The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG-Chapter 10Book Six, : Nightmares

I had been through a lot since coming to Carousel.

I had been a puppet on the strings of many a puppet master. I had run through mazes like a rat and danced when told to dance, but perhaps the most annoying enemy trope I had ever come across was Night Terrors.

The ability that the Repossessors had made it so that my insight tropes came in the form of nightmares. Not such a big deal. It didn't actually block my ability to gain insight; it just punished me for wanting to use it.

My character's parents were out of town, go figure. It took me a long time to figure out where my character's house was supposed to be. It was a small, quiet neighborhood, and the house was nothing impressive, but the doors locked and seemed sturdy, so I wasn't going to complain.

I lay down in the living room on the couch, with the TV still flickering on low volume, to get some sleep.

And that is when the nightmares began.

I was On-Screen for part of it. Both the version of me that was tossing and turning on the couch, accidentally knocking over a bowl of melted ice cream (what could I say, I was a teenager), and also the version of me that was trapped inside of a hellish version of Pecatto's Pizza Parlor.

I didn't remember a lot of events, but I remembered the feelings, the terror. I remembered swimming in pizza sauce. I remembered being chased down a long hallway that looked a lot like the hallway between the back kitchen and the main office.

I was being chased in this dream by Tony the Tosser, the animatronic character.

It was largely a non-event, just something that kept repeating itself. Then there was a jarring end that went all fuzzy in my mind.

It was scary and unsettling, but it came with rewards.

I was able to add more to the total of tropes I had seen, and I was able to explore a place that felt real. This nightmarish version of the pizza parlor didn't seem like some one-off recreation from my dream; it felt like a real place, like some version of me was really there.

I fully expected I would be there again and not in a dream.

When I woke up in the morning, I could hardly remember much, but I did remember the tropes. When I saw the various demons taunting me in my dreams, the tropes appeared to me on a demented version of the red wallpaper.

Repossessor

Plot Armor: 25

__________

Tropes

Night Terrors

All information from insight tropes directly related to this entity will come in the form of On-Screen nightmares or visions.

Stickler for the Rules

This entity has a set of rules or goals that it will always strive to abide by or achieve (whether it is able to is another question).

Fate Worse Than Death

This entity does not want to kill its victims, though, in the end, they will wish it had.

Your Soul to Take

The entity seeks human souls.

Bender of Truth

This entity may not directly lie, but will use wordplay to deceive and take advantage of opponents.

That wasn't a complete list, but it was enough to confirm my theory that we were dealing with demons and, more specifically, the kind of demons that made deals.

I dreaded the nightmares to come that would give me more tropes.

I woke up covered in sweat, so I had to take a shower before I left for work. Call Sheet was really handy. Knowing that I didn't have a scene for a few hours was a huge relief, and it cured an anxiety that I had suffered through in most storylines.

As I showered, the memories of that place faded away, and not a second too soon.

"How's Avery?" Anna asked as soon as we were all back in the restaurant.

We had to gather around for a meeting that had been called. For the most part, we were just standing there waiting while Carousel got footage. We knew the drill.

"I think she may have been dragged to hell," I said. I wasn’t going for shock value. I was just trying to answer truthfully. I wish I had been more tactful.

Anna's eyes got big.

"She'll be okay," I said.

"So it's demons," she said.

I nodded. "I'll tell you more later. We're about to be On-Screen."

We waited as more employees trickled in, including Ramona, who seemed to be having a pretty good time considering we were in the middle of a storyline in which her own trope sealed her fate; she would be Second Blood.

When she got near me, she leaned over and said, "Cassie and Isaac both had a rough start. Nightmares or something."

Ramona's character and Cassie's character were friends, so they had a sleepover.

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Moments later, Cassie and Isaac came in through the door looking ragged. My nightmares had mostly been a fever dream that I had forgotten. I had to wonder what Cassie and Isaac had been dreaming about that left them so mentally scarred. I wondered which tropes Cassie was suffering nightmares for. Might it have been her I'm Blocked trope she had used to scout this storyline?

Camden came in soon after. He was in a good mood. No nightmares in the Tran household, apparently.

Cassie wanted to talk to me, but she didn't have the opportunity. She wasn't an employee; she was just there to drop off Isaac and Ramona. After she had gotten my attention and signaled that she wanted me to meet her outside, I nodded. I would have to wait until after the next scene.

Isaac came in, his little eyes dark and tired.

On-Screen

"I had the worst dream," he said.

At first, I wasn't sure if he should be talking about that On-Screen, but then the nightmares themselves had been partially On-Screen. I was still going to play mine off; I hardly remembered what happened in my dream, and I was a minor character. I didn't need to make myself the focus of anything.

Isaac could talk about his nightmare all he wanted.

"Let me guess. You dreamed that you had a low-paying job at a pizza parlor with irregular hours, during the last summer of your youth," Camden said drearily. "Had the same one."

Isaac ignored him.

"I dreamed something happened to Avery," Isaac said, "that she's in trouble."

I nodded, though perhaps I shouldn't have. It would seem that Isaac's dream wasn't related to the Night Terror trope but was instead related to Avery's Dream Girl trope, which allowed her to give information to her admirers through dreams after her demise.

"I'm sure she's fine," I said. “I talked to her last night when we were closing up.”

We stood and waited for a few moments.

After a while, the moment we had been waiting for arrived. Gus Junior stood in front of us, hat in hand, a look of shame across his face.

There were no customers in yet. The restaurant didn't open up until lunch.

"Well, team, as many of you might know, we've been having a slow period for the last few months. Now, first, I want to say that I don't blame any of you. You've been working your tails off, and I appreciate you all, each and every one of you."

He looked down at the floor for a moment but then continued.

"When my dad needed to make renovations on the store, he brought in some outside investors, and according to the contract that he signed, if we ever went through a down period like we are right now, his investors could come in and make changes. Today, a woman from the investment company will be making a trip to the store just to watch. All I ask is that you follow your training and do your best."

There were several NPC employees.

One of them called out, "Do we have to worry about our jobs?"

I wouldn’t have minded getting fired.

Gus shook his head. "You do not have to worry about your jobs. I will make sure that each of you can stay on and get whatever hours you need. We're just going through a slow time, but we're doing it the way we've always been doing it, and you'll see: things will turn around."

Gus talked more with the normal pep rally-style encouragement, but that happened Off-Screen.

Eventually, he broke us up and sent us to start opening up the restaurant.

While we were Off-Screen for the most part, Isaac was getting some attention from the cameras as he walked around asking if anyone had seen Avery.

I tried to listen in, but I couldn't exactly pull out my headphones while I was prepping the back kitchen. Not in my first week on the job at least.

I knew where she was, and he knew where she was because I had told everyone Off-Screen, but still, he needed to look very concerned.

Eventually, while I was getting everything set up in the kitchen, Isaac came to me, and I went On-Screen.

He walked up to me slowly and quietly.

"What's up, buddy?" I asked.

"Avery quit," he said softly. "She left a note in Gus's office."

So that was how they would play it.

"I'm sorry to hear that," I said. "I know you liked hanging out with her, but if it's any consolation, wherever she is, it's better than being here."

Isaac breathed out sharply through his nose but didn't quite laugh or smile.

The joke was that she was probably still around this place, and if I was right, the entrance to her current whereabouts was less than ten feet away from me, inside the mouth of a giant animatronic oven.

Off-Screen

I liked to think Carousel did a smash cut to whatever she was doing down in Hell at that very moment. Maybe the camera just panned down slowly until it found her down below.

After the announcement that the investor or partner, whatever she was, would be arriving that day, things went back to business as usual.

Orders came in. I hastily prepared them and threw them in the oven. Isaac and whoever was working with him in the front kitchen would take them out when they were done, package them up, and send them where they needed to go.

Of course, I didn't actually have to cook that many pizzas, just enough for Carousel to get its footage, and when the orders stopped coming in, I made my way to the back door.

On-Screen

I didn't know why I'd gone On-Screen, but I had been watching the time tick down for hours on the red wallpaper. I expected some NPC to come start a scene with me, but none had.

When I opened the door, I saw the reason.

There were four scrapes along the back door on either side of the door jamb. I stared at them in confusion.

I had seen what happened to Avery. My character had not, so he would just be a dumb idiot and stare at it. But the audience and I would know what I was looking at.

The long streaks in the black paint around the door were from fingernails. Avery's fingernails. She had a trope that allowed her to leave clues just like these.

First, I looked at those marks, and then I followed the direction that they went and saw, down by the oven, a bright pink piece of plastic, or at least that's what it looked like at first.

I bent over and picked it up to examine it.

It was a paint chip.

Avery had fought tooth and nail, quite literally, against what had happened to her.

I knew my assignment. I stared at the marks on the door, at the nail, and then up at the oven. I even stared into the mouth of Hot Head himself, into the oven, as if expecting Avery to be there, despite that being quite impossible.

All I saw were the five pizzas I had just put in.

No.

Six pizzas.

Not five.

Six.

It had happened again. I was trying my hardest to be a side character, just a face in the crowd, but I was going to have to kick it up. Clearly, Carousel wanted me to communicate these findings.

That was okay. I could be helpful without risking becoming a main character.

Off-Screen

I went outside to talk to Cassie, and luckily, the entire conversation was Off-Screen.

She looked really worried.

"Nightmares?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Yeah. The bad guys here have a trope that only allows you to access your insight abilities in the form of nightmares, at least when you're trying to learn things about them. The same thing happened to me last night."

Cassie was still and quiet.

"We're dealing with actual Hell here," she said. "I know it's dressed up to look like some sort of comedy, but there are tortured souls. I can still hear them screaming."

Was she asking for advice, or did she just want to talk to someone?

I decided to just talk around the issue.

"This wasn't originally a comedy, not when it happened the first time,” I said. “Everything's going to be dressed up to look wacky and weird. I mean, they're even using the old 'demons dressed up in human skin' cliché just to try to make things look funny. But we're dealing with actual evil here. Don't overexert yourself."

She nodded.

"Avery is in Hell," she said, "and there are a lot of people there with her. And somehow it all relates back to that stupid pizza."

She stared blankly forward.

"I woke up last night before the nightmares started,” she said. “I went to the bathroom, and I looked in the mirror, and I saw what we're up against. I was Off-Screen, but I never want to see it again. Can we just beat this one? We don't have to do well. I just don't want to see it again. We just have to get to the end."

This demonic story had been dressed up to look goofy and comedic, and that's how I had largely experienced it so far. But if there was any archetype that was going to see the evil things underneath, it would be Psychics.

"I'm sorry you had to see whatever it was," I said. "We'll try to get this story beat and keep things surface-level. Maybe that'll help."

She nodded. There was a tear forming in her eye.

She dressed like a grungy hippie, which may or may not have been fitting with the setting of the storyline, but it did make her look tough. And she was tough; Cassie had on multiple occasions sacrificed herself using her Anguish trope.

I didn't know what she saw when she looked into the mirror, but I had to imagine it was something terrifying to have her this worked up.

I had seen the demons, but they mostly looked like shadows, like the demons in the movie Ghost. They looked like tortured spirits, terrifying, sure, but whatever she had seen must have been worse.

"Don't worry," I said. "We'll try to get this wrapped up. I gotta get back to work."

She just stood there. I wished that I had a better rapport with her. Kimberly would have known what to do.

All I could do was send Anna her direction the next time I saw her.

And that's what I did. I went back through the restaurant, found Anna, and sent her outside. I started racking my brain, trying to remember who on our team had mental health tropes.