Chương 306: Book Six, Chapter 68: The Game Plan

We picked five players to go on the rescue in Eternal Savers Club. The more players you had, the more characters you had to share screen time with, and because Bobby's rescue trope was about completing subplots from the failed storyline, I worried that we would be hurting for screen time anyway. There was no way to know until we actually got there and used Bobby's trope for the first time. It was Bobby, Kimberly, Antoine, Dina, and me.

It was a good mix of some strong On-Screen players with great Off-Screen support. With access to the script from the original storyline, I felt that we would have an easy time developing a plan of action. But of course, we had to go over everything again before we left, just in case. We went to the diner. It was a safe place, and we could all pack into a booth with our missing posters stacked in front of us and talk things through.

Kimberly, of course, brought her phone so that we could give her talent agent, Sal, a call." Eternal Savers Club, huh?" he asked.

"Yeah, that movie's been in development hell for almost a year at this point. I hear they have to do reshoots. Why are you asking?"

"They're supposed to be pretty extensive reshoots, right?" Kimberly asked.

"Is there a chance that I might be able to squeeze in?"

"I don't know, Kimberly," Sal said.

"I'm sure they'd take you, but movies with this type of trouble behind the scenes rarely end up being that impressive at the box office. I'll see what I can do." We heard him shuffling around papers in the background and sighing. It was no surprise that he was going to be negative about it. We didn't have a big advantage in this storyline level-wise. Even with the twenty-five percent off gimmick, the storyline was probably higher than our average Plot Armor because it was a rescue. But that was the game.

You couldn't play on easy mode because there was no easy mode. If you went too slow or you played too cautiously, you just lost. It might take a while to find out, but that was what happened.

"All right, here it is," he said.

"I actually reached out to the studio about this film months ago, and it does seem like they're just trying to attach any star power they can to it. So if I gave them the call, there's a good chance we might get their wheels turning and get this thing made." He was being very somber.

"What exactly was wrong with the original?" Kimberly asked. Sal had some thoughts.

"They spent millions of dollars on the shoot, and at the end of the thing, they only had maybe thirty minutes of usable footage. Apparently, the director who shot the original stuff was trying a novel approach where they made major modifications to the screenplay that pretty much cut characters out altogether, which cascaded further down in the script to make entire scenes impossible to shoot.

"The good news is that the director is six feet under. The bad news is that the studio is going to want to use a good chunk of the footage that it spent so much money on. So now you're going to have to come in and film basically a completely separate movie that takes place at the same time as the first movie and can pick up from where the other one left off, without any contradictions, and without using most of the original actors.

"It's a nightmare, sweetie. And now the tone is a bit different. The original screenplay was supposed to be a comedy, but then they decided to make it dark and scary. And now, with the most recent rewrites, it's a bit more sentimental. I don't know, Kimberly. If you wanna do it, I'm sure you'll do great, but even being the best part of a terrible movie might not be a good career move." Sal could be long-winded, but that was ridiculous.

"The storyline's about a cult or something like that at a big box store, right?" Kimberly asked.

"That's one of the things it's about," he answered.

"But now they're going in other directions—something about the nature of grief being a major theme." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

"Strange," I said.

"I just assumed that for a story about a big box store, it would be some heavy-handed criticism of capitalism or something like that. Anti-consumer culture, that sort of thing."

"Wait, who was that? Who's talking?" Sal asked. He did that a lot. If he heard someone other than Kimberly, he would say something like that. He was just playing around. Technically, I wasn't allowed to use the trope because it was Kimberly's.

"Sal, I'm going to do it," Kimberly said.

"Are there any surprises I should know about?"

"I wish I could tell you, sweetheart," Sal said very seriously.

"I really do. But movies these days are full of surprises. It's like they think a film is naked without a twist. I just hope they'll leave this one out. Good luck. I hope you'll give me another call soon. We never talk." He hung up.

"I'm glad we called him," I said.

"Really helped raise our spirits."

"Well," Kimberly said, "we knew this wasn't going to be easy. But we have to do rescues, right?" We did. We sold this storyline as being a chance to shop at a real grocery store, but of course, that was kind of a cover story. It was more fun to say that we were going shopping, that we were going to fill our cabinets with all sorts of tasty treats for free. At the end of the day, this was a rescue. And if it had a twist or two, we would just have to deal with it. We were here to level up.

"So there's some sort of monster that wants to be released, right?" Antoine said.

"That's what Cassie's trope told us. Some big evil dude wants to be released, and we have to stop it." He was trying to make it sound simple and failing miserably. We finished our food, and the waitress took our plates away.

"All right," I said.

"Anointed knife." I pulled the pocket knife with the strange blood trope on it out of my hoodie pocket and put it on the table on top of the missing posters for the players we were rescuing. The knife would buff my Mettle if it got my blood on it.

"Gun that we almost certainly won't be able to use," Antoine said as he took the revolver we had gotten in Homibridal out of his pocket and put it on the table. It was nonlethal, but still threatening.

"Magic masks," I said, pulling out my masquerade mask from The Strings Attached. Antoine and Kimberly did too, and placed them in the center of the table. This was a magic storyline, so the magic masks would likely work here. What was better was that their magic was subtle. They simply influenced people around you not to focus too much on your identity. They weren't perfect disguises, but we had seen how effective they were at resisting identification.

"Killer scarf," Dina said, as she pulled the object Isaac had lent her from his winnings at the bowling alley out of her jacket pocket. It was neatly folded up so that it couldn't get snagged on anything. While it didn't explicitly say this in the trope description for the object, it was pretty good blood control if it came to it.

"Shasta and Doughboy," Bobby said. He looked a little down, but he was trying to be cheerful. The dogs were outside next to the window. No one was going to mess with them, although eating right in front of them might have turned them into enemies if their sad expressions meant anything.

"Hot coffee," Kimberly said, placing a trope item she had bought at the flea market onto the table. It was a simple to-go coffee mug with a lid, and it had a Final Girl trope on it called On-Hand To Hand, which turned everyday objects into their most formidable form as a weapon. It wasn't clear what the trope did on the coffee mug until we put coffee in it. Suffice it to say, the steam rising off the coffee was almost enough to burn my skin.

If Kimberly kept this with her, she would be able to splash it on some poor, unfortunate cult member to great effect. We sat and stared at the objects in silence for a while.

"Well, we can't put this off forever," I said, though we were all willing to try. We paid for our food and started our walk south. When I had imagined running through Eternal Savers Club, I wanted one of the sillier versions—the robot security guards, the ghostly messages written in the frost on the freezer doors. Fun stuff. He Who Walks Behind the Aisles was a silly name, and I hoped that meant there was a little bit of silliness to this storyline.

However, a movie that focused on the nature of grief was unlikely to have an uplifting tone. It was strange. From the trailer, I could definitely see there was a darkness to the humor, but I never would have guessed that a movie like this would have themes, let alone melancholy ones like that. I had to wonder what caused the change. Perhaps I would never know. Jules showed up when we were getting near the parking lot of Eternal Savers Club.

She was there because of Bobby's trope, and she was always great to have around. I noted that she was wearing a uniform, but not one for Eternal Savers Club. It was for the CHC, the Carousel Highway Commission. Whatever she was cast as would be related to what Bobby was, so he would probably work there, too. The highway was pretty close, so it made some sense that that place might be included.

It wasn't like we could easily be employees of Eternal Savers Club, given that our subplots had to maintain a distance from the ones of the players we were rescuing. I had no idea who I would be when we got there. Sal was more concerned with making sure we understood how Bobby's rescue trope would work than he was with telling us the plot. We walked across the parking lot and in through the automatic doors. None of us grabbed a shopping cart.

There before us was the Omen: a man who smiled big, but his smile didn't reach his eyes. We walked forward. I checked the difficulty to make sure this was the right Omen and that nothing was switched around. Homibridal had made me paranoid. Everything was as expected. The greeter turned his attention to us.

"Welcome to Eternal Savers Club," he said.

"How can we save you today?"