Book Nine, Chapter 31: Swordplay

“So let me get this straight,” Isaac said as we stood on the docks, having seemingly lost track of the killer. “We rigged this whole Scooby-Doo trap just to steal the guy’s sword? Have you seen him? He could kill us with anything. Why do we need his sword?”

Cassie stepped forward. “Whatever it is, it’s the source of his power. We don’t have to take it, but we can’t let him keep it.”

That line wasn’t how I had written it up, but close enough.

“So now we’re just waiting for the killer to come find us?” Isaac asked. “There’s no way that could go wrong. All I have to say is that the sooner we get off this island, the better.”

He continued ranting for a little while longer, but eventually he was gilding the lily. He had just used one of his tropes to help buff our plan by explaining it.

Of course, he only explained the first part.

The moment I saw Caleb Rowe unequip one of his tropes and then equip Nowhere to Run, I realized that Carousel was setting us up for a game. Not the normal kind, with a Plot Cycle and consistent narrative rules, but something else. Something new.

Because Caleb Rowe only had three tropes equipped. Just three. He had to unequip one in order to add the new one. I knew that he didn’t just have a bunch of tropes hidden, first because we weren’t that far apart in levels, and second because even when I can’t tell what tropes an enemy has, I can tell when they have a bunch of them. And he didn’t.

This was the fundamental piece of information that our entire plan was based on, and it made sense, in a way. If you had all of the enemy and hazard tropes in front of you, you could reverse engineer the plot of any given storyline. They were the bearers of the rules for that story. But we weren’t in a storyline, so Caleb Rowe didn’t have access to a full roster of tropes. He only got enough to define a single scene. That number, apparently, was three.

It was the most I had seen him equip, and I could almost feel Carousel waving it in my face, offering it up as the sole concession in our favor. The enemy could change their tropes, but they could only have three at a time.

Our plan had to form around that, so we had all taken the time to use our information-gathering tropes and put together a plan that we hoped Carousel would reward us for.

Hoped.

Since there was no difference between On-Screen and Off-Screen, we basically just had to separate it ourselves. We played in character sometimes, and then we spoke out of character others, without clear divisions. I wasn’t sure whether we would get punished for it, but so far, my scene-by-scene theory was playing out correctly.

“What do you got?” I asked Camden.

While Rowe could only equip three tropes, that wasn’t all the information that an enemy had. They also had tactics, which I couldn’t see unless they happened to be redundant with the tropes. Normally, to see tactics, you had to have high Mettle, but Camden had the Battlefield Intuition ability that allowed him to use Savvy instead.

“He’s got three primary tactics. The first you can already see. He likes to hide and sneak around. Second, if he finds a group of us, he’ll slaughter us one by one in quick succession. But if he comes across just a single player, he’ll make it last.”

There were tropes that had those same effects. I wondered if the redundancy was tiered, so that in the early game, low-level players would have multiple ways to see the same information.

I didn’t get to wonder for long.

“Give me a second,” Kimberly said as she ran down the docks and jumped aboard one of the derelict ships tied there.

I didn’t know if we had a second to give her, but it didn’t take her long to come back. Her Compulsive Vetting trope had rewarded her with information about a nearby weapon. A harpoon gun, to be exact.

As she got back to the group, Antoine handed her his Better Make It Count trope, which powered up the last shot in a projectile weapon. Since the harpoon gun only had one shot, it would work on the first and only one.

“Should we be standing in a group like this?” Anna asked. “If he’s just going to kill everyone until the last person, shouldn’t we separate?”

“No,” I said. “Only one person needs to. The person that he’s going to chase.”

And for that, I had, of course, drawn the short straw. With Trope Master equipped, my effective Plot Armor was lower than anyone else’s, and since I knew what tropes he was operating under (Evil Never Dies, Slasher Teleportation, and Nowhere to Run), he would default to basic targeting order.

Anna nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t exactly thrilled with the decision.

I wasn’t either, but it was the right call. He was going after me, and if I was in the group when that happened, he would kill me basically in an instant and then move on to his next target. But if I was alone, he would try to torture me first, which would give my friends time to save me.

It was a clear choice. Luckily, we had one additional ace up our sleeve. Like Caleb Rowe, we could trade out our tropes at will, and we planned on using it.

“So get out of here,” I said as I lifted up a radio that I had snagged from Dead Pursuit. We had four working radios now, between the various storylines we had managed to salvage them from.

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So we divided up into groups. Well, most of them did. I went off on my own down the long, poorly lit pier. Cassie broke off with Camden and Isaac. Ramona went with Anna, Kimberly, and Antoine. And Kelsey also left by herself. She was a Scream Queen, after all. It would have hurt her pride to let the little Film Buff be all on his own while she had a group.

-

Say what you will about Film Buffs, but we made excellent bait.

With Oblivious Bystander, I could protect myself for a time, although I wasn’t confident it would last too long, given the fact that I had already used it once. But if the scenes truly were separate, it might be back at full power. I wouldn’t know until a certain mall ninja tried to kill me.

As I walked down the rows of docks, I found myself double- and triple-checking our plans, going over the available information to make sure there wasn’t anything else to glean from it. But there was.

I realized that with only three tropes equipped, the possessive powers that Caleb Rowe seemed to have, through his sword or otherwise, could not have been the work of a trope, which meant that they weren’t script-based or meta. They were lore-based. The sword, or Caleb himself perhaps, must have actually had that ability.

We had seen on the video NPCs opening up the closet and then closing it. It wasn’t clear what could cause that behavior, but I realized that as they got close to the sword, they were simply possessed, forced to open the door, and then were evaluated as worthy or unworthy.

It was all actual possession. Luckily, Antoine had a great antidote for that. His Willpower Is Magic would set the rules for every scene we were in, ensuring that I could use my Grit to break any possession, magic or otherwise, that tried to overcome me. Although I greatly feared doing it, because breaking possession would cause physical injury, and we were outside of a storyline, so I didn’t know how long it would take for me to heal.

It was so dark outside, I couldn’t see more than ten feet from the dock in any direction. There could have been a sea monster on its way toward me, and I wouldn’t know.

There were sharks. Of course there were sharks. That was one of the gimmicks of the island. But they were not what I was worried about. I only saw one come close to the docks, and it seemed to be on an invisible leash that quickly pulled it away. The draw of the caretaker’s body was not stronger than the script.

Time flies when you’re overthinking things, as the saying goes, and before long I heard a blip over the radio that meant Ramona sensed Caleb Rowe was back in the direction of the docks. While I didn’t know where her group was hiding, I knew she must have been nearby.

She had a trope called I Know It’s Still Out There that made her Chase Scene indicator far more sensitive than it should be, which basically meant she had radar on any enemy that wanted to come close to her. Even with Slasher Teleportation, there was no way that Rowe could sneak up on us now.

Well, he could, but we would know he was about to do it.

It was a lot harder to remain oblivious when I didn’t know where the enemy was. Ironically, when I saw them out of the corner of my eye, I could pretend. I felt like I had some level of control. It was all an act, but a practiced one. Suddenly I found myself searching every shadow for the face of a killer, the glint of a blade.

But he didn’t come from a shadow.

His sword did, though.

He threw it through the air from at least fifty feet away, far beyond my vision, maybe even on another one of the docks. Fortunately, I had the exact antidote for this problem in my pocket, with my hand wrapped around the handle.

I drew my silver blade and deflected his sword right in the air, in a moment that was way cooler than I deserved. The blade I had picked up while fighting some werewolves could detect anything sharp nearby and gave me an edge in dodging it.

Rowe’s blade still managed to land hard on the dock, crunching the wood and stabbing in so far I was pretty sure I couldn’t pull it out if I tried.

I was alive, but I might not be for long, as it would be difficult to claim to be oblivious after that move. I considered going over and observing the sword so intently that I might not notice the six-foot-five monster of a man coming up behind me, but something just told me that wasn’t going to work, so I didn’t try.

Instead, I started to run.

“We have eyes on him,” Camden said over the radio.

That was good. It meant that Slasher Teleportation wouldn’t be able to activate in the chase. Caleb Rowe didn’t run anywhere, so as he pulled his sword from the dock, the wood crunching and falling into the ocean below, I managed to make some distance.

He still had the same three tropes equipped.

I ran. He walked after me. This was where I learned that he must have had a lot more Hustle than you would expect from a guy whose heart rate never seemed to elevate past a sleeping murmur.

Even with the others watching, he managed to catch up with me at every turn. It had been a long time since simple stat comparisons had stymied me so much. He wasn’t teleporting. Distance itself was being manipulated by Carousel. I had to wonder what the others were seeing, because all I could tell was that every time I looked over my shoulder, he wasn’t that far away.

Either we had the same Hustle, or his was a bit better. I couldn’t tell. I didn’t need to make an escape. I just needed him to follow me for a little bit longer.

And he certainly did.

He followed me right into the trap.

His hair didn’t move a lot despite being long, largely because it was incredibly greasy, framing his face and almost coming down to his shoulders. The lower part of his face was covered by some sort of white T-shirt material, which must have been ripped from some other article of clothing to form a mask. A remarkably clean white T-shirt and some faded jeans completed the look.

The man looked like he should have been either watching WWE or performing in it.

As he pursued me, he wasted no movement. He wasn’t being led around by the sword like the NPC killer had been. They looked like they were one being. Man and blade.

He stepped forward right as he was about to catch up with me, holding up his sword, ready to cut me in half. He was supposed to torture me first, but that was if I was alone. I no longer was.

“Good thing I threw the javelin in high school,” Antoine said as he launched the large hooked barb into the back of the killer.

At first we feared that this attack would simply bounce off, given the fact that Caleb Rowe was some unkillable slasher, but we had learned a few things since our first brush with the man.

The barb, which must have been some sort of fishing implement meant to catch or protect against sharks, it wasn’t clear, pierced right through the killer’s torso.

“Now!” Antoine called over the radio.

In the distance, a large crate of salt fell down into the sea, pulling a high-weight fishing cable up through a series of metal pulleys and threading through the hook of something that was called a gin pole derrick, quite possibly. Alternatively, it might have been a weigh station gantry. I wasn’t quite sure. Camden had explained it after having pieced together the trap using his Trap Montage trope, but that was his part to worry about. Mine was not getting killed.

As the cable attached to the barb was pulled, Kimberly came up beside Antoine and hooked Caleb Rowe’s sword using a wicked-looking fish gaff, another new term for me, which was basically a giant hook on a pole.

The sword clattered to the dock, and the killer rose fifteen feet into the air, blood oozing slowly from the wound in his torso.

Step one of the plan was complete, and even watching the man skewered through the ribs, I knew it wouldn't be enough.