Arc II, Chapter 75: Mirror Match

I found Kimberly and Antoine. They must have met up and split back apart to look for Gray. I didn’t know where Bobby and Cassie were. They had only just noticed me when I used Flashback Revelation to say, “Follow my voice.”

I should have been more cautious about using that trope. At some point, it could run out, but I needed to get their attention.

I had to walk slowly so that they could follow. Even when I was trying to avoid running into people, I could move through the crowd fast enough that they would lose track of me.

As I took a break to wait for them to catch up, the Deathwatch screen flickered to life. Something was happening On-Screen. It was a bit of a montage, actually.

The mansion had a large garage filled with expensive cars. No surprise there. Two NPCs, young men, were working on a town car, one of the vehicles that had been dropped off by a Geist from what I could tell.

One of them took a nozzle from a fuel pump in a carport outside the garage and dragged a long hose toward the town car. The hose was attached to a large suspender arm above that would help it reach without dragging on the ground. Fancy stuff.

He took the fuel cap off of the car, and right before he started to fuel it, the other NPC swatted it out of his hands, putting pressure on the suspender arm and causing something to snap, though I couldn’t see what.

“Don’t use that, you idiot,” the second NPC said. “That’s practically jet fuel. It’s the other one.”

The NPC had grabbed the wrong type of fuel.

“Sorry,” the first NPC said. He went to return the nozzle to the fuel pump, but the suspension arm was stuck. He pulled on it and tugged on it to no avail. He couldn’t guide it back over to the pump. Embarrassed and in a hurry, he gingerly placed the nozzle on the ground and ran back to grab the other nozzle and hose to fill up the car.

The hose he had just tugged on started to leak, unseen by the workers. It poured into a seam in the garage’s concrete and moved downhill toward the mansion.

“It’s happening,” I said forgetting that no one could hear me. I used Flashback Revelation to say, “It’s coming.”

Antoine and Kimberly stopped being polite and began forcing their way through the crowd.

The screen jumped to another scene. Again, two NPCs. These were making out in one of the upstairs rooms, based on the camera shot through a window.

“What do they have all of these candles for?” the woman said, taking a drag from her cigarette.

The room was filled with candles, mostly in boxes and unused, but also spread out fashionably.

“They’re goddamn devil worshipers,” the man said. “They have a huge candle budget because of their rituals or whatever. Let’s be quick, I have to get back to the party. My absence will be noticed.”

The woman sighed, put out her cigarette on a cardboard box, and threw it into a crack between two boxes. The cigarette, not completely extinguished, landed in some melted wax leaking out of one of the boxes.

It was going to be a big fire.

The large doors to the closed-off wing were in sight.

The screen showed the third and final source of the blaze.

A valet driver wasn’t used to driving the nice car he was given control of. He accidentally swiped a large metal box sticking out of the ground next to the parking lot.

The box contained a gas meter. The indicator of the meter started fluctuating rapidly.

In the kitchens, the cooks were hard at work making more and more food for the party. Suddenly, the gas pressure blew, causing the stovetops to create a fireball. The NPCs cursed, but the real problem started when the fire suppression system above the stove triggered and doused the entire stovetop.

The pilot light on the stoves went out, but gas could still be heard leaking rapidly.

Carousel didn’t have modern safety features, especially in 1984.

Gas was invisibly creeping along the main floor from the kitchens, gallons of candle wax melting and spreading from above, and high-octane fuel leaking into the basement from the fuel pump outside. The party was really about to go off.

They needed to get into the abandoned wing immediately and shut the doors behind them. I hated how automatically my mind went to that reality. If the doors opened, the fire could spread and kill more people than intended. It might end up killing fewer people than intended. I didn’t know which was worse for our case.

The door was roped off, but not locked. It was closed off to discourage guests from hooking up in the unfinished halls, not to stop players.

Antoine opened the door just enough for him and Kimberly to squeeze through.

Then he locked the doors with a large brass key that was already in the door.

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“What are you doing?” Kimberly asked. “Bobby and Cassie are still out there.”

“We can’t let him escape with the flask,” Antoine said.

He knew that he could have doomed Cassie and Bobby by not waiting for them, but they didn’t have time to wait around.

His eyes flashed over to where I was.

“It’s all up to you now,” I said with Flashback Revelation. Then, I ran back through the doors to try and warn Bobby and Cassie.

As I did, I saw the POV of the Die Cast. He was just outside. He was here, and everyone I could see was about to die.

I needed to warn Cassie and Bobby, then get back to help Antoine and Kimberly. I had seen Gray’s enemy tropes. There was nothing too dangerous. Mirror Match would make him hard to beat, but not a threat.

I had to hope I hadn’t overlooked something.

Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to find them. Knowing they couldn’t get through the locked door, I immediately used the Flashback Revelation trope to tell them, “Follow my voice.”

Cassie heard me, and I led them back toward the front door as I used Deathwatch to watch the disaster about to happen. The fire was about to break out.

“We need to go outside?” Bobby asked.

Good Bobby.

“You had better run,” I said using my trope.

Bobby didn’t hear it, because he wasn’t around when I originally said it, but Cassie did.

She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the exit.

Not fast enough.

I couldn’t tell what happened where. All I knew, was that the entire floor was at once covered in fire. The drapes were burning. Everything was burning.

Luckily, Bobby and Cassie were near the door when the stampede started. Unfortunately, Bobby didn’t have a mean bone in his body.