Book Five, Chapter 34: On Theme
Workers harming other workers was a core component of the theme of the rescue, and what better way for Carousel to remind us of that than by having one scab be unwilling to save another?
Michael tried to be a hero in the wrong story, and now our hopes of saving the real player he represented were gone—for a time at least.
Underlying Dina's rescue trope's promises of safety was the reality that it was extremely difficult to succeed with.
It wasn’t that you would die trying; it was that the logistics of getting a bunch of NPCs to survive was legitimately challenging to do. That was the cost; that was the price of having such a safe run. It was hard to get to The End.
Everyone was deflated after Michael died. We had hoped that we could avoid losing one of our central NPCs for a Second Blood, but we had not earned it.
We had been on a roll of finding solution after solution, but we were too slow. Whatever hope we had built up from our successes felt like it was gone.
But Antoine wouldn’t let us give up.
"Come on, people! We still have two players to rescue here. It’s time to focus up and take it down the home stretch," he said. Then he kept saying things like that, and I basically ignored him as I weighed our chances. That type of pep only made me nervous.
There was so much distance between the surrogates and the helm, and it was the Finale already.