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Chapter Sixteen: The Silver Solution
Chapter Sixteen: The Silver Solution
Chapter Sixteen: The Silver Solution
Player Stats and Tropes
Riley
Antoine
Anna
Kimberly
Camden
Plot Armor
11 / 2
12 + 3
14
10 + 5
11
Mettle
1
4 + 2
3
0
1
Moxie
3
1
2
4
2
Hustle
1
3 + 1
2
3
2
Savvy
5
0
2
1 + 4
5
Grit
1
4
5
2 + 1
1
TROPE MASTER
Type: Insight
Stat: Savvy
Effect: Sees enemy tropes. Lose half of PA
IT’S PART OF THE UNIFORM
Type: Buff
Stat: N/A
Effect: Higher Mettle when attacking with sports equipment
LAST ONE ALIVE
Type: Rule
Stat: N/A
Effect: Cannot die until party is killed
CONVENIENT BACKSTORY
Type: Buff
Stat: Moxie
Effect: Can change backstory to assist with current task.
EUREKA!
Type: Insight
Stat: Savvy
Effect: Helps find important information with text.
CINEMA SEER—SURVIVE
Type: Buff
Stat: Savvy
Effect: Buffs Savvy and Grit of Allies by predicting plot elements
GYM Rat
Type: Buff
Stat: Moxie
Effect: Buff Mettle and Hustle by revealing athletic backstory
WHO’S WITH ME?!
Type: Buff
Stat: Moxie
Effect: In Finale, Allies gain buff to relevant stat when assisting the player.
SOCIAL AWARENESS
Type: Insight
Stat: Moxie
Effect: Can see the Moxie stat of all enemies and NPCs.
RIGHT TOOL FOR THE JOB
Type: Buff
Stat: Savvy
Effect: Buffs Savvy and Mettle when fighting an enemy with their weakness.
THE OBLIVIOUS BYSTANDER
Type: Rule
Stat: Moxie
Effect: Cannot be target while convincingly acting oblivious to enemy
LOOKS DON’T LAST
Type: Debuff
Stat: Grit
Effect: Is attacked at First Blood. Debuff enemy 1% PA for every min survived up to 15%
I closed my eyes as the sounds of the room grew dim.
Death was coming.
Soon, I would be jettisoned into the astral plane without Dr. Halle’s big fancy GPS tracking where I went. I could feel it happening. I lamented my bad luck. I spent years putting myself in the shoes of horror movie characters.
I imagined myself living through a zombie apocalypse, outwitting maniacal serial killers, and going up against unkillable monsters yet somehow getting the better of them. In all of those idle daydreams, I always thought I would be the main character.
How ironic that it was that very hobby—watching horror movies—that would get me stuck in a world where horror movies came to life. To twist the knife even further, I was playing a minor character archetype who couldn’t even win a fistfight with a sixty-year-old scientist who was already half dead.
Suddenly, I felt an intense pain in my shoulder. It was the same shoulder where the Astralist had struck me earlier, but the pain was new.
I opened my eyes. I was laying on the ground. I had landed hard on my right arm, but I was free.
I could breathe.
Air filled my lungs and the room came back into focus.
To my left, Antoine was struggling with the Astralist. He had tackled him and the two were now wrestling on the floor. Based on my estimate, the Astralist would have too much Grit for Antoine to win alone.
But he wasn’t alone.
Anna ran up beside him with a wooden club (a table leg?) and swung down hard on the Astralist.
For the first time, the mad scientist screamed in pain. He moved his ghostly arm as fast as the eye could see and lashed out at Anna. It wasn’t enough. The Final Girl had the highest Grit of all of us. If he wanted to hurt her, he would need more Mettle.
Unfortunately, he had just the trick for that. His spirit left his crumpled body on the floor and barreled full force into Anna. She flew back into the wall behind her.
Antoine struggled to get up. His foot was still messed up, his Hustle stat diminished to as low as mine. The Hobbled status ailment lit bright on the red wallpaper under his poster.
He threw the Astralist’s body off of himself and moved to help Anna.
I tried to warn him. “Attack his body!” but the words came out of my mouth too quietly. My throat was damaged from being strangled.
I tried again, “Attack his body!” I knew the Astralist’s spirit form was Invulnerable. His Comatose form, however, was defenseless now that the final battle had come.
Kimberly ran to me as I lay on the ground, “What is it?” she asked. She must have seen me trying to talk.
“Destroy his body,” I said. This time, more of my words got through. I looked up at her. She had a deep, bloody gash on her forehead. Luckily, her buffed Grit was enough to keep her from dying from such a wound.
You’re welcome.
“Kill his body,” Kimberly yelled to Antoine, who, at the time, was attempting to get to Anna after getting support from one of the metal chairs in the center of the room.
Antoine’s eyes went from Kimberly to me to the Astralist’s body he had left on the floor. He turned, grabbed another wooden table leg (it must have come from the same table as Anna’s), and performed an impressive slam into the comatose corpse of Dr. Halle.
As I suspected, the Astralist reacted to this by returning to his Possessed form. His spirit was still dependent on his body. Even though his Possessed form was not invulnerable and had lower Mettle, he couldn’t leave his body unprotected.
The Astralist rose from the ground. His mortal head dripped with blood from Antoine’s attack, but his Ghostly face bore the look of pure rage.
I took in a deep breath. My head ached terribly.
Getting to my feet took effort. I was dizzy. I might have even had a concussion.
As I looked to the now open revolving door that my friends had forced themselves through, Camden came running through holding the books he had picked up in the hidden library and a small bag that I couldn’t Identify.
"You're alive," Camden said.
"Mostly,” I said. It hurt to speak.
"Listen," he said. "We need something called phlogistic gum."
"What?" I said.
"I have no idea," he said. "There's a way to reverse the reaction that lets him control his own spirit like that. We need silver powder and phlogistic gum. We've got the silver powder,” he held up the sack he had been carrying, “Have you seen anything around here that looked like it might be called phlogistic gum?"
I shook my head. I said, "There are some vials over there." I pointed to the shelf by his workstation.
Camden must have made good progress during the Rebirth Phase while I was Unconscious.
I looked back to Antoine and Anna. Both of them had high Grit scores and couldn't be bullied so easily. Where he tossed me around like a rag doll, they took more effort.
Don’t think that because they had high Grit stats that they weren’t getting hurt. To the contrary, they were getting the shit beat out of them. Anna had a cut down her whole forearm; Antoine had an eye swollen shut and glass shards sticking out of one of his hands. I think they both had broken ribs.
Grit didn’t stop you from getting hurt. It stopped the damage you took from affecting the outcome of the movie.
After all, survivors in horror movies are often in terrible shape by the end of the movie. They just take their lumps and keep going. Those same injuries to me or Camden would have us rolling on the floor bleeding out.
Camden and I ran across the room to the shelf where Doctor Halle had kept a variety of ingredients: different powders, metals, liquids, mixtures, things I didn't recognize. I hoped that Camden, being the resident smart guy, would be able to make something out of it all.
Luckily, all of the vials were labeled, and wouldn't you know that Camden's Eureka ability happened to work on labels. After sifting through the vials for a few moments, he was able to grab a large container filled with a strange brown liquid.
"Give me a second," he said. He referenced the Astralist’s Tome, "Tertio, goculum phlogisticum gouttierei ad solutio argentea addendum est."
"What did I say about reading the Latin?"
"I think we're past that," he responded. He was flipping through his Latin-English Dictionary. "I'm trying to understand how to combine them.”
The phlogistic gum, whatever it was, looked like what I imagine honey might look like in a universe where honey was made by cockroaches instead of bees. It smelled awful whenever he took the stopper off.
"Enough!" Doctor Halle said from across the room. "Do you honestly believe that what you're doing is for the good of humanity? What I'm doing is gruesome. I don't deny it. Its morality is veiled. But sometimes, science has to be allowed to make change."
I felt a monologue coming on.
Watch out," I said, "Don’t listen to his monologue or you will get a debuff."
Finally, I felt like I had something to contribute.
Dr. Halle ignored me.
"I watched my wife, my beautiful, vibrant, intelligent wife, turn into a husk of herself," he said. "Do you know what that is like? To see life become a curse? I tried to cure her, I tried to extend her lifespan, to treat her symptoms, but in the end, I recognized that what I was doing was worse than just letting her die.
“In the end, we told each other that we would see each other again, and when I built the Mirror of Stars, she understood. She waits for me. I must finish my machine. I must map the astral plane. Please, please, I beg of you, have some decency.
“You must understand. What could be too high a price to combat death, to eliminate the gap between the living and the dead? Do you not see the logic? Those who die will not stay dead. Their sacrifice is illusory, but what I can achieve here is real.
“The heart reaches out across the astral plane. It is a true sign that we were meant to find each other. Those we love, those who came before, they can come back. They can."
As he spoke his impassioned speech, Doctor Halle's Plot Armor increased by three. His Humanizing Monologue buffed his Moxie while attempting to debuff those who listened.
Luckily, my Moxie was already three—a tie. There was little chance of his plea working on me. Kimberly's Moxie was even higher than mine; she would be resilient as well.
However, Antoine, Anna, and Camden, had most of their points divided into other stats; they were vulnerable.
"Don't listen to him," I said. I coughed. "If you listen to what he says, you'll lose Plot Armor."
It was too late.
Already, Antoine and Anna lost points in Mettle. Anna had lost one point. Antoine had lost two. It was working.
Camden hadn’t been paying attention to the speech. His stats were untouched. I imagine it’s hard to read Latin and be lectured about Halle’s idea of Utilitarianism at the same time.
"Camden, do you have it ready yet?" I asked.
"Almost there," he said. He had taken some of the gum into an eyedropper and was dropping it into a flask that contained dull, silvery powder.
The reaction was instant.
The combination of the phlogistic gum and the silver powder created a writhing, growing mass within the flask.
"What do we do now?" I asked, as the mass within the glass flask started to grow.
"Just a second," he said. He started frantically flipping through the Latin to English Dictionary, trying to translate something from the Latin book.
"Did you not read the last instruction before combining the ingredients?"
"Shut up, I was in a hurry," he continued to read.
Antoine and Anna had returned to pummeling Doctor Halle, but his ghostly self was an Insurmountable defense. With their weakened Mettle, he made it very difficult for them to harm him.
Fortunately, a tie goes to the runner; Camden was ready to enter the fight.
"OK, we just need to put the fluid on him at the place where his spirit attaches," Camden said.
I went to grab the flask.
"Careful, it's having an exothermic reaction," he warned.
It didn't register to me what that meant the moment he said it, but I figured it out when I touched it. It was scorching hot.
“We have to throw it,” Camden said. “The book says you need to stand way back.”
“Accuracy is determined by the Hustle stat," I said. "And Antoine's all the way on the other side of the room, and he's currently Hobbled."
Antoine had the highest Hustle stat, but the Hobbled status lowered his score down to one. He was in no shape to come over here and help us throw the flask at Doctor Halle.
"You have to do it," I said. "Your Hustle is higher, and you'll get a Mettle bonus if you're the one wielding the weapon."
Technically Kimberly had the highest Hustle of the three of us, but Kimberly had no Mettle. I wasn’t sure how that would affect things. With Camden’s Right Tool for the Job trope, it made sense for him to deliver the final blow.
Camden nodded. He grabbed a rag from off the table and grabbed onto the flask.
"I hope this works," he said.
Camden ran across the room. Anna had her table leg placed against Doctor Halle's head, holding him down as his Ghost arm struck at Antoine.
As Doctor Halle looked up, his ghostly eyes saw what Camden had in his hands and said, "No, please, you mustn't. Everything I've worked for! If you do this to me, then they all died for no reason." He gestured back to the shelves filled with corpses.
Anna, Camden, and Antoine must not have known what he meant because right now, that light was still off from when Kimberly had been flipping the switch, but they got the gist.
“Get back,” I yelled, forcing my hoarse voice to be loud.
Antoine and Anna backed away.
Camden ran forward and threw the flask with the concoction against the back of Doctor Halle's neck.
As soon as the flask hit his body, it shattered, and the mass within it went absolutely crazy. It was as if the concoction was reacting to Halle's exposed soul itself—like throwing gasoline on a fire. It started to grow rapidly and spat and hissed.
Dr. Halle began to scream and plead, but the solution was separating his soul from his body, severing his connection to the mortal realm. The reaction started to look almost the same as the effect of the weapon in the center of the room. I could see Doctor Halle's soul being absorbed high into the Mirror of Stars. He clung to his body with every ounce of effort his soul possessed.
As his soul was carried upward, stretched and distorted, I saw a ghostly arm flicker toward the machine. I couldn't tell what had happened, but some lights flicked on and a process started on the computer mainframe, but I couldn't tell what.
The machine started to activate. A million dials started to whir; beeping noises, warning of something, began to go off. His soul had completely departed his body now, which lay dead on the ground, but before his spirit could enter the Mirror of Stars, something in the machine overloaded and an explosion started from within the mirror itself.
The Mirror of Stars shattered. The machine burst at the seams, letting off steam and sending out sparks. The lights shuddered, with only a few of the yellow bulbs remaining on.
The crystal shards disappeared upon contact with the ground. The bright energy they contained released in a hot flash.
And then there was silence.
As my friends began to celebrate, I could not.
Because I had seen his tropes and he had one left to go.
The needle on the plot cycle had not yet hit The End.
Now was time for The Parting Shot.