The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

There was a sporting goods store around the last turn of the U-shaped building.

It had an appropriately punny name: Dead Sprints.

Unfortunately, it was closed down because it contained so many cool objects, and it would be overpowered for us to shop there. After all, sporting implements often made great incognito weapons—even if you weren't an athlete.

The Atlas didn’t say anything about it because trope objects (of which there were tons in there) were new, but the conveniently placed attendant filled us in. They said that the shop’s owner had been murdered the night before so the shop was closed. She gave us details, including a newspaper article. It seemed pretty clear to me that to shop there, you had to run a storyline and save the shop owner the day before you went.

So, as we passed by, we could only window shop, staring past the locked doors and shutters at the hockey sticks, golf clubs, mountain climbing axes, and other interesting items, many of which had tropes attached.

Oh well.

I carried my TV as best I could. We had brought the wheelbarrow in case we found something worth purchasing, but we didn’t bring it inside the outlet mall because of the crowd. Luckily, the TV only had a 13-inch screen, and it really wasn’t that heavy.

Isaac was psyched when I actually bought a TV, and I don’t think he even realized it had a trope attached.

There was a Halloween-esque shop called The Hem and Haunt, and the strange thing about it was that it didn’t appear to have a single omen inside. It had no trope objects, no items of interest at all because it was not a shop in and of itself but rather the setting for an omen that showed up at 3:00 a.m.

I supposed the idea was that people would be disarmed by the lack of danger and then be thrust into a terrible storyline. Who could say?

It would have made more sense back in the days when players were struggling to find a place to survive between Writs of Habitation.

Either way, no one would ever want to walk inside, especially because one of the mannequins in the window was wearing what I could only assume was human skin as a costume.

However, an employee was standing out front, inviting us in. Her name was Jezebel, and I only remembered her because, like several of the other shopkeepers, she kept telling us one thing:

“If we don’t have what you like, our sister store at the Carousel Mall is sure to have what you need. I can give you directions,” she said, holding out a little pamphlet with a map on it.

The actual Carousel Mall was too dangerous to enter, but all of these little shops around town seemed to want to funnel people toward it.

One day, we would surely go—but not that day.

For most people, the real goal for that trip was just clothes. If those clothes happened to have magic powers inside storylines, that would be cool, but for the most part, that wasn’t it.

My friends and I lost our clothes whenever Camp Dyer was prematurely shut down, so we mainly wore what we had on us—with the exception of Kimberly, who put in more effort to procure clothes.

Still, buying clothes and having a choice in what you wear every day was an important part of staying sane.

Personally, I didn’t think that my clothes were too bad, considering I’d been wearing them for the better part of a year, according to the calendar that was. In reality, they weren’t close to being that old; much of the damage my clothes ever had was done in storylines and was instantly reversed after the storyline ended.

More than that, even though we had apparently spent many months inside The Die Cast storyline, my hoodie had disappeared when I entered it, so it would still be in pretty good condition even if it weren’t for the magical resetting ability that Carousel had.

Still, I wanted a new undershirt, and maybe a few backup pairs of socks and other garments would make me feel more at home. I was currently rotating through clothes I had borrowed from various storylines, but none of them were ideal—and none of them were brand new.

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You do what you have to to survive, even if it means stealing undergarments from the characters you play.

So shopping was easy for me. I just needed the basics.

It was equally easy for Dina, who claimed she had purchased an entirely new outfit. However, to my eyes, she looked like she was still wearing her brown leather jacket and ripped-up jeans—perhaps a newer version I didn’t know.

“What?” she asked. “This is what you wear when you don’t want people messing with you.”

She did look tough, but…

“You’ve been murdered in that outfit,” I said.

She shrugged, still admiring her new jacket, which I still swore was her old jacket.

I sat in a small waiting area, my eyes on the door with a good vantage point of the entire store so that I could help look out for omens.

In this circumstance, Kimberly was just as good as me because she had memorized this place as well as the rest of the outlet mall.

Still, I tried to be useful.

There was one of those circular racks with clearance items on it, and a little kid was hiding in the middle of it.

The kid was an Omen. The storyline was called Us. I was sure Carousel would be hearing from Jordan Peele’s lawyers soon. The poster for the storyline featured that same kid, I had to assume, with his face in his hands.

Or at least the place where his face should be was in his hands, because as I concluded after a few glances, when I could take them, through the hanging clothes that surrounded him—he had no face.

It wasn’t like I could see his skull or anything; where his face should be was blank. He just sat in the middle of that clothing rack, facelessly crying from what I could tell, but there was no noise.

Other than that, the clothing store was very delightful. It had a less spooky name, Twisted Threads, and was pretty close to a JCPenney or Dillard’s. There were a few things shoppers had to be aware of, like not letting any of the perfume get sprayed on them by those NPCs trying to sell it.

There were a variety of storylines that could be kicked off just by having some scent sprayed on you. Unfortunately, from what I could see, none of them involved werewolves.

“Riley, check this out,” Kimberly said from somewhere to my right. I saw her standing in the aisle, holding a button-up shirt in my direction. It had a trope on it called Impress the Parents that would automatically do your hair, get you all cleaned up, and buff your Moxie.

Even I could acknowledge how useful that perk was. It was a general trope, but it gave different bonuses depending on whether you were a Stud, a Beauty, a Newcomer, or an Underdog.

No bonuses for Film Buffs.

“No thanks,” I called out. Looking good was not a priority worth giving up the utility of my hoodie. Being able to put my hood up and look like I wasn’t paying attention was just too useful.

“Why not?” she cried back to me. “It looks good.”

“I don’t wanna look like I’m dressed for fourth-grade picture day,” I called back.

She gave me a disappointed look and tucked the shirt over her arm, clearly intent on buying it.

But we had to be careful as far as that went. There was so much to purchase at this store, even more than the other places. And there were plenty of trope items at Twisted Threads. Not a lot of them were useful, but there was a legitimately good selection. We could easily waste all of our money here.

I decided to stand near the checkout to see what people were buying.

No one was supposed to spend more than 10 dollars, which was a lot of money in Carousel, especially when you weren’t buying specialty items.

I had already broken that rule, but the TV was for the group. (Actually, it was for me, but the group could use it.)

Andrew had enough of his own money to afford a trope item: a cane with a trope called Damaged Goods that would cause him to enter a storyline Hobbled but strongly buff his Grit.

That was a pretty good deal for a doctor who mainly used their brain, though he would need to be careful. One of the assets of a good healer was their ability to move around quickly, so he would have to pick his moment carefully.

As I stood near the register, a glance around the room showed me several potential buys. There was an umbrella with a Seer trope that would guarantee it would rain before a dramatic moment in a storyline. There was eye shadow with a Femme Fatale trope for attracting a mark, appropriately called Fatal Attraction. I didn’t want to think about that one.

There was a plain white T-shirt on a clearance rack—not the one with the crying faceless child under it—that would clean itself between scenes. It was a criminal trope called Above Suspicion. While I had absolutely seen stuff like that happen in movies where people's clothes seemed to get washed as they moved from room to room, it occurred to me how useful a trope like that might be when paired with a Betrayal trope that allowed you to act as an ally to the enemy in order to steal their narrative momentum and screen time, or whatever other strategy you were employing that required a betrayal trope.

Cassie managed to find herself a really useful trope item. Even though she didn’t have enough money to buy it herself, everyone chipped in a coin here and there to help her get it.

It was a handheld mirror, so old and beautiful that it could not have come from a store like Twisted Threads in the real world.

It had a Sleuth trope on it that made it so NPCs and enemies would not see it when you used it to peek around corners. It was a total Nancy Drew trope. The real benefit was that she would be able to use her Reflective Jump Scare trope along with it in order to get a peek at the enemy magically and not just around the corner.

All in all, it was a good trip for both our mental health and storyline effectiveness.

But, for us, the day was just beginning.

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