Chapter Seventy: Superstition
As we waited to start out new jobs, I decided to fill everyone in on the roles they had been assigned thanks to my Casting Director ability. The role descriptions on the red wallpaper were as follows:
Riley (Security Surveillance Specialist): Riley, starting his first shift as a Security Surveillance Specialist, is brother to Anna. His job is to monitor the facility's security cameras, using his vantage point to spot anomalies. As he navigates his new job, he will be able to see most everything happening in the facility, but will he see the truth before it’s too late?
Antoine (Security Guard): Antoine, a new hire, steps into his role as one of the facility's elite Security Guards. His strength and size make him a formidable presence, but will he be able to keep everyone safe? As the story unravels, his role as a protector leads him to question who or what he's truly safeguarding.
Camden (Research Scientist): Camden, on his first shift as a Research Scientist, is tasked with studying a mysterious group of people linked to recent disasters. His scholarly insight is invaluable, but his pursuit of knowledge might uncover more than he bargained for.
Kimberly (Therapist for Test Subjects): Kimberly, cousin to Anna and Riley, begins her first shift providing emotional support and therapy to the test subjects. Her social skills and adaptability make her an effective therapist, but her close interactions with the subjects raise questions about the ethical implications of her employer’s work.
Anna (Test Subject Manager): Anna, Riley's sister, starts her first shift as the Test Subject Manager. Her survival instincts and leadership skills are tested as she manages the bridge between the test subjects and the rest of the facility. However, her new role leads her to question the true purpose of the facility and the nature of the tests being conducted.
Anna, Kimberly, and I were related to each other in this storyline. Well, our characters were. Strange, but nothing unheard of.
“Wait,” Anna asked, “Where’s Dina?”
Dina still hadn’t made it through security. I kept expecting her to waltz out of the maze of curtains and machinery, but she didn’t. I wasn’t sure where she had gone. She had definitely entered the security check with us. Now she was nowhere to be seen.
Moments later, we were back On-Screen with Nancy Cartwright appearing with her fake smile.
“If you will all follow me, I will take you to your meet and greets,” she said.
She led us down the hall toward a row of offices where she sent each of us one at a time. I walked into the office where I was supposed to meet my department head and sat in one of the chairs in front of the desk.
It was a nice office with expensive furniture and wall art. They needed good art at KRSL, as there were no windows in the whole building.
One of the paintings was an abstract painting of the human brain as you might see it on a brain scan. The colors swirled like fire. Within them, I swore I could see the faintest traces of some shadowy figures dancing in the flames.
I waited for twenty minutes Off-Screen.
Eventually, the door opened, and I was On-Screen.
A man entered. He was a well-groomed scientist in a lab coat. On the red wallpaper, he was called Dr. Truman Mentes. He was an NPC with 50 Plot Armor. Like other NPCs of that level, he had tropes that appeared gray and unreadable on the red wallpaper. I assumed they were enemy tropes.
“Pardon me for my tardiness,” he said as he entered. “My name is Doctor Truman Mentes, I am the head of research at this facility.”
I stood and shook his hand.
“Riley Lawrence,” I said.
He sat behind the desk as I returned to my seat. He carried a manilla file folder with my name on it.
“Well, we can assume your interviews went well since you made it this far,” he said.
I nodded. I nailed those nonexistent interviews.
“As you may have guessed, I am not actually your department head. As a surveillance specialist, you do not have a true supervisor. That is how we set up the hierarchy. Your job requires that you work autonomously. Your colleague, Mr. Rowe, is already downstairs. He will show you everything you need to know.”
“I can’t wait to get started,” I said.
“That’s wonderful to hear. This is only a meet and greet. If you have any questions, you can ask them. Otherwise, let’s get to know each other.”
“I do have a question,” I said. “What is it, exactly, that we do here?”
“That’s a good first question,” Dr. Mentes said with a chuckle. “Our interest is in public safety. We monitor individuals we believe may be suffering from latent illnesses or traumas. It really is that simple. We try to keep them healthy. We ensure they are safe to go back into the public.”
That certainly wasn’t the whole truth, but I couldn’t say as much.
“Good to know. Sounds like important work,” I said cheerfully.
“It is,” he said. “And the work you will be doing helps make it all happen. We cannot protect these people without professionals like yourself. Tell me, did the work schedule intimidate you when you first learned of it? Five days on, five days off would scare away a lot of candidates. Being away from friends and family days at a time can be quite stressful.”
Five days? As in the storyline would last five days?
“No,” I said. “I am actually looking forward to it. Plus, my sister and cousin are here with me so I’m not truly alone.”
“That’s a good attitude,” he said.
He opened the manilla folder and began going over my fake resume with me. I had never heard of anything that was on that sheet of paper before, but it could be summarized as this: my character stared at a lot of security monitors in some very important places.
As he shuffled through the pages, a small, white and red piece of paper fell out. At first, I thought it was a strange kind of ticket like one Silas might deliver for us. It turned out it wasn’t.
It was a lottery ticket.
Dr. Mentes grabbed it off the table.
“You will have to forgive me for my habit. A silly superstition, really,” Dr. Mentes said, as he tucked the lottery ticket back inside his pocket, “You see my father once saw that I had purchased a lottery ticket and told me that the first week I didn’t buy one would be the week my numbers came up. I have bought a lottery ticket every week since.”
He gave me a restrained but pleasant smile.
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ve been known to buy scratch-offs myself now and again.”
“My father was superstitious that way. I suppose I am too. Those things tend to run in the blood. Tell me, is your family superstitious?”
I thought for a moment. “Yes, I suppose,” I said. “They say my grandmother had ‘the gift’.”
“Oh? The gift?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s what the family says.”
Really, it was just what my background card said.
“Would that be your grandmother Holly?” he said, glancing down at the file folder.
My blood froze in my veins as he said it. Holly was the name of my grandmother, the one who, along with my grandfather, took me in after my parents died. My real grandmother.
I cleared my throat.
“Yes—how did you know…?”
Dr. Mentes again flashed his polite, restrained smile. “We do very thorough background checks here, Mr. Lawrence. It is important work you’re doing. We wanted to be sure we were hiring the right candidate. I assure you; all of your coworkers went through the same process.”
I nodded slowly.
“Would you say that your grandmother passed the gift down to you?”
I shook my head. “No, no,” I said dismissively.
“You can speak candidly here,” Dr. Mentes said. “I’m just trying to get to know you.”
What was it he wanted me to say?
I tapped the table with both hands. “You know, I am pretty good at guessing the endings of movies. If that’s a gift.”
My streak lately might not have been perfect, but still. I needed to lay a foundation that I watched a lot of movies so I could talk about it later.
Dr. Mentes chuckled politely. “I am sure that comes in handy.”
“Not as much as I would like,” I said.
“How about your sister or your cousin?” Dr. Mentes asked. Anna and Kimberly’s characters were related to me in this storyline. “Do they have the gift too?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “They always knew when I was making faces at them behind their backs growing up if that counts.”
That elicited another polite laugh.
“It isn’t every day that we bring in a batch of new hires that are related to each other, but it can hardly be avoided in a small town like Carousel. I imagine that any group of five people from Carousel would likely contain relatives.”
Was Carousel a small town? In many ways, it seemed large.
“Maybe,” I said. “I assure you; it will not get in the way of our work.
“I do not need your assurance on that matter,” Dr. Mentes said. “Now, if you will excuse me, I will have to cut this short. I have other matters to attend to. Nancy will help you obtain your credentials and show you to your workstation downstairs.”
He stood, shook my hand again, and left.
Soon enough, I had my own badge that would allow me into any of the rooms I was authorized to enter. It also allowed me to operate the elevator.
“I think you are going to like your new workstation,” Nancy said. “It's spacious and your bed is right there in your office. Housekeeping should be finished in there now. You’ll need to change into your uniform, of course. I recommend wearing a sweater. Your office is quite cold.”
We took the elevator to floor 2B, the second floor below ground out of four basement levels.
“Come right this way.”
I followed her around a bend to a large, metal door that was secured with thick bars and a heavy-duty electronic lock.
The door was open. Inside, a fairly large room with a wall of computer monitors awaited me. There was a chair in front of the monitors. A man, an NPC named Mr. Rowe, sat inside it.
He was a heavyset fellow with long hair.
“Mr. Rowe,” Nancy said. “I have your new colleague here for you.”
The man turned around in the chair.
“Great, that means I can go home,” he said.
He stood from his chair and came to greet me. He hadn’t shaved in weeks from the look of it.
We shook hands.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Nancy said as she turned to go.
Mr. Rowe stared at her as she left.
“Well let me show you your new home for the next five days,” he said. “Linens just got changed in the bunk.”
He pointed to a bed tucked away in a corner of the room.
“Follow me,” he said.
As I entered the security room, I was immediately struck by the monitors. Specifically, the monitors that contained images of people dressed in white hospital gowns who appeared to be locked away in padded white cells somewhere in the facility. They looked like they were being contained. They were either very contagious or they were prisoners.
“Don’t mind them,” Rowe said, “They’re fine.”
Yeah, sure.
Mr. Rowe explained the fine details of my job for the next week. I was there to observe and report.
“Remember, if you see anything unusual, anything at all, you write it in the logbook. If you leave the book empty, you’ll be out of here in a hot second. It’s an easy job so don’t screw it up,” Mr. Rowe explained to me.
“A lot of newcomers think they can come here and sleep all day and loaf around all night,” he said. “No siree. You keep your eyes on the monitors.”
He pulled out a clipboard with a few laminated sheets clipped into it.
“These are the rounds,” he explained. “Security might make rounds in the night. Make sure to unlock doors for them. You do that from this panel. Don’t need to during the day, but at night nobody can go anywhere without asking you first.”
He then explained to me how the intercoms worked. When someone pressed one of the little white boxes on the walls, a light would flash on my panel and I would have to press a button to speak to them.
“Periodically, check the audio in each room. You can listen to what’s being said in a room by flipping the switch next to the monitor. Don’t go eavesdropping too much, this is for security surveillance only.”
I noticed that there was a little bar next to each monitor that measured how much sound was coming from that area. In the rooms where employees and patients were talking, the little bars danced with each word. Everywhere else they barely moved.
“It worked the same way at my last job,” I lied.
He nodded his head. “Good, so you know.”
Then he put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Some folks come to this job and the long hours start playing tricks on their minds. They don’t last long. Don’t be like them. Otherwise, I’ll have to take over your shifts until they find a replacement. I really don't want to do that.”
“What kind of tricks?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. They get stir-crazy, that’s all. At night when you’ve been staring at the monitors for seven hours straight, everyone else asleep. You start seeing things that aren’t there. Forget I said it.”
Nothing to read into about that.
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Been doing this for years. Don’t plan on going stir-crazy now.”
“Good man.”
With that, Mr. Rowe turned and began packing up his clothes and belongings.
“For the mess hall, follow the signs.”
“Will do.”
Then, he left. I was alone in the frigid surveillance room.
I looked back at the monitors and at the eight people—including two children—that were locked away in the facility so that we could monitor them. I wondered how they were going to play into this storyline. It wasn’t going to be pretty, that much was certain.
It wasn’t just them that I was worried about.
My Trope Master ability showed me the tropes of enemies when I was physically near them and looking at them (with few notable exceptions). It also showed me enemy tropes that related to the setting itself even when I wasn’t near an enemy. I had seen that at the Astralist’s castle and in Benny’s cornfield.
Here, staring at the monitors, I saw two terrifying tropes.
A Knock at the Door: This enemy can target characters behind closed doors, turning a symbol of safety into a source of dread. It may be able to lure characters out with deceptive sounds or eerie silence, manipulating their fear and curiosity, or it may be able to simply break or sneak through such barriers. With "A Knock at the Door", death is just a room away.
Anyone Can Die: This enemy operates under a chilling rule: no character is safe. Whether it's because this film is a rule-breaking reboot or a narrative without a true protagonist, this enemy can target or kill any character without ceremony or hesitation. With "Anyone Can Die...", the only main characters are the ones who survive.
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