Book Nine, Chapter 43: Ramona Interlude

Ramona Mercer awoke standing on her feet about halfway down a grassy trail toward a bonfire larger than any she had ever seen. The terrain was rugged. After nearly tripping over a grapefruit-sized rock sticking out of the ground, she abruptly stopped walking to gather her wits.

Where am I? she silently asked the universe.

Moments earlier, she had been in the dream. Riley had been there. He had gone to the window, looked out, and disappeared mid-scream. Had she followed him?

Yes. Of course she had. She didn't want to. What she wanted most was to force herself to wake up. It wouldn't make a difference, would it? Either way, she would find herself in the apocalypse. But she had to look out the window.

Somehow she knew something was waiting there for her, something unspeakable. She had gone anyway, looked down, and saw... nothing.

Then she looked up. It was in the sky. Her dream self knew that, even though her conscious mind did not. It was always above. Eyes like dark pits sunk into a cloud, yet piercing all the same.

Eyes that stared down at her from the sky. Not a cloud, no. Something invisible to the eye but seen with the mind. Eyeless eyes that could see her.

"There you are," it said.

She had opened her mouth to scream, and then...

"Whoa, Ramona, don't stop or we'll all end up on our asses!" a man's voice called from behind her.

The trail was steep down toward the bonfire, so much so that when she turned and looked back, she saw three people towering over her. Quickly, she started walking again, hurrying her pace as she made her way down to the fire... down to the beach. Not an ocean beach, but a lake.

Had the circus spread to Lake Dyer?

She was On-Screen.

She set foot on the fine pebbles of the beach before she slowed down. She needed to assess the area around her and the people. She always hated that part. The first mystery of every storyline was figuring out who you are, the Atlas said. Yeah, sure. She hadn't even solved that mystery in real life.

There were five of them, all told. Two women, young, beautiful, already down by the fire. Three more people, two men and another woman, behind her on the trail. The others often bemoaned having to interact with NPCs. Their unnatural mannerisms, inherent fakeness, the way you could never tell whether you were talking to a person or their script, these things bothered them. Ramona didn't care so much. She had been raised in a world with only NPCs. When she was an angsty teenager decrying the evils of conformity and homogeneity, it turned out she was on to something.

Finding out her sister was faking her existence was devastating. Finding out everyone else was faking it was liberating. She was immune to the things the others said creeped them out, but sometimes she wondered if she creeped them out too. She was, after all, something entirely different than them. She was from an entirely different world altogether.

These NPCs were special. Every single one of them was a paragon, if their levels meant anything. She had actually seen and interacted with some of them during her life in Silas Dyrkon's little version of Carousel and never knew they were special.

But did she remember anything useful about them? Nope.

Oh well.

She scanned through them, reading their names off the red wallpaper. Geneva, Sidney, Celia, Ace, and Oscar.

Riley had talked about the paragons. He'd even listed them off before in their group training sessions. Had she been paying attention? Not at all. This was going to take a miracle. Normally she could count on Riley whispering in her ear, talking as if she knew everything he was talking about. Normally she had to wait for him to finish talking through things. He usually had to explain things a time or two before he had it all together. But when he did, the plan came next. That part she listened to more closely. Riley came alive when discussing a plan.

Who were these people? The Atlas didn't have a complete list of paragons to begin with, so it was possible that some of these people weren't even on the list.

Geneva was... a name. Ramona could swear she had seen that face on the news.

Sidney was the Scream Queen. A Final Girl. Good, she remembered something. That was one.

Celia... Now Celia seemed familiar. She knew that name, but it didn't go with that face. Not that young of a face, at least.

The paragons played their parts while letting her ogle. Celia was with Sidney. She was lying down, with her head in the Final Girl's lap, facing the fire. Was she in a trance?

Celia... As in the woman who would one day be Madam Celia Dane? The psychic? She must have been twenty years old in this scene. Ramona hardly recognized her. There must have been a lot of wisdom in those wrinkles because this younger version of her was acting pretty silly.

They were doing something touchy-feely. Nothing openly romantic, not yet at least. Maybe a massage... no. Sidney rubbed Celia's temples while whispering in her ear as Celia stared at the fire.

Not the weirdest way to spend a night with friends. Ramona almost hoped it would be her turn soon, whatever they were doing.

There was a keg. Ace had carried it down the hill to the beach. He was fit, blond, and gorgeous. Probably an athlete. Maybe an Athlete, Athlete.

Oscar had a red plastic cup in his mouth with his head tilted back just enough so that the beer in the cup would spill down his throat... and a bit on his shirt. Meanwhile, his hands each held an additional cup of beer, which he slowly poured into his mouth cup, creating a cascading waterfall of booze that he drank up to impress the others. Comedian was therefore high on the list of possibilities.

Geneva was doing her part as the mature one, looking at Oscar with disgust while sipping her own cup. That didn't help narrow things down too much; all it meant was that she was a girl reacting normally. She and Ace were talking about something as Oscar goofed off.

It was your typical college beach party. Maybe a little sparse, but that was normal enough. The bonfire grew higher as Ace tossed in another log, and Oscar jumped back from the embers and smoke, causing him to spill beer all down his shirt.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Paragons, playing roles, playing the main characters in a story. And she was just little old Ramona, the Hysteric.

Somehow, Geneva seemed to notice she had finished her survey of the group and called out, "Ramona, please save me from these boys!"

"Coming!" Ramona said, trying to match the chipper "girlfriends!" vibe that Geneva set.

She bounded across the beach over to where some logs had been set up as seats. As she got closer, she caught a whisper of what Sidney was saying to Celia: "Your eyelids are heavy. So heavy. Look into the fire and listen to my voice..."

Ace caught her staring. "Don't mind them," he said. "Sidney's trying to hypnotize Celia into feeling drunk so she can be our designated driver and still have a good time."

"A noble pursuit!" Oscar called out, raising one of his beer cups. He was a Latino man with hair down to his shoulders. Cute, if it wasn't for the smirk on his face. Ramona realized where she had seen him before. He was an ambulance-chasing attorney. She had seen his ads. Like Celia, he had been older, but it was him. She could almost remember his phone number just from the ad's jingle... what was it, 555-Something?

"Shut the fuck up," Sidney said. She wasn't a large woman, but she had spirit. "We're doing past life regression therapy."

"Oh no, not this again," Geneva said. "Sidney, you need to see a real therapist. What is this quack teaching you?"

"I'm trying to help Celia unlock her childhood memories," Sidney said. "It's real. Dr. Bob told me about it."

"Dr. Bob!" Oscar cried out with glee at the sound of the name.

"Obtaining childhood memories wouldn't be past life regression, would it?" Geneva asked. She seemed like the most adult of these young adults.

"In my past life, I was a child," Oscar said.

"You are this life too," Ace said, grabbing one of Oscar's empty cups from his hand. "Don't worry," he added. "When Tommy gets here, you won't need hypnotism to remember your past lives."

Who was Tommy? Ramona barely had time to question it before she heard the boat growing closer out on the water. The lake was beautiful, reflecting both the moon and the bonfire. All that light was broken up when a young man in an unbuttoned tropical shirt over a white undershirt and suspenders showed up, piloting a small airboat. The boat's giant propeller caused quite a ruckus and churned the water before he pulled it up on the beach to the roaring applause of his peers.

He was dashingly, darkly handsome. He smirked like Oscar did, but he was so much better at it. He nodded to her as he stepped off the boat carrying a suitcase.

She had seen him before. Tommy was the bartender for the Speakeasy. He was the Criminal paragon. His last name changed constantly on the red wallpaper. It was no wonder he fell into a life of crime when he talked and acted as smoothly as he did.

She wasn't surprised when the suitcase opened, and dozens of little plastic baggies were exposed to the firelight, filled with colorful pills and fragrant biologicals.

Maybe it was time to start socializing.

-

"So why are you trying to unlock childhood memories?" Ramona asked. The two young women may have been acting goofy, as friends often do in these situations, but they did appear to take their task seriously.

Celia kept her eyes fixed somewhere between the flames and the sky. "No reason. Just double-checking. I don't remember forgetting anything too important. Maybe I've repressed it," she said.

"It happens," Sidney said. "Dr. Bob..."

"Dr. Bob!" Oscar cheered.

"Dr. Bob says that we can suppress childhood memories for decades and only start to unpack them in our thirties," she continued, in what Ramona figured out was an exaggerated valley girl accent. "I was telling Celia and we were like, if we have something we need to confront our parents over, we don't want to wait until our thirties to find out. They might be dead by then."

"Oh my god," Ace said, laughing.

"That's smart," Oscar said.

"Thank you, Oscar," Sidney said. "Celia has volunteered to be my guinea pig. I want to see if it works before I let Dr. Bob do it on me. He gave me a book on it. It's about memory, dream archetypes and interpretation, and hypnosis. Pretty complicated stuff."

The girls all laughed. It was one big joke. Sidney tried the most to laugh, but Ramona wondered if she was faking. There was a moment when she looked so sad, but it might have just been for the camera.

"Hey, I'd do anything to remember my mom better," Ramona said. "Childhood memories are so hard to remember because you don't know you're supposed to yet. Everything seems like it will last forever."

"That's good," Tommy said, as he reached over toward Ramona, passing her a small baggie with red tablets inside. "You never know what you're supposed to remember. You don't know what's important."

Ramona waved him off. She had her Adverse Reaction trope equipped, and she did not want to add an overdose to whatever else Carousel had in store for her.

The night had worn on, and the fire got low. Carousel had filmed the entire thing. It didn't feel like important footage. It felt like a cage. Ramona would have done anything for a break. She could feel the paragons silently encouraging her as the night played out.

Something was about to happen. She didn't know what, but it would be something. She wasn't here on vacation. Her Restorative Catatonia trope required something to happen to her to put her in a coma. The only question was what it would be.

"So," Geneva asked, "have you regressed to childhood yet?"

"Almost there," Celia joked.

"Stop distracting her," Sidney said. "Our experiment will be ruined."

"They look closer to finding a sexual awakening than to any childhood memories," Oscar whispered to Ace, too loudly. Ramona chuckled.

They talked softly as the fire turned to embers. Ramona joined in where she could. She didn't know if this footage would end up in the final cut, but if it did, just being in it would give her some narrative weight or momentum or whatever it is that Riley was always going on about.

After a while, all was silent, and everyone in the group had wrapped themselves up in blankets. Tommy was kind enough to share his with Ramona. She wondered what Riley might say when he saw the footage later. She wondered if he would even care.

"She's asleep," Sidney whispered, cradling Celia's head in her lap while trying to smoke a marijuana cigarette that had gone out.

"You went too far," Oscar said. "She's a baby."

Everyone, including Sidney, stifled a laugh, trying not to wake up the one-year-old, twenty-year-old, sixty-year-old palm reader.

But that didn't help.

"No!" Celia screamed as she bolted awake. She got up quickly. Somehow, she overshot her launch and ended up stumbling into the fire. Before any real damage could be done, she rolled over onto the pebbles. If the fire hadn't died down, she might have been in trouble.

Everyone quickly rose to help her up.

There were many "Are you okay?" and "Oh my god, Celia, are you alright?" coming from the group. Ramona joined right on in.

"It was terrible," Celia said.

"Did you get burned?" Oscar said. "Damn, I told them we didn't need that big of a fire."

Sidney immediately started checking Celia's body for signs she had been singed, but the psychic herself was not being helpful.

"Not the fire," Celia said. "Not the fire. There was a man!"

"Where?" Sidney asked. "Not on this beach."

"He was under the window when I looked out... my friend went missing. She must have gone out the window."

"What are you saying?" Tommy asked. "What is she talking about?"

"It was a sleepover, and one of the girls went missing when I was a kid. She must have gone out the window. When I went to check, there was a man outside, looking up. His name was... Highbrow Hew." Celia was crying, absolutely wailing. She might have made a good Hysteric.

"What the fuck? How much of that junk did you give her?" he asked Tommy.

"Nothing. She didn't want anything!" Tommy answered.

"She didn't even drink!" Sidney said. "Sweetie, did you remember something? A sleepover?"

"See," Oscar said. "This is why you should keep your memories as repressed as possible."

Ramona stood back. She had experienced the dream before. She wasn't learning anything. It sounded like that same old psychic dream.

Celia didn't calm down, not for some time. She was hauled to the cabin they were sleeping in, swearing up and down that she didn't remember having a sleepover at all and that it wasn't even her house.

All the while, Ramona seemed to notice something strange. The words, the sound of them, the imagery that flashed into her mind, the story of Highbrow Hew... it was nagging at her. She had dreamed that same nightmare plenty, but for some reason, all of a sudden, she couldn't stop thinking about it.

It was clawing at her mind, cramming itself into the corners of her brain. It began to seriously scare her.

And she was worried that the drugs might give her an Adverse Reaction.

She wasn't looking forward to going to sleep that night.