Chapter Two: The Unanswered Plea

“Hello,” the voice called. It was a woman. “Are you all looking for Carousel?”

I looked down toward the road. Three people stood there expectantly. I had to blink a few times. The lights from the animatronics display had left bright impressions on my eyes.

The person talking was a slender woman with black hair. She might have been in her late twenties. Two men accompanied her. One was a tall twig of a guy who wore a jester’s grin around the same age.

The other guy was older—forty-five or so—and he did not look nearly as entertained to be there. He wore a gruff beard and tamed his slightly overgrown hair with a ballcap. He said nothing, but slowly smoked away at the cigar in his mouth.

Antoine spoke first. He cleared his throat. “We’re here to visit my brother. Carousel is just down this road, right?

“It sure is,” the tall skinny man said.

The woman said, “My name is Valerie. These are Todd and Arthur.” She gestured toward the tall man and then the gruff man respectively. “We’re here to guide newcomers to town and help you get all set up. Things are a little diff—”

She was cut off by the taller man, Todd. “Is your brother Christian Stone?” he asked with a bemused smile.

His two companions seemed taken aback by his question. They looked intently at Antoine.

“. . . Yes,” Antoine said. “Do you know him?”

Valerie, Arthur, and Todd looked at each other.

“Yeah, we know him,” Valerie said, not missing a beat. “Have known him for years now. That would make you Antoine?”

“That’s me,” Antoine said. “We’re supposed to be heading to Lake Dyer. He has a lake house over there,” Antoine said. “Is that down this way?”

Todd started to laugh. “He invited you out to the lake house?” he asked. “Sounds like you have a fun time ahead of you.”

“We’ll take you to him,” Valerie said cheerfully. “Are all of you here to visit Chris? There’s a Centennial event; we’re expecting guests to start coming in soon.”

“The two of us are going to the horror convention in town,” Bobby said, putting his arm around his wife. “Is that this way too?”

“Yes,” Valerie said softly. “You must be Bobby Gill?”

“That’s me,” Bobby said.

She turned to my friends and me. “We have to give the guests a little tour as we go before we can take you to Chris. Do you mind just following along?”

Antoine took a moment to consider what he was being asked and said, “Sure. Were we supposed to take these?” He held up the three tickets he had gotten from Silas the Mechanical Showman.

“Those are for participating in the events,” Todd said, “if you decide you want to do that. We have some really cool stuff this year. I’m sure Chris told you all about it.”

“There’s a trivia contest at a bar, right?” Antoine asked. “Scary movie trivia?”

“There is,” Todd said. “But you’re not going to win if there’s anything I can do about it.”

As a matter of fact, the movie trivia contest is why I was invited. They needed a ringer.

“Great,” Valerie said. “If we can get the guests of the convention to come to the front, please.”

Bobby Gill and his wife Janet shuffled forward hauling their luggage.

The woman in the brown jacket stayed behind with the rest of us, never saying a word, carrying her meager luggage.

“Kind of a strange time to be visiting the place, right?” Camden whispered to me as we grabbed our luggage and began following the three guides.

I nodded.

“What kind of place is Carousel?” Anna asked Antoine as we took to the road.

“Dude, I have no idea,” he answered. He must have been as confused as we were. Apparently, his brother didn’t tell him about the welcome committee.

Anna moved closer to me and Camden and asked me, “What are you doing after graduation?”

“Traveling the world,” I said as we marched down the road. “I’ll move from place to place, staying one step ahead of my student loan provider.”

Anna laughed. “I’ve considered that,” she said. “I think they’d find me.”

“Realistically, grad school,” I said. “I don’t know what I would study, but at least it would put off the real world for a few years.”

“They should put that on their brochures,” Camden said.

“What about you two?” I asked. I looked at Camden. “You still going the medical school route?”

“No,” Camden said. “I’m sticking with engineering. The allure of acquiring knowledge has faded. I just want to graduate and make enough money to take care of my family, then I’m retiring early.”

“No surfing doctor?” I asked. It had been a joke when we were kids. Camden said he wanted to open a medical practice near a beach.

“Surfing engineer,” he said. “The hours are better.”

Camden and I managed to pick up where we left off. Lame jokes were like a secret handshake for us when we were kids. I was happy to see we were still in lockstep.

“What did you decide on?” I asked Anna.

“Antoine says he’s going to make me the Secretary of the Interior when he wins the presidency, so I have that job lined up,” she said. “I think I’ll do some volunteer work until then.”

I laughed. “He made a good choice.”

As we walked, my curiosity turned back to those strange tickets we had been supplied so generously by the creepy animatronic figure. I took mine from my pocket and examined them. My friends may not have been too interested in whatever role-playing game the town at Carousel was putting on, but it looked interesting to me. Was Carousel a fancy LARPer colony or something?

“What did you get?” I asked Camden, showing him my tickets.

He showed me his.

He had a silver ticket:

His stats were almost the same as mine.

He had also received a green ticket:

His third and final ticket was blue: