Lucky informed us as soon as he walked through the door that the rest of our teammates were over the hill waiting and would be there shortly.

I wasn’t in any hurry. While I was certainly excited to find the information we had come here for, I found myself fascinated by the evidence left behind by Lucky’s former team.

They were just ordinary roommates, it seemed.

Apparently, one of them had borrowed a few arcade machines over time and put them in his room. That person was also huge into vintage posters featuring big-breasted women, movie and video game advertisements, and alcohol, that sort of thing.

The other rooms were similar, filled with loot grabbed up by the various members of the team.

They were just like us, except, of course, they had a lot more room.

“Lucky said we could have any of this, right?” Camden asked when we found their ping pong table.

“What’s even the point?” I asked. “If you’re beating me on skill, I’m just going to beat you with Hustle.”

“You would have to,” Camden said, “but where’s the fun in that?”

Before we could play a game, the others arrived.

“Nice place,” Antoine said as he entered. “Doesn’t look like much of a fight went down here.”

“It was more of a spiritual battle,” I said as we re-entered the main room.

Lucky was standing in front of a wall in the kitchen covered with pictures, the kind you would drop off to be developed at a store back before everyone had a camera on their phone. As I glanced at all of the pictures, I realized that they had been documenting their time in different storylines.

They had literally taken a camera into storylines just for fun.

One of the photos showed a giant shark swimming alongside the boat the photographer was riding in. It was a selfie, and the guy, who had short hair and a daredevil’s grin, was smiling while some NPCs panicked behind him.

A lot of the photos were like that. The guy was taking pictures of the enemies he defeated, or the ones that defeated him, maybe both.

Some of the photos didn’t feature extreme or risky content. Some of them were simple group photos, like friends would take, photos of skydiving, skiing, or exploring old abandoned places together. Six or seven faces appeared repeatedly across the images. This was a group of young people, probably in their late twenties or early thirties, and it became clear that when Lucky mentioned they had a gladiator’s mindset about Carousel, what he meant was that they were adrenaline junkies. Three women and four men having the time of their lives and risking it all again and again.

I wasn’t the only one gazing at these photos in amazement.

“How do you find people like this?” Kimberly asked. She showed a mix of concern for the people and concern for how unfazed they seemed.

Lucky was looking at the photos too, and he appeared contemplative.

“They knew what they were coming here for,” he said. “You don’t have to trick people into this lifestyle. You just have to look very hard, and I did. There are those who can’t tell the difference between wonder and horror, and they hold a special strength here in Carousel.”

We looked at the people in the photos for a while longer.

“All right,” Antoine asked eventually, “where’s the stuff we came here for?”

“It should be upstairs in the study,” Lucky said. “I didn’t spend a lot of time here. It was improper for a Narrator, or at least that’s what we used to say. It’s funny how priorities can change.”

“Should we check in the basement?” I asked. “Given, you know, the storyline.”

“There is no basement in this house, not originally,” Lucky said. “There is a wine cellar of sorts, but it is barely recessed into the ground. You might check it. That’s where they stored their weapons.”

“Dibs,” Camden said as he moved toward the place that formerly held the stairs to the basement.

“You can’t say dibs until you see what’s down there,” I said.

“I think we’ll know what I’m saying dibs to when we see it,” he said.

The wine racks that had been in the safe room with Bellanti were now in the wine cellar. Carousel must have recycled them.

“Look at this,” Antoine said. “They’re storing soda in this one.”

I would have laughed, but at about that moment, I rounded the corner into the cellar and saw their weapons wall. They had taken all of the weapons that they had acquired, along with any tools they might have wanted, and hung them on their special spot on a pegboard. We could tell where they belonged because someone had outlined them with white.

That’s how we knew all the weapons were missing.

“Not exactly as promised,” I said.

“Yes,” Lucky said. “It would seem that Carousel has traded them out.”

Where all the former weapons had been hung on the pegboard, there were now only six items that didn’t seem to belong in the places where they were hung. They were all trope items.

I wasn’t going to complain.

“Camden gets dibs on the bra,” I said.

“No, I relinquish dibs,” he said.

“You said that I would know what you were calling dibs on when I saw it, and I saw that bra,” I joked.

The bra had a Stooge trope called Goes for the Face, which didn’t actually have anything to do with bras specifically. It made it so you could throw things at an enemy, and they would entangle on their face, temporarily blinding or distracting them. I couldn’t see myself pulling that one off.

The rifle had something called Unburied Past, which was a Commando trope that gave huge power to a weapon that the player’s character had buried as a symbol of their past and was unearthing for a big fight.

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There was also a grappling hook with a trope called So, Anyway, which allowed the user to do something that should require great skill or practice, as long as they did it mid-conversation, as if it were simple or easy. There were a lot of things that you could do with a grappling hook, and being able to bypass Hustle checks could be really cool.

There was a camera bag with a trope called Lucky Bulletproof Souvenir, which could block a fatal blow or projectile as long as you explained why the object was sentimental to you beforehand.

There was a billiard ball with a trope called Boomerang Physics, which enabled the user to ensure the object ended up exactly where they wanted it once thrown, including returning to them.

And finally, there was a raincoat with the trope called Look at Me, which you could entice an NPC to wear after you had worn it, and then the enemy would chase after them instead and turn them around dramatically to fake out the audience.

A nice collection, all in all. While we each had our favorites, we usually shared trope items. We could assign them later.

But none of that was what we actually went to Lark House for.

That was in the study.

~-~

Adrenaline junkies or not, they clearly did their research.

They had files on all the storylines they had run, some of which were nice and thick with lots of case notes, I had to assume, while others were just being started.

They had a map of Carousel drawn as the centerpiece of one of the walls in this study. One of the players on Lucky’s team must have been quite skillful as an artist. The problem, of course, was that it didn’t actually look like Carousel. The only reason I recognized it was because of Lake Dyer.

Like all maps of Carousel, west was at the top.

There was a large table in the center of the room that looked like it had been recently used for planning a large excursion.

“I think someone likes to stab this desk with a knife,” Camden said. “Look at this.”

The heavy wooden table had lots of small holes in it.

“That would be Bennett,” Lucky said. “He often punctuates his opinions with stabbing. He had a trope for it.”

There were lots of notes on the table.

Somewhere in there was a clue as to where the team had started their journey that ended up in the part of town with meta-aware NPCs. If we chose to, we could embark on the same journey and possibly help Lucky learn how to make safe zones within Carousel. We might even be able to find a place for NPC Janet.

There was no other reward in it for us, other than experience and maybe some favor with the audience.

Of course, knowledge and experience were their own rewards.

“All right, how much of this are we going to be able to read?” I asked. “We don’t want to have to worry about spoilers, do we?”

“I’ll do the reading,” Lucky said, “though I’m sure that your Scholar can help you stay away from anything too dangerous.”

Camden’s Eureka trope could help him find information we were looking for in a body of text, but it could also help him stay away from spoilers.

He got to work along with Lucky while most of us just stood around, hanging all the way out into the hallway.

Antoine, however, stood in front of that large map like he was trying to decipher it. That would have been a neat trick. It looked incomprehensible. Carousel had been dissected and rearranged. The map was not drawn directly on the wall, but on many separate strips of paper—hundreds of pages.

There were long blue lines dividing up many different sections of Carousel, practically covering the entire map.

In fact, I would have said that the blue line represented a river, because, well, obviously that’s how maps work. But it was everywhere, cutting between neighborhoods all over Carousel.

After Lucky shuffled through some papers on the table, he too started paying more attention to the map, a look of great concern cast over his face.

He placed his finger up on a point near the Carousel baseball stadium, a place that itself only appeared if you knew how to find it, and rested the tip of his finger on a small X.

Lucky leafed through many layers of paper that comprised the map. They were held down with thumbtacks. With a little effort, Lucky was able to unfold one of the pages and fold it back to reveal more detail on the map.

“You said that their task was to create a map of Carousel, right?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Lucky said.

“Is this it?” I asked.

“Not nearly,” he said. “It is only the beginning.”

“What is this that they’ve marked here that goes all over the place?” Antoine asked.

Lucky didn’t answer at first. Camden almost provided an answer, but he was so wrapped up reading some of the things he found in notebooks on the table that he didn’t bother.

“Those fools,” Lucky said, eventually. “Those absolute fools.”

“What is it?” I asked.

Lucky turned from the map and locked eyes with Camden, the only person who, by that point, would have any understanding of what was going on.

“They’ve done it, haven’t they?” Lucky asked. “They weren’t simply playing through storylines, reaching from one to the next in hopes of uncovering the full breadth of Carousel?”

“No,” Camden said. “It doesn’t look that way.”

Lucky once again looked at the map.

Throughlines were supposed to be accomplished by playing through storylines following a particular theme. I didn’t know exactly what kind of storylines would help you map Carousel, but I could imagine they involved treasure hunts or similar.

“If they weren’t running storylines, then what were they doing?” I asked.

Lucky didn’t answer for some time. He furrowed his brow and then looked down at me.

“What do you know of the Carousel River?” he asked, clearly unsure how much we would know.

I shrugged as I looked to the others.

“It’s a river that sometimes runs one way and then runs the other. Usually goes up toward Dyer’s Lake, sometimes runs across the center of town. Doesn’t really obey the laws of geography at all, really.”

“Yes, that is the long and short of it,” Lucky said.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“So they’ve been traveling by river,” Camden said. “How exactly does that work?”

Traveling by river sounded like a waste of time. The river led to and from the lake and through a bunch of wilderness with Omens everywhere.

“Yes, they’ve been navigating the Carousel River in an effort to follow it wherever it might lead,” Lucky said. “This is dangerous, but it is difficult to argue with their results. Is there enough here for you to figure out what path they might have taken when they found the Sanctuary?”

“I think so,” Camden said. “If I’m understanding this correctly, they sailed down the river until they met an impasse, some storyline or monster’s lair that prevented them from moving forward. They beat whatever it is in their path, and then they continued onward. It looks like they’ve been narrowing down which path to take as they map it, but I don’t understand exactly how this is supposed to work.”

Lucky took a moment as he traced various paths the river took as it left the Riverwalk area next to the baseball stadium.

“The Carousel River flows over every section of Carousel,” he said. “Not only the parts you see, not only the parts that we stitched together to form the game area. It goes everywhere, presumably even to distant parts of Carousel where the game has never been played before.”

Carousel always did have shifting geography.

“So let me understand this,” I said. “In order to run your throughline, we’re going to have to start by finding a way to navigate the Carousel River wherever it might lead, even to places that you don’t know, in hopes of following your team, which went to a place you can’t locate on the map.”

“Yes,” Lucky said. “It appears they never made it back to mark the location of the Sanctuary.”

“It turns out you can hire a riverboat,” Camden said while looking through one of the notebooks on the table.

We talked a little bit about what that might entail. Some in the group were excited, others worried. We had hoped that this throughline would be just a series of storylines, but that wasn’t what we were getting, not just that, at least.

We were getting a whole expedition.

“Oh, yes,” Lucky said at last, raising his voice and spirits as he spoke. “If you choose to come with me, you will not simply be taking a trip, you’ll be embarking on a riverboat odyssey through haunted waters that have not seen a player’s shadow in decades. We will slip into lost realms of Carousel, places the town itself has tried to forget, where monsters gather from throughout the Many Worlds. You will face behemoths dredged from the darkest shapes of your imagination, and you will have to outwit them… or outfight them… if you hope to reach what lies ahead.

“You will sail beyond time, beyond logic, beyond the stitched seams of reality my people have worked so hard to make safe. Into dream, into nightmare, and finally, to that refuge where we might find the means to save untold billions of lives. And through all of this, Carousel will make sure we earn every inch of river we traverse.”

He paused as he traced through one of the paths on the map that ended in a skull and crossbones.

“So,” Lucky finished. “What do you say? Shall we venture forth together? Would you like to help me find the edges of the map?”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep