The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

We found an old guitar in the jailhouse.
It had the trope
attached to it.
Isaac had that same trope and had apparently used it on one of those yard rakes with an extendable handle in a storyline.
Ramona told this story: he was facing off against the enemy of
, and right in a climactic moment, he clicked the handle to extend the rake out all the way.
The trope empowered humorous weapons—a guitar, a leaf rake; both were weapons to a comedian.
It was a funny story.
Everyone laughed as we relaxed in the office space of the jailhouse. It was a good time.
Ramona gravitated to the guitar, tuned it up, and was soon playing beautiful, melodic songs that spread throughout the whole jailhouse.
For the first time since we’d gotten there, the strange ghostly sounds from the basement stopped.
It just couldn’t be done.
Instead, we all camped out inside the main office, which had a nice plush carpet. We brought our blankets from Kimberley’s loft.
We were doing what was required to change our official base from Kimberley’s loft to Isaac’s jailhouse.
We had to spend the night.
It wasn’t that complicated, luckily.
If you weren’t paying attention, the ghosts down in the basement just sounded like the wind.
Ramona played the guitar, and with some prompting, they got Logan to sing a song. I had heard it before, but I didn’t know its name. It was an old, sad country song.
All thirteen of us were jammed into that office, eating food from the vending machine in the break room and nervously talking about what was to come.
I didn’t mind it. The jailhouse was a scary place, but being surrounded by friends didn’t just cancel out the scariness—it elevated it to something else. It was like we were sitting around a campfire. The spookiness actually comforted me somehow.
Most of the time, you don’t know which moments in your life you’re going to be nostalgic for, but I found myself willfully living in every moment that night because I knew it might be our last happy night in Carousel—or anywhere else.
No matter how we moved around the pieces, no matter how we tried to do the math, at the end of the day, our best bet was to bring our best players and our best strategies regardless of how well-situated the remaining players were. Leaving someone with a rescue trope behind might appease the mind of an anxious man, but it wasn’t really a better decision.
If we lost, we would all lose, even those of us who didn't go on the storyline. If we lost, the audience might abandon us. If we lost, it was over.
I had to tell myself that because there was definitely a voice in my head formulating a dozen different variations that would be smarter. That voice was deafening, telling me to be cautious, to just take our time, and a path will open up.
Damn being smarter.
Carousel was designed as a strategy game, but most of the time, you couldn’t do the smart thing. At best, you had to do the dumb thing strategically.
You couldn’t just run when things got weird. You couldn’t follow your rapidly beating heart away from the monster that you
lurked in the darkness.
You had to walk forward.
It was in the town’s bylaws.
Wind blew through the jailhouse. Even though it had been retrofitted to be a museum, it was largely still in the same condition it had been a hundred years prior. It was drafty.
I couldn’t sleep.
Obviously, I literally could sleep—I had a trope just for that.
I couldn’t make myself trigger it, though. When I went to sleep, I would wake up, and it would be tomorrow. I felt like I would do anything to extend the time between that night and the next day.
I got up from the room in the office and decided to do one last look through the jailhouse—the place that might hold our final stand.
Most of the museum was on the ground floor. Everything was stacked away and packed up. The boxes were filled with nothing but those Styrofoam peanuts. They were all props.
I was sure this jailhouse had a history, but I didn’t know it—not just by looking.
I had been through the upstairs multiple times. It was all the same—a lot of cool props, but it was all skin-deep. Once you started digging into it, you just found empty boxes.
We knew that the jailhouse museum would be our characters' place of employment, so I was certain that when we started the storyline, all those props would suddenly become a lot more detailed.
The game makers—those mysterious people—would walk all through the set and exchange our boxes of Styrofoam peanuts with actual artifacts from the history of this place, or at least stuff that would play the part.
I found myself walking downstairs into the basement just to look.
It was safe. The ghosts were locked in their jail cells. I doubted that Isaac’s Writ of Habitation would last long enough for us to see any action on the ghost front.
When I got downstairs, guided by the dim light of the moon and the flickering lights of the basement, I was surprised to see that I wasn’t the only one who had the idea to wander around.
It was Ramona, staring into one of the cells—one of the locked, haunted ones.
When she saw me, she said, “It almost looks like someone is sleeping in that bed, like they pulled the blanket up over their head to block out the light.”
I stared in after her.
It did look like that, but it also looked like some crumpled-up cushions and blankets. If there was a ghost there—and I was certain there could have been—it was hiding itself on the red wallpaper. One perk of being a ghost, I supposed.
"He's probably just blocking out the woman who's staring at him," I said.
She smiled and punched my arm.
We stared together for a bit.
"So, you're going to be risking everything again?" she asked. "Didn't you just do that with the werewolves?"
I took a moment to think before I answered.
"When you're almost out of chips, you go all in every hand," I said. There's a metaphor. That should end that conversation. But it didn't.
"And when you win, you don't win much," she said.
That was true. We might risk it all and walk away no closer to our freedom.
"Well, this life isn’t much, but at least it’s exciting," I said.
She didn’t respond for a moment. She just stared at the pile of fabric that might have been a sleeping ghost.
"Everyone’s talking about you," she eventually said. "They say you’ve got some plan that’s going to set everything straight, but you can’t talk about it."
I hated that people were putting their hopes in me. It was a burden I could barely lift.
"I do?" I asked. "Guess I better draw one up."
She smiled, but it wasn’t a real smile. She was nervous. I couldn’t blame her. More than the rest of us, her future was nothing but question marks.
What was her happy ending?
We didn’t talk about her situation.
Like so many other conversations, this one turned into shop talk. We talked about storylines, plans, and the game. We must have talked for ten minutes, just aimlessly. There was nothing else to say.
"I’ll go with you, you know," she said. "On the storyline. I’d probably end up First Blood, but I’d still do it."
"Thanks for offering," I said. "But your build is more about manipulating a storyline, and you’re not high-level enough to be able to do that."
"Oh," she said. "Sorry."
"No," I said. "It’s just... being under-leveled, being the first blood sacrifice in a storyline with a torturer—that’s something I could never ask you to do."
She stared into my eyes.
"Isn’t Lila going to be first blood?" Ramona asked.
"Well, yeah, but it was Logan who asked her," I said.
We laughed—until the ghost, the one that actually
a ghost and not just a pile of cushions and blankets, shushed us.
I whispered, "Sorry."
He must have been a man after my own heart. Even in the afterlife, all he wanted to do was sleep. I stared at the blanket, and now I could see it slowly rising and falling with the breath of some long-gone prisoner whose name I didn’t even know.
In a way, he was lucky. At least he knew where he stood. He knew his fate.
What was our fate?
I had no idea.
While I was contemplating big questions, Ramona was contemplating smaller ones. I didn’t know what those questions were, but I knew what her answer was.
She kissed me.
We weren’t even On-Screen. It wasn’t even scripted. She just did it because of nerves, or excitement, or the ambiance of the old jailhouse—or maybe just because she wanted to.
Sometimes, girls will just kiss you. You gotta watch out.
Finally finding myself able to turn off my brain, I kissed her back.
For the first time in a long time, I felt normal. Like Carousel didn’t exist and I was truly living in the moment.
Had I ever done that before? Lived in the moment? I couldn’t remember.
I already knew that that night was going to be one I remembered fondly. It was the first time in Carousel that I felt like the night was truly my own—our own.
Those fleeting thoughts that maybe Ramona was a manifestation of Carousel weren’t strong enough to ruin the moment.
The moment stretched on, and time slipped away as we made memories.
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I knew I would value that night for the rest of my life, no matter how long it might last.
I was glad to have an experience like that in that spooky basement jail where I had technically died once—of electrocution.
I just wished I didn’t have to share the moment with half a dozen ghosts and the prying eyes of the audience.
I wondered if they were going to change the channel now.
The next morning, we dropped all the players who weren’t going to join us in the storyline off at Ramona’s cabin.
It was finally summer enough for her Writ of Habitation to go into effect. It was funny. It was always summer in Western Carousel, but you still had to wait before you could use that Writ. The cabin didn’t have any big drawbacks—it was just kind of small. It was in a beautiful location, and I imagined you could hear the banshee very well at night, even through the thick log walls and shuttered windows.
We bid farewell to Ramona, Avery, Isaac, Cassie, Michael, and Andrew.
The rest of us drew the short straw.
We had bought them a mobile omen—something low-level, a toy soldier that I suspected was as aware of us as we were of him. If you took his gun, you would activate the omen. They had Isaac as a scout, but his scouting trope wasn’t foolproof. If they needed to run a storyline or run from a bad guy, they could just activate the omen, and they would be safe as they trekked out to run it.
Purchasable mobile Omens had their place, after all.
Ramona and I hugged goodbye. She didn’t go for a kiss, and neither did I, but I could see in her smile that she enjoyed having a secret. I didn't think Carousel was a place to fall in love unless you were a lesbian werewolf, and I wasn't the kind of guy girls fell in love with, anyway. Still, of all my secrets, it was the most comforting.
As soon as we started walking back, Kimberley was giving me the
eyes.
I didn’t acknowledge her silent inquiries. We had a mission.
The team ended up being me, Antoine, Kimberley, Dina, Bobby, Lila, and Logan. Everyone had a job, a role, and we knew how to adapt depending on what Carousel threw at us.
As we walked back toward the jailhouse, quite a distance from Lake Dyer, Antoine thanked Logan and Lila for helping rescue Anna and Camden.
Lila said something like, “We owe you. We have to help each other.”
Logan, ever the straight shooter, said, “We are completely dependent on you all. If you’re going to throw yourself at something like this, it’s in our best interest to make sure you succeed. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
Not even a sarcastic quip. I would have killed for a sarcastic quip at that moment. If this storyline sounded scary enough to make Logan abandon his sardonic humor, it must have been
scary.
But he was right. Every decision we made would affect them. As much as we wanted to pretend this was an alliance between teams forged of shared purpose, it was more than that—they needed us.
We could not take them for granted.
We walked to the jailhouse, did one last walkthrough to ensure all our preparations were ready, and then left for the roller rink.
Carousel sounds so unserious on paper. Perusing the jailhouse museum and then heading off to skate the days away.
I was excited and nervous and all sorts of other emotions.
“We’re going to see Anna soon,” Kimberley said.
I couldn’t help but smile. That kind of instant gratification rarely happened in Carousel: enter a storyline, see your dead friend.
“We might even be able to see Camden,” I said. “Depending on how the time travel works and whether the first movie is canon.”
“Let’s not get too excited,” Antoine said. “We have to keep our heads.”
That was an odd remark coming from Antoine, who a month earlier couldn’t be found saying anything short of a positive affirmation.
It was an improvement from where I was standing.
We walked until we saw the roller rink—the one that occasionally stopped existing and was replaced by a giant pit in the ground.
“Everything check out?” Antoine asked me.
I double-checked all my insight tropes again, and everything was as expected.
With our new levels, technically, Post-Traumatic might have even had less of a level gap than
, but it was also a much harsher subgenre of horror—with time travel thrown on top.
As soon as we got into the story, we needed to get our bearings straight. We needed to know the lore, to understand what type of time travel we were dealing with, and what this enemy could conjure up against us.
There was only one way to find out.
We walked down the hill toward the roller rink. As soon as it reappeared, we stepped onto the asphalt of the parking lot. The rescue posters of Anna and Camden were held firmly in my hands. Our base was set to the jailhouse.
We walked across the parking lot quickly, unsure if it would disappear on us.
As soon as we reached the door, Antoine grabbed the handle. The moment I heard his hand hit the metal, everything went black, and all I could feel was the sensation of falling.
Riley Lawrence is
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Kimberly Madison is
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Antoine Stone is
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Logan Maize is
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Dina Cano is
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Bobby Gill is
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Lila White is