I couldn’t really complain about nightmares, could I? That was the worst I had seen of these demon enemies of ours, at least as far as my suffering went.

But when I woke up covered in sweat, it was difficult not to regret choosing this storyline.

As strange as it might seem, sleep was something that Carousel rarely denied players, Goodnight Neighbor being an exception. Sure, it might wake them from their slumber to chase them around with monsters, but that was for the camera; there was generally time to rest between scenes.

Here, every time I went to sleep, I learned a few new tropes that the Repossessors held. And in order to acquire them, I had to run through some sort of surreal, hellish version of the pizza parlor, chased sometimes by shadows, but this time by possessed animatronics with cracked limbs that allowed them to contort and twist in ways their design was not meant to.

My pursuers never caught me that I remembered.

Worse yet, I had a feeling that the Night Terrors trope the Repossessors had was interacting with my psychic background to give me insight into the hell world that existed beneath it all. But because this was a nightmare, I was having difficulty remembering what happened.

After the first night, I had set out a notebook and a pen, hoping to write down everything. So when I woke and dried my sopping, sweaty skin with a towel, I began writing, trying to record everything I had seen in my nightmare.

Despite the surreal nature, I got the feeling that this endless, exaggerated maze, composed of things found in the pizza parlor, was a physical place, not just a figment of my imagination.

Worst of all, I felt I remembered something only in part. Something I had seen but couldn’t recall upon waking, except for the feeling it had given me, a feeling of true dread.

A feeling that, though this was dressed up as a comedy, we were dealing with something that had once been quite terrifying. And I had seen something related to it in the darkness, as I ran through a maze of arcade machines and pizza buffets.

I had seen people who had asked me for help.

My memory couldn’t be relied upon to make that conclusion, but my heart remembered.

My heart remembered because a single thought resonated in my mind. That thought was: We didn’t come here to save you. And from that, I could piece together what the aching sensation in my chest was.

For us, this was a fake hell, but not for everyone there.

Repossessor

Plot Armor: 25

__________

tropes

Night Terrors

All information from insight tropes directly related to this entity will come in the form of On-Screen nightmares or visions.

Stickler for the Rules

This entity has a set of rules or goals that it will always strive to abide by or achieve (whether is able to is another question).

Fate Worse Than Death

This entity does not want to kill its victims, though, in the end, they will wish it had. Victims are Written-Off instead of killed.

Your Soul to Take

The entity seeks human souls.

Bender of Truth

This entity may not directly lie, but will use wordplay to deceive and take advantage of opponents.

Foam Ax

Although this entity is very powerful, some limitation prevents it from being physically dominant.

Fairy Land

This entity has a home world, realm, or dimension relevant to the plot.

Wordplay Over Swordplay

The final battle will not be a battle of brawn.

On the bright side, I did learn three new tropes that these enemies had.

First, I learned that they were limited physically. I felt I had seen that limitation in action when I had seen Avery taken. The shadows didn’t seem able to touch a person when they were shadows, but only when they were possessing a physical object. They had to possess Avery’s car or possess the skin suits they wore, however ridiculous those might have been.

I also received confirmation that the final battle wouldn’t be a physical fight. Based on what I had seen, it would likely be a battle of wits, and to that end, it would come down to Camden, our Scholar.

What a coincidence that I was supposed to meet with him that morning to discuss this very problem.

The plan had been for Camden to conduct his research scenes at the library independently. I was going to hover Off-Screen as moral support, for sure, but it would just be him researching within the scene.

But then he got a phone call from Anna.

The night before, while they were at Hanging Tree Lookout, the shadows had come back as predicted. No men in strange skin suits accompanied them, but the shadows were enough to terrify Ramona and freak Anna out.

I had listened in on the scene.

We had tried to preserve Anna’s innocence, so to speak, by preventing her from seeing evidence of the supernatural. That way, she could have plausible deniability for why she would do silly things like going back to work.

But that experience in the car had ruined whatever ignorance she had of the issue; the shadows had made themselves apparent, and their demonic nature was evident to everyone there. Still, Carousel would have to use a lot of precious screen time to show these scenes we were making. That would eat up a lot of the hellish torture scenes that might otherwise take their place.

It also meant that Anna could join in on the research scene.

I was already pushing it as far as being a main character went, so it was unlikely I was going to be able to join Camden in his research-heavy next phase, or at least, I wouldn’t be able to join him On-Screen.

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We went to the library. Luckily, the main Carousel library was actually very close to the storyline, so we could just walk there. We had no reason to worry about any of the omens inside the library because we were already in a storyline.

The only issue, if there was one, was how we would approach our research.

I waited outside while Camden had an On-Screen interaction with a librarian. She pointed him to the right section to search and gave him some tips. I was listening in using my headphones and my Quiet On Set trope.

Camden didn’t need the directions, but maybe the audience did. Who knew.

Anyhow, that was how we ended up sitting at a long wooden table with little green lamps in the folklore section of the Carousel library.

“I believe these demons are associated with El et El,” Camden said. “Eledal. I don’t know; it’s spelled in multiple different ways. He’s called the Great Forger. That’s interesting, I think it means like blacksmith forger, not like counterfeiter.”

“Yeah, that would have been way more fun,” I said. “So does he have, like, a cult presence or something in Carousel?”

Camden had six books in front of him, all open and all so easily accessible to him that it was basically pointless for Anna or me to try to help. Eureka was a powerful trope. I had missed it at moments like these.

“No,” Camden said. “It would seem he has a major religion behind him in this storyline. Something like 70% of people in Carousel attend a Church of Elidel—there’s a third spelling—at least twice a year.”

“Ohh,” I said. “So that’s probably our religion.”

I didn’t even think to probe for that.

“I would bet so. I think Cassie and Isaac’s family is definitely religious because they had some of his iconography on the walls, we just didn’t notice.”

He held up a book and pointed to some pictures and inscriptions.

“Is that a peace sign?” Anna asked.

It did look like a peace sign, the circular kind with the Y inside, but it had another circle in the middle.

“No,” Camden said. “It’s the three-spoked wheel. It’s a major symbol of the religion. But anyway, the Hughes family had some of this on their walls. I can look up the lore on demons in this religion—the Church of Elidel—if you want.”

“Or?” I asked.

“Well, there’s like a separate section that’s just folklore-based, like, uh, Elidelian mythology rather than scripture.”

I nodded my head. “We need to try to keep this as far away from the actual religion as possible. We haven’t put in the prep to be able to succeed at a religious fight, and I sense religion’s not really the strongest angle. From the tropes I’ve seen, I think this is just a simple Faustian bargain or something about tricking the devil at a crossroads or so.”

Camden nodded.

“Well, that narrows things down,” he said. Of the six books he had collected, he took five of them and pushed them away from himself, leaving only one remaining: an old cloth-bound book with a simple title: Rotten Deeds.

“Rotten Deeds,” I said.

“Yeah,” he answered, flipping through the book. “Demons in this folklore are big on deal-making, but the deals, or contracts, or rules that they make always have some flaw in them that makes them non-binding. They’ll still try to drag you to hell anyway, but the deals are bad. And that’s why they’re called rotten deeds like a deed to a house.”

“There’s always something wrong with the deal?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s very clear about that. They don’t want to make a deal with you to send your soul to hell fair and square; they want to trick you into it.”

At that point, I was fairly sure that Gus Senior had made a deal sometime in the decades preceding his death. How was he tricked?

I started to say something else, but then I looked to my left and saw Anna sitting there quietly, listening, and I realized that, for no reason at all, I was steamrolling things. Even if we weren’t On-Screen, Anna and Camden would be scene partners very soon; they needed to start working on a rapport.

Anna had even brought the trope Lead-In Line, which gave her a lot of narrative power when she was the one talking to the Savvy-based ally and drawing out all those important details, like: What kind of deals do demons make, and how do you get out of them?

“You two practice your back and forth,” I said. “We need to know the nature of these deals, and we need to know how to get out of them. And more than that, we need to know what’s going on with that sixth pizza because the idea that eating a pizza could send you to hell is just… well, as we said before, it’s a thin plot device.”

And so they did. They practiced asking questions over and over; Camden must have turned through every page in that little book half a dozen times.

As hard as it was to admit, it was really difficult to just sit back and watch. This was my job; it had been my job in so many storylines.

I felt like I was useless, but I knew I had to do it, because I was just there to help them along and nothing more. It went against every instinct I had developed. Every time Anna missed the opportunity to ask the perfect question to hone in on something Camden had said, it was difficult.

Luckily, I could just write things down, and since the camera wasn’t going to be zoomed in on the pads of paper they had in front of them, well, I could help Anna develop a cheat sheet.

That would, at the very least, help relieve some, if not all, of my anxiety about just watching.

As the details poured out, I realized that the coming scene was incredibly important because these demons were not like the ones from the legends back on Earth, not exactly. They were similar, though.

When it came time for the scene, I left the room and went to the other side of a bookshelf, where I sat knowing I would be Off-Screen.

I could hear what was going on even without my Quiet On Set trope.

I just had to trust them.

Soon, they were On-Screen. They spent time establishing the scene.

“Please tell me that we are officially crazy,” Anna said. “I would rather just find out that I was hallucinating.”

Anna had just poured out her soul about what she had just experienced the night before, in case Carousel needed that footage or explanation for her motivation.

Camden had a perplexed and troubled look on his face as he held the book titled Rotten Deeds in his hands.

“Well, if we’re not crazy,” he said, “I think I know what might be going on.”

He had a nice tremble to his voice.

“Well?” Anna said expectantly.

“Well… it’s demons,” he said.

“I know it’s demons,” Anna said. “I saw something in that shadow. Saw it with my own eyes, but not just with my eyes, you know?”

“Yeah, I know,” Camden said.

“What do they want?” she asked.

“Souls,” Camden said, “almost exclusively souls. There’s all kinds of lore about them scheming, making deals, making contracts, all with the goal of obtaining souls through trickery.”

“Trickery?” Anna asked. “Like the thing where they tried to make a deal with Isaac even though he’s underage?”

Camden was hesitant.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Well, what does maybe mean?” Anna asked.

Camden bit his lip and then tried to explain. “Normally, people who they tricked into going to hell know that’s what’s happening, or at least they know that they’re selling their soul, even if they don’t know they’re being tricked. Isaac and Ramona ate a piece of pizza, and now they are going to hell? That just… it just doesn’t make sense.”

“It makes as much sense as anything else,” Anna said, looking down at the paper I had given her. “Did you look at the ad in the newspaper? Maybe there was, like, some hidden clause or something that said if you ate the free pizza, you go to hell.”

“There wasn’t,” Camden said. “I know that the ad is related to this, but I don’t think it’s a contract or a trap or anything. It just doesn’t have the right language for that.”

“So why’d they try to take Isaac? Why did they terrorize Ramona?”

“I don’t know,” Camden said, “but I do know that what happened when Cassie told them Isaac was a minor is very interesting because traditionally, that’s the way you’re supposed to get out of one of their little devil’s traps, their fake contracts, their arcane laws, their deals. There’s always a problem, and you’re supposed to point it out. And when you do, well, they have to leave you alone. If you don’t… as soon as they get you to hell, it doesn’t matter anymore.”

“So maybe that’s what they’re doing,” Anna said. “They’re making these bad deals that aren’t really contracts and hoping nobody calls them out on it before they get to hell.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Camden said.

“There’s maybe again. Can you speak your mind?” Anna asked. “It feels like you’re afraid to talk.”

“No, I just don’t want to say it out loud,” he said. “I’m still working on a thought.”

“Say it anyway,” Anna said, reaching across the table and grabbing his hand briefly.

He picked up the newspaper and started reading from the ad. “Trespassers be advised. Satisfaction guaranteed.”

He looked up at her, hoping that she would come to the same conclusion he had, so that maybe he wouldn’t seem so foolish.

“Okay, it’s weird that they have the trespassers part. What about it?” she said.

“Well, this is a dictionary for the religion of Elidel,” Camden said. “Look at this. Look at the definition of trespasser.”

He turned the book around so she could see.

“So it means sinner?” she read. “Someone who does wrong against another person.”

That wasn’t just true in this Carousel religion.

“Okay, and check this out.” He then flipped some pages. “Check out the definition of satisfaction,” he said.

Anna stared down at where he was pointing.

“Forgiveness,” she said, “or something like that.”

“Kind of,” Camden said. “Technically, it’s Elidel who forgives you, but satisfaction is about wiping the slate clean and making up for your sin. But there’s other stuff in the ad too. Same crust. Same sauce, Greater bargain. That’s another word for a deal.”

“What are you getting at?” Anna asked. “You’re saying that this is a coded message about sinners bargaining to wipe their slate clean? Why would a demon do that? Isn’t their whole thing about sending people to hell?”

“Kind of. Their goal is to trick people into going to hell. I don’t think that this prevents them from doing that. But here’s the thing, here’s the real clincher. I was looking at the phone number. I thought maybe there’s some sort of hint as to what this ad is actually about in the phone number. Because if the ad’s not for people just buying pizza, then the ad is for people wanting to get their slate wiped clean, right?

“So, what does the phone number say?”

He turned around his own pad of paper where he had written 555-7468, the phone number to Pecatto’s Pizza.

“7468,” he said. “That could spell out RIOT on the telephone, but I don’t think riot is the right word. And I kept messing around with stuff, but I hadn’t been able to find anything… until I thought maybe 746 stands for S-I-N.”

On older phones, users could type words by pressing numbers corresponding to specific letters.

Anna stared down.

“Okay… well, the eight would have to be, what, T-U-V? So, sint, sinu…”

“Probably not,” Camden said, “but what if the 8 isn’t a substitute for a letter? What if it’s just 8?”

Anna stared at him.

“Sin 8,” she said.

“Sin ate,” Camden repeated slowly.

“Sin ate,” Anna said again, realizing what he was trying to say. “Oh my goodness.”

Camden nodded. “Maybe I’m crazy, or maybe I figured out what’s in those free pizzas.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep