Book Eight, Chapter 57: Bobby II

Bobby Gill stepped out of the magical cafe and immediately felt the cold deep in his bones. The remains of the Hatching House were almost completely covered in snow by now. He needed to get back to the sauna where the others were, but he had something else to do first.

The house had many rooms, too many. Carousel would never have shown it, but there were rooms for all occasions, roughly worked together in illogical ways. The viewing audience would never know because of editing, so it didn’t matter.

Bobby only wanted to find what remained of one of those rooms. It had been a game room or perhaps a trophy room, with many mounted animal heads and guns hung from the walls, all of which were disabled so they couldn’t be used during the storyline or afterward. But there was something in the room that interested Bobby.

It had hung from the ceiling.

After he started fumbling through the wreckage and the newly fallen snow, he found it pretty quickly. It was a large canoe, clearly decorative when it was inside the house, but as far as he could tell, it would function just fine with the four of them inside.

After he had dug all the rubble out of it, he flipped it over so that no more snow would accumulate in it, and then he went about finding the oars, which wasn’t so difficult.

Only then could he reenter the sauna and let the warmth radiate through his nearly frozen body.

“Where have you been?” Kelsey asked as soon as he opened the door. “We were about to go look for you.”

The less he said, the better. Luckily, no one ever really talked to him if they could avoid it, especially after his NPC wife had shown up. It was a lonely existence.

“Found a boat,” he said simply.

“A boat?” Isaac asked. “You’re not seriously thinking we’re going back out on the water, are you? Don’t you remember how it went last time?”

“Last time we didn’t have a boat,” Bobby answered. He went back over to the corner he had been sitting in to warm up.

It was always an argument with these people. There was always someone who wanted to maintain the status quo so much that they would shoot down any argument about changing it, even if the status quo was terrible. Change was so much scarier.

It didn’t matter. He knew that he would be able to convince them. They had no food, after all, and it was hard to argue for the status quo on an empty stomach.

–

Their path back onto the water was an easy one. The river was right at the front of the property where the house had been. All they had to do was haul the canoe over to it.

“Maybe next time we find a storyline, you should equip that trope that makes sure that there’s plenty of food,” Ramona said as they made their way down the river. “That way, when we find a place to stay safe, maybe we’ll have something to eat.”

Bobby nodded.

For most of the trip, the others were talking about plans: how they would stay safe, how they would find home, how they would find the others. They didn’t need to know that Bobby already had all that covered.

“We take the next right,” Bobby said. He had one of the only two oars, so it was easy for him to influence the direction they went.

“How do you know that?” Isaac asked.

“The script,” Bobby said.

“What does the script say exactly?” Isaac asked.

Bobby couldn’t say. It would give the game away.

“It says send Isaac down the left path,” Ramona said. “Everybody else goes down the right.”

She splashed some water up at him.

“I told you to stop doing that!” Isaac snapped.

Ramona had learned that the only way to stop Isaac from being a contrarian was to distract him. Bobby glanced back over his shoulder at her, and she gave him a reassuring nod.

She had his back. That didn’t make this any easier.

He didn’t feel the need to explain himself. When the river split in two, they took the correct turn, and that was all that mattered.

Well, it wasn’t the only thing that mattered.

A leak sprang up in the boat not long after that, right under Isaac. It wasn’t an emergency, not really; Isaac could keep it plugged with a piece of cloth if he held it there manually, but it sure did make things scary. They would need an alternative. Bobby didn’t know how long they had to go, and he didn’t know if that hole in the boat would get bigger.

This new version of the script gave him information he had no right to have. His new Quiet One trope was incredibly powerful. It wasn’t meant for players of his level. This script was so large and comprehensive that he could get his team where they needed to go from anywhere in Carousel.

Bad guys really did have it easier.

When the canoe sprang a leak, the script immediately gave him choices about what to do next in order to accomplish the goals of his master, whoever they may be.

“Right up here,” he said as the river started to flow through a flooded parking lot. It wasn’t just a parking lot, he soon realized; it was a whole airport, a small regional one for sure, but still a big building. Large, unnatural clouds hung over the structure, pouring down rain so thick it looked like a waterfall.

The script simply told him that he needed to get into that building, and he needed to do it when the rain stopped.

“Why are we going in here?” Isaac asked. “Don’t you think it’s weird how those clouds look?”

In fact, it was weird, but Bobby wasn’t so concerned with it.

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“See, it’s an omen,” Isaac said, having used his scouting trope to identify the threat. “There’s something in those clouds, and that rain isn’t natural. If it touches us, we’re going to enter a really dangerous storyline.”

“Then we don’t let it touch us,” Bobby said. “Come on, hurry.”

Ramona and Kelsey looked at each other. Maybe they weren’t used to Bobby taking the lead, but they couldn’t let him leave without them. They abandoned the canoe, only taking the oars with them.

When they got to the edge of the storm clouds, they waited for the rain to stop, and when it did, they made a beeline for the front entrance of the airport.

A group of survivors was there, unlocking the doors and removing barricades they had thrown up to let the players inside. They closed the doors right after Isaac made it in. He had hung back initially, but when he realized the others didn’t want to listen to him, he ran full speed to catch up and happened to make it inside right before the rain started back up again.

The survivors inside immediately began expressing their humanity in all the warm, glowy ways that Bobby expected them to, asking them where they had come from, if they’d heard any news, if the local military base was still operational, yada yada yada.

Bobby didn’t care about any of that. He walked straight past them, past a long wall of windows, toward the loading gate for one of the few airplanes that was ready to be boarded.

“Are you a pilot?” one of the NPCs asked him.

He could be if he wanted to. He was a Recast aspect, after all. He could be anything, but that wasn’t the goal. Flying away might have worked, he didn’t know, but the script didn’t tell him to fly away.

He just needed to be on the plane. It didn’t take him too long to figure out why. The script didn’t tell him everything, but it gave him enough that he could piece it together.

He passed right by the NPC without answering any questions. Back in the day, he could waste away the hours talking to NPCs, but he had work to do, and he didn’t intend to stay long.

He ran down the gate until he got to the open door of the airplane and stepped inside. There were more NPCs in there, sleeping in the seats. They sat up and asked if he was a pilot.

“Go back to sleep,” he said.

He started looking around the front of the plane, where the stewardess would stay, until he found what he was after. It was a small plane, and it had emergency supplies if they needed to make a landing. What he was after was in a large red bag. He didn’t know how durable it was, but it was better than a canoe with a hole in it.