Chapter Thirty: The Grotesque Lottery

We waited for the longest time.

I felt like I was 12 years old again and hiding out in the cellar with my grandparents as the storm of the century raged above. I had felt like I was just waiting to find out whether that was how I died.

When I asked my grandpa whether we were going to be okay, he answered, “We will or we won’t.”

That was that.

My grandmother was much better in a crisis and comforted me and said that no matter what happened she would be there with me.

It wasn’t that my grandfather was cold, no, he just had a different outlook. Even when cancer put him on his deathbed, he still had this slight grin on his face like he was amused that death would finally show its face to him after all these years.

When speaking of his potential demise, he would say again “I will, or I won’t.”

Of course, he would have to have a pretty strange outlook on life to get his young grandson hooked on horror movies.

I must have gotten a lot of my personality from him because even as the players around me scrambled, all I could wonder was, is this how I die? I’m not saying that I’m particularly brave or unafraid of death but I am more curious than I am scared.

Anna, on the other hand, was far more interested in being prepared. She immediately started asking around about whether things like this had happened before and what to do about them. Should we run? Can we run?

Grace, under pressure, continued to cook. I could see that she was frazzled, which wasn’t normal for her.

“This hasn’t happened in years,” she told Anna. She took a cleaver and chopped the heads off of the fish that Lee had caught. “And never like this.”

I wasn’t sure what she meant by “like this.”

Her hands were shaking. She really shouldn’t have been holding that cleaver, but I wasn’t going to say that to her.

“Why is no one leaving?” Anna asked, hoping one of the veteran players would let her in on whatever secret it was that they knew.

Roxie, who had immediately found the front entrance to the lodge, and gone to her room to change into attire more appropriate for a storyline, had mercy on Anna and explained it to us.

“Everyone who has seen that Omen can be chosen. It doesn’t matter which team actually picks it up. It doesn’t matter if everyone else runs to the other side of Carousel. All we know for sure is that Janette will be on the team. What’s going to happen is there’s going to be a short debate and then Arthur is going to pick up the Omen. Then the lucky winners will march off to complete the storyline.”

“Can’t we just… not touch it?” Anna asked.

Roxie smirked. “This one? Maybe. The next one? Probably not.”

I noticed that she had changed her tropes around. She was no longer a Femme Fatale; she had downgraded back to Eye Candy.

When I asked her why that was, she explained that it was bad practice to have multiple advanced archetypes on a single team. Advanced archetypes tend to take over storylines and much of the plot will become focused on them. If you have more than one it can be pretty convoluted and difficult to discern how to proceed.

“When whatever a ‘grotesque’ is starts killing us, I want it to be Arthur’s responsibility, not mine,” she said.

She then started helping Grace shuck corn.

Todd, who had been the person with the foresight to lock both doors whenever he saw a strange NPC coming, had emerged from a lodge ready for a fight. While the Comedian archetype was not a combat class, Todd had something called a background trope, titled, “Recently home from the war.”

A background trope allows you to modify your character’s past. In doing so, it makes a variety of tropes–centered around a theme–equippable to players that normally wouldn’t be able to use them. It was the closest thing to multiclassing that you could do in Carousel. Most of the veteran players had their favorites.

His “Recently home from the war” trope gave him access to four or five other tropes, mostly related to combat and firearms.

His small collection of weapons consisted of two sidearms and a large knife.

After thirty minutes or so, Arthur and Adeline finally arrived.

They had run the entire way.

I barely had time to tell them about the Grotesque’s tropes before they locked themselves away to plan a response. As Roxie had predicted, they spent 10 to 15 minutes debating what they were going to do with some of the higher-level players. When they emerged, they decided that Arthur would activate the omen.

Adaline gathered everyone up outside. “Go in through the front door and get whatever tropes you think will help you assist Arthur’s Monster Hunter. Players who have sacrificial builds, please prepare them.”

Even she seemed concerned over this omen. I thought that was strange because her plot armor should have put her well out of range to worry about something like this. Both she and Arthur had 20 plot armor on this creature.

“We thought that we would have another month at least before something like this happened,” she said. “Some players have a difficult time adjusting to Carousel. Others take to it very intuitively. We cannot blame Janette. We’re just going to have to do our best to react and overcome this.”

Even as every player who had been in the vicinity of the omen was prepping for the apocalypse, no one had managed to get Janette out of her room yet. No one had seen her husband because he was out doing a storyline with Travis.

My friends and I had found our own place amongst the chaos. Unlike everyone else we really didn’t have much preparation to do. We didn’t have enough tropes yet that we had to create builds. We just had to use what we had.

Carousel “didn’t like it” when high-level players lent tropes to low-level players. I didn’t know what that meant exactly, but I could use my imagination.

My friends and I tried to comfort each other.

“It’s not going to be you,” Antoine said to Kimberly. He held her in his arms, showing a rare moment of public affection. “That thing is way too high a level. It’s going to pick somebody else.”

He didn’t know that. After all, Carousel had just sent a level 43 omen after Janette who only had nine plot armor. I wasn’t going to correct him.

Camden was doing his best to stay calm. This couldn’t have been a good thing to wake up to after what he had just gone through.

“You know Arthur’s going to activate the omen and he’s a Monster Hunter. That’s just an advanced scholar archetype and they probably don’t need two scholars,” I said to him. It made sense to me, but I didn’t know if that would be a factor at all.

“Thanks,” he said softly. I could tell that he was afraid. Anna gave him a hug.

Anna was far more concerned with making sure that each of us was okay. She was made for situations like this, in a way.

I wanted to ask Kimberly how much Moxie the thing in the box had. I knew I shouldn’t, not with how she was handling things.

It would have been useful information to have. I knew it didn’t have a ton of Savvy because my Trope Master ability worked on it. If I could get an idea of its other stats, I might feel like it was less of a threat. Being able to create duplicate offspring was such a scary prospect. Even Arthur couldn’t withstand getting surrounded by a lot of creatures of this level.

As I considered this, I realized that that might be the reason that even the high-level players were so concerned. Even though Adeline and Arthur were in their low 60s that didn’t mean that they had enough Grit to protect them from whatever a Grotesque was. If this creature had a particularly high Mettle, enough of them could probably kill everyone at camp.

An hour after the package had arrived, Lara, the Psychic archetype, publicly declared that we needed to take it before nightfall.

She had several tropes that could give her information about storylines that she wasn’t a part of and omens that had not yet been activated. Tropes with names like Soothsayer and Harbinger. I wasn’t sure which one she used to make this prediction.

As if they had been waiting for such a sign, Adeline and Arthur got everyone to arrange themselves by plot armor. They acted as if proximity to the omen might play a role in choosing the team so they wanted the strongest players closest. I couldn’t say if that was something they knew to be fact or if it was just a theory.

The air was tense as Arthur, who had packed a large duffel with all of his monster hunting gear, got near the parcel.

There was nothing left but the luck of the draw.

Just looking at the package I could see that the needle on the plot cycle was at omen. For some of us, maybe even all of us, it was about to change.

He reached down and grabbed the package. He took a knife from his belt and opened it up slowly as the surrounding players watched, many with their hands on their holsters.

From within the package, Arthur retrieved a stone statue about the size of a border collie. The statue was hideous. It had the body of a dog, the tail of a lion, the face of a man screaming in agony, and teeth like something out of hell. Two curved horns grew from its head.

I finally figured out what a Grotesque was. It was a gargoyle, and not the Saturday morning cartoon version.

He started looking around at the crowd of players. “Who do we got?”

Three hands raised into the air. There was Reggie, a Bruiser with plot armor 38. Valerie, a Final Girl. Plot Armor 58. And Roxie, the Eye Candy, who smiled like she was expecting it. Plot Armor 40.

Arthur, Monster Hunter, Plot Armor 64 was also part of the party.

Of course, Janette the Hysteric, Plot Armor 9, would be as well.

“Anyone else?” Arthur asked.

There was someone else…

Me.

I raised my hand.

“Oh no,” Anna said. She hugged me.

I was numb. I couldn’t even hug her back.

Arthur cursed.

“Carousel can’t resist a Film Buff,” Roxie said with a laugh.

“You’re going to be okay,” Anna said. It was more of a question than a statement.

“I will or I won’t,” I said under my breath.

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