Arc II, Chapter 5: The Founder’s Tale

“How much time do we have before something happens?” Kimberly asked.

With the arrival of new players, we knew that Carousel would soon do something to attract them to the Tutorial. My friends and I had been shepherded into a storyline before that could happen, cutting short the process. This time, however, the Tutorial was inevitable.

“Let me think,” Antoine said as he took a moment for mental calculations, “When we were intercepted by Arthur and the others after we arrived, it took us maybe an hour to get into The Final Straw II. I assume we have more time than that though. The vets wouldn’t have risked cutting things too close. So we probably have at least some time.”

“That’s the best guess I have too,” I said. “The section on the Tutorial in the Atlas doesn’t say how long it takes for someone to come pick up newbies, so I assume it isn’t something we need to know. We also know that these two will be forced into a storyline at some point, so we had better start heading in that direction.”

With new players, we knew the next step. The Tutorial. With as much as we had been through it was kind of funny that the tutorial was is something that sent chills down our spines. It was jarring to find out that for all our time in Carousel, we had only just begun. I wasn’t sure what we would find. I was excited. I was afraid. Mostly, I was curious.

He stood on the front porch. None of us really had much luggage. We had left that at Camp Dyer. I wished that there was some way we could further prepare for what was about to happen, but we couldn’t.

Antoine jumped up and down and shook his arms out as if he were trying to shake the nervousness right out of his body. Kimberly stood with her arms folded trying to make herself small.

“Hope you guys are ready for this,” Dina said she looked excited and intense. “We only get one shot. No one is left to help us.”

I wished she would at least act like she wasn’t thrilled.

“I need to put out food for the dogs,” Bobby said. “I figure we could be gone for days, right? Digger doesn’t need much; he’s pretty small. Barkley needs the special breed stuff for his coat but there isn’t much left of that. I wish we had more time.”

He headed off toward the dog pens to get them all ready.

“Wait,” Kimberly said after he had left, “Won’t the whole B&B reset after we leave? Does putting food out help?”

I shrugged. I wasn’t going to stop him. “Just let him have this,” I said.

“I’ll carry the Atlas,” Antoine said, stuffing it into the duffel bag I had found for him. It was likely the safest place for it, though the book weighed so much I wasn’t sure if the magic of the Luggage Tags would even protect it. They were designed to stack so you could upgrade a bag to hold more and more weight. Between the book and his bat, he might have already exceeded his ten pound limit.

“Everybody good?” Antoine asked.

“I…” Isaac started to say, but then he lost his train of thought. Both he and his sister were still in shock. Now we were shoving them out the door.

I just wanted to get them out of here and on the way to town before they tried making a run for it like Jeanette had when we got here.

“Do you need help with your bags?” I asked as Isaac and Cassie started picking up their belongings.

Isaac shook his head and started walking out toward the road. I had trouble reading his mental state, but I didn’t think that any of the options were good. He was either scared or paranoid or angry or all of the above.

“I’m good,” Cassie said gently. She was still having a hard time. “I packed light.”

I started to walk toward the road where the others were headed. I stopped short.

“It’s okay to be scared,” I said. “Bad things will happen, but you can work and plan. We can keep going.”

I wasn’t the one who should have been trying to make anyone feel better. My greatest accomplishment in life had been learning to feel nothing. I didn’t know what to say.

“When you all said that we have to die…” she started.

I thought about how Arthur had treated the subject when we got there, he and Adaline both. They never tried to assure us that we would survive. They never gave us false hope to cling to.

“You die. It hurts and it sticks with you,” I said. “You never really get used to it, but you hesitate less. I’m sorry.”

That didn’t exactly lift her spirits. She moved some of the dark hair out of her eyes and then started walking forward.

I wished I had better news for her.

We walked out to the road. The others were waiting.

Bobby walked along with the four dogs in tow. As he stepped over the threshold separating the B&B from the road, the dogs stopped, sat, and watched him. When he noticed, he looked back to them with a look of defeat on his face. Perhaps he had hoped they would follow him further into Carousel.

They were NPCs and had scripts and rules of their own. Of course, I had no idea what a dog’s script looked like. Whatever it looked like, it told them not to leave the setting of their story.

“So we hoof it,” Antoine said when we saw nothing in the distance.

And we did.

For the second time in my life, I walked the Olde Hill Road toward Carousel. It was later in the day than it had been the first time. Darkness was coming quickly.

We joked idly that Carousel had forgotten us. Of course, there was a shadow of hope in our voices as we did.

However, when night finally came, we saw the lights.

Two fiery globes floated toward us down a large stretch of road. I checked and double-checked that it wasn’t an Omen.

It wasn’t until the lights got closer that we heard the sound of hoofbeats and wheels in the distance.

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Sure enough, as we waited longer, we saw that the floating lights were actually lanterns attached to the front of a large, black carriage that was being pulled by two jet-black horses. Sitting behind the horses was a young man who wore Victorian garb including a top hat. His clothes were all black, of course.