“I am asking you literally. Where did you enter Carousel from?” the man said.

I was hesitant to answer.

Antoine wasn’t.

“Olde Hill Road,” he said. “By the run-down bed and breakfast.”

The man ran his hand over the top of his hair. “That’s interesting. Okay. I have to tell you something. You’re not going to want to believe me. Heck, you probably won’t believe me at all, not until it starts happening.”

“Until what starts happening?” Kimberly asked.

The man contemplated his answer. “Sit down. This will sound weird.”

We all did as he asked. The other NPCs in the Diner had long gone back to what they were doing before the man entered the building.

“I am bound by forces that frustrate my attempts to help you, but I am trying to help you. We all have our puppet strings, even me, even you. Listen beyond what I say. There are things out there that can’t be true. At the Centennial, things that don't line up. It’s all part of the trick. You were not invited here for the reasons you think you were. Tell me, why did you come here?”

It seemed that Carousel was getting right into it.

“Horror convention,” Bobby said with sadness in his eyes.

“My brother invited me to his lake house,” Antoine answered. “He invited my friends too.”

Cassie took a deep breath. She stared at the man the way someone might stare at a ghost. “Our brother too. He’s a doctor at the hospital.”

“I see. I’m sorry to tell you this,” the man said. “But you were tricked. You’re loved ones aren’t here. They’re likely dead. There is no horror convention.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Antoine said. He looked shocked at the words coming out of his own mouth. It was all a knee-jerk reaction. It didn’t make sense. Antoine knew what the man said was true. It made no sense for him to react that way.

Yet, I knew why Antoine had said it. Every word that was coming out of this man's mouth was hostile to my mind. Everything he said I didn't want to believe even though I knew it to be true. There was something going on.

“This is not Carousel. It certainly isn’t this happy place,” the man said pointing his hand back in the direction of the celebration. “This is part of the trap.”

“A trap?” I asked, hoping to get some clarification. Still, my mind revolted against the information he was giving us. I didn’t want to believe it for some reason. “Why would anyone want to trap us?”

At this point a new player would be extremely skeptical and likely would not have seen anything supernatural. I tried to speak as if I thought the whole conversation was a joke or the ravings of a lunatic.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “But whoever set the trap did so because they want you here. I don’t know for what purpose.”

“Can you be a little more cryptic, please?” Isaac asked. His instinct to make a quip was stronger than his unease.

The man rolled his eyes.

“So, what are they going to do now that they have us?” I asked with a forced smirk.

“If I told you, you wouldn’t believe me,” the man said.

“Try us,” I said. We needed to slow down and get as much information as possible. I had to fight the temptation to jump forward in the conversation to larger questions.

He shook his head. “I think they want you because your story hasn’t been told yet, unlike the rest of us. The only people in this whole town who haven’t gotten to The End yet are the seven of you. They want to know how far you can go.”

“Who’s they?” Antoine asked.

The man smiled. “After it starts happening, I’ll try to find you. Then we can talk. When you’re ready to believe me.”

He started to get up.

“You’re a Stranger,” Dina said quickly.

The man looked at her and nodded his head. “I know. You don’t know me. I don’t know you, but you have to believe me.”

Dina wasn’t calling him an ordinary stranger. She was trying to say that he was the Stranger. The Stranger Paragon was the manifestation of the Outsider Aspect called the Stranger. We had met several Paragons before and read about others in the Atlas.

It would make sense. The Stranger was the Aspect of the Outsider that existed in the periphery, guiding their allies with cryptic warnings. They were nameless and mysterious.

As I looked the man up and down, he was, indeed, mysterious.

As he walked away, he looked back at us and said, “Don’t forget what I told you. Oh, and if you’re looking for lodgings, the Visitor's Booth might be of service.”

After he was gone, I said, “I told you we were supposed to be finding a place to stay. An NPC just interrupted his cryptic warning to send us in that direction. Can’t get more clear than that.”

“What did he even tell us?” Antoine asked. “What substance should we take away from that for the Throughline? We didn’t even get an entry on the Leads board.”

He was right. Nothing the Stranger had said was entered on the red wallpaper.

“I think he was the Stranger Paragon,” I said. “I think he was using a special trope so that he could give us cryptic warnings but we wouldn’t believe him.”

“Is that what that was?” Bobby asked. “I felt like my brain was doing somersaults.”

“Then what was the point?” Antoine said. “If we didn’t already know he was telling the truth, we would have just dismissed the warning and went on our way. I thought he would at least tell us what to look out for.”

I contemplated it for a moment. Whatever trope he had used to make us doubt him hadn’t worked, though not for long. We already knew most of the things he said. For us, it was a really odd encounter. For actual new players, it would have been an odd moment they all laughed about. Even the grave warnings would be dismissed under the effects of his trope.

His short rant was supposed to give us information without actually changing our minds or making us suspicious.

"I think his whole thing was meant to stop us from running away," I said. "Like it was a logistics thing for the game. If a new player was already suspecting something was up but wasn’t certain, he would ease their suspicion with that trope. A trope that makes people not believe what they are told would stop players from sensing something was off about Carousel before they were supposed to. If we had run into him at the festival and Dina hadn't warned us, he would have just yelled that stuff at us and run off.”

Magically eliminating players’ skepticism while directly telling them that they should be skeptical must have served Carousel’s purpose.

"But we avoided him so he had to chase us down awkwardly," Antoine said.

"We need to get our heads on straight," I said. "If we keep going like this we might miss something important. I mean, this is the Tutorial. We have to act like we do not know what is going on."

"Way ahead of you," Isaac said.

“The Visitor’s Booth?” an NPC with large, bushy sideburns asked. “That’s right over there. Turn at the rope ladder game and go straight. They should be able to set you up with a hotel for the night.”

“Thanks,” Kimberly said.

“I am so tired,” I said as we trudged toward the booth, which had been near the center of town square the whole time. We had passed it while looking for the hospital booth. “What do you think the odds are we actually get to sleep tonight?”

“One in ten,” Antoine said.

I sighed.

The booth was large and was occupied by some smiling NPCs, including one named Gina. It faced a circular patch of grass next to a statue of Bartholomew Geist. It was smaller than the one that had chased me during the Grotesque storyline.

Directly in front of the statue, some men in hard hats were digging a hole. The mayor was near them with his entourage. They were lifting a large metal object out of a wooden crate.

The mayor noticed some people watching and waved to them.

Kimberly struck up a conversation with the NPC Gina.

“Hello,” Kimberly said. “We’re in town for the Centennial and somehow we can’t find the people we were supposed to stay with. Can you suggest us a hotel for the night?”

“Oh my gosh,” Gina said. She was a stout woman with a toothy grin. “Things are so hectic right now. I bet that’s why you can’t get ahold of them. We can certainly set you up with some rooms. This happens with every big event in Carousel. I can check if anyone has canceled their rooms and maybe we can set you up with a place for the night. What do you think?”

“You’re a lifesaver! Thank you so much!” Kimberly said.

“It’ll be just a moment. I’ve got to look through the books. If you want a sneak peek of a big event, the mayor is setting up the time capsule right over there. It’s so exciting!”

The large metal object near the mayor was a time capsule. I had heard of these, but never actually seen one in real life. The capsule was an airtight container that people could put letters or heirlooms into before it was buried. Decades later, the capsule could be dug up and the future mayor could unseal it to reveal all of the neat old stuff inside.

As we approached, we saw the capsule more closely. There were words painted on the side:

Carousel’s Centennial Capsule—A Hundred Years of Fun!

Buried August 5, 2022.

Do not open for One Hundred Years!

Carousel Loves Families!

That "Carousel Loves Families" slogan was on signs and booths, flyers and carnival food wrappers. Now, it was on a time capsule.

“I see you are admiring our new tradition!” Mayor Gray said enthusiastically as we walked up. “Well, she goes into the ground soon, never to be seen again for a hundred years. Isn’t that exciting?”

I nodded.

“Why, I plan to drop in this letter,” he said, brandishing a fancy envelope. “It contains my advice to the mayor of a hundred years from now, as well as my hopes for the future of Carousel. I believe in this place. I believe in what it can be. Do you?”

He was looking at Dina.

“Well, I just got here,” she said.

He smiled knowingly. “I assure you by the time you leave, you will be a believer in my vision for this place. It will be a place of prosperity, of happiness, of reconciliation between what has been and what can be. Do you know who said that?”

He was looking at me this time.

“Bartholomew Geist?” I guessed.

“Yes and no,” he said, looking back at the statue behind him. “It was actually another of our founding fathers, Silas Dyrkon. Geist repeated the words loudly and often, though.”

The mayor looked like he was about to say more, but before he could, the men digging near the statue started calling for him.

I looked over. One of the men rammed his shovel down into the large hole they had been digging. A clanging sound echoed over the square.

“Pipes?” the mayor asked calmly. “I was assured that this would be a safe place to dig for the capsule.”

The men continued finessing the dirt with their shovels as the mayor looked down into the hole quizzically. He looked absolutely at a loss for words.

“This is…” he said. “This makes no sense. It can’t be. Who do we call about this? Who would know?”

Before we could investigate further, we were approached by the woman from the visitor’s booth. She handed Kimberly a handwritten note and map.

“Now just follow these directions,” Gina said. “We’ve got you set up with three rooms all in one wing of the hotel. It’s a nice one if you ask me. Newly renovated. Room service, the whole nine yards. Normally we wouldn’t do this, but given your dire situation, we thought, why not just go the extra mile? I mean, it is a time of celebr—”

She stopped talking and stared over in the direction of the hole. I followed her gaze. Most everyone else was already looking in that direction.

The men were working together to lift something large and metallic out of the ground. It was a cylinder covered in dirt. There were handles and a latch on the side. It look similar to the time capsule that had been prepared for the centennial, but it was slightly larger, and slightly different in its shape.

“I never heard anything about this!” the mayor yelled. He took a handkerchief from his pocket and started wiping dirt off the side of the object. As he did, the bewilderment on his face grew, I knew this because he would look back at the crowd that had gathered just to make sure they were seeing the same thing he was.

As he wiped the dirt away, words were revealed words:

Carousel’s Time Capsule!

A Hundred Years of Thrills--Here’s to a Hundred More!

DO NOT OPEN UNTIL August 5, 2092.

Buried August 5, 1992, during Carousel’s Centennial Celebration

The Mayor, completely speechless, continued to wipe so as to uncover the final words:

Carousel Loves Families!