The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG-Chapter 42Book Six, : Autopsy of a Blackmailer

“She had just died when we found her,” Andrew said as he examined the body, using his flashlight combined with the light of the burners on the stove.

As strange of a situation as this was, stuck in a hotel/casino kitchen as floodwaters gradually poured in on the first floor, one of his friends dead in the walk-in fridge, and the lobby receptionist laid out on an area that was usually used to assemble salads, Andrew sure did make it look like it was just another day on the job.

"Here's the cause of death," he said. He lifted up her left arm and pointed to a small hole just under her armpit.

Bobby, Kimberly, and I gathered close.

"That little pinprick?" Kimberly asked.

"Judging from the entrance of the wound, it appears to have been something that's pointed but without a sharp edge," Andrew said. "Something small enough to go in between the ribs and pierce the heart. She would have been unconscious in seconds and dead in minutes."

She had bled quite a bit from that little wound. It was incredibly precise.

"If you were to take a guess at what kind of weapon it might have been, what would you say?" I asked. Maybe it wasn't in character for me to be so inquisitive just yet, but the fact that we had lost Antoine and didn't know the whereabouts of Logan, Jules, or Ramona suddenly made me feel that we needed to step up our urgency.

"If I were to guess," Andrew said, "it would be some sort of skewer or even, based on the slightly flat shape of the entry wound, a letter opener. She may not have even seen her attacker. This was quick and efficient."

Blackmailer

Codename: Honey Pot

Plot Armor: 30

__________

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.

Keep You On Your Toes

This enemy has a heightened chance of finding and subduing victims who are not paying attention.

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.

"I stared at the young woman who had been the receptionist. I could see all of her tropes now. There were several things to be concerned with, but the one that caught my attention was Thoroughly Dispersed.

We were On-Screen, so I couldn't explain our dilemma just yet, not explicitly, and there was a real chance we wouldn't go back Off-Screen before they needed this knowledge. If she had the Thoroughly Dispersed trope, that meant that she had allies and that enemies might very well surround us.

Before I could say anything, the door to the kitchen opened gently, just enough for someone to peek through.

Kimberly had her pot in hand, ready to smack whoever came through the door, and I quickly moved to a knife block and grabbed a cleaver, as it was the biggest handle I saw, and that's where my instincts took me.

We were ready for whatever evil might try to come through the door, but it turned out it was only Daphne.

"Sweetheart," she said as soon as she saw me. “I saw a trail of blood, and I feared the worst.”

She saw a trail of blood in the wet hallway. Sure, there wasn't exactly a flood yet, but was there enough to wash away any trail of blood leading to the kitchens? I didn't know. Strange. She must have just been acting to explain how she found us.

"Everything's okay," I said. "How were your parents?"

"They're wonderful," she said as she crossed the room, and we wrapped our arms around each other. "I have them locked up and safe. Is this another victim?" she asked, turning to the body of the blackmailer on the salad bar.

"A victim, maybe," Andrew said. "Possibly a perpetrator as well."

Daphne looked incredulous. "You don't think that a little woman like this could possibly be the killer, do you?" she asked.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"Not by herself," Andrew said. "It might be that one of her partners decided she was dead weight."

"Oh dear," Daphne said.

"They killed Antoine for blackmail money," Kimberly said, crying. "Maybe he tried to fight back. Maybe he didn't want to give up the money."

"Those monsters," Daphne said.

It didn't feel fair. Antoine had not been given enough time. We were just putting the pieces together that he was being blackmailed, and suddenly he was ambushed and his money stolen, or at least that's what the narrative led us to believe.

Based on the blackmailers' trope, We Go Way Back, it would appear that Antoine, and possibly the rest of us, were on a very short timer to figure out our characters' backstories.

When Antoine didn't figure out he was being blackmailed quickly enough, he was killed.

But still, what was he doing in that basement?

And how many more blackmailers were there?

"Well, we know she has partners," I said. "They could be anywhere."

I said it forcefully, perhaps even out of character. I needed my team to know we were in danger, and a lot more than we expected.

"They could be anyone," Bobby said. "You know what dawns on me? Most of the employees who volunteered to stay on through the storm are relatively new. I wish I could vouch for them, but I cannot. Jules said I shouldn't have kept them on, that they weren't ready. If I had just listened to her..."

"We still don't know that anything happened to her," I said. "I don't know her very well, but she seemed smart enough to stay hidden."

Bobby nodded, but I saw a look of disbelief in his eyes. We had not yet had the opportunity to discuss this Off-Screen for longer than a few seconds, but I got the impression that Jules might have sacrificed herself.

He said she left him abruptly. She may have secretly drawn our enemies away from him, if only for a time.

And we weren't even at Second Blood yet. Had we underestimated this story? Either our allies were in hiding, waiting for a signal to come out, or they were dead.

"Look at this," Andrew said.

I did, but I almost immediately looked away.

He was rifling through her garments, looking for evidence, and he had gotten down to her pantyhose. Only a coroner could get away with that.

I looked closer and saw what he was drawing our attention to. She had a wad of bills strapped around her upper thigh. Andrew grabbed it.

"There must be around three thousand dollars here," he said as he flipped through the money. "Maybe a little more."

That confirmed it.

"Well, Antoine had just withdrawn twenty thousand dollars for his blackmail," I said. "And if she's got a little over three grand on her..."

"Six blackmailers," Kimberly said.

I nodded, assuming they all got an even cut of the money.

Andrew furrowed his brow.

"What is it?" I asked.

"If she was killed by one of her partners, wouldn't they have taken her share?" he asked.

"Maybe you interrupted them when you found her body," Daphne said.

He wasn’t convinced.

"If so, they're going to want their money back," Kimberly said, staring at the door. "We can't stay here."

The kitchen was a massive area with turns, twists, lots of hiding spots, and it had an auxiliary kitchen upstairs that was accessible through multiple stairways and dumbwaiters.

Six enemies? I had expected only one. But now that we knew, we would have to do whatever it took to protect ourselves.

"Yeah, we need to leave this place. It's too big to secure, and the floodwaters are coming in," I said as I hugged Daphne tight. "We should probably go to your parents' room. We can hole up in there."

Daphne didn't say anything, but she did hug me tightly and look up at me with her beautiful, sparkling eyes, which danced in the firelight of the stove.

Finally, Carousel showed us some small amount of mercy, and we went Off-Screen.

Now that we were Off-Screen for more than a few seconds, Bobby burst with what he had been holding in.

"When I was using The ‘Wisdom’ Of Crowds, one of the NPCs pointed out how my employees weren't doing their jobs, and they were just spending their time with each other. I hadn't thought of it before because I thought they were just doing what NPCs normally do, that they had gotten the footage Carousel needed and were only acting as background characters. But if that isn't true, I think we have to assume that any of the hotel workers, and maybe the guests, could be enemies."

Oddly, it might be better for us if we couldn’t trust anyone.

"How did this get away from us so fast?" Kimberly asked. "It's not even Second Blood yet. Is Logan dead? And where did Ramona go?"

"I'm sorry to say," Andrew said, "but I believe they're dead."

His words echoed throughout the flooding kitchen.

"Health Monitor?" I asked.

His Step Into My Office trope gave him the Health Monitor ability in the same way that Cassie's The Anguish trope did. He was able to see the status of his allies even from a distance. The difference was that his was powered by his Savvy, where Moxie powered hers.

"I noticed that I stopped being able to perceive them, but we were On-Screen and I couldn't say anything. After a few minutes, their Dead indicators lit up."

From the sound of that, he probably won a stat contest. Whoever had killed them must have had a trope to help hide their deaths, but whatever stat powered it wasn't as strong as Andrew's Savvy was, so eventually his trope won out.

"So when we find their bodies..." Kimberly started to say.

"Second Blood," I said. Usually, First and Second Blood would happen On-Screen and there would be players there to witness it, but that didn't have to be the case.

All Second Blood had to be was a reminder of the threat we faced, and when we started finding bodies and realizing that we had far fewer allies than we first believed, that could be our Second Blood.

It was a stark reminder that Rebirth was not safe and that anyone could die during it. They just weren't guaranteed to.

I could have sworn our teamwork was better than this. Did Logan and Ramona go off on their own? Did they trust a stranger? Wouldn't they, shouldn't they, have...

Were they being blackmailed too? I racked my brain trying to understand where we had gone wrong.

"No matter what, in the future," I said, "never go off on your own. Always make sure that you have at least one teammate with you. We cannot risk being caught all alone with an enemy. Clearly, they have no hesitation about killing. Has anyone got any hint that they might be a blackmailing victim?"

We looked at each other. No one said anything. We hadn’t gotten a lot of backstory for our characters. You would think that at a wedding you could learn the skuddlebutt on anyone, but there were hardly any guests to talk to. The storm had driven them away.

"But what is their motive?" Bobby asked. "If they're blackmailers, why are they killing us? Maybe Antoine tried to fight back, okay, but we still have almost half a movie to play out. What advantage is there to them by killing us so quickly?"

It was a good question. Blackmailers were not supposed to be violent.

"Well, you do know the combination to the safe, right?" I asked. "Maybe that's why they went after Jules."

Bobby's eyes got wide.

"There is a lot of money in there," he said. "It's fake money made for the movie, but there is a lot in there. Jules didn't know the code, though. Only I do."

"I have an idea," Daphne said.

I turned to her.

"Why don't we just open up the safe?" she said. "With all that money, they'll have no reason left to kill any of us."

A novel approach for sure. It might even work.

"I don't know how we could justify doing that in character," I said. All else aside, Bobby would take an enormous hit if his casino manager character just left the safe open on such a speculative play. That alone might cause Carousel to heighten the difficulty.

“Well, it was worth a shot,” she said.

"My character does have just over two hundred thousand dollars in there," I said.

"As a poker player?" Kimberly asked.

"As a very good poker player," I said. "In fact, after what happened to Antoine, I kept looking for any part of my back story that might show I was being blackmailed too. I mean, I did bring an awful lot of cash here, but I couldn't find anything. Maybe I only brought it because I intended to gamble it."

"You had to pay for the wedding," Daphne said.

"Yeah, but that was a fraction of the amount I brought," I said. "It just doesn't make sense. You would think that a smart criminal would target me. I was a single man with no family, a few distant friends I saw a couple times a year, and tons of cash."

Daphne smiled slightly.

"But if I'm right about there being some sort of narrative trap, it is possible that my character is being blackmailed and I just don't know about it," I said. "I might not find out until the moment they come to collect."

We got everything that we came for and prepared to leave.

I looked around the kitchen and back toward the walk-in refrigerator where Antoine's body was being preserved.

"It's strange to think this is all about money," I said. "I don't think we've had a storyline like that. Not exactly. Maybe Permanent Vacancy was, but those guys were just hiding out. The money was a small detail."

"It's never just about the money," Daphne said.

I shrugged.

"Well, if it's not just about the money, I have no idea what it's about," I said.

She stared at me almost with pity.

I laughed.

"Well, I don't see you coming up with answers," I said.

"I'm working on it," she said.

As we left the kitchen, it occurred to me that we hadn’t figured out why Carousel had done the strange naming thing with Daphne. She was cast to play Rachel Hutchins, and we didn’t know why it had been done like that. I tried to think about it, even as my head swirled from all the excitement.

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