As soon as we went Off-Screen, the silence in the room suffocated me.

“What is Daphne doing?” Kimberly asked. “Social Awareness is all over the place,” she said, referring to one of her tropes that allowed her to gauge a character’s Moxie and gave her insight into interpersonal relationships between characters.

“What do you mean?” Andrew asked.

“It’s giving me double responses. They don’t make any sense,” Kimberly said. “It’s like it’s arguing with itself. The only thing I know for sure is that she loves you and her parents, and that only makes things more confusing. Everyone else she is suspicious of.”

I thought for a moment.

“Did we ever figure out why Antoine was in the basement?”

“I figure he was doing basic exploration and wandered somewhere he shouldn’t be, into a hazard. Or perhaps he was chasing down a lead and was tricked,” Andrew said.

“Maybe,” I said.

It was true that in the early Party Phase, we could get pretty reckless with exploration, and usually, there were no consequences. But that didn’t mean there couldn’t be consequences. Exploring a location and discovering hidden hazards, treasures, or weapons was a basic form of gameplay.

Was it possible that Antoine had wandered into the wrong room, questioned the wrong suspect, or perhaps trusted the wrong friend?

“Remember the trope that the honeypot lady had?” I asked. “Something about We Go Way Back, how you might have a backstory with the blackmailers, and if you don’t figure out what it is in time, there will be consequences?”

The silence returned as they thought about what I had said.

“You think Daphne had a backstory with them and didn’t explore it?” Bobby asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “I really did find her cutting up something. She might have been Off-Screen before I got there. I must have caught her by surprise. She played it off well enough. She gave me a haircut.”

“I was meaning to say,” Kimberly said, “it looks great. She has a real future as a hairdresser.”

The sarcasm was a bit thick.

“Thanks,” I said. “Maybe Daphne failed to explore a backstory she had with the blackmailers, and the consequences of that were bigger than we could imagine.”

“You’re saying that she might be compromised?” Andrew said. “Wouldn’t that show up on the red wallpaper as infected?”

“It should,” I said.

And then all at once, we collectively paused and reflected.

“I didn’t think to check her statuses,” Kimberly said.

“Me neither,” said Bobby, “and I’m usually very careful about that.”

I hadn’t either. I hadn’t even thought to. This was a mundane storyline. The idea that someone could be infected either with hypnosis or some sort of mind-altering virus or drug didn’t seem likely. It wasn’t set up. Could there be a completely meta type of Infection, something that could alter a player’s mind that powerfully?

“I can’t see her at all,” Andrew said.

“What?” I asked. “You mean with Health Monitor?”

“Yes,” he answered. “She isn’t appearing at all. This is similar to what happened when Ramona and Logan died. They disappeared for a moment.”

Why did I let her leave?

“Don’t tell me she’s dead,” I said. “Please don’t tell me she’s dead.”

Andrew shook his head. “I don’t know. Health Monitor is a very powerful ability, and I have observed that conflicting tropes often get a head start, so to speak, against it.”

It was a powerful ability. Being able to see your allies’ health statuses no matter where you were was a real game-changer.

“To be fair,” he added, “I cannot see Jules either. Perhaps whatever trope is affecting Daphne is simply masking her from me. That would make sense if there were some sort of powerful infecting ability.”

“Some type of ability that is making Daphne act on her own, making her not tell us what’s going on,” I said. “That has to be it.”

“Maybe we should consider something else,” Bobby said. “I’ve been thinking about it, but I didn’t want to say anything.”

“What is it?” I asked. “Just say it. You don’t need to keep quiet on my account.”

“Okay,” he said. “I’m thinking that maybe this Daphne isn’t our Daphne.”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

Bobby was at a loss for words, but eventually he spat it out. “What if she’s been replaced? Something is going on here. Think about it. Why else would Ramona be here? Maybe something about this storyline replaced Daphne and gave us Ramona in her place, like some sort of trade.”

I didn’t like the sound of that at all. It made too much sense.

“Surely there would have been some mention of that in the Atlas,” Andrew said. “That is a fundamentally plan-destroying trope. Ida Rae was a well-known storyline.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “What if it isn’t an enemy trope?”

They stared at me, waiting for me to elaborate.

“What if Daphne is using some sort of betrayal trope? Do you remember the Stranger in the Ten Second Game? He had a trope where he had to act like a, well, maybe not a minor antagonist, but he was definitely lying to us, and he had caused a lot of the trouble we were going through.”

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

A tricky betrayal trope could have caused this. Something that hid its own existence.

“You’re saying that she equipped some new trope, and it had some unintended consequences?” Andrew asked.

“Yes,” I said. “Something like that.”

There was a whole host of tropes categorized informally as betrayal tropes. They all centered around one idea: that a player could be antagonistic to his team in ways that could help the team overall.

“Look, it doesn’t matter,” I continued. “Whatever is happening here, we just have to be aware of it. And we have to trust that our teammate knows what she’s doing. But… you know… maybe we treat her like she has been compromised.”

“Keep an eye on her,” Kimberly said. “Never be anywhere alone with her, no matter how much she begs or manipulates.”

Kimberly was ready to cut Daphne out completely. Her instincts were usually good with people.

“Yeah,” I said. “That. Something must be going on. Something big. There is no way Daphne wouldn’t tell me if she was able.”

“If she even is our Daphne,” Bobby repeated. “If she’s not, we may be in a heap of trouble.”

Maybe they had their doubts about that. I couldn’t blame them. There were times in a storyline where an ally might do something that was inconvenient to you. But normally, when you went Off-Screen, they could easily explain it. Any odd behavior could be forgiven with just a little communication, or so people kept telling me.

I didn’t know what was happening with Daphne, but I did know we could get to the end of the story together. We had done it many times. If she was compromised, and the more I thought about it, the more sure I was that something was up, then we would have to cross the finish line without her. We may even have to fight her.

You can’t play this game relying on just one person.

“So now what?” Bobby asked.

“We have to go after her,” I said. “I’ll insist on it in-character. It may be a mistake in the end, but it will push the plot forward. Staying in this room is only going to cause disaster. I’m pretty sure having everyone holed up inside the banquet hall is what caused the power to go out, but what do I know?”

“We kill anyone who tries to kill us first,” Jules said, looking at me as she said it. “Even if they are dressed in white.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” I said.

“Alright, love bird. How long until we’re On-Screen again?” she asked.

“Hours if we stay in this room,” I said. Call Sheet was such a convenient trope.

“Well, I don’t intend to stay here any longer with these two hogging the bed,” she said.

We had been in Carousel too long. We all chuckled at that.

It might have been better for me to go alone. Their following me may not have been the most in-character thing for them to do, but we had to stay together.

Whatever was happening, we couldn’t risk getting separated again.

So we walked out onto the fifth floor and started looking for some interaction that would send us On-Screen and closer to answers.

I managed to go back On-Screen by leaving the room and entering the stairwell.

“She should have been back by now,” I said.

“She should have never left,” Kimberly said. “Just get out of the way and stay hidden. Fight if you have to. That’s how you survive. Why wouldn’t she listen to us? She’s not just being stupid. She’s hiding something.”

“Stop that,” I said. “If we find her dead, how are you going to feel? She’s your best friend.”

Kimberly stopped in her tracks. I almost ran into her.

“You’re my best friend, you idiot,” she said.

I nodded. The entire conversation took place in the red lights of one of the stairwells.

We were headed down. There was no avoiding it, flood or no flood, the first floor was where the plot was happening. Daphne had made an excuse to go down there, and the safe filled with my character’s money was down there as well, not to mention all the money the casino had.

Andrew led the way because he had the flashlight. He also had a lot of Savvy, which would help him figure out if we were walking into a trap of some kind, theoretically.

It was little pieces of mind control like that, Carousel telling you that there’s a trap ahead because you have high Savvy and should be able to know that, that I was okay with.

The idea that Daphne had been replaced with an enemy, and I hadn’t even noticed it, I was not okay. It had happened before, more or less, in the Straggler Forest. We found ourselves surrounded by people that we thought we knew, but it turned out they were just cursed wanderers hoping to follow one of us out of the forest.

We couldn’t tell friend from foe there. It was a nightmare. Was this a similar situation?

We made it to the first floor and were greeted by water that rose past our ankles, halfway up our shins.

The biggest question on my mind was, How are there still slot machines firing off, and who is playing them?

The bells and chimes cut through the storm.

Outside, the rain poured, and lightning sometimes struck bright enough that it could be seen through one of the five or six windows on the casino level.

The trek across the floor to the banquet hall was uneventful. Andrew was on alert.

When we got there, it was much like we had seen it before. The photographer lay dead, now completely covered in water. The camera rig had stopped taking pictures long ago. Those cameras could only take about thirty-five pictures.

As we walked through the banquet hall, I took a close look at it.

“What is it?” Kimberly asked quietly.

“Look at this,” I said. “Someone set it up so that if that note from earlier got unwedged from the little lever here, it would start taking pictures.”

“Why would they do that?” she asked.

I couldn’t say. It didn’t seem like a trap set for a player. Maybe there could be some implication that they would have their picture taken next to a corpse, and it might imply that they were guilty of the murder, but that was a stretch.

Horror movies often ended with the silent implication that the police would question the protagonist and might very reasonably suspect them of the deaths of the victims. That didn’t stop the plot.

No, whoever had done this wasn’t trying to trap a player.

“Look at this,” I said. “Someone took the film.”

Kimberly got close.

The lighting was very poor. I wished I had brought my trope that made you safer in the dark.

“Maybe someone wanted to see who would check on the body,” she suggested.

That was an interesting thought. If a person could develop the film, they could get a glimpse of who would dare to get close. It was a stretch. Who would develop film in a situation like this?

I looked over at the photographer. If he had been one of the blackmailers, this trap would make sense for a player to use. A player with high Savvy might have set it in the hopes of catching an enemy on film who was there to check on a colleague’s body. But how would that work if the photographer wasn’t a blackmailer?

He was just an NPC as far as I could tell. Maybe he remained cloaked until we found evidence of his guilt.

“His fee,” I said.

I had paid the photographer in cash.

I quickly looked back over at the body. It was hard to see. There was some red light filtering in from the chapel.

“Look,” I said.

I grabbed down and found his wallet right next to his head. I would never have seen it if I weren’t looking for it.

“Someone set a trap for a thief,” Kimberly said.

Should we have even been talking about this On-Screen? This wasn’t just a meta trap. Some portion of this had happened On-Screen, we knew that for certain because we had seen it.

Someone had used their Savvy to devise a trap.

That was what Savvy was for. You come up with a plan, something like, say, leave a body out in the open with a camera next to it, rigged to go off when someone touches it. If a thief walked by, that thief might be inclined to check the guy’s wallet.

It was absurd for real life, I hoped. But in a movie… it just might work. Heck, they should have used a dollar to wedge the camera’s lever. The note was long gone, but I had seen it from a distance when we saw the fake bellboy and chef trigger the trap.

Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if the photographer’s wallet was in his hand, the money hanging out of it, tempting any thief that stumbled upon it.

“But how would the trap work?” Kimberly said. “Anyone who triggered it would just steal the film.”

“Sure,” I said, “but they would make a whole lot of ruckus in the process. When the camera started going off, if someone were around to see those flashes, they would be able to figure out who set it off just by sitting around and watching.”

Had this trapper been there when the camera started going off?

Had they been right next to me at the time, and I didn’t even know it?

We didn’t have any longer to stay and examine the photo trap. We had to continue our search.

One thing was for sure.

Someone other than us was on the hunt.

Someone was hunting thieves.

Maybe it was someone married to me.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep