Book Five, Chapter 60: Carousel Family Video

Carousel Family Video, despite purporting to be a family store, was huge, but it never lost its charm.

As I walked inside, I was struck by an invisible wall of nostalgia that didn’t belong to me. For as much as I liked watching vintage horror movies growing up, I missed the age of the video rental store by a few years.

Sure, when I was a kid, my grandpa would pick up some movies for me to watch, often sneaking them into my backpack when my parents weren’t watching. But by the time I was living with my grandparents, most of my movies were bought online in big boxes of assorted VHSs and DVDs and then doled out one at a time every week or so as a reward for doing my homework, completing chores, or maybe just when I looked sad.

But here was a huge store, the size of a grocery market, with two stories—an upstairs and a downstairs—all devoted to movies, specifically VHS. There were no DVDs to be found.

That had to be a stylistic choice.

Customers and employees filled the place, just browsing, occasionally checking out a film. As the Atlas had led me to expect, there were no omens in the store and no trope items, either. Whatever danger was here truly was unknown.

As we filed into the store, Antoine held the crybaby high, like it was some sort of talisman of religious significance, pointing it in different directions, expecting it to start crying, but its little robotic cry never sounded.

We must have looked like goofballs.

We had a plan for how we were going to do things, and that plan involved visiting a local hardware store—one of the old ones from the 1920s, where you told a guy behind a counter what you wanted, and he went and got it for you—to buy a length of rope.

It just so happened that the length of rope the guy brought back to us had a really cool trope called No Bad Noose. This trope made it so that it would tangle around the neck of its target during First Blood, Second Blood, or the Final Battle and form an impromptu, entirely accidental noose. They would fall, their neck would snap (or it would look like it), that sort of thing.

I laughed when the guy handed it to us because I had seen that trope in countless movies, including Tarzan. It was a very dour subject, but at the end of the day, it always tickled me a little when I recognized a trope from movies I had watched, and that happened all the time in Carousel.

We didn’t need the length of rope to strangle any bad guys—or good guys, for that matter because it would work on whoever got tangled in it. We needed it to help us keep the group together.

When we walked into the video store, we each had the rope tied to us somehow. I just looped it through a couple of my belt loops, as did pretty much everyone else with jeans. Other people had to get more creative, but that’s how we decided to solve our problem of people potentially going missing—we literally tied ourselves together.

Fortunately, none of the patrons of the store seemed to care that we were all tied together, though I could have sworn I saw some NPCs stifling a chuckle as they looked at us. Some even stared.

As with bicycle helmets, if you don’t feel ridiculous, then you haven’t taken enough precautions.

After we had all made it into the store, we just looked at each other and laughed because it was such a silly scenario.

We were so afraid of this place that seemed so normal—almost more normal than any other place in Carousel—because it had no omens, and if you didn’t focus on things, it just looked like a normal store.

We looked like a scene out of The Descent.

I had to clear my mind and get my head straight.

We were there to find a movie with the werewolf that a murderous clown had sketched out for us—the one that had killed Logan and Avery. We were not there to browse in general, but I found clearing my mind to be very difficult because this place was so exciting.

I realized that because no one else seemed to be nearly as amazed as I was because of Kimberly.

“Riley, you’re smiling,” she said as soon as she got a good look at me.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “What can I say? This place is awesome.”

“He’s in his natural habitat,” Antoine said. “All right, everybody, check the knots. We need to make sure we’ve got Riley secured.”

Did I really smile so rarely that it was a cause for alarm?

“Listen up,” Antoine continued, reiterating the plan that we high-Savvy players had made. He was the Fred to our Velmas. “We’re going together. We’ll check every row multiple times. We have no reason to be in a hurry. Make sure you get a good look at every movie that looks like it might have a werewolf in it. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous an unknown threat is, so—”

Antoine’s little speech was cut off because someone screamed from deeper into the store. It wasn’t a scared or injured scream—they were screaming a name.

“Kimberly Madison!” they called from across the store, and then a man in his mid-20s, wearing a red hoodie and a lanyard, came running toward us.

“It’s really you!” he said as he approached the group. His name on the red wallpaper was Gus—just Gus, no last name—and he had normal plot armor, like a regular NPC.

His hair was long, but not as long as mine was getting. He looked like a general geek—the overly excited kind, not the sulky kind like me.

We were silent at first because this was the sort of thing that never happened outside of a storyline unless you were getting jumped by an Omen.

“Do I know you?” Kimberly asked.

He chuckled awkwardly. “Well, of course, you don’t know me,” he said. “But I know you. I’ve got your poster hanging on the back wall.” He turned around and looked for a spot on the back, pointing his finger, and sure enough, there was a poster of Kimberly. It was from The Die Cast—just a character poster like one might see on the red wallpaper.

“I just have to say, I am such a big fan. I’ve watched everything you’ve been in,” he said. “Go on, ask me anything about your entire career, and I can tell you.”

Honestly, I was taken aback by this sort of treatment from an NPC outside of a storyline, but Kimberly was a lot faster on her feet, so she did have a question.

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“How did I get started as an actress?” she said, not with any particular curiosity, but as if she was just testing the waters to see how meta this guy was going to get.

“Easy,” he said. “You came to Carousel chasing some boy—I forget his name—ended up doing some not-so-well-received horror movies, let’s be honest, but you were the best thing in them half the time. You ended up getting ‘discovered,’ as they say in the biz, by Salvatore Morowitz when he saw you in The Final Straw, and now you’re probably one of the most famous actresses in Carousel.”

That was one way of putting things—a made-up story constructed from elements of truth. She had chosen her Celebrity aspect after The Final Straw, though technically Sal, her fictional talent agent, was already representing her within the made-up continuity of her career earlier than Gus said. But I would let that slide; things were getting a little meta.

I had to assume that was what was going on. Gus recognized Kimberly as a Celebrity Eye Candy.

But by that logic, was it possible that he knew who I was? I also had a meta aspect related to filmmaking, so I was certain he knew who I was. And that wasn’t me being conceited—it was because he was dressed exactly like me, in my exact hoodie, with jeans and even Converse sneakers.

But his attention was on Kimberly.

As amusing as all of this would be when we talked about it later back at the loft, at the moment, we were actually quite afraid because we were looking for something to go wrong. With every breath, I was listening for the crybaby to start wailing, but it never did.

“Well, Gus,” Kimberly said, pointing to his lanyard and the name tag at the end of it, pretending that she didn’t just look at him on the red wallpaper, “can you help us find some werewolf movies? Maybe one that takes place on a mountain?”

That was a good question—one that sounded like the kind of thing he could answer.

Every section in the store was marked as Horror.