We had finally heard the entirety of Lucky’s pitch. Our mission, if we chose to accept it, would be to sail the Carousel River, following the path taken by a team more than thirty years earlier in hopes of finding a mythical sanctuary where meta-aware NPCs could somehow live in relative peace, even amongst the horrors of Carousel.

That path would be deadly and unpredictable, and our reward would be significant. Lucky assured us that throughlines paid out well, especially as the storylines within them grew more and more difficult, and he would help us in every way he could.

So it all came down to a simple choice: do we stay, or do we go?

There was a moment of silence as all the important material was repeated and carefully double-checked to ensure everyone understood what was at stake and what the risks involved were.

“So anything could be on that river?” Kimberly asked skeptically. Antoine had been fairly gung-ho about the throughline, and Kimberly had supported him as best she could, but it was pretty clear from Lucky’s description of the Carousel River that she was afraid.

“Anything could be there,” Lucky confirmed. “All I know is that my team survived long enough to find this Sanctuary, so whatever path they took must not have been insurmountable.”

One thing I liked about him was that, even now, when we were on the precipice of deciding whether to do his throughline, he wasn’t trying to deceive us or downplay the danger. I could almost hear his voice catching in his throat as he acknowledged the obstacles in our path.

“And what level was your team?” Logan asked. He and his group weren’t being invited, but they still had a say in whether we went.

“They were in their mid-seventies,” Lucky answered regretfully.

I knew the moment he started to describe the Carousel River that the risks for this throughline were simply too high. Even if the rewards were tremendous, the task at hand did not seem achievable by us at our current level.

“When you said they were fools for going down the Carousel River, did you mean that they were fools because even at level seventy it was dangerous?” I asked.

“I did,” Lucky answered solemnly.

We were silent for a while as we looked around the room at each other, no one knowing what to say next.

“Can you give us a moment to discuss this?” Antoine eventually asked Lucky.

Lucky took a deep breath and said, “Take as much time as you need. Just remember, you would have my help. There are workarounds for many problems that you might face. We could find shortcuts. Navigating the dangers of that river is well within our means. It isn’t clear that you would be putting yourselves in peril here—we don’t know yet. It would require further investigation into the actual route and the obstacles along it. Remember that.”

For a moment, it looked like he was going to say something more, but his tank had run dry. He had nothing left to say. He turned to leave while we discussed our decision.

“So,” Bobby said, his voice sputtering nervously after a moment of silence, “it will be a bit more time-consuming than we thought. We’re going to have to be extra careful. But that’s no big deal, right? We know a thing or two about taking our time, right?”

He tried smiling around the room, hoping to get the rest of us on board, but most of us were avoiding eye contact with him, including me.

Camden was the first to answer him. He sat on top of the table where Lucky’s team had planned the very routes that we were supposed to follow. He had one of their journals in his lap, and even as he spoke, he was flipping through it, reading what he could.

“And if we spend months finding shortcuts and workarounds,” he eventually said, “and we happen to make it out alive, what do we accomplish? Money and experience? Those are things we’re already getting from what we’ve been doing.”

Always the pragmatist, that Camden Tran was.

To Lucky’s credit, he had refused to overpromise. We were not guaranteed anything substantial from him, and he had explicitly told us he didn’t know how to help us get home.

That level of honesty had earned him what investment we had already made.

“Now hold on,” Bobby said. “We were talking about something to do with the audience, right? How important it was to entertain them? And like he says, they really want to see his throughline. We can’t afford not to do it, right? Because we need favor from the audience. Can you think of a better olive branch to the Consortium than to do one of their throughlines? You know, to show that we’re willing to play ball.”

He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right enough to change anybody’s opinion, from what I could tell. If we did want to make friends with the Consortium, running a throughline would be a great way to do it, if we wanted that.

He turned to Antoine and spoke, his voice nervous and cracking. “Plus, let’s not forget that most of the stories will count toward an Adventurer advanced archetype. I mean, isn’t it weird or even amateur that we don’t have any advanced archetypes? That alone is worth the effort, right?”

Antoine was leaning against the map on the wall. He looked like he felt really bad about what he was about to say.

“Look, I am all about being an Adventurer,” he said, “but that’s not enough. Did you see the look on Lucky’s face when he found out this involved the Carousel River? It’s like he knew we were going to say no instantly. He knows it’s too dangerous for us. That tells me all I need.”

Camden snapped the book that he had been reading shut and said, “It is too dangerous. Every other storyline that they describe in here—even without spoilers—sounds too dangerous. We’re not just talking about Omens. We’re talking about monsters living under the water that we’ll have to sail over. How is this even a discussion? We could so easily get wiped out, and for what? The only reason he wants us to do it is that he thinks it involves his destiny somehow, no matter what he says about saving refugees.”

When Camden decided he was against running the throughline, he was all the way against it. Whatever it was he was reading in those journals had scared him.

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For a moment, Bobby looked like he was trying to come up with a response, but he failed to find one.

“Just to check,” Anna said, speaking up from the back of the room, “we can think this through a little more. We can look into it without risking too much, right? I mean, we don’t have to go into the river and look around just to double-check some things, do we?”

“Exactly,” Bobby said. “That’s what he was talking about. We just do a little bit more scouting, make sure that we’re safe, you know.”

He was pleading to deaf ears.

“At some point,” I said, “the more we investigate, the more likely it is that we trigger his throughline, and we’ll be stuck on it for who knows how long. You can only have one narrator at a time, right? Assuming that’s true. We look too far into this, we may not get back out of it.”

As much as I hated to dash Bobby’s hopes, we had to be realistic. It was clear that you could do basic throughlines and thread pulling all you wanted, but that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about a big commitment.

“That would mean we couldn’t run Carousel’s throughline either,” Camden added. “You know, the one that’s supposed to help us actually escape—assuming that’s the truth. I mean, I like Lucky and I like what he says about his goals, but I like us more, and I don’t want to close off the possibility of seeing my family again because we were being nice.”

Bobby walked up to the table next to Camden and swiped some of the books off the table, knocking them to the floor.

“You said you were going to help me,” he said. “That if we moved out to that farm to give you peace of mind, you would help me find a place for Janet to be safe.”

Antoine jolted from his position against the map and squared up against Bobby.

“Bobby,” he said firmly, “she is safe. She’s an NPC. If she dies, she’ll wake up a day later without knowing what happened to her. It’s our safety we need to worry about.”

“You know what I meant,” Bobby said. “I have to keep pulling her thread if I am ever going to see her, you know, the real her, again. If she’s ever going to wake up.”

He was playing the dead wife reanimated as a puppet card. It was a pretty powerful card.

Antoine reached out and patted him on the back. “I know, buddy,” he said.

“Bobby,” Kimberly asked, “do you think bringing her to this sanctuary is actually going to help? She’s not meta-aware. She wouldn’t even know where she was, and we have no idea if the NPCs there would accept her.”

In fact, it was equally likely that meta-aware NPCs bore some level of animosity toward those that were completely scripted and oblivious.

“I know it’s the right thing to do,” Bobby said. “How remarkable a coincidence would it be if we just happened to learn about this lost neighborhood right after I get her back? Pulling the thread for her revival leads to opportunities I have to take to continue pulling it. That’s how it works. Hand over hand.”

I couldn’t say he was wrong. I simply didn’t know.

“So work toward it,” Antoine said. “You don’t have to take this exact opportunity, not right now. We don’t have the levels to make it to the end of that journey safely, and even if we did, it isn’t like we could take her with us.”

That was an excellent point. I was not going to be on Janet babysitting duty while fighting off giant crocodiles or the spirits of dead pirates or whatever else was on that river.

“He’s right,” Camden said. “You should be focusing on a way to make her more portable, like Jules. If you could find an NPC summoning trope for her, all your problems would be solved, for a while.”

They were making sense. It would be a way for Bobby to pull the thread just a bit slower and safer.

In fact, I could have sworn that a switch flipped in his mind, and either he was giving up or maybe he had actually had a change of heart.

There was a lull in the conversation that was soon filled from across the room.

“Folks, I know you weren’t looking for my two cents,” Logan said from over near his team, “but I have to say, waking up to find out we’re bit players to the Party of Promise was a shock. But we still helped you. So, from the non-prophesied part of the population, it would sure be a letdown if the group we’ve been supporting and trusting abandoned us to go on some celebrity cruise they may never come back from. My priority has always been the safety of my team, and so far, that has meant we needed to stick with you. But if you’re going off on some side quest, what are you saying to us? We’ve been busting our asses trying to get a new base unlocked that can safely host all of us through the apocalypse, so we don’t end up squeezing into some cabin in the woods. Are you really going to leave us now?”

And there was always that. It wasn’t just our team that we needed to consider. It hadn’t been for a long time. Taking months on a risky side quest, as Logan put it, would be awfully inconsiderate in the bigger picture.

“Yet another reason we can’t do this,” Antoine said. “It is

a side quest. We have plenty of work to do with the circus spreading. Now might not be the time to go river rafting with no idea where we’re going. We could easily sail right into the apocalypse. We can’t even be thinking about this right now.”

“And speaking on behalf of my team,” Nicole said, “I second everything that Logan said. And I’d also like to remind you that outside of the Party of Promise, or the High Rollers, or whatever you call yourselves, there’s only one rescue trope. If you guys died in a storyline, how long would it take us to save you, or would we even be able to? Not to mention that, even if I don’t know anything about those voyeuristic immortals that you talk about all the time, I bet that if you guys die, they change the channel.”

She was right.

“But that assumes we die,” Bobby said softly. His heart wasn’t in it. “We can be careful, that’s the whole thing—”

He gave up and walked out of the room.

He couldn’t stand there and argue with us. Not only were we not budging, but worse, we had made some really good points. I don’t know which hurt him more: that he couldn’t convince us, or that we were convincing him.

We stood there in silence. Ramona made a joke, reminding everyone that she wanted to do Silas Dyrkon’s Throughline, but she knew we weren’t going to go for it.

“Well, everyone was throwing out opinions. I thought I’d give it a shot,” she said.

It looked like we had made our decision, so I was going to step in at the last moment and wrap it all up.

“It’s simple, then,” I said. “We just tell him no. His audience will have to understand. And in the meantime, we might try to do something entertaining, just in case that matters.”

We didn’t need to cast a vote or anything like that. Bobby was the only person who was really arguing that we should take the deal.

Once it was decided, Kimberly went to get Lucky, and Bobby returned at the same time.

Lucky looked around at our faces and saw the shame, or embarrassment, or whatever emotion it was that gave him his answer.

“This is not the reception I want, is it?” he asked with a weak smile.

“I’m afraid not,” I said.

“Your answer is no, then. I understand. The river holds as many dangers as it does secrets. I wish that we had discovered anything else when we arrived here, but it can be no surprise that such a valuable treasure would be guarded by a gargantuan undertaking.”

At least he was being gracious about it.

“Ask us again in forty levels,” Antoine said with a conciliatory smile.

“I hope to,” he said. “Time passes quickly at my age… however old I am. Don’t think that just because I have lost my fear of death that I have no capacity to empathize with yours.”

He cleared his throat. He looked beyond disappointed. He looked absolutely dejected.

“I hope that we will sail that river together one day,” he said, “and save innumerable lives. Good luck, and I assume you have the good sense to skip the circus.”

“We do,” Antoine said. “I don’t want to get fat on the funnel cake. Plus, I’m pretty sure that no one would purposefully go into that place.”

Lucky laughed politely. “Yes, I’m sure you’re right. But then, you would think no one would sail the uncharted bends of the River of Carousel. But mortals are always surprising in the way they risk their lives… I’ll take my leave now, if you don’t mind. Even immortals need to lick our wounds every once in a while.”

As he said it, he went to a nearby closet door, opened it, and closed it.

And he was gone.

As we walked back to the loft, I couldn’t help but feel a strange, foreboding feeling. I even unequipped my tropes for a moment to see if they were the source of my unease, but they weren’t. I still felt it.

We had refused a call to adventure in the most literal sense.

In no story ever told did the heroes get away with that for long.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep