Lila reappeared not too long after Andrew showed up.

She was nervous, but I could see in her eyes that she wanted to please—that she knew how important it was for us to trust her.

I tried my best to wipe away my preconceptions and my pent-up frustration with watching her surrogate screw things up constantly.

Ironically, I felt closer to trusting her than Michael and maybe even closer than Andrew—and he was a very reasonable fellow.

It required a bit of contortion for a person to wrap their mind around Project Rewind, so I may have been better prepared to deal with the realities of sacrificing fellow players for the greater good.

Michael went off to one of the rooms to relax. He didn’t actually have a room at the boarding house because his character lived in Eastern Carousel, but nobody was going to say anything about it. The last I saw him, he was lying back on a bed without having folded back the sheets, staring up at the ceiling, trying to hide the look of annoyance on his face.

We passed by his room and continued onward until we found a nice, secluded hallway and another room with a couch and some chairs. An NPC was in there reading a book, but Andrew politely explained that he needed the room for a therapy session, and the NPC bowed his head and left.

Lila, having been the target of Andrew's Psychiatrist tropes before, lay down on the couch. Andrew took a seat near her, and I took a seat far away where I could see her, but she couldn’t see me without turning her head.

And then the session began.

I had seen interrogations in Carousel—heck, I’d even been the person being interrogated by the Detective Paragon himself—so when I sat down to listen to Lila bear her soul, I was expecting something more along the lines of a detective trying to get the truth out of a witness.

That wasn’t what happened.

Andrew was very kind and gentle.

Lila was open but incredibly nervous and on the verge of tears over even innocuous things. It felt like I was violating her just by being there, listening as she poured her heart out about her difficulties in Carousel.

Some things that she talked about, I could never repeat.

What I could say is that she had a very clear phobia of being On-Screen. I could relate to some degree. Knowing that some entity beyond your understanding was watching and being amused by your suffering was terrifying.

I almost have to will myself to forget that it’s happening and to think about the game as if it were just a game.

Lila did not seem to be able to do that.

She talked about the audience as if they were her personal tormentors, and she hated the idea of going On-Screen for anything. This had been a considerable roadblock to her team.

It made her tropes make more sense, though, as they were more designed to take her Off-Screen or to get her killed because even that was preferable to her from the way she talked.

It also helped explain why she was a Wallflower instead of a Hysteric. She didn’t want attention. Hysterics almost always did.

She did not like the limelight, as she called it. That term seemed a little poetic, but it was correct. We were the stars of some sick little play.

She apologized to Andrew for past mistakes, and Andrew calmly guided her back to the subject of the current investigation.

Back to the subject of Roxy.

Roxy had approached her after their team had done the Ranger Danger storyline and had promised to help her grow as a player so that she would get the least possible amount of screen time. But even in those early meetings, there had been a hint that Roxy wanted to tell her something.

Roxy had talked about her teammates who had gone missing while playing Carousel’s so-called tutorial. When Lila inquired where they could have gone, Roxy said they might have gone home—she didn’t know.

Of course, I knew that the Axe Murderer had killed Roxy’s teammates because they quit the game. Or at least that’s what I thought I knew. The truth could have been anything. If Roxy was a liar, that could have been another lie.

Lila went on, describing her meetings with Roxy as she was slowly taught the power of a good scream. Apparently, they had some master and apprentice-style meetings over the subject.

I hadn’t put much thought into this before, but by looking at the tropes that Lila carried, it was clear Carousel did like someone with a good scream and rewarded it with tropes. As a dude, my scream potential was limited.

When their teammate Logan had revealed his quest—his mission for which he had come to Carousel on purpose, knowing what that entailed—Lila got nervous.

She didn’t like attention being on her, and she really didn’t like the idea of being part of any quest because it made her feel like the audience was watching her even when she was Off-Screen.

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

And, of course, it was. A player would have to be blind to believe that we weren’t being watched, although I didn’t pretend to know the nature of any such observation.

That led to Lila spying for Roxy, until eventually, Roxy let her in on the little secret that the quest was a “trap by Carousel.”

It was about that point that she stopped speaking easily and started to shift in her seat—a clear sign of stress, her tell. Andrew interjected, asking what Roxy had asked her to do.

“She just wanted me to lead him up onto the mountain,” Lila said. She shifted in her seat.

“Are you sure she didn’t tell you more than that?” Andrew asked.

Lila was quiet.

She knew that she couldn’t lie without revealing herself—not with my trope forcing her to wiggle in her seat every time she tried to lie or avoid a question. Not with Andrew and myself peering at her, using every ounce of our Moxie to try to determine if she was telling the truth.

Even Andrew’s tropes pressed her, forced her to keep talking.

So she told the truth, and while I wasn’t confident about everything she said, I did believe most of it.

“She said we would be attacked on the mountain and to make sure that Logan was in the lead. Then she said that we were supposed to run back down the mountain and into the buildings. I was supposed to take you there, and that way, we would be safe. But then Avery got caught too, and when we ended up inside that storyline with those bedbugs, there was no way that we could win.”

Lila started to cry.

“I swear, I didn’t want anyone to die. I just thought that if we got rid of Logan, everyone would be safe and that his quest would be over.”

I felt she was being sincere. That was my Moxie talking, but her Moxie wasn’t that much lower than mine. Was it possible I was believing what I wanted to?

“How does it make you feel that Roxy didn’t have you kill Logan to stop Project Rewind but rather to further it?” Andrew asked.

Lila thought for a moment.

“I feel like an idiot,” she said.

I understood the sentiment.

I didn’t know if Roxy was on Project Rewind’s side, but it didn’t really matter because her actions aligned perfectly with the project’s goals.

It was all much the same after that.

She apologized profusely. The story was exactly as we were expecting it to be, exactly as the evidence indicated.

She never strayed from her story—the one she told at the very beginning—although she did at least confess that she knew what was going to happen to Logan and that she wasn’t just duped completely.

After that, Andrew and Lila hugged, and Lila seemed to feel much better, another effect of Andrew’s tropes.

In the end, it felt anticlimactic. In Carousel, that was often a good thing.

I didn’t know what I was hoping for.

Was I hoping that she would secretly have been in league with a Narrator and that she would tell us secrets that only such a spy would know?

Was that what I wanted? For her to be more than just a scared young woman? That she was in the know?

If it was, I was disappointed.

Whatever Lila was, I didn’t believe that she was evil. I also didn’t know if we were safe to have her around.

But you could never count on being safe in Carousel.

I felt like this whole exercise was just a little attempt to control the situation. Maybe if we questioned her and ran her through the paces, we wouldn’t feel helpless.

I didn’t know, but I did feel better about things after the interrogation.

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

The Final Straw storyline played out much like it had on our first run.

All of us working together, we were able to figure out that poor Tamara had been killed whenever a man named Torben Patcher had lost control of his horse, and the horse had kicked her while she was walking home.

That was a constant—Tamara died by accident, always at the hands of some irresponsible Patcher, and then they worked to cover it up.

Benny had discovered what they had done when repairing their horse trailer, and so the story moved forward. The story stayed very similar, with a few subtle differences.

Isaac apparently had some humorous scenes where he felt like he was about to be inducted into a cult because his character’s fiancée was a Patcher, but other than that, the story was largely the same, and it ended the same way. There was a reason the Vets used to rerun stories so often. There was safety in that.

With a grocery run.

I waited at the grocery store as the needle on the plot cycle ticked toward the end. We had defeated the Patchers this time without me having to become some vessel for an ancient spirit, and the Carousel was getting its last footage for the film.

As we gathered Off-Screen, ready to start looting Eastern Carousel General Store, Lila promised that she wanted to help rescue Logan so that she could say she was sorry.

As Lila wandered through the shelves searching for canned goods, Andrew and I stood next to each other, picking through the scant seasonings. We had not thought to get Bobby’s food trope, so it was not exactly going to be a feast, but there was enough food to hold us over.

“So, do you trust her?” Andrew asked.

“As much as I can,” I said, scratching my arm. “Do you?”

“I do,” Andrew said, “but there is no way to be sure she’s telling the truth.”

“No, there isn’t,” I said as I bent down and picked up a can that claimed to contain a whole chicken. “Look, the way I see it, it’s a remarkable coincidence that whenever we reset the game, we were given two players who just happened to be siblings to you, a member of the last Party of Promise. I figure that wasn’t an accident.”

“You think you were sent to us?” Andrew asked.

“I think that if she were a threat, we wouldn’t have been directed to you so blatantly. Or at least that’s where I’m willing to put my money.”

I didn’t know if the Insider was still somewhere pulling strings, but I knew that coincidences didn’t exist in Carousel, and in my ignorance, I had to trust in something.

We stood in silence as Lila walked back around, holding a jar of pickled eggs.

“I do still wonder what happened to Roxy’s team,” she said. “How could they all disappear at once? Don’t people normally go missing one at a time?”

“No one knows what happened to them,” I said. “Not even Roxy. Whatever it was she told you, I’m sure it was just a story she invented to cope with losing her friends.”

“That may be the case,” Andrew said.

I could see that his eyes were looking at me as I scratched my arm, my own little tell. Lila wasn’t paying attention; she was diligently packing a wheelbarrow with food.

All I could do was stare back at him, and we both just agreed not to talk about it. He was going to find out anyway, eventually, if he hadn’t already figured it out.

All in all, I felt like we had done pretty well with our first suspicious character rescued from beyond the grave. Maybe one day it would turn out Lila was evil or too naive, but that day, we would choose to trust, or close enough.

All I could hope was that one day, it would not fall on me to try to separate the trustworthy from the untrustworthy. One day, we would have a whole system down with all the right tropes to ensure that we didn’t have any spies amongst us.

Kimberly would be using her Moxie, and Antoine could be the face of our group, so I could go back to lurking in the background.

We’d have Anna back to keep us all in good spirits and keep our group together like a team. Camden would be able to make all the plans and think logically, even when it was so easy to be afraid and distrustful.

And when we got all this set up, I could finally feel like I didn’t have the weight of the world on my shoulders.

I just needed to keep it together a little longer.