Book Six, Chapter 2: The Lineup

“The rock candy and the weathervane work well,” Camden said.

I nodded my head.

“How about the others?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The door handle might be fine, but apparently, that one’s pretty weird when it comes to Plot Armor.

“So,” I said, “We only use it in emergencies.”

He stared into the massive tome that was the Atlas. He ate a Carousel brand Hot Pocket called a Tongue Torcher.

“I’m not exactly sure what it is the players who wrote the entry were trying to say, but it sounds confusing,” he answered after a moment.

Yep. Emergencies only. The players who wrote the Atlas were careful not to spoil storylines, but some pitfalls were so great that they still did their best to warn others off without saying why.

“And the rest?” I asked.

“PA 39. PA 40. 40. Level 41. Level 40 again,” he said, reading off a list he had written and pointing to the relevant omen.

We had spent time going to the pawn shop, the psychic shop—pretty much anywhere that sold omens and wasn’t dangerous to travel to, so we could build a collection.

“I understand,” I said.

There was something very, very dangerous about most of the omens we had collected. And that thing was me.

Storylines in Carousel came in different variations of difficulty. Some had a PA 20 difficulty, but then, if you brought a player with over 40 Plot Armor, the whole storyline jumped up to a 40 PA difficulty. There were some advantages and disadvantages to this system from the player’s perspective.

One benefit was that things like how Eternal Savers Club could be run by players anywhere from Level 10 to Level 80, and it would still be a Plot Armor 40 story. If you had enough players over that PA, assigning shopping duties was a breeze.

Most stories were not so forgiving.

Most stories got more difficult around Plot Armor 40, which I had just crossed.

That made things complicated. If I were around when we needed to use an emergency omen, I would up the difficulty just by being there for most of these.

“Well, I’ll carry around some of the rock candy,” I said.

Camden nodded. The others had a lot more to choose from as far as emergency omens went.

We were in the living room. We had taken all of our omens and put them up on a shelf that we had liberated from the furniture store on one of our trips.

We displayed this odd variety of objects as if they were family heirlooms or valuable decorations.

Camden said it made the whole entryway look like the inside of one of those restaurants that are decorated by covering the walls with old rusty antiques, so the place looks folksy and not like a corporate chain.

This collection was important.

The one drawback to Kimberley’s loft was that sometimes mobile omens—a different type than those we collected, the kind that took “mobile” literally—would knock on the door in some way or another and threaten to trap us all in a storyline if we couldn’t find a way to dismiss them.

If that ever came—if we could not find a way out of triggering a visiting omen—we had a whole shelf of alternatives, some of which could be activated immediately.

You had to pick your poison in life. In Carousel, that was literal. If a nasty omen came to Kimberly’s door that we couldn’t figure out how to dismiss, we could now start a safer storyline using one of our purchased omens.

“Sorry,” Camden said. “Even back when the Atlas was written originally, it was always assumed that there would be a wide variety of players at different levels. But you just keep being an overachiever.”

I nodded.

“I’m a victim of my own success,” I said. “Plot Armor 41. Never thought I’d see the day.”

And I still wasn’t even halfway to the level we would need to be to do the rescue at Camp Dyer.

It was frustrating that I would have to wait for the others to catch up. But that was the game. If I didn’t have a team to run the story with me, I was going to have a bad time.

While we were in the living room, Kimberley, Antoine, Logan, and all of the other players whose Plot Armor was in the 30s were planning out their next run.

They’d been talking for a while, so when they grew quiet, both Camden and I looked over at them, wondering where the silence came from.

And then I heard the ringing. Click.

“Kimberley, why do you never call me these days?” Kimberley’s fake talent agent, Sal, said over the speakerphone. “I swear, there are rumors of your retirement spreading around.”

“I just got off a shoot less than a week ago,” Kimberley said. “I’m not going to retire until I’m dead.”

She shushed everyone as the giggling started.

“Oh yeah, that shoot. The time travel movie. Really took a back seat there, didn’t you? Is your name even in the credits? Maybe I can talk to the production company and have you listed as a cameo so no one thinks your career is on a backward slide.” Sal said, taking a deep breath. “Oh, forgive me, dear. I haven’t had anything to eat today. You know how I can get.”

“Sal,” Kimberley said, largely ignoring his color commentary, “I’m thinking of doing a big blockbuster summer movie. Have you heard anything about The Sunken Cradle?”

The sound of paper being flipped came through the phone. I always imagined Sal’s desk being covered with stacks of scripts.

“Time to cash in on the goodwill, huh?” Sal asked. “Let’s make some real money. Look at you. I may have a contact in that production.”

“Is there a chance I could get a leading role in it?” Kimberley asked.

“With your star power, I’m sure you could just walk on set, and they would cast you as the leading lady. I hear they’ve already got their hero attached.”

“Do they?” Kimberley asked.

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Everyone closed in and smiled. It was hard not to smile when Sal talked. Not only was he genuinely funny, but he was speaking in code the whole time, giving hints about the storyline, and there was a real sense that there was an actual person on the other side. Sal might have been a real guy.

And they might not have been an NPC either.

“Get this—and you didn’t hear this from me,” Sal said. “The film’s final title is Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle. You will never believe who they cast to play Antoine Stone.”

“Who?” Kimberley asked, suppressing a laugh.

“You will never guess,” Sal repeated.

Meanwhile, Antoine was grinning from ear to ear and suppressing his own laughter.

The Sunken Cradle was an adventure story with a very Indiana Jones vibe. It took on the name of its lead player, and that meant Antoine was going to get to be the star—and not just the strong boyfriend, or the carpenter, or whatever he was in Post-Traumatic.

“More than that,” Sal said, “they’ve got this hotshot new director, who you’ve worked with before. Everyone is expecting great things from this film with a director like this.”

As soon as Sal stopped talking, everyone looked up from the phone and turned to look at me.

The trope that Kimberley used to talk to her talent agent, Just Ask Sal, worked like many other scouting tropes. It made educated guesses about which players near the user would end up in the storyline.

Because I was in the room, it assumed I would be joining. Sal had often referred to me as being the director of the movie that we were scouting out. After all, my Aspect was Filmmaker.

“Could you hold on just a second?” Kimberley asked.

“Sure, dear. Let me find my knitting needles,” Sal said.

Kimberley muted the phone and then looked at me. “Do you think that you could—”

“Yes,” I said. “I can leave.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you here,” she added.

I put up my hands in a calming gesture and said, “I understand. Don’t want to confuse the scouting trope.”

And I really did need to leave.

If Sal thought that I was in the movie, that meant the difficulty of the movie he described would get much harder because of my Plot Armor. Which meant that Kimberley and the others would get bad information.

I needed to get out of the range of that trope.

“All right, Team A gets the loft,” I said. “Team Dead Beat goes up on the roof.”