Chương 121: Book Five, Chapter 24: Before the Rescue

I stood in the living room area of the loft next to Antoine and Kimberly. We had taken days off, but knowing the task that lay ahead, there was only so much relaxing that we could do. The storyline, Itch, taunted us. No matter how much work we put into it, we never felt like we were learning enough. But at the end of the day, we were never going to escape Carousel without taking risks.

"Right now," I said, "I see Itch as being a science fiction movie."

"So you don't think the werewolves are involved?" Bobby asked." Werewolves usually aren't strictly science fiction. Itch does sound like the title of a werewolf movie." I was in agreement with that; I imagined that growing fur would be very itchy.

"I don't think so," I said.

"I have a few reasons. First, we have no explanation for what happened to the remaining two members of Andrew Hughes' team. Our working theory is that they were killed by whatever lies in the monster's lair, which we think are werewolves. So, if they were killed by the werewolves, and the werewolves are a part of Itch, then they should show up as potential rescues for that movie, but they don't."

The Atlas was clear that if you got killed by monsters outside of a storyline, you could be rescued from the storyline those monsters were originally from.

"Also, the poster for Itch was some kind of control panel, like for a computer from the '80s. I don't know what that means, but that doesn't seem like werewolves. But most of all, right now, we're pretty sure that the base story of Itch doesn't allow psychic powers, and I have a hard time imagining a werewolf story where psychics couldn't exist." Of course, it was always possible that there was just a very powerful psychic trope that canceled out other psychic powers, but there were a million possibilities.

I just had to make my best guess.

"Well then, that opens back up the question of how science fiction works in Carousel," Bobby said. This type of subject was something that Bobby liked to talk about. We had both been working to try and find our way through the Carousel Atlas as best we could. When it came to things like genre, the problem wasn't that there wasn't enough information—it was that there was too much information, and it was spread out all throughout the Atlas.

The first thing we wanted to know was exactly how technology lined up with the year the storyline was supposed to be set. We were aware that Carousel was more or less organized by date. We had been hauled up and down time enough to know that. The period that was supposed to look like 1960 was called Carousel 1960, and sure enough, all of the stories from that era looked like they took place at the appropriate time. But then, how would science fiction work?

Would we have to wait until 2198, when technology really started to pop off? The answer was no. Science fiction seemed to be the biggest counterpoint to the charade of Carousel's timeline. The Atlas referenced things that just did not exist in the time periods their stories were set.

We found references to ray guns and teleportation, as well as genetic advancements like those we had seen during our fake tutorial, that just could not possibly exist in our world, even in modern times, and yet they existed in stories set in the '80s, '90s, or even further back. If Itch was science fiction, we had no way of knowing what to expect.

"Another point for Itch being science fiction and not werewolves," Antoine added, "is that there were no forests or woods, right?" I looked at him for a moment and nodded. My location scout ability had not given any locations that involved a natural landscape of any kind. It appeared that the story took place inside a building with hallways, control rooms, and storage areas.

Of course, Antoine intentionally pointed out that there were no woods because he wanted to go on this rescue, and he knew I was hesitant to support him if there was a chance he would have another episode.

"The whole thing takes place inside, right?" he asked. I reluctantly nodded.

"It would appear that way," I said.

"Noting explicit, at least. Of course, I am missing information because Location Scout wasn't giving the best information." My Savvy was good, but it wasn't exactly my dominant stat; it was more tied with Moxie and Hustle.

"So, what else is there to discuss?" Dina asked.

"We have literally talked ourselves around in circles on this subject. We either need to do it or move on to something else." This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it. Dina was never really big on discussion or talking things through. When we talked about going on Itch, her contribution was, "When are we leaving?" I gazed around the room at our little group of friends.

We still looked like squatters because we had no furniture, and yet we had all made ourselves comfortable on the floor or in fold-up chairs.

"We need to figure out who's going," I said. In the pit of my stomach, I knew there was no good answer, but I was hoping someone would come up with one.

"We know that because of Dina's rescue trope, we're all going to be background characters," I said.

"We don't know if that means we'll be off-screen the entire time—we just have no idea. And we also know that because it's a rescue story, some tropes just basically won't work. So that needs to go into account for who we bring, what tropes we bring." Antoine took in a big breath and walked forward.

"I know that Cassie and Isaac were hoping to go," he said. He looked at them, and they nodded.

"We need to save Andrew," Cassie said. This was one subject that Isaac didn't joke about.

"So, I think what we have to do," Antoine said, "is bring everybody. We have to bring all of our top players, and we can't leave anybody behind. I know you were talking about only bringing five players," he said, looking at me, "but I just don't see how that could work." Of course, there were problems with bringing everyone. I had lain awake the night before, counting them all. If we brought everyone, Bobby would have to bring his dogs, too.

If we brought everyone—all eight of us—and it turned out that there was a player limit, say six players, that meant that two of us at random would just suddenly… What? We didn't know. The Atlas said that you just wouldn't be in the story if it had met its limit, but then what did those players do? What if none of them had scouting tropes, and they were trapped at the power station alone? What if we got punished for bringing too many players?

Antoine stood and argued his case very convincingly, but the truth was, I already agreed with him—but not for anything he said. He talked about how rescues were never going to get easier. This would literally be the easiest one we ever did, so it was the ideal one to bring the lower-level players on. He was only saying that to rile them up and get them enthusiastic. I wasn't going to poke holes in his argument.

Finally, he got to his last and best argument—the very one that I had come up with myself and agreed with.

"The fact is," he said, "we don't know how long this storyline lasts. It could last weeks—we don't know. Even if we could leave behind three players, we don't know how long they would be left here waiting. With only three players, they wouldn't be able to run any storylines safely. And whatever happens to players who don't run storylines could happen to them." It was the same old problem. We didn't have enough players to split up yet. There was a palpable tension in the air as he said that.

In fact, I was the only person who allegedly knew what happened to players who didn't run storylines—or, more specifically, I knew what happened to players who quit them. But I wasn't going to explain the nuance.

"I agree," I said.

"Now, let's get to planning our loadouts." Antoine was surprised that I agreed so easily. He had clearly been expecting me to argue against it. After all, he knew what I had seen. He knew what liability he represented. But that was just one more risk we had to take. We were going to use pared-down tropes across the board. A rescue trope was volatile and could change stories tremendously and in unpredictable ways.

The Carousel Atlas spoke of rescue tropes and advanced archetypes as carefully balanced chemical mixtures that could create chaos with the slightest bit of contamination. Even the vets knew that, and I doubted that they had the section of the Atlas that I was reading.

When I had gone on my run with Arthur, and he used his advanced archetype to help change the story into an action-oriented monster-hunting story instead of the psychological horror that it was originally, all of the other vets had chosen tropes that were neutral—useful in and of themselves, but that didn't have huge effects on the rest of the story. They didn't even use their aspect tropes. You don't want to step on the toes of the guy who's disarming the bomb, so to speak.

In this case, Dina's rescue trope would take the lead, and we would let it.

"So we're not trying out my new trope?" Kimberly asked.

"Right, not this time," Antoine said. She had just gotten her aspect trope for Celebrity, called The Hall of Fame, and it promised some story-altering and emphasis-changing effects that would normally be really great for a strong player. But we didn't know which elements of that trope would even be taken into account in a rescue. Story alterations were canceled out across the board.

We focused on ourselves and our backgrounds and tried not to think about hedging our bets or relying on improvisation because, if we were background characters, we probably wouldn't have the time to set up the improvisation, to begin with. That ruled out tropes like my Raised by Television ability or Cinema Seer, which required early access to the on-screen.

We even debated whether Bobby would use his trope to swap into the role of a background character because we didn't know if that would be duplicative or cause problems. Then we decided that he ought to use it because that was the ability that allowed him to see the script, and truthfully, that was a very powerful ability for a run like the one we had ahead of us. The newer players had an easier time. They left behind the tropes that they shouldn't bring on a rescue and didn't have many left to go through.

As far as weapons went, we brought all we had, including Antoine's baseball bat, the sawed-off shotgun with a trope, and even my hedge shears, even though I didn't know if they would come up organically. Bobby, of course, brought his gaggle of dogs—five dogs, varying in size from gigantic to mid-size. They all had names, but I had not learned which belonged to which. It wasn't that I'm not a dog person; it's more that I wasn't sure they were dogs—not on the inside.

I could understand that people could be under the influence of mind control and still be people at their core, trapped by the script, not knowing why or how. But was a dog under mind control even really a dog? I didn't bring up these questions with Bobby because he loved those dogs. After much discussion, Kimberly moved to the kitchen and said, "Tonight we feast. All perishables get eaten."

"What?" Isaac asked.

"I've been eating those gross sardines because I didn't want them to be the only thing that was left so we wouldn't have to just eat sardines, and now we're going to eat everything but the sardines? What was the point of that?"

"We never asked you to eat them," Antoine said. And then we began preparing our feast because when we left, we didn't know when we would be back. Or if we would be back.