Book Five, Chapter 35: Walk of Shame

Book Five, Chapter 35: Walk of Shame

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.

"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.