Arc II, Chapter 20: Ready Player Ten

“You killed them?” Antoine screamed. He feigned an attempt to stand but was unable.

Bobby, having gotten Isaac straightened out, started working on Antoine’s leg. He gathered a broken branch from nearby and started constructing a splint. I couldn’t tell if he was doing it properly because I didn’t know how it was done. Still, he did his best to look like he was confident as he wrapped his belt around Antoine’s leg.

“I didn’t kill them!” The Stranger said. “They played the game. I swear. They knew the rules. I thought… I thought…”

“The rules didn’t say anything about that thing,” Antoine said, gesturing up toward the figure in the window staring at us. “You killed those people and now you killed Kimberly! She’s gone. That thing killed her. She was the love of my life…. You—”

The Stranger nodded in defeat. “I’m not going to argue. True be told. I didn’t care what happened to them. I promise though, I did not want it to happen to you or your girlfriend. You weren’t supposed to be here. If I knew some way to run you off without getting run off myself, I would have done it!”

“You didn’t do anything at all!” Antoine yelled back.

“Hold still,” Bobby said as he worked on Antoine’s leg.

“When this is over, you can get your revenge on me,” The Stranger said. “Kill me. Torture, I don’t care. All that matters is that I find my daughter. That’s it. I would do anything for her.”

Off-Screen.

That seemed short. Carousel must have gotten what it needed. Perhaps Antoine lying down on the ground and yelling at the Stranger wasn’t as compelling as I had assumed.

“You think that’s going to work?” Antoine asked, turning his attention to Bobby.

“Travis used to say that acting could do a lot of what tropes could do, it just wasn’t guaranteed to work,” Bobby said. “He never really elaborated on that or gave an example or demonstrated it… It was just something he would say when I messed up or I was afraid to do something. I think this will work.”

The logic was sound. Bobby “setting” Antoine’s broken bone On-Screen combined with Antoine’s high Grit and Walk It Off trope might have been enough to swing some healing. Nothing was guaranteed.

“You might be able to use this as a walking stick,” someone behind us said. It was Dina. She had been watching from the shadows, waiting for us to go Off-Screen. She held out Antoine’s baseball bat. “Found it at the bottom of the hill. Along with a bunch of dead bodies. Did you get my note?”

“We got it,” Antoine said. He grabbed his bat and gripped it tight. He was ready for a fight. He was also at the end of his rope. He had been through a lot. Eventually, it would be too much and something would snap.

“Actually, you might give that back to her for a bit,” I said. “We need to explain how you got it back to the audience. But great idea.”

Antoine started to laugh. “I am so tired of having to play these stupid games.”

We could all agree with that.

“Isaac, you hanging in there?” I asked.

He gave me a look that might have been “Have you seen my head?”

Instead, he said, “When does the pain go away?”

“When we get to The End,” I said.

I wish I could have the right words to say. I didn’t. All I could give him were concrete goals to fixate on. That worked for me.

I turned to The Stranger. “So, you set some people up to die?”

He nodded. “It’s looking that way. My Plot Armor is at zero. I know you all can’t see it. Next, we make the trek down the hill?”

I nodded. “Dina needs to come out of the woods and tell us about the bodies. Maybe throw in something about your son’s ghost if you have it in the barrel. The Stranger will say he needs to go look for his daughter’s body. We follow. Wait… we already know Kimberly is dead because Antoine said so,” I paused to think up a good reason for us to climb back down the hill when the exit was in the other direction. The shadowy figure was in the house, true. It didn’t matter. “We’ll just follow. We don’t need a reason other than that’s where the plot is going. This is a storyline based on a corny internet ritual. No one is expecting us to have logical motivations.”

“Going to see a body is a good enough reason, right?” Isaac asked. It was good to see him engaging even if it was with blood covering his face.

“Going to see a body is an excellent reason,” I said. In horror movies, anytime someone reports a body, the next shot had all of the important characters near the dead body making commentary on it. No one questioned that sort of logic. In a horror movie, you hear about a murder, and you run, don’t walk, to the scene of the crime.

The way the scene played out, my money said that the camera left us to go watch The Stranger’s daughter somewhere. It could also have gone to Constance, but I leaned toward the first.

We took our positions and waited.

On-Screen.

“That should hold for a while,” Bobby said to Antoine. “I did my best with what I had.”

“Thanks,” Antoine said.

I watched the figure as it sat on a bed inside the hotel. The building felt so far away. I had no idea how we would get back there.

Dina came running out of the forest. “You have to come look,” she said, out of breath as if she had run all the way here. “There’s bodies. A dozen of them were at the bottom of the hill. I don’t even know where they came from. My son says an evil man did it. He stacked them there like trophies. My son is terrified to go anywhere near it. Oh my god! The window is shut.”

“Bodies?” The Stranger asked. “I need to go there now. If my daughter is there… I don’t know what I’ll do…”

He headed off in that direction. We were set to follow.

“Here,” Dina said, handing Antoine his bat. “I found this with… Kimberly. I’m sorry.”

Antoine grabbed the bat and used it as a walking stick to pull himself up to a standing position. He could move. His Hobble status was no longer solidly lit. It was flickering. That was an improvement.

Before we could leave, I heard a loud winding sound.

Then, a voice.

“Do you like it here?” the voice asked. It was loud and echoed over the area. “Do you like this world?”

A chill went down my spine.

I turned to see the shadowy figure or at least the ghost of a burned man whose form he hid behind. He was holding the bell from Reply the Departed. He was going to ask us questions.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

“No,” I said, but the words didn’t come out of my mouth. It was like the vibrated through the air but never made a sound.

There was a winding sound.

“I do. I like it a lot. Strange place, wouldn’t you say? Folded and twisted. Put together like puzzle pieces from a thousand boxes. One wonders why… Will you try to escape?”

He was almost breaking character there. What kind of enemy would risk that?

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Antoine answered. I couldn’t hear what he said. The words were pulled from his mouth like mine had been.

Brriiinnnngggg!

The bell sounded in the distance. Antoine’s answer had been reduced to a simple ringing of the bell for yes.

“The game should go on, I suppose,” the figure said. The burned man he was hiding behind stood up and walked out of the room and into the living room.

None of us could speak. We just looked at each other.

My phone started to ring. It sounded so close to the bell ringing that I almost jumped into the air.

I picked it up and answered it.

“Hello,” I said. “Riley’s phone. This is Riley speaking.”

Just in case the audience hadn’t heard my name yet. My name often didn’t get said until late in movies.

“Evening. Or morning, I might say,” Constance said. “I’ve called with the information you requested.”

“Thanks. Lay it on me.”

“To deal with ghosts, simply avoid angering them. Lost spirits, if you believe in such things, are quite docile as long as they are left to their own devices. Certainly don’t give them any information that might upset them. There is a hilarious anecdote here from a very popular charlatan who tells a story about having a high school crush follow her until she went to his grave one day. Upon seeing his own gravestone, he went into such a rage that his, and I quote, ‘spiritual energy was converted all at once into psychic energy and it blew up her father’s van’.”

“Wow,” I said. “How about the other thing?”

“Yes… the creature you described does not seem to exist. I am pleased to inform you that it is such a novelty that not even the internet ghost columnists have heard of it. I can’t find a scrap of information on it. Your friend can rest easy.”

No information at all about the shadowy figure? How were we supposed to beat it? I couldn’t even see its tropes for whatever reason. We were in big trouble.

I hung up the call.

“What did she say?” Antoine asked.

I had forgotten to put it on speaker.

“She said she can’t find anything about it.”

Off-Screen.

We were between scenes. Bobby told us so. The Plot Cycle froze. It was nearing Second Blood. The second half of the stories went by faster than the first. That was just the nature of the game. Much of the Party would be edited out. That wasn’t the same for what came after.

“Twenty minutes,” Bobby said. “The next scene is at the bottom of the hill with the bodies. I don’t have any lines. I think my character wasn’t supposed to be around so much. Oh well.”

And so we went downhill. Instead of turning off to the right where I had found Antoine, we went straight to a different part of the river near where we had seen a giant snake lying dead weeks earlier.

On our side of the river, a pile of bodies had been stacked up. Kimberly’s was on top.

There were at least a dozen bodies there. I couldn’t say where from.

Three of the four red-haired siblings were there. One of the guys was missing. It was awful to look at. They had all died in similar ways. J.T. Guzman was there, or at least his body was. Snapped neck and all.

I stared at the bodies for so long that I almost didn’t notice that we weren’t alone.

On the other side of the river, a young woman stood next to the surviving red-haired sibling. He was an ordinary NPC so he was staying in character, but in the weird way that NPCs did between scenes where they were in a weird state of perpetual professionalism waiting for the next scene. He stood there with his head bobbing staring at his siblings’ corpses.

“Nice to see a fresh face!” the young woman screamed.

She was a special NPC. Normally, I suspected, her Plot Armor would be 50. Right then it was 24. I surveyed all of the information I could from the red wallpaper.

Sidney Martin is The Scream Queen.

She was one of the Final Girl Paragons. Specifically, the Scream Queen Paragon.

She was a Paragon. She was acting as a player.

My Casting Director trope told me:

Sidney Martin: The unlucky object of so much obsession, people around town are always gossiping about how she ends up involved in so many unlikely tragedies. It must be her fault, right? Having found herself trapped in the parallel world of the dead, she must find a way to survive as she waits for her father to save her. Whether she likes it or not, she’s going to be the center of everyone’s attention.

Tropes:

Off-Screen Survival: allows her to make unlikely strides in her efforts to survive mounting odds when Off-Screen, including finding weapons, allies, or information. However, every stroke of luck will come at the cost of some terrifying thrill or cost. Explore thoughtfully.

We can’t stay here…: Allows her to go On-Screen to foreshadow an imminent skirmish. Guarantees the fight or chase scene will happen On-Screen, but also buffs her nearby party’s Hustle and Grit.

Sidney was pretty, but weathered by stress and fatigue. She was no-nonsense to her core.

“The Ten Second Game?” she screamed. “What happened to Reply the Departed?”

The Stranger answered her. “This is Reply the Departed. Carousel messed with things.”

She took a deep breath. “Figures…We’re being chased. They should come out of the woods behind us soon. Come out and help me cross if I can’t. NPC’s a goner.”

“How long do we have, Bobby?” I asked.

“Two minutes,” he answered.

“Two minutes,” The Stranger screamed over the river.

Sidney nodded and walked back into the tree line until I couldn’t see her. The NPC followed.

We did the same, backing up a distance so we could get a shot of us approaching. When the scene started, we would rush to see the scene.

On-Screen.

We raced toward the river. We all did our appropriate reactions. Antoine did his best to move ahead with his busted leg, crying out for Kimberly.

He grabbed her body from the pile and wept. Those were real tears.

The Stranger tore the pile down looking for his daughter’s corpse. He didn’t find it. He was panicked, but also overjoyed at not finding her body.

In the distance, I heard someone yelling.

“Dad!” Sidney screamed. She carried something in her hands. At first, I couldn’t make it out, but soon I got an idea. It was the mirror from the vanity that had been broken off. I was wondering where that had gone.

She and the red-haired NPC ran closer, but he wasn’t fast enough. He was falling behind.

Sidney hit the river with a powerful splash, still holding onto the large mirror by its wooden legs. She splashed across.

The Stranger rushed out to grab her and haul her ashore.

The NPC wasn’t as lucky. They were being chased by an army of ghosts. Each of them had died from various causes, but there was something different about them. They were gaunter, thinner than J.T. or Cassie had been.

They were ravenous.

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