Arc II, Chapter 2: The Keepsake
I held my new Keepsake ticket in my hand as I searched one of the rooms back at the Bed and Breakfast. There were clothes that definitely belonged to Bradley Speirs. There were knickknacks spread around. Cigarette butts. Empty beer cans. I could see on the red wallpaper that all of these things belonged to the deceased psychotic killer. None of them were what I was looking for.
When we arrived back at the bed and breakfast, Samantha was nowhere to be found. I wasn't surprised. We didn't know how long we had before the storyline started back up (or if it would), but we were going to take the chance to rest before we headed back to Carousel proper.
I could see crumpled-up pieces of paper on the ground. I unfolded a few just to read them. Some were letters to a woman named Wanda. Bradley was begging for forgiveness for some unmentionable thing. Other letters were also to Wanda but in those, he lashed out calling her every curse word that he knew but mostly sticking to his few favorite slurs.
Some of the pages were old and yellowed and covered in dust. Others looked fresh. The killers in Carousel were stuck on their own loops. That must have been part of Bradley's. Writing letters he could never send.
For all the junk in the room, I couldn't find one item that was meaningful enough to be used as a Keepsake. And I had to find something. A keepsake was like a trophy or similar that you've got after defeating an enemy. It was a new type of ticket. Antoine and I had both gotten one and they both had the same reward.
They could give us a single-use version of the signature trope from that storyline: Desperation. In Antoine's hands, it was a good trope. In my hands, it would be a game changer. The trope allowed you to transfer Savvy and Moxie into Mettle and Hustle the more desperate your situation became. For me, it would be a "break glass in case of emergency" type of deal. As a player with little to no combat ability, it could be really handy to keep around.
I had to find an item that I could use to activate it. The ticket wasn't enough. I needed some kind of memento from Bradley Speirs to imbue with the power. Unfortunately, after I threw Mr. Speirs off the roof, guaranteeing his death, he was dragged away by a horde of zombies. Having no corpse to plunder meant that it was difficult to find an item that I could use as a keepsake.
I had to keep looking.
Holding the ticket, I noticed that I was able to see whether an item in my view belonged to Bradley Speirs. There were lots of things that he “owned”, but it was mostly trash. I needed something that was important to him in some way, from what I could tell. Antoine had gotten lucky in that department. The enemy he killed was Merritt Speirs. Antoine found a class ring right next to Merritt’s bed after 10 seconds of looking.
I decided to look through Bradley's nightstand and sure enough, as soon as I cracked open the drawer, I saw an object in the shadows that indicated on the red wallpaper was an applicable keepsake. Success.
It was a magazine with the words “Sports Illustrated” printed on the cover with a photo of a woman in a bikini on the front.
He must have been a real sports fan.
I decided to keep looking. I wanted something small and I really didn't want to carry around the swimsuit edition of a sports magazine. I needed to review my options.
I decided to take a break and look for the next thing on my to-do list.
Scouring the entire bed and breakfast, I was only able to come up with two decent bags that could be used with Luggage Tags. There was a large duffel and a neon green belt pouch. The pouch was probably very useful, but it would not really blend well in any storyline not set in the 80s.
The duffel would be perfect for Antoine. I wasn't sure but it looked like it might be just big enough for his baseball bat to fit inside of. I could give the belt pouch to Bobby.
There were other options that I could use. There was a cloth shopping bag and all manner of sacks strewn around the bed and breakfast but nothing that was terribly convenient. I was struck by an idea. Luggage Tags were not just for actual pieces of luggage.
I grabbed my sunglasses and Walkman out of my hoodie pockets. I took the Luggage Tag from my stack of tickets and placed it in the pocket of my hoodie. As soon as I did, it disappeared. A box appeared on the red wallpaper titled Inventory.
Inventory
Token of Affection- Mrs. Cloudburst’s Love Letter, The Strings Attached
Enchanted Object- Masquerade Mask, The Strings Attached
I was shocked to see that there were already things in my inventory. I had thought that those items had been lost permanently whenever the storyline at Camp Dyer had been activated. It turned out that wasn't the case. It was nice to see that I still had those things, though I really wished that my clothes, toiletries, or even my cell phone charger had also been saved. Alas.
Testing to see how it worked, I reached into my pocket, grabbed my Mr. Gray Amber mask, and pulled it out as if it had been there the entire time. Despite being removed from my pocket, it stayed on the list of my inventory on the red wallpaper. I placed it back inside. I then placed my sunglasses and Walkman back inside my pockets.
I laughed at the result.
Normally carrying around my sunglasses required me to be very careful and the Walkman was slightly too thick and heavy to carry comfortably inside of my pocket. With the luggage tag, those things fit inside with ease. I took a few minutes just experimenting. My sunglasses wouldn't get broken anymore from what I could tell. They weren't in my pocket unless I was looking for them.
That setup had limitations of course. I could only carry items that would fit inside of my pockets, and I could never take out all the items in my pockets on-screen because that would look ludicrous, but it was the best I had, and I wasn't going to complain about it.
“I figure if you cut a hole right here, you can make a space in the lining for your bat,” I said, showing the duffel to Antoine. “Should be able to store it there.”
He took the black bag from me and said, “Thanks. Where did you find it?”
“Bradley’s room,” I said.
“You get a Keepsake like you were talking about?” he asked.
“Still looking,” I said.
We were outside on the wraparound porch. Kimberly was skimming the Atlas while Antoine ate a slice of the pre-made sub sandwich we had found in the refrigerator.
“Look,” I said. I pulled out my mask and love letter.
Kimberly glanced up, saw the mask, and then reached down to the cloth bag Anna had wrapped the Atlas in and pulled out her mask as well. She must have already activated her Luggage Tag using that bag.
“You’re going with that?” I asked, looking at the bag.
“I’m replacing it as soon as I can,” she said. She stuffed her mask back in the bag and then retrieved a few small objects from the bottom of the bag.
She held out her hand. They were seeds.
“Benny’s seeds?” I asked with a laugh. Kimberly had obtained those seeds on our first night in Carousel. Benny the Haunted Scarecrow had awarded them to her for unknown reasons when he found her inside the corn maze.
“A Token of Affection,” she said, smiling.
“Women love gifts from the heart,” I said.
“I'm trying not to get jealous about it,” Antoine joked with a sly smile. He was trying his best to be in high spirits. I could see that he was tired. Maybe physically, maybe more than that.
“I should have told him I was in a relationship, huh?” Kimberly joked.
“All I'm saying is that when I get some levels on that scarecrow, I’m going to give him a talking to,” Antoine said.
“What if I love him too?” Kimberly asked, pretending to be emotional about it.
Antoine turned away from her. “So that’s how it is. One skinny dude gives you a handful of seeds and you drop me?”
“At least he has a job, Antoine,” she said. “Scaring away crows. Guarding pumpkins.”
“Of course, you throw that in my face,” he said, smiling. “Don’t forget, he kills people. Turns them into pumpkin-headed monsters.”
“He’s management level! He's got dreams!”
I sat there as they joked back and forth and seemed to forget about me. It wasn't so long ago that Kimberly would have never been able to joke about what happened in the corn maze or any other storyline. Even she was getting used to things. Her mood had lifted ever since finding the Carousel Rewards Program punch card that would earn her The Red Mist trope and guarantee her painless deaths.
I cleared my throat. “I just want to know what they're for,” I said. “The Tokens of Affection.”
Suddenly remembering I was there, Kimberly picked up the Atlas from where she had set it down and flipped it around so that I could see what she had been reading.
The page was labeled “Tokens of Affection”. The section wasn't long; it only took up half the page.
I read through the paragraph quickly. It appeared that they were used for a variety of things. It didn't give much detail because the author of the section didn't want to spoil any plots, but it appeared that there was a subgenre of romance horror and a collection of tropes that used Tokens of Affection as a resource. There was a list of tropes that used them. They were largely Eye Candy related.
“Interesting,” I said. “Can I use this?”
Kimberly shrugged. “I’m done with it. What are you going to look for?”
“You know,” I said, “Tutorial stuff. Rescue tropes, that kind of thing.”
She nodded solemnly.
I took the Atlas with me as I walked around the porch. I sat down on a reclining chair and propped the book open. To my right, was a small table with a clay ashtray that had been absolutely filled with cigarette butts. On a hunch, I grabbed my Keepsake ticket and saw that, as I had suspected, the cigarettes had been Bradley’s. They were not usable as a Keepsake, of course.
Somewhere on the other side of the porch, Kimberly laughed at something Antoine said.
The ashtray was usable as a Keepsake. The second object I had found that had been important to that psychopath. What kind of life did he have to live that the only objects I could find that were important to him were a bikini magazine and an ashtray. Even for a psychopath, that seemed depressing.
Who was I to judge Bradley Speirs on that? When I came to Carousel, I had packed up all of my belongings in boxes and put them in storage so I could end my lease. Nothing but clothes and movies were left of me back in the real world. If I were a monster killed by a player in Carousel, which of my belongings would be important enough to become a Keepsake?
My sunglasses? The Walkman?
Probably.
Whatever the case, I finally had my Keepsake.
I grabbed the ashtray and dumped it out. There was something on the inside, some sort of blue paint had been added to the ashtray before it was baked. It was a handprint. It must have been from a baby or a toddler. “To Daddy” was the inscription.
That was surprising. He had a kid.
I almost felt bad about throwing him off the roof.
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