Book Five, Chapter 46: By the Campfire

Michael built a fire so fast that I would have thought he had a trope for it.

There was a burn pit just off Bobby’s rental’s back porch, surrounded by overbuilt wooden deck chairs. The chairs easily weighed 60 pounds, and the wood was rough, but next to the fire, they were comfortable.

We each sat around, some on the porch, some near the fire, and we talked about our lives, our fears, and our hopes. But mostly, we talked about the storylines we had run.

The longer we were in Carousel, the more the game started to dominate our lives and personal histories. How was I supposed to compare anecdotes about high school to anything that had happened to me at Carousel?

I couldn’t.

No one could.

Even Andrew, who had found some success as a doctor before coming to Carousel, mostly talked about his experiences in storylines. And Michael, who was a legitimate soldier, had more war stories involving ghouls and goblins than actual human conflict back home.

I missed the campfires at Camp Dyer.

It was a nightly ritual to sit out under the stars. The weather there was almost always perfect, and even the rain had been warm. In eastern Carousel, the wind cut through my hoodie and chilled my bones, but still, it was nice.

“So I punched this monster in the face. I punched it hard. I could almost hear its brain knocking against its skull,” Michael said, telling a story from one of the many runs they had done. “But this creature had, like, acid blood, so my fist just fell off after a couple of hours. Didn’t even hurt.”

Something about how he told that story got people laughing.

Michael continued, “So I say to Andrew, ‘Why don’t you heal this up and then put a blade on the end of the stub?’ And Andrew did it, and it was awesome. I can’t believe I didn’t get a trope for it.”

“You never used it,” Andrew said. “And it was wildly impractical to do in the first place. You could barely walk, let alone engage in hand-to-knife combat.”

“I used it,” Michael said. “Twice. I cut the rope that made the boulder drop, and I swiped at the creature through the fence.”

“Okay,” Andrew responded. “I suppose you did use it then, although I believe it would have been more effective if the knife hadn’t had a serrated edge. If you wanted to kill something, you would have had to saw through it.”

We all laughed at the image.

Well, most of us. Lila, our guest of honor, sat in one of the wooden chairs closest to the fire, chilled to the bone by the wind, cuddled up in the only blanket we could find for her. She didn’t laugh, no.

Although we didn’t say it, she was our prisoner.

We weren’t going to let her leave—not until we had made our decision about what to do with her, and we weren’t in any hurry to make that choice.

Luckily, the shock of her betrayal was slowly fading. We could think rationally and, perhaps, compassionately.

“You guys play a lot of storylines?” Antoine asked.

“Dozens,” Michael responded. “I’ve killed just about everything that can die and some things that can’t. You?”

“About a dozen,” Antoine responded. Our numbers were pretty low by comparison despite having similar plot armor.

“Whoa, you folks are taking your time, aren’t you? Wait, how are you at our level?” Michael asked.

“They are taking a more daring approach than we did, I assume,” Andrew said before we could answer. “I have to conclude that our strategy was a poor one.”

He threw a clump of leaves into the fire.

“What strategy?” Isaac asked, looking at his older brother like he was a little kid again.

“When we developed our strategy for picking storylines, we usually picked stories that were about our median level. We didn’t want to overwhelm our less ambitious teammates,” Andrew said. Though he didn’t say so, I had to imagine he was talking about Lila.

“Perhaps our reason for doing so was that, soon after we arrived in Carousel, a high-level team had just been postered,” he continued. “Their strategy had been to complete the most dangerous runs they could in order to grow levels quickly with as few storylines as possible. Having seen them get postered, we decided to do something more conservative. If my understanding is correct, that was probably what sank our chances with Project Rewind.”

“That’s what Chris and his team did,” Antoine said. “They never ran a storyline unless it was at least five levels ahead of them at first. They were always surviving by the skin of their teeth. They wanted to do as few storylines as possible at first. Of course, he didn’t want me to follow in their footsteps, but we ended up doing something similar anyway.”

“Yes, Chris’s team were very daring,” Andrew said, “but even they lost their nerve eventually. Difficulty scales much more aggressively at higher levels. They couldn’t keep up. They had found their limit.”

He threw more leaves in the fire. They sent a small flurry of sparks.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

“Wait,” Cassie said, “why did they want to do it in as few storylines as possible?”

Cassie had never taken Adeline’s mini tutorial, where she taught us about these things.

“Novelty,” I answered. “Carousel rewards you for doing new things. That means not getting spoiled about the details of a storyline, but it also means trying new kinds of storylines and doing things you’ve never done before. Eventually, you just run out of new types of experiences.”

“And you hit level 40,” Antoine added. “Then you level up once, maybe twice a year after that, if at all. The fewer stories you run, the less likely that is to happen.”

Cassie nodded, and then no one said anything else because we weren’t really talking about experience for runs. We were talking about whatever we could to avoid harder conversations. We hadn’t agreed to that—it just came naturally.

“Riley here jumped like five levels at once,” Isaac said, breaking the silence. “The rest of us still haven’t caught up with him.”

“Five stat tickets and one storyline?” Michael asked. “How’d you swing that?”

We had left out some details.

“Somehow, a high-level mobile omen got into Camp Dyer,” I said. “Everybody at camp was liable to be picked for the storyline, and I was one of the lucky few.”

I tried to be sparse on details. I didn’t want to mention Bobby’s wife, who had also been picked and was at the center of it all because she had refused to run storylines. I hoped they would let me get away with leaving that detail out.

But Bobby said, “Janet was picked too. She never came home.”

A silence moved over us. Even the fire didn’t crackle as loudly as it had been.

“She disappeared?” Michael asked.

“Yep,” I said. “Carousel even cut her out of the movie. Anyway, I was really under-leveled, and I ended up being helpful. Died at the end—heroically.”

“That was where he got tickets with coded messages on them,” Isaac added.

Isaac wasn’t spilling our secrets on accident.

We had left out details, either because they weren’t important or because they were inconvenient, and it seemed like he did not intend to help keep those secrets—not from his own brother. We planned to tell Andrew and the others everything once we had a good read of them anyway.

We knew this might happen. It was built into the plan. We had weighed the pros and cons and decided that, even if Isaac and Cassie would never choose us over their brother, it was worth having a doctor.