Book Five, Chapter 74

~Andrew~

By far, the most accurate measure of success during research was the On-Screen/Off-Screen indicator.

The difficulty with playing a character who is supposed to be an expert on the supernatural is that, in the pursuit of research, you often find yourself learning things that your character was already supposed to know.

It can be deflating to stumble across an interesting tidbit—a tiny morsel that you believe might unlock clues to the mysteries of the paranormal—only to realize that the entire discovery occurred Off-Screen.

No matter how important the discovery, if it occurred Off-Screen, it was likely that Carousel did not intend for that line of research to bear much fruit.

The role of the researcher in a story is incredibly consistent, and discovering lore that could enable you to destroy evil always follows a pattern: you start with a problem and then seek a solution. You find one, but you don’t fully understand it. After initial failures, you reach a better understanding, and then, if you are clever, you can find a way to implement your discovery into a solution that can win the day.

Carousel will obtain footage of you all along the way, so if you come across something interesting in a book and the cameras are not rolling, you can almost certainly assume that you have not solved your problem.

The books in the stacks within the Witherhold Manor certainly contained lots of information about werewolves. Much of it was redundant, so Riley and I were left searching for errant phrases, small paragraphs that contained information we didn’t know among seas of information that we already did.

It gave me no small amount of pride that I was the first to find something substantial, something that brought us On-Screen—though I soon wished I hadn’t.

On-Screen.

“Look here,” I said.

“You got something?” Riley asked, his voice eager but cracking from disuse.

“I believe I do,” I replied, flipping open the brittle pages. “This is an oral history from a man named Ephraim Stokes, a jailer in an asylum far to the south. He was charged with the responsibility of feeding a group of ex-soldiers, locked in the deepest, darkest dungeon of that asylum—men afflicted with a curse, men who howled at the full moon.”

Riley’s eyes sparked. “That sounds right up our alley.”

I nodded, letting the weight of the words settle between us. “Here’s what Stokes wrote,” I began, my voice steady. “‘They be men lost, but only in flesh, for their spirits have long gone from ‘em.’ Stokes saw more than just beasts; he saw broken men, shattered in ways deeper than scars of flesh. ‘Several of the men,’ he says, ‘were scarred in the war—not scars of the body, but of the soul.’”

Riley listened on, curious as to why Carousel saw this information worth broadcasting.

“‘As the curse takes hold,’ Stokes wrote, ‘they find themselves back on the battlefield, haunted by old fears, old wounds. In their desperation to escape, they take refuge in the wolf, surrenderin’ their spirit to it. And to keep from falling apart, they look to the pack leader for something steady, something to hold onto.’”

I paused, the candlelight flickering across Riley’s face.

“Some, Stokes believed, would never be men again.”

I let those words hang in the air. First-hand knowledge of having dealt with wolves was useful when most of our research involved legends or secondhand information.

"That's the best explanation for why they're so loyal to the pack leader that I've found," Riley said.

“Yes, most accounts seem to hand-wave that away, as they can't explain why creatures of human intelligence would resort to an animalistic hierarchy that does not appear to be based on reproduction or territory.”

We continued to squabble with small comments, hoping to provide Carousel with whatever lines it needed for its movie, but the plot cycle never shifted one centimeter. The story wasn’t moving forward, which, to my understanding, meant that there was something we were supposed to do or say.

Luckily, Riley was adept at figuring out these particular problems—more so than I had seen among the veterans.

“It would seem,” he said, “that those who have trauma before being changed have the worst of it.”

He stared at me with accusatory eyes.

“It would definitely seem that some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder would exacerbate the curse if this account is to be believed,” I said.

“Well, I hope none of us have any such baggage,” he said with a cough.

And just like that, the plot cycle started moving forward again—just enough for me to notice—and we were Off-Screen almost instantly afterward.

For a moment, Riley and I just stared at each other, and I was certain he was preparing to mock me. It was suddenly quite clear what Carousel's plans were.

"Antoine may end up being more of a liability than we anticipated," I said.

"Yep," Riley replied. Was he being smug, or was he being so tight-lipped to avoid gloating?

I cleared my throat. We would certainly have to plan around whatever it was Carousel was scheming.

~-~

~Michael~

"Michael Brooks is not in the forest," the big guy, Antoine, mumbled under his breath. I thought that’s what he said, at least.

“Did you say my name?” I asked.

Antoine turned to me and said, “No.”

I could have sworn he did. He must not have said any of that because I was in the forest. So was he.

He started looking around the forest trail, then turned to me and asked, “How far are we?”

“Just a little over half a mile further to go,” I said. I knew my way around. A parks map was attached to the red wallpaper in my mind, pinned there with a hunting knife. I could see the map, and I could see us on it. I was the master of navigation. It wasn’t the type of map we used back in the army, but I wasn’t going to complain. I never complained.

Not until lately.

“A lot of the popular walking trails are up this direction,” I said. “Try not to look like we’re on our way to assassinate somebody. We don’t want to scare the shit out of some family on vacation.”

“We’ll just tell him we’re out on a hunt,” the blonde mercenary said. “It’s true, ain’t it?”

The men laughed. I didn’t.

Back at Camp Dyer, they told me that if I didn’t learn to act, I was never going to level up, but that if I always acted intensely and quietly, I could just be that character, the strong, silent type.

It had worked.

We had packed light for this mission. This was reconnaissance, but I could tell that the mercenaries were itching for a fight. I was, too. During daylight hours, the wolves would be at their weakest, and we could end this movie before it started.

As we walked forward, I kept thinking about something the nerd had said: that we needed to be sure someone was a wolf before we killed them. Because if we didn’t, they almost certainly wouldn’t be a wolf, and we would lose all moral high ground, making the story impossible to win.

I didn’t see how you could possibly know that, but then, I wasn’t sure how he knew most of the stuff he claimed to. Film Buff sounded like a snob of an archetype. The folks at Camp Dyer managed to get by without film buffs, but now we were supposed to act like he was an expert.

I didn’t know what to think. Andrew said that we should trust him, that he thinks Riley is so obsessed with the game that we can trust him to help us win it.

I couldn’t wait to find out what Logan would have to say about all this. Logan always had good takes on things. He seemed to understand them so quickly.

All we had to do was rescue him, and I would do that if it cost me my life.

All I knew then was that I wanted to see a werewolf in front of me so I could shoot it.

It’s not often that you can solve a problem with a gun in Carousel. There was always some twist or restriction. It was a drag. But in this storyline, guns were the answer, and I was ready.

What good was I if I wasn’t good for that?

~-~

~Riley~

Andrew was really good at research.

Even without the Eureka trope, he had an eye for finding important things and dismissing things that weren't. Maybe Savvy really did help with that, and I was just having a tough time noticing. I wasn't sure.

Every little piece of information mattered. Even if we weren't going On-Screen for it, knowing more about werewolves was like arming ourselves for battle. The more we knew, the fewer assumptions we had to make, the easier Improvisation would be.

Our fate could be determined by how well we wielded even one fact.

It was no surprise that Carousel was going to incorporate Antoine's trauma into the story somehow. I knew it from the moment I learned his character also had a dead brother.

Carousel wasn’t being cruel. Carousel saw the world in terms of production value. Why have someone pretend to be messed up in the head when you could get the real deal?

I was reading through the journal of Amadeus Sing, a pseudonym for a Far Eastern academic who didn’t think investigating mythical creatures would help his career, so he used a fake name. The Woolsey family hired him to investigate local werewolves, which were beginning to overwhelm the population. His journal told the story of his discoveries. Sometime before he started documenting things, he concluded that the Woolsey’s had killed their daughter. He was afraid for his life, but he didn’t want to abandon his research.

A classic dilemma.

There was one problem with this story: the family name in the storyline, the people that had built Witherhold Manor, were called the Withers. Thomas and Agnes Withers, to be exact.

So why were they called Woolsey’s in this journal, and why was the Manor called Woolsey Manor?

Well, it was a secret, so to speak.

~-~

Sometime while we were doing our research, we were found by the final member of our team. That’s right: Lila White decided to make an appearance while we were knee-deep in the stacks, investigating lore.

“Where have you been?” Andrew asked her as soon as he saw her.

“Don’t start with me,” she said, exhausted. “I had to walk all the way here. I had to hitchhike to town, but nobody was willing to bring me all the way to the Manor. They said it was too dangerous or haunted or something.”

“Well, it makes sense,” I said. “Bad Luck Magnet would make you fail every Moxie check.”

She threw up her arms, clearly tired, and said, “Well, I’m here now.”

After more discussion, it became clear that she had just arrived in Carousel that morning. It also became clear that she was not playing a character. As a Wallflower, she was cast as an extra—a background character with little to no lines.

“I made it here before First Blood. That’s all that matters, right?” she asked.

Sure enough.

I had never seen her so talkative. Perhaps we had not met under circumstances where the subtleties of her personality were easily seen.

“Did you find anything? Is your research at least going well?” she asked.

“It’s going very well,” Andrew said. “I feel confident I know most there is to know about the anatomy of werewolves as well as much of the lore. I question how much more there is to discover, but we have thousands of books to go, and there’s no way we’re going to get through them in the time we have.”

Lila looked up at me as if asking what it was I had found. Her pale skin was red and sunburnt. Had she lost a Grit check against the sun?

“I definitely found something, but I’m trying to find a way to go On-Screen with it,” I said, then I had a thought. “You’re a Wallflower, right? So you should be able to see the script because of one of your tropes?”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t see much, though.”

“That’s fine. Can you tell me what you see right now?”

“Sure,” she said. She closed her eyes and focused. “Midday exploration of Carousel River Camp. Research in the stacks. Campers in the distance act suspicious.”

“And those are the scenes that are ongoing right now?” I asked.

She nodded. “Those are the ones my Savvy is good enough to see. There might be something else, but I don’t know.”

“So you see the scene where we’re here researching, right? Is there anything on it? On that page?”

She thought for a moment. “You revealed a scripted subplot about trauma. Andrew completed his character’s knowledge tree, which means that he learned everything his character should know going into the story. That’s it.”

“There’s nothing else?” I asked. “Anything about something called ‘Rolling Silver’?”

A look of surprise came over her face. “Yeah, just for a second when you said it, but then it disappeared again.”

“Strange,” I said. “There’s this thing that the author is talking about called Rolling Silver, which is supposed to be a huge weakness of werewolves, but I can’t find a way to make it go On-Screen. But I’ve got my theories. We’re going to have to do some tests.”

“What theories?” Andrew asked.

I started laughing because what I was about to reveal was, frankly, quite a huge coincidence in my mind at the time.

“You know how Bad Luck Magnet is supposed to give a boost to all of the user’s allies as long as they’re alive, basically making them a little bit better at everything they attempt?”

“Yes,” Andrew said. “That’s the primary reason we brought Lila—so she could help us with exploration and give us a good foundation for the rest of the story.”

“I think Bad Luck Magnet is the reason we’re doing so well discovering information about werewolves. Heck, once I figure out what Rolling Silver is, it’s supposed to be an incredibly potent weapon against them. But I don’t think it just helped us discover werewolves’ weaknesses. I think there was a reason that Roxy or whoever sent you guys to die at the werewolves' lair.”

“And what was that?” Andrew asked, alarmed.

“I think there’s secret lore here,” I said, holding up the journal. “I think this journal holds a secret that isn’t even part of the storyline itself—something deeper.”

“Whoa,” Lila said, seeing something in her mind’s eye.

“What is it?” Andrew asked.

“It’s weird,” she said. “It’s like a space opened up on the red wallpaper when he said that, but there was nothing there.”

Andrew and I looked at each other.

“What exactly is that journal about?” Andrew asked.

“It mixes lore and secret lore,” I said. “I think this thing goes all the way back to the beginning. I might need your help.”

The question was, did we want to spend our precious time following this lead or focus on a clean victory?

That was probably one of the toughest decisions I had ever been asked to make.

“We should start trying to figure out what he means by rolling silver,” I said. “Then, if we have time, we can spare some time to learn the secrets of the universe.”

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Next Chapter Saturday.