Book Five, Chapter 49: The Crooked Hallway

As we walked back to the loft with our bounty of 1970s general store groceries, I still felt nervous about bringing newcomers to our base.

It was just an inherently risky thing to do.

We had dotted our I’s and crossed our T’s, but at the end of the day, all we could do was stick to the plan. And the plan involved creating a robust stable of players we could use to beat the game at Carousel.

That was the task looming far in the distance, somewhere past my current goal of rescuing Anna and Camden. We would have to attempt to escape Carousel and trigger its throughline.

I took a deep breath to push away the stress, and I could tell the three new players read something into it because, whatever they were talking about, they stopped. Isaac was practicing navigating with his scouting trope. He didn’t seem to notice anything that wasn’t an Omen.

“So, what’s next?” Andrew asked after a beat. “What’s the current mission?”

“There’s a whole list,” I said.

A long list that grew every time I thought about it.

As I walked down the road, my arms loaded with groceries packed into paper bags, a hole formed in one of the bags, and a glass bottle of ketchup popped out. I stopped and grabbed the bottle. It hadn’t broken, and though the bag now had a hole in it, it still seemed secure enough to contain everything else.

The puncture was not catastrophic.

I simply popped the ketchup bottle into my hoodie pocket.

The thing was, it was a little big for the pocket, but of course, it slipped right inside with no problem.

This didn’t go unnoticed.

I remembered that these players didn’t know about Luggage Tags, which allowed you to create a “bag of holding,” so to speak. I had used mine to give my hoodie pockets more room than they should have had.

I was about due for another because I was close to my weight limit, but anything that could fit into the opening of my pocket could be contained in there up to the weight limit.

It wasn’t such a remarkable magic trick that any of them said anything at first, but they did look at each other funny as the large ketchup bottle just seemed to disappear.

It didn’t look like it was being shoved into my pocket; it looked like it fell in, like I had opened up a hole and dropped it.

Before picking up the bags again, I reached into my pocket and withdrew one of the halves of my hedge shears—the ones with the trope attached to them—and then I drew the other half out. They were basically a giant pair of scissors and they disconnected at the bolt that connected them when I loosened it.

I reattached them, tightened the bolt, and watched as Andrew, Michael, and Lila looked on in amazement.

I remembered doing something similar with Cassie and Isaac when they arrived, but all I had were cans of Dr. Pepper, and they looked at me like I was some dorky magician playing a prank on them.

The hedge shears were a lot stronger of a flourish, especially since they had a trope on them, and up until that moment, none of these players had seen an item with a trope before.

That was a new thing in Carousel. Even the Atlas didn’t have information on these.

“Things have changed a bit,” I said as I disassembled the hedge shears and put them back in my pocket.

“How are you doing that?” Michael asked.

I explained Luggage Tags, but I couldn’t show them the actual tag because I was currently using mine.

“We have some catching up to do,” I said, and suddenly, I felt optimistic.

Giving fallen players the bad news that they had been sacrificed for a worthy cause was a downer, even if the conclusion was ultimately optimistic.

Showing them the new toys we had to play with was more fun.

I picked up my bags, careful to make sure the tear wasn’t spreading, and we continued our way to the loft.

Whoever was working the telescope spotted us before we got to the loft, so we were greeted in the restaurant down below.

Isaac and Cassie were happy that everything was coming together for them. Their brother was back with them. I was happy to see them being happy.

I wondered if I would get to feel that.

Lila immediately noticed that there were no Omens in the restaurant, which would seem strange because most places with lots of foot traffic did have Omens.

Kimberly softly said, “You’re safe here.” And they talked quietly.

“It’s like the kitchens at Camp Dyer,” Andrew said. “Tell me, are we able to eat the food provided here? Because at Camp Dyer, we could eat whatever the campers were eating, and no one would stop us.”

“All the chili dogs you could ever want,” Michael said. “It was heaven on earth.”

I remembered those chili dogs. Heaven, they were not. That wasn’t even to mention the fact that they only fed those kids once or twice a month. Poor things. The bottom line was that we couldn’t have survived at Camp Dyer on chili dogs alone.

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“You have to buy the food here,” Cassie explained. “It’s not super expensive, but it really adds up over time.”

“Not exactly,” Isaac said. “You can eat the food that the NPCs don’t eat, that they’re about to throw away, but if you steal any of their food before then, it ends up on your bill the next time you order something.”

He had been experimenting.

“I don’t think we need to eat out of the garbage, Isaac,” Andrew said. “If so, we wouldn’t have brought all of this.” He stretched out his arms, which were as stacked with paper sacks of food as mine were.

Michael had taken wheelbarrow duty and brought a few cases of beer because he didn’t have anyone to tell him not to.

“Thank you for grocery shopping,” Kimberly said. “But tonight, I say we eat at the restaurant. After all, we did just get a big payday.”

We sure had. Rescuing players was good money. After weeks of scrimping by, we had hundreds of dollars in the till.

“Sounds like dinner’s on you,” Michael said as he eyed a waitress walking across the room carrying a plate with a T-bone steak on it.

Carousel did have the best meats.

No one mentioned the awkwardness of Lila.

No one wanted to.