For a while, it was just me and Cecilia On-Screen. She talked in circles. At first, I thought she was just redoing lines to get a better take for Carousel, but then I started to suspect that she was lacking some of her higher faculties.

“When Howard fixes me, I think I will run for Miss Carousel. I’ll have to make a new name, obviously, but that is hardly a problem. If you can change your name, you can change who you are,” she said. After a few moments, she added, “Oh, you really don’t have any idea how beautiful that girl is. I watched her at the party. She was the center of attention.”

That wasn’t strictly true. Dr. Halle was the person everyone else was looking at, but Kimberly was the center of Cecilia’s attention.

“Howard says he cannot guarantee that I’ll look the same as I did, but I’m fine with that. My old life isn’t something I would want to go back to anyway. A pretty daughter is a feather in her father’s cap. Isn’t that the saying? It certainly felt that way.”

“Did you ever run for Miss Carousel back before…” I started to say, but I realized last second that asking her what happened to her might have been the very thing that triggered her Don’t Wake The Beast trope.

I didn’t want to wake the beast. Not even a little.

“Back when I was beautiful?” she asked.

The air was drawn out of the room. I thought I heard a frenzy hiding in her voice.

I shrugged.

She stared at me for dramatic effect. Not being able to see her face or eyes made it impossible to know what was going on in her head. I tested the straps that held me to my hospital bed. They held tight like a treacherous seatbelt.

She gingerly grabbed my injured hand.

She admired the craftsmanship of the long thin fingers. They were like a pianist’s fingers, perhaps. Gray as death, but long and nimble.

What kind of creature could they have come off of? I thought they might be a monkey’s fingers, given the animal parts schtick, but that wasn’t right either. They had an artificiality to them.

She clasped my hand, squeezing it tightly.

Then she answered my question.

“I did run for Miss Carousel. It wasn’t my idea. I was told to. So I did. That’s not what the gossips thought, but they always were so mean. It was just me, the girl who worked reception at my dad’s business, and Julie Havers. The others dropped out. She had a leg cast, Julie did. She had to get it removed prematurely for the competition. Her brother did it with a hack saw. I watched. I don’t know how he didn’t draw blood. It smelled so bad under her cast. Like she was rotting.”

Her gloved fingers moved over my new ones, squeezing them, testing them.

“She was in tremendous pain, you know. The whole time. Everyone watched her wondering when her leg might just… snap. I don’t know how she hid the pain on her face for the judges. I always admired her for that. You don’t deserve the beauty if you can’t deal with the pain…”

Cecilia drifted off into a memory.

I swallowed hard.

Across the room, Isaac let out a moan. He was waking up. I dreaded what might happen when he sobered up enough to understand his situation.

“It looks like he almost has the process figured out,” I said, trying to be positive.

Cecilia looked back to Isaac.

“No. Not quite. He still can’t figure out the molding process. I’ve heard nothing but promises for over a decade. I haven’t given up. You can never give up,” she said. “The pain doesn’t matter. Only the possibilities matter.”

I started to realize that Cecelia might have been drugged. The lulls in her voice. The determination to just float into the future without a future. It was all so familiar.

I suspected something else. Cecilia might not be her name. I had my suspicions.

"Dr. Halle was Jed Geist's personal doctor.," I said. "Did you know him?"

Cecilia didn't answer for a moment.

"He was a nice man," she said with a sniffle. "They never did figure out who killed him, did they? I hear he was the last living Geist, but I don't think he counts. He never cared about his family. He just let them burn up and threw them away... Some say the Geists deserved what happened to them. Do you think so?"

I couldn't say. We hadn't been told what they even did yet.

"Most people don't deserve what happens to them," I said.

She paused again. I could feel her eyes on me even though I could not see them.

"Some do," she said coldly. It was the last thing she said in the scene.

How did Cecilia fit into all of this? There was one person at the center of everything. One person connected Halle’s experiments to Jed Geist’s death.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

That was the point, after all. Figuring out who killed Jed Geist and why. But then Bobby did say there were multiple directions the script could go.

I had ideas, but how did I test them without triggering her trope? I would have to wait until I wasn’t tied down. I would need a weapon and an escape route before I poked that bear.

Isaac started moaning louder, crying.

Cecilia bolted the moment he started as if his anguish was torture for her.

He continued crying, then screaming in horror.

He was pushing against his restraints, desperate to get out.

“Isaac,” I yelled. “Isaac. Listen to me!”

He looked at me with his new eye. The uninjured half of his face was still covered.

His pupil was wide and with points on either end. The green tint around it was too large.

It was clear he had only just noticed me when I spoke to him.

“Isaac,” I said. “You’re going to be okay. Just tell a joke. It’ll make you feel better,” I said, referencing his mental health trope, Gallows Humor, that soothed him when he made a morbid joke.

He was panicking. The drugs were clearing up. The sedative was a made-up movie drug that didn’t play by logical rules. He shouldn’t have been coming out of it that fast.

“Wait,” I said, “I got one.”

If my plan didn’t work, I was going to feel like a real jerk.

“Look at this,” I said, wiggling my new elongated digits, “I can count to twelve and a half on my fingers now.”

I hoped he would catch on to what I was telling him. Carousel would probably cut that joke.

It looked like he was about to say something.

“I can take a group photo all by myself now,” he mumbled.

That was a joke. I couldn’t tell if it was working.

“That’s good,” I said. “You got another?”

He was staring across the room at the window, which was so clean and polished he could see his reflection in it. I had wondered why the windows of this old decrepit building had been the only thing clean. This was part of the plan.

“Don’t look at yourself,” I said. “Just close your eyes. Tell me another joke.”

He did as I said.

“I wonder if I can get mirrors for half price now,” he said. He continued mumbling on, trying to keep his mind off his condition. “No, the half-off joke should be about Halloween costumes. Now I know which side is my good side.”

His Incapacitated status, which had been fully lit, was now blinking. His trope was working. The jokes were calming him down, even the bad ones.

As he calmed down, we went Off-Screen.

I noticed that the hybrid goons that had hanging around had all left the lab. Bobby was gone. So were Cecilia and Dr. Halle.

We marched toward Second Blood. It was soon and I was no closer to getting out of the bed.

I started contemplating all of the different escape methods I might employ. Scooting the bed to find a scalpel, turning the whole bed over, simply wiggling until I squirmed free, etc., but none of them would work. My Escape Artist trope would have gone off if they were plausible.

What was I supposed to do?

Luckily, my answer came only minutes later.

Someone kicked in the door to the lab. It was the same door I had seen when I arrived at the abandoned building.

I soon heard feet shuffling inward.

On-Screen.

“I told you I could have picked it,” Dina said.

“As cool as that would have been, you were taking too long,” Antoine said.

They had made it!

“Over here!” I shouted.

In the excitement of their arrival, Isaac screamed, “Don’t look at me!”

The method that had soothed him before stopped working.

“Isaac,” Cassie said. “Isaac! Oh my god!”

She ran across the room. The others were right behind her, avoiding the equipment that was stacked around the place.

“Cut me out!” I screamed.

Antoine had been distracted by Isaac’s new face. He moved into action, grabbing a scalpel and cutting through my restraints like it was nothing.

I noticed that he was wearing Willis’ belt now, complete with weapons and radio.

I knew it was in vain, but I asked anyway, “Did you contact the cops?”

“They won’t listen to us. Thought it was a prank because of the Centennials. Can you believe that?” Antoine said.

I could believe it. That was the result of one of the enemy tropes in play. We had to try because that was what our characters would do, but of course, it wouldn’t work.

Isaac was on the verge of screaming as Antoine went to cut his restraints.

“Wait,” I said.

I rushed to the cabinet where Bobby had gotten the brass syringe and sedative.

“Kimberly, do you know how to use this?” I asked, handing her a clean syringe and a bottle of the magic drug.

She nodded. She took them from me and started reading the bottle.

“That is so weird,” she said under her breath.

She had used her Convenient Backstory to establish herself as a nurse. Administering this sedative would be a walk in the park.

She drew out the liquid and quickly sedated Isaac with a small amount.

Instantly, he calmed. He actually started laughing.

Off-Screen.

“Thank goodness you were able to show us where you were,” Cassie said. I could see he was hurt, but… “I didn’t even see him get taken. It was so dark.”

Kimberly put her arm around Cassie.

Antoine looked at me curiously. “Why did it attack him first? What happened with your plan?”

I knew what had happened. Bobby had ordered the attack. My plan to draw the bad guys away was working.

I couldn’t tell them that. At least not until the storyline was over.

“Maybe he got debuffed so his PA was lower than mine. Then the injury lowered it permanently,” I said. “Let’s talk about that later. Insert Shot told you to come here?”

I wasn’t sure what Insert Shot, the trope I used to notify my allies of Dr. Halle’s de-sedation gun, would look like to them.

“Got a notice on the red wallpaper that said, Anti-Serum Applicator. Dr. Howard Halle’s pocket at the abandoned Carousel water treatment facility,” Antoine explained. “Cassie pretended she got the info from a psychic vision. We went to City Hall and looked up the location on a big map Dina stole from them."

I nodded. I figured it would be like that.

Psychics were really useful. Having a narrative excuse to act on information obtained from allies' tropes was a huge win. To think, I could have been doing that the whole time with my background trope...

After a few moments to surveil the place and wait for Isaac to level out, we went On-Screen.

“We need to get out of here,” I said. “Halle is using a magic liquid called Ichor to fuse animal parts to humans. That’s what he did to us.”

I wiggled my long fingers.

Kimberly jumped back in shock.

“Most people use their fingers to count to ten,” Isaac said. “He can use his to multiply.”

The others chuckled, probably more at Isaac’s odd demeanor than the joke itself. It was basically my joke too, which I tried not to feel bitter about.

Antoine went to cut Isaac out of his bed.

“What kind of animal has skin like that?” he asked, looking closely at Isaac’s face.

Just as he asked the question, the building started to shake. It wasn’t the raging water from the sewers, though that was growing louder and louder, it was coming from deep inside the building.

“We need to get out of here,” I said, looking over in the direction that Bobby and Dr. Halle had run off to.

“Is that sound of the sewer breaking?” Kimberly asked.

“The water did speed up a lot,” Dina said. “That could be it.”

“No,” I said. “It’s something else.”

Whatever made that sound was nearby. I didn’t know what it was, but I feared we would soon find out.