Arc II, Chapter 55: Cycles

I was shaking when we returned to our sad excuse of a hotel room on the other side of the hill. We had gotten our fair share of clues from Jedediah Geist. That was literally his eternal job; he answered players’ questions. That was the deal he had made.

“The Geists really are different than the others,” I said. “Even more than we previously thought. NPCs are cast in roles in an instant, but the level of… of…”

“Manipulation,” Antoine finished my thought. “The level of manipulation that was needed to get them into their roles was crazy.”

We took our seats in the cramped room. We were hungry, but room service had lost its appeal ever since the resort got retrofitted back to its form from four decades ago.

“Anybody up for The Diner?” Isaac suggested. “You said that all we had to worry about there was trans fats… Or is it saturated fats that are bad?”

“If the food doesn’t crawl out of the fryer and take hostages, it’s safe enough for me. Or it would be. We don’t have money,” Antoine said. “Room service is free.”

Kimberly took everyone’s order and made a call. Intellectually, I knew the food would be safe, but… still, I wasn’t enthusiastic about it.

The burnt burger and greasy fries weren’t so bad. Unfortunately, the resort had not yet discovered chicken wings in this era.

Bobby mainly had been silent since we got back. He sat on his cot and was deep in thought.

Then he spoke.

“I know it didn’t seem like he knew much about the game,” he said, “But the thing is, he talked about people going missing a lot. Maybe there is a legend of where they go. Maybe he has all the information we need to find her.”

“We can try to ask him later,” Antoine said. “But I gotta say, that sounds a lot like ‘seeking her,’ which you aren’t supposed to do.”

Bobby let out a sigh. “That isn’t fair. Why would it hide her specifically…”

He went back to silence for a while.

I couldn’t imagine what he was going through, but at the time, I was distracted by the Throughline plot.

“What do we think of this mystery woman?” Cassie asked. “Player?”

I wasn’t sure. All we knew was that she had stolen the fireplace poker to talk to Jed on the anniversary of his death.

“She claimed her sister died in the original Centennial thirty years ago,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a player. Of course, she could have just been saying that as part of her cover story so he would talk to her.”

She had also talked about a conspiracy, seemingly a more concrete conspiracy than the one shared by all NPCs, to kill the Geists.

“The factory fire happened months before the manor burned,” Kimberly said. She was writing on the walls again.

“Someone warned them, according to the newspaper. Saved all of the workers,” Antoine said.

The newspaper history board made by junior high kids and displayed for the Centennial was filled with facts about the deaths of the Geists. What I had briefly thought was just narrative background was turning out to be directly important to the Throughline plot.

The factory fire, the movie set disaster, and the Geist Manor blaze all involved the Geists, and all happened within months of each other. Now, they were coming up again.

“So if she’s the one who warned them,” I said, “Does that mean she isn’t a player because she’s a part of the story?”

I was tossing around a lot of ideas. We needed more information, so we talked for a while about what we might do next.

The truth was, we had looked up the locations described in the articles when we had free time. We weren’t stupid. We had enough time on our hands. The factory site was now a mini-mall. We couldn’t find the movie set location. The burned Geist Manor was cordoned off and had security guards.

We had only picked up a lead about one of those things.

“Sounds like we need to give the Geist Manor a look over,” I said.

There was silence for a moment. Exploring the manor could easily trigger the third storyline, and none of us wanted that just yet.

“Maybe after a quick game of Reply the Departed?” Isaac said.

That got some laughs.

The board game had been our only consistent form of entertainment, and we weren’t in any danger of activating it on accident, but it was anything but quick to play. The alternative was watching the tiny television. Carousel’s selection of creepy children’s shows was quite extensive, but they gave Kimberly nightmares.

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We had gotten back around sunrise. We set out for the Geist Cemetery at two in the afternoon. We were ready for a fight, though I would have been more pleased to see some elaborate puzzle.

The Cemetery was, as we remembered, quite large. Instead of turning toward the family plot—labeled “Lost but not forgotten”—we turned toward the potter’s field—“Forgotten but not lost.”

However, we soon learned that the endless sea of unmarked graves was not the only thing in that part of the cemetery.

News crews gathered around a large statue covered in a velvet sheet of some kind. The statue was bronze by the look of what stuck out from beneath the fabric.

There was a large marble base under the statue. A man with a chisel stood on his knee, begrudgingly posing for photographs from the crowd.

There was another statue on the other side of the small plaza that was the same size and rough shape as the one they had covered up. The only difference was that the uncovered one had a course, green patina from age.

“You have to be kidding me!” Antoine said with a laugh.

The gathering and statue unveiling just happened to be right in front of the mausoleum with the secret passage into Geist Manor. It was blocked off from our access.

“Today of all days, huh?” I said, laughing.