“Looks like we need an answer really quick,” Antoine said as the sirens got louder.

“Kinda wish I could have answered you five minutes ago then,” Bones said. “As much as I’d love to give you a tour of my old stomping grounds, I can’t risk going to jail.”

Everyone was on their feet and ready to make a run for it. We were On-Screen, so we couldn’t have a real conversation.

“That’s disappointing to hear,” Antoine said. “Can I ask you not to tell them where we’re going?”

“Well, hold on there. I didn’t say no. I just said I can’t risk going to jail, so we better get out of here quick. Honey,” he said to his girlfriend, “get the go bags. You need to go to your mother’s.”

She was on it quickly, shoving a duffel bag into his arms that she pulled from a nearby closet. Then kissed before she exited the room and the story.

“We’re going to have to exit out the back way. Follow me,” Bones said. “I assume one of you can pay my fee.”

“You can assume that,” Antoine said as he followed Bones toward the back of the house, and the rest of us were right behind them.

“I keep a boat at the docks down the shore. I don’t know if we can get there without being seen. Those sirens don’t sound too far away,” Bones said as he pushed open the back door, only to be greeted by a pontoon boat floating up to the riverbank behind the house.

It was our pontoon boat. Bobby was steering it, and Roxy was aboard, although she didn’t seem too happy about it. Her bodyguard was standing, holding on to the railing, keeping an eye around the place.

“This may do even better,” Bones said. “Are these your people?”

Antoine and I looked at each other, and we shrugged.

“Good enough,” Bones said as he jumped from the shore onto the front of the pontoon boat. The rest of us followed one at a time as we began hearing tires screech at the front of the home.

As soon as everyone was aboard, Bobby had the boat full throttle into the swamp, getting us as far away as we could go. The police who arrived could only stare at us as we drove away.

Detective Blackwood was there with a megaphone in his hands, yelling something that I couldn’t quite hear. Then he lowered the device and watched us go, as long as I could see him.

“How did he track us down so fast?” I asked as my cameraman repositioned himself to frame the conversation. The boat was quite crowded.

“He must have been tracking Miss Hughes’ plane,” Camden said. “That’s the best I could figure.”

I looked up at Roxy. Her face didn’t let any emotion through. Detective Blackwood tracking us made more sense than her betraying us at that moment, but she wasn’t exactly offering up explanations or defending herself, and no one was going to accuse her, even though we were all thinking it.

Off-Screen

Bobby slowed the boat down for a while so that we could talk, and I told my assistant to steer. She somehow knew where to go.

“Sorry, I didn’t have time to explain myself,” Bobby said. “I saw the title of the next scene and knew I had to do something.”

“Well, at least we found my boat,” Camden said. Items brought into storylines often appeared randomly throughout the story.

Unlike Roxy, Bones Ibarra didn’t stop talking or stay in character when we went Off-Screen, but that was because he was a companion character brought in by a trope, not simply a paragon.

“You have to understand that regardless of what we do in the party or rebirth, the finale will be heavy with the horror. Don’t be tricked by the events that have come before,” he said.

“Do you even know what First Blood was?” Camden asked. “We haven’t forgotten this is a horror film.”

“Many do,” Bones said.

He then started to talk about his wisdom as an adventurer paragon to support his earlier claim about players getting derailed when they find out that Carousel doesn’t let you substitute vine swinging and treasure hunting for the entire storyline. I gestured for him to hand me the book that his character had written, and he did so.

I pretended to read it for a while, but that wasn’t my real goal. Now that I knew Detective Blackwood was actively pursuing us, I realized we could use him intentionally, leaving clues about where we were going so he could show up at the right moment to help us when the true enemy revealed themselves. It was a classic trope.

I figured the book was as good a clue as any. As soon as I found a spot in the conversation to tell the others, they were on board. We didn’t need the book anymore. We had its author with us.

It took us about twenty minutes driving through the swamp until we found an outlet that brought us to a river, maybe even the Carousel River, but I didn’t know. It became apparent where we were going right as we pulled up to it. It was a small airstrip off the shores of the water.

Regardless of what Bones had said, I could really get used to adventure storylines. I was actually excited about what was going to happen next. Even though I knew it would be nail-biting and temporary, it felt nice to know our next challenge would be about athleticism and quick thinking. Most of our challenges involved pain.

As soon as the boat pulled up to a small slip near the airstrip, we went back On-Screen.

As we off-boarded from the boat, I did my best to accidentally leave the book behind on one of the seats, out of place enough that I figured Detective Blackwood could discover it. I hoped that would be the right move.

“We can fly by my depot before we head down to Peru,” Camden said. “Get resupplied, get something to eat.”

“I’d sure appreciate it,” Antoine said. “I have no right to ask you to come with me.”

His relationship with Camden’s character was quite loose.

“You don’t have to ask him,” Camden said, “and I’m not coming with you. I’m coming with him,” as he pointed at me.

“Hey, I’m just with her,” I said, pointing to Roxy, trying to drag her into the conversation to see what she would say. She had changed into the outfit she had worn at the speakeasy, something a lot closer to a Lara Croft than a black widow.

“You’re not with me,” she said. “I’m paying you. This is a business relationship. You’d best not forget that.”

“As long as you don’t,” I said.

We marched further on toward an airplane hangar.

“Please tell me you’ve bought a new plane since we last saw each other,” Antoine said to Bones.

This story has been unlawfully obtained without the author’s consent. Report any appearances on Amazon.

“No. I’m all about the classics. Don’t you remember?”

“Oh dear Lord,” Antoine said as we walked into the hangar and saw before us a plane that was at least forty years old at the time the story was set.

“That, ladies and gentlemen, is my Munson P42 Mallard. The best airplane man ever designed.”

“Sure it is. Anyone who knows otherwise is still buried in the wreckage,” Camden said.

Bones began to laugh as he started prepping his airplane for flight.

It was a strange craft. It didn’t look like anything I had ever flown in before. The wings were attached at the top of the plane, but they weren’t straight. They made the plane look like it was shrugging its shoulders up to cover its ears.

It was a biplane with two propellers, one on each wing, and three spindly wheels beneath it.

We started loading onto the plane and went Off-Screen.

As we were getting aboard, Camden pointed to a sticker on the side that said the passenger limit was eight to nine. I quickly tore off the sticker, and we both laughed.

We were gonna have a few more than that between the NPCs and us, especially if we picked up some of Camden’s mercenaries.

They taxied the plane outside and then closed up the hangar before we went back On-Screen, and the takeoff sequence started in earnest.

Right on time, we heard sirens in the distance. Detective Blackwood was persistent.

“Antoine, my friend, you must have stolen money from someone very powerful the way they’re after you,” Bones said.

“Oh, come on. You know I don’t steal money. I steal artifacts,” Antoine said.

“To some men, those are the same thing,” Bones said as police vehicles started to pour onto the runway.

“They’re in the way,” Anna said, having somehow ended up in the comfortable seat at the front of the plane right behind the pilots while the rest of us crammed in the back.

Even from where I was sitting, I could tell the police vehicles would never let us take off.

At that moment, I experienced for the first time the very things we were warned against when the vets told us not to use more than one advanced archetype.

It didn’t just make the plot unpredictable. It made them too full.

From the river, bullets started to fire at the police, dinging their vehicles and causing the officers to flee for their safety.

Out on the river, three speedboats appeared, filled with the same gunmen that we had been chased by before.

“Say what you will about these guys, but they’ve got great timing,” Camden said.

The plane was hurtling down the runway. The police vehicles were still blocking the path. Bones tried to take off early so as to avoid the blockade. The plane hopped up into the air and managed to jump over one of the vehicles, but there were more behind it, and we just didn’t have enough lift. We smashed back down to the ground, almost tipping over. Luckily, Bones was able to right the plane, but we were about to hit another line of vehicles, and there was no way we could get airborne enough to get over them.

The gunmen were still firing their weapons at us and the police indiscriminately. I could see Detective Blackwood over near the airplane hangar, watching the action. He was on some sort of radio, no doubt reporting on the plane’s identification numbers or something.

“This is why the Mallard is one of the best planes ever made,” Bones said as he steered left, driving off the runway and avoiding the line of police cars. The turbulence was great. Those tires were not meant for bumpy terrain, and we were headed right for the river.

“We’re about to crash!” Anna screamed. Somebody had to.

“No,” Bones said. “We’re about to float.”

As soon as the plane hit the water, he flipped a button, and I could hear the mechanism below as the wheels pulled up into the plane. As the hull of the aircraft hit the water, it started to skim over the top like a boat.

“Wait, is this a seaplane?” I asked.

“Best one money can buy,” Bones said.

“A few decades ago, yeah, sure,” Camden said.

Bones engaged the throttle, or whatever the big pushy lever was that made the blades spin faster, and suddenly we were skimming across the top of the river at full speed.

We had lost the police.

Unfortunately, we were still being pursued by those mysterious gunmen on their speedboats.

It didn’t really make sense. The last time we had run into them, it was because they were trying to kidnap Anna and Bobby, and we just happened to show up at the same time, but what was the reason for them being here now?

Maybe they were about to take Bones Ibarra captive, as they had many of Antoine’s other colleagues. It wasn’t like that was impossible, but it seemed like a huge coincidence.

Luckily, the seaplane was able to maneuver down the river faster than the speedboats, though I wasn’t sure if that made any sense. It was probably just action-movie logic, where the pursuers were polite enough to stay behind for a while.

But we had already had this kind of scene. The boat chase. Was Carousel repeating itself? We knew that this storyline was thematically tied to the river, but even then, did we need another similar chase?

I didn’t know, but we were about to take off, and the bullets flying past us didn’t appear to be doing any damage.

And then I heard a rumbling in the engine on the right side of the plane.

“Damn it, the engine cut out!” Bones said.

I could see him working the flips and dials at the front of the plane, trying to get the engine back online.

“I need someone to go out there and hand prop it!” Bones screamed. He was all business all of a sudden. This seemed dire.

“Tell me you’re joking,” Camden said.

“I never joke about the Mallard,” Bones said.

“Does hand prop mean what I think it means?” Antoine asked.

“It does,” Bones said, “and you’d better hurry. The river becomes too narrow, and there’s too much limb cover for me to take off from further upstream. You need to move quickly.”

Antoine cursed under his breath as he got up next to the exit door and pulled it open. Then he looked up at the wing above and then back at us.

I was really glad not to be him. Sure, he had the stats to do the stunt, but he still had to choose to do it, and that had to be difficult.

He reached up and grabbed the edge of the wing and then monkey-barred his way out of the passenger compartment until his legs were swinging beneath him so that he could make his way out to the engine that had stalled.

Bullets whizzed around him, and Bones tried to steer with his one remaining engine in order to get him out of the line of fire, but with limited success.

Luckily, the plane wasn’t huge, so he could make it to the engine pretty quickly, dangling from his fingertips as he reached out and grabbed the stationary propeller and did his best to start it moving.

I didn’t know how airplanes worked, and if this were in a movie, I would probably just accept it, but since I was sitting there on the plane watching one of my dearest friends try to do this, the skeptic in me was just exploding at how unlikely this was to work.

Antoine’s feet were dragging in the water as he kept trying to move the propeller enough to get the engine started again, but he just couldn’t position himself well enough to get it spinning.

“We’re running out of time!” Bones screamed.

Antoine thought for a moment and then grabbed down into the lucky camera bag strapped to his side, which didn’t have a camera in it, and pulled out his grappling hook, which he quickly tossed the end of into the open door of the plane. Anna reached up, grabbed it, and affixed it to a large metal eyelet that was probably used to attach cargo.

One-handed, Antoine tied the rope through his belt loops as best he could, as quickly as he could.

As soon as I figured out what he was about to do, I grabbed onto the rope and pulled it taut as he reached up toward the propeller and launched himself at it, grabbing on to the propeller and pulling with all his might in one smooth attempt to get the engine running.

To his credit, it worked. The engine roared to life. The problem was he had nothing left to hold on to, and he probably wouldn’t want to even if he did, since the propeller was now spinning so quickly. He fell toward the water below.

Anna and I quickly lifted the rope to try to keep him from being submerged as he skidded along the water on the seat of his pants, holding on to the rope with both hands. It looked like he was about to try to ski on his feet, but even in an adventure film, Carousel wasn’t going to allow something to succeed at that.

We started pulling him in as the sound of gunfire intensified behind us, and the plane began to take off.

It probably looked pretty cool, but in the moment, it was terrifying, and my It’s Just a Puppet trope did nothing to dull it because there were no fantasy monsters or magical cosmic beings involved. It was just a fear of heights and bullets that was coursing through me at that moment.

I looked back at the gunmen, and even in that moment of adrenaline, I thought how silly it was that they were there in the first place. What an odd plot device. The entire scene could have ended up on the cutting room floor. If anything, it would only hurt pacing at that point.

What had they actually accomplished? A cool action scene? Slowing down the cops?

Did that justify their inclusion? I rarely had to ask these questions about Carousel. And yet when I looked back at the gunmen and saw that they were On-Screen and so was I, something caught my eye that was hard to explain.

They weren’t pointing their guns at us.

One of them pointed his gun off the side of the boat casually, firing right into the water.

Another one was shooting bullets up into the air, off to the left, where they would never hit us.

In fact, while they all had guns, not one of them was actively shooting directly at us. That was incredibly bizarre. Even if they had no chance of hitting us because of a trope or because of our stats, they would still aim the gun at us. It would be Carousel and the script that stopped us from getting hit.

But these guys weren’t even trying, and worse than that, they were doing it On-Screen.

It was true they needed Antoine alive for something, perhaps to solve an archaeological puzzle or maybe just pure revenge, but then why all the theatrics? Why even pretend to shoot?

What in the world was going on?

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep