Book Five, Chapter 64: Mental Health Day

“So, these last few days—the Doll House, the Speakeasy, Carousel Family Video with the weird guy dressed like you—all of that was to get you to walk into the flea market and hear two NPCs arguing over a painting?” Isaac asked.

We were on the roof, just relaxing.

Isaac was being his cynical, skeptical self, never missing an opportunity to criticize the way Carousel worked. After we returned with the Omen, he chattered incessantly about the whole mini-quest to find which storyline Logan and Avery were locked behind.

Frankly, I didn’t know if he was doing it because he was actually confused or if he just liked criticizing the powers that be.

“Basically, yeah,” I said. “The clue was about the Bowlers, and we know the Bowlers have cleared every storyline within spitting distance of the bowling alley. We just had to look around. Once we knew where to look, we were in the home stretch.”

“It’s weird, is all,” Isaac said.

“How strange, the guy who is always skeptical is skeptical about this too,” Antoine said.

“I’m just saying, I don’t like playing ball with Carousel. Doesn’t it feel weird that it sets you on some scavenger hunt, and you just did what it wanted? It’s training you, don’t you get it? You don’t really think that guy trying to sell the painting just happened to be there when you were there, no—he was waiting for you,” Isaac said as if he had some gotcha. “Carousel is patting you on the head for doing what it wanted.”

“I mean… yeah?” I said. “All it wanted us to do was go to a specific place and look around. And you’re probably right—that guy selling the painting was probably going to be there anytime we showed up, because he was our reward for pulling the thread on this little mini-quest and figuring out where to look.”

Isaac just shrugged his shoulders.

It was true that Carousel’s mini-quest didn’t lead us directly to the Omen, but it led us to the place where we were supposed to look, and I didn’t feel like I could ask for more than that. I mean, a map with an X on it would have been preferable, but that was too much to ask for.

We had started out our search by looking in shops hoping to find the Omen for sale–the psychic shop, the pawn shop, heck I even scanned through the omens at the doll shop.

Carousel just helped us find the right one.

We sat on the roof of Kimberly’s loft—just me, Antoine, Andrew, and Kimberly after Isaac left.

We had some information to gather that we didn’t want the others around for.

“Kimberly, this is a high-stakes role, and the audience is going to expect a standout performance from you,” Sal said over the speakerphone. “But I have to say, I can’t help but feel that the ending will be taken as really bleak, and it might put the brakes on your career.”

“You think it will be a difficult role for me?” Kimberly asked.

“I think the audience will have a really hard time believing a happy ending. Honestly, it’s just asking a lot,” he said. He had a serious tone. That wasn’t good.

We were now doing our customary mixing and matching, testing our tropes against the omen for Stray Dawn. We needed to find the best possible rescue trope and the best team to go with it.

Everything was on the line because we no longer had Dina’s very forgiving rescue trope on the table. We wouldn’t have used it if we did.

Sal and Kimberly exchanged their goodbyes, as he didn’t have much more to say.

She had equipped her rescue trope, A Woman in Mourning, which was usually used against serial killers and slashers—human killers who might taunt the loved ones of their past victims. And while the trope technically did work with the new werewolf storyline, all indications were that it was just a terrible fit.

It made sense; creating a visceral thriller where the bad guy has actual supernatural abilities and runs in a pack, while the main character is an isolated, emotionally charged individual, just did not stack up as an easy win.

In fact, when she equipped her rescue trope and I used my I Don’t Like It Here scouting ability, the difficulty shot up to Get to the Car Now, the highest difficulty I measured for regular stories.

The problem was my rescue trope was no different.

The Wrong Reel would have us protecting our base against the werewolves all night long. While this was compatible, it was also far too difficult. My rescue trope, like Kimberly’s, was better against mundane or slightly paranormal human enemies.

Werewolves were ferocious beasts.

“Guess that leaves me,” Antoine said. I could see a look of relief—or pride, maybe—as he said it.

He must have sensed the hesitation on my face.

“What?” he asked. “There’s not going to be a problem here.” He quickly equipped his rescue trope, but Kimberly didn’t unequip hers.

“Maybe we should talk about this,” she whispered to Antoine.

“Let’s just try it out,” Antoine said. “Then we can talk once we have the information.”

Ever since Antoine messed up in The Final Straw storyline and dissociated On-Screen for over ten minutes, Kimberly and I had been worried about what we were going to do when we came across another storyline that involved a forest—an apparent trigger for Antoine’s latent trauma.

He got close to her, put his hand on her hand, and then whispered, “Let’s just try it,” in a sweet way that she wasn’t going to be able to stand up to.

Just as I expected, she unequipped her rescue trope, and with a few taps on her phone screen, another call went out to her agent, Sal.

I didn’t even need to wait for the phone call—I could see that the difficulty of the omen dropped down.

The difficulty level was This is Scaring Me, which was more difficult than the base storyline had registered but less difficult than what either mine or Kimberly’s rescue trope registered as.

That might have been counterintuitive, seeing as his trope, A Race Against Time, turned a storyline into, well, a race against time. It put a time clock on victory and forced the players to accomplish some feat—usually involving Hustle—before time ran out.

Why would a rescue like that be easier than mine or Kimberly’s? It was actually the same reason that Arthur’s advanced archetype of Monster Hunter had made the Grotesque storyline easier, even though, by all accounts, it made the enemies stronger and more violent.

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The Grotesque statue was a powerful enemy in the psychological horror story it was originally supposed to be in. But it was actually a pretty beatable enemy with an exploitable weakness in a head-to-head fight.

The same was probably true with the werewolves in Stray Dawn.

In both mine and Kimberly’s rescue tropes, the enemy was put into a situation where a werewolf would be far too dominant for us to overcome while simultaneously not giving us enough advantages to be able to win.

Antoine’s rescue trope, however, seemed to give us enough wiggle room that even a mighty foe could be beaten.

After all, with A Race Against Time, you just had to accomplish some goal before the time ran out. We didn’t have to kill or capture werewolves, as in Kimberly’s rescue trope, or survive an onslaught from them all night, as with mine.

Of course, what exactly we had to accomplish with Antoine’s rescue trope was not clear.

As we had seen with Dina’s rescue trope in the storyline Itch, sometimes difficulty or ease just came down to how your rescue trope interacted with the base storyline. It wasn’t always clear what would happen—sometimes, the resulting story might be easier or harder for reasons you could never predict.

“Okay, honey, this is a high-paced, action-packed storyline with a nice mystery angle,” Sal said. “It has something for everybody—from the ones who just want to turn their brain off and watch a high-paced flick to people who like the backstory and the lore, depending on how the director goes with it. Frankly, I see you on the poster, scared out of your mind, terrifying beasts at your heels.”

“So it’ll be a lot of running from werewolves?” Kimberly asked.

“Oh, you could expect that,” Sal said. “Fair amount of running toward them, too. The secret here is that your character is brave beyond belief, and in fact, if you don’t play this right, people won’t believe it at all. So you have to just be this character that is ready to re-explore her past at all costs. You know what I mean? Like, she’s had it with running, and the fact that there’s a lot of money on the table for her is just one of the reasons she’s doing it because money alone probably won’t make sense.”

Interesting notes about her character.