On-Screen

We were back inside in the kitchen.

“Lock the doors!” Ramona called out. Nathan quickly ran to the front door and locked it.

“Are you okay?” Cassie asked Isaac, cradling him despite his desire to pull away from her.

“I’m fine,” he said. “They didn’t hurt me, they just got my neck, that’s all.”

Thank goodness it was only his neck.

Cassie took a moment to look closely and examine him. Then she slapped him hard on the shoulder.

“What did you do?” she asked.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said, looking betrayed. “They just started following me and saying weird stuff.”

“They said you entered a contract with them,” she responded.

“They were lying. I’ve never seen them before in my life,” Isaac said. But after he spoke, his eyes glazed over, and a look of fear crossed his face at the same time; a shadow seemed to dance against the ceiling, if only for a split second.

“What?” Cassie said. “What is going on here? Something is happening, you have to tell me.”

“I don’t know,” Isaac said.

The kitchen was pretty big, and everyone stood around. Those who had not gone outside were acting confused, and those who had gone outside were even more confused but also scared.

Yes, there was a certain level of goofiness to demons wearing skin suits, but there was nothing goofy about those demons. Just being around them, they radiated an evil presence. Maybe I picked up on it because I had equipped My Grandmother Had the Gift as a background trope, which made me like a junior psychic, but I doubted I was the only one who felt it. Just looking at Ramona’s face told me that.

She was supposed to look afraid, but I didn’t think she was acting. Luckily for her, she had tropes that would help her soothe nervousness and unease by acting nervous and uneasy.

“Am I the only one who noticed that that guy’s head wasn’t real? His face was just like a mask or something… like a costume?” she asked, freaking out like a good Hysteric.

I backed away and leaned against a countertop next to the oven, which I glanced at, as if remembering old Hot Head back at the pizza parlor.

“I don’t know what I saw,” Camden said.

“I think they’re shadows,” Isaac said. He stared ahead blankly. “Or at least, I think they can be shadows.”

“What are you talking about?” Cassie asked, trying to sound annoyed at his assertion, but clearly showing interest and fear.

“I’ve been seeing shadows all day,” he said, “ever since this afternoon.”

“You’ve been seeing shadows?” Cassie asked. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know, I didn’t want people to think I was crazy,” he said.

It was quiet for a moment, and people stared at him.

“Just flickers of darkness where it shouldn’t be?” Ramona asked. “Like you think you shut your eyes, but you didn’t?”

Isaac looked at her. “Yeah. They zoom around. But when I hit that guy’s head, I swear I saw one.”

Ramona got quiet.

“What is going on?” Anna asked.

No one answered, and for a moment, there was just more silence.

“The trespasser has been advised,” Camden said. “‘Satisfaction must be guaranteed.’ Is that what he said? What a strange thing, but I can’t shake the feeling I’ve seen it before.”

He looked around the room to see if anyone knew what he was referring to.

“Of course you’ve seen it before,” Evan said. “It’s on every advertisement. Or at least the part about satisfaction. What are you guys talking about? What happened out there?”

Camden talked to himself, just muttering with a furrowed brow, as Cassie explained what had just happened at the trash can.

“Do you have a newspaper?” Camden asked, interrupting Cassie’s explanation.

Cassie thought for a moment and nodded. “There’s a magazine rack next to the recliner.”

Camden was quickly out of the kitchen and back into the living room as Cassie finished her explanation, which was just a quick rundown.

“Those men tried to kidnap him?” Anna asked. “What would they want to do that for?”

“They must not know him very well,” Evan said.

I shot him a stern glance. He needed to cool it with the subtle bullying. Luckily, I could do that in character.

“They weren’t men,” Cassie said. “There was something strange about them. Something strange has been happening for days now, and I just can’t put my finger on it.”

Cassie struggled in the way that a psychic would struggle, attempting to reconcile their awesome powers with the mundane veil she had to hide them in.

It was challenging to establish her vague abilities while also allowing her to be a genuine character who loved her little brother, despite having a tumultuous relationship with him. She was doing a fine job.

She had a trope that would increase his Grit by showing concern for him, and she had used it several times: Empathic Shield. I had a feeling Isaac was going to need it.

“I knew I had seen it,” Camden said, coming back into the kitchen and plopping the newspaper down on the island prep station in the middle of the room.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

I looked closely and saw the very ad that had been the omen to bring us here.

PECATTO’S OLD-FASHIONED PIZZA PARLOR

Est. 1966 · Ash & Market, Northwest Carousel · Call 555-7468

BUY 5 PIZZAS IN ONE WEEK, GET YOUR 6TH FREE

No coupons. No cards. We’ll keep track.

New Management has taken possession.

Same crust. Same sauce. Greater bargain.

Open late. Dine in, take out, or delivery.

Trespassers be advised. Satisfaction guaranteed.

PECATTO’S — A SLICE ABOVE.

“Look at this,” he said. “‘Trespassers be advised. Satisfaction guaranteed.’ Why in the world is that in an advertisement for a pizza parlor?”

“I thought it was a joke,” I said. “That ad’s all over the place.”

“But it makes no sense,” Camden said. “For these advertisements, they pay by the letter or something. Why would you add in an odd joke like that?”

“That’s the ad for the ‘Buy 5 pizzas, get one free,’” Isaac said.

We all read over it again.

“The promotion has been redeemed,” Cassie said. She looked at Camden, then at Anna, and then at me. “The man said, ‘The promotion has been redeemed,’ right? Something like that?”

“Yeah, that was one of the first things he said. What was it again?” Camden asked. “The promotion has been redeemed. The trespasser has been advised.” He paused for a moment, not able to remember what came next.

“‘The consumer has indulged freely,’” I said.

“Right. ‘The consumer has indulged freely,’” Camden repeated. Then, after a few moments of thinking, he said, “‘Satisfaction must be guaranteed.’”

“Wait a second. What in the world are we talking about?” Anna asked. “The pizza promotion?”

No one wanted to defend our line of thinking.

Camden turned to Isaac. “Didn’t you eat one of the free pizzas at work today on first shift?”

“I didn’t want to,” Isaac responded. “The boss lady told me to. Well, she suggested it forcefully. It was supposed to be a free pizza, yeah, but the customer cancelled.”

“A sixth pizza,” I said. It was time for me to reveal perhaps the most important plot point that my character was meant to contribute. “Look, this is going to sound crazy, but… Isaac, when you work in the front kitchen and there’s an order for five pizzas that we make in the back, do you make the sixth pizza, the free one?”

Isaac looked at me like I had grown another head. “No,” he said. “I just grab them out of the oven and put them in boxes.”

Everyone looked at me, confused about why I would bring that up.

“I’ve never made the sixth pizza,” I said. “I know this sounds insane, but I only make five pizzas. And then later, I look in the oven, and there’s a sixth pizza. I always assumed it was the front kitchen, but I never saw you putting it in there.”

“What are you talking about?” Ramona said. “What does it have to do with this?”

She wasn’t wrong. Our reasoning was not first-rate, but luckily, it was a comedy, so acting so serious about something silly might play well.

“We’re discussing the possibility that the free pizza we give away as part of a promotion summons demons,” Camden said. “You have to admit, there’s something weird going on. Why would those men say so much related to the pizza ad otherwise?”

“That’s ridiculous,” Ramona said. “I ate a piece of that pizza. I ate it right after Isaac did, and I’m fine.”

She was doing her best to sound nervous, to be our skeptic, but more importantly, to be Isaac’s foil.

Suddenly, a flicker of darkness moved over the room. It happened in an instant, and everyone except Isaac and Ramona ignored it.

She jumped. Isaac yelped.

“Did it happen again?” Cassie asked.

“Screw this,” Ramona said, afraid. “I’m leaving.”

She might have been going too soon. We needed to establish the character dynamic we were going for, but she was new and would improve.

“Ramona, did you just see what Isaac saw?” I asked.

She closed her eyes, and to her credit, when she opened them, there were tears forming.

“I didn’t see anything,” she said. “I just want to go for a drive. Nathan, let’s go.”

“Wait,” Nathan said. “Aren’t we going to call the cops or something?” He wasn’t really paying attention, apparently. When Ramona continued walking toward the front door, he turned to Evan and said, “Come on, man.”

Evan nodded his head, apparently weirded out by the entire situation.

“All right, well, when you figure out which of the advertisements in the newspaper are cursed and which ones aren’t, get back to me. Anna, you still wanna see that vista and nothing else?”

Anna, confused more than anything else, looked at Cassie, Isaac, and then at me and said, “Yeah. Cassie, are you okay for me to go?”

Cassie didn’t look sure, but she nodded.

Anna reluctantly left the room with Evan. Then the four of them got into Evan’s car and drove away Off-Screen.

The Hanging Tree Lookout overlooked the town. It was supposed to be quite a sight.

I had to hope this scene was enough setup.

Ramona had a very powerful trope called The Foil, and in exchange for its power, it required a lot of prep. It allowed her to become a sort of metaphorical counterpart to one of her main character allies.

In this story, she was Isaac’s counterpart. Where they had both eaten from the cursed pizza under my instruction, Ramona was going to react poorly. She was going to be in denial and refuse to accept help. She would try to run.

Isaac would do the opposite of that, and thanks to Ramona’s trope, he would be rewarded immensely. She would be his Foil, making the opposite of all his decisions.

It would cost her dearly, but it might allow Isaac to rise above it all with a nice burst of narrative momentum. And if he kept on his current trajectory, he was probably going to be the main character, if only the rest of us were able to keep him alive and set him up for success.

Off-Screen

I let out a deep breath. That whole sequence had been intense. Something about those demonic shadows got my heart racing and made decision-making an uphill battle.

Isaac and Cassie each went their own way, while Camden and I decided to walk home.

“You sure about what we’re doing?” he asked, referring to the Ramona-Isaac play.

“Yep,” I said. “As sure as I can be.”

“How is it going to turn out, though?” he asked. “I mean, we don’t even know what the deal is with these demons or what kind of contract they got into by eating that pizza.”

I shrugged my shoulders.

“I never know,” I said. “If you wait until you know the whole situation, you’ve waited too long. I’m just feeding story elements out into the ether, hoping that Carousel will play off of them and won’t punish us.”

He nodded. We walked in silence for a block.

“Red Thread Theory is popping off,” he said. “A lot of new information, a lot of new connections.”

“Yeah? What’s that like?” I asked. His new trope, the Red Thread Theory, helped keep track of all the evidence and different theories we had formed, while nudging him to consider whether those theories were sound. But it was hard to picture how it might work.

He scratched his neck as we walked down the street, jaywalking freely because we knew the NPCs wouldn’t dare run us over.

“Well, I thought that the pizza was some sort of trick to make him give up his soul, so that appeared as a theory on the red wallpaper,” he said. “But the connections to… it’s like, uh, there’s a lot of slack in the line. You know how there’s supposed to be a red thread connecting the evidence and the theories? But it’s slack. I think Isaac did have a contract of something, but I don’t think he sold his soul. The language of the ad isn’t suggestive of that type of contract.”

“A pizza for a soul,” I said. “It is pretty simple, but kind of thin, I guess. Too bad.”

Camden nodded.

“We have to do research,” he said. The night was cold, and he was just wearing a short-sleeve button-up shirt with blue Hawaiian flowers on it. He had started wearing more colorful, lax clothing like that, as if to assert that he wasn’t just some scholar.

“Well, the internet hasn’t been invented yet, or at least not for the common folk,” I said. “So, the library first thing in the morning?”

Camden looked over in the direction of the library. It wasn’t that far of a walk.

“Sounds good,” he said. “You turning in for the night?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Depends. How far away is Hanging Tree Lookout?”

He laughed under his breath. “You afraid Ramona might fall in love?”

“Or worse,” I said. “She could get attacked by a shadow demon.”

He stopped in his tracks. “Do you think that’s likely?”

I wasn’t sure. The setup was there, but it was too soon, one attack right after the other? We weren’t even halfway through the movie yet. We weren’t in the constant barrage portion of the film yet. Ramona was also guaranteed to be Second Blood, so she should be safe.

“I think she’ll get freaked out by some shadows,” I said. “I doubt she’ll get kidnapped. I’ll be listening in.”

I didn’t realize how weird it would be to listen in on that sort of scene until later. They didn’t just look at the vista, those liars.

He nodded, and we continued walking, headed in the general direction of our various housing situations.

“Is Ramona like your girlfriend or something?” he asked.

I continued walking for a bit, took a deep breath, and said, “I have no idea.” And then we both laughed and ran off into the night.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep