“Everyone grab a scalpel,” Antoine suggested. He dumped the contents of a drawer that had been filled with the little metal surgical implements wrapped in protective wax paper onto a cold metal table. “I have a feeling we’re going to need something sharp soon.”

A cackle came from behind him.

“We’ll take our tiny knives and you take your gun. We’ll see who’s best,” Isaac said with a giggle. The sedative had washed away his panic. He sat and pressed a finger into the new side of his face, then he ran it up, tracing his stitches upward.

After everyone had grabbed one we all looked at each other silently. A fight was coming. That was true. Isaac was right. A scalpel wouldn't do much in a fight against multiple opponents. Antoine just wanted us to feel safer.

After a moment of silence, Antoine said, “What’s next?”, trying to ignore Isaac.

“Two doors,” Dina said. She stared into the distance. Her eyes were unfocused. I knew that look. She was reading the red wallpaper. “One seems to go further into the building. The other leads outside. Either way, we’re On-Screen as soon as we leave this room.”

Her Outside Looking In trope helped her avoid the spotlight. It looked like, this time, there was no avoiding it.

I noticed that Dina had blood in her hair from their first run-in with the enemy during first blood. They had been attacked in the dark. Never saw a thing but glimpses on the red wallpaper. Officer Willis' flashlight had run out of batteries just before the attack. Flashlights were one of the staples of horror. You needed a trope for them to work right.

Kimberly had managed to make it work again later by saying she had replaced the batteries while On-Screen. Sure enough, it had fired right up. It would probably stop working the moment we needed it again.

“I’m not sure what we’re supposed to do here,” Kimberly said. She flicked the flashlight on and off nervously. I noticed that she tried her best not to look at Isaac's face. She was trying to be strong. “I thought we were solving a mystery, but then we have to deal with monsters.”

She had a point. I was starting to see what Kurt Willis had been talking about. This story was not like the others that we had played through before the tutorial. In a way, it felt like one story stacked on top of another. Part of it was the Throughline.

Outside, the water in the sewers raged. It felt like we were in the bowels of a ship during a hurricane. At any moment, the ship could capsize.

"Now I know what a dirty mug feels like in the dishwasher," Isaac said, as the water became louder; the giant pit outside could only drain so much.

Maybe that was a better metaphor.

Everyone was waiting for me to have a plan. That meant I had to have one. I took a deep breath. I had been through a lot in the last few scenes. The thing that kept coming up in my mind was Cecilia. She was hiding something. Don't Wake the Beast, her trope had been called.

I had a strong conviction that Waking the Beast was exactly what we were supposed to do. She had said that some people deserved death and she was talking about Jed Geist. It couldn't be a coincidence. She was our next move.

But I needed them to make that decision with me.

“We could get out of here and regroup on the surface," I said. "According to Location Scout, part of this story takes place in Town Square." I paused to let them mull over the idea of escape. "At least that’s one idea.”

“Leave the rapidly flooding sewer system? Glad we have a high-savvy player to figure that one out,” Isaac said dreamily. His eyes were closed as he lay back on his hospital bed. He made a very chill Frankenstein's monster.

The water rushed louder. The earth beneath our feet shook gently, but we all felt it.

“You said it’s one idea,” Antoine said, ignoring Isaac again. He kept a hand on his holster, ever ready to protect us. “What’s the other idea?”

“The woman called Cecilia on the red wallpaper knows something about Jed Geist she wasn’t saying,” I said. “We could go find her.”

“Cecilia?” Kimberly asked. Her voice cracked. Her hair was up in a wet ponytail. With every breath, she looked on the verge of tears, but she was being brave. “What was her deal?”

I took a deep breath.

“I don’t think her name is Cecilia for one. I had a conversation with her where she shot up half a dozen red flags. The thing is, she’s sedated with the same drug as Isaac."

"Lucky her," Isaac said with a smile. He still kept his eyes closed. "High five."

He didn't even raise his hand.

I continued. "Part of the reason I used the Insert Shot on that little wake-up gun Halle has is because of how zonked she acted and that was before I had a one-on-one with her. Now I’m certain.”

The fact that she had a trope called Don’t Wake the Beast was also strong evidence for me. I had seen the trope before, but this time it felt a little on the nose.

More than that, I felt the pieces just fit together. Even if we didn't have all of them.

Antoine took a deep breath and nodded his head. “So we use this Antiserum Applicator to get her sobered up. Then she spills her secrets. There's one problem. How are we going to justify going further into the building instead of leaving? I mean, this place is a bunker of pure concrete dug into the ground. There might not be other exits." He gestured around at the concrete walls and floor. "Honestly, I thought we were pushing it when we came down into the pitch-black tunnels to begin with. Our characters have a death wish.”

He had a point.

“Bobby is hurt,” Cassie said, looking at me. She hadn't been holding back tears. Her dark mascara was running and her breaths were irregular. “Not just Mutilated and Hobbled. He keeps getting Incapacitated. Can we say we're trying to save him? His wife was looking for him. You saw his missing poster and his face. Maybe we're just good people. Can't that be enough?”

That might have worked if I had time to establish a connection with Bobby’s character On-Screen. Unfortunately, I was either sedated or conversing with Halle most of the time we were together.

“That’s probably the closest justification we have, but it’s still a stretch,” I said. “Especially since he appears to have joined the bad guys and our characters know that.”

“Oh,” Cassie said, looking dejected. An idea lit up her eyes. “I could have a vision saying we have to go that way.”

That was a good idea.

“No matter what we do,” I said. “It will be the—”

“—wrong decision,” Antoine finished my sentence. I had used that phrase a lot. “Do we want to regret trying to escape or do we want to regret trying to solve this thing? I don’t know about you all, but I’m aiming for second place.”

We all knew the answer. Mere survival was not a victory. We needed to understand what had happened to Jed Geist.

That meant we were going with option B.

“Here’s what I know about the murder,” I said. “Most of the clues aren’t real clues that a detective would use. I see all of the narrative signs pointing to one person. As crazy as it might sound.”

I told them everything that Cecilia had told me and why I thought she knew more than she was letting on.

“How sure are you that we can get her to talk?” Antoine asked. "Don't Wake the Beast sounds like a pretty clear warning."

“A soft 70 percent,” I said.

He bit his lip.

“That'll have to be good enough,” Antoine said. “What else are we doing today?"

"I was hoping to buy a mask," Isaac said. "Surely Carousel has a mask store. I'm for something Phantom of the Opera, but anything that covers this thing up would work."

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

We all rolled our eyes at the same time.

“Something we haven’t talked about is what to do with him,” Kimberly said.

She was right. Isaac was going to slow us down big time. Going into a potential fight with him could spell disaster. Even escaping with him would be difficult. He was able to walk, but he had no sense of urgency.

“I must have gotten the dosage wrong,” Kimberly continued. “The writing wasn’t in English.”

Carousel likely had a hand in that. It couldn’t let us make things too easy.

The time for talk was over. I laid out the plan and it was time to go.

I hadn’t told them what Bobby had told me about the scripts diverging. If I had mentioned that, they might have figured out he had been the one to cause Isaac to be attacked. I hadn’t told them that this was the strongest foundation for my suspicion that if we fled, we would not get the ending we needed. I just had to hope that he had been right.

“Let’s do it,” Antoine said.

He took a step out the door toward the tunnel system we had arrived from. Instantly, we were On-Screen.

“No!” Cassie screamed. “We can’t.”

She buckled to her knees and started hyperventilating. It almost sounded like she was drowning. She had a flair for the dramatic.

“What’s wrong?” Antoine said.

“We can’t go that way,” she said between strained breaths. “The waters are rising. We’ll get trapped before we can escape. We'll drown. We have to go further underground. Our lives depend on it... finding the answers depends on it. We have to go further. Please.”

Cassie wasn’t a bad actress at all. Her terrified expression was genuine. This was pure improvisation. Hopefully, Carousel would be okay with it.

“Damn it to hell,” Antoine said skeptically. “Do you want to run into more of those… things? You weren’t there when they attacked before. I can’t let us go through that again. I can’t.” He looked up at Kimberly. “There has to be another way.”

Cassie didn’t respond. She just looked up at him with tears rolling down her face and mouthed the words, “Please.”

“She led us down here somehow,” Dina said. “She knew what the building was called. Maybe we should listen to her.”

Antoine didn’t respond. He just looked at Kimberly.

When Kimberly nodded, he stepped back from the door.

“This is crazy,” he said. “What do you think of this?” he asked, looking at me.

“I think that woman in black knows more than she’s letting on,” I said. “Besides you can fight monsters, but if we get trapped in a flood… we’re helpless.”

Antoine nodded.

“Better get ready for a fight,” he said.

We all made a show of brandishing our scalpels. Kimberly held onto the sedative and the brass syringe. That would be an effective weapon.

Antoine walked over to the large door leading deeper into the building. He pushed it open and we piled through it. Kimberly and Cassie helped guide Isaac.

"Weirdest pub crawl I've ever gone on," he said with a giggle as they practically carried him along.

We were on our way. The needle on the Plot Cycle marched forward with every step.

The rumbling sound from earlier pounded again. We were getting closer to it, whatever it was.

An alarm started to sound as if it were waiting for us. Red lights and a blaring horn filled the hallway.

“There’s been a breach of the posterior wall. The foundation is compromised,” Halle’s voice rang out over an intercom. “Divert all incoming water toward the base specimens. We have no further use for them. We cannot let the proteus pools collapse. All personnel work to prioritize the east wing. We mustn’t let all our sacrifices be in vain.”

“We need to run,” I said as water started to flood in behind us.

The others looked back.

“Move,” Antoine cried out.

We were locked into our decision. No going back.

The intercom came on again a few minutes later. Halle’s voice was hurried and panicked. “The damage is too severe. Open the retaining doors and release the specimens from the proteus pools. If they remain there, they will be crushed by debris. Then you must save yourselves. All personnel evacuate. All is lost.”

“Evacuate?” Antoine asked. “That means there are marked exits.”

Isaac started laughing.

I followed his gaze. I couldn’t quite believe what it was I saw.

A human ear was hopping down a hallway. That’s what it looked like. A disembodied gray ear. There was no blood or gore. Just a misshapen fleshy ear quickly bouncing down the hall.

At first glance, I was immediately Incapacitated by its tropes. I didn’t even have time to look at it on the red wallpaper before it turned a corner, but I remembered a trope that the guy who bit my hand had.

Animals Are Psychic. The trope reminded me of the instinctual ability of animals to find safety during a natural disaster. I was ready to bet that the hopping little ear had that same trope too and would lead us to safety.

Well, safety from the flood at least.

“That way!” I cried out.

No one argued with me. We turned and ran after the apparently dismembered body part.

When we did, we found the exit. It wasn’t marked though.

There had been a cave-in. A wall had collapsed and a mudslide had poured down into a large concrete room. I could see cobblestones mixed in with the mud. Pavement too. The ground above had collapsed from the floodwater.

I saw gray light leaking in through the hole.

It was a way to get to the outside. Water streamed down the collapsed earth, but it was climbable. The hole that had opened up in the ceiling was at least thirty feet in diameter. I could hear the noise from the Centennial up above.

I could also hear screams. A glance at the needle on the Plot Cycle told me it was Second Blood.

There was no question what they were screaming about.

Climbing up the collapsed mound toward the surface, was an army of human body parts.

Hands. Feet. Faces. Hearts. Intestines.

All of them had been grown, molded onto the backs of giant mutant frog-shaped creatures. The frogs’ flesh wasn’t green. Some of it was gray. Some of it was brown. Some of it was a caucasian pink. All of it was ill-fitting as it sagged off of its host creature.

Isaac tried to make a joke, but even in his sedated state, he couldn’t say anything in the presence of the creatures.

Among them was an impossibly large frog. It was the size of a tank. It could have swallowed a man whole. It had faces molded onto its back, along with entire mounds of flesh-covered bones. The faces were fully functional, and muscled. They had jaws but no teeth. Some of them had voice boxes that wheezed. Tongues lulled about. Eyes rolled in their sockets.

They were just spares. They had to just be spares, grown in the lab. They couldn’t be real people attached to the back of the monster.

Skin Frog

Plot Armor: 25

__________

Tropes

An Affront to Nature

This creature is revolting to see for the first time. One glance will leave the viewer Incapacitated with revulsion.

Unwarranted Aggression

This creature will attack when and if the plot calls for it without logical motivation.

They’ll Never Believe You

When tangling with this creature, the authorities will not believe or take seriously anything the players tell them.

Animals Are Psychic

The creature demonstrates knowledge that it has no logical means to acquire, an instinct to kill or survive.

Uncharted Anatomy

This creature has a unique anatomical design that makes killing them difficult and unpredictable without further study.

Thoroughly Dispersed

This creature’s group can instantly occupy the entirety of a set area, making it appear omnipresent and unpredictable to characters.

Frenzy to the Finish

In a Fight or Chase Scene starting in Second Blood, this creature will prioritize targeting characters based on their Hustle stat alone, regardless of their total Plot Armor.

All Hope is Lost

Flee. Abandon all hope of victory. The Win Condition is Escape the Fray

I looked at the transplanted fingers on my hand. I could see the bandaged hand on the skin frog that it had come off of.

The frog let out a bellow so loud I could feel it in my bones. It had been the thing making the rumbling noise.

I shook my head, snapping myself out of it. We were On-Screen, but I had to tell my friends what the Win Condition was.

“Escape!” I screamed.

They didn’t need to be told twice.

We ran toward the pile of mud and gravel and started climbing our way up. Water poured down on us as we clawed for the surface.

Antoine was working overtime, climbing, then turning around to yank us up after him.

He climbed a tall block of concrete that had been in the mix. Then he reached out to help the others. One step after another, we forced our way up the hill of mud and stone until we found ourselves on the surface in the middle of town square.

The larger skin frogs were devouring people. They even gobbled up any hybrid human they saw. The feather lady's feathers floated in the air as she lay dead.

The rain came down in sheets.

One skin frog that was the size of a car let loose its tongue and wrapped up a nurse. I noticed there were dozens of human tongues attached to it. The creature slurped her up and bit her in half.

Mass human carnage. Most of the NPCs had only 3 Plot Armor. They were defenseless.

“Where do we go?” Antoine screamed.

I didn’t know. I looked around.

I saw a flash of a white lab coat and Dr. Halle on the red wallpaper.

“Over here!” I said.

“Does this count as cannibalism?” Isaac asked, watching a man getting gnawed on by a frog that had multiple sets of human teeth in its jaw.

We ignored him.

I could now also see Cecilia and Bobby on the red wallpaper in the crowd. We chased after them.

The frog with human teeth jumped after us, but Antoine was ready with his sidearm. One shot in the head.

Nothing. The creature was hurt, but its injury almost energized it.

It leaped at Cassie as she helped Isaac along, but before it could bite her, Isaac managed to twist her forward, taking her out of the frog's path and putting himself in the way.

His brotherly instinct had cut through the mind-numbing effects of the sedative, if only just for a moment. He technically broke character, if only for a moment. I had felt the effects of the drug. I knew how it felt. The real Isaac was in there and managed to exert his will when the moment called for it.

Isaac laughed as he realized what he had done. The frog sank its rows of teeth into him. Its mouth was so large that it managed to bite his whole torso.

Antoine took another shot. Then another. Kimberly was readying the syringe to try and put the frog to sleep, but the frog let go of Isaac, who was now bleeding from dozens of little bite marks. He didn't appear bothered by them at all. Between the sedative and his Bloodloss Delirium trope, Isaac wasn't going to be bothered by anything.

Both the Fight Scene and Chase Scene statuses were lit up, so the person with the lowest Hustle would fall victim.

Dozens, hundreds of NPCs were getting killed as the fleshy, misshapen monsters leaped around.

Everywhere we turned, there were more and more body parts. Many were attached to the donor frogs that lugged them around. Others were ripped off of actual humans.

The further we went, the fewer living NPCs we saw. The place was strewn with their body parts.

Fewer NPCs meant that soon, the frogs would only have one target left.

Us.