Book Five, Chapter 38: The Rerun
When we set out for the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion to finally enact our plan, it was our fifth attempt. The first loss was the hardest, but after that, it got easier and easier, and we got better and better.
They say any nightmare you walk away from is a good nightmare.
We learned things we didn’t even know possible to learn about the inner workings of a storyline. We had always dismissed the merits of rerunning a story, but now we understood.
It was like being clairvoyant.
We also gained intimate knowledge of Dina’s Rescue Trope. What had initially been a colossal hindrance became the closest thing to a superpower we had seen in Carousel.
We didn’t go On-Screen ever. It didn’t happen. Nothing happened by accident. Everything was predictable except Carousel's countermeasures, and even it was "fair." The story was just simply not about us. It was freeing and shielding in ways we couldn’t imagine.
The only cost of her trope was that its power started to shine with reruns, which limited its utility.
Of course, we had a few things in our favor. First, we could look at the spoilers in the Atlas, and a few choice spoilers helped us form our plan. It became apparent that this storyline required death, but not main character death.
NPCs would work fine if it was shocking and there were a lot of them.