Book Nine, Chapter 33: Cloudfall

Part of me knew even the best-laid plans could fail. That’s why we always made contingencies. But I had to wonder if our backup plan would work either.

Caleb Rowe was the worst, most terrifying kind of killer. Scarier than some eldritch gods, even. He was the kind that kept coming back. Always. His tenacity was meta. He was the enemy that only had one weakness: The end credits.

But this movie would never fade to black. Fighting scene to scene with no connective tissue made building up narrative momentum difficult. There was no finisher move or final assault. Every attack simply led into the next.

There were no end credits to save us.

We all ran toward our fallback position, the cellar of a church high on a hill. Cassie had used her Deathward trope to mark it as safe, and it would work for a time. We didn’t know how long.

“How is he still alive?” Antoine asked as we met at the entrance to the building. He knew the answer, but he still felt like asking the question.

On some level, you believe that if you can flay the flesh from even the greatest monster, you’ll beat it no matter what the rules say. What does it matter if they have a trope that says Evil Never Dies? What does it matter if they have something called Grit in numbers that made your stats look like you had just started playing the game?

None of that mattered, because your mind wanted to believe that you could continue to live just as you always had.

I ushered the others into the church and down into the cellar, while I stood outside with Trope Master equipped, waiting for Caleb Rowe to pursue me once again.

This time, when he did, Carousel made him pose, showing all the carnage we had inflicted upon his body from the explosion, showing that none of it mattered at all. His body was nothing but a tool held together by dark magic and rage. It was a thing possessed. Explosions were, in a way, too passive to cause the kind of damage we needed.

It was time for the backup plan. It was time for our most powerful move.

I raised my hands into the air.

And I activated a trope that I had never used in a storyline before.

Cue the Rain.

Wind howled at a volume I had never heard before, and rain came sideways like bullets.

My trope allowed me to summon weather based on the amount of tension in a scene, and there was nothing but tension here. A storm had been waiting to destroy Saltspar Island ever since the Consortium found a way to hold it back, and now I was giving it its chance. It was the nuclear option. It was our only option.

I rushed inside the church on that little hill and closed myself into the cellar as the sky fell down on Caleb Rowe. I could barely get the door to shut; the wind was so strong.

The sound was beyond anything I had ever experienced. It was all-encompassing. I couldn’t separate the rush my ears heard from the vibrations my body felt. We were completely, totally at the mercy of a force of nature. The storm was judgment day. It was complete.

It was a lot of things, but fortunately, unpredictable was not one of them. We had seen what it would do to the island, to the town. In fact, we had walked through it. The island was an experiment by the Consortium. The concept, it seemed, was simple. If they could isolate a massive amount of destruction to one designated area, could they essentially vacuum away all the tension and danger from another place, creating a calm in the storm, literally and figuratively?

The answer, it seemed, was a qualified yes. They had mirrored the island exactly. One half destruction, the other half complete safety.

We had been planning out contingencies since the beginning of our stay on Saltspar. When we visited the other side of the island, Camden had gotten a good look at both the destruction and the magic writing used to create this supposed safe haven. It was all a matter of balance.

The storm would repeat forever, in the exact same way it had first struck the island long before it came to Carousel. We knew every single tree limb it would break, every house that would crumble, every dock that would be shattered by the waves.

Camden had gotten pictures of it in his head using his Photographic Memory trope. We knew where the death zones were, and we knew which places survived. We knew where to put the pontoon boat so it would have the best chance at not getting destroyed by the waves, and we also knew where to hide out.

The danger of the storm was, first, the wind. We were experiencing that now. There was no doubt in our minds that anyone exposed to this directly could die from something as innocuous as a piece of wood flying through the air. The rain would pound all man-made things into the dirt, and the waves crashed like the fists of angry gods. Within minutes, I could feel the water crashing against the side of the church, and this building was up on top of a hill, one of the only reasons that it could possibly survive.

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The danger, though, was not only the storm itself. The island was about to be swallowed by the sea. A great flood was coming, and with it came monsters of the deep.

It might be funny to think that one of the dangers of such a great calamity would be sharks swimming through the streets. After the fact, it might be difficult to imagine that that had happened in real life and it wasn’t just some creative decision by Carousel. I didn’t know which was true.

But I knew the way to survive was to go underground, stay safe from the storm, and stay far above sea level, safe from the flood and the sharks.

The ocean had come to wipe Saltspar Island clean, and I was the one who let it. My only hope, our only hope, was that Caleb Rowe could somehow be a victim of the storm in the way that he couldn’t be the victim of a barbed rod or the mother of all explosions.

We sat, and we waited, and as ashamed as I was to admit it, we prayed to Carousel. Maybe not in a religious way, but certainly in a way of reverence that a mortal at the mercy of an all-powerful entity might. We prayed that it would be enough. We begged the system of Carousel that all our effort, all our production value, all our big scenes and coordination would be enough. That Carousel might allow us to live. That it might let us keep fighting.

We held each other in that cellar, hoping that the magic of Cassie’s Deathward would keep us alive. Hoping that Camden had read the magic between worlds spell right, and that the storm would always destroy the same buildings and spare the same lucky few who decided to shelter in the church.

We weren’t alone there. Every night when the storm came, NPCs from around the island went to their various sheltering locations. They never needed to. The storm never came the way it was supposed to. But they still went, and they still hid, and at that moment we were no more likely to survive than they were.

The storm raged for hours, but when it broke, the dawn broke with it.

All that was left to do was to wander out into the destruction. To hope that our boat survived the way we predicted it would. To hope that our enemy didn’t.

I was the first out. I thought it might be difficult to find Caleb Rowe, but it wasn’t.

He was worse for wear. A large splinter of wood had pierced his torso so completely that the damage from the barb had been erased. His legs had been bitten down to nothing but bone. He was half skeleton at this point, but the half that mattered was the half that carried the sword, and that part had not been taken by the sharks.

In fact, the bloodthirsty beasts lay around him in the water, cut in half, skewered, killed one after another.

He had spent his time in the hurricane enacting his trade of wanton murder.

He was tired, sluggish, Mutilated even, and yet he persisted, because Evil Never Dies and we had Nowhere to Run.

He began to climb the hill, one foot in front of another, walking toward me as if nothing had ever happened. As if a bomb and a hurricane and a fleet of sharks had not attempted to separate him from his mortal coil.

One foot in front of another. And we only had one plan left.

I ran. The others knew what they had to do. With Trope Master equipped again, I was the target. Like last time, I could get a bit of a lead, just enough to make it a chase. The half-skeletonized killer pursued me, letting me get just far enough ahead to get my hopes up.

But I wasn’t leading him off into the distance. No, I was just testing things. He had slowed down. I didn’t know if he was debuffed by all the damage we had caused. I had to believe he was. The exact workings of how various ailments affected the stats in Carousel could be vague.

He was clearly Mutilated, which would make his effective Plot Armor reduce by quite a bit. The benefits of that weren’t obvious, but it made it difficult for him to create narrative momentum in the same way it would for someone like me, and he didn’t have my Moxie or understanding of movies.

Essentially, the effect was that his meta unkillability would be noticeably lesser. That was the idea, at least. That was how it would work in a storyline. I didn’t know if that was how it would work in this situation.

I led him in a circle. Right as he was about to get to me, Kimberly arrived to save the day.

“Did you forget about me?” she asked, while activating her trope of the same name, as she jumped out and pointed her harpoon gun at the undead killer.

“You only have one shot,” I said. “You’d Better Make It Count.”

And she did. She didn’t try to hit him in the head or the chest. We all knew he could survive that. He already had enough lumber hanging out of his midsection to board up a broken window.

She aimed for his kneecap.

Somehow, even with the sharks eating away his muscle and flesh, Caleb Rowe had not been Hobbled. It made some amount of sense. He was possessed, and skeletal legs could be just as easily possessed by that sort of magic as perfectly healthy ones.

But when the harpoon went right through his patella, bending his knee backward and causing him to fall to the ground, we knew for sure that he was Hobbled.

And Hobbling had one important function. It absolutely destroyed your Hustle stat, whether you were a player or an enemy. We made sure to injure him as much as possible so that when we made our move, we would maximize our chance of success.

We didn’t mind him having Nowhere to Run as a trope, because we knew that it ran off of Hustle. So if we could somehow debuff that stat, and we could come up with a trope to counter it, our counter would win.

Luckily, we had just the ability to do it.

The group arrived behind us, with Antoine holding up the map we had created of the surrounding territories during all our time exploring the Carousel River as it flowed in and through the ocean around the island.

In his mind, he chose the destination. Our final destination.

“Let’s get back to Carousel proper,” he said.

And in doing so, he initiated the Map Travel Sequence.

With little fanfare, we made our escape. We just needed to get to Carousel proper. If we set foot in the circus, surely we would be free of him.

Just a quick trip down the river.

If only it had been enough.