Book Eight, Chapter 3: Field Trip

I stood inside the restaurant beneath Kimberly’s loft, eating pork chops with my hands as I watched what was going on in the street.

Isaac, Cassie, Anna, Camden, and Ramona were standing there as a group because they had recently run a rescue together, and now the two players they had saved were bidding farewell.

It was the dumbest thing.

Their names were Strider and Sephira, and they were violently in love with each other. Those were their real names on the red wallpaper.

Strider had managed to take his Harley out onto the streets of Carousel after arriving, and he still had it with him as he stood shaking hands with Camden. He was an Outsider, and she was an Eye Candy.

“Look,” Strider said, “we appreciate everything you’ve done for us, but we aren’t the type to wait out the storm. We outrun it.”

Sephira walked up beside Strider and grabbed his hand.

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” Strider repeated as he looked her in the eye.

“Well, we’ve given you all the information we could,” Camden said. “If this is your decision—”

“It is,” Strider said. “There has to be a way out of here, and we’re gonna find it.”

They waved as they walked back toward his motorcycle. He mounted it, and she hopped on behind him.

They had spent days trying to convince these two to stay, but while we were out running Crawlspace, Strider and Sephira had made up their minds that they were leaving.

As Strider started gunning his Harley, sending up smoke as the back wheel spun, many of the Omens and normal NPCs turned to watch.

Perhaps it was because neither one of them had a good scouting trope. Maybe that’s why they didn’t understand how unlikely it was for them to survive. Or maybe they just didn’t like the idea of a bunch of early-twenty-something college kids telling them what to do.

Either way, they rode down the block and turned out of sight.

“So they’re definitely not even going to make it out of downtown Carousel, are they?” Isaac asked as he waved enthusiastically.

“It doesn’t matter,” Camden said. “I’m not going to argue with them anymore. They’re adults. We gave them all the information; it’s their choice.”

Anna, however, blamed herself. “If I had chosen Team Leader, do you think I could have convinced them to stay?” she asked.

“Not forever,” Camden said. “They would leave eventually. And if you used too many mind-control tropes, they would never trust us again.”

“You know,” Isaac said, “I bet using my satire rescue trope was a bad idea, because it gave them the impression that everything was more goofy than scary.”

Camden shrugged. “If they can get murdered by a serial killer and still think this place is safe, I don’t know that there was anything we could have told them.”

They carefully made their way back toward the restaurant.

“Be honest,” I said. “You let them go because it would be too inconvenient to try to keep them alive with their low levels.”

“I’ll never admit to that,” Camden said. “You’ll tell us when they hit an Omen, right?”

“You’ll know when I know,” I said. He had asked me to use my Coming to a Theater Near You trope to check when a new storyline had been triggered. Inevitably, it would be, and inevitably, it would be a very short trailer with lots of screaming and motorcycle noises.

–

On the morning before we were to meet at the zoo with Lucky, we did our best to relax on the roof above Kimberly’s loft. We were all there, minding our own business, trying to psych ourselves up for the big meet and greet.

Honestly, I was a little excited to see the zoo. I had seen the exotic zoo from a distance in southeast Carousel, but it was entirely indoors, which did not bode well for the quality of its contents. A real zoo would be quite interesting.

“I’m glad you guys understood that journal,” Logan was saying from a table near me. “I didn’t get a lick of it. My character must have been half-crazed when he wrote it. Or half dead.”

Logan had only appeared in Crawlspace for about five minutes, but from his perspective, it had been much longer. He was the professor with the knowledge to solve the problem; unfortunately, he died before the problem existed.

“What was so complicated about it?” Ramona asked.

I was glad to see that she was blending in more. The more storylines she ran, the more normal people treated her.

“It was a bunch of random quotes,” Cassie said. “All of the important ones were written in all caps, though, so it wasn’t actually that hard. There were just so many.”

“Yeah, but you had a trope to help you with that,” Isaac said.

“It was still hard,” Cassie said.

He was talking about her It Is Written trope, which came from the Occultist aspect of the Psychic archetype.

“I’m glad,” Logan said. “You know, that may be the first time I’ve actually died from cancer without any outside help. It’s funny, I came to Carousel to prevent dying that way, and I know I was right to do it, because that sucked.”

I wasn’t sure if he was telling a joke there, but people laughed.

We continued talking back and forth—just normal things. Talking about storylines, talking about throughlines, talking about anything except for the elephant in the room sitting next to Bobby.

“So, we’re going to the zoo, huh?” Logan asked. “How do we even get there? You know, I remember a time when Carousel was a small town.”

“You have to go through the park over by the coffee place where the Goodnight Neighbor Omen is,” Camden said.

“I remember the place,” Logan said. “Looks a little small to hide a whole zoo.”

“Well, Carousel looks a little small to hold Carousel,” Camden said.

Like clockwork, our peaceful little gathering was disrupted as, from across the roof, Bobby and the NPC version of his wife, Janet, started arguing.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“I didn’t agree to this at all,” Janet said. “All of our savings, everything… most of that was mine from before we got together!”

“What are you talking about?” Bobby said. “I told you we were going to rent it, not buy it. It’s a nice place; I didn’t say buy it!”

Janet had misunderstood something Bobby said because, despite himself, he refused to treat her like an NPC and was rarely careful with his language. Though I suppose it was difficult, because she really did have moments where she seemed like a real person.

She could join in on games, tell stories about their life that by all accounts seemed to be true, but then a switch would flip, and there would be some vital misunderstanding that turned into a stressful, chaotic moment that Bobby had to bear the brunt of.

“You said you got us a vacation place on a farm. What was I supposed to think?” Janet asked.

“You’re right, I should have been clearer. It’s a rental, but you can stay there while I’m out doing activities, you know, the ones you don’t like.”

“That’s not the kind of decision you should make on your own, sweetheart,” Janet said, somehow managing to make the word sweetheart sound like an insult. “What’s wrong with the loft? Are we being kicked out?”

She turned and looked at Kimberly, who at that point was so tired of all of this that she didn’t even respond.