Arc II, Chapter 61: Grease Fire

The more Ramona spoke, the more I felt like the entire Tutorial was a row of dominoes or, better yet, a Rube Goldberg machine with a hundred little pieces waiting to do their part, their ultimate purpose unknown.

Ramona definitely had a part, though I couldn’t understand it at first. She entered the final storyline again every day, waiting for a team to come through and help her beat it.

Strange.

We talked about her upbringing in Carousel. She described a relatively normal life. Even after her mom and stepdad died, her life was normal, if a little rough. Of course, there were odd things. This was Carousel, after all. People going missing and legends of horrifying monsters were just a part of her life. They were normal to her.

When we told her it was all fake, all orchestrated, that was still beyond what she was willing to accept even with everything she had seen.

“How do you explain Silas Dyrkon, then?” I asked.

That part she was ready to talk about.

“Silas Dyrkon is clearly some kind of genie or something. Maybe he’s a crossroads demon. I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve heard stories about them existing,” Ramona said.

Antoine and I knew very well that crossroads demons existed. Dina had beaten one at poker.

“We believe they exist here,” Antoine said. “But that’s part of the reason this place is weird.”

“I know something weird is happening,” Ramona said. “This place was normal once. To me, at least. It doesn’t really feel the same anymore. Maybe that’s just because Phoebe is gone. I don’t know.”

“Can we put a pin in this part?” I asked. “I don’t mean to be rude, but you just said something that can’t be true. You said Lillian Geist was killed by the guy covered in metal. Are you sure about that?”

Ramona nodded. “If that woman with the things on her face was Lillian Geist, she definitely died.”

“In 1992?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“So, are the Geists like ordinary NPCs that get revived at the end of their stories?” I asked in frustration. The Geists were not normal for Carousel. They were not aware of their situation; they were not attached to the script, and they did not see the red wallpaper—these were all conclusions I had come to. I had assumed that they were basically normal people trapped at the mercy of Carousel. “I thought they were different. We saw Lillian die in 1995 at the end of the last storyline. She couldn’t have died in 1992. I mean, if Lillian can come back after dying in 1992 so she could live to die in 1995, why didn’t the other Geists come back?”

Antoine drank his coffee in one big gulp. “It’s a game,” he said. “Maybe you’re hoping its more than it is. Lillian Geist was alive for the last story because she was in that story.”

“It can’t be that simple,” I said.

“Didn’t you learn anything from us running all over town trying to figure things out?” Antoine said. “Maybe Carousel wants us to think that we can be clever enough to figure this whole thing out, but whatever it decides will happen will happen, and we’re just rats in a maze without cheese at the end.”

“No,” Ramona said. “Mr. Dyrkon talked about positioning players to try to manipulate them. If you, if we can’t find a way to succeed, why do that?”

I let loose a sigh. It was possible this whole thing was part of some mundane torture. I couldn’t just accept that, though.

“Every day, you pick up the ring and do your part for the storyline,” I said. That sounded like an Omen to me. A strange ring in a field would fit right in with Carousel's cursed collection. That meant there were multiple Omens to enter the third storyline. We already knew that about the second storyline. “Tell me again why Dyrkon said to do that.”

Ramona shrugged. “He said it would make people get ready for the Centennial. No, actually, he always said they would get ready for a Centennial. He said that you all would help me find the real Centennial. He always said it that way. ‘A’ instead of ‘the’. It had to have been on purpose.”

There were multiple Centennials. We already knew that, more or less. The town had been preparing Centennials forever.

“So the true ending is when we go to the original Centennial in 1992,” I said. “The generic ending is the Centennial that the town has been setting up. That sound right? Which would mean… Wait, every day you pick up that ring, is it always the anniversary of Jedediah Geist's death?”

Ramona nodded. “It’s always the anniversary of his death after I get back from 1984. Sometimes after I’ve saved Carlyle Geist, I do the ritual and talk to Jed. He only talks about his life and his family. That’s how I know what I know about Carlyle and the others. Plus a bunch of asking around.”

Antoine started laughing. We all did it one by one.

“It was you the whole time!” Antoine said.

“What?” Ramon asked.

I felt both relieved and a little ashamed for not having predicted it.

The continuity loop wasn’t time travel—we figured that out on the first day—and it wasn’t reality warping, either, with a few exceptions. The continuity loop was like Carousel’s script forcing all the NPCs to prepare for the Centennial every day. We didn’t know why it was happening, what was causing it, or how to stop it.

The reason the loop existed was simple: Ramona had been picking up that ring every day. Something about the plot of the third storyline required it to be both the anniversary of Jedediah Geist's death and the day before the Centennial. When Ramona triggered the storyline every day, it became that. The Die Cast was a huge story that spanned time and space. My Location Scout trope told me this story could go all over town.

“Silas Dyrkon recruited you to cause a continuity loop for, well, the last thirty years,” I said. Just saying it felt odd.

Ramona said, “Time skipped forward for me. It feels like it’s been over a year, maybe, but not decades.”

“I don’t know how any of this works,” Antoine said. “There was no loop or whatever when we got here. Even with the ring, time is not what we think it is here. It’s all pretend.”

That part was true. The Throughline acted as if it had been waiting for players for thirty years. That was just for the story. Who could say what Ramona had experienced? Maybe it actually had been thirty years in some manner of timey wimey nonsense. Maybe Ramona existed as some sort of magical save state they could restart whenever they wanted. Who knew?

Ramona asked about how things had been when we got here. Antoine explained it to her. Anna would have been better, I thought. Kimberly also. Antoine was trying to be too vague about the “your hometown is literally our best approximation of hell” part of the explanation. Anna would have navigated it better.

“Damn,” Ramona said after we got to the end. Antoine had left out specifics of the stories we had played through. It was probably for the best, as one of them featured other Mercers.

~=~

We talked further for a few hours. It wasn’t long before the sun was up and bright, and a well-dressed man came by to get our attention. He didn’t come inside. Instead, he waved for us to follow him out behind the diner.

“You had better stay here,” I said as Ramona tried to follow us.

“Why?” she asked. “You all are supposed to help me.”

“I don’t know if you were On-Screen while calling for emergency services, but if you were, it would be really weird if you are suddenly helping the same people you just thwarted.”

“He’s right,” Antoine said. “Gotta play our parts.”

I didn’t know if I was right, but there was a risk. That being said, if she were caught on camera, it would be easy enough for Carousel’s editor to just cut that part out of the final film. I didn’t want to try to play around that just yet.

Ramona held up her hands in surrender and returned to the booth.

Time to get into character. I had to put myself in the head of a pervy director who wanted his boss dead for asinine reasons.

And ACTION.

~-~

“Last night went worse than I could have hoped,” future mayor Gray said as we rounded the back of the diner. “I talked to some of my contacts. They say someone warned the fire department of the fire. They say it was a woman who had heard men talking about hiring someone to burn down the factory.”

I was happy with my decision to keep Ramona away. I just hoped he hadn’t seen her when he waved to us. That had been Off-Screen, so we were probably in the clear.

“That was a bad break,” I said. “Or maybe we got lucky. That curse or whatever we did wasn’t just going to kill the Geists.”

“Exactly,” Ricky Zaragoza said. “My brother would not have wanted this. He was not some crazed killer. What was that about?” he asked, looking at Cassie. “You didn’t tell us anything about that.”

Cassie tried her best to play her part while wearing the flamboyant getup she had been wearing for her role as a shady psychic.

“Look, I tried to warn you seven ways to Sunday, but you all heard what the flask could do, and you stopped listening.”

“You told us the curse would be under our control,” Ricky said. “It was the thing we were so excited about. We didn’t know it would kill anyone in its path.”

Cassie didn’t seem ready to respond. I wasn’t sure how much knowledge she had actually managed to acquire about the flask or the Die Cast before being thrust on screen.

Isaac tried to help out. “Look, you said we could only use it to target one person at a time. That’s what we told it. Why didn’t it work?”

He had helped her.

“One person at a time?” she asked. “Wait, I told you it could be used to kill one person. What do you mean at a time? Did you give it more than one target?”

I almost laughed. I didn’t really like our characters in this one. It was almost funny that we had messed up.

“I wasn’t there when you gave them the warning,” I said. I turned to the future mayor. “You sent that thing after the whole Geist family tree, Roderick. Every one of them.”

Cassie cursed.

“No!” Roderick said. “This is not my fault. You said one at a time. I swear you did!”

“No, she didn’t,” Antoine said. “She said one target.”

Roderick did not like being the butt of criticism. “What’s the difference? I told it to kill one at a time. The oldest living Geist and nobody else. That’s one target.”

Cassie rolled her eyes. “I don’t even know what you’ve done. I need to talk to Celia. She knew more about the Spirit of Vengeance than I ever did. I don’t know what’s going to happen now. I told you how to do it. How did you mess this up? You do a ritual: kill a target. Do a ritual, kill a target. One ritual, one target. No one has ever messed up that part. You asked it to kill a bunch of people one at a time? You moron!”

So that was the premise, huh? A gang of idiots messes up a revenge spell and lets loose some kind of supernatural slasher. I could work with that. Kinda wished I wasn’t one of the idiots, though.

“Why’s it matter?” Isaac said. “It failed. It’s gone now.”

“Gone? Why do you think it’s gone?” Cassie asked.

“It burnt up,” Isaac said. He almost said too much. His character wouldn’t know the Die Cast had stayed in the fire. We did because Carousel had shown us its point of view. “Fire’s gone.”

Right on cue, the back door to the restaurant burst open, and a cook jumped out, carrying a skillet that was burning to high heaven. He tossed it on the ground under a water spigot and turned the spigot on.

The skillet had grease, so the water made the fire worse at first. It spat, boiled, and roared, and the cook himself was singed.

“Damn thing,” he said. “Damn thing just won’t go out.”

We watched as the flames grew and taunted us, almost as if alive. The water could not quench them, not for at least ten seconds. Then, with a hiss, it finally subsided to nothing but ashy water.

Everyone was alarmed. We weren’t acting.

“It’s a sign. The Die Cast shall run its course,” Cassie said. “I’m going back to tarot cards. This is too much.”

“It’s your fault,” Roderick said. “You didn’t warn us well enough. It’s your fault! You told us we could control it!”

“You could control it,” Cassie said as she started walking away. “One ritual, one target. That’s how you control it.”

“Fuck!” Ricky Zaragoza screamed. He was on the verge of tears. “Roderick, what are we gonna do? I gotta go find something. I need something.”

He started patting through his pockets and then went out to Roderick’s brown card and jumped into the back seat. I could only imagine what he was doing out there.

Roderick looked scared and angry. “It’s not our fault. She should have told us. She didn’t say it would get do this.”

I imagine he was right. Cassie might not have even known. More than that, Cassie had a trope that would have debuffed anyone who didn’t heed her warnings. She likely hadn’t warned them well enough.

Then again, if she had warned them, there might be no story.

~-~

PS: If the part about the continuity loop being the result of triggering a storyline every day wasn't explained well enough, please let me know. I hope it was a satisfactory reveal. The loop was a useful tool for constructing the tutorial's environment, but it may have added more complexity than it was worth, IDK.