Book Five, Chapter 46: By the Campfire

Michael built a fire so fast that I would have thought he had a trope for it.

There was a burn pit just off Bobby’s rental’s back porch, surrounded by overbuilt wooden deck chairs. The chairs easily weighed 60 pounds, and the wood was rough, but next to the fire, they were comfortable.

We each sat around, some on the porch, some near the fire, and we talked about our lives, our fears, and our hopes. But mostly, we talked about the storylines we had run.

The longer we were in Carousel, the more the game started to dominate our lives and personal histories. How was I supposed to compare anecdotes about high school to anything that had happened to me at Carousel?

I couldn’t.

No one could.

Even Andrew, who had found some success as a doctor before coming to Carousel, mostly talked about his experiences in storylines. And Michael, who was a legitimate soldier, had more war stories involving ghouls and goblins than actual human conflict back home.

I missed the campfires at Camp Dyer.

It was a nightly ritual to sit out under the stars. The weather there was almost always perfect, and even the rain had been warm. In eastern Carousel, the wind cut through my hoodie and chilled my bones, but still, it was nice.

“So I punched this monster in the face. I punched it hard. I could almost hear its brain knocking against its skull,” Michael said, telling a story from one of the many runs they had done. “But this creature had, like, acid blood, so my fist just fell off after a couple of hours. Didn’t even hurt.”

Something about how he told that story got people laughing.

Michael continued, “So I say to Andrew, ‘Why don’t you heal this up and then put a blade on the end of the stub?’ And Andrew did it, and it was awesome. I can’t believe I didn’t get a trope for it.”

“You never used it,” Andrew said. “And it was wildly impractical to do in the first place. You could barely walk, let alone engage in hand-to-knife combat.”

“I used it,” Michael said. “Twice. I cut the rope that made the boulder drop, and I swiped at the creature through the fence.”

“Okay,” Andrew responded. “I suppose you did use it then, although I believe it would have been more effective if the knife hadn’t had a serrated edge. If you wanted to kill something, you would have had to saw through it.”

We all laughed at the image.

Well, most of us. Lila, our guest of honor, sat in one of the wooden chairs closest to the fire, chilled to the bone by the wind, cuddled up in the only blanket we could find for her. She didn’t laugh, no.

Although we didn’t say it, she was our prisoner.

We weren’t going to let her leave—not until we had made our decision about what to do with her, and we weren’t in any hurry to make that choice.

Luckily, the shock of her betrayal was slowly fading. We could think rationally and, perhaps, compassionately.

“You guys play a lot of storylines?” Antoine asked.

“Dozens,” Michael responded. “I’ve killed just about everything that can die and some things that can’t. You?”

“About a dozen,” Antoine responded. Our numbers were pretty low by comparison despite having similar plot armor.

“Whoa, you folks are taking your time, aren’t you? Wait, how are you at our level?” Michael asked.

“They are taking a more daring approach than we did, I assume,” Andrew said before we could answer. “I have to conclude that our strategy was a poor one.”

He threw a clump of leaves into the fire.

“What strategy?” Isaac asked, looking at his older brother like he was a little kid again.

“When we developed our strategy for picking storylines, we usually picked stories that were about our median level. We didn’t want to overwhelm our less ambitious teammates,” Andrew said. Though he didn’t say so, I had to imagine he was talking about Lila.

“Perhaps our reason for doing so was that, soon after we arrived in Carousel, a high-level team had just been postered,” he continued. “Their strategy had been to complete the most dangerous runs they could in order to grow levels quickly with as few storylines as possible. Having seen them get postered, we decided to do something more conservative. If my understanding is correct, that was probably what sank our chances with Project Rewind.”

“That’s what Chris and his team did,” Antoine said. “They never ran a storyline unless it was at least five levels ahead of them at first. They were always surviving by the skin of their teeth. They wanted to do as few storylines as possible at first. Of course, he didn’t want me to follow in their footsteps, but we ended up doing something similar anyway.”

“Yes, Chris’s team were very daring,” Andrew said, “but even they lost their nerve eventually. Difficulty scales much more aggressively at higher levels. They couldn’t keep up. They had found their limit.”

He threw more leaves in the fire. They sent a small flurry of sparks.

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“Wait,” Cassie said, “why did they want to do it in as few storylines as possible?”

Cassie had never taken Adeline’s mini tutorial, where she taught us about these things.

“Novelty,” I answered. “Carousel rewards you for doing new things. That means not getting spoiled about the details of a storyline, but it also means trying new kinds of storylines and doing things you’ve never done before. Eventually, you just run out of new types of experiences.”

“And you hit level 40,” Antoine added. “Then you level up once, maybe twice a year after that, if at all. The fewer stories you run, the less likely that is to happen.”

Cassie nodded, and then no one said anything else because we weren’t really talking about experience for runs. We were talking about whatever we could to avoid harder conversations. We hadn’t agreed to that—it just came naturally.

“Riley here jumped like five levels at once,” Isaac said, breaking the silence. “The rest of us still haven’t caught up with him.”

“Five stat tickets and one storyline?” Michael asked. “How’d you swing that?”

We had left out some details.

“Somehow, a high-level mobile omen got into Camp Dyer,” I said. “Everybody at camp was liable to be picked for the storyline, and I was one of the lucky few.”

I tried to be sparse on details. I didn’t want to mention Bobby’s wife, who had also been picked and was at the center of it all because she had refused to run storylines. I hoped they would let me get away with leaving that detail out.

But Bobby said, “Janet was picked too. She never came home.”

A silence moved over us. Even the fire didn’t crackle as loudly as it had been.

“She disappeared?” Michael asked.

“Yep,” I said. “Carousel even cut her out of the movie. Anyway, I was really under-leveled, and I ended up being helpful. Died at the end—heroically.”

“That was where he got tickets with coded messages on them,” Isaac added.

Isaac wasn’t spilling our secrets on accident.

We had left out details, either because they weren’t important or because they were inconvenient, and it seemed like he did not intend to help keep those secrets—not from his own brother. We planned to tell Andrew and the others everything once we had a good read of them anyway.

We knew this might happen. It was built into the plan. We had weighed the pros and cons and decided that, even if Isaac and Cassie would never choose us over their brother, it was worth having a doctor.

I hoped we were right.

“Messages in tropes?” Andrew asked. “You mean the titles of the tropes?”

He, Michael, and even Lila were interested in that. I nodded and then skillfully pulled all of my nonsense tropes out of thin air.

“I couldn’t even equip them, so I knew something was going on,” I said.

Andrew and Michael looked at each other.

“It would appear that Logan was justified in his paranoia,” Andrew said. “He also got tickets that he couldn’t equip, seemingly at random—one here, one there. I never could figure out what they meant. It must have been very helpful to obtain them all at once.”

Yes, it was.

I explained to them how the tickets had helped lead us back to the bed and breakfast, back to where it all started.

“It’s really interesting,” Michael said. “I wonder if Roxy had anything to do with this—Bobby’s wife disappearing. How exactly did a mobile omen get into Camp Dyer?”

There were so many possibilities, but that was not the moment I wanted to try to think about them.

“You know, Roxy was on the team that went with Janet when she disappeared,” Bobby said.

I did not want to give oxygen to this conversation, but somehow, it felt inescapable.

My friends and I had an unspoken agreement not to push the envelope when it came to disappeared players, but Andrew, Michael, and Lila were not in on that agreement.

Michael looked at me. “You think she might have had something to do with it?”

I shrugged my shoulders. “Yesterday, I would have said no, but today, I have no idea,” I said.

“A common sentiment in Carousel,” Andrew said.

His eyes locked on mine.

I wasn’t going to reveal anything to him. I had high Moxie, and though I had mostly used it against enemies, it worked just fine against players. Whatever insight he was hoping to gain would fail—unless, of course, he wasn’t using Moxie or Savvy or a trope.

What if he were looking at my face using his actual intuition and could see the guilt, shame, and fear hidden under its façade? Would that work, or was I being paranoid?

“So, how’d you go out?” Michael asked. “In that storyline where you got so many stat tickets? A blaze of glory?”

I thought for a moment, then said, “More than you know. I was being eaten by a creature that was only vulnerable in bright light. It was about to devour me, so I lit myself on fire with a Molotov cocktail. As I understand it, Arthur blasted it to pieces afterward.”

“Arthur was on that storyline too?” Andrew asked.

I nodded, and he didn’t say anything else, but I could tell he was reaching conclusions. Perhaps they knew that Arthur was another person who knew the secret behind player disappearances.

By the grace of whatever ancient forest god was nearest to us at that moment, the conversation eventually broke, and people started heading in to sleep.

I stayed. Andrew stayed, and Antoine stayed while the others went inside.

Of course, Lila never moved from her chair.

I didn’t know if she was there deceiving us or if she was being sincere. Either way, she never tried to run.

“I can’t communicate how frustrating it is to know that we were that close to moving forward,” Andrew said. “That there really were mysteries to be solved. I had lost hope.”

“I nearly did myself,” I said.

There was more silence, and then Antoine said, “There is a large closet in the bedroom. We can form a pallet for her to lay on if she is okay with that.”

Lila nodded her head.

“I’ll do whatever it takes for you to trust me,” she said.

Andrew, Antoine, and I exchanged looks.

“It may take a while,” Andrew said. “Trust is easily broken. You know that. It’s much harder to rebuild.”

“I can be useful,” she said in subdued desperation. “I’m a good scout, and I can help rescue Logan and Avery. To make it up to them.”

“I’m sure you will have plenty of opportunities to regain their trust,” Andrew said.

“I’ll show you the way,” Antoine said, extending his hand to Lila. She grabbed his hand and followed him inside.

When they were out of earshot, Andrew looked at me and said, “Of course, we could never trust her. We could never trust someone who might be keeping dangerous secrets.”

And he wasn’t really talking about her. He had put two and two together and realized that I knew the secret behind player disappearances. Or at least, he had a pretty good hunch.

“I think we should judge people by their actions,” I said. “Let’s not forget, all of us had secrets once upon a time.”

“But then, that was the same secret—a quest that might lead us out of Carousel,” Andrew said.

“True,” I said. “Then again, all of us put our trust in the Insider, and they have more secrets than the rest of us combined. I don’t think we’re going to get to the end of this without a little faith.”

He threw more leaves into the fire.

“So you would have us keep her alive then? Even if it may spell disaster?” he asked.

I thought for a moment.

“What I would have us do is give her a chance to break our hearts,” I said.

“That could end up with all of us dead,” he said.

“That depends on the chance we give her,” I said. “We just need to put her in a place where lying will be much more difficult. If she’s telling the truth, hooray. That means she’s gullible but not evil. I say that’s the best-case scenario.”

He seemed to consider what I was saying and then nodded.

And so, we set about developing our plan.

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