On-Screen

“You should have paid the ransom,” Emmett said. “You didn’t even need that money. You had a meal ticket to last a lifetime,” he said, looking over at me as I abandoned my hiding spot. “Now I’m starting to suspect that your secret might be a little more involved than a hidden identity.”

They stared each other down intensely.

“How are you alive?” Daphne asked. She was sure to seem intrigued, but she tried to hide her fear as best she could, even with her Moxie leeched away.

Now they had to reenact their meet-and-greet in-character.

“It doesn’t matter,” Emmett said. “Suffice to say, you may have the stomach to kill another person, but you don’t have the wisdom to make sure they’re dead.”

There was plenty of footage that I saw on the Dailies to explain the survival of the blackmailers. The script wouldn’t call for a full explanation here. The audience would already know the answer.

“I was just defending myself,” Daphne said, putting on a mocking tone like she were some sort of victim.

Emmett nodded, laughing at her performance.

“We’re pretty good at that, too,” he said. He breathed deeply and pursed his lips, like he regretted what he was about to do. “Go take care of the witnesses,” he said.

It wasn’t clear who he was talking to, but only one of his gang listened. Yes, our window to team up with the blackmailers had long passed.

It was Ed who came after me, of course. It had to be Ed. He was six foot five at least, with enough Grit to survive an apparent drowning and enough Mettle to toss a slot machine out of his way.

I’d had worse odds.

My only shot at beating him in a fist fight would be to dust off my one and only Keepsake, an ashtray with the enemy trope Desperation attached, which would allow me to convert my Moxie and Savvy into combat stats.

It was a one-time use, and I had saved it ever since Permanent Vacancy.

I would certainly have considered using it if only I had been able to find my hoodie, which had been lost to me for the entire storyline. I only just realized that its disappearance wasn’t Carousel’s doing. It probably had something to do with my duplicitous wife.

Ed walked slowly. He didn’t need to run.

He was a pretty dangerous guy.

But he wasn’t the most dangerous thing on the roof.

“Riley!” Daphne screamed, feigning concern and doing a pretty good job of it as the other three blackmailers closed in on her.

“Riley!” Kimberly also cried out, almost at the same time, but hers was much more genuine. She ran across the roof toward me and was between me and Ed before he got close.

The wind and the rain were back now that the dialogue was less important. The gales were so strong that I felt that if I jumped in the air, I would get blown off the building.

That was what I was counting on.

“Stay away,” Kimberly said, brandishing the axe, posting up between me and Ed as he moved forward.

She was too far away, a little off her mark. It was okay. Funny enough, when we had planned this, it was back when we thought the blackmailers were the only enemies.

Kimberly swung her axe, hoping that it might slow him down, but all he did was smile and walk forward without a concern in the world.

“I mean it,” Kimberly said. She took another swing, and it almost came close enough to him to draw blood, but not quite. It even cut his jacket, but those were maroon anyway, so if it drew blood, I wasn’t sure.

Kimberly backed toward me as Ed advanced.

I willed her not to get too close.

She went in for one more strike, but Ed wasn’t even the slightest bit afraid. He grabbed the axe from her, and they struggled for a moment, but even with all of her Mettle from her scrunchytrope, he yanked the axe from her.

She turned tail and ran toward me.

Ed still didn’t run at all. He didn’t feel the need to run, and I was thankful for that. I needed Kimberly to get out of the way.

The patio furniture to my left was making all kinds of noise. Even though it was stacked together tightly, the furniture rattled and raged against their restraints as the wind blew.

They were nice pieces, but at the end of the day, most of the set was made of plastic or wood, the kind of things that could catch the wind really easily. They rattled against the chains and ropes that bound them, including one large chain net that was tied over everything. Other individual ropes were tied to each piece of furniture.

They weren’t going anywhere.

Not without help.

I knew that Carousel had captured footage of the patio furniture flailing in the wind all night long. I hadn’t used the Insert Shot on it. I was just relying on the fact that a few shots of the furniture would be included with Kimberly’s Contract Negotiations trope, and as I fast-forwarded through the Dailies earlier, I had seen some.

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The truth was, I didn’t need a lot of narrative weight for what I had planned.

Because, as dangerous as Ed was, there wasn’t much in a movie that was more dangerous than what I had planned.

I turned to my left and quickly untied an entire stack of beach umbrellas. I had to untie the main chain net holding the furniture in place to do it. I thought I was going to have to start grabbing them and throwing them out, which would have been clumsy and awkward, but there was no need. The wind picked up on them immediately.

The umbrellas and most of the patio furniture started to blow against their restraints after I had weakened them, and suddenly they were no longer neatly stacked on the roof, but instead were rendered almost airborne as they were blown end over end across the roof.

The tables and chairs tumbled, and many of them ended up hanging off the side of the building by whatever chains or ropes were attached to them.

The furniture was easy enough to dodge, at least for Daphne and three of the blackmailers. Most of it didn’t even get that far.

But there was one blackmailer who couldn’t dodge a damn thing. We weren’t in a chase scene, so the trope that would fill the gap in his Hustle wasn’t active.

He tried bashing a table or two out of the way as they rolled toward him, and he was successful at it.

Just as I had planned, the unfurled beach umbrellas were his real challenge. They were designed in such a way that they picked up a lot of energy from the wind, and they were moving quickly, tumbling end over end, their long metal poles suddenly becoming quite the hazard.

The cook had to drop to the deck to dodge one of the rogue umbrellas.

Daphne was able to get around them pretty easily, because she was still in the eyeing-down phase of her fight. The other blackmailers looked annoyed that they had to pause their menacing attack to dodge furniture.

Ed, however, couldn’t have dodged an umbrella if he tried. The first one hit him with a big force, but it was the top of the umbrella, right in the chest. It knocked him back a bit, but he swiped it out of the way with his arm.

I was worried that would be it, but Savvy was designed for this very thing.

As he knocked the first out of the way, he got hit by the second umbrella, and that one skewered him right through the torso. The pole, meant to go in one of the little metal holders placed around the roof, was plenty sharp enough to make it all the way through him.

I didn’t know what his Grit was, but it wasn’t as high as my Savvy, apparently, because that hit was a kill shot.

I wasn’t expecting it. I thought it was an opening move. But hey, never underestimate a rogue beach umbrella.

He dropped to his knees, trying his best to stand, but then he fell backward, dead. Although there was like a fifty percent chance he was pretending again, I wasn’t going to check his pulse. He held onto the axe tightly with one of his hands, even in death.

The umbrella, which had affixed itself somewhere around his aorta, was still catching a lot of wind, and he slowly slid across the roof, a giant bellboy sailboat, taking the axe along with him.

The rest of the furniture was a mess. That which didn’t go over the side immediately spread out over the roof, their ropes and chains one tangled mass.

The stuff hanging from the roof was still attached to one remaining metal post, though it fought and pulled against its anchor with every gust of wind.

So that was our plan, or at least the first half of it. To Daphne, it was just a distraction.

As I looked at her ongoing struggle against the other three blackmailers, I had to be honest, I was rooting for them.

If they killed Daphne, that meant I wouldn’t have to.

I scolded myself for thinking like that. Whatever feelings I had for her were completely counterfeit, and I had to get them out of my mind so I could adapt our original plan to the current situation.

Everyone was relying on me. It was possible, based on their tropes, for them to win and to leave the players alone, but it was probably too late in the movie to rely on that.

I was going to have to kill them too, especially after I popped their heavy like an unlucky beach ball.

This wasn’t a martial arts movie, so their fight was mostly just intimidation.

Or so I thought.

This Emmett guy was apparently much more of a threat than I could have imagined, because he pulled something from his belt, which I had not noticed up to this point.

There was a yellow stick duct-taped to some type of aerosol container. He had two of them in total.

Daphne had her back to us and was slowly inching toward us. Emmett threw his little improvised device behind her, and moments later, the yellow stick lit with a bright orange flame, and that aerosol device started putting out a thick fog.

He had made an improvised explosive out of a road flare and a bug bomb.

Daphne had a trope that limited the weapons that could be found to things that might be realistically accessible in a hotel. Score one for the blackmailers. That was a nifty little device. I didn’t know if it would work in real life, but real life didn’t call the shots here.

The explosion was magnificent. It was huge. At first, it was a flamethrower, but then the flame disappeared and was followed by a huge shockwave, with fire blasting into the sky, even with the heavy rain and wind.

Daphne was thrown forward toward the blackmailers.

But she was quick. She didn’t just fall; she rolled and swiftly passed by Emmett, while grabbing the second incendiary device off of his belt and running toward the other side of the roof, backing toward a corner.

She quickly revealed her lighter, the same one she had used to illuminate her parents’ room, and I now recognized that it was also the same one that had been by the cigarettes in the fire axe cabinet.

She quickly lit the fuse and threw it back at the blackmailers. Based on the timing of the one Emmett threw, she should have gotten three roasted thieves.

Instead, she got a laugh.

“You know, some people really get a kick out of killing enemies with their own weapons,” Emmett said. “I had a feeling that you were one of those people.” He reached down and grabbed the device. The flare was lit, but the bug bomb wasn’t going off.

With a quick adjustment, he remedied that really quickly and lobbed the bomb back toward Daphne.

He knew her really well, to know that she would grab a weapon off his belt and, in doing so, wind up in a corner on the roof of the building with nowhere to go.

Maybe it just came together that way, but with his subdued swagger, it almost seemed like he planned it exactly as it happened.

Though he probably didn’t know we would be duking it out on the roof.

The bomb landed just behind Daphne, and she ran to get out of the path of its explosion.

She made it by the skin of her teeth, but she was hurt. She might have dislocated her shoulder as the bomb blew her through the air, literally tossing her over the cook and almost causing her to fall off the edge of the building.

Meanwhile, Ed, or at least his body, was still blowing toward them, gradually sailing across the roof as the wind blew the umbrella that had impaled him.

Miss Kitty, or Desiree, whatever her real name was, walked over and grabbed the axe from his hand, while also giving him a nod. Not because he was alive. It was more of a gesture toward a fallen comrade. She glared over at me.

She took the axe over toward Daphne, and the three of them closed in against the wounded Homibride.

Off-Screen

Something had happened. Something that put fear of God into Daphne and caused Emmett to burst with emotion that brought a tear to his eye.

“You see it, don’t you?” he said. “The script, it changed.”

He breathed heavily, trying to process his emotions.

“For how many lifetimes did it say that we weren’t allowed to kill you? How long were we forced to be nothing but part of the body count?” He looked over at his wife. She didn’t react. She wasn’t meta-aware. She had her game face on, but she was still in character, waiting to go back On-Screen.

“We did it, my love, we can finally kill her,” he said. He looked back at Daphne. “Until next time, Miss Sinclair.”

Tears of joy ran down his face and were quickly hidden by rain as he finally gave in to his emotions. I found myself strangely happy for him. He was finally able to change his script.

Everybody could use a little bit of that, in a manner of speaking.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep