Arc II, Chapter 41: Stairway Death Scene

Lillian Geist closed the distance across the office toward Halle in a matter of seconds. They had the same Plot Armor, but I had to imagine that hers was more geared toward melee than Halle’s.

“You did this to me!” she screamed. “Tell me why!”

She grabbed him and quickly threw him toward the water fountain in the corner of the room. As she had said, the treatment Halle gave her did not make her beautiful, but it did make her strong.

As the fight bore on, the chorus of frogs in the distance grew closer. They had found their way here from the emergency room area. It was very polite of them to wait until just after Lillian’s reveal and speech.

“We’ve got to get out of here!” Willis screamed to us.

Mystery or no mystery, the Win Condition of this storyline was Escape the Fray, and we… had only gone further into it.

“Come on, Isaac,” Cassie said. She was trying to sound gentle and encouraging, but the adrenaline made the words come out through tears. “We just need to go a little further; get up.”

Isaac wasn’t going to get up. He wasn’t dead, but his Dead indicator on the red wallpaper was blinking faster and faster.

He tried to speak. He couldn’t.

Lillian continued to beat on Dr. Halle, who had taken the scalpel from his pocket—the same one he had used to cut the ribbon earlier—and was wielding it at her in vain.

“Are you going to mess my face up?” Lillian said with a laugh.

She backhanded him. He dropped the scalpel.

Then, she reached over to the fountain and pressed the switch to open the secret staircase.

“Please,” Halle said softly.

He wasn’t going to survive. I had gotten a glimpse of what this scene was titled on the script before it had been taken away. It was his staircase death.

What I didn’t know was that this scene had one last twist to throw.

As Kimberly and I tried to help Isaac get up before the frogs arrived, I heard a scream from the entrance of the room.

It was one of the Malformed Hybrids. Then another and another until a half dozen or so arrived. The woman with the feathers, the various amphibian hybrids, and a man who looked like a warthog all came with their eyes fixed on us and Lillian. Their Plot Armor was higher than I was expecting, almost as high as mine.

Halle had a trope that summoned protectors when the players or an ally attacked him.

This meant that Carousel counted Lillian as our ally. His trope had been triggered.

The warthog rammed Willis before he could respond.

If I were to guess, this fellow might have been the guy who carried Isaac off through the tunnels when he was attacked on Bobby’s orders. He was certainly big enough, with huge muscles and tusks protruding from his mouth.

The warthog turned and started to run after me. I got ready to dodge. My high Hustle would help me there.

But it didn’t even get to that.

Antoine fired two shots at him. The warthog didn’t seem to feel it but did decide to target Antoine instead of me. Antoine then jumped up and over Halle’s couch to evade him. When the warthog charged again, Willis had regained his composure and fired one shot into the beast’s leg, dropping him to the floor and another in his skull for good measure.

The woman covered in feathers was down on the ground asleep before I even saw what happened to her. Kimberly had injected her with a heavy dose of Halle’s sedative as she attacked.

While the hybrids were technically targeting me because of my low PA, they didn’t seem shy about aiming at the others. After all, it would look weird if they didn’t.

A man with a snakeskin pattern on his face and a long neck bit at Cassie, who fell to the ground as she tried to back away. Then, the snake turned to me and bounded for me, only to fall as Cassie grabbed its ankle.

Bobby was protecting his fake NPC wife. He barked at the hybrids, who strangely seemed to understand him and would respond in their animal tongues.

As they moved through the room, they got closer to me, but they also got close to Lillian, who grabbed Halle’s head and bashed it into the fountain.

They must have been restricted from helping him until that point because as soon as she picked him up by the hair, two of the hybrids tackled her. Halle dropped to the ground.

The whole thing was chaotic. The camera would have actually been on Lillian and Halle. Everything else was background.

Lillian threw the hybrids aside with a few brutal swings and a banshee scream.

She went back to Halle, who was trying to crawl away and picked him back up by the hair.

“No more promises from you,” she said. She threw him down the steep stairway into the tunnels.

He hit the stairs, bones audibly crunching the whole way down. For a moment, we went Off-Screen for what was likely a close-up of Halle’s broken body at the bottom of the stairs.

That gave me an idea for how I might use my Cutaway Death trope. A fall into darkness was an ideal setup.

Soon after, the energy in the room changed.

The hybrids’ PA dropped down five or more points a piece. Halle must have been dead. His protective buff had vanished.

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The hybrids looked down the stairs as if in mourning, but they didn’t have much time to be sad because the frogs arrived.

The frogs didn’t discriminate, but they did abide by their rules. In a Fight or Chase Scene, they attacked the characters with the lowest Hustle.

Suddenly, I wasn’t the person in the most danger.

Some of the hybrids were. Once that they had lost their buffs, frogs the size of refrigerators began jumping through the large plate glass windows separating Halle’s office from the rest of the floor and attacking whoever was nearest them.

Those most in danger were the hybrids, Bobby’s wife, and Bobby himself because he was Hobbled and had terrible Hustle.

The enemy of our enemy was our friend. Those of us in the room started closing in on each other. Cassie, Isaac, and I had managed to get separated from the others in the large office.

Cassie continued to try to get Isaac up, but he was a goner.

A message appeared on the red wallpaper from Dina that read, “Tunnels are Off-Screen.”

That was all the confirmation I needed.

“We have to find a way out of here,” he said.

Isaac’s Dead indicator flickered even faster. He was almost gone. Cassie was trying to invoke her Anguish trope to stave off his death, but that wasn’t working. She cried to the heavens, saying, “I can feel your pain, Isaac, but we just have to go a little further.”

She couldn’t feel his pain because he didn’t. Between his Bloodloss Delerium trope and the sedative, he didn’t have pain to share, and if he did, this was not a good moment for her to share it. She was too flustered to set up the power correctly.

A frog swallowed the snake man and started choking on him. That didn’t last long, though, because the frog managed to bite the hybrid in half.

“There’s an exit that way,” Donna, Bobby’s fake wife, said to him as more frogs jumped into the room. She pointed in the direction of the exit. “I saw it when I was looking for you.”

“Show us the way,” Willis said.

He ushered Antoine, Kimberly, Dina, Bobby, and Bobby’s wife out of the room.

Willis knew his job was to help us escape, even if that meant leaving a few of us behind. He couldn’t risk the survival of the group for a few injured players. If the others survived, we would, too, eventually.

That was good for them, but they were closer to the exit. Cassie, Isaac, and I were trapped. Two frogs had found their way in and were scrambling over furniture toward Isaac.

Cassie threw her body over him to protect him.