The trip back to Kimberly’s loft wasn’t exactly silent, but people weren’t talking loudly.

Pushing an entire caravan of shopping carts multiple miles to get back to the downtown area was grueling work. When we went uphill, it was backbreaking, and when we went downhill, it was terrifying, especially when we were trying to navigate around Omens.

Back in the Camp Dyer days, the biggest concern was the gravel roads, which were almost impassable with the carts, but there weren’t as many Omens.

Still, Isaac and I worked to make sure that we all avoided every single one of them.

Another surprise was that the newly rescued team didn’t question where we were going, although they did get pretty wide-eyed when we didn’t make a turn toward the west.

I could see them back there, using what tropes they had to try to figure out what was going on, whether they were being led into a trap or not, but strangely, they didn’t say anything. Not to me, at least.

Maybe Kimberly had found the words to soothe them when I wasn’t looking, or maybe they were smart enough to suspect that something was amiss from the moment they were rescued.

They were watching and waiting, making sure that they had the information they needed before making a move.

When we got back to the downtown area, they were far more skittish than the rest of us and made their way toward the interior of the pack. I had to hold back laughter, as terrible as that made me feel.

I could remember the days when we were that scared of Omens, the days before we would stay up on the roof counting them, analyzing them, and getting used to them, frankly.

Even back at Camp Dyer, there were Omens around, but none of them were walking and trying to lure you in, except for those creepy little girls trying to get you to go to the abandoned cabin.

We made our way through the streets pretty easily. The NPCs cleared away from the sidewalk without noticing there was something odd about all of us with our shopping carts.

We made our way toward Grain Matter, the restaurant underneath Kimberly’s loft, and we pushed our carts right on in the front door. The NPCs didn’t seem to mind, even as we lined them up against the back door where the stairwell was, leading up to the back way into Kimberly’s apartment; they just walked around them without even paying mind or commenting on them.

Once we started unloading the carts, then and only then did the new players start to comment.

“We just need to get these supplies up to my loft. That’s kind of our headquarters,” Kimberly said as she carried bagfuls up the stairs.

The team kept looking at Nicole, who was clearly their leader, wondering how she was going to react to what they were seeing. Some looked nervous but also amused.

Nicole was an enigma.

She was an Eye Candy who had chosen the Socialite aspect, which would make her famous inside the stories that she took part in, but the way she dressed didn’t match that at all. She looked like she was about to do repairs on an old house she had bought.

She wore an overlarge plaid button-up shirt, a bandana in her hair, and pants that might have been yoga pants, but I wasn’t sure. Perhaps one day she realized that Carousel was going to dress her however it wanted, so she stopped worrying about style.

“The downtown?” Nicole asked incredulously. “This is your base of operations? Do you know how many Omens there are around here?”

“Yes,” Isaac said matter-of-factly as he carried a load of groceries up.

He would know; he had spent countless hours cataloging any Omen he could find from his perch on the roof.

“We have a really good idea,” I added, having already carried an entire cartload up to the loft and then some. “We’ve been doing this for a while. This is what Carousel is normally like.”

After that, we had a sort of stare-off as they looked at me, distrusting or at least confused. That staring contest was broken when Janet walked by.

“This is nice, a loft above a restaurant?” she asked, ever so upbeat. “Bobby, I didn’t know we were going to be downtown in the middle of everything. This is wonderful.”

She didn’t help take up any groceries, not even the ones she had shopped for, but I was sure she would have if asked.

For the most part, like the other NPCs, she didn’t really acknowledge the grocery carts, so she may not have even known they were there.

“When are we going to talk about that?” Kelsey asked, eyeing Janet.

They had known Janet and her whole situation. The vets had long speculated what happened to players who went missing. Now they had found one who came back as an NPC. They must have been quite curious.

Lorne turned and whispered to her, “One thing at a time, darling.”

We continued like that for a while, with everyone contributing to getting the supplies up to the loft, except, of course, for Nicole’s team, who didn’t quite trust it yet.

After that, Kimberly, Antoine, and I sat down with Nicole’s team, and we explained everything to them as we knew it.

“Adeline always said to pull off the bandage quickly,” Kimberly said as she started the story and moved through the events that had happened to us ever since we had gotten to Carousel, until the present.

Everything she said was clear, concise, and rehearsed. I was glad that she was there to do it because I was afraid I was going to have to, and I hadn’t memorized the explanation as well as I could have.

To their credit, Nicole’s team took it very well.

We had always dreaded how these interactions were going to go. Logan’s team had done wonderfully with the information, for the most part. The reason, I thought, was that despite how bad the news was, it was news, it was change, it was forward momentum.

It was everything that players from Camp Dyer prayed for as they lay down to sleep, just for something to happen.

I doubted they prayed that everyone they were close to would be killed systematically in order to reset the game through a plan set in action before they even got to Carousel, called Project Rewind.

Still, when Kimberly was done speaking, the Comedian of their group, named Molly Menkin, just started to laugh like she thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

I didn’t know Molly from back in the Camp Dyer days; she blended into a crowd pretty well when the crowd was big enough, but it became immediately apparent what type of Comedian she was, and not just her aspect, which was Stooge.

Molly was a little silly. She reminded me of Joan Cusack in her comedy roles, mixed with some sort of drunk, fun aunt. She wore a scarf and a casual blue dress with some sort of little jacket. She might have been a flight attendant back in real life, but I wasn’t sure.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

“If you have any questions, just ask,” Kimberly said.

We sat and waited.

“We want to see it,” Nicole said on behalf of her group. It wasn’t like she had consulted them on it.

“See what?” I asked.

Nicole didn’t answer because Antoine seemed to understand what she was asking.

“Camp Dyer,” he said. “I get it. We can go with you, whatever you need. Just give me a second, I’ll be right back.”

Kimberly turned to me and asked, “Riley, can you go with him? Just to be sure?”

I nodded. I supposed that meant Kimberly wasn’t going.

Come to think of it, I had never been to Camp Dyer outside of a storyline since it got overrun. I was wondering what was waiting there for us and how different it would be without an active writ of habitation.

Kimberly excused herself and went up the stairs, no doubt to help organize all the groceries. There was no way she was going to let other people try to put things away. If they did, she would have to spend weeks rearranging things.

So I sat there at the table in the restaurant, and we watched as employees from Eternal Savers Club arrived to awkwardly retrieve the carts that we had stolen. I wondered if any of them were cultists.

To pass the time, I decided to ask a question.

“So which one of you was the scout?”

They had a Final Girl, an Eye Candy, an Athlete, a Bruiser, and a Comedian, none of which were known for being scouts. That was usually minor archetype territory.

“I am,” Nicole said. “We don’t need an escort.”

“I don’t know,” Molly said. “A good escort could make things interesting.”

She looked me in the eye and smiled.

“Not now, Molly,” Nicole said.

Luckily, Antoine made his way back down the stairs, and he was carrying my TV with the trope that allowed me to show people the videos I was playing on the red wallpaper. That was a good idea. Assuming we could find somewhere to plug it in.

“Ready to head out?” Antoine asked.

Nicole nodded on behalf of her team, and we all stood and made our way to the street, where I very quickly learned what type of scouting trope she had.

As soon as we stepped out in public, we were surrounded by men and women in black suits with sunglasses. They looked like bodyguards; in fact, that’s what they were.

“We need to get to Camp Dyer,” Nicole said.

The lead bodyguard, who was the tallest and the oldest, put his finger to his ear and said, “Camp Dyer. Everyone.” Then he looked back at Nicole and said, “Right this way, ma’am. We need to move quickly.”

And then they started shoving us on a path out west, beyond the downtown, in a beeline for Camp Dyer.

“Should have let them push the carts,” Molly said with a laugh.

Her trope was called Security Detail, and it was something both Socialites and Celebrities were able to use. It didn’t give her information on the Omens, but it did protect her from dangers, which would obviously include Omens.

From what I could tell from using my scouting trope, the guys were doing a good job pushing us away from anything suspicious and making us run when we needed to run. I even spotted bodyguards on rooftops, keeping an eye on things and making sure we were safe.

Antoine and I shared a glance at the humor of it all.

We got to Camp Dyer quickly, or at least we got to the sign at the entrance, with the warning about the malfunctioning dam and a bulletin board about all the events that were going to take place at Camp Dyer.

“We have to go slow from here,” the lead bodyguard said.

And so he and his men circled in tight, keeping their eyes peeled as they pushed the group forward down the path that would lead to the lodge and then open up to the larger campgrounds.

In fact, we passed several campgrounds on the way, at least one of which had an Omen, something inside one of those weird charcoal grills that were cemented into the ground, where someone had tried to burn something but wasn’t quite successful.

The closer we got, the more different everything seemed. We could hear laughter and movement up over the hill where the camp was, far more than we were used to. When we were there, the campers would keep to themselves on the far side of the camp, away from the lodge where we slept. That certainly wasn’t the case anymore.

There were NPCs all over the place. While this was ostensibly a children’s camp, the reality was that it was a setting for all sorts of storylines, including ones that involved adults. It also included the ones that had teenagers who looked like adults. I spotted at least one group of people on a business retreat in the distance, going through the obstacle courses.

“That’s far enough,” the lead guard said as soon as we came in view of the lodge.

Off to our left were some bushes, with little evil girls giggling in them.

The other players seemed like they were holding their breath as they looked around at all the activity, and while they couldn’t see the Omens, they clearly knew what all this movement meant.

“There are a lot of Omens here, aren’t there?” Nicole asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “All over the place.”

For a moment, they took that in.

But then the little girls hiding in the bush started to sing a familiar song.

“Suzy Snyder, six foot five,

Haunts Camp Dyer, still alive.

She went missing long ago… ”

But before they could finish, Molly approached the girls and asked, “Hey, girls, do you remember me? Your friend Molly? Your good pal?”

The girls weren’t convinced.

“How about this? You remember this?” she asked as she retrieved a handful of colorful, single-wrapped pieces of candy from her purse. “You like candy, right?”

The girls stopped singing, but they didn’t swoop in for the candy. They looked at her suspiciously, like they didn’t remember her at all.

Whatever relationship she had had with the campers at Camp Dyer had been undone by the reset.

One girl started crying and screamed, “Stranger danger!” Another started running away, yelling, “I’ll go get help!” Soon, the girls were all scattering, leaving Molly backing away, embarrassed and confused.

“This is not our Camp Dyer. They knew my name and everything, I swear,” she said.

“Molly, leave those children alone,” Lorne said. “I told you not to get attached.”

“Well, it was easy to get attached when they weren’t running away and screaming,” she said.

They weren’t ready to leave yet. As night came, Nicole’s Security Detail moved us further away from the camp, toward a picnic table next to a large light pole, which, fortuitously, had a plug-in.

They sat and bemoaned their circumstances, but they weren’t nearly as upset as I expected them to be. Maybe it was because even before Camp Dyer exploded, whenever players would die, they would mourn but then move on quickly and rarely mention the names of their fallen allies.

In fact, I wasn’t sure if I had ever heard any of them talk about Logan’s group after they had wiped out. It was just part of the culture they made to survive, no looking back.

Of course, they didn’t have rescue troops.

Eventually, Kelsey said, “Isn’t this what we always wanted? Something to do? A way out?”

I put my finger to my lips and hushed her.

“We’re not pulling that thread right now,” I said.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Antoine and I looked at each other, and then he said, “Every choice we make pulls on a plot thread. Carousel’s main plot, its throughline, is about escape. We aren’t pulling that thread until the right time.”

“If just talking about escape was enough to trigger that plot,” Molly said with a laugh, “we must have practically unspooled the whole thing with all the jabbering we did back in the day. It was all we talked about for weeks on end.”

“You did trigger that throughline. That’s why you guys had to die, to reset Carousel.”

Molly started laughing like I’d told a funny joke.

Nicole had become silent, but she did eventually say, “I can see Carousel’s throughline on the red wallpaper. We really did get a reset, didn’t we?”

Before, they couldn’t see throughlines at all and probably had never heard the term, or at least never heard it and known it was important.

We sat there and talked for a while. When there was silence, we plugged in my TV, and I used my Coming Soon to Theaters trope to show them the trailer from the fall of Camp Dyer.

The whole thing was hard to watch. These were friends and allies for years, dying gruesome deaths without even being able to lay a scratch on the shadowy hulk who served as the antagonist for Say No to Summer, the principal storyline at Camp Dyer.

After the scene where the little campers throw the Omen in the form of a plastic locket onto Arthur’s lap, Molly said, “I guess all that candy really was for nothing.”

But other than that, they were silent.

After the trailer was over, Kyle, Nicole’s nephew and the team’s Athlete, said, “I was going to blame myself for not being there, but I don’t think it would have mattered. How are we supposed to beat something like that? She plowed through all of our best players.”

Good question.

“We level up,” Antoine said. “We get strong enough to take on whatever’s in the way, even her.”

Without any prompting, we all looked over in the direction of the derelict cabin that contained the Omen for Say No to Summer.

There was a beat of silence.

“We got too comfortable,” Nicole said. “I hated myself for it. All those safe nights, sitting by the bonfire. No Omens to worry about. We should have known it was all a trap.”

Lorne put his arm around her shoulders. “Don’t let yourself think that,” he said. “This is what humans do. We huddle up around a fire, or in this case, a cheap little TV, and we stay safe from the monsters in the woods. It’s our nature.”

How poetic.

“So this means we haven’t had a fair chance at winning since we got here?” Kelsey asked, but she wasn’t down on herself or upset. She was smiling now. “We have a chance. This is good news. This is what we all hoped for.”

Molly chuckled. “We were hoping for very different things, my dear,” she said. Then she turned to the nearest bodyguard and said, “Pierce, darling, is the little girl’s room safe these days?”

The bodyguard’s name wasn’t Pierce. He didn’t have a name on the red wallpaper; she was just having fun.

“No, ma’am,” he said. “The facilities are compromised.”

And he was right about that. There was no safe bathroom in sight.

“Well, we can’t stay here,” Molly said, quickly getting up. “We can finish mourning back at the loft. Tell me, is the food at the restaurant free?”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep