The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG-Chapter 68Book Eight, : Last-Minute Prep

We had been given a seven-day time limit, but we didn't know if that was in-story or out. Either way, we couldn't afford to put things off as long as we would have liked to.

We had to scout as best we could. We were more limited than I would like. Without Kimberly to call her fake talent agent, Sal, it was hard for us to get information remotely, and we decided that Cassie couldn't use her I’m Blocked trope because we suspected there was something Lovecraftian on the other side of this storyline, and we didn't need her brains smattered to smithereens from an attempted psychic connection.

But there were some lucky breaks. The fact that this was Part Two meant that we could look at all the spoilers for Part One. We could also ask Antoine about what had happened.

We sat in the back room of the Speakeasy as Camden flipped through the Atlas, searching for the spoiler section on The Sunken Cradle, and when he got there, what we saw was a shock. 𝒻𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘸ℯ𝒷𝘯𝘰𝑣ℯ𝑙.𝘤𝑜𝘮

The page had very few spoilers, almost none, in fact. The spoilers section for the story was far shorter than the non-spoiler section, which only contained cursory information useful for gameplay but not for dissecting the plot.

Camden read out the singular entry for the storyline.

"Players who run this storyline often report being unable to recall major events in the plot or lore-based intelligence. We suspect that this is the result of a trope, or possibly some type of magic from the story. However, they often return with pockets full of gold coins and, aside from hazy memories, appear to be in good spirits after resting."

That wasn't to say there was nothing else on the page. There were some lists of various explorer-type obstacles that had to be passed: steep cliffs, falling monuments, a few traps, rogue mercenaries, and rival treasure hunters, things like that, but nothing that would explain the aforementioned memory problems.

"It almost makes you think there might be secret lore there," I said. "If Carousel gave this enemy the ability to erase players' minds, there's definitely something going on."

"Antoine, you didn't say you couldn't remember anything, did you?" Anna said.

"I remember everything," he said, dejected. "I don't know what these people are talking about. What I think happened is we chose a different ending. I never actually saw what happened inside the cradle. Kimberly must have, I think Logan must have, and Andrew too, but by the time I felt we were losing, I realized we couldn't go any further, so I blew the tunnel, and I made that the finale, burying the evil and the treasure."

It may have sounded unorthodox, but the eldritch horror genre was no stranger to ambiguity, to leaving things unexplained. Still, there was no way we were getting away with it this time.

It would have been nice to see what happened. As a planner, all information can be useful.

"That's quick thinking," Camden said. "If you'd gone down, you might not be talking to us today."

Antoine nodded. "The others seemed to agree, but I never did ask them if they saw anything down there. I knew better. I assumed that they were either killed by the enemy or were left in the darkness until the movie ended."

That was a cold, bold decision. Cut and run for the sake of the win. I wouldn’t have expected Antoine to be able to execute that.

"All right, but even if that's the case," Cassie said, "by that point in time, you were already seeing supernatural stuff, right? And people were dying, weren't they?"

"That's right," Antoine said, staring into his beer. "There was a tribe of people there. They weren't some uncontacted tribe or anything like that. They used guns, trucks, and grenades. They guarded the entrance because they didn't want anyone to get in. They were the first threat, but once we got closer to the tunnel, they wouldn't follow us in. In fact, they were the ones who saved Dina, Bobby, and me in the end."

"A classic trope. A lineage of guardians protecting the sacred location," I said.

"Once we got closer," Antoine said, "there was just something terrifying in the air. Every shadow made us jump. Some sort of psychic or evil phenomenon. I couldn't tell what way it was leaning. I didn't want to be there. The plot halted so fast I got whiplash. It became a real slowburn. Bobby's dogs ran off when we got close enough. We could still hear them running in the forest, but they wouldn't come closer. I wish I had more information, but to tell you the truth, by the time we got to the finale, I was looking for a way to end it without having to go down to the cradle. I wish one of the others was here right now. They might be able to tell you more."

"Are you okay?" Anna asked. She reached out and put her hand on his back.

"I'm fine," he said. "I'm basically topping off on mental health tropes every chance I get, but ever since we got here, I'm feeling something dreadful. This is going to be tough."

"The enemy trope," I said. "Our tropes work here during the choice phase. Why wouldn't theirs?"

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

"Maybe we should try to write things down," Camden said. "If there's some sort of memory magic at play, that could be problematic in the finale."

Camden could literally remember everything and keep track of it on the red wallpaper, but if the enemy trope counteracted that, it would be a stat comparison. Even with his high Savvy, he could easily lose to an eldritch being.

"Well, it is an expedition," I said. "You're supposed to write things down, document them..."

Even as I spoke, an idea formed.

"My understanding," I said, "is that you went on an expedition to rescue Kimberly because she was already on an expedition retracing your steps to the original path to the cradle, right?"

"That's right," Antoine said.

"Well, if there were expeditions, there probably are notes, maybe photographs, maybe even videos," I said. "Maybe there's evidence of what happened on your run that we could use. My character is a videographer. My money says he got a hold of some of that stuff. What do you think?"

"That's a safe bet," Antoine said, smiling as best as he could muster. "Otherwise, you're just relying on me remembering the first movie. It'd be nice if someone else knew about it too."

It was true. There were no other returning characters from the first movie other than Bobby, and he was already captured. The rest of us were in a demonic pizza parlor, working on a summer job.

"I have an idea," I said. I reached into thin air and pulled out my Props Department Requisition trope. "How about we take a look at that evidence right now?"

This was a new trope, and while I was excited about it, I hadn't gotten much use out of it yet. It was hard to tell when I was actually using that trope because it worked so seamlessly that I couldn't tell whether Carousel had put something in place or if I had.

If I could get it to work, it would let me summon hordes of information about the storyline my character would logically have access to. Normally, I could only do it once we were already in the story, but because we were stuck in the choice phase, I figured I had time. We could look at that information before we chose our tropes. We could start forming a plan.

The problem was that I didn't know how to improvise it when I wasn't in character yet. Luckily, it wasn't that difficult.

I just had to throw together some words, and it activated.

"My character collected everything he could about the last expedition to The Sunken Cradle," I said, "and he collected it all right here."

I really didn't expect that to work.

I also didn't expect the pain.

"No further!" I screamed, and I kept screaming it two or three more times. I couldn't tell. It was like someone else was in control of my mouth.

I somehow managed to fall underneath the table of the booth we were in, my eyes pinched shut, my limbs unwilling to move.

"Riley!" Anna screamed.

Moments later, Cassie was crouched down on the floor next to me, writhing in the same pain. She was using her Anguish trope to share what I was going through.

But the word pain wasn't quite correct. It was something deeper, more terrifying. It was visceral fear, and I had no idea what had caused it.

I stayed down there underneath the table as my friends moved to help me. Cassie accidentally kicked me in the face when she fell down after me, but I assume she felt that too, since she was sharing my pain. She might have even felt it worse because she had such low Grit.

I breathed in and breathed out. Anna was talking to me. Camden was, too. Antoine was silent.

After I finally caught my breath, the pain and fear subsided, and I did my best to help Cassie up from under the table as I crawled up too.

I looked at the others.

And suddenly I started to laugh uncontrollably, like sometimes happened when you had an adrenaline rush after a long depressive episode. The normalcy of the room read as joy to my brain because something had absolutely drained all happiness from me. It was something I struggled to describe, remember, or understand.

"What happened?" Camden asked.

"He asked too much of that trope," Antoine said. "That has to be it. As soon as he activated that Props Department Requisition trope, he went under."

How was I supposed to argue? I didn't know what was going on, but I felt something. I felt lonely and scared and lost, and so happy to be back with my friends, as if I'd been away from them for a long time.

"There's something down in the cradle," Cassie said. "Something very sad, something tormented, and it wants us to come to it."

Her eyes were filled with tears, and while I didn't exactly get that same psychic revelation, despite having my background trope equipped, I couldn't disagree with her. There was something in the cradle, and it did want us to come, but I couldn't say what it was or why.

"Wow," I said. "That brought me back to the days of the Unknowable Host."

"That bad, huh?" Camden asked.

I nodded. It wasn't just that it was bad. It felt similar. In one of our earlier storylines, we had been manipulated into finding secret lore and wandering into the resting place of a Lovecraftian deity. It was dead, but for a creature of that magnitude, death wasn't instant, and parts of it, parts that exuded a terrible psychic evil energy, were still alive even as the rest of it decayed, sending out old signals aimlessly, granting wishes and causing terror.

It felt similar. Not the same, but definitely the same ballpark.

"You know what," I said, "maybe we should try to blow up the tunnel again."

And then I forced a laugh, and the others politely followed me, except for Cassie, who stared blankly, tears still flowing.

It took me a while to look at the seat next to me, where I saw a pile of journals, maps, photographs, an eight-millimeter camcorder from the eighties, and some videotapes.

It looked like my Props Department Requisition had been fulfilled.

As I leafed through the stack and put it up on the table so the others could see it, I realized that my handwriting was all over it, as if I had taken notes right on top of other people's records, their journal entries, a cartographer's rough drafts.

My character must have collected all of this and not been too concerned about preserving it, but there was something else weird about these writings. The further along they went in time, the closer they got to the point that would have been the climax of the original Sunken Cradle film, the handwriting became sloppier, tenser. The sentences became shorter, if they were written at all.

That was to be expected. Whatever characters were writing these notes would have gotten very stressed the further they went into the journey and the closer they came to whatever eldritch monster lay beneath the ground. You could measure how close they were to it by the way they wrote.

But that itself wasn't the weird part.

The weird part was that my writing, or at least the writing that looked like mine, was the exact same way. It appeared my character had made that same journey, slowly going mad as he got closer to the end.

I had to wonder how the narrative would explain that, but first, I would have really liked an explanation for why my hands wouldn't stop shaking.