Book Eight, Chapter 17: The River

Lucky informed us as soon as he walked through the door that the rest of our teammates were over the hill waiting and would be there shortly.

I wasn’t in any hurry. While I was certainly excited to find the information we had come here for, I found myself fascinated by the evidence left behind by Lucky’s former team.

They were just ordinary roommates, it seemed.

Apparently, one of them had borrowed a few arcade machines over time and put them in his room. That person was also huge into vintage posters featuring big-breasted women, movie and video game advertisements, and alcohol, that sort of thing.

The other rooms were similar, filled with loot grabbed up by the various members of the team.

They were just like us, except, of course, they had a lot more room.

“Lucky said we could have any of this, right?” Camden asked when we found their ping pong table.

“What’s even the point?” I asked. “If you’re beating me on skill, I’m just going to beat you with Hustle.”

“You would have to,” Camden said, “but where’s the fun in that?”

Before we could play a game, the others arrived.

“Nice place,” Antoine said as he entered. “Doesn’t look like much of a fight went down here.”

“It was more of a spiritual battle,” I said as we re-entered the main room.

Lucky was standing in front of a wall in the kitchen covered with pictures, the kind you would drop off to be developed at a store back before everyone had a camera on their phone. As I glanced at all of the pictures, I realized that they had been documenting their time in different storylines.

They had literally taken a camera into storylines just for fun.

One of the photos showed a giant shark swimming alongside the boat the photographer was riding in. It was a selfie, and the guy, who had short hair and a daredevil’s grin, was smiling while some NPCs panicked behind him.

A lot of the photos were like that. The guy was taking pictures of the enemies he defeated, or the ones that defeated him, maybe both.

Some of the photos didn’t feature extreme or risky content. Some of them were simple group photos, like friends would take, photos of skydiving, skiing, or exploring old abandoned places together. Six or seven faces appeared repeatedly across the images. This was a group of young people, probably in their late twenties or early thirties, and it became clear that when Lucky mentioned they had a gladiator’s mindset about Carousel, what he meant was that they were adrenaline junkies. Three women and four men having the time of their lives and risking it all again and again.

I wasn’t the only one gazing at these photos in amazement.

“How do you find people like this?” Kimberly asked. She showed a mix of concern for the people and concern for how unfazed they seemed.

Lucky was looking at the photos too, and he appeared contemplative.

“They knew what they were coming here for,” he said. “You don’t have to trick people into this lifestyle. You just have to look very hard, and I did. There are those who can’t tell the difference between wonder and horror, and they hold a special strength here in Carousel.”

We looked at the people in the photos for a while longer.

“All right,” Antoine asked eventually, “where’s the stuff we came here for?”

“It should be upstairs in the study,” Lucky said. “I didn’t spend a lot of time here. It was improper for a Narrator, or at least that’s what we used to say. It’s funny how priorities can change.”

“Should we check in the basement?” I asked. “Given, you know, the storyline.”

“There is no basement in this house, not originally,” Lucky said. “There is a wine cellar of sorts, but it is barely recessed into the ground. You might check it. That’s where they stored their weapons.”

“Dibs,” Camden said as he moved toward the place that formerly held the stairs to the basement.

“You can’t say dibs until you see what’s down there,” I said.

“I think we’ll know what I’m saying dibs to when we see it,” he said.

The wine racks that had been in the safe room with Bellanti were now in the wine cellar. Carousel must have recycled them.

“Look at this,” Antoine said. “They’re storing soda in this one.”

I would have laughed, but at about that moment, I rounded the corner into the cellar and saw their weapons wall. They had taken all of the weapons that they had acquired, along with any tools they might have wanted, and hung them on their special spot on a pegboard. We could tell where they belonged because someone had outlined them with white.

That’s how we knew all the weapons were missing.

“Not exactly as promised,” I said.

“Yes,” Lucky said. “It would seem that Carousel has traded them out.”

Where all the former weapons had been hung on the pegboard, there were now only six items that didn’t seem to belong in the places where they were hung. They were all trope items.

I wasn’t going to complain.

“Camden gets dibs on the bra,” I said.

“No, I relinquish dibs,” he said.

“You said that I would know what you were calling dibs on when I saw it, and I saw that bra,” I joked.

The bra had a Stooge trope called Goes for the Face, which didn’t actually have anything to do with bras specifically. It made it so you could throw things at an enemy, and they would entangle on their face, temporarily blinding or distracting them. I couldn’t see myself pulling that one off.

The rifle had something called Unburied Past, which was a Commando trope that gave huge power to a weapon that the player’s character had buried as a symbol of their past and was unearthing for a big fight.

Stolen story; please report.

There was also a grappling hook with a trope called So, Anyway, which allowed the user to do something that should require great skill or practice, as long as they did it mid-conversation, as if it were simple or easy. There were a lot of things that you could do with a grappling hook, and being able to bypass Hustle checks could be really cool.

There was a camera bag with a trope called Lucky Bulletproof Souvenir, which could block a fatal blow or projectile as long as you explained why the object was sentimental to you beforehand.

There was a billiard ball with a trope called Boomerang Physics, which enabled the user to ensure the object ended up exactly where they wanted it once thrown, including returning to them.

And finally, there was a raincoat with the trope called Look at Me, which you could entice an NPC to wear after you had worn it, and then the enemy would chase after them instead and turn them around dramatically to fake out the audience.

A nice collection, all in all. While we each had our favorites, we usually shared trope items. We could assign them later.

But none of that was what we actually went to Lark House for.

That was in the study.

~-~

Adrenaline junkies or not, they clearly did their research.

They had files on all the storylines they had run, some of which were nice and thick with lots of case notes, I had to assume, while others were just being started.

They had a map of Carousel drawn as the centerpiece of one of the walls in this study. One of the players on Lucky’s team must have been quite skillful as an artist. The problem, of course, was that it didn’t actually look like Carousel. The only reason I recognized it was because of Lake Dyer.

Like all maps of Carousel, west was at the top.