The Game at Carousel: A Horror Movie LitRPG-Chapter 40Book Eight, : Dead in the Water

Cutaway Death was a very powerful trope. Being able to walk around and help with the story even after being Second Blood was like getting to have a sixth player waiting in the wings.

The only catch was that there was no guarantee I would actually survive my apparent death. There was no protection from being killed other than the Dead status itself. All that the trope guaranteed was that at the moment it looked like I was about to be killed, the cameras would cut away, and my character would be treated as dead.

If I were, say, trapped inside of a man-eating plant at the time of my apparent death, I could still very much die even after I managed to cut the thing to pieces with half of a pair of hedge shears. After I got the Mettle boost from Sha-Shing, it was easy enough to slice through the plant. I needed to get out as fast as possible because that plant wasn't just trying to trap me. It was trying to digest me, and even with my Grit, it had a pretty good start.

My shoes and pants were coming apart at the seams. My hoodie tore off of me like it was made of tissue paper, and that was good, because the longer the digestive enzymes inside of that bladder were touching me, the more they burned my skin. Getting my clothes off was life or death. The enzyme didn't feel like acid. There was little burning sensation. It felt like the inside of my mouth did after eating too much pineapple.

The water cooled my skin to the touch while I could still feel it.

But as I swam away from the pod that I had managed to shred, I noticed a faint trail of blood following me where my legs had become cracked and blistered from the digestion process.

It was a good thing I was underwater. That way, whatever smell was wafting off of my cooked skin and hair was undetectable to me.

But that was not my chief concern.

Just Out Of Shot was still active and allowed me to see where the cameras were looking, and as best I could tell, they were looking above water. I could see the footage of the finale, with Antoine, Camden, and Anna reviewing the footage I had caught underwater.

I realized that if I swam up for air, there was a chance I could get caught On-Screen, and I didn't know the consequences for that, except that they would be terrible. Wallflowers had plenty of tropes designed to get their characters Written Off, and even though under those circumstances their characters' reappearance was often plausible, there would be harsh narrative consequences.

And that was just for Written Off. I didn't know what would happen if I came back from the dead. I didn’t want to.

Though, to be fair, it's not like the audience would know I was dead for sure.

I tried to think of what to do with the limited air supply I had. Was I seriously going to drown after all that effort to get out of the acidic bladder?

I looked around at the floating graveyard where fish and people alike were being digested all inside their various pods.

My heart sank as I realized that one of those pods was right next to where Cassie had been. Apparently, this massive plant had figured out that it didn't have to wait for people to reach out and grab the drowning decoy, because Cassie had been caught.

She only had two Grit. She liked to keep it low so that her Anguish trope would be powered up.

Unfortunately, it meant that if she ever came close to death, she would make it over the finish line really easily.

I tried to focus, to drown out the feeling of my burning lungs. I tried to watch the story playing out above me on the red wallpaper thanks to Deathwatch.

They were examining the plant's structure from the shoddy video I had managed to take on my camera.

It was a pretty neat deal. There was a main plant somewhere down deep at the bottom of the cove, with all sorts of tendrils shooting off of it. At the end of a tendril was one kind of decoy or another. It might have been a Joanne-shaped decoy or just an ordinary fish for the smaller ones.

That was something that Camden seemed to notice, too.

“Look at this,” he said. “This pod, this smaller one over here, has what appears to be a fish that's struggling to swim at the end of the tendril. Do you see it?”

Antoine and Camden locked eyes.

“The largemouth bass!” they both said in unison, which was a very inorganic thing to say in unison.

“We wondered why the bass kept going missing, why we couldn't get their numbers up, why they never got to legal size, but the catfish were just fine,” Camden said.

“Bass hunt with their eyes. They'll bite anything that's moving. That's what all their lures are designed to imitate: smaller fish, injured fish,” Antoine said. “But not catfish. They hunt by smell.”

That explained the whole largemouth bass conspiracy.

“Wait, what are you saying?” Anna asked. “Are you saying that this plant learned to fish?”

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I was glad that they were laying it out so simply for any part of the audience that was drunk by this point in the movie.

“But that doesn't explain why it looks like my sister,” she said.

“It's mimicry,” Camden said. “Whatever this thing is, it clearly has the ability to see and copy things to change the shape of its lures. This wasn’t natural selection. It happened too fast.”

Anna got quiet.

“What is it?” Camden asked.

“Nothing,” she said quietly. “We have to find a way to get out of here.”

“Good luck with that,” Antoine said. “Our best bet is to try to wait it out till morning when they send out more rescue boats. We try to warn them off before they come close. This whole thing could be a disaster. Rescue boat after rescue boat getting fished into the lake. I have to wonder why this didn't happen until the tournament.”

“Well, no one was allowed on the lake until the tournament,” Anna said. “No one except for Camden's team.”

Good question.

“I've been trying to think of it myself,” Camden said, as he dared to look over the water, at another decoy pretending to drown.

As much as I loved watching, I had to get air. Grit or no Grit, I was about to die, and there was no indicator for it because my Dead status was already fully lit.

The best I could do, I figured, was swim up somewhere where I wouldn't be seen. So, a little while before they started their whole finale talk-through session, I started swimming to the other side of the cove. My Hustle made me quick, and my Grit allowed me to do it without breathing for at least a little while.

Luckily, the cove was fairly small, and I managed to get to my target just in time. I was headed toward the pontoon research vessel.

Unlike a normal boat, it had two hollow pontoons underneath it, which meant the space between them was dark and empty. When I swam up in the middle of them, the chances of my being seen by a camera were almost nonexistent.

I barely made it there, but when I did, I ducked under the boat, swam up so hard that I almost hit my head, and gulped air, suddenly feeling the pain my lungs had been in.

I rested my hand against the inside of one of the pontoons while I peeped across the cove at my costars. I noticed that I was leaving a bloody handprint.

I couldn't even feel the texture of anything. My skin was so raw and spongy. I didn't want to look at my face or anything else.

It was just about then that Camden had a revelation.

“My team and I didn't go out on the lake for recreation. We were doing science, trying to see how many fish of different species there were in different parts of the lake,” he said.

“Okay, but why didn't any of these drowning human lures try to get your attention?” Antoine asked.

“Do you know how biologists check how many fish are in a lake?” he asked. “We don't use fishing poles. We use electricity.”

He gestured across the lake at the pontoon I was floating under, and I quickly ducked down underneath the water.

“You see those poles with the strange-looking wires hanging off the end?” he asked.

“Yes,” Antoine said. “They kind of looked like antennas. That what you're talking about?”

“That's what I'm talking about,” Camden said. “Those are used for electrofishing. Anytime we would come out on the lake away from where the boat ramp and docks are, we had those in the water, running a low voltage, enough to stun any nearby fish. Then we could scoop them up in a net and get some data on them. Measurements, sex, breed. We even scanned them for microchips that we use to track them. Then we released them unharmed.”

“Electricity,” Anna said. “You think that could be the reason that your boats were safe, but all the fishermen weren't? That my dad wasn't?”

Anna's poor dad. Not only was he probably dead, but he likely died being dragged into the lake by a copy of his dead daughter.

“It's the only difference I can think of,” Camden said. “However these creatures work, these pods, I imagine that the electricity causes them to trigger prematurely. Then the plant will have to reset, and while they're doing that, they're not going to be fishing for a manwhich.”

“So if we're going to survive, we need to get back to the other side of the cove,” Antoine said.

“That would be our next dilemma,” Camden said.

Oh great. I wanted to stay out of view of the cameras across the cove, but now it looked like they were about to come over here anyway.

It might have been a pipe dream. There was at least fifty yards of open lake between where they were and the pontoon, and while I could make the distance without getting attacked, that was because I had the Dead status, which in its own way was the most powerful status in the game. Monsters were not inclined to seek out the Dead unless they were the ones that killed your character to begin with. The rules were fuzzy.

Funnily enough, these pods were easier to avoid while underwater, but I doubted Carousel would let them swim the whole way like that. It would be a weird choice for the characters. Even if it made sense, it would be hard for Carousel to cover up the movie magic.

Luckily, Camden had a plan, and it only took them a few minutes to enact.

First, he rigged up the small boat anchor to some high-test fishing line and condescendingly asked Antoine if he could launch it that far.

Of course he could, because this was a movie. He grabbed the fishing reel, tilted it back behind his head, and then launched the anchor, which soared until I heard a thud on the boat above me.

He softly pulled it back until he got the anchor to hook onto one of the side rails of the pontoon.

Then they used the high-test line to pull both boats as far toward each other as they could. Both of them were connected in some way by the plant, which had disabled their propellers, but they had lots of leeway since the plant itself had long tendrils. They managed to close the gap to no more than twenty yards.

Meanwhile, I had to do my best to stay underneath the pontoon so that I could breathe. I might even be of some use. Unfortunately, I only had half of a hedge shear to work with, because the other half was inside my magical hoodie pockets somewhere at the bottom of the lake.

Still, I was going to help if I could.

Once they started pulling the boats closer together and the attention was all on them and their efforts, I decided to swim between the boats underwater and clear a path for them.

It would take forever if I wanted to actually destroy the plants, but I didn't have to destroy them. I just had to disarm them.

I swam up to a nearby pod that would be directly in the way of them being able to get onto the pontoon, and I grabbed it from behind while reaching around and stabbing it near its trap door. It was actually quite easy. The doors were on a hair trigger by their design. As soon as I triggered them, the negative pressure inside the pod would release, sucking in a bunch of water and disarming the trap.

I couldn't do it to all of the pods, because Carousel would punish that, but I thinned out the forest of traps between the boats as best I could, giving at least one or two of them a clear path across.

The fact that I did it in my underwear while bleeding from pretty much all parts of my skin made it slightly more impressive in my mind.

Not that I was going to brag to them.

Now, all I had to do was wait for one of them to draw the short straw. Someone was going to have to take the plunge.