Throughout the relative darkness of the casino, a staticky voice could be heard.

I couldn't tell where it was coming from. All I heard was, "Reporting live…Carousel…dam…overloaded…" Then, after a while longer, "Flooding even worse..."

Someone was listening to the radio.

It was a fool's errand to try to find out where the sound was coming from. It could very easily be a trap.

Bobby, Andrew, Kimberly, Jules, and I had to stick together. We had been stuck On-Screen for ten minutes as we wandered our way around the casino, back toward one of the lesser-known stairways that Bobby had learned about in his capacity as manager.

Of course, the enemies also worked at the hotel and would know about it, but he swore he was the only one with a key, and I didn't have anything better to go on. Locking a stairwell had to violate a fire code, but maybe not in Carousel.

We were almost upon Second Blood.

I had assumed that meant we would find the bodies of our fallen allies, but of course, we could have an old-fashioned Second Blood where one or more of us died.

The water was almost up to my knees, but it had leveled off.

It was the same height as the water outside. That is, until the dam broke, like the weather reporter on the radio was talking about. The funny part of it was that I knew the water system and Carousel flowed the other direction, out west, but the audience wouldn't know that, not just from this storyline alone.

We trudged through the water silently, doing our best to stay out of sight. The darkness helped there. When we finally got to this out-of-the-way set of stairs, we found the door unlocked.

"Maybe not so secret," I said.

"They picked the lock," Bobby whispered as he stared at it.

My eyes had adjusted, and I could see everyone by the ambient light of the room and all we could do was stare at each other, not knowing what to do next.

The area with the secret stairs just happened to be the place where they sold discount tobacco products. All of the shelves had apparently collapsed or otherwise been destroyed. The water was littered with loose cigarettes and pipe tobacco leaves.

It would seem that someone had a vendetta against the entire industry. There was no way that flooding had caused this. Someone had dropped the entire stock into the water.

There might not have been a single pack that hadn't made its way into the floodwaters. Maybe there had been a fight here. I didn't see any bodies or blood, but I could hardly see anything.

We moved into the stairwell so that we could walk up out of the water, and we took a break. Running storylines was tough work, and we had already put in nearly a full day. That was after a marathon session of prep work which, when I thought about it, hadn't helped much.

This was not the murder mystery I was expecting from Ida Rae. The way our scouting tropes had described it, it sounded like a much more Agatha Christie-style story. This was practically a heist, but without all the glamorous celebrities.

I didn't know what was going on, but I knew something was.

"I picked a bad month to quit smoking," Andrew said as he reached into his pocket and withdrew a pack of cigarettes. He must have grabbed them, salvaged the only pack that wasn't drowned.

"You didn't," Kimberly said. "You were doing so well."

Andrew laughed as he drew a cigarette from the pack. "Doesn't quite matter now, does it?" he said.

He withdrew a book of matches and contemplated his actions.

The funny part was that he had never smoked before. He had been struck with the addiction to nicotine without ever having consumed tobacco. For some reason, the addiction followed him right out of a storyline like some sort of lingering trauma. So his fingers were clumsy and unpracticed.

He held it like it was a joint and then like a pencil. He played this off as fidgeting.

We sat in the stairwell as he did his best to light the thing. This pack must have gotten wet, too, if not as much as the others.

It was the calm before the storm, figuratively. The real storm was still out there, beating against the walls of the casino, threatening to drown us.

"You mind?" Jules asked, holding her hand out for the cigarette. "I could use a drag."

Andrew passed it along with the matches.

She lit the thing on the first try. She must have been a smoker.

Jules took a long drag and then another. She winced as the pain from her clearly broken ribs dug into her. She was dying. The whites of her eyes were a yellowish hue. Andrew suspected internal organ damage, but we had not established that On-Screen. We foolishly hoped that if Bobby bandaged her visible wounds, her internal ones would be cured too.

No dice.

His healing trope didn’t work like that.

The audience would know she was hurting, too. She didn’t have much gas left in the tank.

She went to hand the largely spent cigarette back to Andrew, but before he could grab it, she accidentally dropped it off the side of the stairs down into the flooded area below. Except, it wasn't an accident. She did it on purpose but pretended it was a mistake.

"Oh, damn it," she said as she looked at Andrew. "Better to have loved and lost, eh?"

Andrew didn't bother lighting another. He had struggled enough lighting the first one. Maybe it was better to save his breath, because it felt like the plot was about to catch up with us.

Stolen story; please report.

We casually discussed what had been happening, but we had to stay in character, which limited most of the productive conversation we could have had.

"They're down here!" a voice above us called. It was a deep voice. I recognized it as Ed, the bellboy. He and the cook must have caught up to us.

All we could do was run and try to stay quiet. But Ed did not have any intention of us making it away together.

I ushered the others out of the stairwell first, but before I could make it out myself, a metal supply cabinet dropped down the stairwell and slammed into the door, shutting it and blocking it from me.

I almost cursed at how conveniently that worked out for him.

In real life, the solution would have been just to tip the massive piece of furniture over and climb through the door. It would have been difficult, but in an emergency, adrenaline would make it possible.

This wasn’t real life.

Ed was only two stories above. The center of the stairwell, around which the stairs wound, was big and wide, big enough to drop a large piece of furniture down with great precision, apparently.

But even as large as it was, he looked massive, staring down at me.

Blackmailer

Codename: Hammer

Plot Armor: 34

__________

Tropes

Hidden In

Plain Sight

The villain will appear as an ordinary NPC until they don their disguise.

Non-Combatant

This villain cannot be attacked On-Screen until it attacks the player or is otherwise identified as hostile.

Interests Align

This entity does not need the players to lose in order to achieve its goals.

Thoroughly Dispersed

This creature’s group can instantly occupy the entirety of a set area, making it appear omnipresent and unpredictable to characters.

Big Brother

This enemy is buffed in Mettle when defending an ally with lower Grit.

Seeing Red

This villain can maintain pace with their quarry if they destroy obstacles on their path during the chase.

No Neighborhood Watch

The villain will not be seen by NPC witnesses when off-screen.

Two Way Street

If a player with buffed Moxie attempts to interrogate or manipulate this villain, the villain will get an equal buff to Moxie.

We Go Way Back

Players may have a pre-established relationship with this villain that the players must discover before the past catches up with them.

And he didn't just throw it haphazardly. He wasn't trying to kill me with it; that would be anticlimactic.

He threw it there to trap me. Or to trap someone.

That was an act that could use Savvy, because it was a plan. But because of its simplicity, it could have used Ed's Mettle. Carousel, the great game master in the sky, would decide.

I was betting on the latter.

If I understood the matchup, it would be my Mettle against his. The advantage was to him by a mile.

The cabinet was enormous, and the drawers were filled with tools. It wasn’t going to budge.

"Riley!" Kimberly screamed, trying to push the door open from the other side.

There was no use just yet.

"Run!" I screamed.

They continued to beat on the door, but there was no use.

"I'll meet you on the other side of the building," I said, not knowing if I could fulfill that promise.

Ed was working his way down the stairs.

I had no way out, not through the door, at least not with the weight of the dresser and the weight of the floodwater holding it shut.

For a moment, I considered letting myself get captured. He was a blackmailer, not a murderer, right?

But this man was no doubt the person who had killed Antoine with his bare hands.

I could not let him catch me.

So while I couldn't move the giant cabinet, I could climb it.

So that's what I did. I opened the drawers just enough to form a rudimentary ladder and quickly made my way up it as soon as Ed got close enough to be dangerous.

From the top of the set of drawers, I could reach up to the next story and climb up over the railing to the second-floor landing.

Ed jumped and roared, trying to grab my ankle, but my Hustle was better than his, especially after Escape Artist triggered to give me the extra boost. And while he could trap me, he couldn't make me stay that way.

From there, it would just be a race. I didn't want to go further up to the third floor because that was where Ed had come from, and his coconspirators might be there. So I entered the second-floor hallway.

Ed did not even try to chase me.

I ran too fast. And I regretted it immediately, because if he wasn't chasing me, that meant he would try to chase my friends. And if they were stubborn enough not to listen to me, they would be right on the other side of the door, waiting for him.

I had to get back down. But first, I had to regain the element of surprise, so I couldn't use the same stairwell. Luckily, the maze-like casino and hotel was practically made up of stairways. They were all over the place, different kinds, different orientations. The casino played host to a wide variety of stories, so it needed lots of different shooting locations.

I found the nearest stairwell and descended.

Unfortunately, the second floor was better lit than the first, which meant by the time I got back down to the casino level, my eyes had lost their adjustment and I was blinded in the darkness.

I could hear water moving, as Kimberly, Andrew, Bobby, and Jules were trying to escape the wrath of the bellboy.

Luckily for me, I was Off-Screen and had been ever since Ed decided to stop chasing me. I needed to find them in the darkness.

My heart beat fast, and my senses were working overtime, trying to help me form a mental map of the area around me.

Ed didn't even try to hide his location. He would bump into things and knock them over. He was so tall that his head must have come up over the top of the slot machines.

From what I could hear, the Chase Scene that my allies were a part of was still going on.

I stopped and thought about his tropes. He had one called Seeing Red that allowed him to keep pace in a Chase Scene despite his low Hustle stat, as long as he was destructive of obstacles as he went along.

I'd seen that one in movies plenty.

That would explain why he chose to continue chasing them instead of chasing me. There would be no obstacles between him and me; it would have been a hallway chase.

Down on the casino floor, there were obstacles galore.

"Riley," someone whispered to my right.

Someone whose voice I recognized.

"Daphne?" I called out cautiously, almost afraid to say it. Why now?

She appeared from the darkness, better hidden than she deserved to be, given that she was wearing a white dress.

I wanted to run to her and take her in my arms. My heart pulled me in that direction; it was a physical sensation. I reached my hand to my chest just to feel it. It was subconscious. I couldn't help it.

But my head distrusted her. Heck, part of me was afraid of her.

It wasn't just what Kimberly had said. There was a part of me that really wanted to learn the worst of Daphne.

Part of me, the part that had developed all my walls, found joy in the possibility that love really did let me down, just as I had always expected it to.

But it was Daphne. My Daphne. Her love was the best argument I ever had against my self-doubt.

Her love had been stronger than that voice in my head that told me to run from positive feelings.

"Riley, I can explain everything," she said.

"You better do it quick," I said. I hoped she had a good excuse. I made sure to keep a distance. Whatever was wrong with this storyline, my gut said it had something to do with her.