The Game at Carousel: Book Four Stubs July 17th (Arc II Chapters 1- 85)

I had been through a lot since coming to Carousel.

I had been a puppet on the strings of many a puppet master. I had run through mazes like a rat and danced when told to dance, but perhaps the most annoying enemy trope I had ever come across was Night Terrors.

The ability that the Repossessors had made it so that my insight tropes came in the form of nightmares. Not such a big deal. It didn't actually block my ability to gain insight; it just punished me for wanting to use it.

My character's parents were out of town, go figure. It took me a long time to figure out where my character's house was supposed to be. It was a small, quiet neighborhood, and the house was nothing impressive, but the doors locked and seemed sturdy, so I wasn't going to complain.

I lay down in the living room on the couch, with the TV still flickering on low volume, to get some sleep.

And that is when the nightmares began.

I was On-Screen for part of it. Both the version of me that was tossing and turning on the couch, accidentally knocking over a bowl of melted ice cream (what could I say, I was a teenager), and also the version of me that was trapped inside of a hellish version of Pecatto's Pizza Parlor.

I didn't remember a lot of events, but I remembered the feelings, the terror. I remembered swimming in pizza sauce. I remembered being chased down a long hallway that looked a lot like the hallway between the back kitchen and the main office.

I was being chased in this dream by Tony the Tosser, the animatronic character.

It was largely a non-event, just something that kept repeating itself. Then there was a jarring end that went all fuzzy in my mind.

It was scary and unsettling, but it came with rewards.

I was able to add more to the total of tropes I had seen, and I was able to explore a place that felt real. This nightmarish version of the pizza parlor didn't seem like some one-off recreation from my dream; it felt like a real place, like some version of me was really there.

I fully expected I would be there again and not in a dream.

When I woke up in the morning, I could hardly remember much, but I did remember the tropes. When I saw the various demons taunting me in my dreams, the tropes appeared to me on a demented version of the red wallpaper.