Whoever said that decapitation was a humane execution method? When all you have is a head, it always feels like you’re falling, even when you’ve rolled to a stop. I couldn’t tell if I felt the impact of landing on the ground or if I just imagined it. It was hard to know with my consciousness fading so rapidly.

But to its credit, a crick in my neck that had been building the entire storyline was relieved instantly.

I sat up on the dungeon floor.

I could only see by the glow of Christmas lights from the hallway. The red wall, the barrier between realities, was nothing but stone as far as I could tell. We had made it, and yet I still couldn’t generate the enthusiasm to stand up. All I could think about was my final moments before death.

I quickly equipped my Director’s Monitor trope and started watching the movie right there on the ground. The way they had dug the room out, it was severely slanted down toward where the god had been buried, so lying back felt natural as I fast-forwarded to the end, to the part where Bobby betrayed us.

He was betraying us, wasn’t he?

He was supposed to turn on Tom and use whatever magical abilities his character had gained to give us an edge. Sure, such an action would result in his untimely death in all likelihood. It would have given us a solid beat in the fight, taking some pressure off of Kimberly.

I watched him as he was making sacrifices, working through all the objects on the large metal dish and casually eyeing the knife that he would have to run into Antoine before sacrificing him. Was he considering it or just pretending?

I watched as he ran out of the dungeon, stole a cop car, and started driving down the road. He got to the hospital and even made it as far as the room his wife was supposed to be in. Then it cut to black after he made the slightest facial expression. Was it happiness? Had he found her? I didn’t know. It was ambiguous.

What did all that say about grief? I didn’t know. I didn’t really care anymore.

Kimberly had fulfilled her character’s subplot, even if it was a subplot I had altered substantially. What could have been a safe finale ended up as a narrow victory. Not as narrow as it appeared in the final film, but far more narrow than I liked.

The whole point of having one of your party members betray the team was having the ability to bring this story right up to the edge of destruction without having to worry as much about going over. You felt like you had a hand on the wheel as the car careened across the road. In the final film, it looked like that was kind or what Bobby did, a little off script (my script at least), but ultimately, he performed the role he was supposed to.

He betrayed the cult, just not as much as we wanted him to. And I had to wondered: did anyone else even notice?

“Riley, is that you?” Antoine asked through the darkness.

“Yep,” I said as I stared up at the ceiling.

He nearly tripped over me as he approached. I decided that lying down in the middle of the floor was not the right move, so I stood up and we both worked our way toward the exit.

“Man, I’ll tell you, I never want to be bait again,” Antoine said.

“No?” I asked. “Not a potential damsel advanced archetype?”

I was better bait than him, but it wasn’t like I enjoyed it.

“I’ll pass on that,” he said. “I wish you’d given me the heads up about that stuff with Bobby.”

“You can’t say heads up around a decapitation victim,” I said. “That’s insensitive.”

He laughed.

“How inconsiderate of me,” he said. “But seriously, I thought he was about to kill me, the look in his eye, he was really panicking. I guess he’s a better actor than I gave him credit for.”

“That makes two of us,” I said dryly.

Or he wasn’t acting at all.

“Antoine!” a voice called out from down at the bottom of the room. I recognized the voice immediately. Kimberly had made her appearance.

“Up here!” Antoine called out.

I could hear her walking up the steep incline toward us. But the figure that appeared to us from the darkness first was not Kimberly. It was Dina.

A lot of us had died in that room.

“No sign of Kelsey,” I said as everyone gathered around.

“She didn’t die,” Antoine said. “She must have gone looking for her family. They’re spread to the wind right now.”

“How inconsiderate of her,” I said. “Didn’t even leave a note.”

“We were seconds away on that one, boys,” Kimberly said. And by boys, I knew she was talking to me.

“You were supposed to wait until seconds away,” I said. “That was the whole plan. It’s not like you could go headfirst diving into the sacrificial pit or whatever. It had to be a hard decision right at the end.”

That wasn’t what she was talking about, and I knew it. We were supposed to make it look like a last-second victory. It wasn’t supposed to actually be one.

“Still, if it didn’t work, we had no backup,” she said.

“That was the backup,” I said. “Plan A was you saving Antoine as your redemption and running away together.”

We started walking up the path away from the giant sacrifice room. We still had a job to do. This was, after all, a shopping trip.

“Well, at least we all made it out okay,” Dina said sarcastically. “Now we get to do it again every time we need groceries.”

“Oh no,” I said. “We’re going to get so much food that we could eat for a year on it. I’m not coming back to this place until I’m at least level sixty.”

That didn’t get a laugh. Everyone was spent.

“And we’re putting this food where?” Kimberly asked. “I told you we needed another refrigerator. We’ll be sleeping on bags of flour and beans if we want a year’s supply of food.”

“All right,” I said. “Before we get out there, I need to say something.”

I stopped them right around the table with the lemonade on it, in case they wanted a drink.

“What Bobby did in there was not a part of my plan.”

“Which part?” Kimberly asked.

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“What did he do?” Dina asked. She had been dead by that point.

“He came this close to sacrificing me to that god,” Antoine said. “You didn’t tell him to do that?”

“No,” I said. “Dina, you passed along the instructions, right?”

She nodded.

“I gave him your message,” she said. “That he was just supposed to sit around and look pretty until it was time to help us.”

“Wait, what exactly did he do?” Kimberly asked. “He revived his character’s wife, right?”

“He said something about ‘she’s awake,’” Antoine said.

I nodded. “He waited until the reality-warping had revived his wife, and instead of being dead or missing, she was waking from a coma in the hospital. I don’t know. I just watched the end. He never actually got there On-Screen, but that is what he did.”

The others looked at each other in silence and then looked at me.

“Should we be talking about this?” Kimberly asked, as if she were afraid I was going to start panicking, which was a fair assumption, given the topic of Bobby’s wife often left me hearing the breath of the axe murderer. But that really only happened if people pointed out that I knew what happened to her. If they would just pretend I didn’t, all would go on just fine.

“Maybe you guys should be the ones to confront him,” I said.

I turned to leave. The other players, those that had been left behind at Kimberly’s loft, should be showing up any moment to help us haul away groceries, and the less I had to hear about Bobby’s murdered wife, the better.

The store was in pretty good shape, even better shape than it had been when I’d helped with grocery runs here in the past. Sure, Lorne had managed to do a lot of damage up front during Second Blood, and he had single-handedly taken entire vegetables off the menu by crashing cultists into them, but most of the store was left intact.

It was basically a best-case scenario.

I made my way toward the front doors and out into the parking lot. On the other side of it, just far enough away to not interfere, was a collection of players. It was still dark out, but I could see them on the red wallpaper. Anna, Camden, Isaac, Cassie, and Ramona had shown up and quickly made their way across the parking lot toward me.

“Wait a second,” I said. “How did you all get here without a scout?”

While Isaac had the ability to detect Omens, it wasn’t as fast-paced as it needed to be to travel across Carousel proper.

“Lila brought us here,” Anna said. “Before she and the rest of them went to run the Astralist.”

“Anything to get out of helping haul groceries, huh?” Isaac said.

It would seem.

I turned my attention to Ramona for a little bit as she asked me if I had managed to get married in this storyline, too.

“No,” I said. “In fact, I was in my mid-forties by the end of it and still unwed.”

We joked as we walked.

And from there, I walked them back to the store, and everybody grabbed a cart. We started to fill one cart after another with all of the goods that Eternal Savers Club had to offer.

Of course, I had to be responsible and use most of my cart for reasonable things like bags of rice, seasonings, pasta, beans, and other foods that we could get in bulk and that would last a long time. The others were free to fill their carts with candy and frozen foods that we would have to hide in the walk-in freezer of the restaurant downstairs, because technically Kimberly’s writ gave her limited access to it, but we knew that any day we could walk down and that stuff would be gone.

It was amazing how fast we could fill those carts and still feel like we hadn’t even scratched the surface of what was available.

After a while, we started being chased around by Silas the mechanical showman, who did his best to seduce us into touching his button. But we knew we needed to put that off for a little while, while we were shopping. Once we had all gotten our tickets, we would be on a stricter time clock.

I was at the back of the store with Kimberly, trying to talk her out of taking home the cheap build-it-yourself furniture they had in stock, when I heard a scream at the front of the store.

It wasn’t a scared scream; it was Anna’s, screaming for us to come there.

“Is it one of the cultists, do you think?” Kimberly asked.

“No,” I said. “Maybe the rescuees.”

It wasn’t a strong suggestion; Anna knew everyone we were rescuing. But as soon as I got to the front of the store, I knew what the commotion was about.

Yes, the rescue team was there, and they were filling their own carts. I would have to say hi to them later.

Camden was in the electronics section, browsing through old school security cameras, and as soon as I saw him, he was wide-eyed and cursing under his breath.

“Dude, this might be trouble,” he said.

“Oh great,” I said, wondering what he could be talking about, making theories in my mind, and hoping they were incorrect…

I heard her before I saw her.

“But why are the policemen still lying down on the ground?” Janet asked with a giggle. “Are these animatronics? Surely not.”

It was true: the policemen that the cultists had taken out were still lying where they had been left. We had mostly ignored them.

“They’re just actors,” Bobby said. “They’re just playing their roles.” Then he raised his voice and said, “Hey guys, maybe take a break! The show’s over; you did a good job!”

After he said that, the police officers stood up from wherever they had been thrown or collapsed, started dusting themselves off, and left without saying a word. Janet almost found that weirder than when they were lying around on the ground.

NPCs were usually pretty pliable out of storylines.

“So the whole town is like this?” she asked.

“The whole town,” Bobby said. “They’re really into their traditions.”

I walked past the debris toward the registers where they were standing to look at her.

“So what are we doing here exactly?” she asked. “You said the show was over.”

“Yep, everything’s finished,” Bobby said, smiling, unable to contain his unbridled joy as he looked down at her.

“Why does it look like they’re ransacking the place?” she asked, waving her manicured hands around at the players filling their carts.

She was a small woman with short brunette hair. She dressed just under business casual. And for the first time since I had met her, she wore a smile.

“Well, yeah,” Bobby said. “It’s included in the package. We can get food here. We basically paid for it already.”

I looked over at Camden and then Kimberly, and basically, one by one, all of the other players, except for Isaac, who was doing everything he could not to laugh.

“See, look,” he said, pointing up at a large sign on the wall at the front of the store that said YOU CAN HAVE WHATEVER YOU WANT.

In fact, as I looked around, I realized that that sign had been everywhere, and yet somehow I had missed it.

“Bobby, I’m sure that’s not the store’s policy,” she said, sticking a finger to his chest playfully. “Are you messing with me?”

“No, I swear,” he said, laughing. “It’s true. We’re on a shopping trip; go grab a cart.”

She smiled at him and said, “I don’t believe you.”

“She’s an NPC,” Kimberly whispered.

“Yep,” I said.

“Do you have any idea what’s going on?” Camden asked.

“I’ll think about it tomorrow,” I said. “What’s one more ticking time bomb?”

Janet Gill. Non-player character. Plot Armor: 3.

What in the world had Bobby brought upon us? The way he was looking at her, it was like he was ignoring that she was clearly an NPC.

It took a while for people to start shopping again, but Silas the mechanical showman was very quick to remind us how pressing that issue was, so we managed to finish up. The other team, the one we had rescued, had been filled in on the events as we had described them to Lorne and Kelsey. They were staring at us and whispering amongst themselves.

“You know, I was really hoping that Logan would be here,” I said to Camden. “He knew these people better than we did.”

“Stop overthinking it, man. They’re gonna be glad to be alive, they’ll mourn for a bit, and then they’ll whisper behind our backs and foment mutiny. It’s no big deal. Just breathe.”

“No big deal,” I repeated. “You know, I thought that explaining the truth to them was going to be the hard part of this storyline.”

Camden laughed. “Now the hard part is explaining that,” he said, pointing at Bobby, who was trying to find an unexploded watermelon amongst the wreckage, to his wife’s delight.

“You remember the veterans didn’t even acknowledge that NPCs were people,” I said.

“It was easier that way,” he said. “Who would want to believe that being players in a death game wasn’t the worst-case scenario?”

“I don’t care. I’m not going to deal with the Janet situation,” I said. “You guys can have at it. I have to go get my cart, if you’ll excuse me.”

We finished shopping, and everyone did a good job of playing oblivious bystander to the presence of Janet, hoping that at some point the script would tell her to go away.

It wasn’t that we hated her and her surprisingly chipper attitude when she wasn’t freaked out over being in a horror world. It certainly wasn’t that we didn’t want Bobby to be happy. It was that we knew this was not a good thing.

Everyone knew that, except for Bobby, who seemed to believe he had struck gold.

How could this possibly be a good thing?

After we were done shopping, we finally relented and started getting our tickets from Silas. Janet didn’t even seem to notice there was something weird about a fortune-telling machine teleporting around the store, chasing the shoppers. She didn’t even really register his existence until Bobby himself pressed the button.

Then she said, “Am I supposed to press it?” in a teasing manner toward Bobby.

For the first time, Bobby seemed to acknowledge there was something unusual about Janet’s condition. He started thinking about whether or not she should press the button.

“Sure, honey,” he said.

Maybe he thought she would get another player ticket, and she would be a real, live girl instead of a meat puppet.

But when she pressed it, nothing happened.

“Oh, boo,” she said playfully.

Bobby grabbed his Wallflower archetype ticket and showed it to her. “Well, you gotta have one of these, hun.”

She smiled at him, and while he didn’t seem to acknowledge it, it was pretty clear that she did not see that ticket, or even really register what he had said.

“Tick, tick, tick,” Camden whispered.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep