Hours passed in that circle of fog. Days.

"What the hell is going on!" Isaac screamed into the void. "Hello! Riley, Riley, I think they lost the storyline and we're just stuck forever. Riley... I can't...."

"Calm down," I said. "That's ridiculous. The plot cycle still says it's the Finale. Why would that not have changed? Think about it."

"That's what you said yesterday!" Isaac said. "Was it even yesterday?"

All I could see was light and a patch of grass under my feet. It was just Isaac and me, and there was nothing to do. Unlike previous ghostly waiting parties, time did not pass quickly. Isaac's theory that we were stuck here for eternity was slowly becoming more plausible.

I had to ignore that possibility. If I was going to be stuck here, I might as well make it productive.

“I can see it,” I said. “I really can. A Hysteric is driven by emotion. They aren’t just scared; that’s just part of what they are.”

“I don’t care,” Isaac said. "Will you stop playing the game for ten seconds? What the hell is wrong with you? Hysteric, not Hysteric, how does that matter now? It’s all part of the same scam. The details don’t matter. I don’t care if they give her an Archetype. I don't care if she's a demon or an NPC. It's all bull. I still don’t trust her. I still think this is all an exercise in misery. I still think the Paragons are bastards and Carousel is the eleventh circle of hell. You sit there just trusting everything in front of you. I can't believe I followed you. We're never getting out of here!”

Dying and becoming a ghost had a calming effect on me. Isaac, however, had moved past that stage.

“Trust has nothing to do with it,” I said. "If this is all a lie, and we're just in hell, that fucking sucks, but the moment you stop believing you can do something about it, the moment you give up, you lose any chance of a happy ending. I've seen enough--"

"If you say you saw all of this in a horror movie, I swear to god I will find a way to hurt you," Isaac said.

"It's not about movies. It's not stories. It's life. Life sucks, but if you don't believe there's some way you can scrape out some semblance of happiness, you... you might as well--"

"Be dead?" Isaac said. "We are dead."

He started to laugh and laugh and laugh. "Were you going to say we might as well be dead? Oh my god. This is hell and you are my personal devil. I knew when you would always tell us that playing the game was the way out, that we were just going to get stuck further in. We are trapped in quicksand and you kept telling us to wiggle a little more, like that would help us. I knew you were wrong! I knew you were just going to get me and Cassie hurt! Why didn't I stop us. Why didn't I just tell you that this was all a trap and we weren't doing anything to go along with it.... Because I am a coward. I'm a coward..."

He looked at me with tears in his eyes. I wasn't ready for this.

Isaac didn’t say anything more for a while.

Where was this hostility coming from? He had been layabout for most of the Tutorial, making quips about how pointless everything was, for sure, but every time he expressed his doubts, it was in the form of a lame joke. Now he suddenly wanted to make noise and gnash teeth?

“Whatever the case,” I said. “It’s still worth thinking about. You don’t mind me thinking about stuff, do you?”

He didn’t answer at first. I expected some haughty answer, but he thought about it.

“It makes me nervous,” he said gently.

“How does it make you nervous?” I asked.

Isaac shrugged his shoulders. “I just feel like you are putting in more effort than this whole charade deserves. Makes me feel bad. Every instinct I have says that we should just refuse to go along with this whole thing. In the end, the joke is on us, why should we go along with it?”

This wasn’t the first time Isaac had brought this up, though usually when he said it, he was, again, just joking. He believed, as we all sort of did, that this whole exercise—everything related to Carousel—was some kind of trick. When I engaged in solving the Tutorial or pondering the reality of Carousel, he would go out of his way to be disinterested.

“Officially, when we find out this is all just some endless, pointless torture, I will tell whoever is involved that you were never fooled. You saw right through it all. Is that what you were hoping for?” I asked.

He started to laugh. “That works. If you believe it’s all a lie, you can never be fooled. I wasn't fooled. I never trusted anyone. I just can't figure out why I went along with it. How could I set myself up for this?”

If I had been alive, I might have been annoyed, but death, as I had learned over and over again, brought clarity (at least in this storyline). As a ghost, I was able to empathize with Isaac—mostly because I wished I was in his position. If Camden had been here to overthink things instead of me, I wondered if I would be able to lay back and crack jokes and act like I was too smart to be optimistic.

But Camden wasn’t here. I was the guy who had to think about everything from every angle and try to make sense of it all. I didn't have the privilege of being a skeptic.

We sat in the grass, still surrounded by fog.

The Plot Cycle had not moved in days. Weeks? I had no idea. Even as ghosts, we were going insane. I worried that our confinement would have us at each other’s throats for all eternity.

I could feel the tension rising.

“It’s almost over,” I said. “That’s all I can say.”

“Yep,” he said with a chuckle. “The other shoe is about to drop, though. At least we might get an explanation.”

Probably.

I decided to indulge him.

“How about the big reveal? What do you think it will be? Do you really think we've been in hell this whole time? You?” I asked.

“I don’t even want to guess,” he said. “Now that I’m thinking clearly, all I know is that the pursuit of understanding is a torture worse than hell. Whatever’s coming, I’m ready.”

"You think there's no way out?" I asked. "The Tutorial means nothing. The Throughline is a sham? Saving Lillian Geist to get the true ending? It does seem a little inane, doesn't it?"

"Yeah," Isaac said. "I mean, if all we had to do was save Lillian Geist at the Centennial so that the timeline was corrected, why hide it like this? Why make us jump through hoops blindfolded? Where was our guy?"

"Our guy?" I asked.

"You know, in movies," he said. "Where was our guy who was supposed to say, 'This is what's happening, this is how to solve it. It'll be really hard. Good luck?' Our guy. That's what the Paragons should have done. It's almost like the whole point was to make us act without knowing what we were doing."

"Could have used a guy like that," I said. "I did always think that when the Paragons showed up, one of them would reveal what this whole thing was about. They never did."

Even though he was a ghost, I could still hear the crackle in his voice. He was afraid. We all go to different places when afraid. I tried to find answers. I threw myself into the Tutorial, into the Throughline, in hopes of getting through it and rescuing Anna and Camden.

Isaac ran from answers because he couldn’t imagine a world where the answers were something he wanted to hear.

Still, it was weird that he waited this long to try to hash it out. Maybe ghost Isaac was bolder. Maybe he just sensed the end coming.

Or maybe... it was something else.

“Whatever the case,” I said. “I’ll be happy just to know what the answer is.”

Isaac chuckled. “Then maybe that’s what you will never learn. There will always be one more storyline. One more mystery. Another and another. I think you want to find a way to make the numbers add up so bad that you might never have just considered that you have the wrong numbers.”

We had avoided this conversation for so long. What if everything was a lie? Wasn’t that Jeanette’s thesis that had gotten her killed? In life, we were too afraid to face the worst possibilities. As spirits, we could finally talk about them freely.

So we did.

“The wrong numbers—you mean lies. We’re being lied to. That’s what you have to say?” I said. “The Throughline, Project Rewind, the Tutorial, all lies?”

“What does it matter what I have to say?” Isaac asked. “We die no matter what. That’s what I figure. The only question is, who’s going to be there laughing when we finally realize how pathetic we were for thinking we stood a chance? How many times have we used the phrase ‘rats in a maze’?”

Was he picking a fight?

Well, if there was ever a time to have this conversation, it was then. The Final Battle of the storyline and Tutorial itself was coming up sometime in the next millennia, and Carousel seemed to have stuck us together, leaving us without anything else to do.

I took a deep breath. I was not some doe-eyed believer. I knew this whole place was some gruesome theater. Was he saying that I didn’t know how foolish it was to believe everything would be okay?

“Don’t confuse my pragmatism with optimism,” I said. “Somebody has to be the one to put our foot forward. The only thing I know to do is hope that I can figure this out. If the truth at the end is that the numbers don’t add up, we don’t lose anything for trying.”

If you spot this tale on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“What if we do? This place is a nightmare. Now that I’m dead, I finally have time to really think about this place. You know, Cassie and Kimberly and Antoine—they talk about this place like it’s hell because of the gore and the misery. To me, it’s hell because my one defense in life—my cynicism—is useless here. Distrusting everyone doesn’t keep you safe when trusting was never an option. We know we’re being tricked. We just don’t know the punchline.”

“Do you trust me?”

“No!” Isaac said. “How can I trust you? How can I trust anyone? Used to be, the only people I knew were on my side were Cassie and Andrew, but Andrew’s dead and I saw Cassie die too. How do I know the Cassie that came back is actually my sister? Don’t get me wrong, I ignore that question just fine. I decided to go along with you guys because when a person gets scared, they’ve got to cling to the comforting truths. Now I’m dead and I don’t need comfort right now. So I’m back to my old philosophy. It’s all a lie. I just don’t know which lie.”

Cassie and Isaac had it worse in so many ways than the rest of us. They never had one moment of normalcy. Camp Dyer had been our shelter in the storm. The Hughes siblings didn’t have that. They had nothing to anchor themselves to. They had no image of Carousel in their mind that they could hold onto and tell themselves they understood.

I laid back on the ground.

“I’m not naïve,” I said. “I feel like I am being led around. I get sick to my stomach just thinking about all the hours I wasted trying to figure out what secrets about the tutorial or the Throughline might be the ones that we need to know the most, only to find out most of that work was meaningless. The deeper truths feel so arbitrary that I start to wonder if I am just too stupid to figure it out. I kept looking for some fundamental thing to latch onto, something that would inspire people to sacrifice themselves for Project Rewind, but all we learn about are the Geists or Ramona and I just have more questions. Where’s the aha moment?”

He sat down next to me, and we stared into the bright fog that surrounded us. The Plot Cycle was still frozen. It didn’t budge a hair.

“I never said you were naïve,” Isaac said. “I just get mad when you take this obvious bullshit so seriously. I get angry that we don’t have an option to just not care. We can’t just opt out, you know? To wait until we know why we’re doing stuff. I don’t care what you say, the Paragons have been starving us for information. Maybe they're just puppets anyway. Even when they were pretending to be players, I’m pretty sure everything they said was scripted. Cassie told me not to say that because it might cause a fight, but you guys are just way too trusting.”

I hated when he said that. I had never been a trusting person.

“It’s all a lie,” I said, lying back on the grass.

“Damn right,” Isaac said. “It’s all a lie.”

“I know the Paragons are sketchy, but they’re the friendliest faces I’ve seen around lately,” I said.

“The Paragons are full of it,” Isaac said. “When our heads are on the execution block, and one of those friendly faces is holding an ax, I am saying I told you so.”

I laughed. They weren’t the ones with the axe but he didn't know that.

----------------------------------------

More time passed. Hours, days, weeks, I honestly couldn't tell. Ghosts don't have internal clocks. I only felt like our stay in Club Fog lasted somewhere between a few weeks and forever. I started trying to force the Centennial to start by sheer force of will, but I was not successful. I had no power here. Deathwatch showed me nothing.

Why were we stuck there in the fog? All I could think about was the Final Battle. Carousel had decided to stick us in time-out at the worst moment.

I laid my head back and tried to sleep there on the grass. As a ghost, I didn’t feel like I was sleeping, but time passed, I thought. When I looked at the Plot Cycle, it was still stuck in the same place.

I started to think about what Isaac was saying. Everything was a lie. He really thought he got the exclusive rights to that sentiment. To be fair, he was a Comedian and Comedians had a Cynic aspect. Maybe he was a true Cynic. That would explain why he wasn't that funny. Of course the truth was being hidden from us. That wasn’t a unique thought.

The Geists were clearly important to Carousel. They were basically normal humans being used as pin cushions. They were unique. They were special. So special that NPCs brought them up in conversation years after their deaths.

So important that you could find books about them on park benches. Just lying around.

And they were the subject of the Throughline? Did that make sense?

“If everything is a lie, then what’s the lie?” I asked.

“Hell if I know,” Isaac said.

“No,” I said. “Sit up. Listen to me. Assume everything is a lie and then guess what the lie is.”

“I’m there already,” he said.

“What’s the lie? What’s the purpose? What has been accomplished with this whole thing? I can grant that this is odd. The Ramona thing is out of nowhere. The Geists are interesting, I guess, but I’m not getting much to grasp onto as far as plots go. They’re dead and we kind of understand that Bart made a deal, but nothing is gripping me about them yet. And I have tried.”

Isaac got up and took a deep breath. “I can say anything and you won’t be offended?”

“No. Maybe. I don’t know. Say it anyway,” I said.

“The way we found the ‘true versions’ of the stories was weird. They don’t make sense,” he said. “I’m not saying it wasn’t cool. The way you figured out what Jimbo Geist’s murder weapon was, Cassie thought you were a genius; she was gushing. Then ten minutes into the next movie, we are told what the murder weapon was. How lame is that? We didn’t need that info; we would have found it out anyway.”

I had figured out that his murder weapon was the fire poker by looking through the old newspapers.

“It’s a tutorial,” I said. “I figure they want to reward detective wo—"

He held up his hand to cut me off.

“But, whatever. I can accept that. Then when we were looking to do the same thing to get the third movie, I was thinking oh god, oh god, Riley’s gonna do some National Treasure nonsense to bust this thing wide open and we’re going to figure out what the buzz is on these Geists and the founding of Carousel, and then you come up with some half-guess that Lillian Geist was at or near the original Centennial because you can put two dates together and bingo. You solved it again. A completely useless piece of trivia that we would learn later anyway. The first one I can grant kind of. The second one legitimately made me think you were in on the whole thing like you were an NPC.”

How could I defend that? It was an odd trigger for the Omen of the third storyline. Sure, knowing that Lillian Geist was involved in the Centennial disaster in some way was nice, but Ramona would go on to tell us that anyway.

“I didn’t say the Lillian Geist thing was genius. I just figured it was the clue that Constance was trying to get at and… it worked. It’s not like I’m going to look a gift horse in the mouth in our situation.”

He pointed at me. “Exactly. I’m not trying to downplay your accomplishments here, bro, I’m saying that if everything is a lie, that’s the lie. We were always going to figure out our way into the true version of the stories just in the nick of time. Guaranteed. It was all designed to make us think we had earned it. You try to fill in every blank you see. They tell you that you were such a bright boy, and of course, we believe them because we want to… Don’t be mad.”

It did hit my pride a bit. I wished I had said it first so it would have been “my idea.”

“I’m not mad,” I said. “I’m not. I… That fits as well as any theory I had. The game was designed to make us think we were progressing. I can buy that. I gotta say though. If the fix was in on this Tutorial, then why were the storylines so hard? We almost got flattened over and over.”

He nodded in agreement.

“I’m not saying the storylines were easy,” he said. “I didn’t really do much, so they were kind of easy for me.”

“Well, you’re new,” I said. “You get a pass.”

“What do you think?”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“Maybe they want… I don’t know. Speaking of ‘they,’ who’s ‘they’? Who is behind it all? Is Carousel pulling all the strings?”

He threw his hands in the air. “It’s at least the Paragons. I never trusted them. I liked having a face to go along with my suspicion though. That was nice. Blaming Carousel itself feels like screaming into the wind.”

For a moment I stopped and laughed. I took a deep breath and thought for a moment.

“If everything’s a lie. Here’s the lie,” I said. “The ultra-secret Throughline, the hidden current running underneath it all. The story that if you even learn a fraction of it, adds itself to your quest log automatically. It’s about the Geists. The Geist family. Really? The most powerful and famous family in Carousel. How could the Throughline be about the most talked about people in the whole mythos? I learned about the Geists before Project Rewind. It was only a little, but still. That’s the subject of the big secret? How was anybody not ‘on the Throughline’ if it was about the Geists?”

Isaac nodded. “That’s a good question. I didn’t think about that. And a Mercer. And a Halle. All families from your war stories. Yet you weren’t on the Throughline yet but you interacted with plenty of big names.”

We sat in silence for a moment, our minds really beginning to race.

“If everything’s a lie, here’s the lie,” he said. “The Paragons pretend to be players. The Stranger was supposedly a player, but he was using tropes that were not on the red wallpaper. That trope that made it so you couldn’t remember what he looked like? That was equipped the whole time.”

That was true. The Stranger was a player in The Ten Second Game storyline. Even when rewatching the movie on the red wallpaper, I couldn’t recall what he looked like from scene to scene.

“So maybe it’s a little flavor,” I said. “They say those are the only tropes they have, but it’s a white lie they use to play their part.”

“Still a lie. If they can fake what’s on the red wallpaper, why would we ever believe anything we saw on it?”

I didn’t like that. Filling in the blanks usually didn’t involve making new blanks, but we were having a thought experiment. Assume it was all a lie and go from there.

“I’ve got another,” I said.

“Let’s hear it,” Isaac said.

“If it’s all a lie, here’s the lie. The Ten Second Game storyline was not actually made just for us,” I said.

“Who said it was made for us?”

“The Paragons either directly said it or implied it, I can’t remember. Maybe I said it, and they confirmed it. It was supposedly punishment, you know, for cheating or something. To balance the game.”

“So that’s why it went off the rails. It wasn’t a real game?”

“Well, maybe. I meant because the ritual, the ten-second game ritual for talking to ghosts, that definitely wasn’t just for us. Ramona used the same thing with the bell in the flashback. That flashback supposedly took place in a previous game from the current one before any of us got the Carousel. I kind of dismissed that because maybe Carousel built the storyline around the ritual. I don’t know. Anyway, that’s the lie.”

“Oh, yeah,” Isaac said. “It was also used by other players. I mean, The ghost man, whose name escapes me, said other players visited him. That meant previous players also had the ten-second game ritual.”

I couldn’t remember how true that was.

“Well, they might have used the Reply, The Departed board game to communicate with him instead. That one would work, kind of. It’s just more luck-based.”

“Nope,” he said. “Everything is a lie.”

“Of course. That’s the lie,” I said. “But why lie about the Reply, The Departed storyline being rebooted? What does that accomplish?”

I looked up at the sky and thought for a moment. What was achieved by the introduction of The Ten Second Game storyline that wouldn’t have been achieved by the original Reply, The Departed storyline? We did end up playing both, after all.

“If we never got the Ten Second bell for the updated ritual, we probably wouldn’t have gotten to speak to Jedediah Geist directly. We would have missed out on the flashbacks,” I said.

“Which one is Jedediah?” Isaac asked.

“Jimbo,” I said.

“Right. The ghost. So, what did we learn that was so important? Wait,” Isaac said. “He told us about Ramona, right? Well, he told you about Ramona while I hid in the other room, but I saw the flashbacks.”

I shook my head. “No, we were first told about Ramona by Madam Celia, the Psychic.”

“Would that be the Psychic Paragon?” he asked with a grin.

“You’ve got me there,” I said. “Those Paragons are behind it all.”

“I’m serious,” he said. “It never sat right that they used tropes to manipulate us. They could have just asked us nicely. Why use tropes? They knew we would play along.”

At the time, I marveled at how the Tutorial forced us along with those tropes. It made sense for new players. That’s what I told myself.

“The Team Leader Paragon—the one who worked for the government—she used a trope to make us do what she wanted, yeah. Unnecessary. The Stranger. He met us at the Diner. He used a trope there, too, didn’t he?”

“It was a weird one, wasn’t it?” Isaac asked. “Made my head feel funny.”

It was a trope that Antoine and I immediately deduced forced us not to believe whatever the Stranger said. If he said water was wet, we wouldn’t believe it. We told ourselves it didn’t affect us because we already knew what was true.

What had he told us all that time ago?

As I remembered that meeting, a dam burst in my mind.

I started thinking that his trope didn’t work on ghosts because as I remembered what he told us, I started to think that much of what he said was the truth, and we were forced not to believe it.

How much of what he told us was actually true? If that trope worked the way I thought it did, he could tell us the flat-out truth, and we would refuse to believe it.

We thought he was just doing his normal performance that every new player had to watch. Much of what he had said was nonsense, but if he layered in a few key phrases... He had told us so many things that... if we refused to believe them, we would never be able to see even an obvious trap.

That was the lie.