Chương 400: Book Eight, Chapter 67: Choice as a Formality.

My instinct, when a paragon told me why they were here, was to ask: Why are they really here? And the truth still perplexed me, but I felt like I was orbiting some unspoken piece of knowledge that everyone seemed to know except for the players. It would explain why Vincent St. Vane had acted the way he had. It would explain why we suddenly found ourselves lousy with paragons. It might even explain the odd circumstances of our friends' captivity.

The pieces didn't come together until I heard screaming in the distance, about one hundred yards into the jungle. The five of us had been resting. We had a big storyline ahead of us, and all indications were that it would be a real struggle. The screaming was followed by an explosion, the kind that rose in a fireball into the sky. We ran out of the Speakeasy as fast as we could, toward the danger. All of the NPCs were doing the same, along with the paragons.

This wasn't just some narrative loop the bit players were caught up in. This had to do with us. I could feel it in my bones. When we arrived there, we found a weapons depot, as best I could describe it. The whole building and everything in it had gone up in flames, along with all the gasoline that they haphazardly stored within it. Someone had blown it all up to get our attention. There was a tree near the depot, and a message had been left for us there.

It was a long, rough piece of paper, something that looked very old. Upon closer inspection, it was a map, with a literal X drawn on it and words written upon it. It had been stabbed into the tree by a large, bloody knife with an otherworldly black blade. Someone had written a long diatribe on the map in cursive. Dear Antoine, You left me under that mountain, or maybe I should be more specific. You promised you would help me escape, and then you blew up the tunnel leading to my only exit.

Or maybe that isn't specific enough for you to remember who I am. How many men did you leave to die in those depths? Do you remember their names? Do their faces haunt your dreams at night, or has the bottle helped you forget? It just so happens we were right. There was something down there, something valuable in a way none of us had yet conceived, something transformative. I have to say, now I am thankful for you. We all are. You made your escape, and you made us what we are today.

Perhaps I'll pay back the favor in the future. Alas, I am not writing to reminisce. I present to you a proposal, the terms of which I am certain will rouse even the most cowardly corners of your heart. I have your friends, your confidants, your sidekicks. I've collected a group of them. Maybe it wasn't worth it for you to come back for me, but I'm certain you'll be willing to return for them. You are still human, aren't you, even after you peered into the darkness?

Ramona Mercer took it very personally when we captured her. She is special, isn't she? She has her grandmother's eyes and her grandfather's curse. It's strange, even after my metamorphosis, I still get queasy when I venture near the cradle, but Ramona is nearly at home in this place. Do you know why? I regret to inform you that we've also captured your old sidekick, Isaac Hughes. It's funny. He believed that this was going to be another payday.

You could teach him your skills, but you could never teach him your love for history. He was in it for the money and the women. He will get neither. He thinks he can talk his way out of this. He will not be able to, but blasted, he is trying. You remember old Thomas Van Notes's young daughter, Kelsey, don't you? She's grown up now, but you would know that better than me, wouldn't you? She wasn't just your lover, she was your fixer.

She's been helping you for years, getting supplies, making contacts, fighting your fights. I wonder if you've ever thanked her. I wonder if you've ever apologized. There's still a chance. We found your old hound master, Bobby Gill, isolated in the forest, surrounded by his dogs. He was there in the end, wasn't he? When you sealed my fate, he saw what the two of us saw, didn't he? If it wasn't for the love and support of his pups, he might have succumbed to the darkness. The dogs are gone now.

I doubt he'll hesitate to join them. If you wish to save your old comrades, follow the coordinates on this map. There's a second way down to the cradle, not just the throat you collapsed. I found it, but I cannot open it. I need the man who opened the first entrance to open this one as well. I need you. Your friends have seven days to live. If you are not here by that time, I will find some other use for them. Come alone or drag more friends to their doom. It makes no difference to me.

With patience, Ernst Vogler P. S. I left the knife. You'll want it where you're going. The letter was an Omen. Once we grabbed it and returned to the river, we would find ourselves moving past the choice phase into the party phase.

"So there it is," Antoine said. He didn't say much more. This Ernst Vogler seemed to be referencing events from the first movie. I looked at the Omen on the red wallpaper.

"It says Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle Part Two," I said.

"Is there a Part Two?" I asked Camden.

"No," he said.

"In the atlas, it says this series has a bunch of self-contained adventures. They've discovered like five or six of them. None of them had sequels. Let me take a look." Now that he had the Brain Trust trope, he could use my savvy-based insight tropes, so I handed him I Don't Like It Here and he equipped it.

"Ah!" he yelled, as the anxiety innate to that trope ran through him.

"How the heck do you use this all the time? I feel like I'm about to have a stroke."

"You get used to it," I said.

"Some people just aren't cut out for anxiety." He started twisting his back as if trying to relieve stress. The physical effects of the trope must have been less severe on people who experienced anxiety their whole lives. That's why it was perfect for hysterics and acceptable for me.

"This is a hard one," Camden said as he handed the trope back to me.

"How would you say it compares to other stories we've run?" It had been maxed out. Get to the Car Now had been the text the trope gave me. That was the hardest level. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

"Probably somewhere around Post-Traumatic," I said. Even though it was a high level of difficulty, there was a strange wavering quality to it. Sometimes it would feel unbeatable, but other times it felt like the difficulty would drop. It fluttered back and forth even as I looked at the Omen. Maybe it was Antoine's Adventurer advanced archetype that added that variability. The actual text didn't change; it was still"Get to the Car Now," but the feel was that it would be a little easier than that.

I couldn't explain it. It was going to be tough without Kimberly here. I wasn't sure how we were going to pull it off. Her ability to concentrate narrative weight was so essential to the way I played the game that I never really knew what I was going to do without her.

"So if we beat this one, we're in for a nice jump in levels," Antoine said.

"There's our silver lining," Camden said.

"Is it safe for us to take this?" I nodded.

"Just don't bring it to the river." Camden grabbed it as we made our way back to the Speakeasy. All of the NPCs and paragons had played their roles, running through a loop of dialogue, threatening to kill whoever had done this, trying to figure out what had happened. None of it was substantive. They were decorations. But the paragons stood together and stared, not at us, at me specifically. At me only. This wasn't scripted. There was something I was missing, something that made all of this make sense.

"Can I see that?" I asked Camden as he read the letter again.

"Sure," he said.

"It sounds too meta, like this is more of a quest item than an actual in-story letter."

"I agree," I said. I had to treat the story details with a grain of salt. I looked through it. The way the letter described each of our missing friends, as if it were a dramatis personae, listed not only their names but also their backgrounds.

I had a sudden jolt of inspiration and equipped my Casting Director trope, which normally required me to be inside a storyline already to use, but since this storyline was perpetually caught in the choice phase, I was able to use it and would still be able to unequip it later. The four profiles of our missing friends lined up with what Casting Director said. In addition, Antoine was, of course, a world-famous explorer with a mysterious past. I was a videographer trying to capture ancient secrets.

Cassie was the sometimes-insane, prophetic sister of Isaac who wanted to help save him. Camden was a scholar of antiquities and military history, and Anna was Antoine's adventurer sidekick. We all had pretty stereotypical roles. I unequipped Casting Director. I still wasn't able to put my finger on what felt off, what message was being sent. And then it hit me around the time we re-entered the Speakeasy, and the paragons followed us.

They went back to their seats and drinks and games of pool, but they kept looking back at me like I was supposed to be figuring out something that they couldn't tell me. Why were they really here? It wasn't just so that we would understand the various subgenres of the storyline delved into, and it wasn't just because we needed help finding the omen, although that was quite useful. But they were staring at me, so it was something specific. Roxy had not broken character since we had played darts.

She was like the rest of them. I filled the others in on their roles for the storyline.

"Wait, you're saying that I'm Antoine's protégé?" Anna asked.

"We're the same age."

"You're remedial," Camden said.

"You started adventuring as a second career. You need help. Training wheels." We tried to laugh, but the nerves were overwhelming. It was an interesting point. And that is the moment I realized what was going on.

"Protégé," I said under my breath. I reached into thin air and pulled out my newest rescue trope. It was called One Last Lesson, and its gimmick was that it allowed me to cast and film a movie about a mentor going back into the field to rescue an old protégé. That was the basic setup. If I wanted to rescue a fallen player who had been cast in a specific profession, like explorer or doctor or something, I could then cast a paragon as their mentor and help direct a film of the rescue. I'd never used it before.

But I could use it here potentially, because as I looked at the paragons and then I looked back at the list, I realized that for each of our kidnapped allies, there was at least one paragon in the Speakeasy that would be fit to be cast as their mentor. Ramona could easily be Peter, the Eldritch Conduit paragon's protégé. Isaac was called out as an adventurer, so that would be Bones Ibarra. Kelsey was some kind of underworld fixer, so that would be Tommy the criminal paragon or Roxy the femme fatale.

Bobby was a houndmaster, so that actually might have been Hawk Kipling, who was a monster hunter. It wasn't perfect, but the pattern was clearly there. If I wanted to just wait the seven days for our friends to die, they would be perfectly set up to be rescued by my trope. I could pick one of the paragons to be the mentor and the star of my movie, and we could go rescue them.

My rescue trope was powerful, after all, and having a paragon or two to help would give us a tremendous advantage, even if rescues were inherently more difficult.

"There's another option," I said to the others. I had been sitting thinking about this for like thirty minutes, so they had carried the subject somewhere far away.

"What other option?" Antoine asked. I thought for a moment.

"So far, we've been swept up in whatever is going on, and we haven't really made any choices. It's like someone is making decisions for us even though we're not on a throughline. Our friends are in danger, so of course we're going to go help them. It's not a real choice."

"And we need to make choices so that we retain our agency, which is our superpower as players, right?" Camden asked. He was picking up what I was trying to say.

"I think we've been set up so that we have another choice. Instead of running headfirst into whatever it is that has been set up for us, we can go our own way and let this be a rescue instead," I said as I handed my trope to them so they could see it.

"I kept wondering why we were being shown these paragons, and I think it's because they were sent here so that we would have another option."

"But wouldn't the rescue make things more difficult?" Anna asked.

"More difficult on paper," Camden said, "but this would be Riley directing the film. We would have a lot more control. As it is, we're basically walking into a trap on purpose, and we only have seven days to accomplish what we're trying to do. Maybe the greater narrative control is worth the greater difficulty." It was debatable. We had seen how a rescue trope could absolutely transform a storyline.

Sometimes that transformation could actually make things easier for players, even if the difficulty level technically spiked a bit. For instance, an enemy that relied on their plot set up to be strong might be easier to beat if the plot was changed by a rescue trope. That was an exploit that had gotten people axed when abused. If I were able to direct this story, I would have access to a lot of information and control.

It wasn't going to be easy, but it would absolutely turn the tables on whoever or whatever was planning our demise.

"So we're going to do a rescue now?" Cassie asked.

"To do a rescue, I thought they had to be dead, and they're still alive, right, Anna?"

"They're still alive," Anna said.

"So to do a rescue, we would have to let them die," Camden said, "for the chance that we might have more control over the narrative." We debated it. We gave it its due consideration, and the paragons watched us. The rescue was probably workable on some level. We would have to find a way to come up with the players' missing posters. We might even be able to get a paragon to help us with that. But the point wasn't that we were supposed to do a rescue.

I felt confident that the whole point of this exercise was to give us a choice, to give us an alternative. Because someone had been rushing us into this storyline for reasons we didn't understand. Everything we were doing was a reaction, but now we had an actual decision. We had agency.

"I think someone set this whole thing up just so that when we chose to go save our friends, it wasn't because that was the only option," I said.

"I think someone is pulling strings, someone who knows the inner workings of Carousel's magic." Silas Dyrkon had once manipulated us into starting his Throughline instead of asking us because he wanted us to maintain our innocence, a powerful force in Carousel. Now someone wanted us to maintain our agency, another powerful force in the Carousel's unwritten magic system. It almost felt like a formality, but that was how Carousel often worked.

Another formality was that players had to be warned of the danger ahead, but those warnings were often so well-hidden that they might as well not exist. That's how horror movies often worked. They were a narrative checklist that could be completed with even the most perfunctory plot points. The truth was, as much as I wanted to use my new rescue trope, it was a worse option. We had so much narrative weight behind us that changing course could hurt us. I looked down at the letter from Ernst Vogler.

A rescue might have been safer in some ways. That trope promised a lot of control and insight. But I had to give them up. We needed to dive headfirst into the darkness and hope that our wits and wills were enough to save us.