Arc II, Chapter 44: Time to Wait

Days passed while we waited at the hotel suite that had once been Jed Geist’s home.

Kurt Willis, the GI Paragon, had told my friends to wait a couple of weeks or so before pursuing the next storyline.

Weeks. Was that a figure of speech, or did he literally mean we had to just sit around?

That didn’t match up with what I knew about the Tutorial at all—nothing we had seen about the Tutorial referenced weeks spent twiddling thumbs. Then again, I had never seen or heard of an account of the tutorial from someone who completed it when it was new. I had estimated days at most.

It was still the day before the Centennial. We hadn’t crossed that threshold yet. I wanted to find the time capsule in the Mayor’s office, but there was always something stopping us from getting inside.

Dina looked at the lock on the door and said it would take weeks to pick.

Carousel was being adamant.

We were getting our rest at least. That might make sense for rookies. I just wanted to be through with the Tutorial and move on to rescues.

I was alone in the storage room of the hotel suite where we had found the old newspapers with information of Geist’s murder. The room had been reset. All of the boxes were resealed. Somewhere along the line, I got it in my mind that it would be neat to reopen them and see if there was something new to learn.

So I did. I looked through every box all over again. They still had newspapers from around the time of Jed Geist’s death. Nothing had changed—no new information. We still needed the fireplace poker to summon his spirit and interrogate him.

As I continued cycling through the garbage that had been left behind from Jed Geist’s time in the house, I took a mental inventory of everything. It was strange. I swore there were new items. Old items were missing.

As I pondered this, Kimberly walked in and found me while I had my back turned.

“What’s got you brainstorming?” she asked.

I looked back at her. “Oh,” I said. “All of this stuff is different than the stuff that was here before.”

“Different? You think there are new clues in here?” she asked. “I can get the others to help look.”

I shook my head. “No, no. That’s not what I’m saying. These aren’t important objects. Like this,” I said, lifting a box, “There’s a waffle iron. There was a waffle iron when we went through it before, but this one is electric. The other one was the kind you put on the stove.”

She took the iron from me and looked it over. “Okay? Is that… important?”

“So that means that this room wasn’t just reset. Not really. It was restocked. That’s an important difference. We weren’t gentle with tearing through these boxes when we were looking for the newspaper articles. Someone took away the trash we left and replaced it with all new junk, all wrapped in the same newspaper with the date changed because of the continuity loop.”

“That’s interesting,” she said unconvincingly.

“It is. This means that there is a warehouse somewhere in Carousel filled with boxes that only exist to restock this room. That’s not all. Smell the air.”

“Smell the air?” she asked.

I nodded.

She took a sniff. “It smells like a thrift store,” she said. “And menthol. Jed Geist must have been a smoker.”

“No,” I said. “Well, he might have been. That’s not the point. The room didn’t smell this way before. I remember. It smelled like mold and old people. It didn’t smell like smoke. Check this out.”

I pointed to a stack of boxes near a large air vent. There was a small glass ashtray on one of the boxes. Two cigarette butts occupied the tray.

“Someone opened that box over there,” I said, pointing to a different stack of boxes. “They took that ashtray and smoked in this room after they restocked it. Then they left. This room wasn’t turned back to normal by magic. People reset it. NPCs.”

“Wow,” Kimberly said. “Hotel workers?”

“Maybe so,” I said. “Isn’t that interesting? Why would it work like that? Carousel has shown so much power, and yet it has people stacking boxes filled with old junk so that players can look through them to find these newspapers. It’s crazy.”

“Yeah,” she said. She tried to sound as enthusiastic as I was. “But there’s nothing for us back here?”

“No.”

She waited for a moment and then asked, “Riley, why are you back here?”

The question caught me off guard.

“I just told you.”

“We’re in the living room, and we’re having a good time, all things considered. You know we have to wait here for who knows how long. Why don’t you come in there with us? You said yourself there aren’t any more clues back here.”

Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

I could hear them watching TV in the other room. It was a football game intercut with news bulletins.

“Even Dina’s in there, and she is literally an outsider. You can’t say it’s because you don’t know us. We’ve been here for months. If being here doesn’t make us friends, what could? And don’t say it’s because of Anna and Camden because you were the same way when they were… alive.”

I hated being put on the spot for this. As I grew up, I found myself straying away from groups more and more.

“I’ll come in there if you want,” I said. “It’s not that… Look, I’ve always been like this. My grandparents sent me to trauma counseling and everything when I was a kid. It’s just who I am.”

She set the waffle iron back inside the box she had taken it from and said, “Come on.”

The last thing I wanted to do was watch sports and relax. It was too early for that. We needed to figure out the Throughline and find a place to stay other than this haunted house. We needed to start rescues. We needed to raise our levels. We needed to get our friends back. Then, we could talk about letting our guards down.

But I relented. There was nothing to be found in those boxes that we hadn’t already seen. Frankly, if I refused, she might think I disliked them or something. That wasn’t true. It was just that they didn’t want to talk about Carousel or the Throughline.

That’s all I wanted to talk about. I couldn’t think about anything else.