Book Five, Chapter 142: Rewards

One good part of Carousel dividing different moments in time up on sound stages was that Carousel proper didn’t need to be repaired at the end of the movie.

It was just a pleasant walk back over to the jailhouse. No bodies, no debris—just sunshine and passersby.

Unfortunately, that also meant our looting opportunities were limited. But we didn’t come here for loot. We came here for Anna and Camden.

Around the time the jailhouse came into my view, they were coming out of the front door.

We had done it.

So much time planning. So much anguish. And it had finally happened.

When I got to them, we all did a group hug.

Sure, we had reunited in the movie, but we had reserved most of our excitement for after the film was over—because we didn’t want to jinx anything.

“Going to the finale first?” Camden exclaimed. “Why didn’t you tell me that’s what you were doing?”

“Had to keep it a surprise,” I said. But of course, not from him.

Most of us had died in proximity to the jailhouse, so it was a pretty quick reunion.

Logan was actually bubbly with excitement. When he had died, he probably thought it was the last time. Funny enough, he probably died a lot more than he knew.

Antoine and Kimberly, of course, were there. Dina—just one of her—had stuck around after the finale and was lying on top of a car, staring up at the sky as one normally does after experiencing hundreds of timelines and meeting one’s deceased son.

I didn’t see where Lila came from, but the gang was all there.

Bobby had never really left. And his dogs—who had apparently been very good dogs on the other side of time—had been leading Bobby around to where he needed to be, helping him find people with their apparently supernatural sense of smell.

We took a few moments just to pet them, after having denied it to them for so long because we couldn’t physically touch them before.

Right on cue: the phrase we were waiting for.

“Congratulations. You’ve won a ticket,” Silas, the mechanical showman, said, situated right behind us, appearing just when no one was looking.

While the others crowded around to get their tickets and rewards—of which we were sure to get many—I hung back with Bobby.

I looked him in the eye, and I saw much of what I was expecting. He was tired and stressed. Worn sick. Unlike the rest of us, Bobby had seen everything. Pretty much.

“So how’d we do?” I asked.

He took a moment to answer, kicking a piece of gravel under his foot on the sidewalk and watching as his dogs sniffed around the grassy areas where some overgrown weeds had been painted blue with that chemical spray landscapers often use.

“All’s well that ends well,” he said eventually.

I bit my lip.
“That bad, huh?” I asked.

“We really cut it close there,” he said. “I thought there was no way we were going to win.”

I nodded.
“How many times did it take?” I asked.

“Forty-something,” he said. “It was pretty bad at first.”

“I figured as much,” I said.

Our plan—to go to the Finale first and then to Second Blood—was supposed to create a miniature time loop, where I could learn from our mistakes and then go back and do better each time, improving until we eventually made it all the way to the end of the story.

It was an ambitious and fun concept that would allow even an under-leveled team like us a chance at beating Generation Killer.

But of course, Carousel always gets the final word on plans and improvisations.

And it was not going to allow me to just freely loop around until I got all the answers and created the perfect run.

So, it made it so that I could not have access to any memories of previous loops.

Honestly, that was fair. Within the time travel rules of Post-Traumatic time loops, the ones we had planned didn’t make sense.

Go to the finale. Learn what happened before. Go back to Rebirth. Become Second Blood if it makes sense for the story. Carousel made that Second Blood part mandatory, from what I could tell. Our little loop plan couldn’t work here, not perfectly.

There really was no way for me to remember what happened between Second Blood and the finale. We had hoped that we could make it work, though.

Instead, I arrived at the finale and tried to piece together everything that had happened before. If I could find Kimberly and the others, I would talk to them. If all I could find was Bobby, I would try to get him to communicate something.

Eventually, I found a way to give myself the literal footage so I could watch it and go back.

I didn’t remember any of it.

From my perspective, everything worked the first—or maybe second—time, depending on how you look at it.

But Bobby saw it all from the other side of time. And without him there, there was no way we would have worked it all out.

There would have been no chance of meeting with Gabriel Cano. There would not have been many Dinas descending on Generation Killer for revenge.

It had been close—even if the other players didn’t know it.
Even if the audience didn’t know it.

“If you had died just once in the finale, it would have all been over,” Bobby said. “You have no idea how close it came.”

“I can’t imagine,” I said. I really couldn’t. I didn’t want to.

Discovering the meteor magnet device. Figuring out a plan that would work. Using it. All of that came with a price. And the price was many near defeats.

“That’s the game,” I said after a few moments of silence. “I see you got your aspect.”

He whipped out his aspect ticket, and I took a look.

“That could come in handy,” I said.

“I hope so,” he said. Then he got all curious. “Did you talk to me on the script?” he asked.

I looked at him and smiled.
“I sure did,” I said.

Now, Bobby wasn’t exactly the most self-assured person, but he was smart.

“You found a way to get out of your seat. That was your plan at the theater?” he asked, not quite sure enough to say it confidently.

“Yep,” I said.

He smiled hesitantly, then asked, “Did you find out what happened to Janet?”

I shook my head.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was sneaking around the whole time. I only got to see what I happened to run into.”

The mystery of the axe murderer lived on. And for Bobby, the mystery of his wife gone missing did, too.

“Can you talk about what you saw?” he asked.

Good question.

“I think I can,” I said. “When we get back to the loft. There’s a lot to say.”

“We’re going on Carousel’s Throughline, aren’t we?” he asked.

When I didn’t answer immediately, he added, “I mean, that’s what we should have done. That’s what Project Rewind was about. We’re just scared.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It’s time for us to get a move on.”

He looked down at the sidewalk, still never making eye contact.

That’s where I left him.

Our plan to beat Post-Traumatic, despite our disadvantages, was risky. But everything was risky. The only thing I was left not understanding was how the Manifest Consortium didn’t know that’s what we were attempting.

How could it be possible that they knew so much about us—both in and out of storylines—yet didn’t know the thing we had been planning nonstop?

I understood why they didn’t know about my plans to visit, I never told anyone. I couldn’t.

That made sense.

But we weren’t trying to keep it a secret that our plan was to send me to the finale first.
I mean, we even spoke about it, assuming others were listening in, hoping we wouldn’t be judged if it turned out that was a death sentence.

And yet the look on the Proprietor’s face when it was revealed—he thought it was terrific. It was a revelation.

And the only thing I could think of to explain it was something that existed on the status panel—the most mysterious and unknown of all the statuses.

Something like Incapacitation or Fight Scene was pretty easy to figure out, and when they came on, it was all you could pay attention to.

But what about Planning?

We had a whole status for when we were making plans, and it clicked on exactly when you might expect it to.

But why?

Were there tropes that only activated during planning? And even if there were, why would you need an indicator to tell you what you were obviously doing?

Was it possible that planning prevented the audience—or the Consortium—from seeing what you were doing?

How could that make sense if they were supposed to help you enact your plans?

I just didn’t know. I didn’t have answers.

I walked to the line in front of Silas, the mechanical showman, and hit the button when it was my turn.

It sounded like I had just hit the jackpot at the casino.

I got a lot of money.

At least as much as everyone else had combined—because it was my rescue, and I had apparently done pretty well on it.

I’d like to think that it was just my pay for having to film the entire thing. Or at least most of it.
Apparently, Carousel had a union for that sort of thing.

The coins came into the receptacle so fast and so heavy that some fell on the street.

I picked them up and tossed them into my pocket, a handful at a time. I would count it later.

As I was putting the coins in my pocket, I noticed there was something in there I had forgotten about—a newspaper.

My luggage tag.

It allowed me to put an item into my pocket in my fake body, and it would still be there when I returned to my real body.

At least I had something to show my friends. And I was looking forward to reading it myself.

I grabbed my tickets from the receptacle and was pleased to see that there were quite a few of them.

I got five stat tickets.

Darn, these rescues really paid off. I was already the highest-level player. Apparently, I had nearly died at least forty times—without knowing it and without remembering the crucial information between each potential death—so good rewards made sense.

I got four tropes.
No special tickets, but we usually didn’t look for anything out of the ordinary.

 

 

As best as I could tell, this was a trope I achieved because I was higher level than the rest of my friends. It would allow me to interact and help but limit my rewards. More importantly, it would allow me to help without hampering the rewards of my allies. A huge bonus.

With those five extra stat tickets, I was officially over Plot Armor 40—which was where storylines started to jump up in difficulty.

 

 

Roxy had had this same trope. It was a great one.

 

 

A rare combat trope for Filmmaker.

 

 

Undeniably useful, but I had to wonder if I could spare a spot in my loadout for it.

Of course, I had killed at least one Grant Leitner, and for it, I received a souvenir enemy ticket.
Lots of these tickets tried to paint enemies in a sympathetic light, but with a true sociopath, that was kind of hard.

 

 

~-~

Kimberly had done her job as well as we could have asked, but at the end of the day, she was mostly there to help Anna—and eventually Camden—get their bearings.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She did contribute to group conversations, and her character was technically the lynchpin that held some of us together, but in the final cut, it wasn’t clear how big of a deal she was.

She got three stat tickets based on her acceptable performance and the fact that this was a rescue. I had to assume that in at least some of those different finales, she had probably suffered the ultimate fate—but would never remember it.

 

 

And despite the fact that she hadn’t gotten many stat tickets compared to the rest of us, she had received perhaps one of the most useful tropes any of us had for the coming trials—a way to find out if we were on camera. And from the text itself, it appeared that it would work even when we were outside of a storyline.

Everything was building toward our confrontation with the Manifest Consortium.

 

 

I had to imagine that Kimberly had had her fair share of showdowns in the finale—and maybe before then.

Kimberly also got an enemy ticket for Generation Killer. It was identical to mine.

~-~

Anna, who had just run through two storylines back-to-back from her perspective, got five stat tickets. She probably would have gotten more if we’d found a way to make her more central to the plot. But at the end of the day, we were going high speed, and it was a precarious situation—she was just along for the ride.

With her low level, she got the same amount of tickets I did.

 

 

While at first glance this seemed to be a bit of a tease from Carousel, I realized that it was a lot like the one Kimberly had received—and was probably another way for us to avoid being seen by the Manifest Consortium.

Although how to trigger it was a separate question.

 

 

There it was—Carousel commenting on one of the principal flaws in Anna’s contribution to the story. She didn’t have to have all the answers, but she definitely could have asked the questions. If we had prepared better, I was willing to take the blame for that.

But at least she got a decent trope out of it.

 

 

A great defensive trope. Though I noticed that no one cared when a Film Buff bled.

 

 

This could be used really well—if it was set up properly.

~-~

In many ways, Camden did a better job at the task he was given than most of us did, which is why he was so well rewarded—especially combined with his low level to begin with.

He got seven stat tickets.

I was starting to wish that I was the one who died and got to be rescued.

It made sense. We had been careful to make sure that he, as our Scholar, was able to provide as much information as possible. Not only did that seem like an organic way for us to receive exposition, but it was also his job—and no doubt contributed to his success in rewards.

 

 

One of the most impressive aspects of Camden’s feat was that he didn’t really have a whole lot of Grit. When he was in pain, he was actually in pain—and yet he was able to think and analyze the situation anyway.

 

 

This could be good—or not—depending on how it actually worked out in a storyline. A lot of Scholar tropes revolved around helping the player appear smarter than normal people would be by giving them information right there on the red wallpaper.

Even if it wasn’t new information, just organizing it and reserving it for them was useful.