Book Nine, Chapter 32: The Killer Relay

Camden turned the rigging so that the killer hung out over the water instead of over the dock.

“Okay, so what now?” Anna asked as everyone arrived at the scene of the trap.

With the killer strung up and a large barb through his torso, I really wished that I could have told them it was time to leave, that we could make our escape, but that wasn’t how the game worked.

His tropes would prevail over logic, just as they did in storylines. At the end of the day, scenes could be edited together to make even something ridiculous work in a narrative.

Camden’s boat was within walking distance. The motor could be repaired in a couple of minutes the moment we were ready, but we knew better.

I looked down at the sword on the dock. We all kept a distance from it. Even if we could fight whatever possession ability it held, it would be better if we never had to.

“We need him to unequip Nowhere to Run,” I said. “Between that and Evil Never Dies, there is no chance of us escaping this island. So we just have to keep stressing him until he unequips that trope, and the moment he does, we’re out of here.”

I had to hope my performance was enough to convince the sword.

“On to our next positions?” Camden asked.

I nodded. “Back into the assigned groups,” I said.

They quickly ran out to initiate the next phase of the plan.

“Danny!” I called out.

The NPC came from the darkness. My Familiar Filmographer trope allowed me to summon him. It was almost instant. He came out onto the docks wearing a rain slicker and rubber boots. It seemed like he knew the plan before I even had to tell him.

He carried a camera with a tripod.

“Where do you want me to set up?” he asked.

“Right here will do,” I said. “Just make sure the camera is pointed at him and that it’s on and recording.”

Slasher Teleportation couldn’t activate if someone was watching, and I was willing to bet it also couldn’t activate if the cameras were rolling directly on the killer.

It wouldn’t last forever, but I didn’t need it to. We just needed to buy time for the next phase of the plan, leaving just enough room for the enemy to fight back so that Carousel wouldn’t punish us. Kicking the sword into the sea would be most people's first inclination, but I didn't want to touch it. Putting an object like that out of the audience's view could be fatal.

“Where do you want me after?” Danny asked after he had set up the camera.

“I don’t know. Do you have, like, a phantom zone that you can go to?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “That’s exactly what we call it, too. The phantom zone. But if I go there, my camera might too. So what do you want me to do?”

“Go find one of the other groups and stick with them. I need to be on my own.”

He headed out dutifully. I started to wonder: if I let him act as more than a tool at my disposal, would he show more personality? He must have had it, a guy like that. But that wasn’t my concern at the moment. We had work to do.

I stared down at the sword.

Cassie had finally gotten good use out of her Curios and Trinkets trope, which allowed her to compare occult items to those that she had interacted with before, especially those that she had collected. And she had been collecting them ever since she showed up in Carousel, a piece at a time.

Haunted jewelry boxes and plenty of haunted jewelry to go in them, along with lots of other accessories including furniture, had been added to her collection over time. So when she looked at the sword in the hands of Caleb Rowe when he was standing up on the balcony

a few minutes earlier, she could confidently say two things.

“That’s not Caleb Rowe,” she had said, pointing at the man. “It’s... it’s practically a possessed object. The man is an object.”

She seemed to be in disbelief. I didn’t know if she was playing it up to power up her Moxie-based psychic tropes or if she was actually surprised. I sure was. I knew the sword was funky, but knowing the man wasn’t even a man in the way that mattered was certainly strange.

“His soul is in the sword,” she had told us. “He is the sword,” she insisted, as if we weren’t going to believe her. How much money had we spent on cursed objects that we weren’t going to trust her when it was finally time to profit from it?

A man inside a sword, who possessed NPCs so that they would open a closet door and it could get a good look at them and choose its next host.

A sword that could lie on the dock, seemingly innocuous, and eavesdrop on our plans.

I was counting on it.

I walked away from the docks, hoping that everything worked exactly like we thought it would. That the soul inside the sword had heard how much we wanted him to unequip Nowhere to Run.

Surely it would fall for our ruse.

We knew it had a lot of Hustle and a combat build on top of it. Savvy and Moxie were unlikely to be its source of power, so a little trickery should go a long way. While it clung to the trope Nowhere to Run, we had devised a plan to beat it, and meanwhile Caleb Rowe would only be able to cycle between two other tropes, with one of its slots always taken so that we couldn’t escape.

It was the beginning of a plan, but even great plans could fail with poor execution. And if we couldn’t execute, Caleb Rowe would be there, willing to do it his way.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

-

The trick of having the camera set up on the swinging body of the killer, so that he couldn’t inexplicably disappear and reappear behind us ready to skewer us, did work for a while.

But only for a while.

I wasn’t sure how he was going to get out of that trap. Heck, I wasn’t even sure how he would catch up with us if we had just gotten in the boat and left. I just knew he would.

But it was how he got out of the trap that had me fanboying out a little bit. I didn’t know what trope the sword was going to equip to get the job done, but when I finally saw him, I started to reconsider the stat distribution a little bit, because it really was a clever trick.

He had used They’ll Never Believe You. That was such a funny choice. Of all the different things that could have happened, a trope used to surround the area with darkness might have worked, or something that caused electronics to fail; either would be very standard slasher tropes. But he used the one that I had only seen used to make it so that police officers would laugh in your face if you said something hinky was going down.

It made sense, though. The camera was recording a supernatural event, a man seemingly surviving being impaled by a barb and trying to work his way off of it without showing any clear signs of pain. But if there was footage of that, then the authorities would obviously have to believe us. So there couldn’t be footage of it. Thus, the camera shut off.

Carousel had given us a little bit of time, maybe a head start, as a reward for our clever planning. But truly, if the sword was the one that figured out a way out of that trap, it might have more Savvy than I expected. For a killer like that, I would have to be on the lookout.

Kimberly had already figured out that it didn’t have much Moxie, using her Social Awareness trope. Another clue that it had actual magic powers instead of movie magic powers.

Obviously, when someone’s chasing you down trying to kill you, it’s a bad time to be impressed by them, but I was.

Unfortunately for the sword known as Caleb Rowe, we were quite impressive too.

“He’s pursuing me,” I said into the radio.

“Roger that,” Ramona said from wherever she was. “I’m not picking him up yet, so he must be on the other side of you, toward the diner.”

“Thanks for the heads up,” I said.

At this point, we were comfortable not being in character. It was pretty clear that we weren’t playing anyone. We were just being ourselves, and if Carousel wanted to punish us for it, well, there wasn’t much we could do about it.

I found myself standing in a street, making sure I had plenty of distance between me and the place I figured Caleb Rowe must be hiding.

Of course, Slasher Teleportation made that completely pointless. He appeared behind me. Luckily, I was prepared for that, because I could still detect sharp objects thanks to my silver dagger.

He got really close.

“Tag,” I said into the radio as I backed away from him.

I didn’t know if our plan was going to work, but I suspected it might. Suddenly, right in the middle of a step toward me, the giant man stopped, turned his head, and started walking away without killing me.

He was still bound by targeting priority, and we could trade out our tropes. Like any other cheap trick, I didn’t expect us to get away with it forever, but Carousel would give us the benefit of our cunning for a little while.

Kelsey had just equipped Antoine’s Bad Luck Magnet trope, which made her the next target, guaranteed.

It worked so well I almost fell over, letting out a sigh of relief. I didn’t know who I was trying to impress by constantly being the bait, but I needed to rethink my priorities.

It was time for me to get into a new position, and I did so quickly.

A few minutes later, Kelsey called “tag” over the radio.

It was at that moment that she unequipped Bad Luck Magnet. For a moment, Caleb Rowe would be coming back toward me, since I would be next on targeting priority, but luckily I wasn’t the only one willing to show off how brave I was.

Antoine recalled his Bad Luck Magnet trope from Kelsey and managed to equip it before Caleb Rowe even got anywhere near me.

“He’s headed toward us,” Ramona said over the radio.

I was certainly glad for it.

We weren’t just randomly doing all of this. We had plans. Right then, we were playing a chess match, trying to give Camden, Cassie, and Isaac enough time to set up the next part of the plan.

I had never been so afraid or thrilled in all my time at Carousel. My instincts were sharp, and I could rely on them, but if I really thought about what was happening, this was different than anything we had ever done before. There were real consequences.

It hit me all at once how we were playing like we had nothing to lose, but that was the opposite of the truth. Given Caleb Rowe’s tactics, tropes, and stats, if we ever slipped up, he could work through us one by one and be finished within five minutes. He was fast and apparently sharper than any sword I had met, in more ways than one.

“Tag,” Antoine said as he unequipped his Bad Luck Magnet trope somewhere in the distance.

That was a full cycle. I didn’t want to push it much further than that. We only had one more move left to play before what we hoped would be our big finisher. And if that failed, I was going to have to take the nuke out of my pocket and use it to kill that son of a gun.

I hoped I didn’t have to, because it would probably kill all of us along with him.

With Caleb Rowe coming back toward me because of my low effective Plot Armor, all I had to do was wait until I could get him in my sight.

It didn’t take long. He was getting impatient, and with all this walking around, he had in a way earned his next kill. He might take a little extra pleasure in it once he got it.

As soon as I saw him and confirmed that he had Evil Never Dies, Slasher Teleportation, and Nowhere to Run, I unequipped Trope Master.

My effective Plot Armor doubled, and I was no longer the next player to be targeted.

He stared at me, sweat dripping down from his hair. The blood from his torso wound had dried, and he didn’t act as if he had been injured at all. Given the fact that he was some sort of quasi-undead, it was no surprise.

He paused longer than I liked. I thought perhaps Carousel was about to give him permission to pursue me, but instead he picked the next target on the list. The final target, if things went well.

He started heading toward the building where Camden, Cassie, and Isaac were hiding, because Isaac, in his time the least ambitious player living in Carousel, had the lowest Plot Armor.

I kept an eye on him as he walked over toward the building. Then I lifted my radio and said, “He’s headed to the slaughterhouse. Don’t go in there.”

Moments later, Caleb Rowe stepped into the large red building where the script had told him Isaac would be hiding, waiting to be killed.

But unfortunately for Caleb, the script could lie. Or at the very least, tell the truth out of order.

See, there was an essential part of our strategy at play. Cassie had a trope called Deja Vu F.M. with one powerful ability. It allowed her to hear messages over radio waves from the future. In a storyline, it had limited uses, but if there were enough speakers or televisions or people using walkie-talkies, she could justify equipping it.

But in this scenario, where we were all communicating over radio, she could hear everything we said minutes before we said it.

Moments after the killer walked into the kill box, the building exploded. Camden had worked overtime getting that prepped, using Supplies On Hand as well as his Zippos Are Cheap trope to create the mother of all surprises for Caleb Rowe.

Cassie had heard the future warning that Caleb Rowe was about to enter the building, which meant he had to enter the building. So the script had lied to him, telling him that Isaac was still in there. That was how prophecy worked in the Game at Carousel.

I had used my Don’t Go In There trope to maximize the killing potential of Camden’s bomb.

Between us, there was no way that Caleb Rowe’s body could have survived it.

No way at all.

But then again, Evil Never Dies.

I saw him there, blown to smithereens but still standing, bigger and stronger than could ever make sense. His clothes barely hung from his body. His muscles were exposed through his skin, as were some of his bones.

But he stood, and he held the sword.

For a minute, I really thought we had him, but in his stories, he did the killing. Players, it seemed, did the dying.