“Say what you will about Dr. Andrew Hughes, but the man does keep his head, even in the most perilous of situations,” Logan said with a smirk, raising his glass. “To Andrew.”

Logan rarely actually drank, but tonight was an exception. We were in the restaurant downstairs from the Loft, Grain Matter. Their team had only returned hours before. They were weary and tired, but they didn’t want to sleep.

They wanted food. Real food.

“To Andrew!” Antoine, Kimberly, Michael, and the others cheered.

“Very funny,” Andrew said. I got the sense there was an inside joke somewhere, because Andrew distinctly looked like he was being teased.

“Oh, come on,” Isaac said. “Why are you acting so crabby?”

Andrew looked at him and said plainly, “I’m craving nicotine. It may be the worst craving I’ve ever had in my life.”

That did explain some things. He looked green.

“But you don’t smoke,” Cassie said. Both she and Isaac looked concerned for their brother. He had always been the responsible one.

“I’ve never touched it in my life,” Andrew said, “but my character did, and he was craving it every moment of every day.”

That struck me as odd. It wasn’t unprecedented for a player to get information like that about their character, but the type of player who could do that usually wasn’t analytical or logical like Andrew. They were usually emotional and empathetic, like Kimberly.

But still, it was a little funny. I felt sorry for him.

The storyline they had run was not over-leveled for them. Most of them had gained a single stat ticket, except for Antoine and Lila, who got two.

Both Antoine and Kimberly had even gotten rescues. Antoine’s was a more run-of-the-mill case called Baseline Anomaly, where he could investigate the cover-up of one of his old friends’ deaths, where the official story didn’t match what Antoine knew of them.

Something in the vein of, “He couldn’t have drowned in that river. He was always cautious. He would never risk taking that path.”

That sort of thing.

Kimberly’s was a trope called Breath into the Franchise, which allowed her to revive and star in a dead franchise. It was also straightforward.

The run was a success.

Still, though they may have been smiling and cheering and throwing back a few cocktails, they looked genuinely disturbed any time they spoke about their storyline.

It must have been pretty bad because my team was doing all right, and we had literally gone to hell.

Bobby had gotten down to the restaurant late because he had to put his dogs back up on the roof.

He sat next to an NPC named Jules. She had gone on the storyline with them due to the effect of his trope, The Bickering Duo, which gave him a partner for his assumed NPC duties. We weren’t sure about it, but the Atlas spoke highly of tropes like that.

Jules was a character in every sense of the word, outspoken, funny, and domineering. She would never tell us about her real background, although she seemed to imply she was part of a military unit stationed on an alien planet at some point in time.

Though she may have been messing with us.

She was in her fifties but remained in great physical shape. She wore short, spiky blonde hair and military fatigues, but that might have been from the storyline they were on. I wasn’t sure.

“If you had died, I would have missed you,” she said to Bobby after he finally came down to the table. “At least until someone else got my trope. But even then, I’d miss the dogs.”

“Thanks,” Bobby said. He took a deep breath. It would seem that she took the bickering part of The Bickering Duo very seriously.

“I’d just have to hope my next player knows how to drive a stick,” she said.

“I do!” Bobby said. “I told you, the bridge was collapsing. No one can drive a vehicle vertically.”

“Well, if you had been driving in the right gear like I told you, we would have been halfway to that supply depot before the bridge collapsed, and we could have avoided that whole dodging-rocks-while-climbing-the-broken-bridge scene.”

Jules buttered her rolls excessively before eating them.

“Miss,” she said, flagging down a nearby waitress. “My friend here ordered the red-eye gravy. This looks like the standard brown.”

“It’s fine,” Bobby said.

“No, you ordered the red-eye.” She continued talking to the waitress. “Can you go ahead and get us a replacement? And some more rolls and butter while you’re at it? Thanks a bunch.”

The waitress apologized and walked back toward the kitchen.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Bobby said.

“Life is full of things you don’t have to do. A full life is one where you do them anyway. Now slide over that extra roll you have there while it’s still hot. I intend to eat my weight in butter before I have to go back to the barracks.”

Bobby passed her the roll, as commanded.

My mind wandered back to their run. Had things gone poorly, or was this just normal post-storyline trauma bonding?

I tried making eye contact with Kimberly, as if to ask her nonverbally if things had gone wrong, but she was dejected and giving all of her attention to Antoine.

It was kind of funny.

The two groups had both gone on fantastical and horrific adventures, and yet we couldn’t actually tell each other about them. Because there was a real chance that we would each need to run the other storyline at some point in time, and we couldn’t risk spoilers.

Still, each time the topic of Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle came up, there was a palpable uneasiness. A fear. Something unspoken.

Camden had picked up on the same things I had and had gone up to get the Atlas. He shoved the book in front of Antoine and Kimberly and flipped to the spoiler section, which he was careful not to look at himself.

“Does the storyline you played line up with this?” he asked.

“Man, I don’t know,” Antoine said, not even wanting to look down at it. “I don’t want to think about that cradle ever again.”

Antoine must have done well, because in one storyline, just one, he had not only started tracking the Adventurer advanced archetype, but gotten five points in it.

He was halfway to achieving it.

Now, part of that was explained by Athletes being very predisposed to the Adventurer advanced archetype, which covered things like the athletic aspect of exploration, with tropes related to climbing, cave diving, and general outdoor survival.

As an Athlete and a Health Nut at that, Antoine was a shoo-in.

The only part of the Adventurer archetype he was missing at the moment was the information-gathering aspect, since Adventurers usually knew a lot about treasure and history.

But he was working on it, and he seemed excited about it.

“You worried I’m gonna be the first with an advanced archetype?” he asked after sharing his good news.

“Nothing wrong with a little healthy competition,” I said, although I didn’t actually view it as a competition. I only wanted to discover what the “???” advanced archetype was. I was seven points along toward achieving it, and still I couldn’t be sure what I had done to earn them.

Curiosity drove me about most things in Carousel. I wanted to know what the archetype was and why it wasn’t labeled. It had to be something related to my intentional endeavors, surely. The AA tracker had been placed inside the Throughline tracker, and Throughlines required intentional thread pulling. So, whatever “???” was, it must have been related to a “thread” I was already pulling, but what? By the Slice had not gotten me any closer to finding out.

Was it possible that those of us tracking that advanced archetype would be the first to achieve it? Had it never been discovered before?

I didn’t know. Thus, the curiosity.

Kimberly was reading the page Camden had opened up.

And unfortunately, she was feeding into his obsession.

“This is a little odd,” she said. “It’s not that different, but it is a little odd.”

“Is it possible that it got rebalanced to become more difficult than the book suggests?” Camden asked.

“It’s possible,” she answered. “Or maybe we just took a while to figure it out.”

“Let me see that,” Logan said, and then he had the Atlas in his hands, reading through the spoiler section for the Sunken Cradle storyline.

“That is strange,” he said. “We did this part, but then, I don’t know how this is supposed to happen…”

It wasn’t that productive of a conversation because we were all concerned about spoilers.

“Well, I’ve got a theory,” Camden said. “I think the storylines are being rebalanced. They aren’t technically changing a lot, like there are still the same rules and tropes, but maybe Carousel’s experimenting with execution.”

He went on to tell them about how our storyline had basically become a sort of trick, where the players were supposed to accidentally ignore the main plot in favor of the Hell subplot.

Of course, it wasn’t a compelling conversation, with no specifics allowed and all.

“We’re thinking of going to the video store to see if we can find some old tapes of that storyline,” Camden said. “Just to see how much it changed. It’s possible that the spoiler section of the Atlas only contains information that is unusual and noteworthy, which could provide a skewed characterization of the story itself.”

He had really been thinking about this.

“Have you been drinking?” Avery asked him.

“No,” Camden said. “Why?”

“Because you should be,” she said. “This is not the conversation we’re trying to have for the moment, you understand? While you were in the library, some of us weren’t having a great time, and we would like to let off some steam.”

Avery wasn’t usually so confrontational, but she said it in such a ditzy, drunken tone that it didn’t come across that way.

People laughed. Camden dropped the topic reluctantly.

“I’ll tell you,” Jules said, having moved on from rolls and butter to shots of vodka. “I’ve fought some pretty scary things, but what we just saw in the forest? You just got the sense that killing them wouldn’t do the trick, you know?”

“Stop it,” Bobby said. “You’re not supposed to spoil the story.”

“If it were spoilers, I wouldn’t be able to say it. You’re a Wallflower, you should know that,” she said. “Part of it, they already know, they must. And the other part is just me telling a tall tale, for all anyone cares.”

We had come across a lot of meta-aware NPCs and enemies lately. Maybe Camden was right. Maybe Carousel was trying something new. Or perhaps the limited version of Carousel that existed due to Project Rewind didn’t accommodate meta-aware characters.

“I think you’ve had enough to drink,” Bobby said.

“Not possible,” Jules said. “But I trust your judgement, braniac. It would seem I haven’t been called away yet. Could you please show me somewhere I could lie down?”

“Sure,” Bobby said, helping her out of her chair.

“Now don’t get any funny ideas,” she said. “No man’s lips have touched mine except for Private Marquez, when he dragged me out of the Bullhead River on Veleres Nine and gave me CPR. He’ll be the first and the last.”

“I’m not going to kiss you,” Bobby said.

“Well, that is very gentlemanly of you, but you don’t have to say it so hurtfully,” Jules responded. She snorted. I got the sense that she enjoyed this character.

Their conversation went on, but they went upstairs, so I didn’t hear it.

The other team was giggling at Jules and her funny manner of delivering her lines.

“Was she useful?” I asked, genuinely curious.

“Way more than you might think,” Logan said. “Kept Bobby moving at top pace. Was a good lookout. Knew how to use weapons. Could see the script. Saved my life twice. She never let me forget it.”

Logan was a bit loaded himself at that moment.

I would later learn that this storyline had incorporated his cancer as a motivation for his character. He had a trope to help hide his illness; in fact, it was called Awfully Convenient Symptoms, but it only worked if his illness was not relevant to the plot.

From what I understood, he was a prisoner of some kind, though I did not hear those words specifically, and he was literally dying the entire time.

I couldn’t imagine how terrible that must have been.

I understood why he wanted to drink that night after I found out.

Carousel didn’t cure his cancer. No.

That would be wasting production value.

And Carousel would never do that.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep