Chương 289: Book Six, Chapter 51: A Part to Play

"If you have the antidote, you have to use it now," I said, but I knew how futile my attempt was. Now that my brain had caught up with the situation, it was back in control. That was such a silly way to describe it, but it felt true. There was a gaping hole forming in my chest, metaphorically for now, and whatever lived there could not be trusted to run the show. Daphne walked closer to me, and I felt the raw edges of the figurative claws in my heart digging deep. I nearly flinched.

If I weren't cutting off my emotions to the best of my ability, I probably would have. My face was blank, except for my eyes, which were trained on Daphne and were probably betraying the fear I logically felt. As long as they hid the rage, I was alright with it.

"Tell me that you love me," she said. I waited for a beat.

"I love you," I said, but even as the words came out of my mouth, the purity and innocence I had said them with before were gone. I could feel an emotion surging up within me, a deep sorrow and longing, not for Daphne or Homibride as she was called on the red wallpaper, but for the blissful ignorance I had gotten to feel. For the love that I felt. I mourned it. I barely had any time to think about it at all, and yet I could still process that. I was in mourning.

I knew this would happen if I let my feelings get out of hand. The entire time this storyline had been going on, I had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to figure out what the catch was to this novel happiness. Of course, I didn't realize that it had to do with the storyline. I thought it had to do with my relationship with another player. But here it was. The other shoe dropped, and I would just have to lock it away like everything else.

Daphne smiled a girlish sort of smile when I said that, but she was pretending, too. She knew I was lying, and I swore that I could see sorrow on her face as well. Was she mourning me while I still lived?

"Give me the antidote," I said.

"Riley," she said, "it's too late."

"You don't know that," I said.

"Andrew's still alive. He's still breathing. There might still be time to save him."

"No, Riley. It's too late," she said.

"We loved Andrew. He was your best friend. Just seeing him die is devastating, but there is nothing we can do about it. We will mourn him and never forget him." As she spoke, she went somewhere else mentally. She was crying as she spoke about Andrew. What was she doing? Was she just trying to torment me? No, I realized as I looked into her eyes. She was roleplaying. She was pretending to mourn Andrew while he still lived because she wanted to experience those emotions. That's the reason she did everything.

I looked back down at Andrew. Jules had already kicked the bucket, and he was struggling. I held him out of the water as I felt his labored breathing. Fortunately, he had put seven points into Grit. Poison was usually powered by Savvy, and I doubted that her build was high Savvy. I couldn't shake the feeling that he might be able to survive the poisoning, but it wasn't like I could confirm it with him now.

Daphne was high Moxie, perhaps, to help tell lies and to power that terrible, Undetectable trope which had caused so much of this mess. I didn't know how the stats matched up, but Andrew was hanging in there. So was Emmett, the blackmailer. Desiree, however, was slumped over onto his lap. Weird. I figured her for a high-Grit build. How long had she been sick? She hadn't looked that terminal when I first saw her. I could see the pain in Emmett's eyes, the love he had for her rebounding on him. I knew how he felt.

In a way, it was like the woman I loved had died. Suddenly, I remembered Ramona. How could I have forgotten? I would have had to, for the premise of this storyline to work. But it felt like such a sin. I felt like I had cheated on her. And worse, I felt like I had failed to protect her. I might actually have to sit down and talk with her after this. What would I say? The man fiddled with a gun in one hand and stroked his dead wife's hair with the other. I could see why the gun hadn't come into play already.

It had a trope on it called Blind Fire, which forced it to fire all of its rounds at once to intimidate and incapacitate an opponent, but it prevented any of the bullets from making contact. It made sense that the only gun that could be found in this storyline couldn't be used offensively; Daphne had a trope that guaranteed as much. Emmett appeared resigned to his fate. I didn't know if he was meta-aware, but he knew his end was near. Still strange he didn't fire the gun. It seemed like the perfect time.

His character wouldn't know the gun couldn't be lethal, after all.

"We didn't poison your parents," he said, attempting again in vain to acquire the antidote. He wasn't stupid. He was in love. Briefly, I knew something about that. He bent down and kissed his wife's head. Then he attempted to get down off the desk he had been sitting on with her and use that virtually useless gun, if only to intimidate. But as soon as he put weight on his feet, he fell to his knees. He extended his arm out to aim the gun, but he couldn't keep his arms still enough to aim it.

Daphne might have been fifteen feet away from him, but that was as good as fifty yards from the looks of his condition. He continued to try to aim the gun, closing one eye, supporting one arm with the other. He contemplated shooting, but he never did. It was potent drama, watching him give up, but still really strange. He tossed the gun into the floodwater on the far wall past Daphne. On his knees, the water was up past his waist, and it wouldn't be long before he lost the ability to hold himself up.

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"We didn't kill your parents," he said. Daphne stared at him for a moment, as if considering her response.

"Stop saying that," Daphne screamed.

"You're ruining it." He was ruining her roleplay. What was she going for? The devastated daughter? The avenger? It would be hard to avenge a death when the person you were taking revenge on refused to play the role. The whole time, I was making eye contact with Kimberly. Our nonverbal conversation was concluded in something like: We can't run yet.

"What are you talking about?" I asked, but the way I looked at her, it was an accusation.

"Who... who killed your parents?" Daphne scowled at Emmett one last time, and in a fraction of a second, her face changed. She wasn't the angry daughter of slain parents anymore. She was Daphne. Gentle, soft, sane-passing. She looked back at me. Tears welled in her eyes, sparkling in the flickering lights, and her voice trembled with a sincerity that felt pulled straight from the heart of a classic Hollywood romance.

The way she looked at me, I could've sworn she was pouring out her deepest love, pleading with me to embrace her heart completely, but the words didn't match. The words were terrible.

"Riley," she whispered, her voice shaking gently, full of tenderness, "they lost their daughter. Those poor, heartbroken people, their sweet little girl, she was taken too soon. She wasn't even old enough to drive, too young even to know what love truly felt like. And I… I did the only thing anyone could have done. I gave their daughter back to them. I gave them the chance to see her fall in love, to watch her walk down the aisle, and marry… you."

Her eyes searched mine desperately, looking for understanding, for affirmation.

"What we did today, Riley, what we created, it was the greatest gift we could have given them. Today was their perfect day. The last good day they'd ever have. Beth was growing weaker so quickly; she wasn't going to recover. And Robert was close behind her, I could feel it. Without her, his heart would break entirely. Today, our wedding, our vows, they gave them happiness one final, perfect time." She reached out, fingers toward me as if expecting me to run to her, to embrace her.

"Our marriage, Riley, our love, it's something beautiful, something powerful. Don't you see it? Our love made something wonderful out of pain. Tell me you understand. Tell me you see it, Riley, that what we did here today was good and pure, born of love. Please, tell me you understand." She was playing another character. She didn't believe what she was saying. My Moxie must have been higher than hers now.

She was roleplaying as the Angel of Death now, putting those elderly people out of their misery with one final gift. The emotions must have thrilled her because she could barely suppress her joy. Being these characters was a joy to her. My eyes were wide. Truthfully, I was prepared for any sort of evil she might have been up to. In fact, I was probably overcompensating to try to make up for any leftover infatuation that might clog my judgment.

But I had yet to seriously consider the possibility that she had killed Beth and Robert Hutchins. Her love for them seemed so sincere. But then, as I stared at her in horror, I realized that was what her love was. It was murder. It was death. It was a passion so powerful that life could not survive it.

"Did you kill them?" I asked, sounding like an absolute fool. My voice even cracked, but I think I pulled off sincerity.

"I rescued them from every terrible day to come," she said." We did." It took me a moment to think about this, to really absorb it and understand what was going on. She had killed her parents. That's what this whole thing had been about, giving her adoptive parents one final sendoff before fleeing town with my character's money, no doubt. A fantasy that she got to live out. One of many.

This whole time, I felt like I was scraping and searching in vain to figure out what the plot of this film was, beyond the cat-and-mouse game of murderer versus isolated innocents.

But that was because this story was not about me. It wasn't about Kimberly or Andrew. This story was about Daphne and her attempt to give her parents one perfect day, being foiled by blackmailers whom she had to take out one by one. Carousel was testing her to see how far she would go to capture those feelings of love, grief, and exhilaration. The story was about her. She was the main character. Everything started to make sense.

Behind her, Emmett was leaning up against the desk he had been sitting on, holding his wife's hand. She was a goner from what I could tell, and he would be too soon enough. Unlike with Andrew, it wasn't only implied that they had been smoking. According to the plan Daphne described, they had been chain-smoking. Her plan had worked masterfully against them. Was that in the script, or did she actually make up the idea of poisoning cigarettes and leaving them for enemies to find?

There was a certain level of brilliance to it. It was a murder mystery kill. With enough Savvy, you could easily get a low Savvy enemy to fall for it. Maybe Desiree had picked up the cigarettes and shared them with Emmett because he clearly had a high Savvy build. Then again, so did Andrew, and he still picked up the cigarettes. Was her plan so far out of left field that even smart characters couldn't have foreseen it? I would never risk a plan like that. It wasn't my style of cinema.

I would have never thought something so indirect could work, but then, with the right footage… I had pulled off some crazy plans in my career as a player in the game of Carousel, but watching someone casually throw around poisoned cigarettes and land a critical hit that might get four kills made me feel like I was up against a professional. Oh, because she smelled cigarette smoke on the blackmail letter she had received. That was the clue that put her plan in motion?

How many more traps and tricks had she cooked up that hadn't come into play? Emmett screamed as loud as he could to be heard over the sound of the generator, which was on the other side of the desk he was leaning against.

"Send me to her," he said.

"I want to be with Kitty." Daphne turned around at once. She withdrew her letter opener, and after walking over to him slower than a person normally would, she… just watched him struggle to breathe. What the hell. I was prepared to watch her mercy kill him. Even Arthur had done that in the Camp Dyer days. But watching him die was worse. She seemed to think it was beautiful watching them die together.

"Two lovers, together for many years through the best and worst of times," she said.

"Dying in each other's arms, or close enough. They won't be apart for long.... well, maybe a bit longer."

"Won't you just end it?" Emmett asked.

"Do you have no mercy at all?" She didn't answer that I could hear. I saw Kimberly moving out of the corner of my eye over to the far wall of the room. She bent down and picked something out of the water slowly and carefully, not revealing what it was. She was silent as a mouse, or, well, a fish, given the floodwater. As Daphne cooed at the sight of the two lovers, dead and dying by her hand, Kimberly walked back over to where Andrew and I were, and we got ready to go on the run.

Andrew was sickly, but his Infected indicator was blinking at a steady, slow rate. He was Hobbled by the poison. It was no good. Taking him with us wasn't the play. We needed to lure Daphne out of there so that we could get him to a safe place. And then we needed to take the antidote from her. Andrew was my best man for the wedding, so he must have been a pretty close friend in the story. Efforts to save him and ourselves would propel us into a final confrontation. It all fit together.

I left Andrew with Kimberly and put some distance between us.

"Rachel... or whatever your name is," I said. She turned to look at me.

"Was it all a lie? Are you really just this killer? Was saying you loved me just a means to an end?" Daphne turned to me.

"No," she said.

"I truly love you, Riley. I will love you till the day you die." I sensed she was telling the truth. She was hooked on playing her various characters. Maybe if I played along, I could manipulate her.

"You're putting on a show," I said.

"You're performing for your audience." I pointed to Kimberly and Andrew.

"You've always done that. You were always the most in love with me when people were watching. And I was okay with that, because I knew that was the only way I would get to love you." Drama was like catnip for her.

"That is not true," Daphne said.

"I have been devoted to you for our entire relationship." Without her Moxie, she had developed a beautiful, deranged look. I walked away toward the hallway that would lead out of the room.

"Then just talk to me," I said.

"Just talk to me. Explain this to me, because right now, none of this makes sense."

"Riley," she said, following after me. Now that I had her following me, I had to pick up the pace. Hopefully, Kimberly would know how to help get Andrew out of the floodwaters. My plan was formed quickly. But I wasn't the only one planning. As soon as Daphne and I were out of the maintenance room, I heard the generator throw a gasket. The motor came to a screeching halt. I suspected it was Emmett. She shouldn't have left him alive. He had one last trick of his own.

Daphne and I looked at each other for a fraction of a second, which felt like it lasted a minute. And then the power went off altogether. We were in the windowless passages of the casino. It was dark again. What was worse, I realized, was that the water was moving. There was a current again, just like there had been when it flooded initially. I could hear it. The water was rising. Off-Screen.