Lost Rambler

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 52: Daphne Interlude

Logan was making some good points. Too many good points.

Why had she been so careless? Why had she underestimated him?

They stood in the kitchen as the group discussed whether the wedding could go forward, and whether or not to call all of the NPCs into the banquet hall for safety’s sake.

Logan was arguing against the idea because he had a trope, apparently, that would strengthen a plan that he helped to vet.

“With the rain coming down the way it is,” he said, �...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 49: Daphne Interlude (40 on RR)

Daphne had to run to make it to the elevator in time. No sooner did she push the button to go down than the indicator blinked, and the elevator, containing Antoine, opened up.

He casually glanced at her. They were On-Screen. He had to play it cool. Maybe too cool.

“Antoine,” she said, thinking of something to say to him. “I think Kimberly is looking for you.”

He swallowed hard and then said, “I’ll catch up with her in a minute. I’d like to play the slots before...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 48: Daphne Interlude (39 on RR)

Homibride, sometimes known as Daphne Sinclair, had to make everything perfect for her wedding. She stared into the mirror as she brushed her hair and meditated on who she was this time.

She had been here before. Not just in this casino and not just in Carousel; she had been in this exact moment before.

She had loved a man. A gambler who could read everyone in the world just by looking them in the eye, everyone, that is, except for Daphne herself.

That was love, right? What e...

So here is what is happening

I've decided to add more Interludes from Daphne's POV so that the readers won't have to juggle so many unanswered questions. I will also be editing down some of Riley's speculation, as it isn't needed as much when the readers know more than he does. The Patrons will have to read these all at once, but RR will get them sprinkled in where they fit.

Keep in mind that Daphne is the main character of Homibridal, so it does make some sense to see what she sees.

This might be a little ba...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 53: Interlude

~Kimberly~

I had been Off-Screen too long; every second counted now.

Riley was gone, and I had no doubt where he'd headed. He would climb to the rooftop, where the image of a red fire axe would mark the final battle. It was the only place Riley would go, assuming that monster, Daphne, would let him.

From the moment we arrived in this twisted storyline, something about Daphne Sinclair unsettled me deeply. My instincts kept whispering conflicting warnings, but no matter how ...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 54

Being Off-Screen should have meant that we had time to talk, but I was still working to create distance between Daphne and Kimberly. Besides that, we would periodically go On-Screen to show how we were dealing with the ever-rising floodwaters.

We would be swimming soon. The dam had to have broken. That was the only explanation.

"Riley, stop," Daphne called from behind me. "Riley, wait."

She said it both On-Screen and Off-Screen, because in a way, there was no difference to h...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 51

“If you have the antidote, you have to use it now,” I said, but I knew how futile my attempt was. Now that my brain had caught up with the situation, it was back in control. That was such a silly way to describe it, but it felt true.

There was a gaping hole forming in my chest, metaphorically for now, and whatever lived there could not be trusted to run the show.

Daphne walked closer to me, and I felt the raw edges of the figurative claws in my heart digging deep. I nearly fli...

Update

The remaining chapters for this storyline will be posted throughout the day. I need to do some slight revisions.

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 50

We weren't even in the storyline that we were supposed to be in.

Homibridal Part II? What was that all about?

But as I read through her tropes, I knew exactly what was going on. She had taken over our storyline.

She even had player tropes.

The Homibride

Is

Daphne Sinclair AKA Rachel Hutchins

Plot Armor: 40

__________

Tropes

The Mysterious Stranger

This enemy can take over an Omen for a mundane murder myster...

2025-07-01 05:05:19 +0000 UTC View Post

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 49

We went Off-Screen, and Daphne jumped right into action, looting the corpse of the drowned giant. Her fingers were nimble as she moved through Ed's pockets. She was efficient and quick. In only a few seconds, she retrieved a wad of bills similar to those we had found on the fake receptionist.

"This must have been one of the blackmailers who killed Antoine," she said, as if it wasn't obvious—still playing a character Off-Screen.

She quickly slipped the money inside her handbag. 2025-07-01 03:49:55 +0000 UTC View Post

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 48

“I would have told you,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. "I promise, I would have. I wanted to so much. But the note said that if I told anyone, they would be killed. And I didn't know if that was the blackmailers saying that, or if it was some sort of rule that maybe Carousel would punish me for telling anyone. I mean, after Antoine got killed, I was afraid to risk it. What if they had killed you?"

I had hoped to hear something very much like what she was saying. Blackmail...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 47

Throughout the relative darkness of the casino, a staticky voice could be heard.

I couldn't tell where it was coming from. All I heard was, "Reporting live…Carousel…dam…overloaded…" Then, after a while longer, "Flooding even worse..."

Someone was listening to the radio.

It was a fool's errand to try to find out where the sound was coming from. It could very easily be a trap.

Bobby, Andrew, Kimberly, Jules, and I had to stick together. We had been stuck On-Scree...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 46: Interlude

The woman known as Homibride, and occasionally referred to as Daphne Sinclair, stood on a wooden walkway in a seldom-visited section of the seventh floor. It was under construction. She had read about it in the manager's office.

In front of her, the cook, whose name was supposed to be Chef Champlain, was strung up by the feet, her hands bound, her head bouncing gently off the floor, swinging from a banister of a beautiful balcony above.

There were skylights in this room. It was te...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 45

As soon as we went Off-Screen, the silence in the room suffocated me.

"What is Daphne doing?" Kimberly asked. "Social Awareness is all over the place," she said, referring to one of her tropes that allowed her to gauge a character's Moxie and gave her insight into interpersonal relationships between characters.

"What do you mean?" Andrew asked.

"It's giving me double responses. They don't make any sense," Kimberly said. "It's like it's arguing with itself. T...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 44

“I just can't believe they're dead," Daphne said, staring over her parents' bodies. I had guided her to a nearby chair, and she was crumpled down with her face in her hands, weeping openly.

Andrew, ever the pragmatist, was examining the bodies.

You didn't need to be a coroner to know there was something suspicious about these deaths. There were no wounds, no blood, no struggle. That limited down the possibilities to a few different methods of suffocation or asphyxiation, or more...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 43

Whatever we did, we needed to go up a level.

It didn't take us long to realize that the first floor was flooding at an increasingly rapid rate. But, of course, it was. The glass doors at the front of the building could be barricaded against people but not against water, and now it was flooding in so fast that, even before it got to the top of my shoes, it had a sort of current or momentum.

"We need to find Ramona and Logan's bodies," I said. "If we can use those to trigger Second ...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 42

“She had just died when we found her,” Andrew said as he examined the body, using his flashlight combined with the light of the burners on the stove.

As strange of a situation as this was, stuck in a hotel/casino kitchen as floodwaters gradually poured in on the first floor, one of his friends dead in the walk-in fridge, and the lobby receptionist laid out on an area that was usually used to assemble salads, Andrew sure did make it look like it was just another day on the job.

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 41

The stairwell down from the penthouse technically did have emergency lighting, but for some reason, it was an obnoxious dark red color, and it blinked very slowly, so there were entire seconds of darkness between momentary reprieves of light.

Luckily, I had pretty good Hustle, so I wasn’t worried about tripping, even though any person in real life would likely take a tumble under these conditions.

Daphne kept pace with me easily enough, though she did slow down after a few level...

Switch to Binge Model?

I assumed everyone would prefer getting chapters one at a time throughout the week. Would you prefer me to do chapter dumps a couple of times a week?

Either way, you will get the same amount in any given week. I just want to get a sense of what you want.

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 38

Warning: Chapters after this are out of order. You will have to carefully find chapters 39, 40, etc.

“You have 15 minutes, Little Missy,” Jules said. “If you try to fight me on this, I don’t care if you’re a bride or a bronco. The real world

“You have 15 minutes, Little Missy,” Jules said. “If you try to fight me on this, I don’t care if you’re a bride or a bronco. The real world is knocking, and when it hits you, it’ll knock the ha...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 37

“What could Antoine have been doing here?” Kimberly asked. “Why would he come down here at all?”

We were in the basement.

The walls were weeping with floodwater. There were no cracks, no holes; it looked as though the stone itself was crying, as if we were in some sort of cave.

“I’m not getting a signal,” Bobby said as he ran down the stairs. “No telephone, no radio. The storm has wiped it all out. We cannot contact emergency services.”

“All right, ...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 36

“I don’t remember what happened exactly,” Ramona said. “I hit my head, and when I woke up, my car was caught in the floodwater. I thought I was going to die.”

We were On-Screen, back inside the entryway. We had her sit down in a leather chair. The last remaining maid had gone to fetch her some towels.

“That’s awful,” Daphne said. “Don’t you worry, we’re going to take care of you.”

“I didn’t know where else to go,” Ramona said.

Andrew was s...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 35

“I am so sorry, sir, but I have to say, you look so familiar. Is there somewhere I might have seen you?” The receptionist at the front of the casino was gushing to Antoine.

"I don't come around here a lot," Antoine said. "I just have one of those faces."

"Maybe," the receptionist said, but she stared at his face, intent on figuring out where she had seen him. She was a young woman, bright-eyed and freckle-faced, possibly in love with Antoine.

"Miss Tanner," a voice sound...

Book Six, Chapter 34

The chapel was perhaps one of three rooms on the bottom floor of the casino that had a window.

In fact, its window was stained glass, featuring a giant ruby red heart encircled in clear glass, which was itself encircled in red ornamentation, the kind often found in old medieval texts.

What little light there was, peeking out from under the storm outside, filtered in through the stained glass and turned everything in the chapel blood red.

I stood at the front next to Daphne a...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 33

“I want to say that the Mobile Omen idea must have been yours,” Lucien said, looking at me. “Is that what you were plotting when I sent my little greeting?”

He didn't wait for me to answer; he just continued talking in a casual, overly friendly way, as if he couldn't recognize any reason for hostility between us.

“My staff were telling me that I needed to stock the casino with the biggest and baddest Omens to prevent you from waltzing in here, to put you in a bad way, ma...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 32

The Homibride is Daphne Sinclair AKA Rachel Hutchins

The Homibride has a Plot Armor score of 40, Mettle of 4, Moxie of 15, Hustle of 7, Savvy of 7, and Grit of 7.

Free Candy. This enemy can turn any unsolicited gift into a mobile Omen in an instant.

Undetectable. This villain warps the minds of its victims so that they will not notice it does not belong.

Shackles of Civility. A social enemy, they c...

2025-06-02 05:05:49 +0000 UTC View Post

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 31

“Are we going to die?” Cassie asked, panicked, and not for the first time.

“Cassie, look at the red wallpaper,” Andrew said. “There’s no plot cycle. We are not participating in an apocalypse. Just breathe and observe.”

Cassie's eyes glazed over as she stared at the red wallpaper.

I did too. Sure enough, there was no Plot Cycle there; there was no indication at all that we were in a storyline.

A parade of vicious dinosaur ghosts tearing up the streets, thr...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 30

The Atlas contained an aerial photograph of the Carousel Casino, taken from a helicopter's perspective.

It was likely a news helicopter because there was some sort of hostage situation going on on the roof of the building, but we ignored that part. We just wanted to get the layout of the premises.

As we tried to analyze it, Isaac was playing with the rooster-shaped weathervane omen we had picked up from the hardware store.

He would raise it above the table, and a su...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 29

“You're telling me that you've never heard of a deviled egg?" Isaac asked incredulously. “The little party food?”

"Do you mean a devil's egg?" Ramona replied. "Because I have heard of those. They’re quite scary."

"No, a deviled egg, like an egg stuffed with zesty egg," Isaac said.

"It's always bad luck to find a devil's egg," she added.

"No," Isaac insisted. "A deviled egg."

We were at the Diner. We hadn't been in a whil...

Carousel Book Six, Chapter 28

“Say what you will about Dr. Andrew Hughes, but the man does keep his head, even in the most perilous of situations,” Logan said with a smirk, raising his glass. “To Andrew.”

Logan rarely actually drank, but tonight was an exception. We were in the restaurant downstairs from the Loft, Grain Matter. Their team had only returned hours before. They were weary and tired, but they didn’t want to sleep.

They wanted food. Real food.

“To Andrew!” Antoine, Kimb...