The blood-curdling scream demanded a conga line of concerned friends running upstairs. It was one of the oldest rules in horror movie history. Everyone goes to the scene of the blood-curdling scream.

Antoine took the lead.

The others cried out, “Brenda” and “Keisha” in their most concerned voices.

I ran and screamed right along with them.

Antoine found the door that had slammed. He immediately started twisting the knob with all his might, throwing his shoulder against it.

“It’s stuck somehow,” he said. “It might have another lock on the inside.”

Dina came forward and messed with the handle. “It’s not locked,” she said. She bent down and peered through the keyhole. “There’s something in the way. A dresser, maybe.”

“Alright,” Antoine said, “Give me some room. Turn the knob.”

He waved us all back. Dina stretched her hand out so she could keep the knob turned.

Antoine kicked the door right below the handle. A loud screech sounded from the other side, and the door opened a few inches.

Another kick from Antoine. A few more inches.

Now, he put his shoulder back into it and was able to budge the door. The heavy piece of furniture rocked back from where it had been leaned up against the door. There was a loud thud that made me think the floor was about to give in.

The door was open enough for us to file inside.

The object in front of the door wasn’t a dresser; it was a wardrobe. Someone had leaned it back against the door using an old floorboard as a lever.

“Where are they?” Serenity asked.

The room appeared empty.

Antoine shrugged. “Someone had to lean that thing over,” he said.

The room was barren except for a mattress and some old nicknacks, some of which were similar to those that I had unpacked from boxes in my free time. They were Jed Geist’s things.

I pointed in the only direction the girls could be hiding.

Antoine followed the gesture and nodded. There was a closet.

He walked over to it and slowly opened it.

The blood-curdling scream returned as Brenda ran out of the closet toward Antoine.

Her scream turned to laughter.

She got him good, too; he jumped back and barely restrained himself from punching her out of instinct.

“You jerk,” Antoine said, holding back worse words. He turned and walked out of the room.

“You should have seen your faces!” Brenda said as she laughed so hard she could barely breathe.

We were all a little shaken up. The scream had been convincing.

“You’ve had your fun,” Isaac said. “I hate it when people don’t take board games seriously.”

“I was just kidding!” Brenda said gleefully. She looked around the room, and a curious expression took over her face. “Where’s Keisha?”

“Hahaha,” I said. “We’re not falling for that again.”

Brenda still had traces of her smile, but a growing concern cast shadows on her eyes. “No, I’m serious. Was she not down there with you?”

None of us took her inquiries seriously. We stayed in lockstep. We weren’t going to pull threads that might escalate the plot.

Brenda pranked us. Keisha being missing was a prank too. Nothing was going on.

Normally, being deliberately obtuse could cause problems, but we knew that this storyline could be run without fully revealing the nature of Carousel to stubborn newbies.

New players would think everything was an elaborate prank. The Paragons had told us this about the first storyline. If that was true, then refusing to pull plot threads could be an effective strategy for staying safe.

If we never reacted to Carousel’s prodding, then the story would stay a safe, spooky tale.

We weren’t going to do anything that strong-willed skeptics fresh off the carriage to Carousel wouldn’t do.

Having NPCs prank us was actually a good play by Carousel. It was a classic of both middle-grade and young-adult horror. Heck, even The Mummy indulged in the trope.

Pranks are an excellent way to solidify a character as a skeptic by giving them ammunition for dismissing the paranormal.

Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, “Oh god, we’re all going to die!”

Brenda became more and more adamant that Keisha wasn’t with her as we moved back toward the stairs. Kimberly and Cassie stayed with her to listen to her and reassure her.

The rest of us were ready to get out of there.

Before we could find our way, we heard another scream.

“What now?” Antoine asked, still shaken by the previous jump scare.

It was Brenda again, but she wasn’t screaming to scare us. The house was designed so that the upstairs doors could be seen by someone sitting in the center of the living room on ground level—a hallway wrapped around the second floor.

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In the hallway opposite the staircase was Keisha.

She looked genuinely frightened. She was crying. Her arm was held up against the wall as if someone were holding her there. Behind her was a shadow that was so faint it could be missed by anyone who couldn’t see it on the red wallpaper.

“Bradley Speirs (Deceased).”

The shadow vanished no sooner than we looked at it.

Keisha fell forward and caught herself against the rail.

A message appeared on the red wallpaper, “Stick to the plan?”

Dina was asking on the team's behalf using her Pen Pal trope. We still had the opportunity to play it cool here. The shadow was not apparent to anyone who wasn’t looking for it. A viewer would have to pause the screen to see it if they were watching this movie.

I had to answer her question. Do we engage, or do we not?

The real question was, was Carousel just messing with us, prodding and teasing us, or was it intent on making this easy storyline harder than ever before?

If it was going to make this storyline difficult, why would it not have just done that when we first arrived? Why bother creating The Ten Second Game if it was just going to escalate the difficulty here?

I had to make a decision, and I had only moments to consider it.

“If you guys keep doing this, nobody’s going to have any fun tonight,” I said.

I was going all in on skepticism. The beauty of that decision was that we could change our minds later if forced, but if we chose to act like we were in danger, we could never take it back.

Kimberly took my cue. “He’s right,” she said. “We’re here to have a good time, and this is getting out of hand.”

“You think I’m lying?” Keisha said through tears.

I didn’t want my character to see the tears, as that would make it harder to dismiss her claims.

“Let’s go back down,” I said.

I practically jogged to the stairs. The others followed.

We went Off-Screen as soon as my foot hit the stairs. Antoine was right behind me.

“We still going to try to talk to Geist tonight?” he asked.

When we planned everything out, we weren’t sure if we would be able to. Now that we had a good idea of which poker killed him, we could contact him before the storyline ended.

“Let’s not tempt Carousel. I don’t think it will escalate if we don’t force it,” I said. “Let’s not get greedy. We know which poker was the murder weapon. We end the story, and then we contact Geist on our own terms.”

“How certain can we be that this is the right weapon?” Antoine asked.

It was a good question. Our whole theory revolved around two things. First, we knew that the magical rituals that were at the center of Reply the Departed and the Ten Second Game required the user to be at the same time, place, and with the correct murder weapon. It would be strange if there were another ghost who matched all of those requirements, having been killed here with a fireplace poker.

Second, we had to assume that Carousel wasn’t just jerking us around. After the realization that The Ten Second Game was a ruse designed to hide the poker from us, it took a lot of faith to believe that Carousel wouldn’t have another trick up its sleeve, but we had no cards in this game, so to speak. We had to trust that Carousel would allow us to obtain the MacGuffin once we had earned it. We had no other choice. No leverage. No tricks. It was simple: either Carousel was going to let us earn a win, or it was just going to mess with us for eternity.

We had figured out its deception. That had to be enough. The Game at Carousel had to be winnable—not for our sake, but for the sake of the audience, the one true higher power by which even Carousel was limited.

The audience wanted to see what was next. Keeping us clueless and trapped at the beginning was terrible for business.

“It’s tempting to ask for the name. It’s tempting to ask a million questions,” I said. “We need to dial things back. This is just a spooky story. Goosebumps. That’s it. We wait until we are out of the storyline to talk to Geist. The only reason we are running this storyline at all is to make sure we didn’t miss story info.”

Antoine nodded. After so long of waiting to talk to Jed Geist, it was hard to go without confirming we had the right weapon, but we had to.

We walked back downstairs and sat back around the game board. We went back to On-Screen. We were shaken, but we made sure to play the scene as if we thought Keisha’s ravings were part of a prank.

“We can’t keep playing,” Serenity said. “We have to leave.”

We couldn’t do that. Leaving right after First Blood wasn’t possible. Carousel would stop us, or worse, it would expand the scope of the story so that escape didn’t help us.

“Haven’t you ever seen a movie?” I said with a forced smirk, “We can’t leave until we finish the game. That’s how this works.”

I laughed like my suggestion was a joke, but it wasn’t. It was a signal to my teammates of the battle plan and a statement to Carousel itself. I was using improvisation, but more than that, I was suggesting terms of engagement for Carousel.

Go ahead and finish your spooky little ghost story. We aren’t going to escalate. We aren’t going to run. We finish the board game; we go home. That’s our offer—strict Jumanji rules.

And if Carousel didn’t accept?

We would be ready. We would have to be.

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

Turn after turn, we played Reply the Departed. As we played, Carousel played, too.

Creaking floorboards, subtle laughter upstairs that could have been the wind, and all manner of paranormal activity tempted to appear, but we never fell for it.

“Why don’t we ask a spirit if this killed it?” Serenity asked, reaching for Antoine’s bat. He quickly moved it out of the way.

“I just bought that for him last week,” Kimberly said, with a new use of Convenient Backstory, “It was fresh off the line. I doubt anyone has been killed with it.”

Serenity’s smile disappeared.

It appeared our gambit was successful. This story really was straightforward as long as you let it be.

Eventually, though, Bobby got a card that he was forced to play.

> “Play this card as soon as it is drawn. A blue light shines through the library window. Any players currently in that room must escape before the end of their next turn, or they will lose two turns.”

A blue light. That was another thing that sounded familiar.

Fortunately, none of us were in the library, as that was where the ghost sheet with Jed Geist’s information was left uncompleted.

Still, as soon as he played the card, the living room got brighter, and a blue light appeared in one of the rooms down the hall.

“Shit,” Isaac said, “The cops are here.”

He really sold it, too. He struggled to get out of his chair and made a scene of falling over the armrest

“Never mind,” he said. “False alarm. It’s gone. We’re good.”

That blue light was Second Blood, which made no sense until I realized that Keisha had somehow left the room without anyone noticing.

We played on.

Most of us had collected two ghosts, being sure only to use the plastic props as murder weapons so as not to tempt Carousel.

Serenity constantly teased us on behalf of Carousel. It wasn’t just the bat thing. She was still trying to talk to Jed Geist. She almost talked to him, too. Luckily, we were all working against her. We made sure she never succeeded at summoning any ghosts.

Finally, Kimberly got a lucky streak as she collected her third spirit.

The game was over. We all cheered.

Despite its many temptations, Carousel never managed to trick us into making Reply the Departed anything more than it was originally meant to be: a creepy little game meant to be played with the lights on.

Dina kept hold of the fireplace poker we had concluded was the weapon used to kill Jed Geist as we stood up to leave.

“We’re done already?” Keisha asked, reappearing from wherever in the house she had been.

“Yep,” Kimberly answered. She wanted to say more but thought better of it. The needle on the plot cycle wasn’t quite to The End yet.

It didn’t get there until we packed up the game and were officially outside of the house.

Of course, we all survived. Except for Keisha, who had, upon returning to the group, inexplicably leveled up from Plot Armor or 3 to a much more respectable 55. She walked with a grin so wide it would make a crocodile jealous, and when she felt fresh air, I could hear her laughing.

Silas didn't appear to us. We had taken the easy route and the fireplace poker was our only reward.

We walked to our room with the weapon. We were afraid to cheer. The whole exercise had been stressful. Carousel had made sure of that with its constant threat of escalation.

None of that mattered anymore. We had lived.

We had a ghost to interview.

And I had so many questions.