Daphne had to run to make it to the elevator on the floor below in time. No sooner did she push the button to go down than the indicator blinked, and the elevator, containing Antoine, opened up.

He casually glanced at her. They were On-Screen now. He had to play it cool. Maybe too cool.

“Antoine,” she said, thinking of something to say to him. “I think Kimberly is looking for you.”

He swallowed hard and then said, “I’ll catch up with her in a minute. I’d like to play the slots before we have to start boarding the lifeboats.”

He laughed nervously.

“So you’re going down to the casino floor?” she asked.

He nodded his head and said, “Might take the scenic route. There’s supposed to be a gym somewhere around here.”

Daphne smiled and glanced down at his suit.

He grabbed at his tie and straightened it, then said, “I brought a change of clothes. I’d just like to know where it is.”

“I’ll go with you,” she said, stepping into the elevator forcefully. She took a careful glance down at the room selection buttons and saw that he was taking the elevators to the basement level.

“You know, on second thought, I probably should go grab my clothes,” he said.

He was acting shifty, exactly as he was supposed to. Daphne admired that. It took real dedication to play a character well, and he was trying his best.

“You know what,” she said, “I’ll leave you to it. The caterer fled the scene, and Kimberly is probably flipping out.” With another glance down at the basement level indicator, she stepped out of the elevator.

As the elevator closed, they went Off-Screen. Antoine’s arm jutted out between the doors, stopping them from closing.

“Okay, look,” he said. “I just got up to my room and my character’s bags were up there, and inside one of the bags I found this.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a folded-up piece of paper.

“It’s a blackmail note,” he said. “Apparently, my character does steroids. But here’s the thing, it looks like I’ve had it for a while, and check this out: the drop-off is supposed to be at three o’clock, but it’s already five minutes after that. So I bet that the money I’m supposed to drop off is already down there, and I get a subplot of going and spying on who picks it up.”

This team had been around the block a time or two. Interpreting the little clues of how to pursue subplots could get confusing. Daphne had used that to her advantage many times.

“Are you going to find Riley?” she asked.

He shook his head and said, “I want to, but if I delay it too long, they might not be there for me to see.”

“You’re right,” she said. “Okay, quick, you go down in the elevator, and I’ll follow you down the stairs and keep a distance. I think I can stay Off-Screen, and if I can’t, we’ll play it off as me being suspicious of you.”

He considered this.

“I’m not going in guns ablazin’,” Antoine said. “I’m just trying to get some information. If something goes down, save yourself. You don’t have to be a hero.”

“Aww, I’ll try to remember that,” Daphne said, brushing her hand against his arm. “See you down there.”

Antoine breathed deeply and nodded his head, then he put on a charming smile.

Daphne raced back to the stairs so that she could get to the basement level. She went On-Screen so that the audience would follow along. From their perspective, she had just seen where he was going by looking at the button he had pressed and was now following in hopes she could get a glimpse at the other blackmailers.

She quickly took out her trusty letter opener in case things got messy. Who was she kidding? She had the letter opener in case things didn’t get messy enough.

She followed him On-Screen, and then, when they went Off-Screen, she caught up to him.

“Where is the meeting?” she asked.

“That room up ahead,” he said.

She knew that room. It was a large, dank basement area that often posed as the singular basement for the hotel, even though there was an entire network available.

“Go in and look around,” she said. “Make sure that you go in far enough that I can come in behind you and find a hiding spot.”

Antoine looked around. He wasn’t sure about that, but he didn’t say anything.

Still, when they separated again, he went on into the room and, back against the far wall where there was a trash receptacle, he began investigating its contents. That intrigued Daphne at first, but then she realized that must be the drop location for the cash.

She snuck into the room behind him. Half of the room was devoted to laundry services. There would be plenty of hiding spaces. For whatever reason, the half of the room with the laundry baskets that were taller than Antoine and the large industrial laundry machines was not lit.

Daphne found it easy to hide.

Carousel was sure to capture the footage it needed of her tailing him, though he himself rarely went On-Screen. It seemed to her that Carousel was going to use this footage to piece together the narrative of Antoine going down to the agreed meeting place, placing the cash, and then sticking around to catch the blackmailer.

She, of course, always needed to appear on the hunt. She held her letter opener, ready to pounce, or at least to make the audience think she might.

She hoped that he understood what Carousel was doing, too. It seemed that he did, because shortly after Carousel had captured its footage of her, he found a place to hide on the opposite side of the room between a large cupboard and a storage locker.

This narrative has been purloined without the author’s approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

This situation was vaguely familiar to Daphne.

She wondered if she had found herself in a similar scene in one of the many dozen times that she had played through this storyline. The blackmailers were difficult. She remembered it was so hard to clash with them; they were like ships passing her in the night. If she didn’t find a way to get a good look at them On-Screen, tracking them down was a pain.

Just as they had planned, after a few minutes of waiting, the blackmailers arrived to claim their reward. Daphne was sure to get a good look at them and size them up to the best of her ability.

The entrance to the room was a small set of stairs that went down one direction and then back the other direction. They were made of wooden boards, and they creaked something awful, probably on purpose. The space beneath them was dark.

That would have been a fine hiding spot, too, Daphne realized.

The stairs creaked extra loudly when the large bellboy with his strange strapped cap bounded down them, followed by the receptionist from the front of the casino—an eclectic pair.

Daphne tried to imagine what their gimmicks were. The bellboy was obvious. He was impossibly large, likely specializing in physical coercion. The threat of violence was a little less elegant than proper blackmail, but he would likely be useful when things got hairy.

The receptionist was less obvious. She just looked like a normal NPC. It would take investigation to figure out what her hook was, but she was quite pretty in the small-town, wide-eyed girl way. There were many ways to gather blackmail when you had someone like that on the payroll.

Daphne would know. She had a character just like that. Nadine.

“It’s in the trash can,” the receptionist said. “We need to hurry. I need to get back to my station.”

The giant man grumbled something, but he wasn’t particularly well-spoken.

Daphne stared at Antoine, practically willing him not to reveal his hiding spot.

The blackmailers weren’t searching the area. The script wouldn’t call for it this early. Players weren’t on the menu for First Blood. Blackmailers were.

The receptionist got to the trash can first, reached in, and drew out multiple stacks of cash. She laughed as she did it.

“I told you he would pay up,” she said. “There is nothing a man hates worse than telling the truth, and the longer he’s been lying, the more he hates admitting it.”

She handed the stacks to the bellboy, who quickly made them disappear into his jacket pockets.

This was a simple scene.

What Daphne would do next was pick out one of these blackmailers and make sure they wound up dead in time for First Blood. Yes, she knew the call of the script, even if she didn’t always answer it.

Antoine’s in-story character would think that he was alone in the knowledge of what had happened, as he wasn’t aware Daphne was there. And Daphne was certain that she could convince the rest of the players to spend the first half of Rebirth ferreting out the truth from Antoine On-Screen.

If he refused to admit his secret while these blackmailers kept ending up dead, he could play a sort of minor antagonist. Why not? With all of these blackmailers, it seemed everyone else was.

She could even frame him for the deaths. Heck, she might even convince the players to go along with it. Riley would find a way to make it work.

The thoughts of how she could bend the story thrilled her.

All she would have to do was hunt down these blackmailers and then move on with her plans. With any luck, she might even get it done before the wedding.

Except that wasn’t how it would go down.

Just as the bellboy and the receptionist were back on the stairs, static cut through the silence of the room.

A voice came on over a radio one of them had in their pockets.

“Did you find the drop?” a man’s voice asked. The static covered most of the voice’s features, but she could tell it was a deep voice.

The receptionist quickly grabbed her radio from her pocket. “Silver Fox?” she asked.

“Did you find the drop?” the man repeated.

“Affirmative,” the receptionist said. “We’re on our way.”

There was a pause, but then the radio sounded again, static screeching loudly, causing the blackmailers to wince.

“Did you search the room to make sure that no one saw you?” the voice asked. “We don’t need witnesses.”

The receptionist and the bellboy looked at each other.

“There’s no one in here,” the receptionist said.

“Go ahead and make sure,” the man responded.

Daphne was perplexed. This was the Party Phase. Sure, you could make a corpse this early on, but Exploration and spying on your enemy was typical at this point in the game, and it was weird to see enemies punishing that so aggressively.

She looked over where Antoine was hiding. She couldn’t see him, and he couldn’t see her, but they were thinking the exact same thing:

How could they protect Daphne?

The blackmailers made their way back down the small set of stairs and peered around the dark basement.

With the blackmailers actively searching, Daphne’s chances got markedly worse. It was an odd interaction altogether. Daphne started doing the math in her head and came to the realization that this could simply come down to whether she or Antoine had the higher Hustle.

They were both in a Chase Scene, certainly.

Targeting priority wouldn’t come into play.

He was an Athlete. The odds were that his Hustle was higher than hers. She had to think fast. Luckily, she was in the darkness, and as she looked around, she saw that there was a laundry chute not far from where she was hiding. It hung down from the ceiling, but if she could get to it and climb up into it, she was athletic enough to be able to scurry to the next floor.

She moved silently, calling on both her Hustle and her experience, and made her way over to it. She had to climb up on top of one of the industrial machines to get there, and then she had to practically jump out and catch the edge of the chute so that she could do a pull-up and get her body into the space, but she would be able to do that.

As she stood on top of the machine and readied herself for a silent exit, it would seem that Antoine had other ideas. He couldn’t see her escape attempt any better than the other two.

As the blackmailers neared the dark part of the room where Daphne was hiding, Antoine emerged from his hiding spot and knocked into the cupboard he had been hiding next to.

He had done it on purpose, Daphne realized. He was trying to save her. How sweet.

The blackmailers’ attention went toward him immediately.

“We told you not to be here,” the receptionist said. She looked heartbroken to have found him.

“I must have missed that part,” Antoine said as he started edging toward the stairs.

The bellboy moved to cut Antoine off, but he wasn’t particularly quick. However, as soon as he tossed a large sack of industrial solvent out of the way, he sprang forward and managed to block the path.

The two of them began struggling, hand in hand.

“He’s down here,” the receptionist said into the radio. “He waited so he could spy on us.”

The bellboy was stronger, but Antoine wasn’t trying to beat him up. He was trying to position himself where he could get to the stairs, and the giant wasn’t smart enough to realize that was what was going on. He took it for a sumo wrestling match and ended up throwing Antoine back in the direction he wanted to go anyway.

Antoine backed his way up the stairs and said, “I don’t want any trouble. I’m just gonna leave, and you better not follow me.”

Antoine took his steps slowly so that he could fend off attackers from whatever direction they might come. His hands were out, ready to fend off an attack.

“Take him out,” the voice said over the radio.

Daphne almost gasped audibly.

The blackmailers didn’t kill people. That was not proper blackmail. Even with her memories locked away, she knew that. They weren’t supposed to go for the kill, not until later in the story, when they were feeling desperate, if at all. Why would they start now?

First Blood was supposed to be one of them, maybe a random NPC, but certainly not a player. Daphne searched the script both as a player and an enemy and found that this was, at the very least, an edge case.

No. This was something different. Someone had changed the plot.

Before Antoine could turn around and run up the stairs, the receptionist, who had apparently hidden under the stairs after catching some stray blows in the scuffle, reached out from between the wooden stairsteps and sliced the backs of his heels, cutting straight through the Achilles tendons one after the other, getting both done before he could even fall down.

After that, he was a goner.

The big guy started to laugh as he took over the attack and finished it, punching Antoine in the face and then eventually ramming his whole body into the wall headfirst.

By that point, Daphne had already fled up the laundry chute to the second floor. When she climbed out to safety, all she could ask herself was:

What did these amateurs think they were doing in her story?

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep