As we fled into the parking lot from our exclusive party within the hedge maze, we sporadically went On-Screen. That meant we couldn't just wait around; we had to actually stay in character, which meant fleeing.
The problem was that we had walked here, and while that was okay for us to do as players, it was a pretty odd thing for our successful characters to do. As embarrassing as it was to admit, I wasn't sure what we were supposed to do, and it was Kimberly who came up with the plan, nonverbally.
While On-Screen, she led us over toward a red convertible and started digging in her purse, where she withdrew a set of keys and unlocked it.
I quickly jumped into the passenger seat, and Antoine climbed over the back of the car into the back seat, ducking down, not quite trusting his mask to hide his identity.
I tried not to laugh as Kimberly put the key in the ignition, turned on the car, and started to peel out of the parking lot to get as far away from those hovering Night Stockers as possible.
Cars were a funny thing in Carousel.
Usually, you avoided them like the plague unless your character explicitly owned one, which rarely happened. The vets had used a truck in The Grotesque; in fact, I was the one left driving it as we were chased by a giant statue of Bartholomew Geist.
Still, there was always a nervous tension about taking a car.
In Carousel proper, you didn’t want to drive a car at all. It made dodging Omens nearly impossible.
When Antoine and Kimberly went on their jungle adventure, they could only activate the Omen by driving in a certain direction in a car. That felt dangerous enough at the time, and they were only in it for minutes before the storyline triggered.
For the most part, we just ignored vehicular travel and hoofed it, even if we didn't like it.
That's why it was so funny when Kimberly casually improvised keys into her purse and started up the red convertible. It was such a simple thing, and yet for so long we were afraid of it. The audience would easily believe that Kimberly's character had a car, so when Kimberly searched for the keys in her purse, there they were. So simple and yet so nerve-racking.
~-~
We went Off-Screen about a mile away from the hedge maze party, and my Call Sheet trope told me we wouldn't go back On-Screen for at least three hours, though it was inconsistent and occasionally changed. Obviously, the choices we made would change when we went back On-Screen, but three hours was a good baseline.
“Bobby said he was living in the trailer park up north, right?” Kimberly asked.
“No,” I said. “Near the trailer park, those sketchy studio apartments.”
Kimberly nodded.
Carousel, even this more Hollywood-esque version of it, looked so much better when you could actually drive through it with no Omens in sight. It looked like a normal town. A pleasant town, even.
Even the bad parts weren’t really that bad. Sure, there was poverty, but not enough to get the film labeled political. It was movie poverty, where nobody had any money, yet they could still afford to fund all sorts of antics.
We found Bobby easily enough. He was on the bottom floor, and his blinds were up, which was a normal thing in Carousel, as it was in movies, because you needed to get a camera angle from outside. And if the blinds were down, you wouldn’t get any footage.
He sat on a couch watching television and going over stacks of papers. Kimberly parked outside, and as we walked up toward his apartment, we stopped and stared through the window.
Well, Kimberly stopped and stared. Antoine and I followed suit.
“What’s up, babe?” Antoine asked.
“Look at his walls,” she said.
And we did, peeking like the worst peeping toms in history at the back of Bobby’s head, toward the place where his TV was. The wall was covered in documents related to his wife’s disappearance, or at least the movie version of her.
“Do you guys think that he’s searching for clues inside of all this stuff, like actual clues to what happened to Janet?” she asked.
All I could do was shrug and walk forward.
It would make sense. How was he supposed to know that there was some absurd cognito hazard between him and answers? Just thinking about it frustrated me. I wished there was a way to give him the information that wouldn’t trigger my flight-and-fright instinct.
How can you tell someone not to look for their wife when simply acknowledging that you know what happened was somehow enough to trigger her killer’s return?
Of all the mysteries Carousel held, that was definitely one of the top three I needed answers for.
I knocked on the door out of courtesy; it didn’t really matter, it was unlocked. He came and answered it, and while he didn’t seem upset, he didn’t seem particularly interested in our arrival. If anything, he was annoyed, perhaps because we interrupted his search.
“Nicole’s dead,” he said nonchalantly.
Nicole had been the leader of the team we were rescuing. She had been cast as the new manager at Eternal Savers Club, replacing the old manager who mysteriously went missing.
Well, now another one was gone, according to the script that Bobby had access to.
Unfortunately, that script didn’t contain a whole lot more information. When players failed the storyline, Carousel didn’t just have things continue on; it just created a fail state where everything went bad, really, really quickly.
That was, until some plucky players showed up to the rescue.
“Any luck?” Kimberly asked.
“Huh?” Bobby answered. “Oh, right. The research. Nothing. Not the library, not this rudimentary Internet from the nineties, nothing has anything on He Who Walks Behind the Aisles.”
That wasn’t surprising. Whenever Cassie had her floaty episode that allowed us to know the ultimate big bad of this storyline, the first thing we did was call up the library and see if they had any books on him, only to find out that there was no such creature in existence.
Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.
Apparently, He Who Walks Behind the Ailes wasn’t his government name.
Carousel’s modern Internet also had no answers. However, you could get a good price on a kidney.
We had hoped that when we started the storyline, those things might change, that there might be information, but Bobby hadn’t found any.
“Good thing we brought Dina,” I said as I found a spot in a recliner next to the couch.
She had used her Dark Secret trope, which would give us as much information as we needed, hopefully as soon as we found her. The question was, were we having trouble finding her because of where her character was, or because Dina was just a sneaky person in general?
“I think I’ll find out plenty tomorrow,” Bobby said.
Kimberly looked at him with concern. “Did you say yes to his offer?” she asked.
Bobby had been invited to a special group by Tom Carmichael, who we suspected was at the center of all the bad things going on in this storyline, based mostly on his prominence so far and the fact that he worked at Eternal Savers Club.
Plus, nobody was that nice without there being a catch.
“I said that I’d like to check out his group,” Bobby said. “I called him up just before you got here. He was out of breath.”
“He was probably out kidnapping celebrities,” Antoine said.
Bobby shrugged.
“I’ll get whatever intelligence I can,” he said.
“Where’s Jules?” I asked.
“At a bar, I think,” he said.
Normally, she was attached to his hip ever since he got her trope.
“Do you really think that you should be going to this meeting by yourself?” Kimberly asked. “It sounds like it could be a trap.”
“It could be,” Bobby said. “But I don’t think so.”
The truth was, even if it was a trap, Bobby should probably still go. I didn’t say that out loud, but that’s what I thought.
Kimberly still looked concerned. “I just have a weird feeling about this. You know how bad guys usually save their true strength until the end of a movie, because they have to keep getting more and more dangerous to increase the stakes?” she asked.
Adeline had taught us that many plot cycles ago.
“Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re talking about,” I said. “And since the bad guys basically finished off the other team already, they already showed their true power. So they’re only gonna get stronger for our finale.”
“Yeah,” Kimberly said. “Isn’t that something we should be concerned with? I mean, sending Bobby in there alone sounds pretty dangerous. Didn’t they just kill a mother and her two children? It’s not like they have to pretend to be good people for the audience anymore.”
Nicole and her nephew were definitely dead. Her niece wasn’t yet, as far as we knew. They were cast as her adult children.
She had a point. In some ways, this storyline, or at least our version of it, was unprecedented. The bad guys in this story had already gotten their win, and now we were trying to interrupt their victory lap.
The practice rounds were over.
“It doesn’t matter,” Bobby said. “I have to go because that’s what my subplot is. If it makes you feel better, I plan to have Jules follow me out of concern because she’s my friend. And then maybe she can see what happens to me, and will relay it back to you.”
That was a good idea on his part, but it wasn’t exactly enough to get rid of our concerns.
“Maybe we should put it off and talk to Dina. Get a better footing before we dive in on infiltration,” I said.
“Maybe we should,” Bobby said. “But that doesn’t mean that’s what we get to do. This is my subplot. In fact, it was our subplot, but you dropped it, which means I can’t.”
“What do you mean I dropped it?” I asked.
“Tom invited me to this thing because I talked about my traumatic past at the meeting. If you had done it, you probably would have gotten an invite too. But you couldn’t, because you don’t talk about your parents,” Bobby said. “You don’t talk about a lot of things.”
I wanted to argue with him, but as soon as he said it, I knew he was right. We were at a meeting filled with people with trauma, including Kimberly, whose trauma was baked into her background trope, but it was Bobby and me whose backstories became relevant.
Was it possible I was also supposed to get an invite to this exclusive club beneath the bargain store?
“So give us time,” Kimberly said. “We can still get Riley an invitation, and then you can go together.”
“No,” Bobby said. “I already called him. I’m going tomorrow. Besides, if something bad was going to happen, they wouldn’t have to trick me into going there. Clearly, they have the ability to kidnap people, if the news is any indication.”
At that moment, the news wasn’t playing anything relevant to the plot, but was stuck in a loop of one of those advertisements for the news team we were currently watching. “Carousel Channel Eight News Team is on the Watch,” played over and over with different footage.
The truth was, I hadn’t considered my trauma to be a subplot, despite the evidence that existed. I thought it was just Carousel messing with me, like it always did.
Was it possible that my hesitation might lead to Bobby’s demise?
I didn’t want to think about it.
There was a silence in the room.
“I’m going to find a way to fix it,” I said.
“Alright,” Bobby said. “I meet with him at Eternal Savers Club tomorrow at six o’clock.”
“In the morning?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “My character has to go to work. That way, Jules can follow me after I act strangely.”
“Alright, understood. Well, we have the clue for Eternal Savers Club because of the pin the Stocker dropped, so I have an excuse to go there tomorrow. And I have the least famous face of us three, so that should be easy,” I said.
“Just find the employees-only lounge,” Antoine said. “That’s where the entrance is, my money says.”
We talked for a little while longer, speculating on He Who Walks Behind the Aisles and why we couldn’t find any information about him, but we didn’t come up with anything good.
Eventually, it was time to leave Bobby alone. We didn’t have any good reason for being there, and he had some scenes to shoot, it would seem, because he went On-Screen as soon as we left. We could see him through the window, examining evidence, looking mournfully at a picture of his wife.
All I could think about was how I might be able to advance a subplot and get an invite to the secret little club without having to talk about my parents. But I wasn’t coming up with a good idea.
Kimberly drove to her house, which was in Carousel Heights to the north, across a bridge over a river that didn’t make complete geographic sense to exist.
We found her address because it was in her car registration in her glove box. As soon as she had improvised the keys to the car, the ownership information had also changed.
Improvisation really was the next frontier for us.
She lived in a mansion. It was a big house with strong walls.
But it was not our first destination, because when we got to Carousel Heights, one of the first things we realized was that there were at least six separate houses on fire that night, with emergency services outside.
More people had been taken, and the pattern was starting to look pretty clear.
They were wealthy and successful, though I wasn’t sure if that was specific enough. Lots of wealthy and successful people had been overlooked at the party.
On-Screen.
“Wait one second,” Antoine said. “Pull around here, down the block. My place is right up here.”
“We can’t go to your house,” Kimberly said. “They were looking for you. That’s the next place they’ll try.”
“I know,” Antoine said. “I just want to see it. Make sure everything’s okay.”
As we approached, it became pretty clear that everything was not okay.
His house had burnt to the ground.
“No, no, no, no, no!” Antoine said. “I had so much sports memorabilia in there. My first jersey, priceless! What am I gonna do now?”
“You can cash in the insurance check and buy a brand-new jersey,” I said.
“That isn’t funny,” Antoine said as he continued to freak out, while Kimberly drove to her place. “I had so many boxes of supplements in the garage!”
We didn’t have a lot of scenes once we got there, but when we sat down in front of her large television, Carousel got footage of us watching the coverage of that night’s terror.
The newscaster was listing off known victims of the kidnappings, and the information seemed important.
“Are you guys noticing a pattern?” Kimberly asked as they listed off names.
The truth was, we weren’t noticing a pattern right away because we didn’t know any of these people. But our characters probably should have, as we were constantly reminded that the characters were famous.
The murders related to the team we were there to rescue barely got mentioned.
“Among the missing,” the newsreader said, while viewing helicopter footage of all the different fires and damage caused by the night’s escapades, “were talk show hosts Antoine Stone and—"
“They think I’m missing,” Antoine said.
“Of course they do,” I said. “They heard the big floaty guys screaming your name, and now you’re nowhere to be found.”
Antoine seemed deeply concerned. He looked down at the coffee table in front of him and then looked back at me.
“This is gonna help my merch sales, isn’t it?” he said.
“By God, I think it will,” I said sarcastically.
We watched the news footage over and over again, looking for more information.
For some reason, the Night Stockers had taken mostly comedians and several print and television journalists. There were some other celebrities, but it was mostly that.
Was that the pattern? What did those have in common?
They were observers of society, that was certain, although they expressed it differently.
I’d have to keep thinking about it.