Book Five, Chapter 65: The Lineup

Now that we had decided we were using Antoine’s rescue trope—and I say “we” very loosely—we could bring up some of the other players to join the talk since the subject of Antoine’s mental health was no longer on the table.

Should we have kept that a secret from them? I had no idea. I was done thinking about it.

Cassie was now in one of the lounging chairs, doing her best to focus. “On a voice.”

“No,” she said, “voices. I think they’re lovers quarreling. Two women. I hear growling. I can’t tell what they’re saying.”

“How can you tell they’re lovers if you can’t tell what they’re saying?” Isaac asked.

“I’ll tell you when you’re older,” Antoine said.

“One of them is very angry, but now all I hear is roars. I think it’s the werewolves. I hear the word ‘curse,'” Cassie said. “One of them is very angry at the other, but it’s like I’m hearing them through a wall or something.”

She was using her I’m Blocked trope, which allowed her to eavesdrop on the enemy, so to speak, until they eventually shut her out. So far, we hadn’t gotten much content from the trope, but it still held its clues.

If we didn’t already know this was a werewolf storyline, we could probably guess from the way she was describing it. And the two women arguing were interesting, although I didn’t understand the context yet.

Suddenly, Cassie let out a bloodcurdling scream.

“One of them noticed me and just screamed in my ear,” she said. “That’s all I got.” She was actually physically pressing her hand against her ear. Could her psychic eavesdropping cause her physical pain in her ear? Who knew?

“That was useless,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Antoine said. “We learned plenty.”

“Like what?” Isaac asked. “What did we learn?”

“We learned that there is psychic power in this storyline, so these aren’t strictly biological werewolves. Their curse is probably magical in nature,” I said. “If there wasn’t any magic, her trope wouldn’t have worked at all. And we know that a fight between two women—who Cassie somehow knows are lovers—is somehow important, but it’s not clear how.”

“Maybe one of them is Serena,” Ramona said, holding up the VHS copy of Stray Dawn: The Mark.

The back matter of the VHS talked about an enigmatic and charismatic troublemaker who was most certainly a werewolf.

“We’ll see,” I said.

Meanwhile, Andrew had his nose buried in the Atlas in a section about werewolves.

I thought he was wasting his time because, frankly, that section, which described different archetypal enemies, was often lacking.

It could never give spoilers, and trying to generalize enemies based on cosmetic similarities seemed dangerous.

That wasn’t to say there weren’t nuggets of good knowledge in that section of the Atlas; after all, there were some good rules of thumb about different movie monsters that a lot of players might not be familiar with.

“It would seem that a weakness to silver is universal, although the potency of silver changes from film to film,” Andrew said.

Yes…

“It says that Carousel likes to add a mystery to werewolf stories about the identity of the werewolf if possible, and the person who wrote this note suggests that you really spend a lot of time building up that mystery because it’ll take up screen time and take the place of physical altercations.”

“That’s a really good insight,” I said, genuinely surprised. I had read that section, but it had been a while.

“So we try to exaggerate the mystery elements so that the big reveal is what’s important, and the actual fights get less screen time, and we’re less likely to die, right?” Antoine asked.

“That’s how I took it,” I said.

There was one resource that Carousel had in limited supply, regardless of its omnipotence: runtime. A storyline, or at least the movie made from it, could only have so many minutes in it. So, if you could fill up that screen time with stuff that won’t get you killed but that is interesting to the audience, then there would be less time for all the things that can kill you.

“It says that one of the first things you have to do,” Andrew said, “is determine the mindset of these werewolves—whether they are aware of their transformation, whether they’re hiding it, or if they have the same mental faculties as a human and as a wolf. This determination,” he read, “could be the single most important piece of insight in any werewolf story.”

He continued to read through the hints and would read them out loud when he found one he liked.

“Look at this,” he said. “It says that any betrayal trope can act as a blood control trope because in order to betray allies, a player would have an opportunity to be turned into a werewolf, and players should use this to help propel the story forward.”

That wasn’t just true about werewolves; it applied to vampires and zombies as well. Anything that converted you into a monster would work with a betrayal trope to guarantee that that person became a monster—or at least give them the opportunity for it.

He continued reading and didn’t find any more pieces of advice that he felt were worth reading aloud until he got to the end.

“It says here that werewolves are really good for pursuing a Monster Hunter advanced archetype because of the nature of investigating lore, werewolf identity, and eventually hunting down the werewolf… This one mentions a conversation with Arthur C.,” Andrew said.

“Arthur?” Kimberley repeated. “So that’s how he did it—how he got his advanced archetype.”

“It would appear so,” Andrew said. “Of course, this was back before the archetype tracker, so they were just guessing, but it seems they understood the basics. Try to get cast as your desired AA, and then do well in that role. Rinse and repeat.”

“Maybe I’ll go for Monster Hunter,” Antoine said.

“That probably wouldn’t make much sense,” Andrew said gently. “A Monster Hunter is a Savvy-based melee fighter; you’re already a Mettle-based melee fighter. If anything, this would be a downgrade for you.”

“I can put points in Savvy if I need to,” Antoine said. “I find the Athlete to be too generalized. Yeah, I’m a melee fighter, but I feel like I just get assigned to roles without much bite to them. Security guard, cop, jock… I feel like I’m not living up to my potential.”

“That might change once you get your Aspect,” I said. “I feel like most of my roles ever since I got my Aspect have been pretty specific to my skill set.”

“Sport, Stud, or Health Nut,” Antoine said aloud, leaning back in his deck chair and drinking a beer. “What grand opportunities lay before me.”

The conversation continued but took a much more practical route, as we had to discuss builds and team composition.

Luckily, my I Don’t Like It Here trope could do a lot of the thinking for us.

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For instance, Dina and Bobby appeared to be of little benefit in this storyline. We determined that by seeing if the difficulty went up and down with their presence, but it simply didn’t—whether they were on the team or not, I couldn’t even feel the difficulty change at all.

“Sal did say that this was an ensemble movie, right?” Kimberley said. “So Wallflowers and Outsiders don’t get a lot of screen time because they are minor archetypes, right?”

“That’s more or less it,” I said, “but that depends on their Aspect and tropes.”

The more meta they were, the less substantial characters they could play, but again, that was true with Film Buffs, too.

Unfortunately, we could never get a measure of how difficult the storyline would be without me, because I was the one taking the measurement. And unless I was included on the team, we would never know how tough it was. Of course, I could have given my trope to one of them to use, but I didn’t mention that.

“Well, that means we don’t need Lila either,” Michael said. He had kept quiet for most of this, but I could see him over there doing push-ups and sit-ups as he mentally prepared for the fight ahead.

Lila, who had also not been talking much, was finally roused out of silence by that comment.

“I have to go,” she said. “I have to make it up to them… If you take me, I’ll be one of the blood sacrifices. I can guarantee my death—or at least it’ll look like it,” she said.

She did have a trope that allowed her to trigger her own Off-Screen death, similar to mine, although it took her less work because all she had to do was let out a bloodcurdling scream. I, on the other hand, had to come up with some convoluted scenario where it looked like I died but didn’t.

To be honest, that was a very strong offer. Even if she did nothing else, taking first or second blood for the rest of us was a huge benefit.

Kimberley, feeling a sense of duty or something like that, said, “Well, that means I can be first blood. My Looks Don’t Last trope guarantees it.”

Normally, I would be on board, but this wasn’t a normal circumstance.