Arc II, Chapter 37: Escape the Fray

“Everyone grab a scalpel,” Antoine suggested. He dumped the contents of a drawer that had been filled with the little metal surgical implements wrapped in protective wax paper onto a cold metal table. “I have a feeling we’re going to need something sharp soon.”

A cackle came from behind him.

“We’ll take our tiny knives and you take your gun. We’ll see who’s best,” Isaac said with a giggle. The sedative had washed away his panic. He sat and pressed a finger into the new side of his face, then he ran it up, tracing his stitches upward.

After everyone had grabbed one we all looked at each other silently. A fight was coming. That was true. Isaac was right. A scalpel wouldn’t do much in a fight against multiple opponents. Antoine just wanted us to feel safer.

After a moment of silence, Antoine said, “What’s next?”, trying to ignore Isaac.

“Two doors,” Dina said. She stared into the distance. Her eyes were unfocused. I knew that look. She was reading the red wallpaper. “One seems to go further into the building. The other leads outside. Either way, we’re On-Screen as soon as we leave this room.”

Her Outside Looking In trope helped her avoid the spotlight. It looked like, this time, there was no avoiding it.

I noticed that Dina had blood in her hair from their first run-in with the enemy during first blood. They had been attacked in the dark. Never saw a thing but glimpses on the red wallpaper. Officer Willis’ flashlight had run out of batteries just before the attack. Flashlights were one of the staples of horror. You needed a trope for them to work right.

Kimberly had managed to make it work again later by saying she had replaced the batteries while On-Screen. Sure enough, it had fired right up. It would probably stop working the moment we needed it again.

“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do here,” Kimberly said. She flicked the flashlight on and off nervously. I noticed that she tried her best not to look at Isaac’s face. She was trying to be strong. “I thought we were solving a mystery, but then we have to deal with monsters.”

She had a point. I was starting to see what Kurt Willis had been talking about. This story was not like the others that we had played through before the tutorial. In a way, it felt like one story stacked on top of another. Part of it was the Throughline.

Outside, the water in the sewers raged. It felt like we were in the bowels of a ship during a hurricane. At any moment, the ship could capsize.

“Now I know what a dirty mug feels like in the dishwasher,” Isaac said, as the water became louder; the giant pit outside could only drain so much.

Maybe that was a better metaphor.

Everyone was waiting for me to have a plan. That meant I had to have one. I took a deep breath. I had been through a lot in the last few scenes. The thing that kept coming up in my mind was Cecilia. She was hiding something. Don’t Wake the Beast, her trope had been called.

I had a strong conviction that Waking the Beast was exactly what we were supposed to do. She had said that some people deserved death and she was talking about Jed Geist. It couldn’t be a coincidence. She was our next move.

But I needed them to make that decision with me.

“We could get out of here and regroup on the surface,” I said. “According to Location Scout, part of this story takes place in Town Square.” I paused to let them mull over the idea of escape. “At least that’s one idea.”

“Leave the rapidly flooding sewer system? Glad we have a high-savvy player to figure that one out,” Isaac said dreamily. His eyes were closed as he lay back on his hospital bed. He made a very chill Frankenstein’s monster.

The water rushed louder. The earth beneath our feet shook gently, but we all felt it.

“You said it’s one idea,” Antoine said, ignoring Isaac again. He kept a hand on his holster, ever ready to protect us. “What’s the other idea?”

“The woman called Cecilia on the red wallpaper knows something about Jed Geist she wasn’t saying,” I said. “We could go find her.”

“Cecilia?” Kimberly asked. Her voice cracked. Her hair was up in a wet ponytail. With every breath, she looked on the verge of tears, but she was being brave. “What was her deal?”

I took a deep breath.

“I don’t think her name is Cecilia for one. I had a conversation with her where she shot up half a dozen red flags. The thing is, she’s sedated with the same drug as Isaac.”

“Lucky her,” Isaac said with a smile. He still kept his eyes closed. “High five.”

He didn’t even raise his hand.

I continued. “Part of the reason I used the Insert Shot on that little wake-up gun Halle has is because of how zonked she acted and that was before I had a one-on-one with her. Now I’m certain.”

The fact that she had a trope called Don’t Wake the Beast was also strong evidence for me. I had seen the trope before, but this time it felt a little on the nose.

More than that, I felt the pieces just fit together. Even if we didn’t have all of them.

Antoine took a deep breath and nodded his head. “So we use this Antiserum Applicator to get her sobered up. Then she spills her secrets. There’s one problem. How are we going to justify going further into the building instead of leaving? I mean, this place is a bunker of pure concrete dug into the ground. There might not be other exits.” He gestured around at the concrete walls and floor. “Honestly, I thought we were pushing it when we came down into the pitch-black tunnels to begin with. Our characters have a death wish.”

He had a point.

“Bobby is hurt,” Cassie said, looking at me. She hadn’t been holding back tears. Her dark mascara was running and her breaths were irregular. “Not just Mutilated and Hobbled. He keeps getting Incapacitated. Can we say we’re trying to save him? His wife was looking for him. You saw his missing poster and his face. Maybe we’re just good people. Can’t that be enough?”

That might have worked if I had time to establish a connection with Bobby’s character On-Screen. Unfortunately, I was either sedated or conversing with Halle most of the time we were together.

“That’s probably the closest justification we have, but it’s still a stretch,” I said. “Especially since he appears to have joined the bad guys and our characters know that.”

“Oh,” Cassie said, looking dejected. An idea lit up her eyes. “I could have a vision saying we have to go that way.”

That was a good idea.

“No matter what we do,” I said. “It will be the—”

“—wrong decision,” Antoine finished my sentence. I had used that phrase a lot. “Do we want to regret trying to escape or do we want to regret trying to solve this thing? I don’t know about you all, but I’m aiming for second place.”

We all knew the answer. Mere survival was not a victory. We needed to understand what had happened to Jed Geist.

That meant we were going with option B.

“Here’s what I know about the murder,” I said. “Most of the clues aren’t real clues that a detective would use. I see all of the narrative signs pointing to one person. As crazy as it might sound.”

I told them everything that Cecilia had told me and why I thought she knew more than she was letting on.

“How sure are you that we can get her to talk?” Antoine asked. “Don’t Wake the Beast sounds like a pretty clear warning.”

“A soft 70 percent,” I said.

He bit his lip.

“That’ll have to be good enough,” Antoine said. “What else are we doing today?”

“I was hoping to buy a mask,” Isaac said. “Surely Carousel has a mask store. I’m for something Phantom of the Opera, but anything that covers this thing up would work.”

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We all rolled our eyes at the same time.

“Something we haven’t talked about is what to do with him,” Kimberly said.

She was right. Isaac was going to slow us down big time. Going into a potential fight with him could spell disaster. Even escaping with him would be difficult. He was able to walk, but he had no sense of urgency.

“I must have gotten the dosage wrong,” Kimberly continued. “The writing wasn’t in English.”

Carousel likely had a hand in that. It couldn’t let us make things too easy.

The time for talk was over. I laid out the plan and it was time to go.

I hadn’t told them what Bobby had told me about the scripts diverging. If I had mentioned that, they might have figured out he had been the one to cause Isaac to be attacked. I hadn’t told them that this was the strongest foundation for my suspicion that if we fled, we would not get the ending we needed. I just had to hope that he had been right.

“Let’s do it,” Antoine said.

He took a step out the door toward the tunnel system we had arrived from. Instantly, we were On-Screen.

“No!” Cassie screamed. “We can’t.”

She buckled to her knees and started hyperventilating. It almost sounded like she was drowning. She had a flair for the dramatic.

“What’s wrong?” Antoine said.

“We can’t go that way,” she said between strained breaths. “The waters are rising. We’ll get trapped before we can escape. We’ll drown. We have to go further underground. Our lives depend on it… finding the answers depends on it. We have to go further. Please.”

Cassie wasn’t a bad actress at all. Her terrified expression was genuine. This was pure improvisation. Hopefully, Carousel would be okay with it.

“Damn it to hell,” Antoine said skeptically. “Do you want to run into more of those… things? You weren’t there when they attacked before. I can’t let us go through that again. I can’t.” He looked up at Kimberly. “There has to be another way.”

Cassie didn’t respond. She just looked up at him with tears rolling down her face and mouthed the words, “Please.”

“She led us down here somehow,” Dina said. “She knew what the building was called. Maybe we should listen to her.”

Antoine didn’t respond. He just looked at Kimberly.

When Kimberly nodded, he stepped back from the door.

“This is crazy,” he said. “What do you think of this?” he asked, looking at me.

“I think that woman in black knows more than she’s letting on,” I said. “Besides you can fight monsters, but if we get trapped in a flood… we’re helpless.”

Antoine nodded.

“Better get ready for a fight,” he said.

We all made a show of brandishing our scalpels. Kimberly held onto the sedative and the brass syringe. That would be an effective weapon.

Antoine walked over to the large door leading deeper into the building. He pushed it open and we piled through it. Kimberly and Cassie helped guide Isaac.

“Weirdest pub crawl I’ve ever gone on,” he said with a giggle as they practically carried him along.

We were on our way. The needle on the Plot Cycle marched forward with every step.

The rumbling sound from earlier pounded again. We were getting closer to it, whatever it was.

An alarm started to sound as if it were waiting for us. Red lights and a blaring horn filled the hallway.

“There’s been a breach of the posterior wall. The foundation is compromised,” Halle’s voice rang out over an intercom. “Divert all incoming water toward the base specimens. We have no further use for them. We cannot let the proteus pools collapse. All personnel work to prioritize the east wing. We mustn’t let all our sacrifices be in vain.”