Arc II, Chapter 70: The Secret Sixth Principle

I liked to read the Carousel Atlas when I wasn’t doing anything else. I had brought it with me during our month-long holiday as we portrayed our characters’ lives.

The knowledge inside was always qualified with disclaimers. No matter how much our predecessors knew about Carousel, they never really believed they knew anything. The history of the book was marked with change.

Rules that had been placed inside the book years earlier were liable to be crossed out, with long explanations of why the rule was not true and what the true rule was.

CW usually did it, Curtis. He was a Doctor Archetype who left entries on any number of subjects, but especially Advanced Archetypes. He collected them like trading cards.

He had advice for Monster Hunters and Adventurers, Witch Doctors, and Mad Scientists, and half a dozen other AAs, which had such minuscule use cases that I was surprised to find out they were real. He had been something called a Death Negotiator, which could have you bargaining with serial killers, demons, or even fate itself. He had a rare one called Child Psychologist, which only had five tropes as far as he could tell.

His notes were always very clear, technical, and somehow sentimental. Having read his journal entries, I felt like I knew him. He had been there in the midst of Project Rewind’s formulation and had taken himself off the board to ensure its success—or, should I say, put himself on the missing poster board.

His entries were a delight to find, like getting a letter from an old friend. He had written a funny anecdote on a piece of notebook paper and taped it in the entry for The Final Straw storyline. It claimed to have no spoilers, so I read it. The enemy of the storyline—Benny the Haunted Scarecrow—had apparently handed him the glasses that he had dropped. He said it was like an episode of Scooby Doo.

He thought Carousel was setting up a joke scene, so he put on the glasses and acted shocked to see Benny, but then he realized the whole interaction was Off-Screen.

Having had my own interactions with Benny, I could picture the whole thing in my mind.

CW had written an entry in the “Improvisation” section entitled “The Limits of Improvisation.” I read it hungrily, as the subject matter and the author both interested me.

The article contained several ideas I liked to consider, one of which was his assertion that he believed the audience knew what we were going through. I had thought about that myself. How much did the audience know? If they knew everything about our suffering, that was interesting. If they knew nothing, that was somehow even more interesting.

No one believed the audience was completely unwitting, but thinking of these amorphous, all-powerful judges who watched us as actual people made my mind spin. What were their lives like? Who were they?

Were they the people I had seen in the theater when I died, thanks to Deathwatch?

In his essay, he outlined the five principles he believed Carousel took into consideration when deciding if your improvisation would make it into the final cut.

While he said it much more eloquently, he believed Carousel wanted to:

1. Entertain the Audience,

2. Challenge Players,

3. Keep the Story Coherent,

4. Engage Players’ Minds, and

5. Preserve Key Story Elements

Those points lined up with my experience. He also identified a “secret sixth principle.”

The secret principle was this: “Sometimes, Carousel just wants the win.”

He didn’t elaborate on that.

As we scoped out the jail, finding dead end after dead end in our plans for getting Isaac out, I thought about that secret sixth principle.

We sat in one of the coffee shops across from the small jail downtown where Isaac was being held.

Antoine was getting in the groove, belting out ideas.

Most of them were incomplete or impractical in the time we had. One was theoretically workable, at least in a movie. It wasn’t an option, but I had to believe it could work under different circumstances.

Until Carousel rubbed our noses in it.

“We could get cop uniforms and sneak him out ourselves,” he said.

Five minutes later, a cop with a mustard stain on his uniform came in and, when speaking with the barista about the stain, said the laundromat that the city contracted with to clean their uniforms had burned down. All of their spare uniforms had gone up in flames.

Haha. Very funny.

Carousel wanted the win. It wanted Isaac. After its stunt renovating the street to thwart our plans I was sure of it.

Or maybe it just did not want a jailbreak. Maybe there was no way it would let one into its movie. It would disrupt the pacing, after all. Jailbreaks need to be set up in some way. We had none. It was also an odd tone for a movie about relentless death, even a campy one.

This was a simple scene. One of our own was to die. It wasn’t supposed to be climactic or clever. It wasn’t supposed to be the moment we came together as allies. Our characters were mostly not good people. Why would they try to rescue Isaac’s character?

A rescue at a police station was something the brothers might do on Supernatural, but Isaac’s character wasn’t family or even strongly linked to the group.

I could feel the creative juices in my mind start to slow as I came to the realization that Carousel was not going to give him up. It never was. Isaac had sealed his fate already by giving into Carousel’s nudging. He had played the unlikable stooge who got bitten by bad luck.

He had already whacked his face on every rung as he fell down the metaphorical ladder. The only stop left was the bottom.

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

He was a Comedian, sure, but not a lovable jokester. That had been his path out of the line of fire. He could have made the audience like him for being funny. He could have embarked on a character arc that would lead to his being saved by allies.

Instead, he had played up his unlikable qualities. The debt collector was a test, just like my potential bad luck with a razor was a test.

I had passed mine.

He hadn’t. He punched a man he owed money to in the face and set up his eventual, somewhat humorous death.

Carousel was going to ensure this fate no matter what we had done. Even if we had locked Isaac in the basement, I doubted he would be safe.

The sun went down, and the night came upon us.

Cassie panicked as she realized it would be showtime soon, and all we had was the first part of a plan. Moonlight Morrow was going to visit the jail and play nice with the police. He was the mayor, after all. He could walk into any government building, and a story would form around him. He seemed confident enough in his ability to make a distraction.

He was also very quiet about our hopes to save Isaac. That had been telling.

We left the coffee shop and moved to where we would start the scene. We knew the time was soon. The NPC who owned the coffee shop told us the place closed at “6:38 P.M., right at sundown,” which was a standard NPC nudge.

I had to return Ramona to my character’s house. Kimberly and I would be at the production lot working on some voice corrections (she was going to scream into the microphone so we could get good audio for her screams).

Antoine and Cassie would be together. They would drive and get us when Cassie started having “visions” of Isaac’s impending doom. We would drive to the jail to try to save him. It would be the first time our characters had been to the jail.

The clock ticked. It felt like everything was slowing down. It was dark outside. Kimberly and I were working with an audio engineer who showed up just as we got to the production lot. Bobby tagged along and started filling out some insurance stuff related to the set disaster. We needed to keep him injected into the story for later.

A screen appeared on the red wallpaper. It started out staticky, but then the view was clear. I was seeing the enemy’s POV.

Action!

~-~

On-Screen.

Kimberly screamed as loud as she could. It was her scared scream. She was watching footage of her scream in the movie, trying to match up her mouth movement. We were rerecording it.

Tires squealed in the parking lot.

“What was that?” I said. I pushed an intercom button. “Go ahead and stop Kimberly.”

“It sounds like someone raising hell out there,” the audio engineer said.