Chương 25: Arc II, Chapter 18: Let's Split Up, Gang

It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out a solution to our problem. We had to leave the hotel suite and venture out into the land of ghosts, but I also had to be available for a call from Constance, who was researching the lore of the creature described by our deceased friend. The solution was the cell phone in my pocket. This storyline, unlike those I had previously run, was set in an age where cell phones were ubiquitous.

Modern movies had to come up with reasons to take cell phones out of the picture because they were just too useful for resolving horror scenarios. In Carousel, they were unusable without a trope that allowed you to use the phone, a trope like the one Constance had. The very moment I was On-Screen next, I pulled out my phone and noticed that it had full bars for the first time since I arrived in Carousel. I dialed Antoine's phone number. I had to hope that Antoine had kept his phone on his person.

There was no such luck. As soon as I dialed his number, I heard his phone ringing in his duffel. Anyone watching would think it was ridiculous for a young guy like him to keep his phone in his bag instead of his pocket, but modern horror movies used this very trick to disarm victims.

"Dammit," I said.

"Try Kimberly," Dina said hopefully. We knew it wouldn't work. We didn't have a trope for contacting our friends, even when they were in good health. That wasn't the point. All we needed was to establish to the audience that we did have cell phones and hopefully establish that they worked in this storyline. Carousel did not disappoint. Kimberly had her phone on her at the time of her disappearance because it was in the cloth bag she was using as a purse. She had practically kept it strapped to her chest.

"It's ringing," I said.

"She's not picking up." Our characters wouldn't know she was dead so we had to act in false hope of contacting her. I hoped that by establishing on camera that her phone was ringing even though she was out in the ghost realm, it would be enough to show cell phones would work and that Constance would be able to call me on my phone. Kimberly's phone rang and rang. And then someone answered.

"Hello?" a man's voice said desperately.

"Please. You have to help me." I put the phone on speaker and said, "Who is this?"

"My name is Jon," the man on the other end said.

"I'm lost. I don't know where I am. You have to help me!"

"Ok Jon," I said. I looked around at Bobby, Dina, The Stranger, and Isaac like I didn't know what to do, but then I continued.

"I called my friend. Is she there with you?"

"There's a girl here," Jon said.

"Oh my god, she's… I think she's dead." We all gave our appropriate reactions, except for Isaac, who was not ready for it right then.

"Where did you say you were?" I asked.

"I don't know," Jon said, "I've been walking for so long."

"Do you see a large building with a bunch of windows on a hillside?" The Stranger asked. There was no answer. Then, there was a chilling laugh. Not an evil laugh, a laugh like someone thought something was so hilarious that they couldn't hold it in any longer. A deep-throated joyous laugh. Click. The phone call ended. Carousel had taken my idea and ran with it. We had established that cell phones worked in the land of ghosts and the monster of the week had gotten to give us an interaction. Everybody got something.

I stared down at my cell phone as the screen went dark after the call ended.

"The gho—the guy in there said that the creature laughed," Bobby said. I nodded slowly. What came next would be the debate about whether to leave the apparent safety of the suite and venture out into the dark. I didn't want to play the hesitant one. I didn't want to do that song and dance. Maybe for this film, we would all be brave and reckless heroes. I wanted to take the offense, in a narrative sense.

"I'm going out there," I said.

"Kimberly and Antoine are still out there."

"Didn't he say your friend was dead?" Bobby asked.

"Doesn't matter," I said.

"I've got this sense that if we stay here, we die. My grandmother always taught me to trust my intuition. That's what I'm doing. Here, we're sitting targets. Not just for that thing, for all ghosts. When they arrive and we don't have the bell to be able to communicate with them… we'll be trapped." There was a pause as everyone started to consider what I had said.

"He's right," The Stranger said.

"I've spent too much time asking yes or no questions to random spirits. Now that I know Sidney is out there, that's where I'm going."

"I'm going too," Dina said. She could have at least tried to act afraid.

"But J. T. said that he left your daughter behind," Bobby said.

"Doesn't that mean it's too late?"

"He also said that he barely got away and we know that isn't true," The Stranger said.

"Should someone stay here just in case?" Bobby asked nervously. Good. We needed someone to act reluctant.

"It's like the guy said," The Stranger said, nodding his head in my direction.

"You stick around here, you'll be ticking off the spirits. All I know is you don't want that to happen."

"They can't get angry if no one is in the house," Dina said. I could see that Isaac was trying to think of something to say. He started to speak several times but then hesitated.

"I'll call and give the librarian my cell so she can reach us out there," I said. I moved away from the group to take the call. Apparently, that wasn't interesting to Carousel because we immediately went Off-Screen. I dialed the number on Constance's card.

"This trope takes time," Constance said immediately. She must have been Off-Screen too. As near as I could tell, that was how Carousel treated phones. If the audience can hear you, you are On-Screen. If they can't, you're Off-Screen. I had been curious about that.

"I know," I said.

"Dial this number when you have the information. We might not be around the hotel phone for a while."

"I see," she said.

"Riley…" she paused for a moment, "This request you made for the monster's weakness is taking far longer than it should. I've barely got anything. That isn't normal. By now I should know something about it, even if it isn't useful. I haven't learned anything." If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

"So… it's a tough enemy?"

"That would be my conclusion, yes."

"So the goal is to avoid it, not kill it," I said. One thing that had been impressed on me by the Vets was that enemies with levels far too high for their storylines were usually not meant to be killed or else they are meant to be killed in a very specific way, as a werewolf might be killed by a silver bullet. If she was having difficulty finding its weakness, that implied it was a strong enemy.

"That would be ideal," Constance said. Her tone carried something unspoken.

"Or are you suggesting that we can't beat it?" She thought for a moment before she spoke, as she had before when reading her script.

"This is untrodden territory," she said, finally.

"One can't really presume to know Carousel's intentions."

"Alright," I said.

"Call me if you get something." I hung up the phone. Was the implication that Carousel did not intend for us to survive?

"What do we do if we find a ghost?" Isaac asked before we left while we were still Off-Screen. I shrugged.

"We don't let it know it's dead."

"And if we find the other thing?"

"Run," I said.

"Or hit them with the rake." He had settled on bringing a wooden-handled rake as a weapon. It had been in the storage room. There had also been a broom and mop, but he felt the rake might be funnier because of the springy sound it made when it hit something. I thought the mop was the funniest, but I wasn't going to argue with him on his first day out.

"Remember the plan," I said. I had given everyone specific instructions on how I wanted our search to go. Hundreds of hours of movies had gone into my plans. They were meant to give us the best chance possible. Like most horror movies, the hard part is finding all the reasons for people to make the stupid decisions that would move the plot forward. I just hoped our choreography was on point. I tried to think through anything else to say.

I explained to him how to use his healing trope, though I had little hope that If he's still cracking jokes… would come into play with this specific enemy.

"It's convenient that everyone has cellular phones these days, isn't it?" The Stranger asked me.

"I know," I said.

"I'm working on it." He was hinting that we should be working on getting the voicemail played. His trope clearly prevented him from just telling me what his Dark Secret was. I had to investigate it. I still had time. My own tropes were not optimized for going into a fight. I had hoped that The Insert Shot would have come into play better, but the only object I had found in the Party Phase that applied to it was the bathroom mirror that had not been covered completely.

I had no clue if marking it was a good idea or not so I hadn't yet. All I could think about were the things I wished I had done better. I wished that I was not the only high-savvy player on our team anymore. Having Camden around to talk things through with had made me so much less stressed, even though neither of us knew what we were talking about. Now I was alone. Whether I liked it or not, they acted like I was the man with the plan and I just felt like the man trying not to screw up.

I hoped desperately that I would not mess everything up on the very first storyline of the Throughline. On-Screen.

"We leave the window open," I said.

"This is our way back from the outside. We find them and then come right back here," I said. We were fortunate that the house was at the top of a large hill. If the spirit realm was a reflection of our world, then we should be able to find our way back. But if that was true, why hadn't Antoine returned? Why didn't the Stranger's daughter return? For plot reasons. That's what I told myself. They could have returned but they didn't strictly for plot reasons.

That was always the answer when characters didn't do something obvious.

"Everyone ready?" I asked. As if to answer, the Stranger climbed right out the window. He was the only person with a flashlight so I had no choice but to follow. Though I had my smartphone for the first time that I could use as a light, I didn't want to waste the battery. That would be too tempting for Carousel to pass up. I asked myself if we should have waited a minute and fashioned torches or something? No. Torches in movies were only useful because of movie magic.

In real life, they would be hard to make and go out too often. Without a trope that would make them last long enough to be useful, it was a bad idea, even with my high Savvy. I was overthinking things. I felt like we had been given exceedingly little information to accomplish this task, but then, I always did. Luckily, not every effort had gone to waste. As soon as we had climbed out the window, Dina said, "I hear him. I hear my son." She started moving quickly toward the tree line.

Even the Stranger changed course to follow. Unlike me, Dina had no qualms about using her phone for a light, though she only had a small flip phone with no dedicated flashlight on it. She led us through the underbrush and down the hill. With one look back toward the suite, I noticed that J. T., the talkative ghost, was standing in the room watching us go. If he shut that window, he was a dead man. The Stranger had thrown caution to the wind and had begun calling his daughter's name.

He seemed certain that she was nearby.

"I don't think that Sidney would have gone this far," he said eventually. We all assumed that he knew what he was talking about.

"He may be right," I said.

"Surely Antoine and Kimberly would have tried to stay close too."

"Do you still hear your son?" Bobby asked Dina.

"He said come this way," she answered.

"Can't you hear him?" We all paused and listened. I heard a faint howl of the wind, which blew like a storm in the ghost realm. In fact, no one else heard him.

"I swear he's here," she said.

"He said I need to follow him this way. If there's even a chance of seeing him again. You have to understand."

"We're looking for living people!" The Stranger said.

"We have to prioritize that. Haven't you considered that the voice you hear is a trap? That thing seems to like tricking people." I knew he was wrong and so did he. Dina's trope was pretty clear that her son's presence was a positive thing, but our characters absolutely would not see it that way.

"I'm going!" Dina said. She marched off in the direction.

"No!" I whisper-screamed.

"Dina get back here!"

"I'm going back toward the top of the hill," The Stranger said.

"I'm telling you they wouldn't have gone this far."

"What do we do?" Isaac asked nervously, his rake shaking in his hands.

"Make for the suite," I said, pointing uphill in the direction the Stranger had gone. Isaac and Bobby did as they were told. I looked back over my shoulder toward the direction Dina had gone and paused. I walked that way and considered following her. Then I changed my mind, but as soon as I turned around, I noticed that the others had gone too far ahead of me. We were all separate. Just like I planned. Not only did I do better on my own, but I had shared a theory with the others that we had to be on our own.

As we walked together, we watched the Plot Cycle. It didn't move an inch. That meant the story was not moving forward. That was Carousel's subtle hint that something had to change. So, we split up. We tried to make it convincing. Carousel wasn't going to let the next part of the story happen when we were all together. That would be too easy. I was right. As soon as we split up, the Plot Cycle started moving forward again. I heard something in the distance. It wasn't one of those in the group. It wasn't Dina's son.

It was Antoine. He was yelling. I couldn't hear what he was saying, but I did know where the screams were coming from. I ran further downhill to the right of where Dina had gone. I ran until I hit the river bank. The river was the same one that we had such a hard time crossing after the Apocalypse. I could see Antoine on the ground next to the bank. He was injured. Specifically, he was Hobbled and Incapacitated. He screamed for help. It was a trap. It was clearly a trap, in fact.

Antoine's status had him listed as Captured. Normally, going after him would be an obvious blunder. Players would need a good excuse not to immediately help their friend. New players would fall for the trap out of concern for their teammates. I didn't need an excuse to stay away. I just needed to be oblivious. I just had to hope that Antoine would have the presence of mind to know what to do next. I ran down toward him, squinting as if I could barely see my hand in front of my face. It was dark outside.

Not that dark, but dark enough that my character might have trouble seeing danger. I approached him quickly pretending not to see my surroundings. Antoine laid back and closed his eyes.

"Riley…" he was too weak to speak, or at least he pretended to be. We had gone over this scenario before, more or less.

"I got you," I said.

"I got you." Nothing had appeared to try and attack me yet. I needed to get Antoine up and headed back uphill before it did. I could feel Oblivious Bystander activating. The hidden monster would be posing for the camera soon. The audience would see how much danger lurked right behind me. The was no telling how long it would last. This was not an ideal setup.

"You just take it easy," I said.

"I'll get you back to the suite." I hoisted him up and in the rush of things, I "accidentally" dropped my tape player out of my pocket. I grabbed it with my one free hand and pushed play, again on accident, as I shoved it back in my pocket.

"Dammit," I said. I shoved Antoine's arm further up onto my shoulder. Antoine did his best to look out of it. One leg was injured but the other was good enough. The bump on his head gave us good cover. I let the music play the 90s grunge that was on the tape. Something had just come out from hiding behind us. I didn't even try to look at its tropes yet. I had to keep my eyes ahead. Antoine had casually bumped my hood up with his arm around my shoulders until it was blocking my vision of whatever was behind me.

"You just focus on walking," I said.

"I'll guide us. We've got a big step here." This wasn't going to last forever. Oblivious Bystander was not designed for situations where the danger was known. It just wasn't believable that someone would be, well, oblivious in that situation. But maybe, if someone was so focused on getting their friend to safety that they didn't notice the growing threat behind them. Maybe if they accidentally played music to cover the soft sounds of the thing following, the sounds of laughter.

Maybe then, they could get up the hill without noticing the figure behind them. Maybe the figure would get bored and go after some other player with lower Plot Armor. Just maybe.