When we set out for the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion to finally enact our plan, it was our fifth attempt. The first loss was the hardest, but after that, it got easier and easier, and we got better and better.
They say any nightmare you walk away from is a good nightmare.
We learned things we didn’t even know possible to learn about the inner workings of a storyline. We had always dismissed the merits of rerunning a story, but now we understood.
It was like being clairvoyant.
We also gained intimate knowledge of Dina’s Rescue Trope. What had initially been a colossal hindrance became the closest thing to a superpower we had seen in Carousel.
We didn’t go On-Screen ever. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened by accident. Everything was predictable except Carousel's countermeasures, and even it was "fair." The story was just simply not about us. It was freeing and shielding in ways we couldn’t imagine.
The only cost of her trope was that its power started to shine with reruns, which limited its utility.
Of course, we had a few things in our favor. First, we could look at the spoilers in the Atlas, and a few choice spoilers helped us form our plan. It became apparent that this storyline required death, but not main character death.
NPCs would work fine if it was shocking and there were a lot of them.
My first assumption when trying to figure out logical ways to defeat the storyline was that we had two major options. The first was that we could treat it as a straightforward series of puzzles, and that had been our first attempt. But with Dina's Rescue trope, that method was just not going to work.
Solving the puzzles took too long when we had to do it ourselves first and then find a way to get the surrogates to do it.
The second method was to lean into the film's themes. That was tricky, and the only method I had managed to devise had failed spectacularly.
We weren’t going to abandon the themes completely, but we were sure going to put them in the background.
The question was, how were we going to accomplish that?
As far as I could tell, three previous teams had played the storyline called Itch, and they had come up with their own methods.
Because they had more than one melee-class character, their method involved fighting their way forward in what the Atlas basically described as being an ultimate ninja warrior-type storyline, where obstacles and IBECS itself became physical opponents.
The race to the front was quite literal because they were playing the base storyline, which had "Beat the Clock" as a win condition.
The physical ninja warrior path was not an option for us. Even if Michael was fit enough to do that, Andrew was more brains than brawn, and Lila was not dependable.
But there were other options, things that we could not have pulled off on our first run but now had enough practice to succeed at. Our plan was choreographed to the gills with redundancies, escape plans, and multiple contingencies.
The plan was also completely insane on paper and could only be pulled off because we were not technically part of the story—all except for Bobby, of course, who was suddenly going to be a main character.
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The thing was, we only had the IBECS to work with. We couldn't bring in new elements that weren't compatible with what was already there. And yet, we needed to change the story so that the puzzles would disappear—or at least be reduced—and so that the themes would be very… subdued.
Because of some combination of our tropes, we had just the stuff we needed to pull it off.
I was up at the helm with Rudy, Flannery, and the rest of my friends when it came time to enact our plan.
"I must insist that you follow me back to the sleeping bay," Flannery said. "It's a long trip where we're going. You're going to need to be in deep sleep."
"Yeah, just hold off," Antoine said. He turned to me. "I think we're close enough."
I looked at the screen.
One of the questions we had wondered ever since we got to outer space was whether we were actually in deep space in any sense. Obviously, we were on some kind of sound stage, the type of place where Carousel normally filmed its locations that didn't exist in Carousel Proper.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
But even on a sound stage, we had to wonder how much distance our ship actually covered on its voyage.
The answer was not much.
It was all theater, as always.
Even moments after launch, we were already near the IBECS, even though, according to the fake frame story, we had a four-month trip to get there. It was just movie magic… of course it was.
Even though our little frame narrative of being winners of a giant prize—being able to go into space—was thin and almost entirely for show, the tropes we brought and their underlying conceits still worked.
So when I had a trope that allowed me to talk Off-Screen to an enemy like IBECS, it worked as soon as I was physically able to speak to an enemy.
I pushed the call button on the console. I was quite familiar with the buttons now, but that part was easy because they were all call buttons.
"IBECS, this is Ambassador Lawrence aboard the KRSL craft Helio. Do you receive me?"
"Yes, Ambassador Lawrence, I receive you," IBECS answered.
I nodded to the others. They ran off and started doing what it took to throw all of our food overboard. Meanwhile, I had to stick around and develop a rapport with IBECS.
"Alright, IBECS. I'm going to have to ask you to answer back to me at 1.4 times the normal speed. We have a lot to get through."
"Confirmed," IBECS said quickly. "I will respond at a faster pace."
Speed-running a horror movie was just step one of our agenda.
I then started on the conversations we needed to have with IBECS to open up future dialogue trees in the meta script.
Having never rerun a storyline before, we didn't realize precisely how strict some of these dialogue trees could be. Even though we were Off-Screen, we needed to unlock everything so that we could access any line in the narrative we needed when we needed it.
It was going to take a while.
Before she even asked, I turned to Flannery and said, "No, we're not going to deep sleep yet, but thanks for asking. You've been great."
She pursed her lips and nodded her head.
We couldn't go to deep sleep yet because we had too much work to do.
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"It appears that your ship is out of provisions," IBECS said after we set up our plan to dock with the ship. "I will allow you to attach and resupply."
Bobby had ditched his trope that gave us access to tasty food, so this time, throwing out all the provisions wasn’t as heartbreaking. There was a vast gulf between good-tasting space goop and bad-tasting space goop.
Within a few minutes, we had connected to the IBECS.
To our delight, we were just on time.
The Party Phase was beginning. We were so early that the surrogates had not yet woken up from their chambers, and Carousel was still collecting lots of footage of the locations around IBECS to be used.
Even hours into the story from our perspective, we had not taken the four-month skip into the future that triggered when we went into deep sleep. That was how it was supposed to go. We needed to go into deep sleep, but if we put that off, we could get a lot done before things started popping off.
Flannery was not happy but didn’t confront us.
Carousel was quickly catching up.
It would not allow us to intervene or prevent the basic premise of the story—we learned that in attempt three.
The officers would be dead or otherwise indisposed. That was a canon event of sorts.
Either way, we still had to hurry.
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Being able to get into Bobby's lab was an essential part of our plan, but we had to get further than that because his lab did not have what we needed—or at least not everything we needed.
Luckily, while the process for unlocking his door and connecting to the rest of IBECS was a little different, Dina could get through it quite quickly.
We had a full view of the surrogates as they woke up for the first time, something we didn’t get to see on our first run.
It was hard to watch, so I muted the screen, and we continued.
I had thought they were good actors, and I was proven right as they woke up in horror to their surroundings. I shuddered at the thought.
And here we were about to make their problems… bigger.
Time was going way too quickly. Carousel wasn’t playing games.
Well, it was playing games, but it was being very serious about it.
I was standing at the junction between the Helio and the IBECS as Cassie walked past me, holding five Petri dishes. One had a few wriggling specks that looked like dirt from a distance, and the others had a few hairs in them each.
"Make sure you don’t mix those up," I said, trying to lighten the mood with a joke, unsuccessfully.
She nodded her head, ignoring my attempt at humor, and asked, "Are we sure that this isn’t murder?"
"It’s not murder," I said. It wasn’t permanent, at least.
She stared off into the distance, contemplating where her life had taken her, and said, "Okay," then ran back to the room with the clone machine.
In attempt 4, we had actually tried to clone ourselves to create an invading army—or maybe disgruntled union workers.
It was easy enough. The clone machine was flexible, and we could change up the features so that even though everyone would look like us, they wouldn’t be identical. But it turned out that the clones that came out were NPCs who didn’t have personalities and would not act violently, even if you ordered them to.
What a ripoff. That was like the one thing you want in a clone.
We had sat and considered how we were going to trigger an invasion so that we could get IBECS to ignore all of his terrible protocols and actually help the passengers. It took us some time to figure out what the word "invader" meant in the context in which IBECS had used it.
But we figured it out, alright.
It was just going to take some elbow grease to get it going.
I bounced between the IBECS and the helm of the Helio, making sure that everyone was playing their part. We didn’t have a lot of time, either in story or out. By skipping the time jump, we had bought ourselves four months in story time but not nearly that much real-time.
It would have to be enough.
When Cassie returned, she was with Antoine and Kimberly, who were each holding large canvas bags that we had found back at the Powerworks Pavilion and brought with us.
The bags were packed.
"We got like six more of these," Antoine said.
"That was fast." They had only started cloning 30 or 40 minutes earlier. This was something we had practiced in attempt four.
"Good," I said. Then I yelled up at Ramona, who was at the helm, "How are Dina and Isaac doing?"
She turned back, looked down at me, and gave a thumbs-up. "Almost there," she said.
"Is this gonna work?" Antoine asked. "We’re cutting it close."
"We have a month and a half," I said, trying to do the math in my head. "We’re good. I’m going to go get some more bags and meet you out there."
He nodded, and then he and Kimberly walked through the passageway to enter the IBECS.