Finally, the NPCs started to pack things away and break down the room. We were ready for the next scene. The tables of food were being packed up and taken somewhere in the distance. The sad part was that Bobby's Craft Services Are The Real Heroes trope had likely played some part in the absolute feast and he was the only player who had not gotten to enjoy it.
Not to mention that he was Mutilated wherever he was.
Kurt Willis, the GI Paragon who had been leading us on this storyline was playing his part being a likable if slightly boisterous police officer, was going into his spiel about how this was a waste of time again. He repeated himself a lot. I doubted every word would get into the final cut. I wondered how much, if any of it was actually on the script.
“Dr. Halle is very influential in this town,” he said. “Bothering him with nothing to show for it is going to be embarrassing for everyone here.” He gave us a look over. “Well, embarrassing for those of us with real jobs. I doubt the movie dude or the psychic are going to fall too far in public opinion from this pageant of misfit detect—”
Just as he was about to finish his line, a banquet worker walked by him pushing a trolley with a bowl of hard punch inside. As she did, the trolley’s wheel caught a snag in the carpet, and the bowl of punch launched up over Willis, showering him in the thick, syrupy red beverage.
He cursed loudly in shock.
If I didn’t know better, I would say he really was shocked, as if he was not expecting it. Was it possible something new had happened?
Cassie gasped. “It looks like blood!” she screamed. It sounded almost involuntary.
The banquet worker was apologizing profusely as Cassie started hyperventilating.
“I think he’s in danger,” she said.
“I can’t believe I got assigned to this stupid exercise in futility,” Willis yelled as he desperately tried to wipe the red drink off his uniform. It stained instantly.
“Nobody’s going to die,” he said with a meaningful gaze. “I have to go wash up. Don’t go anywhere without me. I’m in charge of making sure this investigation is above board!”
I got the feeling that when he said, “Don’t go anywhere,” he meant the opposite.
“Cassie,” Kimberly said, “It’s okay. He’s just fine. He’ll just need a new uniform.
“You don’t understand,” Cassie answered, “It’s a sign. It means that we are heading toward his death. It’s happened to me before.”
Willis looked at her at first with worry, but then he wiped that off his face and replaced it with anger. He left us behind after soaking up as much punch as he could with banquet napkins.
The punch had looked like blood.
Cassie’s Foreboding Signs trope could help her predict death order. In this case, it was telling her that Willis’ life was in danger. She was right, of course. He had a trope guaranteeing he would be First Blood. With her premonition, we would be able to discuss our impending doom On-Screen and in character. I could see how that would be useful.
“Are we really going to stay here?” I asked.
“Not a chance,” Antoine said. “I think we need to go see if Dr. Halle’s hiding something.”
He nodded over toward a large map of the new wing that had been constructed. Halle’s office was featured prominently on the first floor.
We knew where we were going.
----------------------------------------
“Why the heck would he need an office this big?” Isaac said. “Something tells me his ego had a hand in the new wing layout.”
We spread out. There was a wall of filing cabinets in a hall that looked like a break room connected to his office. His office also had its own bathroom, several closets, a separate area for his secretaries, a conference room, and a fountain that gurgled in the corner.
His desk was cluttered with paperwork as well. A solitary filing cabinet was behind it.
“Keep your voices down,” Antoine said. “If we get caught our investigation is over.”
We searched high and low. The file cabinets were locked, but his desk drawer where he kept the keys wasn’t. Dina found them in seconds. She didn’t even have a trope for that.
We each took a cabinet and started searching.
“I’ve got it,” Kimberly said. “The file from the surgery he performed the morning of the murder.” She looked over it. “My initial impression is that it looks right. I trained as a nurse to help round out my profile for the pageant circuit. These logs and notes are consistent.” She flipped through them. “He was operating for five hours…” She read aloud, “The foreign object was carefully removed, necessitating intricate dissection due to its size and the extent of tissue involvement. Multiple sections of the small intestine were resected, and primary anastomosis was performed… The nursing staff signed off on it.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
She passed the documents around. Her Savvy jumped four points. Convenient Backstory was a really quick way to graduate from nursing school.
“Look,” she said, “He could have faked the whole document, but then the conspiracy would have to include a dozen other people. I just don’t think he’s lying about it.” She looked up at the frames on the wall filled with graduate certificates, licenses, and newspaper clippings. “The guy is incredibly qualified. He’s a world-renowned plastic surgeon yet he was the first call for a complicated emergency surgery from an abdominal injury.”
“So either he’s innocent or he managed to get a lot of people to lie for him,” Antoine said. “That’s terrible news. It means we broke into his office for nothing.”
“We’ll just tell him I came in for a consultation,” Isaac said. “I wonder what the going rate on calf implants is.”
Antoine casually handed him a folder to look through. Antoine had taken a peek. Isaac took it and began flipping through it.
“Check this out,” he said, holding up a large folder filled with photographs.
We gathered around him and looked over his shoulder. Inside, were a collection of photographs of women in various attire, ranging from swimsuits to evening gowns. They appeared to be on stage.
The women were beautiful, but the pictures themselves were marked up with ink from someone circling their various body parts and writing notes beside them like, “Gorgeous” “Perfect” or “Too chubby”.
The pictures spanned at least a decade.
“Oh my god,” Kimberly said as Isaac flipped through them. “That’s me!”
She grabbed the picture and examined it closely.
On the back, it said, “Miss Carousel 1994.” Kimberly was the reining Miss Carousel.
“They’re all Miss Carousels,” Isaac said, showing the other side of several of the photos.
There were lots of names. He flipped through them. At the bottom of the stack was a picture with “Miss Carousel 1972” written on it.
“This is the oldest one,” he said, flipping the page over. The woman was beautiful. It was the only one without notes on it.
“He is a plastic surgeon,” Antoine said. “I imagine this is just his way of staying on his game.”
“Yeah,” Isaac said. “It’s probably like those magazines the barber gives you so you can pick out a haircut. He lets women pick out what they want to look like. I’ll take the lips from ’89, the forehead from ’91, and ‘77’s calves are to die for.”
“Still,” Kimberly said, “It feels strangely violating.”
“Is it because he said you had a perfect face?” Isaac asked.
Kimberly didn’t look sure, but I could tell she was uneasy.
“Let’s put this back,” I said. It was weird and all, but it didn’t make sense for us to dwell on it too long.
I grabbed the photos, stacked them back in the file, and put them back in the file cabinet. As I went to shut the large drawer, something strange happened.
The drawer closed before I had even gotten my hand out of it. The metal edge clamped down on my right hand.
I withdrew and winced in pain.
Cassie stared at me nervously. We both had the same realization. Her Foreboding Signs trope appeared to be at work again. I hoped that having my hand slammed in a drawer was a very loose metaphor. I didn’t want to be crushed that day.
“Your hand,” she said, pointing her finger at my appendage.
I looked closely at it. There was a thin red mark where the drawer had slammed, but it wasn’t an unbroken line. The metal edge had not been smooth. The line was broken up into little dots.
The marks made me think “Cut along the dotted line, Doc” but I hoped I was just looking too far into it.
“I’ll have to be more careful,” I said.
“There you are!” a deep voice boomed from across the room. “What in god’s name are you doing?”
It was Officer Willis. He was wearing a collection of odds and ends that I expected must have come from the lost and found bin. He wore a tropical shirt and shorts that were so short he was in danger of being making this film X-rated. His uniform was in a bag in his hands, but his gun belt and its various weapons were still strapped around his waist.
“You can’t be here. You are acting on behalf of the government. This is a warrantless search. Don’t you understand what that means?”
“That you didn’t see anything, and you need to take another lap around the building?” Isaac said. He was still a little jumpy, but I appreciated his effort. “You look great by the way.”
“This is serious,” Willis said. “I’m calling the mayor’s office. This whole thing was a joke and now you’re breaking the—”
He went silent.
“Someone’s coming,” he said.
He thought for a moment. Even with his condemnation of us, it was clear he didn’t want to get caught. Whether it was his character’s fault or not, he was responsible for us.
“Dammit,” he said. “Hide. Now. If I get in trouble for this, I am tasing you all.”
So we did. Willis flipped off the light and each of us found our best hiding spots.
Something appeared on the red wallpaper. Dina had used her Pen Pal trope to leave a note for us. Since we were all in the room with her, we didn’t have to search for it like normal.
The note said, “Newbies in the closet by the coffee maker.”
Dina didn’t have the highest Hustle for sneaking around(which may have been an oversight on her part) but she could sense which parts of the set were going to be Off-Screen thanks to Outside Looking In. Getting the newbies in a good hiding spot was important because they did not have good Hustle stats either.
In the darkness, I saw three figures, Dina, Cassie, and Isaac go into the closet.
The rest of us didn’t need to. We had Hustle. Kimberly, Antoine, and I were tied in the stat at 5 points (not including Antoine’s buffs from Gym Rat). Officer Willis’ Hustle was good too. I finally understood why Halle’s office was so large.
We needed plausible places to hide. This was in the script, or at least some version of it was. That meant we were doing well I hoped.
People were coming and they were taking forever.
I hid underneath a long conference table. If I was in danger of discovery, I could dart for the secretaries office.
I didn’t see where the others went. Normally, we might not have risked hiding under these circumstances, but with a Paragon telling us to, we had more confidence. Not to mention, we all got a buff to Hustle from following his command because of his Provisional Command trope.
We waited as whispers grew louder down the hall.
Eventually, it became clear that the intruders were Dr. Halle and, as the red wallpaper told me, Cecilia. She had not yet been introduced to us On-Screen, but we had taken note of her. It was hard to miss the person covered from head to toe in black fabric.
“All I’m saying,” Cecilia whispered, “Is that she is interesting, isn’t she?”
“No,” Halle answered. “She is not. She is a perfectly healthy young woman. I have no use for her.”
“But wouldn’t she be perfect for your studies?”
“Cecilia,” he said, “I am a principled man. My studies have strict guidelines and she fits none of them. She is flawless.”
I heard the sound of something heavy creaking along the floor, along with the sloshing of water.
“The fact is,” he said, “I am not certain that it is wise for you to be so fixated on that methodology. The current system is making rapid improvements.”
They continued to speak to one another, but their voices faded and the sound of friction and sloshing water returned.
I looked out from under the conference table and looked toward where I had last seen them over at the back of the office where the water fountain still gurgled.
They were gone.