Book Six, Chapter 75: Getaway Car

As we fled into the parking lot from our exclusive party within the hedge maze, we sporadically went On-Screen. That meant we couldn’t just wait around; we had to actually stay in character, which meant fleeing.

The problem was that we had walked here, and while that was okay for us to do as players, it was a pretty odd thing for our successful characters to do. As embarrassing as it was to admit, I wasn’t sure what we were supposed to do, and it was Kimberly who came up with the plan, nonverbally.

While On-Screen, she led us over toward a red convertible and started digging in her purse, where she withdrew a set of keys and unlocked it.

I quickly jumped into the passenger seat, and Antoine climbed over the back of the car into the back seat, ducking down, not quite trusting his mask to hide his identity.

I tried not to laugh as Kimberly put the key in the ignition, turned on the car, and started to peel out of the parking lot to get as far away from those hovering Night Stockers as possible.

Cars were a funny thing in Carousel.

Usually, you avoided them like the plague unless your character explicitly owned one, which rarely happened. The vets had used a truck in The Grotesque; in fact, I was the one left driving it as we were chased by a giant statue of Bartholomew Geist.

Still, there was always a nervous tension about taking a car.

In Carousel proper, you didn’t want to drive a car at all. It made dodging Omens nearly impossible.

When Antoine and Kimberly went on their jungle adventure, they could only activate the Omen by driving in a certain direction in a car. That felt dangerous enough at the time, and they were only in it for minutes before the storyline triggered.

For the most part, we just ignored vehicular travel and hoofed it, even if we didn’t like it.

That’s why it was so funny when Kimberly casually improvised keys into her purse and started up the red convertible. It was such a simple thing, and yet for so long we were afraid of it. The audience would easily believe that Kimberly’s character had a car, so when Kimberly searched for the keys in her purse, there they were. So simple and yet so nerve-racking.

~-~

We went Off-Screen about a mile away from the hedge maze party, and my Call Sheet trope told me we wouldn’t go back On-Screen for at least three hours, though it was inconsistent and occasionally changed. Obviously, the choices we made would change when we went back On-Screen, but three hours was a good baseline.

“Bobby said he was living in the trailer park up north, right?” Kimberly asked.

“No,” I said. “Near the trailer park, those sketchy studio apartments.”

Kimberly nodded.

Carousel, even this more Hollywood-esque version of it, looked so much better when you could actually drive through it with no Omens in sight. It looked like a normal town. A pleasant town, even.

Even the bad parts weren’t really that bad. Sure, there was poverty, but not enough to get the film labeled political. It was movie poverty, where nobody had any money, yet they could still afford to fund all sorts of antics.

We found Bobby easily enough. He was on the bottom floor, and his blinds were up, which was a normal thing in Carousel, as it was in movies, because you needed to get a camera angle from outside. And if the blinds were down, you wouldn’t get any footage.

He sat on a couch watching television and going over stacks of papers. Kimberly parked outside, and as we walked up toward his apartment, we stopped and stared through the window.

Well, Kimberly stopped and stared. Antoine and I followed suit.

“What’s up, babe?” Antoine asked.

“Look at his walls,” she said.

And we did, peeking like the worst peeping toms in history at the back of Bobby’s head, toward the place where his TV was. The wall was covered in documents related to his wife’s disappearance, or at least the movie version of her.

“Do you guys think that he’s searching for clues inside of all this stuff, like actual clues to what happened to Janet?” she asked.

All I could do was shrug and walk forward.

It would make sense. How was he supposed to know that there was some absurd cognito hazard between him and answers? Just thinking about it frustrated me. I wished there was a way to give him the information that wouldn’t trigger my flight-and-fright instinct.

How can you tell someone not to look for their wife when simply acknowledging that you know what happened was somehow enough to trigger her killer’s return?

Of all the mysteries Carousel held, that was definitely one of the top three I needed answers for.

I knocked on the door out of courtesy; it didn’t really matter, it was unlocked. He came and answered it, and while he didn’t seem upset, he didn’t seem particularly interested in our arrival. If anything, he was annoyed, perhaps because we interrupted his search.

“Nicole’s dead,” he said nonchalantly.

Nicole had been the leader of the team we were rescuing. She had been cast as the new manager at Eternal Savers Club, replacing the old manager who mysteriously went missing.

Well, now another one was gone, according to the script that Bobby had access to.

Unfortunately, that script didn’t contain a whole lot more information. When players failed the storyline, Carousel didn’t just have things continue on; it just created a fail state where everything went bad, really, really quickly.

That was, until some plucky players showed up to the rescue.

“Any luck?” Kimberly asked.

“Huh?” Bobby answered. “Oh, right. The research. Nothing. Not the library, not this rudimentary Internet from the nineties, nothing has anything on He Who Walks Behind the Aisles.”

That wasn’t surprising. When Cassie had her floaty episode that allowed us to know the ultimate big bad of this storyline, the first thing we did was call up the library and see if they had any books on him, only to find out that there was no such creature in existence.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Apparently, He Who Walks Behind the Aisles wasn’t his government name.

Carousel’s modern Internet also had no answers. However, you could get a good price on a kidney.

We had hoped that when we started the storyline, those things might change, that there might be information, but Bobby hadn’t found any.

“Good thing we brought Dina,” I said as I found a spot in a recliner next to the couch.

She had used her Dark Secret trope, which would give us as much information as we needed, hopefully as soon as we found her. The question was, were we having trouble finding her because of where her character was, or because Dina was just a sneaky person in general?

“I think I’ll find out plenty tomorrow,” Bobby said.

Kimberly looked at him with concern. “Did you say yes to his offer?” she asked.

Bobby had been invited to a special group by Tom Carmichael, who we suspected was at the center of all the bad things going on in this storyline, based mostly on his prominence so far and the fact that he worked at Eternal Savers Club.

Plus, nobody was that nice without there being a catch.

“I said that I’d like to check out his group,” Bobby said. “I called him up just before you got here. He was out of breath.”

“He was probably out kidnapping celebrities,” Antoine said.

Bobby shrugged.

“I’ll get whatever intelligence I can,” he said.

“Where’s Jules?” I asked.

“At a bar, I think,” he said.

Normally, she was attached to his hip ever since he got her trope.

“Do you really think that you should be going to this meeting by yourself?” Kimberly asked. “It sounds like it could be a trap.”

“It could be,” Bobby said. “But I don’t think so.”

The truth was, even if it was a trap, Bobby should probably still go. I didn’t say that out loud, but that’s what I thought.

Kimberly still looked concerned. “I just have a weird feeling about this. You know how bad guys usually save their true strength until the end of a movie, because they have to keep getting more and more dangerous to increase the stakes?” she asked.

Adeline had taught us that many plot cycles ago.

“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And since the bad guys basically finished off the other team already, they already showed their true power. So they’re only gonna get stronger for our finale.”