Arc II, Chapter 76: Double Team

Lillian was supposed to be in the secret passage, injured but not dying. If she succumbed to the smoke or if the Die Cast injured her further, Doctor Halle would not transform her into a monster, and, to my understanding, we would not get the true ending of the storyline.

I could do nothing for her. I was a ghost.

I looked around. The air was thick with smoke. I ran outside right through the wall. I needed someone, any of the living players to help. There was only one left.

Cassie.

Bobby was still alive, but not exactly living.

I spotted her. She was lying on the ground, coughing, in pain from sharing Bobby’s injuries. Her skin was bright red, but she was alive. On the red wallpaper, she was fine, with an occasional touch of Incapacitation. Isaac was speechless by her side.

“Follow my voice,” I said using Flashback Revelation.

She stopped coughing immediately.

She looked around, hazily until she saw me on the red wallpaper.

“Hello?” she asked.

I saw that while she was On-Screen, I was not. To the audience, this would look like a psychic episode.

“Follow my voice,” I said again.

She climbed to her feet. It was a struggle, either from residual pain from her Anguish ability or she was just acting.

I led her to the door.

“No!” she said. “I can’t.”

I understood. Smoke was pouring out the doorway. It was so thick that people inside couldn’t even find the exit. Bodies piled up near the door. She would have to step over some to get back inside.

“It’s all up to you now,” I said. I had said that a lot.

“Don’t make her go inside,” Isaac said. “Please.”

“We don’t have a choice,” I said.

Terror lit up Cassie’s face. Going inside an inferno without a good explanation, without help from anyone but a disembodied spirit. This wasn’t just a game. Not in that moment. It was a true nightmare. The fire roared from within. The structure strained; it was buckling from the heat.

Cassie stepped over one of the bodies of a Geist who had almost made it through the door if she had not been pinned down by a large lectern that had been placed near the door.

Cassie took a deep breath and walked inside. As soon as she was past the initial pile of bodies, she dropped to the floor and crawled, blindly, following nothing but the direction the red wallpaper showed her.

I led her across the main hall to where Lillian was.

Lillian was still alive, but she wasn’t going to be for long.

“What am I here for?” Cassie cried, coughing and spitting up.

I stood in front of Lillian. It took her a moment to notice.

“Oh no,” she said.

She knew what to do. She grabbed the prone Lillian and started to drag her. It was difficult staying below the smoke and even that did not afford her good air, just less hot ash.

She dragged and pulled Lillian across the ground. It felt like it was taking ages.

Just before she made it to the hallway with the secret passage, one of the Die Cast’s flaky, fleshy, bloody arms lurked its way toward a bookshelf that was leaning precariously. If it fell, it would land on Cassie and Lillian.

Before the tendril could make purchase on the shelf, I jumped in front of it. It burned and sizzled against my ghostly form. The pain felt like bone pain more than skin pain; it was deep and reverberated all over my body, but the arm did not make it through.

The tendril withdrew and stretched upstairs. Moments later, someone fell down the stairs. It must have been an accident.

Eventually, running on nothing but pure determination, Cassie managed to crawl into the right hallway. The door was already open, as many Geists had piled into it. That was not good. Cassie plowed through their bodies as best she could before pulling Lillian’s body in after her.

Lillian was still alive. In fact, many of the corpses were still alive but twitching. That would change with time.

Cassie reached back up and closed the secret door with all her might.

She was done. All of her health indicators were flashing. Incapacitated, Hobbled, even Mutilated flicked on and off as she whimpered on the floor.

Getting electrocuted wasn’t so bad in comparison.

“Run,” I said. It was the best way I could tell her she was done and she could get away. There was nothing left for her to give.

As I helped Cassie, the fight between Antoine, Kimberly, and Roderick Gray still went on.

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I watched it on the Deathwatch screen.

Antoine stayed down where he had been thrown before. All indications were that he was unconscious.

Kimberly was up though.

I didn’t know exactly what she was planning. I thought the right solution was to combine efforts and hope they could defeat him together. If they could find a way that made sense, like pushing a large piece of furniture on him together, that might allow victory. The rules for how stats stacked together were hard to predict on the fly and Carousel had some byzantine formula the vets barely understood.

Still, they could try it.

But somehow, I had underestimated Kimberly.

Her Social Awareness trope, which usually just served to help her in the party phase as she evaluated Moxie and analyzed social relationships, had a use case in this fight.

She had seen his Moxie change when his trope activated. I was sure of it. Whether she knew exactly what happened or not I couldn’t have said, but it was clear she recognized a change. Maybe she saw the adjustment in the way he held himself.

Either way, my message had helped her.

“You have to give me the flask,” she said. A tear fell from her eye. “People are getting hurt. So many have died. You can stop everything. I know you don’t want to be remembered as a monster.”

She backed down the corridor away from Antoine.

Roderick was incensed. He followed her, never losing eye contact.

“I won’t be remembered as a monster because I will get rid of everyone who knows that I am,” he said. Intoxicated by Power indeed. He was practically giddy.

“You’ll know,” Kimberly said, angling her body to the left, sidestepping. “How will you live with yourself?”

“I’ll remember it fondly,” he said. “That’s the story of Carousel, after all. People wanting something and being willing to do anything to get it. What I am doing is no different.”

Kimberly backed her way into a small alcove with a narrow entrance. “Please,” she said. “Just let me go. I won’t tell anyone.”

Gray started to laugh. “That’s how it always is. People doubt you. Then they fight you. In the end, though, people recognize your power. That’s all that matters. Whether you’re a Geist or some other killer. Everyone eventually respects power. I’ve always known that and that is why I will win. Unfortunately, you aren’t as good of an actress as you seem to think. I know a lie when I hea—”

Just as Gray stepped into the alcove, Antoine appeared behind him and grabbed his head. He slammed it into the stone column that made up the entrance.

Against Antoine, Gray had been a perfect Mirror Match. Seven Grit, Seven Mettle. It was an impasse. Against Kimberly, his Grit was only Three to match her Mettle.

If Gray had only taken a moment to look at Antoine, Kimberly’s high Moxie might have let him know Antoine was faking being knocked out. If he had been able to let go of his pride, if he wasn’t Intoxicated by Power, he might have known Kimberly was leading him into a trap.

Their Moxie tie went in Kimberly’s favor. She couldn’t have done a better job if I was able to tell her what to do.

She was giving Antoine an opening.

Unfortunately for Gray, as he scrambled to try to stand, it was too late. Antoine grabbed the flask from within his coat pocket.

As a roar echoed throughout the mansion, it was apparent the Die Cast had noticed.

“We need to get in there and protect them,” I said.

Isaac was focused on watching his sister crawl away down the secret passage.

“Isaac!” I said.

“Right,” he answered.

We took off and got to Antoine and Kimberly just as they were throwing a chair through a window to escape the manor.

“Where are we going?” Kimberly asked. She already knew. This was for the audience.

“North,” Antoine said. “There’s a river to the north.”

Cassie had given the lore info that the flask was weak to water, which we had learned from Moonlight Morrow. Everything was set up. We just needed to execute.

Then Antoine started to run.

Unfortunately, the Die Cast was just around the corner in the direction they were running. He had a woman in his hands. She had escaped the fire. He… unescaped her by throwing her right back inside through a window.

The Die Cast looked different in person now that I could see the spirit that controlled him. Those same tendril hands used to create bad luck also puppeted the large body of Gale Zaragoza around.

More hands shot off in every direction.

Antoine and Kimberly couldn’t see it.

I was considering telling them to run, but that was unnecessary. Antoine took off. Kimberly was right behind him.

He left her in the dust.

I told Kimberly to hide using Flashback Revelation. We didn’t need her anymore. All she could do was get injured. This was a race. Antoine was the best one of us for it.

She turned off the path and wound back around the mansion.

The Die Cast continued following Antoine.

I followed him too.

Luckily, I was faster than the enemy.

As Antoine broke out of the long driveway of the Geist Manor, a fleshy tendril crept out toward a car that was driving on the street outside the wrought iron fence that surrounded the Geist property.

It was going to make the car hit Antoine somehow.

Not on my watch.

I jumped into the ashy arm and wrangled it.

The maneuver was effective. The limb never hit its mark. The tendril dried up into a mess of charcoal and blood.

From the Die Cast’s tropes, I knew it could appear ahead of us once we changed filming locations. We had changed locations several times, so that was a real risk.

It didn’t move until we got to the river, and we ran through a public waterside park.

It was there waiting for us.

Antoine had the flask tucked under his arm like a football player would. The Die Cast was directly in our way.

There was no way we were getting past it.

I knew that because its burnt, fleshy arms were ready to give Antoine the bad luck required to stop him.

Antoine was none the wiser. He saw only the physical Die Cast.

He was going right for it.

Maybe he planned to juke, to dodge, to evade, I didn’t know.

What I knew was that I had to do something.

Normally, I wasn’t much use in a fight, but this time, I was a ghost. Ghost strength scales off Moxie.

And I had plenty of that.

I also had one point more Hustle than Antoine.

I ran as fast as I could.

I ran past Antoine, right through him, actually.

“Follow my voice,” I said one last time. Antoine listened.

I kept going until I got right to the Die Cast, and I put every ounce of passion and enthusiasm into a full-body tackle.

I went right through Gale Zaragoza’s body and struck the Spirit controlling him squarely.

His tendril arms withdrew as the spirit and I went into the water. Its hold on Gale’s body stayed, but that didn’t help anchor it.

Antoine was right behind me, tackling the Die Cast physically.

We both fell at once from the concrete ledge that separated the river from the park.

We landed in the water, the shallow end.

There was hardly a struggle. As soon as the flask took in water, the spirit started to writhe and shake, creating waves that even Antoine could see as the river broke it down into nothing by spectral debris.

Gale Zaragoza’s body, of course, never moved. It wasn’t possessed any more.

Antoine and I laughed, though he couldn’t hear me. He stood in the water and let the flask go. The river took, who knew where?

“Ruined my tux,” he said.

We were Off-Screen.

We walked back to the Mansion and found Kimberly and Isaac.

Two among the living and two among the dead. We walked together.

Screams echoed from within the Mansion still, but they were not the screams of the living. I doubted Kimberly and Antoine could hear them properly. One wing of the mansion had collapsed, granting a view inside.

A stolen glance at the carnage within told me that not all who died in this story became pristine ghosts. Some became fiery wraiths, which were like skeletons that floated ablaze in the basement of the mansion.

They were classed as NPCs, remarkably. There was probably a reason for that, but I didn’t want to think about it at the time.

I saw the dripping woman that Strander Blake often used as his face. She walked through the house, absorbed a fiery wraith into a mass of black thread, and turned to give me a smile.

Second Blood was over.

The Finale had just begun.

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