Chương 100: Book Five, Chapter 3: A Call with Sal

"Knock, knock," I said as I walked to Ramona's nook. She didn't have her own room but had cordoned off the end of a hallway and put a sleeping mat there. It would do for her. It even had a window. She was sleeping when I showed up. She looked up at me, her eyes still pleading, I thought.

"Go away," she said.

"I will, just came to check on you," I said. She rolled back over. This woman was in her late twenties. She must have been depressed to still be in bed.

"Everyone's on the roof," I said.

"It's a nice place to hang out. You should consider it." I was met with silence. She pulled a blanket over her head. I was struck with jealousy that she got a full-sized blanket, while I got something half as big. That didn't matter right then.

"Look," I said.

"I don't know what you're going through. I really don't. Just know we're here if you need us." No answer. I turned to leave, but then I thought better of it and added, "When it comes time for you to run a storyline, we will force you. Just a heads up. Better wrap your head around that now. We don't have a choice." Adeline had said that to us back at Camp Dyer. You can't let new players start to believe they can sit the game out.

"You have a choice," she said. She didn't elaborate. I left. We had a run to plan. She needed more time.

"Hello," Kimberly said tentatively.

"I'm looking for a Sal? I don't know the last na—""Kimberly, babe!" a voice called from the other end of the line.

"Don't you know your agent when you hear his pipes?" Whoever this Sal guy was, he was a heavily animated character.

"I have been waiting for you to call me for ages. We have so much to talk about. Are you still in that dingy loft in the downtown area? Well, I know of a gig that pays pretty well and it's a five-minute walk. Can you believe that? A five-minute walk. It's a nice, actiony, sexy summer flick with zombies at a health spa. Isn't that a riot? Best yet, I think I can talk them out of making you do the nude scenes. Of course, you'd have to get a body double, but that's a small price to pay for your modesty, right?"

Kimberly sat slack-jawed as she listened to her fictional agent talking a hundred miles a minute, but then she got herself together and responded, "No, Sal, I'm not here about that. I actually have questions about a different job. Do you remember The Final Straw?" We had no idea how her trope worked. It was all part of the experiment." The Final Straw, The Final Straw, let me see. Oh my gosh, The Final Straw. You see, I knew, I knew that you would love The Final Straw. It is perfect.

It's what they call a career maker. I'm looking at a script here that could get you an Academy Award. Do you understand that? It is excellent." Kimberly looked at Antoine and me incredulously.

"All right, just let me get my notes, dear. It'll take me just one more moment, just one more moment... oh, here they are, right on top. Because if you take this role, Kimberly sweetheart, you're going to be right on top."

"You say that about every role," Kimberly said, trying to play along with the gimmick of the trope.

"And have I steered you wrong yet? This one though, this one is going to set you apart because, get this, my dear, you will be the main character. Your face will be on the poster of The Final Straw. Picture this: a young, eager detective hell-bent on saving a missing girl in some hick town out east. Huh? You like that? Well, of course, you won't actually be a detective; you're actually a reporter. But I think that's just as good." The energy and enthusiasm… was funny. It felt like a person playing a character.

It took everything not to laugh even when we were talking about a murder game.

"Tell me more about my character," Kimberly said, holding back a laugh.

"I just want to see if it's something that I could picture myself doing."

"What do you need to know? She's brave, she's beautiful. If I were 10 years younger and a woman, I would play this role in a heartbeat. She's inquisitive, but it's not her hard qualities that make her so special; it's her soft-heartedness, it's her compassion. Oh my God, this character, Kimberly, this character…"

"What's the pay like?" Kimberly said, shrugging her shoulders.

"Standard pay. The real pay is in exposure. This is going to tell the world that Kimberly Madison is a player in cinema, that she's not just some pretty face stripping down in the showers, that she has something to say, that she can carry an entire film on her shoulders." You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

"When have I ever played a character that's stripped down in the showers?" Kimberly asked.

"Oh, it's an expression, honey. I would never say something like that about you. It's just people, they talk. You know how it is; this business is ruthless, ruthless." Kimberly shot a glance at me because I would know whether or not Carousel had snuck in any nude scenes involving her. I shook my head. This Sal person was just being a character. I had never seen a player portrayed as nude. NPCs, on the other hand...

"Either way, I've talked to the studio and I've had them put in your contract that you don't have to do anything you don't want to do when it comes to the lasciviousness that is often in this genre. And of course, they went along with it. You're Kimberly Madison. You were the star of The Die Cast. You've earned your place and they know it, sweetheart." Eight of us sat around the table and tried not to laugh as Sal, Kimberly's fictional agent, gave her information about our next storyline.

She had recently been awarded a scouting trope called Just Ask Sal that let her talk to her agent about storylines as if they were movie scripts that she was signing on to. After all, that was the conceit of the Celebrity aspect of the Eye Candy Archetype, that the player was actually just an actor or celebrity signing on to a movie. That was where the Celebrity got all of their abilities from. We had been researching The Final Straw with all of the resources we had available.

The first and foremost place that we looked at was the Carousel Atlas. The entry read as follows: Title: The Final Straw Omen: A Trail of Missing Posters—A young girl is featured on them. When you walk too far down the Trail, the story starts. Recommended Archetypes for Scouting: Psychic, Detective, Sheriff Insights Not Considered Spoilers: 1. Psychic's Charmed Forecast: The Omen is available during daylight hours. 2. Psychic's Harbinger: The closer you get to the truth, the more danger you will be in. 3.

Athlete's I Have Practice Later: The storyline will take a few days. 4. Time Looper's Time Awareness: Part of the story occurs in the past. 5. Outsider's Eyes On Me: Everything you do will be seen and spread around by the NPCs. An Outsider or similar will be an important character. 6. Detective's Usual Suspects: Results unclear. Even the innocent parties act suspiciously. 7. Doctor's Crime Scene Triage: No Player Deaths are Necessary, but a total wipe is possible. 8. Sheriff's Deputized!

: A police officer is a playable character. Usually a fighter, not a sleuth. 9. Sheriff's The Rumor Mill: Lots of gossip from the townsfolk. Some useful. 10. Detective's The Amateur Detective: The film's main character will be an amateur detective. 11. Soldier's Weapons Check: Firearms are available, but don't expect them to solve your problems. The focus will be on melee, traps, and improvised weapons. There was a host of information about the storyline that we could use to decide our builds and plan our run.

Now, all we had to do was use our own scouting tropes to fill in the cracks and make sure we had all the information available.

"I'm telling you, Kimberly, the industry is dog-eat-dog. You gotta be willing to rise to the occasion, and I think that you can do that with this story. It's got heart; it's got a mature ending. You know how I like a nice bleak ending? That's not to say it'll be bleak because of you; I'm sure that you'll do wonderfully."

"Can you tell me about other characters that'll be in the story?" Kimberly asked.

"Just so I know whether or not I fit into it."

"Oh, of course. This is a story with lots of subtle acting, lots of subtlety—not like a lot of the stories that you see around with their screaming cheerleaders and the angry boys wearing masks. No, this is a mature script. Like I was saying, you have police officers risking their lives to figure out what's going on and to save the day. You have townspeople who are nosy but want to help, more or less, in their own ways.

You have a mysterious figure, a scarecrow, Kimberly, a scarecrow who is haunting the entire thing and taking lives." That was a little vaguer than we had hoped, but perhaps asking about other characters was a bit out of the purview of this trope.

"Do I have a romantic interest?" Kimberly asked as she looked over at Antoine. They had been romantically involved in every storyline they had been in, whether it made sense or not.

"Oh honey, you do not need to be with a man in every single storyline. This one is about you trying to help a little girl. Do you really want to cut back to some scene about you making goo-goo eyes at a smoldering, damaged man? I mean, I get it, Kimberly. The gun and the badge can be very attractive in a man, but at some point in time, you have to stand on your own two feet or you're going to get typecast and not in the way you hope.

This is your chance to show that you can be the one who wins the fights, that you can outsmart the enemy, that you can trap them, and that you can use your wits and your compassion. Don't throw that away just so that you can be arm candy to some hunk." It was interesting, the words he used. Sal was telling Kimberly not to have a romantic fling with Antoine's character.

"Arm candy" was one of Antoine's new tropes. If he had a successful or otherwise desirable romantic partner, it buffed him. We had never considered how that might interact with the story at large. If Kimberly was going to be the main character, perhaps a romantic subplot would only undermine her. Of course, it was always possible that Sal was just being catty. I scribbled something down on a piece of paper and held it over for Kimberly to see. She read it and then nodded.

"Hey, Sal, do I have any allies in this story, or am I all alone?"

"Well, there's allies and then there's allies. There are lots of people trying to solve the mystery, honey, but you are the main character. You'll get help. I believe that there are talks for your character's news producer to have a big-name actor take the role, you know, a real player in the industry. He should help you with the mystery. Or her. It could be a her, but let's be honest, they're not going to let two strong women headline a movie. The world ain't ready for that."

We all looked at each other with a confused expression. It almost sounded like Sal had misspoken and accidentally gave away that the role of her news producer was a man and then tried to correct it. Of course, it was possible that itself was a ruse and that he was telling us the news producer role was for a male player on purpose, and the correction was just flavoring. This trope told a lot, but man, was it a lot to untangle.

"Anyway, Kimberly, tell me if you want to take the role. I will suggest for you that if you do, you should spring for the best accommodations you can find. Eastern Carousel isn't exactly a tourist destination if you take my meaning. Ciao." Sal hung up the phone, and we just sat and looked at each other in the whirlwind of information he had given us.