Arc II, Chapter 69: A Slight Change of Plans (Patreon)

Moonlight Morrow was a Paragon, the Departed Paragon, but in this story he was acting as a player.

That made some sense. Advanced Archetypes like the Departed change the nature of the stories they enter. Detectives like Grace made things into murder mysteries. Monster Hunters like Arthur made things into hunts. A story filled with spirituality like this one could have certainly been the result of some Advanced Archetype rearranging.

Isaac, caught off guard, watched as Moonlight Morrow passed him. The Paragon exchanged a wave with Roderick Gray as he walked away. It was only after he had moved on that Isaac's senses tingled with something amiss. He did a double take, his gaze darting first to Moonlight and then back to our hiding spot across the street.

After Moonlight was done waving at him, Roderick Gray stopped smiling. He started to scowl. He was ever the sore loser.

Isaac managed to get his bearings eventually because he moved forward and greeted Roderick just as planned.

I tried keeping an eye on him as best I could, but I was distracted because our new ally, the Departed Paragon, had apparently spotted us and was making his way to us.

I looked at his tropes.

~-~

“The Other Side” changes the nature of death; deceased characters in the story return as spirits in some form.

“He was the nicest guy…” Buffs his Moxie and increases the odds that NPCs will have positive feelings toward him before and after his death.

“Almost Made It” guarantees he survives to the Finale and ensures that he dies there.

~-~

That added wrinkles. Every character returned as a ghost? That had to have been included for a reason, but what was it?

I checked Casting Director.

Elliot “Moonlight” Morrow: the well-liked new mayor of Carousel. He won the popular vote by a landslide, but due to his friendliness with the Geist family, there are those who believe he has unclean hands.

We had chosen a table in a restaurant near the café where Isaac was meeting with Roderick. Moonlight found his way to us easily.

As he entered, the other customers got excited to see their beloved mayor. It was a big deal. He smiled and greeted them all in kind.

“Folks, I sure am glad to be able to see you here today, but I got to be about my business with these fine voters in the corner,” he said. He gestured toward me, Ramona, Kimberly, Antoine, and Cassie. Bobby had stayed behind with his dogs. That way, if the Die Cast targeted all of us, he would see its POV on the red wallpaper and would be able to call the restaurant and warn us.

As Moonlight approached, he gestured for a patron at the restaurant to stand up. The man, who had been wolfing down on a bread bowl, stood. Moonlight grabbed the man’s chair and whirled it around gracefully next to our booth so he could sit down. The NPC looked around, his mouth still full, as if he had no idea how to respond. He picked up his bread bowl and left.

“I’ve been dying to meet you folks,” Moonlight said. “The word around the neighborhood is that you have been cruising right along through the Centennial. That’s mighty nice to hear.”

He then shook each of our hands individually. “Nice to meet you, young man. Are you taking things okay?” he asked Antoine. Antoine nodded his head, and Moonlight continued his handshakes and greetings. The only other person to whom he said anything differently was Ramona, to whom he said, “Nice to meet you again.”

When I shook his hand, I noticed that he wore a thin black cord tied around his ring finger, though I didn’t find out why.

“You started heading to the finish line. That means it was my time to come out and play. It has been quite a while, hasn’t it?” he asked, though that last part might have been a question for himself.

“The Other Side,” I said, reciting the name of his trope. “When we die here, we stick around?”

“You lay it down straight, don’t you?” Moonlight asked. “That’s the rule here. You die, the fight’s not over. None of you are afraid of dying by this point, are you? That should be old hat to you by now."

If Carousel had the Departed Paragon acting as a player, and gave it a trope to bring everyone back as ghosts, that wasn’t a casual thing. It served some plot purpose. Carousel worked like a clock. That trope was a cog in the machine. What was its purpose?

“Ghosts get their power from Moxie,” I said, wasting no time. “We shouldn’t be using Isaac as bait.”

Moonlight looked over at Isaac, who was sitting down talking to Roderick Gray. “You may be right. Comedian usually gets sent through the paces of playing a fool in this storyline. I guess he’s going out with the cymbal crash? A darkly humorous death. Is that what Carousel cooked up?”

I nodded. Carousel planned it. We… didn’t exactly argue. “Yeah,” I said. “What normally happens during rebirth?”

“Hold up, now,” he said. “First, you need to lay it all out for me. As a player, the script is silent as the grave. Tell me what I need to hear, and tell me what you know about our enemy and the flask.”

So we did. We told him what we knew about the flask, the plot, future mayor Gray, the plan with Isaac, everything.

Moonlight looked over each of us individually and then Isaac. “The conspirators get killed one by one until only the leads are left. Usually. We need to come up with a plan to stop it. Luckily, I have some information about that magical fla—”

He was interrupted as police sirens sounded down the street. Squad cars moved in. Police approached the café where Isaac was meeting with Roderick Gray. Everything was going according to plan.

Moonlight watched as they hauled away Isaac. He was calm, if slightly amused. His eyes had seen things. What kind of person would Carousel pick as the Paragon of the dead? I could only imagine. A waitress brought him a coffee and a piece of pie. He thanked her warmly and didn’t hesitate to indulge.

Once Isaac was in the squad car, he continued. “Cassie, you need to pretend to find out some information from your psychic connections. Do you understand how that works, dear? The psychic is our best source for relaying information to the audience since you have no scholar. I’ll go ahead and tell you what you need to find. The flask needs to be drowned. Put it in running water. That will pause its power, but it will not shut it down for good. Nothing will. Of course, if you want the true ending, you need to act on this information at the proper time. I cannot tell you when that is. It is one of my few restrictions, you understand?”

He took a deep breath.

“Now, as for the afterlife. I don’t know whether you all have been ghosts before, but this one is turbulent. The fight after death will be just as rough as the fight for the living. Now, I don’t mean to presume, but you may want to rethink sending your Comedian to the grave.”

“I can go,” Cassie said. “I have a trope that might be able to save him and let me take his place.”

He looked her over with a sly smile. He was reading something on the red wallpaper.

“Hughes,” Moonlight said. “He was a Hughes, too. Was that young man your old man?”

“Old man? Wait, yuck,” Cassie said. “He’s my brother. My brother. I can save him.”

That wasn’t a good idea. This was a story where having a psychic was an asset. I didn’t have to say anything. Moonlight did.

“Cassie, dear, you are far too important to die this early. You have to go research some information so we can use it in this film we’re making. Now,” he said, looking to the rest of us. “You said your plan was to rescue him before he died?”

We nodded.

“Well, let’s get to that. Luckily, as Mayor, I have some pull,” he said. “We’ll save getting to know each other for later.”

 ~-~

So that was Carousel’s play. Push the story toward Isaac getting killed so that we would build a plan around it and then reveal that Isaac may have been the wrong person to die. Moonlight was vague about what the afterlife meant in this storyline. I did ask him one thing.

“Is this ghost world the same as the one from the first storyline?”

If I was going to be a ghost, I really hoped it wouldn’t be like those ghosts we saw in the first storyline.

He laughed. “No, no, that was a different animal. This isn’t a separate world like what you get with the lantern.”

He didn’t elaborate.

I couldn’t press him. I had other things to deal with.

There were two jails that Isaac could have been sent to that we could find in Carousel 1984. There was a city jail downtown that was older and more decrepit. Then, there was a proper jail in southeast Carousel.

We wanted the downtown jail. Not only did it have no fence, it was absurdly designed. I had not seen a jail like this one outside of movies set many decades before I was born.

The jail cells were in basements, with barred windows close to the streets. From those basement windows, Inmates could yell at people walking down the street from their cells, and those passing by outside could toss contraband inside the jail.

If I didn’t know for certain that jails like these existed I would have thought they were an artifact of movies.

That was the major reason we planned the meeting as close as possible to downtown. We hoped that the nearer the jail, the more likely it would be chosen.

We just had to wait until Isaac ended up in one of the cells. That had been our plan. We were going to attach a chain to the back of Roderick Gray’s car (he still didn’t know Isaac and Antoine had taken it) and pull out the bars. Grab Isaac and get away using our superior stats over the NPCs. Ridiculous, but by movie standards, it was standard.

When fighting horror movie monsters, crime got a pass.

It would make a good scene, too.

Cassie would come to us with a premonition. “If it’s going after him, then it will go after all of us,” she would say. We would decide to help. We were bonded by our relationship to the Die Cast, after all.

We would get in and out quickly. Isaac would act humorously. As a Comedian, he would lend legitimacy to our plan, which required humor to pull off.

Carousel should have liked it. We were playing along, improvising. It should have worked.

But it had other plans. It wanted a little more effort on our part.

~-~

To our credit, Isaac was brought to the jail we wanted him to be.

The only problem was that when we arrived, we saw the barricades.

Large stone structures had been installed near the building. They were cylindrical and strategically positioned to block access to the road we needed to drive down to get the car close enough to pull off our plan.

“These weren’t here,” Cassie said. “How could this happen?”

She wasn’t really asking how it happened. She was just realizing that things would be harder than we initially intended. I let her vent.

“Carousel does not half-ass things,” Antoine said. “Coffee shops, a donut place. A nail salon. Cobblestone. It changed everything.”

The side road next to the jail downtown was always near shops, but they were blocks away. Now, the building next door, which had been some kind of business park, was filled with shops that attracted pedestrians and warranted the cylinders to stop vehicles. There were too many pedestrians.

Our plan A was ruined.

Fortunately, thanks to Moonlight, we now had a plan B.

We walked down the cobblestone road to where the barred windows had been. They were still there.

Isaac had been moved to the cell already, which seemed quick, but time was weird in Carousel.

“What the hell?” he yelled. “When did those columns get put in?” he asked, standing on his tiptoes so he could see out of the window. “There’s one in the flower bed!”

Carousel had indeed put one in a flowerbed and another in the middle of the sidewalk. It was literally impossible to get a car anywhere near the jail window.

Isaac was scared. He knew that this was a death sentence.

“We’re going to get you,” I said.

“Please, I… Please,” he said.

I felt stupid and powerless. Carousel had been so incredibly petty. I thought this was one of its little games, like when it gave me a goatee or when it gave the Die Cast that POV trope because I had mentioned it. This wasn’t a game, though.

If we had done things Isaac’s way, we might have prevented him from being arrested at all. We could have at least tried. Instead, I insisted that giving Carousel its best story was worth the risk. Now, he was going to pay the price.

Unless I could do something about it.