“The rock candy and the weathervane work well,” Camden said.

I nodded my head.

“How about the others?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The door handle might be fine, but apparently, that one’s pretty weird when it comes to Plot Armor.

“So,” I said, “We only use it in emergencies.”

He stared into the massive tome that was the Atlas. He ate a Carousel brand Hot Pocket called a Tongue Torcher.

“I’m not exactly sure what it is the players who wrote the entry were trying to say, but it sounds confusing,” he answered after a moment.

Yep. Emergencies only. The players who wrote the Atlas were careful not to spoil storylines, but some pitfalls were so great that they still did their best to warn others off without saying why.

“And the rest?” I asked.

“PA 39. PA 40. 40. Level 41. Level 40 again,” he said, reading off a list he had written and pointing to the relevant omen.

We had spent time going to the pawn shop, the psychic shop—pretty much anywhere that sold omens and wasn’t dangerous to travel to, so we could build a collection.

“I understand,” I said.

There was something very, very dangerous about most of the omens we had collected. And that thing was me.

Storylines in Carousel came in different variations of difficulty. Some had a PA 20 difficulty, but then, if you brought a player with over 40 Plot Armor, the whole storyline jumped up to a 40 PA difficulty. There were some advantages and disadvantages to this system from the player’s perspective.

One benefit was that things like how Eternal Savers Club could be run by players anywhere from Level 10 to Level 80, and it would still be a Plot Armor 40 story. If you had enough players over that PA, assigning shopping duties was a breeze.

Most stories were not so forgiving.

Most stories got more difficult around Plot Armor 40, which I had just crossed.

That made things complicated. If I were around when we needed to use an emergency omen, I would up the difficulty just by being there for most of these.

“Well, I’ll carry around some of the rock candy,” I said.

Camden nodded. The others had a lot more to choose from as far as emergency omens went.

We were in the living room. We had taken all of our omens and put them up on a shelf that we had liberated from the furniture store on one of our trips.

We displayed this odd variety of objects as if they were family heirlooms or valuable decorations.

Camden said it made the whole entryway look like the inside of one of those restaurants that are decorated by covering the walls with old rusty antiques, so the place looks folksy and not like a corporate chain.

This collection was important.

The one drawback to Kimberley’s loft was that sometimes mobile omens—a different type than those we collected, the kind that took “mobile” literally—would knock on the door in some way or another and threaten to trap us all in a storyline if we couldn’t find a way to dismiss them.

If that ever came—if we could not find a way out of triggering a visiting omen—we had a whole shelf of alternatives, some of which could be activated immediately.

You had to pick your poison in life. In Carousel, that was literal. If a nasty omen came to Kimberly’s door that we couldn’t figure out how to dismiss, we could not start a safer storyline using one of our purchased omens.

“Sorry,” Camden said. “Even back when the Atlas was written originally, it was always assumed that there would be a wide variety of players at different levels. But you just keep being an overachiever.”

I nodded.

“I’m a victim of my own success,” I said. “Plot Armor 41. Never thought I’d see the day.”

And I still wasn’t even halfway to the level we would need to be to do the rescue at Camp Dyer.

It was frustrating that I would have to wait for the others to catch up. But that was the game. If I didn’t have a team to run the story with me, I was going to have a bad time.

While we were in the living room, Kimberley, Antoine, Logan, and all of the other players whose Plot Armor was in the 30s were planning out their next run.

They’d been talking for a while, so when they grew quiet, both Camden and I looked over at them, wondering where the silence came from.

And then I heard the ringing. Click.

“Kimberley, why do you never call me these days?” Kimberley’s fake talent agent, Sal, said over the speakerphone. “I swear, there are rumors of your retirement spreading around.”

“I just got off a shoot less than a week ago,” Kimberley said. “I’m not going to retire until I’m dead.”

She shushed everyone as the giggling started.

“Oh yeah, that shoot. The time travel movie. Really took a back seat there, didn’t you? Is your name even in the credits? Maybe I can talk to the production company and have you listed as a cameo so no one thinks your career is on a backward slide.” Sal said, taking a deep breath. “Oh, forgive me, dear. I haven’t had anything to eat today. You know how I can get.”

“Sal,” Kimberley said, largely ignoring his color commentary, “I’m thinking of doing a big blockbuster summer movie. Have you heard anything about The Sunken Cradle?”

The sound of paper being flipped came through the paper. I always imagined Sal’s desk being covered with stacks of scripts.

“Time to cash in on the goodwill, huh?” Sal asked. “Let’s make some real money. Look at you. I may have a contact in that production.”

“Is there a chance I could get a leading role in it?” Kimberley asked.

“With your star power, I’m sure you could just walk on set, and they would cast you as the leading lady. I hear they’ve already got their hero attached.”

“Do they?” Kimberley asked.

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Everyone closed in and smiled. It was hard not to smile when Sal talked. Not only was he genuinely funny, but he was speaking in code the whole time, giving hints about the storyline, and there was a real sense that there was an actual person on the other side. Sal might have been a real guy.

And they might not have been an NPC either.

“Get this—and you didn’t hear this from me,” Sal said. “The film’s final title is Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle. You will never believe who they cast to play Antoine Stone.”

“Who?” Kimberley asked, suppressing a laugh.

“You will never guess,” Sal repeated.

Meanwhile, Antoine was grinning from ear to ear and suppressing his own laughter.

The Sunken Cradle was an adventure story with a very Indiana Jones vibe. It took on the name of its lead player, and that meant Antoine was going to get to be the star—and not just the strong boyfriend, or the carpenter, or whatever he was in Post-Traumatic.

“More than that,” Sal said, “they’ve got this hotshot new director, who you’ve worked with before. Everyone is expecting great things from this film with a director like this.”

As soon as Sal stopped talking, everyone looked up from the phone and turned to look at me.

The trope that Kimberley used to talk to her talent agent, Just Ask Sal, worked like many other scouting tropes. It made educated guesses about which players near the user would end up in the storyline.

Because I was in the room, it assumed I would be joining. Sal had often referred to me as being the director of the movie that we were scouting out. After all, my Aspect was Filmmaker.

“Could you hold on just a second?” Kimberley asked.

“Sure, dear. Let me find my knitting needles,” Sal said.

Kimberley muted the phone and then looked at me. “Do you think that you could—”

“Yes,” I said. “I can leave.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you here,” she added.

I put up my hands in a calming gesture and said, “I understand. Don’t want to confuse the scouting trope.”

And I really did need to leave.

If Sal thought that I was in the movie, that meant the difficulty of the movie he described would get much harder because of my Plot Armor. Which meant that Kimberley and the others would get bad information.

I needed to get out of the range of that trope.

“All right, Team A gets the loft,” I said. “Team Dead Beat goes up on the roof.”

I didn’t pick the team names.

My team—who, aside from me, all had Plot Armor in the 20s—got up (those of us that were in the room) and started heading up toward the stairs.

Kimberley shot me a look like, I’m sorry. I must have looked sad, and though I didn’t want anyone to know it, there was a strange pang in my stomach realizing that I couldn’t stay here to help them plan.

Not firsthand, at least.

I had a new trope called Behind the Camera that allowed me to help from the sidelines without harming the scores of my teammates. The plan was that I would use that trope to help guide the lower-level players to victory.

It was an important task. The storyline we had picked was a bit higher in level than they could safely handle on their own.

I put a smile on my face—or as close to a smile as I normally had—and climbed the steps up to the roof.

It was a nice day outside, and eventually, all of my team had gathered there with me.

“All right, so the typical way to use this,” I said as I stood next to Ramona, “is to open up the blade and then—for some reason that defies all logic—prick your finger against the end like you didn’t know it was going to be sharp. All you need is one little drop of blood.”

I had seen that happen in more movies and TV shows than I could count.

“Do I actually have to bleed?” she asked.

“What do you think this is? Goosebumps?” I asked.

“Maybe,” she said. “What’s Goosebumps?”

It was so easy to forget she was not of our world. I shook my head.

“‘Do I have to bleed?’” I repeated mockingly. “You do have to bleed—and make sure there’s a good shot of it for the camera. You should probably even say, ‘Ouch. ’”

I had decided to award the pocketknife I’d stolen from the hardware store to Ramona. Its Anointed trope gave the user a boost to Mettle while using it if they got their own blood on it. I was coming up with ways I’d seen in movies for that to happen.

We were going to aim for a combat build for her. It might not have been ideal, but a Defiant often finds themselves alone in a fight, and I wanted her to be able to protect herself. Also, Ramona already had the instinct to run toward danger, so it all fit.

People remember the Hysterics that scream and cry and run away, but sometimes they do the exact opposite. Bruisers were not the only archetype of rage. Hysterics were too.

“Now, pricking your finger,” I said, “is probably not going to give you a huge boost to Mettle, but it’s an accepted way to show that your knife is sharp—so it’s believable when you drive it into someone. You got me?”

She nodded.

“Now, which end am I supposed to stick into them?” she asked.

“Ah,” I said. “Movie fighting is an art, okay? And I’m trying to make sure that you excel at it, so I’d really like it if you’d cool it with the mockery.”

“That’s probably not going to happen,” she said.

“Okay, but the real move with this knife,” I said, “is when you struggle against an enemy and you let them win—at first.”

“Last time I let an enemy win in a fight, I ended up buried in a coffin six feet underground,” she said.

“Gonna be honest—that’s going to happen some portion of the time,” I said. “What you do is, you let them overpower you for a moment. As they try to push the knife back into you, you guide it into your shoulder—and as soon as the knife touches your blood, the trope will activate and give you some much-needed Mettle so that you can overpower them and kill them with the knife. You understand? There’s a bit of pageantry to that move.”

It was another classic movie fight technique.

“I remember learning about that in karate,” Isaac said. “The parents were upset.”

The others on my team were watching us.

My ragtag group of survivors was not particularly balanced, but since when had my team ever been balanced?

I turned to them to assess things.

“All right. Anna is our main fighter. She’s also our Final Girl, so she should be central to the plot. By the Slice does not strike me as a particularly combat-heavy story, but the details are a little fuzzy in the Atlas. What we do know is that there is no death.”

Isaac pumped his fist.

“But the reason for that,” I continued, “is because this storyline has a fate worse than death.”

“I celebrated too soon,” Isaac said.

“What’s more—this is a comedy. So, Isaac, Carousel is going to do something to put some pressure on you. Don’t waste this opportunity. You’re under-leveled, so this might be your chance to make a big splash.”

“That sounds messy. I never claimed to be a comedian,” he said. “I didn’t ask for this. I just want that on record.”

That was on record many times over.

“Trust me, none of us asked for our lives to rely on you being funny,” Cassie said. The brother-sister rivalry raged on.

Before the two of them could get into a shouting match, I asked, “Cassie, have you been able to get through with your I’m Blocked trope?”

Her trope could let her learn important information about supernatural enemies.

“They have me on hold,” she said. “And then when it looks like I’m about to get through, they hang up on me.”

I squinted and looked at Camden.

He shared my fascination.

“You’re saying that when you try to connect psychically with our enemy… it sounds like you’re on the phone with him?” he asked.

She nodded. “Yes. They keep putting me on hold.”

Honestly, that was kind of funny, but it was also worrisome. Comedic power was nothing to take lightly, especially when your enemy wielded it.

I sat back and looked at my team. Anna and Camden were solid. While they weren’t exactly experienced actors, they had good heads on their shoulders—and that was what we really needed.

Cassie was very promising but not particularly motivated when it came to establishing herself as a character that exists within the story.

Isaac could be funny, but he had an instinct to object to anything he worried he might struggle with—usually with some rant about why he shouldn’t be doing it to begin with. If he ever decided to give it his all, he might be a contender.

Comedians had so many options for what kind of character they could play. He just needed to find a couple that he could pull off.

Avery was new to me. She was the Eye Candy for Logan’s team, and he thought highly of her abilities. I didn’t know much about her, and I could tell that she really wished she were on the other team. But I couldn’t fault her for that, because I did too.

That left Ramona. The lowest-level player. The great unknown. She did seem like she had a certain self-awareness and quick-wittedness.

She playfully jabbed the closed pocketknife in my direction.

I stared at her closely.

An article in The Disclosures, the newspaper I had taken from the Manifest Consortium, had spoken about our “most delicate entanglement, whispered in every drawing room—equal parts enchantment and disquiet.”

We were on a reality show for immortal gossips.

We knew the drill. We all did.

To survive, we had to be entertaining. They were watching us every waking hour—and then some.

Survival meant putting on a show.

Ramona stared at me playfully. I reached out and grabbed the knife—and her hand. I smiled at her.

Somewhere in the sky, a camera saw it all.

My new team looked at me. I was the highest-level player around, and apparently, some of the things I managed to pull off were impressive.

That made them feel brave. And optimistic.

I just hoped I could do something more than boss them around.

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