Arc II, Chapter 81: The Tape

As I raced to undo what might have been the biggest mistake of my life (or death), all I could think about was a simple question.

What do you do when you are missing information?

Over the past months, both in and outside of storylines, I had been asking myself that question constantly.

The tutorial, if that was even the real name for the obstacle course that we had been run through, had felt like walking through mud blindfolded with only faint whispers that we were making progress. I latched on to whatever details I could that made me feel like I was actually accomplishing something.

What was the plot of the tutorial?

Looking back at it, it was a fractured timeline resulting in a time loop. How many times had I seen that in a movie or television show? It was a classic setup that allowed storytellers to do absurd things without ever having to stick to any sort of grounded rule set.

Time was broken and so were the rules. Have fun.

It was a simple enough plot, though, as Isaac had said; it was weird the Paragons didn’t just tell us that was what was going on. They were “unscripted” right?

As we explored the Centennial, the true sequence of events was laid out for us. That was a key element of a fractured timeline story. The character always has to know what a fixed timeline looks like.

The Geist family all died in 1984 in a Manor fire caused by the Die Cast, a spirit of vengeance. They all died horrific deaths that night, except of course, for Lillian Geist and her uncle Jedediah. Jedediah, seeing Lillian’s injuries from the fire, had enlisted the help of a mad scientist by the name of Halle. That scientist transformed her into a monster. Eight years later, in 1992, Lillian Geist escaped the mad scientist, returned to her uncle, and murdered him with a fire poker as a thank-you for her transformation.

We summoned his spirit once for a chat.

She returned to the mad scientist and his sedatives. She lived that way until 1995 when she once again broke free from the mad scientist and killed him before following him into the afterlife in the jaws of a giant killer frog.

I knew that to be the truth. I had seen it with my own eyes in the second storyline. I even had a hand it helping it happen.

But there were conflicting reports on the death of Lillian Geist. This was another staple of broken timeline stories—a paradox.

When we met Ramona, the first thing she told us about was how this woman, a woman that we knew to be Lillian Geist, had been killed in 1992 at the original Centennial. We knew that was an impossibility.

But, I was overcome with relief because I finally knew there was a paradox: Lillian Geist had two canon deaths. That simply was not possible.

I knew, that this paradox was the reason for the time loop. It had to be.

We knew how the time loop was accomplished behind the scenes. Ramona Mercer had been initiating a storyline that took place the day before the Centennial. She had done this every day on repeat for an unfathomable amount of time, granting her a very long life, to say the least, and plunging Carousel into a time loop where the days moved forward but the events stayed the same.

Carousel never got to see its Centennial again, and as time passed, the ridiculousness of this scenario began to cause problems.

Somehow, her not being a player allowed her to fill this role without getting killed. It was like she was placed there for us to find.

Was she another paradox?

I had no idea. I wouldn’t for a long time.

Ramona was one of a dozen things I could not reconcile about this Tutorial.

The arbitrariness of what happened between storylines, the unhelpful answers from the Paragons, and their constant positive reinforcement, all ate at me. Every time I expressed my doubts, they patted us on the back and told us what a good job we were doing.

At what? The storylines were a pain and a half, but most of our efforts were like jogging in a train—it didn’t matter how fast we ran, we weren’t really the ones driving.

But of course, I ignored my doubts because what other options did we have?

A time capsule buried during the original Centennial was dug up every single day, and no one knew how it got there. This was classic broken timeline shenanigans. It was an artifact from the true version of events.

Fixing the paradox of Lillian Geist’s two deaths was something I could really sink my teeth into, so I embraced it with all my heart.

The paradox was the problem, and I knew the solution. Make sure the timeline went according to plan. Lillian Geist was supposed to die by a frog bite in 1995, not be beheaded by a rusted piece of metal in 1992.

Saving her from the Die Cast was the solution. I fixated on it, and I focused on it, and I devoted every single piece of myself toward it.

It wasn’t until I died and suddenly the Paragons’ veil of influence lifted away from my mind like chewing gum being scraped from the inside of my skull that I started to question if “forward” really was the only direction we could go.

Moonlight Morrow gave us some vague comments to chew on, but ultimately, the realization that our free will had been manipulated was a chilling dagger to my spinal cord. Choice was a common theme of Carousel. The illusion of choice was all around, but magical manipulation felt different.

It scared the daylights out of me.

So I returned to the questions I had been asking: What do you do when you are missing information?

The tutorial was odd, but if there was some horrible consequence to fixing the paradox and obtaining the “true ending” I didn’t know what it was.

Faced with a choice of continuing down the path we had been tricked into or just destroying it all, the choice was easy. There was a chance that the heavy-handedness by the Paragons was perfectly normal, and we were blowing up our best chance at beating the throughline and leaving Carousel.

It was possible, but the one thing we knew about the tutorial was that you could repeat it and try again.

Heck, I didn’t even know how obtaining the true ending could be a bad thing, except for the fact that we were manipulated into doing it.

I knew in my soul that if we were going to beat Carousel, we weren’t going to do it blindfolded, so the decision was simple.

We would ensure that we did not achieve the true ending. We would not fix the paradox. We would not march blindly toward whatever end we were approaching.

How we were going to accomplish that, after having worked so hard to keep Lillian Geist alive, I had no idea.

It didn’t matter. We had to try and I was thrilled because whatever resulted from ruining the true ending, it would be a choice we made.

And that had to matter.

~-~

Kimberly and the monstrous Lillian were back Off-Screen for a moment.

Before I could even yell with Flashback Revelation, Kimberly pointed to the Die Cast and said something.

Why did she have to have such a high Moxie?

On-Screen.

Lillian looked confused at first. She saw the buildings and booths around the Centennial burning, and the fire reflected in her crazed eyes.

Suddenly, she understood.

“You!” she screamed. “It’s you.”

My Deathwatch screen on the red wallpaper flashed back. There was some fancy editing between shots of Lillian lying on the floor of the burning Mansion staring up and the Die Cast in that same mansion. It gave the impression that she had seen him on the day the manor burned, even though she didn’t really.

The Lillian Scorned Contingency was working.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

Lillian Geist was no longer the gasping young woman who had been burned in the Manor Blaze. It had been eight years for her. Eight years of mutation and experimentation. What remained of her was a true force to be reckoned with. She was almost as high of Plot Armor as the Die Cast. With her tropes, she was even stronger, at least physically.

Of course, there was a catch. She was only strong against enemies who had harmed her in the past. Her fragile psyche prevented her from being a real threat to the average passerby.

But the Die Cast was not a passerby. The Die Cast had burned her.

“You killed my family,” she screamed. “You did this to me!”

The wriggling worms that had been grafted onto her face writhed and rattled to punctuate her scream. She was no longer human, and she meant to prove it.

She attacked.

Her A Woman Scorned trope must have activated because her Plot Armor jumped up seven points.

“You’re the reason they did this to me!” she screamed as she tackled the Die Cast to the ground. “I’m a monster because of you!”

The Die Cast tried to throw her, but she grabbed his arm and, with screaming effort, snapped it backward.

The roided-up monster Lillian might have been a real contender.

Everything was doomed. We were too late.

The Die Cast eventually managed to throw Lillian back into Dina.

Dina had been trying to help her ghostly husband regain control of his old body. They had been making real strides.

Dina landed on the ground. She seemed fine, but one of the long, smoky tendrils of the spirit controlling the Die Cast reached up to a large hit-the-ball game. Suddenly I heard a bolt snap.

The entire tower with the bell at the top fell to the ground.

With a loud, dinging sound, Dina’s head was flattened.

She was dead.

That wasn’t good. We wanted Lillian dead and the Die Cast defeated. It looked like we would have the opposite.

Gale screamed out at the sight of Dina’s death, losing whatever control he had over his old body. Without Dina’s sweet nothings, he was ejected off his body and the spirit reigned once again.

Lillian was all that stood against him.

She and the Die Cast squared off.

I hoped the Die Cast could kill her with some combination of brute force and bad luck, but I had forgotten that Lillian had the trope called Animals are Psychic, which gave her preternatural instincts.

She could dodge any bad luck that came her way.

A propane tank zoomed through the air like a missile. She dodged it. She ran on all fours and jumped twenty feet in the air.

An electric go-cart from the go-cart track zoomed by with no driver and sparks flying out of its motor. It had no chance of hitting her.

Luckily, the Die Cast was not without his own physical prowess. He managed to catch her in the side of the head with his lead pipe when she was dodging a live wire that danced around on the ground.

The pipe hit her with a loud, satisfying thwack.

The Die Cast was on her. His hands were around her throat. She had broken his arm, but he was undead and the tendrils of the spirit of vengeance made him practically invincible.

She wasn’t down, but things were looking hopeful.

And then, I heard the snarling.

A large dog, a great beast, jumped from nowhere and clamped down on The Die Cast’s arm.

The dog was dragging on him with force and power. The Die Cast had to let go of Lillian.

He couldn’t shake the dog. That wasn’t surprising.

The dog, after all, was undead.

Bobby jogged into view moments later.

On-Screen.

He stood next to me and said, “A few years ago, a home invader shot one of my dogs. Thought I would pay him a visit.”

And then it hit me.

Bobby’s license.

It gave him the right to use the Coles’ dogs from the Permanent Vacancy storyline. It never said it only applied to the living ones. One of them had been ghost-zombified when Bradley Spiers killed it.

If there was any storyline where a ghost dog could get some play, it was this one.

The dog held the Die Cast’s attention absolutely.

Bobby and I went Off-Screen.