I went back to the Helio's sleeping quarters and found the six remaining bags, as well as Cassie, who was working with the clone machine. It had turned itself into a large egg shape and was currently gestating a new clone for us.

"Everything running smooth?" I asked.

Cassie was biting her lip and didn’t seem to hear my question. I could understand her problem, but I didn’t have time to argue about it. As long as she went and did her job, it was okay.

She had convinced herself that Andrew’s surrogate bore his soul. Now, getting NPCs killed felt like a harder decision for her.

I grabbed two of the large canvas bags.

They were heavier than I had expected, almost as if they were filled with water balloons, and in a way, they were.

I hauled my bags out into the IBECS. Antoine and Kimberly were busy in Bobby’s lab, so I moved ahead.

I was out in the hallways of the IBECS, completely Off-Screen, with my heavy bags filled, looking for a place to empty them. There were only two sections of the ship where we could safely put the bags: Bobby’s lab and the front of the ship, past the artificial gravity device.

In all versions of the story, the anti-gravity device divided the front of the ship from the back. It was impassable by anything other than a tiny bed bug hitching a ride on cleaning equipment that ran throughout the modules.

When I got as far toward the front of the ship as I could with my bags, I found Dina just as she was finishing unlocking a passageway that would allow us to drop into the gravity device and move to the front of the ship.

"I got it open," she said, "but I don’t know how you’re gonna get those bags across."

"Me neither," I said. "Might need Antoine’s help, but we’ll see."

"I’ll go get a bag, too," she said. "We need to hurry."

"Don’t I know it," I responded.

I dropped down into the artificial gravity passage. We had seen three different versions of this puzzle.

The first was the large platform that tried to buck you off. The second involved tiles that would fall away for some reason. The third had a bunch of spinning rotors that you had to walk between because there were gaps, and you didn’t want to get squished.

We got lucky because we ended up with the fallaway tiles again, which was not a super easy puzzle, but it was at least solvable. You only had to solve it once because, after you figured it out, you could retrace your steps for a bit.

It might have taken me five minutes to figure out the path across, and then I had to go back and grab my bags again that I had left on the first platform. I had to be quick because the tiles would replace themselves, and the pattern would change.

Not too long after I started, I finally got to the front half of the ship.

We were doing so well that I started to wonder if maybe the puzzle version of the story was workable and if all this effort we were putting in was for nothing.

But then I remembered there were a lot more puzzles to go, and if we could get Carousel to delete those puzzles for us by adding an alternative conflict, I was willing to do it.

My arms ached as I carried the bags forward and found myself in the secondary sleeping bay. There were a few dozen ill-fated souls trapped inside deep sleep chambers in this room.

Poor things.

I regretted what we were about to do to them, and that’s why I had to be here to do it myself—because I didn’t want to ask anyone else to.

Not this time. This time, the guilt was on me.

I knew that whatever was about to happen to them, they wouldn’t feel it, and they wouldn’t know.

But I would.

I opened up one of my large black bags and retrieved something about the size of a cantaloupe.

It squelched in my hand and sloshed around but remained intact. In the light, I could see something growing inside of it.

The squishy mass was a gigantic egg. The egg was primarily the product of bedbug DNA, but that wasn’t all it was.

Not even close.

I began taking the eggs and planting them around the room. I even had the nerve to pry open more than a few of the deep sleep chambers—the ones that had brain-dead passengers within them—and pile in a few eggs inside of those.

It was disgusting to watch the actual bed bugs crawl around among these mutants, but we had to do what we had to do.

In Carousel, you pick your battles, and sometimes you pick your casualties, too.

If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

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"Is everything set?" I asked back on the Helio.

Antoine nodded.

Ramona said, "Everything's working fine. The surrogates are having a tough time, though."

"When are they not?" Isaac asked.

"Alright," I said. "It's time for a time skip."

The skip was initially going to be four months, like the first time, but because we had put it off so many hours, it ended up only being a month of in-story time.

But that was plenty. Plenty, that was, if Carousel was willing to go along with our plans.

I was nervous as I lay back in my deep sleep chamber. I looked down the row at my friends and at the cloning machine and hoped I had thought of everything.

I told myself that we were going to succeed because even if we weren't going to be a part of the story, that didn't mean we couldn't take the initiative.

We would have to.

I laid back in my deep sleep chamber, and I was out like a light—no trope needed.

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Flannery woke us up, and I wasn’t even groggy. I suspected that Antoine had used his trope to make the night come so that we would all be well-rested in the morning.

As I got to the helm, I learned a month of in-story time had passed, so I frantically searched the cameras to see what had become of the IBECS after we left.

I was watching the screens in front of me and also watching the dailies in my head, scanning through them at fast-forward, hoping beyond hope that our plan had worked.

And it had.

The first part, at least. The rest relied on us to play our part.

The surrogates were still in the original sleeping bay where they were when we first met them on our first run. They were starving, living on whatever nutrients they could coax the sleep chambers to pump into them. As far as they were concerned, nothing had changed in this version.

There were no large eggs in their sleeping bay.

The other sleeping bay wasn’t so lucky. After having traveled there myself, we had unlocked the ability to see it through the camera.

Watching it drained the blood from my face.

Everything went according to plan—the horror.

“Why is everything so much darker?” Ramona commented.

In my zeal, I hadn’t quite noticed, but all of the cameras were on night vision. That wasn’t normal.

If you had a camera on in a room, the lights were usually on with it, but all of these rooms were dark.

“I think that’s because Carousel accepted our improvisation,” I said. “We changed what type of story we’re in, and Carousel is changing everything in kind.”

The IBECS was dark. That’s when a spaceship was scariest.

We had to hope that didn’t put a hamper on our plans.

“How’s Bobby?” Antoine asked.

I didn’t even want to say.

“He’s not doing too hot,” I said as I viewed footage from the dailies.

I saw as the eggs that Antoine and Kimberly had laid around his lab began to hatch, and the horrible creatures crawled out of them. They first infested the cows and pigs that hung headless from their life support machines.

They eventually found a different kind of prey.

They found Bobby's deep sleep chamber, and they went to town, wriggling their grubby bodies between the cracks of his chamber and taking more than just blood.

They took flesh and life itself.

“Am I dead yet?” Bobby asked, standing beside me on the helm of the Helio.

“Very,” I said.

I watched the image as someone who looked a lot like Bobby continued to be attacked.

“I guess it’s time for me to get to my place,” he said.

It was.

Creating a nightmarish version of a bedbug using an alien cloning machine was a standard play for Carousel, at least. But the problem was that Bobby slept in the same room as all of his headless pets, and for our story to work, we needed those headless pets to be infected with these new advanced types of bedbugs.

How could we put Bobby in a room with those things for a month without him getting injured? Well, we could make a spare Bobby.

Cassie and Ramona worked to wrap real Bobby’s limbs up in gauze from the medical kit on the Helio, so it looked like he had somehow survived those bites in case Carousel wanted to use the footage. He looked like a burn victim.

We were going to cheese it.

We were going to substitute clone Bobby for the real Bobby to make it look like he had survived and gotten to safety. We didn’t know if that would work exactly, but we did know that Bobby had a trope called Not in the Budget, which allowed him to be recast as a new NPC if his old one died an unclear death. So, in the worst-case scenario, he was still in the game.

And since his character had not yet been introduced, we felt our plan was going to work.

We had swiped him out of his deep sleep chamber as soon as we got to IBECS. Carousel didn’t seem to mind the swap.

The clone didn’t mind either. In fact, it had no mind at all.

Cassie made sure of it.

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

For First Blood, we actually chose to do the same thing we had done before, following Isaac's advice: smack around in the deep sleep chambers with a pipe.

While it was traumatic for the surrogates, it was also effective. Not only did it function as First Blood, but it also led to them being able to get out of the sleeping bay.

Everything was going smoothly.

"Alright, Rudy. I need you to disconnect from this port on the IBECS and reconnect on the other side," I said.

"You got it," Rudy said. He and the other NPCs on the Helio didn’t seem to mind our strange activities.

We had to disconnect from Bobby's unit because it was now compromised and filled with the genetic mutants we had created.

"Do you remember your lines?" I asked Bobby.

He nodded his head. "I got it all down," he said. "Just need a quick look at our notes again."

"Here you go," I said, handing him a slip of paper with everything he needed to remember.

Wallflowers were usually background characters with crucial roles in helping the protagonists, but in this case, that was not enough. Bobby adjusted his bandages along his arms.

"These things... they're not bed bugs; they're something else. The mutagen..." he said, practicing his lines, and then he repeated, "These bed bugs... they're something else."

I let him keep going. Really, it didn’t matter. We were going for our best performance possible, but as long as he could pull off someone who was mentally disturbed by the events he had just lived through, we would be fine.

As we reconnected the Helio to a different port, we had to act quickly. We left the port and found ourselves in some conference room with posters about work schedules and stuff like that.

I dragged Bobby behind me because I knew the layout the best. I had studied it, and even though it had changed in the last few runs, I was very familiar with the different ways the ship could reform.

There were patterns, which was how I knew that there was a large dispensary closet that usually spawned close to the gravity machine. It was caged up because it contained narcotics, but that also made it a good place for us to stick Bobby.

It wasn’t exactly bedbug-proof, but it could be made airtight with some duct tape.

That was our story: Bobby had managed to escape from his room after it was overtaken by mutant bed bugs and had holed up inside a closet because he wasn’t able to move forward due to his low rank as an officer and the threat from the mutants.

"Are you good?" I asked him.

"As good as I'm going to get," he said.

"Now, this room does have a communication relay, but it does not have a camera, so if you're in trouble, you have to tell us because we won’t be able to see you."

Bobby nodded.

Then it was back to the Helio for me.

It was finally showtime.