Book Nine, Chapter 41: A Thousand Dailies and Nothing To Watch
It really was the end of the world.
There was a feeling in the air as I walked down the street. An emptiness that somehow pervaded Carousel despite there being NPCs everywhere going about their lives.
I could hear sirens in the distance, but I could never see the emergency vehicles that they belonged to. It felt like there were a million things going on everywhere except where I was. To be honest, I couldn't even tell if the NPCs were in character or if they were just taking a break.
They seemed so casual, so off guard, like they were smoking a cigarette at the end of a busy shift. Many of them sat on porches of the houses that lined the streets or simply congregated on the sidewalks, having conversations that always seemed to hush whenever I got close enough to hear them.
No one looked at me. No one spoke to me. In this city, one of the biggest versions of Carousel I had ever seen, I was somehow all alone.
The sky was red with the sunset. The color of blood, the only red this sky knew.
It didn't feel like the Party Phase. If anything, it felt like the story was almost over. The plot cycle just hadn't caught up yet.
How many storylines had I been through? I couldn't even remember off the top of my head. In all of them, it was so rare to see children out and about that I almost regarded the pipsqueaks with fear, as if there was a change in the air that I couldn't quantify or understand.
Carousel was usually so protective of its kids, maybe because it wanted them to grow old so it could kill them as adults, or maybe it really was because they were such bad actors that it didn't want them ruining a shot.
But wherever it kept its children during normal storylines, it wasn't keeping them there during this apocalypse. There were kids all over.
The Atlas talked about children very matter-of-factly. For the most part, you didn't deal with them, and if you did, they wouldn't stick around for long. Supposedly, a private school somewhere on the periphery of Carousel proper had numerous storylines involving actual child actors, as if Carousel kept them segregated from the normal storylines.
Maybe that was because children were powerful with the audience. Kill some random adult and the audience doesn't care, but if a killer were to take the life of a child, well, that would take some planning, some very specific tropes. Perhaps it was easier to remove them as a complication altogether. Maybe it was the Manifest Consortium that pulled that trick. They had tickets to sell, after all.
And yet, as I walked down the streets of this large, almost metropolitan version of Carousel that took place sometime in the early 00s, I saw children everywhere in the normal places you would expect to find them and in vast quantities. Little child gangs roved up and down the streets, laughing and giggling and telling each other secret jokes when the adults weren't listening.
I could feel something was going on. It wasn't a meta sense. It was psychic. My background trope was working overtime, my grandmother's gift giving me instructions I couldn't interpret one way or another. Still, their feeling and energy were almost overwhelming.
Something enormously psychic was going around, separate from the psychic turbulence that triggered the apocalypse. I couldn't put my finger on it, but these kids creeped me out for a reason, and it wasn't just their size and high-pitched voices.
They were up to something, even Off-Screen.
I walked down the streets with my hands in my pockets, just people-watching, observing, waiting for the day to end so that my Dailies trope would kick in and give me a large dose of exposition.
As I passed by one of the porch stoops, there was a kid sitting on the steps, coloring on a piece of paper. He wore an oversized jacket and had that adorable quality that you hate to see in a horror movie. He might have been nine or ten or eight or seven. What did I know?
Whatever the case, he seemed to realize I had seen him because he looked up at me and made eye contact with a smile.
I awkwardly smiled back and tried not to wave, hoping I didn't seem like a creepy adult.
But he did wave at me, so I quickly flashed the palm of my hand, hoping that would suffice. In response, he turned around the page that he was coloring and showed it to me. I knew I wasn't going to be able to pass right by him because the thing he had drawn, in crayon no less, was a circus tent.
I wasn't going to miss an opportunity to get some insight into the storyline.
As I walked closer, I said, "What you got there?"
He held the sheet up so I could see it better. There was a circus tent, yes, but there was also a giant blue rectangle with a woman inside of it. She had strangely drawn legs that I later assumed were actually flippers.
"What's that? Is this a mermaid?" I asked as I knelt down beside him.
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His name was Nelson on the red wallpaper. He was an NPC. Nothing special to look at as far as stats went, but they all had their secrets that I couldn't see.
"I don't know," he said as he turned the page back around and continued coloring it. His brown hair fell down to his eyebrows. "I don't think she would call herself a mermaid because she has legs. See?"
I looked more closely, and while it was true that she did have two human legs, her feet were definitely flippers. She also had sharp teeth, but I wasn't going to point that out.
"Well, it looks pretty cool," I said. "What's this over here? Is that a circus tent?"
The kid nodded and kept coloring it in alternating white and red stripes.
I wasn't On-Screen, so I thought I might as well take my best shot.
"Have you seen a circus around here?"
Nelson looked up at me and squinted his eyes as if I had just asked something stupid, but then he answered, "Yeah."
"And this woman, was she at the circus?"
He nodded his head. "We had to go through a big line of tents, and we saw a bunch of creepy things in jars until we got to her, and she looked at me and winked," he said.
As I stared down at the drawing, I realized the blue rectangle she was in looked like a fish tank.
"Was it some sort of freak show?" I asked, only then realizing I didn't know whether "freak show" was still the term, and even if it was, whether it was appropriate to say to a child.
"Yeah," he said, "but they didn't have many freaks. Not yet."
Something told me that would change.
"Can you point me to where the circus is?" I asked.
"No," the kid said matter-of-factly.
I honestly didn't know how to come back from that. If this was purely a Moxie-based interaction, it was weird to be stonewalled like that unless the kid had some NPC trope I couldn't see completely counteracting my Moxie.
"Well, I hope I get to go to the circus soon," I said.
"You will," the kid said. "You're a grown-up. You can always go to the circus."
What an outlook.
I said goodbye and went on my way, the whole time not quite sure whether that was an in-character interaction or entirely meta. In a strange way, the kid's answers were probably going to be pretty similar either way.
We're all going to the circus, but as I looked around the city of Carousel, I didn't see any signs for where it might appear or how to get there.
I walked on.
-
My driver's license had an address on it, so I went there to see what kind of life my character lived. It was a nice enough house with an open floor plan, much better than the almost entirely glass house I had been assigned in TheDie Cast.
My character must have been single because it was a total bachelor pad, and it was quite clear that I worked in the film industry. My walls were lined with posters for movies created by Geist Film Productions. Directed by, produced by, and/or written by Carlysle Geist. For as ubiquitous as that surname seemed to be, it was rarely relevant.
I searched around for my character's documents or any clue that my character had been up to something related to the plot and, of course, came up empty. He seemed like a normal, fairly successful film director. Back on Earth, this would have been my dream life in many ways, but I was disappointed here because it meant I didn't have a direct connection to the plot, not that I expected to have one in an apocalypse.
More importantly, I didn't find anything about a connection to Ramona. I was hoping things would be easy, and she would be, like, my girlfriend in the hospital who I visited, but I found no evidence of that. Her Restorative Catatonia trope guaranteed she would be in a coma somewhere. I had to think through ways to find her and wake her up.
For a bachelor, I had a fairly well-stocked kitchen, so I made myself some boxed macaroni and cheese while I waited for the Dailies.
The truth was, I expected to get very scant information, which was why I had stopped using the trope for so long. Usually, there were better, more active ways to get information, and truthfully, scanning hours of footage for breadcrumbs got tiring.
The apocalypse was a unique situation, though, because I didn't have better ways of getting information. I wasn't connected to the story. I couldn't just play a character.
So when the sun finally set and night came, I looked at the red wallpaper and found myself inundated with hundreds of hours of footage right there at my fingertips.
Carousel had held little back. Even with fast-forward, this was going to take a long time. I sat on a big, comfortable couch in the living room and stared at a blank wall, watching CCTV from around Carousel.
I had so much footage I didn't know what to do with it, but scanning it in my mind, I found a lot of red and blue lights, showing where those cops were. While I thought we were still in the Party Phase, Carousel had already gotten started with the killing.
I saw dry, contextless footage of bodies being hauled out of Lake Dyer, obscured by body bags, but when it takes multiple body bags to carry a body, the narrative kind of explains itself.
There was no coherent narrative yet. I didn't recognize any of the NPCs as Paragons. It felt like the world's worst-edited true crime YouTube channel.
I continued to watch, and slowly, as the bodies piled up, I realized what I was looking at.
It was a montage, or, at least, the pieces that Carousel would edit into one.
These were the storylines of Carousel. Maybe they didn't play out fully, but they did play out. Bodies being hauled out of a lake, out of the sewer, being found in empty, abandoned warehouses, in dark alleys, on walking paths through creepy forests. They were everywhere, and while I didn't get footage of what was putting all those bodies there because Carousel didn't want to give away everything, a picture was slowly forming in my mind.
It was when I saw a young woman being hauled out of a corn maze that everything clicked together perfectly. I suppose you could call it the final straw.
This was a raising-the-stakes montage, the kind of thing that usually happened in Second Blood.
I saw footage of that girl in the corn maze as an EMT wheeled her body past a sign that said, "Will you brave Benny's Maze?" A funhouse picture of Benny the Haunted Scarecrow appeared on the sign. They stopped there long enough for the camera to get a shot of that sign. It was intentional visual storytelling.
Even though this was the Party Phase, we were already at the point where the deaths started to cascade. It was like that scene in Ghostbusters after all the ghosts are released from the containment unit and wreak havoc in New York.
Except there were more than ghosts here, and if this was all happening during the Party Phase, I hated to see what was going to happen for First Blood.
I sat and watched footage for hours. While I didn't learn everything, I got a good idea of the general geography of the story. It involved Camp Dyer for certain. Lots of establishing shots had been filmed there.
A final piece of footage played out in my mind before I went to sleep that night. A body was being hauled out of a long hallway. I recognized the place.
I had just had a therapy session there. Doctor Mentes, I hardly knew ye.
Well, at least I had a lead.