The one place that Carousel usually left you alone was in your dreams.

That wasn’t to say that your tropes couldn’t affect your dreams. My Out Like a Light trope usually prevented me from dreaming altogether, whereas my I Don’t Like It Here trope gave me anxious dreams and night sweats.

But for the most part, your dreams were yours. They were the only place you were free. Sure, they might be influenced by the trauma you had received in Carousel, but they could still be good or happy. There was no gameplay involved unless you were inside a storyline where dreams mattered.

I was certain of that right up until the night I dreamed of the slumber party.

It wasn’t even my slumber party.

It was my sister’s. Of course, I didn’t have a sister in real life, but in the dream, I did, and I knew exactly what was going on. My nameless sister and her friends were gathered in the game room upstairs, where my video games were, and they were swapping stories about boys or talking about makeup, whatever it was that girls talked about at thirteen years old, and I was downstairs, staring up at the ceiling, studying the vibrations they made when they walked like some sort of scientist.

I felt a lot of emotions that didn’t belong to me all at once. I knew it wasn’t a real dream because it was an experience I recognized from Homibridal.

There really was once a boy who stared up at the ceiling while his sister had a slumber party, and I was walking through his memories.

I knew this all at once. I took it calmly and dispassionately. If anything, I thought it was neat to experience life through some teenager’s eyes. It was a surreal moment all around, and I was having a good experience at first.

Whatever his name was, he wanted to play his video games, but he couldn’t because the girls had taken that room for their party. Mom and Dad said they could, and they didn’t understand how easy it would be for me to bring my games down to the living room because they wouldn’t listen to me. Parents just don’t understand.

Back when the girls were downstairs baking cookies and gossiping, I had gotten to hang out with them, but now I was locked out.

Even in my own internal dialogue, I got the pronouns mixed up. I, he, he, I. They were the same if I didn’t think about it.

What was her name, the girl that I had a crush on? I couldn’t remember. I never even thought to try, but I knew as I stared up at the ceiling that there was one particular girl I wished would walk down the stairs, but she never did.

The lights were off, and the entire world downstairs was gray, and I was afraid to look outside. I didn’t know why. Mom and Dad were at the neighbors’ house playing cards. It was right down the road, but back in those days, the 80s or 90s, perhaps, that was a normal thing. My sister was thirteen, and I was fourteen, and that was plenty old. Plus, Grandma was in the mother-in-law suite in case we needed anything.

There was nothing out to get me that I could see, and yet I felt extreme dread as I stared around the living room, keeping my eyes from peering out the windows because it wasn’t time to look outside yet, I thought to myself, without exactly knowing what that meant.

Later, I would look outside, and I would know what this was all about, but right now I was supposed to look up at the ceiling and try to make out the muffled voices I heard, hoping to hear the one from the pretty girl saying how cute she thought I was.

I never heard her say that.

I ate the leftover cookies, the burnt ones that the girls didn’t want. I wasn’t even hungry. I was bored.

I started running up the stairs before I even registered the screams.

The screams were not so important to the memory. I knew I was supposed to go up, and I always would. Despite having never had that dream before, I felt like someone had dreamed it many times.

I ran up the stairs, hoping to get there soon enough to see what happened, but I never could. Even if I left before the screams, I would always enter the room, stare around at the five sleeping bags covered in blankets, and the four girls staring in shock.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, trying to be the strong older brother. I wasn’t even trying to impress the girl. I couldn’t if I tried. She wasn’t there anymore. I just wanted to make sure my sister was safe.

No one answered me.

And while I paid it no mind, I realized afterward that I recognized some of those girls, or at least the women they would grow to become. Kimberly was there, and so were Ramona and Cassie, though they weren’t really themselves.

Something terrible had just occurred.

“What happened? Where is she?” I asked. I knew she was gone. I knew something had happened to her, and I hadn’t gotten there in time to do anything about it.

The only response was when Kimberly pointed her finger toward the open window.

It was always going to be the window, I realized. I always had to walk toward it and look outside.

And maybe this time I could actually see what it was I was supposed to see, the thing that had been hidden from me all this time.

But still my feet felt like they were made of lead, and my body was too afraid to move. I walked one more step, and then another, and I almost made it to the window. Try as I might, I could not force my eyes to look outside until I was right at the edge, and as I finally gained the ability to look and see what it was I was supposed to see—

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I woke up.

There was a bang on my door, and I sat up so fast my head felt like it was spinning.

I took a deep breath and looked around my room as the details of the dream started to turn into a little story in my head instead of a memory.

“Riley, come quick! It’s Cassie!” Antoine’s voice was calling from the other side of the door.

I took a deep breath and jumped out of bed. I was already fully clothed in a long-sleeve tee and shorts. Living at Kimberley’s loft with its nighttime visitors had taught me to be ready to jump into action.

I quickly moved to the door and opened it, but by the time I did, Antoine was already halfway down the hall, knocking on other doors.

“Where is she?” I asked.

“The music room,” he said.

I quickly took off down the stairs toward the Great Hall and found the entrance to the music room. The door was already open, and a small crowd had gathered. Andrew and the rest of Logan’s team were already there. Isaac was there.

“Cassie, you need to unequip your tropes,” Andrew was saying as I moved my way into the room to get a good look at her.

She was lying out on a fancy couch, and she looked pale and sickly, her brown hair strewn everywhere and her nightshirt soaked with sweat. Her eyes were wide open as she stared at the ceiling.

“Don’t look out the window,” she said as soon as she saw me.

I knew it. Even as I ran down the stairs, I knew exactly what was wrong.

“I didn’t,” I said. “I promise I didn’t.”

Cassie stared at me, her green eyes wide with pupils like drowning men in the ocean, looking for something to cling to.

“Good,” she said.

“What is happening?” Logan asked me.

Luckily, I had seen a lot of movies, so I didn’t have to beat around the bush trying to figure out that we had clearly just experienced the same dream, or something very similar.

“I think we both had the same dream,” I said. “We were both characters in it. Something bad happened, something terrible, but I don’t remember what. I don’t think my character ever actually saw.”

If this whole thing followed standard movie dream logic, then I couldn’t look outside because the kid whose memory it was never looked outside and wouldn’t have a memory of it to fill the dream with. Or he did look outside and was traumatized, so he blocked it out.

It was a coin flip.

“This doesn’t make sense,” Andrew said as he used a rag to wipe the sweat off of Cassie’s forehead. “Things like this don’t happen outside of storylines.”

Andrew had a medical bag with him that he had filled with supplies from raiding Eternal Savers Club, including their pharmacy, so whatever mental pain Cassie was having, it was going to go away after he slipped her a pill. I didn’t know what it was, but when she fell asleep ten to fifteen minutes later, I had some idea.

The rest of us had eventually made it down to the Great Hall, but I was only interested in talking to two of the people.

“Kimberly, Ramona, did you guys just have a dream of a slumber party?” I asked.

A look of terror spread across Kimberley’s face. “Where’s Cassie?” she asked.

I pointed to the music room.

“This isn’t fair,” Ramona said. “I was asleep in the dream when things went down. I woke up to teen girls screaming.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever been asleep in a dream,” Molly said.

While the situation was urgent, that was an interesting observation, and many of us in the Great Hall stopped and thought, trying to remember if we had ever slept in our dreams.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Something is affecting us. Suspect number one is the apocalypse.”

“Let’s not be rash,” Camden said. “Tell me more about this sleepover. Were there pillow fights?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “They didn’t let me in there with them until the end, when somebody went missing.”

Even as I was awake, there was a strange feeling, like I was in an emotional limbo. I still had that certainty that only happened in dreams. Nothing could surprise me.

“Can you look up how apocalypses work in the Atlas?” I asked. “I know we’ve been through it over and over, but I don’t remember anything like this happening without being brought into the apocalypse storyline.”

“I don’t think it’s all that complicated,” Camden said. “I think that the castle is officially within the area of the apocalypse, and whatever the principal storyline of the apocalypse is has something to do with some teenage girls and a slumber party. It also implies we could trigger it in our dreams.”

He was onto something. With the Black Snow, you didn’t actually get brought into the Apocalypse until you touched the snow itself. Maybe this circus was the same, but instead of snow, the trigger was in our dreams.

“Dream… circuses,” I said. “I wonder where the connection is.”

Dream magic would help explain the phenomenon of a spreading circus.

“Was a woman walking her dog outside?” Dina asked suddenly.

“I have no idea,” I said. I thought back to the memory, searching for things I hadn’t noticed at first. “But a dog was barking.”

“My dog was barking,” she said. “I was walking my dog in the snow late at night, and my dog sensed something and was trying to pull me down the street toward this house at the end of a cul-de-sac, but I heard my son’s voice telling me not to go there.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “You were part of the same dream.”

“It felt real,” she said.

I looked around at the others, most of whom were a little bit groggy at being woken up in the middle of the night.

“Did anyone else here have a dream that felt vivid and real?” I asked.

People looked around at each other and shook their heads. No one else answered.

That small voice of certainty that made me understand what was happening in the dream spoke to me again.

It said, Of course, they didn’t have the dream. They don’t have your gift.

My gift…

I reached into thin air and pulled out my background trope, MyGrandmother Had the Gift, and I unequipped it.

Suddenly, that little voice of certainty, which felt so familiar to the situation, that understood what was going on, disappeared, and when I reequipped the trope, it was back.

“Background tropes,” I said. “I have a psychic background trope. Dina has a background trope that allows her to equip a psychic trope that she always keeps equipped, right?”

“Yes,” she said. “It lets me talk to Sean.”

“Ramona’s got that new background trope, The Weird Girl, right? That makes her attuned to the supernatural. That’s a psychic background.”

That was one of several tropes she had won in the last couple of months.

“And of course, Cassie is a Psychic archetype, so she’s always psychic. I mean, in storylines at least,” I said.

“And maybe in this apocalypse, too,” Camden said.

“Maybe,” I agreed.

“Well, just a second,” Nicole said. “Kyle,” she said, talking to her nephew, “give me your psychic background, the one about the coma.”

Her nephew was a lean, tall, young athlete archetype. He didn’t speak much. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a background trope that, to my knowledge, he had never actually used since being rescued.

It was called It’s Been Twenty Years, and its premise was simple: when you brought it into the storyline, your character would wake up from a coma with supernatural abilities of some kind.

I would later find out that he never used that background because it was super inconvenient for your character to wake up in the hospital at the beginning of every storyline, feeble and weak, especially when you were an athlete.

Nicole quickly equipped his background trope.

It only took her a few moments to notice the effects. I half expected her to suddenly be weak and need help standing, but as it turned out, all she got from equipping the trope was the effect of being psychic, not the part about being in a coma for twenty years.

She nodded her head. “I feel dread,” she said. “Something about playing cards and a little girl screaming.”

“That sounds about right,” I said.

“So what are we saying?” Ramona asked. “Everyone who was even a little bit psychic had a shared dream last night that I slept through?”

Psychic power was clearly very strong in this apocalypse.

“Seems like it,” Camden said. “Of course, there’s only one problem.”

I nodded.

“Kimberly doesn’t have a psychic trope,” he said.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep