Arc II, Chapter 69: A Slight Change of Plans

Arc II, Chapter 69: A Slight Change of Plans

Carousel wanted Isaac in jail. We needed a way for our characters to find out that future mayor Roderick Gray was instigating the recent Die Cast attacks. It seemed so straightforward. Let Isaac be captured, rescue him, regroup...

As the current mayor walked down the sidewalk toward us, I immediately suspected it wouldn't be that simple.

Moonlight Morrow was a Paragon, the Departed Paragon, but in this story he was acting as a player, which was why he had the same Plot Armor as me.

That made some sense. Advanced Archetypes like the Departed change the nature of the stories they enter. Detectives like Grace made things into murder mysteries. Monster Hunters like Arthur made things into action-filled hunts. A story filled with spirituality like this one could have certainly been the result of some Advanced Archetype rearranging.

Isaac, caught off guard, watched as Moonlight Morrow passed him. The Paragon exchanged a wave with Roderick Gray as he walked away. It was only after he had moved on that Isaac's senses tingled with something amiss. He did a double take, his gaze darting first to Moonlight and then back to our hiding spot across the street.

After Moonlight was done waving at him, Roderick Gray stopped smiling. He started to scowl. He was ever the sore loser.

Isaac managed to get his bearings eventually because he moved forward and greeted Roderick just as planned.

I tried keeping an eye on him as best I could, but I was distracted because our new ally, the Departed Paragon, had apparently spotted us and was making his way to us.

I looked at his tropes.

~-~

“The Other Side” changes the nature of death; deceased characters in the story return as spirits in some form.

“He was the nicest guy...” Buffs his Moxie and increases the odds that NPCs will have positive feelings toward him before and after his death.

“Almost Made It” guarantees he survives to the Finale and ensures that he dies there.

~-~

That added wrinkles. Every character returned as a ghost? That had to have been included for a reason, but what was it?

I checked Casting Director.

Elliot “Moonlight” Morrow: the well-liked new mayor of Carousel. He won the popular vote by a landslide, but due to his friendliness with the Geist family, there are those who believe he has unclean hands.

We had chosen a table in a restaurant near the café where Isaac was meeting with Roderick. Moonlight found his way to us easily.

As he entered, the other customers got excited to see their beloved mayor. It was a big deal. He smiled and greeted them all in kind.

“Folks, I sure am glad to be able to see you here today, but I got to be about my business with these fine voters in the corner,” he said. He gestured toward me, Ramona, Kimberly, Antoine, and Cassie. Bobby had stayed behind with his dogs. That way, if the Die Cast targeted all of us, he would see its POV on the red wallpaper and would be able to call the restaurant and warn us.

As Moonlight approached, he gestured for a patron at the restaurant to stand up. The man, who had been wolfing down on a bread bowl, stood. Moonlight grabbed the man’s chair and whirled it around gracefully next to our booth so he could sit down. The NPC looked around, his mouth still full, as if he had no idea how to respond. He picked up his bread bowl and left.

“I’ve been dying to meet you folks,” Moonlight said. “The word around the neighborhood is that you have been cruising right along to the Centennial. That’s mighty nice to hear.”

He then shook each of our hands individually. “Nice to meet you, young man. Are you taking things okay?” he asked Antoine. Antoine nodded his head, and Moonlight continued his handshakes and greetings. The only other person to whom he said anything differently was Ramona, to whom he said, “Nice to meet you again.”

When I shook his hand, I noticed that he wore a thin black cord tied around his ring finger, though I didn’t find out why.

“You've started heading to the finish line. That means it was my time to come out and play. It has been quite a while, hasn’t it?” he asked, though that last part might have been a question for himself.

“The Other Side,” I said, reciting the name of his trope. “When we die here, we stick around?”

“You lay it down straight, don’t you? No small talk?” Moonlight asked. “That’s the rule here. You die, the fight’s not over. None of you are afraid of dying by this point, are you? That should be old hat to you by now."

If Carousel had the Departed Paragon acting as a player, and gave it a trope to bring everyone back as ghosts, that wasn’t a casual thing. It served some plot purpose. Carousel worked like a clock. That trope was a cog in the machine. What was its purpose?

The jail cells were in the basement, with barred windows close to the streets. From those basement windows, Inmates could yell at people walking down the street from their cells, and those passing by outside could toss contraband inside the jail.

If I didn’t know for certain that jails like these existed I would have thought they were an artifact of movies.

That was the major reason we planned the meeting as close as possible to downtown. We hoped that the nearer the jail, the more likely it would be chosen.

We just had to wait until Isaac ended up in one of the cells. That had been our plan. We were going to attach a chain to the back of Roderick Gray’s car (he still didn’t know Isaac and Antoine had taken it) and pull out the bars. Grab Isaac and get away using our superior stats over the NPCs. Ridiculous, but by movie standards, it was doable.

When fighting horror movie monsters, crime got a pass.

It would make a good scene, too.

Cassie would come to us with a premonition. “If it’s going after him, then it will go after all of us,” she would say. We would decide to help. We were bonded by our relationship to the Die Cast, after all.

We would get in and out quickly. Isaac would act humorously. As a Comedian, he would lend legitimacy to our plan, which required humor to pull off.

Carousel should have liked it. We were playing along, improvising. It should have worked.

But it had other plans. It wanted a little more effort on our part.

To our credit, Isaac was brought to the jail we wanted him in.

The only problem was that when we arrived, we saw the barricades.

Large stone structures had been installed near the building. They were cylindrical and strategically positioned to block access to the road we needed to drive down to get the car close enough to pull off our plan.

“These weren’t here,” Cassie said. “How could this happen?”

She wasn’t really asking how it happened. She was just realizing that things would be harder than we initially intended. I let her vent.

“Carousel does not half-ass things,” Antoine said. “Coffee shops, a donut place. A nail salon. Cobblestone. It changed everything.”

The side road next to the jail downtown was always near shops, but they were blocks away. Now, the building next door, which had been some kind of business park, was filled with shops that attracted pedestrians and warranted the cylinders to stop vehicles. There were too many pedestrians.

Our plan A was ruined.

Fortunately, thanks to Moonlight, we now had a plan B.

We walked down the cobblestone road to where the barred windows had been. They were still there.

Isaac had been moved to the cell already, which seemed quick, but time was weird in Carousel.

“What the hell?” he yelled. “When did those columns get put in?” he asked, standing on his tiptoes so he could see out of the window. “There’s one in the flower bed!”

Carousel had indeed put one in a flowerbed and another in the middle of the sidewalk. It was literally impossible to get a car anywhere near the jail window.

Isaac was scared. He knew that this was a death sentence.

“We’re going to get you,” I said.

“Please, I... Please,” he said.

I felt stupid and powerless. Carousel had been so incredibly petty. I thought this was one of its little games, like when it gave me a goatee or when it gave the Die Cast that POV trope because I had mentioned it. This wasn’t a game, though.

If we had done things Isaac’s way, we might have prevented him from being arrested at all. It wouldn't have worked. If Carousel wanted Isaac in jail, it would put him there. We could have at least tried to hide him. Instead, I insisted that giving Carousel its best story was worth the risk. I had no idea how death-centric this story was. Now, he was going to pay the price. He was a sitting duck.

Unless I could do something about it.