Book Eight, Chapter 67: Choice as a Formality.

My instinct, when a paragon told me why they were here, was to ask: Why are they really here?

And the truth still perplexed me, but I felt like I was orbiting some unspoken piece of knowledge that everyone seemed to know except for the players. It would explain why Vincent St. Vane had acted the way he had. It would explain why we suddenly found ourselves lousy with paragons.

It might even explain the odd circumstances of our friends’ captivity.

The pieces didn’t come together until I heard screaming in the distance, about one hundred yards into the jungle. The five of us had been resting. We had a big storyline ahead of us, and all indications were that it would be a real struggle.

The screaming was followed by an explosion, the kind that rose in a fireball into the sky. We ran out of the Speakeasy as fast as we could, toward the danger. All of the NPCs were doing the same, along with the paragons. This wasn’t just some narrative loop the bit players were caught up in. This had to do with us. I could feel it in my bones.

When we arrived there, we found a weapons depot, as best I could describe it. The whole building and everything in it had gone up in flames, along with all the gasoline that they haphazardly stored within it.

Someone had blown it all up to get our attention.

There was a tree near the depot, and a message had been left for us there. It was a long, rough piece of paper, something that looked very old. Upon closer inspection, it was a map, with a literal X drawn on it and words written upon it. It had been stabbed into the tree by a large, bloody knife with an otherworldly black blade.

Someone had written a long diatribe on the map in cursive.

Dear Antoine,

You left me under that mountain, or maybe I should be more specific. You promised you would help me escape, and then you blew up the tunnel leading to my only exit. Or maybe that isn’t specific enough for you to remember who I am. How many men did you leave to die in those depths? Do you remember their names? Do their faces haunt your dreams at night, or has the bottle helped you forget?

It just so happens we were right. There was something down there, something valuable in a way none of us had yet conceived, something transformative. I have to say, now I am thankful for you. We all are. You made your escape, and you made us what we are today.

Perhaps I’ll pay back the favor in the future. Alas, I am not writing to reminisce. I present to you a proposal, the terms of which I am certain will rouse even the most cowardly corners of your heart.

I have your friends, your confidants, your sidekicks. I’ve collected a group of them. Maybe it wasn’t worth it for you to come back for me, but I’m certain you’ll be willing to return for them. You are still human, aren’t you, even after you peered into the darkness?

Ramona Mercer took it very personally when we captured her. She is special, isn’t she? She has her grandmother’s eyes and her grandfather’s curse. It’s strange, even after my metamorphosis, I still get queasy when I venture near the cradle, but Ramona is nearly at home in this place. Do you know why?

I regret to inform you that we’ve also captured your old sidekick, Isaac Hughes. It’s funny. He believed that this was going to be another payday. You could teach him your skills, but you could never teach him your love for history. He was in it for the money and the women. He will get neither. He thinks he can talk his way out of this. He will not be able to, but blasted, he is trying.

You remember old Thomas Van Notes’s young daughter, Kelsey, don’t you? She’s grown up now, but you would know that better than me, wouldn’t you? She wasn’t just your lover, she was your fixer. She’s been helping you for years, getting supplies, making contacts, fighting your fights. I wonder if you’ve ever thanked her. I wonder if you’ve ever apologized. There’s still a chance.

We found your old hound master, Bobby Gill, isolated in the forest, surrounded by his dogs. He was there in the end, wasn’t he? When you sealed my fate, he saw what the two of us saw, didn’t he? If it wasn’t for the love and support of his pups, he might have succumbed to the darkness. The dogs are gone now. I doubt he’ll hesitate to join them.

If you wish to save your old comrades, follow the coordinates on this map. There’s a second way down to the cradle, not just the throat you collapsed. I found it, but I cannot open it. I need the man who opened the first entrance to open this one as well. I need you.

Your friends have seven days to live. If you are not here by that time, I will find some other use for them. Come alone or drag more friends to their doom. It makes no difference to me.

With patience,
Ernst Vogler

P.S. I left the knife. You’ll want it where you’re going.

The letter was an Omen. Once we grabbed it and returned to the river, we would find ourselves moving past the choice phase into the party phase.

“So there it is,” Antoine said. He didn’t say much more. This Ernst Vogler seemed to be referencing events from the first movie.

I looked at the Omen on the red wallpaper.

“It says Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle Part Two,” I said. “Is there a Part Two?” I asked Camden.

“No,” he said. “In the atlas, it says this series has a bunch of self-contained adventures. They’ve discovered like five or six of them. None of them had sequels. Let me take a look.”

Now that he had the Brain Trust trope, he could use my savvy-based insight tropes, so I handed him I Don’t Like It Here and he equipped it.

“Ah!” he yelled, as the anxiety innate to that trope ran through him. “How the heck do you use this all the time? I feel like I’m about to have a stroke.”

“You get used to it,” I said. “Some people just aren’t cut out for anxiety.”

He started twisting his back as if trying to relieve stress. The physical effects of the trope must have been less severe on people who experienced anxiety their whole lives. That’s why it was perfect for hysterics and acceptable for me.

“This is a hard one,” Camden said as he handed the trope back to me. “How would you say it compares to other stories we’ve run?”

It had been maxed out. Get to the Car Now had been the text the trope gave me. That was the hardest level.

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Probably somewhere around Post-Traumatic,” I said. Even though it was a high level of difficulty, there was a strange wavering quality to it. Sometimes it would feel unbeatable, but other times it felt like the difficulty would drop. It fluttered back and forth even as I looked at the Omen. Maybe it was Antoine’s Adventurer advanced archetype that added that variability. The actual text didn’t change; it was still “Get to the Car Now,” but the feel was that it would be a little easier than that. I couldn’t explain it.

It was going to be tough without Kimberly here. I wasn’t sure how we were going to pull it off. Her ability to concentrate narrative weight was so essential to the way I played the game that I never really knew what I was going to do without her.

“So if we beat this one, we’re in for a nice jump in levels,” Antoine said.

“There’s our silver lining,” Camden said. “Is it safe for us to take this?”

I nodded. “Just don’t bring it to the river.”

Camden grabbed it as we made our way back to the Speakeasy. All of the NPCs and paragons had played their roles, running through a loop of dialogue, threatening to kill whoever had done this, trying to figure out what had happened. None of it was substantive. They were decorations.

But the paragons stood together and stared, not at us, at me specifically. At me only.

This wasn’t scripted.

There was something I was missing, something that made all of this make sense.

“Can I see that?” I asked Camden as he read the letter again.

“Sure,” he said. “It sounds too meta, like this is more of a quest item than an actual in-story letter.”