Once the reporters were gone, the Manifest Consortium put on a new face, one that I had never quite seen before, even in my time lurking around their headquarters on the other side of the mountain. Back then, they were still being watched all the time, either by the media or by the refugees that they endeavored to rescue.

Here, they were only being seen by us, Carousel, and the capital “A” Audience.

Suddenly, I was surrounded by a fast-moving operation far beyond my expectations. Vincent St. Vane had taken off his flashy suit jacket and had actually rolled up his sleeves as he directed his underlings.

“I need to know what’s going on right now,” he said. “If this is some kind of experiment by Carousel, find me facts that support that. If this is a trap, you had better not let us walk into it.”

He said things like that a lot from his perch in the center of the command center.

A small lesson about architecture in the Manifest Consortium was that just because two buildings appeared separate on the outside did not mean they were separate on the inside. Before long, the busybodies running around doing MBW had managed to string together the tower overlooking the sanctuary with all the other buildings that had been built in the main base back near the cradle.

My friends and I were, for the most part, overlooked. It wasn’t that no one was interested in us. It was that no one wanted to be yelled at by St. Vane or whatever his real name was.

“I’m telling you,” Mortimer the 304th said. “Carousel is not pushing back at our presence. If I didn’t know any better, I would say she wants us here, or at the very least, she wants the players here, and she doesn’t seem to mind our operation.”

St. Vane was not having it.

“It isn’t that I don’t trust your analysis, old friend, but I have never known Carousel to want us anywhere. Not truly. Get Dyrkon over here. See what he makes of this.”

I sat on a long red couch near the command center, which was sort of like a geographic hub between all the buildings that had been constructed. It reminded me of the command center back at the Consortium’s tower. There were lots of desks with machines that came to life at the whim of the various immortals who operated them. This was the intelligence apparatus, and they were buzzing.

One of the analysts in a long red dress and shawl looked back toward St. Vane and yelled, “We haven’t reached permanence yet, sir.”

“Do you have an estimate on when we might expect it?” St. Vane asked.

“Sir, this is the first time the sanctuary has emerged in decades. We won’t know for certain that it won’t be folded away for some time.”

They had been talking about the sanctuary for hours, using technical jargon that I partially understood. They were speaking English, or at least that’s what I heard. It seemed there was a big debate about whether the sanctuary would stay where it was or if Carousel would withdraw it back to where it was before we triggered The Sunken Cradle Part II.

St. Vane was very worried about this.

Mortimer the 304th was not.

“It is not going to disappear while we’re observing it. I know how she thinks. She wants us here. She’s trying to show us something after all this time,” he said. 𝚏𝕣𝐞𝗲𝐰𝕖𝐛𝐧𝕠𝕧𝚎𝚕.𝐜𝚘𝗺

St. Vane turned to him and said, “That is the very thing that I am afraid of.”

Eventually, someone managed to get a hold of Silas Dyrkon and dragged him up to the central platform of the command center like someone being brought center stage in the middle of a circus.

“What is your take on all this?” St. Vane asked him.

“I believe Mortimer has the best of it,” Silas said. “We’re an audience right now. I suggest we observe and have our escape tickets primed to punch.”

Silas didn’t seem to like St. Vane, or at the very least resented his authority.

All of the immortals had lanyards around their necks for identification, but they also had an additional ticket hanging from those same lanyards, which had been handed out earlier in the day. To my understanding, all they had to do was rip it or punch it, and suddenly they would be out of harm’s way.

For whatever reason, the players didn’t get any such ticket. Go figure.

A few minutes later, Dr. Aldric Rose, a man who dressed like a fun science teacher, arrived at the central platform, bursting with excitement.

“Sir,” he said. “I performed a whether walk.”

This was apparently a very big deal because even the busybodies surrounding St. Vane stopped to listen to the results of whatever experiment it was Dr. Rose had performed.

“And?” St. Vane asked.

“Speak to us, Aldric,” Mortimer said. “Time is of the essence.”

“Nothing happened,” he said. “I managed to climb all the way down the hill, down into the valley, and walked right into the sanctuary without being molested or causing a stir.”

“Did you speak to any of the residents?” a voice called from a distance.

It was Lucky. He had been tasked with some boring, complicated magic they used to secure their base. I hadn’t seen him in a while.

“I made contact with several residents,” Aldric said. “They seemed wary of me, perhaps, but none of them attacked. They were out as if it were a normal day in the neighborhood, although I could see that the houses are greatly fortified on the inside, as are the vehicles in the garages. The normalcy is only superficial. As far as I could tell, there was work around the clock preparing for something that they expected to happen very soon.”

St. Vane took this information without giving any indication of his opinion. Then he asked, “Mortimer, how much can we trust whether walking in this situation? Carousel could easily alter the recreation.”

“Whether walking was never a scientific exercise,” Mortimer said as he took notes in a large leather notebook, never stopping his diligent writing as he spoke. “It is, after all, meant as more of a psychological catharsis than a proper augur. It’s best we proceed with caution. When we’re ready for proper experimentation, we will need boots on the ground.”

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

It would be a while before I could get someone to tell me what whether walking was. When I first heard it, I thought it was about weather, as in rain clouds and lightning, but it turned out to be a “simple” magic designed to let the user simulate a future possibility without actually trying it in real life. In this case, it turned out that Dr. Rose had walked down to the sanctuary to look around without actually having to do it.

This was only one of a dozen reports that St. Vane was receiving every hour as the various, dare I say, scientists around him conducted experiments.

Dr. Striga was next up to bat, and her news was quite dire. She gave me a polite nod, but never came to speak to us. Her report was nonsensical at first, but I eventually understood.

“Possibilities are opening,” was the first thing out of her mouth, and St. Vane was not happy about that at all.

“Are you certain?” he asked. “You can’t tell me that Carousel is about to bring in another world right before us.”

“I’m not telling you that,” she said matter-of-factly. “I’m telling you that the possibilities are opening. Potential realities are about to merge right before our eyes. I cannot tell you the nature of this occurrence.”

From his position in the command center on the central platform, St. Vane could look forward out toward the large window of the lookout tower they had built near the sanctuary. He stared at the tiny neighborhood and didn’t speak for a while.

“Can you tell me when it’s going to happen?” he asked eventually.

“Ten minutes approximately in the sanctuary’s time, but I cannot tell you when we will perceive it. It may be several hours or so, our time,” she said before turning to leave. “I must continue to monitor the situation.”

When she said the possibilities were opening, she meant Carousel was about to tear a hole in reality and let something else in from across the many worlds. Apparently, a “possibility” was a unit of measurement. It was all rather scientific. Ideally, you would want only one possibility, but it turned out we had far too many.

“Lucky,” St. Vane said, “your contacts told you that monsters would attack the town regularly and need to be repelled, correct?”

“Yes,” Lucky said, with his hands behind his back, one grasping another like he was some sort of soldier. He looked ridiculous in his safari outfit, even though he had taken off the hat.

Mortimer was quick to understand the implication.

“Do you believe that this is where Carousel admits new enemies, testing them against the population of this sanctuary?” he asked.

“It would certainly explain why the non-player characters can live so freely in this environment despite Carousel’s narrative laws,” St. Vane said. “What’s an Omen compared to a constant onslaught of otherworldly creatures?”

“Sir,” Lucky said, “I haven’t been able to make contact with any of my team. I was hoping that once we were in proximity of the sanctuary, my beacons would begin to function, but there’s been no indication of my players’ presence.”

St. Vane looked back at Lucky for the first time since their conversation began, and then he said, “You always knew that was a possibility. We have no measure of how much time has passed in the sanctuary since you last made contact, and it is possible, even likely, that your players disappeared when all of ours did.”

All Lucky could do was nod.

The whole time, Camden and I were making theories about what we were seeing and hearing. Most of the others were trying not to be seen by the immortal mages around us. We were sunk into a giant red, oversized couch in a back corner where we had been told to sit hours ago, trying not to get in the way, fearing what reason they might have for keeping us around.

Another hour passed this way. Eventually, they brought us food, which is to say they handed us tickets that we could rip or punch a hole in to make a delicious banquet appear.

Our food was delivered by what appeared to my eyes to be a young man dressed like a bellhop, though immortality complicated my estimation of his age. He didn’t exactly pop into place like he was teleporting, but he arrived carrying trays from a hallway in the distance. But I could tell he wasn’t always in the hallway. It was like he was walking in and out of whatever kitchen all this food had come out of, fading between time and space.

Antoine got a roasted turkey that was all dark meat, along with all the fixings and side dishes that some strange-sounding country liked to eat. I got a tray of savory pastries crammed with meat and other fillings. Whenever I picked one up, another one would appear in its place.

“Say, do I know you from somewhere?” the delivery guy asked when he looked at me. This wasn’t the first time I had been recognized. We really were famous.

Gravy was dribbling down my face from one of the pastries I was eating.

“Nope,” I said. “I get that a lot.”

He had a very old-fashioned New York accent, and he was pushy, so he asked again, saying, “No, I got an eye for faces; have I delivered to you before?”

“Nope,” I said. “First time.”

And right after I said that, he pointed his finger at me in recognition, but before he could say my name or say where he knew me, he began looking around at where he was.

“Tell me I’m not in Carousel,” he said. “What the hell is wrong with you bringing me here?”

And then he ran back down the hallway until he faded from existence.

We all had a good laugh about that.

Because of Antoine and my tickets and how much food they got us, the others kept theirs unpunched for use later.

It turned out, though, that the food came with strings attached, and we weren’t allowed to watch the undertakings of the Manifest Consortium just because they were being nice. Soon after we had eaten our fill, Vincent St. Vane himself came to us with a request.

“I assume your accommodations thus far have been adequate,” he said. “Perhaps you’re tired. We could arrange for you to have a place to sleep.”

“I told you it was coming,” Isaac said as he anticipated the request. One of the first things he had said was that we were here to be guinea pigs.

“Well, it is your destiny, after all, to explore Carousel and overcome its obstacles,” St. Vane said. “You are the Party of Promise, aren’t you? I didn’t realize flattery or begging would be required to obtain your assistance.”

“We’re not going down there,” I said. “We have literally no incentive to, so if it is a trap, it will absolutely trigger, and we’ll be surrounded by narrative sinking sand because we were dumb enough to walk right into it.”

He didn’t lose his composure.

“I understand your hesitation,” he said, “and I am impressed at your grasp of the situation, but I assure you, we have no indication that Carousel intends to harm you or us. We have become very adept at anticipating Carousel’s tricks. This is not one of them.”

You would think that people as smart as all these magical wordsmiths would have learned not to speak in such bold declarative sentences in Carousel. But perhaps, in the same way the Manifest Consortium had fattened us up with food before asking us to walk to the slaughter, Carousel was fattening them up by letting them believe they were some exception to the rule.

Then again, with all I had seen them accomplish in just a few hours, I had to wonder if they actually were as powerful as their egos seemed to suggest.

No, that couldn’t be it.

“Very well,” St. Vane said. “I understand that you need to look out for your bottom line, but I would encourage you to stay here so that you might get a glimpse at the bigger picture. I believe that Lucky told you why we’re here, did he not?”

“He did,” Antoine said. “You’re looking to build homes for refugees from other worlds. I get it. But we’re not walking down into that neighborhood. We’ve already lost enough to get you here.”

St. Vane didn’t push back. Instead, he simply nodded and said, “Well, if you are not up to the task, then others must be.”

He walked away, and I didn’t know what he was referring to for quite some time until I saw the man brought into the command center. He might have been in his late thirties or early forties, and in most rooms, he would be overlooked completely. He was just an average guy, maybe a little more muscular, with a working man’s hands and a face that had seen the sun year after year. He wore jeans, a T-shirt, and a plaid jacket. It was all too modern for what I was used to from the Consortium.

They never introduced him to us or anything like that, but they did begin outfitting him with various magical implements, such as a belt and a special pair of shoes. I couldn’t tell what they were supposed to do, and I didn’t know the significance of any of it at first.

It took a while to confirm what this man was here for. I overheard a few of the analysts talking about him.

He was a refugee from a world that was destroyed. It wasn’t clear how he had come to Carousel or whether he was immortal, but I did pick up that his name was Jim.

Jim was going to be the guinea pig instead of us.

And we were going to have to watch.