Chapter Sixty-Five: A Theory

Chapter Sixty-Five: A Theory

We made it back to Dyer’s Lodge before sundown.

Antoine was still visibly withdrawn and distant. His eyes were red and watery. It was enough that when we walked back into the Lodge, people noticed. Dyer’s Lodge was never the happiest place on earth, but most people breathed a sigh of relief when they walked through the doors.

“Is he... hurt?” Grace asked as we walked by her. She was on the couch reading a book but looked up as soon as we came in.

“Bad run,” I said quickly as we walked by.

Antoine was looking for Chris. I didn’t know what answers he might have; at this point, we knew our version of the campfire storyline was highly unusual. Still, we needed confirmation. We needed to know what exactly had happened differently.

I already had my suspicions.

“Chris!” Antoine yelled as we moved to the center of the entryway.

Players looked up from all over to see what the ruckus was about. Chris was upstairs in the nook where all the unsolved treasure maps and riddles were kept. When he saw Antoine, he immediately knew something was wrong. I think he had insight tropes to help with that, though I didn't think to look at the time.

“What’s wrong?” Chris said. He ran down the stairs two at a time. “What happened?”

“I got trapped in—” Antoine started to say. The very thought of what he had experienced brought back a flood of emotion that caught in his throat and stopped him from talking.

Chris grabbed Antoine and led him to a nearby couch.

He looked back at us. “Tell me what happened now.”

Anna, as usual, spoke for us. “He got trapped in the storyline we went into. The Straggler Forest. He was there for... we don’t know how long.”

“Stragglers? What?” Chris said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

A crowd of concerned players surrounded us. They began whispering to themselves. One thing that was evident was that they had all done the Akers campfire storyline before.

“I was caught by the Stragglers,” a man in the back said. It was one of Reggie and Grace’s teammates, one of the Bruisers. “I was only there for a half hour. Barely even realized I had been caught before the game ended.”

He chuckled to himself at the thought.

“Our storyline glitched,” I said. I had wondered if the Axe-Murderer might be upset for me mentioning it, but I didn’t hear a peep from him. “He was stuck in the first storyline in the anthology after the rest of us left.”

At that, the people surrounding us were confused.

“Glitched?” Lee, the silver-haired Wallflower fisherman asked. “What’s that?”

“Lee doesn’t know what technology is,” Todd, the Comedian said. “It’s like a record skipping, Lee. It messed up, broke.”

“Oh, dear,” Lee said. "I didn't know that could happen."

The crowd parted ways and Arthur came through.

“Tell me everything,” he said to Anna.

So, she did.

She told him about leaving Antoine behind in the Straggler Forest, the glitching second storyline in the mines with the Unknowable Host and Hesper, and the final storyline with Douglas and the Cloven Women. Then she told him about Silas the Showman interceding to make Antoine fail.

Arthur was interested but offered no answers. "How do you know the storyline broke?" he asked. "Maybe this creature just had a powerful trope."

The others in the crowd liked that theory more. It was safer.

Now that they understood his condition a little better, they started to offer solutions.

A Doctor archetype named Jordan gave Antoine a pill to make him fall asleep right there on the couch. They figured that actual sleep combined with his new “You were having a nightmare...” trope would help him shake much of his mental fatigue. It might not be permanent, but if not, the other players offered to share some of their mental health tropes until he was able to manage.

Antoine was soon asleep. A peace spread over his face. Kimberly sat near him, ready to wake him and activate his trope at the slightest turbulence in his sleep. Chris stayed with them for hours. Hearing about what his little brother had experienced has devastated him.

The conversation continued elsewhere so as to not disturb Antoine.

“You guys are just being paranoid,” Todd said with a smile. “Silas does that type of thing all the time. A year after I got here, he appeared to me in a storyline that starts on a plane and gave me a Comedian trope called Rubber Bones that gave me higher Grit but made me more accident-prone. My parachute didn't open all the way. I got horrifically injured, but I also got a background trope called Near Death Experience that I still use to this day.”

Other people had similar stories.

If they expected us to believe that everything was business as usual, they weren’t doing a good job. I refused to believe this was normal.

After a while, everyone dispersed. I found myself on the back deck watching the sunset. I figured that the others wouldn’t know much about the glitch. If they had, that would have come up at some point. Even Arthur didn't seem too interested once we described it. They all explained that NPCs often keep talking Off-Screen to help push you to the next scene or just in case the camera came back on suddenly. They said the camera could have been cutting in and out due to one of the creatures’ tropes.

I don’t want to say they dismissed it, because they didn’t, but they certainly didn’t seem as alarmed about it as we had. They were certainly interested, but it wasn't the game-changing revelation I expected it to be. If anything, they were more interested in the secret lore ticket than the glitch.

Soon, Dina, Anna, and Camden joined me on the deck. They were all tired and confused, I could see it in their eyes.

Camden slumped down into a chair near me.

“What do you think?” he asked.

I shrugged. “A million things,” I said. “They seem to think the glitch was just one of the Host’s tropes messing with us.”

“Well, they’ll see it for themselves soon from the looks of it,” he said.

Inside, many of the veterans had rearranged some couches and brought in a chalkboard to devote to the Secret Lore investigation. The energy inside was electric. Soon, they would be running the Campfire storyline for themselves to try and reproduce our run.

Dina watched them. She actually looked happy to see them working.

“Looks like they’re going to figure things out for us,” she said. “Finally, they’re doing something useful.”

Ann shook her head. “You’re not being fair,” she said. “You heard them talking. They thought all of the Secret Lore was locked behind high-level storylines.”

Dina didn’t respond.

“You all think the Secret Lore will show us the way out?” Camden asked after a beat.

No one said anything at first. It was too early to guess.

“Maybe,” I said. “I couldn’t say.”

I must not have sounded too confident.

“You don’t think so?” Dina asked. “It has to be important.”

I shrugged.

“It may be important, I don’t know.”

“But you don’t think it’s the way out?” she asked as if it were an accusation. ”You don’t think it will lead to saving my son?”

From the moment I picked up that lore ticket, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something off. Antoine’s suffering aside, this whole thing was too easy.

“We stumbled into it,” I said. “This is supposed to be a story, right? That’s what we concluded from the letters Carousel sent you and the messages on the tropes Silas gave me.”

We hadn’t had much time to discuss this.

“So?” Dina asked.

“I don’t pretend to be a movie critic or anything, but I do know some things. In a story, the main character can stumble sideways into a B plot, but they can’t stumble forward in the A plot,” I said. “We went out on some random storyline and just happened to uncover a huge plot development? That isn’t how it works. We are supposed to seek things like that out.”

“You’re reading into it too much,” Dina said.

I was assigned Film Buff for a reason. In fact, if my understanding was correct. I didn’t want to argue with her though. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Camden spoke up. “Silas interfered. We didn’t stumble into it. Silas showed it to us.”

“Fine,” I said. “It’s just a theory. I think we need to keep our eyes open is all.”

Anna changed the subject after that.

I should have waited to bring up my reservations.

The veterans inside were dissecting what we had told them and were making battle plans. I was actually looking forward to seeing them in action.

More than anything, I couldn’t wait for them to go through that same storyline, if only so they could see the glitch for themselves. I wondered if they would explain it away then.

I went inside to watch them discuss their plans. They hadn’t been able to share much with us in that regard on previous storylines because they didn’t want to spoil important stories and cause us to miss out on experience and loot. Now, we could actually learn from them.

And I couldn’t wait.