“So, these last few days—the Doll House, the Speakeasy, Carousel Family Video with the weird guy dressed like you—all of that was to get you to walk into the flea market and hear two NPCs arguing over a painting?” Isaac asked.
We were on the roof, just relaxing.
Isaac was being his cynical, skeptical self, never missing an opportunity to criticize the way Carousel worked. After we returned with the Omen, he chattered incessantly about the whole mini-quest to find which storyline Logan and Avery were locked behind.
Frankly, I didn’t know if he was doing it because he was actually confused or if he just liked criticizing the powers that be.
“Basically, yeah,” I said. “The clue was about the Bowlers, and we know the Bowlers have cleared every storyline within spitting distance of the bowling alley. We just had to look around. Once we knew where to look, we were in the home stretch.”
“It’s weird, is all,” Isaac said.
“How strange, the guy who is always skeptical is skeptical about this too,” Antoine said.
“I’m just saying, I don’t like playing ball with Carousel. Doesn’t it feel weird that it sets you on some scavenger hunt, and you just did what it wanted? It’s training you, don’t you get it? You don’t really think that guy trying to sell the painting just happened to be there when you were there, no—he was waiting for you,” Isaac said as if he had some gotcha. “Carousel is patting you on the head for doing what it wanted.”
“I mean... yeah?” I said. “All it wanted us to do was go to a specific place and look around. And you’re probably right—that guy selling the painting was probably going to be there anytime we showed up, because he was our reward for pulling the thread on this little mini-quest and figuring out where to look.”
Isaac just shrugged his shoulders.
It was true that Carousel’s mini-quest didn’t lead us directly to the Omen, but it led us to the place where we were supposed to look, and I didn’t feel like I could ask for more than that. I mean, a map with an X on it would have been preferable, but that was too much to ask for.
We had started out our search by looking in shops hoping to find the Omen for sale--the psychic shop, the pawn shop, heck I even scanned through the omens at the doll shop.
Carousel just helped us find the right one.
----------------------------------------
We sat on the roof of Kimberley's loft—just me, Antoine, Andrew, and Kimberley after Isaac left.
We had some information to gather that we didn't want the others around for.
"Kimberley, this is a high-stakes role, and the audience is going to expect a standout performance from you," Sal said over the speakerphone. "But I have to say, I can't help but feel that the ending will be taken as really bleak, and it might put the brakes on your career."
"You think it will be a difficult role for me?" Kimberley asked.
"I think the audience will have a really hard time believing a happy ending. Honestly, it’s just asking a lot," he said. He had a serious tone. That wasn’t good.
We were now doing our customary mixing and matching, testing our tropes against the omen for Stray Dawn. We needed to find the best possible rescue trope and the best team to go with it.
Everything was on the line because we no longer had Dina’s very forgiving rescue trope on the table. We wouldn’t have used it if we did.
Sal and Kimberley exchanged their goodbyes, as he didn't have much more to say.
She had equipped her rescue trope, A Woman in Mourning, which was usually used against serial killers and slashers—human killers who might taunt the loved ones of their past victims. And while the trope technically did work with the new werewolf storyline, all indications were that it was just a terrible fit.
It made sense; creating a visceral thriller where the bad guy has actual supernatural abilities and runs in a pack, while the main character is an isolated, emotionally charged individual, just did not stack up as an easy win.
In fact, when she equipped her rescue trope and I used my I Don't Like It Here scouting ability, the difficulty shot up to Get to the Car Now, the highest difficulty I measured for regular stories.
The problem was my rescue trope was no different.
The Wrong Reel would have us protecting our base against the werewolves all night long. While this was compatible, it was also far too difficult. My rescue trope, like Kimberley's, was better against mundane or slightly paranormal human enemies.
Werewolves were ferocious beasts.
"Guess that leaves me," Antoine said. I could see a look of relief—or pride, maybe—as he said it.
He must have sensed the hesitation on my face.
"What?" he asked. "There’s not going to be a problem here." He quickly equipped his rescue trope, but Kimberley didn’t unequip hers.
"Maybe we should talk about this," she whispered to Antoine.
"Let’s just try it out," Antoine said. "Then we can talk once we have the information."
Ever since Antoine messed up in The Final Straw storyline and dissociated On-Screen for over ten minutes, Kimberley and I had been worried about what we were going to do when we came across another storyline that involved a forest—an apparent trigger for Antoine's latent trauma.
He got close to her, put his hand on her hand, and then whispered, "Let’s just try it," in a sweet way that she wasn’t going to be able to stand up to.
Just as I expected, she unequipped her rescue trope, and with a few taps on her phone screen, another call went out to her agent, Sal.
I didn’t even need to wait for the phone call—I could see that the difficulty of the omen dropped down.
The difficulty level was This is Scaring Me, which was more difficult than the base storyline had registered but less difficult than what either mine or Kimberley's rescue trope registered as.
That might have been counterintuitive, seeing as his trope, A Race Against Time, turned a storyline into, well, a race against time. It put a time clock on victory and forced the players to accomplish some feat—usually involving Hustle—before time ran out.
Why would a rescue like that be easier than mine or Kimberley's? It was actually the same reason that Arthur’s advanced archetype of Monster Hunter had made the Grotesque storyline easier, even though, by all accounts, it made the enemies stronger and more violent.
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The Grotesque statue was a powerful enemy in the psychological horror story it was originally supposed to be in. But it was actually a pretty beatable enemy with an exploitable weakness in a head-to-head fight.
The same was probably true with the werewolves in Stray Dawn.
In both mine and Kimberley's rescue tropes, the enemy was put into a situation where a werewolf would be far too dominant for us to overcome while simultaneously not giving us enough advantages to be able to win.
Antoine's rescue trope, however, seemed to give us enough wiggle room that even a mighty foe could be beaten.
After all, with A Race Against Time, you just had to accomplish some goal before the time ran out. We didn’t have to kill or capture werewolves, as in Kimberley's rescue trope, or survive an onslaught from them all night, as with mine.
Of course, what exactly we had to accomplish with Antoine's rescue trope was not clear.
As we had seen with Dina's rescue trope in the storyline Itch, sometimes difficulty or ease just came down to how your rescue trope interacted with the base storyline. It wasn’t always clear what would happen—sometimes, the resulting story might be easier or harder for reasons you could never predict.
"Okay, honey, this is a high-paced, action-packed storyline with a nice mystery angle," Sal said. "It has something for everybody—from the ones who just want to turn their brain off and watch a high-paced flick to people who like the backstory and the lore, depending on how the director goes with it. Frankly, I see you on the poster, scared out of your mind, terrifying beasts at your heels."
"So it'll be a lot of running from werewolves?" Kimberley asked.
"Oh, you could expect that," Sal said. "Fair amount of running toward them, too. The secret here is that your character is brave beyond belief, and in fact, if you don't play this right, people won’t believe it at all. So you have to just be this character that is ready to re-explore her past at all costs. You know what I mean? Like, she’s had it with running, and the fact that there’s a lot of money on the table for her is just one of the reasons she’s doing it because money alone probably won’t make sense."
Interesting notes about her character.
"What can you tell me about my costars?" she asked.
"Well, they had better be ready for a fight," Sal said. "Because this one is an ensemble story where everyone has to bring something to the table, or else nobody is gonna see the light of day, you understand?"
"I got you," Kimberley said.
Sal was beginning to get vague again. That made sense because this was going to be a hard storyline, which meant that he wasn’t going to have a lot to say. But he had told us everything we could have hoped to hear—this was a fight where everyone would need to be ready to carry the story, and Kimberly would be quite important to the narrative, which went well with her Celebrity aspect.
"Anything else?" Kimberley asked.
"All I can say, Kimberley, is that every actress needs a werewolf story in her repertoire, and this might be the one for you if you think you can cut it."
"I think we can cut it," Kimberley said, looking at Antoine but not with optimism. Perhaps with loyalty, like she could never speak an ill word.
Kimberley hung up the phone.
"That sounds better than the last ones," Antoine said. "What is your scouting trope saying?" he asked me, but even before I answered, it seemed he knew just by looking at my face. "It's better, isn't it? It’s easier with my rescue trope, right?"
He had me there.
"Yes," I said, "but I only have theories about why that is."
"Then it's settled," Antoine said. "We go with my rescue trope, max out on Hustle and Mettle, and we go kick some werewolf tail." He looked at me and said, "What? You were hoping that you'd get to leave me behind?"
I hated it when people tried to read me.
"Come on, Antoine, don't be like that. You know exactly why this is a problem—that mountain is covered in forest—"
"The only problem with The Final Straw," Antoine said, "was that I did not bring along my nightmare trope. That was it. Every other time, I have been fine. Stop treating me like a child."
"I am not treating you like a child. I'm treating you like someone who lost his sense of reality On-Screen for long enough that the enemy you were chasing came back and found you and pushed you to the ground to snap you out of it. And if it had been anyone that wasn’t Benny, you would have been dead."
Antoine had no retort, which I hated. I didn’t want to argue. I actually thought we were basically on the same page already, however reluctant he was.
"Riley," Andrew said, stepping in, "I think what Antoine is asking for is for you to respect his judgment of himself and to treat him like someone who is actively improving his condition every day. He has the tools to live with his ailment. If he thinks he can succeed, we should believe him."
"I think he would say he was fine even if he wasn't. If we go into this storyline, which is probably low to mid-30s in plot armor difficulty, and he freezes up, he doesn't just endanger himself—he endangers all of us. He has the stats and abilities to help us win a storyline like this, and we need him. But if he's compromised, then we need to go out and find other rescue tropes and go about this differently."
I really wasn't trying to come across as a jerk.
"I knew this whole time that you were gonna be like that," Antoine said. He took a deep breath. "Riley, I am struggling; I'm not denying that. But I'm not crazy, and I'm not out of control. I just have... I just need a few accommodations, a few mental health tropes, a little bit of understanding. That's what I need. Sitting out on the bench isn't going to be any good for me or the team."
I didn't say anything for a while because I knew I wasn't going to win this fight. I even thought that Kimberley agreed with me because she knew Antoine's condition better than any of us, but she didn’t say anything.
"I am treating him," Andrew said, "both with my tropes and with my training in psychology. I can vouch for him. His injury is almost artificial in nature—it's difficult to describe. I believe that if we do our due diligence and treat it seriously, we can prevent any meaningful symptoms in a storyline."
"Don't act like I'm some lone dissenter," I said. "We were all in agreement that this was a big deal, and then everyone decided it wasn't a big deal, and nobody told me. Alright, I don’t think you’re crazy; I just don’t know how to plan around that particular problem. But if you say the problem's gone and everything's taken care of, well, then I guess I have nothing to talk about."
Andrew may have been telling the truth, and he also may have been playing the odds. He saw that we needed Antoine's rescue trope to rescue his teammates, so he may have been putting his thumb on the scale and exaggerating Antoine's miraculous regimen to maintain his sanity. I would never know.
"Well, I said my piece," I said. "If you're saying that he's gonna be fine, then I’m not going to argue.”
But what I really meant was that whatever happens in the storyline, I needed to constantly plan around Antoine not being 100% reliable. Because while rescuing Logan and Avery, two people I had never met, was not exactly the most important thing on my to-do list, it was still important and the experience gained from a successful rescue was essential.
This was never going to be easy, so why not just throw on another obstacle? I had to hope that Antoine could keep faking it just a little bit longer.
Luckily, he was just one player, and he wasn’t the only fighter we had anymore.
They may have been suspicious about why I gave in so quickly. Maybe they thought I was going to throw a tantrum or something, or maybe I was overthinking it. I didn’t know.
But they started talking excitedly about their plans for the storyline, about how vital the Party Phase was going to be because finding weapons that worked against werewolves was essential. The only way for us to do that was through exploration in the Party Phase—or maybe a bit of Rebirth.
Ideally, we would have found good weapons on our shopping trips, but very few seemed to show up.
I found myself staring at the painting, to which we had devoted an entire deck chair so that we could stare at it when we needed to activate our tropes or just feel inspired.
Who was the woman in the picture, and what was the significance of the silver necklace? And why didn't Sal mention it?
That's when I realized something had changed.
"Wait a second," I said. "The omen changed."
They all stopped talking and looked at the painting.
"What's different?" Kimberley asked.
Purchasable Omens in shops like the pawn shop or the flea market were different from normal omens. Everyone could see details about them, although they were often abbreviated or not very clear.
From what I gathered, everyone could see, to some degree, how this storyline was triggered. Originally, you had to put it into the back of a wood-panel station wagon in southeastern Carousel to activate the storyline.
Their instructions simply told them to return it to its owner, a task which would send them on a long string of clues until they eventually figured out how to put it in the back of the wood-panel station wagon.
But that trigger had changed because of Antoine's rescue trope. That had not happened with Itch.
"The trigger was now simply entering Southeast Carousel," I said, and even they knew that.
"Triggering it became easier," Kimberley said. "Is that good or bad?"
"Neither," I said. "Or both. It means that the storyline is on a sound stage. Doesn’t it?"
"Oh," Andrew said. "That does make sense. The original takes place in Carousel Proper, but this one is different in some meaningful way."
"Can we get Lila to show us around the sound stage using her scouting trope so we're familiar with things?" Antoine asked.
Andrew shook his head. "Her scouting trope's not particularly good for that sort of thing. The sound stages are usually barren when she opens them up—no NPCs, no good information. And I'm not sure she could select this specific sound stage even if she wanted to, especially since the omen isn't in that area; it's a purchasable omen."
Lila could open up sound stages for the purpose of traveling safely, but as amazing as that ability was, it apparently had some limitations.
I didn't know how much this changed things or if it did at all.
Either way, we would find out soon.