Book Five, Chapter 101

Our celebration was muted when we got back to the loft and found a note from the others: they had gone on a storyline.

They couldn’t even wait four days for us and had decided to get a jump on trying to find new rescue tropes. It was good news to me, but it meant I was going to wait to reveal my one-sided chat with the mysterious game maker who whispered to me at the theater.

I wanted everybody to be there. Truth be told, I didn’t even know if I should talk about it at all, but I hadn’t been sworn to secrecy.

At the same time, she—whoever she was—did sound like she was risking a lot just to talk to me.

I had prepared several storyline options for them. The storyline they chose was called The Groundskeeper.

It was similar to The Astralist in that it was much simpler and easier depending on the archetypes or aspects you brought into it. Still, it had a good chance of dropping a rescue trope, according to the Atlas.

Ramona, Isaac, Cassie, Dina, and Bobby weren’t exactly the best-built team. Still, the Atlas made it clear that The Groundskeeper was a pretty simple story: light on plot, light on character development, and closer to a puzzle.

I was confident they could handle the puzzle. The Omen was a wallet sticking out of a pile of dirt at a construction site—simple, straightforward.

I trusted them. All I could ask myself was if we had done enough to prep them for it, as if that was my responsibility.

I looked back at the days of Camp Dyer when I literally didn’t think about any of the other teams most of the time—at least not as far as their runs were concerned, how things had changed.

If they managed to find a rescue trope, that meant they could potentially get a good jump in levels, which they sorely needed. All of my plans about how we were going to gradually build up the players and rescue newbies were starting to get reshuffled as I considered the warning that we were somehow at risk of the audience abandoning us.

What did that even mean? Because if it was literal, that would be an absolute disaster.

When we got back, we had a nice dinner at the restaurant below Kimberley’s loft. One thing that our rescue did not skimp on was the reward money. We were all able to replenish our funds from that one storyline—we averaged around 80 dollars apiece.

The funny thing was, I had hoped to walk away with some of the silver that Kirst had brought in. But the little bit I had managed to hold on to had disappeared at the end of the storyline, and it was not possible to plunder any. When Kimberley triggered Secret Lore, everything about the set had changed.

On the bright side, we did walk out with a couple of guns and my large silver knife with the trope attached.

As we ate our dinner, no one wanted to ask if we should go check the missing poster board to see if the others had failed and needed to be rescued.

I could tell we were all thinking it, though, because Andrew was talking about how his brother and sister had been brought to Carousel—Isaac and Cassie. There was a tension in the air.

At Camp Dyer, it was a very sad thing when someone you loved was tricked into coming to Carousel to find you.

The same went for our little collection at the loft.

Still, we had all been trained on how to deal with the stress of waiting for another team to return from a storyline. We did things to keep our minds off it, including watching the final cut of Stray Dawn.

I thought we had done a pretty good job, but the final film was even better than I expected. Carousel filmed a lot of flashbacks to Clara’s upbringing—or at least a fictionalized version of it—to help fill in the story gaps. I didn’t know if we got credit for that or not.

Secret Lore didn’t seem to affect things because it was triggered after we had already run the storyline. Yet, watching those flashback scenes with Agnes Woolsey—AKA Agnes Withers—I could definitely sense an unseen darkness as they pretended to be a happy family.

My mind, of course, wandered back to what that nameless, faceless man behind me in the theater had said about there being a tavern and a maid who was supposed to be the key to unlocking Secret Lore for Stray Dawn. I took to the Atlas to try to find some tavern somewhere that would give the answers.

I didn’t find anything—the book was simply too big. I would look until I found it. I always did.

~-~

Antoine felt sincerely better. That’s what he said.

It wasn’t an instant fix, no, but I could see a more genuine optimism in his eyes—not just cheering and rallying like he always did, but something honest.

He started talking about picking up a jogging route and even asked me if I could go with him to scout.

I said I’d think about it. The thought of going out into the world filled with omens for exercise seemed so silly.
“We might have to steal you a treadmill,” I said.
He laughed.

The other team—which was something I quickly came to think of them as—started to act more like a unit as soon as we brought Logan and Avery to Kimberley’s loft.

I could see why Logan was their leader. He was older than them, and while he was a Cynic Comedian, that didn’t stop him from being charismatic or from projecting something like confidence, even if it might have been apathy in reality.

The night after we got back, we were up on the roof drinking and celebrating our win when I finally heard the story of how Logan came to Carousel.

“So, I go into the doctor’s office because of some stomach pain. It was so bad I couldn’t ignore it. I figured maybe I had an ulcer or ate something that didn’t agree with me. Turns out, it was pancreatic cancer.”

He let the words hang for a moment, then said, “No sugar-coating, no optimism. Just: ‘You’ve got cancer, and it’s advanced, better get a will written up,’ that sort of speech. I appreciated it.”

He was a big wine drinker. No, he didn’t drink a lot. He was a big wine holder. All night, I watched him. He barely drank at all. He glanced at the glass, swirling the liquid, but not a drop of it touched his lips that I saw.

“Katie—my fiancée—she wasn’t ready to give up,” he said. “She’s got this determination, this belief that there’s always something you can do. Me? I figured the experts had already spoken. I was already mentally planning vacations, figuring out how I would blow my savings, that sort of thing. I had six months to live and too much debauchery on my bucket list.”

He paused, lost in a memory.

“But Katie doesn’t stop. She starts digging into every alternative therapy she can find. Meditation, acupuncture, diets I wouldn’t feed a rabbit—you name it, she tried to talk me into it. I went along with all of it, mostly to keep her from losing her mind over this whole thing. But deep down, I didn’t believe any of it would work.”

He paused again, letting the wind blow over the roof with a loud, haunting gust.

“Then, one day, she gets this letter. No email, no website link—a letter. It’s from some clinic in a place called Carousel. They claimed they’d heard about my case and had a treatment nobody else could offer. They didn’t say much more. No details, no credentials, no doctor’s name. Just ‘Carousel.’”

His lips twitched into a brief smile. “I told her it sounded sketchy as hell. She told me it was worth a shot. Finally, I put my foot down. I said no. I sent a letter back to the address we had, which didn’t even exist according to the internet. I said, ‘This is bullshit. I don’t believe it. Stop harassing my fiancée.’”

He smacked the table as if to signify that was the end.

Of course, we all knew what happened next.

“Got another letter three days later. They said it was a lie. There was no clinic. What they had was something else. Then they lay it out, the whole thing—the game, the deaths, the whole bargain. ‘If you come here, you will die, but that might not be the end.’”

For the first time, someone interrupted.

“So, that convinced you?” Antoine asked.

“Of course it didn’t convince me,” Logan said. “I thought it was bullshit. But this disease was doing a number on me. I had months left, and I had to watch my fiancée lose the love of her life. She deserved better than that. I had to leave. I wasn’t brave. I was a coward. It was easier to come here than to see her cry.”

He set his wine glass down.

“I figured, what the hell? I didn’t have it in me to die slowly. So now, I die quickly.”

It was quiet after he told the story. He told it with a funny energy, but it was all for show.

“So, that is why I came to Carousel,” he said. “I suppose all invitees have a similar story, right?”

Surely, they did.

He had a trope called Awfully Considerate Symptoms, which made it so any terminal or life-altering illness he had only showed symptoms when plot-relevant. Apparently, outside of a storyline, in his day-to-day life, his symptoms were never relevant to the plot. Carousel was an open-world game, technically, so the plot was rarely relevant.

He lived perpetually, his disease held back by a plot device.

So, he had the same backstory as Wade Wilson in the Deadpool movie. I didn’t say that out loud.

~-~

All of my worrying about Bobby and the others was moot because, a day and a half after we got back, they did too—though they were a bit worse for wear.

They didn’t tell us what happened because they didn’t want to spoil us with the mesmerizing plot of The Groundskeeper, but I could tell it had traumatized them.

Bobby walked in as they arrived through the side door into the loft, holding a ticket high for everyone to see. He had earned a rescue ticket and a level.

Ramona got two levels, and even Isaac earned two levels. I didn’t know what that storyline involved to manage flipping his switch, but I was glad to see it—though he looked pretty messed up from it. Nothing a talk with his semi-psychiatrist brother couldn’t help with.

Antoine’s trauma might have been too much for what Andrew was capable of handling, but a little battle fatigue was more up his alley—at least until he got better tropes.

The Unresolved Plot

Type: Rescue

Archetype: Wallflower

Aspect: Recast

Stat Used: Savvy

 The film cut to the credits before they resolved all of the subplots. How disappointing. Guess this is your chance to show them. It turns out that your character has been in the background of the film the whole time and is still able to resolve those dangling threads.

Rescue: When a player enters a compatible storyline with this trope while possessing any missing posters of deceased players who died in that same storyline, the storyline will be changed into a Rescue. Succeeding in the Rescue will revive the dead players. This ticket will indicate on the red wallpaper if a nearby storyline is applicable.

With this trope equipped and activated successfully, the player will begin running through a subplot to the failed storyline that tangentially interacts with the original, but that becomes dominant after the original ends.

Applicable stories will typically be those with lots of plot threads and an ending capable of being reversed or amended in some climactic way. There must be tension left to be resolved.

Table Read: The player and any additional teammates who enter the rescue will be able to read the script from the original cut of the film on the red wallpaper.

Takeover: This trope will cancel out any story alterations except those inherent to the Archetype or Advanced Archetype associated with this ticket. This does not include alterations that were grandfathered into the original plot.

Right the Wrong and Finish the Job are the only Win Conditions. No others may be added to the Rescue.

“Of course, they left stuff unanswered. They were setting up a sequel.”

I was ecstatic. It felt like we were making forward momentum.

Now, with everyone back, the celebration could be done in earnest.