I stood inside the restaurant beneath Kimberly’s loft, eating pork chops with my hands as I watched what was going on in the street.

Isaac, Cassie, Anna, Camden, and Ramona were standing there as a group because they had recently run a rescue together, and now the two players they had saved were bidding farewell.

It was the dumbest thing.

Their names were Strider and Sephira, and they were violently in love with each other. Those were their real names on the red wallpaper.

Strider had managed to take his Harley out onto the streets of Carousel after arriving, and he still had it with him as he stood shaking hands with Camden. He was an Outsider, and she was an Eye Candy.

“Look,” Strider said, “we appreciate everything you’ve done for us, but we aren’t the type to wait out the storm. We outrun it.”

Sephira walked up beside Strider and grabbed his hand.

“Together,” she said.

“Together,” Strider repeated as he looked her in the eye.

“Well, we’ve given you all the information we could,” Camden said. “If this is your decision—”

“It is,” Strider said. “There has to be a way out of here, and we’re gonna find it.”

They waved as they walked back toward his motorcycle. He mounted it, and she hopped on behind him.

They had spent days trying to convince these two to stay, but while we were out running Crawlspace, Strider and Sephira had made up their minds that they were leaving.

As Strider started gunning his Harley, sending up smoke as the back wheel spun, many of the Omens and normal NPCs turned to watch.

Perhaps it was because neither one of them had a good scouting trope. Maybe that’s why they didn’t understand how unlikely it was for them to survive. Or maybe they just didn’t like the idea of a bunch of early-twenty-something college kids telling them what to do.

Either way, they rode down the block and turned out of sight.

“So they’re definitely not even going to make it out of downtown Carousel, are they?” Isaac asked as he waved enthusiastically.

“It doesn’t matter,” Camden said. “I’m not going to argue with them anymore. They’re adults. We gave them all the information; it’s their choice.”

Anna, however, blamed herself. “If I had chosen Team Leader, do you think I could have convinced them to stay?” she asked.

“Not forever,” Camden said. “They would leave eventually. And if you used too many mind-control tropes, they would never trust us again.”

“You know,” Isaac said, “I bet using my satire rescue trope was a bad idea, because it gave them the impression that everything was more goofy than scary.”

Camden shrugged. “If they can get murdered by a serial killer and still think this place is safe, I don’t know that there was anything we could have told them.”

They carefully made their way back toward the restaurant.

“Be honest,” I said. “You let them go because it would be too inconvenient to try to keep them alive with their low levels.”

“I’ll never admit to that,” Camden said. “You’ll tell us when they hit an Omen, right?”

“You’ll know when I know,” I said. He had asked me to use my Coming to a Theater Near You trope to check when a new storyline had been triggered. Inevitably, it would be, and inevitably, it would be a very short trailer with lots of screaming and motorcycle noises.

–

On the morning before we were to meet at the zoo with Lucky, we did our best to relax on the roof above Kimberly’s loft. We were all there, minding our own business, trying to psych ourselves up for the big meet and greet.

Honestly, I was a little excited to see the zoo. I had seen the exotic zoo from a distance in southeast Carousel, but it was entirely indoors, which did not bode well for the quality of its contents. A real zoo would be quite interesting.

“I’m glad you guys understood that journal,” Logan was saying from a table near me. “I didn’t get a lick of it. My character must have been half-crazed when he wrote it. Or half dead.”

Logan had only appeared in Crawlspace for about five minutes, but from his perspective, it had been much longer. He was the professor with the knowledge to solve the problem; unfortunately, he died before the problem existed.

“What was so complicated about it?” Ramona asked.

I was glad to see that she was blending in more. The more storylines she ran, the more normal people treated her.

“It was a bunch of random quotes,” Cassie said. “All of the important ones were written in all caps, though, so it wasn’t actually that hard. There were just so many.”

“Yeah, but you had a trope to help you with that,” Isaac said.

“It was still hard,” Cassie said.

He was talking about her It Is Written trope, which came from the Occultist aspect of the Psychic archetype.

“I’m glad,” Logan said. “You know, that may be the first time I’ve actually died from cancer without any outside help. It’s funny, I came to Carousel to prevent dying that way, and I know I was right to do it, because that sucked.”

I wasn’t sure if he was telling a joke there, but people laughed.

We continued talking back and forth—just normal things. Talking about storylines, talking about throughlines, talking about anything except for the elephant in the room sitting next to Bobby.

“So, we’re going to the zoo, huh?” Logan asked. “How do we even get there? You know, I remember a time when Carousel was a small town.”

“You have to go through the park over by the coffee place where the Goodnight Neighbor Omen is,” Camden said.

“I remember the place,” Logan said. “Looks a little small to hide a whole zoo.”

“Well, Carousel looks a little small to hold Carousel,” Camden said.

Like clockwork, our peaceful little gathering was disrupted as, from across the roof, Bobby and the NPC version of his wife, Janet, started arguing.

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“I didn’t agree to this at all,” Janet said. “All of our savings, everything… most of that was mine from before we got together!”

“What are you talking about?” Bobby said. “I told you we were going to rent it, not buy it. It’s a nice place; I didn’t say buy

it!”

Janet had misunderstood something Bobby said because, despite himself, he refused to treat her like an NPC and was rarely careful with his language. Though I suppose it was difficult, because she really did have moments where she seemed like a real person.

She could join in on games, tell stories about their life that by all accounts seemed to be true, but then a switch would flip, and there would be some vital misunderstanding that turned into a stressful, chaotic moment that Bobby had to bear the brunt of.

“You said you got us a vacation place on a farm. What was I supposed to think?” Janet asked.

“You’re right, I should have been clearer. It’s a rental, but you can stay there while I’m out doing activities, you know, the ones you don’t like.”

“That’s not the kind of decision you should make on your own, sweetheart,” Janet said, somehow managing to make the word sweetheart sound like an insult. “What’s wrong with the loft? Are we being kicked out?”

She turned and looked at Kimberly, who at that point was so tired of all of this that she didn’t even respond.

“No, it’s—” Bobby started to say, and then with a forceful voice, he said, “Remember, this was your idea. You said you wanted to rent a place out in the country.”

He was trying to manipulate her using his Moxie, which usually worked, but he wasn’t putting his heart into it.

“No, it wasn’t my idea,” Janet said. “I would never do that. I said I wanted to go home.”

Those subtle manipulations were never supposed to be easy. They also had to be logical and consistent. With Bobby’s Moxie, he should have been able to do it, but sometimes he slipped. He wanted to talk to his wife, not to this person.

Camden whispered to those of us nearby, “Poor technique. He should have just brought her to the farmhouse and told her it was home.”

Bobby had a Writ for a farmhouse out east. There were plans to try to make Janet stay there. Plans that hadn’t worked out.

“Yeah,” Logan agreed. “Telling your wife you rented a house on a farm where you have to do manual labor for rent was an interesting choice.”

We hushed as Bobby started apologizing.

“Hopefully, we can get the Astralist’s Castle Writ soon,” Logan continued, “It might be safe for her.”

As Janet and Bobby argued in hushed tones, I began to realize that there was no magical way of making her happy. She could never be satisfied. It wasn’t her fault. At the end of the day, Bobby was attempting to resurrect someone from the dead. Even if no one knew the details, they all knew that much, certainly. There was no way you could do that without paying a cost, and Bobby had only just begun to pay it.

Eventually, a switch flipped, and Janet relaxed, starting to act like the more normal, agreeable version of herself. Bobby sat quietly and didn’t dare say anything else.

The day kept on as it normally did, eating, getting dressed, maybe doing a little bit of research in the Atlas, that sort of thing. It was a lot more convenient now that we had two.

As the time to leave for the zoo grew closer, the silence grew larger until no one was talking to anyone, but we all found ourselves down in the restaurant below when it was time to go. This was something we all needed to do.

All of us, of course, except for Janet, who was a bit too unreliable to trust in a volatile place like a zoo—or at least Carousel’s version of a zoo. She stayed in Bobby’s room, claiming she had a headache. I managed to catch Kimberly’s eye around that time and started to suspect that maybe someone had put that idea in her mind.

Down in the restaurant, we divided into three groups: the Party of Promise, Logan’s team, and Nicole’s team. Each group had at least one scout. It was better to do it that way in case we needed to split up or be extra maneuverable. There was also a trick to getting into the zoo that I wasn’t sure we could pull off with a large conga line of people.

“I’ve never seen such a dreary group of people going to the zoo,” Lorne said.

“Every time I’ve gone, Andrew had to sign my permission slip,” Isaac said.

“I just hope they don’t try to keep you,” Andrew said with a smile. He was a different person with his siblings.

Despite their brother being in Logan’s group, Isaac and Cassie stayed with us. We had gone through the Centennial together, and they were just now getting to levels where we could realistically do storylines together without them just getting smashed.

No one laughed at any jokes.

I leaned over to Camden and said, “Your newbies triggered an Omen, by the way. It was a while back. It just ended. They didn’t last long.”

Camden nodded. I couldn’t tell if he was upset with them or with himself.

“How’d they go?” he asked.

“Woman in White,” I said.

There were several different varieties of a Woman in White, which was just a scorned female ghost of some type, but they were similar enough that he understood.

“Surely they didn’t stop for her, did they?” he asked.

“No. I think that Strider saw her in the rearview mirror and got scared and wiped out. They didn’t last long after that.”

He took a deep breath. “Well, we tried. You know, we’d better get a move on if we’re going to make our appointment.”

I nodded and suddenly realized that everyone was waiting for me.

“All right, listen, everyone,” I said. “We have a quick walk to the zoo. None of us has actually been there before, but the Atlas makes it seem pretty simple. Just follow in groups with your scouts in the lead; there shouldn’t be any issue. When we get there, you are going to meet a Narrator. I don’t know if we can trust him, but we need to listen to what he has to say. At the very least, we can learn more about how throughlines work than we know now.”

In my mind, I knew he would have to really mess up to scare us away now. There was a certain optimism that came with doing an actual throughline. It was a sense of progress that we would risk a lot to feel.

With that, I awkwardly started moving toward the door and then added, “So let’s go.”

And so we did.

I led my group, Lila led Logan’s group, and Nicole’s bodyguards led her group. We made sure to keep some distance between us.

My group was the biggest, and we tried to be the fastest. But we lost track of Logan’s group because Lila took them through an abandoned soundstage, which didn’t actually end up being a shortcut, but it didn’t have any Omens on it, so they were safer.

Luckily, our destination was Hollow Park, which was pretty close to downtown. It was a typical type of city park; it had one of those giant wooden, castle-like structures that only seemed to exist when I was very, very young. But that wasn’t our destination, and I knew that going anywhere near it was a bad idea because something evil lived inside of it.

No, instead we made our way to a flower bed in the back.

It just looked like a normal thing—a tree in the center, tons of flowers around it, and a wooden picket fence that rose to about my mid-thigh. At first, it encircled all of the plants within. The bed itself wasn’t very large, maybe the size of a large pickup truck.

But it was the entrance to the zoo, and you could tell that by looking at what was painted on those fence panels. All manner of animals could be seen, from lions and giraffes to undersea creatures like sharks, painted in a very kid-friendly style, with smiles and sunglasses on the animals.

And to enter the zoo, all you had to do was walk around it.

That was it.

As a group, we went one by one, and we walked around the flower bed. As we walked, there was this strange sensation that we were walking downhill because the picket fence started to rise up and get taller. I never actually saw it get bigger; it simply was bigger, as if it had always been that way. All the flowers inside it were taller, too.

The further we went, rounding the bed more and more, the more foliage from the tree started to drop down on our heads, and weeds began to stick out from between the wooden slats of the fence. Eventually, it became quite difficult to continue encircling the fence, but we had to move forward. It would have been easier if I’d had a machete on me.

In reality, I actually did have some hedge clippers disassembled and stuck in my hoodie pocket, but I didn’t know if using them would deactivate the passage to the zoo.

We continued to encircle as traversal became harder and harder, and we had to fight through what appeared to be a jungle of leaves and vines.

Meanwhile, the images on the picket fence stopped being so cartoon-like and started becoming more and more realistic until eventually they were paintings of fierce and terrifying animals. Lions and sharks no longer wore sunglasses. Instead, they had blood dripping from their maws, and there were pieces of ill-fated safari-goers lying around on the ground in the images.

And then we kept going until eventually we heard noises, animals in the distance: an elephant trumpeting, a lion roaring. There were splashes and the chatter of monkeys, and then finally—

We rounded the corner one last time and looked out to see a giant and magnificent zoo, with animals larger than they could have been in real life—an elephant with an evil look on its face being sedated by zookeepers, a bear showing clear signs of rabies charging a fence where some NPCs were staring at it and clapping.

There was an exhibit with a sign over it that said Unattended Children, and it was filled with people who had apparently outgrown the outfits they had come to the zoo in as children after getting lost.

Overhead, the sky was filled with thousands of birds, and all around were forests of different kinds.

The zoo was a wondrous place, even taking into account that every fifth exhibit had been breached and its animals were nowhere to be found.

“Stay close,” I said.

And then we made our way forward.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep