🔴 REC    SEP 24, 2018 16:48:13    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

"It's not anything to be nervous about," Anna said, though I could tell that she was nervous even as she said it. "It's not like a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of thing. You can feel it happening. As long as you've got this necklace with you, you can feel yourself start to slip."

It was a bright and beautiful day.

People were out walking their dogs, which distracted Bobby's two hounds, but they never disobeyed him. They sat eagerly, awaiting his next command, straining against the script in hopes of getting a sniff of something in the wind.

Kids were playing at a playground next to a daycare center across the street.

Six people from different walks of life stood on a sidewalk, waiting for a man in a blue suit to walk next to the historic mercantile building—at which point bricks would fall from the roof, striking and severely injuring him.

Nothing to see. Just an everyday, ordinary thing. Strangers hanging out.

The nerves were palpable.

I mostly focused on getting shots of the street. It was really nice out, and I knew that these shots would make a valuable juxtaposition for what had come before and what would surely come next.

"When is this guy supposed to show up?" Antoine asked. He was carrying his duffel bag filled with a variety of goodies—from firearms to construction tools, whatever we might need.

"It should be any minute," Kimberly said.

"About five minutes, actually," Logan added.

"How can you know that?" Kimberly asked.

"In the picture of him being taken away on the stretcher in the article, you could see that the shadow of the building was on that fire hydrant. I figure with people around, the ambulance was probably called immediately and couldn't have taken more than a few minutes to get here with the hospital so close. Given where the shadow of the building is now and where it is in the photograph, I'd say we have about five minutes."

He was holding onto a printout of the news article. He had printed out several other articles.

I walked up to him and aimed the camera at the sheets in his hands.

"Ingredient number one," I said. "A historical document memorializing an event in the timeline."

Logan turned the papers and shuffled through them to show the article about the drag race where things almost got deadly—well, more deadly.

"Ingredient number two," I said, moving the camera over toward Anna, who held the necklace with the ruby-red jewel on the end. "Magic space rock. Highly decorative."

Anna didn't look directly into the camera. She just looked at me as if annoyed or unsure about my presence. That was probably the best way to handle it.

I had to get footage—a variety of footage at that—so that Carousel would have something to cut together in hopes that the audience might miraculously understand the rules of this storyline.

But in order to get that terribly invasive, repetitive footage, I was going to have to do cameraman things—like getting close into people's personal space and expositing in a humorous, if annoying, way.

I got footage of Bobby petting his dogs. He was playing a good-natured guy—someone who could just go along with a ridiculous plot like this.

We couldn't all be in denial.

I was going along with it because I was the cameraman, so of course I was. The cameraman can't be cautious or doubtful.

Kimberly played the empathetic mama-bear role, focusing on her desire to protect Anna and the rest of us.

Logan played the cynic and the skeptic, who—despite his great doubts—was still curious enough to go along with everything.

Antoine didn't want to be there, but he didn't want to be alone either.

I felt we covered the spectrum of character reactions pretty well, though I didn't know how much screen time they were going to get to show it off.

Most found footage tropes were designed to distract from a lack of characterization and common sense.

I kept getting footage from all around, and I did it for one particular reason—I was on the lookout for a man wearing a long trench coat and a fedora.

I didn't see him, despite my vigilance.

I really needed to see him. I needed to look at his tropes. They would tell the story—perhaps even better than Camden could.

That might have been exactly why Carousel was keeping him from me.

I hadn't seen him at the daylight dance. I had been looking around, but he wasn't there—until we looked at the footage. That was fair play, I supposed, because it made some amount of sense with the rules of time travel.

When I saw the man in the blue suit, I immediately turned my attention to him and pointed the camera at him to ensure we got a good shot.

He was just an ordinary man, talking on a cell phone as he walked down the street.

Little did he know that his life was about to change forever after getting hit on the noggin by a falling brick.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

Or at least, it would have.

Just as he was walking up to the mercantile building, we were there.

"Watch out," Antoine said before the man walked past us. He held his hand out.

The man—whose name was ironically Ron Mason, according to the red wallpaper—stopped, apparently annoyed at the interruption.

"Can't you see I'm on the ph—" he started to say, but before he could get the words out completely, a loud succession of thuds sounded as bricks fell from the top of the building and landed on the sidewalk right where he would have been.

There was a look of alarm on his face that didn't quite go away.

"Marsha, you would not believe it. I almost died! This building is falling apart right next to me. I almost got squished," he said.

"Wouldn't have died completely," I said under my breath. "Just head trauma."

He turned to look at us, to thank us, but he must have felt something odd about the group of strangers who were all huddled together, holding on to each other.

"Did you see that?" he started to ask.

Poor guy couldn't get out the sentence.

At that moment, I started to see a red tinge in the air. While I thought it would be coming from the amulet, it actually kind of felt like it was coming from everywhere.

Suddenly, I got this sensation in my stomach—like I had fallen.

But I hadn't.

I was standing still, holding on to Kimberly and Bobby, who was desperately holding on to his dogs.

Again, I felt like I fell—but I didn't.

"Whoa," Ron, the passerby, said, tripping over himself and falling forward toward us.

Antoine caught him before he could fall completely.

And then the falling continued.

But this time, when we fell, all of our surroundings started to shift.

Suddenly, the day shot upward, and it was the middle of the night.

Then it was day again, and we were standing in the same place, with solid ground underneath our feet. And yet, the sensation of falling continued—as if we were in a runaway elevator.

The next two falls became more turbulent. This time, we didn't just fall—we changed location.

We were still standing on the ground, but not in the same place. And I couldn't say where it was we were—because it was impossible.

Even to describe it would be an unimaginable task.

It was as if the place on Earth where our feet were planted was connected to a million different places all at once, circling us. And I could perceive all of them—like I was trapped in a kaleidoscope.

And as we moved, the kaleidoscope changed. Buildings whirred past. Cars on the street flooded by so repeatedly that they became one solid mass—a blur of metal, lights, and paint so seamlessly blended together that it didn’t even look like moving objects anymore. It just looked like a solid chunk of motion.

In the sky—in the million skies—I saw airplanes everywhere. Lines of them, sometimes so numerous it looked like the sky had metal prongs running along it, the planes blurring together in my vision.

We were moving in space quickly now too. Not just time, but the world itself was shifting around us.

I fought through the mental fatigue, trying to understand what was happening, but the only takeaway was that this time travel implied some sort of innate intelligence.

Even as that thought entered my mind, I didn’t quite understand what it meant. Was this time travel itself intelligent? Or did it just appear that way?

Wherever we stood, it was always in a place where humans normally stood. Even as we moved geographically, we were always on a sidewalk, in a street—never phasing through buildings, never colliding with cars. Even people never touched us.

In fact, I didn’t see other people at all. I only saw blurs of color and shape where people should have been—like outlines on park benches, fragments of motion.

There were so many different things to see in the kaleidoscope of time that my mind simply could not comprehend it.

I heard... rushing water against a shoreline, but I saw nothing of the sort. It was information overload.

My brain sought patterns, and there were patterns to see—but not to understand.

Suddenly, we were standing on another sidewalk. A solid metal line of cars clogged the street. The colors and shapes I recognized as people began to sharpen, coming into view.

As the kaleidoscope became more understandable and less frantic, I started to realize—that our new position on the sidewalk seemed dictated by where all the blurs of color had been.

We were finding a place where we could fit in without touching anyone.

Intelligence.

The thought lingered in my mind.

This time travel magic is intelligent.

Or perhaps it ran by rules that imitated intelligence in the bosom of infinity.

It was like we were always in that moment, waiting for everything else to catch up with us.

Suddenly, we were standing on a sidewalk filled with people.

The solid metal streak of cars had separated. Now, there was just one car, twenty yards away, moving slowly as time became real again.

As the final seconds ticked into place and our jump completed, the world started to speed up or slow down. I honestly couldn’t tell.

It was like the optical illusions where frames in a video slow down enough that you can finally tell how fast they had been moving before.

I moved the camera to capture the car.

And almost no one noticed us.

The crowd was distracted by the race.

The race.

That’s right. We were at an illegal drag race—where an accident almost happened.

My thoughts finally caught up with my surroundings. And at that moment, I made eye contact with the driver of the red car speeding down the street.

Though time had not yet returned to full speed, I could tell the car was handling poorly. The man was about to lose control.

According to the article, he would regain control just in time, steering the vehicle away from the crowd and into a nearby building. Saving them and sacrificing himself.

But I made eye contact with him.

I got his face right on camera.

And as he saw us—panic, or maybe realization, flickered in his eyes.

He knew we weren’t supposed to be there. He saw that we had just appeared out of nothingness—a phenomenon that seemed selective. In all the footage I’d reviewed, no one had ever appeared out of nowhere.

But to him, we must have simply blinked into existence.

The driver kept looking at us.

It was only for a few seconds—his souped-up streetcar was moving too fast.

He didn’t have time to correct his trajectory.

Not with the distraction.

The car kept going, careening to the left.

This time, he didn’t dodge the crowd.

His red car smashed sideways into a group of people.

Flattening them.

The car turned and rolled, crushing bodies underneath.

The noise was deafening.

I couldn’t hear the snapping of bones, but there must have been. The way those people were flattened, shredded, and scooped up against the building beneath the wreckage—

People screamed.

I started screaming, yelling in shock. I didn’t even remember what I said until I rewatched the video.

"No!" Anna yelled.

She was about to run toward the injured people, but we couldn’t afford that.

Kimberly grabbed her.

No one was screaming louder than Ron—the NPC.

Ron, who was not supposed to come with us into the past.

Ron, who somehow managed to anyway.

"What just happened?" he screamed. "Marsha, do you hear me? Hello?"

The guy still had his phone to his ear.

I looked at the others.

As much as I wanted to panic at the mass death we had apparently caused, as much as I wanted to problem-solve the fact that we had accidentally taken a random NPC back into 2010 with us, I knew my job.

I was the cameraman.

And my job was to get the scene covered.

I filmed everything as we walked away.

Kimberly ushered us along.

Anna was panicking.

Logan was dumbstruck.

Antoine cursed.

Bobby comforted his dogs. They worried so much.

My first thought was that we had to keep Ron with us.

But Ron ran off—vanished into the chaos of the crowd.

And I was too busy filming to stop him.

Capturing every angle.

Looking for our friend in the fedora.

But I never saw him.

We left.

Running across town to the only place we knew would be safe.

The jailhouse.

As we approached, Anna ran to a board covering the back door and tugged at it.

"I’m sorry," she said. "When I hid the tapes, that was how I got in."

"We’ve got everything under control," Kimberly said, pulling out an old pair of keys.

We went to the front.

Kimberly unlocked it.

And we were back in the jailhouse.

Safe.

At least for a little while.

■ STOP