I was shaking when we returned to our sad excuse of a hotel room on the other side of the hill. We had gotten our fair share of clues from Jedediah Geist. That was literally his eternal job; he answered players’ questions. That was the deal he had made.

“The Geists really are different than the others,” I said. “Even more than we previously thought. NPCs are cast in roles in an instant, but the level of… of…”

“Manipulation,” Antoine finished my thought. “The level of manipulation that was needed to get them into their roles was crazy.”

We took our seats in the cramped room. We were hungry, but room service had lost its appeal ever since the resort got retrofitted back to its form from four decades ago.

“Anybody up for The Diner?” Isaac suggested. “You said that all we had to worry about there was trans fats… Or is it saturated fats that are bad?”

“If the food doesn’t crawl out of the fryer and take hostages, it’s safe enough for me. Or it would be. We don’t have money,” Antoine said. “Room service is free.”

Kimberly took everyone’s order and made a call. Intellectually, I knew the food would be safe, but… still, I wasn’t enthusiastic about it.

The burnt burger and greasy fries weren’t so bad. Unfortunately, the resort had not yet discovered chicken wings in this era.

Bobby mainly had been silent since we got back. He sat on his cot and was deep in thought.

Then he spoke.

“I know it didn’t seem like he knew much about the game,” he said, “But the thing is, he talked about people going missing a lot. Maybe there is a legend of where they go. Maybe he has all the information we need to find her.”

“We can try to ask him later,” Antoine said. “But I gotta say, that sounds a lot like ‘seeking her,’ which you aren’t supposed to do.”

Bobby let out a sigh. “That isn’t fair. Why would it hide her specifically…”

He went back to silence for a while.

I couldn’t imagine what he was going through, but at the time, I was distracted by the Throughline plot.

“What do we think of this mystery woman?” Cassie asked. “Player?”

I wasn’t sure. All we knew was that she had stolen the fireplace poker to talk to Jed on the anniversary of his death.

“She claimed her sister died in the original Centennial thirty years ago,” I said. “That doesn’t sound like a player. Of course, she could have just been saying that as part of her cover story so he would talk to her.”

She had also talked about a conspiracy, seemingly a more concrete conspiracy than the one shared by all NPCs, to kill the Geists.

“The factory fire happened months before the manor burned,” Kimberly said. She was writing on the walls again.

“Someone warned them, according to the newspaper. Saved all of the workers,” Antoine said.

The newspaper history board made by junior high kids and displayed for the Centennial was filled with facts about the deaths of the Geists. What I had briefly thought was just narrative background was turning out to be directly important to the Throughline plot.

The factory fire, the movie set disaster, and the Geist Manor blaze all involved the Geists, and all happened within months of each other. Now, they were coming up again.

“So if she’s the one who warned them,” I said, “Does that mean she isn’t a player because she’s a part of the story?”

I was tossing around a lot of ideas. We needed more information, so we talked for a while about what we might do next.

The truth was, we had looked up the locations described in the articles when we had free time. We weren’t stupid. We had enough time on our hands. The factory site was now a mini-mall. We couldn’t find the movie set location. The burned Geist Manor was cordoned off and had security guards.

We had only picked up a lead about one of those things.

“Sounds like we need to give the Geist Manor a look over,” I said.

There was silence for a moment. Exploring the manor could easily trigger the third storyline, and none of us wanted that just yet.

“Maybe after a quick game of Reply the Departed?” Isaac said.

That got some laughs.

The board game had been our only consistent form of entertainment, and we weren’t in any danger of activating it on accident, but it was anything but quick to play. The alternative was watching the tiny television. Carousel’s selection of creepy children’s shows was quite extensive, but they gave Kimberly nightmares.

~-~

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

We had gotten back around sunrise. We set out for the Geist Cemetery at two in the afternoon. We were ready for a fight, though I would have been more pleased to see some elaborate puzzle.

The Cemetery was, as we remembered, quite large. Instead of turning toward the family plot—labeled “Lost but not forgotten”—we turned toward the potter’s field—“Forgotten but not lost.”

However, we soon learned that the endless sea of unmarked graves was not the only thing in that part of the cemetery.

News crews gathered around a large statue covered in a velvet sheet of some kind. The statue was bronze by the look of what stuck out from beneath the fabric.

There was a large marble base under the statue. A man with a chisel stood on his knee, begrudgingly posing for photographs from the crowd.

There was another statue on the other side of the small plaza that was the same size and rough shape as the one they had covered up. The only difference was that the uncovered one had a course, green patina from age.

“You have to be kidding me!” Antoine said with a laugh.

The gathering and statue unveiling just happened to be right in front of the mausoleum with the secret passage into Geist Manor. It was blocked off from our access.

“Today of all days, huh?” I said, laughing.

We knew immediately this was not a coincidence at all. We were excited, though, for two reasons. One, it meant we were getting somewhere. Two, it meant we didn’t have to go inside the spooky mansion.

Soon after we arrived and assimilated into the crowd, none other than the mayor of Carousel, 3 Plot Armor edition, arrived to stand on a raised platform before the crowd.

Mayor Roderick Gray looked out across the crowd. Rhonda Moore, Paragon and City Coordinator, was not far behind him.

Mayor Gray looked worse for wear. He was still very well-groomed, but the light had left his eyes. All of the criticism he had been facing for the flood (nobody had mentioned the frogs) had taken its toll. He was here to try to save face.

He stepped up as close as he could to the crowd. A podium was moved out in front of him.

“Ladies and gentlemen, as we gather in the presence of this newly cast statue, its silent bronze form stands as a solemn reminder of the lives lost in the recent flood. This sculpture, identical to one dedicated three decades ago, underscores a haunting message: the tragedies of our past are not just echoes but lessons we must confront if we are to forge a better future. Today, we are not just here to mourn; we are here to affirm our commitment to remembering our past, with its pain and loss, as a critical step towards preventing history's cruel repetitions.

This commitment means more than just reflection; it demands action. By inscribing the names of the victims on this statue, we do more than memorialize them; we pledge to break the cycle of tragedy that has befallen our community. This act of remembrance compels us to face our past, learn from it, and embrace the changes necessary to reclaim our city and protect the ones we love. Today, let this dedication serve as a turning point, a moment when we collectively decide to honor those we have lost by creating a future where such losses are no longer inevitable. Together, let's embrace the lessons of our history to ensure a brighter, more resilient tomorrow.”

There was clapping and cheering from some around the crowd, but I recognized some of the loudest as Mayor Gray’s entourage.

He waved his hand. The cover was removed.

Underneath was a shining bronze statue of an abstract humanoid in a tumultuous pose inside a large circle constructed from long, rough shapes.

Next to the old one, it was telling us a story. I wasn’t the only one who recognized what it was meant to look like, the shapes with their energy and motion.

“It’s the loop,” Cassie said. “The two of them. It’s about a woman traveling through the continuity loop.”

She was right or close to it. One statue was new, one thirty years old but identical, and one cycle that needed to be broken.

The speech was over, but the crowd didn’t disperse. We spread out and talked to everyone who would speak to us.

They were all very upset. They thought the mayor was trying to shift blame from himself for not fixing the sewers. Yet again, no one mentioned the frogs. One guy thought the statue was of a clock. He might have been giving a hint, but I couldn’t tell.

None of us got a word in with the mayor or Rhonda Moore. We couldn’t.

When we got back together, we compared notes.

We stuck around for a little longer and glanced at the older statue. The names carved in were numerous. Dozens had died at the original Centennial Celebration, though the statue was dedicated to the 70th anniversary celebration. The continuity loop was consistent, at least.

No names rang a bell as I skimmed, not really. I thought I was familiar with some of the surnames of NPCs, but I wasn’t sure if they meant anything.

“Look,” Kimberly said. “Mercer. Ramona and Phoebe.”

“Ooh, the plot thickens,” Isaac said. “Who are Ramona and Phoebe Mercer?”

Kimberly looked at Antoine, Dina, and I. We had met a few Mercers in our time.

“A family in Carousel,” Kimberly answered. “We met them in a storyline. They all have the power to summon an invisible monster that kills people. I guess they aren’t just in that story.”

Indeed. The story we had seen them in never felt like a main Mercer storyline. It was a collection of odds and ends. Two Mercers having died in the tragedy might mean something. It might not mean anything at all.

We walked away from the crowd.

“Let’s visit the Geist plot again,” I said. “Just to be thorough.”

I had gotten a cemetery plot map and made plenty of notes on it, but I was always open to the idea that I had missed something.

We made our way to the Geist section and started looking things over again.

“You know,” Cassie observed, “There is a lot of blank space around here. It almost looks like there should have been more Geists.”

She was right. Several portions of land looked like they could have been special sections for the various branches of Geists, but they were now empty grass and leaves.

“Maybe they didn’t plan on dying all at once in a towering inferno,” Isaac said. “They thought they would have more bodies to bury.”

A lot of the Geists had no specific grave but had their names on a monument to the Geist fire. This graveyard had many monuments to people who died by the dozen.

I looked over the names.

Bensen Geist. Steven Geist. Lillian Geist, of course.

As before, her name was broken, as if someone had taken a metal implement to it to try and scrape it off.

A thought occurred to me far later than I was happy to say.

“You know how I said that Lillian herself might have tried to scrape her name off this thing?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Antoine said.

“Lillian Geist comes out of sedation for the first time in years and kills Jed after being manipulated by Dyrkon. That was the night before the Centennial disaster, the night before the original Centennial, and before the loop started. Lillian says she doesn’t know what happened after that. She was just back with Halle and sedated again. We know that, but have we ever really considered how big of a coincidence it is that on the day of the Centennial Celebration disaster, the last living Geist was unaccounted for?"

“What are you saying?” Kimberly said. “That Lillian caused the Centennial disaster? She was terrified. How could she be at fault.”

“I'm not saying that," I said. "I'm saying that we were told these stories as if they were all separate. Maybe they have more to do with each other than we thought."

I looked back at the Manor Blaze memorial and thought about all the possibilities.