Book Five, Chapter 19: A Party Divided

Antoine put on a big smile this time as we walked along. He was still angling to show how confident he was, but the further we walked south, the more apparent it became that that would be a liability.

There were stretches of trees and fields similar to those in eastern Carousel, although there were quite a few more pine trees in this direction.

I didn’t say anything. I just hoped that if we could find a solution to his problem as fast as possible, we wouldn’t have to make any hard decisions.

So, we moved forward at a faster pace than normal toward the nearest solution. Dr. Andrew Hughes was likely to have some psychiatrist tropes that would help with diagnosing and fixing whatever glitch had caused Antoine to dissociate On-Screen.

I had used this to justify why we would be rescuing Andrew Hughes first instead of searching for some low-level storylines to do rescues in.

The truth was a little more complicated than that.

We had agreed to go to the poster wall and find the easiest storylines we could use to practice rescues.

The logic was sound. Start with the easiest storylines and then work our way up.

Another consideration was what to do with the rescued players.

If players were very low-level, that meant they would be malleable and more likely to follow our lead. One of the biggest worries we had about rescuing players that we didn’t know was that they wouldn’t respect us or that they would cause infighting.

Low-level players were less likely to be a threat, but I still didn’t want to rescue someone I didn’t know. At least we knew that Andrew’s team had been at Camp Dyer. We didn’t know them, but I thought our common experience would lead to cohesion.

If they had experienced Camp Dyer, then I was almost certain that they would work toward returning to that level of cohesion and peace.

So that’s who we were going to rescue, even though the storyline that had killed them was likely going to be a challenge for us.

It was worth investigating.

“Isn’t it really creepy that these players died less than a month before we got here, and no one at Camp Dyer wanted to talk about them?” Kimberly asked as she leafed through the missing posters that we had brought along with us.

In fact, it was a little creepy. Back before rescue tropes had returned, death was a taboo.

“I can’t blame them,” Antoine said. “What’s the point in scaring new players?”

What indeed.

It became apparent that we were headed in the right direction as power lines started to converge and become bigger the further we walked along. There weren’t a lot of omens on this road, perhaps because there wasn’t a lot of anything.

I doubted that it was because Carousel just didn’t have enough storylines; it was probably because the emptiness of a dusty back road offers a certain feeling of isolation. The further we went, the more isolated I felt.

We were just on a scouting mission. Everything would be fine.

As we traveled, the barren fields turned into rocky hills, and the trees grew taller and taller.

“Now that I think of it,” I said, “I thought the dam on Dyer’s Lake was hydroelectric. Why do we need another power plant?”

I didn’t know how much energy one extra-dimensional town could consume.

No sooner had the words left my mouth than we turned a corner on the dirt road winding up the hills and saw the power plant in the distance, jutting off the side of a large mountain.

“Good question,” Antoine said.

There were giant candy-cane-striped smokestacks and lots of barbed wire. Giant buildings large enough to house football stadiums loomed in the distance.

Powerworks.

Sure.

This was a haven of Omens, no doubt. It could act as a power plant, but looking at it, I could see many movies being set there. Because of the large building built into the mountain, it had an industrial look but also a supervillain vibe.

“Stick to the road,” I blurted out instinctively as some feeling in my gut kicked into gear.

I was feeling anxious. I kept my head on a swivel, looking for omens, but I didn’t find any other than the normal border omens that existed off in the distance to keep you from running into the woods.

We continued down the path. As we walked, we came across a large chain-link fence on the left of the road, but it was not for the power plant. The sign said, “Derelict Machinations Incorporated.”

It was a sort of junkyard, but the items contained within it were not the usual kind of junk.

“That’s a roller coaster,” Kimberly said, staring off into the yard.

In fact, it was. There was a dismantled roller coaster and an anti-gravity machine ride shaped like a UFO. There were also a bunch of those little machines that you used to be able to find out front of a supermarket, where you could put a quarter in and ride in a rocket ship—if you were eight years old at least.

“Is this where they keep all of the rides from the Centennial?” Kimberly asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

But truthfully, I didn’t recognize a whole lot.

Something that stood out to me was that all of the rides and other machines in the yard were themed around sci-fi. There were spaceships and battle mechs as well as aircraft and robots. All of it was apparently related to some sort of carnival rides or similar, but I didn’t get a close look.

“Let’s stay out of there,” I said. “Omens are lighting up like the Fourth of July.”

We continued on past the junkyard, the second one we had seen in Carousel.

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We went on further until, eventually, we found the entrance to the power plant. There was a small shack at the gate with a sign that said, “Power Plant Tours $5.”

We would have considered paying that price, except there was no one there to give our money to. Besides, the gate was open. Suckers.

“This is as far as we go, right?” Antoine said as he looked around.

I nodded. According to the Atlas, no matter which direction we walked from there, we would run right into an omen.

This area was called the Pavilion because it was built like some sort of “Age of Tomorrow” sci-fi proselytizing area for the press to take pictures of when a CEO gave a speech. KRSL was advertising its amazing technology in murals on the walls. It could have been beautiful if it wasn’t abandoned.

As far as I could tell, all of the buildings were locked and secured, but several paths led into the compound.

“There’s no one around,” Kimberly said.

“If we trigger an omen, there will be,” I said.

“Here, you each take two,” she replied, handing us the missing posters.

“According to the Atlas, we just have to look at the omen, and we’ll be able to see if our rescue tropes will work,” Antoine said.

“That’s the theory,” I replied.

“I only see one,” he said after a few moments of concentration. “Over there, the loose cable.”

He pointed in the direction of a set of stairs that would lead to a metal walkway that reminded me of something out of Jurassic Park. The walkway moved out over a large ravine of some sort, but I couldn’t say what was inside the ravine because I didn’t want to move close enough to look.

The loose wire swung gently as if something was hiding there, trying to get our attention. The omen was for a storyline called Apex. It was a very difficult storyline, and my scouting trope told me next to nothing about it.

I couldn’t even see the poster for it.

“I’m not getting anything,” I said. “My rescue trope doesn’t seem to be triggering.”

“Mine neither,” Kimberly said.

“Mine does,” Antoine said. “It’s a big plaque that says ‘rescue.'”

My rescue trope worked on the premise that the enemy of a storyline where players had been killed would have somehow been filmed themselves doing the evil deed, and then somehow I found those tapes.

The enemy would then attack my base, and I would have to survive until morning. Whatever the enemy of the Apex storyline was, it was not the kind that would film itself committing its crimes or care if those tapes got out.

Kimberly’s rescue trope was for things like serial killers. She would mourn the death of her friends (aka the players we were trying to rescue), and the killer would show up at the funeral.

Antoine’s rescue trope was a little different; he turned the storyline into a race of some kind. Whatever the enemy of the Apex storyline was, it was ready for a race.

“Where are the other Omens?” Antoine asked. “I only see the one.”

If you didn’t have a scouting trope, it could be pretty challenging to find omens, especially to the untrained eye. When we walked into The Final Straw II storyline upon first arriving in Carousel, I didn’t see the poster on the red wallpaper until the storyline was almost already triggered and that was with the Vets telling us it was there.