Chương 199: Book Five, Chapter 102: Side Storyline: Goodnight Neighbor

Sometimes we ran storylines for big, important reasons. Sometimes... we ran them for smaller ones.

"But I don't understand," Virginia, the NPC, said, frowning.

"If we're trying to get away, why are we loading a couch onto the truck? Shouldn't we just go?"

"I told you," Isaac said, rolling his eyes.

"We need furniture in the back of the big moving truck so we don't bounce around on our escape. Now, if you want this to go faster, you could help." Virginia shriveled away, averting her gaze.

"That's what I thought," Isaac said at the end of his rope.

"Just ignore the NPCs," Avery scolded him.

"They're trying to guide us to what we're supposed to do next. They're not just messing with you."

"They are messing with me," Isaac muttered.

"They are, and none of you believe m—" He stopped mid-sentence and yelled, "Eustace! Eustace, you get up off that bed right now! What are you doing lying down? Did you think you would take a nap? I swear, on everything holy, if you NPCs don't just stand here and wait, I'm gonna lose it." We had put him in charge of NPC wrangling, which Comedians were supposed to be skilled at. Goodnight Neighbor had a simple storyline—maybe not an easy one, but definitely a simple one.

It took a little bit of willpower and some planning, but if you worked around the limitations of the story, it had something to offer—something we sorely needed at Kimberly's loft. Furniture. All the furniture we could ever want—or, more exactly, all the furniture we could load into the back of one moving truck with a 12-foot bed. Kimberly had gathered a posse and dragged us to the storyline.

"What do we have left to load?" Avery asked.

"Just all these mattresses," Kimberly said, "and that lamp over there with the gold trimming."

"I love that one," Avery said. She paused for a moment and then continued, "I also think we should also get a new shower curtain."

"Oh, absolutely," Kimberly agreed.

"I wasn't trying to criticize, but—""Oh, I know," Kimberly interrupted.

"The silver one doesn't go with the bathroom."

"It's just, if we're already here, we might as well," Avery finished.

"Exactly," Kimberly said.

"Exactly," Avery said. I wasn't there to help pick out the furniture. I was just there to help lift it and, hopefully, keep us on track so we didn't die to the Night Neighbors. Mattresses? Check. All of the blankets and bed sheets we could ask for? Check. Enough chairs so everyone could sit down? Check. Couch? Check. Lamp? Check. It was all really coming together.

"Eustace! Get up off the chair!" Isaac screamed at the elderly NPC who was along for the ride as we hid from the Night Neighbors. The irony of hiding inside a furniture store—filled with comfortable places to sleep—while running from a plague of memetic monsters that could travel through people's dreams was not lost on us. In fact, I had to assume it was intentional on Carousel's part. But Goodnight Neighbor was a great storyline in a lot of ways.

For one, it only had two level variations: level 27 and, later, level 60. If everyone in your party was under level 60, you got the level 27 variation. It was super useful, even if the furniture in this version was a bit bland. The store was having a going-out-of-business sale. This storyline was a bit of a sandbox. There were infinite varieties of possible endings and Win Conditions. Players from yesteryear liked it for looting furniture. I wasn't going to complain.

A little home décor would really make Kimberly's loft feel more like home, and the fact that we were getting it all for free was the icing on the cake. If you have to run storylines, might as well get a new couch out of it.

"All right, do we have everything we need?" I asked as we loaded the last of the items onto the back of the truck in the loading bay. Kimberly looked around the store, clearly wishing we could take more.

"Kimberly," I said firmly, "come on. We can always come back." She grabbed a pillow off one of the display beds and said, "Yes. This is good enough for now."

"All right," I said.

"We don't go On-Screen until someone falls asleep."

"Well, good thing," Isaac said.

"These NPCs have been trying to sleep this whole time. It's like they're on the Night Neighbors' side." In a way, they probably were. I looked at the NPCs: an older woman, an older man, and a young boy. We rescued who we could but our numbers had thinned. This was probably the worst day of their life—perhaps even of their real lives—and all we could ask was that they stay out of the way so we could load furniture onto the back of a truck.

"Places, people," I said. We all scattered around the store. Not going On-Screen until one of us fell asleep was an insidious tactic. That's how the pattern of the movie had been going so far. It was a cruel irony that balanced the entire story. No matter what your stats were, you still had to sleep. And Carousel would leave you stranded without the plot cycle moving forward until one of you did.

And once you went to sleep, you didn't get back up—not after that hypnotic signal went out over the radio and TV, awakening some sleeping people's inner Night Neighbor. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon. It spread from person to person. If you fell asleep, you would stay that way forever, your mind acting as real estate for the Night Neighbors, as an antenna, extending their power.

Once enough people got infected and fell asleep, they were strong enough to overthrow the entire town. And I was going crazy wanting to know what they looked like. They were supposed to be spooky-looking, but not in a scary way—more in an off-putting, liminal-monster kind of way. Basically human, but something was off about them. I had found a child's drawing of one. Creepy men of odd proportions and odd smiles.

So, as the Atlas instructed us vaguely, we were left in the furniture store, loading as much stuff as we could get our hands on. We all spread out around the store, doing our own thing. Isaac was in the backroom where there was a 20-year-old computer, playing a video game. Kimberly and Avery were chatting. I just wandered around until, finally, we went On-Screen.

"I see you," the voice rang out around the store.

"You thought you could hide, but you could not. And now my neighbors are coming." We all stood up slowly from where we had found ourselves and moved toward the center of the furniture store, where the sound was coming from. Eustace was a winner. He was the first to fall asleep. Eustace lay back on the sofa, his body slack as though sleep had stolen every ounce of tension from him. But his face… his face was wrong.

His lips twisted into a goofy, exaggerated grin, and his eyes—though closed—darted beneath the lids as if watching some warped pantomime behind them.

"Don't you want to come with us?" he said, the voice emerging light and airy, tinged with a sing-song cadence that was completely out of character. It wasn't Eustace's voice. The crotchety old man with a gravelly baritone was gone, replaced by something that sounded dreamy yet ancient. Each word hung in the air, unnervingly playful like a clown inviting you to step behind the curtain of its grotesque carnival.

"To the land of dreams," the voice cooed, stretching the words like taffy, sweet, and sticky, drawing us closer at first despite ourselves.

"It's warm here and soft, like sinking into a feather bed that never ends. Don't you want to rest those weary bones? Aren't you so, so tired?" We all took a step back, instinctively moving away from the thing Eustace had become. But he— it —sat up suddenly, snapping to attention in a jerky, puppet-like motion that made my stomach churn. The grin widened, impossibly wide, almost splitting his face in two.

"You've worked so hard, haven't you?" it crooned, tilting its head at an unsettling angle.

"Running, running, running, hiding… and running again. Always awake. Doesn't it hurt? Wouldn't it feel better to just… stop? Just for a moment? Just long enough for us to reach you." The voice shifted again, growing deeper, slower, almost echoing within itself.

"We are coming," it said, the sweetness gone, replaced with something ancient and raw, like the groaning of a rusted gate opening into darkness. The air in the store felt heavier, like it was pressing against my chest, squeezing the breath from me. The lights overhead flickered, and Eustace—or whatever had taken hold of him—began to laugh. It started as a giggle, high-pitched and childish, but quickly devolved into a cascade of unsettling sounds: wheezing, cackling, and guttural gasps.

"You can't run forever," it whispered, the words cutting through the laughter like a razor.

"You're all so… deliciously fragile. Sleep will find you. It always does. And when it does, we'll be waiting." Eustace's body slumped forward, his grin faltering for a moment before snapping back into place. His head bobbed like it was too heavy for his neck, the laughter still bubbling from him like a broken record.

"Come play with us," he said, the voice returning to its sing-song lilt.

"There's no pain here, no fear, no struggle. Just dreams… sweet, endless dreams." I felt my feet falter as if the words themselves were trying to pull me closer, to draw me into whatever void he spoke of. I was tired. So very tired. I clenched my fists, forcing myself to look away from Eustace's grotesque grin, and turned to the others.

"Sorry, Eustace," I said, my voice shaking but firm. I turned to the others.

"Let's go. There's a truck in the loading dock. We can make a break for it." Eustace—or the Night Neighbor—leaned back into the sofa, his laughter subsiding into a low hum. His head lolled to one side, and his eyes fluttered open just a crack, revealing nothing but white.

"We'll see you soon," he murmured.

"One by one, you'll come to us. They always do."

"But where do we run?" Kimberly asked.

"Where in the world can we run where we won't need to sleep?" I shook my head.

"I don't think they can follow us forever. I think they are geographically stuck near their hosts." The windows began to shake throughout the store as Eustace started laughing. The Night Neighbors were here. No longer bound to the world of dreams, the wanted to put us down for a nap.

"Weeeeee are heeeeerrrrrrre," he said.

"If we drive far enough, I think we can escape it," I said. We had better be able to. That was what all the research I had done in the Party Phase indicated. The same thing had happened at a military outpost 20 years earlier. Everyone affected had died in their sleep, and those who survived did so by staying awake long enough for the afflicted to pass. They did it hopped up on amphetamines. We… uh… had learned from their wisdom. Isaac more than the rest of us.

"We have to try it," Avery said in her thick southern drawl.

"That or we lay down dead." Kimberly nodded.

"Let's go." So that's what we did. We loaded into the truck that just happened to be filled with furniture—because of course it was; this was a furniture store. No one in the audience would ask questions. I got behind the wheel, Kimberly climbed in next to me, and the others loaded into the back. And we just drove. Drove until Carousel became a distant memory behind us. But as we drove, we found others who had tried the same. Miles and miles of people had pulled off to the side of the road.

They still slept in their cars. As we drove, we passed the occasional sleepwalker—subconscious runners attempting to escape the fate consuming them but unable to truly be free.

"How will we know," Kimberly asked me when we were On-Screen next, "How will we know we've gone far enough?" I put a serious look on my face but didn't answer, in that vague sort of ending where my character secretly knew we were doomed but was just trying to keep everyone's spirits high. We had been awake for nearly two days and in the world of the story it had been four. I was getting tired. And then I heard it—that voice.

"You'll never get away from me," the Night Neighbor said through Kimberly's mouth. I turned to her and saw that she had slipped into sleep. I started to scream— —and then I woke up, still driving the truck. I had nodded off on the road. I looked to my right, and Kimberly was there.

"Is everything okay?" she asked.

"Yeah," I said with a smile.

"Everything's great." The end. ~-~ We kept driving, and soon enough, we found that although we had been driving away from Carousel for 40 minutes or so, for the storyline, we were somehow driving back toward it. We re-entered the city limits just as the story ended. We drove toward an office park where we found Ramona waiting for us. She had been the First Blood of the story. Second Blood had been the rest of the town. She climbed in as Kimberly scooted over.

"That wasn't so bad," Ramona said.

"You should go to Dreamland sometime. We're waiting for you."

"Don't start with that stuff," I said.

"I'm already going to have a hard time getting back to sleep tonight." Ramona and Kimberly laughed as we drove all the way back to Kimberly's loft and parked right in front of it. When we got out, Silas appeared to give Isaac a stat ticket but nothing else. Ramona got two stat tickets and a hysteric trope that would let her use Moxie to stay energized and awake. For her, this was a pretty difficult storyline—she had been a blood sacrifice, after all.

"Were the Night Neighbors as beautiful as I imagined?" I asked Ramona.

"I did cry when I first saw them," she said playfully.

"But I don't think it was because of their beauty. Who knows." As soon as we showed up, the others appeared to help us unload the truck. We had to do it before the omens started showing back up. Finally, after so long, we had a bit of furniture. We had mattresses to sleep on—just a bunch of generic twin-sized ones, nothing fancy. We had a nice big couch—or at least one that could fit inside the back of the truck. It was a nice haul. Antoine and some of the others had done a grocery run with The Final Straw.

We had a functioning little guild. I had run this storyline while I planned our next real move. The warning I had received from one of Them in the theater had scared me to my core. I didn't even know if I could tell anyone. Surely, they were listening. If I mentioned that one of their people had warned me, would there be consequences? I didn't know. But I had to find out. If we had to move forward, I knew what to do next. I had been planning it for months. Longer, even. We were going to rescue Anna and Camden.

The others would get on board. The audience wanted a show. I had one in mind.