Days passed while we waited at the hotel suite that had once been Jed Geist’s home.

Kurt Willis, the GI Paragon, had told my friends to wait a couple of weeks or so before pursuing the next storyline.

Weeks. Was that a figure of speech, or did he literally mean we had to just sit around?

That didn’t match up with what I knew about the Tutorial at all—nothing we had seen about the Tutorial referenced weeks spent twiddling thumbs. Then again, I had never seen or heard of an account of the tutorial from someone who completed it when it was new. I had estimated days at most.

It was still the day before the Centennial. We hadn’t crossed that threshold yet. I wanted to find the time capsule in the Mayor’s office, but there was always something stopping us from getting inside.

Dina looked at the lock on the door and said it would take weeks to pick.

Carousel was being adamant.

We were getting our rest at least. That might make sense for rookies. I just wanted to be through with the Tutorial and move on to rescues.

I was alone in the storage room of the hotel suite where we had found the old newspapers with information of Geist's murder. The room had been reset. All of the boxes were resealed. Somewhere along the line, I got it in my mind that it would be neat to reopen them and see if there was something new to learn.

So I did. I looked through every box all over again. They still had newspapers from around the time of Jed Geist’s death. Nothing had changed—no new information. We still needed the fireplace poker to summon his spirit and interrogate him.

As I continued cycling through the garbage that had been left behind from Jed Geist’s time in the house, I took a mental inventory of everything. It was strange. I swore there were new items. Old items were missing.

As I pondered this, Kimberly walked in and found me while I had my back turned.

“What’s got you brainstorming?” she asked.

I looked back at her. “Oh,” I said. “All of this stuff is different than the stuff that was here before.”

“Different? You think there are new clues in here?” she asked. “I can get the others to help look.”

I shook my head. “No, no. That’s not what I’m saying. These aren’t important objects. Like this,” I said, lifting a box, “There’s a waffle iron. There was a waffle iron when we went through it before, but this one is electric. The other one was the kind you put on the stove.”

She took the iron from me and looked it over. “Okay? Is that… important?”

“So that means that this room wasn’t just reset. Not really. It was restocked. That’s an important difference. We weren’t gentle with tearing through these boxes when we were looking for the newspaper articles. Someone took away the trash we left and replaced it with all new junk, all wrapped in the same newspaper with the date changed because of the continuity loop.”

“That’s interesting,” she said unconvincingly.

“It is. This means that there is a warehouse somewhere in Carousel filled with boxes that only exist to restock this room. That’s not all. Smell the air.”

“Smell the air?” she asked.

I nodded.

She took a sniff. “It smells like a thrift store,” she said. “And menthol. Jed Geist must have been a smoker.”

“No,” I said. “Well, he might have been. That’s not the point. The room didn’t smell this way before. I remember. It smelled like mold and old people. It didn’t smell like smoke. Check this out.”

I pointed to a stack of boxes near a large air vent. There was a small glass ashtray on one of the boxes. Two cigarette butts occupied the tray.

“Someone opened that box over there,” I said, pointing to a different stack of boxes. “They took that ashtray and smoked in this room after they restocked it. Then they left. This room wasn’t turned back to normal by magic. People reset it. NPCs.”

“Wow,” Kimberly said. "Hotel workers?"

“Maybe so,” I said. “Isn’t that interesting? Why would it work like that? Carousel has shown so much power, and yet it has people stacking boxes filled with old junk so that players can look through them to find these newspapers. It’s crazy.”

“Yeah,” she said. She tried to sound as enthusiastic as I was. “But there’s nothing for us back here?”

“No.”

She waited for a moment and then asked, “Riley, why are you back here?”

The question caught me off guard.

“I just told you.”

“We’re in the living room, and we’re having a good time, all things considered. You know we have to wait here for who knows how long. Why don’t you come in there with us? You said yourself there aren’t any more clues back here.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

I could hear them watching TV in the other room. It was a football game intercut with news bulletins.

“Even Dina’s in there, and she is literally an outsider. You can’t say it’s because you don’t know us. We’ve been here for months. If being here doesn’t make us friends, what could? And don’t say it’s because of Anna and Camden because you were the same way when they were… alive.”

I hated being put on the spot for this. As I grew up, I found myself straying away from groups more and more.

“I’ll come in there if you want,” I said. “It’s not that… Look, I’ve always been like this. My grandparents sent me to trauma counseling and everything when I was a kid. It’s just who I am.”

She set the waffle iron back inside the box she had taken it from and said, “Come on.”

The last thing I wanted to do was watch sports and relax. It was too early for that. We needed to figure out the Throughline and find a place to stay other than this haunted house. We needed to start rescues. We needed to raise our levels. We needed to get our friends back. Then, we could talk about letting our guards down.

But I relented. There was nothing to be found in those boxes that we hadn’t already seen. Frankly, if I refused, she might think I disliked them or something. That wasn’t true. It was just that they didn’t want to talk about Carousel or the Throughline.

That’s all I wanted to talk about. I couldn’t think about anything else.

----------------------------------------

Back in the living room, the others had pulled all of the furniture from around the house and a few mattresses back into the center of the room. They were watching Carousel University play the team with the Ranger Danger mascot.

The stadium was having a moment of silence for those who died days earlier in the terrible flood and ensuing attack. A man I recognized as the dean of the university was leading the moment of silence. Even through the television, I could see he looked uninterested. He had done it all before.

The moment of silence was over, and the teams took back to the field.

“I played in a game like this,” Antoine said. He had been drinking. I couldn’t blame him. “Demolished everyone. Best time I had in a storyline, hands down.”

We had kept the television on as we watched news footage from the aftermath of our last storyline. Unlike storylines from before, the damage and the deaths had remained, as Willis had seemed to imply they would. The reports were light on details. So light, in fact, they didn’t even officially mention the frogs.

The only reference to those mutant abominations was from a witness who spoke of giant monsters covered in human skin. The reporter had dismissed this claim.

Other than that, it appeared the deaths were canon, so to speak. And every few hours, the reporters would cycle through various stories.

As I got settled, the feed changed from the game to an interview again.

A reporter dressed in a tan jacket was standing outside the football stadium covering what appeared to be protests from the citizens of Carousel.

Their objections were difficult to discern at first.

“Impeach Mayor Gray!” one protestor yelled.

Others were not so polite. All manner of curse words were flung.

The screen cut away to a pair of newscasters. “Sounds like there are some passionate protestors down there. Just one moment as we reconnect with Jen in the field.”

This sort of thing happened all day. Newscasts in horror movies cut in and out without meaningful continuity. They were only there to reveal important information at the right moment. Then they were gone. Every time someone entered the living room, breaking news would overtake whatever came before it. We had heard most of the stories already.

This happened a few more times.

I sat in an oversized, overstuffed chair and watched as the news cycled between the game and coverage of the protests.

Live at Carousel University stadium; a reporter was interviewing a woman named Bonnie Hayworth, who was giving them lines about how celebrating the anniversary of the founding, even the centennial, was in bad taste.

“Thirty years ago,” she said, “Tragedy struck, and look here, days before the Centennial, tragedy struck again. When is our mayor going to realize that this town is better off forgetting its past?”

Back to the newscasters.

“It’s difficult not to be reminded of the 70th-anniversary disaster that happened almost exactly thirty years ago,” one reporter said. “The mayor’s office has issued a statement asking citizens to forego the customary superstition, stating, ‘We need to take the time to mourn our losses. Discussion of the Centennial is disgraceful at this time.’”

Antoine lowered the volume on the television.

“It’s chaos out there,” he said. “I’m starting to think they aren’t actually going to tell us what happened thirty years ago.”

“I am so confused about the timeline,” Cassie said. “I thought the frogs happened in 1995. Now it happened in 2022?”

Perhaps that was the purpose of the constant newscasts. To make sure we had time to learn how the timeline worked.

I still wrestled with it.

The Throughline was set in the current year, 2022, but storylines set in the past still affected The Throughline as if they had just happened. Carousel worked in layers. The Throughline cut through the layers, down toward… something… in the distant past.

“Last chance for a quick game of Reply the Departed,” Isaac said with a cackle. I could tell he was doing it to work through his fears, but it still made my heart leap.

“Stop it,” Cassie said. “Don’t even joke.”

“I’m sorry,” he said once it seemed he had taken it too far.

Bobby lay on one of the mattresses, reviewing his new license, which allowed him to bring the dogs from the B&B into a storyline.

After the conversation drifted a bit, he asked, “If it says not to seek her, that means she is somewhere to be sought.”

This solicited groans from everyone in the room. Bobby’s license had contained the warning, “Do not seek her,” which he immediately interpreted as being about his deceased wife Jeannette. He might have been right. I wasn't sure.

“Please tell me you’re not stuck on that again,” Antoine said. “That is literally the nicest Carousel has ever been giving you that warning. Just stop, man. Just stop.”

“What if it isn’t a warning? What if it’s a dare?” Bobby asked. “Maybe I’m supposed to be brave.”

“In this case,” Isaac said, “A dare is probably the same as a warning.”

Bobby rolled over and vanished the license to whatever place such documents and tickets go when we put them away.

“This is the first time she’s been acknowledged, is all,” Bobby said.

I wanted to say something to comfort him. I didn’t know what it could be. I was the last person to see her alive, at least the last living person to see her alive.

Occasionally, the others would glance over in my direction as if wondering whether I would say something. By now, Cassie and Isaac knew everything the others did. They must have been told when I wasn’t around.

I had seen Jeannette cut nearly in half by the axe murderer for quitting the game. Counter-intuitively, I was not allowed to talk about it, or it seemed I would summon the murderer again. That was yet another thing I needed to understand about Carousel. Why keep him a secret from the players?

Even as I thought about him, I started to hear him breathing in my ear. Fear gripped me instantly.

Cassie looked at me in surprise.

“You’re Incapacitated,” she said softly, with a head tilt.

I jumped up from the overstuffed chair and left the living room. It was time to sort through boxes again. I wouldn’t find any surprises, I knew.

Maybe that was half the point.