You have to choose your battles in Carousel.

We had chosen Stray Dawn, and we had won handily. Now, we would never have to fight that battle again.

So, “we” decided it was okay to spoil the story to the others.

We all piled into the living room on our new chairs. The girls got the couch—chivalry was undead in Carousel.

We were having a movie night, and we decided to watch Stray Dawn. Not the version we had just played—no, we wanted to watch the VHS we had rented so long ago. We wanted to watch Stray Dawn: The Mark.

It was a movie starring the Bowlers, and while seeing our old friends again brought a certain pain, it also brought joy and nostalgia.

We came to find that this version of the movie, altered by Grace’s Detective AA, was very different from the version we had played.

It was about two sisters, played by Grace and Bella, who moved to a small town called Southeastern Carousel that was run-down and in financial ruin.

This version of Southeastern Carousel was much more like the one in Carousel proper. It had many tourist attractions, but not the expensive kind.

Southeastern Carousel wasn’t a tourist destination—it was a tourist trap, with all kinds of gimmicky places to spend your money, like a mountain you could climb to witness UFOs or an actual “working” wishing fountain. The few streets that comprised downtown Southeastern Carousel were filled with souvenir shops.

A strange cult of overly polite congregants could be found holding signs condemning gambling and begging everyone to repent. Their compound was up on a different mountain, where they had a giant statue of the god they worshipped. I didn’t get a chance to look at it when we were last there, but I did see that admission to the statue cost five dollars.

Everything in Southeastern Carousel seemed to cost five dollars.

You wanted your palm read, your horoscope, or a word from a deceased loved one? They all cost the same.

There was a Museum of Oddities, similar to those Ripley’s Believe It or Not buildings that were built upside-down back in the real world. It was filled with all sorts of illusions and surreal attractions.

The Atlas said not to go in there because literally nothing in that building was an illusion.

The point was, it was a good place to lose money—especially if you kept going southeast and found the casino, whose jingle we knew so well.

It was that sort of place.

Every state—heck, every country—probably has a town like that. They probably had several. Southeastern Carousel had every horror story that had ever arisen in places like that.

Honestly, I really wanted to go down there just to look around, but we didn’t have the money to waste.

Anyway, Grace and Bella rolled into town looking for a new start, getting jobs and meeting people. Unfortunately, the people Bella met were members of a noisy motorcycle gang led by the rough and tough Serena.

Bella wanted to be like Serena, and luckily for her—this being a werewolf movie—she had just the chance.

Meanwhile, Grace was the main character and tried to save Bella from herself while simultaneously solving the murder of the curator of the Museum of Oddities.

She lined up her suspects and found out that the murderer was… Reggie Varga, of all people. But it was okay because the curator, it turned out, was evil himself and was using a magical stone to control the werewolf motorcycle gang.

I didn’t know which part was harder to look away from: the implied romance between Bella the Bully-Bruiser and Serena the werewolf, or the fact that Reggie and Grace were also given a subplot originally meant for lovers despite them being brother and sister.

I thought Carousel must have been messing with them.

It was supposed to be an ’80s movie, so that type of stuff wasn’t exactly out of place, but still, it gave us a strong case of the giggles to watch them literally shake hands during a close up shot as the sun rose at the end of the movie in a scene that would have usually called for a kiss.

I had heard of movies turning romantic subplots into friendship subplots and vice versa, but that was something different.

The movie ended with them defeating the undead curator once again and Serena and her motorcycle gang of werewolves riding off into the distance with Bella, who had found her new life.

Of course, that wasn’t to mention the terrifying second half, during which the other team members were torn to shreds at the curator’s behest.

But still, overall, the movie reminded me of The Lost Boys more than anything.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Yeah, it was The Lost Boys but with women in their 30s and a random murder mystery thrown in.

Still, we hooted and hollered at every victory, we gasped at every death, and we clapped when the thing was over.

Something that I didn’t get a lot of, even though I had watched a lot of horror movies, was the experience of watching them with people. I had missed out on that. Sure, I had gone to theaters doing double features that got sold out and were filled with avid fans, but I had never had any friends of my own to go with.

I had to come to Carousel for that.

And as the credits started to roll, I knew it was my time to ruin the fun.

Because we had work to do.

I stood up in front of everyone as the movie ended, and I flipped on the light.

I needed to make sure that everything I said was clear and easily understood. I needed everyone to be on the same page.

As soon as I got up there, Kimberly was looking at me like she could see something had been weighing on me, and she knew I was about to lay something heavy on them.

I had tossed and turned, agonizing over how to tell them, over whether I should.

But I had no choice. I had to get the ball rolling.

“We need to move up our plans,” I said.

They looked at me expectantly. Were they surprised or confused? Or… did they just not know which plans I was talking about?

We had so many plans. Plans to earn new rescue tropes. Plans to find other bases to stay at. Plans for grinding levels. Plans for escape. How could they possibly know which ones I meant?

“We need to rescue Anna and Camden soon,” I said. “Now.”

“Now?” Antoine asked. “Why now? We were going to let the others level up for a bit. What changed?”

I cleared my throat.

“Information has come to light, and I’m not sure if I am supposed to know this or tell you this. I just don’t know,” I said. I let that hang in the air. “You know how I go to the theater when I die? How there are people there? Audience members, workers—I don’t know—Them. The people behind it all?”

I looked out over their faces. Everyone knew what I was talking about.

Even Logan and Avery had been let in on my little secret by then. It was hot news. I was that strange Film Buff, after all. The rumors of my odd encounter with Them must have been great gossip.

“I heard them talking after Stray Dawn,” I said. “I didn’t know if telling you this was a good idea or bad. I still don’t.” I took a deep breath. “I think you need to know regardless.”

“What happened?” Kimberly asked. Heck, she wasn’t the only one. They were on pins and needles, practically begging me to spill the beans.

Hopefully, they weren’t the only ones.

“First, when Kimberly triggered the secret lore,” I said, “They were talking about how it was weird we could do that because we hadn’t ‘talked to the maid at the tavern,’ whatever that means. I don’t know. I guess we have more research to do on secret lore.”

“Maid at the tavern?” Antoine repeated. “What maid? What tavern? What does that have to do with Anna and Camden?”

They speculated for a bit.

“We’ll look into that,” I said. I looked at Kimberly and Antoine. “That isn’t the part I was most concerned about. So, after I heard that, I was listening, trying to catch every whisper from Them, everything I could. I heard something I don’t think I was supposed to hear.”

I paused for a moment and then continued. “They said there was talk of Them abandoning us. That we needed to be moving forward, and we weren’t. There was a whole discussion about it. I guess they thought I couldn’t hear them.”

Everyone reacted as I assumed they would: confusion, denial, and questions upon questions.

“What exactly did they say?” Logan asked me, serious for the first time since I had met him.

“Exactly what I told you. We aren’t doing enough. Maybe we aren’t entertaining enough, or we aren’t making enough progress—I don’t know. Your guess is as good as mine.”

I went on to tell them everything the woman had told me about throughlines and such, though I didn’t reveal that it had been her to say it. If we were being watched, I didn’t want to burn a potential ally. I didn’t know if the woman who whispered to me was a friend or foe, but I couldn’t be too sure.

What did it all mean?

Kimberly thought it might mean the audience was going to stop watching altogether.

Antoine thought it was more than that—that these secret, anonymous people who helped Carousel function in some unknowable way would just abandon their post, and suddenly, many of the features we had gotten accustomed to would stop working.

Still, Logan theorized that the entire system was going to shut down. That we would be stuck in this monstrous world, and everything designed to keep us from getting torn apart as nature intended would suddenly stop working.

“No more tropes, no more plot cycle, no invisible barriers keeping monsters inside their lairs. No script telling serial killers to act like normal people. Chaos. Basically instant death at that point,” he said.

They continued to discuss and suggest things, just as I intended.

“Hold on,” I said, increasingly close to losing my calm. “What I know for sure is that if things are about to get worse, we need to do our rescuing right now. I don’t know if everything’s going to shut down, but if it does, we need to get Anna and Camden back before that happens. We can’t leave them there.”

I didn’t have to fake the emotions. They were really there.

There was silence for a moment, and then Antoine said, “We can do it. Our levels aren’t that far off from what they would need to be. Heck, we’re not any more under-leveled for Post-Traumatic than we were for Stray Dawn. With a good strategy, we can do the rescue. It doesn’t have to look pretty.”

It didn’t have to look pretty. It probably wouldn’t.

We sat and discussed everything we knew about Post-Traumatic. While we didn’t have a lot of plot details from the Atlas, we had learned some things, like how Savvy and Hustle were important. And since it was essentially a torture plot, we would need Grit.

“Is that why you put three stat tickets into Grit?” Cassie asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why. No use feeling all that torture. I figure that I’m going to be Second Blood, given the nature of the story.”

Antoine looked at me and said, “So you’re planning on using your rescue trope?”

“I think it’s the best bet, but we can discuss that,” I said. “We may have to prep for it, but it won’t be the first time we’ve set traps. And I figure we have a jailhouse with stone walls and metal bars. Time travel, however it works in that storyline, is complicated. Why go chasing a plot when we could make the plot come to us? Might simplify things.”

Bobby’s new rescue trope was a real contender. My worry was that is would be hard to prep for. Mine gave us a solid setting that we could plan around. We had already determined it was better than Kimberly’s.

These were things we had discussed, but we had mostly discussed them in a hypothetical, far-off, distant-plans kind of way. I needed us to go forward with it now.

So that’s what we did. We got up from watching the movie and started our planning.

We had spent our entire time in Carousel waiting for an opportunity.

This time, I was going to make the opportunity.

All I could hope was that somewhere in a far-off building, They were listening.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep