Book Five, Chapter 18: The Fallen

“Are you sure we can’t just call Sal again?” Isaac asked. I could tell there was something he was aching to say. He was afraid. Unfortunately, his fear came out in the form of insincere apathy and overdone caution. “We just need to ask him the right questions.”

“We already talked to Sal,” I said. “I am telling you, it is best to just have a good attitude about this sort of thing.”

If not a good attitude, at least dread things silently.

“I am telling you, I have a funny feeling that I’m really going to regret this,” Isaac said. “We should pick a different story.”

“I have the same feeling,” I said. “About you regretting it. Still, there is no right story. There is only the next one.”

We had all taken a walk to a small suburb in western Carousel. There was a community center there, and inside that community center was an omen for a story called The Box Lunch.

We had encountered a problem. Ramona was way too low-level to compete in the higher-level storylines the rest of us were attempting. Isaac was the next lowest-level player. Her Plot Armor was 11, and his was 18.

There was a lot of difference between those two levels, in my experience.

The problem was everyone had to run a storyline every few weeks. In fact, running them more often was better so that no one got too relaxed.

The question was, how were we supposed to send Ramona out on a storyline where she wouldn’t just get torn to shreds because of her low plot armor?

Our solution was The Box Lunch.

The Carousel Atlas had a list of storylines that were good for low-level players. It wasn’t exactly phrased that way, but that was the gist.

Storylines didn’t scale down to the player’s level, but they did scale up to the highest level player, which presented a problem.

Most low-level storylines appropriate for Ramona would cease to be appropriate as soon as we added higher-level players to go along with her.

Luckily, storylines in Carousel were not scaled one-to-one. Storyline difficulty came in stages that were unique to each storyline. While enemies might scale to the highest-level player to ensure that they are engaged, the story overall would usually be in a preset difficulty range. We had experienced some exceptions to that rule, but we didn’t expect more of them.

Running storylines to avoid the axe was routine.

Case in point, The Box Lunch was a storyline that, according to the Atlas, had a difficulty of about plot armor 15. The difficulty did not jump until you had a player at level 30 enter it. That was a very generous range. It meant we could put Ramona, Cassie, Isaac, Dina, and Bobby on the team, and they should have no problem beating it without worrying about it scaling up.

Ramona had reacted jubilantly to our solution. Which is to say, she had said “Thanks” without making eye contact. I hated to think she blamed us. If she got a few painful deaths thrust upon her, she would definitely be salty.

I just hoped we could level her up fast enough that she wouldn’t be the target for too long.

The problem was that The Box Lunch was not exactly a desirable story.

The Carousel Atlas had not been explicit, but when Kimberly had called her fake agent Sal, he made it clear to her that if she were to run through that movie, there would be gifs of her floating around the internet that would completely destroy whatever sex appeal she had built up.

We interpreted that to mean that it was kind of a gross-out movie.

Gross-out beats torture any day.

In theory at least.

Other than that, it was a perfect storyline.

“Have I ever told you about how my first death went?” I asked.

“Yes,” Isaac said. “Have I ever told you that I have a weak stomach?”

Had we been that stubborn when we started out?

Antoine and Anna had been pretty gung-ho about the whole thing, and we didn’t really have a chance to have a bad attitude because of it.

Now, we didn’t have Anna and Antoine was… not himself.

Still, we trudged onward.

“Better invest in some grit then,” I said.

Antoine and Kimberly were off walking by themselves, staying with the group only enough to avoid running into any omens.

We had some hard talks ahead of us. It was nice to get everyone else out of the loft for a while so we could discuss things.

“Two days, though,” Isaac said. “This storyline lasts two days.”

“That’s enough,” Cassie said, elbowing him in the arm. “I thought men were supposed to be brave for the women.”

“That depends on the men,” Isaac said. “It also depends on the women.”

Ramona said nothing in all of this. She had been amenable to discussing strategy and learning the game as best as I could teach it. She was still under a perpetual rain cloud and I couldn’t blame her.

Luckily, the suburban area where the community center existed was fairly quiet of omens.

There were the normal things, like the chunk of sidewalk that was missing, leaving a hole that led so far down we couldn’t see the bottom. We were stared at by NPCs and others from every window we walked past, but it was no big deal.

When we got to the community center, everything felt normal.

“Let’s go in and look around,” I said.

Antoine didn’t have a lot to say, but he took the cue and walked in front of us with his baseball bat ready to protect us.

We walked through the doors and were greeted by a series of tables. On the far side of the room was a cubby cabinet that kids in kindergarten might keep their belongings in, but in this case, it was used for all manner of board games and personal belongings of the people who were visiting the community center.

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I quickly got an eye on the omen across the room. It was one of those that was difficult to accidentally trigger.

“OK,” I said. “What you’re going to do is go search behind the cubby, and you’ll find a thermos that looks like it’s been there for a while. Just take the thermos and put it up with all the other lunches in that cubby over there, and that’s all it will take.

“That’s it?” Cassie said.

“I told you it was simple,” I said.

“Be careful; there are other omens in that cubby. Don’t touch anything except for the thermos,” I added.

I looked around at the newbies to make sure they were paying attention.

“Does anyone else hear that music box? That’s way louder than it should be,” Isaac asked.

As soon as he did, a loud bang was heard as somewhere the music box closed loudly. That had been an Omen.

“Focus and you’ll be fine,” I said, looking back toward where the thermos was and glancing at the poster for the storyline. It looked like the cover of a Goosebumps book. They would be fine.

They would just have to barf up a few gelatinous monsters first.

Kimberly, Antoine, and I made our way out of the community center, leaving the others to run their simple, little, disgusting storyline where no one had to die, and everyone would want mouthwash after.

“They’ll be OK, won’t they?” Kimberly asked. She had put on a brave face and tried to do her best Adeline impression when prepping them for the run. Newbies begged and pleaded, but at the end of the day, they had to run storylines.

Luckily, Dina and Bobby were willing to help.

We continued walking. We weren’t heading back to the loft yet. We had another stop that also happened to be in western Carousel.

We walked in silence. I didn’t know if they were expecting me to say something, but I wasn’t going to.

As soon as Antoine knew I knew of his problem, he told Kimberly everything. He told her that his problem wasn’t just being startled in his sleep, which had been a lot of what had manifested so far. His problem went deeper than that.

He had completely zoned out while On-Screen for nearly half an hour.

He wasn’t trying to play down what had happened. Still, I could see the desperation in his eyes to just let him continue to hide his issues. I was tempted to let him. We couldn’t scare the newer players.

After we had walked for a while, he started to talk. “All we have to do is stick to storylines that don’t take place in a forest,” he said, “just until I get things figured out. And that was also the first storyline where we didn’t use my nightmare trope. I think that was the real mistake.”

He had such a charming cadence to his voice. I bet guys like Antoine never got fired, not when they could talk so smoothly.

I hoped he was right. In previous storylines, we had kept his mental health problems at bay by using his You were having a nightmare… trope to help transform his very real traumatic memories into dreamlike echoes that he could work through more easily.

No matter what we tried, his trauma re-exerted itself. Part of the problem was that he didn’t have enough Moxie to use the trope to its full effect. Unfortunately, he couldn’t just put all of his points in Moxie because he was our fighter.

We had ignored the problem for too long.

“Antoine,” I said, “I’ve got an idea to fix… the problem.”

“I’m telling you it’ll be OK,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “Maybe we should change our rescue plans just for a little bit.”

He took a few deep breaths before speaking. “I know what you’re actually saying,” he said. “Look, I got it under control. That was just one time. I’ll be fine.”

“Antoine…” Kimberly said softly.

I didn’t know if he was right, but I had an idea for a solution. “Just hear me out. I think we need a doctor,” I said. It just so happens I know of one who needs rescuing.”