Kimberly looked through the tropes and then stared back up at us, hoping that we would be able to encourage her decision.

We had discussed this a long time ago, back when we had nothing but time and the Carousel Atlas to look through. When it came to the Eye Candy archetype, there were no bad choices.

The Atlas made it a point to warn that the Beauty aspect required a lot of commitment because the Beauty had to juggle a lot of characters and interactions. That made them powerful in ways that might not be obvious.

Storylines in Carousel were, well, stories, after all, and it was true that the characters in them often got overshadowed by the plots, dangers, and fear. However, being able to connect with NPCs and fellow players and use those connections was quite valuable, even if newer players weren't able to appreciate that yet.

The Socialite aspect was seen as incredibly useful for information gathering and manipulating NPCs in its own ways. Picking that aspect usually resulted in you being cast as some sort of famous person within the story world.

From the description, you ended up with a story kind of like Sinister, where the character is a famous author, and other characters all know who he is and either hate him or love him because of it. Socialite also had lots of perk tropes, and as we have learned so far, never underestimate perks.

That left the Celebrity aspect—one of the hardest to use and most versatile. If Kimberly chose the Celebrity aspect, it wouldn't significantly alter which characters she portrayed. However, the treatment of her character in the film would change, as the role would now be played by a famous actress.

The benefits of the Celebrity aspect were numerous, though not particularly well-coordinated for any given strategy. It was a jack of all trades. Even trades you didn’t know existed. It required thinking on your feet and a willingness to go out with a bang.

When we got here, I thought Kimberly would have chosen Beauty or Socialite. Those were more straightforward. She had changed a lot in Carousel.

She looked at us and said, "Celebrity," as if asking for permission.

"It's your choice," Antoine said. "We told you this before: we’re not going to be upset no matter what you choose."

She looked down at the tropes she had been given as options and went back toward Silas, the Mechanical Showman, and returned two of them.

Upon doing so, I could see her plaque on the red wallpaper change. She was now a Celebrity-Eye Candy.

To her, it wasn’t just an arbitrary decision; it wasn’t even really about the roles or the abilities. To her, picking the more versatile option meant that she could take on more responsibility.

With Project Rewind and the deaths of so many people we cared about, none of us wanted to be the person who coasted.

After she made her decision, Antoine hugged her, and we sort of clapped as we finished gathering up groceries.

Then we walked back to Kimberly's loft downtown. Antoine was kind enough to push the wheelbarrow. I didn’t know if that was out of kindness or out of some apology for his own perceived failures.

Why had he gotten no tropes from that storyline?

By all rights, he should have. From what I saw, he did great.

It was possible that his experience level was just at a particular place where he wasn’t close to being awarded another trope, but it seemed more likely that something else was going on.

~-~

"I hope you like it hot," Isaac said as he put a steak onto my plate.

It had once been a pristine cut of ribeye. I couldn’t tell anymore.

I wasn’t sure if that was a joke or if he actually did think that torching the steaks was the right way to cook them, but none of us really cared. He seemed genuinely proud.

“I was always the cook in our family,” he said. Cassie didn’t seem to give him grief for it, so I didn’t either.

We sat on the roof of the loft and watched as the sun moved across the sky.

Even though The Final Straw was not the hardest storyline we ever went through, it felt like one of our biggest accomplishments. Most of the time, we had either been thrust into storylines or chosen them because we didn’t want to get axed (even though I was the only one who knew that would happen).

With The Final Straw, however, we were doing it because we needed to provide and survive. There was something very comforting in making our own choices and succeeding at them.

"So you’re really not going to tell us what it was about?" Isaac asked after he sat down with his own food.

Baked potatoes and steak were our reward. It probably wasn’t normal for a rural general store to have fresh meat, but we weren't going to complain.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

It took a while to get used to eating meat in Carousel and wondering where it came from, but we were past that.

"No, we’re not going to tell you what it’s about," I said, "because you are gonna go run it next time."

"You think we can do it?" Cassie asked. She seemed nervous.

I thought for a moment and said, "Well, maybe not the very next time, but eventually, you guys are going to go get groceries."

There was a lull in the conversation as we ate.

"So, have you seen it yet?" Kimberly asked. She was wondering if I had watched The Final Straw on the red wallpaper yet.

"Yep," I said. "You are the star. They cut my lines down by about half."

"But at least you’re not bitter about it," Isaac said.

"I’m just glad I survived," I said.

I could see this lingering look in Kimberly’s eyes that told me she wasn’t really asking about the storyline.

She was asking about Antoine.

She wanted to know if I had seen what had happened that caused Antoine problems. I hadn’t yet.

Whatever had happened had been cut from the movie, but when nighttime came, I would get to see the raw footage or at least some of it, and I was betting that Carousel couldn’t wait to show me.

As night came, I couldn’t tell if I was dreading seeing it or excited.

~-~

I excused myself and retired to my room. On my way downstairs, I ran into Ramona.

"We have steak and potatoes up there," I said. "I hope you like them medium well because Isaac thinks that's how they're supposed to be done."

Not another awkward silence.

"I’ll go look," she said. Then she stopped and said "So, you survived."

"Yep," I said.

"And what, we just do that over and over again?" she asked. “That’s our life now?”

"As long as Carousel allows it," I said. I meant it as a joke, but it came out a bit more grim than intended.

After a moment, I added, "Nobody died in this one. You can’t guarantee that, but sometimes you get lucky."

I decided not to tell her that my nervous system had been burned out after being possessed by ancient nature spirits.

"So what’s next?" she asked.

It took me a moment, but then I said, "We start the rescues. It’ll be good to see some old friends."

"I imagine," she said.

I knew I was supposed to say something there, but I couldn’t figure out quite what, so instead, I just said, "If you ever need to talk, come find me."

Then we awkwardly parted, me going downstairs and her heading upstairs.

When I got to my room, I lay down on my pitiful little bed and stared up at the ceiling.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw an eagle carrying a skull across the sky out the window. It was funny; the thought that went through my head was, "Oh, cool, an eagle." And then my Dailies trope activated.

I fast-forwarded through it all.

There was a bunch of footage of Patchers quitting what they were doing and rushing out to try to stop us from getting the truth out. Much of that had ended up in the final cut. Or at least parts of it.

I kept going back, looking for what Antoine had been up to when he was away from us.

Then I found it.

I saw Antoine running through the woods near the gorge. This was when we had separated and we had stupidly sent him off alone into the forest.

When he arrived to find Benny (actually Rustle) killing the Patchers who were digging up Tamara's body, he was more or less okay.

The adrenaline had kept him moving, and from the way the footage was shot, it looked like he saw something, like perhaps he was chasing Benny through the woods. As this was raw footage, it was hard to tell.

He found the dead and dying Patchers that Benny had left near the burial site before running away.

Antoine continued to pursue Benny, realizing that he was headed back toward the Harless property where Kimberly and I were.

He ran out of the forest near the campsites by the gorge, then crossed the street to head into the forest that would eventually connect to the Harless property.

And then, after he had run far enough to be completely surrounded by trees, he stopped running.

He had his gun drawn, and he was in the middle of the action, and then he just abruptly stopped and looked around like he had gotten lost. At that moment, his expression changed, and I could see every bit of the light in his eyes disappear.

He just stood and stared into the trees, and that was it.

It was full-on dissociation.

I lay in my bed and watched footage of Antoine standing still and staring forward for thirty minutes.

It wasn’t that I watched him that long, he was standing there that long. Just staring forward.

I fast-forwarded through it at first, but then I just let it play as I watched in morbid fascination.

Antoine froze up On-Screen in the middle of a chase scene. I couldn’t believe it.

It only ended when Benny or Rustle or whoever returned to him, likely under instruction from the script, drew his sickle and made as if he were about to strike Antoine.

But if those were his instructions, he didn't do it.

I wasn’t sure what I was watching.

Benny tilted his head and poked Antoine. Then, in a last-ditch effort to jog him, Benny shoved him.

Antoine fell back onto the ground hard.

That worked.

Antoine dropped his gun but was quickly scrambling for it as Benny returned to his escape. Antoine stood up in pursuit of Benny as if nothing had happened.

I didn’t want to watch anymore.

Finally, I understood.

Antoine had frozen up, an obvious symptom of his torture in the Straggler Forest.

Carousel had no choice but to get rid of his character. Writing off a character was fine, but it was probably difficult to do that when that character was in the middle of a chase scene and refused to move. Being Written Off usually resulted from being a no show to your next scene. I didn’t have any idea what would happen to someone who froze in the middle of one.

It had decided to send the killer back to kill him, from what I could tell. I supposed that under normal circumstances, a killer would have slit Antoine’s throat, and we would have been greeted with his severed head as some sort of grim calling card.

That didn’t fit the story necessarily, but what else was Carousel going to do?

I stopped watching the red wallpaper.

I didn’t know what to do.

We literally had no option but to move forward with Antoine as our only fighter. I was going to have to have a conversation with the others about this, or at least with Kimberly and Antoine.

We could never put ourselves in a situation where that happened again.

I understood that the architects of Project Rewind probably did not understand that Antoine’s condition would be a consequence of their decision to teach us about secret lore by forcing us into it during the campfire anthology.

I hoped whoever the insider was, that they were at least regretting their decision now, assuming they were still alive.

I got up from my bed and walked back upstairs to the roof.

Everyone was still up there.

They were playing a game of cards under the light from string lights that were hung around poles.

As I arrived, Antoine made eye contact with me. He knew that I had seen it, and I could see the shame and embarrassment on his face. I went to the table and sat down. Kimberly looked like she wanted to ask me what I had seen. Antoine nonverbally begged me not to tell her.

The game went on with the added weight of my new knowledge.

I grabbed a drink from the cooler, returned to the table, and said, "Deal me in."

Tonight, we were celebrating a victory.

Tomorrow, we could discuss what we had lost along the way.