Arc II, Chapter 29: Cold on the Trail

Player

Plot Armor

Mettle

Moxie

Hustle

Savvy

Grit

Riley

25/2

3

7

5

7

3

Antoine

23

6

4

5

2

6

Kimberly

21

3

7

5

1

5

Dina

20

3

3

4

3

7

Bobby

20

3

6

4

3

4

Isaac

13

1

4

3

3

2

Cassie

14

1

6

3

3

1

Player Tropes:

(I would like to remind readers that this is a reference. I will describe tropes before they come up. You dont have to read this unless you want to)

Riley Lawrence is the Film Buff.

Having risen to level 25, he can equip 9 tropes and one background instead of 8.

“Trope Master” grants him the ability to perceive enemy tropes, but at the cost of sacrificing half of his Plot Armor.

“Cinema Seer” buffs the Savvy and Grit of his allies when they hear him predict cinematic and impactful plot elements.

As an “Oblivious Bystander,” Riley remains untargeted by enemies as he convincingly acts oblivious to their presence.

“Escape Artist” buffs his Hustle to help enact plausible escape plans.

“The Insert Shot” makes allies aware of an object the player chooses. The object will be shown to the audience and its use will be buffed in the Finale.

Directors Monitor allows him to watch the rest of the storyline after his demise via Deathwatch.

Flashback Revelation allows him to communicate with allies from Deathwatch through flashbacks to his past dialogue.

Casting Director gives him a summary of his teams roles in the storyline.

“My Grandmother Had the Gift”

A background trope that gives Rileys character some ambiguous connection to The Gift through his heritage.

Cutaway Death sends him Off-Screen before the moment of his characters implied demise and allows him to exist behind the scenes Written Off if he survives the encounter.

He did not equip Coming To A Theater Near You, “I Don’t Like It Here…,”Out Like a Light, “Location Scout,”The Wrong Reel, Raised by Television, What Doesnt Kill Them Makes Them Angry, or “Dead Man Walking.”

I had about a dozen combos I wanted to try, but I didnt want to mess around with the Tutorial. I would have to make some time to experiment afterward.

Kimberly Madison is the Eye Candy.

“Convenient Backstory” allows her to believably change her backstory to assist with the current task, buffing the relevant stat.

“Social Awareness” allows her to see the Moxie stat of all enemies and NPCs.

“Get a Room!” boosts the odds of important discoveries when exploring with a love interest during the party.

“A Hopeless Plea” forces the captor to explicitly deny her release when she asks to be released.

“Pregnancy Reveal” buffs her Grit when she pretends that she is pregnant and buffs the father’s Mettle if she dies.

“When in Rome” buffs her Grit until Rebirth if her performance matches the tone of the movie.

Does anyone have a scrunchie? allows her to shift Moxie’s points into another stat by putting her hair up.

Carousel Academy Awards buffs her Moxie based on the quality of her performance in the previous storyline.

She did not equip A Lip Cease, Looks Dont Last, Typecast, Breaking the Veil of Silence, The Woman in Mourning, or “That’s What I Said!”.

Antoine Stone is the Athlete.

His “You were having a nightmare” trope allows him to repress or heal mental trauma (he is not strong enough to use its plot-resetting powers yet).

“Gym Rat” buffs Mettle and Hustle by revealing athletic backstory.

“It’s Part of the Uniform” gives him higher Mettle when attacking with sports equipment.

“Just Walk It Off” heals the Hobbled status by walking.

Knight in Shining Armor buffs his Mettle and Grit when defending a love interest.

“Time Out!” allows him to go Off-Screen during a fight, reducing enemy aggression.

Brandishing a weapon is Like a Security Blanket,buffing his Grit and soothing his and his allies fear.

Reload After Cut allows him to go Off-Screen by reloading his gun.

He did not equip Swing Away, Off the Bench, Everyone Loves a Winner,The Playbook, A Race Against Time, Coyote in a Trap, or “Bad Luck Magnet.” He also didnt use Play it Cool because he worried that Carousel was planning something nefarious by giving it to him.

Dina Cano is the Outsider.

“Guarded Personality” resists all insight abilities.

“An Outsider’s Perspective” alerts her to new, out-of-place, or unusual information.

“Better Late Than Never” buffs Mettle and Hustle if she waits until the Finale to assist allies On-Screen against the enemy.

“A Haunted Past” A background trope that gives her character some past trauma that haunts her and gives her access to various tropes.

“Encouragement from Beyond” soothes her when stressed, scared, or in pain and may provide useful information.

“Outside Looking In” grants her the ability to discern ideal spots to linger and observe events without actively participating in the narrative.

They Fell Off allows her to quickly get out of handcuffs and similar restraints.

She can leave physical or mental messages in the story that her allies can detect when in the location she left them with Pen Pal.

Light Fingers buffs the players attempts at stealing items from the set.

She did not equip You dont know me, but, Dark Secret, or They ruined the shot

Bobby Gill is The Wallflower.

Background Noise allows him to get background information from NPCs when Off-Screen.

The Good Samaritan buffs his Mettle and Grit for helping allies in a crisis if they have not met On-Screen and are strangers.

Last-Minute Casting recasts him as an NPC that is moderately involved in the plot. The selection is seemingly random. He will get some limited background information for the character and some access to the NPC script.

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From Humble Beginnings debuffs the players stats 30% in the Party, then but buffs them 15% in Rebirth, the Finale, and the Final Battle resulting in a net 15% buff by the end of the story.

Craft Services Are The Real Heroes ensures that there is edible food and water on set somewhere during the storyline.

My Only Role is Exposition gives him some useful information to be relayed On-Screen but takes it away if he starts to bore the audience.

Actually, I’m a Veterinarian changes his characters background to being an animal doctor and allows certain tropes to be equipped.

If you Can’t see it, it Won’t Bleed allows him to temporarily mend wounds by covering them from the audiences view.

Remember Me? allows him to promote his character to main cast by pretending to know them and introducing himself.

He did not equip The Hidden Infection, The Wisdom of Crowds, or And Thats Lunch.

Cassie Hughes is The Psychic.

The Anguish lets her see her allies health stats from anywhere and lets her take some of their pain by feeling it herself. This can reduce their overall injuries.

We are not abandoned can keep her allies spirits high by weaving a narrative of some higher power in control. When done well, this trope can heal Incapacitation, certain forms of spiritual Infection, and even buff Grit.

Reflective Jump Scare allows her to get a glimpse of the enemy when she looks in a mirror, giving her some small insight into what is in store.

Foreboding Signs gives her insight into who will die next and how in character, allowing her to prepare for what is to come.

Isaac Hughes is The Comedian.

If hes still cracking jokes allows the player to reduce or eliminate injuries by using humor the next time he is On-Screen before the audience know how injured he is. Works on allies situationally.

Weapons of Mass Absurdity using humorous weapons Buffs his Mettle and Hustle. The buff extends to weapons that are used if the original weapon fails.

Blood Loss Delirium gives the player a pleasant drunken stupor when they have major blood loss and provides cover for antics.

Gallows Humor allows him to ease mental pain with dark humor after a tragedy.

Police Chief Kurt Willis is The GI.

Ill buy you some time buffs him greatly in all stats when he sacrifices himself to allow his allies to escape. If used during First or Second Blood, he is guaranteed to be the blood sacrifice.

Pack Mule allows him to carry the weapons a soldier might carry on his person. Buffs Grit.

Till the job is done allows him to survive an apparent death and return in the Finale, but he may only use two tropes during the Finale and his injuries remain.

Provisional Command upon taking control of a situation, allows him to temporarily buff allies by commanding them around. With his impending demise, he can buff one ally permanently.

We stood before the flooded waters.

Police Chief Willis was giving us last-minute instructions.

Hope you know how to shoot a gun, he said. Listen to everything I say, or I might shoot you myself.

He had other generic military catchphrases that he spouted off too, but I got the sense that he was just trying to get a reaction from us.

Most of you have been through plenty of storylines by now so you’ll know the way they work, he said. This one is part of the Throughline though. Keep your eyes and ears open because there is information in this storyline that is true or at least true outside of the game. Most of it is only true in the original storyline, or not true at all, but some part of it is true.

“You mean canon?” I asked.

“No, I left my cannon in the car,” he said with a wink. “Might wish I hadn’t later.”

I looked at the water.

“Cold-Blooded Things” was the title. My I dont like it here trope had said it was a high difficulty. Location Scoutwasnt too useful outside of storylines, and I didnt want to waste a ticket slot to use it in the storyline even though I had just unlocked a new slot by getting to 25 PA. I would have to be satisfied with what it could tell me. The storyline involved sewers (several different types), the basement at City Hall, Hallowed Heart Hospital, and Town Square.

Thats all I knew for sure.

I got my tropes all set. My goal was to use my Oblivious Bystander strategy in combination with Cutaway Death to try to stay in the game as long as possible.

No time like the present, Chief Willis said. Ill go first and come back to get you.

He walked into the ankle-deep water and disappeared from our view down below. He was acting as a player, so when he took his first step into the water, he triggered the Omen. The needle on the Plot Cycle clicked from Omen to Choice to Party.

It didn’t take long for him to turn around and come back toward us. I could hear him walking through the water. The thing was when he returned, he wasn’t Police Chief Willis. He was Officer Willis.

He had even changed clothes into a standard police uniform.

All right, he said, if you insist on coming now’s the time. Sorry about the flooding, we can’t control the weather. Unless of course, you want to turn back. There’s no reason we have to put up with this charade any longer.

We’re coming, Kimberly said confidently as she walked down into the water.

The rest of us followed.

What became immediately apparent was that the Cold Case Museum was not a museum anymore, not in this storyline at least. Like the library or the hospital or the university, the Cold Case Museum was a collection of Omens, I realized. We had asked for the omen related to Jed Geist’s death, and that is what we had gotten. I theorized if we had asked about any other case, we would have come downstairs, and it wouldn’t have been flooded.

We would have to visit the museum some other time when it was, well, a museum instead of a flooded storeroom filled with cardboard boxes and ticked-off police officers.

They managed to get the power on right as we came down. The room was huge and filled with shelves covered in white boxes.

Bobby, of course, disappeared before the rest of us had even gotten off the stairs.

What did you say was going on? a man named Detective Jeff Swanson on the red wallpaper asked.

Task force, Officer Willis said. Mayor handpicked them so that they could work on the old Jed Geist case.

I took note of everything I was hearing. My friends and I were part of a task force, apparently. I started to review our roles on the red wallpaper using my Casting Director trope, but soon I realized that that was unnecessary.

Another task force? Detective Swanson asked. Didn’t we already have some crack task force who couldnt solve it in the first place?”

“Oh, you see, that was a task force made up of senior detectives, experienced investigative reporters, and criminologists. This is a different kind of task force. You see, we’ve got a local psychic,” he said, pointing toward Cassie, “and we’ve got the guy from Isaac in Traffic, you know, the shock jockey,” he said, pointing at Isaac, “and of course, Miss Carousel,” referring to Kimberly. “Oh, and this is that guy who tackled the bank robber last year, and the other guy is a Geist family historian, wait, no, that’s not right, he is a Geist family horror movie historian. You know he’s an expert in all of the horror movies that the Geist family produced which I am sure will be very useful. And finally, we’ve got the woman who sued us last year when her son went missing because we didn’t have enough to deal with already,” he said, pointing toward Antoine, myself, and Dina, respectively.

The vets had always warned me that casting director was a waste of a trope slot. Carousel would never let players go through a storyline without giving them information as basic as their identity. Convenience of the trope aside, I felt pretty silly. Our roles lined up mostly with our Archetypes.

We really were a special task force.

Why them? Detective Swanson asked.

Well, they’re celebrities, don’t you know? Willis answered. That makes them uniquely qualified.

Publicity stunt, Swanson said, nodding his head. For the Anniversary.

I would never accuse the mayor of something like that, Willis answered.

Well, if they need to see the evidence, they’re going to have to wait a bit while we fish it out, Swanson said. He gestured over to a section of the room where the shelving had collapsed from the flooding. You really saw all of the Geist movies? Swanson asked, looking at me.

Thinking on my feet, I said, Yep, saw every one of them, ask me anything.

Nah, Detective Swanson said.

Willis laughed.

That was how the scene went on for some time; the camera would come on, and one of the officers would make a comment toward one of us for us to respond to. Carousel was just gathering lines for its final cut.

Swanson asked Antoine, I can’t believe a guy like you would wanna be stuck in a group like this, a bunch of attention hogs. Didn’t you save a cop? What are you doing here?

Antoine kept his cool, looked over at Kimberly, and said, I have my reasons.

One of the officers said something to Dina that I didn’t hear about what she expected from them. It was probably related to her character’s missing child whom she had sued the department overfor incompetence or something.

In response, all she said was, This is basically what I expected from your operation, she gestured generally toward the flooded basement filled with old case files and evidence.

The police officers cussed under their breath.

Eventually, an Officer Martinez arrived and said his one line, They’ve got the box over here for you, he said, gesturing across the room.

We went off-screen after that while we trudged across the basement and dug through a mountain of ruined file boxes filled with artifacts from other cold cases.

You see that guy over there, Willis asked. Officer Martinez? We got him from a storyline with a monster called a toe biter, whatever that is. Look at how jumpy he is.

The man he was pointing to was indeed very nervous about trudging around in murky water. I knew that some NPCs were aware of their situation, but some anonymous police officer without much of a speaking role having leftover trauma from the horrors of his world was different. He was just an ordinary NPC. Didnt seem fair.

We went back on-screen as we were sorting through boxes that were falling apart.

I got it, Willis said. Geist, Jed. Died August 6th, 1992. Exactly three years ago, wouldn’t you know it?

Three years ago? Had I misheard him? It was thirty years ago. Or at least it would have been. This storyline must have taken place twenty-seven years earlier. Other storylines had been set in the past. It wasnt unusual.

The box wasn’t in great shape; the lower portion of it was brown from water, but unlike many of the boxes around it, it wasn’t completely destroyed. Willis carefully picked it up from the bottom and set it on a plastic table.

All right, Willis said, The mayor has made clear that you are to see and examine the contents in this box. However, we will be watching to make sure that you do not take anything. You are not police officers; you are not on this case officially. If it were up to me, you wouldn’t even be here. Is that clear?

We all nodded.

Willis lifted the lid off of the box and stared down into it. The box was barely large enough that the fire poker would have been able to fit in it diagonally. Even then, it might have to have been sticking out a little from under the lid.

That is, if it had been there.

You said you were looking for the murder weapon specifically, Willis asked. He didn’t even have to search through the box to realize the weapon was missing. Jeff, he said, talking to Detective Swanson. It’s on the inventory, but the murder weapon is not here.

Let me look at that, Swanson said, grabbing the clipboard with the inventory list out of Willis’s hands. Now that doesn’t make any sense at all; I remember that being here.

I do too, Willis said. I was the one that put it there. Is it possible it was taken away for additional testing?

They already got fingerprints and blood analysis, what else is there?

The two men started to get hot under the collar, probably because they were being watched by a task force that they had spent the better part of 30 minutes making fun of.

Typical, Dina said. The mayor told me that I would get a good look at the quality of our police by joining this task force. He didn’t know how right he was.

Cool it, Willis said. We’ll find the murder weapon; it has to be around here somewhere.

We went off-screen as a group of cadets came in and started sifting through boxes, sorting evidence into piles. None of them found the murder weapon of course. They were just getting into position for the next shot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the contents of Jed Geists box were laid out on the table and organized so that we could look at it.

We would go back on-screen occasionally to get shots of us examining the evidence.

Most of it was not very useful. The clothes that Jed Geist was wearing when he was killed were in there, as were a dozen other pieces of evidence that didn’t seem to amount to much. Fiber samples, a slip of paper with Jed Geist’s fingerprints on it, a map of the hotel room as it was back when it was Geists home, things like that. There were also crime scene photos that were very vivid and grizzly. The camera did not go off-screen while we were looking at them, which told me that this storyline was likely a gory one.

There were two things of interest buried in the paperwork.

This is a prescription for oxycodone, Antoine said, holding up a small orange bottle. Whoa, that dosage is off the charts. He must have had a high tolerance.

A drug addiction? Isaac asked. My listeners are gonna love that.

Doctor Howard Halle, Antoine read off the bottle.

Kimberly, Antoine, and I looked at each other.

Halle was the last name of the Astralist, a mad scientist who had attempted to suck out our souls not so many months ago. If this person was related to Simon Halle, that could be useful information. That told us that there were supernatural elements to the storyline, assuming that both Simon and Howard were from the same world.

That made sense in a way. If a world was filled with horrors, Carousel might be inclined to double dip when it brought in its storylines.

That meant that Cassie and my psychic abilities could play well here.

It also told us exactly how close we had come to being a part of the Throughline and ruining Project Rewind.

Antoine handed me the bottle and I looked at it. The label read, Take 40 mg every 6 hours as needed for pain.

He then picked up and passed over several other bottles. One read 10 mg and another read 20 at a later date. We were being shown a growing addiction through an evolution of dosages on prescription bottles.

Look, Kimberly said, Dr. Howard Halle. She was holding up a business card for Halle. Isnt this the address for the resort that got built where his home used to be?

She passed the card around. She was right.

Looks like we need to talk to Dr. Halle, I said.

Don’t go bothering him, Willis said. You think we didn’t notice the prescriptions? Halle was his physician. There was nothing weird going on.

Halle had an alibi, Detective Swanson said, He was performing emergency surgery at the time of the murder. Hard to beat that one.

That is quite the alibi, Isaac said. I couldnt have killed him, officer; my knife was in some other guy at the time of the murder.

It was nice to see that Isaac’s sense of humor was stronger than his sense of impending doom this time.

His sister, however, was quite a different story.

As we stood idly chit-chatting with the camera going on and off-screen, she stared off into the darkness of the recesses of the storeroom.

I kept an occasional eye on her just to make sure she was doing OK. It was unfair that she had to play another storyline after dying so recently for the first time.

I just happened to be watching her face the moment she saw it.

She stared down at the still slightly flooded floor and screamed. Her eyes darted up as if she expected something to be there, but of course, nothing was there.

Then she looked down back at the water.

“What’s wrong?” Isaac said. He broke character at hearing his sister’s scream, he ran to her to see if she was OK.

“I thought I saw something, she said. She was breathing quickly and clearly startled.

“Oh, here we go,” Detective Swanson said. “The psychic has to get attention.”

“What did you see?” I asked.

“I saw a reflection in the water, but there was nothing there when I looked up. I swear I saw it, it was awful.”

“What was it?” Kimberly asked gingerly.

“A man,” Cassie said, “but there was something wrong with his face. It had a bunch of stitches, and there was something else that I couldn’t quite see before it disappeared.”

“This has to be a prank on us, doesn’t it?” Detective Swanson asked Willis.

“Don’t listen to them,” I said. “My grandmother had the gift too. I’d like to think she left a little bit of it to me.”

Cassie forced a smile at me. “Maybe more than a little,” she said.

That was pushing it. A little psychic goes a long way. A lot of psychic goes off the rails. I didn’t want her giving Carousel an excuse to do something wild with me.

A man with a stitched-up face. A doctor with links to the victim, I said, In the old Geist horror flicks, you could expect a mad doctor or two. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if it turned out that Doctor Halle was up to some surgeries not approved by the medical board.

Between his last name and the fact that the hospital was a shooting location, it was clear. I threw in a little Cinema Seer prediction just to help my friends out.

“Well, it’s official then,” Detective Swanson said. “Turns out the doctor was involved in the murder because the psychic saw a man with stitches.”

Officer Willis started to say something, but before he could, he was cut off.

There was a loud rumbling sound somewhere deep in the distance. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere outside the walls of the basement. Everyone in the room froze in place as the sound droned in and out and then finally stopped.

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