Book Five, Chapters 22 and 23

The Carousel Atlas’ section on rescues was written, or at least rewritten, by Curtis W., who was the same guy whose journal entries in the Atlas told us about Project Rewind.

He proposed a system for rating rescue tropes based on three criteria: Potency, Availability, and Risk (PAR).

I read through the entry in the Atlas aloud so that everyone else could hear.

"Availability is exactly like it sounds," I said. "It's how likely, on a scale of one to five, a rescue trope is to work in any given storyline. Potency is about how straightforward and beatable the 'game' becomes, with emphasis on the win condition that the rescue trope creates. Risk is a question of the conditions for the rescue trope and whether they favor rescuers or not."

I continued reading to myself for a little bit, but Antoine interrupted me.

"What kind of conditions are we talking about?" he asked. "Is that talking about the live-to-tell-the-tale part?"

"Yes," I said. “Rescue tropes with high risk create storylines that are just as dangerous to the rescuers as they are to the people they were rescuing. The ones with low risk: You can fail the rescue, but as long as you don't die, you’ll be fine."

Antoine nodded. "Mine must be low risk then."

In fact, there was a way to check.

Popular rescue tropes had their own small sections. Antoine’s rescue trope was called a Race Against Time. It had a risk of two, a potency of four, and an availability of three.

Kimberly's rescue trope was A Woman in Mourning. It had an availability of one, a potency of five, and a risk of four.

My rescue trope was not listed. Overall, the Atlas didn’t have much information about Film Buffs.

"I kind of like Dina's," I said. "It was a pretty popular one from what I can tell."

I looked up from the book. She wasn’t there.

"Where’s Dina?" I asked.

"She went downstairs," Kimberly answered.

For the first time in a while, I put the Atlas down and took a moment to see what the others were doing. Surprise, surprise, they had not been just listening to me with rapt attention. Cassie was trying to use her psychic trope to learn more about the enemy we faced. She was not having a good time.

"I’m sorry," she said, tears flowing down her cheeks. “I’m trying my best, but it just isn’t working."

Kimberly comforted her. "There’s clearly something about this storyline that makes scouting it hard," Kimberly said soothingly. "We’ll figure it out. Don’t you worry."

But Cassie was worried because her brother's life was literally on the line.

At that moment, Dina came back upstairs holding a beer with its label torn off, which is how they sometimes appear in movies to obstruct the brand name.

"The creepy guy's back," she said.

There was a man who was clearly up to something, but it wasn't clear what. He would just stare at us anytime we went down to the restaurant. He wasn’t an omen, and he wasn’t an enemy as far as we could tell, but he was unnerving because he wasn't hiding his staring at all. He was an NPC with a generic title, “Drifter.”

No name other than that.

We had seen him a few times.

"I got something," Cassie said. "It's weird, but I’m definitely hearing something."

Dina stopped and stared as we waited for Cassie to extract as much information as possible from her I’m Blocked trope.

"It’s talking too fast," she added.

We waited as Cassie listened to something we couldn’t hear.

"Well, I’m going upstairs to get some ice," Dina said. She went toward the stairs that led up to the roof, and after she was out of the room, Cassie exclaimed, "I lost it!"

Cassie started to cry; her eyeliner was hopelessly smeared.

I didn’t know what was going on with this storyline that we were having such difficulty doing scouting. It was true that whatever tropes the storyline had would apply to the scout’s abilities as if they were in a storyline.

That was likely the reason that the Atlas contained very little scouting information for the story.

If we could just figure out what was going on, we might be able to learn something more. Of course, it would be easier one day when we had lots of players who could contribute.

Back at Camp Dyer, anytime someone needed to scout out a new storyline, they could make the rounds, talking to all the different archetypes they could find with dozens of different scouting tropes that could tell you all kinds of information.

They never let us do that because they wanted us to learn to play the game the old-fashioned way.

After a moment, Dina came back down the stairs and asked, "Why can we not keep the ice scoop in the ice machine?"

"Just use the cup," Isaac said. "It's there for a reason."

In the middle of a town filled with horror stories, the biggest debate going on at the loft was whether the metal scoop we owned should be used in the rice bin or the ice machine. Everyone took sides, and it got messy.

"It’s back," Cassie said. "I hear it again. It's just talking so fast."

"Whatever," Dina said as she went back upstairs again.

"What are you trying to drink beer with ice?" Isaac asked.

"I want a glass of ice water," Dina said as she continued walking back upstairs.

Isaac shrugged.

"I lost it," Cassie said again. This time there were no tears, just resignation.

I started to notice a pattern.

"Dina, come back down here," I said. "Just for a second, come back down."

She did just that.

"What?" she asked.

"Cassie, try to use your trope again."

So, Cassie did.

"It's working!" she said. "I keep hearing this voice. It’s definitely a voice, but it’s talking so fast I can’t understand it."

"Now, Dina, go back upstairs," I said.

Intrigued, she did as I asked.

Right on cue, Cassie said, "Now I’ve lost it."

We all stared at each other. Antoine stood and started looking back and forth between Dina and Cassie. He motioned for Dina to come back down.

Cassie, noticing what we were doing, immediately reported that when Dina got back down to the living room, she could suddenly hear the voice again, an unintelligible whisper telling her in some manner or another to stay away.

"What’s happening right now?" Dina asked.

We didn’t exactly have an answer, but I had a hunch.

"Dina, unequip your rescue trope," I said.

She did so.

Immediately afterward, Cassie said, "The voice is gone."

We all looked at each other.

I had a theory.

"The base story cancels out psychic tropes," I said.

That was the only explanation that I could come up with. When Dina was around and a part of the party, so to speak, Cassie’s power was being used to scout out the rescue version of the storyline.

When Dina left, she was scouting out the base version.

"Now, Antoine, try," I said. Antoine equipped his rescue trope.

We waited a moment for answers to come.

"I’m not hearing anything," Cassie said.

We looked at Dina.

"So that’s weird," Dina said.

"It sure was."

~-~

We tried to confirm many times that Dina’s rescue trope was affecting Cassie’s scouting trope and every time, we came to the conclusion that it was.

We knew that rescue tropes changed the base storyline, but whatever Dina’s trope did, it changed it in such a way that Cassie’s psychic trope was able to be used. We didn't know what to make of that.

"Maybe we should just run the base storyline," Antoine said. "I feel like everything we learn about this thing, the more confusing it gets."

"No," I said. "Half the point of running rescues is to grind levels. If we do the base storyline first, we’ll be cutting ourselves off at the knees.”

We had to at least try a rescue. Doing the base story would dramatically reduce the rewards we received.

“Look at this: Dina's rescue trope has a one in risk and a five in availability. I think it’s the perfect way for us to try our first rescue. We’ll have a shot at big rewards.”

"Counterpoint," Antoine said. "The Atlas also says that all rescues are dangerous, even ones that have a one in risk. That comparison is to other rescues, not to general storylines. And also, we don't even know what the story is about other than it'll make you ugly. We also know that her trope has a one in potency. Mine has a four."

He wasn't wrong. No rescues were actually easy; they were all more difficult than the base storyline. But if we were going to do a rescue, Dina’s trope was the one.

I could just feel it.

We tabled that conversation.

There was no need to make decisions in a rush.

As confusing as the storyline was, I was also excited. We didn’t know how to navigate the river exactly, but at least we had our hands on the steering wheel.
~-~

I woke up with my heart racing because I knew that in a matter of hours, I would finally have my hands on the book that chronicled Carousel's horrific past, even if it was fictionalized.

“The Town of Carousel: Horrific Events Through the Ages” had been in the back of my mind for months. I didn’t know what kind of clues it would give us but I had to believe it had some vital information we could use to save our friends.

The book seemed to be a nonfiction collection of terrible events that took place in a fictional version of Carousel, and ever since my scouting trope had told me it existed, I felt that there was a reason.

As we walked to the library to pick it up, I could feel the nerves vibrating through my body.

Kimberly's little trick to be able to get a book out of the library without having to go in worked well. The Atlas had a section on how to interact with NPCs in Carousel proper, and using your stats or tropes in those interactions was perfectly normal.

In fact, the vets had done it plenty when they were researching Secret Lore and the Western Excursion. We had to file that away for future use. Kimberly even wrote it down in the Atlas if anyone in the future ever needed to know there was a way to check out a book as long as you knew its title.

The pickup was easy.

The NPC holding it smiled as we approached and simply handed it to Kimberly. I kept waiting for some omen to appear, but none did. The book itself didn't show up on the red wallpaper, nor did it give off any scary vibes, as I had felt from the monster's lair on the mountain.

Cassie picked up the book and tried using her newly acquired trope, Curios and Trinkets, to feel if it was an occult item. It allowed her to intuitively compare one magical item to others that she had collected.

She said, "This is nothing like the flask."

She shrugged her shoulders and handed the book to me.

The flask was the now cement-filled item that had been used to summon the Spirit of Vengeance in the Die Cast storyline. If the book was nothing like it, that meant that there was no spirit inside the book that could be invoked, or at least that’s what I understood the trope to mean.

Did that make it safe?

I had to hope so.

It would be unfair if my scouting trope had told me about this book in the trailers for The Strings Attached storyline, and it turned out to be a trap. However, we couldn't be too careful.

As we walked back to the loft, I couldn’t even open the book and take a peek simply because I needed to keep my eyes out for omens. But when we finally reentered our safe space, the first thing I did was take the book up to the roof and find a chair in the shade.

It didn't take me long to completely regret finding the book.

Reading through it was like reading one of those Guinness World Record books that everybody wanted in the 5th grade. The cool pictures and the fun text entries convinced our young minds that everyone in the world was trying to win records through various odd feats of human skill.

This book had the same tone.

Whoever wrote about these massacres and horrific deaths did so as if they were reporting feats of human athleticism or mental prowess.

“Six dead from a rat poison accident at Sundown Bakery,” one entry read.

The entry lamented the fact that the accident happened at a relatively unpopular bakery—not that they wanted more deaths, but that they wanted a better record.

The entire book was ghoulish and unsettling, especially because, as I came to realize, many of the photographs were too close to the accidents. They were taken too soon as if the photographer knew what was about to happen and was sitting around waiting for it.

I was reading through a sickening entry about crowd crush at some sort of festival in Carousel when I saw something that made me jump up from my chair and run to the others.

"It’s them," I said. "Look!"

I pointed to the black-and-white photo. It was a horrifying image, and I wish I had warned Kimberly and Antoine before they looked. Bodies were mangled together as if twisted and fused, the people dying from the weight of those on top of them—a terrible image.

Next to the alleyway where that occurred, I saw a brunette in a denim jacket with her hair tied in a ponytail next to a man with jet black hair and a missing arm, cut off at the elbow.

"Oh my God," Kimberly said as she looked at the photo.

Antoine stared at the image and then looked up at me. "So we can track where they were in the storyline, right?" he asked.

All we knew, aside from what I had seen with my scouting trope, was that their storyline involved time travel. Anna was not willing to spoil anything more than that in the letter she wrote us and attached to the back of Silas the Mechanical Showman.

"It might be useful," I said. "I don’t know. I can check to see if they’re in any of the other photos. Maybe we can trace their path, assuming they went to other dates in the book."

That was something I could do. It felt like progress.

I didn’t like looking at the horrific pictures.

Funny enough, if these exact same pictures had appeared in a movie, they might not have bothered me aside from maybe a jump scare here and there.

But the book, with its strange tone and the knowledge that in some way these deaths were real, whether it was a fictional event portrayed by NPCs or real events brought here from a universe unknown...

I went back to my seat and flipped open the book, double-checking to see if there was any indication of who the author was or when it was published, but I got nothing. For all I knew, the book was self-published within its storyline.

There was no way to tell.

But the more I read it, the more I got to know its voyeuristic author.

The entries were written in the tone of someone who really enjoyed the sport of rubbernecking history's greatest tragedies.

He didn't emphasize the gore or the sadness, but he did commentate on how there could have been more deaths or why a particular tragedy didn't rank highly for him in one way or another.

One quote I picked up on was, "There was very little screaming because the victims did not realize their fate until it was upon them. Oh well, the looks on their faces at the end were well worth the trip."

At that moment, it dawned on me that this wasn't just some book written by coincidence that was used in a time travel storyline.

From the way he talked, it almost sounded like he was collecting mini-vacations to tragic events.

Still, he did lament the deaths of children and women on occasion but was never overly sympathetic to them.

After enough time, I finally found another picture with Camden and Anna in it.

It was something that happened in 2010—a group of teenagers died in the woods from apparent suicides.

One picture was of the police investigating.

In the background, I saw Anna and Camden walking down the road. I recognized the road. It was one of the roads that led to Camp Dyer.

And suddenly, I had all the pieces, and I could put together what had happened. They had gone to that specific tragedy to collect the Atlas in 2010, back before it was so heavily censored.

But that mere clarification was not what I was after. That was just details of information I already knew.

What I needed to know was how to save them.

That answer didn’t come.

As I flipped through the pages and looked intently at each picture to try and find my friends, I started to notice that there was one obscured figure in many of the pictures. It was the same man I had seen in the shadowy alleyway in the trailer for Post Traumatic—the man wearing an overcoat with the strange amulet.

I was done reading. I started to bring the book back down inside, but something within me did not allow it. The book had genuinely creeped me out, and I had no desire to take it inside our sanctuary. I went to the bar that was on the ceiling not far from where I was sitting and found a cabinet to stash the book in. The ceiling was off-limits to enemies and omens the same as the loft, but it was also outside, and that’s where I left it.
~-~

That day and the next were some of the many peaceful days we had at Kimberly’s loft.

We had come to savor them, even though the longer they lasted, the sooner we would start to feel the panic and dread that came with running another storyline.

That night, however, we would not get to relax.

In our first few weeks there, we got used to a knock on the door coming as we went to sleep. Isaac took pride in being able to disengage and send away whatever omen had come to try and trick us into a storyline.

We saw no reason to exercise anything but abundant caution, so it was pretty normal for us to use multiple opinions. He would look, then I would look, and then we would decide what to do to send the omen packing.

Even though the others didn't have scouting tropes that would allow them to be helpful whenever omens knocked on the main entrance, they still got up and got dressed enough to be ready on the off chance we failed to send away the omen and we were all drawn into a storyline.

Everyone was wide awake by the time we congregated outside the main door.

Isaac held his breath as he walked up to the door and put his eye to the peephole.

He froze.

He literally didn't move for about 10 seconds, then he backed away and looked at me.

It was my turn.

From the icy look on his face, there was something very scary on the other side of the door.

I couldn’t imagine what it was.

Normally, other sounds accompanied the knocking—something like a person asking to be let in or some ominous growls. When I looked through the peephole, what I saw was Camden.

My friend Camden Tran, whom I had known since I was a little kid, was standing out in the hallway, anxiously waiting to be let in.

He had a smile on his face and strangely seemed to know that I was looking at him as he made eye contact with me even though we kept the lights off on our side so they couldn’t see the shadows.

I knew it couldn’t be him, but the sight of it made my heart jump. I made sure to look at the omen on the red wallpaper. It was titled Suitability. The storyline was dangerous, which made it hard to see what was on the poster, but I could guess it had something to do with shape-shifters or similar, given that my dead friend was staring back at me.

I didn’t need to know anything except how to dismiss the omen, how to send it away.

My hint was helpful: "Be a better stranger," according to the red wallpaper, was what I had to do to send him away. However, it wasn't as clear as some of the hints had been, which made me dread the day when the hints were so obscure that we could guess wrong.

Being a better stranger to someone who looked like my oldest friend meant something pretty clear to me. I just hoped that I was right.

I found myself afraid to speak, but I took a deep breath and spoke anyway.

"Go away," I said. "I don’t know you."

I seemed to have guessed right because Camden suddenly looked very confused.

"Are you sure? I thought I was at the right place," Camden said.

"I’ve never seen you before in my life. Get out of here," I said through the door.

And then we waited to see if I had guessed right.

Slowly, Camden—or whatever looked like him—turned and walked away.

Dina stood near the door with the sawed-off shotgun pointed and at the ready. If I had been wrong and fake Camden had tried to bust through that door, he would have gotten a real surprise.

No one spoke, but Antoine looked at me like he was hoping I would explain.

"I’ll tell you later," I said. I was afraid to acknowledge what I had seen because I was low-key afraid the monster would hear.

I took a deep breath and we all just kind of walked back into the living room area, none of us ready to go back to bed.

"I don’t think I’m ever going to get used to that," Kimberly said.

"Not after Camp Dyer," I said.

“I miss it so much,” she said. “Scratch that. I miss the real world.”

I assumed she wasn’t talking about the reality show.

We stood in silence for a moment longer. It occurred to me that every base we would ever have would have some drawback.

This one had omens that would tempt you.

They were easily avoidable, but still, the constant barrage brought on a stress that reappeared every time we heard that knock.

And then, as I thought about it, an idea occurred to me.

"Kimberly, can I see the writ of habitation for this place?" I asked.

Because it was no further away than her reaching into thin air like we could for our trope tickets, she immediately handed it to me. I read through it until I found the section I was looking for.

“Guarantee Against Encumbrances and Hostility: The described property shall remain free from lairs, nests, or havens of any adversarial entities. All hostile presences nearby will immediately vacate the vicinity and abstain from combative behavior.”

"This writ of habitation protects us and guarantees that there are no lairs at this base," I said. We had recently been researching monster lairs, but because their presence was a huge spoiler, the Carousel Atlas didn’t have much on them other than basic explanations.

"And?" Antoine asked.

"We looked for monster lairs, but did we check under the section on bases?" I asked.

We knew that there was a monster lair out by the Powerworks area, but we didn't know much about it. The Atlas was not well organized because it didn't have to be, usually. We went to the Atlas at the kitchen table, flipped it open, and started looking through the tabs until we found a small section on bases, which were locations throughout Carousel where players would be safe from omens like Kimberly’s loft or Camp Dyer.

I flipped to it and started looking through to see if I could find a list of bases that other players had used. I was in luck. I found one.

I started moving my finger down the list. "Monastery, farm, cabin, apartment, house, cave," I was reading out loud. "There," I said. "KRSL Powerworks Pavilion."

There was an entry on it.

Someone had used it as a base at least once.

It made sense; it was a huge compound that could be very easily secured and hold a lot of people.

I flipped to the section where the information on that base was located, hoping that I would find all kinds of information, but when I found it, I was deflated. It was a small section with barely any information, and the information wasn't even first-hand.

Someone had written:

"Had a conversation with a Stranger today. Pretended not to know who they were--Strangers hate to be recognized--but I know they live in a base up at the Powerworks Pavilion. Bought him a beer and he told me that his crew has to clear out of their base a few days out of the month and he spent the whole time at the bar."

"What happens every month?" I asked him.

"Full moon," he said.

Hmm.

-CW

I took in a deep breath.

Was that a spoiler? Or maybe it wasn’t because that information would have been found on his writ of habitation. Information from the writs was not a spoiler.

That’s what I told myself, at least.

If that wasn’t spoilers, it was great information. I knew a monster that came out on the full moon.

And I had been looking for it ever since I got to Carousel.

~-~

After that revelation, we stayed up and spoke at length about its implications.

We were one step closer to figuring out what had happened to Andrew Hughes’ teammates, who had not entered Itch with him.

It wasn't really a priority, but in some ways, all mysteries felt like priorities in Carousel.

I lay back in my bed and stared out my window, thinking about everything we had accomplished over the past few days: our grocery run, our research, our teamwork.

I noticed that in the sky, the moon was almost full, and I watched it without thinking about anything particular for a long time.

Eventually, I saw something or someone fly across the sky, directly across the moon. A witch on a broom?

It snapped me out of it, and I rolled over and went to sleep.

We had so many things to do, and it would all start tomorrow.