Lost Rambler

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 36

Arriving at the docks and tying off may have triggered the storyline, but it didn't teleport us to our starting locations. Other things changed, though. The river changed so much that I couldn't see it anymore; all I saw was a lake with a large interior and fingers snaking through the hills.

After tying off, I managed to climb out of the boat, suddenly aware that I had a large digital camera in my right hand. This wasn't an at-home film-your-kids-unwrapping-Christmas-presents type of ca...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 35

“Is Ramona there?” I asked from a distance, keeping an eye out near the water tower.

I didn't get an answer. Maybe I didn't ask loud enough. Antoine was quickly climbing up the fence the posters had been stapled to because the newest posters were at the top.

I looked out in the distance. I could see large yellow tents, but the circus wasn't close enough for the psychic effect to start triggering yet. Our problem was not going to be clowns. It was going to be Omens and free-ran...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 34

Due to the results of the poll, the past has been changed. Anna made it onto the boat headed out on the Carousel River. Kimberly made it on the boat too, but because Anna was there, she got on later:

"Kimberly!" we all screamed, willing her to run faster, to get to the far side of the platform before the zombies overtook her.

She almost did.

As she ran along the platform, a wave of zombies crashed into her, almost knocking her into the water, but she managed to...

2025-12-28 01:12:44 +0000 UTC View Post

Rewrite Fate

The die has been cast, the players divided, but as Patrons, you have the final say.

Kimberly, Antoine, Riley, Camden, Cassie, and Andrew are on the boat setting sail down the Carousel River. I offer you an alternative.

Anna Reed began this story as the team's Final Girl. She was adept at both playing support with her social tropes and fighting enemies with her melee stats. She might have grown to be a prominent character, had death not intervened, a death caused by a Patreon vote...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 33

The river was moving fast, even when we stuck our oars in the water to try to slow ourselves down in hopes of being able to drag our teammates out of the water.

But as we went around the bend, passing through dark tunnels illuminated mostly by a single torch Camden carried, we realized quickly that they weren't going to catch up with us. Still, we did our best to slow our passage. We steered next to the wall to our left, hoping to do what Camden had done before: find some crack or crev...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 32

“What am I supposed to say?” I asked. “I can’t prove any of this, but surely if you look at the situation we're in, you can’t say this is all random or a coincidence. We have been put in a very specific position. If you looked at all of our behavior up until now, you would predict that we would make the sacrifice play—but for the first time, I think we would be wrong.”

“Yes,” Andrew said, standing up from where he had been kneeling next to Cassie. “They expect us to ...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 31

“The circus is in here, but it’s a secondhand story,” Camden said, flipping back through the Atlas, “same as I told you before.”

“All right, well, tell me that story,” I said.

“It’s just a recording of a conversation between two players from different factions,” Camden said, “heavily redacted, by the way.” He flipped to the page in the Atlas and started to summarize what he was reading.

“The other player’s talking about running an apocalypse in or...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 30

“Why isn’t it crying?” Cassie asked, exasperated.

She held the most hideous baby doll I had ever seen at arm’s length. The Crybaby was a powerful, semi-occult tool that would cry whenever any unperceived danger was nearby. When we had first acquired it from the Tea House on our quest to find the Omen to rescue Logan and Avery, we had tested its power.

The baby doll had the Fear of the Unknown trope, and it meant that literally. When we tried to use it to d...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 29

It took a while for Kimberly to leave Cassie’s side, which was odd.

Don’t get me wrong, Kimberly was very caring and had spent a lot of time looking after Cassie inside storylines and out, but this was different. I could see in her eyes, as she stared at Cassie’s sleeping face, that she was feeling her character’s emotions.

She recognized Cassie, not just as a familiar player, but as one of the teen girls from our dream. In my gut, I knew that was dangerous.

She sat ...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 28

The one place that Carousel usually left you alone was in your dreams.

That wasn't to say that your tropes couldn't affect your dreams. My Out Like a Light trope usually prevented me from dreaming altogether, whereas my I Don’t Like It Here trope gave me anxious dreams and night sweats.

But for the most part, your dreams were yours. They were the only place you were free. Sure, they might be influenced by the trauma you had received in Carousel,...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 27

“Are you guys all right?” Antoine called from the other side of the door as he struggled to lift it.

“We’re fine,” Michael said. He went to hack at the zombies in front of us.

I grabbed his arm because we didn't need a fight at that moment. More undead were coming, and I feared Michael’s instincts were born in battles where death was an option.

“We have a lot of monsters over here!” I called out. “Be careful opening the door.” Then I turned to Michael and...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 26

As much freedom as we had found at Kimberly’s loft, it could never make up for what we had lost when we could no longer call Camp Dyer home.

The open spaces, the views of nature, the distance from town, the feeling of safety you got from knowing that there were a hundred other players there with you at any time, ready to come to your aid or, at the very least, go through hell with you… that was hard to do without.

But Halle’s Castle was a step back in the right direction. We...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 25

There was something strange about castle walls and high towers that made us feel like a fight was coming to us.

Back in the Camp Dyer days, apocalypses were feared, but they weren't something the vets made a big deal about. There were still bonfires to be had and rounds of kumbaya, cookouts, and volleyball. And that was in the open air, no fences.

The danger was far away and well warned.

Whatever Writ had made Camp Dyer safe must have had a huge amount of square footage in i...

Update

So there were mixed reactions to the Astralist Interlude. I felt weird about having some other team earn the Writ for an entire castle without you seeing any of it. You may remember that Logan's team had been working on that for a while in the background. If you have any thoughts about it, feel free to share a gentle version of them in the comments. I feel the Astralist, being based on old black-and-white horror movies that were not as scary, may not have been the best story to do this sort ...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 24: Six Weeks Later

SIX WEEKS LATER

Eternal Savers Club really was quite simple to beat when you weren't doing a rescue. Antoine, Kimberly, Camden, Anna, Dina, and I managed to pull off a win as part of an ambitious shopping project to help us stock up for the apocalypse, the event that had occupied much of our attention ever since our parley with Lucky the Narrator.

This time, there was no cult, and while there was a strange aura in the air, it was nothing like the one that had existed when...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 23: The Astralist Part IV

The entrance to the secret passage did not elude Logan, Michael, and Andrew for long. The room was well lit, and very little of it had been touched in months, except for one bottle of wine, which sat on a shelf, dust-free, its green, glassy exterior visible.

As Logan reached for it and pulled on it, he discovered that it was attached to the shelf by a mechanism that caused the wall where the cables had run under to lift up and open a passage.

The men looked at each other. That fee...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 22: The Astralist Part III

The next post will be the last of this interlude.

Alarmed but without any explicit justification for worry, Logan walked swiftly down the hallway toward the area he knew the maids’ quarters to be. Andrew and Michael were right behind him.

“We asked the help,” Logan said. “She would know where the happy couple sleeps. I bet every dollar in my pocket that’s where Avery is, probably helping out in some way or another.”

It did not take them...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 21: The Astralist Part II

The men sat in the smoking room, continuing to talk about their lives, but Logan could see that Simon's heart was not in the conversation. He was fidgety and distracted, constantly looking toward the door as if wondering whether his wife might need his aid. Logan couldn't imagine being in such a position. He almost spoke out and gave Simon permission to leave the group, but he figured it was better to let Simon come up with the idea himself.

It didn't take long.

"You'll forgive me...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 20: The Astralist Part I

I'm doing something a bit different here. I am writing this as if it were the novelization of the movie version of the team's run. There will be no meta information. Just the story as it went down. We'll see how it works. All I ask is that you face it with an open mind.

~

Four sets of hands met upon the outer edges of the old wooden planchette at the center of the Ouija board. There were breathy giggles and snorts rising from the group as the small triangular piece of wood moved...

Update

Several Interludes are coming up, three of which will be a side story featuring Logan's team (I really need to come up with nicknames for the teams). I hope you like it, but if not, the main story will be back shortly.

I will have a chapter out later tonight. Maybe four or five hours from now. That's just where my sleep cycle is right now.

Thanks for reading,

-lost_rambler

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 19: Interlude

Mortimer the 304th walked the cracked pavement toward the high school as if he had all the time in the world—which, technically, was an understatement. He had far more time than this world.

It had been a thousand years since he had missed the Barker. While others relied on corporate news and old-fashioned gossip for information on the Barker’s whereabouts, Mortimer had devised his own alert system. To those who had studied the Magic Between Worlds, it was quite simple.

Mortime...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 18

We had finally heard the entirety of Lucky's pitch. Our mission, if we chose to accept it, would be to sail the Carousel River, following the path taken by a team more than thirty years earlier in hopes of finding a mythical sanctuary where meta-aware NPCs could somehow live in relative peace, even amongst the horrors of Carousel.

That path would be deadly and unpredictable, and our reward would be significant. Lucky assured us that throughlines paid out well, especially as the storylin...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 17

Lucky informed us as soon as he walked through the door that the rest of our teammates were over the hill waiting and would be there shortly.

I wasn't in any hurry. While I was certainly excited to find the information we had come here for, I found myself fascinated by the evidence left behind by Lucky's former team.

They were just ordinary roommates, it seemed.

Apparently, one of them had borrowed a few arcade machines over time and put them in his room. That person was als...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 16

We had known that there were storylines that were essentially death puzzles for a long time, and in fact, we had kind of played through one, Itch.

Of course, we beat it by circumventing the puzzle aspect altogether and creating mutant bed bugs, which was the equivalent of taking the Rubik's cube apart and putting it back together solved, but a win was a win.

It was nice to get the win based on pure strategy. I almost thought Camden might get his Aspect, but as it turned o...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 15

It was funny in the end how tricky a storyline could be when there was no one trying to kill us. Nearly half of our tropes relied on us getting targeted or attacked or maimed or killed, but the danger of this storyline was simply getting trapped in a house.

That was it: leave before morning or you lose.

Such a simple idea, and yet it left us without a whole lot of tools to work with. There was no fight, there wasn’t a lot of plot; it was almost funny how strongly we relied on di...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 14

On the red wallpaper, my status was Captured. It was probably true about all of us, but Carousel didn't clue us in until we had actually seen the proof of it.

I ran as fast as I could, with the elk-like creature on my tail for quite a few minutes. If it was trying to catch and kill me, it could have, but it seemed much more interested in intimidating me, making its blood-curdling cry, and smashing its antlers against any object it saw.

When I finally felt like I was getting some d...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 13

The strange thing about Lark House was that while it was immediately apparent once we got to the stairs that the rooms and hallways and walls had been rearranged, it wasn't like the house was moving in front of us. Instead, it just appeared as if the house had been built differently than we remembered.

Many of the hallways near the stairs were gone, and there was much more space throughout the area.

"This is different," I said, feeling the need to comment on the changes On-Screen....

Update

Alright. You will receive the rest of your chapters this weekend. I will be getting back to the Tue-Fri schedule ASAP because this unpredictable one is a bit hectic, I'm sure.

In the meantime, I am working on getting book five ready for book form. If you could tell me your opinions on The Final Straw I, Itch, and Stray Dawn, I would much appreciate it as I start editing.

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 12

The still, ghostly look on Bellanti’s face, which I initially thought was a sign of nervous insanity, gradually shifted into what I can only describe as paranoid rage. He stared at me so completely still that it was as if he was daring me in a way only he understood.

His gaze was like a warning: “I know what you are, you can't fool me.” Like how teenagers get stared at when they enter a mom-and-pop convenience store.

Of course, I wasn't actually trying to fool him.

"Mr...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 11

The movie was flying by, even though, from what I could tell, not much had happened.

It was clear there was some type of architectural or similar horror involved that had kept Molly and Bobby from reaching their destination.

Whatever it was that awaited us on the other side of the vault door would likely be the thing to propel the story forward. I had a raw excitement in my belly, ready to turn into fear or joy depending on what I saw.

The sound of Dina's drill covered up pr...