I walked through the aisles of the general store with a purpose.

I was making a mental shopping list. The shelves were stacked with a meager supply of canned goods as well as all the staples that you might expect, such as flour and salt. Did we need kidney beans? Did we need beets? Did anyone need beets?

The refrigerated section was even less impressive, but it had eggs and milk and bacon. What more could we ask for?

As I rounded the corner of the aisle, I came across Dina. She was doing much the same as I was. We made eye contact and didn't say a whole lot.

"They have a lot of really old candy," was the only comment she had.

I nodded.

We heard a noise from somewhere beyond the refrigerated doors at the back of the store. It sounded like a scream. We couldn't see what was happening because the glass of the refrigerated unit was fogged over, but there was a single handprint visible and conspicuous.

As long as we didn't open that door, we were safe.

As long as we didn't eat from the cracked glass container of pigs' feet (and the creature that infected them) on aisle 3, we were safe.

As long as we didn't steal from the store, we were safe.

As long as we didn't… and the list went on.

“You need help finding anything, you just let me know,” Corduroy Patcher called from the front of the store.

He was an older, rotund man with blue eyes and pupils like little dots. He watched us every step we took. His words were friendly, but his tone was not. He was the proprietor and sole employee from what I could tell.

“We don't have much as you might be used to back in the big city, but we got plenty. We got all a family needs,” he added.

He was right. He had everything we needed at that moment. He had very little of what we wanted, but we weren’t in a position to complain.

You would think that in a haunted world based on horror movies, death by hooks or teeth would be the biggest worry, but it turned out that death by slow starvation was a bigger threat once you started to get the hang of things.

Sure, if you went into a storyline, you could eat your fill, but as soon as you got to the end of the story, your body would reset to being hungry again. It was a small price to pay for healing all your injuries, but it presented a problem.

The only way to create a sustainable base of operations was to find a source of food that could keep players sated and satisfied when they weren't out on storylines.

The Vets, when we got here, had it all figured out. They could go clear a storyline at Eternal Savers Club and then load up shopping carts to take back to Dyer's Lodge. Even when we were trying to outlast an apocalypse, we never went hungry from their stores of food at the lodge.

But we were not high-level enough to clear the storyline at Eternal Savers Club, so we had to find somewhere else to shop.

Our money was running low. We needed a storyline that ended with a scene that we could pillage and loot for food. Before I actually had the responsibility of making it happen, I thought it would be easy.

Practically every storyline had food accessible, and some of them had really good food, but that wasn't enough.

You needed that food to be accessible to be looted after the final battle where most stories no longer had food available. Normally, all that was left at the end of the movie was destruction.

We were in luck, though. The Carousel Atlas contained all the solutions that players from years past had come up with for this very problem. Eastern Carousel General Store was a great place to loot. Sure, the pickings weren't great.

Of course, the food was old. Not old as in expired, but as in the type of food they ate in the '70s.

All we had to do was clear one of the three storylines in the surrounding area, and then we could raid this general store to stock our pantry for weeks. We just had to make sure ol’ Corduroy Patcher bit the dust by the end of the story.

The question was, what were we going to take when we got here at The End? That was today's mission: to get a list of what was offered to make sure that this storyline would be worth the risk.

As I looked at Dina, we both nodded in agreement that this place would do very well. We couldn't keep spending our money at the restaurant downstairs from Kimberley's Loft.

If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it.

As we walked around, Dina kept picking things up off the shelves to rile up the storekeep up front. Maybe she was messing with me; I couldn't tell. Of course, she put everything right back. I cracked a smile, hoping that would satisfy her and she would stop with her little game.

It was my fault, really. I had told her specifically not to shoplift because that would trigger one of the many Omens in the store. She might have taken it personally, but really, I was talking about her stealing trope, which only worked in the storylines.

I wasn't going to cause a fuss about it.

Corduroy Patcher was, though.

“I can see what you’re doing back there,” the man said. “I ain’t nobody’s fool.”

He stared us down like we were trying to rob him blind. To be fair, we were going to rob him blind, just not yet.

I went to the back cooler and avoided the glass window to the refrigeration unit with the handprint. I grabbed an ice-cold glass of some off-brand cola and walked to the front of the store. There was one good thing to say about Eastern Carousel. The prices were cheap.

The shopkeeper eyed me up and down and sneered at my hair, which desperately needed a cut. Fortunately, most of the length had disappeared whenever we finished The Die Cast storyline and my body was reset.

“You folks are from the city, I can tell,” he said.

I nodded. “Downtown,” I said, confirming his suspicion.

He was just an NPC as basic as any other.

“People often forget how different Eastern Carousel is from the big city,” he said. “It's a million miles away. My family's been here since the first war, and we're going to be here till the last war. Nothing ever changes over here, and we don't need any of your nonsense.”

He took my soda, popped off the cap, and handed it back to me. I was glad that Eastern Carousel wasn't actually a million miles from the Carousel Downtown. We had to walk, after all.

“Oh, don't worry,” I said. “We're on our way out of here.”

A glance to my right showed me that Dina was looking at me with some urgency. As I glanced at her, she deliberately moved her eyes down toward the shopkeeper's hands. One of them was under the till.

“I'd best be getting back to the big city,” I said and quickly moved toward the door where Dina was. I glanced back to see what he was holding underneath the till.

I saw the butt end of a shotgun.

It was a sawed-off shotgun, though I couldn't actually see the barrel. It was called that on the red wallpaper. The only reason I could see it on the red wallpaper was because it had a trope. Silas Dyrkon had created a throughline that was a lot like Carousel, but it didn't have items with tropes attached.

Once we were out of his throughline, we saw them everywhere, though most of them were unobtainable.

Unobtainable, that is, unless you beat the storyline they were a part of.

This one was particularly desirable. It had a Criminal-Outsider trope called The Hidden Barrel that had a simple premise. If you hid the gun and aimed it at an adversary, the gun would go off if they started to attack you. This was a staple of crime dramas.

An instant shotgun blast to any enemy who crossed the line would be very useful.

As we left the store, I said, "Nice catch. We're gonna have to grab that."

One more thing added to the shopping list.

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

"We could keep it by the front door just in case," she said. "Probably won't need it, but it'll make us feel a lot safer. Well, it'll make Isaac feel safer."

I nodded in agreement.

Outside, Antoine, Kimberly, Cassie, Isaac, and Bobby were waiting. Because of all the omens, we didn't want too many people in the store.

“Looks like a good target,” I said.

"Did they have produce of any kind?" Kimberly asked. She had put on her Sorority President hat and was doing her best to make her loft livable.

"Sure," Dina said, "But they cooked it all in tiny tin cans so that it'll last decades."

Kimberly was dejected. Grace's home cooking with fresh vegetables was just a dream at this point.

"All that matters is that they have enough food so that we don't have to keep going on storylines," Antoine said. "Sounds like a success. So I guess we're doing the storyline you picked out?" he asked, looking at me.

"The Final Straw," I said. "Can't wait."

But I would have to wait because we still had planning to do.

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

But of course, if we were going to do a storyline in Eastern Carousel, we might as well take a look at it while we were here. It was easy enough to find, just a few streets down from the general store.

The flyers started with one being placed on a telephone pole, then another on a chain-link fence with a barking dog behind it, and then there were more on a wooden barricade that blocked off a long gravel road. And then more on every surface that a poster could be placed on.

A hurricane of them blew down the street.

“Looks like you've already been cast, Dina,” Antoine said as we looked at the posters.

He was right. The missing poster wasn't like those you would find for players who had died in storylines. It looked like a real missing poster. It showed a picture of a young girl staring innocently at the camera, wearing a dress and a white long-sleeve shirt.

Her name was Tamara. Tamara Cano. Unless it was a huge coincidence, it would seem that Carousel intended for Dina Cano to be Tamara's mother in the story.

"It's like it's mocking me," Dina said.

We stood there silently contemplating whether there was any possibility this wasn’t meant to mock her at least a little. Carousel had mocked my dead loved ones. It had no reservations about rattling its players.

"You are probably asking for it with the tropes you use," Isaac said.

Cassie elbowed him in the ribs and whispered something sharply in his ear.

He wasn’t exactly wrong. Dina had a background trope called A Haunted Past that she always combined with Encouragement from Beyond, which allowed her to speak with her dead loved ones. If Carousel was going to pick one of us to have a missing daughter, it would be Dina.

I didn't know if there was any greater meaning to that. I didn't know if Carousel was doing it because Dina's son had died in real life.

All I knew was that we now had one piece of information we didn't have before. When it came time to plan our run of The Final Straw, we would be more prepared because of it.

"Let's get out of here," Dina said. Her mood had soured, which was a bummer because it had just begun to lift in the days since we finished the so-called Tutorial.

I just hoped that she would be able to play the grieving mother when the time came.