Arc II, Chapter 47: Reply the Departed, Classic

Antoine laid back on the overstuffed chair I had grown fond of in our time at the hilltop suite that had once been Jedediah Geist’s home. Every few moments, it looked like Antoine was about to get up and go somewhere else, but he didn’t.

We sat and had the same conversation we had been having ever since the second Tutorial storyline. It was going nowhere.

“That’s it,” Antoine finally said as he started to get up, “I’m making myself something to eat. I can’t think about this anymore.”

At last, I had the chance to reclaim my seat.

Or so I thought.

“I ordered room service,” Bobby said, “They make pizza from scratch in the kitchens.”

Antoine plopped back down in the chair. “Thanks, man,” he said.

Bobby nodded.

And so I never did get to sit in that chair again.

What a pity.

~-~

We had gone over all of the information we had gathered a half dozen times.

After Lillian Geist made her appearance, we were more certain than ever that the news articles attached to the junior high history display at the Centennial were more than just story flavor. They were some kind of checklist.

Kimberly had written the information we had on the wall with a marker.

• Geist Buys Town (1922): Bartholomew Geist acquires bankrupt township with help of Silas Dyrkon, plans revival.
• Carousel Revival (1924): Geist seeks partners for agricultural, industrial, tourism boost, etc.
• Film Sets & Criticism (1934): Geist family's film set projects in      Carousel face local safety concerns.
• Asylum Project (1964): Cherise Geist’s asylum construction speculated as film set/tax write-off.
• Pageant Win (1972): Lillian Geist wins Miss Carousel, highlighting family’s local influence.
• Factory Fire (1984): No injuries in Geist factory blaze due to upstanding citizen; Bensen Geist plans innovative rebuild.
• Film Set Tragedy (1984): Fatal accident on Geist horror film set kills 4,      including Carlyle Geist.
• Manor Blaze (1984): Mysterious fire destroys Geist Manor during event; all family members present affected.

Some of these were just background, but we still knew nothing about the movie sets, the asylum, or the various fires except that they happened.

“When we tell Camden about this, we’re going to pretend we figured it out a lot sooner,” I said.

I pulled my hair as I looked over the info.

“Yeah, everyone else gets to die and we have to play a game,” Antoine said.

Kimberly was still writing things on the wall. She was convinced that if we just saw it all in front of us, we would stop going in circles.

She wrote about the events of The Ten Second Game and Cold Blooded Things. She wrote what the Paragons had told us and what Howard Halle had told me.

“What are we missing?” I said in frustration.

“Are we thinking that Madam Celia was talking about a player or something else?” Kimberly asked. I had told them everything I could remember about my chat with the Psychic.

“I think it's from the Throughline,” I said. “She was in character when she said it. If she was talking about a player, I don’t think she would have mentioned it at all. She had to be talking about a character in the story, someone who knew about storylines from the sound of it, someone who thought they could change the past by triggering one.”

Kimberly started to write things out on a numbered list.

1. Mystery Woman X changed the past (storyline?)

2. X also wants to save the people who died somehow at the original centennial, where the time capsule is from.

3. Celia tells X to contact Jed’s ghost.

4. X steals the murder weapon.

5. …

6. Continuity loop

7. Thirty years pass

8. Game starts

“What do we know?” Kimberly asked. “She does the ritual?”

“She had to have,” Antoine said. “It would be weird if she didn’t.”

“Which means the fireplace poker was brought here to the hotel,” Dina added. “Where Jed Geist died. But it’s not here now. We’ve torn the place apart looking.”

We had literally torn it apart. The NPCs had to fix it. Everything smelled like paint.

“Why is this mystery person just now showing up?” Cassie asked. “Is there a chance we met her already?”

“If we did, we didn’t talk to her,” Antoine said.

It was really late to introduce an important character. If this person was important, why are we just now hearing about her?

“Is it possible we just aren’t able to beat the Tutorial the first time around?” Bobby asked. “That’s something Carousel might do. The first storyline told us barely anything about the Throughline, and the second one was designed so that the Throughline information could be skipped, too.”

No one wanted that to be true, but it did make sense. Carousel’s first storylines were designed to be beatable without learning important plot points.

“I hate it when demonic interdimensional towns play tricks like that,” Isaac said. “It’s just not neighborly. Worse than that, it’s cheating. I’m starting to think all those protestors are right. We really should have a recall election. The leadership in this town is lacking.”

Would Carousel flat-out cheat? If the information Celia had was necessary for a player to learn, then newcomers couldn’t possibly get it because it cost money to do the reading. They would have to play through twice.

“Why cheat, though?” Kimberly asked. “New players are going to be so freaked out they have no chance of solving it. Why hide things like this?”

“It’s a fool who looks for reason in the mind of a cosmic entity,” Isaac said.

It felt like we were missing something essential.

“Alright,” I said. “We thought about it from a story perspective. How about a game perspective?”

“We did talk about that,” Isaac said. “Carousel cheats.”

Isaac could sometimes get caught in cycles of evangelizing cynicism.

“We technically cheated too,” Bobby said, “I doubt any players in the history of the game were set up as well as we were to win.”

We did have experience. We knew what we were getting into. Project Rewind had set us up to win and the Atlas often made questions of gameplay knowledge trivial.

Carousel knew what we had done. How would it respond?

“We did cheat,” I said. “We really did.” I turned to Bobby. “Tell me about the script again. In the second storyline, how did you know we were headed in the right direction?”

In the last storyline, Bobby had seen enough of the script to know that the path of the story diverged based on whether someone ended up going under Dr. Halle’s knife. He had made one of the hybrids capture Isaac in hopes that I would follow.

We hadn’t told anyone about Bobby’s involvement in Isaac’s injuries. That was a post-tutorial conversation.

“One script was titled The Fray,” Bobby said. The other was titled Possible True Ending. That second one only triggered if the hybrids captured someone, and since you and Isaac did, we were on the right path.”

The ability to see the script made Wallflowers incredibly useful. They might not help you in a fight, but even a glimpse at different alternate script titles could be helpful.

“I’m glad I could be of service,” Isaac said. It's a good thing I just happened to be attacked.”

Isaac had been sedated nearly the whole storyline, so he felt very little pain. Hopefully, he would forgive us in time.

“What about the first storyline?” I asked. “Did that one have a true ending that we missed?”

Bobby thought for a moment.

“I didn’t see anything like that,” he confessed. “That weird enemy Xander Black or whatever kept going off-script. I don’t even know what the story really was. There wasn’t much to it. The pages didn’t flip very often unless he did something unplanned, so it was a short storyline.”

That was my memory of the story, too. It was an uneven mess, not at all what Carousel appeared to have intended.

Or did it accomplish precisely what it was meant to?

“The original first storyline was called Reply the Departed,” I said. “The Ten Second Game, which we played, was a reboot of that with the same props and setting and a new enemy.”

“Punishment for Project Rewind,” Antoine said. “Carousel made a harder version of the story. Isn’t that what we decided?”

Was that really our punishment? Strander Black had made things scary and hectic for us, but most of that was when he broke character. Carousel didn’t seem to plan on most of that happening.

“This hotel room is the last known location of Jed Geist’s murder weapon, assuming our mystery woman performed the séance,” I said. “But the poker isn’t here. Anymore.”

“Anymore?” Antoine asked. “You mean…”

“Based on the dates of the printout for the rules, the Ten Second Game appeared to have taken place in the modern day,” I said. “But the fireplace poker—the murder weapon—obviously wouldn’t be here in the modern day.”

“Of course not,” Dina said. “The hotel was renovated. In fact, NPCs were literally renovating it the moment we showed up for the first time. The Stranger even pointed it out.”

Isaac sat up from his place on the rug. “You guys just realized something important, didn’t you? I was paying attention. Can you go over that again?”

“Carousel didn’t give us a rebooted version of the first storyline because it wanted to make things harder,” I said.

“It was trying to hide something inside the original storyline,” Bobby said.

“Yes,” I said. “The original storyline, Reply the Departed, must have had the information we need to find the murder weapon, but Carousel hid it under an extra layer because we cheated.”

“That would explain why the second storyline wasn’t changed to be harder,” Antoine said. “Carousel was just trying to throw us off the trail from the beginning. Something about Reply the Departed would have made this game too easy for someone who knew what to look for.”

Antoine was getting excited about our recent theory. We were starting to connect the dots where, before, there were too many to see a pattern. He almost jumped up out of his seat, but before he did, Kimberly ran to him and jumbled into his lap.

He sat there eating pizza until it was time to pack. We had to leave for a bit, and that meant Carousel was liable to reset the place. We didn’t know what would happen to our stuff if we left it there.

The thing was, even if we knew we were supposed to play through the original Reply the Departed storyline, we had little idea of how to do so. There was no Omen any longer. The board game itself had been cleared out when the suite was repaired after we played The Ten Second Game there.

“Where are we going exactly?” Cassie asked as we were moving out the door.

“Pawn shop,” Dina said.

“If you’d told me that, I would have dressed up,” Isaac said.

“The pawn shop sells items from storylines you recently did,” Kimberly explained.

Truthfully, I didn’t know if this was the right path to take. If we assumed the things we were shown were clues, then the pawn shop made sense as a place to start.

Getting there was far easier this time around. There were no Omens to navigate, just the occasional construction barrier from the repairs being made to town square.

Despite the enormous damage many of the buildings had taken, Happened A Pawn was completely untouched. The frogs hadn’t even broken a window.

That was reassuring.

We entered the store to find that most of the shelves were empty. No tropes were for sale, and no specialty items were available.

All the pawn shop carried were a few odds and ends. In the back of the store, under the “Games” section, was the singular item in the store that registered on the red wallpaper.

An old rectangular box read, “Reply the Departed: A game not for the faintly-hearted, to seek replies from the departed.”

“We might just be onto something,” I said.

I picked up the box. On the red wallpaper, it read, “Reply the Departed.”

It was an Omen. My, I don’t like it here…. The trope told me it was triggered by taking it to Jedediah Geist’s house and playing the game.

The difficulty was, “I’m getting goosebumps.” That was a low difficulty. Made sense for a first storyline.

“Don’t worry,” a voice boomed from across the room. It came from a tall, bald man wearing a Hawaiian shirt. It was Tar Bellows, level 50. He was a Paragon and owner of the pawn shop. “It’s hard to play without all the pieces.”

“Tell me about it,” I said.

Tar smiled.

“Now, you kids wouldn’t be thinking of taking that game into the old abandoned Geist place up on Overlook Hill Road, would you?”

Overlook Hill Road was the road the resort was on, the same resort that had renovated Jed Geist’s house into the suite we were staying in.

“Abandoned?” Antoine asked.

“Yeah,” Tar answered. “It’s been abandoned ever since Jed Geist was skewered with a kitchen knife. Never mind. I thought that’s where you all were going.”

The abandoned Jed Geist place. That was more like it. We paid for the board game and left. It just so happened to cost every penny we had.