The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

"About like that?" Danny asked as I stared into his viewfinder.

"That’s great," I said, as I evaluated how well the camera was picking things up in the near-darkness. "And remember to position yourself between us and unestablished danger, but then cross over to the other side once it is established."

"It’ll be hard to forget that," he said. "I literally couldn’t if I tried."

He smiled playfully, but I could see a hint of fear there, too. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter how many times you died or whether you were going to remember it fully. The instinct to flee danger never really went away. Sometimes it took on a new meaning, though.

The underground had the perfect amount of light. It was bright enough that we could see the silhouette of most things, more or less, even if we couldn’t make out details, but it was dark enough that if we pretended to be blind, the audience would likely believe us.

I had not brought my No Stab in the Dark trope, but still, this level of lighting would buy us a few meaningful seconds any time we entered a dangerous spot, as Carousel would want to get that perfect shot of us being oblivious to danger.

I was used to that shot, and it brought me great comfort.

The tunnels weren’t what I expected as we ventured further in. They weren’t narrow or that complicated. If anything, it looked like an underground go-kart track, largely because there were vehicles designed to travel through the tunnels: little golf carts and one of those vehicles they use to haul luggage at airports.

That also meant no stairs. That had to be in the zombies’ favor. Everything was at an incline. Each room led to the next with a slight change in elevation. We would have to keep track of that for when the action started.

We didn’t get too far in before we went On-Screen.

While the tunnels were not exactly complicated, we still needed to find a place to rest, and much of the scouting fell to Isaac and me. Technically, I was the next one to be targeted. My effective Plot Armor was a bit below his, but I had a lot of experience navigating that situation. We had to risk ourselves for our teammates.

We were very careful as we traveled, never trying to look like we were separated, staying in small groups so Carousel could get shots of us as we went along.

I would be the first one through a door to a room that we were investigating, but the others weren’t far behind.

The first room we tried was some kind of break room, as far as I could tell. Maybe the maintenance staff would come in there because I found the remains of a game of cards that had been interrupted. Whether it was interrupted by the zombies or by the normal work schedule, I didn’t know. We saw cigarette butts and the like. Nothing major.

I walked over toward the back of the room, doing my best to remain oblivious in the darkness as I saw an enemy on the Red Wallpaper. It was one of the zombies, and from what I could tell, he was lying down in a sort of makeshift napping spot that the workers must have created back behind one of the shelves. I knew from their tropes that if I stayed quiet, he wouldn’t attack me, but I didn’t exactly know how quiet we needed to be.

So I walked by the shelving unit and felt Oblivious Bystander trigger, which meant the zombie must have heard me.

I quickly pressed one of the buttons on my headset, which sent a very quiet signal to the others outside the door. Just a beep.

"How are you doing in there, boss?" Antoine said over the radio in response to my signal.

"Place looks abandoned," I said. "No way out, though. I don’t like it. We have to keep looking."

We didn’t want to get boxed in.

As long as I was distracted by the conversation with Antoine, it was plausible that I couldn’t hear the zombie struggling to escape the sleeping bag that he was wrapped up in behind the shelves. It was believable that I didn’t see the movement because it was too dark.

I slowly moved toward the exit of the room and closed it behind me.

I was just another oblivious bystander who got lucky. The darkness made the trope viable even though I knew fully what the danger was. After all this time, I was well-practiced in using it defensively.

So we moved on.

"You know the tunnels, right?" I asked Camden.

"Sure do," he said. In fact, he had gotten a good look at a map of them, though none of the maps were complete, which was one of Carousel’s favorite tropes.

"What’s our ideal destination?" I asked.

"This might sound crazy," he said dryly, "but the safe room. Multiple entrances and exits to the outer hall, relatively secure, good line of sight. We could probably set up some noise traps to catch anybody coming toward us, and worst-case scenario, we can hide out in the safe and die of suffocation instead of whatever fate the military has planned for us."

I nodded. "So we should head there, right?"

"You would think so," he said, "but unfortunately, that whole area got shut down automatically due to what we thought was a terrorist incident."

"Gotta protect the money," Antoine said as he guided a very pliant zombie Kimberly along.

"That’s why they paid me the big bucks," Camden said. "If we’re going to get inside, we need to get to the auxiliary security room, but that’s on the other side of the facility."

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

"Of course it is," I said. "So we make do for the night. Then the safe room, then the broadcast room."

It was all we could do to set up some concrete goals for later without getting too greedy. Funnily enough, as we described it, we went Off-Screen. If I didn’t know better, Carousel was panning a camera around to illustrate our path to the audience. It could easily show them each room.

We would unlock a relatively safe fortress for later, but we would have to survive the night tonight. It was a bargain we were making with Carousel.

It was time to find out if it would accept.

We rounded the next bend, the floor tilting downward another half-degree. That was when I started hearing Ramona again.

Isaac and Cassie were each helping direct her forward. She wasn’t as easy to control as Kimberly, but she was doing her best. I could hear her whispering beneath the cloth hood covering her head. She wasn’t just repeating one phrase. She was talking, but there was a madness in her voice.

"Everything’s going to be okay," Isaac whispered to her, soothingly. "Everything. We’ll get out of this. You know, Dad used to pay off governments all the time, so that’s what we’ll do, right? Nobody accounts for a little corruption. We have the coin purse now. At the end of the day, money talks."

"Money talks," Ramona repeated from underneath her hood.

"Be quiet," Isaac said. "You’re going to get us caught."

Isaac veered left, leaving Ramona in Cassie’s hands, giving her a small private grin she didn’t return, as he went to check out a path toward a set of rooms that might be good for us to hunker down in for the night.

I had my tools for investigating the darkness, and he had his. His Hindsight Is 20/20 trope had really developed into a useful ability. He was starting to learn the ins and outs of how it worked, whereas before the trope was almost good for nothing except adding insult to injury. He had learned how to wield it.

He kept looking back at Ramona and Cassie, doing his best to look distracted. His weapon of choice was a muffler pipe, the best thing he could find to replace his yo-yo as a ridiculous weapon. It was overly big and impractical, but in a Comedian’s hands, it would do nicely.

He walked over into the darkness and stared into the rooms.

"Everything’s going to be just fine," he repeated, and as good as he had gotten at acting, I could tell from his voice that he knew that wasn’t true.

He tripped over the very pipe that he was carrying, falling to the ground, but what looked like clumsiness was actually just the activation of a trope. His Whoops! ability protected him from being attacked while engaging in physical comedy.

And he really needed to use it then, because three angry zombies poured out of the room he had just looked into. Their faces were swollen and purple. Their teeth were chomping.

His hindsight trope must have given him the news just in time for him to clumsily fall downward as the zombies tripped over him.

His physical comedy chops were coming in nicely as he scooted away from the infected.

"Coffee, two sugars," one of the zombies said to him in a monotonous voice.

Isaac managed to get to his feet just as five more of the zombies poured out of that room, one of them still holding a handful of cards from the poker game in the break room, presumably.

"I’m good for it," the card player said. "Trust me, I’m good for it."

His mouth was selling assurances, but his body was going full assault mode toward Isaac.

The rest of us moved ahead quickly, doing the best we could to scout and stay safe as Isaac tried and failed to keep up. We didn't know how many more zombies would pour out of that room, but their numbers were already large enough we couldn't risk getting tangled with them.

Cassie called back to Isaac, but she was busy trying to restrain Ramona, whose zombie instincts were kicking into high gear at the sound of her kind.

Cassie wasn’t strong enough to hold back her fake half-sister, but she tried her best to use Moxie to convince Ramona to stay with her.

"I can’t," was all Ramona could say in response, trapped in her infected body, unable to steer where it was going or control what it wanted to eat.

I got the rest of the group to the next room and quickly scouted out to make sure it was safe for us to make a stand there. It would have to do.

I ran back toward the room where Cassie, Ramona, and Isaac were.

Isaac was doing quite well at combining physical comedy and fighting.

"I’ll double your salary for a year, whatever they’re paying you here at the race track," he was saying to one of them.

"Coffee, two sugars," the man responded as he lunged at Isaac.

"You could even afford cream," Isaac said to himself as he laughed at his own silliness. Comedians had to do double duty in their fights to activate their tropes.

He swung his pipe and struck the zombie in the head.

"Do I look like a barista to you?" he asked, trying to trigger his Trash Talk trope.

I managed to make it back to Cassie, who was holding on to Ramona’s legs, trying to stop her from joining her infected brethren.

"We have to go," Cassie said. Then she called out for Isaac.

But unfortunately, as much as Isaac tried, he was doomed. His level was comparable to a single zombie, and he was holding his own against even three of them at a time, but as more of them poured from the room they had been waiting in, their collective level rose, and even with all his tricks, he couldn’t avoid being grabbed and bitten.

Cassie did what she could for him. She cried out in anguish, activating her psychic trope to share the pain, putting on a performance.

She did so well that I doubted he felt any of the pain at all.

"We have to go," I told Cassie as I tried to pull her up.

She ignored me.

"Ramona, come with us," she said.

Ramona was babbling, apologizing, asking for help. I didn’t know if Ramona was really in there at all. Her arms were still tied up against her neck by Isaac’s yo-yo. The bag was still over her head.

"It’s too late," I said. "We can’t calm her down in time."

I knew we didn’t have to keep Ramona with us forever, but we had to show we'd tried.

Ramona pulled against Cassie’s grasp and mine. The monster inside her head activated, and I wasn’t sure that we could get her to go along with us.

"It’s too late," I said. "She’s too far gone. Just let her go."

Anna had shown up to help and was matching my sentiment exactly, helping pull Cassie away.

"She’s still in there. We can’t leave her behind," Cassie said as she fought against us.

"You tried to help her," I said. "It was all you could do."

In the distance, the pack of zombies had stopped working on Isaac. All at once, like a flock turning on a wire, they pivoted to face Ramona. Her words were like a homing beacon. One of them took a step toward her. Then another.

"Just listen to her," Cassie said. "She’s still in there. We can’t leave her behind."

For a moment, we paused to listen for whatever it was Ramona was supposed to say, but instead, she said nothing.

She didn’t utter a single line. I could hear her struggling, but whatever it was that she was supposed to say, she didn’t.

"See?" I said. "She’s gone now. We have to go too."

Ramona’s silence gave Cassie the permission she needed to flee, but not before doing one last favor for her half-sister.

She reached forward and violently pulled the bag from Ramona’s head. A simple gesture, to be certain. I wasn’t sure how the audience would read it, but it felt important enough. I wasn’t sure it was smart. Ramona's eyes and teeth were now back in play.

We’d have to see if that was a good thing.

Anna, Cassie, and I managed to make it out of the room and over to where everyone else was. We pulled down a large rolling shutter from the ceiling that separated us from the main path.

None of us knew exactly what to say. We weren’t at the point where we could feel justified in our decision to split from the rest of the survivors, and at that moment, we looked pretty dumb, but later, I expected we would be vindicated.