Book Nine, Chapter 29: Observation Duty

As the sun set over Saltspar Island, I left the inn and headed out toward one of the gray beaches close to town. The views were okay, even as the rain started to fall gently, but that wasn't why I was going. I was on a mission.

The caretaker walked ahead of me like a man with a concussion. It was impossible to tell if he knew where he was going. My best guess was that he wasn't following the script. Had he been, his actions would have been more decisive. More easily readable.

Somehow, he managed to look like he had just stumbled out of bed, even though I had just watched him doing his duties diligently and with an apparently clear mind.

I knew where he was going, because he had been there before. In the last couple of days, studying him had become my hobby.

As he clumsily crossed a large wooden dock toward a pavilion that would lead him to the beach, I snuck along behind him. It wasn't clear if I actually needed to. He wasn't on guard. But when you're tailing a suspect, your soul pleads to hide behind stuff and peek around corners. Secret agent stuff.

Of course, your soul assumes that you yourself are not being watched.

"What are you doing, Riley?" Kimberly asked as I stared at the caretaker from behind a wall of metal pails, which contained various fish byproducts that were probably going to be used as chum.

"Getting some fresh air," I said as I stood and turned around to see that both Kimberly and Anna had managed to follow me. I was just glad Dina wasn't around to see that failure. With my cover blown, I decided to walk a little more casually, following the caretaker as Kimberly and Anna followed me.

"Wait, are you spying on that poor, sweet janitor?" Kimberly asked.

"I'm observing," I said as we crossed the pavilion, caught on the trail of the NPC on the loose.

"Is he a suspect?" Anna asked. "My trope says that you are suspicious. I wondered if that meant you were acting suspicious or that you were suspicious of someone else."

"Bit of both," I said as we continued forward. The caretaker had reached the beach. Now it was time to watch.

"I guess this means that you're packed," Kimberly said as if I had ever taken my stuff out of my hoodie pocket to unpack in the first place. "Aren't we supposed to be leaving in the morning?"

"If you think we're leaving in the morning, then you're gonna be real surprised, real soon," I said.

We had agreed to run the apocalypse, but the gnawing paranoia I had experienced ever since we came to Saltspar Island was finally coming to a head. If something was going to happen, it had to happen tonight. There was no way we could actually just have a nice vacation, courtesy of the Consortium.

"Don't say stuff like that," Anna said. "People are already stressed enough."

"Someone has to say it," I said as I found a place to stand on the pavilion and watch the caretaker from a distance. "Look at him. Doesn't he seem strange?"

"Every NPC seems a little strange if you watch too long," Kimberly said. "They're being mind-controlled."

"Not him," I said. "He's already done his duties."

Now that the man had gotten to the beach, he slowed down and stared out into the water like a dreamwalker.

"He comes out here often from what I’ve seen. In the morning and the evening. Multiple times, as best I can figure," I said. "Yesterday, I noticed that he's been finding stuff out here on the beach and bringing it back to the inn."

I had noticed him carrying a sandy wooden lamp carved to look like a bear, but that wasn't all. I saw him with his hands always filled with strange items, and as I thought back on it, I noticed they were often covered in sand. It was easy to miss when an NPC was acting odd, but without the stimulation of my scouting tropes, I had to focus on something.

"So why are you watching him?" Kimberly asked. "Can't you just ask him what he's doing? You’re not doing all this because you want to avoid a little social interaction, are you?"

I laughed. "I know why you would think that, but believe it or not, I actually did ask him, and he acted like he didn't know what I was talking about. The thing is, when I asked him, he was in the middle of doing his repair duties up at the inn, which meant that he was being scripted. Which is why I think right now, he's not."

The wind blew, sending Kimberly's hair flying wildly. Anna was wearing a baseball cap, so she didn't have to worry about it so much. They both stared after the man.

"I've followed him out here twice now," I said. "Once after I saw him carrying the bear, and today."

"What is it you hope to find?" Anna asked. "Do you really think he's doing something harmful?"

"We're going to find out," I said.

"By watching him?" Kimberly asked. "Surely we could watch him from the inn, if he's bringing everything back there with him."

"More information is always better," I said.

"Not always," Kimberly responded as some fishermen passed us by, carrying some of those chum pails.

"I tried to follow him back to where he hid stuff yesterday, but I got distracted waiting around on him, and he disappeared. Today, that's not happening."

So we watched and waited as the caretaker combed the beach, looking for whatever might catch his eye. Eventually, the thing that caught his eye was a wooden cross, highly intricate, that he spotted floating against some rocks near the shore.

After seeing it, he went and grabbed it pretty quickly, but then he just stared down at it for five or ten minutes. Long enough that I started to wonder if he was ever going to go back to the inn with it.

"So what is inherently suspicious about this?" Kimberly asked. "Tell me. What are his motivations? What is he up to?"

I reached into my hoodie pocket, drew out a small yellow fleck of organic matter, and held it out to her.

"What is that?" she asked, looking closely at it. Admittedly, there wasn't much to see.

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"The last time I was here," I said, "I went looking up and down the beach after he left, and I found this. You probably wouldn't know what it is. But she might," I said, holding it out toward Anna.

And indeed, she did.

"Is that from one of the flowers from that plant monster?" she asked. "All the way out here?"

It certainly looked exactly like it.

"The river never loses anything," I said. "It just brings it downstream."

Kimberly had been filled in to some degree on the Breathing Deeply storyline, so she knew what we were talking about, even though she had been absent when we ran the story.

"What do we make of this?" she asked.

"It's a piece of a monster," Anna said. "It's part of an enemy, and it made it all the way here. You think it's an omen. Not, like, an Omen omen, but a real omen."

I looked at them. I almost didn't want to put it into words. Carousel had a funny idea of fairness and consent. You were punished for your choices, even if it wasn't clear what information you were supposed to base those choices on. What served as a warning could be anything from a message hidden in a letter to some subtle detail that hinted there was trouble nearby.

"I can't shake the feeling that when we try to leave this place for good, it's going to get difficult. And the only way I know how to look for danger is to follow every breadcrumb. To pull the thread."

"What if pulling the thread is the thing that causes the danger?" Kimberly asked.

All I could do was look at her and shrug. I wasn't being dismissive. I just didn't know. Was it possible that by looking for danger constantly, on an island that didn't have any, I could somehow manifest it?

"I don't know," I said. "If you wait around until you know things for sure, it's probably too late. But here's what I am certain of: if the Consortium had really figured out how to make someplace safe, they would be storing all those refugees here. We need to be cautious and paranoid."

The ladies didn't have much to say in response.

The caretaker eventually started walking with the wooden cross back toward the inn. In fact, he walked right past us, barely navigating well enough to avoid walking into us.

So we set about following him. It wasn't hard. Obviously, it was a little soul-killing that I had to act normal now that I was with Anna and Kimberly, but we followed him, and he didn't try to evade us. Unlike last time, he also didn't disappear.

He simply walked all the way back to the area where his quarters were, found a closet right outside his door, opened it, and placed the cross inside. From there, he stared into the closet for a minute or two before closing it and walking away.

Surprisingly poorly hidden.

"There we go," I said as I made my way over to the closet. Even though we had unequipped our insight tropes in order to maximize the power of the crybaby, which would only alert you to danger that you couldn't already perceive, I ended up equipping my scouting trope just to make sure there were no Omens in the closet. Actual Omens. The kind that would trigger a storyline.

Of course, there weren't. There were no Omens on Saltspar Island. Not that kind, anyway.

Inside was a grand collection of junk, neatly stacked, almost like a shrine. It was a bunch of random stuff. I even saw the carved wooden bear lamp. But there was nothing else there that jumped out at me as important, except for the one thing I was looking for.

"Here we go," I said as I grabbed a camcorder from right in the center of the stacks and held it out toward Kimberly and Anna.

"Wait a second. That's yours," Anna said.

Technically, it belonged to some character from Post-Traumatic whose role I had taken, but it was mine now.

"What was I supposed to do?" I said. "He stole it from me."

"He stole it from you?" Kimberly asked, skeptical.

"I'm not here to accuse anyone of a crime," I said. "I'm just glad I got it back."

And it still had plenty of charge left. In fact, the red light was still on. It was set to record only when it sensed motion.

All there was left to do was find out what I had filmed.

-

I knew I would get the footage I wanted. I had equipped my Did You Get That? trope, which I hadn't yet had the opportunity to use. It greatly increased the odds of capturing important details on film, even those that had technically not been present during the filming but arguably could have been.

We gathered in the drawing room, hooked the camera up to the little TV Antoine kept in his duffel bag thanks to his Luggage Tags, and started skimming through the footage.

"Hey, you see that thing over there on the sand?" my voice sounded over the recording. "That's pretty weird, isn't it?"

Kimberly flashed me a look and said, "You tricked that old man," under her breath. All I could do was smile mischievously.

The camera didn't have a great shot of me, but it had filmed me standing on the beach next to the caretaker.

"They say the storm is going to wipe the island clean," the caretaker responded. "Do you think that's true? Will we be driven back into the ocean like our ancestors?"

"I hope not," I said.

Whatever the case, my plan had worked. The NPC had found the camera, picked it up, and started investigating it. Luckily, he didn't stop it from recording, because it captured his entire walk back to the inn, where it was put into the closet. Unfortunately, it was moved around so fast that we only caught glimpses of what was going on. If anything important happened, we would have to freeze-frame to see it.

But the interesting part was what we saw once we started watching the film from inside the closet.

The camera would start recording anytime someone walked by the door, because their bodies would block out the light, triggering the motion-sensitive aspect of the camera.

Immediately after the screen went black when the camera was placed in the closet, it lit up again with footage of someone walking by outside, which made the light under the door flicker. They stopped right in front of the door, opened it, and stared into the closet. It was one of the housekeepers. An NPC.

She then closed the door and kept going.

The footage cut to the next time somebody walked by, and yet again, they stopped in front of the closet, opened the door, and stared inside. It was the cook. The same one who had delivered us that fine pizza pie. After glancing inside, he closed the door and walked away.

"It looks like they're in on it together," Antoine said. "All the NPCs."

I wasn't so sure. None of them were carrying anything from the beach. It wasn't clear why they were doing what they were doing. But the pattern continued. Pretty much every NPC that had reason to walk down that hall would stop in front of the door, open it, look inside, and then close it. In fact, this happened seven or eight times before someone passed through the hall who didn't do it.

A shadow crossed over the limited light leaking into the closet. Then another. Then a third shadow. But the third one stopped in front of the closet, opened the door, and stared inside, just like all the NPCs had.

It was easy to recognize who it was.

It was the saw-slinging slasher: the NPC the Consortium had dressed up as a lumberjack enemy with a giant saw, who terrorized the members of the Consortium whose job it was to playtest the island.

Unlike all of the other NPCs, after he stared into the closet, he didn't simply close the door. He reached past the camera, grabbed something from the top of the stack, and pulled it back toward himself.

The TV screen was pretty small, and even though we had mostly gotten used to it, we all crouched as close as we could and stared at what the fake killer held in his hand.

"Is that a samurai sword?" Isaac asked. "That's a samurai sword."

"It's the samurai sword," I said.

Camden had tossed it from the boat after Caleb Rowe had used it to kill Andrew, back when we first set out on our river journey. I recognized the handle.

The NPC then took the sword and closed the door. The next time the camera came on, the caretaker was adding another object to his collection.

This was exactly what I had been looking for, for so long. Something was fishy in the clam chowder.

This was what Carousel had been building toward, right under our noses.

"So, if we try to leave in the morning, I bet we get that sword in our backs," Camden said.

If we even made it to morning. It was like a storyline. You had to figure out what was going to happen so you had a chance of changing it. And whatever was going to happen involved that sword.

"I say it's time to go to bed," I uttered after a moment of silence. "Maybe tomorrow we'll watch Halloween II."

There was a pause as the others interpreted my comment.

"I don't remember which one that was," Isaac said.

Of course he didn't. When we had gone over the code words, he was busy cracking jokes.

"Ferris Bueller's Day Off," I said.

"Oh. I got it," he said.

Escape from Alcatraz, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. What did all of these movies have in common?

The next part of my plan. If we were going to get off the island alive, we had to earn it.