On-Screen.
“Dammit, Riley, it’s been a year. A whole year. We’re days away from the window for them to perform the ritual, and we are no closer to defeating them than we were months ago,” Kimberly yelled at me as she paced around her mansion, tossing papers from our research into the air.
“No closer?” I asked. “No closer? I joined a cult for you. We know almost everything because I painstakingly pried every one of those wackos for the information you need. Just because I don’t know how to kill a god does not mean we haven’t gotten anywhere.”
Antoine and Kelsey were sitting on the couch, shuffling through copies we made of old history books, trying to tune out Kimberly’s rage.
“I just don’t understand how you haven’t even seen him yet? When I was taken, they brought me into the red chamber immediately, and you’re still stuck in customer service,” she said.
“I told you,” I said. “None of them are going back there. They have that tunnel sealed off. They are deeply ashamed that that thing, the god or whatever, is even involved. They don’t even acknowledge it. They have all of the ritual supplies stacked up in front of the door because they're afraid… I think they’re afraid they’ll never leave if they go in that room alone. Besides, we have a plan. I think I am close to being let into the inner circle.”
“Premium membership,” Antoine said casually. “A rewards member.”
“Stop that,” Kimberly said. “This isn’t a joke.”
“The employees of the local warehouse club are trying to end the world,” he answered. “If that’s not a joke, then nothing is.”
Kimberly rolled her eyes and turned back to me.
“Are you sure you will get access to the chamber before they… you know, before they—”
“Yes!” I said. “I will.”
“That’s it,” Antoine said as he stood up. “This is pointless. I’m just going to hop on a flight. I’ll hide on a beach somewhere. They won’t be able to sacrifice me. The world won’t end. Problem solved. Should have done it sooner.”
He walked toward the door.
“We don’t know if that will work,” Kimberly said tearfully.
“Kimberly,” Antoine said. “I love you. I always have, but don’t think I haven’t noticed how you only started talking to me civilly when you realized I was a bargaining chip to help you fight your little vendetta.”
“That’s not true,” Kimberly said. “I’m trying to save you.”
Antoine stared her in the eye and hesitated like he might want to say something more, but then he abruptly said, “I’m going to the airport. Wish me luck.”
Kimberly started to respond, but before she could, someone else spoke and genuinely caught us all off guard.
“It won’t matter,” Dina said, standing at the entrance to Kimberly’s living room where we had collected our research.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. We had rehearsed our little skit several times, and Dina was not supposed to be involved. She wasn’t even supposed to be there.
“What?” Antoine asked, clearly unsure of what to say.
“Dina?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”
I started moving toward the chalkboard we had wheeled out into the middle of the room. I turned it around, as it had our plan written out on it, but in doing so, I revealed the other side, which had pictures of all of the principal characters, including Dina.
“Wait,” Kelsey asked, brandishing her handgun, “This is that Dina?”
Dina looked at her without fear. She had prepared this. That only meant one thing: she was about to reveal her Dark Secret
. We just had to adapt.“They are tracking your every move,” Dina said. She walked around the room until she found a table with some of Antoine’s sports drink powder canisters stacked up on it next to various herbs and crystals. “You really shouldn’t have come out of hiding. I thought you had enough money to run, to stay safe. I didn’t expect you to go back on your show that quickly.”
“I told you,” Kimberly said.
“Not now,” Antoine whispered. “I had obligations!”
“No matter where you go or what you do, they will find you,” she said. “This group is stronger than most. They want it more, I think.”
Everyone was silent. I figured I would try to push things forward.
“So what is this?” I asked. “Are you here to kill us? To take Antoine?”
Dina turned to me and looked me in the eye. “They don’t know about your plans. Not specifically,” she said. Her speech was slow, contemplative, and melancholy. “They think they’re keeping you around to keep tabs on Antoine, but I think Tom keeps you around because he actually cares about you. He wants to help you. Wants to help everyone, that guy.”
She paused on that statement.
“But you knew about us,” I said.
She nodded. “Well, I’ve been doing this longer.”
She continued her earlier speech from where she left off.
“Tom really is a die-hard. When I told him the ritual failed last year, I expected him to lose hope. To lose faith. That’s usually what happens when the ritual fails, assuming they don’t do something crazy,” she said that last part while looking at Kimberly. “Their faith fades, and then the big guy below fades… Usually. But that didn’t work out this time.”
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
“What are you saying?” I asked, as I moved to follow her gaze, “Are you saying the ritual has been done before? How? Wouldn’t we all know about it?”
“How would you possibly know about it?” she asked.
“Because… because,” I started to say. I was beginning to figure out what she was getting at, but I had to play it confused.
“The guy below,” she said. “He still thinks he's a god. He still wants to be worshipped. Still wants sacrifice, and he still answers prayers, but he doesn’t ever get the thing he really wants.”
There was a palpable tension in the room.
“Released,” Kimberly whispered.
“He has been granting prayers for new worlds every chance he gets, but in each new world, he is still trapped in that prison, still unable to leave. The funny thing is, the gods that did it are gone now, and he will last forever.”
“Not all gone,” I said. “They just change names.”
Dina shrugged her shoulders. “He’s forgotten his.”
“Why are you telling us this?” Kelsey asked, moving closer to Dina with the gun.
Dina looked at her, got closer to the gun, and said, “Do it. When the dust settles, I’ll be born again in the new world, always back in his service. Forever. My oath is bulletproof.”
Kelsey acted like she was going to shoot, but she didn’t. She didn’t holster her gun, though. She just moved further away in the room.
Dina looked at Antoine. “They will find you, and they will sacrifice you.” She looked at me. “When they find out you are a spy, they’ll kill you. They won’t hesitate. And these are good, caring people, by the way. They always are. You’d be surprised what people are willing to do when they think they can undo it. They will win, eventually. A new world will come, and he won’t manage to get out of his cage because he never does. Then, he’ll start whispering again, promising some new group of sad sacks like me a better world. Over and over again, because he doesn’t know how to free himself. He’s tried everything, and now he has me doing the same old spells that have failed before. He isn’t even trying to escape, not really. This is what he is now. He’s just going to reshuffle the cards of reality in the hopes that this time he’ll get a runner-runner. Everyone will die again. Everyone will be reborn in the way his followers ask for, and the cycle repeats. Only I will know.”
She was pulling off the depressed immortal pretty well. In a way, we all had experience in that.
Kimberly stepped forward. “You want it to stop, too, don’t you?”
Dina stared down at the floor and then up at Kimberly. “The next time I die, I want to stay dead. My prayers won’t be answered until he gets his way, and I don’t think that’s on the table. Maybe it never was.”
We discussed it back and forth a bit, not being too redundant, but making sure we got some footage options for Carousel.
I found myself sitting on the coffee table.
“So even if Tom gets his perfect world,” I said, “It’ll only last as long as it takes for someone else to succeed in changing it. Well, that’s disappointing. He sure did spin a good yarn about his plans.”
Dina still stood.
“He is more connected than any other follower I have ever seen. More than me, really, I’m just trapped. Bound to help cult after cult attempt to remake the world.”
Dina’s plot armor had long since dropped to zero as she revealed her Dark Secret and the dark truth about this gods miracles.
“If you want to end the cycle,” Kimberly said, “Does that mean you will help us?”
Dina nodded her head slowly. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
Off-Screen.
That had been tense. The downside of Dark Secret was that we couldn’t prepare for it as a group.
“Dina, are you a Night Stocker?” I asked as soon as we weren’t being filmed. I hadn’t even considered it because nothing indicated that on the red wallpaper. I thought she was one of the more mundane cultists.
“Yep,” she said.
“I knew it the moment you snuck up on us like that. Have been one this whole time?”
I knew she was a "prophet" of the cult, but I didn't know she had been given enemy tropes and magic powers...
I was a part of the cult, and all I got for it was an ulcer from the stress. Only a quarter of the collective could do the whole wraith thing.
“Sorry,” she said. “Not that it’ll be much use to you now. Look, I think things are being set up for Tom to realize that the whole thing is doomed to fail, and when that happens, he might not be such a nice guy anymore. I’m thinking he’s going to kill me. Might make for a good Second Blood, I don’t know.”
If her death was Second Blood, it would be soon.
Lorne walked into the room from Kimberly’s closet, where he had been hiding for that whole conversation.
“I thought that scene was only supposed to take ten minutes,” he said, walking straight to a plate of sandwiches we had lying out.
“Dina surprised us,” Antoine said. “Great, now we have to find another way to explain our plans.”
“Sorry, everybody,” Dina said.
“Don’t worry about it,” Lorne said, laughing. “I end up getting forced into the closet in most storylines.”
I didn't get much sleep that night. I found myself scouring my character's journal for anything that might help. There was so much information within. It must have been because of my high Savvy. Still, the journal was written in my handwriting, in my speech patterns, and with my sense of humor.
It felt deeply personal, like reading a diary from yourself as a kid and finding its author both deeply relatable and still alien at the same time.
The more I read it, the sadder I felt. The words were like a letter from an old friend desperate to reach out to me. Though the occasional page was left blank for reasons I didn't understand, the bulk of the journal and other documents were filled with useful information.
I had heard the story of the birth of the cult many times, or at least Tom's version of it. My character had written about it extensively. It went something like this:
~
“Come on, people,” Tom said, holding the poster with his brother’s face on it high so that everyone driving by could see it. “I just want you to look at it.”
He stood near the road next to where the Eternal Savers Club would one day be. His brother had only been dead for weeks. The whole construction site had been closed down.
The news media had been vicious.
“Just look at him!” he called out.
People were there to see the place where the infamous crash had occurred. Teens had been caught sneaking into the cordoned-off area for bragging rights. Tom himself had become something of a celebrity because of his efforts to stand up for his brother’s good name.
“Just look at him!” he screamed at the rubberneckers staring at the scene of the crash.
Most didn’t make eye contact.
He stood next to the road with his signs and prayed to an uncaring universe that he wasn’t crazy, that the world itself was wrong.
A nice SUV drove past him, filled with fraternity brothers from Carousel University. The driver made it seem like he was going to veer into Tom, but only for a second. It was a prank, but Tom didn’t know that.
He jumped backward and ended up falling back down the embankment toward the parking lot.
“You maniacs!” he screamed.
He realized, as he stood up, that his sign had torn. He started to cry from embarrassment and hopelessness.
YOU CAN HAVE.
Words popped into his mind. He didn’t hear them. He felt them, like they were coming from his own heartbeat… but they weren’t.
They were coming from the construction site.
He turned and stared. There were no guards anymore. Most of the important stuff had been removed from the site temporarily.
YOU CAN HAVE.
The words vibrated in his chest. He walked toward the site carefully, slowly.
He easily squeezed between two fence panels and continued forward. He wandered in the general direction that the words were coming from until he saw a sight that shocked him.
Blood. A dried-up pool of it on the ground.
It was the place his brother had died.
A small stream of blood spread from that place and flowed downhill toward the inner part of the site.
WHATEVER YOU WANT.
Tom continued forward, following the dried trail of blood as it led him to a large, dug-out place where more foundation would be poured. The blood had trickled down into the hole.
YOU CAN HAVE.
Tom jumped down into the hole, careful not to trip over the rebar laid out.
WHATEVER YOU WANT.
He crouched down, where he saw the smallest, tiniest hole in the rock beneath. The blood trail ran into the crack. He could follow it no further.
“Hello?” he asked.
YOU CAN HAVE.
WHATEVER YOU WANT.
Tom was in awe of what he was feeling. The presence beneath him radiated up through the ground.
YOU CAN HAVE WHATEVER YOU WANT.
RELEASE ME AND YOU CAN HAVE WHATEVER YOU WANT!