When we got back, the others were very excited to see Ramona, which was a bit of a surprise because most people kept a distance from her.
It was clear that they hadn't gone on The Final Straw, because that storyline lasted multiple days, whereas ours had lasted less than one.
Anna was in tears and embraced her.
“We thought we lost you,” she said. “You just disappeared.”
Anna was using her Are you okay in there? trope. I didn’t even have to see it on the red wallpaper; it was obvious from how stressed she looked.
“I saw that you were dead, and I thought that you had somehow triggered an Omen. We didn’t know what had happened.”
Ramona was a little uncomfortable with the hug, but had the good sense to hug back. She eventually managed to escape.
“It was a whole ordeal,” she said.
As we filed in, we quickly explained what had happened, to the best of our understanding, about how we had been intercepted by an enemy who could take over certain types of storylines.
That was interesting to everyone, though not quite as interesting as the fact that I got married, which apparently was hilarious.
I tried to ignore that.
There was excited chatter about the storyline and about having met with a narrator. Logan and Antoine were both quite willing to drop all talk of Homibridal and preferred to discuss Lucky’s offer.
Of course they wouldn’t want to talk about this storyline; they had both died pretty unceremoniously. Not that I blamed them. I was saved by the love of a bad woman.
“I just have to see this,” Isaac said. “Can we watch it?”
Oh yes, my role as the team's DVD player. Didn’t pay well, but had good job security.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Am I correct in understanding that there are no groceries in the house?”
“No,” he said. “We spent all day looking for Ramona.”
“Great,” I said. I was starving. The wedding cake and champagne weren’t enough to keep me full.
I made my way further into the loft. We had kind of been brought to a halt at the entrance by all the people who cared about us, those inconsiderate jerks.
I didn’t care about food, not at that moment. I just wanted to get away from all the talk of my failed marriage. As I made my way toward the living room, I noticed that Camden had continued to research Eternal Savers Club
after they were returned to the loft.As strange as it was, I was eager to get into another storyline. Even though we had managed to survive and even look cool in the finale, I felt embarrassed. I needed a capital V victory to make me feel like we had any hope of success.
Regardless of how things had turned out, we had fallen into a trap. We hadn’t been cautious enough when activating the Omen for Ida Rae, and as a result, we ended up in the wrong storyline. I had allowed myself to get distracted.
One thing was certain: we would want to avoid bringing extra players to a location where we were going to activate an Omen. I didn’t know if that was a good rule of thumb, but if we had not brought the others with us on their way to The Final Straw, we would have ended up in the right storyline.
And I wouldn’t have this stupid thought pattern in my brain, wondering if I could fix Daphne Sinclair. I knew I couldn’t, but the heart is the stupidest organ.
I locked eyes with Ramona as everyone was filing in, and a line for the bathroom formed. We only had one, after all.
I made my way up to the roof, and she followed.
We walked in silence, and we didn’t say much when we got there, not for a while. I didn’t know how to navigate romantic relationships. I hadn’t watched enough rom-coms, apparently. But it was nice to be able to be silent and it not be seen as a bad thing.
Eventually, I did have something to say.
“I’m sorry for that whole thing,” I said.
“Last I checked, it wasn’t your fault,” she answered, sitting next to me in one of the lounge chairs that only hours ago had been on top of the casino, or at least one that looked like it.
“Sure felt like it was. When the trope broke, I suddenly felt like a total idiot,” I said, pausing as someone down on the street below screamed out in joy. Night had fallen, and the bars on the downtown streets were filled.
“You know, I can actually relate to that,” she said. “I look back on my whole life, and I can see these obvious points where things were scripted. I mean, I had guys and girls constantly asking me out, even when I wasn’t even trying. I have to imagine that Silas or even Carousel was doing that just to create drama.”
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I laughed.
“Now you’re just bragging,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I was a hot mess in my early twenties. My parents were dead, and I was raising my sister, who apparently had the consciousness of an adult woman but didn’t tell me about it because the script told her not to. And yet, all these people seemed very interested in me.”
“I can’t relate,” I said. “Or at least I couldn’t until I met Daphne.”
I still had false memories of falling in love with that homicidal maniac.
“I went to prom with a guy named Billy Hannigan,” Ramona said. “I think that was his last name, at least, and we drank the spiked punch, and he threw up all over my dress. To this day, I have to wonder, was that scripted or did he just do that?”
“Did he lose the job right after that?” I asked.
She shrugged and nodded her head. “You know what? He did. His family moved away just after that, but I thought it was because he graduated,” she said.
“No. When he struck out with you, he and his family got put in the refrigerator, or wherever NPCs go whenever they’re out of work,” I said.
I probably shouldn’t have made that joke.
“From the sound of it, we might be able to find out soon,” Ramona said. “What exactly did the narrator say?”
I looked over at her. It hadn’t occurred to me, but Ramona might have a unique motivation to join Lucky’s throughline. I had assumed that she wouldn’t want anything to do with any of the narrators other than Silas, but if the safe haven for free-range NPCs was real, there might be someone waiting there for her.
“So, you wanna run the throughline?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. “Every decision is the wrong decision, but I wouldn’t mind choosing that one.” She was afraid to seem too gung-ho. Her sister Phoebe was somewhere in Carousel, surely.
“You think we might find her there?” I asked.
“I can hope,” she said.
“Well, I know that Antoine’s going to be on board because he wants the Adventurer advanced archetype, and that probably means Kimberly will be too,” I said.
“If the three of you say you want to try it, I’m sure the others will agree too,” she said.
“Other than Isaac, of course,” I said. “He’ll never agree.”
“He doesn’t count,” she said.
No, somehow he didn’t. He was always going to say no; that way, if things went wrong, he could say, “I told you so.”
“Well,” Ramona said after a lull in the conversation, “we can at least be sure that no one is scripting our relationship.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked, laughing.
“Nothing,” she said. “Back then, when someone wanted to date me, it was like everything was falling into place. My apartment building got condemned, and then the guy who liked me at work said he had a whole house to himself, and that there was even room for Phoebe.”
“That’s so sweet,” I said. “And if you lived with him, you’d basically have no choice but to fall in love.”
“Exactly. I think that was his plan. It didn’t pan out. Though looking back on it, Phoebe was actually okay with it. I guess that makes sense if she was just scripted. But then, she was pretty young then.”
That must have hurt, to wonder how much of her relationship with her sister was real.
“Or Phoebe was just meta-aware enough to know that you would be safe in that house,” I said.
“Or that,” Ramona said. “I sure would like to be able to ask her about it.”
I nodded. Then there was another moment of silence. Ramona looked at me, and I was supposed to do something or say something. I could tell, but I didn’t know what. Surely she wasn’t after a kiss.
“You’re right. You can be certain that our relationship isn’t scripted,” I said, “because if it were, whoever’s writing it must not know a thing about romance.”
She laughed and leaned over and kissed me.
We didn’t get to stay alone up on the roof for long because Isaac came up to do some of his favorite hobby, which was Omen fishing.
He took his rod, which had a trope that attracted its lure toward the nearest Omen, stuck it over the side of the building, and observed all of the Omens down on the street.
He had a notebook where he kept a log, so at the very least, he was being productive. I could even hear him talking to himself as he was practicing using his scouting trope, which required him to point out how odd something was in order to gain information about the storyline and the Omen itself.
I looked over at Ramona, gave her a devilish grin, and then lifted my hands to summon rain.
I got up from my chair and walked over next to Isaac.
The storm clouds were gradually coming in. This wasn’t going to be a monsoon. Something I was learning was that the rain I summoned fit the scene it was in, which told me that it was going to take some narrative manipulation to get different types of rain, whether it be soft, romantic stuff or a storm of the century.
“Let’s see what the Omens do when it rains,” I said.
Isaac nodded. I could see him staring at my trope on the red wallpaper.
“Do you think they might all go away?” he asked.
“I’m thinking they might,” I said. “It’s rained before, and the Omens typically go away, or at least new ones come out.”
We excitedly waited as the storm rolled in. It wasn’t so much rain as it was a heavy mist.
Ramona joined us as we watched.
“Zombie’s back,” Isaac said, looking over to the man who was in the final stages of zombification. It was clear he was a fast zombie. If I ever had a choice, I would never enter a storyline like that.
Within a few minutes, the NPCs had received new instructions and were making their way home. Those who stayed were fixtures.
“Some of the Omens are leaving,” Isaac said.
It was true. Even the zombie was shambling away. You would think it wouldn’t mind the rain, but it wasn’t just that the characters didn’t like the weather; it was that they were scripted to do different things when it rained.
Eventually, most of the Omens that could walk had disappeared.
“That’s promising,” Ramona said, as the lure on the fishing pole stopped jerking back and forth like it normally did. “Are they all gone?”
I quickly handed my hysteric scouting trope to her. She would be able to use it.
At first, the shock of suddenly being anxious almost took her off her feet, but then she stared down at the road and confirmed that most of the Omens were gone.
“So we could use that to clear Omens from places that normally are too dangerous to enter," she said as the rain started to fall gently.
“I don’t know,” Isaac said. “That doesn’t look like a normal sewer backing up.”
He was looking over at a sewer grate, which had some sort of black liquid, or something covered in black liquid, at least, reaching up through it.
That comment must have given him information about that Omen.
“So we lose the normal Omens, and we gain specific rain Omens,” I said. “But for a few minutes there—"
“There were almost no Omens at all,” Ramona said.
I lifted my hands to the sky again to clear away the rain. I didn’t actually need to do that; I could just think about it, but I couldn’t help myself. Lifting my hands just felt right.
Ramona and I walked downstairs, leaving Isaac to his hobby.
I was so unsure of my relationship with Ramona. It just seemed like a liability in a place like Carousel. It seemed pretty clear that Daphne would not have interrupted our storyline if it wasn’t for our relationship, or at least our public display of awkwardness.
But I felt a strange optimism. I had loved that serial killer, and everything turned out okay. Wherever my relationship with Ramona went, it couldn’t be worse than that, right?