Arc II, Chapter 56: The Die Cast

“Are you sure there are no Omens here?” Kimberly said for the third time.

“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye out.”

She was nervous, but how could I blame her? The last time we had gone to the library, the vets had acted like we were walking into a lion’s den while covered in lamb’s blood. The library, which had once been so thick with Omens that turning my head too fast would make me nauseous from the flashes of storyline posters on the red wallpaper, was just a normal library. Almost.

It was “under construction.”

We had four days left and we had resorted to checking and rechecking every place in town that might have a missing clue of what we should do next. What we knew for sure was that we didn’t want to wait until the default Omen for the third story arrived. That Omen would not lead us to the real version of the storyline. We wanted the true ending, just as we had gotten the true ending for the second storyline.

The library shelves were covered in sheets. The hallways were blocked off. The entire place was being renovated. Even the jobs board outside was under renovation. It would be until after the Centennial. Haha.

“You’re back,” Constance Barlow said as she saw us walking up to her desk. “I am sorry to say that the library is still being renovated.”

I understood why Paragons had to pretend to be NPCs most of the time. Having them be meta all the time would make things too easy. After all, they did appear to be trying to beat the Throughline, too, in their own way. If they could help, they would.

Constance was the Researcher Paragon and even when she had been acting as a player, she couldn’t tell us as much as she would like. Carousel limited her script because she knew too much. Her most potent memories were literally locked away from her. She had memories from before Carousel had a death game attached to it. It made sense Carousel would make those off-limits.

Those weren’t the memories we were after, though. We wanted help figuring out the last piece of the puzzle for the Tutorial.

“Alright, Constance,” Antoine said. “I’m sorry to do this, but we’re back to try again.”

“Perseverance is key,” Constance said. “I’m sure you’ll keep digging up the past until something turns up. May I suggest this book on Bartholomew Geist? He was known to be a very effective negotiator.”

“That’s not what I remember,” Isaac said. He watched her as she stamped library books. “You know, Ms. Barlow, if this library has been under renovation for the last thirty years, it would be weird for you to always be stamping returned library books still.”

He was at it again.

She was mildly entertained but still professional. “Thirty years is a long time for anything to happen. If you check the calendar by the door, you’ll see we only started the renovations last week. Patrons who checked out books before then would still be returning them, so it makes sense that I am checking them back in.”

Isaac looked over at the calendar. “I’ll get you one of these days.”

Isaac had really taken a fascination with calling out places where the continuity loop was “broken,” as he put it.

It was interesting when we thought about it. An entire town being reset to the eve of a holiday celebration that would never come. The logistics were mind-boggling. How could you live your life if every day was New Year’s Eve?

“Look,” I said. “We want the good ending to the third storyline. That means we have to trigger the storyline before the two-week break is up, right?”

She continued to stamp books and stack them on a cart next to her desk.

“A good ending?” Constance asked. “Aren’t you a little old for choose your own adventure books?”

“You’d think so,” I said. I was feeling brave, ready to go out on a limb. “We know the story involves Lillian Geist.”

We didn’t know that. I was guessing.

Constance didn’t speak for a moment.

“Lillian Geist,” she said. “Poor woman. I guess that would make your story non-fiction then, wouldn’t it?”

Would it? Was the story of the Geists real or fabricated? The more I learned about them, the more I started to think it was somehow both.

“Is there a way you might let us take a peek in the non-fiction section?” Kimberly asked.

“I’m afraid not,” Constance said. “The books in the section you are after had to be sent out for repair. They got extensive smoke damage. I couldn’t say how.”

She looked over to the Carousel History nonfiction section, right above the children’s section. She was making a joke. The vets used to start a fire in that section to artificially remove a mobile Omen from the library when they needed to come here.

“We just need to find the true ending,” I said.

I didn’t read her as annoyed. She did seem frustrated, though. I couldn’t blame her. Given what we knew about the Throughline, the answer we were looking for was probably going to be simple even if concealed by layers of distraction.

The original Tutorial was simple enough. If you figured the story out as you went along, you got the true ending. If you didn’t, you got a basic version of the next story… Our answer was somewhere, but it was possible we wouldn’t think of it until after the Tutorial.

“The true ending to Lillian Geist’s story,” Constance said. “The townsfolk must be rubbing off on you if you are that obsessed with the Geists. We’re superstitious here. We never really believed they died off. We always thought there would be more of their story to tell. Then again, maybe not everyone wants the true ending. Maybe burning up in a fire is a better end than the other possibilities. I mean, if she hadn’t died in that fire, think of all the worse things that could have happened. You know, it’s funny. Her uncle Carlyle and cousin Bensen escaped fiery deaths just months before she died. Of course, they ended up dying shortly after, anyway. I guess when your time is up, it’s up.”

She was referencing the factory fire and the movie set disaster, which preceded the manor blaze.

“Are you saying that Carlyle and Bensen would have died in the factory fire?” I asked. We didn’t know that. The article we had available didn’t say they were there when it happened.

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“As the town historian,” she answered, “That would be the kind of thing I would know, don’t you think?” I could see her eyes go unfocused as she read her script. Her tone changed to be more hurried. “It might be best for you to leave now. We really do have a lot of work coming up.”

I got the sense that she was cutting things close, but what did that insight actually mean?

We turned to leave.

“Until next time,” Isaac said. “I notice that you updated the newspaper rack. Why would you do that if you were under renovation? Why refill it?”

Constance rolled her eyes playfully. “We didn’t refill it. The newspaper sent one of their delivery men over. Thank goodness, too, because I like to stay informed,” she said, grabbing a newspaper off her desk and waving it.

Isaac smiled a toothy grin. “We were just at the newspaper place looking for clues,” he said as he backed out the library door. “They said they had shut down a week ago due to the flood and would not be going to print until after the Centennial! Where did the newspapers come from, Constance?”

Isaac did an air pump as if he had finally beaten Carousel by proving that the continuity loop and resets were not perfect.

Constance smirked and went back to her work.

We sat on the steps of the library for a couple of hours after that. I felt that if I could just know the edge pieces of the puzzle, I could figure out the middle. I didn’t know where to look. There were too many places to look for clues.

Which, in itself, was a clue.

“What do we know that no ordinary team would know going through the tutorial for the first time?” I asked.