Chương 207: Book Five, Chapter 110: The Final Girl

🔴 REC SEP 23, 2018 14: 02: 35 [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%] Kimberly was slumped over in her chair, leaning against one of the desks in clear distress, drinking a glass of wine unashamed.

"We're off the clock," she had said earlier. Logan was examining the outsides of the tapes on his workstation. I sat just out of the camera's range. We were having a quiet moment; all that could be heard was the construction going on a few rooms down. Antoine appeared in the doorway with an unapologetic look on his face and asked, "Are we disturbing you?"

"You're fine," Kimberly said softly.

"It's just—we tried to get this done on the weekends so that we wouldn't bother you," he added.

"I know," Kimberly said, looking back up at him.

"You didn't do anything wrong. We didn't realize that we would be in this weekend." Antoine broke his gaze away from Kimberly and looked around the room until his eyes landed on the wooden crate that had contained the videotapes. His eyes perked up.

"Did you manage to play those tapes?" he asked.

"Not that it's any of my business; it's just a really strange find, and I once found over 100 Barbies behind a sheet of drywall." He was being funny—he had not yet seen the tapes. He didn't have to act worried or confused. Kimberly glanced at me and then at Logan before saying, "They... they aren't anything important."

"Well, that's too bad," Antoine said.

"I was sure we'd stumbled on some lost history." Logan let loose a restrained chuckle. Antoine, sensing the tension in the room, said, "Well, I'll get back to work. Sorry for interrupting things--wait," he said, doubling back.

"Did you guys hear about the stage collapse yesterday?" We all nodded.

"I talked to some of my work contacts. The stage was rotten. Somehow, it has passed inspections for the last decade. Somebody's getting fired."

"Heads will roll," Logan said.

"Well, anyway," Antoine said and then left.

"So it wasn't sabotaged," I said.

"For whatever that's worth." Kimberly waved him goodbye. After a moment of silence, she asked, "What are we going to do?"

"Whatever you tell us to, boss," I said. She glared at me and then sipped her wine.

"Well, my first instinct would be to go to the police," Logan said, "Actually, my first instinct is to confirm and authenticate the find so I can take credit, but my second instinct is to go to the police. Of course… when the police got the tapes, they would need to call in an expert on Carousel's history to authenticate them, and I'm who they would call. So it's all the same to me."

"We go to the police and say what?" Kimberly asked.

"We found some disturbing tapes that appear to be historical snuff films or reenactments of snuff films, and we, the brains over at the Museum of Crime, cannot figure out which. We are going to look like fools. We have to know more about these before we say anything."

"The old tapes are one thing," Logan said, "but if we show them the tape from yesterday's accident and say we found it behind a brick wall a week ago, what are they going to make of that? Of course, we could just throw that one in the trash…"

"I have an idea," I said.

"Do you have a real idea, or is it a joke?" Kimberly asked.

"I'll wait to answer that question until we see if it works," I said.

"What?" she asked at the end of her emotional rope.

"Well, from what I can tell, all of these films were shot in Carousel, and they deal with Carousel's history. Maybe we could find a person that we recognize from town, and then we can just ask them about it. If they participated in a reenactment, they could tell us." Kimberly sat up straight.

"That could work," she said. Logan walked over toward where Kimberly and I were sitting, clearly interested in my idea.

"Have you recognized anyone from these videos yet?" he asked.

"The ones I've seen that happened recently," I said, "I did recognize the people—like the daylight dance video."

"Speaking of, how recent are these videos? Is there a pattern or a cut-off date?" he asked.

"Seems completely random to me," I said. He furrowed his brow.

"I'm running out of reasonable theories very quickly," he said.

"The only one that still makes sense is that you're faking this."

"I hear you," I said.

"I'm in the same boat, but I have one fewer theory to work with because I know I didn't do it. Off the top of my head, I did find one video that I think is pretty recent because the cars look modern, but I can't find any reference to the accident on the Internet."

"Show it to me," Logan said. I fiddled through a list of tapes I had loaded onto the computer until I found the one labeled afternoon nap. ■ STOP ▶ PLAY Jan 12, 1996 16: 58: 02 The film started eerily silent as the cameraman walked through a dark hallway in what looked like a factory. No one was speaking, but machinery was running in the background. The camera panned around a room at the end of the hallway, which contained a machine I had seen before in movies and on TV, but I didn't know its name.

Logan recognized it, too, because he whispered, "Textiles." As soon as he did, I realized he was right—this was some sort of textile factory. While the room was larger than the hallway, it was still a very enclosed space, and the windows were very high, with grass poking up into view. The room was underground. As the camera was moved around, I could see lots of desks crammed into the space with sewing machines on them. Most of the desks did not have people sitting at them, but three of them did.

The people at the desks were leaning over and not moving, almost like they were taking a nap. One of their sewing machines was still on because the worker had kept her foot on the pedal beneath the desk. The camera panned around some more and revealed another worker lying out on the ground.

"Okay, pause it," Logan said. If you come across this story on Amazon, it's taken without permission from the author. Report it. I immediately hit the space bar. ■ STOP 🔴 REC SEP 23, 2018 14: 15: 06 [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%] Logan pointed at the screen.

"See that against the wall?" he asked. I squinted.

"Yes," Kimberly said.

"It's a calendar." We had a good view of the calendar, except a fan was blowing near it, flipping the bottom half upward and obscuring the month and year. All we could see was the top half, which featured a picture—a photograph of a beautiful house. Moving the video forward or backward didn't reveal the bottom half. I zoomed in as much as the program would allow, but it wasn't like magic television zooming. The blurriness just became bigger, but I could make it out.

"Raker Realty," I read from the top left of the calendar.

"This is one of those advertisement calendars that gets sent out every year," I said.

"So if we can figure out what year and what month had that picture, we should be able to figure out the date of this video," Logan said.

"It's that easy," I said sarcastically.

"It's better than nothing. When you said that you searched to find an incident like this one, what did you search for?" Logan asked. I could see why Logan was the highest-level player on his team. Beneath his veneer of apathy and cynicism, there was a part of this game that he definitely liked.

"Carbon monoxide poisoning at a factory in Carousel," I said. He tapped his fingers against the desk.

"Maybe we need to expand our search a bit," he said.

"We don't know for sure it was carbon monoxide poisoning."

"Well, you look it up. I've been looking up terrible, depressing things ever since I watched the first tape," I said. He didn't argue. He just went back to his computer to do research. But before he could make any progress, Kimberly had an idea of her own. I knew she did because she started putting her hair up in a ponytail to transfer some points from Moxie to Savvy.

"You know, they hand those calendars out every year. They mail them to everyone," she said.

"Yeah," I responded.

"Well, this place has been getting mail for decades." Logan and I looked at her and then at each other. We walked out toward the side of the museum devoted to the historic courthouse. The pile of mail was not-so-neatly stacked in a corner. While there was a lot of it, it was easy enough to separate something the size of a calendar from something the size of normal mail.

Kimberly and Logan did most of the sorting while I filmed and occasionally panned around the room just to make sure the audience got a good idea of the physical space—and to make it look like I was busy so I didn't have to sort through the mail.

"I got one," Kimberly said, holding up a calendar that was sealed closed and clearly bent as someone had pushed it through the mail slot.

"What year?" I asked.

"2018," she said.

"This year." We immediately rushed back to the computer as she opened the calendar and started flipping through it, looking for the month with the right picture at the top. She flipped, and I carefully got footage of her doing it while maintaining a shot in the distance of my computer screen, which was still paused at the image of the calendar in the factory. She flipped it one final time and revealed a matching picture. I focused the camera down on the date.

"September 2018." I carefully readjusted the focus so that it would show the calendar on the screen, demonstrating the comparison. The calendar in the factory was flipped to September 2018. I got a quick shot of Logan and Kimberly acting slightly slack-jawed at the revelation.

"I'm going to go look it up. You must have missed it somehow," Logan said as he went over to his workstation. I leaned over, getting a good shot of Kimberly as I said, "I didn't miss anything." ■ STOP 🔴 REC SEP 23, 2018 18: 04: 33 [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%] Kimberly and I continued watching the rest of the video, which cut around, showing at least one additional deceased person before showing the police arriving and conducting an investigation from a hiding spot across the street.

There were no signs or markings in the footage to indicate the name of the factory.

"Why does it have that date?" Kimberly asked, pointing to the date on the screen from the footage.

"Is that an error in your program or...?"

"I think the camera being used to film this thinks that it was 1996," I said. I filmed her face as she looked at me, her expression suggesting she was coming to the same conclusion that my character had reached—the one Logan was still resisting. The camera used by the bad guy had been hauled through time. Or it just hadn't been set to the right date. Either way.

"Did you find anything?" I asked Logan from across the room.

"Nothing yet," he said. Then he turned around and added, "How many carbon monoxide-like deaths of that magnitude could there have been this month? At this point, the most logical explanation is that these are reenactments of some kind—except for..." He paused. That wasn't a logical explanation—or at least not a complete one. He was playing the skeptic as well as could be expected in this short timeframe. Antoine popped in again, comically frustrated that we had not yet woven his character into the main storyline.

"I'm sending my guys home," he said.

"I've got to stick around and do some insurance paperwork if that's okay." I smiled at him deviously, knowing I was off-camera. He held a straight face as Kimberly replied, "That's fine. Do whatever you need to do." The truth was that Antoine, Lila, and Bobby were all just waiting to be incorporated into the story. Dina was somewhere else, doing her own thing. ■ STOP 🔴 REC SEP 23, 2018 19: 13: 48 [▮▮▮▯▯ 60%] Bobby's turn was next. He showed up with his two dogs and was soon in the office with us again.

"Oh, you got another one of those reenactments, huh?" he asked as he saw my computer screen and paused on a shot of some police cruisers.

"Reenactments?" Logan asked.

"Yes, the reenactments of Carousel's historical crimes and tragedies. You remember them," I said.

"Oh, yes. You're still watching those, huh?" Logan asked.

"The rest of us have to work for a living."

"Well, it looks like they're going to have the closed-circuit security system up and running within the next few days," Bobby said.

"That's great news," Kimberly responded, though her character's heart clearly wasn't in it. After all this idle conversation, we were not even halfway into the party phase. Bobby left to go on patrol, Logan returned to his workstation, and I continued playing the video. I shot a quick clip of myself just to remind the audience what I looked like, in case they needed to remember it when it was my time to be in front of the camera for an important reason.

The footage at the factory was almost over when I noticed something I thought was worth documenting.

"It looks like the same guy," I said.

"Check this out." Kimberly walked over to me and looked over my shoulder. Our mystery man was standing next to a building right before he stopped filming. He walked by a window, and in that window, we finally got a good look at our antagonist. He just looked like a normal guy. He had an expressionless face—the kind that could blend into any crowd. His clothing was a little worse for wear, but it would take a few moments to notice that if you were passing him on the street.

I couldn't see his eyes very well because of the shadow cast by his brimmed hat. Still, I knew it was an important shot for the movie, so I angled the camera to get a perfect view of him. Loud barking sounded from the entrance to the room. Both of Bobby's dogs were going crazy, pulling on him toward the computer and barking at the man on the monitor.

"I'm sorry. They're not usually like this," Bobby said.

"Hush!" he commanded. The dogs stopped pulling and barking, but their rapt attention remained on the man pictured in the reflection of the window.

"Gee, that was strange," Bobby said. The commotion brought Antoine back into the group. Now, all of us were together except for Lila and Dina. We were just in time to hear glass break down the hall. Kimberly looked back at the screen, and I made sure to show the audience what she was looking at before she turned to me. We were all silent. It took Bobby a moment to remember that he should be the one to check on it instead of Antoine.

"I'll go look into that," he said. He and his dogs immediately left the office area and headed down the hall toward the historic courthouse. I followed closely, getting a good shot for the audience. The others trailed behind me as we made our way down the hall. When Bobby opened the door to the courthouse, his dogs began barking hysterically again, pulling him further inside. I ran behind him, trying my best to keep a steady shot, anxious to see what was on the other side of the doors.

I entered as soon as I could without destroying the tension we were building for the audience. Bobby's dogs continued to bark but didn't attack. Bobby had a gun trained on someone standing near a far window that had been opened partially and then apparently broken. Standing with her arms raised was Anna. She was dirty, scared, and on the verge of tears. In one hand, she held a book, one that I recognized: The Town of Carousel: Horrific Events Through the Ages. In the other hand, she held a newspaper.

"Please," she begged.

"I didn't mean to get you all involved in this. Please don't hurt me." Bobby's dogs sniffed in her direction, then stopped barking and calmed down as if intuiting her better nature. Following their lead, Bobby holstered his gun.

"Put your hands behind your back," Bobby said.

"I'm not here to hurt you or do anything wrong, I promise. I'm trying to save you," she said.

"Ma'am," Bobby repeated, "this is government property, and you are not permitted to be he—""Wait!" Kimberly cried out from behind me. She moved forward until she was in frame.

"That's the girl in the footage!"

"Holy hell," I said aloud, as if just recognizing her. I may have overdone it.

"Please, I didn't mean to bring you into this," Anna said, holding the newspaper forward.

"You have to listen to me. If you don't, you're all going to die." ■ STOP Anna Reed is The Final Girl Her aspect is Girl Next Door Girl Next Door: The Girl Next Door is genuine and relatable, making her the emotional anchor of any group. High Moxie reflects emotional strength and the ability to connect with others, while Grit showcases resilience, enabling perseverance through challenges and the protection of loved ones.

Though unassuming, tenacity and emotional intelligence reveal unexpected solutions in the narrative. Anna has a Plot Armor score of 21, Mettle of 4, Moxie of 4, Hustle of 4, Savvy of 3, and Grit of 6. Free Background Trope: -- Current Trope Limit: 8"Last One Alive" prevents death until the rest of the party is killed.

"Who's With Me?!" buffs allies during the finale.

"Let's Not Fight" buffs allies when she defuses infighting.

"A Kind Face" makes NPCs more likely to reveal important plot information.

"Shared Experience" allows players to gain loot based on her efforts.

"Stick to the Plan" salvages seemingly failed plans through a powerful rallying speech. (borrowed from Riley)"The Heart" allows the user to end the game when they are the last one alive and participate in her own rescue. Buffs those who protect her.