Book Eight, Chapter 45: Bobby

Bobby Gill stepped back and surveyed the destruction that he, or at least his character, had helped to foment. The house was gone, all except for, ironically, one of the stalls of the sauna. The oldest one. The one that had been there before the house.

Sigrid Haraldsen, a woman of great means and with a deep spiritual connection to her ancestors, had hired him to find the child she believed had been stolen from her at the hospital nearly thirty years earlier, under the guise of being stillborn. What a sad story it had been.

His character had searched for every single child born on that day in any hospital within a hundred miles and lured them to the house. But when Bobby himself dug a little deeper, he discovered only that his character had lied. That there was no plot to kidnap Miss Haraldsen’s child. The child truly was stillborn.

And yet, as she died, she used the magical power of a sauna to prolong her life and give her power over the mechanized house that lay in splinters around him now.

Such a sad story would probably be undermined by the concept of magic saunas, but how could he be sure? The greatest gift a movie could give was the chance to live within its world. Bobby had believed that with his whole heart, and that was before he came to Carousel, where it became true in the worst way.

He climbed through the wreckage. In his final moments, he had managed to distract Miss Haraldsen before she could kill everyone in the house. Had it cost him his life? He wasn’t sure. The movie had ended shortly afterward, and he woke up covered in rubble.

“Hello,” he called out. “Ramona? Isaac? Kelsey?”

No answer.

He even cried out for Jules, though he wasn’t hopeful. She had sacrificed herself in her typical badass fashion. Jules was a great companion, but if she got the opportunity to have an epic fight or an epic death, she would take it.

Bobby rarely had epic deaths. Usually, his death happened Off-Screen and might not even be mentioned. That was the life of a minor archetype, unless you just happened to be named Riley Lawrence.

Ramona had been the first player to die, which was quite the twist, as she had the greatest connection to the house and to the woman who was offering up her soul to control it. When it was confirmed that she was not actually Sigrid’s daughter, she had been sucked through the plumbing of a bathtub, which meant she could reappear anywhere, Bobby reckoned.

Mechanical parts and steam pipes lay every which way throughout the wooden wreckage, and the snow was beginning to cover it all.

In the distance, he heard the sole survivor, Kelsey, returning to the scene of the movie.

“I guess that means I lose,” she had said after revealing she had clogged up the steam-powered mechanisms of the house, causing it to explode before leaving through a hole in the exterior she had to squeeze through.

The storyline had been a contest to see who could stay the longest. The winner got the house.

“Bobby,” she asked. “Oh, thank god. I had to run away from the house before it exploded, and Carousel kept me On-Screen running through the blizzard for like fifteen minutes. I don’t know how much footage it needed. That damn thing.”

It was still snowing harshly. Bobby was wet and freezing.

“It wanted you to jump in the lake,” Bobby said. “It was the title of the last scene. Something like Watery Escape.”

“Well then, it was out of its mind, because there was no way I was going to do that. I don’t care if I get rewards for this or not,” she said.

He shrugged.

“Still no sign of Ramona or Isaac,” he said.

“Well, they have to be around here somewhere,” Kelsey said. “They did good for their level, don’t you think? Ramona almost made herself the main character with that one trope of hers where she split the party.”

Bobby shrugged. He didn’t think that it was always obvious when someone was instrumental to a victory. Even Carousel didn’t always acknowledge how difficult it was to be a minor character when everything was going to hell.

“As far as I can see, the only thing that survived was that old sauna, and there’s smoke coming from the pipe up top,” he said. “I say we go look there.”

“No better place to start,” Kelsey agreed.

They began trudging through the blizzard toward the ancient sauna building. Their team had very little research capability outside of Bobby’s meta tropes, so they barely understood the magic that was going on. It hadn’t mattered in the end.

The little building looked ancient, and if it wasn’t so cold, Bobby would never want to go inside it.

But when they got there, and they opened the door, they found Ramona and Isaac warming themselves against a one-hundred-year-old furnace.

“It’s about time you made it out here,” Isaac said.

Before anyone could respond, there was a cracking sound in the air, and Silas the mechanical showman appeared in the very small amount of floor space in the little shack.

They were all quick to get their rewards, if only because of how cramped the building had become.

To Bobby’s surprise, everyone did very well. It wasn’t the kind of story his usual team would want to tell. It was far more desperate, and they had won by putting everything on the line at the last minute. That was fine for a horror movie.

Bobby himself got two stat tickets, and as he pulled his rewards out of the dispenser, he noticed that he had gotten something he never would have expected.

A writ of habitation for the sauna itself.

Carousel was throwing them a life raft. They could just stay there, and everything would be okay. They wouldn’t have to worry about Omens or monsters. The only thing that might be a danger is if the circus could spread all the way out there.

He almost cried out in joy, but then he thought about it again and quickly vanished the writ into thin air.

“You know, it really was a dick move of Carousel to make our clothes wet again after the storyline was over,” Isaac said. “Especially in this climate.”

“We’re lucky we found a storyline we could beat,” Ramona said. “That was like finding a piece of hay in a needle stack.”

“Hey, I’m the one who saw this place,” Isaac said. “Somehow, wherever we are.”

Bobby couldn’t take the bickering. As soon as Silas, the mechanical showman, found his way out, Bobby went to the opposite corner of the room that the others were in, stripped his clothes off as much as he could, and hung them up to dry.

He noticed that the furnace, if that was what it was called, stayed hot with no effort. He wasn’t even sure how it operated, but a glance at his writ said that it would always work. It never needed fuel or maintenance.

Such a good reward.

Maybe he had gotten it because they had decided not to choose one of the players as the big bad’s descendant. Maybe if they had chosen Kelsey or Ramona and changed the story around, it would have been them who got the writ.

That was what Riley would have done. He would have chosen a player to be the descendant and taken control of the story, rather than allowing it to degrade into chaos.

The author’s content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

It didn’t matter. Bobby’s instincts had helped them survive. He knew how stories like this were supposed to go. Either everyone died, or they got some corny ending where the Final Girl managed to punish the bad guy in some unrealistic yet hypothetically satisfying way.

Forcing the house to blow up had worked well enough.

He switched his writ over to a different ticket. A ticket that he didn’t want any of the others to know about, and he stared at it much as he had every night since he had acquired it.

The narrator, Lucky, had given it to him just in case.

“Just in case what?” Bobby had asked.

“Just in case you can get your friends to change their minds,” Lucky had said. “They aren’t going to accept my throughline. Maybe you can convince them.”

Bobby had found Lucky when they had first learned that the Carousel River was the path chosen to get to the NPC sanctuary. It had been a short meeting, and Bobby had said something like, “Even if they don’t want to go, I do.”

He didn’t want to think about it. He had pleaded to the narrator about his dead wife and the strange not-Janet NPC she had returned as.

He kept believing that if he was sincere and emotional, eventually someone would care about his plight. It hadn’t worked. It never would. His loss was just something he would have to live with. Everyone else accepted Janet’s fate. Why couldn’t he? He was only her husband.

The ticket didn’t look like the tropes Bobby was used to. The text was older, much fancier, and strangely, it looked like an advertisement. Like a coupon for services.

“Coffee with a guest” was what it offered. “Olde Alley Café. A trip from anywhere to our cozy hole in the wall.”

Bobby stared at it while his clothes dried. Luckily, he had brought a jacket. Once everything was done drying, he got dressed and walked out of the sauna, ignoring the questions about where he was going.

He was going to find a door. He wasn’t sure if the sauna door would work since there were people inside it.

It took him a while to find one, and when he did, it wasn’t standing. It and the entire wall it was built into were lying on the ground, but as far as Bobby knew, that wouldn’t matter.

He took his ticket and ripped it in half, hoping that he was doing it right.

Moments later, he bent down, turned the handle on the door, and opened it, and what he saw beneath him was the most amazing, most magical coffee shop he could have ever imagined.

He couldn’t exactly walk into it because the entrance was lying on the ground. He had to crawl through the door. It was a strange sensation as gravity shifted when he was on the inside, and the door swung shut behind him.

He looked around at the busy store. A few people were staring at him because of the way he entered the establishment, but for the most part, he was ignored. He was used to that.

He realized that the people around him were likely immortals or otherwise came from worlds connected to the enigmatic Sweepstakes that Riley had talked about. He had trouble breathing just from thinking about it.

He watched as the patrons went about their lives, reading newspapers, having jovial conversations, and cracking open a good book. They dressed fancy, but he couldn’t put his finger on what style he was looking at. Something old. Something proper. And yet something he had never seen before.