Chapter Sixty-Eight: Bet Your Life On It! (Patreon)

As night fell, my friends and I found ourselves on the back deck watching the sun go down. We didn't talk about much. We had had a busy day and there were veterans around steering the conversation.

Antoine was the quietest. It was hard to see him like that. Ever since we got there, Antoine had made it his own mission to reassure us and to encourage us that we would be able to get out of this place. I thought he was being too optimistic, naively so. Anna said it was because he felt guilty about getting us trapped in Carousel. He wanted to believe that he could fix it.

He didn't talk like that anymore.

Kimberly had picked up the slack. Where before she was the one worried about what was going on back home, what her parents were thinking, and how long it would take for us to get out of this place, now, she was a beacon of positivity. She tried to soothe Antoine by encouraging him and telling him that this was just a minor setback and thanks to his new trope, he would forget it all in time.

Antoine wanted us to believe that he was over it, but none of us did.

~~~

Inside, the veterans had put up a chalkboard where they wrote all the information they had gathered about Secret Lore. Right now all it had was the information that they had been able to ascertain from talking to the head librarian. They had gotten a lot more information than us but still, they only had a few leads.

The only real storylines with secret lore that we actually knew about were the campfire storyline and the one that Lukas had played through. No one had investigated that one yet. They were taking their time and being methodical.

Most of the veterans had gotten information, but a lot of it was redundant. The unique pieces of information were posted as follows. The players included their names and the trope they had used to acquire the information in case anyone else wanted to give a crack at it.

Sam

Rumors of the Lost City:

I learned some possible prizes: Treasure Maps, Money, Consumables, Excursion Train tickets, Private Showing Tickets, Tropes, Maybe Stat tickets but not clear.

Sam was a higher-level Adventurer archetype. He used a trope that encouraged NPCs to tell him information about valuable treasure both in and out of storylines. The trope was very powerful and even worked for something like this where the treasure he was seeking was a prize.

Lara

Are you ready to listen?:

More hints will appear to us in the next few weeks. Everyone keep an eye out.

Lara was flummoxed trying to use her psychic tropes. She said that something was blocking her. It made sense. If you were a psychic and you could use your full power set, this entire endeavor would be trivial. She did manage to use a generalist Psychic trope that assured her more information would make itself known to the players.

Grace

What were you going to say?:

One of the storylines at the Botanical Gardens has Secret Lore

Human Lie Detector:

She said there was no way to trace the information about the Campfire storyline back to some clue in Carousel. She was lying.

Grace was a Detective archetype and used a couple of her tropes to narrow down the location of a storyline with secret lore. She was also able to figure out that our attempts to dissect the campfire storyline were logically sound.

Bella

The Implication: Check out the Natural History Museum for leads

Bella was a Bruiser who specialized in the Bully aspect. She managed to threaten the librarian into giving up some information.

Oliver

Used “Professional Courtesy” as an Antiquarian:

Other NPCs involved in the SL Project are the Curator at the Natural History Museum, someone at the Botanical Gardens, the Lead Astronomer at the Observatory, and a few other unspecified.

Call it a Finder’s Fee:

There is something about secret lore and an antique vase.

Oliver was an Antiquarian. I'm not super familiar with his tropes but they mostly revolve around antiques and cursed items. From the second trope, it sounded like he'd managed to bribe the librarian.

Lukas

“They” don’t want you to know:

-All of the Secret Lore is in supernatural storylines.

-The truth was hidden by the mayor. He is hiding his involvement.

-The leads are only found inside other storylines

-Carousel is tricking us. This is a trap.

-Finding Secret Lore is the only way to escape Carousel.

-One or more of the players knows more than they are letting on…

-Bartholomew Geist is still alive and laid out clues for us to follow.

-Carousel doesn’t want us to know the truth.

-Carousel wants us to know the truth. It needs our help.

-The NPCs are scheming.

-We are just pawns in all of this. We are being led around.

In addition to being a Hysteric, Lukas had an advanced archetype called Doomsday Prepper. This archetype had a lot of conspiracy theory-related tropes or at least the version that Lukas played did. The way his trope worked is that he would get a lot of information given to him at once but only a small amount of it was actually true. The higher his Savvy stat, the less misinformation would be there, but Savvy was not his best stat. We were advised to take all of this information with a grain of salt.

Roxie

Just like old times:

An NPC related to a secret storyline visits the Casino regularly.

Roxie managed to coax information from the librarian. I'm not quite sure how.

Ethan

I used The Golden Boy along with The Eligibility Imperative: Check out the graveyard on Sickle Street.

Ethan was an athlete who specialized in the stud aspect. He used two tropes that gave him a lot of favoritism from authority figures like a librarian. He got a solid lead.

~~~

As we sat on the back deck, the sun faded to darkness. A fog moved over the lake. Grace went around lighting citronella torches and oil lamps so that we could still see. We continued talking quietly to ourselves, theorizing about what the Secret Lore might mean.

Everyone had different theories, but the common element was that they thought it meant we were going to find the way out of Carousel.

One of the veterans I hadn’t talked to too much, Peter, made a joke about how we were going to get to the end and Silas would ask us what took us so long.

I wasn’t so sure we were home free, but I didn’t voice my doubts. It was a rare thing to see people talking about getting out. That kind of optimism was pretty taboo around here. Sure, they would dream about what they would do when they go back home but hope made people nauseous.

Eventually, Todd joined us. He was one of the higher-level players. He had been part of the group that was still planning out the Excursion Train route so he had little involvement in the Secret Lore runs until they started working.

“You know what’s funny about this,” he said. “We were just talking about that storyline the other day, weren’t we Chris?”

Chris nodded shamefully. I think he still felt guilty about sending his little brother to the Straggler Forest, even by mistake.

“When we first got here,” Todd continued. “We ran that storyline a dozen times. No joke. One run after the other. Trying to find treasure.”

“Did you not know how to trigger the treasure hunt variation?” one of the veterans, Sam, asked.

Todd shook his head. “We were the ones who found it. Well, we had help. Winston Ashwood.”

“Here we go,” Chris said.

“They need to know,” Todd said. “Winston Ashwood. Real character. Psychic archetype, a seer. Almost never went out of storylines. He had a trope that let him hear spirit messages or whatever in scrambled radio broadcasts. He’d sit out on the deck all day long wearing a smoking jacket--pipe in one hand, book in the other, listening to the radio for messages to tell the other players.”

“Had a Salvador Dali mustache,” Roxie added.

“Yep,” Todd agreed. “Almost. Strange guy. His name wasn't even Winston Ashwood. His name was Egan Johnson or something like that, something really white bread. He was always so frustrated that you could see his real name on the red wallpaper in parentheses.

“Anyway, Winston Ashwood comes to us one day and says you need to go run the campfire storyline. The third one in the franchise. The one with the Stragglers. We asked him why. Well, he's heard it on the spooky radio broadcast that there is treasure there; that there was something very important that we had to go find in that storyline.”

“The casino jingle,” Chris said.

“The casino jingle,” Todd repeated. “He had himself convinced that whenever the radio broadcast messed up and you could hear the carousel casino commercial come on, that that was a sign of fortune or good luck.”

He started singing the jingle:

"Under the neon glow, where the lucky ones go,

Bet your life on it, it's the Carousel Casino.

The stakes are high, but so is the fun,

Bet your life on it, the night's just begun!"

He and some of the other veterans laughed.

“I don't know if there's any truth to it, considering what ended up happening, but every time that commercial came on during one of his prophesies, he would get all excited and tell players to go out and look for treasure.

“So, we go run the campfire storyline again. Nothing. Just a normal storyline. Few days later comes back and he says you missed something you gotta find something else. So we go run it. Nothing. Again. This repeated itself for two months off and on until eventually, we found the treasure hunt variation with the moonshiners. Even after that, he was still on our butts about it. Guy never quit.”

Todd laughed for a bit, but as he slowly stopped, a heavy silence grew.

“You think he was trying to… you know?” Sam asked.

I wasn't sure what Sam was asking, but Todd seemed to.

Todd looked over at Chris.

“We always wondered,” Todd said. There was something they weren’t saying. “Whatever the case, a few days ago we heard that casino jingle on the radio, right Chris? Several times. Made us think of him. Reminded us of that storyline too. It’s just, it was a big coincidence, us talking about it, and then turns out it was important.”

~~~

We sat in silence for a few moments more, but then eventually, small talk broke out and we were talking about Secret Lore and our plans once we got back home again. Todd and Chris left, as did some of the other veterans.

Once they were gone, Dina leaned over to Roxie and asked, “So what was that about? With the whole Psychic dude. The awkwardness.”

Roxie, who had clearly been waiting ever since his name was mentioned to talk about it, replied, “He betrayed us. Got a lot of people killed.”

She paused, letting her words linger in the air.

“What do you mean?” Kimberly asked. She had largely stayed out of the conversation and only paid attention to Antoine. Now both of them were interested.

“If you’re going to talk about that,” Grace said. “Keep your voice down. Arthur hates us talking about it.”

Roxie rolled her eyes. “Arthur just hates hearing about it. That's all.”

She leaned toward the rest of us.

“You know how some players don't have to go out on storylines as much, right? They can just stay here and give advice to people using their tropes and they can get experience from that? Well, psychics can do that way more than anyone else. Well, this Psychic Winston Ashwood guy was here for about two months after I got here. That's what he did--he sent people on storylines and gave them psychic advice.

“I got put in a group with Lara and a couple of others. One day we go to him asking for advice about what storyline we should do next. He describes where we should go and tells us all these different prophecies about what we have to do once we get there to win. Same old same old. Except he was lying. Laura had psychic tropes of her own. She had only been here for a month longer than I had but even then, she could tell that this Winston guy was sending us into a storyline we couldn't beat.

“We thought maybe because he was high-level he could see things that she couldn't, but she was insistent. She was crying and kicking and screaming telling us not to go on this storyline that he just sent us on. So we went to Arthur and Adeline. We described the place that Winston wanted us to go and what he wanted us to do there.

“Turns out, he was sending us on a storyline that was 15 levels ahead of us. None of us had scouting tropes to be able to figure that out, but Laura had a premonition from one of her abilities. Leading up to that point in time, it had become common for us to lose a group every month. We were dropping like flies; we didn't know what was going on. Normally we only lose maybe one team per year. We get enough new players to replace all the old ones.

“Not that year though, teams were wiped out one after another. So Arthur starts to interrogate Winston with the help of a Detective archetype and a couple of Bruisers who all have tropes that will work outside of the storyline and can help you get information out of people. It turned out Winston had been sending people on storylines they couldn't beat for years.”

“Oh my god,” Kimberly said. “Why?”

Roxie shrugged. “Lost his mind, I guess. We never found out.”

“Well, what happened to him?” Anna asked.

“Arthur never said exactly, but his missing poster is on the community board by the Diner if you ever want to go look.”

I did want to look. I had heard about this community board before but had never seen it. I imagine it became a lot less important once rescue tropes disappeared.