Arc II, Chapter 24: The Four Stages of Carousel

Warning: you are about to get a pretty decent lore drop as a direct result of having chosen Constance as a companion. Voting has consequences.

Priority number one: get away from the haunted hotel room. We knew that technically our odds of something bad happening were low, but this was the place where Cassie’s body had laid cold for over an hour. This was not a place we could sleep comfortably if we could avoid it. There were broken windows and some shredded wallpaper.

“You can come to my place,” Sidney offered. “My Dad will make you some scrambled eggs.”

“Your dad?” I asked. “You don’t mean…?”

She understood what I was asking. “No,” she said. “God no. The Stranger isn’t my real dad. That was just for the story.”

She and Constance shared a giggle.

“Your real dad is here?” Kimberly asked.

Sidney nodded. “Dad, stepmother, and her son. The whole family. That was part of the deal.”

I figured that Constance would invite us to her house because that was so close, but it turned out that place belonged to some random NPC from a story about mind-controlling leeches. She just took it over for our storyline.

As we walked through the night, Cassie and Isaac walked solemnly. Antoine had Kimberly wrapped in his arms. Dina trailed behind.

Bobby wanted to talk.

“You notice how the Now Playing board calls that story a reboot of Reply the Departed. Indeed it had.

The Throughline

The Centennial Celebration:

Reply the Departed: Reboot

I also noticed that the section on that board for Bonus Material had gained another ‘???’.

Bonus

???

Secrets of Carousel #6: The Dark Water

???

???

That told me that Reply the Departed had Secret Lore or something similar. If I were to guess, it had something to do with the blue lantern ghost. Even as we walked through the darkness, I still wanted to go find that lantern. Magic was strange.

“I can’t wait to listen to that tape,” Bobby continued. “It might give us a jumpstart on solving the Throughline. One step closer to figuring this whole thing out.”

The tape detailing the history of Carousel that Dina had stolen from the carriage that brought us to town was still unplayed. We didn’t want to listen to it while still at the hotel.

Constance, who was not very far ahead of us, said, “You might take Carousel’s warning on that.”

“What warning?” Bobby asked.

“When Carousel makes a point to mention something like that, that’s a warning,” Sidney said.

Constance nodded her head. “Yes,” she said. “I would wait until you completed the Centennial storylines at least. Wouldn’t want to steal Carousel’s thunder or you might also get the lightning.”

Sidney and Constance laughed together as fast friends.

“Is everything on the tickets a threat?” Antoine asked.

“I’m sure not everything is a threat. You must consider the context,” Constance said.

Antoine and Kimberly looked at each other.

The walk was about twenty-five minutes until we got to a house in a nice neighborhood with big lots and multiple stories. They each had nice gardens and automatic sprinklers.

“There it is,” Sidney said, pointing to a house at the end of a cul-de-sac.

It was the type of house you might wish you had grown up in.

“This is actually the cul-de-sac I grew up in,” Sidney said. “They’ve got NPCs in them of course, but the houses were from my world.” She led us up the driveway to the front door.

She took out a key and started fitting it into the lock. Before she could, the door was opened and a man in a T-shirt and pajama pants opened the door. He was slightly balding. He looked like any random dad.

“Sidney! Do you have any idea what time it is?” he asked. “You had us worried sick.”

“I tried to call, but my phone wasn’t working,” Sidney said. “I was at the library helping Ms. Barlow with an exhibit for the Centennial tomorrow. I promise.”

The red wallpaper called her dad “Ross Martin, Worried Father”. He was level three. Nothing out of the ordinary.

His eyes shot toward Constance. “Oh,” he said. “I wasn’t aware you needed her tonight, Constance.”

“She did try to call, Ross,” Constance said.

“Oh,” Ross said, “Still. I don’t like not knowing where you are. After what happened before, you know. We moved to Carousel so I didn’t have to worry about you, you know.”

Sidney hugged her father and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “That stuff is long behind us, Dad,” she said.

How old, exactly, was Sidney supposed to be? That was the question I was asking. Her age was so ambiguous. I thought she was our age, maybe older, but now I was wondering if she was a teenager.

“And these are?” he asked.

“My friends. They helped on the project.”

“Ah,” he said. Then he looked at us. “If you’re going to stay, just keep it quiet. You guys like scrambled eggs?”

“Sure do,” Bobby said.

Ross waved us in. The house was beautiful. The living room was filled with comfortable furniture. We all piled in and laid out, exhausted.

Sidney’s stepmother, Tawny, was in the living room and greeted us enthusiastically, “You’re Sidney’s friends? I’m so glad to meet you. She never lets us meet her friends. Let me get you some drinks.”

She was awfully chipper for five in the morning.

“You moved to Carousel so he didn’t have to worry about you?” Isaac asked. That was the first thing he had said in a while.

Sidney faked chuckled and said, “Yeah. I had some run-ins with evil. First when I was sixteen, then again every few years until I was in my mid-thirties and it was going to kill my daughter. I got a deal to save her. They made my life into six storylines. That’s almost a record here. Dad doesn’t get killed until the third one.”

“Does he know about all of this?” Dina asked.

Sidney shook her head.

“He is blissfully unaware. Thinks the first storyline happened before we moved here. Really it’s just on the other side of town. He’s happy most of the time.”

“What do you mean when you say you took a deal?” I asked. “Samantha said something similar.”

In fact, she had taken the deal to save her dad, as I understand it.

“Some mysterious man arrived and offered me a deal. Just that simple. He said he was fascinated by my story. Said he had a place for me where my daughter would be safe, where I’d get to see my father again. Mind you, the whole time, everything is moving in slow motion. My daughter was screaming. My house was burning. I had lost. I usually won in the end. He just needed me to say yes. That’s what I did. There’s more information somewhere in my script, but I can’t find it. They don’t like to be brought into the story like this.”

Sidney got a look of sadness on her face. I couldn’t help but notice that her daughter was nowhere to be seen.

Constance appeared to sense that Sidney was done talking too because she turned to us and said, “You chose me because you thought I might have some information for you. Indeed, I do. Ask it quickly. I have a schedule to keep.”

Antoine and I looked at each other. We hadn’t had time to come up with a list of questions.

“What are we supposed to be doing here? The Throughline is the main goal, right? We have to finish the Throughline to leave, right? How does Secret Lore play in?”

Constance thought for a moment.

“Carousel considers knowledge to be power. Knowing certain things is all it takes to move forward in the narrative, more or less, for better or for worse. I need to give you the knowledge to understand Carousel, but that is the limit of what I am willing at this moment.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Carousel is best understood through the stages of its history. I have divided the ages of Carousel into four segments. I have spent lifetimes studying these ages and as you progress, I am sure you will as well. I have named these ages, ‘Stages’ because Carousel is like a book that keeps being rewritten. It's the same story, just scribed by a different pen for purposes I do no yet know."

She looked at me. "You may want to write this down."

I grabbed the Carousel Atlas from Antoine’s bag and a pen from Dina so I could write things down. Even then, there was a lot to write down. I turned to a blank page and started to write what Constance told us.

“You must understand that this place has reinvented itself multiple times, but each age is a reflection of the age that came before it. You’ve already learned of these ages in your time here. The first age, which I call the Dark Stage, is the age before Silas Dyrkon and Bartholomew Geist founded Carousel. It is a time before recorded history. Very few NPCs have memories of this age and that makes sense. It was from before they were NPCs. Before the script itself. This Stage I know very little of, but from what I know from Silas Dyrkon, something important happened then. Something he and Carousel itself, obsess over.”

The Dark Stage. A time before Carousel was Carousel.

“The second era is called the Founding Stage. As the name suggests, it is the time when Carousel was founded and the many horrible decades to follow. It too is shrouded in darkness and terror. It was before the red wallpaper. Before players. I was brought to Carousel at the end of this age by Silas Dyrkon himself so that he could question me about my work. That conversation is lost in the endless pages of my script. The Founding was chaotic and harsh. Carousel wielded its power then without limit. None speak of this age fondly.”

Constance took a moment to look out into the distance as the sun rose.

The Founding Stage. The story of Sylas Dyrkon and Bartholomew Geist founding Carousel.

After a beat, she continued. “The third age is the Facsimile Stage. This is when, in his desperation, Silas Dyrkon implemented the Game at Carousel itself. He wanted to recreate the ages past. He brought in the script. He brought in a litany of other storylines. He brought in a partner... The Partner brought civility and rules. Now the helpless townsfolk were NPCs. The visitors were players, and the monsters were… under control. It was an age of relative peace. Everyone had a role to play for whatever purpose.”

Constance looked at Sidney.

“This was the age when Sidney and most of the other Paragons were introduced in quick succession. It was an age out of time altogether, designed purely as a facsimile of the ages before. Sidney was brought in at Carousel 1996. Tar came in Carousel 1969. I, of course, was always the librarian. They cobbled together an overarching story for their game, the Throughline, which told the story of the Founding Stage. That was the goal anyway. If it had done that faithfully, we might still be in the Facsimile Stage, but that was not so.

The Facsimile Stage. A reproduction of the age before.

“The Partner was never satisfied. It had a few years it wanted to fill in. When Samantha Cole, the Damsel, was brought in to help fill out Carousel 1989, something went wrong. A connection formed between your world and this one. Carousel is composed of worlds overlapping and folded together like fifth-dimensional origami, but this was different. You probably know the rest or at least most of it. The connection between Carousel and your world led to players being lured here in a way that never happened before. These events led to disarray and eventually what you would call the First Cataclysm. The rest is for you to figure out.”

It was a good call choosing the Researcher Paragon.

“Wait,” Antoine said, “What is the Fourth Stage called?”

“I haven’t decided on a name yet,” Constance admitted. “I was hoping to name it after you all if things come to pass how we have all dreamed.”

I looked at Antoine, Kimberly, and the others. It was scary to think we might be left to define an entire age.

Sidney’s stepmother came into the living room with some cups of ice and a pitcher of lemonade. “Drinks, anyone?”

“I’m afraid that I should be headed home,” Constance said. “I have lines today. Have to work the library’s booth. I have a meeting with the mayor tonight. Goodnight, everyone.”