The renovated version of Jed Geist’s house, acting as a deluxe suite for a hip, modern resort, had been an incredible vacation.

I didn’t realize that while we were there. I could only focus on the negatives: the dark shadows cast in the windows, the oppressive luxury that seemed to mock us as we struggled for our freedom, the memory of having fought for our lives there in a storyline, the fact that the resort staff got our room service orders wrong half the time.

Now, in the cramped little room we had been given after the modern resort returned to its run-down state from years prior, I realized just how lucky we had been.

I supposed that this little room, which never made claims of being deluxe or even a suite, was the room that most newbies would be placed in for the Tutorial. How better to encourage players to get out and interact with the world than to put them up here?

This place was a masterpiece in insipid horror. We could hear fighting in the room next to ours, fighting that always ended in a loud thud and the tenant moving out quickly. We never actually saw these people. They weren’t a storyline; they were just part of the environmental orchestra.

The mini fridge made a dull buzzing sound and clicked erratically. The television would turn on on its own. Someone kept calling our phone and saying ominous things that sounded like code contract killers might use to talk about their work.

The beds were small, the blankets itchy, and the shower always ran cold.

I missed Dyer’s Lodge. I missed the simplicity of that life, even though I had not seen it as simple back then.

I lay awake on a cot. It was daytime, but we were going to spend the night talking to Jedediah Geist, so we needed to sleep.

Despite the room, everyone else had succeeded. Antoine was out like a light, thanks to my trope of the same name.

I could see it under his hand as he slept on one of the twin beds with Kimberly. Together, they were far too big for the bed, but they made it work. Funny, there were no more cots or beds. It was as if Carousel knew they would sleep in the same place.

If I could sneak over there, I could probably take my ticket back. I could be asleep without a care in the world. After a while, it would reappear in my possession anyway, but that hadn’t happened yet. No one would ever know…

But I didn’t want to risk it. I really didn’t want to give Antoine the impression I resented him for using that trope. He needed help drifting off, even if he was reluctant to say it. He was hiding the severity of his problems from us. I had tried to make it seem so casual that I gave up my magical instant sleeping trope, but in truth, I wished I could use it instead. Insomnia was one of the reasons I had watched so many movies growing up.

I decided to watch a movie instead of sleeping. That was one advantage I had over everyone else: I had built-in entertainment of sorts. My Director’s Monitor trope let me watch our old storylines on a screen on the red wallpaper.

It wasn’t a fun time, usually, but it did occupy my mind. I felt like I was seeing the fingerprints of Carousel itself as I watched us struggle to survive. If could just reconstruct its thought process, I might be able to help guide my team even better.

Like this most recent storyline, Reply the Departed. It was corny, short, and less intense than most of the stories we played through, but there was something to learn from watching Carousel turn a bunch of footage of young people playing a board game into a spooky spectacle that would have scared most young teens with its jump scares and building dread.

We were not the main characters. That was something of a trend. Keisha was the main character, remarkably. We were just the friends who didn’t believe her as she struggled to escape the house.

As we played the game, the events on the board were reflected throughout the house. Dina talked to a ghost who was killed with a mallet. An apparition appeared, apparently killed in the same way, watching us from the upstairs balcony.

I had no idea at the time.

Keisha’s character managed to get lost twice: once when they decided to prank us and again when she was trying to find a way out. The front door was locked. I didn’t even remember her trying to open it, but Carousel had shot some footage of it, probably when we weren’t in the house anymore.

It was funny, knowing the layout of the house by heart, that someone could get lost in it. It was large and had many rooms, but the entire floor plan centered around the living room. No place in the house was more than two turns and a hallway from finding us.

Despite this, Carousel used fancy shots and angles to make it look like she was good and truly lost in a maze inside a creepy old manor. It had done something similar in the Astralist when I was being chased by a zombie.

Impressive.

When that movie was over, I rewatched Cold-Blooded Things. My friends and I only appeared in a quarter of it. Lillian was the tragic main character.

It was in this movie that I got a glimpse of some of the Geists. Though I learned suspiciously little about them.

Lillian’s father was Steven Geist, brother of Carlyle and Jedediah. He was a small man who had punched above his weight class in pretty much every aspect of his life, from business to romance. He wore expensive clothes, and he was truly proud of his daughter’s beauty.

The film followed her from beauty queen to her injury to her interactions with Jedediah. Jedediah might have been seventy years old in the movie, maybe younger. The film tried to portray him as casting her aside, but the only objective evidence of that was his shock at her appearance after the caecilians were put on her face.

Before that, their interactions were cut up, spliced together, and involved little dialogue. Carousel was hiding something. A casual viewer might not know it, but I suspected that there was more to Lillian and Jedediah’s interactions than the film portrayed.

In fact, if Howard Halle hadn’t been there to explain that Jedediah had put her in his care, a viewer might never have learned that. That was basically Halle’s job, explaining things that Carousel couldn’t get good footage for.

The murder of Geist happened at the midpoint and was not presented as a mystery but as a tragic action by a psychologically devastated woman. She then lived in a sedated stupor until my friends and I showed up to try to solve his murder. We were presented as clowns. How else could we be presented? The audience already knew who the killer was.

When I finally exposed Cecilia as Lillian Geist, she snapped out of it, and the movie ended with her dying from her fight with Halle. That wasn’t how it actually went down, of course. That meant that Carousel either reshot things or used old footage. Perhaps jumping into a giant skin frog’s mouth wasn’t a proper ending.

My friends’ escape was only shown in a montage over sad music. The End

“Can you stop messing with that?” I asked as the credits rolled.

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Isaac awoke at some point during the second movie and found an old radio in the hotel room. He was insistent on playing with it. He found a channel on the radio which appeared to play music exclusively performed by singers in duress. Occasionally, the whispered words “Keep singing” could be heard as the singers tried to perform through tears.

“Sorry,” Isaac said. “This thing is freaky.”

The others were waking up, preparing for our night-time séance.

I tried remembering the early parts of Lillian’s life, the faces of her family. Truthfully, her father was the only person who was identified. The rest involved scenes with NPCs who were all obsessed with her beauty, a high school boy in her grade, a college professor, and the guests at the first annual Miss Carousel pageant.

Anytime someone would comment on her looks, I could see something in her eye. An alertness, a distrust.

I couldn’t help but feel Carousel had left some parts of the movie out on purpose, but I couldn’t prove it. How hard would it be to edit up a version of the film that gave very little information? Technically, players should not have a trope to watch the movie on their first run of the Tutorial.

It was time to get up.

I could almost throw up from the nerves, but I didn’t want to get my face anywhere near that commode in the hotel room.

I went outside for some fresh air.

The sun was setting, and the sky danced with colors—red, orange, pink, more red, blood red.

I pulled the little metal bell from my pocket.

Soon, it would be time.

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

“Are you sure about this?” Antoine said.

I nodded. I had just gone over my plan for the séance one last time.

We were going to play the Ten Second Game instead of Reply the Departed. Our license gave us the option of doing either type of séance. Reply the Departed was just a board game and was likely much safer, but it had one drawback: in order to talk to Geist face to face, we would have to rely on luck of the draw. Otherwise, we would be stuck with yes or no questions.

The Ten Second Game was more dangerous, but we could talk to Geist as soon as he showed up and talk to him directly.

It was a risk we needed to take.

“We don’t know how many shots we get at this,” I said. “It may just be the once. We could be pushed into the third storyline after this is over, and then we might not have the information we need for the true ending. We need to talk to him directly.”

Antoine didn’t seem sure, but he wasn’t going to say no. He always had to project strength.

“Order of operations,” Kimberly said. She held a list of all of the questions we had come up with, including a few joke questions that Isaac had contributed in jest. Unfortunately, we weren’t going to ask Jedediah Geist about updog or his underclothes. Luckily, Isaac also had some good ideas to add in. Everyone did. We were all fully invested. “We decided to put off talking about Lillian until the end, but other than that, we will follow his lead and try to get him to talk about Silas and the nature of Carousel, if possible.”

I nodded.

“We don’t know how aware he is,” I said. “If he has meta knowledge, we need to find out. Other than that, we need to figure out why the Geists appear to be cursed.”

That was the plan.

We walked through the woods around to the other side of the hill. The house was still rundown, with police tape everywhere. I had secretly wished that it would transform back to its renovated self, but it never did.

We entered. Isaac invoked the spirits, or whatever it was called, where we announced our intention of playing the Ten Second Game that night. The creepypasta rules had seemed pretty straightforward.

Then, it was time to wait until three o’clock at night—the witching hour. There was no good place to sleep or wait in the house. Everything was decrepit and dusty.

“Maybe we should tidy up?” Kimberly suggested, gesturing to the weapons spread in every direction.

That was a good idea. Everyone pitched in, throwing the dangerous knives, hammers, and other deadly things outside. We didn’t need them around if things went wrong.

The mirrors were covered, and the doors were all locked except for those leading to the individual rooms, which stayed open.

“Remember,” I said, “Blue light means run. Don’t tell Jed he’s dead.”

“Do you think his name is Jed because he’s dead?” Isaac asked. “Carousel would do something like that. Give someone a name that rhymes with dead. It makes sense.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Sometimes names are just names.”

Three o’clock got there early that night. Carousel could change the time of day, and it was clearly willing to do so as we used our séance licenses.

“Last chance to back out,” I said. “Anyone wants to leave? Now’s the time.”

No one moved. We had waited for this moment too long.

Three o’clock.

Dina and I took the first shift. Bell in hand, we entered the nearest room and lined up in front of the window. Dina carried the fireplace poker. We had agreed to keep it out of sight, so she slipped it into her purse, which could contain it thanks to her Luggage Tag.

I was still queasy. Dina was solid. Prepared. Ready.

I wound the bell and waited.

It rang.

We waited for the first sign of a spirit. I had forgotten how difficult it was to see them playing the Ten Second Game. They were subtle, easily mistakable for a branch moving or a trick of the light.

But eventually, I saw one.

“Are you Jedediah Geist,” I asked. I rewound the bell.

Tick, Tick, Tick.

No ring.

It was a dud. Even though Jedediah Geist should show up because we had met the right conditions, that didn’t mean other curious ghosts couldn’t come too.

We asked it questions about what it wanted and the like. It gave typical answers to our yes and no questions. Eventually, it got bored and left.

Dina and I backed out of the room.

“No luck,” I said. “Who’s next?”

“Us,” Antoine said. At first, I thought he meant him and Kimberly, but he meant Bobby. It made sense. The last time Antoine had played this game with Kimberly, she had gotten dragged out of the house and killed.

Dina handed over the poker. I gave them the bell.

I found a place to sit and waited.

Antoine and Bobby didn’t find anything either.

Neither did Cassie and I, nor Antoine and Isaac.

“I’ll go next,” Kimberly said.

“You can just wait,” Antoine said. “He’ll come.”

Kimberly shook her head. “I think Carousel is waiting for me. We can’t avoid this.”

Antoine understood that Kimberly was going to be in danger a lot in storylines, but this license was something new. We didn’t know what could happen. Carousel could be tricking us. Suddenly, Antoine was feeling protective.

“Come on, Dina,” Kimberly said. She ushered Dina forward, and they took the bell and poker to another room.

We waited.

The first ring of the bell would mean they found a ghost. The second should mean they found the right one.

The bell rang. Moments later, it rang again.

Everyone in the living room was alert all of a sudden.

That meant they had confirmed their ghost was Jedediah Geist.

The next part was crucial. There were two ways of letting the ghost in. Looking behind them instead of at the window and simply opening the window. We preferred the second option. That was the safer one in our experience.

I heard the old window being coaxed open.

Moments later, the temperature dropped in the room, and I heard Kimberly say from the other room, “Hello, Mr. Geist. So glad to see you.”

“Always glad to see me,” a gruff voice said. “Always a sight for sore eyes, just the guy you want to see. Now, why don’t you cut the bologna?”

Antoine, Bobby, and I filed into the room. Now that we had a ghost in our midst, we could have more than two people enter the room at a time.

I cautiously stepped around the door and found myself face to face with the man I had just seen while watching Cold-Blooded Things—Jedediah Geist, wearing a ratty bathrobe, surprisingly well-groomed despite his state of dress.

He had a gash in the side of his head. I could see his skull; a bit of gray matter glittered in the moonlight.

Jedediah Geist, The Black Sheep

(Wandering Spirit)

Plot Armor: 45

Geist

Tropes

The Tormented

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

Death Delusion

This entity is not aware it is dead.

Don’t Wake the Beast

This entity is asleep or in a similar condition. They will not stir without outside intervention. Waking them will transform them into a more dangerous form that plays by different tropes.

Walking Crime Scene

This entity’s ghostly form reveals clues as to the nature of its demise.

Flashback Monologue

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

“Mr. Geist,” Kimberly said, trying to sound gentle and non-threatening. “We were here to ask you a few questions about your life.”

“I know who you are,” Jedediah Geist said. “I know why you’re here.”

My heart skipped a beat. Was it possible that Jedediah Geist was meta-aware? That could be a best-case scenario.

“Oh?” Kimberly asked.

Geist nodded. He eyed her with distrust, and his jaw quivered with old man rage. “You’re one of them,” he said. “You’re trying to trap me. Just admit it. You’re all trying to get me like you did my family. But you won’t. I’m onto you. I’ve always been onto you. I nearly thought you’d given up.”

He knew something alright. He knew this world was not as simple as it looked at first glance. The question was: how much did he know?