We made it back to Dyer’s Lodge before sundown.

Antoine was still visibly withdrawn and distant. His eyes were red and watery. It was enough that when we walked back into the Lodge, people noticed. Dyer’s Lodge was never the happiest place on earth, but most people breathed a sigh of relief when they walked through the doors.

“Is he… hurt?” Grace asked as we walked by her. She was on the couch reading a book but looked up as soon as we came in.

“Bad run,” I said quickly as we walked by.

Antoine was looking for Chris. I didn’t know what answers he might have; at this point, we knew our version of the campfire storyline was highly unusual. Still, we needed confirmation. We needed to know what exactly had happened differently.

I already had my suspicions.

“Chris!” Antoine yelled as we moved to the center of the entryway.

Players looked up from all over to see what the ruckus was about. Chris was upstairs in the nook where all the unsolved treasure maps and riddles were kept. When he saw Antoine, he immediately knew something was wrong. I think he had insight tropes to help with that, though I didn't think to look at the time.

“What’s wrong?” Chris said. He ran down the stairs two at a time. “What happened?”

“I got trapped in—” Antoine started to say. The very thought of what he had experienced brought back a flood of emotion that caught in his throat and stopped him from talking.

Chris grabbed Antoine and led him to a nearby couch.

He looked back at us. “Tell me what happened now.”

Anna, as usual, spoke for us. “He got trapped in the storyline we went into. The Straggler Forest. He was there for… we don’t know how long.”

“Stragglers? What?” Chris said. “That doesn’t make sense.”

A crowd of concerned players surrounded us. They began whispering to themselves. One thing that was evident was that they had all done the Akers campfire storyline before.

“I was caught by the Stragglers,” a man in the back said. It was one of Reggie and Grace’s teammates, one of the Bruisers. “I was only there for a half hour. Barely even realized I had been caught before the game ended.”

He chuckled to himself at the thought.

“Our storyline glitched,” I said. I had wondered if the Axe-Murderer might be upset for me mentioning it, but I didn’t hear a peep from him. “He was stuck in the first storyline in the anthology after the rest of us left.”

At that, the people surrounding us were confused.

“Glitched?” Lee, the silver-haired Wallflower fisherman asked.

“Lee doesn’t know what technology is,” Todd, the Comedian teased. “It’s like a record skipping, Lee. It messed up, broke.”

“Oh, dear,” Lee said. "I didn't know that could happen."

The crowd parted ways and Arthur came through.

“Tell me everything,” he said to Anna.

So, she did.

She told him about leaving Antoine behind in the Straggler Forest, the glitching second storyline in the mines with the Unknowable Host and Hesper, and the final storyline with Douglas and the Cloven Women. Then she told him about Silas the Showman interceding to make Antoine fail.

Arthur was interested but offered no answers. "How do you know the storyline broke?" he asked. "Maybe this creature just had a powerful trope."

The others in the crowd liked that theory more. It was safer.

Now that they understood his condition a little better, they started to offer solutions.

A Doctor archetype named Jordan gave Antoine a pill to make him fall asleep right there on the couch. They figured that actual sleep combined with his new “You were having a nightmare…” trope would help him shake much of his mental fatigue. It might not be permanent, but if not, the other players offered to share some of their mental health tropes until he was able to manage.

Antoine was soon asleep. A peace spread over his face. Kimberly sat near him, ready to wake him and activate his trope at the slightest turbulence in his sleep. Chris stayed with them for hours. Hearing about what his little brother had experienced has devastated him.

The conversation continued elsewhere so as to not disturb Antoine.

“You guys are just being paranoid,” Todd said with a smile. “Silas does that type of thing all the time. A year after I got here, he appeared to me in a storyline that starts on a plane and gave me a Comedian trope called Rubber Bones that gave me higher Grit but made me more accident-prone. My parachute didn't open all the way. I got horrifically injured, but I also got a background trope called Near Death Experience that I still use to this day.”

Other people had similar stories.

If they expected us to believe that everything was business as usual, they weren’t doing a good job. I refused to believe this was normal.

After a minute of discussing Silas, they all started recounting their experiences in the Campfire Stories storyline. One thing remained constant: the Straggler's Forest. After that, you would get two different mini storylines. We didn’t have to worry about spoiling the story because everyone had already done it. Some of the stories actually did sound fun as Chris had promised.

“We got the mines,” Grace said. “Didn’t see any undead god, but we did the minecart race thing. Barely managed to fit my boys in the cart. Then we did the mutant bat hunt with the rifles. Bruisers don’t have Hustle though, so they just smacked them with tree branches.”

This elicited some laughter.

“We repeated it a dozen times trying to get the treasure hunt one,” Todd said. “We got the minecart race, the dirt bike race with the ghost horses, the bat shootout, and a few others. We also got the one set in the past with the monsters whispering in the dark, but there was nothing about a wishing well.”

As they told their stories, none of them had heard of the wishing well. To them, the Cloven Women had been a glorified game of flashlight tag. They ran through the dark woods trying to avoid getting lured away by unseen voices.

More significantly, none of them had seen the Unknowable Host, or Hesper for that matter. In fact, no one remembered the owner’s son, Nicholas, being there. In fact, the mine owner was usually a role for the players to play.

It wasn’t like this was a niche little storyline either. On the contrary, many had played it multiple times trying to find new mini-games and hoping they would get a storyline with otherworldly moonshiners and buried treasure. Only a few had succeeded.

That was the reason Chris knew it so well. He had gotten the treasure years earlier.

After they had told their stories and the mood started to calm, I showed them the secret lore ticket. “Has anyone gotten one of these?” I asked.

They seemed vaguely familiar with them, but most had only heard of them second-hand. The former generation had dismissed them as being tied to high-level storylines and they had believed them to be inaccessible. They were apparently wrong.

Upon passing around my secret lore ticket, one of the players I had never spoken to in-depth laughed. “I got one of these. A million years ago. Sure.”

He was a small man in his mid-thirties named Lukas. His poster on the red wallpaper showed him screaming at an axe that was lowering into the frame.

Lukas Lewandowski is The Hysteric. Plot Armor: 44.

He was a jumpy guy who spoke very enthusiastically even when talking about everyday things like the weather. Every morning, he could be seen draining an entire pot of coffee into an insulated jug and walking around camp with it taking big swigs every few minutes.

“What do you want to know?” he asked, eager for attention.

Anna looked down at Antoine on the couch and decided to take the lead. “Did the storyline glitch?” she asked. “Did the story go Off-Screen or did any of the NPCs act funny?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Well, the last part. I don't know about any glitches. The story went off the rails for a bit and we were Off-Screen for it. It’s actually an interesting story.”

He took a big swig from his jug of coffee.

“We were just fooling around, this was over a decade ago, mind you, so my memory isn’t fresh. We were trying to see how much we could power up one of my tropes called Too Pathetic To Kill. It’s Moxie-based and prevents you from being killed as long as you act, well, pathetic. Harmless. But its odds of working go down every phase of the plot cycle.

“We had a plan though. We would get a bunch of strong buffs and buff my Moxie through the roof. Then we would go to a storyline and see if we could make me immortal. We tried it a few times. It worked pretty well. The problem was, if I ever tried to help fight or ever acted brave, it would stop working permanently. So not viable in most storylines.

“But that doesn’t matter. We decided to clear through a—” he paused, closing his eyes and lifting his finger while he was in thought. “I’ll be vague because of spoilers. We decided to clear through a particularly tough storyline. It was way over my level but I had some heavy hitters with me. A home invasion slasher. There are plenty of those out there, right? Anyway, this one was weird. I tried acting all pathetic, sad, pitiful, things that had worked before.

“Except in this storyline, they didn’t work. Not even a little. My Moxie should have been high enough, but still, these slashers didn’t even hesitate to kill me. So then we tried to find out why. We tried everything to figure it out. Maybe they’ve got a ridiculous Moxie? Too high for the trope to work? Nope. Brought in an Eye Candy. Their Moxie was super low.

“Maybe they had a trope that prevented it from working. That’s our next thought. Nope, got an Outsider—he's gone now—with a Betrayal trope called Evil All Along—”

He looked over at Anna. “What? You furrowed your brow.”

“What’s a betrayal trope?” she asked.

Lukas held up a finger and closed his eyes for a moment while he thought about the best way to explain it. “A Betrayal trope allows you to betray your team for some benefit. There are a bunch of them. Some are useful, some less so. I’ve got a Hysteric one that allows me to betray someone in First Blood and get them killed by the bad guy, but guarantees I get killed as Second Blood. Pretty good Blood Control.”

(Lukas was the only person at the Lodge who called manipulating First and Second Blood, “Blood Control”)

“Anyway, this one was a good one. It allowed an Outsider to betray their team and reveal that they were on the side of the bad guys the entire time,” he smiled a big smile, “In doing so, the Outsider can then see the enemy’s tropes because he is on their side. He can sneak over Off-Screen and tell you everything. ‘Course, then you have to kill him in the Finale, but still. It is really useful to know the enemies’ tropes.”

I’d have to agree with that.

“Anywho, that didn’t work. He said they are all normal slashers. No tropes to explain how they are resisting my trope. It was infuriating. There was no explanation. But we didn’t give up. We kept trying. We were obsessed at this point.”

Lukas stopped talking for a moment to gulp down his coffee.

“We decided to pull out an old trick from treasure hunting. We invited a player who had a Departed advanced archetype. Departed become ghosts when they are killed. Couldn’t get him to come until we told him the Betrayal trope didn’t work. Then he was suddenly interested. I forget his name, he… well, he’s gone now for many years.

“He comes with us. Gets killed for First Blood and then he’s a Departed, floating around unseen looking for some explanation for why these killers are resisting my trope. But the story was just a slasher without any supernatural elements, so of course he couldn’t reveal himself, but he could give us hints Off-Screen. Then he found it: there were other ghosts there. The strangest thing. These ghosts had 90 Plot Armor in a 60 Plot Armor storyline. They must've had tropes that block even most psychics from detecting them. Must have had a trope that countered mine too.

“Turned out this simple home invasion storyline wasn’t actually just a slasher: it was a haunting. The victims were responsible for a bunch of people dying and were being haunted. The killers were all possessed, but the ghosts were so strong no one could detect that. On that run, the story went in a whole different direction. We had played through this storyline dozens of times at this point, mind you. It changed completely.

“By the end, we had to escape as the ghosts killed the NPCs that had killed them years earlier. Mind-blowing. As you said though, we were Off-Screen for some bits, but I didn’t think too much of it at the time. If you play through the storyline today, you would never think there was anything supernatural involved, but there is.

“When we finished the storyline, we got one of those tickets, talking about some massacre in Carousel years ago. Traded it in for a treasure map a couple of years later. Still, it was quite exciting at the time.”

After a while, everyone dispersed. I found myself on the back deck watching the sunset. I figured that the others wouldn’t know much about the glitch. If they had, that would have come up at some point. Even Arthur didn't seem too interested once we described it. They all explained that NPCs often keep talking Off-Screen to help push you to the next scene or just in case the camera came back on suddenly. They said the camera could have been cutting in and out due to one of the creatures’ tropes.

I don’t want to say they dismissed it, because they didn’t, but they certainly didn’t seem as alarmed about it as we had. They were certainly interested, but it wasn't the game-changing revelation I expected it to be. If anything, they were more interested in the secret lore ticket than the glitch.

Soon, Dina, Anna, and Camden joined me on the deck. They were all tired and confused, I could see it in their eyes.

Camden slumped down into a chair near me.

“What do you think?” he asked.

I shrugged. “A million things,” I said. “They seem to think the glitch was just one of the Host’s tropes messing with us.”

“Well, they’ll see it for themselves soon from the looks of it,” he said.

Inside, many of the veterans had rearranged some couches and brought in a chalkboard to devote to the Secret Lore investigation. The energy inside was electric. Soon, they would be running the Campfire storyline for themselves to try and reproduce our run.

Dina watched them. She actually looked happy to see them working.

“Looks like they’re going to figure things out for us,” she said. “Finally, they’re doing something useful.”

Ann shook her head. “You’re not being fair,” she said. “You heard them talking. They thought all of the Secret Lore was locked behind high-level storylines.”

Dina didn’t respond.

“You all think the Secret Lore will show us the way out?” Camden asked after a beat.

No one said anything at first. It was too early to guess.

“Maybe,” I said. “I couldn’t say.”

I must not have sounded too confident.

“You don’t think so?” Dina asked. “It has to be important.”

I shrugged.

“It may be important, I don’t know.”

“But you don’t think it’s the way out?” she asked as if it were an accusation. ”You don’t think it will lead to saving my son?”

From the moment I picked up that lore ticket, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something off. Antoine’s suffering aside, this whole thing was too easy.

“We stumbled into it,” I said. “This is supposed to be a story, right? That’s what we concluded from the letters Carousel sent you and the messages on the tropes Silas gave me.”

We hadn’t had much time to discuss this.

“So?” Dina asked.

“I don’t pretend to be a movie critic or anything, but I do know some things. In a story, the main character can stumble sideways into a B plot, but they can’t stumble forward in the A plot,” I said. “We went out on some random storyline and just happened to uncover a huge plot development? That isn’t how it works. We are supposed to seek things like that out.”

“Does everything have to fit perfectly?” Dina asked. "We're clearly being led this way. We can't just ignore it."

I was assigned Film Buff for a reason. I didn’t want to argue with her though. I shouldn’t have said anything.

Camden spoke up. “Silas interfered. We didn’t stumble into it. Silas showed it to us.”

“Fine,” I said. “It’s just a theory. I think we need to keep our eyes open is all.”

Anna changed the subject after that.

I should have waited to bring up my reservations.

The veterans inside were dissecting what we had told them and were making battle plans. I was actually looking forward to seeing them in action.

More than anything, I couldn’t wait for them to go through that same storyline, if only so they could see the glitch for themselves. I wondered if they would explain it away then.

I went inside to watch them discuss their plans. They hadn’t been able to share much with us in that regard on previous storylines because they didn’t want to spoil important stories and cause us to miss out on experience and loot. Now, we could actually learn from them.

And I couldn’t wait.