I awoke in the darkness.

  In one hand, I held the plastic, fake version of the silver necklace that Clara had been wearing. In the other, I held a flashlight—one of the ones we had brought into the crypt.

  As I clicked the light on and looked around, I realized there was no crypt anymore.

  I was underground, and I could hear the earth around me shifting. I quickly crawled toward the exit.

  No sooner had I pulled myself out of the hole and into the hallway of the underground passages than I heard the earth collapse behind me.

  I found my way out of the tunnels to the large room where the caged werewolves had been, but they were gone. Logan and Avery had been cured and taken away.

  I bounded up the steps and found myself in a version of the Manor house I hadn’t seen before—a version converted into a museum. None of the artifacts or exhibits had been placed yet. All I saw were empty glass display cases and placards with nothing on them.

  Carousel really did reuse everything.

  I left the Manor house behind and ran to the field where I had last seen Kimberly—the place she had been returned to after surviving the secret lore sequence. It had been a surreal experience to observe from my view in the theater.

  Kimberly had been ushered through a bizarre maze of scenes from Clara Woolsey’s life.

  Throughout her journey, a werewolf lurked just out of sight, but it never approached her. I couldn’t discern its purpose—perhaps a deadly obstacle, but it merely observed.

  Kimberly had made it through, learning the truth about the werewolf curse.

  The words of the faceless person in the theater echoed in my mind: how could we have found secret lore when we hadn’t spoken to the maid at the tavern?

  What did that even mean? What tavern? What maid?

  I dropped this train of thought as I found Kimberly kneeling in the field, tears streaming down her face. Taking a chance, I approached and hugged her. She hugged me back. After a moment, she asked something strange.

  Wiping her tears, she looked at me and asked, “Do you think you do so well here in Carousel because it offers something that real life didn't?”

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere.

  “I don’t know,” I said, unsure. I wasn’t finished sorting out those feelings myself.

  She looked at me strangely and then said, “Never mind.”

  I began pacing, watching the blue lights of our chemical traps go out around us.

  “We did it,” I said after contemplating her words.

  She nodded. “We did it.”

  I tried to strike up a conversation about the ending—how we’d handled things when Serena was killed by Antoine—but the conversation was cut short when Antoine himself appeared in the distance.

  Something was different about him. I couldn’t pinpoint what, but his smile and the joy on his face made it clear something had changed.

  He had an aspect now—he was a Health Nut. It came with a new trope already equipped: The Mountain as a Metaphor. It would be an asset, though I couldn’t help but wish I’d seen his other aspect trope choices.

  He and Kimberly embraced and whispered to each other while I stood awkwardly nearby.

  The next to appear was Andrew. As he approached, I extended my hand.

  “Good work, doctor,” I said.

  “Yes, and you too,” he replied.

  All our planning had paid off. We’d made mistakes, but we’d overcome them.

  I was certain we’d given Carousel enough footage to construct a good film.

  Andrew and I talked about the silver purification plan—how well we executed it and what adjustments we might have made had we better predicted how the weapon interacted with the werewolf curse.

  It was idle chit-chat for us.

  Finally, the people we had come there for—Logan and Avery—arrived, wearing the clothes they must have been lured into the monster’s lair in.

  Though I had technically met them while they were caged, it was clear that wasn’t really them. They’d been exhausted and said very little, both On-Screen and Off-Screen.

  Logan looked like he was heading to a casual beach wedding—tall, tan, with dirty blonde hair just long enough to brush off his forehead. He might have been in his mid-thirties, which led me to believe he had been de-aged to play Kirst’s son. He approached Andrew with a half-hug and several pats on the back.

  “Did you understand what I was saying?” Andrew asked hurriedly. “Was it you in the cage? You didn’t respond.”

  “I was in there,” Logan said, “but the script was in control.”

  “So you heard about…” Andrew began.

  “I heard everything,” Logan said. “Lila came to apologize during the storyline. Gave us a whole speech.”

  “She does seem genuinely remorseful,” Andrew said.

  “Well, it would be best for her to seem that way, given our circumstances,” Logan replied with a half-smile.

  Avery, still shaken from the whole being-dead thing, smiled despite the tears in her eyes. She wore an oversized red sweater that wrapped around her fashionably, her red hair held back with a headband.

  She was an Eye Candy with the Beauty aspect and her aspect choice made sense at a glance. She put a lot into her presentation.

  Kimberly greeted her, and they talked for a while. Antoine introduced himself, putting his people skills to good use. I stood by, watching as our group of survivors grew a little larger.

  Time passed. We waited.

  “That makes you the Film Buff,” Logan said after a lull in the conversation.

  “That’s me,” I replied, shaking his hand.

  “So you’re the one who knows what’s going on, huh?” he asked.

  I shrugged. “Nah, that's somebody else.”

  He laughed—a sardonic laugh, not joyous.

  “I look forward to stumbling through hell with you,” he said.

  “You as well,” I replied, but my response was cut off as Lila appeared.

  She didn’t say anything at first, and eventually, someone noticed her standing at a distance, afraid to approach. Her porcelain face was red with tears.

  The next part? Antoine, Kimberly, and I didn’t listen. This was a group moment for them.

  I couldn't hear what they were saying, but there wasn’t anger—at least not from Logan. Avery, however, did seem to have some lingering resentment, which was more than understandable after having been lured into the jaws of the werewolves.

  Logan, though, didn’t seem to care. I couldn’t see it anyway. He acted like all she had done was spill milk on his pizza.

  Getting him and his friends killed? Don’t let it happen again.

  An interesting attitude.

  When their little group came back over to us, I heard him saying, “Next time you revive me, wait until the game is almost over.”

  He had that little bit of darkness in him that made this place survivable. Dina had the same thing.

  So did I, I supposed.

  Finally, Michael arrived. He and Logan shared a big bear hug, complete with more of those slapping pats on the back. I didn’t get where that was coming from, but it must have been their group’s thing.

  Good for them—their group was back together. Ours was still fractured, but not for long.

  What happened next was no surprise. There was a small crack in the air, and suddenly, a mechanical man appeared, informing us that we had won a ticket.

  Oh boy, had we won tickets.

  Most of the time, I waited for others to go first, but I just had to know whether everything we had risked was worth it.

  We had been down to one viable player in this storyline. If Antoine hadn’t regained his sense, if our plans hadn't worked, if Kimberly had died before she could get to the end, that would have been it—we would all have been gone.

  I wondered if I would have been stuck in the theater, watching random camera angles for eternity.

  I slapped that red button on Silas’s front before anyone else.

  I got a handful—not as many tropes as I had anticipated, but not a small amount either. I got three.

  It wasn’t really the tropes I was after, though.

  It was the stat tickets because they would determine whether or not this whole “using rescues to grind levels when needed” thing was going to work.

  And it did.

  I got six stat tickets.

  Six.

  That was more than I had gotten when I was dragged along on The Grotesque—grossly under-leveled, at that. Of course, The Grotesque wasn’t exactly our best performance. It was a functional, clean victory—not designed to be fancy or to score high, but just to survive. Didn’t even really tell much of a story.

  Six stat tickets explained why all those former players had been willing to risk it all to exploit the rescue mechanic. Why they had spent months scouting out rescue opportunities where they might find an edge.

  It explained everything.

  Our average level was around 27, and this storyline’s level had to be in the mid-30s. Most of the vets would never do something like that unless they had no other option.

  We would have to do this over and over again, pressing our luck. Because when we got closer to level 40, things were going to slow down, and even running rescues would only get us a few stat tickets.

  But we would have to do it.

  We would have to keep pushing forward. And if the woman who stood behind me in the theater was correct, we would have to start doing more.

  We might even have to do Carousel’s Throughline.

  After all, the reward for that was supposed to be escape.

  The stat tickets and the tropes weren’t all I got. We all also got fresh Luggage Tags with higher weight capacities. We got a couple of coupons to restaurants around Carousel that were supposed to allow us to eat there without risk of danger—but I would have to consult the Atlas to make sure those were what they seemed to be.

  And finally, the biggest card in the lot:

  We got secret lore.

  I read through the secret lore ticket before I even looked at my tropes. I just had to try to find the pattern in what secret lore was, in hopes that we could uncover more of it. I also hoped to figure out why we needed it in the first place.

  The werewolf curse had been the result of a woman with Munchausen by proxy in a world where magical curses existed. She had used those spells on a child who was wearing some sort of magic amulet that combined them all.

  That was interesting. In fact, that could have been a storyline in and of itself. But instead, it ended up as secret lore. I would have to figure out why.

  After reading the secret lore card twice, I turned to my tropes.

  Essentially, this trope made it easier for me to accomplish tasks that might otherwise require proper planning and setup. Not a bad choice, but it would need to be a real time-saver for me to consider equipping it.

  This was one of the tropes my psychic grandmother background allowed me to equip. I wasn’t sure I would ever use it. In fact, it came across more as a joke.

  Either way, it was out of my wheelhouse.

  I could see myself using a trope like this. Being able to trust the darkness and use it as a shield could be a genuine lifesaver.

  I had to wonder, though, if its benefits could be ruined by using a flashlight.

  Apparently, the first wolf I killed was a guy named Callum. I was confident my self-defense claim would hold up in court. He must have been the one I skewered with my silver spoon-turned-knife—the only one I managed to kill with it.

  That was neat.

  I got to keep the knife. In fact, aside from a few silver bullets, that was the only silver we got to loot. Everything else was gone. Some silver and a few guns. Who could complain?

  Lila was next. She was ushered forward by her group.

  She got four stat tickets. Her low level, combined with her sacrifice for first blood and the huge buff she provided with Bad Luck Magnet, countered her very small amount of screen time.

  She had complained that she had a difficult time getting to the manor house, and this was her reward. The real benefit would be outside of a storyline.

  This exact trope would have allowed her to escape from Wolfie Antoine and successfully launch her death scream trope. It could have saved her.

  It was a solid trope. While it wasn’t fancy, it made things predictable—and that was always a good thing.

  That was interesting. Having another way to boost our rewards was always an asset, though I wasn’t sure if it would ever come into play.

  Andrew was next.

  He got six stats, just like me. He ended up being very important to the story, if only for his super scientist scenes and, from what I could tell, his clutch use of purification to snap Antoine out of it so he could save the day.

  I couldn’t complain. After all, we were basically always On-Screen together until the end. It made sense that we got the same amount of stat tickets.

  I didn't know enough about Savvy-based perks to be sure, but this sounded like a potentially broken trope. I was happy for him.

  He had used math to calculate how much of each ingredient we had used for our plans. It would be useful to get instant answers. That said, I wasn’t sure you’d ever use something like this unless you knew there was going to be science involved.

  I wasn’t sure what information a trope like this could have gotten Andrew in Stray Dawn, but in some storylines, it would probably be crucial.

  A good autopsy scene was always cool to watch, and whenever an archaeologist or anthropologist managed to uncover insights from bodies that had been dead for centuries, it was always fascinating—great content for a scene.

  Andrew had bagged many a werewolf in this story. This was his first.

  Kimberly got seven stat tickets.

  We had all contributed to the final story, but she won the "main character" competition and steered the story's narrative, and with that victory came the spoils.

  If she could keep up this momentum, she wasn’t going to plateau nearly as hard as the vets when we hit level 40. Apparently, at level 50, things slowed to such a crawl that you’d be lucky to get one stat ticket in six months of solid storylines.

  For now, we could celebrate. We could take one last squeeze of the lemon before leveling became a slog.

  This seems like a trope with some potential growing pains. Trying not to sound cringy was going to be a priority. If she could pull it off, that would be really useful.

  Kimberly obtained her first background, and it was a good one at that. The strength of backgrounds didn’t just come from being able to equip tropes you normally couldn’t—the real strength was in having a history you could leverage for the story. This background would be amazing.

  Being able to say you had survived a similar situation could be incredibly useful, especially when combined with something like Convenient Backstory. Kimberly was going to continue to be a powerhouse.

  A solid Final Girl trope for team cohesion. We wouldn't need Kimberly to be doing that job much longer, but it was good that she had something for when we needed her.

  I wasn’t sure how many wolves Kimberly had killed. The number had been high. After Serena was killed, it looked like Kimberly might have to fight through dozens more. Luckily, her improvisation—tying together all the little pieces of narrative surrounding Clara—did the job for her.

  And Clara Withers, née Woolsey.

  I wasn’t sure if what Kimberly had done counted as killing an enemy, but maybe you really do destroy an enemy when you make them your friend.

  IBECS didn’t seem to think that was enough.

  Antoine got six stat tickets for a phenomenal climactic final battle. It was really something to watch, though I spent most of the fight worrying about how he had ruined literally everything we had planned by coming back from the dark side.

  Still, it all worked out.

  I had seen a lot of things On-Screen that I hadn’t told the others. I had seen him hallucinating shortly after fleeing. If those scenes made it into the final cut—which I was starting to believe they would because of his role in the finale—I might talk about them. Otherwise, I wouldn’t bring them up.

  If I understood correctly, Antoine had agreed to come to Carousel all the way back when he was just a kid, 13 or 14. He had always been so ashamed of being tricked into coming to Carousel, and I always thought he was too hard on himself. After all, his brother had seemingly FaceTimed him.

  But being warned and asking to come anyway? That, I could see being different—though I didn’t blame him, and I didn’t think anyone would.

  He must have gotten this for slightly murdering Lila and Andrew. At first, it seemed more like a punishment or some sort of snide mockery, but the trope could be truly powerful if used correctly; we would have to think on it.

  One of the best tropes in the game. Antoine’s brother, Chris, had that trope, and it was what allowed me to break through possession in The Strings Attached storyline.

  It was so useful that I couldn’t imagine him ever going into a storyline without it again.

  Who knew that Athletes also catered to brain health?

  Now, that was a real trophy. Serena had been a big collar.

  ~-~

  Michael had been torn up about having dropped his subplot. That was why he was willing to sacrifice himself for Second Blood. Personally, I didn’t blame him much—the rules had been a little weird in that storyline. Frankly, he was there to be a big gun, and I wasn’t even sure what we’d lost with his subplot anyway.

  He sure blamed himself, though.

  He did well enough to earn four stat tickets. Being a blood sacrifice and putting on a great shooting display easily earned him that. Combined with his comparatively low level, it all made sense.

  Now, if he would just focus a little more on his character, he could be a real contender.

  A great sacrifice trope. Ideally, everyone on your team should have one.

  Of all of the various enemy tracking tropes, this was one of them.

  This was a really cool trope, actually, but it highlighted the flaw with most combat tropes, especially those of the Soldier or Bruiser archetype—they were so specific. If your enemy didn’t have something grenade-like, you just wasted a trope slot.

  What you really needed was some type of trope that would let you know what weapons your enemies had.

  That could make a soldier unstoppable in storylines that emphasized combat.

  All of these werewolf cards were so sad. Monster tickets were generally sad.

  Eventually, we were going to encounter a bunch of pure evil monsters. Those were usually reserved for the higher levels.

  After everyone had hit the red button, we noticed that Silas didn’t leave. Instead, he started to sing a little poem that only rhymed because of how strangely he delivered the lines. I had heard the poem when I got my aspect, and apparently, everyone else had too.

  The Cliff’s Notes version? There was no right aspect choice but you still needed to choose wisely.

  But who was this poem for?

  It was for Michael—our Soldier—who could only unlock his aspect after participating in a rescue. He had made himself an asset in this storyline, and now he was being rewarded for it.

  Best of all, I would actually get to read all the cards Silas gave him, unlike with Antoine.

  “Go ahead, big guy,” Logan said.

  Michael pressed the red button, and he got all the normal, expected stuff.

  He also got a ticket explaining all of the different Soldier aspects.

  Come to think of it, because rescues were required for a soldier to get their aspect, and rescues had been off the board for over a decade, Michael was the first soldier to get an aspect in quite a long time.

  Dear lord, all this information was so long. Whoever designed this system must have been really proud of it to force us to read all of this. I had to imagine there was a setting in the Carousel game menu where you could make all the text abridged.

  Like always, he got three aspect tropes to choose from, and whichever one he chose would set his aspect.

  By far, Emergency Transmission was likely the most impactful archetype ability I had ever seen. All I got was Death Watch. Kimberly got Center of Attention, and Antoine had something called Torchbearer.

  All of those were really cool, but Emergency Transmission was something else.

  If I understood it correctly, it allowed a soldier archetype player who was not yet participating in the storyline to be called in for a rescue during the storyline. This worked even if you hadn’t wiped out yet. If you realized you needed extra muscle, you could get it.

  Players would have to judge whether it made more sense to call in a Soldier or just wait for another team to rescue them after they died, but it was still an incredible option.

  The Atlas mentioned this ability was really hard to pull off because it required a strong narrative framework to work. But if you could manage it, it was like starting a rescue before the original storyline was even over.

  With an ability like that, it was no surprise there were so few soldiers.

  With a glance at Logan, Michael chose Commando. He was the only fighter on this team, really, so he needed to be the best.

  I wasn’t sure who noticed it first, but someone pointed out that the advanced archetype tracker had been updated—for all of us.

  Michael, Antoine, Kimberly, Andrew, and I had all gained at least one point in the Monster Hunter advanced archetype. Everyone but Antoine had gotten two points in it. Ironic, since his character was literally a monster hunter. Though, he hadn’t spent most of the story that way.

  To make up for it, he got the Afflicted advanced archetype with three points. The Afflicted dealt with transformative curses or diseases like Jekyll and Hyde, vampires, or, of course, werewolves. It was actually a fairly common advanced archetype for players back at Dyer’s Lodge, though they almost never used it.

  Andrew and I earned points for Mad Scientist, with Andrew getting two and me getting one.

  Finally, Kimberly and I each got a point in the hidden advanced archetype marked only as “???” on the red wallpaper.

  I had to wonder why we weren’t allowed to know the name of this advanced archetype.

  It was good nonetheless. I had six points in that AA. I would find out eventually.

  The mood was light and happy. We had won, and we would celebrate as winners. Even later, when our momentum slowed down, we’d have to remember these days and hold onto these feelings.

  “Lila, do you want to lead us home?” I asked.

  I didn’t know why I’d been so touchy about letting her open up Sound Stages to lead us around before, but I was tired, and I could sure use a break.

  She almost smiled when she accepted.

  Following her was like following the White Rabbit through the rabbit hole—an entirely unreal experience.

  We went through a back door of the manor and into one of the bedrooms. We climbed out the window.

  Suddenly, I realized we weren’t in the middle of nowhere anymore. The manor house had been moved to a neighborhood—an old, expensive one with large trees.

  And so it continued.

  We’d turn corners into completely different places, climbing through windows, doorways, alleys, and, in one instance, a subway (yes, subway) grate, as she folded space around us. Finally, we came out two blocks away from Kimberly’s loft.

  I took it from there.

  That was an experience—another one to add to the pile.

  And it was time to go find more of them.