Book Nine, Chapter 28: Darlene

A promise was never going to be enough. No matter how much we tried to appease Isaac in his desire to research the storyline his brother had so tragically been locked behind, he resisted us. I didn't blame him. We had literally told him that we couldn't rescue his brother until after an apocalypse. It would be hard not to take that as a dismissal.

"We don't have the Omen," Camden said. "That limits our research. Odds are we won't be able to run that storyline until after the apocalypse anyway."

The Omen for Killers Rowe III was a television set that would play a news story about the Rowe family as an NPC flipped through the channels. In order to trigger it, you had to tell them to flip back to the news story.

"But we still don't even really know what it's about," Isaac said as he tossed the Atlas down onto the table in the drawing room of the inn. "These hints are bullshit. What's the point of this book if all it tells us are things we would figure out in the first thirty minutes anyway?"

"You have to read between the lines," I said. I reached over, grabbed the Atlas, and turned it around. The non-spoiler page for Killers Rowe III wasn't exactly full, but it contained clues. I pointed to a line. "Like this, right here. It says that one of the aspects you might want to bring with you is an Occultist. So it's supernatural. But if you look at the first two movies, not only is there no Occultist recommended, they're saying you should bring a Sheriff or a Bounty Hunter. You understand? Nobody is suggesting you go out of your way to get a Sheriff or Bounty Hunter advanced archetype. It's just a little clue to tell you something about the story. It would seem it was mundane in the first movie, started getting supernatural in the second, and now it's much more supernatural, if I'm reading the tea leaves correctly."

He thought for a moment, and I assumed he was going to respond to what I'd said, but he was still hung up on what Camden had told him earlier. "Finding the Omen should be pretty easy, though, right? We found the werewolf Omen. We just have to find an NPC flipping through TV channels."

Of course, the werewolf Omen was the mobile kind. There was no reason to believe that Killers Rowe had one of those.

"I don't know. I was dead at the time," Camden said.

"Yeah, we chased down that creepy painting omen," Antoine said. "It sent us walking all over Carousel proper. In fact, that's when we found your nephew over there." He nodded his head toward the crybaby doll sitting on the couch next to Cassie.

Isaac then went into a rant about how, just because Cassie called it her son sometimes, jokingly, that didn't make it his nephew.

Whatever the case, the conversation wound down, and Isaac, though never satisfied, managed to return to his usual apathetic shell.

We waited in the drawing room all afternoon, because immortals didn't respect other people's time. I supposed that when you had lived a thousand lifetimes, three hours could seem quite meaningless.

So we sat there, having reruns of old conversations, and even managed to play a game of Reply, the Departed. It was an interesting experience in a hotel that actually did have ghosts. Luckily, we played the normal game instead of the enhanced ruleset that turned it into a complicated Ouija board. I kept my eyes on the door. Without my scouting trope on, I was a nervous wreck of the natural sort.

There was no one in the inn except for a few NPCs, the playtesters the Consortium had sent along, who mostly avoided us on instructions from their employers, and, of course, the ghosts. The caretaker passed by several times carrying various broken-down knickknacks, including a clock that looked like it had seen better years. Heck, it looked like it had seen better centuries.

I didn't know exactly what I hoped Lucky would tell us about apocalypses when I invited him, but seeing as the authors of the Atlas had very little advice to give other than "DON'T RUN THE APOCALYPSE," I was willing to grasp at some straws. I knew that Lucky felt guilty about his role in Bobby's deception, which had risked our lives. I hoped that guilt would compel him to tell us whatever he knew.

He managed to exceed my humble expectations, because when he showed up, he was not alone.

"You're telling me these are the last surviving players of the Game at Carousel," the woman growled. She extinguished her cigarette on the heel of her boot and tucked a pinch of chewing tobacco into her lip in the same motion. Cassie must have made a surprised face, because she followed it up with, "It's helping me quit smoking."

I figured that was a joke.

Her name was Darlene. She was an Outsider Criminal and the only surviving member of Lucky's original team that I knew of. I recognized her both from pictures we had found in their base after clearing the Redwood storyline and from the footage of the sanctuary, a place where she had apparently put on some years, though it was ambiguous how many. She was still dressed like she was ready to hop onto her man's chopper and ride down the highway to burn an enemy biker gang's hideout to the ground.

"Yeah, I ran some apocalypses 'cause the man to my left told us to," she said. "Two of 'em. One worth talking about. What do you want to know?"

She stared at us like we were children wasting her time. Lucky stood back and observed, hoping, I imagined, that his gift of Darlene might inspire some forgiveness for whatever hand he'd had in our troubles.

"We want to know everything," Camden said. "Strategies, priorities. Tell us exactly how you got through those two apocalypses and how other people might have failed. What level were you when you did it? What kind of apocalypses were they? There's no detail too trivial."

"Trust me, there are always details too trivial when it comes to neurotic players talking about running apocalypses. Overthinking gets you killed." She looked around the drawing room, at the doilies and the portraits, like somehow the decorative touches of the room were an indictment of us, that we were too soft. "You're used to storylines where you gotta make the audience care about your dead mommy so your tropes fire off in the finale. Forget all of that. An apocalypse isn't your story. It isn't anybody's story. It's a flood caught on film. The first thing you do is get this through your skulls: it is bigger than you. Say it with me if it helps."

She didn’t repeat it so we could say it with her.

"First one I ran, I was level fifty, or on my way to sixty, and I was scared, same as you're scared right now. But it's like Lucky told us back then: Carousel didn't make these things; it just runs 'em. Carousel already knows what it wants, and it's got the NPCs doing everything it needs. It's a movie, all right. But it's a big movie, and it ain't about you.

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"First apocalypse. We called it the Hiccup. Can’t remember its actual name. The whole town of Carousel, the whole world, maybe, falls out of pace with time. One second behind where it’s supposed to be, maybe two. And you don't notice at first. That's the sick part. First day, the radios start getting feedback loops, echoes, people talking over each other. Second day, I watched a waitress pour coffee that was already in the cup. You tell yourself you're tired. You're seeing things. Then the sun starts coming up wrong, stuttering. And then you learn there are things living in those lost seconds. Things that got left behind by time so long ago they're nothing but demons, or close enough, and you might just become one of them." She tongued the tobacco in her lip.

"We lost our wheelman on the fourth day. You want to know how? He stood still too long. That's it. That's the whole story. You had to stay moving when the wind started blowing. He got to remembering something at the wrong moment, and he got ripped right out of time, became… something else. Went mad, I expect. To survive, you had to catch back up with time, and there is no way of describing that without breaking your brain, so I'm not going to do it. Didn’t understand it when it happened. We drove till things started making sense. That's as much as I can say."

I couldn't think of a worse explanation of a movie's plot that also made perfect sense to me. It reminded me of Stephen King's The Langoliers, a story where every moment in time had to be destroyed before the next one could exist, or something like that. Bad CGI monsters were about all anyone remembered of that one. They looked like little silvery Pac-Men, which was exactly what I pictured Darlene and her team going up against.

"But that's not the real apocalypse worth talking about," she said, waving it off. I got the feeling she really didn’t like it. "That was just surviving and running, and I'm sure you all can do both. The next one, now. That was an end of days.

"Aliens come down. Except they don't just come down; that's the thing. They reveal they've been here the whole time. Politicians. Preachers. Movie stars. Mind-controlled since who knows when. There's a broadcast where a senator peels his ear back on live TV and shows everybody the vines, and the whole world finds out at the same time. Little viny brains, like ivy made out of nerves. One of those gets in you; it burns out everything that's you and drives your body around.

"Now here's the beautiful part." She leaned forward, and for the first time, she looked like she was enjoying herself. "The world this apocalypse landed in had ghosts. Real ghosts. Killing ghosts. So when the vines killed you, you came back. And not to watch. You came back with your claws out. Best mood I ever saw our Sport in was after he died. Man was a poltergeist on a coke bender. He spent three days throwing aliens around.

"And that's where the big stunts come in. It's the end of the world. There is nothing you can do that's out of character. Steal cars if you need cars. There are no laws. There is no help coming. The end is always going to be bad. The only question is whether you live to see it. So when you kill something, make it big. We rolled a fuel tanker into one of their nest ships, and Carousel gave us slow motion." She pointed at each of us one at a time. "That's how you know you've done good. You get slow motion."

She went on for a good ten minutes about how much she loved the alien possession ghost apocalypse and how much she hated the lost-in-time apocalypse, and I couldn't blame her. What lessons could be gleaned from a premise that unique? Whatever the Ringmaster apocalypse was, it at least seemed to have a concrete story. I hoped it was a little more graspable a concept than the time thing.

After a while, she stopped and waited to see if we had questions.

I did.

"You said Carousel had NPCs already doing things in the apocalypse. Does that mean you've actually seen the footage? What did the movie end up being about? The one with the alien vines."

It still needed characters doing things.

"Bunch of ghosts killing aliens, bunch of humans staying alive, and at the end some narrator talks about the human spirit. The aliens turned tail once they figured out humans came with a defense like that. Mass death was their whole play, and it didn't work on us. Movie ends with the sun coming up over the survivors."

"So it was like an ensemble movie," I said.

"I don't know. Yeah. Probably. We weren't in it more than fifteen minutes altogether. Clips of us kicking ass. Same with the Hiccup footage, the parts of it I could stand to watch. And before you ask, no, our characters didn't have names. I sat through the credits. You know what I was billed as? 'Daredevil.'"

Honestly, I found that answer incredibly unsatisfying, and I kept trying to clarify. Did they have backstories? Character arcs? Anything?

"Sweetheart, the apocalypse does not care about you," she said. "No backstory is worth the screen time. If you can’t tell the audience who you are quickly, they won’t know. They have other things to worry about. That's the vacation of it. Just be alive and stay that way."

I couldn't believe it. We had actually found a player who had run the exact type of storyline we were worried about, and she had the least possible to say about it.

"It's like I said. The last thing you want to do is overthink it. Apocalypses are designed to still work even if nobody plays them, understand? Let Carousel tell its story and have its destruction. Stay out of the way. Can't stay out of the way? Clear the way. Gonna kill something? Make it big. The whole thing is a highlight reel, and you want to be the highlight. Oh, and don't worry about your baby levels. There are plenty of weak enemies in an apocalypse, and at least you've got numbers. Only one of you has to make it to the end credits." She looked us over. "That's a comfort, depending on which one of you I'm talking to."

That didn't satisfy me even a little bit. The others continued to ask her questions, and some of them managed to get good information out of her. There was a lot of holing up, setting up camp, going on supply runs, that sort of thing. Busy work at the end of the world.

It was only near the end, when she was fishing out her tobacco tin again, that she said, repeated what would be her main point: “You don't beat an apocalypse, kids. You outlive it. That's the whole win condition. There is no other one. The worst part and the best part is the story is bigger than you."

After Darlene was finished talking, Lucky sat and chatted with us about the development of apocalypses.

"They really are large storylines. Most of them did result in the destruction of their world, though that isn't guaranteed. But Darlene was right." He sat with his dining chair turned backward, leaning against the backrest. "The story of the apocalypse is already going on. It's not clear you'd even want a lot of screen time in these things. I will warn you, we lost control of the apocalypse engine a while ago, so there's no telling what Carousel might have done with it. But Ringmaster was one of ours, originally."

My ears certainly perked up at that.

"I can't spoil it for you. I couldn't even if you were my players. But I will tell you it's not so unbelievable that you might survive this one. Almost every character has the same plot going on. It will be a challenge, but remember, you're not the main characters. I don't know whether you'll like that or hate it, but it can be pretty useful, not being the focus of attention."

I knew a bit about not being the focus of attention.

Lucky answered all our questions, both about apocalypses and the sanctuary, although there wasn't much to say about the sanctuary. I got the impression they were dialing their efforts back a bit, now that they'd realized it wasn't what they'd hoped.

I could see that he was genuinely trying to help us, and so was Darlene. But they gave us my least favorite type of advice: Everything will be okay; you have to keep on keeping on. That wasn't what I wanted. I wanted them to tell us it was going to be the most difficult thing we had ever done. I wanted them to warn us, to beg us not to do it. I wanted them to tell us the challenge would be insurmountable unless we did some impossible thing, because at least that would be something to work with.

Instead, we were left with the hope that Carousel was really going to let us slip through the apocalypse like background characters. I couldn't believe that. Altogether, their news was too positive. Too optimistic.

I knew better than that. Darlene had run apocalypses before Carousel had broken from the Consortium. If Carousel took over the apocalypse engine, whatever that was, there was no reason to expect things to be like what they were, especially with it calling us in. She might have been telling the truth, but that didn’t mean she was right. Our most recent intel came from players warning against them completely.

Now, I had to be the guy to tell my team to prepare for the opposite of what we had just learned.

I almost wished I had never asked Lucky to come.