Arc II, Chapter 67: Up to Speed

Arc II, Chapter 67: Up to Speed

“The Spirit of Vengeance requires a delicate touch,” Madam Celia said after we had gathered inside and settled in the downstairs living room. “You were supposed to use its magic once and then return the flask. My sister tells me that you have sent it after half the town and now the flask is missing?”

“I didn’t say it was missing,” Cassie said. “The guy who had it said he ditched it, but I don’t know.”

The conversation involved a little bit of backtracking. I got the feeling Carousel was just using it to provide editing options to help tell the story.

Madam Celia was apparently Cassie’s sister in this story. She was also an NPC, not a player, so there were no meta-chats. There were plenty of lore chats, though.

“The Spirit takes on the essence of that sin it avenges,” she said. “It chokes drowners with a watery grave, arsonists with ashes, and all manner of evil with evil in kind.”

We let that realization wash over us. We kind of figured that, but it was good for our characters to understand.

“Gale Zaragoza died in a supposed accident,” I said. “Hence the bad luck wafting every which way.”

Isaac cursed.

“What do we do?” Cassie said. “If the Spirit grows too strong, then the town is doomed. Not just the Geists. Everyone.”

“That is not our concern, sister,” Celia said. “We will be moving on. If what you say is true, then we have no further business here.”

Madam Celia was playing a shady evil psychic in this story, but she still stood with the poise and elegance she always had. She was not much of an actor. I could tell she felt it was beneath her.

Cassie and Celia bickered for a while longer until Celia said, “The Spirit needs a host. As long as it has one, it will only grow in power until it has completed its duty.”

“How do we take away its host?” I asked. “Can its body be killed?”

Celia paused and then said, “It will maintain authority over its host regardless of your actions. None of you have a better claim to the host than it does.”

There was a brief pause of confusion.

“You never told me about this. Who could have a claim to the host?” Cassie asked.

We were suddenly Off-Screen.

That was odd. Premature. Something else must have happened to take attention away from us. Normally, we would just wait for our turn again, but then Celia picked up her bags and started to leave.

She couldn’t speak out of character; even Off-Screen, she was limited. She turned to Cassia and then to each of us. She rested on Ramona, who had sat cross-armed in a chair for the entire scene, perplexed.

“Venture forth. Tiny victories. Tiny defeats. That is the way. Do not lose heart.”

Then she left.

~-~

When the door closed, Isaac said, “Wait, is that the lady who writes the fortunes for the fortune cookies? I need her autograph.”Upttodated from n(0)/velbIn/.(co/m

Cassie shoved him. “Be serious.”

“Things are going pretty well, aren’t they?” Kimberly asked. She moved next to Antoine. They had not seen each other in weeks, though Antoine had reportedly been “taken off the board” for much of that time. He was really starting to withdraw inward, but he definitely perked up now that Kimberly was back around.

No one had seen Dina. The phot of her with pre-Die Cast Gale Zaragoza was the only clue we had that she existed. Cassie didn't even have her vitals on the red wallpaper. She was in the wind.

Bobby was in the kitchen looking through my shelves and fridge for food. There was a ton of it.

“I’ve been parking out on a farmer’s land out east,” Bobby said. “His wife makes me fresh-cooked meals, and they have a fenced-in place for the dogs. I just woke up there and never left. Still, I can’t say I’m not jealous of what you’ve got going on here.” He eyeballed the pseudo-modernist glass house my character lived in.

“Thanks,” I said.

Now that someone had commented on it, everyone piled on.

“Oh my god, Riley, this place is so tacky,” Kimberly laughed. It was hard to argue when she and Antoine were sitting in a chair that was shaped like a giant red hand.”

“Yeah, well, it’s home,” I said as I scooped some tortilla chips into a bowl and started making nachos.

We shared our accounts of the places we had been staying.

Ramona and I were in the glass house my tool of a character had designed, likely with his eyes closed.

Antoine slept in a spare room of a halfway house, and the woman who owned the place provided meals.

“There are multiple unmarked graves in the back,” he said. “There are spots where the grass grows greener, and the landlady always has a creepy smile.”

He concluded that she belonged to a horror story of her own and was just filling in for this one.

“Between that and seeing my daughter every other weekend, I’ve had work at a mill a couple of days, but mostly, I just jumped forward weeks at a time.”

He wasn’t under the scrutiny of a Geist. He didn’t need to be around all the time like I did. We all knew Carousel could put us in stasis or whatever it did. It had demonstrated that power multiple times. It had never done so to this extent, however.

“Oh no,” Cassie said with a chuckle.

“So I put my pants on, and the guy, my employee, an NPC named Earl, says that my character had fired the sales staff, and now it’s my job to sell the furniture,” Isaac said.

“Is that what you’ve been doing between scenes?” I asked. “You’ve been selling furniture?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s easy, too, because my Moxie beats their Moxie. Piece of cake.”

Isaac's story was funny, and just about everyone laughed—everyone except Ramona, of course. She was genuinely disturbed by the tale. It made sense. Carousel as a vengeful, evil hell was something you could wrap your head around. Carousel, purveyor of petty torments, was something else, something even harder to understand.

“Okay,” Antoine said. “So why were you running when I saw you?”

“Cops,” Isaac said.

“What did you do?” Cassie asked.

“I punched a guy. He wouldn’t leave me alone. Kept hounding me for money. He was a creditor. Called himself that constantly. Followed me day and night. Watched me in the furniture store. Wouldn’t leave me alone.”

“In front of customers?” I asked, acting appalled.

“Yeah,” Isaac admitted. “He got more and more aggressive until, eventually, I punched him. I tried smooth-talking him, but he was level 10, and it all must have been in Moxie or Savvy or something because I could not convince him to leave me alone. I punched him and knocked him out in one hit.”

“He definitely didn’t have any Grit if you knocked him out,” Antoine said.

“Must not have,” Isaac said solemnly. “A woman nearby called the police. Now, there’s a cop posted up outside the store. They’ve been looking for me for days. Haven’t gotten any sleep. I have no idea what’s happening.”

And there it was. The funny story of a ne'er-do-well heir down on his luck became part of the plot of a horror story.

“Jail?” Cassie exclaimed. “I saw a silhouette of someone hanging behind jail bars. I’ve been seeing so many premonitions. Dozens every day. I’m not sure if it’s in my head or what.”

That made some sense. Cassie could see premonitions of death, but the Die Cast was not bound to kill any particular character. Her premonitions changing rapidly was understandable.

So jail was Carousel’s plan, apparently. Put Isaac in jail, where he was a sitting duck. The Die Cast wouldn’t even have to get to him. Just get close enough for Isaac to die of bad luck.

“What do we do?” Cassie asked.

I closed my eyes while I thought things through. When I opened them again, everyone else was looking at me again.

“So we know what Carousel’s plans are, or at least one of the scenes it’s setting up,” I said. “Rebirth. The moment we learn that Future Mayor Roderick Gray has used the flask thing to target us. You said he was acting weird?”

“Suspicious,” Antoine said. “Yeah.”

“As you might expect, he’s turning on us. Thinks we might rat him out. The cops did get there too quickly with the factory fire. He’s going to get paranoid. When he sees Isaac go to jail, that’s going to be the moment that pushes him over the edge because he thinks you’ll talk for a reduced sentence. He sends the Die Cast after you. We learn that we are now being hunted. I’m sure he’ll find a way to tie Kimberly and Bobby in with it somehow. Just wait.”

I couldn’t know for sure, but it was my best guess. I had heard their descriptions of his behavior. Gray was a liability, and he saw all of us as liabilities, too.

“I can’t die in jail,” Isaac said. At first, I thought he was telling a joke, but he was serious. “I can’t deal with that. Trapped, nowhere to run. I—”

The jovial storyteller from moments ago was gone. He was suddenly facing his own mortality again.

“We may not want to prevent it completely,” I said.

“Carousel will just change plans,” Kimberly said. “Or escalate the danger.”

I nodded. Adeline had drilled that part into our heads during our stay at Dyer’s Lodge. Carousel was the type of place where you could win a battle and lose a war.

“So, sacrifice me?” Isaac said.

I put my hands up. “No,” I said. “This isn’t Second Blood. No one has to die. Or at least none of us do.”

I relayed to them my experience with the Die Cast and the razor blade.

I whipped the blade out of my pocket. “Carousel set me up with a kind of test. I could see the killer’s tropes, but I might die if I wasn’t careful. This is similar. We need the revelation that Gray has turned on us, that he is the guy pulling the strings. It’s so much easier to beat a person. If that is never revealed, we will have a much harder time winning.”

The Die Cast was a really tough customer. The guy holding the flask, not so much.

“So we just kill him?” Isaac asked. “He’s not even an enemy. He’s a level 3 NPC. I could kill him.”

That was an option. Carousel did make him an NPC instead of a proper enemy.

“That’s a trap,” I said. “We would kill him, and then Carousel would make the Die Cast himself even more dangerous somehow. We need Gray to be pulling the strings. We can win under those circumstances. Plus, that is probably necessary to get the true ending.”

“I don’t want to die,” Isaac said. He was having a minor freak-out, but I didn’t blame him.

“Well, then, we’re just going to have to take special care of you,” I said.

Then, the planning began.