Book Six, Chapter 29: Deviled Egg

“You’re telling me that you’ve never heard of a deviled egg?” Isaac asked incredulously. “The little party food?”

“Do you mean a devil’s egg?” Ramona replied. “Because I have heard of those. They’re quite scary.”

“No, a deviled egg, like an egg stuffed with zesty egg,” Isaac said.

“It’s always bad luck to find a devil’s egg,” she added.

“No,” Isaac insisted. “A deviled egg.”

We were at the Diner. We hadn’t been in a while.

A strange, green-black egg could be seen inside a small metal crate from which the short-order cook was grabbing eggs as he worked.

We watched, wondering if he would pick that one when making our food, which, naturally, led to a conversation about deviled eggs, the tasty potluck staple.

“Finding a devil’s egg is said to bring terrible luck,” Ramona explained. “There was a girl in my class who supposedly found one. She got taken out of school for some sort of infection three days later. So, if you find a devil’s egg, be sure not to touch it.”

“A deviled egg,” Isaac repeated. “I know you’re messing with me.”

“Because if you touch the devil’s egg, the devil will smell your scent, and then he’ll abandon it,” Camden said. “You don’t want that to happen.”

“All I asked is if you had a food called deviled egg,” Isaac started, exasperated. “Because that sounds like the exact kind of thing Carousel would take and run with, “

“And without the mother’s warmth, the young devil is sure not to survive,” I added.

Ramona, having grown up in Carousel, albeit a slightly altered version, was a source of endless amusement. Not only did she take very strange things, like children going missing or bizarre TV stations, as normal, but many of the concepts we thought were normal were completely foreign to her.

One of those might have been the food called the deviled egg. Or she might have been messing with Isaac. I gave it about fifty-fifty either way.

When we walked into the diner as a team now, we basically filled up an entire wall. Somehow, I lucked out and ended up at the fun table. The other table was discussing a grocery run.

As much as I liked The Final Straw as a storyline, about the fifth time you run it, it starts to get old, especially when all you get from it in return for your efforts are some 1970s-era rural general store foodstuffs. It’s nice to see Benny, of course. It felt like he remembered us.

It was right around the time the conversation on deviled eggs died down that we heard Andrew comment, “If only we could simply go to the store and spend our own money. I would do anything for normal food.”

He must not have been talking about Eastern Carousel General Store.

“Are you talking about the Eternal Savers Club?” I asked, turning around in my booth to face them.

Andrew nodded.

“They’ve got a 25% off sale according to the newspaper,” Logan said casually.

Logan was holding the newspaper open. He had been reading it.

“Wait, let me see that,” Camden said. He was sitting in the same booth as me.

Logan reluctantly handed him the paper, and Camden instantly flipped to the page with the ad on it, thanks to his Eureka trope.

He looked back at Logan, Kimberly, Andrew, and Antoine, who were all in that booth.

“This isn’t like a normal sale,” Camden said. “Don’t you remember what this means?”

The blank looks told the story. They didn’t know.

“Twenty-five percent off isn’t talking about prices,” Camden said after he got no answers. “It’s about the Plot Armor of the storyline. Don’t you remember the vets talking about that?”

Apparently, they didn’t. While Eternal Savers Club was more relevant to our interests than many other storylines the vets regularly ran, we didn’t actually know many details. The vets were very big on preventing spoilers.

What I remembered was waiting out across the street for the storyline to end, so that we could help haul grocery carts all the way back to Camp Dyer.

“Wait, 25% off,” Antoine said. “It’s normally around Plot Armor 40, right? So that would bring it down to 30?”

Well, an opportunity like that has a tendency to get people thinking. And so we did.

We’d want to confirm that the 25% off deal meant what Camden said it did, but if it did, it’d mean visiting a modern grocery store and being able to buy, or ‘loot,’ in bulk.

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“But do they have pickled pig’s feet?” Isaac asked, to some light chuckling.

We had a jar of them back at the Loft pilfered from The Final Straw. None of us had been brave enough to try them.

“My friend Marcie has a membership card,” Ramona said. “Or at least she did. But I don’t think that’s very helpful to us now, if it’s like you say.”

It wasn’t very helpful. While Ramona had been immune to omens before becoming a player, or at least the omens didn’t exist, it wasn’t very clear. Now they did exist, and Eternal Savers Club was rife with them.

The most dangerous one, of course, was the one you triggered simply by walking into the building through the customer entrance, because the omen was the dead-eyed greeter you met when you entered.

“There’s another layer to this,” I said. “You know, there was a whole team that got wiped out there when Project Rewind triggered?”

Most vets had died at Camp Dyer, but there were others who had not been at camp at that time.

“A rescue,” Kimberly said. “If it’s 25% off, that brings it down to Plot Armor 30. A rescue would bring it a few points higher, maybe Plot Armor 34 or 35. We could do that.”

“Assuming the version that killed the vets was the typical run,” I said. “Remember, they died in it, and this was something they normally ran.”

“Who was it?” Avery asked. She was seated at the low bar near the booths with Cassie and Lila.

“Huh?” I asked.

“Who were the players that died in Eternal Savers Club?” she clarified.