The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG

If there is one thing that Carousel has plenty of, it's college students.

As we followed the final instructions Todd and Valerie had given us to lead us safely to Delta Epsilon Delta, we arrived on Traditions Blvd., the street that held most of the Greek life houses at the University of Carousel.

We got there just as the sun was going down which is funny because it was only a quarter after three in the afternoon. It must have always been sundown on that street. Throngs of NPC students joined us as we walked down the street. They were all divided into groups, each with a unique destination in some storyline or another.

The atmosphere was electric as the students spoke excitedly of tomorrow night’s game (in fact, several told Antoine “Good Luck”). Of course, they were also excited about whatever parties, mixers, and get-togethers they were going to that night.

Delta Epsilon Delta was separated from the road by a huge row of hedges. It was set a ways back from the road. The driveway to the house was cobblestone and the house was large, white, and adorned with columns in the Greek Life aesthetic you might see at any college in the US.

This one only had one thing that set it apart.

A man was hanging from the balcony.

Not a real man, as far as I could tell. It was a mascot costume of some sort. The costume consisted of a flat-brim cowboy hat, a pair of leather chaps, and a poncho. The letters SMU were emblazoned on the front of the poncho and on the hat. The mascot’s face was stuck in an ambiguous stare that might have been a cartoonish glare or grimace, I couldn't tell because his entire lower face was covered in a bandana. His outfit was charcoal black with accents of midnight blue. He sported a large, foam machete in his belt.

A noose was around its neck--a rival team’s mascot hung in effigy.

As we stared at it, the needle on the plot cycle jumped to Omen.

“We ready?” Anna asked.

We all looked at each other and nodded.

Loud music blared from inside the house. As we reached the front steps and Antoine knocked on the door, the needle on the plot cycle moved from Omen to Choice to Party.

We had made our choice.

“Now this is a Party,” Kimberly said as the door opened and revealed a house full of lively drunken college students.

She was right. In this storyline, the Party Phase actually was a party.

It made sense that Kimberly was happy. “We” had decided that Kimberly would not bring her Looks Don’t Last ticket on this storyline. “We” were relying on my Oblivious Bystander strategy, so why would we need it? Without her trope, the bad guys would target me first instead of her. Really it was Anna’s decision, and no one argued.

It felt like all of the pressure was on me now.

It was time to explore.

“Anna!” the guy who answered the door said as he caught sight of her. It was an NPC named Evan. He was a handsome trust fund kid from what I could tell. Probably intelligent and funny too. I disliked him immediately.

“Evan!” she said back not missing a beat.

“I didn’t think you were going to show,” Evan said, “Come on in.”

He looked at the rest of us and gave us a quick smile. “Hey Antoine, Kimberly, Camden.”

He skipped me. It seemed strange at the time.

As the night wore on, more and more NPCs would pop out of the woodwork and greet one of my friends.

Antoine was greeted by some football players. “You ready to hand SMU their asses tomorrow night!?”

They peeled him away from us to talk about the game.

Kimberly was shepherded over to a gaggle of pretty sorority girls from Epsilon Epsilon Kappa.

“Early admission, U of C School of Medicine!” some guy yelled at Camden with a hug and chest bump.

These were what Antoine’s brother Chris called “Scripted Interactions,” or “Roles.”

In some storylines, every player was assigned a role based on their archetype. Anna was the likable main character that everyone seemed to know (and some guy named Evan had a crush on). Kimberly was a sorority girl at Delta Epsilon Delta’s sister house. Antoine was an athlete playing in the big game. Camden was some overachiever.

I… was sitting on the couch with a big bowl of popcorn in my lap watching the whole thing go down.

An hour into the party, I had not had a single scripted interaction. Everyone else was laughing and talking about school. They were singing and dancing along to a song that sounded like Nickelback from a parallel dimension.

A bunch of the guys had spikey hair with frosted tips and cargo pants. The girls wore skinny jeans and straight, bottle-blonde hair.

The guys were dressed like Justin Timberlake, and the girls were dressed like Paris Hilton.

It was the early 2000s in this storyline, apparently.

That explained the huge, outdated tv in the living room.

I took it upon myself to explore the house. Odds were, we would be trying to fight a killer there soon. I moved from room to room checking drawers and closets. All I found was a bunch of staring strangers. Nothing useful.

I didn’t know what determined your luck in finding important information during the Party phase. Whatever it was, I didn’t have much of it. My theory was that total plot armor was the determining factor because I had almost none of that.

As I moved through the kitchen, I saw that the backyard pool was surrounded by chairs. They were mostly empty. I decided to go outside and take a seat while I waited for one of the NPCs to come and tell me what my role was.

Just as I sat down, I heard a squeal of tires out front and a bunch of the NPCs went that way so I followed.

An old orange farm truck had just pulled into the driveway. From the look of it, it narrowly avoided missing the front porch of the building.

The driver opened the door and stepped out.

“Torsos!” he screamed.

Everyone else screamed “Torsos,” back.

It was a strange interaction.

“Ruck, you idiot, you’re drunk as hell,” Evan said. He and Anna had come outside after the commotion. “What are you doing driving?”

Evan appeared to know this Ruck character. Anna, Evan, Camden, and the guy who chest-bumped him gathered around Ruck and started talking to him. The passenger in Ruck’s truck came around too. His name was Nathan. I returned to my seat in the back. I can’t explain it. It would have felt like I was spying to stay there with them. That wasn’t my “role.”

Ruck was an interesting guy, if only because he was the only NPC with a last name—Johnson. He was a heavyset fellow with a backward cap and a patch of whiskers on his chin.

Every once in a while, Ruck would scream, “Torsos!” and the whole house of people would respond, “Torsos!” back at him.

My luck eventually turned around. Anna, Ruck, Camden, and the rest eventually made it back around the pool area where I was. I think Anna might have had something to do with that.

Just as Ruck was about to lay back in a deck chair a few seats away from me, some chick in a tube top named Amber showed up and shoved him back into the seat.

“You asshole!” she screamed.

Ruck landed hard. “Hey, what did I do?”

“You told Robin Roeper that I slept with you on winter break,” she yelled. “Do you know how embarrassing that is?”

Ruck was drunk as a skunk but was not too far gone to respond. “I didn’t tell her you slept with me,” he said in his best peacekeeper tone, “I told her you slept with every guy at the resort. She must have misunderstood.”

Amber screamed an animalistic scream and yelled at him for five more minutes before leaving in a huff. She had caused quite a scene.

“What was her name again?” Ruck asked as she left.

Anna scolded him in a disapproving tone. She snuck a look up at me, one of those, “Are you getting all this?”, looks.

She had sensed, as I had, that this storyline was going to have something to do with everything we were seeing right now. Anna was the main character of this story. If the story brought her here, it was probably important.

The stereo played four or five knock-off Backstreet Boys songs after that before something else happened.

Three enraged men arrived. One, named Kevin, was fuming. His ire was directed at none other than Ruck.

“You son of a bitch!” Kevin said. His black hair hung in his face and an SMU college t-shirt told me what he was mad about.

“Did I tell people you slept with me too?” Ruck asked.

“What? Our mascot,” Kevin said. “You’re the one who stole it.”

“You got no proof of that,” Ruck said with a grin.

“It’s hanging from your balcony you idiot,” Kevin said. “And I know you were the one who dumped that huge pile of cow shit on our field before our game last week. I saw some in the back of that crap truck you drive.”

“The pile of shit on your field last week was your offensive line,” Ruck said. “Now get the hell out of here.”

“We’re talking to your dean,” Kevin said.

“Don’t do that. I can prove it wasn’t me.”

“And how’s that?” Kevin asked, incredulous.

“Look,” Ruck said, putting his hand into his back pocket. He took his hand out of his pocket and smacked Kevin in the face, sending him reeling back into the pool.

Kevin’s meathead friends tried to throttle Ruck for that, but the ruckus had attracted a crowd including Antoine and his NPC teammates.

Kevin’s friends looked tough, but Antoine and the other football players easily separated them from Ruck.

Kevin quickly pulled himself from the pool and gestured for his lackeys to leave with him, but as he left, he gave Ruck the middle finger and cursed up a storm.

As Ruck laid back on the lounging chair, he looked over to me and said, “I’m going to pay for that, aren’t I?”

That was the first line an NPC had spoken to me all night.

What’s more, it was true. I knew then that whatever involvement Ruck had in this storyline, he wasn’t going to like it.

“Torsos!” Ruck cried. Again, everyone yelled, “Torsos,” back.

The night moved on after that. Evan asked Anna to dance. She was very flattered and took up his offer.

Camden had settled into a chair near me and we struck up a conversation about what we had seen so far.

Antoine and Kimberly disappeared for a bit. I didn’t see them again until they opened the door to the back balcony that overlooked the pool. Everyone outside looked up and screamed different things to the effect of, “Don’t go out there, the balcony is broken.”

Sure enough. The support beams looked rotten even from the ground.

A discussion broke out about what everyone was doing after college.

“I’d really like to go to Harvard,” Anna said. “They have a program there for my field of study and I know some of the faculty, actually.”

“What kind of school is Harvard?” Evan asked.

That might have been the first thing Evan said all night that caught her off-guard. They must not have had the Ivy Leagues here in Carousel.

“It’s a private school,” she answered.

“Hmm,” Evan responded.

Evan was staying on at U of C for his MBA. The guy that had been Ruck’s passenger in his truck, Nathan, said that he wanted to be a Doctor. He was premed. He and Anna talked about how much work that line of study would take. The guy must have been passionate because he got teary-eyed as he talked. That might have been the beer though.

I finally figured out what the whole, “Torsos!” thing was about. The Torsos were the school’s mascot. The University of Carousel Fighting Torsos.

How artful.

I knew this because Ruck had a theory that the Torso was the toughest college mascot.

“What about the tigers?” Evan asked.

“No. Torso wins. Tigers instinctually go for the throat. The torso has no throat. Tiger gets confused and, in its confusion, the Torso strikes.”

“Alright, buddy,” Evan said. “You’ve had enough to drink.”

That explained why some of the students wore shirts with cartoon mutilated torsos on them.

As the night began wrapping up, some guy wearing a University of Carousel t-shirt ran back into the back yard hollering about how someone was “Tearing up the field! Come quick.”

It was like everyone in the house was scripted to leave as soon as possible at that very moment. They all got up and followed the guy back toward the field, wherever it was. The house was abandoned in the blink of an eye.

Everyone was gone. Even my friends. I ran to follow behind, but I noticed that one person was still in the backyard: Ruck. He had fallen asleep in the lounging chair.

The needle on the plot cycle neared First Blood.

The only question was, did I stay at the frat house, or did I follow the crowd?