"Hey, buddy," Eleanor says gently. She's waist-deep in the water now, too, because Chidi couldn't hear them from the shore. At least she's earning mad SURPISE! points for it.
"Eleanor! You're okay! The Scary Heads didn't get you!"
They can unpack who the Scary Heads are once they get to the shore. "Yeah, I'm alright. What are you doing in the river, though?"
"I'm trying to… cover… my scent," Chidi says, seemingly realizing how insane he's sounding as the words leave him. "It's quite possible that I'm going insane."
"Pssh," Eleanor laughs. "Join the club. I just tracked down my distinctly not-dead mom with the Devil, who convinced me to forgive her… Or something. And then an intergalactic not-robot not-computer not-girl who's read her mind assured me that she loves me. So." She wants to add more—the whole part about how the same devil had packed 500 years of memories into her and how she no longer felt like herself, but in a good way, and how she was capable of love. Of loving Chidi, specifically, but it seems like the thread his sanity is holding on by is already quite thin.
"Plus, there's the whole thing about how we're doomed to be tortured in hell together."
"Plus that."
"I need to sleep."
"Yeah," Eleanor says, reaching one hand out, "I think we all do."
Chidi takes her hand and they wade through the water, back to the shore, leaning on each other for balance, steps unsteady in the rushing water, slippery pebbles shifting underfoot.
"Okay, time to head back," Eleanor announces after they crash back up on land.
"Please," Chidi says desperately.
"But I was just about to pull ahead in SURPRISE!" Jason protests.
"You got a billion points for finding Chidi," Eleanor reminds him. "You swept. Game's over."
"Yeah, but after I found Chidi, I pointed to him so you found him and Tahani and Janet found him, so now we all have a billion more points. And Chidi gets twice the river points for getting you to jump in the river."
"How did you devise this game? And why?" Tahani asks.
"Janet didn't like not knowing things, so I tried to make the unpredictable fun."
"It worked!" Janet chirps. "Thank you."
"Maybe the real winner was Janet all along," Jason says thoughtfully. "She got to have fun not knowing things, and I got to have fun knowing things." He tells them about how they played trivia at one of the bars in town and how smart it made him feel.
"I mean," Eleanor says, "you know what happens in the afterlife. That's pretty significant knowledge."
"More substantial than bar trivia," Chidi puts in.
Jason pumps one fist in the air and cheers, "I'm the smartest man in the world! We have all the wisdom in the world!"
They start to migrate back to the hotel, slowly but surely, sharing between themselves the highlights and lowlights of their night. Chidi demands to know how Eleanor could have possibly mistaken the bar name Ryan's for Michel's, and no one can figure it out. No one, including Chidi, can figure out what exactly Chidi thinks happened in town, but they're all happy to put it in the past. He seriously needs to sleep.
Eleanor is aware of her every step as they walk. Sometimes her steps synchronize with her friends', then fall apart again. Janet is leading the way; everyone else has been wandering too long to keep track of where they are and where the hotel was.
Being part of a pack still makes something deep down inside of her squirm, but it feels buried. She's trying to reconcile the eight hundred versions of herself that were jammed inside, and it feels scary to shove the part of her that was her one true self until a couple of days ago off to the side, to replace her. Absurd, yes, but the absurdity is familiar by now.
She could run off, try to outrun the sunrise, go back to Arizona, or find somewhere entirely new, but even the temptation to do so is muted. She welcomes the rush of memories, allows the people alongside her to feel like home.
The walk back to the hotel brings them to the falls, where they stop and lean over the railing, starting off at the waterfall that gave the town its name. Waves of water surge and crash over the edge before rushing past them. No one can speak over the sound of the rushing water, but they all wordlessly agree to take a moment to enjoy the view, just as the first pink light of morning starts to creep up from the horizon.
It's morning already, and they're going to be in so much trouble when Michael realizes they've gotten no sleep between them, but the clouds look like cotton candy, and even though Eleanor knows now that they were wrong when they named the skies the heavens, she understands why. Perhaps the sky knows they're not supposed to be here, perhaps it's trying to offer them a glimpse of the real Good Place, while it still can.
There's a sense of unity, and Eleanor swears that they're all feeling the same thing, that she knows them so well that they must be sharing each other's thoughts.
It feels like the ending is coming. It feels like the heavens are beckoning them again, to take them into eternity with each other. The real world, out on the road and back at home and everywhere in between, feels inconsequential, when Eleanor knows what lies beyond and when she's had a taste of eternity.
She does have all the wisdom in the world, but she can't put it into words or force it to silence the parts of her that don't want to let her old life become just memories. It won't help her make Chidi understand how she feels or stop Michael from being furious at them in a matter of hours.
By the end of the day, they'll be in Canada, saving humanity. She's not sure all the wisdom in the world can help her do that. Maybe it can't save her friends or save herself or change the way the world works or even guarantee that they won't get into another screaming match when they hit the road again, but it's real. She can feel it here in the morning fog with her friends that made her eight hundred different people.
"Can we promise to do better today?" she asks her friends as they walk away, about to face the day.
"We're friends," Tahani says with a confident nod. "It shouldn't be that hard."
"We're more than friends," Eleanor adds, hoping no one will notice how she's looking at Chidi. "We're all, like, soulmates."
"More than soulmates," Jason says. Then, voice cracking: "You guys are… my dream blunt rotation."
They all crowd together, linking arms, cradling shoulders, holding hands.
"Plus," Jason says after a fond pause. "I'm thinking of some rules for a game to play in the car. It's called Amadeus, and it's really simple. In order to figure out who goes first, everyone has to pick a color, a number, a animal, and a TV detective…"