Book Five, Chapters 64 and 65

There will be several chapter drops this week. I'm thinking four unless I get impatient. I am breaking them up into a few at a time. I hope that's okay.

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We sat on the roof of Kimberley's loft—just me, Antoine, Andrew, and Kimberley. We had some information to gather that we didn't want the others around for.

"Kimberley, this is a high-stakes role, and the audience is going to expect a standout performance from you," Sal said over the speakerphone. "But I have to say, I can't help but feel that the ending will be taken as really bleak, and it might put the brakes on your career."

"You think it will be a difficult role for me?" Kimberley asked.

"I think the audience will have a really hard time believing a happy ending. Honestly, it’s just asking a lot," he said. He had a serious tone. That wasn’t good.

We were now doing our customary mixing and matching, testing our tropes against the omen for Stray Dawn. We needed to find the best possible rescue trope and the best team to go with it.

Everything was on the line because we no longer had Dina’s very forgiving rescue trope on the table. We wouldn’t have used it if we did.

Sal and Kimberley exchanged their goodbyes, as he didn't have much more to say.

She had equipped her rescue trope, A Woman in Mourning, which was usually used against serial killers and slashers—human killers who might taunt the loved ones of their past victims. And while the trope technically did work with the new werewolf storyline, all indications were that it was just a terrible fit.

It made sense; creating a visceral thriller where the bad guy has actual supernatural abilities and runs in a pack, while the main character is an isolated, emotionally charged individual, just did not stack up as an easy win.

In fact, when she equipped her rescue trope and I used my I Don't Like It Here scouting ability, the difficulty shot up to Get to the Car Now, the highest difficulty I measured for regular stories.

The problem was my rescue trope was no different.

The Wrong Reel would have us protecting our base against the werewolves all night long. While this was compatible, it was also far too difficult. My rescue trope, like Kimberley's, was better against mundane or slightly paranormal human enemies.

Werewolves were ferocious beasts.

"Guess that leaves me," Antoine said. I could see a look of relief—or pride, maybe—as he said it.

He must have sensed the hesitation on my face.

"What?" he asked. "There’s not going to be a problem here." He quickly equipped his rescue trope, but Kimberley didn’t unequip hers.

"Maybe we should talk about this," she whispered to Antoine.

"Let’s just try it out," Antoine said. "Then we can talk once we have the information."

Ever since Antoine messed up in The Final Straw storyline and dissociated On-Screen for minutes, Kimberley and I had been worried about what we were going to do when we came across another storyline that involved a forest—an apparent trigger for Antoine's latent trauma.

He got close to her, put his hand on her hand, and then whispered, "Let’s just try it," in a sweet way that she wasn’t going to be able to stand up to.

Just as I expected, she unequipped her rescue trope, and with a few taps on her phone screen, another call went out to her agent, Sal.

I didn’t even need to wait for the phone call—I could see that the difficulty of the omen dropped down.

The difficulty level was This is Scaring Me, which was more difficult than the base storyline had registered but less difficult than what either mine or Kimberley's rescue trope registered as.

That might have been counterintuitive, seeing as his trope, A Race Against Time, turned a storyline into, well, a race against time. It put a time clock on victory and forced the players to accomplish some feat—usually involving Hustle—before time ran out.

Why would a rescue like that be easier than mine or Kimberley's? It was actually the same reason that Arthur’s advanced archetype of Monster Hunter had made the Grotesque storyline easier, even though, by all accounts, it made the enemies stronger and more violent.

The Grotesque statue was a powerful enemy in the psychological horror story it was originally supposed to be in. But it was actually a pretty beatable enemy with an exploitable weakness in a head-to-head fight.

The same was probably true with the werewolves in Stray Dawn.

In both mine and Kimberley's rescue tropes, the enemy was put into a situation where a werewolf would be far too dominant for us to overcome while simultaneously not giving us enough advantages to be able to win.

Antoine's rescue trope, however, seemed to give us enough wiggle room that even a mighty foe could be beaten.

After all, with A Race Against Time, you just had to accomplish some goal before the time ran out. We didn’t have to kill or capture werewolves, as in Kimberley's rescue trope, or survive an onslaught from them all night, as with mine.

Of course, what exactly we had to accomplish with Antoine's rescue trope was not clear.

As we had seen with Dina's rescue trope in the storyline Itch, sometimes difficulty or ease just came down to how your rescue trope interacted with the base storyline. It wasn’t always clear what would happen—sometimes, the resulting story might be easier or harder for reasons you could never predict.

"Okay, honey, this is a high-paced, action-packed storyline with a nice mystery angle," Sal said. "It has something for everybody—from the ones who just want to turn their brain off and watch a high-paced flick to people who like the backstory and the lore, depending on how the director goes with it. Frankly, I see you on the poster, scared out of your mind, terrifying beasts at your heels."

"So it'll be a lot of running from werewolves?" Kimberley asked.

"Oh, you could expect that," Sal said. "Fair amount of running toward them, too. The secret here is that your character is brave beyond belief, and in fact, if you don't play this right, people won’t believe it at all. So you have to just be this character that is ready to re-explore her past at all costs. You know what I mean? Like, she’s had it with running, and the fact that there’s a lot of money on the table for her is just one of the reasons she’s doing it because money alone probably won’t make sense."

Interesting notes about her character.

"What can you tell me about my costars?" she asked.

"Well, they had better be ready for a fight," Sal said. "Because this one is an ensemble story where everyone has to bring something to the table, or else nobody is gonna see the light of day, you understand?"

"I got you," Kimberley said.

Sal was beginning to get vague again. That made sense because this was going to be a hard storyline, which meant that he wasn’t going to have a lot to say. But he had told us everything we could have hoped to hear—this was a fight where everyone would need to be ready to carry the story, and Kimberly would be quite important to the narrative, which went well with her Celebrity aspect.

"Anything else?" Kimberley asked.

"All I can say, Kimberley, is that every actress needs a werewolf story in her repertoire, and this might be the one for you if you think you can cut it."

"I think we can cut it," Kimberley said, looking at Antoine but not with optimism. Perhaps with loyalty, like she could never speak an ill word.

Kimberley hung up the phone.

"That sounds better than the last ones," Antoine said. "What is your scouting trope saying?" he asked me, but even before I answered, it seemed he knew just by looking at my face. "It's better, isn't it? It’s easier with my rescue trope, right?"

He had me there.

"Yes," I said, "but I'm not sure why exactly that is."

Actually, it kind of made sense, but not in a way that I could put into words well.

What kind of opportunities would Kimberly’s rescue trope provide that would be useful in fighting werewolves?

As for my trope, I wasn't convinced that a werewolf couldn't just climb up the side of the building and break through a window of Kimberley's loft.

While we could use Isaac's Writ of Habitation and use the jailhouse as a base, I didn’t know how well those bars would stand up to a werewolf, either. At the end of the day, I didn't care how prepared you were—it felt like Carousel was going to make sure the bad guy got inside the base, and you’d have to continue to defend it. But if a werewolf got in and all we had were the weapons we currently owned, we would be screwed.

My rescue would have been great if we had stockpiled supplies at our base. Heck, if we had a bunch of silver bullets, my trope would have been the obvious choice. Ironically, we would probably need to steal those from a werewolf storyline.

We just had hedge clippers and a fishing pole.

"Then it's settled," Antoine said. "We go with my rescue trope, max out on Hustle and Mettle, and we go kick some werewolf tail." He looked at me and said, "What? You were hoping that you'd get to leave me behind?"

I hated it when people tried to read me.

"Come on, Antoine, don't be like that. You know exactly why this is a problem—that mountain is covered in forest—"

"The only problem with The Final Straw," Antoine said, "was that I did not bring along my nightmare trope. That was it. Every other time, I have been fine. Stop treating me like a child."

"I am not treating you like a child. I'm treating you like someone who lost his sense of reality On-Screen for long enough that the enemy you were chasing came back and found you and pushed you to the ground to snap you out of it. And if it had been anyone that wasn’t Benny, you would have been dead."

Antoine had no retort, which I hated. I didn’t want to argue. I actually thought we were basically on the same page already, however reluctant he was.

"Riley," Andrew said, stepping in, "I think what Antoine is asking for is for you to respect his judgment of himself and to treat him like someone who is actively improving his condition every day. He has the tools to live with his ailment. If he thinks he can succeed, we should believe him."

"And what I want to tell you," I said, "is that Moxie or no Moxie, Antoine is good enough of a talker to convince you that he's fine even when he isn't. If we go into this storyline, which is probably low to mid-30s in plot armor difficulty, and he freezes up, he doesn't just endanger himself—he endangers all of us. He has the stats and abilities to help us win a storyline like this, and we need him. But if he's compromised, then we need to go out and find other rescue tropes and go about this differently."

"I knew this whole time that you were gonna be like that," Antoine said. He took a deep breath. "Riley, I am struggling; I'm not denying that. But I'm not crazy, and I'm not out of control. I just have... I just need a few accommodations, a few mental health tropes, a little bit of understanding. That's what I need. Sitting out on the bench isn't going to be any good for me or the team."

I didn't say anything for a while because I knew I wasn't going to win this fight. I even thought that Kimberley agreed with me because she knew Antoine's condition better than any of us, but she didn’t say anything.

"I am treating him," Andrew said, "both with my tropes and with my training in psychology. I can vouch for him. His injury is almost artificial in nature—it's difficult to describe. I believe that if we do our due diligence and treat it seriously, we can prevent any meaningful symptoms in a storyline."

"Don't act like I'm some lone dissenter," I said. "We were all in agreement that this was a big deal, and then everyone decided it wasn't a big deal, and nobody told me. Alright, I don’t think you’re crazy; I just don’t know how to plan around that particular problem. But if you say the problem's gone and everything's taken care of, well, then I guess I have nothing to complain about."

Andrew may have been telling the truth, and he also may have been playing the odds. He saw that we needed Antoine's rescue trope to rescue his teammates, so he may have been putting his thumb on the scale and exaggerating Antoine's miraculous regimen to maintain his sanity. I would never know.

"Well, I said my piece," I said. "If you're saying that he's gonna be fine, then I’m not going to argue.”

But what I really meant was that whatever happens in the storyline, I needed to constantly plan around Antoine not being 100% reliable. And if that condition was forced on me, that was just another thing I would have to do. Because while rescuing Logan and Avery, two people I had never met, was not exactly the most important thing to me, the experience of a successful rescue was essential.

This was never going to be easy, so why not just throw on another obstacle? I had to hope that Antoine could keep faking it just a little bit longer.

Luckily, he was just one player, and he wasn’t the only fighter we had anymore.

They may have been suspicious about why I gave in so quickly. Maybe they thought I was going to throw a tantrum or something, or maybe I was overthinking it. I didn’t know.

But they started talking excitedly about their plans for the storyline, about how vital the Party Phase was going to be because finding weapons that worked against werewolves was essential. The only way for us to do that was through exploration in the Party Phase—or maybe a bit of Rebirth.

Ideally, we would have found good weapons on our shopping trips, but very few seemed to show up.

I found myself staring at the painting, to which we had devoted an entire deck chair so that we could stare at it when we needed to activate our tropes or just feel inspired.

Who was the woman in the picture, and what was the significance of the silver necklace? And why didn't Sal mention it?

That's when I realized something had changed.

"Wait a second," I said. "The omen changed."

They all stopped talking and looked at the painting.

"What's different?" Kimberley asked.

Omens in specialty shops like the pawn shop or the flea market were different from normal omens. Everyone could see details about them, although they were often abbreviated or not very clear.

From what I gathered, everyone could see, to some degree, how this storyline was triggered. Originally, you had to put it into the back of a wood-panel station wagon in southeastern Carousel to activate the storyline.

Their instructions simply told them to return it to its owner, a task which would send them on a long string of clues until they eventually figured out how to put it in the back of the wood-panel station wagon.

But that trigger had changed because of Antoine's rescue trope. That had not happened with Itch.

"The trigger was now simply entering Southeast Carousel," I said, and even they knew that.

"Triggering it became easier," Kimberley said. "Is that good or bad?"

"Neither," I said. "Or both. It means that the storyline is on a sound stage. Doesn’t that make sense?"

"Oh," Andrew said. "That does make sense. The original takes place in Carousel Proper, but this one is different in some meaningful way."

"Can we get Lila to show us around the sound stage using her scouting trope so we're familiar with things?" Antoine asked.

Andrew shook his head. "Our scouting trope's not particularly good for that sort of thing. The sound stages are usually barren when she opens them up—no NPCs, no good information. And I'm not sure she could select this specific sound stage even if she wanted to, especially since the omen isn't in that area; it's a purchasable omen."

Lila could open up sound stages for the purpose of traveling safely, but as amazing as that ability was, it apparently had some limitations.

~-~

Now that we had decided we were using Antoine's rescue trope—and I say "we" very loosely—we could bring up some of the other players to join the talk since the subject of Antoine's mental health was no longer on the table.

Should we have kept that a secret from them? I had no idea. I was done thinking about it.

Cassie was now in one of the lounging chairs, doing her best to focus. "On a voice."

"No," she said, "voices. I think they're lovers quarreling. Two women. I hear growling. I can't tell what they're saying."

"How can you tell they’re lovers if you can't tell what they're saying?" Isaac asked.

"I'll tell you when you're older," Antoine said.

"One of them is very angry, but now all I hear is roars. I think it's the werewolves. I hear the word 'curse,'" Cassie said. "One of them is very angry at the other, but it's like I'm hearing them through a wall or something."

She was using her I'm Blocked trope, which allowed her to eavesdrop on the enemy, so to speak, until they eventually shut her out. So far, we hadn't gotten much content from the trope, but it still held its clues.

If we didn’t already know this was a werewolf storyline, we could probably guess from the way she was describing it. And the two women arguing were interesting, although I didn’t understand the context yet.

Suddenly, Cassie let out a bloodcurdling scream.

"One of them noticed me and just screamed in my ear," she said. "That's all I got." She was actually physically pressing her hand against her ear. Could her psychic eavesdropping cause her physical pain in her ear? Who knew?

"That was useless," she said. "I'm sorry."

"Don't be sorry," Antoine said. "We learned plenty."

"Like what?" Isaac asked. "What did we learn?"

"We learned that there is psychic power in this storyline, so these aren't strictly biological werewolves. Their curse is probably magical in nature," I said. "If there wasn’t any magic, her trope wouldn’t have worked at all. And we know that a fight between two women—who Cassie somehow knows are lovers—is somehow important, but it's not clear how."

"Maybe one of them is Serena," Ramona said, holding up the VHS copy of Stray Dawn: The Mark.

The back matter of the VHS talked about an enigmatic and charismatic troublemaker who was most certainly a werewolf.

"We'll see," I said.

Meanwhile, Andrew had his nose buried in the Atlas in a section about werewolves.

I thought he was wasting his time because, frankly, that section, which described different archetypal enemies, was often lacking.

It could never give spoilers, and trying to generalize enemies based on cosmetic similarities seemed dangerous.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t nuggets of good knowledge in that section of the Atlas; after all, there were some good rules of thumb about different movie monsters that a lot of players might not be familiar with.

"It would seem that a weakness to silver is universal, although the potency of silver changes from film to film," Andrew said.

"Yeah, obviously," I thought to myself.

"It says that Carousel likes to add a mystery to werewolf stories about the identity of the werewolf if possible, and the person who wrote this note suggests that you really spend a lot of time building up that mystery because it'll take up screen time and take the place of physical altercations."

"That's a really good insight," I said, genuinely surprised. I had read that section, but it had been a while.

"So we try to exaggerate the mystery elements so that the big reveal is what's important, and the actual fights get less screen time, and we’re less likely to die, right?" Antoine asked.

"That's how I took it," I said.

There was one resource that Carousel had in limited supply, regardless of its omnipotence: a storyline, or at least the movie made from it, could only have so many minutes in it. So, if you could fill up that screen time with stuff that won’t get you killed but that is interesting to the audience, then there would be less time for all the stuff that can kill you.

"It says that one of the first things you have to do," Andrew said, "is determine the mindset of these werewolves—whether they are aware of their transformation, whether they're hiding it, or if they have the same mental faculties as a human and as a wolf. This determination," he read, "could be the single most important piece of insight in any werewolf story."

He continued to read through the hints and would read them out loud when he found one he liked.

"Look at this," he said. "It says that any betrayal trope can act as a blood control trope because in order to betray allies, a player would have an opportunity to be turned into a werewolf, and players should use this to help propel the story forward."

That wasn’t just true about werewolves; it applied to vampires and zombies as well. Anything that converted you into a monster would work with a betrayal trope to guarantee that that person became a monster—or at least give them the opportunity for it.

He continued reading and didn’t find any more pieces of advice that he felt were worth reading aloud until he got to the end.

"It says here that werewolves are really good for pursuing a Monster Hunter advanced archetype because of the nature of investigating lore, werewolf identity, and eventually hunting down the werewolf… This one mentions a conversation with Arthur C.," Andrew said.

"Arthur?" Kimberley repeated. "So that’s how he did it—how he got his advanced archetype."

"It would appear so," Andrew said. "Of course, this was back before the archetype tracker, so they were just guessing, but it seems they understood the basics. Try to get cast as your desired AA, and then do well in that role. Rinse and repeat."

"Maybe I'll go for Monster Hunter," Antoine said.

"That probably wouldn’t make much sense," Andrew said gently. "A Monster Hunter is a Savvy-based melee fighter; you’re already a Mettle-based melee fighter. If anything, this would be a downgrade for you."

"I can put points in Savvy if I need to," Antoine said. "I find the Athlete to be too generalized. Yeah, I'm a melee fighter, but I feel like I just get assigned to roles without much bite to them. Security guard, cop, jock… I feel like I’m not living up to my potential."

"That might change once you get your Aspect," I said. "I feel like most of my roles ever since I got my Aspect have been pretty specific to my skill set."

"Sport, Stud, or Health Nut," Antoine said aloud, leaning back in his deck chair and drinking a beer. “What grand opportunities lay before me."

The conversation continued but took a much more practical route, as we had to discuss builds and team composition.

Luckily, my I Don’t Like It Here trope could do a lot of the thinking for us.

For instance, Dina and Bobby appeared to be of little benefit in this storyline. We determined that by seeing if the difficulty went up and down with their presence, but it simply didn't—whether they were on the team or not, I couldn't even feel the difficulty change at all.

"Sal did say that this was an ensemble movie, right?" Kimberley said. "So Wallflowers and Outsiders don’t get a lot of screen time because they are minor archetypes, right?"

"That’s more or less it," I said, "but that depends on their Aspect and tropes."

The more meta they were, the less substantial characters they could play, but again, that was true with Film Buffs, too.

Unfortunately, we could never get a measure of how difficult the storyline would be without me, because I was the one taking the measurement. And unless I was included on the team, we would never know how tough it was. Of course, I could have given my trope to one of them to use, but I didn’t mention that.

"Well, that means we don't need Lila either," Michael said. He had kept quiet for most of this, but I could see him over there doing push-ups and sit-ups as he mentally prepared for the fight ahead.

Lila, who had also not been talking much, was finally roused out of silence by that comment.

"I have to go," she said. "I have to make it up to them… If you take me, I'll be one of the blood sacrifices. I can guarantee my death—or at least it'll look like it," she said.

She did have a trope that allowed her to trigger her own Off-Screen death, similar to mine, although it took her less work because all she had to do was let out a bloodcurdling scream. I, on the other hand, had to come up with some convoluted scenario where it looked like I died but didn’t.

To be honest, that was a very strong offer. Even if she did nothing else, taking first or second blood for the rest of us was a huge benefit.

Kimberley, feeling a sense of duty or something like that, said, "Well, that means I can be first blood. My Looks Don’t Last trope guarantees it."

Normally, I would be on board, but this wasn't a normal circumstance.

"The thing is, you’re a Celebrity," I said. "Keeping the story revolving around you with your Hall of Fame aspect trope could be really useful to us. And Looks Don’t Last doesn’t guarantee your death—it guarantees that you suffer the fate of that particular storyline, which in this case might mean turning into a werewolf. And if you're a werewolf combined with being a narrative-hogging Celebrity, it might make you a pretty strong werewolf, depending on how those two things play together."

Lila's trope guaranteed that she would get the "dead" status, which meant she would not turn into a werewolf. It was a huge benefit.

"So, what are we talking? Lila as First Blood?" Andrew asked.

"That would be hard to guarantee," I said. Unlike Looks Don’t Last, her trope Dying Last Scream did not guarantee that she would be first or second blood; it just guaranteed that she would get the dead status when she let out a bloodcurdling scream while being attacked.

"What if she had a little bad luck?" Antoine asked.

"Well, there’s a thought," I said. Now where could we get some bad luck?

"Bad luck?" Andrew asked.

Antoine reached into his pocket and pulled out his Bad Luck Magnet trope. He had been awarded this in the middle of the Campfire storyline in order to guarantee he was attacked and to ensure he could not run from it. It would give the rest of us a lot of invisible bonuses on everything we tried as long as she lived, but it would guarantee she was targeted first, regardless of anything else.

Andrew grabbed the trope from Antoine and read over it.

"Yes, you told me about this," he said. "It looks like it could work. Any thoughts?" he asked, looking over at me.

"Well, assuming that there is no enemy trope that allows for early deaths unrelated to First Blood and assuming that there's not a scripted First Blood, it would likely work," I said. “If there is a scripted First Blood, that would be even better.”

Whatever objection Michael or anyone else might have had to allowing Lila to run the storyline evaporated at the prospect of giving her Bad Luck Magnet. In all likelihood, she would die pretty quickly, but if she didn’t, she would make us a little bit better at everything we did.

It was a win-win.

"All right, so Lila comes on as general support and potential blood sacrifice. Antoine is in as a fighter and for his rescue trope," I said. "Kimberley is in for narrative control; because she's a Celebrity, we can ensure that the story will circle around her in some manner that’ll make it predictable for us. What else?"

Andrew nodded his head. "What has me particularly confused is that the story seems to respond so well to high-Savvy players. You and I are both high-Savvy," he said, talking to me. "We won’t do very well in a fight, and yet our presence seems to make the story easier. I’m curious as to why that might be."

He was right. Whenever he left, the storyline did get a little harder, but I had chalked that up as just the benefit of having a healer. But it was true—the team did have a lot of Savvy, and it wasn't clear why that was beneficial from anything we were told.

Until I thought about it for a moment.

"Well, werewolves go hand in hand with monster hunters, right?" I said. "And monster hunters are Savvy-based. So, is it possible that this storyline benefits from Savvy because werewolves have to be researched and have to be hunted, which are things that Savvy is good for?"

Now, we were onto something.

"So we have a Doctor and a Film Buff covering it from both a lore and meta perspective," Andrew said. "And I must say that, in addition to being Logan and Avery’s teammate, Michael also has many tropes that could be useful for fighting werewolves."

He certainly did—his ability to know the terrain alone would be priceless.

"Hell yeah, I do," Michael said.

"So that's it," I said. "A soldier, a doctor, an athlete, a celebrity, a blood sacrifice, and a guy who watches too many movies."

"Sounds like a team to me," Antoine said.

There was a nervous excitement in the air as we all talked about what tropes we were going to bring. We let Antoine talk about how well we were going to do and give us a pep talk.

But the truth was, we were at a big disadvantage. It was true that this storyline was not as hard as Post-Traumatic, the storyline that Anna and Camden were trapped in, but it was a difficult storyline, and we were not going to have an easy time.

Even though Antoine’s rescue trope also had that same little safety net that Dina’s had—where if you weren’t killed in the storyline, you would survive it even if you failed—this one would be different because, unlike in Dina's trope, we would not be background characters or nonexistent characters. We would be the focus, and I had a hard time believing that too many of us were going to survive if we failed, regardless of a safety net.

More than that, I believed we had to throw away the safety net in our minds because our goal wasn’t to struggle through and grind out levels over the decades. Our goal was to beat this in one shot and gain enough experience to beat the game at Carousel before we died of old age.

I knew that the smart thing to do was to abandon our hope of this rescue for a time, go out, train, gather more experience, and level up until this rescue would be easier.

But to do that would take months, and it would defeat the purpose of having all these rescues available to us. We couldn’t be safe. We had to be exceptional.

The goal was to reach a high level with the fewest storylines possible. That way, we could maximize experience without building up too many residual spoilers.

And we were going to succeed at that because I had no intention of letting my friends rot in Carousel for the rest of their lives.

~-~

I wanted to bring Dina along, or maybe even Bobby. According to my difficulty rating abilities, they might not help that much innately, but having them around to level up would be great. Unfortunately, having them stay behind might have been more critical.

After we had planned out a run of Stray Dawn, I got Bobby and Dina together, along with Kimberley and Antoine, and I told them my plans straight up.

"We need you to stay behind with Isaac, Ramona, and Cassie," I said. "As much help as I would think you might be on the storyline, we need you to stay behind in case we fail."

Dina seemed to have already gathered that from how I hadn’t suggested their presence already.

"I'll have to get my rescue trope back," Dina said, "but that shouldn't take more than a few months, and it'll take a long time to be able to rescue you."

"No, that's not what you should do," I said. "What you need to do is find other storylines where you can be awarded rescue tropes—storylines that have innate rescues built into them. That's where you have to go. Get as many rescue tropes as you can find and find one that works really well to come save us. That’s your method of attack," I said. "I suspect that the rescue tropes we have right now are not perfect, but they’re good enough. When you come to rescue us, you need one that's perfect."

I handed them a list of storylines I had found that I believed had a high probability of rewarding rescue tropes. It wasn’t urgent that we find new rescue tropes right now; Antoine’s would be sufficient, assuming that his promises of keeping his mental health under control were true.

"The first thing you're going to do is rescue new recruits—specifically these two," I said, handing them two missing posters.

“Somehow, these two players entered Carousel alone and didn't get caught by an omen until they got all the way downtown. And when I say downtown, I don't mean the Centennial—I mean they outlasted the Centennial without triggering an omen and eventually got trapped by themselves in a storyline called The Mind Wanders.

You might remember that one; it’s the one a few blocks over with the tall building, and somebody splats beside you on the sidewalk, and suddenly you're in a storyline. I told you about that—that's the one that caught them."

"Why these two specifically?" Dina asked.

"I think we can trust them. They were actually mentioned in the Atlas by Curtis, the guy who wrote all the stuff about Project Rewind. He ran into them and tried to convince them to join his group, but they declined. Here’s the thing: they never ran a storyline the entire time they were here. That's why their levels are so low, and yet they managed to survive for a week and a half because one of them is a soldier and has a really good Agent scouting trope."

"So, you know they're not hostile," Bobby said.

"Right. Get this: they came here back in 2002, just the two of them. Because of all the fighting amongst different groups of players, no one ever rescued them because that was just something you didn’t do back then, according to Curtis. He didn't want to rescue them because they had already turned down his help, and he figured he didn’t really have anything to offer them better than the peace of death. But he always kept that rescue in his back pocket in case he ever needed a quick level in an emergency."

"And do you think that they'll join up with us?" Dina asked.

"Well, probably not," I said, "unless you're more convincing than Curtis was. Or maybe dying in a storyline finally got them to believe that what was going on was really happening. But it will give you a really good rescue that will bump up your levels. In fact, I've got a whole list of good leads."

I handed them a list of good rescues. If we weren’t attempting the slingshot method of level ascension, we would have run those.

"If we do die, you will need to relocate to Bobby's place because I'm not sure that Kimberley's Writ of Habitation will apply once she's been postered."

"Also, I think that the storyline is really a good fit for the five of you, and it's low-level enough that you'll be able to pull it off even with the teammates you have."

I handed them the whole stack of papers I had written out for their plan of attack and everything.

"Of course, you'll also keep the Atlas. And heck, one of those two players I mentioned is actually a scholar—it was a scholar and a soldier—so she might have the Eureka trope and be able to look through that thing."

"You really thought this out, didn’t you?" Dina said.

"All I get to do is plan. That's my whole job," I said. "And about going to Bobby's place—you'll probably want to go directly there when we leave, on second thought, just in case. If the Writ of Habitation suddenly stops working while you're asleep one night, well, you'll probably be hit by an omen really quickly."

Perhaps I was being a little too nonchalant about all of this, but they were taking it in pretty heavily.

They let me explain it and seemed to take it well enough, heaviness aside.

"One thing," Bobby said. "Before you go on that storyline, I want to see The Grotesque."

Of course, he did.

"I'll show it to you," I said, "but I'm telling you, she's only in one scene and barely—she's mostly just referred to."

"I want to see it," he said. "I'm sure of it."

Who was I to deny that request—the last glimpse of his wife he might ever see, and it was a background shot of her standing outside of a home while the rest of us did our jobs and played our characters.

And then she was gone, but we watched the whole movie through, and Bobby was closely attentive, watching everything.

She wasn’t even in it enough to trigger heavy breathing. There was no hint of the axe murderer.

I thought he would be angry and demand more, but Bobby wasn't the type to get angry. He was the type to get sad. Sad but resolute.

"I'll find her if it's the last thing I do," he said through tears, "no matter what."

I hoped he would find answers, though I had no idea what those answers would be.

Now, all that was left was to throw our chips in against Carousel’s terrible beasties and see if we lived to see the dawn.