Chương 248: Book Eight, Chapter 5: Lark House

Lark House, as near as I could tell, was set in the 1990s. The neighborhood looked like the kind of place that rich kids in movies of that era would live in. A simple line about their parent being a surgeon or a lawyer would explain how their house was so big. It was nothing compared to the mansions in the Carousel Hills, but it was quite large and had a proper stone wall all around the perimeter that made viewing the actual house difficult.

Well, most of it was stone—the kind that got covered in that white concrete-type stuff and smoothed out. There were large areas of the wall that were nothing but iron bars so that the owner could show off the fancy statues in their yard. What was the point of owning a house like that if people couldn't see it? The house itself was situated at the end of a long drive, and the front door wasn't even facing the street, but rather, a courtyard of some kind to the side. The statues of humans were so lifelike.

The artist must have been a real talent, capturing their fear and defensive posture so well. On our third trip to the house, we stood on the street outside, staring into those bars and trying to get a good accounting of the Omens within. The gate itself was actually unlocked and slightly ajar, but that itself was an Omen. It was a pretty basic storyline from what I could tell.

I pieced together the plot as being something like getting hit by a car or pinched by the gate, and then the owners would kidnap you and try to figure out a way to get away with their negligence instead of taking you to the hospital. Basic stuff. I preferred monsters to the terrors of people trying to prevent getting points on their license. Most of the players who had come along with us were about done.

The first two days, we had logged the Omens, and there was a great deal of excitement speculating on which one was the main Omen of the house. But we narrowed it down, eliminating each one as a contender until there were none left. It made sense that Lucky's team of heavy hitters didn't use an easily accessible Omen as the "lock" on their base. I just wished Lucky himself knew which one it was. If he did, he wouldn't tell us.

Now, on the third day, it did not appear that there were many Omens we had not seen before. The other players were getting disheartened.

"The boot sticking out of the pond and the body belonging to it are a common Omen," I said.

"You can find it anywhere in Carousel that has murky water. It makes the rounds." It was a waterproof rubber boot that had seen some wear and tear.

"I guess you could call it a floater in more than one way, then," Molly, the newly rescued comedian, said with a giggle as she walked to join the group up the hill.

"I guess we could," I said. That left only me and Camden still interested in the project.

"So, one more Omen to cross out," Camden said.

"Have we considered this might involve a mobile Omen? I mean, this lawn is a minefield. Can you imagine there are Omens inside the house where no one would ever run into them?"

"That's where all the good ones are," I said.

"Where no one is likely to find them." I didn't actually know that to be true. I just thought it sounded like a cool thing to say. It was true that Omens could be found anywhere—even places no one would ever go. And the mobile Omen theory was at the forefront of my mind. It was actually a top theory. While we were talking, one of the bodyguards who was part of Nicole's scouting trope approached.

"Folks, let's move up out of the street here. There's a suspicious vehicle coming," he said. I glanced in the direction he was pointing. It was an ice cream truck, and it was absolutely an Omen—in fact, it was several.

"All you have to do is avoid waving him down or signaling him," I said.

"He's not going to hit us." The bodyguard was having none of it. His job was to keep us safe.

"Sir, I'm going to have to insist," he said. We complied just to end the conversation. That was the problem with that trope. All it did was keep you out of the way of danger. It didn't differentiate between a likely danger or an unlikely one. For the most part, it just kept you away from Omens altogether, which added a lot of travel time and made scouting that much harder. Those bodyguards were part of the reason Nicole and the others were waiting so far away.

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"Anyway," I said, "I sure hope it's not mobile. The last one we tracked down without knowing anything about it took forever. We literally had to thread-pull it into existence. Or thread-pull our way toward it, whatever the proper terminology is."

"That must have been torture," Camden said.

"You wouldn't know. You weren't there," I said with a smile.

"It's a lot of walking. A ton of it." So we stood there on the sidewalk, checking and rechecking to see if there was any interesting Omen activity on the other side of the gate.

"Did you see the moving flowers?" Camden asked eventually. I had. They weren't moving naturally, like they would if there was wind blowing them. They were shaking, like they were trying to get our attention.

"Yep," I said.

"That's the pixie one, right?" he asked.

"It is that time of year," I said. We were desperate to come up with some meaningful information to justify the walk here, but we hadn't found it yet. Camden and I kept glancing back up at the group. It looked like they were getting impatient, but maybe that was just our anxiety.

"Should we give them my smoke grenade idea?" he asked. His idea was pretty simple: set off a mobile Omen near the house, which would cause all of the nearby Omens to deactivate. Then, when the players of that storyline departed toward the actual setting of their storyline, a secondary team could come and check out the home. The problem, of course, was that when the Omens started coming back online, the second team might be trapped in the house before they found the Omen we were looking for.

"No," I said. We had discussed this before.

"Why not?" he asked.

"I'd like to hear their opinions on it."" Why not?" I repeated.

"Because they might go for it."

"You don't think the old Camp Dyer caution will get in the way?" he asked with a smile.

"We're not at Camp Dyer anymore," I said.

"They're nervous. They might not wait forever without a plan. At least at Camp Dyer, they knew what was what. I don't think we're inspiring much confidence." That wasn't our job. There were other Archetypes for that.

"We do have a plan," he said. That was technically true.

"Cataloging every Omen in the area each day of the week isn't as much of a thrill for the low-savvy players," I said. We turned to leave. There was nothing else for us to see there. I had already done my trick of making it rain so that we would see what Omens would replace the current ones, but it was nothing revolutionary. I figured if we were looking for the main Omen of the house, it would probably be one that existed under ordinary circumstances, not during rain.

As we got to the edge of the property, we passed by a group of neatly trimmed bushes bordering against the wall. Camden noticed something we had not seen before.

"Check that out," he said, pointing inside one of the bushes. I followed his gaze and saw that a small rectangular "For Sale" sign was leaning against the back of the bush just out of view. It wasn't an Omen or anything like that.

"It's safe," I said.

"If it wasn't, that big, tall bodyguard would have tackled us by now." He still didn't reach out for it. Not being able to see Omens without help made Carousel terrifying. I remembered those days when avoiding Omens felt like some unknowable mystical art.

"It was my idea. That means you have to grab the sign," he said.

"You need me to?" I asked.

"You can't do it yourself?"

"It was my idea to have you grab it. That's the distribution of labor around here. The person with the idea gets to sit back like an authority figure," he said. We were just joking around. I leaned over and grabbed the sign. My heart raced a little bit, but I hid any fear from my face. Before I handed it to him, I said, "That's probably why you like the smoke bomb strategy, because you don't plan on being a part of it. Here you go, boss man." He grabbed the sign from my hand and didn't deny the charges.

He took a close look at it and noticed that there were holes at the top and bottom, evenly spaced. He looked up at the mailbox for the house and got a grin on his face. It was the type of "For Sale" sign that was designed to be hung below a mailbox. He went slow, in case I told him that an Omen suddenly appeared on the red wallpaper or anything like that. He hooked the sign to the bottom of the mailbox and backed away carefully as I laughed.

"If it's for sale, maybe we can get some real estate agent to do a showing," he explained.

"It's okay to be confused. I know that property ownership is the furthest thing from your mind at your age." I looked over the house at all the Omens placed around the yard and among the statuary.

"That's one reason for them to spruce things up," I said. It wasn't a bad idea. There were all kinds of things like that in the Atlas. Carousel was a game, after all. There was a bit of a point-and-click adventure element—put the "For Sale" sign on the house, and then you can go in and look around without fearing any danger. It made enough sense. But I wasn't going to stroke his ego.

"Shall we make a bet?" I asked.

"I'm not going to take your money," he said.

"Of course not," I said.

"You're going to lose. There's no way it's that easy."

"I disagree."

"Okay, but remember, it's possible that worse things happen than your plan simply not working. It could backfire. We should probably not be standing around when it happens," I said.

"Fair enough," Camden said as we turned to leave the house behind, hoping that the "For Sale" sign would grow into a scouting opportunity for later.

"So you admit that the odds of your plan backfiring are pretty high," I said.

"Since you're running away."

"No," Camden said.

"I just don't want you to feel unsafe. I, myself, feel pretty good about things." It didn't take very long after we started walking away for a minivan to pull up next to the house. A woman in a red blazer got out of the vehicle with a very similar sign to the one that Camden had hung. It said "Open House Thursday, 3-5 P. M." She hung it under the "For Sale" sign. I looked at Camden, and he was ready to gloat.

"Instant results," he said.

"And you thought you were the main character in these parts." I had expected to see results the next day. At least the wait might humble him.

"The main character?" I asked.

"No, not me. I'm not the major archetype. I believed in you; I just didn't want you to get your heart set on it just in case. Not to mention that open house could also mean something like an 'open house on players.' I bet you didn't think about that. You know how Carousel loves its puns."

"You're right," Camden said as we moved to rejoin the group.

"That's probably what it means. On Thursday, they'll finally start trying to take out the players, because it's open house on players." We laughed as we started to run back to the others.