Jules didn't like the plan at all.
The plot cycle may have said it was the beginning of Rebirth, but there were other things to take into account—the vibe, for one.
The problem with players is that so few of them, even back in the days of rescues, ever truly experienced a doomed storyline, not with their eyes open, at least. When players failed, they usually didn't know what hit them.
Jules had been on plenty of failed missions since arriving in Carousel, and she knew the feeling when a story was really heating up, when it started to accelerate into the finale. That was the trick with movies. Sometimes they could take place over weeks or even years. Other times, they could take place in one afternoon. She had even been in storylines that barely lasted long enough for a movie's runtime.
Rebirth could take off, then Second Blood could hit like a hammer, and the finale could kill every single one of these players, and they wouldn't see a thing coming.
She pretended to take money from another car as she stared over at Bobby's lane.
He had always been a sad man, a bit of a doormat, really. If there was anyone who needed her help, it was him. The way he engaged with life explained why he had been made a Wallflower. He just took the hits and kept on going, and while normally that would be admirable, Carousel was liable to take advantage of a person like that.
In Carousel, you needed to hit back.
It was almost quitting time at the Turnpike, and soon she would do as Bobby had asked of her. She would be a lookout. Bobby was going into the belly of the beast, and if he never made it out again, she was supposed to do what—report on it?
What good would that be?
The enemy had struck hard, but what should have been the last, final attack had instead been the first one. It would only get harder from there, and it was going to get hard quickly.
Jules could not see the whole script, but she could see the NPCs moving closer and closer to Eternal Savers Club. The script wasn't specific, but she knew what it meant. Carousel needed witnesses who would observe the coming tragedy. It needed victims who would suffer the ultimate fate.
The end would come soon, Jules knew, and she had expressed this to Bobby the best she could with the limitations she had.
Jules had a nose for disaster. It's what made her an effective leader in the campaign on Rotuu. She knew where to send her troops, and she also knew when she was ordered to send them to their deaths, and she went right along with them.
That wasn't too impressive. She was never getting off that planet alive. The enemy was too powerful. The human weapon supplies were running short. All they had left was a bombardment from space, and the only way to make that useful was to flush the enemy out using bait.
Jules had died as bait. Not a bad way to go, all things considered.
Now, Bobby was going to die as bait, too, maybe in this scene or maybe in the next. Sending Bobby in as an infiltrator would have made sense if he were still a minor character, but this was his rescue trope, and Carousel wouldn't let him get away with that.
The end was in the air.
And so was quitting time. They were On-Screen.
She packed up her things into a bag and left her small booth, running to catch up with Bobby, who was already on his way to the parking lot.
"Hey Bobby," she said. "What are you up to tonight? They've got a candlelight vigil for the victims of last night's attack in Town Square. I thought we might take a peek. You know, it would be a good place to pass around posters for Janet."
That caught his attention.
"That's actually a good idea," he said. "But I do have a prior engagement. I might have to go tomorrow night if they're still doing it."
He was playing his role, but he wasn't acting. The emotion was real, the sadness, the listlessness. It was the hollow sound of a man ready to die.
"A prior engagement? Don't tell me you have a date," she asked.
"No," Bobby said as he shuffled toward the locker room. "I have group."
"Right, the therapy thing," Jules said. "Well, I'll see you on the flip side."
Somehow, she felt that a woman her age still wouldn't be saying words like that, even if they were appropriate to the decade. But what did she know? She had grown up in the 90s, but not the 1990s.
Off-Screen.
She quickly found her place at the gas station across the street from Eternal Savers Club so that she could “accidentally” catch Bobby going in there and get suspicious for some reason.
This was silly, she thought. Whether Bobby died in there or not, having her as a lookout wouldn’t help one way or another.
Oh well.
She followed him from a distance as he wandered into the store. Carousel filmed her doing it, though she doubted it would wind up in the final cut.
Bobby made his way to the back of the store quickly. Jules followed with her cart, mindlessly filling it with every random thing she might have wanted.
What was happening?
She looked down at her cart. It was almost halfway filled. How did that happen? The script never asked her to do that, and she wouldn't have done it. She had grabbed slippers that were pink and fuzzy. She was always a more practical woman. She knew there was a surcharge on pink and fuzzy.
But if it wasn't the script compelling her, what was?
She followed Bobby until he got to the very back of the store, to a place next to the pharmacy. There was an alcove with some bathrooms and an employee lounge.
Bobby was talking to someone in front of the employee lounge. He was a tall man with a kind face. Jules couldn't see what was on his script, but she could tell how big it was, and that was all she needed to know.
She loitered in that area while Bobby made his way into the employee lounge. Then she began her watch.
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(Bobby)
Bobby Gill didn't see anything interesting inside the employee lounge. Just the eyes of all of the people wearing red aprons, the associates.
Whatever this was, they were in on it because they weren't just casually curious. No, they were expecting him. The question was, was the involvement of retail employees purely to add a little silliness, or was there a real reason? Bobby would have to find out.
"Come over, our meeting is this way," Tom said. "I know it's a little strange for us to meet at the store, but most of our members actually work here. You'll understand in a minute. Right this way."
There was only one path leading out of the employee lounge, and it appeared to be a dead end. It was a hallway lined on one side with lockers and at the end with a door that said Boiler Room.
"The meeting's in the boiler room?" Bobby asked.
"Not exactly," Tom said. "Don't worry, it's a nice place."
Bobby began really thinking about his plan to infiltrate the Eternal Savers Club. It would be so easy for him to get murdered here, but why would they do it? They had no motive.
As if they needed a motive. Riley may have over-relied on the tropes enemies had, but Bobby knew that when the plot demanded it, Carousel would find a way to get what it wanted. The rules were just technicalities.
"Right this way," Tom said as he opened the boiler room door.
Bobby stared into the room, and it was exactly what it said on the tin. There was a large boiler designed to heat the building, though it was off at the moment since it was still summertime.
Tom could sense his hesitation. "Look, the room's right through here. I know it looks dingy, but I promise it's okay. Our meeting is about to start."
"No, this is fine," Bobby said, trying his best to sound upbeat, like he wasn't suspicious at all of what was going on.
Though in his mind, he was seventy-five percent certain he was about to get killed. If that was the case, so be it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Heck, in Carousel, it felt more like nothing had ever been gained.
He walked into the boiler room, and Tom quickly followed him, closing the door. Instead of feeling a sharp crack on the back of his head or a garrote going around his throat like Bobby suspected might happen, he felt Tom quickly walk past him to the other wall.
"Upper management doesn't know about this," he said. "If they did, they'd probably just use it for storage space."
He walked up to what appeared to be a brick wall and pressed it inward. The entire wall moved in and then popped out like one giant door.
Beyond that, there was no more concrete flooring, but instead stone and dirt, with Christmas lights strung up showing a path that moved forward and slightly to the left.
"Pretty cool, huh?" Tom asked.
"Totally," Bobby said.
There were so many terrible monsters that would have found that to be a great hiding spot. Carousel must have realized how weird it would be to follow someone down a path like that, so he went Off-Screen almost immediately once the door had been opened.
Tom started walking down the path, and Bobby followed. As he did, the door swung closed behind them, pulled by a giant spring.
Bobby followed Tom along the path that moved downward as it went.
"Be careful," Tom said. "I'm not sure if the store's liability coverage would apply down here."
He was joking. Was it a menacing joke or a friendly one? Bobby wasn't sure.
"So is this part of the building, or an older structure?" Bobby asked.
"It's kind of complicated," Tom said. "When they built the place, this whole area was covered by the concrete foundation, but this path was brittle. The concrete and rock broke away like old clay pottery. It was like it wanted to be unearthed. You'll see."
This was a bit beyond secret hangout level. Bobby thought he was going to get a slow introduction, but he suddenly got the feeling that the timeline was being accelerated. He was getting an initiation by fire. His performance here would matter immensely.
On-Screen
Finally, they got to the end of the corridor, which opened up to a large, shockingly normal-looking room that was well lit and furnished with chairs, couches, posters—pretty much anything they could find from the store above. It really did look like a hangout spot, but for a laid-back cult.
There were other employees there, but Bobby had a hard time focusing on them because as soon as he entered the room and got a good look at it, only one thing drew his attention.
The wall.
It was covered in pictures, letters, and torn pieces of paper. There were recent newspaper clippings about the recent kidnappings, as well as pictures of the victims, including the players who were killed.
"What in the world?" Bobby asked, and then he saw a picture of Janet, and he couldn't speak.
It was a missing poster, one of the ones he had been passing out.
"What is this?" Bobby demanded, perhaps a little too strongly.
He looked around at the other employees who were there and caught a familiar pair of eyes looking back at him. Dina had appeared from one of several hallways leading to the room.
Tom pointed to the wall and said, "This—this is our demand letter for a better world."
Off-Screen.
On-Screen.
"This is Dina," Tom said. "She is amazing. She's one of our prophets, our best one. Without her help, we would never have figured everything out. Without prophets telling us what to do, this whole thing would have taken forever. We would never be where we are today. They are the reason we've been doing all of this."
"Prophets?" Bobby asked.
"Exactly. This isn't just some corporate store; it is destiny. Don't you understand? This store had to be built in this space so that we could find what was buried below."
Bobby looked over at Dina. She was playing it cool, which was ninety percent of what she did in storylines.
"This is a lot to take in," Bobby said. "Can you explain it to me one more time?"
In fact, Bobby hadn't received any explanation at all. They had barely been Off-Screen. This was a classic trick in movies: jump forward just a little bit so that the audience didn't have to see the awkward fumblings of a man like Bobby trying to deal with all this weird stuff. You could jump straight forward into the meat of it.
"It's simple. The world around us is not fixed or unchangeable. It is shaped by the choices and actions of the powers that be. At some point, whether it was thousands of years ago or much more recently, a group of people decided to build the system we live in today. They designed it to be corrupt, divided, and cruel. The unsettling truth is that our perception of history, even our memories, may have been altered to keep us from questioning it. That is the real secret."
Bobby had no idea what he was talking about, but he knew enough to know that he couldn't just accept that at face value.
"I don't understand," he said. "Are you telling me that nothing out there is real?"
"Bobby," Dina said in her gentlest voice, "everything is real, even things that you can't see or hear. Reality is a matter of will, and for so long we have lived under a dynamic that was designed to oppress and destroy us slowly. Can you honestly look at the way the world works and tell us that this is natural? I can't. My son Sean died of cancer, a cancer that should have already been cured. They've been working on it for years without finding a solution. Why? Because that's how the world is designed. This world was created to create constant suffering and cruelty. The new world won’t be."
Bobby was almost speechless.
"It's the same way with me," Tom said. "When my brother died, do you know what happened? They made fun of him. They didn't have sympathy. He became a punchline. This world is rotten to its core. This is not how things were meant to be. But there is a way to fix things, to turn them back to how they're supposed to be, and we've almost done it. We're almost there."
Tom was crying.
Bobby stood up, and no one stopped him. He started pacing around. In this scene, he would have been discussing this for hours. He would have at least processed some of it.
"My wife went missing. No one knows what happened to her, and no one cares," he said. Then more softly, he repeated, "No one cares."
"Exactly," Tom said. "Can't you tell that this isn't the real world? This is not right. This is not how people are supposed to be with the mockery, apathy, and the cruelty."
"But wait a second," Bobby said. "What are we even talking about here? Are we talking about the law of attraction? Because I already tried that, believing that my wife would come home, willing it into existence. It didn't work."
Tom got up from where he had been kneeling and came up to Bobby, grabbing him by the shoulders gently.
"We can't do it alone. We need help."
"Help?" Bobby asked.
Tom nodded, took his left arm, and pointed toward one of the hallways leading away from the room.
"We need someone in our corner," Tom said. “Someone who remembers the world before, who can help us remake it in our own image.”
A chill washed over Bobby as he followed Tom's gesture and peered down into the darkness of the hallway. A feeling came over him, something so strong it was like getting struck in the face. A certainty.
There was something down that hall. Bobby was both terrified and exhilarated to find out what.
But this wasn’t the scene to reveal it, much to Bobby’s disappointment.
Off-Screen.