Book Nine, Chapter 46: Where's the Fire?

I had to stop worrying about the big bad and work the problem.

I wasn't surprised when it turned out to be rats. After all, the concept of “rats in the walls” being tied to psychological trauma or mental illness was well established in the genre. But I was surprised by the rats themselves.

These weren't normal animals. That was immediately clear. They weren't simply meta or psychically enhanced. We had faced both types of enemies. Instead, they radiated evil like some of the cosmic beings we had encountered. There was something primal about them. As I watched them scurry out of the holes in the walls, a fear activated in my brain, something that wasn't even logical. It was purely instinctual.

I thought I was getting good at telling the difference between my own emotions and the ones Carousel forced on me, but this feeling bypassed that.

It was the same response that struck up when you saw a snake in the grass or a cockroach crawling on a wall in the distance. There are innate fears in the human mind. They go back so far that they're closer to biological than they are psychological. That's what I felt, something deep and abiding that I couldn't understand.

They came out like a sea of fur and tails. I couldn't hear what was happening, obviously, but in a strange way, I felt it. I recognized them as enactors of inevitable death, the same way you might feel when watching a video of someone dying in a factory accident, where even without confirmation, you knew they were dead, that there was no surviving that.

The creatures were large for rats, but that wasn't why they were scary. They were scary because they were fast, impossibly so. Even as I looked at them, it felt like they were moving quicker than my eyes were as I scanned from side to side. They covered the entire office floor, crawling over the furniture, and surrounding Geneva, Sidney, and Ace.

I assumed they were going to die at that moment. I didn't think anyone would survive after seeing what they had done to Dr. Mentes. But luckily, Geneva had brought pepper spray, which she handed to Sidney, who happily applied it to the pursuing horde of vermin.

It worked. There must have been a trope involved, given how the rats backed away, but that didn't solve all of their problems. The rats had already cut them off from the door.

I watched, trying to figure out how these characters would survive. The paragons only had 50 plot armor. It was possible they had some defenses I couldn't see, as some NPCs do, but if that wasn't the case, I couldn't see how they would get out of this unless they had the perfect trope for the situation.

The whole time I watched through the telescope, I narrated, but the others could largely tell what was going on with the naked eye.

“Where are they going to go?” Kimberly asked. “They can't get to the stairs.”

I had thought I was saving them by improvising those stairs into existence, but there was something bigger at work here, something that a little bit of strategy and cleverness couldn't overcome.

“They're scripted to die,” I said. “They aren't supposed to survive.”

That surprised me, knowing that the big bad was Highbrow Hue. The idea that the main characters would die to some low-level rats this early in the Party—

Wait a second.

It wasn't early in the Party. The needle on the plot cycle had jumped up, and it was nearly First Blood. I thought we had a lot more time.

Across the street, the three paragons had backed away into Dr. Mentes' bathroom and shut the door against the rats outside. It worked at first, but the rats yearned to be in the walls, and Mentes had broken so many holes in his that the rats found a simple entry point and began flooding in through a small hole he had made, chewing through the drywall and making it bigger.

“They're going to die,” Antoine said. “There's no way out of that room.”

Was that what this storyline was going to be? Unbeatable enemies with decidedly little gameplay involved? A simple stat check, and you died? The script working against you in a way that it never did before?

Normally, enemies with this high of plot armor didn't attack you directly. They stayed to the periphery of the story, or they commanded troops, but that wasn't the case for this apocalypse. Was this really a trap after all? Had I led my friends to their deaths?

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A realization struck me as the needle on the plot cycle got closer to First Blood. It was practically on the line. I knew that when the Consortium had developed the concept of an apocalypse, they had somehow done it by transforming normal storylines into something bigger and more dangerous. It was only now dawning on me exactly how they had done it.

It was simple. The Party Phase of an apocalypse contained the entire base storyline, and then First Blood was going to be the moment the main characters failed, which would lead to the proper end of the world. An apocalypse was what happened if a failed storyline kept going.

They were simply extending on what was already there.

If I was right, that meant something important. It meant that as long as those players were alive, we had a buffer between us and certain doom that would allow us to learn, to adapt, and to plan.

But they wouldn't survive long. The script simply wasn’t going to allow it. Their life and death were just a plot device to bring about the end of the world. They were not supposed to succeed. Their demise almost felt trivial.

But what if they did survive, at least for a little while?

“We need to help them,” I said. “The longer they're alive, the more time we have to prepare.”

“How are we supposed to help against that?” Antoine asked. In all the situations we had been in, he rarely sounded so hopeless, even when he was struggling with his trauma.

I honestly didn't know. I searched the rats for a solution hidden in their tropes. Weaknesses were often hidden right alongside strengths inside the rules of an enemy. Sometimes one was disguised as another.

This felt completely hopeless. They were going to die in minutes, and there was nothing we could do. If we went anywhere near those rats, we would be about as effective at killing them as cardboard pellets.

I looked around, hoping for inspiration that would jog my creativity.

I just happened to see it.

Down on the street, I saw NPCs dressed as paramedics, police officers, and even a couple of firefighters. They weren't On-Screen. This was simply Carousel preparing for the next scene, where our dead main characters were going to be hauled out of the building just as Dr. Mentes had been. Carousel was efficient that way, though it was funny to actually see it happening live. Normally, it managed to get everything done when you were looking at something else.

Cops and firefighters… An idea spawned in my brain. I glanced back up at the rats and scanned through their tropes until I found it.

“That's it,” I said. “They'll Never Believe You. The authorities will never believe that there are rats here, or at least not an Armageddon of rats. We need to call the cops. No, wait... the fire department. Kimberly, find a phone in this building. Call 911 and say that you see smoke coming from the, what is that, the 17th floor.”

“I'm on it,” she said as she left the empty office to go find one that was furnished.

One of Carousel's more nitpicky rules was that we couldn't use our smartphones in stories set before smartphones were invented, and this one was about half a decade away.

“I'm going to go pull the fire alarm,” I said.

I paused for a moment and then added, “We need to find a way to make it feel integrated into the story. Find Kimberly and tell her to say that she saw sparks too. It might make them think it was an electrical fire, like maybe the rats chewed through a wire they weren't supposed to. Don’t mention the rats, of course. That way, it's at least integrated into the story.”

I then left, choosing the stairwell and running as fast as I could down to the first floor of our building, crossing the street. I had to walk past a large group of NPCs who I assumed were there to be looky-loos. The police tape was already up, blocking off the entrance to the building, but since we were Off-Screen, that didn't apply to me, although a couple of beat cops made a half-hearted attempt to tell me not to cross the barrier.

I made it into the lobby quickly enough, where I found the paramedics waiting with three separate stretchers. I passed right by them. One of them, I noticed, was playing a brick breaker game on something that looked a lot like a BlackBerry.

I needed to get out of sight. I didn't know how important it was that I actually not be seen, since I was Off-Screen anyway, but instinctively, I didn't want to pull a fire alarm in front of a cop.

The building wasn't exactly up to fire code, especially with things like emergency exits boarded up and covered in drywall to cut down on visual clutter for Carousel's cinematic demands. After a bit of searching, I did find a fire alarm off in a back hallway. I pulled it.

All I really needed to do was to get an alarm to sound upstairs within range of the On-Screen cameras. I had never actually seen a fire alarm pulled in real life, but in movies, they sent a blaring and often flashing alarm into every room in the building.

If Kimberly did her part and found a way to get firefighters to the 17th floor, then I knew for a fact those rats wouldn't be there. After all, if the firefighters found those demonic nightmare rats swarming, that would directly contradict their trope.

I had to rely on that. I couldn't use my own tropes to beat these things, but I could use their tropes against them.

Now all that was left to do was wait as the siren sounded loudly throughout the halls and the lights turned almost entirely red. I wasn't sure that part was realistic, but I had seen it in movies before. As I headed toward the lobby, a large group of firefighters pushed me aside as they made their way toward the stairwell I had magicked into existence.

The only question was, would they get there in time? Seventeen floors, after all, was a long way to climb.

All I could do was squeeze out of the lobby past the confused emergency responders who hadn't yet received their instructions on the script and hope we succeeded.

I looked up at the crow's nest where we had been waiting. Antoine was there at the telescope. I could see that much.

He was watching for me. After a few minutes, he looked down and gave me a thumbs-up.

Moments later, I received confirmation on the red wallpaper as the needle on the plot cycle moved backward. First Blood would have to wait. The players, or at least one of them, had survived the onslaught.

If the rats were this bad, I couldn't imagine what else we would be up against.