Book Nine, Chapter 37: Interlude: Anna

Anna Reed is the Final Girl.

Her aspect is Girl Next Door. The Girl Next Door is a genuine, relatable emotional anchor whose high Moxie and Grit fuel connection, resilience, and quiet strength that protects others and uncovers unexpected solutions.

Anna has a Plot Armor score of 42, Mettle of 12, Moxie of 12, Hustle of 7, Savvy of 3, and Grit of 8.

Free Background Trope: “The Second Choice” makes her the backup chosen one of whatever forces of destiny, luck, or divinity will govern the storyline.

Current Trope Limit: 9

“Have You Seen Them?” establishes a Rescue when she asks NPCs about a missing player while holding their poster.

“Last One Alive” prevents death until the rest of the party is killed.

“The Heart” allows her to end the game when she is the last one alive and participate in her own rescue. Buffs those who protect her.

“A Kind Face” makes NPCs more likely to reveal important plot information.

“Library Card” allows her to bypass many forms of resistance and red tape with seemingly innocent cover stories.

“Maladaptive Daydreaming” lets her gain insight about the antagonist in her daydreams that the camera can see. Increases tension and emphasizes her relationship with the enemy.

“Tastefully Omitted” prevents her from being filmed during indecent or exploitative moments.

“Friends to the End” allows her to get buffs for all fallen allies if she is the Last One Alive in the Finale.

“From Humble Beginnings” debuffs her stats by 30% in the Party, but then allows her to earn up to 15% of her original stats in Midpoint, Finale, and Final Battle.

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Anna Reed sat in the booth at the diner across from Danny and reviewed her tropes. The plot cycle wasn't moving, and it wouldn't for quite a while, she reasoned, not until she pushed the story forward. That was the basis for her rescue trope, wasn't it? That her friend had gone missing, and no one cared until she decided to go out and find out what had happened to them.

She had Last One Alive equipped, as she always did, but she wondered how useful it would be, being the only person in the storyline. Well, the only player. If she was going to make it useful as part of her defensive lineup, she was going to need to recruit some NPCs to die before her.

The NPC sitting across from her seemed to read her mind as she stared at the ticket.

“Riley told me to do whatever it takes to protect you,” he said. “You don't have to worry about it. Dying in Carousel is not the worst way to go for me.”

She looked up at him and smiled, and he smiled back. He wore a backward baseball cap for the Carousel ice hockey team, the Shipwrecks. She wanted to be nice because he was being nice, but there was always an awkward question left lingering in the air when talking to NPCs. Was what they were saying just the script talking for them, or was it really them?

She chose to believe the latter. Without a little trust, society, even Carousel society, could not function.

Her background trope was going to be doing some heavy lifting. The Second Choice didn't seem to have many obvious advantages, but in this storyline it should do at least one important thing. It would prevent her from becoming prominent in the story until the end. That was one reason Riley wanted her to keep it on her, even though it wasn't as powerful as his or Kimberly's background tropes.

If Anna was going to be the second choice, that meant there was plenty of time for her to get the hang of things. It dovetailed in nicely with her rescue trope, too. She was playing a character who was insignificant and unimportant except for her determination.

That setup made up most of her initial defenses. Completely meta. Completely narrative. Completely terrifying to rely on.

She was banking on Caleb Rowe not pursuing her because she was unimportant at first. It was even more terrifying because she had chosen to use From Humble Beginnings, a trope her background gave her access to.

Riley always liked the trope, even though Bobby never used it fully. The concept was that you start out as an insignificant character and then get promoted to a main character by the end, but Bobby wasn't much of an underdog. He was much more of a recast or an extra. Actually, she didn't know what to think of Bobby anymore. She didn't want to.

From Humble Beginnings would give you at least a 15% total buff by the Finale. That was about all Bobby ever got because he never tried to be the main character in storylines, but Anna hoped she could get more out of it. It was between this and Break in the Third Act, which would power her up based on the trauma she had endured.

She was beginning to doubt her choice because the trauma, at least, was guaranteed.

A Kind Face, Library Card, and Maladaptive Daydreaming would form her information-gathering core. Normally, it wasn't so important that she find clues or do research, but it wasn't like someone else was going to be able to do it for her.

She had equipped Tastefully Omitted, even though she wasn't sure how much it would help her. When they researched the Killers Rowe franchise, they came away with an awful taste in their mouth. This was a story about terrible people, and in a story like that, knowing she couldn't be part of any exploitative or demeaning scene could be a powerful shield. She might never know if it worked. It might work invisibly.

Friends to the End may have been a mistake. She had it equipped already and hadn't thought to get rid of it. It let her power up based on her fallen allies, but in this storyline she didn't have any allies. Not players, at least.

She glanced back up at Danny. He was demolishing a stack of pancakes and waiting for her to finish going through her tropes. At least he was patient. He must have been in his mid-to-late twenties. He wore an oversized jacket that she might expect to see on skater kids or mall hoodlums. She wondered if her stereotypes could even apply to someone from another world.

When she got to the end of the stack of tickets, her heart skipped a beat. It felt like so little against so much. Caleb Rowe had powerful tropes that completely undermined entire player strategies. His Plot Armor was 60 against her 42. She could tell herself all the optimistic plans she wanted, but those numbers didn't need to respond to her arguments. She could be killed simply and quickly, and that would be it.

She would be dead right along with Andrew.

“What's wrong?” Danny asked. “I mean, I know this isn't a happy situation, but is there something specific that maybe we could talk about that might make you feel better?”

Was she shaking? Was she breathing quickly? What was he picking up on that told him how weak she felt?

“No, I'm fine,” she lied. “Just nervous energy. Excitement, maybe.”

“Well, if it counts for anything,” he said as he wiped off his face with a napkin, “I'm pretty excited in the exact same way. It's perfectly normal. And I've been on thousands of storylines.”

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He never spoke this much before.

She flipped her wrist, and all of her trope tickets disappeared into thin air. She picked up a fork and started poking at her hash browns, but no matter how much she tried, no appetite grew to meet her. She was too nervous. Her eyes flitted out the window to the nearly empty parking lot. If she wasn't vigilant, Caleb Rowe could stab her right through that window...

“So tell me about yourself,” she said. If Danny was talking, then she wouldn't need to. Maybe he could drown out the silence that was driving her crazy.

“Let's see. I am a cameraman by trade, but you knew that. I have been a companion for, I don't know, maybe thousands of years. Who can tell? Since before the game was really the game. Let's see... Maybe you have a specific question you want to ask?”

He was good at talking. Not great at it, but all of his awkward pauses came off as endearing. He had probably had a lot of practice. All of the meta-aware NPCs did, she imagined.

“Are you reporting everything that's happening here back to Carousel?” she asked. She was only half joking.

“Kind of,” he said. “I mean, I don't really have a choice. Everything I say or think or do ends up on the script, sometimes before it happens, other times after it happens. But I promise you, Carousel does not need NPCs to spy on you. Let's not forget that you have a script, too. It just has a lot less ink on it.”

That wasn't a comforting thought. She wanted to change the subject.

“So how did you end up coming to Carousel?” she asked, although after doing so, she wondered if it was a faux pas. Maybe it was considered rude.

“Well, I was a cameraman back in my world, working for a ghost-hunting documentary.”

“A documentary?” Anna asked with a sly smile.

“Yes,” Danny said, “but you have to remember that in my world, ghosts were a thing. Everybody knew about them. You just didn't get to see them all the time, so it was a respectable profession to film them. Although I understand most players come from worlds where there are no ghosts, so that might be a bit foreign to you. But yes, I was a cameraman, and we were running a legit operation, just trying to catalog and categorize ghosts. We had a government grant. We were no fly-by-night hucksters, no matter what you think.”

“Of course you were,” Anna said. “You were basically a nature documentarian.”

“Right, exactly,” Danny said, “but with more dead people and much spookier background music.

“Well, the truth was, even though we knew ghosts were real, you didn't get to see them all the time. It wasn't like that. It was more like a faint impression or a handprint in the dust, maybe some electrical interference in the camera. Rarely did you come across a fresh haunting that would make for good TV.”

Anna squinted her eyes. “But you're sure that ghosts actually existed, or is this just something that you believed?”

“This was a known fact. Everyone knew about it. It was just not something you saw every day,” he said, playing along with the right amount of exasperation.

“Okay, I believe you then,” Anna said. “I mean, you're in Carousel, so you must have had some ghosts.”

“Well, not exactly,” Danny said. “I never said that we actually captured footage of ghosts. It was the first day of filming the special. We were working at an old mental hospital that had gotten shut down, kind of a standard thing for such a documentary. Looking for ghosts, finding some evidence. You know, some strange patterns in the dust in the air, windows opening and closing without any explanation.”

“Both of those could be explained by the wind,” Anna said.

“Anyway, as I was saying, we found some real signs of ghosts beyond any real explanation,” Danny continued with a laugh. “Doing government-funded research in a scientific manner. Very respectable stuff. But the thing was, we did capture something on film, something that we never should have captured.”

His lip quivered. Was he just pretending to be nervous suddenly, or was he touching a subject that genuinely haunted him? Anna couldn't be sure, but she read it as sincerity.

“It wasn't a ghost. We were certain of that by the end. It was something else. What do people in your world call non-human spirits? Demons? Poltergeists? I don't know. We didn't have a word for whatever this was, which is why it took us so long to know what we were dealing with. It was something that was playing with us, but the thing was, we didn't know it happened until after we got home... This is complicated. I always mess up this part of the story. You'll have to forgive me.”

“I forgive you,” Anna said with a smile.

“Thanks,” Danny said bashfully as he took a drink of water. “Just one second. I'm a bit parched. “All right, here's the deal. You know how people think that taking a picture of someone captures their soul on the film? Did you guys have that concept in your world?” he asked.

“We do,” Anna said, “although I don't think it's true.”

“I didn't either then,” he said. “There was no evidence of it. Remember that ghosts absolutely existed in my world, so we had all kinds of scientific literature on them, and there was no reason to believe that filming a ghost would somehow capture anything but light and electrical interference. Except it did.”

His smile faded as he took another drink.

“The thing is, whatever this entity was, it got imprinted onto the films that we used. The actual tapes, physically infused. I didn't even find this out until afterward. And fragments of our souls were also on that tape, right? Because we were filmed on them too. And we didn't know what was going on at first, but it would seem that we ended up in one of those classic endless torture loops. The moment we closed the doors of that mental hospital, we were trapped. The entity toyed with us over and over. Everything from possession to physical torture, but mostly messing with our minds. Psychological torture. Making us see old memories, playing out our biggest regrets. Just happened constantly, and when it finally got through with us, it would all start over again, and we would barely remember it.”

As he spoke, his face got redder, and his voice got uneasy.

Anna reached across the table and grabbed his arm and said, “You don't have to tell me this if you don't want to. It's okay.”

“No, it's fine. Carousel fixed it, for the most part. The psychological trauma. See, even though part of my soul got trapped on those videotapes with the entity, the rest of me went on living just fine for a few more decades. Carousel fused the pieces back together, so I remember it all. Carousel has a way of taking your worst memory, abstracting it, boiling it down, and feeding it back to you like it's just a story you know. Still, it's not a pleasant story.”

“That sounds terrible,” Anna said, trying to comfort him. “How did you escape?”

He stared back at her and smiled impishly.

“Oh,” Anna said. “You didn't make it out.”

“Nope. We're in Carousel,” he said.

“I am so sorry. I wasn't thinking.”

“It's no problem,” he said. “My torment ended whenever the videotape dry-rotted, and the image of the entity was erased, basically. So it wasn't eternal. It just lasted a long time. But I will tell you, it was great practice for this place.”

“I imagine it was,” Anna said. “Did you spend the whole time trying to film this thing, whatever it was, while it was tormenting you?”

“Yeah. Endless loops of footage. Like I said, it was a lot of practice. Even though it took me a few thousand loops to really remember that we were trapped.”

That was a situation you wouldn't find on a get well card.

“I can see why Carousel valued you after that experience,” she said.

“It's the shining jewel of my resume,” he said as he went back to eating his pancakes.

Anna wondered if one day she and her friends would talk about Carousel that same, casual, almost affectionate way. Forever was a long time. Who knew what tomorrow would bring, or all the tomorrows after it?

“So are you grateful to Carousel?” she asked.

“Yes,” Danny said. “I know that's weird to you. Players like to imagine that there's an antagonistic relationship between them and the Big C, but I don't feel it myself.”

“Then what do you feel about it?” she asked as she saw a small hint of a thunderstorm in the distance and wondered if it was the storm over Saltspar Island.

“I feel like I'm a part of something bigger. Most of the meta-aware NPCs do,” he said. "We're not allowed to say much else."

“And what is that?” she asked. "What bigger thing?"

He shrugged. “Wouldn't spoil it for you even if I could,” he said. “All right, let's talk about gameplay. Riley never really asked me to be a character. He kind of just used me like a really advanced tripod. What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to be a character, definitely,” Anna said. “Talk back to me. Maybe be funny if you can. I need to show that I have friends and people I care about so that I'll be stronger by the Finale.”

“All right,” he said. “I'll do what I can, but I don't know how long I have. Technically, it's fine for companion NPCs to be sent into storylines without their players, but it's not really a strong position, let's just say. Usually in storylines, I play kind of a wisecracker or maybe a really caring, humanizing friend.”

“You may have to do both,” she said. “We'll just have to see. Maybe we play off each other. What kind of stuff did Riley tell you to do? Just curious. If he never wanted you to be a real character, I don't know what the alternative was.”

Danny laughed. “He was very concerned with the angle that I was shooting from and making sure that I captured things a certain way. He really wanted the light balance to be correct. He was very concerned with hiding stuff in shadows and keeping stuff out of frame. Definitely a director. I'm not sure he even remembers my name.”

Anna laughed. “Yeah, it can seem like that sometimes. He approaches the whole thing analytically, I think. I mean, we all have our coping mechanisms.”

“Not me,” Danny said with a smile. “Frankly, I enjoy dying all the time.”

“Maybe it'll grow on me,” Anna said. “I haven't liked it so much myself.”

She thought back to the first time she had died at the hands of the Mercer Poltergeist and shivered. Maybe it wasn't so different than Danny's experience.

They finished up their meal and continued talking for a while before Danny brought up something a little more serious.

“You should know that everyone, all of your friends, all the NPCs I talked to, they expect you to use The Heart. I mean, I understand if you want to save your friend Andrew, but I'm telling you, this is going to be very difficult, and I'm not sure if it's realistic for you to expect success.”

Her final trope, The Heart, gave her the ability to quit a storyline if she was the last one alive. She wouldn't have to experience the sting of death. The storyline would just end wherever she wanted, and she would fade into nonexistence until her friends rescued her sometime in the future.

“It's nice to have in my back pocket,” she said. “But even if I choose to do that, the more information I can learn, the better off the rescue will go. So let's just see how far we can get.”

There she went, sounding nervous again.

“All right,” Danny said. “That's all I needed to hear. Let's go find some answers.”

Anna nodded, and the two of them walked out of the diner together.