Book Nine, Chapter 30: Game Changer

The plan was simple. Give Carousel a few scenes so we could earn our escape, then ride off to safety. So simple.

I walked along the beach at night, staring out at the waves and the looming storm, which had just given us a reprieve. My headphones were on, and my head was swaying to a tune that I could only hear with my imagination. I couldn't see very far; anyone watching could tell that because I had to squint when I looked where I was going. The rain might not have been falling, but it was still dark out.

There was no way I could see what was unfolding behind me.

"Please! That won't kill me," the man screamed. He was dressed in a green sweater and brown pants. I couldn't identify the decade that he was trying to emulate, but I could tell that his clothes didn't belong to him. He was LARPing as the victim of a horror movie. "Please, please, you have to understand. I can't die."

He had been LARPing, at least.

A strange thing to hear on the beach. But of course, I couldn't hear it, because I was supposed to be listening to music. Anyone watching would know that I had my hood up, so my peripheral vision was basically cut off. I was a sitting duck.

Obviously, my ruse would be familiar to any audience member watching; I could tell what was happening. I gave them a glance, but only enough to see what I needed. I never reacted to the commotion. I couldn’t react at all. So when I saw the immortal attempting to punch a ticket with his one remaining hand, there was no way I could help him. He was bleeding out golden ichor in the sand.

My job was not to be a hero. It was to distract the villain so my team could make an exit. I was the Oblivious Bystander, and I had practiced it well.

I started walking back toward town, wandering right by the killer NPC who, for whatever reason, had suddenly taken up arms against his masters and was doing his best to filet them with the samurai sword from the closet. One of the immortals was unkillable in the godlike sense that prevented the sword from doing any damage to them, but that was of no use to his compatriots, because he took a ticket out of his pocket, ripped it, and suddenly stopped being there. No doors, no anything. He just disappeared.

The one-handed immortal in the green sweater crawled through the sand for sanctuary, while a woman who was immortal in the worst way screamed, even though she was nothing but a disembodied head. Her blood was transparent. Gross. It turned out that living forever was a curse, even to the Manifest Consortium.

I had come down on the beach to make sure the killer was accounted for. If we didn’t keep an eye on him, he was liable to sneak up on us. The magic here was confusing and uncertain. We weren't in a storyline. We couldn't be. We didn't have an Omen. There were no Omens on Saltspar Island. But then, there were no enemies either. Not that I could see. Even the lumberjack NPC with the killer mask didn't register as a threat, though I suspected there was something strange about the samurai sword.

In the distance, my friends were preparing for the next phase. I didn't know the rules of this scenario. I didn't know anything except my instincts on how the story would play out without the Plot Cycle. If we tried to leave all at once, I suspected we would be stopped. I knew it in my heart. Carousel picked favorites, sure, but it didn't go easy on them.

All I could do was make sure that the enemy was distracted, and while I wasn't there to protect these immortals who had foolishly believed they could make Carousel safe, I also wasn't there to listen to their screams or suffering.

That's me. An old softie.

I walked as close as I could justify, as oblivious as I could be. My only goal was to attract the killer. I felt Oblivious Bystander trigger, just as I expected. I had only used it outside of storylines a few times. It was strange.

The best I could understand it was that when you were outside of a storyline, using tropes like this was more about the scene as an individual unit of story in a vacuum. The sequence didn't matter. After all, there was no way that I could be oblivious after having seen everything that I had seen. I had just watched the video of the sword being taken out of the closet and seen the immortals running for their lives across the fields, from the window in the inn.

And yet it didn't matter, because in this scene, I was clueless. I wished I didn’t have to learn the intricacies of how the game worked under these circumstances, but that was always the case.

Was this the closest we would ever get to experiencing Carousel before the consortium came and gamified it? Maybe it would be. Of course, we still had trope tickets and the Red Wallpaper with its host of information at our disposal.

The killer started following me, leaving the blubbering immortal scrambling for a ticket in his pocket that he had to activate by ripping it with his teeth. He disappeared instantly.

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I had no love for the consortium. I always felt that they were too arrogant. But in a strange way, you can be so arrogant that it wraps back around to being naive, and for that reason, I pitied these poor saps who could never see the just deserts about to be served to them.

Now I had a killer on my tail. Took long enough. I was pretty experienced at kiting bad guys at this point. Walk fast enough that it looks like I'm going somewhere, compelling them to follow, but not so fast that I lose them and they're freed from the magic of Oblivious Bystander.

Were there cameras watching us? If there were, I didn't know about it. I had equipped my Just Out of Shot trope for the exact purpose of being able to see cameras, but whatever the consortium had done to Saltspar had neutered that trope. Maybe they didn’t put cameras here because they didn’t want people seeing any potential failure. There was no telling which of our abilities would work. We were going to have to be careful.

I led the swordsman down the path that the team had agreed upon. All I could hope was that they'd already made it out to the boat. They had plenty of time to get it done. There was no telling how much time I had, though.

Literally, there was no telling.

I had no idea how powerful this enemy was. Or what tropes he had to compete with Oblivious Bystander. If he had Slasher Teleportation, which I suspected, he could easily flee if his stats beat mine. I couldn't see much on the Red Wallpaper. I suspected that whatever was going on was so high-level that I literally couldn't perceive it. But if that was the case, Oblivious Bystander could easily run out of gas soon.

Even if the enemy couldn’t compete on stats alone, Oblivious Bystander would peter out on its own once it got old. Luckily, it usually lasted long enough to move from one set to another.

There was something strange in his behavior that was hard to figure out, because I couldn't watch him directly. But I noticed that his eyes were wide, not with anger, but with fear. It was hard to tell through the mask.

The way he walked was strange, too. It was like he was being pulled by an invisible force. And not just the script, but by some force I didn't quite understand.

All things considered, it seemed like the sword was possessing him. Why a cheap mall ninja sword would have that power, I couldn’t say. I had to be careful, because I had been wrong before, and unlike in those instances, we were outside of a storyline, so I couldn't take the risks I was accustomed to.

My path took me back to the docks, where boats were lined up one after another, still shaking from the storm that had just gone through. Even with things calming down, there was tension in the air.

As I walked, I could smell the fuel that had been poured over the old wood. The trap was set. I couldn't wrap my mind around how this was supposed to work narratively. Was I an oblivious bystander, or was I some sort of bait? I could be both, but not through my character's own agency. What logic did things like this run on outside of the story?

It didn’t end up mattering because when I set out onto the docks, my stalker managed to slip my hold. He was in the wind.

Oblivious Bystander had finally broken. All I could do was stare out at the waves and keep up the act for a little while longer. I looked down between the slats that made up the docks, expecting to see a sword thrust up through them, through my foot, at any moment. Luckily, there was a metal grate on the left side of the dock, so I moved over and started walking on that instead.

Surely the killer wouldn't just run off.

But he had. Our backup plan of burning the docks ended up being a little superfluous, because the original plan caught our enemy hook, line, and sinker.

The code word was Halloween II, a film that featured a scene I knew Carousel would be unable to resist.

As I stared back casually toward the inn at the top of the hill, I saw that the killer had found his way to where my friends had been. He was standing on a balcony right near where our rooms were. Feathers were in the air.

Our plan centered on making sure we knew where the killer was at all times, so the first thing we did was head back to our rooms and stuff pillows under our blankets to make it look like we were sleeping, just like in the movie (and many others).

There was no way Carousel would allow a killer to walk by that inn without trying to slaughter the sleeping innocents, only to discover that they weren't really there.

He stood up on the balcony and stared down at me. The feathers from the pillows he had just massacred were blowing around like a snowstorm.

And then, in a surprise that I wasn't ready for, he took his blade, held it out in front of himself with the point resting on his chest, and then a massive man walked up behind him, grabbed the handle, and thrust the sword deep into the NPC's chest.

I recognized the man as Caleb Rowe. Plot Armor level 60. I wondered how long it would take for him to come pick up his sword.

For a moment, all we did was lock eyes and stare at each other.

I felt an overwhelming fear. Had Caleb already gotten to my friends? I was so busy distracting the NPC butchering immortals that I never considered where the man himself had been.

I thought we had done enough to escape. Thought I was so clever. I was on the dock. My friends were supposed to arrive on the boat and pick me up before he could get to me. If we needed to set the dock on fire to keep him away, we could do that.

Unfortunately, we were not the only ones with tropes. And for the first time in my experience, I actually saw an enemy trade them out. Caleb Rowe equipped a trope right in front of my eyes, though I didn't see him fiddle with any tickets.

Nowhere to Run

The setting for this story is isolated. There is no one to ask for help within the story, and nowhere to go that the enemy will not find you.

As if to punctuate the point, I finally heard my friends on the pontoon. They appeared out of the darkness right on time, but the rumble of the engine that I was expecting was abruptly halted the moment they came into view.

I could hear them yelling for me.

Something was caught in the propeller. As the boat floated toward the dock where I was standing, carried only by its momentum, I saw that the thing stuck in the engine was a fishing net. And trapped in that fishing net was the body of the caretaker for the inn.

We didn't know the rules for surviving outside of a storyline, being chased by a killer that seemed to have no leash.

My heart jolted with the realization that there may not be any rules at all.

Caleb Rowe stared down at us. He was never going to let us leave.