There were tens of thousands of us climbing out of the cradle. Carousel wanted its big impact shot, and that was it. Or so I thought.

I spent my time filming with the camera I got from Danny. While the storyline had ended and we had won, that didn't mean the filming was over. Not for a storyline like this, where the win condition was something other than a traditional happy ending.

Eventually, we found Isaac and Kelsey. Multiple times, actually, because they had been copied. But the real versions of them, I had to assume, stuck with us as we moved along.

They were emotionally and mentally drained. Timelessness was a real drag, as I understood it.

The whole escape was an absolute mess, with very little coordination, and most of it was On-Screen.

In the masses of non-player characters, I eventually found one I had not seen in quite a while. Bones Ibarra, who had never even entered the cradle and gotten written off because of it, stared at us in amazement as soon as he found us.

We went Off-Screen for this meeting.

“I sent you in there to save two or three little players, and you come out with all this?” he said.

“What can I say? I'm an overachiever,” I said.

Antoine Stone, or at least the one being played by a shapeless one, ignored Bones completely. He wasn't meta-aware.

Bones pointed to him and said, “Well, you're not that much of an overachiever. I believe these things were supposed to stay inside.”

“My job was to get to the end of the story,” I said. “No one said I had to actually beat the enemy, although I'm sure we'll get docked points for being anticlimactic.”

Bones shrugged his shoulders.

“I'm telling you, something's brewing on the script,” he said. “It might not be so anticlimactic after all. Not for the audience, at least.”

“Yeah, well, I feel like we're just along for the ride at this point,” I said.

“Story of my afterlife,” Bones said. “If you have need of a river guide or treasure hunter, I hope you'll think of me. Dark days are ahead.”

Weren’t they always?

He left us and went to find the actual Antoine to have a chat with, adventurer to adventurer.

To think, my plan for him, had I not come up with a better one, was to have him crash his helicopter into the entrance of the cradle in order to seal it. Yes, we had certainly gone a different direction from that.

It was time for Carousel to show us exactly how different.

The red wallpaper was suddenly overtaken by video footage projected onto it. The footage played so loudly in my mind that it was hard to see anything else.

I saw a news anchor seated at a desk with a serious look on his face.

“The Peruvian government tonight is calling it the largest civilian recovery operation in the country's history,” he said. “At last count, over four thousand, I'm sorry, that's fourteen thousand people have now been pulled from the rainforest after suffering what is reported to be some sort of prolonged captivity. Peruvian authorities are coordinating with the Red Cross and multiple NGOs in an effort to untangle what must be one of the most perplexing mysteries, or viral stunts, in the history of the modern world.”

The footage suddenly cut away. We were in a montage. Overhead, a news helicopter filmed us all. We were a sea of silver, as we all wore those emergency blankets that were supposed to keep us warm. Their silvery color reflected all the various light sources in the dark forest as the camera captured all.

It was only then that I realized that I, too, was trying to cover up with one of those emergency blankets to keep off a light trickle of rain as I continued to film. Carousel was playing with us now, teleporting us around like it was nothing. Heck, it might have simply been blanking our memories to make it seem like we were teleporting. It was getting that last bit of footage, and for whatever reason, it didn't want us to have much agency in the matter.

That same news anchor's voice continued. “Officials have not yet released a coherent account of how so many people came to be captured in one location, or what criminal organization or military might be responsible. Survivors themselves are giving accounts that our network is still working to verify.”

Rapid cuts between footage of random people being interviewed about their time in the cradle flickered onto the screen, with each sound bite crazier than the last, as they claimed interdimensional invaders and shape-shifters were to blame.

The news anchors and reporters always scoffed or acted incredibly skeptical, but only at first.

The next piece of footage was of two news hosts. They were arguing about some of the claims made by survivors.

“And this is how you know it's legitimate, Tom,” the woman was saying. “We have well over ten thousand survivors, all of whom give different stories of their abduction, its circumstances, and its culprits. But they all use the same two words: shapeless ones.”

“Diana, lots of mass trauma situations create a shared vocabulary. We've had experts on who will…”

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

But then he was cut off as the first host said, “With nearly nineteen thousand people from different ethnic groups and eleven different language groups all repeating the same two words?”

The other host threw up his hands with no response.

Next was footage from what I first assumed was a podcast, but then realized was probably talk radio because of the time period, where the host was talking to an alleged survivor.

“Now tell us, if you can, about these shapeless ones. What do they look like?” the host asked.

His guest was shaken. “I know this is going to sound ridiculous,” he said. “I know it does. But they looked just like us when they wanted to, but sometimes they unfolded themselves like, I don't know, like maybe they were made of millions of little threads. I saw one of them get shot in the back once, and the hole, it looked normal at first. There was even blood coming out of it. But a few seconds later, it just kind of undid itself, and suddenly the hole didn't look like a gunshot wound. It looked like… I can't even explain it, like some sort of giant hallway twenty miles deep right in the guy's back. I know it sounds ridiculous, but these things, they don't make any sense if you see them. When you see the real them.”

The next piece of footage was the title of a documentary titled The Sunken Cradle: A Film by Riley Lawrence. It was the documentary my character must have made from all the footage I took from the cradle.

The neat part was that, as the montage skipped through the documentary, much of the footage was the same I was filming at that very moment of our escape through the jungle. The footage changed as I moved my hand. It was little things like that that let you know Carousel had a wonderful AV specialist on staff.

Not much of the documentary was shown, but its content was clear. Footage of the shapeless ones in their many forms was shown as the storyline’s credits rolled.

I even saw my name: Riley Lawrence as Riley Lawrence.

The footage came interspersed with several news pundits arguing. It was basic bickering, and then it shut off as the credits continued. Some believed the accounts of the shapeless ones. Others said that this Riley Lawrence character was clearly off his rocker after a distinguished career.

Then the footage cut to a talk-show set, with a man delivering a monologue. What was funny is I had actually seen him before, but I couldn't remember his name. He was one of the characters from the Eternal Savers Club storyline, one of the ones who got kidnapped at the very beginning, which told me that he probably was a talk show host in real life. Carousel sure did love to recycle.

“We need to straighten our backs and take a deep breath,” he said. “Listen to what we're talking about. Yesterday, I had a man sitting on my couch debating with me the difference between an extraterrestrial and an interdimensional threat. Is this really the reaction we have to what must be a hoax? These so-called shapeless ones—what a lazy moniker, by the way. They came here to do one thing: to copy our shapes. Of course, they did. It's a good thing they didn't call themselves brainless ones, or they'd be taking our brains. Either way, the result seems to be the same.”

The audience gave him a polite chuckle.

“This Lawrence fellow,” he continued, “clearly a hack, uses his documentaries as his personal travel fund, and now he wants us to believe that we are beset by creatures beyond our understanding. That they have been here throughout all time. And governments around the world are latching on to the story. News organizations, corporations. And why is that? It's because of fear. Scared people don't ask why their taxes are high, and their grocery prices are even higher. They want us afraid. Now, I don't know where we get these twenty-some thousand refugees, most of whom were never reported missing. But I will tell you one thing: the mass hysteria will die down, and some of us will retain our self-respect, and others of us—"

Something must have happened in front of the speaker that disturbed him. Some sort of sound.

“What's happening? Turn on the house lights,” he said.

Someone listened to him, and then one of the cameramen for his show turned to film a member of the audience.

She was standing up, clearly straining and struggling.

“Ma'am, are you in distress? Someone help her.”

But before anyone could, suddenly her body burst apart, parts sloughing off like wet watermelon. What remained was something that looked a lot like what was left over of Alasdair. It was a red mass shaped like shredded veins and viscera.

The audience started to scream and scatter.

Meanwhile, the shapeless one, who had for a very long time been in the shape of that poor woman's DNA, and probably some of her ancestors', too, had suddenly remembered that it wasn't DNA at all. It was something much greater than that.

It turned out that no matter how little DNA was stripped from your body, you pretty much turned to soup. The building blocks of life were finicky that way. You can survive with your DNA cooked by radiation, for a while, but when it bursts out of your cells, death comes quicker.

The being continued unfolding itself until, eventually, it disappeared.

The camera turned back to the host, who was absolutely flabbergasted and at a loss for words until a producer somewhere said, “Cut to commercial.”

And so the montage changed. Instead of skeptical news hosts, there were dozens of clips of people doing exactly what the woman in the audience had done: liquifying. Rumors of the shapeless ones had begun waking up all the slumbering pieces of themselves they had left over. Sometimes they woke from within the genetic code of their descendants; other times, in places you would never think of.

I certainly had gotten the news out.

Some shapeless ones must have gotten eaten by various decomposers, bitten by mosquitoes, or swallowed alive in oceans and become part of the food chain. Since the creatures were basically infinite, even one drop was enough to cause a massacre whenever the shapeless one would wake up and decide to stop being whatever it had pretended to be. Entire parts of forests fell as trees just collapsed.

Society went into unrest as entire family lines just kind of stopped existing. Ancient shapeless ones in the form of corpses began to rise from their graves when little, distant pieces of themselves somehow heard the story of what happened at the sunken cradle.

It was a disaster of apocalyptic proportions.

In The End, one final line was sent out over a black screen as the credits ended.

“We always believed that we were alone in the universe,” a man said, whimpering over a radio. “And now we are.”

Suddenly, the red wallpaper show stopped, and I found myself standing outside the entrance to the cradle. The tens of thousands of escapees were gone, and all who remained were players. Even Camden was there. That saved him quite a walk.

Kimberly had disappeared, but then we expected that. I didn’t know what she was, but she wasn’t the Kimberly we lost. I hoped that the real Kimberly would have here memories, though. Carousel had done something similar when hundreds of Dina's from different timelines helped us kill an army of time-travelling serial killers.

“Where's Bobby?” Isaac asked.

But I ignored him as Antoine and Anna were forced to tell him that they didn't know where he had gone.

They were going to have to get used to that, never being able to acknowledge that they knew the truth.

I had been reset. All of the sweat, dirt, and blood that had covered me were now gone, and I had my old, familiar hoodie back.

The thing was, I wasn't the only person wearing my hoodie.

Standing in the entrance of the cradle was an exact copy of me. My name, my plot armor, my tropes. All of it checked out on the red wallpaper. The only thing that revealed his true nature was the fact that, for whatever reason, his right hand morphed and elongated as it seemed to fuse with an object. It only took me a few moments to realize what that object was.

It was a videotape.