Arriving at the docks and tying off may have triggered the storyline, but it didn't teleport us to our starting locations. Other things changed, though. The river changed so much that I couldn't see it anymore; all I saw was a lake with a large interior and fingers snaking through the hills.
After tying off, I managed to climb out of the boat, suddenly aware that I had a large digital cara in my right hand. This wasn't an at-ho film-your-kids-unwrapping-Christmas-presents type of cara. It was production quality, and the entire device was encased in a hard, waterproof plastic container.
Luckily, we didn't start out On-Screen. We had a little bit of ti to get our bearings.
A young woman ca to collect Camden, calling him Doctor Tran.
"Sounds like I might be doing surgery on one of you guys later," he said as he forced a snarky smile and followed the NPC.
Before he left, I said, "Everybody loosen up. Get ready to play your characters until the end. We don't have ti to feel our emotions; we have to feel our characters' emotions."
I almost said, "like Kimberly always did," but thought better of it.
Antoine was taking deep breaths, trying to get into character while searching the area for clues about his character’s identity. He checked his pockets, looked for na tags, all the normal stuff.
"I think I figured out your identity," Cassie said softly.
"How?" he asked.
She pointed to a bass fishing boat that was being backed into the water a few hundred yards from where we were. Antoine's face had been vinyl-wrapped onto its hull. Text read: Antoine Stone, Outdoorsman.
It didn’t take long after that to figure out what my role was. I was Antoine’s field caraman or so kind of producer. Upon examining the truck used to back the boat trailer into the water, I found all kinds of information about Antoine and . He was a TV fisherman with nurous awards and accolades.
The story was set in the mid-2000s.
While Antoine and I were investigating that, Anna and Cassie had each found their own paths and were learning new things about their characters.
"Jackpot," I said as I lifted up a clipboard I found in the back seat of the truck.
"What ya got?" Antoine asked.
"Itinerary," I said. "So the fishing tournant starts at sunrise, which is about thirty minutes from now."
That was a bit confusing, as the sun was already up, but I knew it was in Carousel’s ability to fix that. The sun in the sky was re set dressing for a being of Carousel’s power.
"We need to get so interviews then," I said. "et the townsfolk, learn about the tournant, that sort of stuff."
"Great," he said. Then he had to get into the truck and back the boat the rest of the way into the water, because the boat had just been hanging there, waiting for us to do it.
"Anna’s at the table over there," I said, "let’s get so footage of people signing in."
Antoine nodded. He was still sullen and quiet, but he got rid of that the mont I pressed record, and we went On-Screen. As expected, the sun quickly hid back over the horizon, and all we could see was dawn’s gray light.
"This is Antoine Stone. We got another tournant here. This is the Carousel Basin Lake Bass Tournant. Gonna go catch so fish, y’all."
In an instant, he had transford into a magnetic, charismatic country boy, donning a ball cap from one of his several sponsors and leading over to the sign-up table where Anna was working.
"Good morning, miss," Antoine said, holding out his hand for her to shake. “How many boats signed on so far?”
She looked up at him, then at the cara, like a deer in the headlights at first, but then she switched on the sweetness.
"Twenty-six," she said. "It’s more than we ever expected."
"Did you hear that?" Antoine said, staring into the cara with a smile. "We got so competition. Co on, folks, let's go et ‘em."
And so we went about interrupting fishern as they prepared for the tournant's start and asking them inane questions about their strategies and experience.
"Well, I ain't telling you that," one of the n said with a not-so-toothy smile. "I ain't giving away my secrets."
He laughed, and Antoine laughed with him.
"Smart man," Antoine said. "I almost got you."
He looked down into the man's boat.
"I see you're using a lot of stink bait. You guys got so strange breed of bass around here or what?" he asked.
"Not going for the bass," the man said. "Going for the catfish. Total weight tournant. Catfish is legal."
"Wait, they allow catfish? I thought this was a bass fishing tournant," Antoine asked, confused.
The fisherman we were talking to just shrugged and climbed into his boat.
"It was a bass fishing tournant," Camden said from behind us on the docks. He was wearing a fishing vest with many pockets and a bucket hat.
"It's not a bass fishing tournant anymore?" Antoine asked.
It wouldn't have been a surprise except that we found a flyer for the tournant, advertised as a largemouth bass event. Largemouth bass was the typical target for tourneys like this, according to a trade magazine I found in the truck. We had gathered the info, but then heard a contradiction On-Screen, suggesting it was our characters who were ant to be surprised.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
"Largemouth bass numbers are low at the mont. Can’t get them up to size no matter what I do,” Camden said. “Catfish are thriving. Carp are thriving. We figured we either make catfish legal for the total weight prize, or we’re going to have a pathetic showing this year."
"Can you tell us who we're talking to?" Antoine asked as we moved toward Camden.
"Dr. Camden Tran," he said. "I work for the city's Fish and Ga program. We worked to rehabilitate the lake after so contamination, restocked it, and got it ready for fishing and swimming. This tournant is our big opening of the lake. But as I said, we haven’t got the largemouth bass numbers where we like them. They’re not at the legal size for fishing."
So that was what kind of doctor he was.
"So we're adding catfish to the nu. That's just fine," Antoine said with a cheery tone.
We interviewed a few more fishern as ti stood still while we got all the footage we needed.
We talked to so of the people working the event, and I managed to get so footage of Anna as she t her character’s father, who was competing in the tournant. His na was Richard. They seed to have a close relationship; she hugged him before he went and boarded his boat.
He was an older, sun-beaten guy, built like a linebacker, with a long white ponytail, and, in lieu of a normal hat, he wore a neon-yellow visor. I didn’t get to et him, but I got several pieces of footage of him smiling and laughing with other NPCs.
I even got so strange footage of Anna as she stared out at the lake with a reserved look of sadness. I worried she must not have realized I was filming her and was still processing her emotions over Kimberly. I must have kept filming her for a while as I waited for any NPCs in the area to make themselves notable.
That’s how it normally worked when I was the caraman; I didn’t have to seek out opportunities. Carousel would send them to to choose from. At that mont, the only interesting thing happening was Anna’s dad, Richard Reed, being well-liked and joking around with lots of the locals.
After a while, I realized that there was an NPC standing right next to , staring and waiting just out of shot.
I got the ssage.
I turned the cara to her. Her na was Barbara. She was an older woman with a mischievous smile.
“Ma’am, can you tell who that gentleman over there is?” I asked.
“That man over there with the ponytail? That’s Richard Reed. Used to be the mayor around here, but he quit when his daughter passed away. Poor fella.”
“Oh, I was under the impression that the sign-up lady was his daughter.”
Barbara glanced over at the sign-up table and said, “Oh, that’s just Anna, his other daughter, Joanne is who I was talking about. It was a terrible situation. So terrible. I’m just glad to see that the two of them can co out and face the day after what happened.”
At first, I thought Carousel was just being thick with exposition, but this woman was really selling it as pure small-town gossip. I could practically see her eyes begging to ask more questions.
“What happened to her?” I asked. “Joanne, the other daughter.”
“Well, nobody knows exactly, but she ended up drowning in the city pool just down the road. Maybe she hit her head. Who could say? She was alone, they say. Anna’s the one who found her. A terrible tragedy. The poor girl was only fourteen, but she was the prettiest girl to ever co out of Carousel County. Or at least, she would have been if she ever made it out.”
“Sad story,” I said, as I moved the cara back to Anna and suddenly understood why she was looking out over the lake, sad.
I kept getting footage, but the sun was rising, and I realized the tournant was about to start. I hightailed it to where Antoine was getting the boat ready, and no sooner did I get in the boat than the officiant of the tournant started blaring the loudspeaker, sounding like one of the adults from Charlie Brown.
Everybody in the boats was complaining, saying they couldn’t understand what he was saying, yelling for him to turn the speaker down because of the reverberation. But the officiant, who was a short man nad Dexter Hornswoggle, didn’t notice or care. He was reading from a sheet without even looking up.
But when he lifted the starting gun into the air as he looked down at his watch, everyone understood.
We waited on bated breath and baited hooks until eventually he fired, and twenty-six boats took off into the lake all at once. It was more fun than I expected.
Antoine was driving, and I got several action shots of him with sunrise in the background and so Carousel off-brand Oakleys wrapped around his eyes.
The fishing tournant had begun.
Now we just had to figure out what type of monster was going to be fishing for us.
Antoine had angling before, and all I had to do was get good footage of him doing it while nothing happened. We were early in the Party Phase, but the needle on the plot cycle was moving pretty quickly.
“Not a bite,” Antoine said as he reeled in a shiny tackle that was ant to look like an injured fish of so kind.
“Well, we can’t have that,” Antoine said to the cara. “Looks like we’re going for catfish.”
He switched poles to the one rigged to catch catfish and did his best to apply stink bait. I didn’t know how much of it was his own knowledge or stuff that he had read about in the very convenient trade magazine, which had a very useful quick-start guide for new fishern.
The stink bait didn’t work at first, either.
We went Off-Screen and On-Screen trying to get footage, but in the first couple of hours, Antoine only managed to snag three fish, none of which were very big.
When we were Off-Screen, I looked over at the poles and said, “I wonder which stat fishing scales off of.”
He looked at , understanding what I was trying to say, and rolled his eyes.
“Please don’t say it’s Savvy,” he said as he handed the pole.
It turned out to indeed be Savvy. Catching fish was essentially a trap, and that was sothing Savvy was good at, though we soon learned through trial and error that bringing in the fish required a combination of Hustle and ttle. So we had to work together. I had the Savvy and higher Hustle, whereas he had all the strength.
I made sure to never get footage of our attempts, but eventually we got the hang of it, and I managed to get so good footage of Antoine reeling in so huge channel catfish.
We went back to trying the lures designed to catch largemouth bass, but as Camden had said, those were nowhere to be found.
The way the tournant worked was that there was a prize for the biggest fish and a prize for the heaviest total weight of your five biggest fish.
We were definitely going to be contenders for both.
As the three o’clock deadline rolled in, we decided to get back early to get more footage of the boats coming in and made our way to the docks.
Checking in was relatively simple, and so was getting our fish weighed. The NPCs did it without asking because we were Off-Screen. Whatever the story was about had nothing to do with how heavy our fish were.
Luckily, Carousel didn’t make go through with the gimmick of filming everything On-Screen as it had back in Post-Traumatic. By the ti we got back to the docks, the normal On-Screen/Off-Screen system and its invisible caras had kicked in, capturing everything that was going on.
I still got footage of the boats coming back and the fish being weighed, but at the end of the day, most of what I accomplished was busy work. Carousel didn’t seem interested.
Not until the three o’clock deadline arrived and the boats really started pulling in. There was a fifteen-minute grace period, and I fild the entire ti while Antoine gave comntary behind , comnting on the boats and the fish being brought ashore.
We were the second boat to get in, and after us, ten more ca to et the three o’clock deadline. Five more ca after that within the grace period.
Nine boats remained out on the lake.
Dexter, the officiant of the tournant, was making jokes over the loudspeaker, which had been fixed so his voice could be heard. He was talking about how an awful lot of people must have had an embarrassing haul and just decided to duck out.
That led to nothing but nervous laughter from the crowd.
We fild as people went from cheering for the returning boats to silently waiting to being terribly worried as ti wore on.
Cassie made her first appearance, and she was On-Screen, talking to Anna, saying sothing that disturbed her.
Anna was panicking because her father’s boat was one of those that hadn’t returned yet.
And as we waited for the remaining boats, First Blood struck.
The five players looked around at each other, locking eye contact from our places throughout the crowd. We understood the ga that was afoot.
In the inaugural fishing tournant, which reopened the forrly polluted Carousel Basin Lake, twenty-six boats set out in the morning hours, and by afternoon, only seventeen returned.
What happened to the boats and to the people aboard them was a mystery. And we were tasked to solve it.
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