When I opened my eyes, the sun was setting. I stood on the campus of the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion.

The storyline was over. We didn’t even get a visit from Silas, the Mechanical Showman.

"It's great to hear you had such a leisurely time," Tripp, the NPC who guided us when we first arrived, said. He was standing right in front of us.

It took a moment to orient myself. I looked around. The place was still populated, but it would soon return to its abandoned aesthetic when we left.

We had lost, and in the blink of an eye, we were no longer in outer space. We were standing on a long red carpet while Tripp told us how exciting our trip had been and how important it was for KRSL.

I was so deflated that I could have dropped to my knees, but a numbness in my mind kept me from doing so. I could feel my disappointment, but it was distant.

"Well, anyway," Tripp said, "it was nice meeting you, and if you ever happen to win a trip to outer space again, I guess I'll be seeing you."

He smiled and walked away.

We just stood there for a moment, taking it all in.

Isaac and Cassie hugged each other. So did Kimberly and Antoine.

It felt like we were at a funeral. Heck, it felt almost like how dying feels.

"Well, that was something," Dina said. "Somehow, I still know a whole lot about connection ports on the IBECS Model 103P."

If Dina was trying to make a joke, the vibes must have really been off. She must have sensed our collective regret, disappointment, and grief over our loss.

We had survived, and so had Bobby, even though he was far up ahead of us with his dogs on their leashes.

But it was still surreal.

One day, in a rescue that won't be so forgiving, we were going to experience that exact same thing: the story moving on without us. And then everything's going to go black, possibly after some ferocious act of violence against us. And then we'll just stop existing.

And if it is anything like Itch, it will be my fault.

We were too slow to solve the puzzles.

That was my fault.

I was the high-Savvy character, the only one we had. We didn't play to the themes of the story, and that was explicitly my decision because I didn't know what to do to get the NPCs to go along with it.

I still didn't know how to do that. The further the story went along, the harder it was to corral them.

I didn't know how many mistakes I had made, but I knew they had started to pile up at the end. I didn't know how to improve just yet. I was numb.

We failed our first rescue. Did this spell doom for our plans of saving everyone?

Because that was the plan, we were going to journey into stories where survival was uncertain, where we would be outmatched and under-leveled. That's what Project Rewind was about: giving us lots of rescues so that we could power level.

Dina's trope was supposed to be our safeguard. It had kept us safe, but otherwise, we failed.

Survival was not the real goal, but it was all we managed.

We had to thrive, or we would die here—inside a storyline or out—if we didn't escape. And to escape, we had to level up.

The framers of Project Rewind had been clear: we needed to power level, we needed an Invitee (which we already had), we needed a Guide (whatever that was), we needed a Secret Keeper, we needed to stick to the plan, and we had no room for failure.

Sure, this time, we all survived, but there would come a time when we didn't.

If we couldn't defeat a storyline with bedbugs and a poorly programmed chatbot, how were we going to compete against all of the other horrors of the universe?

The pressure felt physical. It felt like it was pressing on my lungs, weighing my face down, and daring my heart to burst.

I couldn't stand it.

I couldn't stand letting the others down.

I had closed my eyes as soon as I had the wits to, and I had yet to open them. I just knew that the others were staring at me, that they knew now that I was going to get them killed.

And now I had to focus because I was the only one who could safely shepherd them back to the loft. That was my job.

Luckily, one skill I could always count on was not showing my emotions.

I took a deep breath and opened my eyes.

Isaac and Cassie were still talking to each other, whispering. I could see tears in Cassie's eyes. I could see absolutely nothing in Isaac's. As much as he wanted to pretend he was a cynic and a pessimist, I knew that he had built up a lot of hope for this rescue.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

Even though Cassie was the one crying, she was also the one comforting because she knew that beneath Isaac's blank gaze, he needed it.

"At least we know it's really Andrew," she said.

"How?" Isaac asked. "How would we possibly know he’s actually here? His face on a reward poster doesn’t mean anything. I'll believe we can save him when I see it."

"We did see it," Cassie said. "Even though that wasn't his face, it was still him. You could tell he wanted to help those people, and he could never hurt them. I think that was Andrew in there. Didn't you feel him? Didn't you know?"

Tears streamed down her face, and Isaac didn't answer her, but he also didn't argue with her. I thought I saw a tear start to form in his eyes.

"That means he's here," she said. "I don't know how, but he's here, and we can save him."

"How do you know?" Isaac asked. "They always say Carousel isn't a place with happy endings."

"How would they know?" Cassie said. "Nobody’s been to the end yet."

They continued back and forth. I stopped listening.

Built-up tension and fear turned into tears in more than just Cassie's eyes as we walked back.

In a way, we had gotten a taste of the worst that can happen.

As we walked, we rejoined Bobby and his dogs. The dogs were excited to go on a walk and happy to see Bobby again. They wagged their tails and yipped excitedly, which I thought was a terrible failure to read the room.

As we walked, I stopped and said, "I'm sorry about… that. I take full responsibility, so if you want to blame me, I'm not going to argue. I know I talk like I know what I'm doing all the time, but clearly…. Look, I’m just trying my best. I know this is a huge setback because now we don't get all the bonus experience and rewards, even if we do succeed. So we're basically no further now than when we started, and that's my fault."

While I spoke, I tried to deliver my words without any emotion because I really didn't want to sound like I was on some self-pity, everything-is-my-fault rant, but from their reactions, I guess I failed.

Because they hugged me.

Kimberly and then Cassie, and Antoine gave me a pat on the back, and I don't know who else joined in because I froze.

And then I turned away from them because I felt myself starting to get way too close to tears.

And before anyone could comment on it, a sickening howl sounded from higher up the mountain, and whatever was on our minds, whatever moment was being had, it ended.

Antoine had his baseball bat back, so he moved up in front of us. I didn't know if we should have been ashamed, but our reaction was to wait.

We didn't try to run; no one but Antoine and Dina pulled out weapons.

We just waited to see if that howl preceded our doom.

Even Bobby's dogs had quieted down and were paying rapt attention.

One thought that entered my mind was that if a werewolf did come barreling down the mountain at us, we would at least get to know for sure what happened to the rest of Andrew's team.

"Get ready to go back to Itch," I said, my instincts taking over.

We all backed away a few steps and waited.

But the one howl was all there was.

No giant wolf came to greet us.

As usual, the monster lair was just there for the atmosphere—a howl as the moon rose to remind us that this was a place of horror.

And the occasional bedbug.

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

"This one hurts," Antoine said. "It sucks. We just got a better taste of our own mortality than when we actually die in storylines. Remember, this was the plan. We picked Dina's trope because it gave us the best chance at surviving, and look, we survived. Everything's going according to plan. We have to stay positive and keep moving forward, one step at a time."

I was beginning to wonder if Antoine's speeches and motivational rants were more for him than they were for the rest of us, but then I saw that the others seemed to appreciate them.

Yes, we had planned to maximize our chance of survival at the cost of increasing our chance of failing the storyline. It was calculated, but we were all hoping for a different outcome.

"No regret or sorrow," Antoine said, "only hope for tomorrow."

Okay, I wished he would stop.

As soon as we got back to Kimberley's and everyone was safe, I made my way up to the roof so that I could be alone for a little bit as darkness fell.

Of course, I had forgotten that Bobby had to return his dogs back up to the top of the roof, so he was up there, too, petting them and playing with them. But I could abide that; he could stay in his little world, and I would stay in mine.

Except he was not the only person to follow me up.

Ramona came, too.

I went to the side of the roof and leaned onto the brick barrier that surrounded it, looking out over the city.

The city was alive, like an ordinary town. It didn't care that we had just been defeated. Life and unlife moved on here, whether you willed it to or not.

Ramona came and stood next to me, leaning up against the brick railing.

For a few minutes, neither of us spoke.

"You all right?" she asked eventually.

"Of course," I said. "Didn't you hear? Everything went according to plan."

She laughed.

"It honestly wasn't the worst vacation," she said. "We had a view and room service, at least until we threw away all the food."

"I remember that being your idea," I said.

"Well, you said we needed an emergency so that IBECS would let us make port. And I was already tired of slurping down those nutrient pouches."

"Yeah," I said. "The apple cinnamon was okay, but the turkey dinner was the worst thing in the universe."

"I still don't understand some things about that run," she said. "Why didn't Kimberley's trope work well? I thought there was supposed to be some anti-scouting power, but you said there wasn't one. And I also don't understand why we were on a strange alien spaceship if that never came up in the story or why we had a clone machine on it with us.”

“Mysteries of Carousel,” I said.

“Growing up, they said that Carousel spins in both directions, which meant that sometimes things don't make sense. Because a lot of things didn’t make sense now that I think about it. To me, Carousel was just the state and city where I grew up, but now I get it."

I had thought about those questions, too.

"Kimberley's trope worked fine," I said. "Remember how I said IBECS had a trope that made Moxie checks use Savvy instead? Well, Kimberley's scouting trope with Sal uses Moxie, but because of IBECS, it used her Savvy stat, and she only has one point in Savvy. That's why it didn't work."

Ramona started to laugh. "We were so confused about that."

"I still haven't told her, though. I think she may have figured it out," I said. "You know she's got that trope that allows her to transfer stat points when she puts her hair in a ponytail. So the reason that the trope failed, in a way, was that she didn't have her hair up."

Ramona laughed again.

"And I think the reason that we got the advanced spaceship was part because of our tropes combos. But part was a warning against trying to just rescue the surrogates outright by putting them on our ship. Because no one in their right mind would think that our spaceship and the IBECS were from the same story. And I think that the cloning machine was just a place to keep Bobby's dogs where they would be safe."

"Oh. I see. But I don't think having your DNA on a cloning machine is the same as being safe," Ramona said.

"Well, at the very least, it allowed Carousel to fulfill Bobby's license without putting a bunch of dogs in outer space."

"Still," she said, "it would have been cool if we could get it to work, maybe find a way to incorporate it. I mean, how often do you find a working cloning machine?"

"In Carousel?" I asked.

"Well, maybe. I guess there probably are other cloning machines here," she said. "But how often do you get to play with one?"

"Almost never," I said.

We continued to talk as the night wore on.

I began to suspect that maybe she wasn't actually just curious about Kimberley's trope not working or our alien spaceship. Maybe she just wanted to give me a chance to explain something because she knew that it would make me feel better.

Because it did.