The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

We stood there as the words from the tape echoed in each of our minds.

“Featured” Throughline? That had to mean that there was more than one. The tone of the tape, the way it was phrased, it almost seemed like there were lots of Throughlines that players could go on. It was hard to separate reality from the strange, game-like façade that obscured everything in Carousel.

Had we nearly signed on to Silas Dyrkon’s own personal Throughline in his “employ,” whatever that meant? It certainly seemed so.

Where did the colorful language end and the hard facts begin?

As I pondered this, Silas the Mechanical Showman repeated his spiel in the background as the sounds of the Centennial Celebration grew quieter.

A voice called out from behind us.

“So,” it said, “You figured it out at the last minute. I’m not surprised. I did get a little greedy there, didn’t I?”

We all turned to see Silas Dyrkon, the man in the flesh. He was tall and well-dressed, though his collar had been loosened, and his suit jacket hung over his shoulder. His hair and eyes were dark. He could have been a movie star in his youth. Now, he looked hollow, tired.

“Yes,” he continued. “I am not surprised that the script was altered to give you a fighting chance at discovering my ruse; I just want to know who actually acted on it. Who did the deed? Was it Celia Dane, that old viper? It was, wasn’t it? Don’t tell me it was The Strang—”

“It was me, Silas,” Moonlight Morrow said, appearing out of nowhere as far as I could tell, along with all of the other Paragons we had met during the Tutorial (if that really was a Tutorial).

Silas turned to look at him. Moonlight stood firm.

“After all that talk about how players just need to learn their place in the story, you helped them?” Silas asked.

Moonlight stayed silent for a moment and then said, “You know it’s funny. Narrators are the only people in Carousel who believe they aren’t a part of the story.”

Silas looked at him curiously, but his curiosity turned to dread as Silas the Mechanical Showman appeared next to him.

He stared at the red button on the machine’s front and then back at Moonlight.

“No,” he said weakly.

“See for yourself,” Moonlight said.

I wasn’t sure what they were talking about.

Silas contemplated his actions for a moment, then reached out his hand and pressed the big red button.

As he did, a large ticket dropped from the machine’s receptacle.

He slowly reached down and picked it up.

He didn’t take a single breath as he read the ticket. Whatever blood was left in his tired face drained.

“I see,” he said after he had finished reading it. “It is nice to finally have an answer.”

I would never know what that ticket said, but whatever it was, it put the fear of Carousel into Silas Dyrkon.

He reached into his pocket and retrieved a small silver tool that I recognized as a hole puncher. He lifted it up to the ticket, but before he clicked it, he looked back at my friends and me and said, “I suppose I will need to explain some things first.”

He lowered the hole punch back into his pocket and then swirled the ticket in his hands. He was thinking to himself.

While most of us were silent, Isaac leaned over and gestured toward Silas Dyrkon and his mechanical twin. He said with a grin, “I think I’m seeing double.”

Before Isaac could laugh at his own joke, Silas said, “Really? Because I don’t think they captured my roguish features.”

His words were a jokey retort, but his tone was even as if his heart wasn’t in it.

After a deep breath, he asked, “What does the term ‘through line’ mean?”

No one answered. It wasn’t that we didn’t know the answer; we were all a little frazzled.

“You do have the term ‘through line’ back in your world, don’t you? When I say through line, do you register it as an existing term? You didn’t hear it here for the first time, did you?”

At first, I thought he was being an ass, but the way he said it, it was like he was asking a genuine question as if it was entirely possible through line was an alien concept to us.

“We know the term,” Antoine said.

“Good. What does it mean?” Silas asked.

“A connecting theme in a story,” I said. It wasn’t exactly a common term, but we had heard it.

Silas nodded. “Players always have trouble with Throughlines. They treat them like they are some sort of movie series or overstory. I always wondered how much the architects of Project Rewind actually knew about what they were doing. When you brought that Atlas of yours onto my Sound Stage, suddenly, I realized how little they knew about anything. Remarkable to have been beaten by a group of players who didn’t even understand what they were doing.”

He took a breath and said, “A Throughline is not just about storylines connected to each other. It is about the thing that connects them and that connects every action players take in one singular effort.” He looked back at the ticket in his hands and said, “How will I explain this?”

He thought for a moment.

“What connected the storylines I sent you on?” Silas asked. “What were you doing the entire time you were attempting my Throughline?”

There was certainly a plot that connected all of the stories, but that seemed obvious. The plot was about Lillian Geist’s paradoxical premature death. That couldn’t be what he meant.

Summoning all of the courage I could, I said, “Just tell us. We’re too tired for this patronizing lecture.”

Silas almost looked relieved to hear that. “Very well.”

He snapped his fingers.

Suddenly, we weren’t at the Centennial anymore. We were standing in a large crowd next to a stage. It was the first Miss Carousel Pageant if the large glittery banner was to be believed.

Up on stage, an eighteen-year-old Lillian Geist was accepting her crown and tiara.

There were NPCs around us, but they didn’t seem to notice us. Lillian was breathtaking. She accepted her award with a smile, but there was nothing behind it. She seemed almost wary of the crowd.

“Lillian Geist is always beautiful. Every single version of her. Whether her name is Lillian or not, she is always known for her looks. Look at her. She thinks her father paid the judges off for her victory, but he didn’t. She won it on her own merits. A sad thought that she never knew that.”

Another snap of his fingers, and we were back at the Centennial. The monstrous version of Lillian Geist’s body lay before us.

“Lillian Giest, no matter if that is her name, will always be disfigured by the time of her death. It doesn’t matter what the Narrator does. It always happens. To be fair, my version ended up a touch crueler than I had hoped, but then I did leave her in the hands of a mad scientist. One more bad deed I will have to live with.”

He looked up at us and said, “Carlyle Geist always enjoys making movies or writing books or telling tales around the campfire. He always dies being betrayed by a friend.” Silas looked up at me as he said it. “You see, there has always been a town and there has always been a family. The town was not always called Carousel, and the family was not called Geist, thank heavens, but it has always been this place, and it has always been these people.”

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

He took a moment to catch his breath.

“You see, I built this version of Carousel on this Sound Stage myself. Built for the Throughline of my own design. Every step along the way, I forced you to seek the hidden history of the Geists. To seek, but not find. Because the answers about the Geists always change, but the questions stay the same. Understanding the Geists by watching them in modern Carousel is like watching shadows on the wall to learn about who cast them.”

He snapped his fingers, and Carousel changed. The modern town was gone, and all that remained was a road leading up to a mansion on a hill. Lighting flashed in the background. A gate had a sign that read, “Geist Manor.”

It was not the Geist Manor I knew.

He snapped his fingers again, and we were standing in a dark city like something out of a gothic science fiction novel. A large skyscraper stood before us. Pipes poured glowing green water out the side of the building, which was called the Geist Tower.

He snapped his fingers again and again. We saw a giant 1990s mansion that belonged to the Geists. Men with long hair and unbuttoned shirts stood guard, and I felt the aura of magic in the air. A large swimming pool filled with scantily clad supermodels, one of whom was Lillian Geist, took up much of the front lawn.

He snapped again and we were in a swamp. A single path led through the murk and mire of a graveyard to a mansion that looked like a cousin to Disney’s haunted mansion.

He snapped again, and we were back at the Centennial, breathing hard and with eyes as wide as our skulls would let them be.

“The Geists have always been the same. They have always been… boring. They do not matter to me,” Silas said, “but a Geist has been around to see every single event that ever took place in Carousel. In every version of Carousel, the Geist family has been there none-the-wiser. That is what I need them for. They have seen everything. Their stories go back eons in this place. You could almost say that they are a kind of... time capsule.”

He grinned at that statement.

“If you want me to tell you what a Throughline is, boy, here is what it is: a Throughline is a piece of magic so old and so powerful that it can bend reality and Carousel itself. A Throughline is a theme pursued doggedly by players. For instance, if a player sought but did not find the secret history of the Geists, they would eventually be put on a throughline where the secret history of the Geists began showing up one storyline at a time. First, you exhaust the modern Geist stories. Then, Carousel is forced to tell older stories, the ones from the far past and past versions of Carousel. If I had gotten you to do that one final act, restoring the Geist timeline, that was all it would have taken. You and your friends would be on my Throughline following the Geists into the past to where the real answers lay, to where my… answers are. But now that will not come to pass.”

Silas took the silver hole punch from his pocket and lifted it to the corner of his new ticket.

Just before he punched a hole, he hesitated.

“No,” he said, “I think you are still confused. Let me help.”

He put the hole punch back in his pocket. What did punching a hole do that he was so hesitant about?

Silas walked forward a step. “Yes, I tried to deceive you. I failed. It’s a shame. If I had succeeded, we would all be in better positions.”

My breathing became stiff with anxiety. What did he mean by that?

“Explain,” Antoine said, finally.

Silas smiled. Not an evil smile like I might have hoped, but an embarrassed one.

He started to speak in a casual storytelling voice as he recited to us a tale.

“Not too long ago, one of my fellow Narrators, a real up-and-comer, so to speak, decided that we needed a new Damsel Paragon. The last one was good. She was a real pro. Her story was a classic, too. A man hijacks a horse-drawn carriage. He carries with him a large steamer trunk with… something in it. Something she sees him giving food to. Classic horror—truly, a classic. Carousel 1950 rolls around, and the horse-drawn carriage sticks out like a sore thumb. Well, since I still have you on my Sound Stage, I might as well show you.”

He snapped his fingers, and we found ourselves in an older version of Carousel. Classic cars drove by, and well-dressed NPCs walked about. It did look like the 1950s, as far as I could tell. As we watched, a stagecoach pulled by large horses ran a red light and pulled across an intersection while a woman inside screamed.

He snapped his fingers again and we were back.

“Somebody had to find a new Damsel that would fit with modern times. Something flexible. Well, they search and they search, and they find a young woman held hostage in a little bed and breakfast in some mundane convergent verse in the middle of nowhere. But she is perfect. She was willing to do anything to survive—anything. Plus, her storyline worked for Carousel 1950 as well as it did Carousel 2025. Flexible, you understand. More importantly, her world had no monsters or magic, but it had a superb horror culture. I suppose a society whose superstitions go unquenched for a few millennia would be liable to fantasize about ghosts and goblins. Anyway, my colleague thought this world was ripe for harvest and it was, but we were not the only ones who thought so.

"You see, just as we made preparations to invite some new players from her—your—world, something happened. All of our players disappeared. In fact, every Narrator’s players were gone. There were no players in all of Carousel. We could not imagine what had transpired. In a place where everything has happened before, this was new.”

He stepped closer. I felt my heartbeat quicken.

“Not only were there no players, but this world we were assimilating was still connected to our world—by a physical road, no less. We were unable to bring anyone in from anywhere else. We eventually figured out what had happened. Carousel had done it. You see, as players started to pour in from your world, Carousel had started bringing them onto its own Throughline.”

He paused as if we should find that patently hilarious.

“Carousel fancied itself a Narrator. It didn’t just want players. It wanted all of the players to come under its fold for the new game. All of them. Sure, I managed to sneak away a few, but barely enough for a team. Not enough to be self-sustaining. Other Narrators faired no better. You see, we needed players. In Carousel, to obtain power, you must surrender your agency in some way. We can’t run storylines ourselves.

“Narrators are simple. We have understandable motivations. Some wish to retrieve ancient magics forgotten in their world but not here. Others seek fortunes. Still, others want love or adventure or any number of ordinary things. We build Throughlines to attain our desires. I want to travel into the past using the Geists. But what, I might ask, could Carousel need players for?”

His speech felt... prepared. He had been waiting to tell us this part.

Carousel designing a Throughline. He said it like it was absurd. I was so new to this that it didn’t sound any weirder than anything else.

He walked back to Silas, the Mechanical Showman, and pressed the red button. A ticket spat out—a richly colored ticket on thick stock with golden letters.

He looked at it, rolled his eyes, and said, “Carousel added some flavor, but here you go.”

He handed it to me.

Narrator Tips: Throughlines

Welcome, New Narrator!

As a Narrator in Carousel, your role is to craft compelling and immersive experiences for your players while exploring the unfathomable cosmic nexus that is the Town of Carousel. One of the most powerful tools at your disposal is the concept of a Throughline: a series of stories and actions connected by a goal, theme, motif, or set of common elements.

To create a Throughline, choose a central theme that aligns with your ultimate goal, such as finding fortune, power, or love. Collect multiple storylines from around Carousel that revolve around this theme, each contributing unique challenges and rewards for the players. Design a custom version of Carousel Proper, filled with characters, locations, and events that are thematically linked around your ultimate goal. As you guide players through these interconnected stories, Carousel will gradually reveal additional rare storylines that share the same theme. This builds narrative momentum, leading players toward a significant goal related to the theme, such as obtaining a powerful artifact or revealing forbidden magic from the abyss of Carousel just for you!

By mastering the art of Throughlines, you can manipulate the players' journey, ensuring they advance your objectives without regard to their well-being. Leverage the power of storytelling to subtly direct their actions and watch as your Throughlines bring Carousel to life in ways that serve your ultimate ambitions.

The Town of Carousel - Everything is Here

I couldn’t breathe as I read it.

“What?” I asked. It didn’t make me sound intelligent. I didn’t care.

“It’s exactly what it looks like,” he said. “Most players would never learn about this. The chipper tone was a nice touch. Carousel really has developed its own brand, hasn’t it? I almost liked it better when everything dripped in blood. There was a certain honesty to that.”

When I finished the ticket, I passed it back to Antoine. He read it quickly, but I think he read it again when he was done.

“So you could imagine how funny it was for Carousel to build its own Throughline. What exactly could Carousel want that it didn’t already have? Those Narrators that could leave, left. Those of us who intend to obtain what we have worked so hard for stayed. We couldn’t do much, not against players. We could trick them. Deceive them. Railroad them. Cause internal strife. So we did. It didn’t even take long before we had your homeworlders so turned around they could never succeed. We sat back and saw the fruits of our labors. Or so we thought.”

“Project Rewind,” I said instinctively.

“So named from what a person does with a videotape. Yes. Project Rewind... Made fools of us all. The players were at each other’s throats. Throwing around mobile omens like grenades. Leading each other into monster’s lairs. Giving each other false prophesies. All the while, Carousel’s systems were breaking down, and its Throughline went offline completely. We thought we had won. Of course, that was all part of the plan. Project Rewind. You know, it was unintentionally brilliant. They thought they were tricking Carousel. What they had actually done was set up a powerful plot device. They had created their own throughline and activated it themselves. Something like that gets set up; it’s going to play out. The audience demands it. By the time we figured out what had happened, it was too late. They had done it right in front of us with the help of their little Insider and the very Paragons we had trusted to assist us… Never can trust a Paragon,” he said, shooting a stern glance at Madam Celia. “But you can script them when they are in your own Throughline.”

He laughed.

“Sorry, this is all funny when I say it out loud,” he said. “Would you like to know what Carousel’s Throughline is about? Would you like to know what theme runs through it? How about this? Would you like to know what was so special about you that you became the Party of Promise?”

He leaned in toward us, finally ready to tell us everything.

TO BE CONTINUED…

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