Lost Rambler

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 10

With the vault door uncovered, all that was left to do was wait for Dina to get it open.

We had several theories on the plot going into this. Was getting into the safe something that would happen in the finale, or was it the thing that would trigger the monsters to come out and kill us? We didn't know, and we wouldn't know until we got in.

So we went forward with the plans that we'd developed. All you could do in the face of uncertainty was give Carousel something to work with so ...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 9

We tried to do one of those scenes where everyone in the heist gets together, and we learn what everyone is good at. The kind where the audience meets the hacker, the hitter, the face man, stuff like that, but Carousel didn't go for it.

As best I could tell, Nicole's Written by the Victors trope gave everyone a little bit more prominence than they deserved, so the heist that we were working on was probably originally more of a low-rent break-in, but because all of our c...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 8

After I finished talking to Camden, I needed to find out where my character lived so I could have a good home base. Since I was the guy in charge, AKA the mastermind, it was probably the location where the team would meet up before the heist, so I should know where it was.

I did the trick that we had learned, where you could improvise into having the keys to any car you saw, start it up, and then suddenly the car would be yours. That way, I could look at the registration and see where I...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 7

Riley Lawrence is The Film Buff

His aspect is 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 meta-movie elements.

Riley h...

2025-11-12 20:11:09 +0000 UTC View Post

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 6

Our first stop for the day was Eastern Carousel. It was early morning, so some of the various nature spirits that lived among the crops and scrub trees in the area were still out and about, roaming through the fields.

Bobby's house was in the distance. It had been a while since I had been there, but it, like many things in Carousel, was unchanging.

I let Antoine do the talking.

He approached the front door and knocked. It looked like he was going to give it three good knocks...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 5

Lark House, as near as I could tell, was set in the 1990s. The neighborhood looked like the kind of place that rich kids in movies of that era would live in. A simple line about their parent being a surgeon or a lawyer would explain how their house was so big.

It was nothing compared to the mansions in the Carousel Hills, but it was quite large and had a proper stone wall all around the perimeter. Well, most of it was stone—the kind that got covered in that white concrete-type stuff a...

Posting Break Until November

Alright, I'm in the home stretch for Book 4's manuscript, so I am devoting a lot of attention to it. I have to take a break from posting here for quality control. I'm just too distracted, and I don't want to post filler chapters.

I have one in the pipeline for you, but that is it until I turn in Book 4 on the 1st. I wish I could do both at the same time, but I can't. It is really difficult to switch from writing Tutorial Riley and modern Riley, and I end up making no progress in either....

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 4

Lucky was already there when we arrived at the food court. As distracted as we were by the various exhibits at the zoo, we tried to hurry, dodging every Omen that came in our path.

Funny enough, not all of the Omens had to do with animals in a direct way that I could tell. Some just used the zoo as a setting but were otherwise run-of-the-mill, which was interesting, you don't see a lot of horror movies set in zoos.

Zoos probably wouldn’t give filmmakers permission for that. They...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 3

I stood inside the restaurant beneath Kimberly’s loft, eating pork chops with my hands as I watched what was going on in the street.

Isaac, Cassie, Anna, Camden, and Ramona were standing there as a group because they had recently run a rescue together, and now the two players they had saved were bidding farewell.

It was the dumbest thing.

Their names were Strider and Sephira, and they were violently in love with each other. Those were their real names on the red wallpaper....

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 2

I quickly found my way back to the theater seat that I had come from.

The others didn't need my help at that point. Camden had taken the lead and had planned the entire storyline, Crawlspace, out with the goal of being able to copy the Carousel Atlas, one of several things that had been on our to-do list for too long.

I sat back and watched as Kimberly, Lorne, and Antoine built up stacks of old books as barriers between themselves and the creepy crawlies that were on thei...

Carousel Book Eight, Chapter 1

Perhaps you are wondering how this is Book Eight. Shouldn't it be Book Seven? Well, hawk-eyed reader, you are correct. The last book was Book Six. However, in hopes of preserving all of Book Five, I have had to divide it into two books. So Five became Five and Six, Six became Seven, and Seven is now Eight. Nothing can ever be simple.

The University of Carousel library was vast, but its rooms were usually narrow and out of the way, with anyone who wished to exp...

Storyline Ideas

Please leave any movie monsters or story types related to creature features or adventures that you want to see in the comments. I have one storyline still open for the next book. I will put up a vote later in the week.

Remember, I will post all chapters late in the week, possibly on Sunday. I am hard at work on getting the Book 4 manuscript finalized.

P.S. If you liked Eternal Savers Club, please consider voting for it 2025-10-15 02:34:31 +0000 UTC View Post

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 95

After the incident with Janet in the night, I had to use Out Like a Light if I wanted to sleep at all, and yet I found myself waking up well before the sun rose. I sat and listened as the city held its breath before dawn.

Once my eyes adjusted and were no longer blurry from sleep, I noticed that Camden wasn’t in his bed. There was little question of where he had gone. I tiptoed out of the room so as not to disturb Isaac and made my way to the main room of the loft. 2025-10-13 23:35:43 +0000 UTC View Post

Book Six, Chapter 94

Like many nights after coming back to the loft from a storyline, we eventually found ourselves on the roof, relaxing.

But it wasn't that we were completely comfortable with each other yet. We were getting there, and a few mixed drinks under the stars couldn't hurt. Normalcy wasn’t the default in Carousel. It was a choice.

Just as I had come to expect, any conversation could eventually become a conversation about our various experiences in storylines.

Like pretty much every...

Book Six, Chapter 93

The trip back to Kimberly’s loft wasn’t exactly silent, but people weren’t talking loudly.

Pushing an entire caravan of shopping carts multiple miles to get back to the downtown area was grueling work. When we went uphill, it was backbreaking, and when we went downhill, it was terrifying, especially when we were trying to navigate around Omens.

Back in the Camp Dyer days, the biggest concern was the gravel roads, which were almost impassable with the carts, but there weren�...

Book Six, Chapter 92: The Savings

The next two chapters will be coming out ASAP, probably by noon. They just need some editing.

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Carousel must have really liked my plan because, in part due to this being a rescue, I earned four stat tickets. I was thrilled because it made me feel like I was slingshotting past the doldrums at Level Forty.

I got two tropes, and that was about it, other than the money that everyone got. It wasn’t a big rewards session for me, but the tropes I got, ...

Book Six, Chapter 91

Whoever said that decapitation was a humane execution method? When all you have is a head, it always feels like you're falling, even when you’ve rolled to a stop. I couldn't tell if I felt the impact of landing on the ground or if I just imagined it. It was hard to know with my consciousness fading so rapidly.

But to its credit, a crick in my neck that had been building the entire storyline was relieved instantly.

I sat up on the dungeon floor.

I could only see by the glow...

Book Six, Chapter 90

Kimberly thought they were making great headway.

The offerings that they had made to the Heaven King worked wonderfully to counter any magic that the cultists could brew up, and since most of their opponents were unnamed, lowly hooded figures, they acted like it.

She couldn’t express it, but when she put her hair back in a ponytail to activate her Scrunchie trope, and her Mettle surged, she felt such confidence in a fight. Not arrogance. She didn’t feel like she was unbeatable...

Book Six, Chapter 89

I wondered why I hadn't been pulled apart in the way that Lorne had been.

He had far more Grit, and even though he was the Second Blood sacrifice, I didn't see any good reason for Tom to take his time with me, any good reason, of course, except for Carousel to get the footage it needed.

I was done for. Alive was a bit of an exaggeration.

In an attempt to keep the shadowy rope around my neck from strangling me, I had jammed my fingers in between the shadow and my neck, and al...

Book Six, Chapter 88

(Bobby Chapter)

One year later…

The words appeared on the script so plainly, and yet they represented such an accomplishment. Bobby Gill stared at them while his eyes glazed over.

How had Riley been so confident that Carousel would accept such a bargain? One time skip, and suddenly the players and the enemies were back in sync. It was an impressive move, and while things like that had once inspired envy for the pettiest of reasons, now they inspired envy for another.

Book Six, Chapter 87

“Come, my brothers and sisters,” Tom said as he began walking down toward the front of the room where Antoine was tied up. “Let’s save the world.”

Everyone cheered.

That illustrated the importance of word choice in the formation of cults. If he had said, for instance, “Let’s kill everyone on the planet at once and replace them with mind-wiped versions of themselves if they get replaced at all,” he probably wouldn’t have gotten as loud of a response.

Quickly...

Book Six, Chapter 86

The most frustrating part of playing the game at Carousel wasn’t the dying. No, dying was easy, physically if not emotionally, and there were plenty of monsters around to help you do it.

The most frustrating part was that even when you knew who the bad guys were and had some idea of how to defeat them, you still had to put on the show. There was a back and forth where the audience might not know who would win, and you were right along with them, not knowing, because if you didn’t pe...

Book Six, Chapter 85

How the cops got there so fast, I would never know. It was obviously movie magic. Carousel would cut things to make it seem like they were inbound the whole time. The audience wouldn’t even notice until they saw their universe’s version of CinemaSins.

Still, I didn’t see them show up. Was I frozen, waiting for them, or did Carousel make me forget?

Lorne’s cop-summoner build was impressive to see. He ran behind them, screaming at them to arrest the floating cultists, to sho...

Message Board

UPDATE 10/20/25: This week will probably be similar to the previous one as far as posting goes. Things will get better at the end of the month. Thank you for your patience.

I will still release four chapters a week in the coming weeks, just not on the normal days. I am in the final part of editing Book Four, so I need flexibility. I accidentally deleted the post where I talked about this before.

Thanks for understanding.

Book Six, Chapter 84

We walked through the temple at the crest of the largest hill in Southeastern Carousel. Since this was a sound stage, the circus was nowhere to be seen.

A lot of research had led us to this place. It was beautiful.

On-Screen.

“So, is it true that the gods used to live as giants among men?” I asked the man who worked as both a tour guide and a spiritual leader. He wore robes like a priest, but they were dusted with a bright yellow powder.

“Yes, I know the stories,...

Book Six, Chapter 83

On-Screen.

“Dammit, Riley, it’s been a year. A whole year. We’re days away from the window for them to perform the ritual, and we are no closer to defeating them than we were months ago,” Kimberly yelled at me as she paced around her mansion, tossing papers from our research into the air.

“No closer?” I asked. “No closer? I joined a cult for you. We know almost everything because I painstakingly pried every one of those wackos for the information you need. Just becau...

RR Schedule

You may have seen that the Royal Road schedule moved down to three posts a week. That does not apply to Patreon, even after I make up for last week. I am trying to publish at least four a week on Patreon, though the actual days of posting might be erratic for a while. I know that isn't ideal, but I don't want to post things until they are ready.

The next post is tomorrow, and I plan to post this weekend as well.

Afterward, we will be doing some monster hunting/a...

Book Six, Chapter 82

Antoine’s show ended with a prayer. Every head was bowed, every eye closed, except, of course, for Antoine’s, because he had never seen this prayer before and needed to read the words off the teleprompter.

The show had been a major success, even bigger than I had originally planned. There wasn’t a better way to dangle Antoine out like bait.

We had a section where we celebrated the life of each missing celebrity, journalist, or comedian. Antoine invited members of the familie...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 81: The Props Department

I didn’t remember pushing the red button.

I didn’t even remember Silas the Mechanical Showman being there.

Where was I?

My character’s studio apartment. Or… a copy of it.

Before I even took my hand off the button, I found myself staring out the window. It was dark outside, but not nighttime. The darkness was a physical thing, almost like fog, and some things, like the road, were lit up with spotlights. The shadowy darkness was everywhere else.

I pulled my...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 80

Note: This chapter is experimental.

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We needed time. Time to plan, time to research, time to form an attack.

If we were going to get it, we were going to have to steal it.

So let the heist commence.

“First,” I said, as I laid out my plan to the group, “if we’re going to delay doomsday, we can’t just rely on Dina speaking it into existence. We need somebody with high Moxie and a connection to th...

2025-09-16 03:38:16 +0000 UTC View Post