The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

We were back at Happened A-Pawn.

The previous time we had been to the pawn shop, there hadn’t been much of a selection—at least not anything we needed. But this time was different because we had played several storylines since then, and the stock was determined by the recent storylines that had been run.

I was pleased to see that the weapons selection was far better, no doubt thanks to Stray Dawn having so many firearms and other killing tools.

It wasn’t like we could just buy a gun and that would be it. You needed a trope to bring a firearm into a storyline. But this storyline was different because we got to prepare a base to defend.

So, while buying a sci-fi military-grade sniper rifle might not be realistic, police-grade weapons would make sense to be found at a jailhouse museum. The Atlas suggested that Carousel respected the base building, but the players didn’t have free rein.

We couldn’t get greedy.

We just made sure that there were a couple of handguns and a rifle available, along with ammunition. We chose the ones that would look the best in a museum.

Some guns had the same basic design for over 100 years, so that part was easy. Unfortunately, those guns were usually slow to load. We managed to pick up one that was dark gray metal with a wooden handle.

It was a big gun that would put a hole the size of a silver dollar in a cattle rustler.

It was funny how revolvers had built-in drama because of how long they took to reload. Still, the revolver, a smaller handgun, and a rifle seemed reasonable to exist inside a jailhouse museum.

We would have to cross our fingers.

The good news was we could get them for cheap.

The whole time we were in the pawn shop, Tar Bellows watched carefully.

That was unusual because normally, he pretended not to even notice us until we were ready to make a purchase. The others were looking around at the various supplies available.

We weren’t all going on the Post-Traumatic storyline, but we were all working on it.

We ended up getting hammers, screwdrivers—anything innocuous that could be used as a weapon in a moment of need. We had been by the jailhouse just to look in the windows at all the displays. We didn’t want to activate the Writ of Habitation yet because it didn’t last very long.

Building tools—we’re talking the basic stuff—could be very useful if we were smart. Unlike with Stray Dawn, we weren’t aiming for the highest score possible. We just wanted to get the rescue done.

A torture storyline was not something to get fancy with.

We barely talked. The nerves were getting to us. Maybe that was why Tar was watching us.

He was six foot five and built like a bull. We could sure use a Bruiser like him. If only, if only.

I took a glance at the tropes he had on display, but there was nothing special.

I was fidgety and nervous, and Tar could tell.

“Got something on your mind?” he asked.

“Always do,” I said.

“What are you looking for, exactly?” he asked.

“Home defense,” I said.

He nodded. “That can be a tricky one. You can never be too safe.”

“Not in Carousel,” I said.

“Sure enough. You know, the best home defense can be a good guard dog,” he said. “It’s the bark that does it more than the bite.”

Was he giving us practical advice? Encouraging us to bring Bobby and one of his dogs along?

Kimberly was right there next to me—or at least close enough to listen in.

“But we were warned,” she said. “If the dog gets killed, won’t Bobby die too?”

He looked at her like she was… naïve, to put it nicely. He didn’t say anything at first, but that look said enough.

“Wait,” I said. “The warning that Bobby got when he got his dogs was that they couldn’t get hurt because the audience doesn’t like to see it. Are you telling us that that was just flavor and not a rule or something?”

When Bobby got his license to bring those dogs into the storyline, it said that if the dogs suffered, Bobby would, too. We had taken that as strictly literal, but from the look on Tar’s face, I was beginning to think that perhaps we had been foolish.

Having a dog was not such an unordinary thing in a movie, even a horror movie.

We called over Bobby and went through the entire scenario with him.

After we were done, Tar pointed us toward an aisle that had some basic pet supplies—most of it used.

Bobby picked up some leashes and collars, but I could tell from his face that he wasn’t exactly excited about the prospect of turning his beloved pooches into guard dogs.

Still, Tar had never given us a bum lead—the tutorial notwithstanding.

All the while we were talking about this, I could still feel Tar’s eyes on me. When the others had left to continue looking around, I finally turned to him and asked him what he was staring at me for.

He shook his head. “Nothing I can say in polite society.”

What exactly did Paragons know? Were they more like NPCs who were bound by the script, or had he been to the theater? Was he privy to the things that the whispering woman had warned me about?

One lesson I had learned since coming to Carousel was that, when in doubt, use your words.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Are you talking about the audience abandoning us?” I asked.

He squared his shoulders and looked at me. He said nothing.

“You can’t talk about the people in the theater, can you? It’s one of the restrictions on the script,” I said. “But you do know about them. You know what they’re planning over there, right?”

“A fellow hears things,” he said.

“We’re going to move forward,” I said. “We’re going to pick a through-line. It’s just going to take some convincing.”

He didn’t seem sure, but I couldn’t exactly have a conversation where he couldn’t even acknowledge what it was we were talking about.

All we knew about Them—the people at the theater—was that they did not like to be referenced at all. It was as if they were on the other side of the fourth wall, a funny concept given how meta Carousel was.

We could never mention the audience.

Well, I didn’t care much for that restriction. Unless I heard a certain axe murderer breathing in the distance, I was going to keep pushing until I got answers.

Making decisions because we had no other choice was how we ended up in the tutorial. We needed real answers, and if they wanted us to move forward, they were going to have to give them to us.

If I could just find a way to send that message without getting my head chopped off.

A few old guns, some building supplies gathered from whichever stores we could safely enter, and a new plan involving some big dogs—that was what we headed back to Kimberly’s loft with.

The prep didn’t stop there.

We were hard at work.

"He's angry and scared," Cassie said. "He says that they're after him, and he can run for eternity, but he'll never get away."

"Is he talking to you? Can you speak to him?" Kimberly asked.

Cassie lay on the couch, her eyes covered with a small cloth. She shook her head.

"He's talking to…. No, he’s arguing with himself. He keeps speaking over himself. I don't understand what they’re saying sometimes," she said.

"Are they talking about who is chasing him?" I asked.

"No," she said, "not right now. But when they do, they're very afraid."

Cassie was using her I’m Blocked trope, which allowed her to obtain information about supernatural enemies from outside of a storyline.

She had been going for a while, which gave us good information in and of itself. Normally, she would get cut off by now. Since she wasn't, that meant our enemy had very low Moxie—at least compared to hers.

That wasn’t necessarily a good thing. It meant that their other stats were going to be higher.

"He thinks he's being chased," Cassie continued, "and he's talking about how they need to find a new hideout. But he—I think an older version of him—thinks that the younger one is being paranoid."

So the enemy was being chased… That was an element Anna didn’t mention and the trailers didn’t reveal. That could be useful.

I really liked having a bigger bad around.

"Oh, Gods," Cassie said. "It sounds like one of the bad guys has been grabbed and is being tortured. And I hear sounds—like sci-fi or magic sounds. He's screaming."

She sat up from the couch. "I'm blocked," she said.

"That took forever," Isaac teased. "Can we be sure that she wasn't just daydreaming?"

"Daydreaming?" Cassie asked. "I'm closer to being a real psychic than you are to being a real comedian."

She threw the cloth that had been over her eyes at him.

They continued with their brother and sister antics.

"That's good," I said. "If there's more plot to this than just a drawn-out fight until dawn, we could use that."

"Something to take up screen time?" Antoine asked.

"Exactly," I said. "Maybe even something to help make up for our weaknesses."

We talked about the various possibilities of what could be chasing a time-traveling serial killer.

Once we had ruled out Timecop and Doctor Who, our ideas started to come together.

Kimberly, Antoine, and I had been doing most of the work, with Bobby upstairs preparing two of his biggest dogs for the role of their lifetime and Dina ever-present, absorbing but not relaying any of her wisdom.

Ramona watched, too, nervous but not saying anything.

Even after a couple of storylines, it was still weird to watch someone have psychic visions for half an hour while everyone else sat around eating potato chips.

"All right, I'm gonna make the call," Kimberly said.

Moments later, a familiar flamboyant talent agent’s voice filled the room.

"Kimberly! It has been forever since you called me," Sal said.

It had been a couple of days.

"Well, I couldn't wait any longer," she said. "I was hoping you could tell me about Post-Traumatic. Didn't they get Riley Lawrence as a director on that project?"

"They certainly did," Sal said. "He's a real up-and-comer. Lots of gossip surrounding that one. You looking to attach your name to the project?"

"I'm always looking," Kimberly said.

"Well, let me look at the details. Just a moment," he said, as the sound of paper being flipped through came over the speaker. "Ohh, here we are. Yes, I've been looking at the latest revisions of this script. This is actually kind of a reboot slash sequel, a soft reboot, they call it. They're bringing back the main actress from the original movie that flopped and went straight to DVD."

"Really? Anna Reed? I like her," Kimberly said.

"I like her too, but she might be out of her league here," Sal said. "But who am I to talk? In the original, they barely gave her anything to do. She just ran around, looking scared. I don't know what they were thinking. Hopefully, she'll be a more reliable lead in this one."

Kimberly looked at me and then at Antoine. Anna wasn’t just going to be in the rescue; she was going to be the main character. That must have been her trope at play because Plot Armor level has a big influence on that sort of thing.

"Can you tell me about what role I might play?" Kimberly asked.

"I sure could. Let’s see... I spoke with the producer, and he said that if you were to join the cast, they could do a rewrite where one of the minor characters—a spunky museum director—could get rewritten to be a larger role. What do you think about that?"

"I love it," Kimberly said. "Can you tell me about the antagonist? Do we have an actor attached?"

"Yes, they do. His name is Grant Leitner, and he is great. He’ll have to play a dozen different versions of the same character. They’re going to expand on his role from the original film. You know how reboots are—everybody's got to have a backstory. The faceless killer that tracks people through time isn’t enough to put butts in theater seats these days."

"How about my costars?" Kimberly asked.

I had gotten so used to the various questions that Kimberly asked Sal. It was like she was running through the options on a dialogue menu in a video game. There was a reason she asked them. They tended to get the best results.

"Well, you have the construction foreman who's been doing renovations on the museum you work at, a big tough fella, and you also have the media relations manager, who—in a surprise twist—will be played by the director."

This enemy really did have low Moxie if Sal was being this open and honest. Though to be fair, Kimberly had just gotten a bunch of levels since the last time she asked about Post-Traumatic.

"Will there be a lot of traveling for the shoot?" Kimberly asked. "You know how I hate living out of motels."

"It will all be shot in Carousel, darling," Sal said. "But yes, you will have to travel some. You can’t shoot the whole thing in an old jailhouse museum. Not unless you want it going straight to DVD like the last one."

What a strange place Carousel was, that the term "straight to DVD" was synonymous with permanent death.

"Any advice to really stand out?" Kimberly asked after a few more questions that airballed.

"Well, strangely enough, I think this movie is going to rely on the director. We’ve got the actors, and the audience is absolutely ravenous. It’s like they just ran through the previous seasons and are finally caught up. Nobody has patience these days. Everyone is anxious to see what he has planned."

A chill went down my spine.

What did they know? Was Sal controlled by Carousel or by Them? Was there a difference?

I understood that Carousel would know all my secrets, but the others—the game makers—felt more invasive, strangely.

That was Sal's last contribution. She asked him more questions, but even with her huge Moxie advantage, he was done talking.

We had gotten a really good haul of information. Now, we just had to use it.

As soon as she hung up, Antoine asked, "So what do you have planned?" looking at me.

"A little tour of Carousel," I said honestly. "I know we will end up in the jailhouse for the win condition, but I think we might want to play a game of hide and seek first. I do know a lot about Carousel’s history. I’ve got some theories to try out."

"And we’re going to power the tour through self-inflicted pain?" Antoine asked.

“That is some good production value, wouldn’t you say? You heard Sal. If we don’t do a little bit of traveling, we’re going straight to DVD."

Antoine nodded. Then he looked at Kimberly, and they both looked back at me.

"Where's that demented history book?" Antoine asked.

We had some planning to do.