Chapter 479: Chapter 479

We tried to do one of those scenes where everyone in the heist gets together, and we learn what everyone is good at. The kind where the audience meets the hacker, the hitter, the face man, stuff like that, but Carousel didn't go for it.

As best I could tell, Nicole's Written by the Victors trope gave everyone a little bit more prominence than they deserved, so the heist that we were working on was probably originally more of a low-rent break-in, but because all of our characters were inflated, it seemed like an ensemble piece. Simply put: everyone had already been introduced.

It was no problem. We could adapt on the fly.

The next time Carousel let us be On-Screen, the party phase was over halfway done, and it was time to get this story moving forward. We were loaded inside of Molly's van, which she had stolen from a furniture store.

Bobby was leaning in the passenger side window, talking to me.

"You sure you don't need one more set of hands on the inside?" he asked.

We were all a bit afraid of being Written Off, and Bobby’s character lifted right out.

"What is it about this one? Most of the time, you only show your face to get paid," I said with a grin.

"Come on, man, it's a safe, a vault, a mobster's vault," he said. "How am I supposed to stay away?"

"I see how it is, Geraldo," I said. "You want to see inside the vault? Okay, hop in. But remember, I'm in charge. If I tell you to cut and run, you run. I can't have all those poor animals rotting in their cages on my conscience."

Bobby laughed and opened the back door to make his way inside.

"Wait," Molly said. "Are we the animals in that metaphor?"

Both Bobby and I laughed.

"I'm a veterinarian by trade," Bobby said. "He seems to think that all I do all day is take care of snakes and cockatoos."

Molly shrugged. She put the van in gear and pulled us out onto the road.

We were still On-Screen, so I pulled out my wallet and grabbed something that I'd found in there in the many hours that we tried to create additional scenes for our heist. It was a newspaper article with the title ROBBER SHOT, KILLED IN ATTEMPTED JEWEL HEIST.

My character's journals revealed that I once had a partner in crime named Marcus. During a heist, a nearby building caught fire, prompting me to call everything off due to the increased police presence. However, Marcus stayed behind, determined to finish the score, and was eventually caught by a passing beat cop because of the fire.

My character was very upset about it. We all had little story elements like that, and since Carousel wasn't teasing me about my dead parents, I decided to go along with it.

Dina was in the back seat. She looked up at me, saw that I was looking at the article again, and gave me a reassuring nod.

"This one's going to go smooth," she said. "Nothing to worry about."

It didn't take Molly that long to get us back to the house for the final time. As we pulled up the street, we were Off-Screen, going over some last-minute notes for how we were going to introduce the final member of our crew. We had those pre-home invasion jitters you hear about.

"So, how are we getting past the security system?" Dina asked. "I feel it's weird that I have to keep asking. I know Molly isn't going to do it."

I didn’t answer. I only smiled.

"I could do it," Molly said.

"So how are you hacking it?" Dina continued. "Because I'm not ready. You didn't give me any prep time."

"Wait, you don't know how you're cutting the alarms?" Camden asked, trying to be the concerned client. "If you were having trouble, I could have put together some ideas. I've installed systems before, you know, for certain clients that expect a little extra. Tell me we aren't doing this all on the fly."

"We aren't doing this all on the fly," I said. "My guy's waiting for us there."

Molly pulled the rest of the way toward the gate. A figure stood in front of it, waiting for us in a dark coat.

"Who'd you get? Is it Robson?" Dina asked. "Tell me it wasn't Speckle or whatever his dumb name was."

"I told you," Molly said. "I can do it. I'm great with security systems. I know everything there is to know."

“Sure you do, Molly,” Dina said.

As Molly turned toward the driveway, her headlights shone bright on the figure standing in front of them.

"Who is that?" Dina asked.

"Just watch," I said.

In front of us, Nicole—the dark figure—took her hood off and then walked over to the keypad that could open the gate. She was holding a small flashlight.

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"Oh, get out," Dina said. "It's the realtor."

Nicole typed in the code, and the gates swung open. She then waved the flashlight, letting us know to move forward.

Molly moved the van up toward the courtyard but didn't quite park next to the house yet. There was still the security system to turn off, and we were pretending that we were in a blind spot or something like that.

Dina opened up her door but didn't get out.

"So what, you’re in deep cover as a real estate agent?" she asked as Nicole walked up the drive toward us.

"Listing agent, in fact," Nicole said. "Wait here. I'll have the security system shut down momentarily."

Nicole walked past us, around to the front door, where she fumbled with the lockbox that real estate agents kept a shared key inside for a moment. Once she got the key, she unlocked the front door. Then she went inside, typed in the security code, and came back out, waving us in.

"She gets a whole cut just for that?" Dina asked.

"Were you hoping we'd rappel down from the roof and dodge the laser grid?" I asked.

"That's what I would've done," Molly said.

"No," Dina said. "I knew it was going to be something. How did you even approach her with this? Does she need to be here? If you had asked me to, I could've bypassed the system without risking letting a civilian in on the job."

"She's not a civilian," I said. "She's who we needed."

“For a four-digit code?” Dina asked. “All of our shares are getting cut for that?”

“No,” Nicole said once we had walked over closer to her. “I did far more than type in a four-digit code.”

“It was eight digits,” Molly said, looking up at the house. “System .”

Molly had a funny delivery that made even little lines like that tempt a smile.

“I had to convince the executor of the estate that his brokerage was cheating him so he'd switch to mine and let me list it myself, all last minute,” Nicole said, “which was wonderful, because I did it just in time to swap out the home inspector with my guy, who'll look the other way for a few bucks, because any decent inspector would realize the building didn't line up with the plans even if the feds didn't.”

For a woman who usually wore sweatpants, Nicole had an intimidating presence when she wanted to.

Dina shrugged. “Okay, that makes sense,” she started to say.

“I then had to convince the executor to delay the auction so we'd have a window to enter the place. And I had to convince him to force Bellanti's nephew out of the guesthouse, which he'd been living in since the property was freed up, because Riley thought maybe the man might get suspicious of us hauling things out of the property at night. And finally, I got my hands on the eight-digit code to disable the security system. That's how I earned my share. What are you doing here again?”

“I'm cracking the safe,” Dina said.

“Good,” Nicole said. “Let's move on to that.”

She and the others walked into the house, leaving Dina and me behind.

“I told you I got somebody,” I said. “Somebody good.”

“Yeah, maybe,” Dina said.

We hoped that that would be a funny sequence. Nicole had been cast as the real estate agent for the property, and as far as we could tell, she didn't have any other connection to the rest of us. She might have been supposed to interrupt the heist later.

We weren't satisfied with that.

According to Nicole, that was a common side effect of her Written by the Victors trope, which would cast you in a role that fit you very well, even if it didn't fit the story. It was possible that red wood, as a storyline, didn't actually have a good role for a Socialite, but because of her trope, she got the best one available instead of just being cast as some random thief.

The problem was that once the story got going, any player whose subplot wasn't directly related to the direction the story took risked getting Written Off. The benefits were great, but we had to be cautious about that sort of thing, so we found a way to include her more directly.

I also thought it was kind of anticlimactic in a funny way that our way of breaking into the house was getting the realtor to do it.

Whatever the case, once we were inside, we were in, and it was time to get to work. We stayed On-Screen as we walked into the main room, which had largely been cleared out due to the property auction, all except for some things that Nicole ensured never made it to the auction table.

Various occult items and books, which we might need to help unravel the story. She was very resourceful in that way. Most of those items that she had reserved were lying out in boxes near the stairwell.

Molly, in an effort to be funny, started going through those boxes.

“You know, I have someone who could help us fence some of this if you're interested. This weird magic hokum stuff is actually a lot more valuable than you might think and untraceable.”

That was Molly's character's whole thing. She was transportation, but she was also going to help us fence anything that we found in the vault.

“Focus,” I said. “Basement first. If things go according to plan, you'll have a lot more valuable things to help us offload than some trinkets. Is everything set up on your end?”

“I'm good,” Molly said as she dropped one of the objects back into the box, breaking it. “Oops,” she added. “My guy's ready with the boat. We can move anything valuable overseas by sunrise. Well, it'll be on its way overseas by sunrise, you understand.”

That concluded the role call. Phew.

Camden led us to the stairs to the basement and then brought us down.

He was going purely from a sketch that his character had made to find the safe, but because of his Photographic Memory trope, he was literally just staring at it as he walked forward.

“It's this way,” he said. “The vault should be along the outer wall. He wanted privacy more than structural sense. In fact, we had to dig out the foundation the first time just to get things to his liking.”

He led us down a path into the dense maze of wooden hallways toward the back. It was true what Dina had said earlier; even if you had some sort of X-ray machine, it would take a weekend at least to scan everything, trying to find the vault. It was a very big place.

As we walked along, lit only by flashlights, the unease that we felt every time we'd come came back with a force, but we forced ourselves to ignore it as best we could.

“This place is even creepier at night,” Dina said.

She was right. In the shadows, the dark parts of the wood looked like blood, but then when I shone my flashlight on it, it was just wood.

Camden moved us to the area and signaled to me that we were in the right place.

“Show me where you had it framed in,” I said.

Camden walked to the wall and knocked hard. He had a confused look on his face.

“It's behind here,” he said, “but this—” he pointed to a wall that intersected with the outer wall “—this isn't how it should look. Someone divided the room in half here, which would've pinched the hinges. There's no way it could open.”

“So we need to do a slight amount of demo,” I said. “Take out this wall here.”

“Yes,” Camden said. “Should be pretty simple.”

And it was simple. We worked On-Screen with pry bars, pulling the large, ancient-looking boards apart and tossing them in a stack, clearing the way for the entrance of the vault. Then we started peeling very similar boards off the outer wall, and once we'd gotten through a layer or two of them, we struck paydirt.

Camden walked over to the newly exposed part of the outer wall, dinged his knuckles against a metal surface: the outer door of the vault.

We all cheered. Our characters would be happy, but something we hadn't acknowledged verbally was that while we were moving the wood, a fine spray of dust was slowly falling from the ceiling from all the commotion.

Even after we'd finished uncovering the vault door, the dust continued to fall.

When we were finally done, we noticed a noise, just a creaking noise like an old house on a windy night. The dust continued to fall in a fine layer; nothing to panic about.

After we silently celebrated finding the vault, and Dina started getting to work unlocking it, I heard a faint rumble up above.

Everyone did, and we were all acting like it was the strangest thing. Maybe it was out of character to do so, but it was difficult, because on the red wallpaper, the needle of the plot cycle had moved to First Blood.

But as we looked around the room, all six of us were still present.

So whatever was happening upstairs was enough for the audience to realize the threat. We, however, were none the wiser.