I wouldn't have picked the rooftop for the final battle if I had known it was going to take so long. I was soaked to my core.
Luckily, the weather subsided a bit. It had been so difficult to see and hear what was happening around me. But now, when the blackmailers arrived, it was clear as day, and the rain was only set dressing.
It didn’t feel like a real place. The odd lighting made it feel like a movie set.
I had realized recently that this storyline, Homibridal Part II, was obviously not about me. It wasn’t about any of the players. It was all about her. Daphne, whom my heart loved and ached for, and my brain and soul reviled. So clever, so conniving, but suddenly surprised.
The bright side was that I was finally understanding a lot of her humor.
All I knew for certain was that something was different with this storyline. Something had gone wrong.
Maybe Camden wasn't just overreacting. Maybe Carousel was rebalancing the storylines.
We were Off-Screen when the man started to speak. I had thought him dead. He had apparently died from poisoning(or drowning), but that goes to show how little you could rely on appearance in Carousel.
"I'm sure I can call you Daphne," he said in a Southern accent. It hadn't been so distinct earlier, but now he spoke clearly. "No more need for this Rachel nonsense."
"I think you've earned it by now; go for it," she said. "You're not zombies, are you? Because I try to avoid the undead. I like my dead to stay that way."
The man didn't answer quickly. Silver Fox was his name on the red wallpaper. His tropes defined him as an experienced strategist. Not that I had seen it up to this point. As hard as we looked, it was difficult to find much of what the blackmailers had been up to, other than the obvious stuff, which didn't seem that strategic.
But then, maybe his strategy was meta.
Killing Antoine certainly didn't seem like a smart move in-character.
But if my experience in By the Slice told me anything, it was that sometimes the bad guy has to take a gamble. Verity Pryce had gambled that we would charge headlong in the wrong direction and waste too much time to be able to solve the simple clues of her storyline.
What gamble was this man taking, and how did it involve the players?
The big guy, Ed, who was a bellboy, had apparently died after being paralyzed with poison and left to drown. I had seen it happen and even helped Daphne pull it off. That had seemed sufficient to kill him at the time.
It apparently hadn't been.
Some tropes could allow you to see the health of enemies, but so far in my experience, they didn't seem that important. “Dead” was usually easy to see, trope or no trope.
I had seen him struggle to breathe, unable to move under the water. Had he played dead? Silver Fox and Miss Kitty, who had posed as Rachel's distant family members, had also seemed dead. Poisoned. Drowned. Whatever. But here they were.
If Rachel’s dead parents walked onto the roof, I was going to lose my mind.
It seemed a cook was involved somehow. I didn't even realize, although I did see some flashes of her getting hung upside down when I watched the Dailies at high speed. She fell into an industrial-sized laundry basket filled with bedsheets. The basement was nearly flooded by then. In real life, that fall might have killed her. In a movie, especially a comedy, it wouldn't have, though my only reference for that was Dunston Checks In, a movie about a burgling ape in a hotel similar to this one.
The drowning should have killed her, though. The water, plus the fact that she was tied up, should have finished her off, but it would seem she had help.
The blackmailers had been helping each other in the background. I couldn't focus too much on the Dailies, I had to be present, but it was like a choreographed heist with these people. It was like they knew what Daphne would do before she did it.
Yes, this storyline was about Daphne. But it was also about those blackmailers. I was just playing catch-up.
Hopefully, they could fill in some of the gaps I was missing.
Emmett picked up a handheld radio and spoke into it, but I couldn't hear what he said. Had he been controlling everything from a distance?
"So how does it feel," he said, "to finally have a fair fight on your hands?"
Daphne shrugged, casually holding up her hands to show that she had nothing in them. "I'll tell you when I know.”
"There's no need for that," he said. "The little quips. Jokes. The audience isn't watching us right now. It's just us killers. Surely we could have a conversation."
I looked over at Kimberly, and she looked at me. We were both unsure of what to do. While Daphne and this gang of blackmailers were clearly enemies of each other, that didn't mean they would help us. We needed to think on our feet.
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"How long have you been awake?" Daphne asked. “All this time I thought I was alone.”
"It's hard to say," he said. "Time isn't something you can count on in this place, is it? It feels like we've always been here, and anything before that is just a story. A distant blank space."
He stared off into the distance, but then looked up at his wife. He reached over and touched her face. She looked at him with love in her eyes but said nothing. I recognized part of that look. Part of it was the look of an Off-Screen NPC. It was a rare thing for them to be able to interact with you in any real way when the cameras were off. If they did, it was only as set dressing. They might scoop your ice cream or help usher you to the next scene.
The idea of someone you love being like that was different.
I had seen Wallflower tropes that would allow more meaningful Off-Screen interactions with NPCs, and of course, I was currently using a trope that allowed me to speak to enemies in-character Off-Screen. But I had learned pretty quickly that meta enemies couldn't resist the urge to break that fourth wall when I used it. I supposed that after an endless torment (giving or receiving), they just couldn't resist spilling their thoughts. Interacting with a player, even if they weren't supposed to be, must have been a thrill. Or maybe, when they were meta, that was their character.
He looked at his wife desperately. She looked back, but she wasn't really there. She was being scripted.
"It sure does get lonely being the only one, doesn't it?" he said.
"I'm never alone," Daphne said. "And I actually prefer it when my playmates stick to their parts."
Was that a jab at me?
Emmett nodded. "I suppose you would prefer that. I remember it all now. I couldn’t even begin to count how many times we've met. One or two of them on this very rooftop. How about that? I think our first time, you killed me over there," he said, pointing off into a distant lot that was now covered in water. "Event staff buried a pig in a fire pit, a traditional cooking method, I was told. They didn’t notice that you had snuck in and buried just under the surface, paralyzed and gagged before they put the pig in.”
Daphne laughed.
"That was you?" she asked. "Wow. It has been a while, hasn't it? The audience didn't like that one. They got confused because of some of the sloppy camera work. They thought that when the pig was dug up and everyone was eating it, they were actually eating you. Which, of course, was never my intention. I couldn't help but feel that Carousel was punishing me."
"You weren't supposed to kill me. I had done everything you asked," Emmett said. "You were inexperienced then. Not like now. You're much better at pleasing the audience now."
He was being friendly, almost, but I could hear rage building in his voice.
"I am, aren't I?" Daphne said, a bit tongue-in-cheek.
"Suppose that's why you don't finish your victims off. You leave them to die Off-Screen. The audience doesn't actually like seeing how bloodthirsty you are. Not quite, I imagine."
Daphne didn't answer.
"I searched my memories," Emmett said, "looking for a weakness. But the truth was, you had the experience of hundreds of victories, and you’ve gotten quite good. I couldn't see a weakness. Not until I got to that. You leave your victims to their fate if at all possible. Few confirmed deaths. Of course, you may be regretting that now."
His plan was incredibly meta, it would seem.
"Nonsense," Daphne said. "The truth is, I always kind of miss my victims. There's a connection there that you can't get with a person in any other way. You were there with them for the most important moment of their life, the last one. And I'm so happy to see you all again so that we can experience that moment one more time."
Emmett chuckled politely.
"You never did let us win, did you?" Emmett said. "You know we're killers, same as you. Once upon a time, that is. Whatever this world is, we wouldn't be here if we didn't have a checkered past. But we're always scripted to lose. Isn’t that how it is? Whether you won it or not, we had to lose. Almost every single time. Doesn't seem fair, does it? The only way we got to win is if the players killed you off early."
I did my best to piece together the missing context using the footage from the Dailies, but watching things at fast-forward speed could make them more confusing. Still, I put it together.
Daphne left Ed to drown after poisoning him. She left the cook to drown, dropped down a laundry chute, and she left Emmett and Desiree to succumb to poison.
But of course, leaving them to die meant she had to leave them. And right after she did, another woman, a tall, slender maid, would arrive to save them. Carousel had recorded footage for a montage of the maid pulling them from the water.
They spat up water, took in lungfuls of air. After the cook was saved, she retrieved little white vials of antidote and spread them around to the other blackmailers, knowing that Daphne had just stolen poison from her.
Emmett looked somber, but that ever-present rage was coming to fruition.
"You have the experience of hundreds of victories. But this time, I have the experience of hundreds of losses. I suppose we'll see which of us has the better of it."
Daphne didn't seem fazed by this. She was too good an actress. But she had to have been afraid. There was no more room for strategy or sneaking around or last-minute reveals. This was the rooftop, and only the winners got to take the stairs down.
Maybe if Kimberly and I could just stay out of the spotlight, they would take each other out, and we could finish off the survivor.
But of course, the script would likely force us to join the fight. The blackmailers even had a trope alluding to the possibility of a team-up. They didn't have to kill us. That didn't mean they wouldn't. Perhaps if we had spent more time interacting with them, we could justify a team-up, but I wasn't sure. It was a risk.
After all the work I put in to lure the bad guys to their death on the rooftop, I wondered if it would be enough to take out five bad guys, including my wife.
I wasn't sure.
I looked over at the patio furniture chained up next to the utility building. Kimberly had to use her Contract Negotiation trope to get it there. We didn't think of it soon enough, or else we could have put it there with proper improvisation. But I suppose that was what her trope was for.
The funny part was that it was our furniture, the stuff we had up on our roof at the loft. Was that Carousel being funny? I wasn't sure.
What I didn't know was if Kimberly having the fire axe might be to her disadvantage at this moment. A lot of narrative momentum was placed on that axe, and if she was holding it during the final battle, it would be very hard for us to avoid the fray.
"So in a way, I guess we are undead," Emmett concluded. "You've killed us and dozens of our colleagues more times than I could count, anytime you had the opportunity to. And now we're back for our revenge."
His partners were silent. They didn't appear to be meta-aware in the slightest. He was alone in his little universe.
"I suppose you're wondering what else you missed. You didn't realize your folly of leaving your victims to die. You clearly underestimate the utility of playing dead, or how hard it is to drown a person with high Grit. The truth is, I don't think you are as good at this game as you believe. I think you've just never had a real opponent. But that changes now. I'm here for you, Daphne. It's just us, the only ones awake, listening to the chimes of these eternal wedding bells. And this time, they truly ring for you."