Chương 268: Book Six, Chapter 30: A Proper Greeting

The Atlas contained an aerial photograph of the Carousel Casino, taken from a helicopter's perspective. It was likely a news helicopter because there was some sort of hostage situation going on on the roof of the building, but we ignored that part. We just wanted to get the layout of the premises. As we tried to analyze it, Isaac was playing with the rooster-shaped weathervane omen we had picked up from the hardware store. He would raise it above the table, and a subtle breeze would pick up and shuffle our papers.

Then he would lower it again. The omen was for a storyline called Ida Rae, which was a character-driven murder mystery or slasher that took place during a heavy storm. As we all stood over the aerial photograph, Antoine was pointing out all the outbuildings around the casino.

"Tell me that doesn't look like a ski lift," he said. And it did, or at least it looked like one of the halves of a fancy ski lift, the indoor kind. It was the structure you would enter at the bottom of a mountain to get on the lift. Of course, a few things were missing, the most important of which was the mountain and all of the lifts. But the building was there, in case any of those just happened to appear.

"Look here," Camden said.

"Someone theorized that the casino is connected to Snowblind, but they don't know how."

"If only the Vets had known about that, we might have been on the other side of the mountain already," Antoine said solemnly. Antoine's brother, Chris, had been part of the team that was supposed to go out to Snowblind and try to find a way over to the Manifest Consortium's compound. But of course, the Vets didn't know that's what was over there. They just knew something important was.

"You think that's weird?" Logan said.

"Check out this building over here. What does that look like to you?" I stared at it. It was a very simple structure. Nothing more than a few walls that almost looked sunk into the ground.

"Are those stairs?" Kimberly asked.

"This is a subway entrance," Logan said.

"Not quite as fancy as the one in Northern Carousel, but that's what it is. In the middle of a rose garden." Most of the buildings around the casino were sheds. There were a few trailers. We had no idea what their function was.

"The casino has tons of omens in it," Camden said.

"Most of which are just repeats from those found elsewhere in Carousel. There's actually a machine in there where you can gamble on omens, and then the one you win will seek you out."

"I'm not so concerned with all the random omens from around Carousel," I said.

"The Atlas says those can be easily avoided. You basically have to go out of your way to get them. What storylines are native to the casino itself? I assume that there are tons. It's built like a resort, and all the different sections look like the resort is located in different places."

"That sounds super tacky," Isaac said, as he lifted the rooster weathervane and caused the aerial photograph to billow under its breeze.

"I think it's reasonable to assume that if we start a storyline in the casino, there's no telling where that storyline is going to be set," Logan said. I agreed. The whole place was built like a maze, more so than a normal casino. You never knew where you were or what time it was. That much was clear. And I had only been in it long enough to get dragged upstairs for torture by Generation Killer.

"No windows," Camden said.

"No clocks. No set time period for the decor. I'd say you're right. We trigger a storyline in there, we could end up anywhere doing anything."

"We could play a death game on the beach. Or a death game at a ski resort. Or a death game in the desert," Isaac said.

"So many options." The fact was, we didn't have a lot of information on the storylines within the casino, because any logical person would walk into that place, realize how dangerous it was, and how many omens were bouncing around the walls in there, and never play any of them. But what if you could visit the casino with all the omens gone? What if there were a storyline you could play that would adapt to wherever it was that you started it? Such a storyline did exist. And Isaac was holding the omen for it.

Ida Rae. Wherever you strapped down the rooster weathervane was the place you had to survive the storm.

"With all these buildings clearly being set pieces meant to lead to different locations, we should be careful about which building we attach it to," Antoine said.

"If we attach it to the ski lift, for all we know, our storyline will be set in Snowblind, and we won't even be able to walk into the casino."

"So we attach it to the casino itself. That should guarantee we get what we're after," Logan said.

"Unless of course, this narrator realizes he's in a storyline and decides he's too chicken to meet us off-screen." I had a feeling that this Lucien Graves fellow wouldn't back down from our little meet and greet just because we decided to meet him on our terms. If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

"I still think we should do the hallucinogenic rock candy omen," Isaac said.

"Of course, the meeting with the immortal sorcerer might be a bit more awkward."

"You won't be going on the storyline at all," Logan said.

"You have to stay here with your scouting trope and help keep the others safe."

"Yeah, yeah," Isaac said.

"You finally find a fun storyline at a casino, and I'm not allowed to go. But trying to figure out why a man dressed like a scarecrow is murdering members of a weird cult family? I get to do that every other week." He might have gone on those grocery runs to The Final Straw, but he rarely contributed more than a pint of blood or so. I had to admit that in By the Slice, he had been very useful, but he'd also engaged with the plot because of his possibly real crush on Avery.

"This storyline should be around Plot Armor 35, so that limits our options," Camden said. He didn't seem too upset that at Plot Armor 27, he was not a prime candidate to run Ida Rae. Luckily, I could run the storyline without worrying about the level jumping up to an unbeatable difficulty. That was the exact reason we had gotten the omen.

"The Atlas gives it all the makings of a murder mystery, everyone cut off in the storm," Camden said.

"Classic," I said.

"I have to assume that we're not going to have to deal with too many NPCs either."

"That's right," he said.

"Fewer suspects. That's always a good thing."

"Do we know how big of a threat this storm is? Or is it just designed to keep us from escaping?" Kimberly asked.

"Don't know," Camden said.

"It's not clear. Not in the Atlas at least." If things had gone differently, we would be scouting out Eternal Savers Club instead. But we would have to do that one later. Our interview with a Narrator took precedence. We needed to bring the Narrators and the Consortium itself into the larger narrative. I was sure of it. Night was falling outside. We should have been up on the roof lounging like the other players, but we had work to do. As dusk approached, the sky turned a deep red. Too red.

"Something's happening," I said.

"Get ready." And so we scrambled, like a bunch of firefighters when the alarm rang, to get dressed and ready for a fight. I equipped I Don't Like It Here, and I almost immediately regretted it. I buckled to my knees. That trope didn't just give you information; it gave you the anxiety and fear to go along with it.

"It's an apocalypse," I said, barely managing to get the words out.

"What?" Antoine asked.

"Where? What is happening?" I couldn't blame him for the confusion. It did come out of nowhere. But it was so strong that I could see the storyline on the red wallpaper, even with my eyes closed, regardless of which direction I looked. Dread Epoch Difficulty: Apocalypse. The world is ending. Trigger: Imperceptible. The last time I had felt something this powerful, it was when the Black Snow struck.

"Are we scheduled for an apocalypse?" Kimberly asked.

"Not for another two months," Camden said.

"Not that the W hether Forecast was reliable last time." In Carousel, there was a program on the radio and television, and in the newspaper that allowed you to check the whether. Not the weather as in storms and climate, but the whether, as in some ethereal psychic force. The forecast allowed you to learn about various supernatural events going on around Carousel. Most importantly, you could get predictions of the next apocalypse.

"What do we do?" Lila asked. She had been upstairs but had come down in all the commotion. Others had too.

"We make a break for it. Run for the cabin on the lake," Michael said, holding on to one of his guns with a death grip.

"Wait," I said.

"It's coming." As if to confirm my warning, something skidded across the living room floor and crashed against the glass with a thud. It was Isaac's fishing pole. Its lure would always be attracted to the most powerful omen nearby. This omen had been so strong, it had just pulled the entire pole along with it. We all just stood there, staring out the window into the red light of dusk. And we watched.

"Shouldn't we activate one of these mobile omens?" Ramona asked, panicked.

"Isn't that what we got them for?" I shook my head, still reeling from the intense, pulsing fear that my Hysteric scouting trope had forced onto me.

"If it's an apocalypse, it won't work," I said.

"They take over any storyline running in their path." One thing that we needed was a mobile omen that transported us away from where we were instantly, for this exact reason. The fishing weight on the end of Isaac's rod was moving back and forth along the window, straining and pulling toward something that we couldn't see. Not yet. But then it came into view.

"What the hell is that?" Antoine asked, staring down at the ground. We were on the third story, so it wasn't that far away. Still, the brain doesn't always want to believe what the eyes tell it. Down on the street below, creatures started to crawl over the cars, chasing people. But they weren't disorderly. They weren't chaotic. They were marching. It almost looked like…

"It's a parade," Kimberly said. And it was. Hundreds of creatures, large, feathery, long-toothed creatures, were marching down the road, three by three.

"Are those dinosaurs?" Isaac asked. They were. In fact, some of them were weak enough that I could actually see them on the red wallpaper, and that's what they were: dinosaurs. Except there was something very strange about them. Their bodies were cut and broken. Some had bites taken out of them. Others were half-rotted.

"Those are ghosts," I said.

"Ghost dinosaurs." I looked closer.

"Something is strange about them…"

"You can't put your finger on it," Isaac said, attempting a nervous joke.

"You can't figure out what's strange about those ghost dinos." Antoine was quick-thinking. He had grabbed the telescope, which had an omen-scouting trope attached, and had moved it up next to the window. He was staring down at the dinosaurs. There were raptors and triceratops, long-necked dinosaurs and T. rexes, and other things that looked like they would eat a T. rex for breakfast. There was even a large creature that appeared to be swimming through the air.

"Look through them," Antoine said.

"They're transparent. A little bit. Look through them." And I tried. It was true. As ghosts, they were a little see-through. And there was something within them, but I couldn't tell what at first. Until I looked at one of the raptors, and saw that the thing inside the dinosaur was too big to fit all the way within it, so it just kind of stuck out in certain places. That thing was a person. Their arms and legs were out of sync with the dinosaur, and I could see a tie flapping around.

"They're possessing people," I said. The parade of dinosaurs continued to walk down the street. It was difficult for me to make heads or tails of what we were seeing. They were clearly enemies from an apocalyptic-level storyline, but why were they marching so orderly? We couldn't tell until the very last group of dinosaurs passed by. They were the tallest dinosaurs, with long necks that could reach all the way up to the window of Kimberly's loft.

Clutched in the jaws of one of these giant creatures was a banner with writing on it. SEE YOU SOON—XOXO, LG The dinosaurs marched on. And as the banner passed by Kimberly's loft, suddenly there was a shriek, not the kind that came from lungs, but the kind that came as hundreds of dinosaurs suddenly got exorcised from their human hosts. The banner flew in the wind as the ghost dinosaur that had been carrying it disappeared.

Down on the street, all of the NPCs who had been possessed mainly lay still, some having seizures. What could you say after something like that? An Apocalypse had come and gone in a moment. We all just looked at each other.