Chương 317: Book Six, Chapter 79: The End is Nigh

"Can we trust them?" Kimberly asked. I looked back at the couch where Lorne and Kelsey were sitting, discussing something with Antoine. I shrugged my shoulders.

"Theoretically, they should just be normal players, but maybe we stay alert. You've got to think about what they might do if we try to exclude them."

"I don't want to," Kimberly said.

"Yeah, me neither," I said.

"I was really banking on them being out of the picture, as bad as that sounds." Antoine was still talking to them as we walked back into the living room. We had been asking them questions the entire time. They didn't have a whole lot of insights that we didn't already have. The script was fairly comprehensive.

"So I was cast as the district manager," Lorne was saying as I sat down.

"I was the big boss, but I realized I was having real difficulty getting the employees to do what I asked, so I figured they must not be NPCs because I am usually very good at getting them to do what I say. I got these terrible vibes, like they were staring daggers at me and not just the normal way that you stare daggers at your district manager when he comes into town and tells you how to do things."

"So that's why you ejected yourself from the storyline for a bit?" I asked.

"I had a fakeout chase with one of those flying Stockers. I was in enemy territory. I had to disappear," he said.

"I just wish I had gotten a chance to tell Nicole. She thought maybe two or three of them might be bad. Usually, the employees aren't who you look out for, it's the products. She never would have imagined that all of them were in on it, poor thing."

"Indeed," I said. We continued to talk a bit, just trying to keep things calm. We still hadn't decided whether or not we were going to tell them the condition of Camp Dyer. We needed them sharp if they were going to be involved in the movie, but they kept asking questions.

"So what has it been, twenty years?" Lorne eventually asked nervously. I could tell he had emotion behind that question. He wasn't a man afraid to hide his emotions, which was strange for a Bully aspect, I assumed. But what did I know? Maybe when you were as big as he was, you could do whatever you wanted and still feel tough. The question caught me off guard at first, but then, as I turned to Kimberly and Antoine, I realized why he assumed it had been so long. We had all been aged up.

They thought they had been in the ground for twenty years. We were in our early twenties when we arrived at Camp Dyer, and here we were, middle-aged.

"No," Kimberly said, "it's been about ten months. Carousel just did this to us for this storyline." The relief that washed over their faces brought laughter to the room.

"I was about to say," Lorne said, "Oh, thank God." No wonder they were so surprised by me.

"Wait a second," Kelsey said, "if it's only been ten months… haven't you like doubled your levels?"

"Something like that," I said.

"Get busy living or get busy dying, right?"

"Sure, sure. That's still pretty extreme," Lorne said.

"Adeline must be furious. She hates it when players are reckless. Of course, back in the day, I hear she was quite the hellcat herself." I simply nodded. Soon, Dina, Bobby, and Jules arrived at Kimberly's house. A bell rang, and we could see their faces on the security feed near the door. Kimberly's house was gated. Kimberly quickly moved to let them in, and they wasted no time rushing inside.

"Tell me you've got good news," Antoine said.

"The world is going to end," Dina responded.

"Any bad news?" he asked with a smile.

"We have less than twelve hours to live," she said.

"Well, that was bad news," he said.

"How did you even find Kimberly's house?" Antoine asked after we had settled in and given them the first volley of questions. Dina sat on a large round ottoman. She looked nervous. It was hard to pin down her age, but it was different than normal. Her face and skin had a gray quality I couldn't explain.

"We looked you up in the phone book," she said, looking at Kimberly. Her voice didn't sound older. It was still sharp and distrustful.

"You're listed."

"Wait, her address was in the phone book?" Antoine asked.

"Is that a Carousel thing? I can't remember."

"Hate to break it to you, kid," Dina said, "but that's how things were in the real world, too." He was genuinely surprised by that. A lot of people our age had never touched a phone book, let alone used one.

"Come on, man, haven't you seen The Terminator?" I asked. If phone books didn't have addresses, Sarah Connor would have been a lot safer.

"I guess not," Antoine said. He found his own seat near the giant fireplace, but he just stood in front of it. He wasn't the only one. Most of us were standing waiting for Dina to explain.

"Last night they performed a ritual that will end this world and bring about a new one," she said.

"Like reality being recycled and rebuilt completely. The End."

"Last night?" I asked.

"As in it's already been done? We can't interrupt it?"

"The ritual is over. Right now, some sort of blood magic is drilling through the veil of reality, or whatever the guy said. Look, once that's done, the world ends. We lose." We took a beat to take that in.

"Eh, I wasn't too fond of this world anyway," Jules said dryly as she sipped wine she had found in Kimberly's kitchen. That wine had made its way around the group as we realized how difficult things would be.

"Hold on a second," Antoine said.

"What do you mean? We just lose like that? We've gotta go stop it, right?"

"It's already done," Dina said flatly.

"I think this is what they were supposed to do in the finale, but they did it already." We were learning a lot about Bobby's trope. We thought that by using it on a rescue where the players died early, it would make things easier by giving us more room to maneuver, but it was turning out that might be the opposite of the truth. The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

"We picked up from right where the other team lost. This was supposed to be the last thing that happens in the storyline," Bobby said.

"Now it's happening at the beginning of Rebirth." The end of the world was always inconvenient.

"Wait a second," Lorne said.

"Go back. You said something about a rescue trope. How exactly do those work?" We spent a little bit explaining those things to Lorne and Kelsey. It gave us a break from contemplating our imminent doom. All they could do was nod. They understood the concept of a rescue trope, but they had never seen one.

"All right, Dina, you're gonna have to go back to the beginning. Why exactly do they want to end the world? What does that have to do with the theme of grief? What's the point, is what I'm asking. Give me something to work with." She shrugged her shoulders and grabbed a glass of wine for herself from the nearby coffee table.

"I told you that already," she said.

"They don't like this world. They think it's corrupt and evil, so they performed a ritual to destroy this world with the help of some ancient god, and he's going to remake the world in exchange for releasing him. And that is all I know." On the bright side, Dina's Dark Secret trope was proving to be a remarkable Insight ability.

"But you said you were some sort of prophet for this religion or whatever it is," Antoine said.

"How can that be all you know? Shouldn't you know how to stop it?"

"When I walked into the story," Dina said, "the guys started introducing me as the person who helped them figure out the ritual. I didn't actually have to walk them through anything; they just said that I had already done it. I know a lot about it, but I was only around for ten minutes before they did the blood ritual with the sacrifices, and I couldn't stop it. They were strange. They used magic. They were like wizards or something." I thought about what she said for a moment and then said, "That makes sense.

They couldn't put you into the story until the other team lost, so you got rushed in right at the last second. Great. But Dark Secret gave you a lot of information, right?"

"I have a lot of information," she said, lying back onto the ottoman.

"I can't tell you a lot of it, but I have a lot. And I'm telling you, they've done the ritual. The world ends at sunrise."

"It's going to be a new day," Bobby said quietly.

"That's what they told me. If we want a way to stop it, we're going to have to make one." That wasn't a deal breaker. Just because the current rules and lore painted a grim picture, that didn't mean we couldn't create a silver lining.

"Okay," I said, "but if they already did the ritual last night, how does Bobby fit into this? He didn't meet them until this afternoon."

"I don't exactly think that's true," Bobby said.

"What do you mean?" I asked. He struggled to find the words, but once he said them, I understood.

"I don't think that our scene at group therapy or my scene meeting the cult actually happened today. I think they happened in the past. That's what Dina and I figured." Well, that certainly complicated things. Forced into a corner because of Bobby's rescue trope, Carousel had pulled out an old trick: shooting out of order. Theoretically, being On-Screen didn't mean that the scene you were in came after the scene you were filming before.

"So wait, you just filmed a scene that took place before the ritual?" I said.

"Yes," he said.

"But then, the next thing I knew, they were saying the ritual had already been done. I didn't even have a chance to see it or stop it." Carousel just needed the footage. It could put the scenes in any order it wanted to. I turned to Dina.

"Tell me there's something, some loophole, some problem with the ritual, some way to get through and prevent it. Something we can build off of." She shook her head.

"Riley, I am telling you, I have spent all of my time so far looking at this. Once the ritual was performed successfully, there is no straightforward way to undo it. We have less than a day, and that's it." Dina looked down at the ground and then back up at him.

"Once the veil is pierced, our world ends, and we lose. I mean, maybe we get reborn in the next world, but how can that count as a win?" Somehow, it didn't seem like it would be a win. We needed to earn it. I was pacing back and forth, just trying to think.

"The problem here is that the bad guys are basically in their finale, and we're still in the first half of the movie. I didn't realize that we would pick up directly from the failed state of the team we were rescuing. I thought maybe we would be given a grace period or something, or else what's the point of the trope?"

"Sorry about that," Lorne said.

"We got as far as we could."

"Well, is there a way to slow things down?" Kimberly asked. I thought for a moment as I looked around the room. Antoine stood next to Kimberly with his arms crossed, focusing on the problem.

"Slow things down," I said.

"Maybe…" I looked around at all of them.

"So, what's the story here?" I asked.

"We start with a false protagonist, a new manager at Eternal Savers Club… She hires her kids, starts working. Gets suspicious of some of her employees. Maybe she fires one or two. Makes waves. Gets killed because she is in the way of the cult that Tom has hired to work there. Her son is killed, her daughter escapes with her life." I looked over at Kelsey. A daughter escapes slaughter only to plan revenge.

"Vengeance," I said.

"You want vengeance…"

"You're damn right I do," Kelsey said.

"Those nerds postered me." I shook my head.

"Not you, you. Your character wants vengeance. Revenge is in the neighborhood of grief. It's an expression of grief. So that's your character's subplot." I continued looking around the room. I saw Kimberly. How did she tie into this…

"You were attacked by a cult years ago and barely survived," I said.

"I read your character's book. Harrowing stuff. However... Redemption is your subplot. Redemption is also related to grief." She gave me a funny look.

"What do I need redemption for?"

"You lied in your book. You could have saved some of your cast mates, but you chose yourself," I said, matter-of-factly.

"Of course I did," she said.

"And it wasn't just some cliché Eastern European cult, either. It was this cult, well, a different branch of this cult… Does that work, Dina?"

"Whatever you say, boss," she said.

"Just give me my lines." I continued looking at the other players, putting together my plan.

"Wait a second," Lorne said.

"What are we doing here? This sounds like you're making this all up. You aren't going to try to improvise a whole new story, right? That would be crazy." Everyone kind of looked at each other.

"Basically, yeah," Antoine said. The Vets were great at what they did. This was not what they did.

"But you have to find out your character's backstory. You can't just change it, not once it's set," Lorne said.

"I mean, right?" He looked around for someone to agree with him. He didn't get that.

"Come on," Dina said, still lying down.

"Take a walk on the wild side." It didn't appear he wanted to, but he didn't say anything. Our methods had allowed us to gain levels quickly. They were dangerous. That was something we often ignored. At any point, Carousel could just reject our Improvisations if they weren't good enough, and we could be doomed to lose.

"So our first issue is this 'whole the world ends at sunrise' thing. That's not going to work. I don't like it. We don't have time to make our character arcs in less than twelve hours," I said.

"We have to do some rearranging."

"The cultists aren't going to like that," Bobby said.

"Carousel won't either." He wasn't wrong.

"Preventing doomsday is part one of the plan. Getting away with it is part two," I said. I took a moment to think.

"Look," I said, "It isn't the Finale. The bad guys have time to regroup if we stop them now. Carousel shouldn't be too mad about it. After all, Carousel wants a full-size movie." Bobby was still pushing back.

"It doesn't matter if Carousel wants a better movie. If we pull lame tricks to say the ritual failed, Carousel will punish us for it. Narrative tension is at a high point as the world gets closer to ending. We end the ritual, we'll end up with something worse." I pointed at him in agreement.

"Right," I said.

"Narrative tension. We can't just cancel doomsday and think that everything is going to settle down. The cultists would probably find us and kill us if we did that. We need to find a way to force things to settle down. Take the wind out of their sails." I remembered Adeline's lessons about narrative tension and trying to cheat Carousel. She used the story of the player who shot a mundane slasher killer with a shotgun point-blank, thinking they could end the storyline early.

The player didn't even have the Mettle for that kind of kill. What happened was they pulled the killer's mask off and revealed it was actually a sheriff's deputy who had been bound and put into the costume as a decoy. The killer was still at large, and now the player was in jail. That was actually a story I heard multiple versions of. I reminded the group of it.

"Carousel punishes shortcuts, right?" I said.

"It punishes people who try to get around its rules instead of playing by them."

"So, we have to find a way to play by them," Antoine said.

"Yep," I said.

"We just have to give Carousel something better. Something that will help straighten out this disjointed storyline and set us up for a good finale. It wants a good movie, and we need time to get our affairs in order."

"I suppose you have an idea what might work?" Antoine asked.

"I do. If Carousel wants to play time tricks, so can we," I said.

"Just three words. With three words, we should be able to avert the end of the world and still get a banging finale… Just three words: One. Year. Later." There was a beat of silence.

"A time skip," Bobby said.

"You want to improvise a time skip? So, what... We make this ritual fail, then we force a time skip to a peaceful future before the enemy has time to recover." Everyone seemed to consider it.

"I'm in," Antoine said.

"Me too," Kimberly said.

"I'm not sure exactly how that helps us," Kelsey said, "But I'm not going to be the wimp who chickens out."

"Adeline is not going to like this," Lorne said.

"But if that's the plan, I'm in." That was that. Now, I just had to figure out how to make it happen.