The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG-Chapter 46Book Eight, : A Left Turn

They say that you don't feel the fall itself, you feel the acceleration. Well, they were full of it, because as our pontoon fell down the endless waterfall, I could feel my stomach in my throat the entire time, and I never lost the sensation.

It took me minutes to even start thinking again.

I was afraid to even look around to see how the others were doing. It wasn't the type of fear that lived in the head. It was the type that permeated the entire body. I could feel my muscles loosening and tightening in an unending cycle as I held on tight to the railing of the pontoon boat.

After five minutes, I was finally brave enough to lean out and look back at the others.

Cassie had tied herself to the boat, maybe fearing that she didn't have the Mettle to hold on. Camden held on to the steering wheel with white knuckles, his body lifting off the seat ever so slightly.

Antoine, though, stood in the back, grabbing onto the high railing beneath the hard upper deck. I didn't know if that was some sort of macho thing or if he had been caught off guard.

But it was Anna's scream that caught my attention. She was still up on top of the second deck, a place we had intentionally placed her so that she would be just a little bit more in danger than the rest of us to activate Cassie's Empathic Shield ability.

I craned my neck to look up at her. I could still see her hands and arms wrapped around the railing. I could see her mouth moving as she was trying to tell us something.

She must have seen something up ahead or down below, depending on which words were appropriate for our current orientation.

It was time for me to be brave. I stood up, holding on to whatever rails I could get my hands on as I moved up off the seat I had been sitting in.

"Left." That's what Anna was yelling. "Go left."

I did my best to look ahead and see what she was talking about, and that's when I saw it. There was a left turn coming up. The falling waterfall diverged as a normal river might.

It wasn't clear why she was telling us about the left turn until I saw a flash of light from ahead and realized that the reflective orange water wing we had put in the bag with the cue ball and tracker was shining back at me. It had taken a left turn down the waterfall.

Against all instinct, I turned myself around and threw myself in the direction of the driver's seat.

"Turn left," I screamed, trying to be louder than the sound of the blood pumping through Camden's ears or the roar of the water around us.

"And do what?" Camden screamed. "How am I supposed to steer when we're falling?"

Camden was going to spout out the logical problem with trying to turn while falling down a waterfall, as if physics were somehow in charge despite all evidence.

"Just turn left," I said, pointing ahead.

He looked where I was pointing and squinted to get a good view. We still had time to get over to the other side of the running waterfall, assuming our motors would let us and that the pontoon wouldn't topple the moment it turned a little bit sideways.

The boat had two motors, and while no pontoon boat of this type was particularly powerful, it was buffed by Anna's Along For The Ride trope. We had to hope it would be enough.

"Everyone get on the left," Camden yelled after my intense, scared looks had convinced him that we had to try to turn while falling.

I was holding on to the rail on the right of the boat for dear life while talking to Camden, so I had to basically jump over to the other side. Unfortunately, Cassie was in the seat right next to me.

If I understood what Camden was saying, it was that we had to get on the left side of the boat so that when we turned left at this speed, the boat wouldn't barrel-roll.

I tapped Cassie on the shoulder and pointed to the other side of the boat.

She looked back at me, wide-eyed.

"What?" she screamed.

"Go to the left side," I said.

She didn’t respond, but at least she was untying herself. I went ahead and did the jump back to the left side, grabbing onto the railing and then reaching back toward Cassie so I could grab onto her.

She eventually worked up the courage to make the leap.

Antoine saw what we were doing and also moved to the left at the back of the boat.

There was no chance we could communicate this to Anna in time for her to actually pull it off. All that was left was to hope that movie magic could save us.

The turn was approaching, and as I stared at it, my mind refused to understand what I was looking at exactly, because while the waterfall was falling, the path to the left that we were trying to follow looked like an ordinary river. In fact, it looked like the waterfall joined the river right at the end of some rapids.

We weren’t going to hit the waterfall. It looked like we would transition straight from the fall to the river like they were stitched together.

As we approached, Camden turned the wheel to the left and gunned the engines. Even though the boat was falling, the propellers were technically in the water, but I had no idea how effective they would be at pushing us in any direction.

It turned out they were pretty effective. Not as much as they would be if we were on a lake, but the boat did begin to turn left.

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And it began to tilt to the right.

I instinctually leaned off as far to the left of the boat as I could, hoping that my meager weight would be enough to stop the boat from tipping. It wasn't clear if that had any effect at all, but as the boat reached the junction, we barely made it to the leftmost path. As we did, exiting the waterfall and skidding forward onto a section of the river that had been connected to it, the boat tried to tip over but never quite did. It did bounce a few times, though.

And while the water we were now on was flowing quickly, it was nowhere nearly as quick as the waterfall had been.

I looked back behind us, and in the place where we had entered the new river, there was no waterfall, only a few white water rapids.

"Woo!" Antoine screamed from the back, unable to stop himself from laughing. The adrenaline from that drop was enough to put a smile on anyone's face, along with a smattering of tears and snot.

We had made it.

Camden slowed the engines as I struggled to get to my feet under the new gravity and found my way to the radio tracker, just to make sure that our target was still in range. While I couldn't see it up ahead because of a bend in the river, when I pointed the antenna in the right direction, I saw its blip on the screen.

"I need a break," Camden said as he stumbled out of the driver's chair, and I replaced him.

We were all tired at that point, though the waterfall had been a great way to wake us up.

"You still up there, Anna?" I asked.

"I think so," she said with a laugh.

And so we sailed onward, chasing the tracker through the river, not knowing how long it would take us to get where we were going and hoping that there were no more waterfalls on the way.

It was another hour on the river before I could get visual confirmation of the cue ball. It had been moving fast off the waterfall, and we had to move a little bit faster to catch up.

We had seen the normal montage of storylines as we went along, but for the most part, we were left alone.

The further we sailed, the darker things got, not because of the sun going down or anything, but because the sky became overcast and then stormy. The last thing I wanted was to have to navigate this river in the rain.

The others had moved on to more mundane conversations.

"I actually like it when the ketchup soaks all the way through the bread like that," Cassie said as she examined a baloney sandwich we had made from stuff we bought at the marina after the last storyline. "Plus, the cheese slice gets watery somehow, and it’s like a sauce. Reminds me of being a kid."

"Can't say we ate a lot of baloney sandwiches growing up," Camden said. "My mom wouldn't have allowed it. If she didn't pack our lunch with at least 12 ingredients, not counting the protein, she felt like she was letting us down."

“But she did teach you manners, right?” Anna asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “But not well. You asked if I liked it; I thought you really wanted to know.”

It had taken a while after the waterfall before we could start having normal conversations again. We even let Anna come down onto the bottom deck to walk around like a normal person instead of one of those Viking carvings of a woman in the front of their long boats.

"Does anyone hear singing?" she asked.

In fact, I did hear it once she mentioned it. It was a beautiful melody that almost sounded like the wind from a distance, but got louder and more pleasing the closer we got.

"It's probably going to be sirens," I said. "We can't listen to their song."

Luckily, I was one step ahead of Carousel on that one. The marina we had shopped at had earplugs, the kind that kids would wear to prevent ear infections when swimming.

Before we got close enough to even tell what the mermaids were saying, let alone what they looked like, we all had our ears plugged, just like the heroes of myth as they avoided being lured against the rocks.

And it worked for a while, too.

We sailed down the river, and then we saw them; they were like sunbathers on the bank, singing to themselves at first. But then, once they saw us, they slithered down into the water and swam toward our boat, encircling us like giggling schoolgirls around the K-pop idol.

And when they got close, the earplugs made no difference at all. Their song vibrated through my skin and teeth, and I could hear it as if I wasn't wearing any protection at all.

And the song was a beautiful melody, a promise that I couldn't help but believe. And while it wasn't clear what they were promising, it was happiness. My natural instincts fought against the thoughts, but they couldn’t block the feelings. Whatever their promise was, it was a blissful existence. All I had to do was jump in the water with the half-fish women and swim away.

But I never did.

The voice of doubt was stronger than the song. Resisting the melody gave me a headache and burning sensations in the muscles of my arms and legs as I tensed them to prevent myself from jumping overboard. It was painful, but possible.

I couldn't say the same for everyone.

Camden was absolutely panicking. The temptation was strong, and he was holding on to the side rail across from me with all his might for fear that he might jump into the water.

Antoine didn't seem affected at all. He grabbed Camden by the shoulders just to be sure he didn’t get any funny ideas.

Anna was a little worried, but still didn't fall for the trap.

But Cassie did. Whatever she heard was everything she wanted to hear. Luckily, Anna seemed to pick up on this, and before Cassie could jump over the side of the boat, Anna had dragged her to the floor.

If anyone was saying anything, I couldn't tell because the earplugs blocked that sound.

I looked out at the women in the water around us. They were smiling and singing, and while they could definitely be called beautiful in the way a flower was, they weren't quite beautiful in the way a human woman was. A picture of one would never fool someone.

We sailed on, with the sirens growing increasingly upset with us until they finally stopped singing and struck the boat harmlessly with their fists before swimming back to the river's edge.

We sailed onward, and I tried to make sense of what had just happened until it hit me as I watched Cassie slowly come down off whatever spell she was under.

It was strange. You might almost expect a psychic to deal with a magical song like that better than others, but maybe they were even more receptive to it.

As I glanced around, I noticed a pattern. The amount the song affected us seemed to be based not on our archetype, but rather on our Grit.

Cassie only had two Grit, while the rest of us had at least five. Normally, Grit wouldn't help with something like that. Magic was the weakness of tough guys, after all.

But then Antoine had his Willpower Is Magic equipped, and a picture started to form in my mind. That trope was extremely useful in many storylines, but it wasn't known to have many uses outside of them. In fact, the Atlas recommended not equipping it outside of storylines.

And yet, if I didn't know better, his trope had already saved us twice. It had helped us ward off the first ghost we found on the river, and now it had helped us resist a siren song.

All from a trope that was never supposed to work outside of storylines.

It occurred to me that storylines were not part of what Carousel originally was. They were part of the logic that the Manifest Consortium had added when they gamified the magic of this world.

We were on an adventure. A real adventure. A plot.

I couldn't shake the feeling that maybe tropes were powered by story, not just storylines.

The implication of that got my mind racing so much that it took me an hour to remember to take out my earplugs.

When a foul smell entered my nostrils, I snapped out of my contemplation. We had entered a swamp area. There was no telling what monsters hid in those waters.

As we navigated it slowly, Camden reported that the tracking device had stopped moving. We approached it to find it stuck in the mud by a strange device that looked like some sort of communication device about the size of a parking meter with a blaring red light.

The device was an Omen for a story called Familiar Grounds. Its poster featured a group of people in futuristic biohazard suits walking down a trail at night.

The cue ball, in tracking down Ramona, needed to make a left turn where there wasn’t one. Unfortunately, we knew how we were supposed to change that.

The storyline was at the This is Scaring Me difficulty level according to my scouting trope. The second-highest of the ordinary difficulties.

It was a risk. It was intimidating. It was the only way forward.