The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

🔴 REC   SEP 21, 2018 13:08:21   [▮▮▮▮▯ 80%]

We had been in the storyline for less than 10 hours, but if you believed the clocks, calendars, and the camera I was recording with, it had been over a week.

We had barely made any dent in the plot cycle.

Carousel was collecting lots and lots of footage, and when I was Off-Screen, I would sometimes take out my headphones and use my Quiet On Set ability just to listen around.

It was surprisingly comforting to feel tapped into what was going on, even if all I heard was a conversation between Kimberly and Antoine or Logan ad-libbing a darkly humorous rant about some serial killer who managed to delay his execution by revealing the locations of his victims gradually.

I went through my character's desk, looking for some kind of adapter that would allow me to view the material on the tapes we had found on the wall, but there was no luck.

Kimberly was standing at the entrance of my cubicle, and I was playfully filming her. We hadn't established what our relationship was, but we were friends of some kind.

I was a talented but irresponsible freelancer who worked part-time for the museum system of Carousel. It was just what we could concoct with our interactions.

As if we had not just planned out our conversation, Kimberly casually asked me in the way a boss might:

"Can you catch me up on those tapes we found? Have you been able to decode them?"

Decode. Ha.

I explained, "They are archival quality and in good shape, but they have an outdated format. I don't have any way to read them with my current setup. But I put a call out to Tom Skelton over at the electronics shop. He was able to order the part. He says he'll come in tomorrow afternoon and open up the shop so that I can pick it up. Seemed very eager to help after I name-dropped you."

"Oh, well, he's a good friend," Kimberly said.

"Clearly," I replied, with as much mischief as I could put into those words.

She rolled her eyes.

In reality, I had used the Internet—which actually existed in this storyline—to look up a local electronics shop. After much mental preparation, I called them, and they said they could get it for me. It was all in a day's work for Riley Lawrence, horror detective.

"So you'll have them ready by Monday?" she asked.

"I should," I said. "I'm going to try and get a head start on it this weekend. I'll come in Saturday after my gig downtown."

"Your gig?" Kimberly asked. "I thought this was your gig."

"This is one of my gigs," I said. "Even my main gig, if you will."

"What else are you working on?" she asked.

"The Carousel Daylight Waltz," I said.

"Oh, that's a big deal," she replied.

"They needed elite camera work, so obviously, they called in me," I said. “Told me I could name my price.”

"Obviously," she repeated with another eye roll. "Well, get back to me on those tapes."

■ STOP

🔴 REC   SEP 22, 2018 14:23:47   [▮▮▮▯▯ 60%]

The Carousel Daylight Waltz was not really a waltz, and though it claimed to be a competition, it wasn’t really one. It was more of a talent show with the locals—specifically, the 50-and-over crowd.

Perhaps that’s a little too cynical. The truth was, it was a nice tradition. Men and women dressed their best and brought the person they loved onto a stage at the bottom of a grand outdoor theater near downtown.

The theater's seats were long, concrete benches built into the ground, all facing the stage.

It was framed as a competition, but it was for charity.

Even though it wasn’t the type of event I would normally attend or enjoy, it was the kind of event I wished I could enjoy—a tradition, something passed down between generations, a little local flavor.

And boy, was it popular.

We had a main camera set up to capture the stage. I had a team of three NPCs who would do whatever I told them to, although I never let that power get to my head.

I focused on getting close-ups of whoever was dancing at the center of the stage at any given moment.

The event was lively and filled with energy, both in the crowd and on the stage. The mayor of Carousel was there, but it wasn’t the paragon I had met before. It was just a random NPC.

He was announcing and speaking as the people on stage danced. From what I could tell, the participants were mostly people from local families in Carousel—older women dancing with their young sons, fathers dancing with daughters, that sort of thing.

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There were a ton of entrants in the competition, so many that the stage was crowded with dancers, all trying not to bump into each other as they showed off the moves they’d been practicing.

They waited for their names to be called so they could waltz into the center of the stage and perform.

Kimberly, Logan, and Antoine were there somewhere, though they only interacted casually. Each had come with a separate group of NPCs who I supposed were their friends and family, but I couldn’t be sure.

I was vigilant in panning my camera around the crowd, making sure we captured good shots of people cheering and making their own dance moves as they watched the competition heat up.

It wasn’t a serious contest, but you wouldn’t have known that by listening to the crowd.

As much as I liked observing this little slice of wholesome culture—something I realized I hadn’t seen in a long time—I couldn’t shake the uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach.

I filmed as much as I could.

Sometimes, my camera would stop recording, but that didn’t mean I, Kimberly, or the others would go Off-Screen. No, we were still being filmed by Carousel’s invisible eyes or possibly one of the other cameras I had set up.

When I finally regained control of my equipment and was able to start recording again, I made sure to capture a good view of the stage.

There were so many dancers on that old wooden stage—too many. Heck, there were at least a hundred pounds of sequins alone.

As the contestants of all ages danced and swung around to what sounded like the unholy offspring of waltz and polka music, a loud crack echoed through the entire Greek theater.

In the blink of an eye, the stage, packed with dancers, seemed to vanish. Gone so fast, I didn’t even hear the sound of them falling until they were out of sight.

The stage had broken under their weight, and all the dancers, the mayor—everyone on that stage—plunged into the depths below. It was quite a fall. There was an underground complex beneath the stage for the various productions to use.

Dust rose into the air as people screamed at what they had just witnessed. Panic set in as the crowd began running and shouting in confusion.

All I could do was keep filming. I filmed the stage. I filmed the crowd. I wanted to make sure I captured everything because if this was an important part of the story, we couldn’t afford to miss it.

My camera stopped working a few minutes after the disaster, and we were no longer On-Screen. Carousel had gotten its footage.

It was a terrible place to be, especially when you knew there was nothing to be done.

Amid the chaos, I could have sworn I saw a familiar face—a girl I had grown up with. But I couldn’t comment on it. Not yet.

■ STOP

🔴 REC   SEP 22, 2018 22:53:13   [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

"I couldn’t sleep," I said into the camera. "The police called. They said they wanted copies of my footage for their investigation into the collapse of the stage. I just don’t want to look at it again—once was enough... Whatever, I sent them the file. No big deal. But then I started looking through these tapes we found in the wall last week. I finally got the converter to hook them up to the computer, so I was looking through them, reading their titles... and I saw something that freaked me out. Here, look at this."

I moved the camera over one of the tapes, focusing on its label.

“daylight dance”

It read in simple lowercase letters.

I turned the camera back to face myself. "What are the odds of that?" I asked.

■ STOP

▶ PLAY DEC 21, 1995 05:25:30

I put the tape into the adapter and opened the video program on my character’s computer. It was simple and intuitive.

I pressed play and started watching the tape.

And I watched the whole thing. Talk about déjà vu.

What I saw was the exact same dance competition I had just witnessed in real life. At first, I worried I had messed up and was accidentally viewing my own footage from that day. But I wasn’t.

The footage I was looking at was filmed from a completely different angle—off to the side of the stage. That wasn’t where I had been standing. I had a clear, central view of the dance competition.

The person who recorded this tape filmed several segments of the dance competition, stopping and starting again a few minutes later. They were closer than me. The could see the stage starting to buckle as the dancing went along.

Suddenly, I heard a scream, followed by a crack, as the stage collapsed.

■ STOP

🔴 REC   SEP 22, 2018 23:28:07    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

I began filming myself again, this time capturing my pure disbelief at what I was seeing. I made sure to record plenty of footage of my reaction—it wasn’t like I had any limitation on how much I could film.

I started sorting through the other tapes.

"This isn’t possible," I muttered to myself multiple times.

Just to be sure, I grabbed another tape titled “river tour” and popped it into the adapter. With the camera still rolling, I pressed play.

As soon as I did, the camera stopped.

■ STOP

▶ PLAY APR 02, 1996 10:33:27

I watched the screen as someone filmed what appeared to be the Carousel River. They were positioned near a small, one-lane bridge covered in rust.

The footage showed several shots of the river until, eventually, a large riverboat began moving down the water toward where the cameraman—whoever they were—was standing.

The boat was filled with people wearing cheap orange life vests. They were talking and having fun as a tour guide described things over a speakerphone, though I couldn’t quite make out the words.

There were families and children on that boat.

The boat moved slowly as the passengers looked left and right, admiring the wilderness around them. It was a peaceful afternoon, and I couldn’t tell exactly what was about to happen.

The boat gently approached the bridge, but before it could pass underneath, an engine roared to life from above.

A car driving over the bridge suddenly veered off, crashing through the rusty guardrail and landing directly on top of the boat full of people.

I jumped up in shock—genuine shock. I had known something was coming, but the sudden roar of the engine was loud and the horrifying image of all those people being crushed into the water all at once genuinely startled me.

Heart pounding, I pressed the space bar on the computer, pausing the video.

■ STOP

🔴 REC    SEP 22, 2018 23:52:19    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

I didn’t have to act like I was freaked out—no amount of preparation could help you wrap your mind around videos like this.

Somehow, I hadn’t seen that coming, but after it happened, a neuron fired in the back of my mind. I realized I was familiar with that particular tragedy.

I had read about it in The Town of Carousel: Horrific Events Through the Ages. But that wasn’t the only place I had seen information about this disaster.

Grabbing the camera, I practically ran downstairs to the jail cells, skimming through them. They had been set up with basic information about the various larger-than-life criminals who had once inhabited them.

It was grim, but it was all in the name of education.

Eventually, I found it—a display inside one of the jail cells. This particular cell was quite popular and had several exhibits attached to its metal bars.

Rhett Mavis had been the one to do it. He had been driving the car.

I read through the display, filming it as best I could while narrating.

"It is not possible that someone recorded that event on this type of film," I said, zooming in on the dates. "That occurred in the 1960s, long before this technology was developed. They would have had to transfer it over. Possibly for archival purposes."

I quickly read through the information about Rhett Mavis.

Born to "raise hell" or something like that, he had driven a stolen car off the bridge and onto the boat just because he could. He almost got away with it, too. He was one of the few survivors pulled from the river. They didn’t catch him because of police work; they caught him because he tried to do it again not a week later.

But that time, he missed.

I ran back upstairs, intent on finding every event depicted in those tapes.

I had work to do.

■ STOP