Chương 267: Book Six, Chapter 29: Deviled Egg

You're telling me that you've never heard of a deviled egg?" Isaac asked incredulously.

"The little party food?"

"Do you mean a devil's egg?" Ramona replied.

"Because I have heard of those. They're quite scary."

"No, a devil ed egg, like an egg stuffed with zesty egg," Isaac said.

"It's always bad luck to find a devil's egg," she added.

"No," Isaac insisted.

"A devil ed egg." We were at the Diner. We hadn't been in a while. A strange, green-black egg could be seen inside a small metal crate from which the short-order cook was grabbing eggs as he worked. We watched, wondering if he would pick that one when making our food, which, naturally, led to a conversation about deviled eggs, the tasty potluck staple.

"Finding a devil's egg is said to bring terrible luck," Ramona explained.

"There was a girl in my class who supposedly found one. She got taken out of school for some sort of infection three days later. So, if you find a devil's egg, be sure not to touch it."

"A devil ed egg," Isaac repeated.

"I know you're messing with me."

"Because if you touch the devil's egg, the devil will smell your scent, and then he'll abandon it," Camden said.

"You don't want that to happen."

"All I asked is if you had a food called deviled egg," Isaac started, exasperated.

"Because that sounds like the exact kind of thing Carousel would take and run with, ""And without the mother's warmth, the young devil is sure not to survive," I added. Ramona, having grown up in Carousel, albeit a slightly altered version, was a source of endless amusement. Not only did she take very strange things, like children going missing or bizarre TV stations, as normal, but many of the concepts we thought were normal were completely foreign to her.

One of those might have been the food called the deviled egg. Or she might have been messing with Isaac. I gave it about fifty-fifty either way. When we walked into the diner as a team now, we basically filled up an entire wall. Somehow, I lucked out and ended up at the fun table. The other table was discussing a grocery run.

As much as I liked The Final Straw as a storyline, about the fifth time you run it, it starts to get old, especially when all you get from it in return for your efforts are some 1970s-era rural general store foodstuffs. It's nice to see Benny, of course. It felt like he remembered us. It was right around the time the conversation on deviled eggs died down that we heard Andrew comment, "If only we could simply go to the store and spend our own money. I would do anything for normal food."

He must not have been talking about Eastern Carousel General Store.

"Are you talking about the Eternal Savers Club?" I asked, turning around in my booth to face them. Andrew nodded.

"They've got a 25% off sale according to the newspaper," Logan said casually. Logan was holding the newspaper open. He had been reading it.

"Wait, let me see that," Camden said. He was sitting in the same booth as me. Logan reluctantly handed him the paper, and Camden instantly flipped to the page with the ad on it, thanks to his Eureka trope. He looked back at Logan, Kimberly, Andrew, and Antoine, who were all in that booth.

"This isn't like a normal sale," Camden said.

"Don't you remember what this means?" The blank looks told the story. They didn't know.

"Twenty-five percent off isn't talking about prices," Camden said after he got no answers.

"It's about the Plot Armor of the storyline. Don't you remember the vets talking about that?" Apparently, they didn't. While Eternal Savers Club was more relevant to our interests than many other storylines the vets regularly ran, we didn't actually know many details. The vets were very big on preventing spoilers. What I remembered was waiting out across the street for the storyline to end, so that we could help haul grocery carts all the way back to Camp Dyer.

"Wait, 25% off," Antoine said.

"It's normally around Plot Armor 40, right? So that would bring it down to 30?" Well, an opportunity like that has a tendency to get people thinking. And so we did. We'd want to confirm that the 25% off deal meant what Camden said it did, but if it did, it'd mean visiting a modern grocery store and being able to buy, or 'loot,' in bulk. A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"But do they have pickled pig's feet?" Isaac asked, to some light chuckling. We had a jar of them back at the Loft pilfered from The Final Straw. None of us had been brave enough to try them.

"My friend Marcie has a membership card," Ramona said.

"Or at least she did. But I don't think that's very helpful to us now, if it's like you say." It wasn't very helpful. While Ramona had been immune to omens before becoming a player, or at least the omens didn't exist, it wasn't very clear. Now they did exist, and Eternal Savers Club was rife with them. The most dangerous one, of course, was the one you triggered simply by walking into the building through the customer entrance, because the omen was the dead-eyed greeter you met when you entered.

"There's another layer to this," I said.

"You know, there was a whole team that got wiped out there when Project Rewind triggered?" Most vets had died at Camp Dyer, but there were others who had not been at camp at that time.

"A rescue," Kimberly said.

"If it's 25% off, that brings it down to Plot Armor 30. A rescue would bring it a few points higher, maybe Plot Armor 34 or 35. We could do that."

"Assuming the version that killed the vets was the typical run," I said.

"Remember, they died in it, and this was something they normally ran."

"Who was it?" Avery asked. She was seated at the low bar near the booths with Cassie and Lila.

"Huh?" I asked.

"Who were the players that died in Eternal Savers Club?" she clarified.

"Oh," I said.

"It's, uh... the chick in her 40s who did yoga. But not the athlete, the one who always wore her hair in that knitted cap thing. She came here with her adult niece and nephew, who were always being cast as her children. You remember?"

"Yes, we remember. Nicole," Kimberly said.

"That's it," I said sheepishly.

"I never really knew her." In my defense, there were a lot of players at Camp Dyer, and most of them didn't make a habit of getting attached to the newbies. Luckily, people seemed to ignore my lapse in memory as our food started to be delivered. We chowed down. No one had gotten the black and green egg.

"Eternal Savers Club is a slasher, right?" Anna asked sometime later, after we had eaten, reigniting the conversation.

"No, it's science fiction," Logan said.

"I remember them talking about it. Jacques looted some kind of mechanical heart or pump from one of the enemies."

"Are you sure?" Camden asked.

"Because I remember it being something to do with mold. Like a hive mind or something, I guess. Remember?

'Cause the food would sometimes have this faint odor of mold on it, and they would always tell us that it was all right, that the smell was from something else, it'll go away." Strange.

"So," I said, "in the trailer for the film where the team died, it was some sort of satanic cult. The players were very upset about it, because they weren't expecting it. I'm going to guess that Eternal Savers Club can go in a lot of different directions. It makes sense, if you think about it, they've got so many props." A slasher, a sci-fi robot horror, a demonic cult…

all of those could be superficial skins wrapped around the real plot, which must have universally featured employees at the store going bad one way or another.

"We should have brought the Atlas," Camden said.

"There's a huge section on it." There would have to be. It was the best place to loot food and many other items, assuming you had a Plot Armor of 40. But before we could discuss things any further, something strange happened. The diner was a prized location in Carousel, mostly because it was perfectly safe. There were no Omens inside. Even the strange egg that the cook kept almost pulling from the basket up above his station was just there as set dressing.

So, when a man came inside, just an ordinary NPC whose only name on the red wallpaper was 'Drifter,' and started hooting and hollering about having won big at Carousel Casino, well... we knew something was up. The guy was also drunk. Or high. And excessively friendly. I didn't know which was worse.

"I turned forty bucks into four thousand!" he exclaimed.

"Check it out!" I expected him to try to pull four thousand Carousel dollars in coins from his pockets, but he actually just took out a check and started showing it to anyone who would look. He even stumbled over to our section of the diner, flashing the check around. He got very close, and while his behavior was meant to appear bumbling and chaotic, he somehow found his way directly to me, leaning over Camden and Ramona to do it, and showed me the check. It was for four thousand, alright.

It was signed Lucien Graves. It didn't take me long to remember where I had seen that name before. It was one of those stage names that people in Carousel liked to give themselves so much. I saw it on a poster, among other posters, for a Narrator. One who sought out risky storylines in search of whatever strange desires an immortal like him could have.

"Luck is in the air," the drunk man said.

"Everybody can win. They got all kinds of good odds, you can look that up!" He walked across the store, sat down in his own booth, and ordered a coffee. And, in fact, shortly after the man had finished saying, "look that up," Camden started flipping through the newspaper until he found an article. Carousel Casino Opens "The Reckoning Room" — All Bets Welcome By R. Averill, Staff Writer (filling in for W. Averill) The Carousel Casino has cut the ribbon on its newest attraction: The Reckoning Room, a betting hall where you can bet for or against absolutely anything. Casino spokesperson Lucien Graves described The Reckoning Room as a "space for speculation, strategy, and a little chaos." He boasted: "Want to wager your neighbor makes it through the week? You can. Bet against your own birthday happening this year? That's on the board.

Will the couple tying the knot at the newly renovated 24/7 Wedding Chapel call it quits by sunrise? Place your chips. Think the plucky survivors crawling around a hell dimension won't make it to credits? We'll take that action."

Bets currently circulating on the whiteboard include:"Randy finally snaps during horror movie trivia night" (3: 1, heavy action)"Kimmy returns from the cornfield crawl" (25: 1)"It's all been a dream" (Even odds — suspiciously stable)"Tonight is The End" (Line shifting hourly) You don't need to know the rules. You just need to believe it could happen. Odds are calculated by The House. Outcomes are final. Disputes are... discouraged.

"What is going on?" Anna asked me. I looked around, trying to appear dramatic and shaken.

"It sounds like one of the Narrators wants to talk," I said. It made sense that the famously risk-taking Narrator would be the first to reach out. He had made his move, and it was time for us to make ours. We had pushed the story in this direction, put ourselves at the high-stakes table, so to speak. It was time to put our money where our mouth was. The air was sucked out of the room, and whatever excitement there had been for running Eternal Savers Club was doused like a torch in the rain. No one knew what to say.

No one knew what to do.

"Oh, did you mean devil ed eggs? Like the food?" Ramona asked Isaac, flashing the trickster's grin. I couldn't help but laugh.