The Discord notification came in at 2:47 AM on a Tuesday, which should have been my first red flag.
I was still awake, obviously. Tuesdays were for deep cuts. I had a rotation: Mondays were for new releases, Wednesdays for rewatches, Thursdays for foreign horror, Fridays and Saturdays for marathons, and Sundays for reading. Tuesdays were the night I dug through streaming catalogs and torrent sites for the stuff nobody talked about. The shot-on-camcorder folk horror from rural Japan. The unlicensed Slovenian slashers that never got subtitled. The kind of movies that made you feel like you'd committed a minor crime just by knowing they existed.
I was halfway through a Thai film about a possessed elevator when the ping hit.
RobLastrel: Hey Nolan! Big news. I'm doing a small meet-and-greet for some of the more dedicated fans from the server. It's going to be in a little mountain town in California called Carousel. I know it's short notice, but I wanted to reach out to you specifically. You've been one of the most insightful readers I've had. Would love to meet you in person. Details below.
There was an attached image with a date, a rough address, and directions from the nearest highway. The town was called Carousel, California. I'd never heard of it, which was unusual for me. I'd mapped out most of the notable horror filming locations across the continental US as a hobby. Small towns in mountain country were prime slasher territory.
I didn't think twice about it. I didn't think once about it. I just said yes.
That's the thing about me that most people don't understand, and the few who do find exhausting. If the subject is horror, I don't have brakes. I don't have a filter, I don't have a sense of self-preservation, and I apparently don't have the baseline survival instinct that tells a normal person not to drive nine hours to meet an internet stranger in a town that doesn't show up on Google Maps.
In my defense, Rob M. Lastrel was not just some internet stranger. He was the author of The Game at Carousel, the best horror LitRPG I had ever read. Three books published, plus ongoing chapters on Royal Road that I refreshed like a life support monitor. I had read the published trilogy four times each and the web serial chapters the day they dropped. I had a spreadsheet tracking every trope mentioned by name, cross-referenced with archetype compatibility and stat interactions. I had another one cataloging every storyline, its difficulty, its enemies, and which phase of the Plot Cycle each major event corresponded to.
I was not a casual fan.
I was the kind of fan that made other fans uncomfortable.
So when the author himself reached out to me, personally, to invite me to a meet-and-greet in a town with the same name as the setting of his books? There was no universe in which I said no.
The drive was long enough to listen to two full audiobooks and a podcast about the production history of Hellraiser. I drove a 2011 Honda Civic that smelled faintly of old coffee and had a passenger seat buried under a pile of horror paperbacks that I never got around to organizing. Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, Paul Tremblay, Grady Hendrix, a dog-eared copy of House of Leaves that I'd read so many times the spine was held together by hope alone.
No one rode shotgun. There was no one to ride shotgun. I didn't have the kind of life that came with a group of friends willing to road-trip to a book signing. I had online acquaintances. I had coworkers who tolerated me. I had a landlord who I'm pretty sure thought my name was "the quiet one in 4B."
I was fine with that. People were complicated in ways that didn't interest me. Horror movies were complicated in ways that did.
The GPS had given up about forty minutes ago. The last town I'd passed through was barely a town at all. Just a gas station, a church, and a bar with a parking lot full of trucks. After that, the road narrowed and the trees closed in, and my phone signal died the kind of death that would be foreshadowing in any self-respecting horror story.
But I wasn't thinking about foreshadowing. I was thinking about meeting the author of my favorite book series. I was thinking about whether he would want to hear my theory about the Manifest Consortium's relationship to the Narrators, and whether it would be weird to bring my signed copy of The Bystander for a second autograph alongside my copies of Atlas and The Invitation for their first autograph.
The road climbed. My Civic protested the grade. The sun was hanging at that late-afternoon angle, somewhere between golden hour and dusk. Up ahead, another car was navigating the same narrow mountain road. An SUV, moving faster than me, which was not a high bar. Behind me, even farther back, I caught the occasional flash of a smaller car taking the turns cautiously.
I crested a hill and saw a parking lot.
It was enormous. Way too big for whatever town was supposed to be out here. Paved and lined but almost entirely empty. A few dozen vehicles were scattered across it, but they were clustered in odd places, and even from a distance something looked off about them. The SUV ahead of me was already pulling in.
A large sign stood at the entrance.
CAROUSEL
"Huh," I said, to nobody. "He really did name it after the town."
That was my assumption. That the author had visited this place, thought the name was evocative, and used it as the setting for his book. Writers did that kind of thing. Stephen King had his Maine. Lastrel had his Carousel. It made sense. Although I do believe there were other towns called Carousel outside of California. Google said that there were 22 towns with that name when I was scouting before I decided to go.
I pulled in and parked near the SUV, which had settled next to a VW van in the shade. A woman with dark hair and a brown leather jacket was already walking toward the road, hauling an overstuffed backpack and a duffel. She looked like she wanted to be left alone.
I got out, grabbed my own backpack from the back seat, and locked the car. Inside the bag: a water bottle, a phone charger that was useless without signal, my signed copy of The Bystander, my other books and a notebook filled with theories about Secret Lore and Throughlines.
No extra clothes besides what fit my backpack. No other supplies. I might be here for a meet and greet, but at the same time, I was living in that car for the last few months, so there's that.
The SUV's doors opened and five people spilled out. Older than me, probably college-aged, from the look of them. A tall, athletic Black guy who radiated the kind of quiet confidence that usually belonged to student government types. A blonde woman in a sundress who could have been on the cover of a magazine. A guy with glasses and an analytical look about him, like he was already cataloging everything he saw. A woman with auburn hair and a steady, watchful expression. And a shorter guy with an easy smile who I would later learn was named Riley.
They were clearly together. Friends, or at least traveling as a group. The tall guy seemed to be the reason they were all here. They were talking among themselves about a lake house.
None of them seemed to be here for the meet-and-greet.
Behind us, the little compact car finally pulled into the lot. A man and a woman climbed out, already mid-argument. Well, the woman was arguing. The man was weathering it with the resigned patience of someone who had learned that fighting back only extended the storm.
"I just don't understand why they would hold an event all the way out here in the middle of nowhere," the woman said. Her voice had a nervous, pinched quality. "Don't they know it's more sensible to hold it in a bigger city?"
The man saw us grouping up near the road and made a beeline in our direction, wife in tow.
"You all here for the convention?" he said, extending his hand toward the nearest person, who happened to be Riley. "Name's Bobby Gill."
Convention. My ears perked up.
Riley shook his hand. "Riley Lawrence," he said.
"They don't need to know your name," Janet said, tugging Bobby's arm. "This place gives me the creeps. Let's just go."
"It's just polite, Janet," Bobby said. He looked around at the group. "So how about this convention, huh? I can hardly think I'm so excited."
The guy with the glasses, Camden, told Bobby that their group wasn't here for the convention. They were heading to the lake. Bobby's face fell for about half a second before his enthusiasm rebuilt itself.
"Carousel is holding a horror convention you may know," Bobby said. "Carousel Horror Nights. They have for nearly three decades." He could barely contain himself. "I've been asked to be a guest speaker. I moderate one of the top horror boards on the internet. Arterial Oasis. If you've heard of that."
I had heard of it. But in another way.
Unlike Riley, who stayed quiet, I couldn't help myself.
"You run Arterial Oasis?" I asked, faking interest because I could feel that there was something wrong with that name. Did Rob also steal the name of that forum when coming up with Bobby Gill, the character?
Bobby's eyes lit up like a Christmas tree in a haunted house. He turned to me, and for the first time, someone was actually happy to see me at a social gathering.
"You know the site?" he asked.
"I've been lurking on Arterial Oasis since I was fourteen," I said.
Bobby looked like he might cry. Janet looked like she might kill me for encouraging him.
"That's..." Bobby started, and then he laughed. "That's awesome, I never met anyone who knew my website. What's your username?" Bobby asked.
"I don't have one. I just read."
Bobby squinted at me. "You've been lurking for years and never posted?"
"I don't post," I said. "I just absorb."
That was the truth about me, distilled to its purest form. I absorbed horror. I consumed it. I cataloged it and cross-referenced it and filed it away in the vast, meticulously organized archive that lived inside my skull. But I didn't produce anything. I didn't create content or write reviews or argue in comment sections. I watched. I read. I remembered.
Bobby didn't seem to mind. In fact, he seemed delighted to have found someone who would actually listen to him talk about horror without their eyes glazing over. His wife had already wandered a few steps ahead, arms crossed, radiating the specific kind of impatience that comes from years of hearing about things you don't care about.
"So are you here for the convention too?" Bobby asked.
"Meet-and-greet," I said. "An author I follow. He said he was doing an event in town."
"Which author?"
I hesitated. Not because I was embarrassed, but because explaining a web serial LitRPG to a forum moderator who specialized in film criticism felt like it would require a thirty-minute preamble.
"Rob Lastrel," I said. "He writes a series called The Game at Carousel. It's a horror LitRPG. Actually set in a town called Carousel."
"Oh, I don't know if I've heard of it," Bobby said. "How does that work though? Aren't LitRPG supposed to take place in fantasy stuff?" He asked.
"The characters get trapped in a supernatural town and have to survive horror movie storylines. To survive the storylines, they have to learn the system, which has their own stats, tropes which replaces skills and some other stuff..."
"Sounds like my kind of thing," Bobby said.
Before I could launch into a full breakdown of the Plot Cycle and why the Comedian archetype was the most underrated in the game, we were interrupted by a loud bang from up ahead.
The tall guy, Antoine, had knocked on the door of a wooden building off the side of the road. It read "EMPLOYEES ONLY" and looked like it had been there for decades. Now it was swinging open.
"Were you trying to break it off its hinges?" Camden asked.
"I just knocked on it," Antoine said. "I heard someone in there."
"I don't see anyone," Anna said.
We all gathered around the doorway. The woman in the brown jacket was already peering inside, quiet as a shadow. The interior was dark. Too dark for the time of day. Even with the door wide open, the light didn't seem to want to go in.
Then music started playing.
Carnival music. Old, slow, and slightly warped, like it was being squeezed out of a music box that hadn't been wound in years. The kind of calliope melody that belonged on a boardwalk in 1920 or in the opening credits of a movie about a very bad circus.
Lights flickered on inside the building. Not ceiling lights. Bulbs affixed to a machine. The machine was about the size of an ATM, glass-fronted, with a mechanical figure seated inside.
It was a fortune-telling animatronic. The kind you'd find at a carnival or an old penny arcade. But this one wasn't dressed like a psychic or a mystic. This one wore a red jacket with brass buttons and a round usher's cap with a chin strap. In one mechanical hand, he held a flashlight that flicked on and off with the other bulbs.
Across the top of the machine, a sign read: Carousel's Own Silas the Mechanical Showman!
"Now that's some excellent theming," Bobby whispered to me, grinning ear to ear. "They really commit to the bit around here."
I agreed. I figured this was part of the convention setup. Maybe even part of the meet-and-greet that Lastrel had organized. Put a fortune-teller machine at the entrance with some kind of horror-themed ticket gimmick. It was fun. It was charming. It was the kind of thing that a guy who wrote a book about a horror-movie town would think of.
A red button sat on the front console, with a receptacle underneath.
The animatronic's mouth began to move. Wooden jaw, yellow teeth, slight clacking sound.
"Welcome to Carousel, the town where movies come to life. The show's about to start, and you're in the front row!"
"What the heck," Riley said next to me. Who the hell says heck? Aren't you supposed to be older than me?
"Come on up and get your tickets. The Centennial Celebration awaits."
Nobody moved.
"Are we supposed to get a ticket?" Anna asked, looking at Antoine.
"I have no idea. Chris didn't say anything about this," Antoine responded.
"No admittance without a ticket," Silas said. "You don't want to miss the show!"
Antoine went first. He pressed the red button, collected three tickets from the dispenser, and began reading them with a puzzled look. Then Kimberly. Then the woman in the brown jacket. Then Anna and Camden. Bobby and Janet each took a turn, though Janet looked like she was being asked to pet a spider.
Bobby pressed the button and three tickets clunked into the receptacle. He scooped them up and his eyes went wide.
"These are awesome!" he said, flipping through them. "They really go all out with this convention."
He started reading his tickets with the intensity of a man who had just been handed the Dead Sea Scrolls. I glanced at them over his shoulder. Silver, green, blue. Same layout as everyone else's.
Riley pressed the button. Three tickets. He started reading in silence.
My turn.
I stepped up to the machine. Silas's painted eyes seemed to follow me, though I knew that was just a trick of the curved glass. I pressed the red button.
The gears inside turned. Three tickets dropped into the receptacle.
I picked them up. Heavy. Thick stock. Faintly warm, like they'd been sitting near a heat source. Each one had a title, an illustration, an elaborate graphic border, and blocks of text printed in sharp, old-fashioned typeface.
Silver. Green. Blue.
I started with the silver.
The Film Buff
Minor Archetype
You are the Film Buff. The master of the unwritten rules of horror movies. You've seen every slasher, spine-tingler, and creature feature; now we will see if you can survive them in real life! With your help, your allies may stand a chance against the nightmarish beings that lurk in the shadows of the silver screen.
That is, if you can get them to listen to you before it's too late...
Base Stats
Mettle -- For Feats of Strength and Offensive ability: 1
Moxie -- To make your performance convincing: 3
Hustle -- To be Quick, Nimble, Evasive, and to always hit your Mark: 1
Savvy -- For Perception, Planning, and Deduction: 5
Grit -- For Willpower, Toughness, and Endurance: 1
Plot Armor -- Conquering all five aspects of Plot Armor will make you a Master of Horror: 11 (total of all stats)
I read it once. Then I read it again.
Then the floor dropped out of my stomach.
Film Buff. Minor Archetype. Mettle 1, Moxie 3, Hustle 1, Savvy 5, Grit 1. Plot Armor of eleven.
These were Riley Lawrence's starting stats. Not approximately. Not close enough to be a coincidence. These were the exact numbers, the exact wording, the exact stat names from Chapter One of The Bystander. I had read this passage so many times that I could recite it from memory, and I was now holding it in my hands, printed on a physical ticket that I had just pulled from a mechanical fortune-telling machine in a town called Carousel.
My hands were shaking. I looked at the green ticket.
Cinema Seer
Type: BuffArchetype: Film BuffAspect: --Stat Used: Savvy
The Film Buff has seen every horror movie and can guess every twist and turn. When the Film Buff makes a clever prediction about an important and impactful plot event, all allies who hear it will obtain a boost in Grit and Savvy if that prediction is proven true.
Beware, the more predictions the player makes, the less powerful they will become. Predictions must be made On-Screen. Multiple buffs in a single storyline are difficult to perform at the lower levels.
You may not want someone calling out a plot twist in your theater, but you would kill to have someone do it in Carousel.
Cinema Seer. Word for word.
The blue ticket was already in my hand before I'd decided to read it.
Trope Master
Type: InsightArchetype: Film BuffAspect: --Stat Used: Savvy
The signature ability of the Film Buff is their ability to understand how monsters and slashers operate within a story. With this ticket, the Film Buff will have insight into which tropes enemies have equipped. This trope works best with high Savvy and close proximity to the enemy.
Enemy tropes have generic descriptions. The clever player will figure out how their tropes will be expressed in each specific storyline.
With great power comes great balancing: during storylines where this trope is equipped, the Film Buff's Plot Armor will be reduced by half. Hopefully, that's all that will be cut in half.
I lowered the tickets.
Around me, the others were still reading theirs. Bobby was talking excitedly about production value. Janet was telling him to stop touching the cards because they were probably dirty. Antoine was conferring with his friends about what the stats meant. Nobody was panicking. Nobody was scared. They all thought this was a game, a gimmick, a fun quirk of a quirky little mountain town.
I looked up at Silas the Mechanical Showman.
He looked back at me.
And I realized, with a cold, sinking clarity that settled into my bones like ice water, that these were not props for a meet-and-greet. They were not convention merchandise. They were not part of some elaborate promotional event for a LitRPG novel.
These were Riley Lawrence's starting tropes.
Riley Lawrence. The protagonist of The Game at Carousel. A fictional character in a fictional book series written by a man named Rob M. Lastrel.
Except that I was holding Riley's tickets. In Riley's town. Standing in front of Riley's fortune-telling machine. And the guy standing three feet to my left, the quiet one with the easy smile who introduced himself as Riley Lawrence, was reading his own set of tickets with the exact same confused expression that the book described.
My mouth went dry.
I looked at the group again. Really looked at them, for the first time.
A tall, athletic Black guy. Student government energy. Here to visit his brother.
Antoine.
A blonde woman in a sundress. Beautiful. Instagram follower army.
Kimberly.
A guy with glasses. Analytical. Engineering student.
Camden.
A steady, auburn-haired woman. Calm. Watchful. The kind of person who held things together.
Anna.
A man who ran a horror message board, here for a convention that didn't exist. His wife, who didn't want to be here.
Bobby and Janet.
A quiet woman in a brown leather jacket who hadn't spoken to anyone.
Dina.
I knew their names. I knew their archetypes. I knew who would live and who would die in the incoming corn maze. I knew what Bobby would get for his archetype, and I knew what would happen to Janet, and I knew about the woman on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, and I knew about the Rulekeeper, and I knew about rescue tropes, and I knew about the mountain, and I knew about all of it because I had read the book.
I had read the book.
The book was real.
And there was no meet-and-greet. There was no author. There was no Rob M. Lastrel, not here, not in this place, because this was Carousel, and Carousel didn't invite you to meet-and-greets.
Carousel lured you. Motherfucker.
The message at 2:47 AM with the personalized invitation. And that flattery. The appeal to the one thing I cared about more than my own safety. It was all tailored. Designed. Crafted for me specifically, the way that Antoine's brother's phone calls had been crafted for Antoine, the way that Bobby's convention invitation had been crafted for Bobby.
Everyone had been given a reason to come. A reason that was perfectly, surgically calibrated to overcome any hesitation.
Mine was an author who didn't exist, inviting me to a town that shouldn't exist, and I drove nine hours without telling a single person where I was going because there was no one to tell.
I looked down at the tickets in my trembling hands.
Film Buff. Plot Armor of eleven. Savvy 5. Everything else in the gutter. A minor archetype. A supporting character. The guy who knew everything and could do nothing.
Around me, everyone else was moving on. Chatting. Comparing tickets. Treating this like an ice-breaker at summer camp. Bobby was trying to show me his tickets, saying something about how his said "Wallflower" and wasn't that a strange name for a horror game archetype.
I couldn't hear him.
I could only hear the faint, broken, tinny sound of Silas the Mechanical Showman behind me, his gears winding down, his last words hanging in the air like the closing line of a prologue.
"Hehehe."
I tucked the tickets into my jacket pocket with numb fingers.
There was no meet-and-greet.
There was no way out.
The Game at Carousel had begun, and I already knew how the story went.
The problem was that I was no longer reading it.