Book Six, Chapter 14: 555-7468

I couldn’t really complain about nightmares, could I? That was the worst I had seen of these demon enemies of ours, at least as far as my suffering went.

But when I woke up covered in sweat, it was difficult not to regret choosing this storyline.

As strange as it might seem, sleep was something that Carousel rarely denied players, Goodnight Neighbor being an exception. Sure, it might wake them from their slumber to chase them around with monsters, but that was for the camera; there was generally time to rest between scenes.

Here, every time I went to sleep, I learned a few new tropes that the Repossessors held. And in order to acquire them, I had to run through some sort of surreal, hellish version of the pizza parlor, chased sometimes by shadows, but this time by possessed animatronics with cracked limbs that allowed them to contort and twist in ways their design was not meant to.

My pursuers never caught me that I remembered.

Worse yet, I had a feeling that the Night Terrors trope the Repossessors had was interacting with my psychic background to give me insight into the hell world that existed beneath it all. But because this was a nightmare, I was having difficulty remembering what happened.

After the first night, I had set out a notebook and a pen, hoping to write down everything. So when I woke and dried my sopping, sweaty skin with a towel, I began writing, trying to record everything I had seen in my nightmare.

Despite the surreal nature, I got the feeling that this endless, exaggerated maze, composed of things found in the pizza parlor, was a physical place, not just a figment of my imagination.

Worst of all, I felt I remembered something only in part. Something I had seen but couldn’t recall upon waking, except for the feeling it had given me, a feeling of true dread.

A feeling that, though this was dressed up as a comedy, we were dealing with something that had once been quite terrifying. And I had seen something related to it in the darkness, as I ran through a maze of arcade machines and pizza buffets.

I had seen people who had asked me for help.

My memory couldn’t be relied upon to make that conclusion, but my heart remembered.

My heart remembered because a single thought resonated in my mind. That thought was: We didn’t come here to save you. And from that, I could piece together what the aching sensation in my chest was.

For us, this was a fake hell, but not for everyone there.

On the bright side, I did learn three new tropes that these enemies had.

First, I learned that they were limited physically. I felt I had seen that limitation in action when I had seen Avery taken. The shadows didn’t seem able to touch a person when they were shadows, but only when they were possessing a physical object. They had to possess Avery’s car or possess the skin suits they wore, however ridiculous those might have been.

I also received confirmation that the final battle wouldn’t be a physical fight. Based on what I had seen, it would likely be a battle of wits, and to that end, it would come down to Camden, our Scholar.

What a coincidence that I was supposed to meet with him that morning to discuss this very problem.

The plan had been for Camden to conduct his research scenes at the library independently. I was going to hover Off-Screen as moral support, for sure, but it would just be him researching within the scene.

But then he got a phone call from Anna.

The night before, while they were at Hanging Tree Lookout, the shadows had come back as predicted. No men in strange skin suits accompanied them, but the shadows were enough to terrify Ramona and freak Anna out.

I had listened in on the scene.

We had tried to preserve Anna’s innocence, so to speak, by preventing her from seeing evidence of the supernatural. That way, she could have plausible deniability for why she would do silly things like going back to work.

But that experience in the car had ruined whatever ignorance she had of the issue; the shadows had made themselves apparent, and their demonic nature was evident to everyone there. Still, Carousel would have to use a lot of precious screen time to show these scenes we were making. That would eat up a lot of the hellish torture scenes that might otherwise take their place.

It also meant that Anna could join in on the research scene.

I was already pushing it as far as being a main character went, so it was unlikely I was going to be able to join Camden in his research-heavy next phase, or at least, I wouldn’t be able to join him On-Screen.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

We went to the library. Luckily, the main Carousel library was actually very close to the storyline, so we could just walk there. We had no reason to worry about any of the omens inside the library because we were already in a storyline.

The only issue, if there was one, was how we would approach our research.

I waited outside while Camden had an On-Screen interaction with a librarian. She pointed him to the right section to search and gave him some tips. I was listening in using my headphones and my Quiet On Set trope.

Camden didn’t need the directions, but maybe the audience did. Who knew.

Anyhow, that was how we ended up sitting at a long wooden table with little green lamps in the folklore section of the Carousel library.

“I believe these demons are associated with El et El,” Camden said. “Eledal. I don’t know; it’s spelled in multiple different ways. He’s called the Great Forger. That’s interesting, I think it means like blacksmith forger, not like counterfeiter.”

“Yeah, that would have been way more fun,” I said. “So does he have, like, a cult presence or something in Carousel?”

Camden had six books in front of him, all open and all so easily accessible to him that it was basically pointless for Anna or me to try to help. Eureka was a powerful trope. I had missed it at moments like these.

“No,” Camden said. “It would seem he has a major religion behind him in this storyline. Something like 70% of people in Carousel attend a Church of Elidel—there’s a third spelling—at least twice a year.”

“Ohh,” I said. “So that’s probably our religion.”

I didn’t even think to probe for that.

“I would bet so. I think Cassie and Isaac’s family is definitely religious because they had some of his iconography on the walls, we just didn’t notice.”

He held up a book and pointed to some pictures and inscriptions.

“Is that a peace sign?” Anna asked.

It did look like a peace sign, the circular kind with the Y inside, but it had another circle in the middle.

“No,” Camden said. “It’s the three-spoked wheel. It’s a major symbol of the religion. But anyway, the Hughes family had some of this on their walls. I can look up the lore on demons in this religion—the Church of Elidel—if you want.”

“Or?” I asked.

“Well, there’s like a separate section that’s just folklore-based, like, uh, Elidelian mythology rather than scripture.”

I nodded my head. “We need to try to keep this as far away from the actual religion as possible. We haven’t put in the prep to be able to succeed at a religious fight, and I sense religion’s not really the strongest angle. From the tropes I’ve seen, I think this is just a simple Faustian bargain or something about tricking the devil at a crossroads or so.”

Camden nodded.