Book Five, Chapters 18 and 19 (Patreon)

"Are you sure we can't just call Sal again?" Isaac asked. I could tell there was something he was aching to say. He was afraid. Unfortunately, his fear came out in the form of insincere apathy and overdone caution. "We just need to ask him the right questions."

"We already talked to Sal," I said. "I am telling you, it is best to just have a good attitude about this sort of thing."

If not a good attitude, at least dread things silently.

"I am telling you, I have a funny feeling that I’m really going to regret this," Isaac said. “We should pick a different story.”

"I have the same feeling," I said. "About you regretting it. Still, there is no right story. There is only the next one."

We had all taken a walk to a small suburb in western Carousel. There was a community center there, and inside that community center was an omen for a story called The Box Lunch.

We had encountered a problem. Ramona was way too low-level to compete in the higher-level storylines the rest of us were attempting. Isaac was the next lowest-level player. Her Plot Armor was 11, and his was 18.

There was a lot of difference between those two levels, in my experience.

The problem was everyone had to run a storyline every few weeks. In fact, running them more often was better so that no one got too relaxed.

The question was, how were we supposed to send Ramona out on a storyline where she wouldn’t just get torn to shreds because of her low plot armor?

Our solution was The Box Lunch.

The Carousel Atlas had a list of storylines that were good for low-level players. It wasn’t exactly phrased that way, but that was the gist.

Storylines didn’t scale down to the player's level, but they did scale up to the highest level player, which presented a problem.

Most low-level storylines appropriate for Ramona would cease to be appropriate as soon as we added higher-level players to go along with her.

Luckily, storylines in Carousel were not scaled one-to-one. Storyline difficulty came in stages that were unique to each storyline. While enemies might scale to the highest-level player to ensure that they are engaged, the story overall would usually be in a preset difficulty range. We had experienced some exceptions to that rule, but we didn’t expect more of them.

Running storylines to avoid the axe was routine.

Case in point, The Box Lunch was a storyline that, according to the Atlas, had a difficulty of about plot armor 15. The difficulty did not jump until you had a player at level 30 enter it. That was a very generous range. It meant we could put Ramona, Cassie, Isaac, Dina, and Bobby on the team, and they should have no problem beating it without worrying about it scaling up.

Ramona had reacted jubilantly to our solution. Which is to say, she had said “Thanks” without making eye contact. I hated to think she blamed us. If she got a few painful deaths thrust upon her, she would definitely be salty.

I just hoped we could level her up fast enough that she wouldn’t be the target for too long.

The problem was that The Box Lunch was not exactly a desirable story.

The Carousel Atlas had not been explicit, but when Kimberly had called her fake agent Sal, he made it clear to her that if she were to run through that movie, there would be gifs of her floating around the internet that would completely destroy whatever sex appeal she had built up.

We interpreted that to mean that it was kind of a gross-out movie.

Gross-out beats torture any day.

In theory at least.

Other than that, it was a perfect storyline.

"Have I ever told you about how my first death went?" I asked.

"Yes," Isaac said. "Have I ever told you that I have a weak stomach?"

Had we been that stubborn when we started out?

Antoine and Anna had been pretty gung-ho about the whole thing, and we didn’t really have a chance to have a bad attitude because of it.

Now, we didn’t have Anna and Antoine was… not himself.

Still, we trudged onward.

"Better invest in some grit then," I said.

Antoine and Kimberly were off walking by themselves, staying with the group only enough to avoid running into any omens.

We had some hard talks ahead of us. It was nice to get everyone else out of the loft for a while so we could discuss things.

"Two days, though," Isaac said. “This storyline lasts two days.”

"That's enough," Cassie said, elbowing him in the arm. "I thought men were supposed to be brave for the women."

"That depends on the men," Isaac said. "It also depends on the women."

Ramona said nothing in all of this. She had been amenable to discussing strategy and learning the game as best as I could teach it. She was still under a perpetual rain cloud and I couldn’t blame her.

Luckily, the suburban area where the community center existed was fairly quiet of omens.

There were the normal things, like the chunk of sidewalk that was missing, leaving a hole that led so far down we couldn't see the bottom. We were stared at by NPCs and others from every window we walked past, but it was no big deal.

When we got to the community center, everything felt normal.

"Let’s go in and look around," I said.

Antoine didn’t have a lot to say, but he took the cue and walked in front of us with his baseball bat ready to protect us.

We walked through the doors and were greeted by a series of tables. On the far side of the room was a cubby cabinet that kids in kindergarten might keep their belongings in, but in this case, it was used for all manner of board games and personal belongings of the people who were visiting the community center.

I quickly got an eye on the omen across the room. It was one of those that was difficult to accidentally trigger.

"OK," I said. "What you're going to do is go search behind the cubby, and you’ll find a thermos that looks like it's been there for a while. Just take the thermos and put it up with all the other lunches in that cubby over there, and that's all it will take.

“That’s it?” Cassie said.

“I told you it was simple,” I said.

"Be careful; there are other omens in that cubby. Don’t touch anything except for the thermos," I added.

I looked around at the newbies to make sure they were paying attention.

"Does anyone else hear that music box? That's way louder than it should be," Isaac asked.

As soon as he did, a loud bang was heard as somewhere the music box closed loudly. That had been an Omen.

"Focus and you’ll be fine," I said, looking back toward where the thermos was and glancing at the poster for the storyline. It looked like the cover of a Goosebumps book. They would be fine.

They would just have to barf up a few gelatinous monsters first.

Kimberly, Antoine, and I made our way out of the community center, leaving the others to run their simple, little, disgusting storyline where no one had to die, and everyone would want mouthwash after.

 ~-~

 "They’ll be OK, won’t they?" Kimberly asked. She had put on a brave face and tried to do her best Adeline impression when prepping them for the run. Newbies begged and pleaded, but at the end of the day, they had to run storylines.

Luckily, Dina and Bobby were willing to help.

We continued walking. We weren’t heading back to the loft yet. We had another stop that also happened to be in western Carousel.

We walked in silence. I didn’t know if they were expecting me to say something, but I wasn’t going to.

As soon as Antoine knew I knew of his problem, he told Kimberly everything. He told her that his problem wasn’t just being startled in his sleep, which had been a lot of what had manifested so far. His problem went deeper than that.

He had completely zoned out while On-Screen for nearly half an hour.

He wasn't trying to play down what had happened. Still, I could see the desperation in his eyes to just let him continue to hide his issues. I was tempted to let him. We couldn’t scare the newer players.

After we had walked for a while, he started to talk. "All we have to do is stick to storylines that don’t take place in a forest," he said, "just until I get things figured out. And that was also the first storyline where we didn't use my nightmare trope. I think that was the real mistake."

He had such a charming cadence to his voice. I bet guys like Antoine never got fired, not when they could talk so smoothly.

I hoped he was right. In previous storylines, we had kept his mental health problems at bay by using his You were having a nightmare… trope to help transform his very real traumatic memories into dreamlike echoes that he could work through more easily.

No matter what we tried, his trauma re-exerted itself. Part of the problem was that he didn’t have enough Moxie to use the trope to its full effect. Unfortunately, he couldn’t just put all of his points in Moxie because he was our fighter.

We had ignored the problem for too long.

"Antoine," I said, "I’ve got an idea to fix… the problem."

"I’m telling you it’ll be OK," he said.

"I know," I said. "Maybe we should change our rescue plans just for a little bit."

He took a few deep breaths before speaking. "I know what you’re actually saying," he said. "Look, I got it under control. That was just one time. I’ll be fine."

“Antoine…” Kimberly said softly.

I didn’t know if he was right, but I had an idea for a solution. "Just hear me out. I think we need a doctor," I said. It just so happens I know of one who needs rescuing."

He met my eye for a moment as we walked. His attitude changed as he considered my motives.

"So that's it," he said. "You want to go after the Hughes brother?"

I nodded.

"I know we were talking about trying to get some easy rescues in, trying to find the lowest-level players from the lowest-level storylines, but I really think we need to hit the ground running. If we can get a doctor, someone with some psychiatrist tropes, that'll be all the better."

"Isaac and Cassie will be happy," Kimberly said. "From the way they talk about Andrew, he was always a positive, calming force in their lives. It might be a good idea to get him."

Antoine didn’t say anything. That didn’t mean that he was done, but I thought he was ready to drop it.

As we arrived on the street with the diner, the missing person board loomed in the distance. It was just as massive and overstuffed with missing posters as I remembered.

I was relieved to see that it had not been cleared. In the back of my mind, I was always afraid that we would arrive at the rescue board to find that our friend's posters were gone and that had been too late.

When we reached the boards with the hundreds of papers covering them, we stood and stared for a moment.

We were always awestruck when we looked at it.

"Which ones do we take?" Kimberly asked.

The three of us looked at each other for a moment, and then I said, "All of them."

We knew that when you took a poster, it would eventually get replaced by the NPC who took care of the board. It couldn’t hurt for us to just grab all of the posters. We had planning to do.

Kimberly grabbed Anna and Camden, as well as many of our other friends from Camp Dyer as she could.

Antoine was tall and able to reach the top of the board, so he just started collecting them hand over fist. I made a beeline for the posters that had Dr. Andrew Hughes and those of his apparent teammates.

I stared down at them.

They were all in their mid to late 20s in plot armor. They went missing near a power plant.

Missing posters didn't tell you what storyline a person died in; they just told you the location of the omen for that storyline.

We would have to research and figure out where they were ourselves.

 ~-~

We carefully placed the huge stack of missing posters inside one of the kitchen cabinets back at the loft in hopes that they would remain safe. Truthfully, it was difficult to look at them and to know what they represented.

The three of us stood around the kitchen table staring down at the remaining five posters.

"So these are our targets," Antoine said.

I nodded. "A Soldier, a Doctor, a Wallflower, an Eye Candy, and a Comedian," I said.

MISSING

Name: Michael Brooks

Plot Armor: 26

Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022.

Occupation: Soldier

Reward: 100 Dollars

MISSING

Name: Dr. Andrew Hughes

Plot Armor: 28

Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022.

Occupation: Doctor

Reward: 100 Dollars

MISSING

Name: Lila White

Plot Armor: 23

Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022.

Occupation: Wallflower

Reward: 100 Dollars

MISSING

Name: Avery Lawson

Plot Armor: 27

Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022.

Occupation: Eye Candy (Beauty Aspect)

Reward: 100 Dollars

MISSING

Name: Logan Maize

Plot Armor: 29

Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022.

Occupation: Comedian (Cynic Aspect)

Reward: 100 Dollars

"No Final Girl," Kimberly observed. "And only five players."

It was rarely lower than that. Most teams did have a Final Girl, but not all. A soldier tended to balance things out.

Of course, there was always the possibility that they did have a Final Girl, and she had just not lived up to her name, so to speak.

I lifted up the Carousel Atlas and placed it on the table. The Atlas allowed you to search by geographic region, which was useful because I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion.

I flipped around in the Atlas until I found it. It was in southern Carousel, where we rarely went out.

"Damn," Antoine said. "It's out of town."

We knew what he meant by that. It was way off in the boonies. There would likely be trees and forests just waiting to trigger whatever magical psychological problem he had.

I read the Atlas closely. "There are eight omens in that area that the Atlas has info on," I said.

"Do we have any way of knowing what levels they are?" Antoine asked.

I shook my head. "We can look them up individually and hope that there's information on them, but if not, we're going to have to go check ourselves."

A quick flipping back and forth revealed that seven of the omens had entries in the Atlas, but only three of those had information about how dangerous the storylines were.

"High 30s, mid-40s, mid-40s," I said. All three we had information on said their plot armor level was out of our league. “I doubt it was any of those, given their levels."

"That narrows it down at least," Antoine said.

At the end of the day, we were going to have to go there ourselves and do some scouting.

~-~

Antoine put on a big smile this time as we walked along. He was still angling to show how confident he was, but the further we walked south, the more apparent it became that that would be a liability.

There were stretches of trees and fields similar to those in eastern Carousel, although there were quite a few more pine trees in this direction.

I didn’t say anything. I just hoped that if we could find a solution to his problem as fast as possible, we wouldn't have to make any hard decisions.

So, we moved forward at a faster pace than normal toward the nearest solution. Dr. Andrew Hughes was likely to have some psychiatrist tropes that would help with diagnosing and fixing whatever glitch had caused Antoine to dissociate on screen.

I had used this to justify why we would be rescuing Andrew Hughes first instead of searching for some low-level storylines to do rescues in.

The truth was a little more complicated than that.

We had agreed to go to the poster wall and find the easiest storylines we could use to practice rescues.

The logic was sound. Start with the easiest storylines and then work our way up.

Another consideration was what to do with the rescued players.

If players were very low-level, that meant they would be malleable and more likely to follow our lead. One of the biggest worries we had about rescuing players that we didn’t know was that they wouldn't respect us or that they would cause infighting.

Low-level players were less likely to be a threat, but I still didn’t want to rescue someone I didn’t know. At least we knew that Andrew’s team had been at Camp Dyer. We didn’t know them, but I thought our common experience would lead to cohesion.

If they had experienced Camp Dyer, then I was almost certain that they would work toward returning to that level of cohesion and peace.

So that’s who we were going to rescue, even though the storyline that had killed them was likely going to be a challenge for us.

It was worth investigating.

"Isn’t it really creepy that these players died less than a month before we got here, and no one at Camp Dyer wanted to talk about them?" Kimberly asked as she leafed through the missing posters that we had brought along with us.

In fact, it was a little creepy. Back before rescue tropes had returned, death was a taboo.

“I can’t blame them,” Antoine said. “What’s the point in scaring new players?”

What indeed.

It became apparent that we were headed in the right direction as power lines started to converge and become bigger the further we walked along. There weren’t a lot of omens on this road, perhaps because there wasn’t a lot of anything.

I doubted that it was because Carousel just didn’t have enough storylines; it was probably because the emptiness of a dusty back road offers a certain feeling of isolation. The further we went, the more isolated I felt.

We were just on a scouting mission. Everything would be fine.

As we traveled, the barren fields turned into rocky hills, and the trees grew taller and taller.

"Now that I think of it," I said, "I thought the dam was hydroelectric. Why do we need another power plant?"

No sooner had the words left my mouth than we turned a corner on the dirt road winding up the hills and saw the power plant in the distance, jutting off the side of a large hill.

"Good question," Antoine said.

There were giant candy-cane-striped smokestacks and lots of barbed wire. Giant buildings large enough to house football stadiums loomed in the distance.

Powerworks.

Sure.

This was a haven of Omens, no doubt. It could act as a power plant, but looking at it, I could see many movies being set there.

"Stick to the road," I blurted out instinctively as some feeling in my gut kicked into gear.

I was feeling anxious. I kept my head on a swivel, looking for omens, but I didn’t find any other than the normal border omens that existed off in the distance to keep you from running into the woods.

We continued down the path. As we walked, we came across a large chain-link fence, but it was not for the power plant. The sign said, "Derelict Machinations Incorporated."

It was a sort of junkyard, but the items contained within it were not the normal kind of junk.

"That’s a roller coaster," Kimberly said, staring off into the yard.

In fact, it was. There was a dismantled roller coaster and an anti-gravity machine ride shaped like a UFO. There were also a bunch of those little machines that you used to be able to find out front of a supermarket, where you could put a quarter in and ride in a rocket ship—if you were eight years old at least.

"Is this where they keep all of the rides from the Centennial?" Kimberly asked.

"Maybe," I said.

But truthfully, I didn’t recognize a whole lot.

Something that stood out to me was that all of the rides and other machines in the yard were themed around sci-fi. There were spaceships and battle mechs as well as aircraft and robots. All of it was apparently related to some sort of carnival rides or similar, but I didn’t get a close look.

"Let’s stay out of there," I said. "Omens are lighting up like the Fourth of July."

We continued on past the junkyard, the second one we had seen in Carousel.

~-~

We went on further until, eventually, we found the entrance to the power plant. There was a small building with a sign that said, "Power Plant Tours $5."

We would have considered paying that price, except there was no one there to give our money to.

"This is as far as we go, right?" Antoine said as he looked around.

I nodded. According to the Atlas, no matter which direction we walked from there, we would run right into an omen.

This area was called the Pavilion because it was built like some sort of "Age of Tomorrow" sci-fi proselytizing area for the press to take pictures of when a CEO gave a speech. KRSL was advertising its amazing technology in murals on the walls.

All of the buildings were locked and secured, but several paths led into the compound.

"There’s no one around," Kimberly said.

"If we trigger an omen, there will be," I said.

"Here, you each take two," she replied, handing us the missing posters.

"According to the Atlas, we just have to look at the omen, and we’ll be able to see if our rescue tropes will work," Antoine said.

"That’s the theory," I replied.

"I only see one," he said. "Over there, the loose cable."

He pointed in the direction of a set of stairs that would lead to a walkway that reminded me of something out of Jurassic Park. The walkway moved out over a large ravine of some sort, but I couldn’t say what was inside the ravine because I didn’t want to move close enough to look.

The loose wire swung gently as if something was hiding there, trying to get our attention. The omen was for a storyline called Apex. It was a very difficult storyline, and my scouting trope told me next to nothing about it.

I couldn’t even see the poster for it.

"I’m not getting anything," I said. "My rescue trope doesn’t seem to be triggering."

"Mine neither," Kimberly said.

"Mine does," Antoine said. "It’s a big plaque that says 'rescue.'"

My rescue trope worked on the premise that the enemy of a storyline where players had been killed would have somehow been filmed themselves doing the evil deed, and then somehow I found those tapes.

 The enemy would then attack my base, and I would have to survive until morning. Whatever the enemy of the Apex storyline was, it was not the kind that would film itself committing its crimes or care if those tapes got out.

Kimberly’s rescue trope was for things like serial killers. She would mourn the death of her friends (aka the players we were trying to rescue), and the killer would show up at the funeral.

Antoine’s rescue trope was a little different; his turned the storyline into a race of some kind. Whatever the enemy of the Apex storyline was, it was ready for a race.

"Where are the other Omens?" Antoine asked. “I only see the one.”

If you didn’t have a scouting trope, it could be quite difficult to find omens, especially to the untrained eye.

"Look to the left of the Apex omen," I said. "Do you see the building with the dirty windows that have a smiley face drawn into the dust of the glass?"

"Yep," Antoine said, following my instructions.

"Oh," Kimberly said. Suddenly, she was able to see that omen, too. All it took was to focus and know what to look for—that plus a few free moments to stare into danger.

It was difficult to spot Omens walking down the street, but we had all the time in the world.

"That one works for me," Kimberly said.

"I still can’t see it at all," Antoine said.

"It works for me too," I said. "But it’s really high level. I can’t even tell what the title is."

That wasn't the only problem. We weren’t finding the storyline that Andrew Hughes and his team had died in. That was the entire reason we had come. We knew that the posters were supposed to allow us to see which storyline it was when we stared at its omen.

We would have to keep looking.

"Alright, I’m not seeing any more. I’m going to take a few steps forward," I said.

I could almost feel them take a gasp of air as I said that. A few more steps and I looked around at all the empty buildings.

"OK, look over there. Do you see that poster that says, 'This facility is restricted by section 14 of the Carousel Health Code'?"

They stepped forward.

"That one works for me," Antoine said.

Kimberly shook her head. “Doesn’t work.”

"Doesn’t work for me either," I said.

I kept looking around, trying to find the omen that had led to Isaac and Cassie’s brother's demise.

Finally, I found it.

I was holding Andrew Hughes' missing poster and one of his teammates, Michael. As soon as I saw a distant building with graffiti on it, I saw the omen.

"There it is," I said.

"Itch," I read. That was the title of the storyline.

"My rescue trope does… not work with that storyline,” I said.

Despite that, I could still see copies of the missing posters in my hands placed on the red wallpaper underneath the poster for Itch, which showed some kind of 80s tech display.

"My rescue trope doesn’t work with that one," Kimberly said, "and I don’t see a missing poster on it."

"Well, my rescue trope does work," Antoine said, "and I only see one missing poster."

That was troublesome because he was holding two.

"Wait, what?" I said.

"It’s what I’m telling you. I’ve got Logan and Lila, but Logan's poster isn't showing up on the red wallpaper," he said. He handed it over to me.

Sure enough, nothing changed on the red wallpaper. I stared more intently until I could finally read the graffiti: "Death to scabs."

Great.

"Hand them here," I said, gesturing for them to give me all of the posters.

Once they were all in my hands, only one more appeared on the red wallpaper.

"Lila, Michael, Andrew... they're all here, but these other two, Logan and Avery, don’t register."

"What does that mean?" Kimberly asked.

"It means they got separated," Antoine said.

I agreed. That was the only logical explanation.

It was our understanding that you could rescue as many people as you had posters for. The fact that only three showed up in this Itch storyline meant that only three had died there.

"The other two are in a different storyline," Kimberly said.

I shrugged my shoulders and continued looking around.

It took 15 or so minutes, but I eventually spotted every single omen that the Carousel Atlas told us was in this area. Yet, I never found any storyline that contained Avery or Logan.

"This doesn’t make any sense," Antoine said. "Their posters say that they died in this area, right?"

"Right," I said, double-checking.

"So there must be some sort of omen that doesn't show up all the time," he said. "Like a mobile omen, like at the bowling alley."

That was one explanation.

I kept my head on a swivel, looking from omen to omen. Then my eyes caught something.

It was not an omen, but a road. It was in the forest behind us. We had passed by it on our way to the power station.

I noticed that in the distance, in the deep part of the forest, there was a flat plane where gravel had been run up in a line like it often does at the edge of a dirt road.

"There’s something back there," I said.

I almost felt my heart stop beating.

A fear rose up that I was not unfamiliar with.

My I don’t like it here… trope didn't just give me information on the red wallpaper; it also made me feel anxious and afraid. In this case, those aspects were a feature, not a bug. It made it easier to spot omens and kept me on high alert.

The last time I had felt anxiety this strong was when the black snow had appeared, and the apocalypse had almost killed us all.

"What is it?" Antoine said, staring off into the woods, a slight twitch in his eye.

"Is it an omen?" Kimberly asked.

"No," I said. "Yes. Wait, I don’t know."

I started to back away from the power plant entrance and walked slowly toward the woods we had passed.

There was a small field between us and the thick grove of trees. Beyond that was the road I had seen going up the mountain, and yet something in the back of my neck was on edge.

Was that my hysteric trope, or was it something else? After all, my grandmother did have the gift, or so my background trope said.

Slowly, the three of us walked toward the woods, and as we walked, I saw something move in the shadows in the distance.

"Stop," I said.

"What?" Antoine asked. "Do you see an omen?"

"No," I said. "There’s no omen there, but I feel an omen. I don’t know if that makes any sense."

I wasn’t used to the feeling of an omen being near without being able to see it on the red wallpaper, yet that's exactly what was happening.

Then an idea dawned on me.

"I think I know what happened," I said. "I think that those other two members of Andrew’s team did die here, but they didn’t die from an omen or in a storyline."

Antoine immediately put together what I was saying. "There's a monster's lair out there," he said.

I didn’t have the right tropes to confirm it, but all the facts added up, and my gut loudly sang to me that something dangerous was watching us from those woods.

"Let’s get out of here," I said. "We have some research to do."