Chương 292: Book Six, Chapter 54: The Axe

Being Off-Screen should have meant that we had time to talk, but I was still working to create distance between Daphne and Kimberly. Besides that, we would periodically go On-Screen to show how we were dealing with the ever-rising floodwaters. We would be swimming soon. The dam had to have broken or at least overflowed. That was the only explanation.

"Riley, stop," Daphne called from behind me.

"Riley, wait." She said it both On-Screen and Off-Screen, because in a way, there was no difference to her. After I'd made it out of the labyrinthine back halls of the casino floor, I found myself surrounded by slot machines that were short-circuiting in the floodwaters. There was light that seemed to hang in the air without any particular source. Carousel must have been done shooting things in the dark. It didn't want the audience to miss what was next, perhaps.

I dove headfirst into the water and gave up on walking. I had to hope that Kimberly would find one of the closer stairways. I was taking Daphne on a detour.

"Riley, wait! I can't swim!" Daphne cried from behind me while we were On-Screen for a moment. She was toying with me for the audience. I had to turn to look at her to confirm that she was indeed swimming, because I needed to maintain some level of innocence. I couldn't suddenly turn on my wife, the woman I loved, just because I knew she was a killer. Though the 'til death do we part' line might have allowed it. I mean, it was someone's death. I would have to consult a love lawyer.

While we were Off-Screen a bit later, I could hear her laughing.

"Riley, we still have to play the part, right?" she called ahead. She paused for a moment as we went On-Screen. Then she continued, "We are still husband and wife, and you can't just turn that off. I know I can't."

"I didn't turn it off," I said.

"I just want to know what is happening." I turned to stop, but she didn't stop. She thought she was so clever. It was immediately apparent that we had a tie in Hustle, so she was trying to use the dramatic situation to force me to stop so she could catch up. I couldn't afford that.

"You need to give me space," I said, pushing myself back in the water. By the time we made it across the casino floor, the water was to the top of the slot machines. In a way, I benefited from the humorous, teasing persona that Daphne put on when she was performing for the audience. I wasn't just now seeing it, but I was only just now realizing its significance. It allowed me to add a bit of awkwardness that I needed to dodge and look silly, swimming away from her.

I didn't know the exact nature of this comedy, but it was certainly tongue-in-cheek. The audience, the ones who would watch a film like this, came to see her kill me and look at the camera humorously as she did it. It was all a big tease, like cutting my hair with those terrifying scissors. Had she done that to tease the audience? I just had to hope that there were enough people in that same audience who wanted to see me live.

So she was going to play games as she chased me through the water and winked at the audience every time I made a goofy move that she had to copy, or every time she said some corny, lovey-dovey phrase that only Homibride would say. I would gladly play the counterpart, turning back only to watch her. Enthusiastically and awkwardly lurching away from her as she got closer to me, maintaining as much distance as I could both in character and out. Finally, I made it across the ground floor and got to the stairways.

The door was actually hard to open because of all the water pressing against it, but I didn't have time to goof around. So I grabbed my meat cleaver and smashed it through the door window, releasing a ton of pressure. So much so that when the water started flowing through the door window, the entire door cracked through the middle and was swept into the stairwell.

I didn't know if that looked ridiculous or not, but at the moment, it felt very violent and real because I didn't just swim in gently; the rushing water forced me in. I barely managed to gather my bearings in time to climb up a guardrail and onto the stairs before Daphne made it to the door. On the first landing, I turned and looked at her. She wasn't chasing me anymore, but we were still technically in a Chase Scene. We were On-Screen.

She reverted to emotional, in-love Daphne, and as I looked down at her, I couldn't deny a physical pang in my heart. I wished beyond anything that she would reveal her heel turn was all for show and that she really was everything I believed her to be hours earlier. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon. But that wasn't going to happen. We didn't say anything. We just stared at each other.

I held my cleaver, not threateningly, but there really was no way to hold a meat cleaver that didn't convey some level of threat. After prolonged eye contact, I turned and continued up the stairs.

"Riley," she called after me. I could have left her there, but I knew from her tropes that she had ways to get around impossibly quickly. And we were in the run-and-slash portion of the film. If I didn't keep her with me, then I knew where she was going to go. She would find Kimberly wherever she was, and I wouldn't be able to do anything about it. We went Off-Screen. I turned around, planted my feet, and asked the first thing on my mind. Ramona.

"Why did you kill her?" She stopped, too, still looking at me, with only the emergency lighting, which turned everything blood red.

"She really did try to stop the wedding. You should have warned her against it," Daphne answered. This wasn't the emotional love interest Daphne or the deadly bride from an exploitation flick. This was the tactician. This was the part of Daphne that liked playing the game. I had seen this version of her several times. It was the scariest version of her.

"She was a low-level player doing her best to portray a Defiant Hysteric, but an aspect like that needs a lot of support so that they can manipulate the narrative, and you didn't give it to her." She was right. Ramona got here, and all I could do was wonder why. I hadn't adapted. I hadn't assigned her a role. We had a plan, and she wasn't part of it.

"I dropped the ball," I said.

"I can't blame you. You know, the thing that players never realize is that if your level is too low, it's like the story wants you to die. I'm not exaggerating. Whenever a low-level player ends up in a storyline with me, I can't help but run into them in hallways by accident or find myself with ample opportunities to kill them with no repercussions, just by coincidence. The game is not forgiving.

Players win and win and win and never realize that what separates them from the losers is often a single misunderstanding, a rule they thought they knew but they didn't. If you're low-level enough, you aren't a side character. You're not a character at all. And if you don't have coattails to ride on, you will always get swallowed up." There was something haunting in the clear, sober way she was talking. She wasn't crazed or in love. I had been a low-level player in high-level storylines before.

I was in the mid-teens when I played the Grotesque, but in that story, I wasn't a side character, let alone a background character. I was given a prominent role. Had someone arranged that? Arthur had a trope that made me his apprentice. Was that why I survived as long as I did? What Daphne was saying felt true. Low-level players needed to coast off high-level players to survive. Had my own experience dulled my ability to intuit that rule? Had I not understood how urgent it was to help Ramona?

Or was she lying to me?

"Did you kill her because we were together?" I asked.

"No," she said plainly. And I believed her, because her Moxie had dropped so much that I could tell if she was lying, or at least I thought I could. She was such a naturally gifted actress that I could have been fooling myself.

"Carousel wanted me to kill her, don't you understand? The moment she started hounding me, saying that we should delay the wedding because of those inane blackmailers, all the witnesses just happened to filter out of the room. We were standing in the casino, and there wasn't a single person in sight. Even my father suddenly needed to retrieve something from the front desk. I knew what I was meant to do at that moment.

I was meant to prevent her from ruining my plans, from revealing to my parents that there were blackmailers in the casino, because that might lead them to the conclusion that I was not really their daughter." Even enemies were guided by more than just the script, apparently. If I had done something, if I had just simply given Ramona something to do, Carousel might have seen fit to keep her around. But she was left to play the role she knew and died because of it.

I could tell myself that I had been in a funk because of all the mind manipulation, but I remembered a moment where I wanted to take charge and help guide her into the storyline. But I didn't, because my own role preoccupied me.

"It's time to go up," I said. Daphne looked at me curiously.

"To the penthouse?"

"Just up," I said, pointing to the rising water. And so I began to run up the stairs. Kimberly had a higher Hustle than I did, and so did Andrew, but he was likely still Hobbled from the poison, if not worse. I had to hope that I had bought enough time for them to find a room for Andrew to hole up in so that Kimberly could make it to the roof. We had a date with an axe, and we all knew it.

That was the beauty of the Insert Shot: the earlier you used it, the more often Carousel would bring it into frame to remind the audience of its existence. And then, when it finally mattered, it would matter all that much more. So I ran up, hoping to keep Daphne behind me, but realistically knowing she would eventually break away from me. I didn't know how her various tropes worked exactly, but she might even be able to beat me up the stairs and prepare a surprise attack if she used them properly.

Or worse, she might attack Kimberly or Andrew. I ran as fast as I could, Off-Screen and On, until eventually I got to the roof access. I found the red fire axe case hanging on the wall and reached to open it before seeing through the glass that the axe was gone. My heart sank. All that was left was a pack of cigarettes, but funny enough, there was something different about them. When I used the Insert Shot on the axe, my team and I all got an image of it flashed to us on the red wallpaper.

We could view it whenever we liked, assuming that we had the good sense to know what it was. I stared at the red wallpaper and realized that the pack of cigarettes had been flipped around, as if somebody had taken it out and used it before putting it back. Maybe they had smoked in the stairwell; they certainly hadn't gone out on the roof to do it in this weather. Or maybe... I reached out and touched the cigarettes. They were ever so slightly damp, stained just enough that you could tell if you were looking for it.

When Daphne said she had poisoned cigarettes and left them around, she was telling the truth. It wasn't just implied. She had actually done it, which helped explain why it had worked so well. These were poisoned cigarettes. I channeled every bit of my Savvy to try and see if they really were a trap, and I felt they were, but I had no way of confirming it. All the same, I grabbed them and put them inside my jacket pocket. I looked out onto the roof.

The whole thing was enveloped in rain so thick I could barely make out the body lying flat just outside the door, with a red-handled axe sticking out of its back. It was Logan.