Book Six, Chapter 57: Silver Fox

I wouldn’t have picked the rooftop for the final battle if I had known it was going to take so long. I was soaked to my core.

Luckily, the weather subsided a bit. It had been so difficult to see and hear what was happening around me. But now, when the blackmailers arrived, it was clear as day, and the rain was only set dressing.

It didn’t feel like a real place. The odd lighting made it feel like a movie set.

I had realized recently that this storyline, Homibridal Part II, was obviously not about me. It wasn’t about any of the players. It was all about her. Daphne, whom my heart loved and ached for, and my brain and soul reviled. So clever, so conniving, but suddenly surprised.

The bright side was that I was finally understanding a lot of her humor.

All I knew for certain was that something was different with this storyline. Something had gone wrong.

Maybe Camden wasn’t just overreacting. Maybe Carousel was rebalancing the storylines.

We were Off-Screen when the man started to speak. I had thought him dead. He had apparently died from poisoning(or drowning), but that goes to show how little you could rely on appearance in Carousel.

“I’m sure I can call you Daphne,” he said in a Southern accent. It hadn’t been so distinct earlier, but now he spoke clearly. “No more need for this Rachel nonsense.”

“I think you’ve earned it by now; go for it,” she said. “You’re not zombies, are you? Because I try to avoid the undead. I like my dead to stay that way.”

The man didn’t answer quickly. Silver Fox was his name on the red wallpaper. His tropes defined him as an experienced strategist. Not that I had seen it up to this point. As hard as we looked, it was difficult to find much of what the blackmailers had been up to, other than the obvious stuff, which didn’t seem that strategic.

But then, maybe his strategy was meta.

Killing Antoine certainly didn’t seem like a smart move in-character.

But if my experience in By the Slice told me anything, it was that sometimes the bad guy has to take a gamble. Verity Pryce had gambled that we would charge headlong in the wrong direction and waste too much time to be able to solve the simple clues of her storyline.

What gamble was this man taking, and how did it involve the players?

The big guy, Ed, who was a bellboy, had apparently died after being paralyzed with poison and left to drown. I had seen it happen and even helped Daphne pull it off. That had seemed sufficient to kill him at the time.

It apparently hadn’t been.

Some tropes could allow you to see the health of enemies, but so far in my experience, they didn’t seem that important. “Dead” was usually easy to see, trope or no trope.

I had seen him struggle to breathe, unable to move under the water. Had he played dead? Silver Fox and Miss Kitty, who had posed as Rachel’s distant family members, had also seemed dead. Poisoned. Drowned. Whatever. But here they were.

If Rachel’s dead parents walked onto the roof, I was going to lose my mind.

It seemed a cook was involved somehow. I didn’t even realize, although I did see some flashes of her getting hung upside down when I watched the Dailies at high speed. She fell into an industrial-sized laundry basket filled with bedsheets. The basement was nearly flooded by then. In real life, that fall might have killed her. In a movie, especially a comedy, it wouldn’t have, though my only reference for that was Dunston Checks In, a movie about a burgling ape in a hotel similar to this one.

The drowning should have killed her, though. The water, plus the fact that she was tied up, should have finished her off, but it would seem she had help.

The blackmailers had been helping each other in the background. I couldn’t focus too much on the Dailies, I had to be present, but it was like a choreographed heist with these people. It was like they knew what Daphne would do before she did it.

Yes, this storyline was about Daphne. But it was also about those blackmailers. I was just playing catch-up.

Hopefully, they could fill in some of the gaps I was missing.

Emmett picked up a handheld radio and spoke into it, but I couldn’t hear what he said. Had he been controlling everything from a distance?

“So how does it feel,” he said, “to finally have a fair fight on your hands?”

Daphne shrugged, casually holding up her hands to show that she had nothing in them. “I’ll tell you when I know.”

“There’s no need for that,” he said. “The little quips. Jokes. The audience isn’t watching us right now. It’s just us killers. Surely we could have a conversation.”

I looked over at Kimberly, and she looked at me. We were both unsure of what to do. While Daphne and this gang of blackmailers were clearly enemies of each other, that didn’t mean they would help us. We needed to think on our feet.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

“How long have you been awake?” Daphne asked. “All this time I thought I was alone.”

“It’s hard to say,” he said. “Time isn’t something you can count on in this place, is it? It feels like we’ve always been here, and anything before that is just a story. A distant blank space.”

He stared off into the distance, but then looked up at his wife. He reached over and touched her face. She looked at him with love in her eyes but said nothing. I recognized part of that look. Part of it was the look of an Off-Screen NPC. It was a rare thing for them to be able to interact with you in any real way when the cameras were off. If they did, it was only as set dressing. They might scoop your ice cream or help usher you to the next scene.

The idea of someone you love being like that was different.