Lost Rambler

Book Five, Chapters 67 and 68

After about ten minutes of driving, I finally connected with a familiar road—a road that normally led to the Powerworks Pavilion. But this time, as I drove along, I saw that I was supposed to turn left onto a small road leading further uphill, one that had been washed out when we’d been here before.

There was a simple sign showing the way to the Manor. The other road, the one we usually traveled down, seemed to lead to a quarry instead of a space base/power station. I suspected they...

Book Five, Chapter 66: Stray Dawn

Riley Lawrence is The Film Buff

His aspect is Filmmaker.

Filmmaker: The Filmmaker has a comprehensive understanding of the filmmaking process. They can manipulate the game environment effectively, altering the game's dynamics in subtle but impactful ways. Their abilities are a mixture of meta-Insight and meta-Rule tropes. They have higher Hustle, reflecting their ability to stay out of the way, stay alive, and remain unseen as they manipulate ...

2024-10-31 04:46:38 +0000 UTC View Post

Book Five, Chapters 64 and 65

There will be several chapter drops this week. I'm thinking four unless I get impatient. I am breaking them up into a few at a time. I hope that's okay.

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We sat on the roof of Kimberley's loft—just me, Antoine, Andrew, and Kimberley. We had some information to gather that we didn't want the others around for.

"Kimberley, this is a high-stakes role, and the audience is going to expect a standout performance from you," Sal said over the speakerphon...

Update

All right, as you have probably figured out, the next storyline is coming up soon. I am planning a big chapter on Monday to kick things off. I gave you today's chapter yesterday. I wanted to give you another today, but I may need to change things about it later, so I won't, sorry.

I hope you like Stray Dawn. It should be one of the more fun storylines in a long while, though it does have one little experiment. Please go into it with an open mind.

PS. If you picked...

Book Five, Chapters 62 and 63

With an abundance of caution, we decided not to go to the bowling alley immediately but rather to head back to the loft to do some research.

Now that we knew the name of the storyline—or at least were reasonably confident that we were on the money—we could do some digging. The only way to confirm that this was the right storyline, unfortunately, was to find the actual omen and see if the missing posters of Logan and Avery appeared on it when we were near it.

It wasn’t that I...

Book Five, Chapters 60 and 61

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 ...

House of Fane CYOA?

I asked you a while ago about additional Tales from Carousel, and you responded positively. I'm currently working on that, and I have an idea related to that I would like to pitch.

I was wondering if you all might appreciate a bit of collaborative storytelling like a choose-your-own-adventure. It wouldn't have the main characters in it, but I could potentially include side characters from the series. The idea would be that I write the storyline House of Fane, a story I have wanted to wr...

Book Five, Chapters 57, 58, 59

We gently wrapped the crybaby’s arms around the coat hooks at the entryway to the loft, both for convenience and practicality. Not to mention style.

If something came along that we needed to know about, we hoped that the baby would cry and tell us. But that was actually a point of confusion—ever since we had gotten the baby, it had yet to cry even once, and we had come close to some tremendous dangers in Carousel since obtaining it.

We did that every day, just traveling around...

Book Five, Chapter 56

Our next stop was Happened A-Pawn. I had hoped it would have some answers—or maybe even the omen for the Werewolf storyline itself—but that was a little too much to hope for.

"So, normally, it's a lot different than this," I said as the group filtered into the pawn shop, looking around at the mostly barren shelves.

Behind the counter stood a tall, bald, heavily muscled man named Tar Bellows, a Paragon, one of the Bruisers, as far as I understood it.

"I can only stock use...

Book Five, Chapters 54 and 55

From the outside, the House of Dolls looked picture-perfect, like an American Girl store or the type of place that only existed in the minds of young girls playing tea parties with their dolls.

Because there were dolls. Tons and tons of them.

It was a Queen Anne-style home, except for two of the walls—the ones facing the street—were mostly windows. Through those windows, you could see tables set up for patrons who might want to have a tea party themselves, as the Dollhouse was...

Book Five, Chapters 52 and 53

I know the quasi-slice of life is not usual for this story, but I am enjoying it. I promise this is going somewhere.

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There was a sporting goods store around the last turn of the U-shaped building.

It had an appropriately punny name: Dead Sprints.

Unfortunately, it was closed down because it contained so many cool objects, and it would be overpowered for us to shop there. After all, sporting implements often made ...

Book Five, Chapter 51

I stood in the middle of a large stone corridor, like something out of Hogwarts to my eye. Fancy stonework. No formed concrete. Yet, these walls were not for some royal courtyard. They were storefronts. On either side, there were eight to ten glass doors with big glass windows packed with goods to draw customers in.

The only exit out of the corridor I could find was the same way we came in.

This was a kill box.

If something were to chase you into this place, you’d have to ...

Book Five, Chapter 50

Here's what's happening. The post got really big, with lots of slice-of-life and miscellaneous Carousel adventures. It is nearly 20,000 words, all told pre-editing. I had to chop it up for my own sanity. I will release it over the next few days as I edit it. That's what I'll be doing all weekend, lol. It should be 4-6 posts total, and IDK how many chapters. Please bear with me. Thank you for your patience.

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It was incredible how life could move forward s...

Update

Hey everyone, just a quick update!

Thank you all for responding so enthusiastically to my last post! I’m working hard to incorporate as many of your ideas into the post as I can and will deliver it soon. Some of your suggestions were already planned for later chapters, while others might overlap with future twists I have in store. If you don’t see your idea in the final draft, just know that it might have been excluded for a variety of reasons, but I’m definitely ...

Taking Requests

Your next post is a big one and will come soon.

Spoilers: It involves some trips around Carousel to various shops where Omens and other goodies can be bought.

Are there any of these that you might hope to see? There are lots of fun tidbits I intend to include, but I thought I would ask you if there is anything you specifically want. There will be tropes for purchase if you would like to make suggestions.

Please answer in the comments.

Book Five, Chapter 49

More to come ASAP. Got some setup chapters to get done before the next full moon.

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As we walked back to the loft with our bounty of 1970s general store groceries, I still felt nervous about bringing newcomers to our base.

It was just an inherently risky thing to do.

We had dotted our I's and crossed our T's, but at the end of the day, all we could do was stick to the plan. And the plan involved creating a robust stable of players we could use to beat t...

Book Five, Chapter 48

Lila reappeared not too long after Andrew showed up.

She was nervous, but I could see in her eyes that she wanted to please—that she knew how important it was for us to trust her.

I tried my best to wipe away my preconceptions and my pent-up frustration with watching her surrogate screw things up constantly.

Ironically, I felt closer to trusting her than Michael and maybe even closer than Andrew—and he was a very reasonable fellow.

It required a bit of contortion f...

Book Five, Chapter 47

“I can’t talk you into staying any longer, can I?” I asked.

Kimberly stood in front of me, looking like a 1970s movie star. Behind her was a French door, and she was backing toward it.

“You know I would stay if I could,” Kimberly said. “If I had my way, we would stick to this story until we found that little girl. But unfortunately, life moves on, and there are a lot of other stories that need my attention.”

We exchanged a knowing smile, the kind only old frien...

Book Five, Chapter 46

Michael built a fire so fast that I would have thought he had a trope for it.

There was a burn pit just off Bobby's rental's back porch, surrounded by overbuilt wooden deck chairs. The chairs easily weighed 60 pounds, and the wood was rough, but next to the fire, they were comfortable.

We each sat around, some on the porch, some near the fire, and we talked about our lives, our fears, and our hopes. But mostly, we talked about the storylines we had run.

The longer we were in...

Book Five, Chapter 45

"I'd love to sit here and sing 'Kumbaya' with all of you," I said, as I put my tickets away into the ether where they disappeared, "but it's getting dark, and we still haven't decided what we're going to do about her."

I glanced over at Lila.

We had expected there might be some friction when rescuing new teams—that was built into the plan. We had thought that part through. So, when Andrew and Michael took longer than would be convenient to trust us, that did not slow us down. 2024-09-20 00:38:23 +0000 UTC View Post

Tales of Carousel pt. II

It's time for more Tales of Carousel! For those of you who liked those short stories, now is the time to make requests.

Are there any storylines you would like to see? Are there any historical periods of Carousel you want to look at? Any characters? Any enemies?

The stories will be written in the third person and can be from anyone's perspective, though I promise not everything will be as straightforward as it seems.

Leave your requests in the comments.

Book Five, Chapter 44

I rapidly began to understand that Andrew and his team were just like us, but they had arrived a year earlier. I wanted to question what had happened, what had gone wrong that they had never found Permanent Vacancy, but that was just one of a million questions.

They were supposed to be the Party of Promise. They were the Highrollers, but they failed.

"I assume that you guys know some anonymous person who said they were your friend or something and that they were going to ...

Book Five, Chapter 43

"We really cannot risk staying here," I said, but I might as well have been talking to myself because Michael and Andrew could not resist interrogating Lila.

My friends seemed to agree that the interrogation was more critical than whatever risk standing at the entrance of the Powerworks Pavilion might hold.

I kept my head on a swivel, looking for Omens. I didn't know of any that would threaten us, but we were certainly surrounded.

So, if one of the Omens turned out to be mob...

Update

Hello! I am still working on the next chapters. I will have them out soonish. I just forgot how slow it is to write rewards. You are still ahead of RR.

In other news, I have changed the end of the previous chapter. Here is the change. This takes place after their plan to invoke IBECS' defensive protocols succeeds but before The End. By reading this, you are agreeing to pretend it was always there.

Antoine and I watched in amazement and relief as our plan finally...

2024-09-09 23:38:32 +0000 UTC View Post

Thoughts on Itch

So, Itch was used to practice writing reruns and compact storylines (the rerun was compact, not the whole Itche section). If you have any comments on where I could improve, I'd appreciate it. If you have nice things to say, I would appreciate the encouragement too lol. Either way, nonstandard storylines like this will never be common exactly, but I need to be able to do one if the narrative requires it so I am working on them.

The next storyline is much more standard and character-drive...

Book Five, Chapters 38, 39, 40, 41, 42

When we set out for the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion to finally enact our plan, it was our fifth attempt. The first loss was the hardest, but after that, it got easier and easier, and we got better and better.

We learned things we didn’t even know possible to learn about the inner workings of a storyline. We had always dismissed the merits of rerunning a story, but now we understood.

It was like being clairvoyant.

We also gained intimate knowledge of Dina’s Rescue Trope. Wha...

Book Five, Chapters 36 and 37

“It just comes down to a question,” Antoine said. “Do we try Dina's Rescue trope again, or do we switch to mine? Because we are not giving up. Not at the first real loss we suffered. I feel like we got a pretty good look at what my Rescue would be like, except there would be no player surrogates, and we’d have less time to get things done. I’m up for that, but I’m willing to put it up for a vote.”

We were on the roof of Kimberly's loft, eating food we had purchased to go f...

Book Five, Chapter 35

When I opened my eyes, the sun was setting as I stood on the campus of the KRSL Powerworks Pavilion.

The storyline was over. We didn’t even get a visit from Silas, the Mechanical Shoman.

"It's great to hear you had such a leisurely time," Tripp, the NPC who guided us when we first arrived, said. He was standing right in front of us.

It took a moment to orient myself. I looked around. The place was still populated, but it would soon return to its abandoned aesthetic when we...

Book Five, Chapters 34

Workers harming other workers was the official theme of today's rescue, and what better way for Carousel to remind us of that than by having one cowardly scab be unwilling to save another?

Michael tried to be a hero in the wrong story, and now our hopes of saving the real player he represented were gone—for now.

Underlying Dina's rescue trope's promises of safety was the reality that it was extremely difficult to succeed with.

It wasn’t that you would die trying; it was ...

Book Five, Chapters 32 and 33

"IBECS, this is the Helio. Please confirm this transmission. We have no edible provisions on our ship. Mayday, this is an emergency; we are requesting aid on behalf of KRSL," I said.

That line required hours of planning, including taking all the food we had on our ship and throwing it out the airlock.

"This is the IBECS. I'm confirming with the Helio AI. It seems that you are out of food. That is troubling. My protocols allow me to permit temporary coupling to provide the Helio wi...