Arc II, Chapter 76: Double Team

Arc II, Chapter 76: Double Team

Lillian was supposed to be in the secret passage, injured but not dying. If she succumbed to the smoke or if the Die Cast injured her further, Doctor Halle would not transform her into a monster, and, to my understanding, we would not get the true ending of the storyline.

I could do nothing for her. I was a ghost.

I looked around. The air was thick with smoke. I ran outside right through the wall. I needed someone, any of the living players to help. There was only one left.

Cassie.

Bobby was still alive, but not exactly living.

I spotted her. She was lying on the ground, coughing, in pain from sharing Bobby’s injuries. Her skin was bright red, but she was alive. On the red wallpaper, she was fine, with an occasional touch of Incapacitation. Isaac was speechless by her side.

“Follow my voice,” I said using Flashback Revelation.

She stopped coughing immediately.

She looked around, hazily until she saw me on the red wallpaper.

“Hello?” she asked.

I saw that while she was On-Screen, I was not. To the audience, this would look like a psychic episode.

“Follow my voice,” I said again.

She climbed to her feet. It was a struggle, either from residual pain from her Anguish ability or she was just acting.

I led her to the door.

“No!” she said. “I can’t.”

I understood. Smoke was pouring out the doorway. It was so thick that people inside couldn’t even find the exit. Bodies piled up near the door. She would have to step over some to get back inside.

“It’s all up to you now,” I said. I had said that a lot.

“Don’t make her go inside,” Isaac said. “Please.”

“We don’t have a choice,” I said.

Terror lit up Cassie’s face. Going inside an inferno without a good explanation, without help from anyone but a disembodied spirit. This wasn’t just a game. Not in that moment. It was a true nightmare. The fire roared from within. The structure strained; it was buckling from the heat.

Cassie stepped over one of the bodies of a Geist who had almost made it through the door if she had not been pinned down by a large lectern that had been placed near the door.

Cassie took a deep breath and walked inside. As soon as she was past the initial pile of bodies, she dropped to the floor and crawled, blindly, following nothing but the direction the red wallpaper showed her.

I led her across the main hall to where Lillian was.

Lillian was still alive, but she wasn’t going to be for long.

“What am I here for?” Cassie cried, coughing and spitting up.

I stood in front of Lillian. It took her a moment to notice.

“Oh no,” she said.

She knew what to do. She grabbed the prone Lillian and started to drag her. It was difficult staying below the smoke and even that did not afford her good air, just less hot ash.

She dragged and pulled Lillian across the ground. It felt like it was taking ages.

Just before she made it to the hallway with the secret passage, one of the Die Cast’s flaky, fleshy, bloody arms lurked its way toward a bookshelf that was leaning precariously. If it fell, it would land on Cassie and Lillian.

Before the tendril could make purchase on the shelf, I jumped in front of it. It burned and sizzled against my ghostly form. The pain felt like bone pain more than skin pain; it was deep and reverberated all over my body, but the arm did not make it through.

The tendril withdrew and stretched upstairs. Moments later, someone fell down the stairs. It must have been an accident.

Eventually, running on nothing but pure determination, Cassie managed to crawl into the right hallway. The door was already open, as many Geists had piled into it. That was not good. Cassie plowed through their bodies as best she could before pulling Lillian’s body in after her.

Lillian was still alive. In fact, many of the corpses were still alive but twitching. That would change with time.

Cassie reached back up and closed the secret door with all her might.

She was done. All of her health indicators were flashing. Incapacitated, Hobbled, even Mutilated flicked on and off as she whimpered on the floor.

Getting electrocuted wasn’t so bad in comparison.

“Run,” I said. It was the best way I could tell her she was done and she could get away. There was nothing left for her to give.

As I helped Cassie, the fight between Antoine, Kimberly, and Roderick Gray still went on.

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I watched it on the Deathwatch screen.

Antoine stayed down where he had been thrown before. All indications were that he was unconscious.

Luckily, I was faster than the enemy.

As Antoine broke out of the long driveway of the Geist Manor, a fleshy tendril crept out toward a car that was driving on the street outside the wrought iron fence that surrounded the Geist property.

It was going to make the car hit Antoine somehow.

Not on my watch.

I jumped into the ashy arm and wrangled it.

The maneuver was effective. The limb never hit its mark. The tendril dried up into a mess of charcoal and blood.

From the Die Cast’s tropes, I knew it could appear ahead of us once we changed filming locations. We had changed locations several times, so that was a real risk.

It didn’t move until we got to the river, and we ran through a public waterside park.

It was there waiting for us.

Antoine had the flask tucked under his arm like a football player would. The Die Cast was directly in our way.

There was no way we were getting past it.

I knew that because its burnt, fleshy arms were ready to give Antoine the bad luck required to stop him.

Antoine was none the wiser. He saw only the physical Die Cast.

He was going right for it.

Maybe he planned to juke, to dodge, to evade, I didn’t know.

What I knew was that I had to do something.

Normally, I wasn’t much use in a fight, but this time, I was a ghost. Ghost strength scales off Moxie.

And I had plenty of that.

I also had one point more Hustle than Antoine.

I ran as fast as I could.

I ran past Antoine, right through him, actually.

“Follow my voice,” I said one last time. Antoine listened.

I kept going until I got right to the Die Cast, and I put every ounce of passion and enthusiasm into a full-body tackle.

I went right through Gale Zaragoza’s body and struck the Spirit controlling him squarely.

His tendril arms withdrew as the spirit and I went into the water. Its hold on Gale’s body stayed, but that didn’t help anchor it.

Antoine was right behind me, tackling the Die Cast physically.

We both fell at once from the concrete ledge that separated the river from the park.

We landed in the water, the shallow end.

There was hardly a struggle. As soon as the flask took in water, the spirit started to writhe and shake, creating waves that even Antoine could see as the river broke it down into nothing by spectral debris.

Gale Zaragoza’s body, of course, never moved. It wasn’t possessed any more.

Antoine and I laughed, though he couldn’t hear me. He stood in the water and let the flask go. The river took, who knew where?

“Ruined my tux,” he said.

We were Off-Screen.

We walked back to the Mansion and found Kimberly and Isaac.

Two among the living and two among the dead. We walked together.

Screams echoed from within the Mansion still, but they were not the screams of the living. I doubted Kimberly and Antoine could hear them properly. One wing of the mansion had collapsed, granting a view inside.

A stolen glance at the carnage within told me that not all who died in this story became pristine ghosts. Some became fiery wraiths, which were like skeletons that floated ablaze in the basement of the mansion.

They were classed as NPCs, remarkably. There was probably a reason for that, but I didn’t want to think about it at the time.

I saw the dripping woman that Strander Blake often used as his face. She walked through the house, absorbed a fiery wraith into a mass of black thread, and turned to give me a smile.

Second Blood was over.

The Finale had just begun.