Chương 369: Book Eight, Chapter 36: Breathing Deeply

Arriving at the docks and tying off may have triggered the storyline, but it didn't teleport us to our starting locations. Other things changed, though. The river changed so much that I couldn't see it anymore; all I saw was a lake with a large interior and fingers snaking through the hills. After tying off, I managed to climb out of the boat, suddenly aware that I had a large digital camera in my right hand. This wasn't an at-home film-your-kids-unwrapping-Christmas-presents type of camera.

It was production quality, and the entire device was encased in a hard, waterproof plastic container. Luckily, we didn't start out On-Screen. We had a little bit of time to get our bearings. A young woman came to collect Camden, calling him Doctor Tran.

"Sounds like I might be doing surgery on one of you guys later," he said as he forced a snarky smile and followed the NPC. Before he left, I said, "Everybody loosen up. Get ready to play your characters until the end. We don't have time to feel our emotions; we have to feel our characters' emotions." I almost said, "like Kimberly always did," but thought better of it. Antoine was taking deep breaths, trying to get into character while searching the area for clues about his character's identity.

He checked his pockets, looked for name tags, all the normal stuff.

"I think I figured out your identity," Cassie said softly.

"How?" he asked. She pointed to a bass fishing boat that was being backed into the water a few hundred yards from where we were. Antoine's face had been vinyl-wrapped onto its hull. Text read: Antoine Stone, Outdoorsman. It didn't take me long after that to figure out what my role was. I was Antoine's field cameraman or some kind of producer. Upon examining the truck used to back the boat trailer into the water, I found all kinds of information about Antoine and me.

He was a TV fisherman with numerous awards and accolades. The story was set in the mid-2000s. While Antoine and I were investigating that, Anna and Cassie had each found their own paths and were learning new things about their characters.

"Jackpot," I said as I lifted up a clipboard I found in the back seat of the truck.

"What ya got?" Antoine asked.

"Itinerary," I said.

"So the fishing tournament starts at sunrise, which is about thirty minutes from now." That was a bit confusing, as the sun was already up, but I knew it was in Carousel's ability to fix that. The sun in the sky was mere set dressing for a being of Carousel's power.

"We need to get some interviews then," I said.

"Meet the townsfolk, learn about the tournament, that sort of stuff."

"Great," he said. Then he had to get into the truck and back the boat the rest of the way into the water, because the boat had just been hanging there, waiting for us to do it.

"Anna's at the table over there," I said, "let's get some footage of people signing in." Antoine nodded. He was still sullen and quiet, but he got rid of that the moment I pressed record, and we went On-Screen. As expected, the sun quickly hid back over the horizon, and all we could see was dawn's gray light.

"This is Antoine Stone. We got another tournament here. This is the Carousel Basin Lake Bass Tournament. Gonna go catch some fish, y'all." In an instant, he had transformed into a magnetic, charismatic country boy, donning a ball cap from one of his several sponsors and leading me over to the sign-up table where Anna was working.

"Good morning, miss," Antoine said, holding out his hand for her to shake.

"How many boats signed on so far?" She looked up at him, then at the camera, like a deer in the headlights at first, but then she switched on the sweetness.

"Twenty-six," she said.

"It's more than we ever expected."

"Did you hear that?" Antoine said, staring into the camera with a smile.

"We got some competition. Come on, folks, let's go meet 'em." And so we went about interrupting fishermen as they prepared for the tournament's start and asking them inane questions about their strategies and experience.

"Well, I ain't telling you that," one of the men said with a not-so-toothy smile.

"I ain't giving away my secrets." He laughed, and Antoine laughed with him.

"Smart man," Antoine said.

"I almost got you." He looked down into the man's boat.

"I see you're using a lot of stink bait. You guys got some strange breed of bass around here or what?" he asked.

"Not going for the bass," the man said.

"Going for the catfish. Total weight tournament. Catfish is legal."

"Wait, they allow catfish? I thought this was a bass fishing tournament," Antoine asked, confused. The fisherman we were talking to just shrugged and climbed into his boat.

"It was a bass fishing tournament," Camden said from behind us on the docks. He was wearing a fishing vest with many pockets and a bucket hat.

"It's not a bass fishing tournament anymore?" Antoine asked. It wouldn't have been a surprise except that we found a flyer for the tournament, advertised as a largemouth bass event. Largemouth bass was the typical target for tourneys like this, according to a trade magazine I found in the truck. We had gathered the info, but then heard a contradiction On-Screen, suggesting it was our characters who were meant to be surprised. Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

"Largemouth bass numbers are low at the moment. Can't get them up to size no matter what I do," Camden said.

"Catfish are thriving. Carp are thriving. We figured we either make catfish legal for the total weight prize, or we're going to have a pathetic showing this year."

"Can you tell us who we're talking to?" Antoine asked as we moved toward Camden.

"Dr. Camden Tran," he said.

"I work for the city's Fish and Game program. We worked to rehabilitate the lake after some contamination, restocked it, and got it ready for fishing and swimming. This tournament is our big opening of the lake. But as I said, we haven't got the largemouth bass numbers where we like them. They're not at the legal size for fishing." So that was what kind of doctor he was.

"So we're adding catfish to the menu. That's just fine," Antoine said with a cheery tone. We interviewed a few more fishermen as time stood still while we got all the footage we needed. We talked to some of the people working the event, and I managed to get some footage of Anna as she met her character's father, who was competing in the tournament. His name was Richard. They seemed to have a close relationship; she hugged him before he went and boarded his boat.

He was an older, sun-beaten guy, built like a linebacker, with a long white ponytail, and, in lieu of a normal hat, he wore a neon-yellow visor. I didn't get to meet him, but I got several pieces of footage of him smiling and laughing with other NPCs. I even got some strange footage of Anna as she stared out at the lake with a reserved look of sadness. I worried she must not have realized I was filming her and was still processing her emotions over Kimberly.

I must have kept filming her for a while as I waited for any NPCs in the area to make themselves notable. That's how it normally worked when I was the cameraman; I didn't have to seek out opportunities. Carousel would send them to me to choose from. At that moment, the only interesting thing happening was Anna's dad, Richard Reed, being well-liked and joking around with lots of the locals. After a while, I realized that there was an NPC standing right next to me, staring and waiting just out of shot.

I got the message. I turned the camera to her. Her name was Barbara. She was an older woman with a mischievous smile.

"Ma'am, can you tell me who that gentleman over there is?" I asked.

"That man over there with the ponytail? That's Richard Reed. Used to be the mayor around here, but he quit when his daughter passed away. Poor fella."

"Oh, I was under the impression that the sign-up lady was his daughter." Barbara glanced over at the sign-up table and said, "Oh, that's just Anna, his other daughter, Joanne is who I was talking about. It was a terrible situation. So terrible. I'm just glad to see that the two of them can come out and face the day after what happened." At first, I thought Carousel was just being thick with exposition, but this woman was really selling it as pure small-town gossip.

I could practically see her eyes begging me to ask more questions.

"What happened to her?" I asked.

"Joanne, the other daughter."

"Well, nobody knows exactly, but she ended up drowning in the city pool just down the road. Maybe she hit her head. Who could say? She was alone, they say. Anna's the one who found her. A terrible tragedy. The poor girl was only fourteen, but she was the prettiest girl to ever come out of Carousel County. Or at least, she would have been if she ever made it out."

"Sad story," I said, as I moved the camera back to Anna and suddenly understood why she was looking out over the lake, sad. I kept getting footage, but the sun was rising, and I realized the tournament was about to start. I hightailed it to where Antoine was getting the boat ready, and no sooner did I get in the boat than the officiant of the tournament started blaring the loudspeaker, sounding like one of the adults from Charlie Brown.

Everybody in the boats was complaining, saying they couldn't understand what he was saying, yelling for him to turn the speaker down because of the reverberation. But the officiant, who was a short man named Dexter Hornswoggle, didn't notice or care. He was reading from a sheet without even looking up. But when he lifted the starting gun into the air as he looked down at his watch, everyone understood.

We waited on bated breath and baited hooks until eventually he fired, and twenty-six boats took off into the lake all at once. It was more fun than I expected. Antoine was driving, and I got several action shots of him with sunrise in the background and some Carousel off-brand Oakleys wrapped around his eyes. The fishing tournament had begun. Now we just had to figure out what type of monster was going to be fishing for us.

Antoine had been angling before, and all I had to do was get good footage of him doing it while nothing happened. We were early in the Party Phase, but the needle on the plot cycle was moving pretty quickly.

"Not a bite," Antoine said as he reeled in a shiny tackle that was meant to look like an injured fish of some kind.

"Well, we can't have that," Antoine said to the camera.

"Looks like we're going for catfish." He switched poles to the one rigged to catch catfish and did his best to apply stink bait. I didn't know how much of it was his own knowledge or stuff that he had read about in the very convenient trade magazine, which had a very useful quick-start guide for new fishermen. The stink bait didn't work at first, either. We went Off-Screen and On-Screen trying to get footage, but in the first couple of hours, Antoine only managed to snag three fish, none of which were very big.

When we were Off-Screen, I looked over at the poles and said, "I wonder which stat fishing scales off of." He looked at me, understanding what I was trying to say, and rolled his eyes.

"Please don't say it's Savvy," he said as he handed me the pole. It turned out to indeed be Savvy. Catching fish was essentially a trap, and that was something Savvy was good at, though we soon learned through trial and error that bringing in the fish required a combination of Hustle and Mettle. So we had to work together. I had the Savvy and higher Hustle, whereas he had all the strength.

I made sure to never get footage of our attempts, but eventually we got the hang of it, and I managed to get some good footage of Antoine reeling in some huge channel catfish. We went back to trying the lures designed to catch largemouth bass, but as Camden had said, those were nowhere to be found. The way the tournament worked was that there was a prize for the biggest fish and a prize for the heaviest total weight of your five biggest fish. We were definitely going to be contenders for both.

As the three o'clock deadline rolled in, we decided to get back early to get more footage of the boats coming in and made our way to the docks. Checking in was relatively simple, and so was getting our fish weighed. The NPCs did it without asking because we were Off-Screen. Whatever the story was about had nothing to do with how heavy our fish were. Luckily, Carousel didn't make me go through with the gimmick of filming everything On-Screen as it had back in Post-Traumatic.

By the time we got back to the docks, the normal On-Screen/Off-Screen system and its invisible cameras had kicked in, capturing everything that was going on. I still got footage of the boats coming back and the fish being weighed, but at the end of the day, most of what I accomplished was busy work. Carousel didn't seem interested. Not until the three o'clock deadline arrived and the boats really started pulling in.

There was a fifteen-minute grace period, and I filmed the entire time while Antoine gave commentary behind me, commenting on the boats and the fish being brought ashore. We were the second boat to get in, and after us, ten more came to meet the three o'clock deadline. Five more came after that within the grace period. Nine boats remained out on the lake. Dexter, the officiant of the tournament, was making jokes over the loudspeaker, which had been fixed so his voice could be heard.

He was talking about how an awful lot of people must have had an embarrassing haul and just decided to duck out. That led to nothing but nervous laughter from the crowd. We filmed as people went from cheering for the returning boats to silently waiting to being terribly worried as time wore on. Cassie made her first appearance, and she was On-Screen, talking to Anna, saying something that disturbed her. Anna was panicking because her father's boat was one of those that hadn't returned yet.

And as we waited for the remaining boats, First Blood struck. The five players looked around at each other, locking eye contact from our places throughout the crowd. We understood the game that was afoot. In the inaugural fishing tournament, which reopened the formerly polluted Carousel Basin Lake, twenty-six boats set out in the morning hours, and by afternoon, only seventeen returned. What happened to the boats and to the people aboard them was a mystery. And we were tasked to solve it.