. Now it made sense why Carousel used all coins in their strange little economy.

I was the last to take my ticket from Silas. It was possibly the simplest ticket type we had seen. Just a plane rectangle of paper with perforated edges like you might win at an arcade. It listed our number. Antoine received 0038 and each one of us received one number higher than the last.

That meant he went first. He climbed into the booth with Madam Celia and her crystal ball and closed the curtain. I couldn’t hear anything they were saying, even though I should have been able to hear through the curtain.

Seven minutes later, Antoine pulled back the curtain and climbed out of the booth. He had a look on his face I only saw when he was at a low point—a profound sadness and confusion.

He didn’t talk to us when he left. He just got out and went out the front door. At first, I thought he was having a panic attack and needed some air, so he ignored us. He even ignored Kimberly.

That wasn’t the case.

Kimberly did the same thing. Then Bobby did. Then Dina, Cassie, and Isaac copied them exactly.

I got the feeling that we were being controlled by a trope that prevented us from talking to our teammates between readings.

That was the first indication that I should put my guard up.

The second was that when I pushed myself into the booth as the last person, I saw a message from Dina on the red wallpaper.

Sneaky, sneaky, sneaky.

“Asked about son. Couldn’t help it. Sorry,” the message said.

Either Dina just dropped the ball or we didn’t have free will. The truth of our heart’s desire. That was what Celia had promised. Perhaps, we were being compelled to ask specific questions.

Was this a waste of money? Could this be beaten?

I closed the curtain behind me. It was time to find out.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

“Child,” Madam Celia said softly, moving her long, colorful fingernails over her crystal ball. “You have been through so much. I know the question in your heart. Ask it, and I will tell all.”

I had to fight it. Or could I?

If this was a trope, that meant Celia’s stats probably controlled its effectiveness, likely her Moxie. There was little chance I could beat her at that.

Still, as the many possible questions began to form in my mind, I realized that I did have some ability to fight them.

I expected to feel questions like, “Who’s the Insider?” or “How do we complete the Throughline as fast as possible?” but such questions never appeared in my mind. Either Celia didn’t really know my heart’s desire or the game was rigged to exclude certain topics. Of course, it was the second option. There were no doubts there.

The first question that popped into my head was, “Do we stand a chance of rescuing Anna and Camden?”

I was so tempted to just ask it. I could feel my willpower slipping. If I gave in, I knew I would lose track of everything we set out to do. I almost asked it, but by some miracle, I fought long enough, and the question faded from my mind.

What was my heart’s desire?

Surely that would have been it?

But then, something deeper welled up within me that shook me completely.

I almost asked the next question. I nearly lost control.

“Are they here?” I wanted to say. Which they? Not my grandparents. Carousel had teased me about my grandparents multiple times even when it was asleep. They wouldn’t be in a place like this.

They. An image flashed in my head.

No. I couldn’t bear to think of it.

Why hadn’t Carousel mentioned them? Why wouldn’t it needle me about Them when it was such an obvious play?

Why pester me about my fictionalized “gifted” grandmother or my horror movie-loving grandfather?

Why didn’t it mention Them? It had to have known about them.

“Asked about son. Couldn’t help it. Sorry,” flashed into my mind again—Dina’s message from the red wallpaper.

I needed a better question. Something that would help the group. I had to think.

What kind of question could I ask? What was my heart’s desire?

I could ask what he looked like, the shadow I had caught a glimpse of. I could ask about that. I had always wanted to know. The police wanted to know too, but my grandmother yelled at them when they pressed me too hard. Who was it? Why had he been there?

It occurred to me that tears were falling from my eyes.

I could know instantly. I could find out right then.

“Asked about son. Couldn’t help it. Sorry,” Dina’s message repeated in my mind.

Wait. That’s not what I was here for.

“I don’t want a reading,” I said loudly.

In an instant, everything went back down where it had come from. The memories faded into the places I had put them so long ago. By the time I left the booth, I could hardly remember.

“No?” Celia asked, “Well, you paid for my time. What were you hoping to ask?”

I took a deep breath. What was it we had come for?

“Thirty years ago in Carousel 19—I mean in 1993, do you remember someone trying to contact the spirit of Jedediah Geist?”

“Child,” Celia said, “My clients have asked about that miserable man’s life more than I have been asked about soul mates and lottery numbers combined. You’re going to have to be a touch more specific.”

“Right,” I said. “It would have been one of the first. Someone who eventually figured out how to do it. They would steal the weapon that murdered him from the police and then use the bell from Reply the Departed—the boardgame—to do a weird ritual at his house. Did anyone ask questions about that sort of thing?”

“Reply the Departed,” Celia said. “Oh.” Her eyes drifted back into a memory as she spoke. She spoke with long pauses. “I really shouldn’t have told her about the game. I couldn’t help it. I felt like a force beyond myself compelled me. It was originally played with a spinning top. The bell got popular later. She was an odd duck, that one. Had some strange stories. I didn’t see any harm.”

“Who was she?” I asked. “What kind of stories?”

“Never knew her name,” Celia said. “She had some idea that nothing here in Carousel was real. I know what you’re thinking. Mental illness, a palm reader taking advantage, but I swear, she was lucid and certain of her beliefs. She came into my shop one night right before closing. She spoke of being able to change the past, that all of this was some sort of story that could be rewritten. Strange ideas, I know. She asked if I knew anything about that.”

Someone who thought that Carousel was fake. That meant they had meta-knowledge.

“I told her that the only person I knew who ever spoke of such things was Jedediah Geist, who, for a period before his death, started coming to me regularly. His obsession with his family’s legacy began to bloom after they had passed away. He wasn’t so bold as to call the world fake, but he claimed to know the secrets of Carousel’s founding. Of course, he was dead, so she was out of luck unless she could conjure his spirit.”

“Why did she want this information?” I asked.

Celia thought for a moment. “She was convinced that she could find a way to save those people who died in the 70th-anniversary accident. She didn’t seem delusional; she was oddly calm and claimed she had done something similar before. Look, I told her about the ritual in hopes it would dissuade her. Speaking to the dead is not to be taken lightly. I didn’t realize she would go through with it, but if someone really took the weapon used to murder Jedediah, then it seems she might have.”

“What did she look like?” I asked.

“Thirty years old at the time. Understated, her hair hidden in a hat. I haven’t thought about her in years. The world being fake… Odd ideas indeed,” Madam Celia said. She was playing a character here. Obviously, she knew the world of Carousel was not normal, but her character apparently wasn’t quite aware.

Psychics are powerful, but they aren’t meta.

“Go,” Celia said. “I have to rest.”

“I need to know where the fireplace poker is, the murder weapon!” I said.

Celia paused.

“You already do. But how did it get there?” she said before grasping her head and exiting the booth.

~-~

I walked outside, dissatisfied with my meeting with Celia. It would turn out I wasn’t the only one. Most of them didn’t have Dina’s message to help tether them to reality.

Antoine was particularly hard on himself.

“What did he ask about?” I asked Kimberly as I saw Antoine distant and sulking.

“He won’t tell me,” she said with a lump in her throat. “I wasted my question on something stupid and vain. I didn’t know that would happen. It just slipped out.”

“What did you ask?”

She looked deeply ashamed.

“If I would still be young when we escaped,” Kimberly said through tears. “She barely even gave me an answer. She said it is not a likely case. I kept asking questions, but I couldn’t get my head right. Before I knew it, it was too late.”

Perhaps Psychics were a little meta.

A quick survey concluded that Bobby and Dina had both managed to ask some basic questions to help us. Bobby figured out that “Our path would open up when we knew the destination.” He didn’t even remember what he asked to get that answer. He had wasted most of his questions asking about his wife, which had confused Celia terribly and led nowhere.

Dina figured out that we needed to talk to Jed Geist before the next storyline. Again, she had wasted her questions for the most part and didn’t even remember how she managed to steer back on track.

Cassie and Isaac asked about their brother. They forgot they were even supposed to ask something else until we reminded them.

I had more to tell, but as I spoke, my memory of my time in the booth got scrambled. I remembered the answers but not the questions. It took a while to explain things.

“We have a character out there that’s part of the Throughline and, from the sound of it, might know about storylines,” Antoine said. “That’s not nothing. Better than I got.”

I still felt like we were far from where we needed to be, but at least we had something new to talk about.

All I knew was that Jedediah Geist had better have some killer information, or else I was going to be very irritated.