Book Five, Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 (Patreon)

I walked through the aisles of the general store with a purpose.

I was making a mental shopping list. The shelves were stacked with a meager supply of canned goods as well as all the staples that you might expect, such as flour and salt. Did we need kidney beans? Did we need beets? Did anyone need beets?

The refrigerated section was even less impressive, but it had eggs and milk and bacon. What more could we ask for?

As I rounded the corner of the aisle, I came across Dina. She was doing much the same as I was. We made eye contact and didn't say a whole lot.

"They have a lot of really old candy," was the only comment she had.

I nodded.

We heard a noise from somewhere beyond the refrigerated doors at the back of the store. It sounded like a scream. We couldn't see what was happening because the glass of the refrigerated unit was fogged over, but there was a single handprint visible and conspicuous.

As long as we didn't open that door, we were safe.

As long as we didn't eat from the cracked glass container of pigs' feet (and the creature that infected them) on aisle 3, we were safe.

As long as we didn't steal from the store, we were safe.

As long as we didn't… and the list went on.

“You need help finding anything, you just let me know,” Corduroy Patcher called from the front of the store.

He was an older, rotund man with blue eyes and pupils like little dots. He watched us every step we took. His words were friendly, but his tone was not. He was the proprietor and sole employee from what I could tell.

“We don't have much as you might be used to back in the big city, but we got plenty. We got all a family needs,” he added.

He was right. He had everything we needed at that moment. He had very little of what we wanted, but we weren’t in a position to complain.

You would think that in a haunted world based on horror movies, death by hooks or teeth would be the biggest worry, but it turned out that death by slow starvation was a bigger threat once you started to get the hang of things.

Sure, if you went into a storyline, you could eat your fill, but as soon as you got to the end of the story, your body would reset to being hungry again. It was a small price to pay for healing all your injuries, but it presented a problem.

The only way to create a sustainable base of operations was to find a source of food that could keep players sated and satisfied when they weren't out on storylines.

The Vets, when we got here, had it all figured out. They could go clear a storyline at Eternal Savers Club and then load up shopping carts to take back to Dyer's Lodge. Even when we were trying to outlast an apocalypse, we never went hungry from their stores of food at the lodge.

But we were not high-level enough to clear the storyline at Eternal Savers Club, so we had to find somewhere else to shop.

Our money was running low. We needed a storyline that ended with a scene that we could pillage and loot for food. Before I actually had the responsibility of making it happen, I thought it would be easy.

Practically every storyline had food accessible, and some of them had really good food, but that wasn't enough.

You needed that food to be accessible to be looted after the final battle where most stories no longer had food available. Normally, all that was left at the end of the movie was destruction.

We were in luck, though. The Carousel Atlas contained all the solutions that players from years past had come up with for this very problem. Eastern Carousel General Store was a great place to loot. Sure, the pickings weren't great.

Of course, the food was old. Not old as in expired, but as in the type of food they ate in the '70s.

All we had to do was clear one of the three storylines in the surrounding area, and then we could raid this general store to stock our pantry for weeks. We just had to make sure ol’ Corduroy Patcher bit the dust by the end of the story.

The question was, what were we going to take when we got here at The End? That was today's mission: to get a list of what was offered to make sure that this storyline would be worth the risk.

As I looked at Dina, we both nodded in agreement that this place would do very well. We couldn't keep spending our money at the restaurant downstairs from Kimberley's Loft.

As we walked around, Dina kept picking things up off the shelves to rile up the storekeep up front. Maybe she was messing with me; I couldn't tell. Of course, she put everything right back. I cracked a smile, hoping that would satisfy her and she would stop with her little game.

It was my fault, really. I had told her specifically not to shoplift because that would trigger one of the many Omens in the store. She might have taken it personally, but really, I was talking about her stealing trope, which only worked in the storylines.

I wasn't going to cause a fuss about it.

Corduroy Patcher was, though.

“I can see what you’re doing back there,” the man said. “I ain’t nobody’s fool.”

He stared us down like we were trying to rob him blind. To be fair, we were going to rob him blind, just not yet.

I went to the back cooler and avoided the glass window to the refrigeration unit with the handprint. I grabbed an ice-cold glass of some off-brand cola and walked to the front of the store. There was one good thing to say about Eastern Carousel. The prices were cheap.

The shopkeeper eyed me up and down and sneered at my hair, which desperately needed a cut. Fortunately, most of the length had disappeared whenever we finished The Die Cast storyline and my body was reset.

“You folks are from the city, I can tell,” he said.

I nodded. “Downtown,” I said, confirming his suspicion.

He was just an NPC as basic as any other.

“People often forget how different Eastern Carousel is from the big city,” he said. “It's a million miles away. My family's been here since the first war, and we're going to be here till the last war. Nothing ever changes over here, and we don't need any of your nonsense.”

He took my soda, popped off the cap, and handed it back to me. I was glad that Eastern Carousel wasn't actually a million miles from the Carousel Downtown. We had to walk, after all.

“Oh, don't worry,” I said. “We're on our way out of here.”

A glance to my right showed me that Dina was looking at me with some urgency. As I glanced at her, she deliberately moved her eyes down toward the shopkeeper's hands. One of them was under the till.

“I'd best be getting back to the big city,” I said and quickly moved toward the door where Dina was. I glanced back to see what he was holding underneath the till.

I saw the butt end of a shotgun.

It was a sawed-off shotgun, though I couldn't actually see the barrel. It was called that on the red wallpaper. The only reason I could see it on the red wallpaper was because it had a trope. Silas Dyrkon had created a throughline that was a lot like Carousel, but it didn't have items with tropes attached.

Once we were out of his throughline, we saw them everywhere, though most of them were unobtainable.

Unobtainable, that is, unless you beat the storyline they were a part of.

This one was particularly desirable. It had a Criminal-Outsider trope called The Hidden Barrel that had a simple premise. If you hid the gun and aimed it at an adversary, the gun would go off if they started to attack you. This was a staple of crime dramas.

An instant shotgun blast to any enemy who crossed the line would be very useful.

As we left the store, I said, "Nice catch. We're gonna have to grab that."

One more thing added to the shopping list.

"We could keep it by the front door just in case," she said. "Probably won't need it, but it'll make us feel a lot safer. Well, it'll make Isaac feel safer."

I nodded in agreement.

Outside, Antoine, Kimberly, Cassie, Isaac, and Bobby were waiting. Because of all the omens, we didn't want too many people in the store.

“Looks like a good target,” I said.

"Did they have produce of any kind?" Kimberly asked. She had put on her Sorority President hat and was doing her best to make her loft livable.

"Sure," Dina said, "But they cooked it all in tiny tin cans so that it'll last decades."

Kimberly was dejected. Grace's home cooking with fresh vegetables was just a dream at this point.

"All that matters is that they have enough food so that we don't have to keep going on storylines," Antoine said. "Sounds like a success. So I guess we're doing the storyline you picked out?" he asked, looking at me.

"The Final Straw," I said. "Can't wait."

But I would have to wait because we still had planning to do.

~-~

But of course, if we were going to do a storyline in Eastern Carousel, we might as well take a look at it while we were here. It was easy enough to find, just a few streets down from the general store.

The flyers started with one being placed on a telephone pole, then another on a chain-link fence with a barking dog behind it, and then there were more on a wooden barricade that blocked off a long gravel road. And then more on every surface that a poster could be placed on.

A hurricane of them blew down the street.

“Looks like you've already been cast, Dina,” Antoine said as we looked at the posters.

He was right. The missing poster wasn't like those you would find for players who had died in storylines. It looked like a real missing poster. It showed a picture of a young girl staring innocently at the camera, wearing a dress and a white long-sleeve shirt.

Her name was Tamara. Tamara Cano. Unless it was a huge coincidence, it would seem that Carousel intended for Dina Cano to be Tamara's mother in the story.

"It's like it's mocking me," Dina said.

We stood there silently contemplating whether there was any possibility this wasn’t meant to mock her at least a little. Carousel had mocked my dead loved ones. It had no reservations about rattling its players.

"You are probably asking for it with the tropes you use," Isaac said.

Cassie elbowed him in the ribs and whispered something sharply in his ear.

He wasn’t exactly wrong. Dina had a background trope called A Haunted Past that she always combined with Encouragement from Beyond, which allowed her to speak with her dead loved ones. If Carousel was going to pick one of us to have a missing daughter, it would be Dina.

I didn't know if there was any greater meaning to that. I didn't know if Carousel was doing it because Dina's son had died in real life.

All I knew was that we now had one piece of information we didn't have before. When it came time to plan our run of The Final Straw, we would be more prepared because of it.

"Let's get out of here," Dina said. Her mood had soured, which was a bummer because it had just begun to lift in the days since we finished the so-called Tutorial.

I just hoped that she would be able to play the grieving mother when the time came.

~-~

The storekeep might have been right about Eastern Carousel being a different world. This part of Carousel was trapped in a perpetual autumn, an unending harvest. All the trappings of the fall season could be found on the homes and in the fields as we walked toward Bobby's claim.

His Writ of Habitation had given him access to a small cottage rented from a farmer. It wasn't until we got to that farm that I realized how odd his little home away from home was.

Where the rest of Eastern Carousel was filled with golden and amber hues, the farm where Bobby's cottage was built remained green and full of life. They grew pumpkins and squashes. They were still harvesting melons and tomatoes. The pumpkins were the size of wagon wheels, and the squashes were the size of pumpkins. The tomatoes were just normal size, but they still looked delicious.

The main house on the property had a wrap-around porch. On that porch, an NPC sat with a shotgun leaned up against his rocking chair as he whittled a piece of wood—not into some piece of woodland art but just whittled it smaller.

There was a post on the fence with a simple sign that said, "In Eastern Carousel, old ones roam— Pines whisper, Sheaves dream, Moon quilts fields, River sings, Ancient songs breathe here."

“I think my grandma had a quilt with that on it,” Isaac said to a reply of chuckles.

There was an odd feeling in the air, an aura, but not a depressing aura like that of the Unknowable Host. It was still an ancient feeling.

I wondered to myself if it was my psychic background trope that was giving me these insights, but the others felt something, too, which they would later report, if not as profound. In a magical place like Carousel, this place was still special.

We couldn't wait to get Bobby's things and get out of there.

Bobby’s Writ of Habitation meant that he could alter the premises of his base. Practically, this meant he was going to gut it of everything we might need, and we were going to lug it back downtown to Kimberley's loft.

Bobby's gaggle of dogs would follow him wherever he went, so they weren't much trouble. But the barrel of dog food needed to be wheeled out of there on a hand truck, which was luckily included in the property. Bobby's bedding and all of the toiletries and dining accoutrements were also packed up for us to take.

"I'm sorry I tried to have it ready to go, but there's just so much," Bobby said as I looked around the room. I wasn't sure what he was talking about; the place was as bare bones as Kimberley's, but it did have some touches of home.

Kimberley was not happy with the style of Bobby's throw pillows and curtains, but she didn't complain. We weren't shopping at IKEA. The place was smaller on the inside than Kimberley's loft, but it had a lot of land where we could have grown a garden under the mystical haze that this property seemed to exude.

There was plenty of room for the dogs to run. The cottage itself wasn't in great shape and would need repairs.

We weren't going to worry about it; sticking together was more important.

Everybody was carrying as much as they could as we walked back toward the downtown, down the dirt road that Bobby's base had been on. The NPC on the wrap-around porch watched us as we went but said nothing.

"We're not going to be bringing anything from the prison, are we?" Isaac asked. His Writ of Habitation had given him access to the historical jailhouse. Everything there was bolted down, but if we needed to during our brief moment of having access to it, we could take some of the reinforcements and metal grading to help secure the loft.

That wasn't on our minds at the time.

"I thought you were staying in the jail," Antoine said. "Don't you have to finish your sentence?"

"Haha. My life sentence ended when I died there," Isaac said.

The banter continued back and forth, but I mostly focused on watching for omens and getting us back to our new home.

~-~

It was well past midnight when the knocking started.

Each of us exited our rooms and entered the central loft, one at a time. Cassie was still wrapped in her threadbare blanket, and the rest of us wore whatever we slept in.

We said nothing. We stared at each other, solemnly understanding what our lives would be like at the loft.

“Please,” the man on the other side of the door pleaded. “Please, I need help. Please open up.”

He was crying and screaming and banging on the front door of Kimberly’s loft apartment.

None of us dared say a word.

Kimberly stood wrapped in Antoine’s arms. His baseball bat was in his hand. He was ready to strike at whatever lay on the other side of the door.

I gestured to the others to be quiet as I inched closer to the door. I was shirtless but wearing pants and my hoodie. I had to because my blanket was too small for a grown man.

I took a deep breath as I approached.

I put my eye up to the peephole.

The man on the other side of the door was named Edwin Morales. I didn’t need the red wallpaper to see that. He was a bartender at Grain Matter downstairs. He was a nice enough guy. He wore a lot of hair gel to spike up his mid-2000s hairdo.

We had gotten to know him over the past few days as we spent our money downstairs at the bar and restaurant.

He asked us questions about our lives and our families. He was nice.

Was this why? Had he been nice to us to make tonight even harder on us?

Edwin’s rhinestone-fringed button-up shirt was ripped.

“Kimberly!” he screamed from the other side. “It’s Edwin. Please let me in. Please.”

Through the peephole, I could see that he was an Omen. We had been expecting one soon, and we expected them to start ramping up.

I could see how to trigger the Omen. Letting him in, of course. But it wasn’t phrased like that. Kimberly’s Writ of Habitation made it so Omens would leave if they were “denied.”

The red wallpaper revealed that he could be “denied entry by telling him to leave.”

That meant that each Omen that appeared required some special variation. Locking the door would not be enough.

I took in the air to try and yell at him to run him off, but I thought better of it. We had a plan for this.

I turned to the others.

“Isaac,” I whispered as I gestured for him to come closer.

“You’re going to be doing this when we’re on a run,” I said quietly. “Take a shot at it.”

I stepped aside so that he could get a view through the peephole.

Isaac had a scouting trope that would allow him to spot Omens. His was called How is this normal? and it required him to call out how an Omen was unusual to get info about it.

One glance woke him up quickly.

“Come on, guys,” Edwin said. “I can see you looking through the peephole. Please let me in.”

Isaac thought for a moment. “Why do you keep looking to the right?” he asked. “That’s strange.”

Sure enough, it was strange.

Edwin had been looking at something or someone to the right of the door that we could not see.

Moments later, I heard a shot from outside, followed by a body dropping. Someone had shot Edwin.

“Let us in now, or I will make you regret it!” some man screamed from outside.

“We’re just looking for a good time,” a woman’s voice said in an exaggerated, sultry tone.

Isaac looked back at us.

“Did you see the Omen?” I asked.

Isaac nodded. “Kids’ Games,” he said.

That was the title of the storyline the Omen triggered.

I nodded.

“Go away!” I screamed.

Antoine joined in with me. “You all had better get your asses out of here.”

Laughter echoed in the hallway for longer than should have been humanly possible.

Then silence.

After a moment, Isaac looked outside and said, “They’re gone.”

But none of us really believed that.

We stayed ready for them to return all night, but they never did.

~-~

“I am the master,” Isaac said the next day. “I am the sentry on the top of the tower.”

He stood on the astroturf at the top of the building, his eye firmly planted on the telescope that had been included with the loft. He swerved it from side to side as he watched for Omens.

“A sentry stands at a gate,” Cassie said. “You’re a lookout. Lookouts stand at the top of a tower.”

Isaac laughed.

“I was a sentry last night,” Isaac said. “Last line of defense.”

Cassie rolled her eyes.

The roof of Kimberly’s loft building was clearly a part of the bar downstairs originally. Her Writ of Habitation had given us rights to it, but it was clear the place was some type of rooftop bar once. Half of the roof was built out like a deck so that patrons could get a good view of the city.

The other half had a mini golf course that would make Happy Gilmore noxious, with its twisting tubes and spastic fountains. It only had three holes. There were also bean bag toss and axe throwing setups, but no axes to throw. That was a cheap omission.

Kimberly laid out in the shade of a large black net that covered much of the decking.

“You really think dogs could be happy up here, Bobby?” Antoine asked from his place behind the bar. There was a little bit of alcohol, but not much else. “I found cutlery!” he cried out.

It was a big deal. We needed to make an inventory of everything we had available to us.

“I think they love it. They have room to run and they can stay in the snow cone shack,” Bobby said, pointing to an empty snow cone hut that had been used to make adult snow cones. It didn’t really have much other use, but there it stood, insulated and ready for a pack of pups.

We also had a nice grill to use. It even had a propane tank with a trope. Backyard Bomb was a Brute-Bruiser trope that allowed the large but portable tank to blow up based on a player-set fuse and deal a lot of damage.

In movies, you would see muscle-bound characters chuck these things into zombie hordes. They could definitely clear away some enemies.

That was a nice thing to fall back on, at least.

“Hey, Riley,” Kimberly asked. “Have you talked to Ramona? She’s not still in her room, is she?”

“She doesn’t want to talk,” I said. “Unless we agree to reach out to Silas Dyrkon to join his throughline, she won’t have anything to say.”

“It’s just that you were closest to her and she needs to know we are still thinking about her. We don’t want her to… disappear. You know,” Kimberly said.

Wait, I was closest to her? She wasn’t close to anyone.

“The guy talking to his pocket is back,” Isaac said, looking down at the street. “Bet he’s going to make a run for the door sooner rather than later.”

It was nice to see Isaac taking his job seriously.

“There’s something else I saw,” he said. “A few blocks down, at the park. There’s a red wagon. I figure we could use it, you know, for groceries.”

That was an interesting idea.

“Let me see,” I said. I took the telescope and pointed it where he told me to.

It was a humble wagon. It would definitely make transporting goods easier.

I let Antoine get a look. He was apprehensive. I could tell.

We had a silent conversation.

“Can’t do it,” I said. “Too much risk. Too close to stealing.”

Stealing was okay in storylines or in a place you have rights to like a base, but outside of them, it was a big no-no. The Atlas was clear about it. Steal to your heart’s content between scenes or after the end, but don’t take things otherwise.

The Vets even harped on us about that, and they were missing a lot of information.

I did wish I didn’t have to be so careful. That wagon could have been really helpful.

Oh well.

~-~

“Knock, knock,” I said as I walked to Ramona’s nook. She didn’t have her own room but had cordoned off the end of a hallway and put a sleeping mat there. It would do for her. It even had a window.

She was sleeping when I showed up. She looked up at me, her eyes still pleading, I thought.

“Go away,” she said.

“I will, just came to check on you,” I said.

She rolled back over. This woman was in her late twenties. She must have been depressed to still be in bed.

“Everyone’s on the roof,” I said. “It’s a nice place to hang out. You should consider it.”

I was met with silence. She pulled a blanket over her head. I was struck with jealousy that she got a full-sized blanket, while I got something half as big. That didn’t matter right then.

“Look,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re going through. I really don’t. Just know we’re here if you need us.”

No answer.

I turned to leave, but then I thought better of it and added, “When it comes time for you to run a storyline, we will force you. Just a heads up. Better wrap your head around that now. We don’t have a choice.”

“You have a choice,” she said.

She didn’t elaborate.

I left. We had a run to plan.

~-~

“Hello,” Kimberly said tentatively. “I’m looking for a Sal? I don’t know the last na—"

"Kimberly, babe!" a voice called from the other end of the line. “Don’t you know your agent when you hear his pipes?” Whoever this Sal guy was, he was a heavily animated character.

"I have been waiting for you to call me for ages. We have so much to talk about. Are you still in that dingy loft in the downtown area? Well, I know of a gig that pays pretty well and it's a five-minute walk. Can you believe that? A five-minute walk. It's a nice, actiony, sexy summer flick with zombies at a health spa. Isn’t that a riot? Best yet, I think I can talk them out of doing the nude scenes. Of course, you'd have to get a body double, but that's a small price to pay for your modesty, right?"

Kimberly sat slack-jawed as she listened to her fictional agent talking a hundred miles a minute, but then she got herself together and responded, "No, Sal, I'm not here about that. I actually have questions about a different job. Do you remember The Final Straw?"

We had no idea how her trope worked. It was all part of the experiment.

"The Final Straw, The Final Straw, let me see. Oh my gosh, The Final Straw. You see, I knew, I knew that you would love The Final Straw. It is perfect. It's what they call a career maker. I'm looking at a script here that could get you an Academy Award. Do you understand that? It is excellent."

Kimberly looked at Antoine and me incredulously.

"All right, just let me get my notes, dear. It'll take me just one more moment, just one more moment... oh, here they are, right on top. Because if you take this role, Kimberly sweetheart, you're going to be right on top."

"You say that about every role," Kimberly said, trying to play along with the gimmick of the trope.

"And have I steered you wrong yet? This one though, this one is going to set you apart because, get this, my dear, you will be the main character. Your face will be on the poster of The Final Straw. Picture this: a young, eager detective hell-bent on saving a missing girl in some hick town out east. Huh? You like that? Well, of course, you won't actually be a detective; you're actually a reporter. But I think that's just as good."

The energy and enthusiasm… was funny. It felt like a person playing a character. It took everything not to laugh.

"Tell me more about my character," Kimberly said, holding back a laugh. "I just want to see if it's something that I could picture myself doing."

"What do you need to know? She's brave, she's beautiful. If I were 10 years younger and a woman, I would play this role in a heartbeat. She's inquisitive, but it's not her hard qualities that make her so special; it's her soft-heartedness, it's her compassion. Oh my God, this character, Kimberly, this character…"

"What's the pay like?" Kimberly said, shrugging her shoulders.

"Standard pay. The real pay is in exposure. This is going to tell the world that Kimberly Madison is a player in cinema, that she's not just some pretty face stripping down in the showers, that she has something to say, that she can carry an entire film on her shoulders."

"When have I ever played a character that's stripped down in the showers?" Kimberly asked.

"Oh, it's an expression, honey. I would never say something like that about you. It's just people, they talk. You know how it is; this business is ruthless, ruthless."

Kimberly shot a glance at me because I would know whether or not Carousel had snuck in any nude scenes involving her. I shook my head. This Sal person was just being a character. I had never seen a player portrayed as nude.

"Either way, I've talked to the studio and I've had them put in your contract that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do when it comes to the lasciviousness that is often in this genre. And of course, they went along with it. You're Kimberly Madison. You were the star of The Die Cast. You've earned your place and they know it, sweetheart."

Eight of us sat around the table and tried not to laugh as Sal, Kimberly's fictional agent, gave her information about our next storyline. She had recently been awarded a scouting trope called Just Ask Sal that let her talk to her agent about storylines as if they were movie scripts that she was signing on to. After all, that was the conceit of the Celebrity aspect of the Eye Candy Archetype, that the player was actually just an actor or celebrity signing on to a movie. That was where the Celebrity got all of their abilities from.

We had been researching The Final Straw with all of the resources we had available. The first and foremost place that we looked at was the Carousel Atlas. The entry read as follows:

Title: The Final Straw

Omen: A Trail of Missing Posters—A young girl is featured on them. If you approach the NPC at the end of the Trail, the story starts.

Recommended Archetypes for Scouting:
Psychic, Detective, Sheriff

Insights Not Considered Spoilers:

1.       Psychic’s Charmed Forecast: The Omen is available during daylight hours.

2.       Psychic’s Harbinger: The closer you get to the truth, the more danger you will be in.

3.       Athlete’s I Have Practice Later: The storyline will take a few days.

4.       Time Looper’s Time Awareness: Part of the story occurs in the past.

5.       Outsider’s Eyes On Me: Everything you do will be seen and spread around by the NPCs. An Outsider or similar will be an important character.

6.       Detective’s Usual Suspects: Results unclear. Even the innocent parties act suspiciously.

7.       Doctor’s Crime Scene Triage: No Player Deaths are Necessary, but a total wipe is possible.

8.       Sheriff’s Deputized!: A police officer is a playable character. Usually a fighter, not a sleuth.

9.       Sheriff’s The Rumor Mill: Lots of gossip from the townsfolk. Some useful.

10.   Detective’s The Amateur Detective: The film’s main character will be an amateur detective.

11.   Soldier’s Weapons Check: Firearms are available, but don’t expect them to solve your problems. The focus will be on melee, traps, and improvised weapons.

There was a host of information about the storyline that we could use to decide our builds and plan our run. Now, all we had to do was use our own scouting tropes to fill in the cracks and make sure we had all the information available.

"I'm telling you, Kimberly, the industry is dog-eat-dog. You gotta be willing to rise to the occasion, and I think that you can do that with this story. It's got heart; it's got a mature ending. You know how I like a nice bleak ending? That's not to say it'll be bleak because of you; I'm sure that you'll do wonderfully."

"Can you tell me about other characters that'll be in the story?" Kimberly asked. "Just so I know whether or not I fit into it."

"Oh, of course. This is a story with lots of subtle acting, lots of subtlety—not like a lot of the stories that you see around with their screaming cheerleaders and the angry boys wearing masks. No, this is a mature script. Like I was saying, you have police officers risking their lives to figure out what's going on and to save the day. You have townspeople who are nosy but want to help, more or less, in their own ways. You have a mysterious figure, a scarecrow, Kimberly, a scarecrow who is haunting the entire thing and taking lives."

That was a little vaguer than we had hoped, but perhaps asking about other characters was a bit out of the purview of this trope.

"Do I have a romantic interest?" Kimberly asked as she looked over at Antoine. They had been romantically involved in every storyline they had been in, whether it made sense or not.

"Oh honey, you do not need to be with a man in every single storyline. This one is about you trying to help a little girl. Do you really want to cut back to some scene about you making goo-goo eyes at a smoldering, damaged man? I mean, I get it, Kimberly. The gun and the badge can be very attractive in a man, but at some point in time, you have to stand on your own two feet or you're going to get typecast and not in the way you hope. This is your chance to show that you can be the one who wins the fights, that you can outsmart the enemy, that you can trap them, and that you can use your wits and your compassion. Don't throw that away just so that you can be arm candy to some hunk."

It was interesting, the words he used. Sal was telling Kimberly not to have a romantic fling with Antoine's character. "Arm candy" was one of Antoine's new tropes. If he had a successful or otherwise desirable romantic partner, it buffed him. We had never considered how that might interact with the story at large. If Kimberly was going to be the main character, perhaps a romantic subplot would only undermine her.

Of course, it was always possible that Sal was just being catty.

I scribbled something down on a piece of paper and held it over for Kimberly to see. She read it and then nodded.

“Hey, Sal, do I have any allies in this story, or am I all alone?”

"Well, there's allies and then there's allies. There are lots of people trying to solve the mystery, honey, but you are the main character. You'll get help. I believe that there are talks for your character's news producer to have a big-name actor take the role, you know, a real player in the industry. He should help you with the mystery. Or her. It could be a her, but let's be honest, they're not going to let two strong women headline a movie. The world ain't ready for that."

We all looked at each other with a confused expression. It almost sounded like Sal had misspoken and accidentally gave away that the role of her news producer was a man and then tried to correct it. Of course, it was possible that that itself was a ruse and that he was telling us the news producer role was for a male player on purpose and the correction was just flavoring.

This trope told a lot, but man, was it a lot to untangle.

"Anyway, Kimberly, tell me if you want to take the role. I will suggest for you that if you do, you should spring for the best accommodations you can find. Eastern Carousel isn't exactly a tourist destination if you take my meaning. Ciao."

Sal hung up the phone, and we just sat and looked at each other in the whirlwind of information he had given us.

Kimberly put her phone back in her bag.

~-~

“No… romantic… subplot,” I said as I wrote it on the piece of paper we were using to gather our plans on.

“And I think he was suggesting that I use The Penthouse trope,” Kimberly added. “The note about accommodations was pretty clear.”

“Right,” I said, adding that bit.

Sal had talked so fast and so scattered that I feared I might have missed some of the actual clues he gave Kimberly.

“So I gather from the Atlas entry and Sal’s advice, that Antoine will be a cop, you will be a reporter, Dina will be the missing girl’s mother, and I will be your news producer,” I said as I went over my notes. “Anybody got anything else?”

Isaac was the only one to speak. “How does Sal know who is going on the storyline? I mean, he just assumes that Antoine will be there and that you, the Filmmaker aspect will be the news producer. What if you two just don’t show up?”

Isaac questioned everything. It wasn’t a bad thing.

“Tropes always make assumptions,” I said. “Even my I don’t like it here… trope makes assumptions about who will be on my team. Speaking of, when we were looking at the Omen, it said the difficulty was ‘I’m getting goosebumps’ but that was with eight of us there, so it will probably be a bit harder than that with fewer players.”

The Final Straw had been offered to us before on the jobs board where we found the Subject of Inquiry storyline, but that must have been a different version. This one seemed harder.

“Location Scout told me the movie will be shot all around Eastern Carousel,” I said. “There were no notable hidden locations or anything. That’s good to know.”

“Makes sense,” Antoine said. “A missing child would involve a wide search. I could see the story going anywhere.”

I nodded.

“My Lifting the Veil of Silence trope never activated while we were over there,” Kimberly said. “That means the enemy does not target women specifically. We already knew that, though. It’s Benny.”

“You had a much more pleasant experience with the scarecrow than some of us,” Dina said. “Of course, my experience probably doesn’t mean anything.”

When we played The Final Straw II, Dina had dared Benny to kill her. He obliged. Meanwhile, Kimberly and I got out without a scratch. Benny picked favorites, only killing those he believed were worthy of death based on his own judgment.

“Atlas says no deaths are required,” Kimberly added. “Thank god. That means no Looks Don’t Last, and no Deathwatch, right?”

I thought for a moment.

“Yeah,” I said. “If we can walk away unscathed, we should try it.”

“We shouldn’t plan on dying if we don’t have to,” Antoine added.

We were in agreement.

“Okay,” I said. “Cassie, did you get any readings?”

Cassie put her fingers to her temples. Her I’m Blocked trope was proving difficult for her to activate on command, but that was probably built into the trope.

“I sense the supernatural,” she said.

“The supernatural?” Isaac asked with a smirk, “In this storyline? I wonder if the flying scarecrow knows.”

Cassie glared at him.

“Let her work,” Antoine said.

And she did, but with little success.

“I’m sorry,” she said, as she realized all eyes were on her. “I’m just not getting anything.”

“Take your time,” Kimberly said. “We aren’t in a rush. Just get to know your trope.”

Cassie went back to her meditation.

We stared.

“Maybe we should leave,” Isaac suggested. I wasn’t sure if he was being a jerk or if that was his legitimate suggestion.

Cassie was wearing her emotions on her sleeve for whatever reason. “I’m trying, I swear,” she said. “I’m not normally this stupid, I promise.”

She squinted hard.

“No one thinks you’re stupid,” Kimberly said.

Isaac looked like he was about to say something, by Antoine stared him down.

“Cassie,” I said. “You’re putting a lot of points in Moxie, I notice.”

“I’m supposed to,” she said. “The Atlas said so.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m not criticizing that. It’s just, putting in the stat points isn’t the whole picture. Moxie is about performance. Maybe if you actually tried to play it up, it might work better. Like when you use the Anguish ability.”

My meager experience with psychic power might have been coming in handy.

She nodded. Her fingers came down from her temples. “That’s easier because the pain kicks in and I don’t have to pretend so much.”

She took a deep breath and lifted her hands, “I see, yes, I see…. There is a presence,” she started to say. Whatever her I’m Blocked trope was meant to do, it hadn’t kicked in yet.

Isaac got up from the table, hiding a giggle from Cassie. It was for the best.

Eventually, with lots of flailing and attempts to tap into her abilities, she succeeded.

“They’re angry!” Cassie screamed. Tears started flowing down her face. Her power was working. “They don’t like me looking, the spirits. They don’t like me looking!”

“Keep looking, Cassie,” Kimberly said. “What do you see?”

I’m Blocked was all about opposition. It was designed to detect opposing spiritual forces.

“There is great magic at play. Forces that ought to be left alone. They are angry and they want blood spilled. A child of the earth, life endangered, heartbroken. … someone violated the sanctity of that land… You are old, but we are older,” Cassie stopped talking for a moment and then, in a soft whisper, said, “Your choices transform you. What will you become?”

In a split second, Cassie’s head was thrust downward and hit the table before we could stop it.

We crowded around her in concern.

“Oh my god,” Kimberly screamed.

“Cassie?” Isaac screamed from across the room. He ran to her side. “Cassie, are you okay?”

For a moment, there was silence. Then, she moved.

She looked up, a lump forming on her forehead. “I can’t see any further,” she said. “I’m blocked.”

And so she was.

~-~

Kimberly reminded Cassie of how well she did for hours after that. Her vision had been chaotic and had certainly set the tone for the storyline we were about to take part in. Sal’s information almost made it seem light-hearted, if only from his humorous way of speaking. Cassie’s vision spoke of anger and retribution.

I had always wondered what Benny’s deal was.

“We have to talk about the thing we all already kind of know,” Antoine said. “We have to talk about who is going.”

“I think Kimberly should go. I know she’s a bit of an odd choice…” Isaac started. Before he could continue with his little joke, he said, “Look. It’s got to be the highest level players. You already know your roles, right?”

We all knew he was right.

“I know that Kimberly, Antoine, Dina, and I are going. I know,” I said. “But someone has to point out how we are the only ones with rescue tropes. If we die, Project Rewind is a failure. No one can save Anna and Camden. No one saves the Vets.”

We took a moment for that to sink in.

“We don’t have a choice,” Antoine said. “We are the best players for this storyline.”

“What about Bobby?” Kimberly asked. “He’s got a high level. Why aren’t we considering him?”

Antoine and I looked at each other. We both knew.

“If we die, the lower-level players need to have enough players for a team. We have eight players. If we take five and die, then they are left with three players and are basically dead in the water. This storyline won’t be easy, but no one has to die. It’s our best shot.”

I nodded.

Four players to a run was on the light side, but it could be done. It had to be done until we rescued more players.

“The only question left,” Antoine said. “Are what tropes we bring.”

~-~

Antoine was not Kimberly’s leading man for this run, so he didn’t need his romance-based tropes. No Arm Candy, no Knight in Shining Armor.

The Atlas (and Sal himself) had strongly implied that Antoine would be cast as a police officer. He took Play It Cool. Without Kimberly there to soothe him using You were having a nightmare…, he would need a mental health trope to help him out. He was doing great lately. He told us everything was better than before and we didn’t need to worry.

My Moxie was higher than his, so I knew he was hiding something, but still, he had come through before, so I trusted him.

“I’m going to use my social trope,” he added. “Everyone Loves a Winner should be nice for a cop.”

“Yeah,” Kimberly said. “Should help with early interviews with NPCs.”

He also went with his basic buffs and melee tropes, as well as, The Playbook. Since he wasn’t going to have as good of a reason to be with Kimberly, that trope would help him know when it was time for him to act from a distance.

Kimberly tossed Looks Don’t Last, of course, and built around her Scrunchie trope that let her turn Moxie into other stats, like Savvy or Hustle. Her old standbies like Convenient Backstory and Social Awareness came along, as did The Penthouse and Breaking the Veil of Silence, which had useful in-story abilities.

“Everything a leading lady needs,” Antoine said. He was trying not to be offended that he would not be a love interest in this story.

Kimberly blushed.

Dina equipped Out-of-Town Cousin to help tie her to the action of the story and kept her background setup, which was ideal for this plot. She kept Guarded Personality and An Outsider’s perspective, though I wasn’t sure she actually needed it. No Return Address was added to the rotation in place of Pen Pal, just to change things up. This was a multi-day storyline so she thought it would work well.

She debated bringing her growing collection of Criminal tropes, but I wasn’t sure whether they would come into play. Ultimately, it was her decision.

I brought Oblivious Bystander, to no one’s surprise. I also brought my background trope, My Grandmother Had The Gift, which would be useful in a supernatural storyline and allow me to equip my Detective trope, He has a Tell… If we were not using Deathwatch, I didn’t need Director’s Monitor or many of my Deathwatch tropes, but I brought Off-Screen death so I could still work from the sidelines if necessary. Raised by Television made a return to the rotation, as well as The Dailies. I didn’t know how much help it would be to see the raw footage, because I didn’t think Carousel would give away too much, but I needed to practice with it.

The Insert Shot made a return, as did Escape Artist and, of course, Trope Master. There might be a day where I would not use Trope Master, but it wasn’t that day.

We chose a lean, simple, flexible loadout for out outing. We didn’t want to mess with the plot too much and we wanted every player available at all times to help.

One of us would also have to bring in Bobby's Craft Services Are The Real Heroes trope to maximize our gains when we were searching for food.

We were as ready as we were ever going to be.

~-~

“How’s my favorite table doing?” Edwin, the bartender said as we got the nice corner table down at Grain Matter for one last meal before we hit the road.

Kimberly told him we were doing great. He gave us menus and said our server would be there soon. If he remember being shot in the head a couple of days earlier, he didn’t act like it. The senior Dr. Halle had told me NPCs only remember what made them better at their jobs, which was ironic given that he clearly didn’t remember a lot.

Edwin, with his sequin shirt and chipper attitude didn’t need a memory of a gruesome murder.

We ate our steaks and veggie bowls.

We even laughed, though that might have been helped by the drinks.

Things felt normal, even as a hyena person salivated at us from outside the window. Kimberly’s writ would keep him out, along with all of the other dangers.

We bought Ramona some grilled skewers. That was the traditional present for someone who just found out their life was a lie and they were just being used as some Narrator’s pawn, right?

This was going to be a storyline where we made no mistakes. We were going to get in, play our parts better than we had ever done before, and bring home the bacon.

Edwin brought us more drinks. We laughed more, Isaac was funnier when we had been drinking. We took deep breaths and tried to stay in the moment.

Because soon, we were going to be fighting for our lives.

But, hey, that’s every day in Carousel.