“Are you sure there are no Omens here?” Kimberly said for the third time.
“I’m sure,” I said. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
She was nervous, but how could I blame her? The last time we had gone to the library, the vets had acted like we were walking into a lion’s den while covered in lamb’s blood. The library, which had once been so thick with Omens that turning my head too fast would make me nauseous from the flashes of storyline posters on the red wallpaper, was just a normal library. Almost.
It was “under construction.”
We had four days left and we had resorted to checking and rechecking every place in town that might have a missing clue of what we should do next. What we knew for sure was that we didn’t want to wait until the default Omen for the third story arrived. That Omen would not lead us to the real version of the storyline. We wanted the true ending, just as we had gotten the true ending for the second storyline.
The library shelves were covered in sheets. The hallways were blocked off. The entire place was being renovated. Even the jobs board outside was under renovation. It would be until after the Centennial. Haha.
“You’re back,” Constance Barlow said as she saw us walking up to her desk. “I am sorry to say that the library is still being renovated.”
I understood why Paragons had to pretend to be NPCs most of the time. Having them be meta all the time would make things too easy. After all, they did appear to be trying to beat the Throughline, too, in their own way. If they could help, they would.
Constance was the Researcher Paragon and even when she had been acting as a player, she couldn’t tell us as much as she would like. Carousel limited her script because she knew too much. Her most potent memories were literally locked away from her. She had memories from before Carousel had a death game attached to it. It made sense Carousel would make those off-limits.
Those weren’t the memories we were after, though. We wanted help figuring out the last piece of the puzzle for the Tutorial.
“Alright, Constance,” Antoine said. “I’m sorry to do this, but we’re back to try again.”
“Perseverance is key,” Constance said. “I’m sure you’ll keep digging up the past until something turns up. May I suggest this book on Bartholomew Geist? He was known to be a very effective negotiator.”
“That’s not what I remember,” Isaac said. He watched her as she stamped library books. “You know, Ms. Barlow, if this library has been under renovation for the last thirty years, it would be weird for you to always be stamping returned library books still.”
He was at it again.
She was mildly entertained but still professional. “Thirty years is a long time for anything to happen. If you check the calendar by the door, you’ll see we only started the renovations last week. Patrons who checked out books before then would still be returning them, so it makes sense that I am checking them back in.”
Isaac looked over at the calendar. “I’ll get you one of these days.”
Isaac had really taken a fascination with calling out places where the continuity loop was “broken,” as he put it.
It was interesting when we thought about it. An entire town being reset to the eve of a holiday celebration that would never come. The logistics were mind-boggling. How could you live your life if every day was New Year's Eve?
“Look,” I said. “We want the good ending to the third storyline. That means we have to trigger the storyline before the two-week break is up, right?”
She continued to stamp books and stack them on a cart next to her desk.
“A good ending?” Constance asked. “Aren’t you a little old for choose your own adventure books?”
“You’d think so,” I said. I was feeling brave, ready to go out on a limb. “We know the story involves Lillian Geist.”
We didn’t know that. I was guessing.
Constance didn’t speak for a moment.
“Lillian Geist,” she said. “Poor woman. I guess that would make your story non-fiction then, wouldn’t it?”
Would it? Was the story of the Geists real or fabricated? The more I learned about them, the more I started to think it was somehow both.
“Is there a way you might let us take a peek in the non-fiction section?” Kimberly asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Constance said. “The books in the section you are after had to be sent out for repair. They got extensive smoke damage. I couldn’t say how.”
She looked over to the Carousel History nonfiction section, right above the children’s section. She was making a joke. The vets used to start a fire in that section to artificially remove a mobile Omen from the library when they needed to come here.
“We just need to find the true ending,” I said.
I didn’t read her as annoyed. She did seem frustrated, though. I couldn’t blame her. Given what we knew about the Throughline, the answer we were looking for was probably going to be simple even if concealed by layers of distraction.
The original Tutorial was simple enough. If you figured the story out as you went along, you got the true ending. If you didn’t, you got a basic version of the next story… Our answer was somewhere, but it was possible we wouldn’t think of it until after the Tutorial.
“The true ending to Lillian Geist’s story,” Constance said. “The townsfolk must be rubbing off on you if you are that obsessed with the Geists. We're superstitious here. We never really believed they died off. We always thought there would be more of their story to tell. Then again, maybe not everyone wants the true ending. Maybe burning up in a fire is a better end than the other possibilities. I mean, if she hadn’t died in that fire, think of all the worse things that could have happened. You know, it’s funny. Her uncle Carlyle and cousin Bensen escaped fiery deaths just months before she died. Of course, they ended up dying shortly after, anyway. I guess when your time is up, it’s up.”
She was referencing the factory fire and the movie set disaster, which preceded the manor blaze.
“Are you saying that Carlyle and Bensen would have died in the factory fire?” I asked. We didn’t know that. The article we had available didn’t say they were there when it happened.
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“As the town historian,” she answered, “That would be the kind of thing I would know, don’t you think?” I could see her eyes go unfocused as she read her script. Her tone changed to be more hurried. “It might be best for you to leave now. We really do have a lot of work coming up.”
I got the sense that she was cutting things close, but what did that insight actually mean?
We turned to leave.
“Until next time,” Isaac said. “I notice that you updated the newspaper rack. Why would you do that if you were under renovation? Why refill it?”
Constance rolled her eyes playfully. “We didn’t refill it. The newspaper sent one of their delivery men over. Thank goodness, too, because I like to stay informed,” she said, grabbing a newspaper off her desk and waving it.
Isaac smiled a toothy grin. “We were just at the newspaper place looking for clues,” he said as he backed out the library door. “They said they had shut down a week ago due to the flood and would not be going to print until after the Centennial! Where did the newspapers come from, Constance?”
Isaac did an air pump as if he had finally beaten Carousel by proving that the continuity loop and resets were not perfect.
Constance smirked and went back to her work.
----------------------------------------
We sat on the steps of the library for a couple of hours after that. I felt that if I could just know the edge pieces of the puzzle, I could figure out the middle. I didn’t know where to look. There were too many places to look for clues.
Which, in itself, was a clue.
“What do we know that no ordinary team would know going through the tutorial for the first time?” I asked.
Antoine took a deep breath. “We know who killed Jed Geist, why, and with what weapon. We know someone saved some factory workers using a storyline somehow, and now we know that they also saved Carlyle and Bensen Geist, but those two ended up dying anyway. Someone was trying to kill the Geists actively at the end. Not just the passive bad luck they had been living with before. I’m forgetting things.”
“We know about Lillian Geist,” Kimberly said. She had spoken passionately about Lillian Geist’s plight many times, but now her energy and emotions had drained. “She suffered terribly for years because of Silas Dyrkon. We don’t know why.”
I lay back on the warm concrete step. It was somehow more comfortable than my cot at the hotel.
“We just need one thing,” Bobby said. “One thing to trigger… whatever is next. Just like when we figured out that the poker was the murder weapon, and we unlocked the second storyline. Easy peasy. Just one thing.”
We thought and spoke out loud. Isaac made jokes. Cassie told him to stop. Antoine comforted Kimberly, and Kimberly comforted Antoine. Dina only spoke to correct us when we got a fact wrong. She was vigilant that way. Bobby kept saying things like “easy peasy” every few minutes.
“We needed to know what the murder weapon was to play the version of the storyline we played. Otherwise, the answer would have been revealed without any effort,” I said. A cop had literally picked us up after figuring the clue out, so we couldn’t talk to Jed Geist too soon. “What could we know that would be necessary for the next storyline.”
I thought about what the story could be about. Parts were obvious. The subject was the death of the Geists; Constance practically confirmed that. The info she had just given us was about the Geists' deaths, and it was teetering on the edge of being a spoiler. The Centennial was also important, but how could we link those together? I had theorized that Lillian had something to do with it, but I was just missing—
“Oh,” I said. I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cemetery map. I looked to see where Steven Geist was buried. He was Lillian’s father and Jedediah’s older brother. He had died in the manor fire.
In the distance, a car’s wheels squealed. I looked up to see a tan sports wagon making its way down the street quickly toward us.
I started to laugh.
“Easy peasy after all,” I said. “We were overthinking it.”
“Is that…?” Kimberly asked.
“Yes,” I said. “That is an Omen.”
The tan car was an old model, but it looked new. It wasn’t an exact brand I recognized, but it was in the style of early eighties cars.
The Omen flashed into my mind as I looked at it.
“The movie is called The Die Cast,” I said.
“That’s ominous,” Isaac said.
“Difficulty is high,” I said. “We activate it by getting in the car when asked.”
“Already?” Antoine asked. “What was the thing we needed to figure out?”
I started shifting my tropes around. I used Location Scout to find out where in Carousel it was set.
“It’s set all over Carousel,” I said. “It’s listing off hundreds of places. I don’t… I don’t know what it means.”
Location Scout usually only listed a few dozen interconnected locations at most.
I took a moment to consider how to answer Antoine. What had been the thought in my head to trigger the Omen? I had been laughing before, but one glance at that movie poster had killed my laughter in my throat. The poster showed a large, muscular man carrying some kind of weapon. I couldn’t see what it was. The man was a silhouette. He was staring at a large window where people danced.
The language of this poster was familiar to me. It reminded me of the poster for Friday the Thirteenth.
I could only hope I was wrong. I decided to start telling my friends what I had discovered.
“What connected all of the disasters we have learned about?” I asked. “It was so simple. We just had to change some facts. Connect the dots.”
“What connected them?” Kimberly asked. “The Geists, right?”
“We know someone was killing off Geists starting after Bartholomew died, but it really ramped up in 1984. Most of them were wiped out in a matter of months. The factory fire killed no one. It seemed unrelated, but Constance just told us that two of the Geists, Carlyle and his son Bensen, were there and only survived because some mystery woman intervened. But then Carlyle dies in a mysterious film set disaster. Then everyone left dies in the manor fire. Then, Jed is killed by Lillian. Somehow, the Centennial is involved even though it happens eight years later. Why eight years? These disasters must be related because Carousel is putting them in front of us, but how?”
“Wait,” Bobby said. He didn’t say anything after that. He must not have figured it out yet.
“Is it a coincidence that the oldest living Geist at any given time becomes the target of these disasters?” I said. “That’s the pattern. Carlyle at the factory, but he survives. Carlyle, at the film set, dies. Steven Geist—Lillian’s dad and the middle child of Bartholomew Geist—dies at the manor fire along with almost every other Geist. Then nothing. Nothing for eight years. Jed is the oldest Geist during that period. Whatever this is, it can’t kill Jed; Silas’ deal protected him. It doesn’t kill Lillian for some reason, even though she was secretly alive the whole time. Maybe it only kills men; maybe Carousel just wanted to torture Lillian. I don’t know. On the night before the Centennial, Lillian kills Jed, and then she becomes the oldest living Geist right on time for the Centennial disaster,” I said.
They were quiet.
“But that doesn’t make sense,” Antoine said. “Lillian didn’t die in the Centennial. She died three years later because you reminded her of her trauma.”
“I didn’t say it was perfect,” I said.
“If it killed every Geist it went after,” Kimberly said, “Why didn’t it keep going after her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I came up with the idea, and then the Omen showed up, so I must be on to something.”
“The point is,” Dina said, speaking up for the first time in a while, “We need to know that something is targeting the oldest living Geist, right? That’s the part that matters.”
“Exactly,” I said. “We can figure out how Lillian survived later. We found the Omen. We're as ready as we are going to get. Let’s go try not to die.”
They didn’t seem too excited over what I had come up with. We were missing pieces, but I was excited to have progress of any kind.
We started to prepare our tropes. It was impossible to get a perfect setup. We figured out our strategy. We had been working on this for some time. We were as ready as we were going to be.
We approached the car, which had been idling for the length of the time we had been talking.
A voice rang out, “Are you coming? We need to get there soon, Antoine.”
Antoine was in the front of the pack as usual. He opened the car door. I leaned down to get a glimpse of the driver before I got in the backseat.
He was well-dressed, almost dapper. He might have been in his mid-twenties. I recognized him, though he looked different than I remembered. Much younger.
Roderick Gray. Plot Armor 3. There was no “Mayor” next to his name.
And then, in a blink, I wasn’t there anymore.
There was no brown sedan. There was no young Roderick Gray.
What I saw before me was a large room—a living room. It was peculiar because the walls were fake. I could see them being held up by two-by-fours. There was camera equipment behind me. I was in a large warehouse of some kind. It was dark.
“Do you plan on doing anything today?” A voice rang out behind me. I recognized it. I had heard it on my way to the Tutorial. I turned to see Carlyle Geist.
“You know, Mr. Lawrence,” he said while puffing on a pipe, “You really are wasting time. Now get over here. We have to rework our next scene, or the only people we’ll be scaring are the investors.”