What had the Stranger said to us? What truths had we been forced to be skeptical of?

I remembered he said this was a trap. He said it was a trick.

He said those things to our faces.

He said a lot of things. Which ones were truths masquerading as inane rantings I couldn't say.

We thought we weren’t affected. We believed we knew what he was talking about, that Carousel was a trap, and that we had been tricked.

Suddenly, the veil lifted from my eyes, and I realized that The Stranger was telling us that we were currently being trapped—that some other trap was in the works.

But what?

Isaac started to laugh. “Does that mean that Project Rewind was bullshit?”

“Don’t say that!” I screamed. I got up and paced around. “No, why would it be a trap? It already had us. What was the point of Carousel tricking us again?”

Isaac continued to laugh. He laid back on the grass.

“For the fun of it,” he said. “Isn’t it obvious? To give you hope and watch it melt away.”

I couldn’t believe that—I wouldn’t believe that.

No.

The Geists didn’t fit the Throughline described in the Atlas, and the "tutorial" was askew in some way I could not determine.

That was the trap. I refused to believe that this thing--Project Rewind--so many of us had put our hopes in had been a ruse from the beginning. That didn’t make sense. Carousel was harsh and evil, but rarely mean.

I sat and thought for some explanation that would make the world upright again. None came.

Not at first.

“Hello, boys,” a man said. I hadn’t noticed him arrive.

It was Moonlight Morrow.

Even as a ghost, my blood froze in my veins.

He stood among us in the patch of grass surrounded by fog. He was still alive.

“See,” Isaac said, pointing to Moonlight. “He can talk to ghosts, but he has no trope for that on the red wallpaper. He’s been deceiving us this whole time.”

Moonlight watched my eyes as if looking for a reaction. He had been wearing a hat, but he took it off to talk to us.

When I gave no response, he spoke. “I do have tropes for communicating with ghosts. I am the Departed Paragon, after all. I hate to disappoint you, Isaac. I don’t need a trope to speak to the dead. Trust me when I say I earned my Archetype the old-fashioned way.”

Part of me wanted to theorize on that, but I had bigger fish to fry.

“Death,” I said. “It frees us from tropes that controlled us, didn’t it?”

Moonlight looked at me with a small smile. Was he happy with what I had said? Was he messing with me?

“Not all death frees you from what bound you in life, but this one did, yes,” Moonlight said. "You never really know yourself until you've seen the other side, I've found."

Death. Were we set up to die precisely so that our existence as spirits could give us the clarity to see through the deception?

“So that’s the game, huh?” I asked, seething. “We discover the truth too late. Just soon enough to know that something was coming, some grand humiliation.”

Moonlight shook his head.

“You’re the player. In Carousel, the player chooses the game,” Moonlight said. “This scheme, using Paragons to manipulate players… It was artless. Carousel would know better.”

I froze.

“What?” I asked. “Carousel would know better… Does that mean?”

“Yes,” he said before I could finish my sentence. “This was not done by Carousel, but Carousel is no man's fool.”

Moonlight started to walk. The fog cleared a path for him.

“Project Rewind, what a wonderful ploy,” he said. “Powerful. So much narrative force your homeworlders created with that plan. So well executed. By the time the Narrators figured it out, it had so much momentum they couldn’t stop it. Truly, a thing to behold. I thought the glory days of the players of the Game at Carousel were behind us. It turns out, they may just be beginning.”

Wait.

“Project Rewind,” I said. “It’s real? Please…”

I felt my throat clench as I waited for his answer.

“A group of players defying the heavens and… other forces to give themselves a second shot at the impossible? Under the noses of every Narrator who might seek to stop them? It is something worth believing in. I give you my word. That was not the trap, but there was a trap.”

I felt a surge of emotion well up in me. I cried just at the words. I needed to hear that. I couldn’t help it. I needed to believe he was telling the truth. Why lie at this late hour?

Even if everything is a lie, that couldn’t be the lie. I wouldn't believe it. Camden and Anna had died giving us the Atlas so we could learn of Project Rewind. It couldn't be a lie.

But what was the lie?

Isaac was awfully quiet. He kept a smirk on his lips. He needed to doubt what Moonlight was saying. He felt more comfortable in a world where he had a fix on things.

“What is going on?” I asked.

Moonlight looked at me with pity, but he did not answer my question.

“I’m supposed to ask you to accompany me to my death scene. You see, Roderick Gray sees that some camp counselor is putting a certain flask into the time capsule. He makes a move to steal it, thinking he will summon that curse again, but I catch him in the act and what do you know, the flask activates itself, as has been foreshadowed. In the ensuing chaos, he kills me and stuffs me in the one place he thinks no one will look for a hundred years."

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"The time capsule," I said. "Your body was in the time capsule."

The storylines of the supposed "Tutorial" had happened in reverse chronological order. Everything we saw was time loop shenanigans. The real truth was in the past, that much was clear. Now I wondered why all of the theatrics. Why was any of this done?

"You already figured that out, did you? He will be pleased you took his little throughline so seriously."

I had thought about this a lot.

A whole lot.

“I didn’t know specifics. I knew you were in there, your body. The scene we were forced to watch of Mayor Gray opening the capsule with his whole confused and terrified act. That was because he knew that in the true course of events, he was the one who buried it, right? Time was broken. The loop kept rubbing it in his face, haunting him. Three years from now in 1995, when the flood happens for the second storyline—the real version, the time capsule is unearthed and warped by the water. Your soul escapes and possesses him again. That’s the actual end, right?”

Moonlight smiled.

“I suppose that means you don’t need to come see what happens to me. There are more pressing places for you to be.”

He waved his hand and a path opened in the fog.

I stared in the direction the path led.

“Why would you be helping us?” I asked.

Moonlight thought for a moment.

“You see, they went too far. Tied your strings too tight in hopes of achieving their ends. Carousel didn't like that. That’s why I could lend a hand. Help you help yourself. I am the Mayor of Carousel. I serve the people, not the Narrators. Death does not pick favorites.” He began to walk away. He was not bound by the fog like we were. As he left, he said. “The train is not yet at the station, Mr. Lawrence. You still have time, if just barely. Good luck.”

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

Isaac and I ran. The Plot Cycle was moving again and we were certain that the Final Battle was underway.

“What are we doing?” Isaac asked. "You're trusting him just like that? Have you learned nothing?"

I shook my head, not completely sure.

“No. I just look at the options we have and realize we only have one play to make,” I said. “We obviously have to beat the storyline or else, you know…”

“We’re forever young?” Isaac asked.

“Basically. Our only option is to win the storyline but not get the true ending. We have to let the Die Cast kill Lillian Geist. I don’t know why, but that does seem like the only thing we have control over. And if I'm wrong, we just run the Tutorial again. It was made to be repeated, right?”

That was my safety net. If we blew up the Tutorial at the last minute, we could just do it all over again, this time knowing what would happen.

"Moonlight is a Paragon. How is he different than any of the others?" Isaac screamed.

He wasn't, but we were put in a position to either trust him or trust the Paragons, who we knew for sure manipulated us.

Something I couldn't say to him or any of the others was that I liked this sudden U-turn because it actually felt like a choice. There were two options and it was up to us to decide.

The whole Tutorial had us moving in one straight line. Sure, the storylines could be hard, but I never felt like we were being proactive or making our own choices. I felt like we were being led along and jerked around.

I finally had a choice to make: walk down the path we were given or burn it to the ground.

In my heart, I chose the second one. I chose before Moonlight even showed up. The moment I felt the Stranger's trope lift, I knew I was going to do whatever it took to bring this whole scheme to a shrieking halt even if it ended up being the wrong decision.

"We've been fooled, Isaac. That's all I know for sure. We don't have to trust anyone. If everything is a lie, let's pick a different lie."

Isaac laughed. We continued running past buildings, rushing to the downtown as fast as possible. We had finally made it to the Centennial. Didn’t even have time to stop and smell the funnel cakes.

As soon as we arrived, we passed screaming NPCs. Time was not on our side. We were manipulated to arrive late, as that was the only way the Die Cast would already be there. I had missed part of the movie on Deathwatch.

What I saw On-Screen was Antoine and a very injured Cassie struggling to find Roderick Gray. Moonlight must have already been dead.

“So, we need Lillian Geist to… die?” Isaac asked as he ran right through a family of four, causing them to inhale sharply. "The whole thing we were here to prevent--Lillian Geist dying at the Centennial instead of later--that's what we are here to prevent now?'

“Yep,” I said.

“And our living allies are all trying to prevent it and we have no way to tell them to stop?"

“Yep.”

“Oh,” he said. “Good. I bet you’re really hoping the Lillian Scorned Contingency fails, huh?”

Oh damn.

I had forgotten about the Lillian Scorned Contingency.

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

> Many scenes before, back in Rebirth.

“What are you trying to explain to them?” Isaac asked as he lay on the red-hand chair back in my character’s house.

This was after we were ghosts but before the Manor Blaze.

I stood in the middle of the living room playing the most frustrating game of charades imaginable. I was invisible and trying to communicate a fairly complicated idea to the living.

They were eating popcorn and throwing it at me. Ramona watched the buffoonery from afar.

“Lillian was supposed to survive,” I said using Flashback Revelation. It was a short little statement I found. I couldn’t even remember when I had said it in the current storyline.

They looked at me like I was making no sense.

“Right, Lillian wasn’t supposed to die,” Kimberly said. “She was supposed to die three years later in the second storyline. What are you trying to tell us?”

The problem was that I was trying to explain to them what Lillian’s tropes were, but I had never actually told them. It was a bad habit, but in that case, it was totally justified because I only saw the tropes minutes before she died, and at that point… who cared?

I had noticed something odd about Lilian Geist's build. She was high-level and had some very powerful tropes, but she didn't need any of them. The players didn't have to fight her and all she did was kill Dr. Halle. Why did she need such lethal tropes just for that?

Later, when I realized that she must have been present at the Centennial, I realized why she was built like a monster.

I was so frustrated. Luckily, the group was in the right zip code. I just had to let them talk until they figured out what I was talking about.

“Maybe the secret is to lure her away?” Antoine said.

I moved back and forth, a communication that meant “maybe.” They knew that wasn’t what I was after.

“She starts innocent, then she becomes baptized in blood. She’s a survivor,” I said, recalling a conversation I had with Kimberly about her character in the fake movie we made.

Kimberly conveyed what I said.

“She fights back?” Antoine said.

I moved to signal “Yes.”

“We have to get her to fight back?” Antoine asked.

Yes again.

We continued until I had gotten them to come to the following conclusion:

“Lillian is a monster too. The Die Cast is to blame. Oh, oh,” Cassie said. “Lillian Geist's revenge. We have to get her to take revenge on the Die Cast.”

One more emphatic Yes and the Lillian Scorned Contingency was born.

Lillian was a Pattern Killer. All we had to do was show her a part of the pattern. Her A Woman Scorned trope was the next part of the puzzle. If she realized the Die Cast caused her injuries, she should get a buff to fight him herself. Dr. Halle turned her into a monster.

We didn’t know what Dina was working on in the background.

This was our backup in case the initial plans failed.

We would get Lillian to fight back. The tropes lined up so well that I assumed it was designed to be used this way. Lillian would act in her own defense, using the monstrous abilities her mutation had given her. She would save herself.

That was the plan. It would be a battle of mutant vs undead juggernaut, and our fate would hang in the balance.

Now that we wanted her to die, it was a huge obstacle. Odds were, Lillian would have a fair chance at surviving the altercation as long as she fought back. It was a pretty good improvisation. If she held off the Die Cast and the others managed to defeat him using Dina’s whole love is stronger than death nonsense, we would have gotten the true ending.

And our fate, in some gruesome way, would be sealed.

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

“Maybe when we get there you’ll have time to stop them from activating Lillian?” Isaac said.

But of course, it didn’t work out that way.

When we got to the celebration, Dina was pleading with the Die Cast while the ghost of Gale Zaragoza fought to wrestle control of his old body. They were doing well.

I couldn’t see Kimberly, Antoine, or Cassie with my eyes, but I saw Lillian Geist sitting on the ground crying. I was able to use my Deathwatch screen on the red wallpaper. In the distance, I saw a woman in a witch costume running away with her teenage sister.

It looked like Ramona had decided to leave Lillian to her fate this time around. I couldn’t blame her. She had lived with that regret for too long. Her sister would live this time.

I pushed away questions about what Ramona was and how she was involved because as I ran to find Lillian, I saw Kimberly arrive at her side On-Screen.

It didn’t take long for me to find them in real life too.

Kimberly knelt down, talking to Lillian and comforting her.

We were too late.