Arc II, Chapter 9: Carousel Loves Families!

“I am asking you literally. Where did you enter Carousel from?” the man said.

I was hesitant to answer.

Antoine wasn’t.

“Olde Hill Road,” he said. “By the run-down bed and breakfast.”

The man ran his hand over the top of his hair. “That’s interesting. Okay. I have to tell you something. You’re not going to want to believe me. Heck, you probably won’t believe me at all, not until it starts happening.”

“Until what starts happening?” Kimberly asked.

The man contemplated his answer. “Sit down. This will sound weird.”

We all did as he asked. The other NPCs in the Diner had long gone back to what they were doing before the man entered the building.

“I am bound by forces that frustrate my attempts to help you, but I am trying to help you. We all have our puppet strings, even me, even you. Listen beyond what I say. There are things out there that can’t be true. At the Centennial, things that don’t line up. It’s all part of the trick. You were not invited here for the reasons you think you were. Tell me, why did you come here?”

It seemed that Carousel was getting right into it.

“Horror convention,” Bobby said with sadness in his eyes.

“My brother invited me to his lake house,” Antoine answered. “He invited my friends too.”

Cassie took a deep breath. She stared at the man the way someone might stare at a ghost. “Our brother too. He’s a doctor at the hospital.”

“I see. I’m sorry to tell you this,” the man said. “But you were tricked. Your loved ones aren’t here. They’re likely dead. There is no horror convention.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Antoine said. He looked shocked at the words coming out of his own mouth. It was all a knee-jerk reaction. It didn’t make sense. Antoine knew what the man said was true. It made no sense for him to react that way.

Yet, I knew why Antoine had said it. Every word that was coming out of this man’s mouth was hostile to my mind. Everything he said I didn’t want to believe even though I knew it to be true. There was something going on.

“This is not Carousel. It certainly isn’t this happy place,” the man said pointing his hand back in the direction of the celebration. “This is part of the trap.”

“A trap?” I asked, hoping to get some clarification. Still, my mind revolted against the information he was giving us. I didn’t want to believe it for some reason. “Why would anyone want to trap us?”

At this point a new player would be extremely skeptical and likely would not have seen anything supernatural. I tried to speak as if I thought the whole conversation was a joke or the ravings of a lunatic.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “But whoever set the trap did so because they want you here. I don’t know for what purpose.”

“Can you be a little more cryptic, please?” Isaac asked. His instinct to make a quip was stronger than his unease.

The man rolled his eyes.

“So, what are they going to do now that they have us?” I asked with a forced smirk.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” the man said.

“Try us,” I said. We needed to slow down and get as much information as possible. I had to fight the temptation to jump forward in the conversation to larger questions.

He shook his head. “I think they want you because your story hasn’t been told yet, unlike the rest of us. The only people in this whole town who haven’t gotten to The End yet are the seven of you. They want to know how far you can go.”

“Who’s they?” Antoine asked.

The man smiled. “After it starts happening, I’ll try to find you. Then we can talk. When you’re ready to believe me.”

He started to get up.

“You’re a Stranger,” Dina said quickly.

The man looked at her and nodded his head. “I know. You don’t know me. I don’t know you, but you have to believe me.”

Dina wasn’t calling him an ordinary stranger. She was trying to say that he was the Stranger. The Stranger Paragon was the manifestation of the Outsider Aspect called the Stranger. We had met several Paragons before and read about others in the Atlas.

It would make sense. The Stranger was the Aspect of the Outsider that existed in the periphery, guiding their allies with cryptic warnings. They were nameless and mysterious.

As I looked the man up and down, he was, indeed, mysterious.

As he walked away, he looked back at us and said, “Don’t forget what I told you. Oh, and if you’re looking for lodgings, the Visitor’s Booth might be of service.”

After he was gone, I said, “I told you we were supposed to be finding a place to stay. An NPC just interrupted his cryptic warning to send us in that direction. Can’t get more clear than that.”

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“What did he even tell us?” Antoine asked. “What substance should we take away from that for the Throughline? We didn’t even get an entry on the Leads board.”

He was right. Nothing the Stranger had said was entered on the red wallpaper.

“I think he was the Stranger Paragon,” I said. “I think he was using a special trope so that he could give us cryptic warnings but we wouldn’t believe him.”

“Is that what that was?” Bobby asked. “I felt like my brain was doing somersaults.”

“Then what was the point?” Antoine said. “If we didn’t already know he was telling the truth, we would have just dismissed the warning and went on our way. I thought he would at least tell us what to look out for.”

I contemplated it for a moment. Whatever trope he had used to make us doubt him hadn’t worked, though not for long. We already knew most of the things he said. For us, it was a really odd encounter. For actual new players, it would have been an odd moment they all laughed about. Even the grave warnings would be dismissed under the effects of his trope.

His short rant was supposed to give us information without actually changing our minds or making us suspicious.

“I think his whole thing was meant to stop us from running away,” I said. “Like it was a logistics thing for the game. If a new player was already suspecting something was up but wasn’t certain, he would ease their suspicion with that trope. A trope that makes people not believe what they are told would stop players from sensing something was off about Carousel before they were supposed to. If we had run into him at the festival and Dina hadn’t warned us, he would have just yelled that stuff at us and run off.”

Magically eliminating players’ skepticism while directly telling them that they should be skeptical must have served Carousel’s purpose.

“But we avoided him so he had to chase us down awkwardly,” Antoine said.

“We need to get our heads on straight,” I said. “If we keep going like this we might miss something important. I mean, this is the Tutorial. We have to act like we do not know what is going on.”

“Way ahead of you,” Isaac said.