Chương 362: Book Eight, Chapter 29: Flyers

It took a while for Kimberly to leave Cassie's side, which was odd. Don't get me wrong, Kimberly was very caring and had spent a lot of time looking after Cassie inside storylines and out, but this was different. I could see in her eyes, as she stared at Cassie's sleeping face, that she was feeling her character's emotions. She recognized Cassie, not just as a familiar player, but as one of the teen girls from our dream. In my gut, I knew that was dangerous.

She sat down at the table and made herself a plate of biscuits and gravy just to be polite to whoever it was that made them, but she didn't eat them. She sat there in her pajamas, stroking her blonde ponytail, which hung over her shoulder, and staring ahead.

I sat across from her, chewing on some bacon that had been burnt beyond recognition, half of my attention wondering who had cooked it and the other half wondering which of the tropes she had equipped might have caused her to be sucked into a shared dream with a bunch of psychics.

"Are these the tropes that you had equipped last night?" I asked.

"What?" she asked. She was far away, still deep in thought. Antoine was sitting next to her, doing a much better job of eating than she was. He leaned over and said, "The tropes you have equipped right now are the same ones you slept with, right?"

"Oh yes," she said.

"I didn't think to change them." I scanned through them again. She had used Convenient Backstory to give herself vague psychic powers before inside of a storyline, but that trope alone couldn't be the culprit because both Avery and Nicole had that same trope equipped, and they didn't report any dreams at all. I looked down the long table. There were many seats, most of them not filled.

Avery had Convenient Backstory equipped, I could see on the red wallpaper, but she also had another trope, which was a staple of hers, called Dream Girl, which allowed her to communicate with her admirers in their dreams after something bad happened to her in a storyline. I remembered back to the dream where my character had powerful feelings of infatuation toward some teenage girl upstairs, whose name I never learned, and who wasn't there when I walked upstairs, who had disappeared altogether.

I took a deep breath and tried to think through exactly what might have been going on. Clearly, we were being included in elements of the apocalypse even though we weren't technically signed on yet. I felt that was especially curious. The Apocalypse had been moving closer. The music reached us even louder at night, and the radio kept talking about it expanding and adding new acts all the time. Then again, apocalypses were always very easy to gain insight about outside of tropes.

The Black Snow aside, nothing was deviously hidden from the players. There was information all over the place in the months and weeks leading up to the apocalypse that could tell you all sorts of things. So if this apocalypse was really big on psychic powers, maybe that's all that was happening. Those of us who had psychic-related abilities through one trope or another were just gaining insight about something related to the apocalypse. Maybe Carousel was just being especially fair and giving us a heads-up.

Or apocalypses were like storylines, and as the circus drew nearer every day, we were slowly being cast in roles that we would later play if we accidentally triggered it. Heck, it could even be how we trigger it. What if we triggered it in our sleep? Apocalypses were unlike anything else in Carousel. Even by their nature, they included all sorts of characters from many different storylines, regardless of what the underlying plot of the apocalypse was. That meant that they were quite meta.

I looked back at Kimberly's tropes on the red wallpaper. She had one called The Hall of Fame. In fact, it was her aspect milestone trope, and its powerful yet unpredictable effect was to make Kimberly the Center of Attention when it came to meta parts of a storyline. That had to be it.

"Kimberly, are you trying to feel your character right now?" I asked. She nodded but didn't make eye contact. A few seconds later, she said, "I can't help it. She's so sad, but she can't remember why."

"Try unequipping The Hall of Fame," I said. Finally, she made eye contact with me and stopped stroking her hair long enough to unequip that trope. Afterward, she continued staring at me.

"She's gone," she said.

"There it is," I said.

"Always have to be the center of attention, don't you, babe?" Antoine asked with a laugh. Kimberly rolled her eyes. Well, that seemed to be a good explanation for Kimberly's invitation to the slumber party. Still, there was also Avery's Dream Girl trope, which may or may not have been interacting with the apocalypse.

If the dreams that we were having were meant to be part of a bigger narrative that would come to a head in the apocalypse, then it made sense for Avery's character to be dead or missing, given her trope. The very concept of it implied that her character must disappear or die.

"Avery," I asked, "did you have any dreams last night at all, even if they didn't seem related to what's been going on?" She shook her head.

"Sorry. Slept through the night." Maybe she actually slept like the dead? Maybe I was overthinking it.

"Could you unequip your Dream Girl trope just in case?" I asked. It was normal practice to just leave your tropes on through the day and night. There had never been a real reason to take them off as a rule, with the occasional exception. She shrugged her shoulders and casually grabbed her trope out of thin air and flung it into the air, where it flipped end over end longways until it disappeared when it hit the floor. Nothing happened. She continued to not know what I was talking about.

Logan was sitting across from her and noticed the interaction.

"You're thinking that any trope that might give some sort of psychic or supernatural power should be unequipped?" he asked.

"It's a theory," I said.

"That seems to be the point of attack for whatever this story is." And so, the rest of the morning, we all went through our tropes, trying to imagine if any of them could be recontextualized as psychic powers. In the end, we covered all our bases and acted with an abundance of caution.

"This isn't good enough," Camden said after he joined us. He had gone back to bed after the whole incident in the night.

"If there is some way that the apocalypse can be triggered in our dreams, what are we supposed to do about this psychic chick that's sleeping in the next room?" Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. Oh, yes. Her.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Andrew asked, standing up from the table.

"I'm saying that Cassie can't take off her psychic abilities like other people can. If that really is going to end up being the trigger for the apocalypse, even putting her to sleep isn't going to be enough." The room was poorly designed for this type of conversation. It was long and narrow and almost entirely filled by the giant table we ate at. It was hard to see who you were talking to if they were seated too far away, which is why perhaps no one noticed when an extra player slipped in.

"There's one thing we can do," Cassie said from the entrance to the room.

"You can kill me." It was nice of her to be the one to present the idea.

"That's not what I was saying," Camden said.

"I was just saying that we need a solution."

"What other solution could there be?" she asked. She had been crying and looked emotionally drained. Psychic powers were not always the kindest. If we were stone-cold logical players, there would be one clear solution and only one: send Cassie down into the dungeon so she could be killed by one of the monsters down there, preferably a low-level one, and then rescue her after the apocalypse.

"Wait a second," I said.

"This is all predicated on the idea that being psychic is innately dangerous, which right now is just a theory. For all we know, having Cassie around could be valuable. She may know things that can help us avoid this apocalypse if it ever gets close enough for us to worry about." That somehow brought us back to the fifth debate about whether Avery's Writ might protect us from the apocalypse. The final conclusion, yet again, was that the Act of God clause was a reference to apocalypses.

The Atlas confirmed that much. I was tempted to re-equip my psychic background just so I could feel that powerful intuition again, and maybe I would know what to do, but my dumb logical brain kept telling me not to. - By sheer coincidence, surely, Carousel was ever so kind as to clarify the matter only a few hours later. I wasn't outside when it started, but I did get a glimpse out a window and made my way out to the castle walls. Hundreds of flyers rained down on us from above, maybe even thousands.

These ones were different than the ones we had seen, which were really generic advertising the Red Chalk Circus. It didn't take long for pretty much everyone to find their way outside to the courtyard, or perhaps one of the walkways on the castle walls. And what we found when we looked at the flyers was strange. It was almost a normal advertisement. Low Top And Co Present The Red Chalk Circus's Headlining Attraction, it said at the top.

Most of the flyer was taken up by a photograph of various circus performers and a few children who were watching them up close in fascination. There was a bearded lady and a man balancing on a ball, along with a few clowns in old costumes that probably would have looked a lot less creepy if the photo weren't in black and white. And in the center of it all, where all of the people in the photo were staring or reaching out toward…. was nothing. Nothing at all.

It was clear someone was supposed to be standing in the middle. There was a little platform, and the entire flyer was centered around whoever was supposed to be there, but instead, it was just a blank spot, and all of those circus performers and children were staring at nothing. At the bottom, there were more words, big and beautifully detailed. Highbrow Hew, it said, and his menagerie of dreams. Smaller off-center text said, He remembers you.

As soon as we had grabbed a few of these flyers and confirmed that they were not Omens or otherwise dangerous, we brought them inside and examined them. Cassie had waited inside, fearing that going out there with the flyers might trigger another psychic attack.

"Oh my God!" she screamed as she looked at one when we brought them in. She turned and closed her eyes.

"What is it?" Andrew asked. Isaac was so concerned that he was left speechless. He had stayed by her side all morning.

"I shouldn't look at them," she said.

"Get it away from me." Quickly, Andrew took her into the next room while the rest of us stared at these strange flyers with a blank space in the middle where Highbrow Hew, whoever that was, was supposed to be. We discussed it for a bit, but we were genre-savvy enough to know that whatever was on this page could only be seen by someone with extrasensory perception, if it could be seen at all.

"We should look at it," Camden said.

"Somebody should, somebody who can be psychic." He was looking at me.

"Why in the world would we look at it?" Logan asked.

"Cassie just said that we weren't supposed to see whatever was hidden on that page."

"Cassie said she wasn't supposed to see it," Camden said.

"She can't stop being psychic, but one of us can."

"You're going to risk bringing the apocalypse down on us just to indulge your curiosity?" Nicole asked.

"In case you haven't noticed," Camden said, "I hear music outside. It arrived with the posters. Whatever that damn circus music is, the apocalypse is already accelerating, and if we don't learn anything about it, then we can't possibly stop it."

"What if just seeing what's on there is how you trigger the Omen?" Logan asked.

"I thought we agreed this wasn't an Omen," Camden said.

"If seeing whatever is missing on this flyer triggers the apocalypse, then that would make this flyer the Omen, and Riley or Lila would be able to check. In fact," he said, turning to Isaac, "Use How Is This Normal on this poster." That was an interesting idea.

Isaac's scouting trope was a bit more burdensome than mine or Lila's, in that he had to specifically call out anything suspicious or ominous in order to get information about it, but it also had the effect of making whatever ominous thing he saw much less ambiguous. It would comically confirm his suspicions. Isaac, at that point, had had a rough couple of days after a fight in the dungeon didn't go his way, but with some accelerated healing from his brother's tropes, most of his problems were in his head.

"Now you wanna know what I have to say?" Isaac asked. He paused, waiting for a response, but he didn't get one.

"Don't you think it's a little weird," he eventually said, "that everyone in this poster is looking at this space in the middle and there's no one standing there, all creepy like?" That was it. That was all it should take. If there was some Omen hidden, his particular brand of scouting trope would have been ideal for making it more obvious. Maybe the wind would catch the page, or maybe there would be a flash, and suddenly we would see whoever this Highbrow Hew was. But none of that happened.

In fact, we stood there for nearly a minute, and there was no hint of anything bad happening.

"Well, just a second," Logan said.

"If this is an apocalypse Omen, he may be too low level to detect it."

"That's not how it worked for me," I said.

"With my scouting trope, I could see what the apocalypse storyline was called and that it was an apocalypse even when I was half the level I am now." It had been a very disturbing moment when the Black Snow first arrived. I had actually seen the Omen through the roof of a building that I was in; it was so powerful. And this page gave off none of those vibes.

"Well, this is a terrible plan you guys have," Logan said.

"Just because the apocalypse is bearing down on us doesn't mean we have to run toward it." He was using one of his Cynic tropes.

"It'll let us know if we have to run away from it too," Camden said, "while we still can." Logan shrugged. His job as the skeptic was done.

"All right, whatever," I said.

"Meet back here in ten minutes for the show. Maybe we prepare for the worst." And so we did, we came back later carrying weapons, go-bags, and dressed properly for a storyline. Camden held out the flyer, and I reached into thin air and grabbed my psychic background trope and quickly equipped it. As I stared at the flyer, nothing happened. Nothing appeared in the ink. There was no sudden revelation. And yet I did learn something.

I learned that the Omen for this storyline could not be seen with the eyes or heard with the ears. It could only be perceived with the third eye and a powerful scouting trope like mine. Whatever psychic power radiated from the circus was something I could feel, much like Cassie could. And that feeling carried with it now something it hadn't had last night. It carried the Omen right there in my mind. What I saw on the red wallpaper was the flyer that Camden had in his hands. It was just a normal movie poster.

I turned away from Camden just to make sure it didn't disappear when my eyes left the flyer, and it didn't. I was perceiving it entirely through psychic power; however, that was supposed to work. The poster in my mind had no blank space. There was a man standing on the small platform, with all the circus performers and children staring at him in amazement. He was dressed like a circus ringmaster, except his clothes had patches and his shoes were oversized, like a clown's. And I couldn't see his face.

I'm sure it was there, but he was looking up and not just with his eyes. His whole head was tilted back so far that his face was aimed up at the sky. Even though his body acted quite normally, his hands outstretched as if presenting himself, his head tilted all the way back. I could see the underside of his chin and his full throat. I could see that he had white makeup all over his face and neck, but I couldn't actually see his eyes. I saw a hint of his nose and the corners of his red smile.

Tufts of red clown hair stuck out past his ears. As I stared at the poster, I began to dread the moment that he would lift his head and show me his face. I focused on the storyline. The Omen read as follows: Ringmaster Omen: Psychic Turbulence Difficulty: Apocalypse. The world is ending. Trigger: Remembering him. My grandmother's psychic intuition, passed down to me, told me the only way to trigger that Omen was to remember my character's relationship to Highbrow Hew, the clown who only looked up.

I quickly unequipped my psychic background due to fear and discomfort from the psychic turbulence I felt. As my mind went back to the plain old mundane settings, any chance of remembering my character's relationship to that terrible clown disappeared. It was just a story now, a story I didn't know. The pressure bearing down on my psychic senses was gone. I walked across the Great Hall until I found the room where Cassie was lying down. I slowly approached her and met her eyes. She still felt the disturbance.

Without a psychic connection to the apocalypse, I would have a better chance of guessing the atomic number for vibranium than of remembering how that clown related to the little boy whose memories I had just lived. But Cassie, wherever she had gone off to, she might remember him at any moment.