“How were their levels this low?” Isaac asked. “What were they doing the whole time?”

We were up on the roof, reviewing Eternal Savers Club. Everyone was there, either in a chair or lying out on a blanket.

“It was a different time, Isaac,” Andrew said. “I know how foreign the concept must seem to you, but in those days, taking extra risks felt completely unnecessary and foolhardy to many players.”

Isaac was having a hard time processing this. I got the feeling that maybe he was counting on being able to coast to the higher levels. Maybe it was just something he needed to tell himself to sleep at night. He was so invested in the conversation that he had reeled in his fishing line and given up on finding new Omens on the streets below.

“You said that they were here for six years,” Isaac said. “Six years, and the highest-level player on this team only has forty-five Plot Armor?”

“Look, kid,” Logan said. “At the end of the day, they were right. Doesn’t that make a difference? We didn’t know about Project Rewind. We thought we were in hell or at least purgatory. Turns out, our entire purpose was to create a soft landing for the winning Party of Promise, you know, to be there when they arrived, to mentor them. It worked out. Eventually.”

Logan’s team could have been the Party of Promise, but things didn’t work out just right for that to happen. They didn’t often talk about that. Maybe it was because, as time passed, we had stopped seeing our teams as being separate. I wondered how long that would last.

“But still,” Isaac said. “How do you even survive at that level? Wouldn’t you naturally level up higher than that just by doing the normal amount of storylines you have to do?”

In Isaac’s defense, he was pushed off the deep end the moment he arrived in Carousel. It seemed he could hardly imagine an entire society of people who took zero unnecessary risks.

“From what I was told, Nicole was a real go-getter when she got here at first,” Avery said, lying out in the sun with sunglasses and a big hat. “But when her niece and nephew arrived, she was more concerned with keeping them alive than she was escaping.”

That was a whole different conversation. How would this Camp Dyer era team adjust to their new reality?

“I didn’t even know you were awake,” Isaac said, blushing. He turned his attention back to the missing posters we had brought up there, with the five players who we could potentially rescue from the big-box store and its principal storyline. “So you guys just did storylines that were your level?”

“Or lower,” Logan said. “When you have no obvious goal and you have generations of players who haven’t managed to figure anything out, survival becomes about persistence. We did the same thing. That’s probably what got us wiped off the board.”

Isaac was having a really tough time digesting the concept. It was odd. He wasn’t exactly pushing us to make plans or find a way out anymore. I thought he would understand the mentality of Camp Dyer. Still, he eventually stopped asking questions.

We had learned some things about the fallen players at the Eternal Savers Club. There were five of them from Camp Dyer. On average, their Plot Armor was around forty, and they had only run the storyline twice before. When we were at Camp Dyer, going to Eternal Savers Club was just one of the chores that got divvied up.

I remembered something about the Outsider Travis’s team being teased because they never leveled up enough to run the storyline. Someone joked that they were doing it on purpose.

I stared at the flyers, hoping that the scant information on them would speak to me and give me insight, but very little came.

MISSING

Name: Nicole Van Note

Plot Armor: 45

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Eye Candy (Socialite Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Kyle Van Note

Plot Armor: 36

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Athlete (Stud Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Kelsey Van Note

Plot Armor: 35

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Final Girl (Scream Queen Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Llorne Thomas

Plot Armor: 41

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on NovelBin. Report any occurrences.

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Bruiser (Bully Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

~

MISSING

Name: Molly Menkin

Plot Armor: 39

Place Last Seen: Eternal Savers Club, August 02, 2022.

Occupation: Comedian (Stooge Aspect)

Reward: 150 Dollars

I noticed that they had no minor archetypes, which meant that they had almost nonexistent Off-Screen play or meta manipulation. That didn’t make them bad; it just meant they had a much more straightforward style of play.

A Socialite, Stud, and Bully meant that they were probably very good at social manipulation, and having an Athlete, Bruiser, Scream Queen, and Stooge meant that they were covered in combat.

Socialite had some Insight tropes, but otherwise, they didn’t seem very strong in investigation beyond what they could learn from talking to NPCs. But none of that mattered. They had beaten this storyline twice before, if our collective memories were correct.

Somehow, on this third time, Project Rewind had upped the difficulty, and I worried we might face the same threat for the rescue. But so far, Sal, Kimberly’s talent agent, didn’t seem to indicate there was anything weird going on.

She talked to him as I read through the flyers. One of us had to be holding them; we couldn’t predict which players Sal would think were running the storyline. She was sitting right next to me, so we felt pretty safe.

“The franchise is really going back to its roots,” he was saying. “They need a strong female lead, someone recognizable, and I may have casually dropped your name. Now, I can’t make any promises, but some of the higher-ups were definitely receptive. Do you want me to keep pushing this forward? I need to know soon.”

There was something so funny about having our death game translated into acting jobs through Kimberly’s trope. Sal had a sense of humor, and it made the whole thing feel more like an actual game, at least for a moment.

“Just a second,” Kimberly said. I could see her fiddling with her tropes, unequipping her new rescue trope, Breath Into The Franchise, which made her the star of a franchise reboot.

Antoine quickly equipped his newest rescue trope, called Baseline Anomaly, which put Antoine in the position of trying to figure out what happened to one of his friends when the official story didn’t line up with things that Antoine knew.

The cool thing was that his rescue was compatible with Andrew’s new Coroner rescue trope, and if we decided to go with both of them, we would be able to bring two teams, which sounded remarkable, though the Atlas was very clear that each team would face an equal amount of danger, so, while it was two bites at the apple, it wouldn’t make things twice as easy.

“You know what, sweetheart?” Sal said. “I just got an altered version of the script. Just checked my e-mail. Looks like they’re going in a different direction, more of a sequel to a previous installment. Although my contact at the studio says they still have a role for you.”

The tone shifted to describe the details that had changed.

Even with the twenty-five percent off coupon, the storyline was going to be pretty tough because it was a rescue, which limited how much information we could get on it.

Still, we moved through all of our rescue tropes to decide which one to bring. Most of them were compatible. Kimberly’s first rescue trope, A Woman in Mourning, which we hadn’t used yet, had her character stalked by the killers of the last movie, was compatible, though by all indications, it would be quite difficult.

My new rescue trope was compatible, although it was a lot more complicated, because I would have to recruit paragons to put on a rescue. Sal even listed off some potential actors for the lead role, which was to say which paragons I could recruit, and they were all ones I hadn’t heard of by name, which ruled out my using it.

Isaac’s rescue trope would work, but in turning the storyline into a goofy satire in the vein of Scary Movie, it would put a lot of control into Isaac’s hands, and we weren’t sure he was ready for it, especially since he was ten to fifteen levels lower than he needed to be.

We still checked, if only out of curiosity.

“Well, nuts,” he said when we gave him the bad news. “I guess I’ll just have to stay here, wait for you to get back. That’s going to be hard to get used to.”

Andrew’s new rescue trope was very similar to Antoine’s in description. It also worked.

Dina’s rescue trope, You Don’t Know Me But…

, which we had used on Itch, was available again, but we were going to save that for a worst-case scenario. Having failed so many storylines with it, I just didn’t want to go through that again, and the others agreed with me.

Finally, there was Bobby, who had earned a rescue trope called The Unresolved Plot on one of the storylines he ran with the lower-level players, and it intrigued me. Its conceit was that an entire separate story was going on at the same time as the original storyline, an unfinished subplot, related to the main story but not dependent on it. Bobby would have to dodge and weave around the fallen players’ storyline while trying to complete his own, and if he did, the rescue was complete.

It was a Lion King 1½, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead type situation, where we had to shoot an entire movie without fundamentally interrupting the original.

I liked the concept, but I worried about how it would actually function. Would we be penalized if we accidentally ran into the original players? From the trailer I had watched, which depicted their deaths using my Coming to a Theater Near You trope, it would appear that they died pretty early on, but I couldn’t say that for sure. If they did, that would mean there was minimal risk.

We weren’t sure which one we would use, but at least we had options. I figured we should pick one that altered this story the least, because then all the information we got from the trailer would be directly applicable.

The whole while, we had Cassie using her I’m Blocked trope to try and get some idea of what type of enemy we were dealing with, other than what was obvious from the trailer. Her trope was hit and miss, but it was still useful enough to give it a go.

She was lying out on a deck chair, completely covered by the shade of one of the beach umbrellas that I had used to skewer a blackmailer, and focusing on her thoughts.

“Hello!” she screamed out, finally.

“Hello,” Logan said, and then the rest of us joined in, saying hello and waving at her.

“It’s talking to me,” she said.

It took her long enough.

“I hear… a voice,” she said, as if there was some other way it could be talking to her. “It’s… an offering. A deal.”

Suddenly, the sky darkened and the wind picked up. Kimberly looked at me as if I had done it.

I tried using my Cue the Rain trope to turn it off, to no avail.

Cassie started to shake violently. As she did, she said, “Release me,” but it wasn’t her voice speaking. It was a deep, earthen voice that shook the chair as she spoke.

She started lifting up into the air. Andrew leapt across the roof from where he had been sitting and grabbed onto her legs. The rest of us were right after him.

“Unequip the trope!” Antoine yelled, but Cassie was in no condition to comply.

We all held on, with some of us being lifted into the air. Bobby’s dogs had taken note and were barking incessantly at the whole ordeal.

“Release me,” she said again, over and over again, until the voice faded and all that was left was her own voice.

She was crying and still saying it. “Release me, release me, release me, release me…”

And then, as quickly as it had started, it stopped. The wind died down. We fell to the roof, scrambling to make sure everyone was alright.

“Cassie,” Andrew said firmly, hiding his worry. “Cassie, say something.”

He cradled his sister’s head in his lap as he sat, sprawled out on the fake grass of the roof.

“I lost the connection,” she said eventually.

“It’s okay,” Andrew said. “Everything’s okay.”

After a few moments where we all caught our breath, Kimberly asked, “Who wants to be released?”

Cassie stared up at the fading clouds above for a moment, but then turned to her and answered, matter-of-factly, “He Who Walks Behind the Aisles.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep