I knew that Carousel rewarded exceptional feats, but I was expecting a reward in the form of something that fell out of Silas the Mechanical Showman’s ticket slot.

There were dozens of coins in varying denominations in the safe, about a hundred dollars worth, but that was not what interested us the most.

It was an envelope containing one handwritten letter that we wanted to see first.

It only took me a glance to know what it was. I passed it around so that the others could read.

“But I thought you couldn’t learn new information in the finale,” Isaac said. “Are we not in the finale?”

“You can’t discover new information in the finale unless it’s scripted,” I said. “But you can find a piece of paper containing information that you already figured out.”

I didn’t expect the Hell plotline and the devil’s deal plotline to dovetail Off-Screen like this, but you live and you learn.

“Camden and Anna?” Ramona asked after she had read the letter.

“They did their job,” I said. “Now we have to go back up there and help them finish.”

The truth was, there was only one real theory that could get us across the finish line. After all, this storyline had nothing to do with going down into hell. Rescuing these poor souls from their all-you-can-eat-and-more pizza buffet was a subplot.

The main plot was a different kind of rescue altogether.

What we had just received was not just a reward to us, I suspected. It was a reward to Anna and Camden for having solved the principal mystery of the story: how had the demons cheated Gus Senior into selling his soul? What was the trick? And how might we undo it? The letter told all. We just needed to get it to them.

First, we needed to escape Hell.

After we defeated the demon amalgamation, I could suddenly see the red wallpaper.

According to my Call Sheet trope, I didn’t go On-Screen for another three hours.

I was trying to think about the logistics of that, because as far as I could tell, all we had to do to escape was climb up out of the pit and use Hell’s version of Hot Head to ascend to a higher plane, aka the pizza parlor.

Was it still late at night up there?

I wasn’t going to complain. I was tired.

The NPCs weren’t acting scripted, which made me very concerned. In between scenes like this, they should be out of character, doing what they had to do to get to the next scene.

But they were acting like real people. It made me nervous.

Avery and Ruck had clearly formed some kind of bond with all the other captives, and all of them were hugging and rejoicing as they slowly made their way toward the stairs.

I caught up with them, and Isaac and Ramona followed. Isaac was moving a little slower; his healing trope could only do so much. He had taken quite the tumble.

Once we were all gathered together, I said, “I’m guessing that we have a scene at the top of those stairs, so I’ll have to fall behind in a bit.”

Isaac had come down here to rescue Avery, and that subplot needed some footage to show them leaving. The confrontation with the Off-Screen amalgamation would be like it never existed. It was only there as part of the hidden mechanics of the story.

As we waved the NPCs forward, I caught Ruck talking to Ramona.

“So there I was, laying out in my lawn chair. I’ve done this hundreds of times, thousands, I don’t even remember, and all I can think is, here we go again, wonder who the killer is. And I look over at the house, and I see Riley sitting inside the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal in front of the big window, acting like he can’t see me,” Ruck said.

Ramona shot me a curious smile.

“Now he’s playing the outcast even though he doesn’t know it, and we have my death scene coming up. It’s First Blood, it’s pretty standard. And all I can think is, what is this guy doing? So my friend Nathan, you know Nathan, you met him earlier, was the killer. And he comes up ready to stab me, acting all menacing while I’m basically just sleeping there in the lawn chair. And he shoots me this look like, what is this guy over here doing? So he stabs me to death. Nothing to worry about, I’ve secretly got like 100 Grit when it comes to pain in that storyline, so getting stabbed in the gut feels like a shirt button popping off to me.”

“Was he using Oblivious Bystander?” Ramona asked.

“He was using, yeah, that trope. I don’t know the name of it. Then Nathan has to go chase him, because that’s what he was supposed to do if there was a player around during the murder. And he goes to do it, but suddenly he can’t. He can’t do anything aggressive. He just looks menacing at him and poses up in front of the window. All the while, Riley’s just sitting there eating cereal while I’m getting murdered, bleeding out by the pool, dreaming about those little sandwiches that craft services gives us.”

“He doesn’t really use that very often anymore for some reason,” Ramona said, “but he always takes it with him.”

If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it’s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

“Well, I can’t blame him,” Ruck said, laughing. “I bet it drives all the killers wild.”

I felt like I was getting called out.

“I like having it with me,” I said, “as a backup even if I can’t use it all the time. It’s harder to be oblivious when you also have to be on top of things. I’ll use it more later, once people get leveled up.”

Maybe I was being defensive, as if this were a criticism of my loadout.

“It’s alright. We know you have everything thought through,” Ramona said.

Not by a long shot.

I shrugged my shoulders. The truth was, I would like to go back to just being some hapless Film Buff in storylines. But then, I had chosen Filmmaker as my aspect, which was a leadership role, even if it was a meta one.

“So who solved the murder?” Ramona asked. I felt like she knew the answer to this, but she was being friendly with Ruck.

“Our boy here,” Ruck said. “So there we were, in the finale, only like three players left. Riley’s got some bleeding wound, literally about to die on his way to the hospital. The Detective is ready for his scene. He’s gonna go to the frat house, give the remaining players that one last clue, and then get killed by Ranger Danger. That’s his thing. See, what most people don’t realize about Delta Epsilon Delta

is that it’s not actually a murder mystery for the players, it’s a murder mystery for the audience. Because none of the players have all the information. That’s why you need the Detective there.”

“That’s what happened when we ran it,” Avery said. “We thought we were about to lose. It was just me and Logan. We locked ourselves in the closet, and he was apologizing to me because he thought he had messed up. The Detective gets there and starts calling out our names, but we hadn’t really interacted with him that much, and for all we knew, he was the killer. Mostly, he had talked to Michael and Lila, who absolutely hated it. So he’s calling through the house, asking if anyone’s there, and we were too afraid to come out of the closet. Eventually, we go Off-Screen, and he comes and opens up the closet and basically tells us, ‘I need to have a scene with you real quick, so stop hiding.’ And then he gave us a clue, and it turned out that the Dean killed you because of some lawsuit.”

Ruck was laughing. “Yeah, that’s a rare one. The Dean hardly ever kills me. I don’t think the audience likes that one, but they don’t tell us anything. But the Detective never got to do his scene in Riley’s run, because here comes Riley, riding on a golf cart, holding in his guts, walks into the frat house and explains everything while bleeding out.”

Ruck looked at me with a big smile, and all I could feel was incredibly shy, suddenly.

“I didn’t know about the Detective showing up,” I said. “I thought my friends were about to die. I did what I had to.”

“Yeah, you did,” Ruck said. “We’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since.”

“Who?” I asked, suddenly feeling paranoid.

“The NPCs,” he responded. “Well, the ones who know what the heck is going on.”

I knew that there were meta-aware NPCs, but the idea of them meeting up with each other to talk about players felt strangely invasive. Normally, we didn’t hold our tongues around NPCs, because they ignored what we said, and they were everywhere.

“Isaac, how are you doing?” Ramona said. “You just found out that we’re being spied on by the NPCs, and you’re not saying anything?”

“What?” Isaac asked. He hadn’t been paying attention at all. He was lost in thought with a dreamy look on his face.

“There’s a question I have,” I said to Ruck. “It may be a little personal.”

We had started moving up the stairs. It was quite a walk, and we were a big group. I kept an eye on my Call Sheet trope timer because the moment that thing jumped forward was the moment the scene was about to start, and I needed to get out of the way.

“Go for it,” Ruck said.

“Who actually killed you?” I asked. “Like, originally.”

“I knew it,” he said.

“Well, every other storyline has changed for Carousel, but you can kind of guess what might have really happened. But your story has a new killer every run. It’s hard not to be curious,” I said.

“So you’re wondering which of those degenerates at the Delta Epsilon Delta house actually murdered me, huh?” he asked. “Well, the answer is… none of them.”

That was unexpected.

“Then who?” I asked. “And how did you end up here?”

“Well, it’s an interesting story,” he said. “A lot of it happened the way you saw in the storyline. We stole the Ranger mascot costume, so the Rangers ran their trucks out on the football field as revenge. Everybody at the party left the house to go kick some ass. Of course, it wasn’t Delta Epsilon Delta in real life. It was… I don’t really remember what it was. It’s been too long.”

“I’m drunk as a skunk, laying out on a deck chair as you saw, and then I see through the window somebody rifling through stuff in the house. Some kid. Sixteen, seventeen, maybe. I yelled at him to stop, and he heard me. Told him I was gonna kick his ass or call the cops just mouthing off, kind of thing I used to do. Well, he got really scared because he was homeless. Apparently, there was a mission down the street, something to do with orphans or something like that. So he grabs a knife and he comes out and he stabs me. And then he apologizes for it once he realizes what he did. All the time, I didn’t even manage to get out of the chair. I was so drunk and out of shape.”

He stopped talking, his eyes drifting to some far-off place in the past. He’d been trying to tell it like a funny story, but that didn’t mean it was one.

“Well, anyway, I didn’t know this because I was dead, but apparently, people had a lot of fun guessing who killed me. There were a lot of suspects, because I was a bit of an ornery fucker, you know. Well, with the Ranger costume missing, it all started an urban legend: Ranger Danger. Then every person that got killed on campus or near campus suddenly became another victim of Ranger Danger.”

He was trying to sound upbeat and happy, but I could hear a sadness in his voice. Of course, there was.

“Well, anyway, that’s how I ended up in Carousel,” he said. “Guess it made a game out of the whole thing.”

That was heavy.

“I’m so sorry,” Avery said. “It must be terrible to get killed all the time.”

“Yeah, all of us got murdered in the DED house,” he said. “It’s nice to be around my peers.”

“Yeah, I imagine everyone in that storyline has been killed a time or two,” I said.

“Well, no, I mean, we all got murdered. That’s what makes us special,” he said.

We had paused our ascent up the stairs.

“Like… in the real world?” Avery asked.

He nodded. “Evan got mugged, and they killed him because all he had was his student ID. He tried to explain to them that they could buy food from the campus stores with it, but they didn’t really care. Amber died on her spring break trip—she doesn’t like to talk about it. Nathan got locked in a burning building after he threatened to report someone for academic dishonesty.”

There was a silence after that. It was easier to think of them as drunk college kids. But the idea that they were a collection of murder victims painted a very different picture from the one I remembered.

“It’s not so bad,” Ruck said after a minute. “It’s an eternal party. Not the worst afterlife, eh?”

Suddenly, the timer on the red wallpaper went from just under three hours to thirty seconds, which was my cue to get out of the shot.

I ran back down the stairs and hid in some of the wreckage from the fight until my timer corrected itself.

Thinking of NPCs as constructs made by Carousel made it really easy to digest their existence. When we found out they were real people, that was hard. But finding out the specifics of how they died was a whole different deal.

I didn’t know if it was a good thing that Carousel grabbed them and gave them the odd afterlife of an ever-renewing murder mystery.

It was hard to say. Was any life beyond death better than none?

Up at the top of the steps, the escape scene was beginning, and all I could do was watch.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep