Arc II, Chapter 75: Mirror Match

I found Kimberly and Antoine. They must have met up and split back apart to look for Gray. I didn’t know where Bobby and Cassie were. They had only just noticed me when I used Flashback Revelation to say, “Follow my voice.”

I should have been more cautious about using that trope. At some point, it could run out, but I needed to get their attention.

I had to walk slowly so that they could follow. Even when I was trying to avoid running into people, I could move through the crowd fast enough that they would lose track of me.

As I took a break to wait for them to catch up, the Deathwatch screen flickered to life. Something was happening On-Screen. It was a bit of a montage, actually.

The mansion had a large garage filled with expensive cars. No surprise there. Two NPCs, young men, were working on a town car, one of the vehicles that had been dropped off by a Geist from what I could tell.

One of them took a nozzle from a fuel pump in a carport outside the garage and dragged a long hose toward the town car. The hose was attached to a large suspender arm above that would help it reach without dragging on the ground. Fancy stuff.

He took the fuel cap off of the car, and right before he started to fuel it, the other NPC swatted it out of his hands, putting pressure on the suspender arm and causing something to snap, though I couldn’t see what.

“Don’t use that, you idiot,” the second NPC said. “That’s practically jet fuel. It’s the other one.”

The NPC had grabbed the wrong type of fuel.

“Sorry,” the first NPC said. He went to return the nozzle to the fuel pump, but the suspension arm was stuck. He pulled on it and tugged on it to no avail. He couldn’t guide it back over to the pump. Embarrassed and in a hurry, he gingerly placed the nozzle on the ground and ran back to grab the other nozzle and hose to fill up the car.

The hose he had just tugged on started to leak, unseen by the workers. It poured into a seam in the garage’s concrete and moved downhill toward the mansion.

“It’s happening,” I said forgetting that no one could hear me. I used Flashback Revelation to say, “It’s coming.”

Antoine and Kimberly stopped being polite and began forcing their way through the crowd.

The screen jumped to another scene. Again, two NPCs. These were making out in one of the upstairs rooms, based on the camera shot through a window.

“What do they have all of these candles for?” the woman said, taking a drag from her cigarette.

The room was filled with candles, mostly in boxes and unused, but also spread out fashionably.

“They’re goddamn devil worshipers,” the man said. “They have a huge candle budget because of their rituals or whatever. Let’s be quick, I have to get back to the party. My absence will be noticed.”

The woman sighed, put out her cigarette on a cardboard box, and threw it into a crack between two boxes. The cigarette, not completely extinguished, landed in some melted wax leaking out of one of the boxes.

It was going to be a big fire.

The large doors to the closed-off wing were in sight.

The screen showed the third and final source of the blaze.

A valet driver wasn’t used to driving the nice car he was given control of. He accidentally swiped a large metal box sticking out of the ground next to the parking lot.

The box contained a gas meter. The indicator of the meter started fluctuating rapidly.

In the kitchens, the cooks were hard at work making more and more food for the party. Suddenly, the gas pressure blew, causing the stovetops to create a fireball. The NPCs cursed, but the real problem started when the fire suppression system above the stove triggered and doused the entire stovetop.

The pilot light on the stoves went out, but gas could still be heard leaking rapidly.

Carousel didn’t have modern safety features, especially in 1984.

Gas was invisibly creeping along the main floor from the kitchens, gallons of candle wax melting and spreading from above, and high-octane fuel leaking into the basement from the fuel pump outside. The party was really about to go off.

They needed to get into the abandoned wing immediately and shut the doors behind them. I hated how automatically my mind went to that reality. If the doors opened, the fire could spread and kill more people than intended. It might end up killing fewer people than intended. I didn’t know which was worse for our case.

The door was roped off, but not locked. It was closed off to discourage guests from hooking up in the unfinished halls, not to stop players.

Antoine opened the door just enough for him and Kimberly to squeeze through.

Then he locked the doors with a large brass key that was already in the door.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

“What are you doing?” Kimberly asked. “Bobby and Cassie are still out there.”

“We can’t let him escape with the flask,” Antoine said.

He knew that he could have doomed Cassie and Bobby by not waiting for them, but they didn’t have time to wait around.

His eyes flashed over to where I was.

“It’s all up to you now,” I said with Flashback Revelation. Then, I ran back through the doors to try and warn Bobby and Cassie.

As I did, I saw the POV of the Die Cast. He was just outside. He was here, and everyone I could see was about to die.

I needed to warn Cassie and Bobby, then get back to help Antoine and Kimberly. I had seen Gray’s enemy tropes. There was nothing too dangerous. Mirror Match would make him hard to beat, but not a threat.

I had to hope I hadn’t overlooked something.

Luckily, it didn’t take long for me to find them. Knowing they couldn’t get through the locked door, I immediately used the Flashback Revelation trope to tell them, “Follow my voice.”

Cassie heard me, and I led them back toward the front door as I used Deathwatch to watch the disaster about to happen. The fire was about to break out.

“We need to go outside?” Bobby asked.

Good Bobby.

“You had better run,” I said using my trope.

Bobby didn’t hear it, because he wasn’t around when I originally said it, but Cassie did.

She grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the exit.

Not fast enough.

I couldn’t tell what happened where. All I knew, was that the entire floor was at once covered in fire. The drapes were burning. Everything was burning.

Luckily, Bobby and Cassie were near the door when the stampede started. Unfortunately, Bobby didn’t have a mean bone in his body.

When a little old lady was pushed up against a large piano on her way to the exit, Bobby stopped to help her.

It was instinct, I’m sure. He reached out an arm to try to scoop her forward. He was immediately punished for it.

What might have been a narrow escape stopped being an escape at all.

Bobby was lifted off his feet as the floor ten feet in front of him burst open in a fire ball of splinters. The fuel that had leaked into the basement had ignited.

He wasn’t the worst off. While he definitely got some splinters, he wasn’t near the actual blast. The people that were became debris. Those close by were burned beyond human recognition.

Bobby was okay. He could have stood up and left. He was in bad shape, but it was survivable.

Except, of course, for the fact that he was right below the room with the candles.

A tin ceiling tile—one of the fancy antique kind—came loose right above him. It hadn’t fallen on its own. Something I was sure only I could see had helped it. It was a flaky, crusty, soot-covered hand. The hand was connected to something at the back of the mansion by a tendril of flesh and elbow joints. It was the Spirit of Vengeance and its little hands of bad luck

A flood of molten wax poured down on Bobby from where the tile had been.

Cassie screamed from outside the doors.

People panicked. They fell into the hole. They tripped on each other. Before long, many abandoned trying to leave through the front door because of the explosion and molten wax and started venturing elsewhere for sanctuary.

I saw dozens of smoky, flaky, bloody hands wreaking havoc, causing bad luck wherever they went.

The screams would never leave my mind.

The mansion was ablaze. People were dying before they could even reach fresh air. Bodies piled up near the exit, crushed by the weight of the crowd.

I thought I was ready for it.

I was not.

Bobby didn’t die quickly, I’m sad to say.

He made it outside after Cassie pulled him out, one of the few who did. Like them, though, he didn’t make it much further than that.

Cassie shrieked as she realized just how injured he was.

“I can help,” she said, crying, “I can help, I can help.”

I tried telling her not to, that it was too late, but she tried anyway. She started sharing his pain.

Bobby’s breaths were agonizing, even shared by Cassie.

Isaac stared, unable to process what he was seeing.

Bobby’s skin was just… falling off, but he wasn’t dying.

I had to leave. I was useless here. I had to find Antoine and Kimberly. That was what I would do.

That was all I could do.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Gray was evenly matched with Antoine. Of course, he was. He had a trope for just that.

Mirror Match made any fight, whether a battle of the brain or brawn, a tie. There was hope though. There was a puzzle, that, if solved, could help you beat him.

His Intoxicated by Power trope buffed his physical stat saving throws and debuffed his others. That meant that, even though it was a tie, the tiebreaker in the fight would go to him more times than not. He would eventually win.

But if the fight wasn’t just an all-out brawl? If it was a battle of Savvy or Moxie, It worked the other way.

They had found Gray and were fighting him, trying to get the flask. Antoine had been taking a beating. I had watched them with Deathwatch.

How was I supposed to tell them about his trope? It wasn’t a powerful trope by any means, but it was terrific for stalling, and that was exactly what he needed—to stall until we lost.

Antoine just wouldn’t stay down. “Get back,” he said. “I got him.”

He jumped toward Gray and landed a blow to his face, but Gray returned it in kind, sending Antoine falling backward into a rolltop desk, which shattered dramatically. Antoine tumbled to the floor on the other side of the desk out of sight.

Kimberly jumped forward with a coat stand that had been at the entrance of the wing and knocked it against Gray’s back, but all that did was break some of the wooden arms on the stand.

I tried searching through my lines for something to tell Kimberly that might help her figure out what they needed to do.

Luckily, I had spent a lot of time with her on this storyline. We had spoken at length about the fake movie we made. I just needed to figure out the right line and fast.

As Gray grabbed the coat stand and managed to throw it, along with Kimberly, across the room, I had an idea.

I saw his Mirror Match trope activate. His stats changed from Antoine’s physical ones to Kimberly’s social ones. I couldn’t actually see his stats, but he held himself differently. He was slyer and quicker. Less intimidating. It was night and day if you knew what to look for.

I settled on something I had told Kimberly during filming to get her in the right mindset. “You’ll never beat him at his game,” I said. “You need to make your own game. So you scan the room and figure out how to put him on the back foot. You size him up. You look around. Really show the audience how smart you are.”

Carousel must have liked it because we went Off-Screen and the actual flashback played On-Screen. That was strange, given I didn’t actually remember that exchange being On-Screen in the first place, which meant that Carousel triggered the flashback on its merits, not just because of my trope.

Kimberly stumbled to the ground near Antoine. They were still Off-Screen, so she whispered something in his ear.

The flashback ended.

We didn’t go back On-Screen immediately.

Instead, I saw a camera panning over the destruction, resting on someone I didn’t expect to see.

Lillian Geist.

She was burned and coughing. The problem was that she was out in the main hall, not in the secret passage where she was supposed to be.

That meant she was going to die from smoke inhalation.

We needed her to survive. After all this, we were about to lose anyway.

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