Book Five, Chapter 101: While we were gone…

Our celebration was muted when we got back to the loft and found a note from the others: they had gone on a storyline.

They couldn’t even wait four days for us and had decided to get a jump on trying to find new rescue tropes. It was good news to me, but it meant I was going to wait to reveal my one-sided chat with the mysterious game maker who whispered to me at the theater.

I wanted everybody to be there. Truth be told, I didn’t even know if I should talk about it at all, but I hadn’t been sworn to secrecy. I wished I had more information. I wished I just knew what to do.

At the same time, she—whoever she was—did sound like she was risking a lot just to talk to me.

I had prepared several storyline options for them. The storyline they chose was called The Groundskeeper.

It was similar to The Astralist in that it was much simpler and easier depending on the archetypes or aspects you brought into it. Still, it had a good chance of dropping a rescue trope, according to the Atlas.

Ramona, Isaac, Cassie, Dina, and Bobby weren’t exactly the best-built team. Still, the Atlas made it clear that The Groundskeeper was a pretty simple story: light on plot, light on character development, and closer to a puzzle.

I was confident they could handle the puzzle. The Omen was a wallet sticking out of a pile of dirt at a construction site—simple, straightforward.

I trusted them. All I could ask myself was if we had done enough to prep them for it as if that was my responsibility.

I looked back at the days of Camp Dyer when I literally didn’t think about any of the other teams most of the time—at least not as far as their runs were concerned. Oh how things had changed.

If they managed to find a rescue trope, that meant they could potentially get a good jump in levels, which they sorely needed. All of my plans about how we were going to gradually build up the players and rescue newbies were starting to get reshuffled as I considered the warning that we were somehow at risk of the audience abandoning us.

What did that even mean? Because if it was literal, that would be an absolute disaster.

When we got back, we had a nice dinner at the restaurant below Kimberley’s loft. One thing that our rescue did not skimp on was the reward money. We were all able to replenish our funds from that one storyline—we averaged around 80 dollars apiece. Antoine got even more because it was his rescue.

I had hoped to walk away with some of the silver that Kirst had brought in. But the little bit I had managed to hold on to had disappeared at the end of the storyline, and it was not possible to plunder any. When Kimberley triggered Secret Lore, everything about the set had changed.

On the bright side, we did walk out with a couple of guns and my large silver knife with the trope attached.

As we ate our dinner, no one wanted to ask if we should go check the missing poster board to see if the others had failed and needed to be rescued.

I could tell we were all thinking it, though, because Andrew was talking about how his brother and sister had been brought to Carousel—Isaac and Cassie. There was a tension in the air.

At Camp Dyer, having a loved one lured to Carousel was a constant fear and something they were all too used to.

It created a dark cloud no one could escape. We had seen it when we showed up.

Still, we had all been trained to deal with the stress of waiting for another team to return from a storyline.

To keep our minds off it, we watched the final cut of Stray Dawn.

I thought we had done a pretty good job, but the final film was even better than I expected. Carousel filmed a lot of flashbacks to Clara’s upbringing—or at least a fictionalized version of it—to help fill in the story gaps. I didn’t know if we got credit for that or not.

Secret Lore didn’t seem to affect things because it was triggered after we had already run the storyline. Yet, watching those flashback scenes with Agnes Woolsey—AKA Agnes Withers—I could definitely sense an unseen darkness as they pretended to be a happy family.

My mind, of course, wandered back to what that nameless, faceless man behind me in the theater had said about there being a tavern and a maid who was supposed to be the key to unlocking Secret Lore for Stray Dawn. I took to the Atlas to try to find some tavern somewhere that would give the answers.

I didn’t find anything—the book was simply too big. I would look until I found it, as I always did.

Antoine felt sincerely better. That’s what he said.

It wasn’t an instant fix, no, but I could see a more genuine optimism in his eyes—not just cheering and rallying like he always did, but something honest.

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He started talking about picking up a jogging route and even asked me if I could go with him to scout.

I said I’d think about it. The thought of going out into the world filled with omens for exercise seemed so silly.

“We might have to steal you a treadmill,” I said.

He laughed.

The other team—which was something I quickly came to think of them as—started to act more like a unit as soon as we brought Logan and Avery to Kimberley’s loft.

I could see why Logan was their leader. He was older than them, and while he was a Cynic Comedian, that didn’t stop him from being charismatic or from projecting something like confidence, even if it might have been apathy in reality.

The night after we got back, we were up on the roof drinking and celebrating our win when I heard the story of how Logan came to Carousel.

“So, I go into the doctor’s office because of some stomach pain. It was so bad I couldn’t ignore it. I figured maybe I had an ulcer or ate something that didn’t agree with me. Turns out, it was pancreatic cancer.”

He let the words hang for a moment, then said, “No sugar-coating, no optimism. Just: ‘You’ve got cancer, and it’s advanced, better get a will written up,’ that sort of speech. I appreciated how direct it was.”

Logan was a big wine drinker. No, he didn’t drink a lot. He was a big wine holder. All night, I watched him. He barely drank at all. He glanced at the glass, swirling the liquid, but not a drop of it touched his lips that I saw.

“Katie—my fiancée—she wasn’t ready to give up,” he said. “She’s got this determination, this belief that there’s always something you can do. Me? I figured the experts had already spoken. I was already mentally planning vacations, figuring out how I would blow my savings, that sort of thing. I had six months to live and too much debauchery on my bucket list.”