Book Six, Chapter 47: Smoke Break

Throughout the relative darkness of the casino, a staticky voice could be heard.

I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. All I heard was, “Reporting live…Carousel…dam…overloaded…” Then, after a while longer, “Flooding even worse…”

Someone was listening to the radio.

It was a fool’s errand to try to find out where the sound was coming from. It could very easily be a trap.

Bobby, Andrew, Kimberly, Jules, and I had to stick together. We had been stuck On-Screen for ten minutes as we wandered our way around the casino, back toward one of the lesser-known stairways that Bobby had learned about in his capacity as manager.

Of course, the enemies also worked at the hotel and would know about it, but he swore he was the only one with a key, and I didn’t have anything better to go on. Locking a stairwell had to violate a fire code, but maybe not in Carousel.

We were almost upon Second Blood.

I had assumed that meant we would find the bodies of our fallen allies, but of course, we could have an old-fashioned Second Blood where one or more of us died.

The water was almost up to my knees, but it had leveled off.

It was the same height as the water outside. That is, until the dam broke, like the weather reporter on the radio was talking about. The funny part of it was that I knew the water system and Carousel flowed the other direction, out west, but the audience wouldn’t know that, not just from this storyline alone.

We trudged through the water silently, doing our best to stay out of sight. The darkness helped there. When we finally got to this out-of-the-way set of stairs, we found the door unlocked.

“Maybe not so secret,” I said.

“They picked the lock,” Bobby whispered as he stared at it.

My eyes had adjusted, and I could see everyone by the ambient light of the room and all we could do was stare at each other, not knowing what to do next.

The area with the secret stairs just happened to be the place where they sold discount tobacco products. All of the shelves had apparently collapsed or otherwise been destroyed. The water was littered with loose cigarettes and pipe tobacco leaves.

It would seem that someone had a vendetta against the entire industry. There was no way that flooding had caused this. Someone had dropped the entire stock into the water.

There might not have been a single pack that hadn’t made its way into the floodwaters. Maybe there had been a fight here. I didn’t see any bodies or blood, but I could hardly see anything.

We moved into the stairwell so that we could walk up out of the water, and we took a break. Running storylines was tough work, and we had already put in nearly a full day. That was after a marathon session of prep work which, when I thought about it, hadn’t helped much.

This was not the murder mystery I was expecting from Ida Rae. The way our scouting tropes had described it, it sounded like a much more Agatha Christie-style story. This was practically a heist, but without all the glamorous celebrities.

I didn’t know what was going on, but I knew something was.

“I picked a bad month to quit smoking,” Andrew said as he reached into his pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He must have grabbed them, salvaged the only pack that wasn’t drowned.

“You didn’t,” Kimberly said. “You were doing so well.”

Andrew laughed as he drew a cigarette from the pack. “Doesn’t quite matter now, does it?” he said.

He withdrew a book of matches and contemplated his actions.

The funny part was that he had never smoked before. He had been struck with the addiction to nicotine without ever having consumed tobacco. For some reason, the addiction followed him right out of a storyline like some sort of lingering trauma. So his fingers were clumsy and unpracticed.

He held it like it was a joint and then like a pencil. He played this off as fidgeting.

We sat in the stairwell as he did his best to light the thing. This pack must have gotten wet, too, if not as much as the others.

It was the calm before the storm, figuratively. The real storm was still out there, beating against the walls of the casino, threatening to drown us.

“You mind?” Jules asked, holding her hand out for the cigarette. “I could use a drag.”

Andrew passed it along with the matches.

She lit the thing on the first try. She must have been a smoker.

Jules took a long drag and then another. She winced as the pain from her clearly broken ribs dug into her. She was dying. The whites of her eyes were a yellowish hue. Andrew suspected internal organ damage, but we had not established that On-Screen. We foolishly hoped that if Bobby bandaged her visible wounds, her internal ones would be cured too.

No dice.

His healing trope didn’t work like that.

The audience would know she was hurting, too. She didn’t have much gas left in the tank.

She went to hand the largely spent cigarette back to Andrew, but before he could grab it, she accidentally dropped it off the side of the stairs down into the flooded area below. Except, it wasn’t an accident. She did it on purpose but pretended it was a mistake.

“Oh, damn it,” she said as she looked at Andrew. “Better to have loved and lost, eh?”

Andrew didn’t bother lighting another. He had struggled enough lighting the first one. Maybe it was better to save his breath, because it felt like the plot was about to catch up with us.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

We casually discussed what had been happening, but we had to stay in character, which limited most of the productive conversation we could have had.

“They’re down here!” a voice above us called. It was a deep voice. I recognized it as Ed, the bellboy. He and the cook must have caught up to us.

All we could do was run and try to stay quiet. But Ed did not have any intention of us making it away together.

I ushered the others out of the stairwell first, but before I could make it out myself, a metal supply cabinet dropped down the stairwell and slammed into the door, shutting it and blocking it from me.

I almost cursed at how conveniently that worked out for him.

In real life, the solution would have been just to tip the massive piece of furniture over and climb through the door. It would have been difficult, but in an emergency, adrenaline would make it possible.

This wasn’t real life.

Ed was only two stories above. The center of the stairwell, around which the stairs wound, was big and wide, big enough to drop a large piece of furniture down with great precision, apparently.

But even as large as it was, he looked massive, staring down at me.

Blackmailer Codename: Hammer
Plot Armor: 34		__________
Tropes
Hidden In Plain Sight	The villain will appear as an ordinary NPC until they don their disguise.
Non-Combatant	This villain cannot be attacked On-Screen until it attacks the player or is otherwise identified as hostile.
Interests Align	This entity does not need the players to lose in order to achieve its goals. Continue Reading You are reading a free preview (50%). Log in to unlock the full chapter and join comments. Log In to UnlockCreate Account Related chapter tags #thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgchapter47#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgchapter48#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgchapter49#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpglatestchapter#thegameatcarousel:ahorrormovielitrpgreadonline 0 chapter views Related Novels Five Element Overlord: I Can Upgrade Everything! Villainess of Tangled Tragedies The Echoes Between Stars The Signal Between Suns 0 Comments You must be logged in to comment. Bookmark Quote TTS Link Play Pause Stop Skip Scroll Settings Note DMCATermsPrivacyContact 1 online