The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

Carousel Family Video, despite purporting to be a family store, was huge, but it never lost its charm.

As I walked inside, I was struck by an invisible wall of nostalgia that didn’t belong to me. For as much as I liked watching vintage horror movies growing up, I missed the age of the video rental store by a few years.

Sure, when I was a kid, my grandpa would pick up some movies for me to watch, often sneaking them into my backpack when my parents weren’t watching. But by the time I was living with my grandparents, most of my movies were bought online in big boxes of assorted VHSs and DVDs and then doled out one at a time every week or so as a reward for doing my homework, completing chores, or maybe just when I looked sad.

But here was a huge store, the size of a grocery market, with two stories—an upstairs and a downstairs—all devoted to movies, specifically VHS. There were no DVDs to be found.

That had to be a stylistic choice.

Customers and employees filled the place, just browsing, occasionally checking out a film. As the Atlas had led me to expect, there were no omens in the store and no trope items, either. Whatever danger was here truly was unknown.

As we filed into the store, Antoine held the crybaby high, like it was some sort of talisman of religious significance, pointing it in different directions, expecting it to start crying, but its little robotic cry never sounded.

We must have looked like goofballs.

We had a plan for how we were going to do things, and that plan involved visiting a local hardware store—one of the old ones from the 1920s, where you told a guy behind a counter what you wanted, and he went and got it for you—to buy a length of rope.

It just so happened that the length of rope the guy brought back to us had a really cool trope called No Bad Noose. This trope made it so that it would tangle around the neck of its target during First Blood, Second Blood, or the Final Battle and form an impromptu, entirely accidental noose. They would fall, their neck would snap (or it would look like it), that sort of thing.

I laughed when the guy handed it to us because I had seen that trope in countless movies, including Tarzan. It was a very dour subject, but at the end of the day, it always tickled me a little when I recognized a trope from movies I had watched, and that happened all the time in Carousel.

We didn’t need the length of rope to strangle any bad guys—or good guys, for that matter because it would work on whoever got tangled in it. We needed it to help us keep the group together.

When we walked into the video store, we each had the rope tied to us somehow. I just looped it through a couple of my belt loops, as did pretty much everyone else with jeans. Other people had to get more creative, but that’s how we decided to solve our problem of people potentially going missing—we literally tied ourselves together.

Fortunately, none of the patrons of the store seemed to care that we were all tied together, though I could have sworn I saw some NPCs stifling a chuckle as they looked at us. Some even stared.

As with bicycle helmets, if you don’t feel ridiculous, then you haven’t taken enough precautions.

After we had all made it into the store, we just looked at each other and laughed because it was such a silly scenario.

We were so afraid of this place that seemed so normal—almost more normal than any other place in Carousel—because it had no omens, and if you didn’t focus on things, it just looked like a normal store.

We looked like a scene out of The Descent.

I had to clear my mind and get my head straight.

We were there to find a movie with the werewolf that a murderous clown had sketched out for us—the one that had killed Logan and Avery. We were not there to browse in general, but I found clearing my mind to be very difficult because this place was so exciting.

I realized that because no one else seemed to be nearly as amazed as I was because of Kimberly.

“Riley, you’re smiling,” she said as soon as she got a good look at me.

I shrugged my shoulders and said, “What can I say? This place is awesome.”

“He’s in his natural habitat,” Antoine said. “All right, everybody, check the knots. We need to make sure we’ve got Riley secured.”

Did I really smile so rarely that it was a cause for alarm?

“Listen up,” Antoine continued, reiterating the plan that we high-Savvy players had made. He was the Fred to our Velmas. “We’re going together. We’ll check every row multiple times. We have no reason to be in a hurry. Make sure you get a good look at every movie that looks like it might have a werewolf in it. I don’t need to tell you how dangerous an unknown threat is, so—”

Antoine’s little speech was cut off because someone screamed from deeper into the store. It wasn’t a scared or injured scream—they were screaming a name.

“Kimberly Madison!” they called from across the store, and then a man in his mid-20s, wearing a red hoodie and a lanyard, came running toward us.

“It’s really you!” he said as he approached the group. His name on the red wallpaper was Gus—just Gus, no last name—and he had normal plot armor, like a regular NPC.

His hair was long, but not as long as mine was getting. He looked like a general geek—the overly excited kind, not the sulky kind like me.

We were silent at first because this was the sort of thing that never happened outside of a storyline unless you were getting jumped by an Omen.

“Do I know you?” Kimberly asked.

He chuckled awkwardly. “Well, of course, you don’t know me,” he said. “But I know you. I’ve got your poster hanging on the back wall.” He turned around and looked for a spot on the back, pointing his finger, and sure enough, there was a poster of Kimberly. It was from The Die Cast—just a character poster like one might see on the red wallpaper.

“I just have to say, I am such a big fan. I’ve watched everything you’ve been in,” he said. “Go on, ask me anything about your entire career, and I can tell you.”

Honestly, I was taken aback by this sort of treatment from an NPC outside of a storyline, but Kimberly was a lot faster on her feet, so she did have a question.

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“How did I get started as an actress?” she said, not with any particular curiosity, but as if she was just testing the waters to see how meta this guy was going to get.

“Easy,” he said. “You came to Carousel chasing some boy—I forget his name—ended up doing some not-so-well-received horror movies, let’s be honest, but you were the best thing in them half the time. You ended up getting ‘discovered,’ as they say in the biz, by Salvatore Morowitz when he saw you in The Final Straw, and now you’re probably one of the most famous actresses in Carousel.”

That was one way of putting things—a made-up story constructed from elements of truth. She had chosen her Celebrity aspect after The Final Straw, though technically Sal, her fictional talent agent, was already representing her within the made-up continuity of her career earlier than Gus said. But I would let that slide; things were getting a little meta.

I had to assume that was what was going on. Gus recognized Kimberly as a Celebrity Eye Candy.

But by that logic, was it possible that he knew who I was? I also had a meta aspect related to filmmaking, so I was certain he knew who I was. And that wasn’t me being conceited—it was because he was dressed exactly like me, in my exact hoodie, with jeans and even Converse sneakers.

But his attention was on Kimberly.

As amusing as all of this would be when we talked about it later back at the loft, at the moment, we were actually quite afraid because we were looking for something to go wrong. With every breath, I was listening for the crybaby to start wailing, but it never did.

“Well, Gus,” Kimberly said, pointing to his lanyard and the name tag at the end of it, pretending that she didn’t just look at him on the red wallpaper, “can you help us find some werewolf movies? Maybe one that takes place on a mountain?”

That was a good question—one that sounded like the kind of thing he could answer.

Every section in the store was marked as Horror.

How helpful.

To their credit, they also listed subgenres.

Unfortunately, none of those subgenres were werewolves. They were things like romance, thrillers, mysteries, and crime stories. That was where our leads ran dry. We didn’t know what kind of horror story this werewolf movie was supposed to be. Luckily, most werewolf movies were straight-up horror and weren’t particularly gimmicky as far as genre goes.

Still, if Gus could help us, that would be a godsend—though I wouldn’t be able to say which god sent it.

“I love werewolf movies! Are you going to do a werewolf movie?” Gus said, still focused on Kimberly. “Are you here doing research? Do you need my help?”

“Yes,” Kimberly said. “We’re doing research for a werewolf movie, and we need to find one that takes place on a mountain.”

“Well, I don’t know if we can search based on where it takes place,” Gus said. “And unfortunately, we don’t organize the movies by what monster is in them, but I would be glad to help.”

He was really playing up the excited fan angle, and despite the fact that he was a normal NPC on the red wallpaper, I couldn’t help but feel something was going on. Unlike the other NPCs, who were gawking at us for the whole tying-ourselves-together thing, he had yet to acknowledge it.

But what really made me think something was going on was the way he looked at me when he turned and waved for us to follow him. It was a knowing look, with a grin and everything, that only lasted a second—but he met my eyeline perfectly.

Was my I Don’t Like It Here trope giving me anxiety? No, no, it wasn’t. In fact, ever since we walked into this store, it hadn’t been making a peep. And I doubted it was my psychic background throwing me a bone.

What alerted me was my natural distrust of people, and I did not trust this guy—even though I could not find one objective reason.

But still, if we ever hoped to leave Carousel, we couldn’t run away from everything we distrusted. So, when he turned and walked away with his goofy demeanor, we followed cautiously.

And for thirty minutes—thirty whole minutes—Gus didn’t do anything to make me think he was up to no good. He just guided us down various aisles, picked up werewolf tapes, and showed them to us.

And in thirty minutes, we found nothing. Luckily, nothing found us either.

“Wait a minute,” Dina said, and then she managed to point something out to us that we had somehow managed not to notice in all of our searches. With every werewolf movie he presented to us, we did not notice it because we were looking in the wrong place.

“Look at this,” she said. She grabbed a movie off the shelf and held it out to us.

On the cover, there was a beautiful vampire queen—almost exposed and definitely enticing. But that was not what Dina wanted us to look at. She wanted us to look at two of the characters who were on the cover of the movie but not the center of it. They were simply reacting in horror or amazement—I couldn’t quite tell—to the central figure. And darn if I didn’t recognize one of them.

His name was Sam. I didn’t have a whole lot of history with him other than the fact that we were both trapped in the nightmare world together, but I did know him. He was one of the vets at Camp Dyer. He was an Adventurer—an advanced archetype, originally an Athlete, a Health Nut who would actually go out on jogs every morning from the day he got his first scouting trope that made it quasi-safe for him to do.

He was on the cover of this movie.

That was not something we anticipated. And even as we looked at movie after movie that Gus showed us, we had not put it together—the covers of these VHS tapes had characters on them, and not just the original characters from the universe of the movie, but they had the players who had last played them on them.

We hadn’t even thought of it because the Atlas didn’t say anything. And more than that, we had spent so much time looking at movie posters on the red wallpaper—which didn’t change based on the players inside of them—that it never occurred to us that the VHS covers might.

And that simple insight was enough for Dina to ask, “Hey Gus, can we look up movies by who’s in them? Like, who stars in them?”

“Of course,” Gus said. “How else would you follow your favorite actor?”

We all looked at each other and suddenly realized what Dina was up to. It was so simple that we felt like fools for not thinking of it. To be fair, she was old enough to have been able to actually go to movie rental stores for much of her formative years.

“Can we see all the movies starring Grace Varga?” she asked.

Those were the clues we had. Madam Celia's cryptic riddle seemed to point us to the Bowlers. We had assumed that meant we would eventually have to check for the storyline around the bowling alley, but what if it meant something more than that?

What if it was a clue that could help us not spend days searching through the massive amount of films in this store?

What if we were directed to the bowlers because they were the last players to play the werewolf storyline that we were looking for?

“Sure,” Gus said. “I’ll have to go get the list from the back if you’ll follow me.”

And here’s where he started acting strange again because it was almost like his plans had been ruined just a little bit. But only just.

But still, we followed him—this time at a longer distance, on my insistence—as he showed us around to the back of the store, a desolate area where even some of the shelves were sparsely populated.

The lights flickered back here.

And that is where I saw something I was not looking for.

At the back of the store, there was a wide doorway leading to a hall. Right across from that doorway was another door that was closed. It had a movie poster on it, which wasn’t so remarkable because most places had a poster on them in this place. But it was notable because the poster featured a grotesque eyeball, with the nerve and everything attached.

The movie was called Archive Esoterica, but that didn’t matter.

To the left was a stairway going up—but not up onto the second story of movies; the stairway for that was in the center of the shop. Besides, the doorway had an "Employees Only" sign.

To the right of the door with the eyeball poster on it was another stairway I could just make out, and it went downward into darkness.

Gus went upstairs.

As he started jogging up the steps, I noticed that he passed yet another poster—another one littering the walls. It was one of many, many of which were torn from people walking up and down the stairs. But I noticed that there was a very particular poster just out of my line of sight.

I started moving forward, trying to crane my neck so I could see further upstairs and get a better look at this movie poster that seemed to call to me in a way that did not register on the red wallpaper or anywhere else.

It called to me because I recognized it just from looking at the corner of it—the bottom right corner. And as I got closer, I knew what it was. It was different than all the others. Untouched, pristine, literally taped on top of some that were already hung in that little hallway moving up the stairs.

That movie poster did not have a title—just a blank space filled with underscores, as if the title had yet to be written.

The photo was taken in front of a carnival ride. It featured three people: two parents and a child: a man, a woman, and a boy.

I knew them well because one of them was me. This picture had hung in our house when I was a child.

My parents. On an unfinished poster for a movie.

Carousel had been teasing me for so long, and now it showed them to me.