Interlude: In Time

“Anna,” Camden said, as we strapped ourselves into the helicopter. “They’re going to be okay.”

Was he asking me or telling me?

“I know,” I said.

“They will be,” Bella reassured me. She must have seen the worry on my face. “Grace is a top detective. There’s no way they lose.”

She gave me a sincere smile.

Bella was a stout woman with a loud, confident voice and a take-no-crap-from-anyone attitude. She was a Bruiser on the Bowler’s team. She had been a parole officer before she came to Carousel. She still was, in some ways, with how she wrangled the men on her team when they started getting rowdy.

I nodded my head and tried to smile.

I felt like I was abandoning members of my team when they needed me most.

I took a deep breath. I needed to focus on the storyline at hand. I couldn’t do the others any good if we failed here. I had to survive. That was what Final Girls did, right?

Headhuntress Reborn.

I didn’t need Riley to picture what we might be up against with that title. I could almost feel a blade on my neck just thinking about it.

I needed to learn more about the story. I looked around the helicopter for clues. Unlike a certain Film Buff, the rest of us had to actually look for important information. We couldn’t just see enemy tropes unless they were displayed somewhere.

We were not the only people on the helicopter. The pilot had not arrived yet.

There were eight passenger seats. Two were filled by a well-dressed woman and an energetic four-year-old—a little girl. They were both NPCs.

As everyone got in an buckled up, she started to speak. We all listened intently.

“Sweetheart, we’re going to see Daddy!” she looked into her child’s eyes and brushed some thin hair out of her face. “And his twenty-two-year-old ‘assistant’. I think he might need a new ‘assistant’ because he hasn’t been answering my calls since he got to Anera Island for his ‘business trip’.”

Missing person on Anera Island.

That was the Omen, and, like most, it was not subtle. It was delivered to us through a scripted dialogue from a woman that believed herself to be the victim of infidelity.

“I bet Daddy will be very happy to see us!”

The NPC tried to deliver her lines in a happy tone for her child, but with enough venom that we knew how angry and hurt she was by the suspected infidelity.

She was failing.

Like all of the NPCs we had seen since the storm began, her fear was evident. It choked out every word she spoke. Knowing of the impending Apocalypse, it must have been difficult for her to play her character.

With the Omen delivered, the pilot was likely to show soon. I hoped.

The little girl didn’t understand what was going on. She didn’t know the danger of the black snowstorm billowing in the distance. The script would never let her say anything about it even if she did.

She knew that her mother was upset and set herself on fixing that.

She turned in her mother’s lap and place her tiny hands against her mother’s face. When a solitary tear fell from the woman’s eye, she wiped it with her yellow sleeve.

“Mommy,” the little girl said. I could see her moving her lips and trying to find words, but something was stopping her.

“Is Daddy ok?” the little girl asked finally.

Her mother swallowed deeply. “That depends on what we find out when we get to Anera, Baby.”

Lines.

More lines.

Her voice was soft, and her eyes filled with tears. Her character was a woman scorned. All she could say were lines from her character that would act as an Omen to us.

Lines that signaled, “A man has gone to the island of Anera and not returned. Beware.”

How could she comfort her daughter with such restrictions? How could she say words meant to show anger and hurt in such a way that her young daughter’s worries about the storm would be quelled?

NPCs had a life even worse than ours. That was my belief. Sure, the veterans talked about them like they were not real or they were not alive, but that was a defense mechanism. Who could look at an exchange like this between a mother and a daughter and deny they were really in there somewhere?

The woman drew her daughter in for a hug. She looked out the window and back toward us.

Finally, a man in a white uniform began running toward the helicopter from the building across the tarmac. He was tall and muscular with an experimental (and not so successful) mustache. It was the kind of facial hair men only wore when they were young or had no one to impress.

“Sorry about my tardiness, folks,” the man said as he entered the helicopter. “Traffic was something else today.”

After he turned and looked at us, he flashed a pearl-white smile. He wore aviator sunglasses. I got a good look at his face. He was sweating profusely. His cheeks and forehead were flushed. He almost looked drunk. I was not looking forward to how that might play out in the story.

“This is a one-way trip to Anera Island. I have been told that your bungalows are not yet ready, but they have rooms available for you at the retreat next door.” He took a deep breath and coughed into his hand. “My apologies. I should warn you; the retreat does have an open bar, so pace yourselves, or your memories might check out before you do.”

The man strained to smile at his joke.

The storyline was at some kind of tropical hotel, from the sound of it, complete with cheesy jokes. I wondered how the titular Headhuntress would fit into it. I glanced over at Camden. I was glad to have him here. He was usually good in a crisis.

The pilot fumbled around with his controls while we sat in the back seat, still in the Omen phase of the story. He needed to hurry. I wasn’t sure how much longer we had before the storm got to us. Our “divine intervention” in finding the bus had gotten us far away from the storm, but it drew closer every time I looked out the window.

I glanced over at Travis. His gaze was focused on the pilot like a hawk. He had a suspicious look that I recognized.

I tried to figure out what had him on high alert. Was it simply that the pilot was taking too long?

Travis was an Outsider, and his Outsider’s Perspective would clue him into the presence of something strange, but not actually tell him what it was.

Dina had the same ability. That was where I had seen that look before.

I began looking at the pilot too. I knew he was acting weird, but I assumed it was normal for the storyline. Could it be something else?

Travis started unbuckling rapidly. “We have to go!” he screamed. “Look at the spots on his shirt!”

Spots.

I didn’t see spots. Not at first. They were small and difficult to separate from sweat stains, but as I looked closely, I realized what I was supposed to be seeing.

Black stains.

Small round black stains.

Like those you might get if black snow fell on you.

“Everyone out!” Reggie yelled.

I was already out of my restraints and out the door before I even realized what the dots meant. We had not actually activated the Omen. Riley had said that we needed to take off to activate it. The vets’ experiences suggested the same.

The black snow on the pilot doomed our run of Headhuntress Reborn. We didn’t know what the snow did, but we knew that the pilot was part of the Apocalypse since it had touched him. Our escape would certainly fail.

Perhaps sweating and flushed skin were symptoms of the snow. Was the Apocalypse a disease of some kind? We couldn’t wait around to find out.

I looked back over my shoulder. The mother and daughter sat still, their fate sealed. The mother had a look of horror on her face. She must have thought she would escape the black snow for a moment. Suddenly she knew she wouldn’t.

I wished I could have done something for them. No one deserved to suffer like that. The NPCs were doomed to sit there until someone came and successfully activated their Omen, as we almost had. They would still be there until the Omen was deactivated. By then, it would be too late for them.

It would turn out that I was not the only one who realized their situation.

After we had all disembarked the helicopter, Bella leaned back in and shouted, “We changed our minds. Get them out of here!”

“You got it,” the pilot yelled back. He sounded relieved to get the order.

Bella was a Bruiser with a Bully aspect. I had never seen that aspect in action before. I still wasn’t able to see aspects at all because I had not met the condition required to choose one yet. It was nice to see that the Bully had abilities that could help knock the NPCs out of their scripted prison, if only in limited ways.

The pilot shut the door after us and started to take off.

It was a long shot. The pilot had been touched by the black snow before he arrived. I had no idea what that might cause, but I knew the chances of them surviving were only slightly higher than if Bella had done nothing.

We were out of the helicopter and on our way across the tarmac in a heartbeat.

~~~

We ran as fast as our legs would take us. One of the planes had already taken off. It was the one with the hardest storyline that no one had been assigned to. The Omen must have disappeared before we realized our pilot was infected by the black snow.

The other plane with an Omen was larger and blue. It had already pulled away from the portable stairs the other players used to climb up. We were going to miss it. I was sure of it.

I was wrong.

The plane stopped suddenly before it had fully turned around toward the runway. The large door flew open.

Tory, a fellow Final Girl that was a member of Travis’s team, had managed to get the door open. I could see NPCs bustling about, panicked over her actions.

Travis was the first one to the open door. He had to jump up and pull his body up and into the plane.

He turned, grabbed onto a handle inside the plane with one hand, and reached the other one out toward Jose, his teammate. Jose grabbed it, and Travis pulled him up into the aircraft.

Next, Travis reached out for Bella, who was nearest. He hoisted her up with an adrenaline-soaked scream. His hand was back out the door in seconds, reaching for mine.

I grabbed for it, but before I reach him, he was pulled back, and the door was shut by an NPC.

“Why?” I screamed. It only took me a second to figure it out. The plane had been larger than the other, but it was still quite small. There was enough room for the cockpit and eight passengers if the windows told me anything.

The plane was full. The five original team members that were assigned to that storyline, and three of ours.

We were cut off. Storylines had limits to how many people they took. That was why the Grotesque storyline took so few players when it was activated.

“No!” Reggie screamed.

The plane started taxiing down the runway as the passengers screamed for us. I could hear Bella screaming for them to let us in, but even her abilities had limits.

“We need to find another Omen,” Camden said. “Reggie, do you have something you can use for that?”

“Sorry, kid,” Reggie said. “That ain’t in my bag of tricks.”

“Riley!” I yelled. “Riley said there was another Omen when were almost here. The roller skate building.”

We turned around. We had gotten disoriented.

“There!” Camden said.

He pointed westward toward the storm.

Could we make it in time?

~~~

The bus had been left in the airstrip parking lot on the other side of the tarmac.

We would have to run all the way back there and hope that the bus was still working. Surely Travis had left the keys in it. Even then, we were not guaranteed to be able to operate it because we had no tropes that granted that ability.

Either way, running across the airstrip and jumping over a fence at the end was faster.

We ran as fast as we could. It looked impossible.

Every few seconds, the Roller Rink would flicker away. Every time it did, I worried it might not come back.

We got the fence. It wasn’t very tall, and Reggie threw us over before pulling himself up and over, landing on his back as he rolled.

We were up on our feet in seconds. We still had hundreds of yards to go, and the black haze of falling snow was getting closer and closer. We didn’t just have to beat the storm, we had to beat it by enough that not even a snowflake touched us.

“We can’t make it,” Camden said. “We need to turn back. There might be… other Omens somewhere.”

He was right. We were running out of time. Soon, the building’s parking lot would start getting powdered with black snow.

Reggie was up ahead of me. He was very fast for a larger guy. I could see him shuffling through his tickets. He apparently found what he was looking for, because they went back in his pockets.

Then he fell.

I could see his knee hit the pavement hard.

I stopped to try and help him. It was second nature. I couldn’t leave a player behind.

“Leave me!” he yelled. “Go!”

He shoved me away, hard. I did as he asked and ran to catch up with Camden.

But it was all for show.

My Hustle rose twenty points. So did Camden’s.

I looked over my should and saw the ticket he had equipped on the red wallpaper.

I’m just slowing you down!

Type: Buff/Action

Archetype: Bruiser

Aspect: Gentle Giant

Stat Used: Moxie

It is truly noble when a character acknowledges that they are a liability to their allies and willingly sacrifices themselves to improve their allies’ odds of escape.

With this trope equipped, a player can sacrifice themselves in order to help their team escape. To activate the trope, the player must devise a reason that their death or abandonment will help the other players in their escape efforts. If successful, a buff equivalent to the player’s Plot Armor will be distributed among present allies’ Hustle. However, the player is guaranteed to suffer whatever fate they attempt to flee.

If this trope is used during a chase scene with an enemy assailant, the player will get one chance to inflict injury upon the assailant before death.

“If you want to move forward, you have to be willing to leave something behind.”

A self-sacrifice trope.

I ran toward the Roller Rink with every bit of speed I could muster. I wasn’t actually moving faster because of my increased Hustle, but the storm… I couldn’t tell for sure because of its massive size and the shadow it cast, but I swear it was standing in place.

Our Hustle was so high even the Apocalypse could not outrun us, at least at that moment.

Camden and I ran into the parking lot of the roller rink. With a pull on the metal handle, Camden was inside. Then I was.

I started scanning Camden for snowflakes. I hadn’t seen any on the way in, but we needed to be sure. He scanned me for the same.

“I think we made it,” Camden said.

“We did,” I said, looking out the window to Reggie, who was stumbling hopelessly toward the building.

I thought we would have to watch him suffer the consequences of his sacrifice, but Reggie was gone in the blink of an eye. The storm was gone.

Suddenly the sun was shining, and the music of the Roller Rink was all I could hear.

It was like we had been transported somewhere else, but we hadn’t; the airstrip was still there. The street had not moved.

We weren’t in a different place.

We were in a different time.

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