Book Six, Chapter 63: Rescue Scouting

“How were their levels this low?” Isaac asked. “What were they doing the whole time?”

We were up on the roof, reviewing Eternal Savers Club. Everyone was there, either in a chair or lying out on a blanket.

“It was a different time, Isaac,” Andrew said. “I know how foreign the concept must seem to you, but in those days, taking extra risks felt completely unnecessary and foolhardy to many players.”

Isaac was having a hard time processing this. I got the feeling that maybe he was counting on being able to coast to the higher levels. Maybe it was just something he needed to tell himself to sleep at night. He was so invested in the conversation that he had reeled in his fishing line and given up on finding new Omens on the streets below.

“You said that they were here for six years,” Isaac said. “Six years, and the highest-level player on this team only has forty-five Plot Armor?”

“Look, kid,” Logan said. “At the end of the day, they were right. Doesn’t that make a difference? We didn’t know about Project Rewind. We thought we were in hell or at least purgatory. Turns out, our entire purpose was to create a soft landing for the winning Party of Promise, you know, to be there when they arrived, to mentor them. It worked out. Eventually.”

Logan’s team could have been the Party of Promise, but things didn’t work out just right for that to happen. They didn’t often talk about that. Maybe it was because, as time passed, we had stopped seeing our teams as being separate. I wondered how long that would last.

“But still,” Isaac said. “How do you even survive at that level? Wouldn’t you naturally level up higher than that just by doing the normal amount of storylines you have to do?”

In Isaac’s defense, he was pushed off the deep end the moment he arrived in Carousel. It seemed he could hardly imagine an entire society of people who took zero unnecessary risks.

“From what I was told, Nicole was a real go-getter when she got here at first,” Avery said, lying out in the sun with sunglasses and a big hat. “But when her niece and nephew arrived, she was more concerned with keeping them alive than she was escaping.”

That was a whole different conversation. How would this Camp Dyer era team adjust to their new reality?

“I didn’t even know you were awake,” Isaac said, blushing. He turned his attention back to the missing posters we had brought up there, with the five players who we could potentially rescue from the big-box store and its principal storyline. “So you guys just did storylines that were your level?”

“Or lower,” Logan said. “When you have no obvious goal and you have generations of players who haven’t managed to figure anything out, survival becomes about persistence. We did the same thing. That’s probably what got us wiped off the board.”

Isaac was having a really tough time digesting the concept. It was odd. He wasn’t exactly pushing us to make plans or find a way out anymore. I thought he would understand the mentality of Camp Dyer. Still, he eventually stopped asking questions.

We had learned some things about the fallen players at the Eternal Savers Club. There were five of them from Camp Dyer. On average, their Plot Armor was around forty, and they had only run the storyline twice before. When we were at Camp Dyer, going to Eternal Savers Club was just one of the chores that got divvied up.

I remembered something about the Outsider Travis’s team being teased because they never leveled up enough to run the storyline. Someone joked that they were doing it on purpose.

I stared at the flyers, hoping that the scant information on them would speak to me and give me insight, but very little came.

MISSING

Name: Nicole Van Note

Plot Armor: 45

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Eye Candy (Socialite Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Kyle Van Note

Plot Armor: 36

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Athlete (Stud Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Kelsey Van Note

Plot Armor: 35

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Final Girl (Scream Queen Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Lorne Thomas

Plot Armor: 41

The author’s narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Bruiser (Bully Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Molly Menkin

Plot Armor: 39

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