Chương 265: Book Six, Chapter 27: The Wait

"It's too early to worry like this," I said.

"They're still within the time frame allotted for the story. Just have faith." I didn't know what I was saying, but it was my attempt to comfort a worried friend. Anna paced back and forth across the living room floor.

"I'm telling you something is wrong. It says Lila is doomed. It says Michael is doomed. Kimberly is panicked. And Antoine, why did we send him back into the forest? Why did we allow that?" He had wanted to go back into the forest. His trope, The Mountain as a Metaphor, could gradually cure his psychological troubles, he believed, if he only attempted a proper challenge. They had taken precautions, and the storyline they were entering was not over-leveled.

He had made leaps and bounds in progress since the werewolf storyline. What had happened there had been a huge breakthrough for him. We couldn't exactly keep him on the bench forever.

"What does Antoine's description say?" I asked. She turned and looked at me.

"It says he's struggling to put it all together."

"How about Logan or Andrew? They're strong players. Are they okay?"

"It says that Andrew is numb. And Logan is annoyed."

"Great," I said.

"If things were going off the rails, Logan would be far worse than annoyed." Anna had just acquired a new trope called Are You Okay in There?, which allowed her to check in on her allies to see if they needed help and gauge their emotional state. It seemed like a great tool to have in a storyline. But it didn't only work in storylines. The other team was still running Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle. It had been two weeks since we had parted ways.

They were definitely on the far side of the time frame we expected.

"Do you want to see the trailer again?" I asked. As soon as I could after we had completed our storyline, I had used my Coming to a Theater Near You trope to watch a trailer for the storyline the other team was playing. It was a habit of mine. The trailer didn't always reveal huge spoilers because it was most powerful if you actually had it equipped in the storyline you just ended, but you could still see trailers if you equipped it a short time after running a storyline.

"Yes," Anna said.

"You know that this isn't going to update unless we do another storyline, right?" I asked.

"It's going to be the same trailer." She nodded. This new trope of hers was more trouble than it was worth. At the end of the storyline, everyone would be panicked and annoyed. What use was it to watch their emotions change? Especially if they ended up losing.

"We could run a new storyline. Something that only takes a few hours," Anna said.

"You can equip your trope so that it'll be more powerful."

"We can do that," I said, "but I don't think we should." To tell the truth, I was nervous too. But we couldn't both act nervous. Somebody had to be solid and logical. And it wasn't going to be Camden, because he was checked out. Something to do with his own trauma from failing a storyline. The rest of the players at the Loft had given Anna a wide berth.

Her usual calm demeanor was a real boon to the team at large, but watching her panic while tracking the emotions of her closest friends as they faced death was hard to see. I thought maybe her emotions stemmed from the trope itself. It might be making her feel this way. My Hysteric scouting trope sure did a number on my anxiety. I didn't want to say that because that would sound dismissive, and it might not even be true. Anna's experience with a failed storyline was different than Camden's.

She had been rewarded for continuously persevering through everything, even as her nerves ground to dust. It almost felt like she was afraid that if she didn't worry, something might happen. It was just me, Ramona, Camden, and Anna in the living room. We sat down in front of my old TV and used its trope to show them what I was seeing on the red wallpaper: the preview for Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle.

The trailer opened with wide, sweeping shots of a vast jungle and the weathered remains of ancient ruins, their edges hidden beneath creeping vines. As the morning sun broke over the trees, the shapes of long-lost structures emerged from the undergrowth, momentarily visible before vanishing again into shadow. Over the footage, Andrew's voice spoke calmly.

"You once searched for the Cradle," he said.

"They say you almost found it." Antoine answered without emotion.

"They say a lot of things." Andrew continued.

"They say you found it in the wilds off a trailhead near a town called Carousel." The image cut to a close-up of Antoine's face. His expression didn't change, but the silence lingered.

"Who've you been talking to?" Antoine asked. Andrew laughed.

"Everyone. Everyone who might've known about your voyage. You found it, didn't you?" Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original. Antoine's voice came slower now.

"All I found was blood." The screen flashed gold-stained deep red, gleaming artifacts half-submerged in what looked like liquid metal, pooling thickly like oil.

"If you're half as smart as they say, you'll walk away from this. There are safer treasures out there."

"Perhaps I would," Andrew said, "but it's too late for her." Antoine straightened.

"You don't mean, " Kimberly appeared on screen, caught mid-spin in a slow dance with Antoine at a black-tie gala, eyes closed, smiling, untouched by danger.

"She wanted a piece of the legend," Andrew said.

"She wanted to finish the journey the great Antoine Stone was too afraid to complete."

"When did she leave?"

"A month ago." The music picked up tempo as a recruitment montage began. Michael stood at a firing range, nodding grimly as he lowered a rifle. Bobby crouched in a clearing, two silent dogs beside him as he tracked something unseen. Dina was watching them from a distance. For a few seconds, it felt like an adventure film. Then it didn't. The tone shifted fast and hard. Jungle turned to darkness. Rain poured in sheets. A flashlight beam shook as someone ran.

A jeep skidded out, tires screaming as it careened off a waterfall. Mercenaries screamed orders, grabbing rifles in panic, not control. The sounds shifted, too. Birdcalls and leaves gave way to something deeper. Beneath the natural noise, something else stirred, an artificial hum just low enough to be felt more than heard. Sub-audible, heart-syncing, wrong. Then came a glimpse. Just a flash of a silhouette, a man, or something like one, with a long shape twisting around his head. A snake, maybe. Or maybe not.

The trailer didn't give it time to make sense. Just long enough to leave it burned into memory.

"You never should've come here," Kimberly whispered.

"I know," Antoine answered. The screen cut to black. The title emerged: Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle. The letters gleamed gold for a moment, pristine and polished. Then vines twisted up from below. The gold dulled. The edges cracked. The title decayed in place. A calm announcer's voice repeated the name, slow and even.

"Antoine Stone and the Sunken Cradle."

"Coming soon." Silence followed. Then, quietly, under the black screen, something began breathing. Its breath sounded like quickening winds through the forest, in and out.

"That's ominous, right?" she said.

"Every single trailer in Carousel ends ominously," I said.

"They all suggest that something terrible happened and that the enemy is overwhelmingly powerful." I had seen trailers for movies where the players failed, and they were much more dour than this. I had seen trailers for films taken over by the Black Snow apocalypse. Yes, the trailer was scary, and the breathing at the end wasn't doing anyone's anxiety any favors. But it meant nothing as to the success or failure of the team. Anna continued to monitor the other team continuously.

It had been four days since we got back. I looked at Ramona like she might be able to tell me what to do, but I was afraid she'd just say: Talk to her. Or Comfort her. All she did was bite her lip and try to look sympathetic. In a way, I was glad she wasn't particularly well-adjusted. Growing up in Carousel would probably do that to a person.

"Anna," I said, as she sat on the couch staring into the distance unceasingly, which told me she was seeing the red wallpaper.

"I know what it's like to have friends not return. I understand. We waited for you, Camden, and Reggie for days, over a week actually, just hoping… but this is different than that. Because if the worst happens, we can save them."

"What if the same thing that happened to our storyline is happening to theirs?" Camden asked.

"What if it was rebalanced toward the enemy?"

"This is not the time for that," I said.

"We don't know that's actually happening." Camden was talking about the fact that our storyline, By the Slice, had presented itself differently for us than it had for those who had described the story in the Atlas. Our scouting tropes still worked. Heck, the scouting trope information that wasn't considered spoilers in the Atlas was still accurate. It was like a different story was told from the same baseline rules and setup.

Miss Verity Pryce, demoness, had somehow reconceived her story, not as a survival horror of employees trapped in a hellish pizza parlor with no one able to perceive their dilemma, but as a sort of modern morality tale or fairy tale, designed to try to trick the players instead of beating them head-on.

"We need to go to the video store and see if they have old films from previous runs," Camden said. Ever since we told him about the video store, he had wanted to go there for one reason or another. He had really run headlong down the path of trying to understand the game as a way of controlling it, and I couldn't blame him. I started down that path on day one.

"We have to wait until the other team comes back," I said.

"If they come back," Anna said, tears rolling down her face.

"Kimberly feels dread. Logan is mourning someone, but I don't know who. Andrew… I think Andrew died." Anna and Camden were supposed to be my unshakable rock. What was happening? One failed storyline, and they give in to despair and obsession? Did the Film Buff Archetype have mental health tropes? I would have to check. Ramona gestured for me to follow her up to the roof. So I did.

"Death is hard enough to come back from," she said once we were out of earshot.

"But the big death must be even worse." I had dreaded the realization of failure from the beginning. I didn't know how I would react to losing a storyline. I hoped I would never know.

"It would seem," I said.

"I think it's just because they weren't here for all those months of desperation after Project Rewind hit. There's something really zen about realizing our lack of agency in a world completely controlled by a higher power."

"More than one higher power," she said.

"They'll be fine. But Camden might be right. It wouldn't hurt to check. Is there another reason you don't want to go to the video store?"

"Yeah," I said.

"Because I get the strange sense that my old neighborhood is in the back room."

"Your old neighborhood? Like from when you were a kid?" she asked.

"Yep," I said.

"Aren't you curious?" she asked.

"Extremely," I said.

"But I don't know what Carousel is up to, and until I get some idea, I'm not going anywhere." It seemed to me like Carousel was trying to take my life story and make it into one of its stories. Ramona would know something about that, but luckily, she sensed I didn't want to talk about it. Ramona understood the peace that comes with just ignoring problems and emotions. We stayed up on the roof in the shade, listening to the radio that played down on the streets.

Isaac was playing with his fishing pole again, just trying to get a sense of the terrain, what types of Omens were around, that sort of thing. One of these days, he was going to catch something with that pole. Hopefully not today. Anna had said that the other team was panicked and all sorts of other negative emotions, but that didn't tell me anything. In fact, her ability itself worried me. Because now Anna was going to be able to tell how I was feeling, no matter how hard I tried to hide it.

What a selfish thing to worry about. Luckily, be it Elidel or whatever other gods might exist in Carousel, Anna came running up the stairs about three hours later, screaming that the other team was okay.

"Antoine is exhilarated! Kimberly is relieved!" she said, listing off the emotions of our teammates.

"Lila is shaken, but I think something happened to her, like maybe she got killed, but either way it's good, because there hasn't been an update on her emotions for a long time, so I think she just got revived or something. Like it's the end of the storyline."

"Well, there you go," I said. Anna was smiling from ear to ear. I smiled too. Could Anna see the guilt I would have felt if Kimberly, Antoine, and the others had died when I wasn't around to help? I hoped not. That trope was overpowered enough as it was.