Book Five, Chapter 74: Exploration and Research
By far, the most accurate measure of success during research was the On-Screen/Off-Screen indicator.
The difficulty with playing a character who is supposed to be an expert on the supernatural is that, in the pursuit of research, you often find yourself learning things that your character was already supposed to know.
It can be deflating to stumble across an interesting tidbit—a tiny morsel that you believe might unlock clues to the mysteries of the paranormal—only to realize that the entire discovery occurred Off-Screen.
No matter how important the discovery, if it occurred Off-Screen, it was likely that Carousel did not intend for that line of research to bear much fruit.
The role of the researcher in a story is incredibly consistent, and discovering lore that could enable you to destroy evil always follows a pattern: you start with a problem and then seek a solution. You find one, but you don’t fully understand it. After initial failures, you reach a better understanding, and then, if you are clever, you can find a way to implement your discovery into a solution that can win the day.
Carousel will obtain footage of you all along the way, so if you come across something interesting in a book and the cameras are not rolling, you can almost certainly assume that you have not solved your problem.
The books in the stacks within the Witherhold Manor certainly contained lots of information about werewolves. Much of it was redundant, so Riley and I were left searching for errant phrases, small paragraphs that contained information we didn’t know among seas of information that we already did.
Riley had found a journal that fascinated him and contained enormous troves of information about the history of Witherhold Manor, but the information was, as he claimed, not canon to the storyline itself but rather to something deeper. He believed he had found information about this story from before it was a story, from back when it was real in its own world. I wasn't sure if he was correct about the nature of his discovery, but we stayed Off-Screen as he read it to himself and to me, so it didn't really matter.
It gave me no small amount of pride that I was the first to find something substantial, something that brought us On-Screen—though I soon wished I hadn’t.