Because of the Astralist skulking around, we had to take a much longer detour to get back in the direction we needed to go. Chris said that we couldn't risk going anywhere near him given the fact that the only way to beat him would be either using the chemicals in his lab or using his own machine against him. If we ran into him in the woods, neither of those things would be available.

We went as far west as we could until we hit the tree line where we finally found an Omen. It was the familiar Omen that stopped anyone from heading further around the lake. I had seen it before. We had to go South. Luckily it only took us an hour or so to find a place where we could cross the river without touching the water.

Chris wasn't sure that the water itself was dangerous but he wasn't going to risk it. He stood, poised with a rusty old weapon that had not been taken away after we left the mansion, ready for something to jump out of the water but nothing did. His Gut Instinct trope was pretty good at predicting stuff like that but he remained vigilant, as a high enough level enemy could still remain undetected.

By the time I saw the road that led to Camp Dyer, it was already dark. I could barely see the sign at the entrance. As we walked toward the lodge the familiar chanting by the little campers caught my ears:

“Suzy Snyder, six foot five,

Haunts Camp Dyer, still alive…”

It almost felt comforting instead of terrifying. This place had not been touched by the Black Snow.

We made the last part of the trail on foot. I subconsciously walked faster during the last part, ready to be somewhere safe at last. When I got to the door and turned to look at the others, I noticed that Jack Goforth was nowhere to be found. Guess he wasn’t needed anymore after he guided us around the woods.

When I opened the door and we walked in, I was greeted by dozens upon dozens of sullen faces. Most of the players at Dyer’s Lodge had survived. But not all.

When we walked through the door, there was a spark of hope, but then when it was only five of us, that was snuffed out.

Adeline came out to the common area from behind the bar in the kitchen and hugged Grace. They started whispering to each other. I was sure news of the fallen would reach back to everyone soon enough.

We were offered food, though all they had left were canned emergency supplies. Guess they had prepared to be holed up during an Apocalypse eventually.

Dina was in the common room and tried to get my attention. I dodged her gaze. I was not ready to tell her about how her quest had been dashed against the rocks when we lost our Final Girl and Scholar. I’m sure she would be very disappointed to know that two of the people she was relying on to beat the game were gone.

I would talk to her in the morning. I just walked to my room and shut the door. I hated how quiet things were in there without Camden. Often, we would spend the nights before we went to sleep spitballing about how to get out of Carousel. We had theory after theory of what was going on and how it might be fixed. It was all dumb. What did we know?

I used my “Out Like a Light” trope to go to sleep fast so that I didn’t have to deal with the emerging emptiness inside of me.

The Apocalypse lasted for two more weeks. Then, one day, the radio in the kitchen just started playing its regular programming of unsettlingly positive hosts and music that sounded vaguely familiar but that I could never put my finger on.

The storm was never acknowledged by the hosts, even when they did the weather forecast.

A few days after we made it back, Garrett and his team--who had literally jumped into hell to escape the Black Snow--arrived. They were injured. They had come across some shadow people after clearing their storyline and suffered some cuts and broken bones as a result, along with wicked hand-shaped bruises. Fortunately, a Doctor archetype was at the Lodge to patch them up, but they were still on the mend for quite a while.

Eventually, we sent a scout out to take a look at town. When they reported back, they said everything was back to normal. No black snow. No mutants.

And just like that, life went back to normal at Dyer’s Lodge. People were quiet like it was a funeral, but still, things slowly started to go back to the way they had been when we had arrived. I was reminded that the team that had arrived nearly a year before mine had wiped out a matter of weeks before we got there and if it weren’t for their missing posters, I would never have known they were there. No one talked about them.

Camden and Anna were just gone. I got a few condolences but not much more. Death was a way of life at Camp Dyer. People were ready to get back to eating real food, so a run was planned to go to Eternal Savers Club for some bulk groceries.

People were talking about the Excursion out west and their Secret Lore plans.

Lara used a Psychic trope to tell us the news of everyone who had died. The Eleventh Year Reunion team and the Head Below Water team had been killed in the storm. Reggie had not made it either. Grace was a mess all over again because of it.

Travis’ team and the remaining Bowlers had died as well, but not in the Preservation storyline. They had completed that and died later. Lara was sparse on the details, but it seemed as though they somehow triggered a different storyline after completing their original one, or else the killer from a different storyline had found them in the woods. It wasn't clear to her.

She turned to me. I knew what she was going to say before she said it.

“Anna and Camden didn’t make it," she said. "I’m sorry, Riley. I’m sure they tried their hardest.”

I had been expecting the news but still wasn’t ready to hear it. They were gone. Again, I retreated to sleep to escape my feelings.

Many players went to the missing poster wall to pay their respects. Kimberly and Antoine went with them. I didn’t because I couldn’t do anything like that in public. I would go on my own later. The path there was safe enough to walk alone.

“Lara said they didn’t suffer,” Kimberly said as we sat on the back deck of the Lodge after their trip to the wall.

“She was lying,” I said. I knew they had suffered. I saw what had happened to Camden.

Kimberly started crying. She cried a lot. Antoine comforted her as best he could, but I could see everything was taking a toll on him too.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I really sucked at being around people sometimes.

Dina was sitting on a chair nearby. “We can still save them,” she said. “We just have to solv—"

“Yes we’re still going to help you,” I interjected. “It’s all you’ve wanted to talk about since we got back. Whether we can still help you.”

There was an awkward silence.

“It’s not just me,” Dina said. She got up out of her chair and went back inside.

I looked over at Kimberly and Antoine. “So, we just pretend they were never here? Don’t you see that’s what everyone here does? They just forget people.”

“What do you want us to do?” Antoine asked.

The worst part of Carousel was that there was no one to be angry at. The bad guy had not shown his face. It was frustrating. There was no one to yell at.

“I don’t know. I’m going back to sleep.”

I stood up and walked back into the common room. The radio was still playing on the kitchen counter. No one had turned it off in the days since the storm abated.

I found a couch that was away from everyone else and laid down on it. Instead of sleeping, I spent a while just imagining scenarios where I could vent my anger. I wanted to scream at everyone.

“Riley?” someone behind me asked.

I turned over to see it was Grace. She was dressed like she was about to run a storyline. A handful of other players including Lara and Roxie were standing by the door near her.

“What’s up?” I asked, trying to contain my emotions.

She pointed across the room at the chalkboards used to plan the Secret Lore runs. “I left those maps out on the table over there if you wanted to take a look,” she said.

“Maps?” I asked.

“The maps of Carousel throughout the years. We talked about it at the mansion, remember?”

“Oh. Right. Thanks, I’ll give them a look over,” I said. “You’re doing runs already?”

She nodded. “We have a good lead at the museum. We have to move forward. For Reggie and the others. We can’t stop now.”

“Right,” I said. In my heart, I wasn’t ready to start avenging my fallen friends yet. Grace, though, she apparently was. “I’ll see you when you get back.”

She nodded. “Those maps are very interesting. Lots of fun details if you poke through them. You can see the entire town growing right before your eyes if you go through them in order.”

I didn’t respond.

Then she and her new team left.

Antoine and Kimberly stayed out on the deck with a group of other players. I didn’t know where Dina was--probably off trying to convince herself that The Black Snow was somehow a good thing. That it had put her one step closer to reviving her son.

I was alone. I couldn’t go back to my room because then I would only be reminded that Camden was missing.

I decided to just lay back on the couch and use my sleeping trope to go to sleep. I listened to the soft, strange music playing over the radio in the kitchen area.

Just before I decided to doze off, the thought of the maps reentered my mind. I figured I might as well take a look.

I walked over to the table she had pointed me to and saw a pile of maps rolled up into scrolls and bound with rubber bands. They were labeled by year with a black permanent marker.

I grabbed the one that said, 1989, the year Grace said the parking lot arrived, and unrolled it. Then I grabbed 1988 to compare.

Sure enough, the parking lot and the entire road leading to the farm with Benny’s cornfield did not show up until that year.

Someone, maybe Grace, maybe not, had taken to circling each building the year it was added to the map. They had not finished, but I decided to follow along anyway by looking at all of the settings for stories I had completed.

The Museum at Halle Castle appeared in 1999, along with the road that led up to it. That seemed way too late for its arrival. If memory served, that castle canonically was brought to America… I forgot when. I remembered being told this in the story. Luckily, I had a way to double-check.

I used my Director’s Monitor trope to rewatch the Astralist storyline to the point where Judy, the museum caretaker NPC, had told us about the castle's history. There were a lot of strange cuts in that movie. Probably because my friends and I kept breaking character unintentionally.

“You know, this castle was actually brought over from Europe after the destruction of World War Two,” Judy explained. “They brought it here piece by piece, the Halle family. They knew the importance of history.”

That's what I thought. I flipped through the older maps. The castle was missing until 1999. The Astralist story took place in 1999, as a matter of fact.

I kept looking.

Camp Dyer showed up in 1997. In fact, Dyer’s Lake changed shape dramatically that year, becoming larger and changing the location of some key features like several marinas and the dam.

If I were to hazard a guess, the storyline took place in 1997. Of course, the camp would have needed to be around long before that so that the abandoned cabin could have been… well, abandoned.

The Delta Epsilon Delta fraternity where the Ranger Danger storyline took place was called Sigma Alpha Epsilon until 2001. I remembered people dressing like it was the early 2000s. That checked out.

The church from the Grotesque broke the pattern. It was always there, even though the Grotesque had to have taken place in the last few decades. I assumed that the church set was used in several different storylines.

Aker’s Plot from the Campfire anthology was not important enough for a label, but the road that led out to the entrance only showed up in the mid-nineties. It was hard to tell exactly when because that area had very little in it and was not very detailed.

Patcher’s Farm started in 1976 and turned into Patcher’s Family Farm, the roadside attraction, seven years later.

There was no reference to the building from Subject of Inquiry, which made sense. It was a secret.

The Mansion in the Carousel Hills wasn’t labeled, but it did show up in 1992, the same year the storyline was set. That was wrong. The storyline stated that the Mansion had been there for years by 1992.

The settings for each storyline showed up around the time the storyline took place, not when they should have arrived within the continuity of their stories. That meant that the oldest sites in Carousel would not necessarily be those that had been there for the longest according to their own lore.

That was assuming the dates were not rebooted by Carousel, which was a big assumption.

Eventually, my eyes wandered back to the parking lot where we had arrived. The nearest storyline was called Permanent Vacancy. The map didn’t show the names of the storylines. I just remembered it. We had been told that name when we arrived as Valorie tried to explain the concept of Omens or something like that. The terrified woman pleading to be freed as she tried to squeeze through the barbed fence was seared into my memory.

On the map, that storyline took place at a hotel called, “Olde Hill Bed and Breakfast: The Jewel of Carousel. (Condemned)”

The Bed and Breakfast didn’t exist until 1989, the same year it had been padlocked off and condemned it would seem.

I wasn't sure if these maps were good for finding secret lore, but they still seemed important.

Something about that little Bed and Breakfast stood out to me as odd. I couldn’t place my finger on what was so unusual about it.

But then, I remembered what it was.

I could have laughed. The clues we had been given were finally starting to come together. I ran back to my room and grabbed my cell phone from where it stayed on the charger. There wasn’t much use for it with no signal, but I still kept it charged out of habit.

I ran back to the table with the maps and clicked through my apps to find my messages.

I wanted to scream for joy. I had finally found something.

In the kitchen, the radio abruptly stopped playing the mellow music from before and started to play a tune I had never heard before, but still recognized.

"Under the neon glow, where the lucky ones go,

Bet your life on it, it's the Carousel Casino.

The stakes are high, but so is the fun,

Bet your life on it, the night's just begun!"

I stared at the radio aghast. That was the jingle that Winston Ashwood claimed meant there was treasure to be found. Or, as I interpreted it, it meant jackpot.

I looked back at the map and then at my phone. I thought back to the tickets I had been awarded with a coded message on them.

Hidden in plain sight right in front of me was a "Glitch in the Matrix" "Accidentally Captured on Film".