Chương 115: Book Five, Chapter 18: The Fallen

"Are you sure we can't just call Sal again?" Isaac asked. I could tell there was something he was aching to say. He was afraid. Unfortunately, his fear came out in the form of insincere apathy and overdone caution.

"We just need to ask him the right questions."

"We already talked to Sal," I said.

"I am telling you, it is best to just have a good attitude about this sort of thing." If not a good attitude, at least dread things silently.

"I am telling you, I have a funny feeling that I'm really going to regret this," Isaac said.

"We should pick a different story."

"I have the same feeling," I said.

"About you regretting it. Still, there is no right story. There is only the next one." We had all taken a walk to a small suburb in western Carousel. There was a community center there, and inside that community center was an omen for a story called The Box Lunch. We had encountered a problem. Ramona was way too low-level to compete in the higher-level storylines the rest of us were attempting. Isaac was the next lowest-level player. Her Plot Armor was 11, and his was 18.

There was a lot of difference between those two levels, in my experience. The problem was everyone had to run a storyline every few weeks. In fact, running them more often was better so that no one got too relaxed. The question was, how were we supposed to send Ramona out on a storyline where she wouldn't just get torn to shreds because of her low plot armor? Our solution was The Box Lunch. The Carousel Atlas had a list of storylines that were good for low-level players.

It wasn't exactly phrased that way, but that was the gist. Storylines didn't scale down to the player's level, but they did scale up to the highest level player, which presented a problem. Most low-level storylines appropriate for Ramona would cease to be appropriate as soon as we added higher-level players to go along with her. Luckily, storylines in Carousel were not scaled one-to-one. Storyline difficulty came in stages that were unique to each storyline.

While enemies might scale to the highest-level player to ensure that they are engaged, the story overall would usually be in a preset difficulty range. We had experienced some exceptions to that rule, but we didn't expect more of them. Running storylines to avoid the axe was routine. Case in point, The Box Lunch was a storyline that, according to the Atlas, had a difficulty of about plot armor 15. The difficulty did not jump until you had a player at level 30 enter it. That was a very generous range.

It meant we could put Ramona, Cassie, Isaac, Dina, and Bobby on the team, and they should have no problem beating it without worrying about it scaling up. Ramona had reacted jubilantly to our solution. Which is to say, she had said "Thanks" without making eye contact. I hated to think she blamed us. If she got a few painful deaths thrust upon her, she would definitely be salty. I just hoped we could level her up fast enough that she wouldn't be the target for too long.

The problem was that The Box Lunch was not exactly a desirable story. The Carousel Atlas had not been explicit, but when Kimberly had called her fake agent Sal, he made it clear to her that if she were to run through that movie, there would be gifs of her floating around the internet that would completely destroy whatever sex appeal she had built up. We interpreted that to mean that it was kind of a gross-out movie. Gross-out beats torture any day. In theory at least. Other than that, it was a perfect storyline.

"Have I ever told you about how my first death went?" I asked.

"Yes," Isaac said.

"Have I ever told you that I have a weak stomach?" Had we been that stubborn when we started out? Antoine and Anna had been pretty gung-ho about the whole thing, and we didn't really have a chance to have a bad attitude because of it. Now, we didn't have Anna and Antoine was… not himself. Still, we trudged onward.

"Better invest in some grit then," I said. Antoine and Kimberly were off walking by themselves, staying with the group only enough to avoid running into any omens. We had some hard talks ahead of us. It was nice to get everyone else out of the loft for a while so we could discuss things.

"Two days, though," Isaac said.

"This storyline lasts two days."

"That's enough," Cassie said, elbowing him in the arm.

"I thought men were supposed to be brave for the women."

"That depends on the men," Isaac said.

"It also depends on the women." Ramona said nothing in all of this. She had been amenable to discussing strategy and learning the game as best as I could teach it. She was still under a perpetual rain cloud and I couldn't blame her. Luckily, the suburban area where the community center existed was fairly quiet of omens. There were the normal things, like the chunk of sidewalk that was missing, leaving a hole that led so far down we couldn't see the bottom.

We were stared at by NPCs and others from every window we walked past, but it was no big deal. When we got to the community center, everything felt normal.

"Let's go in and look around," I said. Antoine didn't have a lot to say, but he took the cue and walked in front of us with his baseball bat ready to protect us. We walked through the doors and were greeted by a series of tables. On the far side of the room was a cubby cabinet that kids in kindergarten might keep their belongings in, but in this case, it was used for all manner of board games and personal belongings of the people who were visiting the community center.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. I quickly got an eye on the omen across the room. It was one of those that was difficult to accidentally trigger.

"OK," I said.

"What you're going to do is go search behind the cubby, and you'll find a thermos that looks like it's been there for a while. Just take the thermos and put it up with all the other lunches in that cubby over there, and that's all it will take.

"That's it?" Cassie said.

"I told you it was simple," I said.

"Be careful; there are other omens in that cubby. Don't touch anything except for the thermos," I added. I looked around at the newbies to make sure they were paying attention.

"Does anyone else hear that music box? That's way louder than it should be," Isaac asked. As soon as he did, a loud bang was heard as somewhere the music box closed loudly. That had been an Omen.

"Focus and you'll be fine," I said, looking back toward where the thermos was and glancing at the poster for the storyline. It looked like the cover of a Goosebumps book. They would be fine. They would just have to barf up a few gelatinous monsters first. Kimberly, Antoine, and I made our way out of the community center, leaving the others to run their simple, little, disgusting storyline where no one had to die, and everyone would want mouthwash after.

"They'll be OK, won't they?" Kimberly asked. She had put on a brave face and tried to do her best Adeline impression when prepping them for the run. Newbies begged and pleaded, but at the end of the day, they had to run storylines. Luckily, Dina and Bobby were willing to help. We continued walking. We weren't heading back to the loft yet. We had another stop that also happened to be in western Carousel. We walked in silence. I didn't know if they were expecting me to say something, but I wasn't going to.

As soon as Antoine knew I knew of his problem, he told Kimberly everything. He told her that his problem wasn't just being startled in his sleep, which had been a lot of what had manifested so far. His problem went deeper than that. He had completely zoned out while On-Screen for nearly half an hour. He wasn't trying to play down what had happened. Still, I could see the desperation in his eyes to just let him continue to hide his issues. I was tempted to let him. We couldn't scare the newer players.

After we had walked for a while, he started to talk.

"All we have to do is stick to storylines that don't take place in a forest," he said, "just until I get things figured out. And that was also the first storyline where we didn't use my nightmare trope. I think that was the real mistake." He had such a charming cadence to his voice. I bet guys like Antoine never got fired, not when they could talk so smoothly. I hoped he was right. In previous storylines, we had kept his mental health problems at bay by using his You were having a nightmare…

trope to help transform his very real traumatic memories into dreamlike echoes that he could work through more easily. No matter what we tried, his trauma re-exerted itself. Part of the problem was that he didn't have enough Moxie to use the trope to its full effect. Unfortunately, he couldn't just put all of his points in Moxie because he was our fighter. We had ignored the problem for too long.

"Antoine," I said, "I've got an idea to fix… the problem."

"I'm telling you it'll be OK," he said.

"I know," I said.

"Maybe we should change our rescue plans just for a little bit." He took a few deep breaths before speaking.

"I know what you're actually saying," he said.

"Look, I got it under control. That was just one time. I'll be fine."

"Antoine…" Kimberly said softly. I didn't know if he was right, but I had an idea for a solution.

"Just hear me out. I think we need a doctor," I said. It just so happens I know of one who needs rescuing." He met my eye for a moment as we walked. His attitude changed as he considered my motives.

"So that's it," he said.

"You want to go after the Hughes brother?" I nodded.

"I know we were talking about trying to get some easy rescues in, trying to find the lowest-level players from the lowest-level storylines, but I really think we need to hit the ground running. If we can get a doctor, someone with some psychiatrist tropes, that'll be all the better."

"Isaac and Cassie will be happy," Kimberly said.

"From the way they talk about Andrew, he was always a positive, calming force in their lives. It might be a good idea to get him." Antoine didn't say anything. That didn't mean that he was done, but I thought he was ready to drop it. As we arrived on the street with the diner, the missing person board loomed in the distance. It was just as massive and overstuffed with missing posters as I remembered. I was relieved to see that it had not been cleared.

In the back of my mind, I was always afraid that we would arrive at the rescue board to find that our friend's posters were gone and that had been too late. When we reached the boards with the hundreds of papers covering them, we stood and stared for a moment. We were always awestruck when we looked at it.

"Which ones do we take?" Kimberly asked. The three of us looked at each other for a moment, and then I said, "All of them." We knew that when you took a poster, it would eventually get replaced by the NPC who took care of the board. It couldn't hurt for us to just grab all of the posters. We had planning to do. Kimberly grabbed Anna and Camden, as well as many of our other friends from Camp Dyer as she could. Antoine was tall and able to reach the top of the board, so he just started collecting them hand over fist.

I made a beeline for the posters that had Dr. Andrew Hughes and those of his apparent teammates. I stared down at them. They were all in their mid to late 20s in plot armor. They went missing near a power plant. Missing posters didn't tell you what storyline a person died in; they just told you the location of the omen for that storyline. We would have to research and figure out where they were ourselves.

We carefully placed the huge stack of missing posters inside one of the kitchen cabinets back at the loft in hopes that they would remain safe. Truthfully, it was difficult to look at them and to know what they represented. The three of us stood around the kitchen table staring down at the remaining five posters.

"So these are our targets," Antoine said. I nodded.

"A Soldier, a Doctor, a Wallflower, an Eye Candy, and a Comedian," I said. MISSING Name: Michael Brooks Plot Armor: 26 Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022. Occupation: Soldier Reward: 100 Dollars ~ MISSING Name: Dr. Andrew Hughes Plot Armor: 28 Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022. Occupation: Doctor Reward: 100 Dollars ~ MISSING Name: Lila White Plot Armor: 23 Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022.

Occupation: Wallflower Reward: 100 Dollars ~ MISSING Name: Avery Lawson Plot Armor: 27 Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022. Occupation: Eye Candy (Beauty Aspect) Reward: 100 Dollars ~ MISSING Name: Logan Maize Plot Armor: 29 Place Last Seen: KRSL Powerworks Pavilion, April 22, 2022. Occupation: Comedian (Cynic Aspect) Reward: 100 Dollars"No Final Girl," Kimberly observed.

"And only five players." It was rarely lower than that. Most teams did have a Final Girl, but not all. A soldier tended to balance things out. Of course, there was always the possibility that they did have a Final Girl, and she had just not lived up to her name, so to speak. I lifted up the Carousel Atlas and placed it on the table. The Atlas allowed you to search by geographic region, which was useful because I didn't even know that there was such a thing as the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion.

I flipped around in the Atlas until I found it. It was in southern Carousel, where we rarely went out.

"Damn," Antoine said.

"It's out of town." We knew what he meant by that. It was way off in the boonies. There would likely be trees and forests just waiting to trigger whatever magical psychological problem he had. I read the Atlas closely.

"There are eight omens in that area that the Atlas has info on," I said.

"Do we have any way of knowing what levels they are?" Antoine asked. I shook my head.

"We can look them up individually and hope that there's information on them, but if not, we're going to have to go check ourselves." A quick flipping back and forth revealed that seven of the omens had entries in the Atlas, but only three of those had information about how dangerous the storylines were.

"High 30s, mid-40s, mid-40s," I said. All three we had information on said their plot armor level was out of our league.

"I doubt it was any of those, given their levels."

"That narrows it down at least," Antoine said. At the end of the day, we were going to have to go there ourselves and do some scouting.