First, I found Camden a few blocks away by the field.

“What just happened?” Camden asked. “I was right next to Mark, but then suddenly he was gone.”

Mark was the name of the guy that had chest-bumped Camden when we got to the party.

I explained the Everyone is a Suspect trope to him. Everyone got separated from everyone else. I didn’t get a chance to explain what I had seen on my first successful use of my Oblivious Bystander strategy because we were surrounded by NPCs.

“That explains why I can’t find the others... It was Ruck, right?” Camden asked quietly.

I nodded as I scanned the crowd. NPCs as far as the eye could see. Any one of them could have been Ranger Danger. There would be no way to know.

“I didn’t get anything,” Camden said. “None of my abilities are helpful with this one.”

It was true. Camden could find information from books and got a bonus when using a Zippo lighter or when exploiting an enemy’s mortal weakness. Ranger Danger didn’t have a weakness in that way. He (or she) was just a human.

“I guess you could light something on fire,” I suggested.

Camden smiled, “I’ll see what I can do.”

Antoine and Anna found each other after the crowd died down. They had found a place in the stands to survey the damage on the field. We joined them and kept an eye out for Kimberly.

“Evan disappeared as soon as we started running off,” Anna informed me. Did she suspect him? I think she might have.

I was tempted to let her believe that his disappearance was suspicious, but I couldn’t. If there was anyone that needed all of the available information, it was Anna. I told her about the Everyone is a Suspect trope.

The field had a twenty-yard streak starting at one of the endzones. Someone had wrapped a chain around one of the goalposts and pulled it down and dragged it until it had caught in the ground and their chain broke.

“Suspect still unknown,” a campus policeman said after the crowd started asking for details. He looked absolutely overwhelmed by the situation and kept a whistle in his mouth to blow every time someone even looked like they were going to walk onto the field to inspect the damage.

His name was Officer Ricky on the red wallpaper. His plot armor was 3.

The veteran players had told us that all the storylines share one police force and that we would get to know the cops pretty well in our time at Carousel. This was the first one I had met.

Given how jumpy he already was, I wondered how he’d handle it when they found the body.

As I was watching the panicking policeman, I heard a familiar voice, “Look who I found.”

It was Evan. He had found Kimberly and helped her find us. Then he plopped down on the bleacher right next to Anna.

With him there, we couldn’t talk shop, so we spent twenty minutes trying to talk about the classes we were taking and other fictitious nonsense. I say “we.” I didn’t do any talking. Evan didn’t seem too interested in what I thought. We were soon joined by Nathan and Mark. They didn’t seem interested in talking to me either.

It was uncanny.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been on the outer orbit of a friend group before, but they weren’t even making eye contact with me.

As I contemplated their strange behavior, a line of police cars approached in the distance.

“Woah. Looks like they’re taking this seriously,” Mark said.

However, the line of police cruisers kept going past the stadium.

Down on the ground, Officer Ricky got a message on his radio that made him grow pale. Everyone was moving down the stands after the police passed.

“What happened?” Evan asked over the roar of the crowd.

Officer Ricky was backing away toward his security golf cart parked near the field entrance. He seemed to be weighing priorities between guarding the field and going along with the other officers. Eventually, he had a burst of clarity.

“They found a body,” he squeaked out as he turned on his cart and drove away with the sound of a high-pitch “wee woo wee woo.”

“A body?” Nathan asked. He had sobered up a bit on the jog over.

“Wait, where’s Ruck?” Evan asked.

Everyone in the area suddenly showed great concern. They all looked around. Of course, everyone's favorite frat dude was nowhere to be seen. I tried reading their faces to see if any of them were acting weird, but they all had the worried, frantic energy to them that I would expect.

We took off down the road to the scene of the crime.

By the time we got there, the scene had been cordoned off by the police. No one could get in or out of Delta Epsilon Delta. It was a good thing I left when I did.

Just as we arrived, a large body with a sheet covering it was being loaded into the back of an ambulance. I assume that the timing of it was scripted because it was too perfect.

“Ruck!” Evan screamed and attempted to cross under the police tape.

An officer grabbed hold of him and stopped him from getting there. “We cannot allow you near the crime scene. You have to understand. I’m sorry, son.”

We weren’t the only ones to arrive at the scene. Several news crews arrived just after we did and began asking bystanders questions about what had happened.

As the ambulance closed its doors and took away Ruck’s remains, a woman’s wailing could be heard from on the property. It was coming from the backyard.

“Who is that?” Kimberly asked.

“Was someone else hurt?” Anna asked. She glanced over at me as she said it almost as if she was asking me whether there was another victim. I didn't dare answer her, not in front of the NPCs.

As we watched, an officer appeared from behind the house escorting a young woman. The woman was crying with her makeup smeared and her face contorted into a caricature of its natural form. Her face, hands, and much of her tube top were covered in blood.

It was Amber, Ruck’s maybe girlfriend who had yelled at him earlier.

Officer Ricky passed by us on the other side of the tape, clearly trying to stay as far away from the blood in the backyard as possible.

“Ricky,” Evan said. He leaned as far over the tape as he could without breaking it.

“I really can’t talk to you right now,” Officer Ricky said.

Anna joined in. “What is she doing here?” she asked.

Officer Ricky looked at Anna and there was a glint of recognition as if he knew whatever character she was portraying. “Anna,” he said. “That’s police business.”

“Come on, Ricky,” Kimberly joined in. Kimberly had a higher Moxie, so her efforts must have worked even better.

“Girls, Evan…” Ricky said, closing his eyes as he spoke, “Okay, fine, but you can’t tell anyone, I don’t want to get in trouble… She found Ruck Johnson’s body. Ran out into the street and flagged down campus police.”

“Oh my god,” Nathan said. “Is it really Ruck?”

Officer Ricky’s eyes opened wide, “Oh shoot, I wasn’t supposed to tell you that.”

Nathan kneeled over and put his hands on his knees. “Oh fuck, oh fuck,” he said.

Anna instinctually put a hand on his back. “Let’s go sit down over here,” she said, gesturing toward the curb on the other side of the street.

She guided him across the street.

“They seemed pretty close,” Antoine observed.

Mark nodded. “Ruck and Nathan have been friends forever. Nate was his tutor, chauffeur, wingman, and everything else Ruck needed.”

The group migrated across the street to where Anna and Nathan were.

“If I hadn’t been drinking, this wouldn’t have happened,” Nathan said through tears.

“You don’t know that,” Anna said. “We all left Ruck behind. It’s all our fault—"

“No,” Evan interrupted, “It’s the fault of whoever killed him.”

Anna shook her head. “You know what I meant.”

Evan ignored her. “And whenever I find out who did it, they’re going to pay."

Maybe I was imagining it, but when he said that I thought he glanced at me.

Not long after that, people started to clear away from the Delta Epsilon Delta house. The news crew, rubberneckers, students, and even the police all found somewhere else to be. Even Mark, Evan, Nathan, and the other stragglers we had gotten to know from the party made excuses and left.

For the first time in a long time, every one of my friends had their “Off-Screen” status lit. Mine was usually on because I was a minor character, but Anna’s only turned on for a few minutes at a time.

“Does this mean we’re between scenes?” Kimberly asked.

I shrugged.

The veteran players had told us about this. The storyline we were in was composed of multiple scenes. From what Todd and Valorie had said, our next scene didn’t start for hours. Until then, we were free to roam Carousel (within reason). We couldn’t trigger another storyline until this one was over. As long as we didn’t walk into a monster’s territory, we would be fine.

Town Square was a known safe zone so that’s where we headed.

“I’ve been dying to just go somewhere,” Kimberly said. “Anywhere where we don’t have to deal with this horrifying stuff.”

As we turned into Town Square, three women who looked like 1950s housewives walked by us. They had impeccable hair and makeup and wore big, lipstick-clad smiles.

“You’re so pretty,” the first one said to Kimberly in a high-pitched, cheery voice. She wore all purple.

“So pretty,” the second one said in a matching tone. She wore all yellow.

“Very pretty,” the third said. She wore all red.

Then they continued walking, only turning their head away from Kimberly once they were fifteen feet away.

They never blinked.

“What the fuck was that?” Antoine asked as they moved into the distance.

I had no idea. We would deal with them when their storyline came up.

“I hate this place,” Kimberly said, moving back to the center of the pack.

Town Square looked… normal. Like a real town square. There were stores and cheery townsfolk. The Square was well lit and the nightlife here was bustling. Sure, the occasional odd character would show their head, but mostly it was normal.

But maybe that was because we couldn’t trigger any omens.

We found a malt shop and took a seat. The prices were incredibly low. A malt for fifty cents. We indulged, except for Antoine, who kept looking at ours like he expected something to crawl out of it.

I told them everything I had seen and explained Ranger Danger’s tropes as I remembered them.

“Wow,” Camden said. “That’s a lot of rules.”

“The basic concept is that you have to figure out who the killer is to win.”

Anna pursed her lips. “It could be any of them. I assume we can cross out Amber?”

“Maybe?” Antoine said. “Just because she called in the body doesn’t mean it wasn’t her.”

That was true.

“We may not have all of the information we need yet. It’s still really early in the Rebirth Phase,” Camden said.

In fact, the needle hadn’t moved much at all since I left my bowl of cereal after First Blood. There was still a lot of story to go.

"Ranger Danger is a pattern killer," I said. "It said so right in his tropes. He kills according to a pattern."

"And?" Kimberly asked.

Anna looked me in the eye and nodded. She understood. "You need more than one body to form a pattern," she said.