Book Five, Chapters 52 and 53

I know the quasi-slice of life is not usual for this story, but I am enjoying it. I promise this is going somewhere.

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There was a sporting goods store around the last turn of the U-shaped building.

It had an appropriately punny name: Dead Sprints.

Unfortunately, it was closed down because it contained so many cool objects, and it would be overpowered for us to shop there. After all, sporting implements often made great incognito weapons—even if you weren't an athlete.

The Atlas didn’t say anything about it because trope objects (of which there were tons in there) were new, but the conveniently placed attendant filled us in. They said that the shop’s owner had been murdered the night before so the shop was closed. She gave us details, including a newspaper article. It seemed pretty clear to me that to shop there, you had to run a storyline and save the shop owner the day before you went.

So, as we passed by, we could only window shop, staring past the locked doors and shutters at the hockey sticks, golf clubs, mountain climbing axes, and other interesting items, many of which had tropes attached.

Oh well.

I carried my TV as best I could. We had brought the wheelbarrow in case we found something worth purchasing, but we didn’t bring it inside the outlet mall because of the crowd. Luckily, the TV only had a 13-inch screen, and it really wasn’t that heavy.

Isaac was psyched when I actually bought a TV, and I don’t even think he realized it had a trope attached.

There was a Halloween-esque shop called The Hem and Haunt, and the strange thing about it was that it didn’t appear to have a single omen inside. It had no trope objects, no items of interest at all because it was not a shop in and of itself but rather the setting for an omen that showed up at 3:00 a.m.

I supposed the idea was that people would be disarmed by the lack of danger and then be thrust into a terrible storyline. Who could say?

It would have made more sense back in the days when players were struggling to find a place to survive between Writs of Habitation.

Either way, no one would ever want to walk inside, especially because one of the mannequins in the window was wearing what I could only assume was human skin as a costume.

However, an employee was standing out front, inviting us in. Her name was Jezebel, and I only remembered her because, like many of the other shopkeepers, she kept telling us one thing:

“If we don’t have what you like, our sister store at the Carousel Mall is sure to have what you need. I can give you directions,” she said, holding out a little pamphlet with a map on it.

The actual Carousel Mall was too dangerous to enter, but all of these little shops around town seemed to want to funnel people toward it.

One day, we would surely go—but not that day.

For most people, the real goal for that trip was just clothes. If those clothes happened to have magic powers inside storylines, that would be cool, but for the most part, that wasn’t it.

My friends and I lost our clothes whenever Camp Dyer was prematurely shut down, so we mainly wore what we had on us—with the exception of Kimberly, who put in more effort to procure more clothes.

Still, buying clothes and having a choice in what you wear every day was an important part of staying sane.

Personally, I didn’t think that my clothes were too bad, considering I’d been wearing them for the better part of a year, according to the calendar that was. In reality, they weren’t close to being that old; much of the damage my clothes ever had was done in storylines and was instantly reversed after the storyline ended.

More than that, even though we had apparently spent many months inside The Die Cast storyline, my hoodie had disappeared when I entered it, so it was still in pretty good condition even if it weren’t for the magical resetting ability that Carousel seemed to have.

Still, I wanted a new undershirt, and maybe a few backup pairs of socks and other garments would make me feel more at home. I was currently rotating through clothes I had borrowed from various storylines, but none of them were ideal—and none of them were brand new.

You do what you have to to survive, even if it means stealing undergarments from the characters you play.

So shopping was easy for me. I just needed the basics.

It was equally easy for Dina, who claimed she had purchased an entirely new outfit. However, to my eyes, she looked like she was still wearing her brown leather jacket and ripped-up jeans—perhaps a newer version I didn’t know.

“What?” she asked. “This is what you wear when you don’t want people messing with you.”

She did look tough, but…

“You’ve been murdered in that outfit,” I said.

She shrugged, still admiring her new jacket, which I still swore was her old jacket.

I sat in a small waiting area, my eyes on the door with a good vantage point of the entire store so that I could help look out for omens.

In this circumstance, Kimberly was just as good as me because she had memorized this place as well as the rest of the outlet mall.

Still, I tried to be useful.

There was one of those circular racks with clearance items on it, and a little kid was hiding in the middle of it.

The kid was an Omen. The storyline was called Us. I was sure Carousel would be hearing from Jordan Peele’s lawyers soon. The poster for the storyline featured that same kid, I had to assume, with his face in his hands.

Or at least the place where his face should be was in his hands, because as I concluded after a few glances, when I could take them, through the hanging clothes that surrounded him—he had no face.

It wasn’t like I could see his skull or anything; where his face should be was blank. He just sat in the middle of that clothing rack, facelessly crying from what I could tell, but there was no noise.

Other than that, the clothing store was very delightful. It had a less spooky name, Twisted Threads, and was pretty close to a JCPenney or Dillard’s. There were a few things shoppers had to be aware of, like not letting any of the perfume get sprayed on them by those NPCs trying to sell it.

There were a variety of storylines that could be kicked off just by having some scent sprayed on you. Unfortunately, from what I could see, none of them involved werewolves.

“Riley, check this out,” Kimberly said from somewhere to my right. I saw her standing in the aisle, holding a button-up shirt in my direction. It had a trope on it called Impress the Parents that would automatically do your hair, get you all cleaned up, and buff your Moxie.

Even I could acknowledge how useful that perk was. It was a general trope, but it gave different bonuses depending on whether you were a Stud, a Beauty, a Newcomer, or an Underdog.

No bonuses for Film Buffs.

“No thanks,” I called out. Looking good was not a priority worth giving up the utility of my hoodie. Being able to put my hood up and look like I wasn’t paying attention was just too useful.

“Why not?” she cried back to me. “It looks good.”

“I don’t wanna look like I’m dressed for fourth-grade picture day,” I called back.

She gave me a disappointed look and tucked the shirt over her arm, clearly intent on buying it.

But we had to be careful as far as that went. There was so much to purchase at this store, even more than the other places. And there were plenty of trope items at Twisted Threads. Not a lot of them were useful, but there was a legitimately good selection. We could easily waste all of our money here.

I decided to stand near the checkout to see what people were buying.

No one was supposed to spend more than 10 dollars, which was a lot of money in Carousel, especially when you weren’t buying specialty items.

I had already broken that rule, but the TV was for the group. (Actually, it was for me, but the group could use it.)

Andrew had enough of his own money to afford a trope item: a cane with a trope called Damaged Goods that would cause him to enter a storyline Hobbled but strongly buff his Grit.

That was a pretty good deal for a doctor who mainly used their brain, though he would need to be careful. One of the assets of a good healer was their ability to move around quickly, so he would have to pick his moment carefully.

As I stood near the register, a glance around the room showed me several potential buys. There was an umbrella with a Seer trope that would guarantee it would rain before a dramatic moment in a storyline. There was eye shadow with a Femme Fatale trope for attracting a mark, appropriately called Fatal Attraction. I didn’t want to think about that one.

There was a plain white T-shirt on a clearance rack—not the one with the crying faceless child under it—that would clean itself between scenes. It was a criminal trope called Above Suspicion. While I had absolutely seen stuff like that happen in movies where people's clothes seemed to get washed as they moved from room to room, it occurred to me how useful a trope like that might be when paired with a Betrayal trope that allowed you to act as an ally to the enemy in order to steal their narrative momentum, screen time, or whatever other strategy you were employing that required a betrayal trope.

Cassie managed to find herself a really useful trope item. Even though she didn’t have enough money to buy it herself, everyone chipped in a coin here and there to help her get it.

It was a handheld mirror, so old and beautiful that it could not have come from a store like Twisted Threads in the real world.

It had a Sleuth trope on it that made it so NPCs and enemies would not see it when you used it to peek around corners. It was a total Nancy Drew trope. The real benefit was that she would be able to use her Reflective Jump Scare trope along with it in order to get a peek at the enemy magically and not just around the corner.

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The trip out of the outlet mall was just as treacherous as the trip in, but we pulled it off, and I could tell that our mood was better from this seemingly normal mini-vacation. The wheelbarrow was outside, just where we left it. I quickly walked over and placed my purchases, including my television, inside of it—as did pretty much everyone else.

Michael insisted on being the one to push it. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, and he wanted to show off his guns—not just the one tucked in his waistband.

As he picked up the wheelbarrow, he glanced at the television, and I thought maybe it occurred to him that it looked an awful lot like televisions back home, but if he realized that, he didn’t say anything.

Michael mostly talked when he was sarcastic, using dark humor, or angry. Other than that, he was fairly quiet, though I wasn’t sure if that was his real personality or if it was just because we weren’t close yet.

“Where to next?” Kimberly asked with a smile on her face. For Kimberly, today was about as good as any day in Carousel could get, and I was happy about that.

Everyone gathered around, and we explained our next move.

Well, I explained it.

“First things first,” I said. “We need to get off of this lawn because there’s something trying to break up through the grass over there. I don’t know if you can see that…”

“Oh, damn!” Isaac said, jumping away from where he was standing about five feet from whatever it was that was pushing up through the grass.

We moved over to the parking lot.

“All right, as you all know, the number one priority right now—given our levels and all the things we have to accomplish in the next few months—is that we need to figure out what storyline Logan Maize and Avery Lawson are trapped behind. To be honest, there’s not a lot of guidance in the Atlas, and frankly, it feels like finding a needle in a haystack. All we know is that it features werewolves, and we know its general location, so we’re going to go out and look around. We’re going to go to Omen shops in hopes that we can find a mobile omen for the story.”

Everyone nodded in a generally good mood.

“What are the odds that we find it?” Michael asked. It would seem he was yet another person who wasn’t comfortable with optimism.

“We’re going to look until we do find them,” Antoine said, “even if we have to turn over every single shop in Carousel. You have my word.”

Antoine must have been getting bad because he was really laying the gung-ho attitude on thick.

“I would say our odds are very small of finding the omen outright,” I said, “but I think that if we ask around, there are several ways we can find that storyline. We know that Paragons are able to give you tickets to specific storylines, so that’s another thing that we’ll be trying today. There are no promises being made here.”

I hated to undercut Antoine’s message, but I had no idea what our odds of finding the right omen were.

Oddly, if I wasn’t mistaken, I thought Michael liked my answer more. I knew that I would have if I were in his position.

Andrew started to clap and encourage the others in much the same way that Antoine did, although I thought that Andrew was just doing it to humor Antoine.

“Show us the way,” he said.

And I did.

~-~

Our first stop was a semi-familiar haunt we had been to twice before. It was a little psychic shop in the middle of a strip mall (we were hitting all the different kinds of malls that day except for the real one) parking lot that had largely been abandoned. The entire area was overcome with the sounds coming from the fur store. Roars and screams.

From the outside, it looked like the establishment of any palm reader in any town in the U.S., but I knew that inside, there were powerful things.

“Andrew, Michael, and Lila,” I said, “you definitely need to go in and talk to her. Your connection to Logan and Avery should help her nonsense work better. The rest of you can either stay out here or go inside and shop, but I’ll warn you, there are a lot of purchasable omens in here, and some of them can get you if you’re not paying attention. Cassie, if you want to come in and look around for psychic stuff, whatever. Isaac, you’re the lookout.”

I could trust Isaac to be on the lookout, especially in this spot, because I knew that no omens were coming by anytime soon.

We had scoped it out before, and the new Atlas had some information on it, but it was still good to give him responsibility every once in a while so that he didn’t revert to being a slacker.

He nodded and seemed to take the job seriously.

The psychic shop was exactly as I remembered it, except there was more stuff now, including keepsakes and trope items.

Silas, the mechanical showman, was still broken down in the corner.

As per usual, after a few moments of browsing through the archaic goods and occult items, Madam Celia made a shocking surprise entrance.

“I know why you have come,” she said. “Come with me. I will do a reading for you, but be warned—the price will be great, and not just in coin.”

The price was great in coin too because it cost 40 dollars, which was twice as much as I paid for my magic television.

Still, this was important, and the cost likely reflected the reward.

Likely.

“I’m going with them,” I said to Cassie. “Use your magic sensing trope not to touch anything that will kill you.”

“What if it will kill others?” she asked.

“Better leave those alone, too, just to be safe,” I said.

Andrew, Michael, Lila, and I squeezed into a booth in the back of the shop.

I didn’t really need to be there, but they didn’t say anything, and frankly, if she was going to give us some clue, I wanted to hear it myself. I was sure that Andrew would take things seriously and give me a good account, but still.

Madam Celia was in a flamboyant mood that day. While she always wore the purple dress and crazy jewelry, she often had a serious look on her face, like she was impatient with ignorant players for not understanding her fortunes.

She examined Andrew, Michael, and Lila one at a time. She gingerly reached out, grabbed their hands, and moved her fingers over their palms, around their wrists, and up their arms.

“A very skilled doctor,” she said, examining Andrew.

“You knew violence long before you came to Carousel, I see,” she said to Michael.

That wasn’t too impressive; she was just basically describing their archetypes.

She was still examining Michael when she said, “Your anger at Carousel—it’s potent. Anger because it trapped you, anger because it tricked you, and anger from a broken heart.”

“That’s not what we’re here for,” Michael said. He pulled his hand back, and for the rest of the time we were there, he leaned back on the bench as if hoping she wouldn’t read him again.

For Lila, she said, “You seek redemption, and you will find it, but perhaps it won’t be what you hoped for.”

I didn’t really understand that. Most of Celia's psychic nonsense was less supernatural intuition and more reading the systems of Carousel.

I was always under the impression that player choice mattered, so to say that she would obtain redemption implied that either our fate was already sealed or that Celia was saying something generic to try to soothe Lila.

After she was done with Lila, she moved on to me.

“Back again?” she asked. “Do you have a question you’d like to ask me?”

“I thought you said you already knew what we were here for,” I said.

“I know the question you came with, but I did hope that you would ask another.”

The last time I was here, Celia and her gimmick left me a little emotional after a non-consensual walk down memory lane.

“I repeat what the guy said—that’s not what we’re here for,” I said.

“It strikes me that everyone believes they know what they’re here for, and hardly any of them are correct… You seek a Quester. You seek friends who have fallen. And there are answers to your question, but I am not the one to answer them.”

She produced a small card from a pocket somewhere in her cloak and handed it to Andrew.

“Next, seek your answers here. In Carousel, the story moves wherever you pull the thread, so keep pulling,” she said.

The card looked like a business card, but it had flowers and little silhouettes of people on it. I couldn’t quite see what it was for, but Andrew looked puzzled.

“What I can give you is this warning:

Your friends have all fallen, some here, some there;
'Til they have risen, you've no friends to spare."

Madam Celia, the quest-giver—you stop in to get your fate divined, and she outsources it to someone else with some fortune-cookie knowledge.

I was sure it would all pay off, but I was secretly hoping for a private showing ticket like the one she had given Dina. That would have made things a lot easier.

The story moves in the direction you pull the thread. That was how magic worked in Carousel; the more you pursued a theme or an idea, the more the universe seemed to warp around that mission.

They called it a throughline. Silas Dyrkon had explained something like that. It was funny how so many things in Carousel all worked that same way—sometimes in small ways, like when improvising in a storyline, and sometimes in big ways, like trying to rewrite the universe or travel back in time.

I thought over the poem, and for some reason, I kept looking at the Throughline Tracker on the red wallpaper, but it hadn’t changed. I still felt something weird about it.

Your friends have all fallen, some here, some there;
'Til they have risen, you've no friends to spare."

I thought over the words. This seemed to be a straightforward warning that we couldn’t risk losing anyone else until we rescued more people, but that seemed a little cheap for a 40 dollar fortune. I would have to think on it more.

My wheels were turning.

“Will they ever forgive me?” Lila asked before we left the booth. Her eyes were red from tears. She had been silently crying next to me.

“Now, dear,” Madam Celia said, “they have been betrayed far more than what you’ve done, and it’s possible they’ll be betrayed again far worse. I promise you that the night will grow pitch black before the sun begins to rise in Carousel.”

That wasn’t a yes.

I slid out of the booth first and walked back out to the front, where Cassie had collected two items. The moment I saw her, she looked at me with puppy-dog eyes because she didn’t have enough money for them.

They were not trope items. They weren’t keepsakes. She was holding actual cursed objects, with which Madam Celia had taken the proper precautions to negate their harmful qualities—or so the sign on the wall said.

“Look, you know I have that Curios and Trinkets trope,” Cassie started, “and these are the cheapest ones I can buy.”

I took a deep breath and reached into my hoodie pocket to retrieve some coins.

It was an investment. Curios and Trinkets was a powerful scouting trope that allowed her to sense the nature of magical or cursed objects by comparison to other magical or cursed objects she already owned.

The group would be paid back in information.

“So what do we got?” I asked.

“This necklace puts you in a coma,” she said, holding out a small box with a disassembled talisman inside.

“It would be far worse than a coma, dear,” Madam Celia called as she reentered the front room. “But as it is, it is quite safe.”

The other item she had was a music box that, from what I could tell, had been superglued or epoxied inside and out so that the music would never play and the little dancer on top would never sway.

“And what’s this one do?” I asked.

“Summons a ghost or demon,” Cassie explained. “According to the description on the card.”

“Yes, that item is very dangerous, which is why we have nullified it. When played, it would bring forth Naarlax of the Dark Dimension to steal the souls of children and mothers,” Madam Celia added, suddenly showing a side of herself I had never seen before: the saleswoman.

Apparently, Naarlax had never heard of glue when he made his little music box.

They were fifteen bucks apiece which explained why Cassie was treating me like I would turn her down even though buy something here was on the agenda.

“You’re keeping them in your room,” I said as I handed her the money.

After carefully reviewing every Omen in the shop in hopes of seeing Logan and Avery’s missing poster appear on the red wallpaper (I had the real posters in my pocket), I found Andrew, who was still staring at the little card he had received.

“Where was it that Madam Celia is sending us?” I asked.

He showed me the card.

The Teacup Cottage: House of Dolls, it read.

A chill went down my spine.

Depending on the genre of the story, a doll could be a delightful companion for a child or a terrifying foe.

In Carousel, you could always guess the genre.

“It’s not far,” Andrew said.

“Good,” I said. “We wouldn’t want to be tired when we get our souls sucked out.”