Book Six, Chapter 61: Wedding Gifts

I wished that the rain would come back. Once the storyline was over, it would have been a pleasant, warm embrace.

Instead, I got sunshine. It was nighttime at the end of the story, but that didn’t mean anything to Carousel. We got daylight, if only to allow us to watch as Carousel drained the massive flooding around the casino as if by some miracle.

Within ten minutes, it would all be gone. Heck, within fifteen, it would probably be dry outside. Carousel had no limits within its domain that I knew of, other than the restrictions of storytelling.

I felt embarrassed, not because I didn’t figure out that Daphne was an enemy; there was no way I could have done that, not until after her Moxie had started to fall. By then, I already knew the truth.

I was not upset about the gameplay. That was not a failure. That was just one heck of a handicap.

I was upset about how it affected me, about her dumb little love trope. That didn’t feel fair. Being forced to love a serial killer was sickening beyond anything I had felt in Carousel up to that point.

I felt that old familiar call to just hide it somewhere deep inside and forget those emotions, and I would have too, except I was not the only one who knew about what had happened.

Kimberly was there, and she was trying to comfort me, and I couldn’t blame her. In my heightened emotional state, I had revealed my biggest secret.

It wasn’t her fault that I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I just wanted so much to see the look on Daphne’s face when she realized that her dumb backstory and motivations weren't able to shock me. That becoming one more dead groom for her was a waste of production value. She would understand that. Carousel certainly did.

Kimberly didn’t say anything, and neither did Andrew, though he pretended that he had never heard what I had said to Daphne, even though he was standing on the other side of the roof access door when I said it.

I could see Kimberly searching for the words, and she eventually found them. She took her hair down from a ponytail and said, “I can keep your secret.”

I thanked her, and then we walked toward the stairs as the sun shone down on us. Kimberly kept the axe, and we had the gun with the trope on it. We couldn’t afford to lose those.

Andrew walked over to Logan’s body and nudged it gently, waking him from the big sleep. He woke up cursing, realizing that he was waking from the dead.

“I think Daphne killed me,” he said. “Wait.” He paused for a moment and thought. “Who the hell is Daphne?”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

Honestly, and this may not be the best reflection of my character, at that moment, all I hoped was that Ramona didn’t remember anything. It was not like she hadn’t been paired up romantically with an NPC before, and I hadn’t minded that. So clearly, she couldn’t get mad at me for marrying another woman, right? That is how that worked. I was sure of it.

And as far as I could tell, it was more or less right, because when we found her on the ground floor, she was sitting on a couch near the elevator bank at the place where the casino transitioned into a hotel.

She laughed as we showed up.

“You didn’t actually send me that rose, did you?” she asked.

I was so relieved to see her smiling. “No,” I said. “I was too busy with wedding planning.”

She laughed again, a dazed, almost delirious laugh, like she had exhausted herself with it before we arrived.

“So Daphne wasn’t even real?” she said. “I feel so stupid. I must have looked like an idiot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “There is a lot of that going around.”

I reached toward her, and she grabbed my hand. I pulled her up from the couch and hugged her.

“So how was the wedding?” she asked.

“I can't complain,” I said. “I have nothing to compare it to.”

“Did she try to kill you afterward?” Ramona asked.

“I think so,” I said, “but unfortunately, I might have been too much of an Oblivious Bystander. Also, she was very frustrated that I kept trying to solve the mystery, so just remember that if you ever plot a murder spree.”

Ramona nodded her head. “I'll keep that in mind.”

She put her fingers through my hair to show that, despite all previous experience, my hair had not grown back at the end of the storyline. Carousel was teasing me. Maybe the shaggy hair was hurting ticket sales. I didn’t know.

At least I had my hoodie back.

Bobby wandered over not long after we got down to the first floor. He hadn’t died far from there.

Antoine was the last to arrive, and he was shivering as he did it.

“Who put me in the refrigerator?” he called out when we were in sight.

We were all laughing again, and I was glad for it. We joked back and forth, and our spirits were surprisingly high.

We had gotten to the end of the movie with three players still alive. Had Daphne not gotten sudden opposition from her longtime punching bags, things could have ended differently. But not that different. Kimberly was prepared to chop her to pieces.

The blackmailers were probably the only reason she was allowed such a powerful mind whammy trope to begin with. Without them, she would have mowed through us in an afternoon.

As we waited around for Silas, the mechanical showman, to arrive, I decided to go ahead and watch the movie. It was a black comedy starring Daphne as the titular Homibride. It wasn't bad, but I did get a lot less screen time than I expected to. In fact, all of us did. Strangely enough, Kimberly probably got more screen time than I did because of her flashbacks to a bank robbery her character had experienced.

We were only there long enough to set up who we were in relation to each other so that the finale would make some sort of sense. I sped through it so that I could see the blackmailers’ parts, which were greatly expanded from what they were supposed to be. I was certain of it.

We gave up on sticking around inside the casino and walked outside to a parking lot that was not only free from flooding but that had cars and NPCs arriving en masse to return to their posts.

That was when Silas arrived, his red cabinet fitting in surprisingly well with the casino’s aesthetic right under the carport.

Someone had kissed the glass on the front of his cabinet while wearing red lipstick. A final kiss goodbye, perhaps.

We all noticed, but we had the giggles something awful at that moment, so we didn’t discuss it seriously.

“So far, no more players are showing up,” Logan said. “So maybe it was just Ramona that got brought in.”

It would seem that she had to be brought in, as Daphne had used her to latch on to our party as we activated the Omen for Ida Rae, which was now long gone, having blown away in the storm.

That was really a shame, because it would have made a cool weapon in the finale. Stabbing someone with a weather vane would be a unique kill. A beach umbrella was a good substitute.

“Congratulations, you won a ticket,” Silas repeated once again.

I didn’t know what to expect. The truth was, based on what little I had seen of the final film, even if we had played perfectly, there was not really a lot of a performance to base the rewards on. Sure, we kicked butt in the finale, but up until then, we were played for fools and did a really good job of it.

I pressed the big red button first. I got one stat ticket, one trope, and one enemy collector ticket. I wasn’t going to complain.

I didn’t know if this was supposed to be a joke. Sometimes Carousel did punish us with the tropes that it chose, or at the very least mocked us. It was true that rain had lots of different narrative uses, but I wondered if I could ever really use up a trope slot just to change the weather. I had hoped to get a trope to prevent falling victim to mind control shenanigans again, but that was asking too much, apparently.

As a bit of a goof, I actually equipped the trope right after I received it, and sure enough, within a few minutes after willing rain into existence, a crack of thunder could be heard in the distance, and the bright sun started to fade. I quickly canceled the plans for rain, and the sun returned.

For as silly as it sounded, I had never felt more powerful than I did using that trope. I felt like Storm from the X-Men.

Everyone else was a little nervous when the storm returned, until I started laughing and they saw my trope on the red wallpaper. Gotta enjoy the little things.

Naturally, even though I had killed three of the blackmailers, I only got one of their collector tickets.

I had a feeling that in future runs of this storyline, the tug-of-war between Daphne and Emmett would be a bit fairer. Carousel was rebalancing old power structures and storylines, giving more agency to enemies, something that Daphne herself had enjoyed for a long time, it appeared. His collector card, it seemed, was outdated. He wasn't a mere blackmailer in over his head any longer.

We would have to be ready in the future, knowing that we might have a competitor in every storyline now, someone who was not simply bound to the script but was able to fight back on their own terms.

That was just what we needed. Things were starting to get a little too easy.

Sarcasm aside, anxiety boiled in my stomach with every breath. Giving more agency to the bad guys couldn’t be a good thing, could it?

~

Kimberly got a stat ticket, a trope, and a monster collector ticket, just like me.

This trope may very well have made the entire fiasco with Daphne Sinclair worth it. If it was as powerful as the text seemed to indicate, it wouldn’t only have helped against the meta mind washing of Homibridal, but it could temporarily help beat so many other things.

I was absolutely jealous after I saw it, but I tried not to make it too obvious.

Sure, Kimberly did knock Daphne off the roof, but I had Incapacitated her with the gun. Whatever the case, I was glad I had Kimberly there. Without her, the plan wouldn’t have worked.

~

Antoine didn’t get a monster collector ticket because he didn’t kill anyone, but he did get a stat ticket and a trope. He was First Blood, after all, and in Carousel, you got credit for that.

Gut Instinct was one of the most powerful Athlete abilities. Antoine’s brother Chris had it, and from what I understood, he brought it into every storyline. While it didn’t give you perfect insight into the dangers around you, sometimes the process of elimination and paying attention to when the trope triggered would do the trick, regardless.

Antoine smiled when he read it and showed it around.

~

Logan got the worst of everything. He didn’t get a stat ticket because his death was neither First Blood nor Second Blood, nor was it necessary at all. From what I could tell, he hardly got any screen time until his body showed up in the finale.

It would honestly be hard to tell he was even a player from the film alone.

He did get a trope, which I assumed had something to do with something he had said, but he didn’t say it to me, so I didn’t know.

~

Ramona got two stat tickets and a trope. She was very underleveled for the storyline and, by all accounts, probably should have gotten more stat tickets if only her character had been more integrated into the story.

The truth was, she had one good scene, which was her last, where she was practically begging for Daphne to come to her senses and cancel the wedding. There was a palpable tension as everyone watching knew that Ramona was dooming herself.

The fact that she ended up being Second Blood because we found her body before Logan’s sealed the deal.

Scenes like that made me understand why Daphne was a horror protagonist. She was incredibly scary when her mask broke, and I hadn’t even seen that happen properly because, by the time I learned the truth, she had already given up on her secrets.

I understood why Ramona got this trope, and I could see why it was useful, but I couldn’t help but feel shame that I didn’t manage to help guide Ramona toward a more meaningful character arc. Watching her be the only person reacting to the situation with proper alarm and then getting punished for it was difficult for me.

I would have to do better in the future, whether I was getting married that day or not.

~

Bobby didn’t get any stat tickets, and he didn’t get any kills. In fact, he didn’t get anything at all other than a handful of coins.

Truthfully, he was set up to get some things done, but he never quite got there. After sacrificing himself to be a quick and anticlimactic kill by a minor antagonist that only took a few moments On-Screen, he basically sank all of his potential.

I also got the feeling that Jules had led him down a path to keep him safe rather than help him shine. I didn’t blame her for that. In a story where you cannot even comprehend the presence of the enemy, trying to stand out might not be the way to go, especially for a Wallflower.

Still, he did act embarrassed about it. I wasn’t sure he deserved that.

Andrew really impressed.

Apparently, not only did he get two stat tickets, he got two tropes, one of which was a rescue ticket compatible with Antoine’s latest rescue trope, but he also got a kill on a blackmailer that I didn’t even know existed.

I knew he was going to get rewarded. The way he pulled off those autopsies, those were great scenes. We learned everything we needed to know from them, except, of course, that there was a killer amongst us.

This was a common trope in movies with autopsies, but it was usually played for laughs. It made sense that it would mark a medical examiner as having a particularly strong stomach and mind, though eating on the job didn’t fit Andrew’s personality so well.

He only did autopsies in kitchens when he had no other choice.

I was skeptical that any of us had done enough to earn a rescue trope. Still, there might have been other factors involved, because it was quite a coincidence that Andrew’s new rescue was explicitly compatible with the one Antoine had just received in the Sunken Cradle.

Even with small stat gains and a bit of a demoralizing effect over the party, this storyline did have some good rewards.

So, he killed an arsonist, electrocuted her during a blackout using clever improvisation, all the while being poisoned and on the edge of death.

He didn’t even tell us that part. I had to watch it in the movie. I was pretty sure that Carousel included footage of Yvette, who was apparently a maid that I had actually seen but didn’t identify as an enemy, just so that it could also include her death, which ended up being pretty cinematic.

It had to be pretty cinematic if Carousel chose it over the lye-bag-in-the-rain kill for rewards, though the death of the cook might not have been a full kill, seeing as her initial survival was more of a running meme in the story after Daphne almost drowned her, and then Kimberly and I dropped her off a building.

Whatever the case, good for him.

As we started to walk back toward Kimberley’s loft, it finally occurred to me that I hadn’t even thought about our entire purpose for going to the casino in quite a while. When we got back, we would have to discuss whether we would join Lucky’s throughline. It felt so weird calling him Lucky.

Carousel knew that we had to make that choice, because it had even put his throughline on the red wallpaper with zero percent progress.

The walk back was uneventful. All the evidence of the dinosaur ghost massacre was gone. Omens were back out roaming the streets in their normal way.

I took one look back at the casino when it was almost out of sight, and in the distance, at a tree line that would lead toward the riverlands and the canyons beyond, I could see someone staring at us. She was wearing a white dress.

Luckily, I hadn’t given her the chance to wear a black one.