Arc II, Chapter 29: Cold on the Trail

Arc II, Chapter 29: Cold on the Trail

Player

Plot Armor

Mettle

Moxie

Hustle

Savvy

Grit

Riley

25/2

3

7

5

7

3

Antoine

23

6

4

5

2

6

Kimberly

21

3

7

5

1

5

Dina

20

3

3

4

3

7

Bobby

20

3

6

4

3

4

Isaac

13

1

4

3

3

2

Cassie

14

1

6

3

3

1

Player Tropes:

(I would like to remind readers that this is a reference. I will describe tropes before they come up. You dont have to read this unless you want to)The roots of this story extend from novell bìn origin.

Riley Lawrence is the Film Buff.

Having risen to level 25, he can equip 9 tropes and one background instead of 8.

"Trope Master" grants him the ability to perceive enemy tropes, but at the cost of sacrificing half of his Plot Armor.

"Cinema Seer" buffs the Savvy and Grit of his allies when they hear him predict cinematic and impactful plot elements.

As an "Oblivious Bystander," Riley remains untargeted by enemies as he convincingly acts oblivious to their presence.

"Escape Artist" buffs his Hustle to help enact plausible escape plans.

"The Insert Shot" makes allies aware of an object the player chooses. The object will be shown to the audience and its use will be buffed in the Finale.

Directors Monitor allows him to watch the rest of the storyline after his demise via Deathwatch.

Flashback Revelation allows him to communicate with allies from Deathwatch through flashbacks to his past dialogue.

Casting Director gives him a summary of his teams roles in the storyline.

"My Grandmother Had the Gift" A background trope that gives Rileys character some ambiguous connection to The Gift through his heritage.

Cutaway Death sends him Off-Screen before the moment of his characters implied demise and allows him to exist behind the scenes Written Off if he survives the encounter.

He did not equip Coming To A Theater Near You, "I Don't Like It Here...,"Out Like a Light, "Location Scout,"The Wrong Reel, Raised by Television, What Doesnt Kill Them Makes Them Angry, or "Dead Man Walking."

I had about a dozen combos I wanted to try, but I didnt want to mess around with the Tutorial. I would have to make some time to experiment afterward.

Kimberly Madison is the Eye Candy.

"Convenient Backstory" allows her to believably change her backstory to assist with the current task, buffing the relevant stat.

"Social Awareness" allows her to see the Moxie stat of all enemies and NPCs.

"Get a Room!" boosts the odds of important discoveries when exploring with a love interest during the party.

"A Hopeless Plea" forces the captor to explicitly deny her release when she asks to be released.

"Pregnancy Reveal" buffs her Grit when she pretends that she is pregnant and buffs the father's Mettle if she dies.

The vets had always warned me that casting director was a waste of a trope slot. Carousel would never let players go through a storyline without giving them information as basic as their identity. Convenience of the trope aside, I felt pretty silly. Our roles lined up mostly with our Archetypes.

We really were a special task force.

Why them? Detective Swanson asked.

Well, they're celebrities, don't you know? Willis answered. That makes them uniquely qualified.

Publicity stunt, Swanson said, nodding his head. For the Anniversary.

I would never accuse the mayor of something like that, Willis answered.

Well, if they need to see the evidence, they're going to have to wait a bit while we fish it out, Swanson said. He gestured over to a section of the room where the shelving had collapsed from the flooding. You really saw all of the Geist movies? Swanson asked, looking at me.

Thinking on my feet, I said, Yep, saw every one of them, ask me anything.

Nah, Detective Swanson said.

Willis laughed.

That was how the scene went on for some time; the camera would come on, and one of the officers would make a comment toward one of us for us to respond to. Carousel was just gathering lines for its final cut.

Swanson asked Antoine, I can't believe a guy like you would wanna be stuck in a group like this, a bunch of attention hogs. Didn't you save a cop? What are you doing here?

Antoine kept his cool, looked over at Kimberly, and said, I have my reasons.

One of the officers said something to Dina that I didn't hear about what she expected from them. It was probably related to her character's missing child whom she had sued the department overfor incompetence or something.

In response, all she said was, This is basically what I expected from your operation, she gestured generally toward the flooded basement filled with old case files and evidence.

The police officers cussed under their breath.

Eventually, an Officer Martinez arrived and said his one line, They've got the box over here for you, he said, gesturing across the room.

We went off-screen after that while we trudged across the basement and dug through a mountain of ruined file boxes filled with artifacts from other cold cases.

You see that guy over there, Willis asked. Officer Martinez? We got him from a storyline with a monster called a toe biter, whatever that is. Look at how jumpy he is.

The man he was pointing to was indeed very nervous about trudging around in murky water. I knew that some NPCs were aware of their situation, but some anonymous police officer without much of a speaking role having leftover trauma from the horrors of his world was different. He was just an ordinary NPC. Didnt seem fair.

We went back on-screen as we were sorting through boxes that were falling apart.

I got it, Willis said. Geist, Jed. Died August 6th, 1992. Exactly three years ago, wouldn't you know it?

Three years ago? Had I misheard him? It was thirty years ago. Or at least it would have been. This storyline must have taken place twenty-seven years earlier. Other storylines had been set in the past. It wasnt unusual.

The box wasn't in great shape; the lower portion of it was brown from water, but unlike many of the boxes around it, it wasn't completely destroyed. Willis carefully picked it up from the bottom and set it on a plastic table.

All right, Willis said, The mayor has made clear that you are to see and examine the contents in this box. However, we will be watching to make sure that you do not take anything. You are not police officers; you are not on this case officially. If it were up to me, you wouldn't even be here. Is that clear?

We all nodded.

Willis lifted the lid off of the box and stared down into it. The box was barely large enough that the fire poker would have been able to fit in it diagonally. Even then, it might have to have been sticking out a little from under the lid.

That is, if it had been there.

You said you were looking for the murder weapon specifically, Willis asked. He didn't even have to search through the box to realize the weapon was missing. Jeff, he said, talking to Detective Swanson. It's on the inventory, but the murder weapon is not here.

Let me look at that, Swanson said, grabbing the clipboard with the inventory list out of Willis's hands. Now that doesn't make any sense at all; I remember that being here.

I do too, Willis said. I was the one that put it there. Is it possible it was taken away for additional testing?

They already got fingerprints and blood analysis, what else is there?

The two men started to get hot under the collar, probably because they were being watched by a task force that they had spent the better part of 30 minutes making fun of.

Typical, Dina said. The mayor told me that I would get a good look at the quality of our police by joining this task force. He didn't know how right he was.

Cool it, Willis said. We'll find the murder weapon; it has to be around here somewhere.

We went off-screen as a group of cadets came in and started sifting through boxes, sorting evidence into piles. None of them found the murder weapon of course. They were just getting into position for the next shot.

Meanwhile, the rest of the contents of Jed Geists box were laid out on the table and organized so that we could look at it.

We would go back on-screen occasionally to get shots of us examining the evidence.

Most of it was not very useful. The clothes that Jed Geist was wearing when he was killed were in there, as were a dozen other pieces of evidence that didn't seem to amount to much. Fiber samples, a slip of paper with Jed Geist's fingerprints on it, a map of the hotel room as it was back when it was Geists home, things like that. There were also crime scene photos that were very vivid and grizzly. The camera did not go off-screen while we were looking at them, which told me that this storyline was likely a gory one.

There were two things of interest buried in the paperwork.

This is a prescription for oxycodone, Antoine said, holding up a small orange bottle. Whoa, that dosage is off the charts. He must have had a high tolerance.

A drug addiction? Isaac asked. My listeners are gonna love that.

Doctor Howard Halle, Antoine read off the bottle.

Kimberly, Antoine, and I looked at each other.

Halle was the last name of the Astralist, a mad scientist who had attempted to suck out our souls not so many months ago. If this person was related to Simon Halle, that could be useful information. That told us that there were supernatural elements to the storyline, assuming that both Simon and Howard were from the same world.

That made sense in a way. If a world was filled with horrors, Carousel might be inclined to double dip when it brought in its storylines.

That meant that Cassie and my psychic abilities could play well here.

It also told us exactly how close we had come to being a part of the Throughline and ruining Project Rewind.

Antoine handed me the bottle and I looked at it. The label read, Take 40 mg every 6 hours as needed for pain.

He then picked up and passed over several other bottles. One read 10 mg and another read 20 at a later date. We were being shown a growing addiction through an evolution of dosages on prescription bottles.

Look, Kimberly said, Dr. Howard Halle. She was holding up a business card for Halle. Isnt this the address for the resort that got built where his home used to be?

She passed the card around. She was right.

Looks like we need to talk to Dr. Halle, I said.

Don't go bothering him, Willis said. You think we didn't notice the prescriptions? Halle was his physician. There was nothing weird going on.

Halle had an alibi, Detective Swanson said, He was performing emergency surgery at the time of the murder. Hard to beat that one.

That is quite the alibi, Isaac said. I couldnt have killed him, officer; my knife was in some other guy at the time of the murder.

It was nice to see that Isaac's sense of humor was stronger than his sense of impending doom this time.

His sister, however, was quite a different story.

As we stood idly chit-chatting with the camera going on and off-screen, she stared off into the darkness of the recesses of the storeroom.

I kept an occasional eye on her just to make sure she was doing OK. It was unfair that she had to play another storyline after dying so recently for the first time.

I just happened to be watching her face the moment she saw it.

She stared down at the still slightly flooded floor and screamed. Her eyes darted up as if she expected something to be there, but of course, nothing was there.

Then she looked down back at the water.

"What's wrong?" Isaac said. He broke character at hearing his sister's scream, he ran to her to see if she was OK.

"I thought I saw something, she said. She was breathing quickly and clearly startled.

"Oh, here we go," Detective Swanson said. "The psychic has to get attention."

"What did you see?" I asked.

"I saw a reflection in the water, but there was nothing there when I looked up. I swear I saw it, it was awful."

"What was it?" Kimberly asked gingerly.

"A man," Cassie said, "but there was something wrong with his face. It had a bunch of stitches, and there was something else that I couldn't quite see before it disappeared."

"This has to be a prank on us, doesn't it?" Detective Swanson asked Willis.

"Don't listen to them," I said. "My grandmother had the gift too. I'd like to think she left a little bit of it to me."

Cassie forced a smile at me. "Maybe more than a little," she said.

That was pushing it. A little psychic goes a long way. A lot of psychic goes off the rails. I didn't want her giving Carousel an excuse to do something wild with me.

A man with a stitched-up face. A doctor with links to the victim, I said, In the old Geist horror flicks, you could expect a mad doctor or two. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if it turned out that Doctor Halle was up to some surgeries not approved by the medical board.

Between his last name and the fact that the hospital was a shooting location, it was clear. I threw in a little Cinema Seer prediction just to help my friends out.

"Well, it's official then," Detective Swanson said. "Turns out the doctor was involved in the murder because the psychic saw a man with stitches."

Officer Willis started to say something, but before he could, he was cut off.

There was a loud rumbling sound somewhere deep in the distance. It sounded like it was coming from somewhere outside the walls of the basement. Everyone in the room froze in place as the sound droned in and out and then finally stopped.