We moved as quickly toward the hospital as we possibly could. Isaac was slowing us down. He was bleeding out. Unfortunately because of his sedation and the tropes that he had equipped it was nearly impossible to tell exactly how close he was to death.

A few times I actually thought he had died but the red wallpaper confirmed that he had not yet, though his Dead indicator status had lit up briefly once or twice, sending Cassie into tears.

As we moved, I tried throwing out ideas of what we would do when we got there. Trying to string together some motivation for our characters was difficult. This storyline made it difficult the moment we decided not to just run for the hills.

“Whatever you do,” I said, “Don't try to kill him.”

I had other ideas on how we would get his magic little wake-up gun out of his pocket. Unfortunately, they relied on Isaac to survive until we found the good doctor.

On-Screen.

“Everyone down!” Willis screamed.

I hit the ground.

I heard gunshots firing. I heard the sound of things dying though I could not exactly call them screams. It was Antoine shooting, not Willis.

“Move!” Willis cried again.

Off-Screen.

“It's a dance,” Willis said. “Don't just bam bam bam kill every enemy you see. Shoot one duck behind the car then pop out and shoot another. Let it rush you for a few feet, and shoot again. Make it entertaining.”

“I just stop shooting them?” Antoine asked. “They were coming right for us. I’m supposed to just let them get closer?”

“You evaluate, you make a judgment, and you give Carousel a nice piece of footage. Never let the audience know when things are easy, or they won’t be.”

Antoine sounded frustrated.

We kept moving forward, a half block at a time. The frogs were everywhere, strategically placed so that they were behind things in your line of sight, only to jump out at us as we moved forward. Most of them weren’t serious threats. Some didn’t even attack us. A lot chased NPCs, but they never did that close enough to us for us to intervene.

On-Screen.

“Hospital’s half a block further,” Willis said. “He still cracking jokes?”

Isaac moaned.

Kimberly was helping him along. She looked him over and said, “We don’t have long. He’s lost a lot of blood.”

“There they are!” Dina said. “Going in the back way.”

She pointed toward the hospital. Our detour with the giant frog hadn’t taken us much time On-Screen. Halle, Cecilia, and Bobby must have slowed down for us to catch up for continuity.

“We’ll deal with him late,” Willis said. “We need to get to the emergency room. My money says it’ll be packed.”

That was a bet he lost.

We made it across the final street to the hospital.

The emergency room was to the right. The direction Halle had gone was to the left.

“I’m following them!” Dina said. She picked up speed and took off toward him.

“We’ll be right behind you,” I said.

As she left, she made notes on the red wallpaper using Pen Pal. I could only see two before she got too far away for me to see the rest.

We couldn’t go after her yet. We had hoops to jump through.

“Oh my god!” Kimberly said as we rounded the building toward the emergency room.

I might have said the same thing.

There were dead NPCs everywhere. More than I had ever seen. It was raining, but the water that flooded over the ground of the parking lot was thick with blood.

“And you were worried it would be crowded,” Isaac said.

We rushed to the door. It was locked.

Antoine banged on the door. It was an automatic, but they had disabled it and piled chairs in front of it.

“Hello!” Cassie screamed. “We need help!”

A lone nurse poked her head over a stack of chairs. Her nose had been bleeding and she looked scared out of her mind.

“Help,” Cassie screamed. “My brother’s hurt. Please let us in.”

That was a slip-up. They hadn’t been established as siblings in this story. Perhaps the audience will think she is lying for sympathy.

The nurse looked tempted to help and even started moving a chair, but then she got a full view of Isaac’s face.

Fear overcame her.

She turned tail and ran.

We watched her as she faded into the distance.

Oh well. We tried. At least it was an excuse to get to the hospital.

As the nurse faded into the distance, she stopped, turned, and started running toward us. We saw through the glass windows as a swarm of frogs the size of dirt bikes started chasing her back toward us.

As she got to us, she tried unstacking the chairs to escape, but she was too late. I saw her get dragged backward and that was the last of her.

“We need to move,” Willis said. “There’s a hospital west of here. It’s smaller, but it might be safer.”

“No!” Cassie said. “We have to save him. We need the doctor. He’ll help.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“That quack is the one who did this to him,” Antoine said.

Cassie started to cry. “He will help.”

“Plus,” I said. “That woman Cecilia is with him. She knows something about Geist.”

“How can you think about that right now?” Antoine asked. “That was a publicity stunt. Who cares who killed the lonely rich guy?”

We had gone with Antoine being the skeptic who argued against our ideas. We needed someone and he seemed like the most down-to-earth character we had.

“Dammit,” Antoine said. “If he turns me into one of…,” he shot a glance at Isaac. “If he does that to me, kill me.”

~-~

We followed Dina’s notes on the red wallpaper right back to Halle’s office. That was little surprise. We found her hiding in the shadows and watching as Halle packed a bag. We had been Off-Screen for a bit.

When I got a clear view of Halle’s office, I saw why.

On-Screen.

“Why didn’t you find me, Bobby?” Donna, his NPC wife cried. “I waited so long. I knew you were out there somewhere.”

She had found him at long last. He was crying, but he couldn’t reciprocate because his tongue was unnaturally long.

He hugged her. She ran a finger over his odd scars, his deformities. She didn’t seem the least bit deterred by his grotesque appearance.

As they embraced, she suddenly fell into his arms.

Halle stood behind her holding a syringe.

“She knows our little secret now,” Halle said. “I told you that if she found out she would join us, didn’t I?”

Bobby growled. He sounded like a dog.

We needed to get in there.

He lunged at Halle, but instead of going for his throat, he reached for something on Halle’s person.

“He’s going for Halle’s little wake-up gun,” I said.

Bobby had seen my Insert Shot trope activated on the red wallpaper. He was going for the Antiserum Applicator under the pretense of trying to reawaken his fake wife.

I rushed into the room. Halle was not a physically dominant enemy, but still, he gave Bobby a difficult time.

I noticed that Cecilia stood behind Halle’s desk. I hadn’t been able to see her before. She was just watching. Not a care in the world. Even without seeing her eyes, I could tell she wasn’t alarmed at all.

Bobby managed to remove the wake-up gun from Halle’s pocket. He couldn’t get ahold of it, in part because of his deformed hands. He knocked it away from Halle.

He knocked it right toward me.

I grabbed the gun. I did the classic pretend dilemma thing that characters do in movies as if I didn’t already know what to do next.

I glanced up at Cecilia. I ran to her and stuck the applicator against her arm and pulled the trigger.

Cecilia stumbled backward but didn’t react beyond that.

It wasn’t going to be as easy as bringing her out of sedation. I needed to solve the mystery. That’s how these things worked. Can’t get around that.

“You’re name isn’t Cecilia at all, is it?” I said.

She wasn’t looking at me. She looked at her gloved hands.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t say it.”

“You’re Lillian Geist,” I said. “Winner of the first Miss Carousel Pageant. You’re supposed to have died when the Geist Mansion burned up.”

She didn’t say anything, but she did turn her attention up toward me. Had I not said enough? Was I just wrong?

It was odd that we found a folder of photos of Miss Carousel winners in Halle’s office. At first, I thought it was some sort of plastic surgery nightmare storyline, but that wasn’t it. It was a story about animal-human hybrids and skin frogs.

The only Miss Carousel photo in Halle’s office that wasn’t scribbled all over belonged to Miss Carousel 1972. That was Lillian Geist. All of the signs had pointed to Lillian Geist from before this storyline even started. The newspaper clipping about her winning the first annual Miss Carousel Pageant had stuck out like a sore thumb when we read about the Geist family.

That picture in Halle’s folder had been of her, her true face. It was the first time I had ever seen a Geist, assuming a statue didn’t count.

The clue Kimberly and Antoine discovered about the mansion burning up, allegedly killing Lillian Geist, was placed conspicuously in the same room where we first met the veiled woman, Cecilia. Even the new hospital wing being the type that a burn victim might be admitted to was a clue.

All of it revolved around her. All of it pointed to her presence.

But they weren’t real clues. Not for a detective. They were clues for an audience—for the people watching the movie. To them, finding that photo would have meaning. That was for the benefit of the audience. It was some type of callback for them.

We had been given precious little backstory for this story. From what Willis had implied not-so-subtly, this story followed the villains’ perspectives more than it did ours.

We as characters were not being led to the truth. We were just here to try to survive the carnage.

“What you said about Jed Geist abandoning his family,” I said. “You were talking about yourself. He abandoned you. You attacked him.”

I didn't have the motive figured out so I tried to be vague.

“It’s not my fault,” Cecilia said. “It wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t control myself. It was what they did to me!”

She had said that if someone could change their name, they could change who they were. She had sure tried.

She reached up with trembling hands and removed her veil, pulling it off her head completely so that we could see her whole face and head.

She had been burned, of that I was sure, but that wasn’t even a fraction of what horrors had been done to her. Her face and head were covered from scalp to neck, with wriggling creatures that looked like a cross between a snake and a worm.

They were not freely moving. Instead, it looked like they had been grafted into her skin directly, one of Halle’s early experiments no doubt.

She put a trembling hand up to her face and felt the wriggling things.

She screamed in abject horror.

“Cecilia,” Dr. Halle said. “Calm down. I’ll get you sedated shortly. Just calm yourself. All will be set right.”

But Cecilia, or should I say, Lillian, grabbed onto one of the wriggling things and yanked it off her face. Blood poured from the place where the creature had been affixed.

“Leave the caecilians alone, Cecilia,” Halle said. “Don’t damage yourself further. I can still fix you.”

She didn’t listen. She ripped another caecilian off, whatever that was. Suh-si-lee-un.

“That isn’t my name,” she said. “I can never escape my family.”

Lillian Geist, The Beauty Queen

Plot Armor: 25

Geist

Tropes

The Tormented

This villain is out of the ordinary but you don’t know why.

An Affront to Nature

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

Home Lair Advantage

The villain can travel freely, unnoticed due to their knowledge of the setting and its passages - both public and secret.

They’ll Never Believe You

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

Animals Are Psychic

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

Far Gone

This villain has lost their humanity, but not all at once: Something remains.

Interests Align

This entity does not need the players to lose in order to achieve its goals.

Pattern Killer

Before the finale, the villain will only kill victims chosen according to a pre-established motive.

Non-Combatant

This villain cannot be attacked On-Screen until it attacks the player or is otherwise identified as hostile. Attacking it will not be effective, nor will it change the story. It will cause the player to go Off-Screen for a time.

A Woman Scorned

Never underestimate a woman seeking revenge. All stats and saving throws are buffed against those who wronged her and those who try to stop her.

Flashback Monologue

This villain has a story to tell, or, rather, to show.