Book Six, Chapter 61: Wedding Gifts

I wished that the rain would come back. Once the storyline was over, it would have been a pleasant, warm embrace.

Instead, I got sunshine. It was nighttime at the end of the story, but that didn’t mean anything to Carousel. We got daylight, if only to allow us to watch as Carousel drained the massive flooding around the casino as if by some miracle.

Within ten minutes, it would all be gone. Heck, within fifteen, it would probably be dry outside. Carousel had no limits within its domain that I knew of, other than the restrictions of storytelling.

I felt embarrassed, not because I didn’t figure out that Daphne was an enemy; there was no way I could have done that, not until after her Moxie had started to fall. By then, I already knew the truth.

I was not upset about the gameplay. That was not a failure. That was just one heck of a handicap.

I was upset about how it affected me, about her dumb little love trope. That didn’t feel fair. Being forced to love a serial killer was sickening beyond anything I had felt in Carousel up to that point.

I felt that old familiar call to just hide it somewhere deep inside and forget those emotions, and I would have too, except I was not the only one who knew about what had happened.

Kimberly was there, and she was trying to comfort me, and I couldn’t blame her. In my heightened emotional state, I had revealed my biggest secret.

It wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I just wanted so much to see the look on Daphne’s face when she realized that her dumb backstory and motivations weren’t able to shock me. That becoming one more dead groom for her was a waste of production value. She would understand that. Carousel certainly did.

Kimberly didn’t say anything, and neither did Andrew, though he pretended that he had never heard what I had said to Daphne, even though he was standing on the other side of the roof access door when I said it.

I could see Kimberly searching for the words, and she eventually found them. She took her hair down from a ponytail and said, “I can keep your secret.”

I thanked her, and then we walked toward the stairs as the sun shone down on us. Kimberly kept the axe, and we had the gun with the trope on it. We couldn’t afford to lose those.

Andrew walked over to Logan’s body and nudged it gently, waking him from the big sleep. He woke up cursing, realizing that he was waking from the dead.

“I think Daphne killed me,” he said. “Wait.” He paused for a moment and thought. “Who the hell is Daphne?”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

Honestly, and this may not be the best reflection of my character, at that moment, all I hoped was that Ramona didn’t remember anything. It was not like she hadn’t been paired up romantically with an NPC before, and I hadn’t minded that. So clearly, she couldn’t get mad at me for marrying another woman, right? That is how that worked. I was sure of it.

And as far as I could tell, it was more or less right, because when we found her on the ground floor, she was sitting on a couch near the elevator bank at the place where the casino transitioned into a hotel.

She laughed as we showed up.

“You didn’t actually send me that rose, did you?” she asked.

I was so relieved to see her smiling. “No,” I said. “I was too busy with wedding planning.”

She laughed again, a dazed, almost delirious laugh, like she had exhausted herself with it before we arrived.

“So Daphne wasn’t even real?” she said. “I feel so stupid. I must have looked like an idiot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There is a lot of that going around.”

I reached toward her, and she grabbed my hand. I pulled her up from the couch and hugged her.

“So how was the wedding?” she asked.

“I can’t complain,” I said. “I have nothing to compare it to.”

“Did she try to kill you afterward?” Ramona asked.

“I think so,” I said, “but unfortunately, I might have been too much of an Oblivious Bystander. Also, she was very frustrated that I kept trying to solve the mystery, so just remember that if you ever plot a murder spree.”

Ramona nodded her head. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

She put her fingers through my hair to show that, despite all previous experience, my hair had not grown back at the end of the storyline. Carousel was teasing me. Maybe the shaggy hair was hurting ticket sales. I didn’t know.

At least I had my hoodie back.

Bobby wandered over not long after we got down to the first floor. He hadn’t died far from there.

Antoine was the last to arrive, and he was shivering as he did it.

“Who put me in the refrigerator?” he called out when we were in sight.

We were all laughing again, and I was glad for it. We joked back and forth, and our spirits were surprisingly high.

We had gotten to the end of the movie with three players still alive. Had Daphne not gotten sudden opposition from her longtime punching bags, things could have ended differently. But not that different. Kimberly was prepared to chop her to pieces.

The blackmailers were probably the only reason she was allowed such a powerful mind whammy trope to begin with. Without them, she would have mowed through us in an afternoon.

As we waited around for Silas, the mechanical showman, to arrive, I decided to go ahead and watch the movie. It was a black comedy starring Daphne as the titular Homibride. It wasn’t bad, but I did get a lot less screen time than I expected to. In fact, all of us did. Strangely enough, Kimberly probably got more screen time than I did because of her flashbacks to a bank robbery her character had experienced.

We were only there long enough to set up who we were in relation to each other so that the finale would make some sort of sense. I sped through it so that I could see the blackmailers’ parts, which were greatly expanded from what they were supposed to be. I was certain of it.

We gave up on sticking around inside the casino and walked outside to a parking lot that was not only free from flooding but that had cars and NPCs arriving en masse to return to their posts.

That was when Silas arrived, his red cabinet fitting in surprisingly well with the casino’s aesthetic right under the carport.

Someone had kissed the glass on the front of his cabinet while wearing red lipstick. A final kiss goodbye, perhaps.

We all noticed, but we had the giggles something awful at that moment, so we didn’t discuss it seriously.

“So far, no more players are showing up,” Logan said. “So maybe it was just Ramona that got brought in.”

It would seem that she had to be brought in, as Daphne had used her to latch on to our party as we activated the Omen for Ida Rae, which was now long gone, having blown away in the storm.

That was really a shame, because it would have made a cool weapon in the finale. Stabbing someone with a weather vane would be a unique kill. A beach umbrella was a good substitute.

“Congratulations, you won a ticket,” Silas repeated once again.

I didn’t know what to expect. The truth was, based on what little I had seen of the final film, even if we had played perfectly, there was not really a lot of a performance to base the rewards on. Sure, we kicked butt in the finale, but up until then, we were played for fools and did a really good job of it.

I pressed the big red button first. I got one stat ticket, one trope, and one enemy collector ticket. I wasn’t going to complain.

I didn’t know if this was supposed to be a joke. Sometimes Carousel did punish us with the tropes that it chose, or at the very least mocked us. It was true that rain had lots of different narrative uses, but I wondered if I could ever really use up a trope slot just to change the weather. I had hoped to get a trope to prevent falling victim to mind control shenanigans again, but that was asking too much, apparently.

As a bit of a goof, I actually equipped the trope right after I received it, and sure enough, within a few minutes after willing rain into existence, a crack of thunder could be heard in the distance, and the bright sun started to fade. I quickly canceled the plans for rain, and the sun returned.

For as silly as it sounded, I had never felt more powerful than I did using that trope. I felt like Storm from the X-Men.

Everyone else was a little nervous when the storm returned, until I started laughing and they saw my trope on the red wallpaper. Gotta enjoy the little things.

Naturally, even though I had killed three of the blackmailers, I only got one of their collector tickets.

I had a feeling that in future runs of this storyline, the tug-of-war between Daphne and Emmett would be a bit fairer. Carousel was rebalancing old power structures and storylines, giving more agency to enemies, something that Daphne herself had enjoyed for a long time, it appeared. His collector card, it seemed, was outdated. He wasn’t a mere blackmailer in over his head any longer.

We would have to be ready in the future, knowing that we might have a competitor in every storyline now, someone who was not simply bound to the script but was able to fight back on their own terms.

That was just what we needed. Things were starting to get a little too easy.

Sarcasm aside, anxiety boiled in my stomach with every breath. Giving more agency to the bad guys couldn’t be a good thing, could it?

~

Kimberly got a stat ticket, a trope, and a monster collector ticket, just like me.

This trope may very well have made the entire fiasco with Daphne Sinclair worth it. If it was as powerful as the text seemed to indicate, it wouldn’t only have helped against the meta mind washing of Homibridal, but it could temporarily help beat so many other things.

I was absolutely jealous after I saw it, but I tried not to make it too obvious.

Sure, Kimberly did knock Daphne off the roof, but I had Incapacitated her with the gun. Whatever the case, I was glad I had Kimberly there. Without her, the plan wouldn’t have worked.