Book Eight, Chapter 16: Trespass

We had known that there were storylines that were essentially death puzzles for a long time, and in fact, we had kind of played through one, Itch.

Of course, we beat it by circumventing the puzzle aspect altogether and creating mutant bed bugs, which was the equivalent of taking the Rubik’s cube apart and putting it back together solved, but a win was a win.

It was nice to get the win based on pure strategy. I almost thought Camden might get his Aspect, but as it turned out, there was no savvy-based enemy for him to compete against. It was just a magic forest bound by its own rules.

Still, I was thrilled not to have died in it, even though it represented one of the most desirable afterlives I had seen yet in Carousel.

It didn’t take long for Silas, the mechanical showman, to pop into existence next to the van Molly had stolen. I didn’t expect a whole lot because even though our solution was risky and we probably cut it closer than I would like to admit, at the end of the day, the storyline could have been easily beaten with a book of matches.

I didn’t get any stat tickets. In fact, most of us didn’t, and since we hadn’t killed anyone, we got no Enemy Collector tickets either. But we did get something interesting, a new type of ticket I had never seen before called a Notice of Trespass.

It was similar to how Lucky had described it. It allowed you to take a mobile Omen, of which we had many, and use it to protect your base from other players. I hoped we would never need it, but we each got one, so if we did, we would have it.

That also meant that red wood was likely not an innate storyline to Lark House. It made a lot of sense in the end, because no one in the storyline was named Lark, and while the forest had giggling spirits and a trickster’s personality, the word Lark just didn’t fit.

As soon as I got the Notice of Trespass, I started thinking through all the mobile Omens we had and trying to figure out which one we would set up to protect Kimberly’s loft.

Fast zombies, anyone? The notice had a peel-away piece of wax paper that revealed a sticky spot. We would have to attach it carefully.

I also looked around, trying to find any evidence of Lucky’s former team’s base, but all I saw was the set for red wood.

I managed to get a trope out of the ordeal.

Funny enough, I didn’t get that trope because I was a Film Buff; I got it because it was one of the tropes granted by my background. It could be immensely powerful, a very useful blood control trope. Though I expected it to have diminishing returns with multiple uses, given that it was narrative-based, I was still excited to try it out, although there would certainly be guilt from directly causing my teammates’ deaths.

They would understand.

~

Camden was the lowest-level player on the team, and it was technically his plan that got us out of there. He pulled his weight. Nicole had talked about her Written by the Victors trope, and she claimed it was a pretty fast way to level someone, at least for a while.

I believed her. Camden got two stat tickets.

He also got a trope.

It was interesting that, as players of the game at Carousel, we often had to make decisions our characters would never make, and for the most part, we just had to lose points in the audience’s eyes.

Like in this storyline, where we couldn’t burn the place down even though it was obvious, there would be many circumstances where we had to make decisions that made the storyline harder for us. At least now we had a way around that.

~

Bobby also got a trope.

Bobby had brought a trope that would debuff him at the beginning of his story and then gradually buff him until he was stronger than ever at the end. But with Nicole’s trope that evened up everyone’s plot armor, that trope was made entirely useless, not to mention the fact that Bobby was turned into a main character, which undermined the entire purpose of a Recast.

Union Rules also felt like a very exploitable trope. We would have to experiment.

I wasn’t around for a lot of the discussions the others had with Bobby about his decision to pursue his wife. I didn’t want to be. Eventually, it was decided that he would have to go to his farmhouse in the country just to keep everyone else safe. No one felt good about that, but we didn’t have any other choice.