The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Chapter Twenty-Nine: To the Attention of Janette Gill

The day the package arrived started like any other day at Camp Dyer.

It was the day after we had finished the Delta Epsilon Delta storyline. I awoke to someone tapping on the large glass window that dominated a whole wall in my room.

It was the NPC campers again. No surprise there. I lifted my head and glared at them and they giggled and ran away. Most of the players had gotten used to these kids, but I found it very difficult.

Camden had remained quiet ever since dying in the last storyline. He insisted that he was fine and he just needed some time.

“Everyone takes death differently,” Valerie had warned us. “Just give him his space.”

So, I did. I left him to sleep on his bunk as I went and got ready for the day.

Mornings at Dyer Lodge could be hectic if you were inside. Over fifty people were clamoring to get breakfast and even though the accommodations of the lodge were very good, the kitchen was not large enough for everyone to move about.

Many players had taken to the tradition of eating breakfast outside. The weather was always nice, after all. Camp Dyer had several campsites close to the lodge with large grills that could be used by the players. One of the players, Grace, a Detective archetype with plot armor 41, appeared to be in charge of the cookout.

A Detective is an advanced scholar archetype. For someone to get it they would start as a Scholar and eventually receive the upgraded archetype from Silas the Showman.

What she cooked varied wildly. Food was never something hard to find at Camp Dyer. The veteran players would make food runs into town. There was a large wholesale store somewhere in Carousel where players could stock up on anything that they needed with only a moderate risk of triggering a storyline.

Today’s brunch was fish. When she was cooking, I could see many of the same qualities that probably made her a good teammate in a storyline. She was very well organized, very well spoken, and incredibly bossy—I mean a good leader.

She had to be bossy; she was the leader of the group that was called the Bowlers because they had a habit of going to Carousel’s bowling alley and clearing it of storylines so that they could spend the day throwing back beers and bowling.

They were one of several teams that didn't have a Final Girl. The Bowlers consisted of three, yes, three Bruiser archetypes. A Bruiser is usually a heavy-set character with high Mettle and Grit but little Hustle or Savvy.

I'll repeat, Grace's team had three of them.

In a movie, a Bruiser is usually going to be a biker or prisoner or maybe the husky kid at high school who gets picked on. Additionally, they had an Outsider named Jesse. Jesse was a long-haired hippie type of guy. I got the impression that Jesse and Grace used to date, but now they were strictly platonic.

It’s kind of a funny story:

One of the Bruisers, Reggie, was Grace's brother. A few years after Grace and Jesse got lured to Carousel, Reggie started getting letters in the mail that he believed were from Grace. Those letters are what eventually drew him and his Bruiser buddies here.

How did Carousel trick him? It had "Grace" promise to make him some paprikash.

It’s funnier when Grace tells the story.

To make myself useful I decided to go help Lee with the fish. Dyer’s Lake was surprisingly bountiful for existing in a nightmarish reality. You could angle fish from it all day long.

Lee, a Wallflower, would spend hours every day out on the dock near the lodge doing nothing but fishing. Lee did not have a team that he belonged to. I think he used to though. I don't know what happened to them.

He was an old greybeard. Mid-sixties. He was the oldest player here, though he only had a plot armor of 33 and he was far from the most experienced, having only arrived a few years ago.

“Now the trick to fishing,” Lee would say, “Is that you got to reel up what you catch right to the water’s surface but don't pull it out until you make sure it's a fish.”

The first time we spoke to him Anna was with me. “What else could it be?” she had asked.

“Could be lots of things,” Lee said. “A cursed ring, a magical conch, anything. You just gotta cut the line if it's not a fish. Because if you reel it in you'll wish you hadn't.”

That morning, he had brought in a large haul. I arrived just in time to help him bring it back to Grace.

Antoine, his brother Chris, and a whole host of other players had started playing catch with a frisbee. As they played Antoine regaled them with tales of his football heroics the night before.

“I was running back,” he said. “I hadn't played football since high school, so I thought I'm about to get creamed by these guys, but then I realized these are all NPCs with one Mettle. So as soon as I get the ball I run right through them like they're not even there. As soon as I touch them, they fly back and land on their asses. Felt like I was Superman.”

Chris and the others were laughing at his story as he talked about scoring touchdowns and trying to run up the scoreboard before the scene ended.

“The announcer was losing his shit,” Antoine said. “It was like he'd never seen anything like it.”

I sat at a table where I could keep an eye on everything that was going on. I laughed along with Antoine as I tried to get to know the other players.

Anna was talking to Grace and a Femme Fatale named Roxie. A Femme Fatale is an advanced Eye Candy archetype that often plays a more morally gray role than a straightforward protagonist. Her teammate Lara, was a Psychic archetype, one of the archetypes that I was most eager to learn about but hadn't gotten the chance to.

They were talking about our performance in the Delta Epsilon Delta storyline.

“So who killed Ruck?” Grace asked.

I hadn't considered until that moment that there might be more than one version of the mystery. That explained why the Ranger Danger ticket hadn’t included Nathan’s name.

“Nathan,” Anna had answered. “We figured it out when he was the only one left alive. I knew why he had killed Ruck but I couldn't figure out why he was killing everyone else. Luckily, Riley figured it out.”

“Nathan? Isn't that Ruck’s friend?” Roxie had said. “Hadn't had him before.”

They also apparently hadn't been arrested when they played. Most of them never even made it to the football game.

“I've done it three times,” Grace had said. “Twice it was Evan. Once it was one of the football players.”

As they were talking I noticed that a commotion had broken out near the lodge. Something had sent all of the players away. They weren’t just walking, they were running.

“Oh my God,” Lara was exclaiming over and over again. She wasn't looking over in the direction of the lodge but was instead staring off into the distance. I recognized this look; she was looking at the red wallpaper. One of her Psychic tropes must have been activating.

I tried to get a closer look at what was causing the commotion.

As I moved toward the lodge, I got warnings from various players that I passed. They told me to get back. Whatever they had seen must have put them on edge.

I wasn't going to get too close.

As I got closer what I saw was a man holding a large cardboard box. The box was rectangular. It was sealed shut sloppily with more tape than would be necessary. At first, it wasn't the box that drew my attention.

The man was clearly in disarray. He was an NPC. He had nothing out of the ordinary in terms of plot armor, nor did I see that he had any enemy tropes. His name was Donald.

His hair was uncombed and the shirt he wore didn't fit. As he stood there, he would occasionally try to pull down the sleeves to cover up what appeared to be large circular bite marks on his arms. They might have been from a dog, I wasn’t sure.

Some wounds were fresh. Others were scabbed over. He also appeared to have one on his left ankle. Moreover, he was missing a finger on his left hand which had been hastily bandaged.

“I have a delivery for Janette Gill,” he said. He spoke loudly; his voice cracked as if he were afraid of something. His entire manner was devoid of sanity.

He appeared to be desperate in his search for Janette.

That was incredibly strange to me.

Janette had been one of the players that had arrived around the same time I had. She was a Hysteric archetype. She exemplified her archetype better than any person I had met. She had refused to leave the lodge at all. While my friends and I had been out playing through storylines at the demand of the veteran players, no one had been able to successfully pry her out of her room.

Her husband, Bobby, was a Wallflower archetype who had taken up venturing out into the town of Carousel with various teams. I hadn't had many run-ins with Bobby personally except for one where I got the impression that he thought that Silas the Showman had mistakenly given me his Film Buff archetype, but he may have been joking about that.

The idea that an NPC would be looking for Janette was very strange. She had not interacted with anyone. Up until this point the only time I had seen NPCs acknowledge players in any meaningful way had been whenever you were in a storyline with them. Whenever you had a scripted role to play the NPCs would speak to you as if you were an old friend or an employee or whatever relationship the script said you had.

Even at Camp Dyer, the NPCs didn't talk to us in any substantive way; they mostly just scurried about. There was this implication that we were counselors at the camp but none of the NPCs had had any scripted interactions with us in that regard because we were not in a storyline with them.

This man though was certain that he needed to speak to Janette Gill.

“Please, I have to give this to her. Have you seen her?”

The needle on the plot cycle was at Omen.

The veteran players were very attuned to ignoring NPCs who were acting strange so up until that moment no one had actually spoken to this guy nor had they gotten close enough to come anywhere near the package.

Donald stood on the back deck trying to get into the lodge but someone had had the foresight to lock the door. He knocked furiously at the back door almost to the point that I was afraid that he would try to break it down but he never did.

So far, omens had not gone out of their way to make it out to Camp Dyer. Not in this way at least. Camp Dyer had its own Omens related to the abandoned cabin, and of course, whatever it was Lee was dredging up from the lake along with our breakfast.

However, NPCs coming out of their way to try and trick you into a storyline? It had not happened here yet. That's why this location was chosen by the veteran players.

“Please, you don't understand,” Donald implored those few players who dared stay within 20 yards of the guy.

No one took the bait.

Behind me, I could hear some of the more experienced players start to form a plan.

“We need Arthur and Adaline,” Grace said. “Are they at the diner?”

Those around her nodded in agreement.

“Jesse,” she said looking at her Outsider teammate. “Go get them. Be quick.”

Jesse nodded his head and started running down a path toward the main road, being sure to give the lodge and the deranged NPC a wide berth.

“What's happening?” Antoine asked. No one answered him but he quickly surveyed the situation and realized what was going on. “Kimberly’s in there!”

“Don't worry,” Chris said. “He's not getting in. He's not going to break down the door.”

I turned back to the NPC.

He was staring down at the box in his hands. It almost looked like he was listening to it.

“I'm trying,” he said desperately.

He looked around hoping some player would be willing to take the box, but none offered. Eventually, he decided to just leave it. He propped the box up against the back door. And backed away, unsure of whether this was acceptable.

he tugged at his sleeves still trying to hide the bites on his arms.

He looked like he was about to cry.

“I'm sorry,” he said as he turned tail and started to run away from the lodge, leaving the box for us to take care of.

With the NPC gone, I felt a little braver about getting close. Some of the other players must have felt the same way because we started to close in to look more closely at the parcel.

As we got closer there was a succession of gasps as each of us was able to see something on the red wallpaper.

Grotesque.

Plot Armor: 43.

But I was able to see more because of my Trope Master ability. I could only see two of its tropes but I could tell that there were more. Whatever this thing was it must have had at least enough Savvy to counter my six and limit Trope Master.

Grotesque

Plot Armor: 43

TROPES

Progenitor

This creature has the ability to create duplicate offspring.

Jekyll and Hyde

This villain has multiple forms. Stone: Grit = 0, Living: Grit = 20.

As I got close I could see that there was something written on the box:

“To the Attention of Janette Gill.”

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