Book Six, Chapter 21: The Real Night Terror

The rest of the scene was a non-stop onslaught.

Isaac, teaming with Ruck and Ramona, managed to move through the rest of the demons and cut through them with ease.

To Isaac’s credit, he was really good at maintaining a level of fear that made him look more like a scared teenager fighting for his life than a badass, which was good for his character.

Demons in skin suits, demons made of props, all lay shattered, their dark shadows emitting whisper-screams.

Eventually, when the last demon fell for the final time, Isaac dropped to his knees, supported only by his pizza paddle, and took a long breather.

And then, finally, after what felt like forever, everyone was Off-Screen.

I found the stairs that Isaac and Ramona had taken to get down into the pit, and I followed them all the way down.

When I found Isaac, I said, “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

And it was true, because I didn’t have the build for it.

Ramona hugged me. But then so did Avery. And Ruck.

And as Avery pulled away, I saw a look in her eye. I knew what it meant.

There was an awkward pause, and then I asked, “I’ve been down here before, haven’t I?”

She pursed their lips, trying to soften the blow. But she nodded her head.

It didn’t make any sense to me, but this hell felt too familiar. Not just the concept. The corners. The places. The demons. I had seen it all before.

“You’ve been here about six times,” she said.

I nodded. “That sounds about right. Well, no, it doesn’t, but here we are.”

I knew those nightmares were too real.

I couldn’t explain it, but I had a feeling of dread, something that didn’t tie to any particular memory. Yet I knew something bad was coming.

The demons had a trope called Night Terror that made it so you could only use your Insight tropes against them in the form of a nightmare. But I was starting to suspect that the details of how that trope came into play weren’t so straightforward.

“Something bad is about to happen to me, isn’t it?” I asked.

Again, Avery nodded.

“Something bad always happens,” Ruck said.

Avery started to explain, telling me what had happened before. But before she could get more than a few words out, I heard the rumbling, and a memory I didn’t even know I had started to piece itself together as I turned around.

I remembered running but never being able to escape. There would always be something there, something to kill me before the night was over. And then I would wake up, remembering too little. My nightmares had been filmed in person.

Around us, all of the broken and defeated demons were moving.

They weren’t walking or crawling. They never actually had to. That was all part of a performance.

They were floating.

I knew what happened next. I had seen too many movies and TV shows not to.

“What’s happening?” Isaac asked. “Is it a boss fight? Why are we Off-Screen?”

I looked at Isaac, but I didn’t answer as a realization came to me.

We both had one thing in common.

Technically, we might have just been dreaming.

We weren’t dreaming, to be clear. Technically, we could have been. After all, my character was in bed asleep, as far as the audience knew. This whole trip could be nothing more than another night terror.

Would I wake up in the morning believing this to be a dream? Barely remembering any of it?

Again? When had I even come down here? How? Had I been dragged here unwillingly, or did I go to sleep in bed and get teleported here?

Isaac was in a similar boat, but for a completely different reason. Avery’s Dream Girl trope had caused him to dream of warnings and cries for help. And what better warning than what was about to happen?

Was it possible that both Isaac and I would die in hell and wake up in our respective beds believing that this was all just a dream?

As the demons started to come together, forming one giant amalgamation of skin suits and pizza parlor props, I believed that was the truth.

I still couldn’t see the red wallpaper properly, so I couldn’t see its tropes. That didn’t mean I couldn’t read the writing on the wall, so to speak.

“If that thing kills us, we wake up, and it’s all a dream, right? Isaac and I?”

Ramona and the others’ fate was sealed. But Isaac and I could just be dreaming right now.

“I think so,” Avery said. “You never really made much sense. You never remembered.”

“Has Isaac been here before?” I asked.

She shook her head. “This is his first time.”

“Let’s hope it’s the only time,” I said.

We didn’t have time for this to all be a dream.

We were in the finale. If this were all a dream, then it was all for nothing.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“Isaac, get up,” I said. “We’ve got another fight on our hands.”

“But we’re Off-Screen,” he said again, in disbelief.

“I don’t think that thing cares,” I said.

The traditional notion was that Off-Screen monsters didn’t try to kill you, but that was for the audience’s benefit. The audience would never know about this.

I had read in The Atlas that at the higher levels, entire battles took place Off-Screen. You would bring in players whose entire job was to go ahead of the story Off-Screen and thin out the mobs so that the On-Screen players would have a chance when they got there.

But how could we have a chance against this thing? It was humongous.

Isaac would have to whack at it with his pizza peel for half an hour just to make any progress, and even then, it could probably reform.

As the demons finished creating the amalgamation, its form defied all laws of nature. I couldn’t describe it as a spider or a centipede. All the individual props had lost many of their distinctive features and started to blend together to create a giant, irregular praying mantis-centipede-spider.

You could hardly call its legs “legs.” They jutted out in all the wrong directions, but they functioned just fine.

If it were to stay still, it was possible that a person might not even notice it was some sort of monster. They might just think it was a strange sculpture, with skin suits hanging from it at various places, stitched together to form some incomplete cover.

Electrical cords dangled from its hind area in a mass of copper wires and plugs, remnants of the various arcade machines that had once been components of individual monsters.

And therein lay the only real idea I had.

The electrical cords.

I looked around the pit. It was built to mimic the dining room above, and like the dining room above, it had its fair share of those strange stained-glass lamps growing out of the walls instead of the ceiling.

I found a group of them, growing like mushrooms, and in their vicinity, I saw what I was looking for: extension cords.

Upstairs, when they didn’t have a plug-in, they would run an extension cord under the carpet.

When this place copied the upstairs, it copied the extension cords.

They shot out of the wall like vines.

But did they have electricity running to them? I wasn’t sure. But the lamps around them did, so I just had to believe.

This was Off-Screen, so the audience wouldn’t have an opinion one way or the other.

How did the rules change under those conditions?

I didn’t have time to think about it.

“Isaac, get its attention and then try to back it against that wall with all the lamps,” I said.

“How do I do that?” he asked.

“Make fun of it,” I said.

He even had a trope for debuffing an enemy with insults.

The question was: what was this demon amalgamation sensitive about?

I tried to think back, but I came up blank.