Chapter One Hundred and Two: By the Fire

“I saw them…” I said.

It took the rest of the team a few seconds to realize what I was talking about. I was having trouble putting it into words.

“They’re in a storyline that was stronger than this one!” I said. “They’re alone…”

Grace started to protest, saying, “Reggie is wit—”

She stopped talking as she saw my new movie trailer trope on the red wallpaper.

“Where’s Reggie?” she asked.

I looked at her and she knew from the way I couldn’t say. Reggie was stuck in the apocalypse.

Grace grew faint.

“Let’s get to the lounge over here,” Chris said, gently grabbing Grace and guiding her across the hall to a room filled with opulent decorations as well as plenty of expensive furniture, including, appropriately enough, several fainting chairs.

Antoine and Kimberly encouraged me to follow, prying me up off the ground.

Grace sat quietly in her chair. I sat on a couch nearby.

They didn’t force me to talk. The stress of having died again coupled with the sudden realization that my two oldest friends were doomed was difficult for me to process.

“I need a drink,” I said.

Chris went back to the ballroom and procured us all something to sip on.

~-~

As time went by, the conversation started to open back up.

“What’s it like out there?” Antoine asked.

“A lot of missing posters are about to be added to the wall,” I said. “The people in the stories that were running… It’s like The Black Snow took the movie over.”

I explained how the trailers looked and how most of the running storylines had “The Black Snow” as their subtitle.

“So we have at least two teams down?” Chris said, surprised. “Do you remember who was on them?”

Oh boy.

I tried my best to describe which players I had seen in which storyline. I then explained the dire situation that Anna and Camden were left in.

“They might make it,” Kimberly said through tears, “You said they had a plan.”

No one corrected her, but no one echoed her optimism either.

“Meg’s team. Carl’s run…” Chris said.

“The team on the plane…” I said.

Grace made eye contact with me at the mention of them.

“The plane crashed from the storm,” I said. “They weren’t a part of The Black Snow, but… they were in trouble.”

This hit Grace again. The rest of her team was on that plane.

~-~

Time went on and we sat around not talking about anything important. Chris had taken to fortifying the room. He gathered up anything from around the mansion that could be used as a weapon as well as some food from the kitchen.

He said that it wasn't safe for us to be separated, we would be sleeping in the lounge. There were plenty of couches to accommodate that.

Eventually, once he had accomplished his task, he and Antoine went out to the limousine to gather all of our clothes. They came back and reported that the limo had been abandoned. As far as they could tell the NPCs and enemies were all gone.

“We don't know how long before they get back,” Chris said. “We need to keep our masks on just in case. They should still work if the storyline starts back up, but hopefully, we'll be out of here before that happens. This one is tricky. Most of the time you gotta kill all of the enemies before you can take over a place like this. It's not often you find yourself an ally to the bad guys when the story ends.”

It really did seem such a shame that we had this very useful magical object which could at least temporarily obscure our identities and they were of no use anywhere in Carousel except for this one obscure story out in the hills.

I got up and started moving around. I picked an unclaimed area in the lounge and started moving myself a couch in that direction. Antoine helped me.

~-~

As night started to fall, Chris started a fire in the fireplace of the lounge. With it lit, all of the other lights could be turned off to transform the room into something that seemed at least slightly hospitable.

Sleeping in a place like that was a daunting proposition. Even if the NPCs and enemies were gone from the ballroom and the guest rooms, that surely didn't mean that the enemies and the casks downstairs had been hauled away. Knowing that there were dark sorcerers in walking distance was not pleasing. Then again, I had spent the night in a laboratory with a poltergeist. Eventually, I would get used to it.

Luckily with my out like a light trope actually getting to sleep would not be that difficult.

Kimberly found a record player and started playing classical music on it. I didn't recognize the music but then again, it was Carousel. Everything seemed slightly off-brand.

Chris had asked Kimberly for one of her new tropes. He just wanted to examine it. It was the one called breaking the veil of silence. He seemed confused by it.

Eventually, he was so perplexed that he was willing to talk to Grace about it even though she had stayed silent since the storyline ended.

“What is a hunting tag or a writ? A tarot card?”

When I saw the trope description: “…hint at what types of special rewards are available for the storyline, including Hunting Tags, Pawn Tickets, Licenses, Vouchers, Travel Tickets, Private Showings, Rescue Tickets, Bounties, Attestations of Authenticity, Carousel Tarot Cards, Writs, and More…”, I had thought I was just inexperienced.

Chris didn’t know about most of them either.

Grace shrugged her shoulders.

~-~

“Guess their plan is ruined,” Antoine said to Chris an hour or so later.

“Yeah, well… it probably wouldn’t have worked anyway,” Chris said.

I thought they were talking about the Excursion trip to Snowblind. But then they kept talking.

“What plan?” Kimberly asked.

“Just something some of the players were planning,” Chris said.

That piqued my interest. Was he talking about the hidden lore runs?

“What were they planning?” I asked.

“You won’t like it,” Chris said.

Me specifically? What was he talking about?

“Won’t like what?”

Chris started to laugh. “Some of the higher-level players we're going to try something stupid while Arthur was away on our excursion trip. Thought they were going to try and make a break for the lights beyond the mountain between scenes of a storyline. Arthur always told us we couldn't.”

“Chris said that if it worked,” Antoine added, “we could do it too after he got back from the excursion.”

“But I suppose Arthur actually told you why we're not supposed to do that, right?” Chris asked. “You're one of the people who know the secret right? You know what happens to people who disappear, who, I assume, die without a missing poster”

My eyes went wide. I heard breathing on my neck.

Chris started to laugh. “Don’t worry about it. I know you won’t tell us anything.

Had that been the thing that Chris and Antoine were talking about at the bowling alley? They knew that people disappeared who tried to sneak toward the mountain between the scenes of another storyline. Why would they do something so stupid?

“Carl was the one that was going to do it,” Chris said. “Crazy S.O.B. Guess he won't be now.”

Carl was apparently one of the players who had been in a storyline when The Black Snow hit.

“Wait,” Kimberly said. “So you do know something? Camden always said you had a secret you couldn’t tell us.”

I could hardly hear her over the sound of breathing in my ears.

“Please, can we not talk about this?” I begged. I considered using my sleeping trope to just fall asleep instantly. That would end the conversation. Luckily Chris wasn’t trying to cause trouble.

“I know, I know,” Chris said. “Valorie always acted the same way when the subject came up.”

No one talked for a while. All I could hear was the crackling of the fire as the sound of the axe murderer breathing faded.

But then Grace started talking again.

“You know it's a strange thing,” Grace said. “Did I ever tell you the whole story of how my team got here?”

No one responded, but we looked in her direction from our various sleeping spots.

“You see my then-fiancé Jesse--you know Jesse--he won an exclusive package to a couples retreat,” she looked over at Chris, “you know the one up on Gallows Hill?”

Chris nodded.

“All we had to do to claim them was come to Carousel during the Centennial Celebration. They said that they were going to feature us in a float that the hospitality coordinator oversaw. I didn't know any of that when I came. To me, this trip was all a surprise.”

She stood and walked in front of the fireplace.

“Of course, when we got here this was not the romantic getaway that Jesse had promised me. But that’s enough said about that. A few years later my brother Reggie,” she struggled to say his name. “Showed up with his friend Dirk and Dirk’s girlfriend Bella. You've met them. Who you never met, was Trudy.

“They took a few years of leveling up to match our plot armor but eventually they joined Jesse and I and we became a team. One day we were doing the Laughter at Midnight storyline and when we finished we all reconvened to get our rewards but Trudy never showed up. I asked Reggie what had happened to her because they both should have survived that storyline and he said that he didn't know. She had gone missing. Disappeared as it were.

“I'd heard that people would sometimes go missing for no explanation, but I didn't quite understand it. It never sat right with me no matter how much Arthur and a select few others insisted that it was perfectly normal and not to press the issue. Suddenly I saw that Reggie had joined in that small group of people who seemed to know some secret that the rest of us didn't.

“I'm a naturally curious person. I have been ever since I was a kid. Growing up, Reggie didn’t have any secrets from me. I couldn't stand feeling like Reggie knew something and wasn't telling me. So, I ambushed him one day using all of my detective tropes to try and get the truth out of him. Chief among them was this one,” she said brandishing her Human Lie Detector trope. “This is my most reliable trope. I promise when you can tell when people are lying you never want to give that ability up.

“So, I pressed him, and I asked what had happened to her. He avoided the topic. But I kept asking and he literally ran from me. My brother Reggie, who never freaks out over anything looked terrified just because I was asking him questions. I’ve seen him cut his own hand off to avoid a zombie infection. The look on his face was like he had a paper cut.

“I was using tropes to draw out answers and to force him to talk. You might have thought that I was driving needles under his fingernails from the way he acted. Eventually, I cornered him out on the docks on the lake. I almost asked him another question, but he stopped me. He said that if I kept asking him questions he would jump out into the lake and swim out of the Cove until the lake monster killed him.

“He was telling the truth,” she said.

She drew closer to me.

“So, when you first came back with that news I had heard several times before that Jeanette had disappeared. Gone missing, I had my Human Lie Detector trope ready to go. I out-leveled you by so much that there was no way you could get anything passed to me. So do you know what that trope told me about what you had said?”

I was terrified to answer. I could feel the rule keeper breathing down my neck like he was right behind me. I grabbed a pillow off of the couch and put it up to the back of my neck just in the hope that it might ease the sensation. It didn't.

Kimberly and Antoine watched on with shocked expressions because I was acting like a crazy person.

I couldn't answer her question. She kept talking anyway.

“No? Don’t want to guess. I’ll tell you anyway.”

She paused for a moment.

I needed to go to sleep right at that moment with the power of my trope. I almost did, but then she answered her own question.

“It didn't tell me anything,” she said. “Not a single damn thing. It didn't tell me if you were lying or telling the truth. It didn’t even say the results were inconclusive. I've had this trope for years. I've used it in every circumstance that a human could tell a lie. I've been able to trust it in countless situations. And yet whenever you people talk about the players that go missing suddenly it and many of my other interrogation tropes stop working. Curious, wouldn't you say?”

She turned to Chris, Antoine, and Kimberly.

“It's almost as if Carousel doesn’t want us to know what happened to the missing players. Our tropes simply won't let us discover it. Psychics have the same problem. Their tropes can be among the most insightful in the game and yet they are completely blind to what happens to missing players. For years this blind spot was enough to keep the players at Dyer’s Lodge from acting out. But even in the face of such risk, people get restless.

“I've heard the plans people have made to try to make a run for the mountain on the far side of the lake between scenes. Personally, I think they're stupid,” she looked at Chris when she said that, “but I understand the impulse.”

“As do I,” Chris echoed.

“Goodnight you all,” Grace said. “I need sleep.”

I didn’t wait for the breathing to go away again. I activated my trope and drifted off almost instantly.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you for your thoughts on Anna's aspect. I have decided that the vote is a little premature and have decided to delay it. I will likely tweak some things. I will tell you when the vote is up.