Not so long ago, after receiving our rewards, we knew exactly what we would do next. We were going back to the loft. It was a simple routine, but it was one I missed.

Ever since we set sail on the river, the question of what to do next changed constantly. Did we try to find our allies? Did we try to find shelter? Do we try to return to Carousel proper? I didn’t always know the right answers, but we had to do something.

After the Sunken Cradle Part II, I still had questions, but I was too tired to ask them.

Not everyone was.

"Where's Bobby?" Isaac asked. He was back in his tie-dye shirt and cargo shorts.

We had given them all a rundown of the storyline, and they had shared their perspectives, which mostly involved waiting while captured and then being frozen in time.

But there was one explanation we could never give them, and that was what had happened to Bobby.

"We don't know where he is," Antoine said, not meeting Isaac’s gaze. "He's missing."

No one added to that.

"So that means that we wait around until he shows up?" Camden asked.

Camden had not actually seen the axe murderer, but he was no fool, and he knew what it meant to say that someone disappeared or went missing with no further explanation.

"You're not saying what I think you're saying, are you?" he asked.

Antoine, Anna, and I exchanged glances. Cassie looked down at the ground, ashamed, and Ramona started laughing, but a strange fear overtook her, and her laughter was caught in her throat.

That was all it took for Camden to understand. He was a smart guy.

"You've got to be kidding me," he said. "All of them are in on it now."

I couldn't confirm or deny it. The trick was, we weren't allowed to acknowledge that we knew what had happened to Bobby or any of the others, and I certainly wasn't brave enough to try to come up with some goofy workaround, especially after my close encounter with the axe murderer himself. I could feel his desire to kill so potently. It was like he was only waiting for an excuse.

"I think I know what happened," Isaac said.

"You probably shouldn’t say," Camden said, still huffing over being the only one not in on the secret.

"No, I have an idea," Isaac said. "Look, Bobby had that trope that let him escape a storyline once his role was finished, right? Well, I bet that's what happened. I bet he saw things were going south, and he abandoned us. He was acting weird."

We couldn't exactly argue against it, but we didn't need to.

"That's not what happened, you idiot," Kelsey said. She was a veteran and had been around a lot longer than us, so she was familiar with what it meant when someone never returned. "He went missing."

"No, what I'm saying is that he ran off in the middle of the storyline," Isaac said. "That's the most logical explanation."

This went on for a couple more seconds, him trying to explain what he remembered of the rules for Bobby's Meaningful Sacrifice trope, and then eventually it clicked. Luckily, he figured it out before Kelsey managed to glare him to death.

"Oh. He went missing," Isaac said eventually. "That is some crazy timing, isn't it? He just happens to, you know, whatever happened to him, right as we seemed to beat Lucky's through line. I still don't understand how that worked."

I looked around at Antoine, Cassie, Anna, and Ramona. They were not appreciating all this conjecture about Bobby's fate. I always thought it was hard on me, but apparently, I had gotten used to it to some degree, just as Roxy had.

I was glad for the change in subject.

"It would seem that our time on the river wasn't wasted," I said. "Makes you wonder whether or not Lucky was involved in this somehow, seeing as he got what he wanted."

Bobby had mentioned that Lucky was involved. I was just throwing it out there.

"Did he get what he wanted?" Antoine asked, his relief at the change of subject palpable. "I thought he was trying to get us to some sanctuary neighborhood, and it looks like we're in the middle of the jungle."

"That's why I said it would seem that our time wasn't wasted," I responded. "I haven't exactly tested my theory."

"Okay, well, how do we test your theory?" Anna asked. “Are we really in the middle of a jungle?”

She gestured around at the valley and forests that surrounded it.

"Seems pretty simple to me," Camden said. "We go up high, and we look for some suburbs, and we go there and ask if they have anything to eat."

We were still at the bottom of the valley, but luckily, we didn't have to travel far to find a way up the cliffside that would lead us to the top of the waterfall. I didn't know what I would see when we got there. To tell the truth, I didn't really care whether there was a sanctuary neighborhood at the end of all this. Normally, I was all for indulging curiosities, but we had paid too high a price for this. We had risked too much.

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We emerged at the top of the cliff with nothing to show for our effort except a long stretch of grassland pockmarked by large boulders sporadically scattered across the land. The river ran strong up here, but we had no boat to navigate it, and even if we did, we would have to go upstream to continue in the direction we were headed.

While I contemplated our next move, Antoine called me over to him, away from the rest of the group.

Funny enough, he looked to be in much better spirits than he had just minutes earlier. The climb up the cliffside had triggered his Mountain As A Metaphor trope to help heal whatever mental health irritation the axe murderer had caused.

The climb had gotten me nothing but dirt under my fingernails and a bruised shin.

"I don't understand this," Antoine said. "We were always theorizing about why you couldn't tell us where people went when they disappeared, but I thought that when we found out, there would be some explanation for it all. Some reason that it had to be a secret."

It appeared his mind was still occupied with that.

"I wish I could help you," I said. "Whenever I learned the secret, even the other people who knew hated talking about it, and they didn't know anything to begin with. It was majorly frustrating being terrified of this enforcer or whatever he is, but not getting to know anything about him."

In fact, it still was frustrating.

"Right," Antoine said as he knocked some dirt off his pant leg. "Because wouldn't it make more sense to let everyone know he existed?"

I had asked the same thing.

"I don't know," I said. "If you're Carousel, maybe the inane bureaucracy of it all is part of the fun."

I stared over at where the water fell off the edge of the cliff. I didn't want to think about this anymore. I wanted to sleep. Still, I couldn't help but devote a great deal of my brainpower to reviewing all the facts.

"It can't be that simple, can it?" Antoine asked. "Carousel wants some strange mystery that people are afraid to reveal the truth to for no reason?"

"I don't know," I said. "There's at least one reason."

"What's that?" Antoine asked.

I looked up at the sky. It was huge and blue, not a cloud in sight.

"Well, I figure," I started to say before biting my lip for a moment just to give it a little bit more thought, "if you know that quitting the game results in your death, then it's not really a choice, is it? But if there's a chance, even the smallest, most unlikely chance, that something else happens, well, maybe that's enough for Carousel to say it's a real choice."

We talked for a bit longer. I wasn't completely satisfied with my answer, but it was the only one I had, and we all knew how Carousel liked to skirt around the idea of consent and true free will. After all, the power of players was their ability to make choices. We were under no one's control, at least by Carousel's definition.

"So what do you think happened to him?" Antoine asked.

"He got cut from the left side of his neck to his right armpit," I said. "Who knows what might happen after that?"

I had two ideas fighting inside of me. The first was that Bobby's choice had mattered and that there was something on the other side of it. The other idea was that he was a complete idiot and had accomplished nothing. I didn't know which idea I liked more.

I didn't have much more time to think about that because, as we walked back over to the group and rejoined them, our attention was stolen by a particularly strange sight.

In the field, in the area of about an acre by my best guess, maybe more than that, trees started to grow where there had only been grass. And they weren't growing slowly. In fact, it looked like we were watching a time-lapse. They would jump up in height a few times a second, moving just slow enough that we could register the jumps in time.

And the trees were not even the most unusual thing, because standing in front of them was a team of men. The men moved much more quickly. They were dressed like they were performing at one of those colonial villages designed to show you what life was like back in the Old West or something like that. They had aprons and large saws as well as huge crates filled with supplies.

"What the heck is going on?" Isaac asked.

"We either need to watch or run," Kelsey said. "We need to make a decision quickly."

"Let's watch," I said.

The men jumped forward in time so quickly that we could actually see their beards growing and then getting trimmed back suddenly. It wasn't a particularly cinematic showing. The men would show up, stare at the trees, then walk away, disappearing from our sight. This would happen once or twice every ten seconds as the trees grew.

"I don't see them on the red wallpaper," Anna said.

I didn't either. Luckily, we were a pretty safe distance away from what was happening, so we all silently decided to watch.

Eventually, the trees were big enough to tower over the men, but this didn't last long because the men brought out their big saws and started cutting them down one at a time. And then the real work began.

They took the wood from the trees and began to hew it into lumber. They leveled a square of land, built a stone foundation, and then began to take wood from the trees to construct a small cabin, as far as I could tell.

The men worked tirelessly from our perspective, but the way that they would work and then disappear and then work and then disappear told me that in whatever strange temporal situation they were in, a lot of time was passing, days or even weeks, as the house was being built right in front of us.

The workmen didn't seem to notice us or care one way or another. They worked diligently as the cabin took form, got walls, a roof, and then finally a door, all of which must have happened in less than five minutes, from the first sprout of a tree to a finished cabin.

In the last seconds, the men finally turned to us, tipped their hats at us, smiling under their big mustaches, and then disappeared altogether.

The strange time lapse stopped. The trees and plants in the background stopped growing, and a large burst of wind tore from that area, moving over the field and us.

All we could do was look at each other.

"Did Carousel just build us somewhere to sleep?" Anna asked.

That was a good guess, but it wasn't right. Carousel had nothing to do with this.

Moments after the workmen disappeared and the burst of wind struck us, the door to the cabin opened, and someone within it stuck their head out.

It was a man who appeared to be in his late forties and probably had appeared that way for thousands of years. He wore a suit that would have been out of date back home on Earth, but the Manifest Consortium didn't really care about clothing going out of date. They were obsessed with the time periods and trends of the worlds they came from and with those that they never got to experience.

He wore gloves and a thin, polite smile. As soon as he got sight of us, he turned back into the cabin and yelled something out that sounded like, "I found them!"

Then he stepped out of the cabin completely, followed by an assortment of immortal sorcerers, some of whom I vaguely recognized, others of whom I knew by name.

Silas Dyrkon, Lucien "Lucky" Graves, Dr. Aldric Rose, Dr. Masha Striga, Vincent St. Vane, and many others all emerged from the door with their own unique theatrical flourishes.

My friends looked absolutely petrified. The Manifest Consortium were an odd bunch, the way they dressed, the way they talked, the way they viewed us mortals.

And we would have to put up with it. We were at their mercy. I decided to walk ahead of the group and greet the narrators first. The others followed me. If I didn't show fear, if I didn't grovel at these sorcerers' feet, maybe the others wouldn't feel so nervous.

Maybe.