Chương 311: Book Six, Chapter 73: The Gala

"But I don't understand, if the title of the movie is Homibridal, won't the audience know who the killer is?" The man asked, blank-faced, standing next to a pair of women who also didn't seem to get the premise. He was a big movie producer asking me about my latest project.

"Well, it's not a murder mystery," I said.

"It's a black comedy. The bride is the main character. The audience is supposed to enjoy watching her antics while the groom and others slowly begin suspecting she's up to something." I had been pitching movies to guys like him all night. Homibridal, it seemed, was a niche taste.

"Huh," was all the man said in response.

"Sounds like an interesting idea. Oh, there's Lars. I'm sorry, Mr. Lawrence, I need to go talk to Lars." He quickly scurried away toward a tall, bald man with a wide smile. The two female NPCs followed. That had been my night so far; it was that awkward part of celebrity get-togethers before the human sacrificing starts. Kimberly had gotten pulled away from me, and Antoine was entertaining a gang of minor celebrities who seemed to find him incredibly interesting.

In a strange way, I almost preferred the party from The Strings Attached, at least there, I could wear my mask. Here, I wore a different mask, a mask of distraction. I worked my hardest not to make eye contact with any of the beautiful people or the wealthy benefactors wandering around the garden. I knew something was about to go down. There was no way that Carousel would waste a beautiful set piece like this hedge maze. The plot cycle was nearly at the First Blood.

Our Party Phase was almost nonexistent, probably as a result of the nature of Bobby's rescue trope. I was wearing a suit, but I had ditched my tie. I was going for the over-the-hill and giving-up type look. The truth was, I was uncomfortable looking in the mirror long enough to tie it. I must have been nearly forty in this movie, and while I never considered myself vain before, aging that quickly created a rapid-onset dysphoria where I felt like I wasn't even in my own body.

I channeled it into the awkwardness I was intending to convey in hopes of repelling NPCs. Carousel had put us through the wringer for about two hours, with lots of On-Screen conversations and lots of minor characters being introduced with little depth. I got the sense that Carousel really wanted my character to make an impression. Maybe I had failed. Kimberly was lighting up the room. She had aged gracefully; apparently, she had made a recent comeback after her hiatus from the film industry.

After the massacre years ago, her star had risen right back up, maybe even higher than it ever had been before. I watched from afar, dodging glances and doing my best to understand what was happening. I circled the perimeter of the party. We were in the middle of the hedge maze, and it had genuinely been fun following the string of lights through the maze toward the center, where the party was.

I pitied every single person working this party, from the caterers to the waiters, because anything that needed to be brought to the party had to be brought through the maze. But they were champs. I went to the bartender, who quickly held out a glass of champagne for me to grab. But then I did the classic movie move of asking, "You got anything stronger back there?" All I needed was a quick laugh, but I got more than that. The bartender's name was Trent.

He looked from side to side, then grabbed a bottle from beneath the bar and held it up to me. I couldn't tell what type of alcohol it was, but I could tell it was expensive from the bottle. I did my best to look impressed.

"The Geists really went all out for this, huh?" He leaned in and said softly, "They showed me to their liquor room. They've got like twenty of these." He then poured me a small glass of something brown on the rocks. I took the drink and brought it to my lips, pretending to take a sip. I looked at the glass in my hand and then back at the bartender.

"That's smooth." Hopefully, that was a coherent thing to say for that type of alcohol. I raised my glass to the bartender and nodded, and he nodded back. Then I was back circulating around the interior of the hedge maze, following the line of string lights and glass ornaments that had been hung in the hedges. Ever since I found out that the Geists supposedly ran this party, I had been looking for Carlisle, my old friend.

I didn't know if it made sense for him to be alive at this date, some ambiguous time in the nineties, but this was not Silas Dyrkon's version of Carousel, so there was always a chance. The truth was, I didn't see any of the actual Geists. Their name was being used as part of the setting and nothing more. Perhaps even Carousel wasn't willing to script them, so they could never really be proper NPCs. I was a little disappointed. I had missed my conversations with Carlisle. But it didn't matter.

Finally, after I had wandered around and had small talk with all the various Carousel elites, we all went Off-Screen. Everyone. Kimberly, Antoine, and I met up at a large ice sculpture of an angel that was near the entrance to the center of the maze. You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version. Even the angel wore a cloak and hood.

"You all have anything?" I asked.

"Something bad is about to happen," Antoine said, "but I haven't figured out what."

"It's the waiters," Kimberly said. That was a W for Kim. We all had sort of vague insight tropes now. I was technically a psychic because of my background trope, and this was a supernatural story, so my powers theoretically should have been working. However, my ability to control and manifest them was a crapshoot. For the most part, I couldn't even tell what my psychic powers were doing, but I was afraid to go into a storyline without them.

Antoine had finally obtained the Gut Instinct trope, one of the most useful tropes that Health Nut had to offer. What the difference was between Gut Instinct and psychic powers, I didn't know. But unlike my psychic powers, Antoine's trope alerted him on the red wallpaper, and they worked the same in every storyline. Kimberly had a trope from her background called Compulsive Vetting that made her very paranoid and observant.

"So, what's wrong with the waiters?" I asked.

"You tell me," she said. At first, I thought she was joking, but she really wanted me to attempt to figure it out. I looked around at the wait staff and noticed that something was strange. The professional and polished waiters I had seen when we first arrived must have been on a break, because the people serving our drinks and food were ever so slightly different, a little more poorly groomed, a little less fitting in their waiter uniforms.

"They got replaced," I said. Kimberly nodded.

"One by one," she said.

"Every time they would go back into the hedge maze, a new person would come out wearing their clothes."

"I knew something was wrong, but I wouldn't have guessed that," Antoine said.

"I've spent the last thirty minutes staring down waiters suspiciously," she said.

"Hopefully, Carousel got the footage it needed." Antoine proudly wrapped his arm around Kimberly and kissed her on the forehead.

"I did the interrupt-something-I-was-saying-and-act-like-I-heard-something-weird thing," Antoine said, "and then, when the NPC asks what's wrong, I looked around and said, 'Nothing.'""Classic," I said.

"Well, what did you do?" Kimberly asked me.

"I've just been walking around," I said.

"There are no enemies here, so they must have that trope that helps them go undercover around NPCs. I've been trapped On-Screen for most of this."

"You're slacking," Antoine said.

"Using my psychic powers isn't as easy or as organic," I said.

"They're not automatic. I have to pretend something is going on, which I normally don't do until something starts going on."

"Hey, if you're not up to it," Antoine said with a smile, "Kimberly and I can handle this scene. Maybe you can do something later."

"Look, I know something's going to happen," I said, and then I told them my theory about how Carousel wasn't going to waste a set piece like this beautiful hedge maze party.

"That's not the same at all. We all know something's going to happen, the plot cycle's almost at First Blood. Have you picked up on anything?"

"Have you?" I asked, laughing.

"I'm here for the macro-level insight. I'm getting a feel for things."

"As a matter of fact, I have found some things," Antoine said.

"You see that big statue of the angel? Look at its left foot." I glanced over at it, and sure enough, there was a crack forming in the left foot and spreading up the leg of the angel. After I observed it, there was a flicker of a poster on the red wallpaper for the hazard, but it didn't stay there long. We still had more to learn about detecting and manipulating hazards.

In a lot of ways, Carousel was one big Final Destination movie; you never knew what prop could become deadly, whether it was an ice sculpture of an angel or patio furniture.

"All right," I said.

"Next time we're On-Screen, I'm going to do something, really get some insight, all right?"

"We gotta keep each other sharp," Antoine said. I looked around and thought of ways to activate my psychic abilities on purpose. In all honesty, I did tend to stick to my Film Buff tropes and let my psychicness act as a backup. We circulated. The party was full of very minor characters, most of whom didn't even have names; they were just "partygoer," "celebrity," or "waiter." But as Kimberly had pointed out, that last one was now a lie.

Eventually, we had about fifteen seconds before we went back On-Screen, and I told the others to go back to their spots. I looked back around the party for some easy way to force a psychic vision or something useful. Without a specific psychic trope, it was a big roll of the dice. I technically didn't need to establish I was psychic; that was what the background trope was for, but I still wished I had.

Right before we went On-Screen, I noticed that there was a large fountain toward the center of the clearing in the middle of the maze. I got an idea. On-Screen. Things continued normally. I walked over to the fountain and looked down at the calm waters. The little bubbling brooks placed around the edges barely disturbed the mirror-like finish of the surface. I looked down at it and saw an older version of me looking back, not old, not yet, but older.

And then all I had to do was act psychic and hope my Moxie was high enough to do something useful in this storyline. I felt foolish. I began staring at the reflection of the clouds above in the water and acted like I saw something strange. Then I looked up and saw nothing. My heart started to beat, and I knew it had worked. I was replicating a trope that Cassie had called Reflective Jump Scare, well, sort of. Hers was supposed to come with insight. I looked back down at the water, at the reflection.

I expected to see a figure behind me, or maybe a face. But what I saw was something larger than I had ever anticipated, a titan, massive, covered in a cloak that seemed to be cobbled together from still-screaming hides of thousands of human-like creatures. It was like this Lovecraftian entity was standing above me, its legs as wide as any building, taller than I could fathom. I only had a second, but in that second, the entity that I was seeing reflected in the pool activated Trope Master.

Not long enough for me to read the two or three tropes that my Savvy allowed me insight into. I knew this thing was high-level. All I could see was the name He Who Walks Behind the Aisles. That stupid, stupid name attached to such a terrifying deity. I quickly looked up to confirm that the giant wasn't there, and he wasn't. When I looked back at the reflection in the water, he was gone. In the distance, screams could be heard.

I looked around, and the waiters had surrounded the party, covering all the exits, which seemed silly to me at the time, because most of those were dead ends, but still. Suddenly, shadows descended from above like sheets and enveloped the waiters and waitresses. They looked like the shadows of the hides I had seen sewn into the entity's cloak. They fell upon these waiters, covered them, turning them into hooded wraiths. I looked for Kimberly and Antoine. We met back up at the angel statue.

Most of the guests were very wary of these hooded figures, but they weren't quite sure how to react. Some of them must have thought this was the entertainment for the night. However, when the first hooded wraith came into the clearing from one of the many different paths in the hedge maze, a foreboding aura spread throughout the crowd and many people gasped. He was taller than the others. Even though all I could see was the cape, he seemed scarier.

He opened up his cloak, revealing nothing but shadow where his body should be, and then jumped into the air. He glided across the clearing until he landed upon an actress adorned with many diamonds. He closed his cloak around her, and she disappeared, diamonds, screams, and all, all at once. This story had all sorts of surprises.