We found Chris down in the same lounge where we had been sleeping. He was arranging various weapons that he had found around the mansion. Most of them were antiques. He had a jewel-encrusted sword and a morning star among them.

“You're really going to try and take those?” I asked.

I knew that you couldn't just take anything after clearing a storyline. You could take most things but certain items like weapons had limitations that weren't quite clear.

“Oh, I'm gonna try,” Chris said.

The three of us stood in front of Chris. Kimberly and I looked at Antoine. Chris was his brother so he should be the one to ask the questions.

“What do you guys need?” Chris asked, sensing that there was something we needed to talk about from our awkward body language.

Antoine didn't look like he wasn't sure what to say but eventually, he came out with it. “Who was Zoe Paulson?”

Chris looked genuinely surprised at that question.

“Whoa,” he said. And then he paused for a moment and looked into the distance. “Where did you hear that name?”

“We saw it in the Carousel Atlas,” Antoine answered. “There was just one reference. We think Todd wrote it so maybe you would know since you guys came here together.”

Chris zoned out for a moment.

“Zoe Paulson. She's been gone for over seven years,” Chris said. “Wait how did you get a hold of the Carousel Atlas?”

At that question, Antoine looked back toward me.

“Some of the other players left it out one night so we just took a look at it,” I said.

“So you just took a look at the book that you're not supposed to touch? What section was her name in?” He asked.

Before Antoine could answer, Chris walked out into the hall and yelled, “Grace! Come in here for a minute.”

Grace took a bit to arrive. “What do you need Chris?” She asked.

“Tell her what you told me,” Chris said.

So Antoine did.

“I'm amazed you could find anything about her at all,” Grace said. “Ashwood stole a lot of the entries from it before he… you know.”

“Wait, you're saying that Winston Ashwood, the psychic that tricked a bunch of people to going into getting killed, tore up the Carousel Atlas?” I asked. I had always assumed that Arthur had done it in order to censor it.

“Well, he's one of the people who messed with it,” Chris said. “That book's been vandalized so many times that we keep it off-limits to anyone but a select few.” He shot Grace an accusatory glance.

“What?” she asked. “It’s my fault they stole it?”

“I wouldn’t say we stole it,” I said. “We returned it.”

“None of this matters,” Antoine said loudly. “We were just asking if you knew who Zoe Paulson was.”

Chris looked like he didn’t want to answer.

“Zoe Paulson was the person who invited me to Carousel,” Chris said. “Me and Todd and Valorie, my whole team. Then after less than a year here, she decides she can't take it so she runs head-first into a dangerous storyline and takes the easy way out. I guess we'll see her again if we ever beat this thing maybe. I have no idea.”

“The entry in the book said that Zoe had some sort of quest. Do you know what that was talking about?” I asked.

Chris thought for a moment. “I don't know if you would call it a quest,” he said. “She seemed to think that we would somehow find a cure for her sister. Her sister was sick and she thought that we would find medicine or magic and take it back to her and save her life. That hope got dashed on the rocks pretty quick obviously.”

Antoine, Kimberly, and I looked at each other. That sounded very familiar.

“Why did that hope get dashed on the rocks?” Kimberly asked.

Chris threw up his hands. “You have to understand that she wasn't really making any sense, especially toward the end. She said that we picked the wrong type of aspects. Is that what you wanted to know? I don't know what that meant, but I remember her saying that a day or so before she left.”

The wrong type of aspects? What could that mean?

“You really shouldn’t have taken that book without permission,” Chris said. “If we lost that, I’m pretty sure Adeline would die of a heart attack. That thing has been around since before she got here.”

“Sorry,” I said. Kimberly and Antoine followed suit.

“There’s something else we wanted to tell you about,” Antoine said.

He was about to talk about Dina’s quest to save her son. I still wasn’t certain about that but I wasn’t going to be able to convince Antoine to keep secrets from his brother any longer.

“What?” Chris said.

Antoine looked back at me and Kimberly. “Something that we found out recently,” he started. “We think that Carous—”

“Shh,” Chris interjected. “There was someone outside the window just now.”

I turned around to look out the window but was unable to see anything. For a moment we all stayed still waiting, listening.

Then it came. A knock on the door.

“Weapons,” Chris whispered to each of us.

We each moved to pick up a weapon from the collection of antiques that Chris had found around the mansion. I chose a large spear because I didn't want enemies getting anywhere near me and those swords look so sharp I might cut my own fingers off.

Chris quietly crept out of the lounge and around the hallway so that he could face the front door.

I could hear muffled yelling from the other side of the door. I couldn't make out what they were saying.

“Is that…?” Grace asked, wielding a small revolver.

The door was solid wood so we couldn't see who was on the other side but there were windows on either side of the door. I could see a figure pressing his face against the window trying to see through the frosted glass into the building.

“Riley,” Chris said. “Is that an omen?”

“No,” I reported back. I was using my "I don't like it here..." trope constantly to make sure that we weren't running into omens around the mansion.

I didn't see an omen. As we got closer it became obvious who was on the other side of the door because they became visible on the red wallpaper once we could get a good look at them even through the frosted glass.

It was Jack Goforth, our NPC companion from the storyline.

“What is he doing here?” Grace asked.

“I have no idea,” Chris said. “Why would an NPC show up like this?”

Grace didn't seem to know.

“Do we let him in?” Chris asked.

“Still no omens?” Grace asked looking at me.

“Nope,” I answered. “I would be able to tell by this point.”

If he was an omen, I would be able to see it. Even if the omen he carried was very over leveled I'd still be able to tell that it was there even if I couldn't read anything about it.

He knocked on the door again.

“So, this is what the ‘It’s Open’ trope is for,” Grace said.

“Never thought I’d see a use for that,” Chris agreed.

“It’s Open” was a trope that allowed a player to unlock a door to a building or room they were already inside of that someone else was trying to get into simply by yelling, “It’s open!” It did not work if the player was captured, or the door was visibly locked or barricaded.

I had seen the trope in movies before. It was a joke around Dyer’s Lodge that it was a mostly useless trope.

“I’m just going to open it,” Chris said. “It’s an NPC. Be ready just in case.”

Chris moved to the door. He cautiously unlocked it and opened it up.

As soon as there was a chance, Jack slid inside. He then turned to close the door behind him.

“You guys are still here?” Jack asked, breathing hard. “Are the cultists gone? Or are you… You’re not puppets now, right?”

Grace and Chris looked at each other.

“They all left,” Grace said. “We’re just here to weather the storm. What are you doing back here?”

Jack fanned his face. It looked like he had been running.

“Came to find you,” he said. He looked around and started walking into the ballroom where the liquor was kept for the party.

We followed.

“It’s going to look like I’m drinking a mimosa,” he said, retrieving a bottle of orange juice from a small refrigerator behind the bar and pouring it into a glass of champagne, “But let’s pretend it’s a beer or whiskey or something more macho.”

“Where did you go?” Grace said.

Jack drank the cocktail quickly before pouring himself another.

“I went… it doesn’t matter where I went. I'm back, but not for long. We all need to go.”

“Are the sorcerers coming back?” Grace asked.

“I would assume so,” Jack said. “Messy situation that was, huh? If they had learned our secret,” he said, looking back at me, Kimberly, and Antoine, “Who knows what bad things could have happened? Secrets are funny that way.”

We all looked at each other. It sounded like our friends in high places didn’t want us to talk about Dina’s quest.

“Yeah, it would have been terrible,” Grace said, looking up at Chris to see if he knew what was going on. “So, you would have us leave?”

Jack nodded. “I would definitely have you leave. You have a house on Dyer’s Lake, right Chris? Let’s go there. We’ll be safe there. Just a quick hike from here, huh?”

Chris took a moment to respond. “I have a house over there, sure, but you know how many… things are between us and it right now?”

“A few skirmishes, sure, but I imagine most things near Carousel would be hiding because of the storm. If we stay close enough to town to avoid the wilderness and far enough away to avoid the storm, we should be fine.”

“Just a second,” Chris said. “Let’s go back into the lounge for a moment, you guys, and get our stuff. Jack, you wait here.”

Jack smiled. “You got it,” he said.

We hurried back into the lounge where all of our stuff was.

“What the hell is going on?” Chris asked as soon as we were inside the room.

“I have no idea,” Grace responded.

Antoine, Kimberly, and I looked at each other. We shrugged our shoulders and pretended that we had no idea why an NPC might be acting out of the ordinary.

“Are we supposed to stay in character?” Grace asked. “This is really unusual. Do you think it's because of the storm?”

“I have no idea. I've seen NPCs act weird once or twice, but this is something different. How can this not be part of an omen?” Chris answered.

“Do you think… they say that the tutorial had NPCs who would guide you to storylines and help you find places to stay afterward. Do you think it's like that?” Grace asked.

“I don't know. I didn't do the tutorial,” Chris said.

Most players had missed the tutorial when they arrived, including my friends and I. Players who had completed it reported that it was distressing and woefully uninformative. Because players were known to give up before finishing, the vets now intercepted new players and brought them to the corn maze.

“I mean he's not an enemy, right?” Grace asked. “The level 50s can sometimes be bad guys but not outside of a storyline, surely.”

I decided to jump in. “I didn’t see any sign of him being an omen. None of us have lived in settings of storylines after beating them. Maybe this is always what happens. The NPCs stay in character and guide us once it’s time to go.”

“Maybe,” Grace said. “I’m sure the old timers would have written about that in the Atlas, but we’ll never know since so many pages got ripped out.”

I think she meant it as a joke, but no one laughed.

“We've already made some plans to get back to the Lodge without running into anything too terrible. You have the maps?” he asked Grace.

“I do,” she said.

“Get your bags and get ready,” Chris said. “We need to move fast.”

We each had a bag that contained everything we needed for the hike. Food, toiletries, and camping supplies, all gathered from around the mansion. Chris had also stuffed in some weapons and other loot just in case.

We grabbed them and went back out into the hall to meet Jack.

“Bug-out bags,” Jack noted. “That has you written all over it, Chris. These were your idea, weren’t they?”

Indeed, they were.

“I suppose you didn’t make an extra?” Jack asked.

“Didn’t know you were coming, Jack,” Chris said.

“Neither did I, Chris,” Jack responded. “But I’m the well-known tabloid journalist, of course, that’s who you want on a dangerous hike. I’m already prepared,” he said with a smile, gesturing down at his tux.

We exited the mansion and headed west.

“You know it’s lucky my stepdad sent me to wilderness camps to toughen me up,” Jack said. “I got dragged up and down these hills as a teen.”

Jack’s Plot Armor jumped up six points. Strange. I couldn't see his tropes or his stats, but I could see that.

“Well, that’s convenient,” I said.

Jack chuckled. “Indeed.”

Goodbye mansion, hello camping.