Eye Opener

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 67: Disruption

I could tell Benji wanted to drop a bombshell on us.

It half worked. Lena stared at him. I shook my head, though.

"I did wonder if that was what Omar was up to," I said, "but the timing doesn't work out."

"You sure about that, bro?"

I had been, until I saw the look on Benji's face. "I thought it must all tie together. Omar closed down his weird VR amusement park in the middle of tourist season, but he kept all his staff. Couple months later, and he seems to have far more Third Eye resources than anyone else, and he's offering the vacant park up for this tournament. Crazy suspicious, right?"

Benji nodded.

"Except," I said, "he closed the park in December. Before the beta started."

"When did you find out you'd gotten ripped off, Ben?" Lena asked. Either somewhere in the haze of the last night and day, I'd remembered to tell her he wanted to be called that, or she'd picked up on the change in how I addressed him.

He scowled at her phrasing anyway. "I started sweating in December, yeah. Didn't know for sure until later."

Lena cocked her head. "How exactly did you find out?"

He ran his hand along the Sonata's armrest and opened the door. "Let's walk while we talk. You've got scouting to do, right?"

We both knew he was putting off the answer.

He wasn't wrong, though.

We got out, I loaded Bernie into his sling on Lena's back, and we looked up. The rest area where Benji had pulled off extended a dozen feet from the road. The only indication it was more than a wide shoulder was a sign, dry and worn, near a trail of compacted dirt that led steeply up into the foothills.

Lena pointed her phone at it, then looked over the top. "Oh, that's a real sign?"

Benji nodded. "Mt. Glennon. It's not much of a park, so I figured maybe nobody else would scout here."

"You figured right," I said.

Lena and I both focused our phones on a rock formation that only existed in Third Eye. It blended in better with the surroundings than the weird mounds we'd seen south of Denver. As long as we switched between our phones and the naked eye, though, we shouldn't have too much trouble scouting. Our phones flashed as I collected it. Three Stone, one Wood. I supposed the latter accounted for the moss.

"Can you turn that flash off?" Benji asked.

"I wish," Lena said. "I'm not saying it's the worst thing about Third Eye, because those're the parts where we're scared for our lives. This comes right after, though."

"So weird." Benji shook his head. He made for the path and grunted as he started up.

Compared to the Rueter-Hess Incline, this seemed like much rougher going. Wilder. No signs telling us where we couldn't or shouldn't go.

Which left us free to roam. As we began our ascent, we soon saw the value in that. Even more than the day before, Materials and XP started to flow in. The reason we were out here, or distractions? They could be both.

After twenty minutes of hard, uphill hiking, in which Benji stuck to the patchy approximation of a trail and Lena and I rushed around grabbing Materials, Benji sank onto a seat-high rock and held up his hand.

We joined him, but didn't bother to sit.

He sucked down a breath. "You really don't get tired, huh?"

"I know, it's crazy," I said.

"I go to the gym every couple of months," he said, "go hiking every summer, and this is what I get. I should've spent all my time playing video games after all."

Lena grinned. "Of course!"

Benji chuckled, briefly.

A rare cloud passed over us. It seemed to match the change in Benji's mood. "Okay, so. First some background."

We blinked at him.

"I found out about Odyssey Futures from listening to Omar's podcast." He watched our faces for the hint of an eye roll and wasn't disappointed. He scowled. "Say what you want, but I got a lot out of it. The dude's an expert at selling himself, obviously, but that wasn't the focus of the pod. Good vibes. Energetic, optimistic. Not afraid to get weird. Honestly, even you two might've enjoyed it."

I kept my opinion to myself.

Lena nodded, though. "I can believe it. When Omar hit me up on Discord, I was actually kind of looking forward to playing with him. Until you told us about the scam, I mean."

"That's how he gets you." Benji sighed. "Change. That was his whole thing, the thing he was interested in."

"Disruption," I said.

Benji shook his head. "I listen – listened – to enough podcasts and TED talks to know all about disruption. It amounts to the same shit, but Omar always insisted it didn't. His favorite saying was, you get enough oars and you can row in whatever direction you want, but it's smarter to use a sail and let the wind work for you."

"The ship in his logo has oars," I said.

"I know it was all bullshit now, Cameron," Benji snapped. "You want me to explain, or you want to spend two days mainlining old podcasts so you understand the vibe?"

"Both," Lena said.

My eyes snapped to her. "You're going to listen to Omar's podcast?"

"Sure," she said. "You should, too. Know thy enemy, yeah?"

"The two of you shouldn't have anything to do with him," Benji said.

"That's not on the table," Lena said.

Benji pinched his nose. "You're seriously still planning on going to this tournament?"

"We got a lot riding on it, Ben," I said. "I told you before, the Third Eye community is paying a ton of attention to it. Lena's got to be there, whether she competes or not, to keep growing her channel."

His head bobbed in something that could have been a nod, or just him breathing hard.

I hesitated. Which was stupid. I forced myself to keep talking. "It's also where we're going to spill the beans about Third Eye being real magic."

Benji closed his eyes. "I don't know whether I think it's crazier that you haven't told anybody yet, or that you're planning to."

I forced a smile. "It can be both."

One of his eyes cracked open. He saw my expression and tried to grin. "I guess that would be the place. You'll have as many eyes on you as you're going to get. Assuming Omar lets you get away with it."

"Why would he stop us?" I said. "From what you're telling us, we'd be doing exactly what he wants. We'll cause a disruption, then he can ride the wave."

"And don't I just hate that." Benji slapped his thighs and dragged himself to his feet. "Let's keep moving."

We continued up the mountain. Twice, the trail seemed to peter out, blocked by a boulder. The first time, I collected it as Stone. The second time, I was astonished to discover it existed IRL. We had to pick our way around.

The route made no sense to me for a public park, but it did take us close to a copse of trees that didn't really exist. Forty three Wood! Absurd. I rejoined Benji on the trail. "So you listened to Omar's podcast. Then what?"

"Sandy and I were looking for ways to jumpstart our investments," Benji said. "We were hoping..."

I could practically hear him grinding his teeth.

My voice softened. "Hoping what, Ben?"

"The money wasn't supposed to just be Mason's college fund," he said. "At this rate, I don't know if that's even going to come up."

For reasons I didn't understand, he looked to Lena.

She'd started smiling when he brought up his son. Until we got Bernie, I'd never seen her more content than the times we'd visited my nephew; Lena seemed like she'd have been happy to push Duplo blocks around with Mason for hours.

Under Benji's gaze, she looked down at herself and brushed at her stockinged knees. "Did I get dirt on me?"

Instead of answering, he said, "Cam told me you did a weird path through school?"

"The weirdest," she said. "Montessori when I was little. Half a crappy year of public high school, then my parents pulled me out and homeschooled me the rest of the way."

"And that worked out for you?" Benji asked.

Lena spread her arms and did a little twirl.

Benji sighed.

She hooked her finger through a ringlet of her hair. "I'm happy where I ended up, at least. You're thinking about something like that for Mason? If I can help, let me know, okay?"

"We were," Benji said. "He's... struggling. It's hard for Sandy and I to understand, 'cause at home he's always such a bright and curious kid. But we get him in a classroom and he just... can't. Can't concentrate, can't remember anything, gets frustrated, gets disruptive."

Techbros can't get enough of disruption. Teachers, not so much.

"Shit," I said. "I had no idea."

"We didn't exactly blast the news on our socials, Cam. You think Mom and Dad would be happy to hear it?"

"Of course not." I thought about their disappointment with me, first at my choosing an unconventional route, then at my, from their perspective – and let's face it, from mine – screwing it up.

But that was me, the fuckup. I got some passive aggression from Mom and not much of anything from Dad, but they could only be so disappointed when they hadn't expected much to begin with.

Benji was the golden child. Mason, the adorable heir apparent.

My parents weren't monsters. They wouldn't blame a little kid for not excelling at school. But they were, quite frankly, kinda assholes. They would totally blame his dad.

"What was your plan?" I asked.

Benji stared off into the thin blue air. It refused to give him another cloud to match his mood. He muttered, "If we could get ahead on our finances, not just investing for the future, but short-term gains, too, we'd have options. We could look into expensive private schools. If the money really came in, Sandy was even talking about quitting and trying the homeschool thing."

"And you sold her on Odyssey Futures as a way to make that happen," I said.

"Sold hard," he said. "It started off so goddamn well. Number goes up! This summer, we paid for a whole vacation off pure gains. That's when I started roping the rest of the family in."

"And it kept going well?" I asked.

He nodded. "Right up to December. Based on where the markets were at, I could've pulled out an entire year of Sandy's salary and we'd have still had plenty ticking up. That was gonna be her Christmas present."

He fell silent.

Lena collected a Third Eye sign, almost without looking at it. Two Iron. Over her shoulder, she asked, "And instead?"

"I tried to sell some of my coin," Benji said. "Got a message saying, 'Due to temporary market volatility, we've put a stay on short-term sales for the protection of our customers.'"

"If it was temporary," Lena said, "couldn't you have just waited it out?"

"'If,'" Benji repeated. "When it didn't change, I put in an emergency sell order with customer service. You know what I got?"

We didn't.

"An error message," he spat. "Which I've gotten ever since. Me and everyone else who's tried to cash out."

"Even if it was a temporary measure, it would still be bullshit," I said. "A volatile market is exactly when people might want to sell, either so they could get into something safer or so they could buy back in at a lower price."

Benji raised an eyebrow.

I flushed. "That's right, isn't it?"

"Yeah," he said. "I didn't think you were interested in finance."

"I'm not interested in finance, but I'm as interested in money as only a person who doesn't have much can be. Lena and I do a really small-scale version of market trading with the stuff we buy and sell on eBay."

"Cool." He picked his way around another boulder.

We followed. The other side offered more, harsher slopes, and more, richer deposits of Materials. Nothing that looked like a Reactant yet, but maybe when we got near the peak, we could get more Air?

For now, we swept our phones over all the Third Eye objects, racking up XP.

"If all this happened in December," I asked, "how come you think it's connected to Third Eye?"

"First, because of Omar's podcast. Late last year, starting, like, September, he got really hyped about something he wouldn't share the details of. He kept telling everybody to 'keep their powder dry,' because the next change that was coming was going to be bigger than anybody could imagine."

"I looked at the Kickstarter," I said. "There was nothing about Early Access for somebody who backed at the First Circle level."

"You think I don't know that?" Benji shook his head. "I looked it up, too."

"What was the second thing?" Lena asked. "You said the first was the podcast."

"The Kickstarter," he said.

We stared.

He smirked. "All you checked was backer rewards, yeah?"

I nodded.

"I looked up the backers themselves," he said. "Only four people went in at that top level. Three of them had their usernames listed in the special thanks. And those three? They all started acting screwy last September."

I wanted to zip to the site and check what Benji was saying. I also wanted to kick myself for not thinking to do so before.

"Screwy how?" Lena asked.

"I've told you about Omar," Benji said. "The second one was an influencer. Streamer. Kinda funny, what with how you've done well for yourself, but instead of showing off Third Eye, he said he was going on vacation in September. Hasn't streamed since, which you know is death in that business. The last one was a telecom engineer in Mexico. She quit her job and her Twitter feed was a bunch of responses to people insisting she'd found a great opportunity, but her LinkedIn hasn't updated with anything."

Not definitive proof, but it would be a damned weird coincidence. I said, "Nice detective work."

For some reason, that put a scowl on Benji's face. "I literally just did a search on their usernames, Cameron."

I scratched the back of my neck.

Lena nudged her way between us. "There's just one thing I don't get."

Benji shifted.

"You found out about your investments being frozen in December, right?" Lena pressed on before he even had time to nod. "And that's what you and Sandy had a fight about? So how come you didn't come stay with us until February?"

Benji turned away. He put his hands on a boulder to prop himself up and tapped his forehead against it. "That's where the loan came in."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 68: Double Down

"That's where the loan came in?" I stared at Benji. "I thought you told me it was to leverage your investment."

"You told yourself that," he said. His voice dropped to a mumble. "I let you."

"Oh." I tried to process this. Failed. As in so many regards, his software and my operating system were incompatible.

Instead of coming up with something useful to say, I trudged further up the slope.

If Lena hadn't continued to point out the Materials we passed, I'd have stopped focusing on them. As it was, my rising XP totals proved that Third Eye was tracking our camera movements more than our state of mind. I collected my half and patted her arm in thanks.

She seemed to be handling the news better than me. I supposed they weren't her relatives. That felt like a cruel thing to think, even if it was true.

We kept moving. I took deep breaths. The air was thinner up here but it smelled clean, crisp, and piney. I wondered if I would've been allergic to the pines if not for Third Eye; I knew Lena and I would have been gasping for breath.

Benji wasn't, quite, but when we came to a reasonably level stretch of trail, he paused by one of the rocks.

I prowled around the edge, grabbing more Stone. Failing to process. Failing to engage.

He said, "Spit it out, bro."

I swallowed. "You took out a loan to pretend you could withdraw money from the crypto market you'd persuaded everybody in our family to invest in."

If he could've denied it, he wouldn't have let me keep talking.

Unfortunately, I kept talking. "And you did this to convince your wife that... what?"

"That we would be okay if she quit her job."

I nodded because I didn't know what else to do. "Did she?"

"She gave her notice," Benji said. "Now that she's found out what went down – what I pulled – she's trying to walk it back."

"The fact you say 'trying' sounds pretty bad."

"Sandy was having problems at work already. She hasn't gotten a raise in three years, she doesn't get along with her boss, her company is shrinking its headcount. When we were deciding which of us would quit if one of us could, it was pretty freaking obvious. Going back..." He shook his head. "It doesn't look great."

Which meant their household income had been slashed at the same time their savings were rendered inaccessible.

And –

I asked, "What kind of loan?"

"Second mortgage."

"So if you can't get the money back, and Sandy can't get her job back, you might lose your house, too?"

"Lots of people have second mortgages, Cameron."

"Is that a no?"

"Yes!" He ran his hands through his hair. He kept his cut shorter than me. It didn't droop into dorky bangs; the flipside was that his fingers couldn't shape it into the cool upswept bangs Third Eye gave my avatar. "I mean, no. I can make the payments for now."

I swallowed. "How long is 'for now?'"

"I don't know," Benji snapped. "It was temporary! I thought I was just dealing with a server error and I'd be able to pull the money the week after Christmas. Then we could just use the mortgage money to put up solar panels or some shit, like normal people."

"Which," Lena said, "is still what's going to happen."

We both looked up at her. She'd pulled ahead of us while we talked and had scaled the rock we were idling near. With the morning sun streaming down on her, she almost looked ablaze with no need for a Third Eye filter.

"You and everybody else Omar screwed over are getting a lawsuit together, yeah?" she said.

"It's an open and shut case," Benji said. "The only way the bastard could get any more obvious about ripping us off is if he actually pays out prize money when he's sitting on all our investments. It's just..."

"That only helps if Omar's still got the money," I said.

"If he blew it on some crazy Third Eye scheme and there's just nothing to recoup, we won't get shit." Benji looked skyward. It didn't seem like a long way to look, up here. "Or if the scheme's not crazy. That's what I was trying to figure out earlier. How do you arraign a dude who can teleport?"

"Take away his phone?" I spread my hands. "We don't know if teleportation is possible. I'm not even sure Albie could place herself above the law, much less a regular player."

"So we can probably sue him and get access to our accounts again." Benji sighed. "That's no guarantee. I'm not completely stupid. Crypto markets are volatile. Right now, the shit in my portfolio is way up from what I bought in at, but if the suit drags on for two years, it could be worth millions or it could be worthless."

"Plus, you know," I said. "Two years."

He nodded miserably.

Lena put her hands on her hips. "Why are you piling on, Cam?"

Benji shook his head. He looked to me. "You want to take this one, or should I?"

I tapped my chest. "I'm not piling on, Lena. I promise. This isn't a roast, it's a rehearsal."

"I've got to talk to Sandy about this," Benji said. "You better believe she's thought it through a lot more than you have. I lied to her, embarrassed her, and put our family at risk in all kinds of ways."

Lena clenched her fists. "But you did it to help Mason."

"It was something to try," Benji said. "Sandy was gonna take the second semester and try to tutor him, take him back and forth, keep a closer eye. If that didn't help we'd figure out our next move in the summer."

"But it will," Lena said. "It's gotta."

"Not with all this shit hanging over us." His hands dropped to his sides. "Right reasons, wrong call."

"Right reasons." She practically snarled it. "Full stop."

He flinched.

It's within the realm of possibility that he wasn't the only one.

Not, or not just, because of what she'd said or how she said it. The force of her belief was startling. Magnificent, if I let it be.

I couldn't afford to.

I understood how Lena thought about this. I saw no way for her way of thinking to lead to a sensible course of action.

There was the part I sympathized with. Honestly, the part I envied. Lena had inherited from her parents a very simple decision-making matrix when it came to kids. Responsibilities, practicalities, your own limits? Did. Not. Matter. Whatever helped your kids, you did it. As she'd put it, full stop.

It was wonderful, frustrating, admirable, terrifying.

And the part I didn't. Lena loved a harebrained scheme. If she had something she wanted or believed in and saw a shortcut to get there, the only question was whether she'd try to smash open an even shorter path instead of taking the one she'd discovered.

If it was just for fun, that could be wonderful, too, but as soon as she tried it on something important it became merely frustrating and terrifying.

If she thought what Benji had done was justified, fair enough.

The problem was that from her point of view, Benji literally hadn't done anything wrong. He'd taken a huge swing for the fences for Mason's sake, and when he'd struck out, he'd tried to fast-talk the pitcher into double or nothing.

I was pretty sure that was how baseball worked. Maybe I'd ask Erin later; she'd probably know.

The important thing was that after he got over Lena's tone, Benji stood up a little straighter than he had been. Which, great, happy for you, bro, but this was not a double down situation. If he went home and told Sandy he'd thought long and hard about it and decided he'd been right all along?

I didn't know what would happen but I knew it wouldn't be pretty.

Lena locked eyes with me. I wasn't looking through a Third Eye filter, but her gaze blazed all the same.

I knew I should shake my head.

Instead, I felt light-headed. We were high enough above sea level, even above city level, to run low on air. Maybe that proved Third Eye didn't protect us against hypoxia, after all.

Maybe I was just a fool.

Lena's eyebrows crept upwards. Her hands remained balled on her hips. Her lips started to curl. Her eyes studied my face for the first hint of surrender.

And goddammit, she got the smile she was looking for.

This was not a double down situation.

For Benji.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 69: Homeward Bound

"If you're wrong about this –"

"Then I'll shlep everything back up to the apartment," I said. "But it won't come to that."

Benji nodded as he turned onto Ceylon Way in Aurora, the sprawling suburb on the east side of Denver. We'd crisscrossed the metro area in the span of a morning.

We hadn't found another Reactant at the peak of Mt. Glennon, but I sure as hell didn't consider it a wasted trip. We'd come by another windfall of XP and Materials, which was great in and of itself.

More importantly, we'd come to a decision.

That was why Benji, Lena, and I were pulling into the driveway of a bilevel house with white siding, green trim, and, at this time of year, a front yard empty of anything except dried grass. It matched most of the houses on the block. They reminded me of the neighborhoods in Parker we hadn't stopped to collect from, not quite uniform, but all drawing on the same templates. Despite the multi-floor layout, I thought it looked a little less expensive than Miguel's house, and the location, further from the light rail and the heart of the city, backed that up.

But then, Miguel was only renting. Benji and Sandy owned their home. For a value of "owned" that meant "owed to a bank twice over."

"It has been way too long," Lena said.

I tried to think. We'd only seen Benji's family once or twice since lockdown. Had we been over here even once in that time? I didn't think so. I wondered who had used it as more of an excuse, him to avoid inviting us or me to avoid asking.

"Yeah," he said, a frog in his throat. "It has been."

Somehow, I didn't think he was talking about the span between us coming over.

He parked beside a battered blue minivan. The front door of the house opened as we were getting out of the car.

I knew Benji had called ahead to let Sandy know he was coming. I realized he hadn't mentioned he wasn't coming alone when I saw her wide-eyed expression.

Benji's better half had put on weight since I'd last seen her, and she wore it well. A fringe of straightened black hair framed her round face. One of her eyebrows quirked up as she watched us.

She didn't seem to have too much trouble conjuring a smile, though. When Benji loped up to the doorstep, she embraced him and kissed his cheek. "Welcome home, honey."

He got his voice under control. "Hey, babe. Missed you."

"I bet." She hesitated, then leaned around him to look at us. "Cameron, Lena, hi. I didn't expect you, so I don't have a lunch spread ready or anything."

Lena waved. "Heya, Sandy!"

"That's fine," I said. "Mind if we come in, though?"

"No, not at all."

Mason peeked out of the doorway. He'd grown a few inches since I'd last seen him, and so had his curly hair, which took after his mom's minus the straightening. His eyes widened when he saw all of us, but he said, "Hi Dad."

"Hey Mace." Benji stepped forward to ruffle his son's hair. "You been good for your mom?"

Mason glanced at Sandy, then mirrored her nod.

"Good guy," Benji said. "I figured, so look who agreed to visit."

"Aunt Lena," Mason said. "Uncle Cam."

Did Lena stand up a little straighter at being named first? Yes. Yes she did.

I gave him a thumbs up. "That's right, kiddo."

Lena crouched with her hands on her knees. Her mouth opened wide. "Wait, that's you, Mason? You're getting so big I thought for sure Cam had another brother he hadn't told me about."

"Not that big," Mason mumbled.

"You totally are," Lena said. "See, you're almost as tall as me!"

In her current pose, it was even true. Mason blinked at her, then looked one by one at each of the other adults present, all of whom were a lot taller than Lena. He cracked a little smile and repeated, "Not that big."

She puffed her cheeks out.

Mason laughed.

"I got something for you." Benji produced a Lego box from his coat and handed it over.

Mason gripped it tightly. "Cool!"

Lena studied the box as though she hadn't seen it in the car. "You graduated from Duplo, too?"

"'Course," he said. "That's baby stuff."

Lena sighed theatrically. "Everybody leaves me behind."

Benji glanced at Sandy. I couldn't see her expression, but I could watch his tiny raised eyebrow, his microscopic nod. "Why don't you show your aunt how to put that together, Mace?"

"Can I?" he asked. "Right now?"

"Sure. Your mom and I have got a couple things to talk about, anyway."

Mason's head bobbed. He dashed into the house, and Lena followed. The last thing I heard as they disappeared down the stairs was her whispering, "Do you like dragons?"

I missed out on Mason's answer, but I was willing to bet that whatever he said now, it would be a "yes" by the time we left. I smiled after them.

"You can go with them, if you want," Sandy said.

I dragged my eyes away from the stairs. "Actually, I can't."

She searched my face; whatever she found there, she didn't betray it in her own expression. Finally, she gave the faintest hint of a shrug and marched upstairs.

Benji and I followed her to the kitchen.

"Help yourself if you want a snack or something to drink, Cameron," Sandy said.

I shook my head. "I'm good, thanks."

She sat down at the table.

It was round, with three chairs set out, although it had room to accommodate more. Because of the arrangement, we ended up spaced equidistant from each other, rather than two of us on one side of a counter and the third on the other. Instantly, it created a different vibe from what it would've been at my and Lena's apartment. More companionable than confrontational.

I hoped it would last.

Benji and I sat.

"Sandy," he began.

She shook her head curtly. "Before you start, Ben, I have to ask. Why are you and Lena here, Cam?"

I glanced toward the stairway. "Lena is here because she had an excuse to see Mason."

Sandy cracked a smile. "Good taste. And you?"

I ran my hands through my hair. I'd actually bothered to sweep it up in the style Third Eye gave me. I felt like I needed to look my best for this. "I'm here because there's something I need to tell you. And probably show you."

So much for her smile. "I don't know how much Ben has explained –"

"Pretty much everything," he said.

Her eyes flickered to him. Her frown deepened. To me, but without looking at me, she said, "Then I'm sure you understand why I feel like I have better things to talk about than whatever it is you're up to these days?"

"Bizarrely," I said, "what I'm 'up to' is relevant."

"This, I've gotta hear." She leaned back in her chair.

"Before you start, Cam," Benji said, "I've just got to say that I'm sorry."

"You said that over the phone often enough." Sandy looked away.

"Still true," Benji said.

"Okay." Sandy worried her lip. "It's not that you're sorry I need to know, it's why."

He swallowed. "For lying to you. I should've told you the money was tied up."

She nodded. "Yeah."

"How's Mason doing?"

"Missing his dad," Sandy said. She sighed. "Better, I'd say. He's not getting as upset, and his homework is going great. He's still having trouble during the actual school hours. I'm sure me stressing hasn't helped, though I'm trying to keep a lid on it."

I shifted on my chair. Would what I had to say actually make Sandy less stressed?

Regardless, it was too late to back out now. Both she and Benji were staring at me.

I swallowed. "My turn?"

"I think it's got to be," Sandy said. "If only so the curiosity stops killing me."

"Makes sense," I said.

When I didn't immediately start talking, Benji reached around the table and pressed his fist into my shoulder.

It felt a little too much like something he'd done to annoy me when we were kids. I dodged away. Still, my desire to stop him from pestering me did what my resolve couldn't. I started talking.

I said, "Lena and I came over because we're mixed up in this, too."

Sandy's eyebrows raised. She didn't say anything, but looked to Benji. Wondering where we'd gotten enough money to get ripped off in the first place, I supposed.

"Not because we invested with Odyssey Futures," I said. "Because we're playing the same game that Omar Jeffries is."

Sandy's eyes narrowed. "The game where you steal people's hard-earned money?"

I shook my head. "The game that he saw so much potential in, he decided it was worth burning all his bridges to maximize his progression in it."

Sandy pursed her lips. "You know this for a fact? Because no offense, guys, but that sounds... completely absurd."

"No," I said. "There's an awful lot of circumstantial evidence, but we don't have proof. Yet. Benji, Lena, and I hashed it out. I've got the details written up in a document on his laptop. You can read it later."

"I'm still not super happy about having a digital record of this crap," Benji said. "My laptop is secured for work, though, so it's about as safe as it gets."

Sandy looked back and forth between us. "What you wrote up is so explosive you don't even want a record of it? I thought you said you were talking about a game."

"It's... kind of a weird game," Benji said. As understatements went, I'd probably made that same one.

"I don't care how weird it is." She glared at us. "How could it possibly be worth all this nonsense? More to the point, how could somebody who was at least good enough at grifting idiots to make a lot of money possibly think it was worth risking his money, his business, and God willing even jail time, over a game?"

"I think it would be easier," I said, "if I showed you."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 70: Demonstrative

Back at my and Lena's apartment, we'd deployed a whole range of tests/demonstrations. Those required either Fire or props I didn't want to carry around, not least because bringing my own made the results less convincing.

We'd worked out something a little more portable.

"This is going to sound weird," I said.

Sandy arched an eyebrow. "You don't say."

I chuckled. "Even weirder. Still, it's better if you do it. Then you'll know I didn't stage it somehow."

She folded her arms. I thought her patience was tremendous, even if it didn't extend to disguising itself.

I stood up, more because it seemed rude to ask someone else to rise – in her own home, no less – than because I needed full mobility to perform the demonstration. "Can you fold, say, five napkins on the counter for me? It doesn't matter how, but they need to stand up."

"Like little pyramids," Benji said. Which, I had to admit, was probably a better explanation than I'd given.

"Napkins," Sandy said. "And this is going to explain to me why a scammer decided to withhold our money?"

I dipped my head. "I promise."

She pushed back from the table, looking at Benji the whole time.

He nodded.

She sighed, stood up, and grabbed a handful of napkins from a quaint wooden holder shaped like a rooster. Her first attempt at a pyramid collapsed, but she set up the remaining four. They looked sturdy.

"Now I step back, or what?" she asked.

"Actually," I said, "why don't you stay there. It might help the demonstration."

She leaned against the cabinet. "Fine."

I took out my phone, opened the Third Eye app, and manifested Plastic with Air. A bit of a shame, that. Plastic was the Material I had by far the least of, and it also seemed to be the toughest to resupply outside of town. Couldn't be helped, though. I needed its precision control for this demonstration.

Sandy frowned more deeply, so I suspected she'd felt a gust of wind. She finally looked from Benji to me.

Which wasn't quite where I wanted her attention. "Watch the napkins, please."

She shook her head, but did so.

As carefully as I could, I knocked the first of the four over.

"What the –" She shook her head. "I don't know how or why you've decided to do a magic trick right now, Cameron. It's something to do with the way you move your hand?"

I couldn't help it. I grinned. "I mean, you're not wrong. Are you watching closely?"

"Sure. Let's get this over with." She put her hands on her hips. "Then you can explain how you did it and why I should care."

"That's the plan." I flicked the next napkin in line off the counter entirely, then, while the next wobbled from the air moving past it, scooped it up and tossed it toward Sandy like a shitty paper airplane. Extremely shitty; it wasn't aerodynamic enough to do more than flutter in the air for a second before it drifted to her feet.

Still, that was a lot to accomplish by moving my hand from halfway across the room. Sandy kept frowning, but her eyes had started to widen. She swallowed, hard.

Time for the piece de resistance.

I swept my Plastic around to knock the final napkin off the counter. Instead of letting it fall, though, I wrapped it up and held it.

In midair, in front of Sandy's face.

Her straightened hair blew in the updraft.

She stared at the napkin. Abruptly, way too late to have done anything about it if she'd had any reason to, she swatted at it. Her hand knocked the napkin and my Plastic toward the floor –

But not all the way. I raised the napkin back up and danced it back and forth in the air.

Sandy touched her hair, feeling the wind as it obeyed my command.

"What do you think, Ben?" I asked. "Is that enough of a demonstration?"

"Nope," he said.

I glanced at him. His grin looked downright wolfish. I wondered when he'd last seen Sandy so astonished, but didn't have to wonder if he enjoyed the view.

"Personally," I said, "I prefer a little ambiguity. But if you insist..."

With tight, precise gestures, I crumpled the napkin into a ball in front of Sandy. With sharp chops, I bounced it around the kitchen. With a final crook of my fingers, I shot it back across and into my waiting hand.

Then, for good measure, I "tossed" it into the wastebasket and scooped the other four up to join it.

Sandy's mouth worked, but no words spilled out.

Benji stood up and strode to her side. When her hands stretched out, his were there to clasp them.

"What..." She shook her head. "How...?"

"You think that's dramatic?" Benji asked.

She found her voice and it was a hiss. "Cam controlled the wind with his phone! I think that's pretty goddamn dramatic!"

"He showed me by jumping off a three-story balcony," Benji said.

To my surprise, her eyes got even wider. "Can he fly?"

Benji laughed. "Well, little bro? Can you fly?"

"At the time, I was really hoping the answer would be yes." I grinned sheepishly. "I'd like to think I managed to fall with style."

"Guess I won't spoil it for you," Benji said. His voice softened and he turned back to Sandy. He grasped her arms gently. "What he did do was make one of those idiotic superhero landings –" Had I? God. I didn't remember that. I flushed. "– and instead of breaking most of his bones, he sprang up and ran it off like it was nothing."

"How is any of this possible?" Sandy asked.

"Because of Third Eye," I said. "That's the game Lena and I are playing. The game Omar is also playing, and it seems like he's got a couple months head start on us."

"What are you saying?" She gave a harsh shake of her head and tried to push Benji away. Either she didn't put any force into it or he resisted, because he didn't budge. "What is wrong with you guys? Do you think tricking me like this is going to make me forgive you, Ben?"

"It's not a trick," he said.

Her fists clenched. "It has to be!"

"Those were your napkins, Sandy." My voice sounded so calm, it almost unnerved me. It felt like I was listening to myself give a performance on one of Lena's videos. "You set them up. You felt the wind on your face. If I'm tricking you, how am I doing it?"

"But that's..." She slumped.

Benji caught her; she let him. He wrapped her up in his arms and hers snaked around his back.

If we had somehow tricked her, it seemed to me it would've actually been an effective way to get him back in her good graces. Right up until the point where she found out.

Good thing this wasn't a trick.

I hadn't intended it to be quite this scary, though.

Benji had learned about Third Eye by accident, and by the time I'd had a chance to talk to him about it, we'd all had plenty more to worry about.

The last time I'd shown someone intentionally, it'd been a group from the wiki team and all of them had at least harbored suspicions. Zhizhi was the only one who had been taken completely by surprise, and I was starting to realize that she was more flexibly minded than most people.

Plus, she'd recognized from the outset that she would get the story of a lifetime out of it if she played along.

All Sandy stood to gain was a shattered view of the material world.

I decided video presenter was not the right persona to adopt, not that I'd done so intentionally. I ran my fingers through my hair and scratched the back of my neck. "I'm sorry for dropping this on you, but you had to understand what we're dealing with."

"Understand?" She shook her head against Benji's chest. "That's one way of putting it."

I exhaled. "Fair. The truth is, as players, we barely understand it ourselves. We're still focused on figuring out what we can do. Figuring out how it works has to take a backseat."

"How did you walk off the fall Ben talked about?" she asked.

"It's not going to make it sound more plausible," I said, "but we've got HP."

"Hit points," Benji clarified. "Like a life bar in a video game."

"And as long as you have any of those, what?" Sandy asked. "Nothing hurts you?"

My first instinct was to make a pedantic correction. It hurt, it just didn't do any lasting damage. I didn't think that would make Third Eye sound less frightening, though. "Basically, yeah. If there is a limit... well, it's not jumping from a three-story balcony."

She shuddered. "I almost want to ask for a demonstration. On the other hand, I really, really don't."

Benji patted her back. "They can do a lot more than what Cam's showed you. Lena can cook food and even generate a little electricity. And they've got these virtual pets that, well, don't seem that virtual."

"And we're basically just starting out," I said. "What I showed you, it's not quite my limit, but it's pretty close. That's with one unit of Air. Lena has two. The most anyone we know has used is three. Omar is offering five as part of the prize for winning the tournament he's sponsoring. Somehow, I doubt he's giving away more than he's keeping."

"God." Sandy dragged in a deep breath. "It's so much, I half forgot why you brought it up in the first place."

For a wonder, I had the sense to keep my mouth shut and let her process.

After a moment, she slipped her hands around and pressed them against Benji's chest. He let her go so she could straighten up and face me. "If what you're saying is true, you think this Jeffries character is, what? Stealing all of our money so he can buy more power in the game you're playing?"

"Not directly," I said. "There's an in-app store, but it's not open, at least at this point in the beta. I'm not convinced it will work on real money, anyway."

She spread her hands. "What's he doing then?"

"That," I said, "is what Lena and I are going to Florida to find out."

 

[Candlelight]

After all this 'growing up and reconnecting' with Ben and his family, and all the hints that his home life growing up was 'not terrible but not ideal' I kind of wonder if we'll see Cam go see his family and find a realm there. I also wonder when we'll get an explanation on why Cam is so unusually low in HP and MP for his circle, as we've seen others in that circle with health and mp in the hundreds vs his 10. It kind of feels like he was never really meant to make it this far and was supposed to be in an early lowest 1%.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 71: Wizard

I thought that was a pretty good line to end my demonstration on. Still, I wasn't sure how Sandy would take it, especially after she'd seemed so shaken by the demonstration itself.

Not on my bingo card: her bustling over to the table, putting her hands on my shoulders, and pressing me down into my chair.

I sat, more from surprise than anything else.

"No," she said. She clicked her tongue. "Absolutely not."

I blinked. "What?"

"How can you even talk about that? You can't!"

"I just did –"

"Well you shouldn't," she snapped. Her glare shifted to Benji as he joined us at the table. "And you, Ben. How could you encourage him like this?"

He drew back. "Trust me, I don't understand this shit enough to encourage anything."

Sandy pointed her finger, not quite at him, but close enough to his general direction for him to dodge. "You don't have it in your head that Cameron and Lena are going to go down to Florida and get back the money you lost?"

He scratched the back of his neck. "I mean, isn't that the best outcome?"

"Of course not," she said.

Which left both of us staring.

"Would I like that money back?" she asked. "Of course. It's better for us, better for our parents, better for Mason. I don't have to figure out if I can justify staying home, or if I can justify going back to work, or if there's no good answer. It'd be smiles all around."

It sounded like the lead-in to declaring it was, in fact, the best outcome. Somehow, I found the sense not to say as much.

Benji didn't. "Exactly. If they were going already, it's just a bonus –"

"None of that," Sandy said, "is worth sending them into the castle of a God. Damn. Evil wizard."

I started to laugh but the sound got lost somewhere on its way up my throat.

What part of Sandy's description of Omar did I find laughable? There's the joke. Once I thought about it, nothing.

I could quibble that Albie and her brother were the only real wizards (and/or aliens, I added, if only in my head – I'd left that complication out of my description of Third Eye). Omar might have a head start, but he was one of the apprentices, right alongside Lena and I.

But he did have his head start, and if I was right, he also had a small army of employees swarming around South Florida with an eye toward turning it into an insurmountable advantage. If he wasn't a full-fledged wizard yet, he was at least, like, a second level magic-user.

Evil? Well, why not? One of the very first things I'd learned about him was that he was willing to take his investors' money and use it on his personal projects. He was, at minimum, unscrupulous, and not bound by any legal niceties he thought he could get away with ignoring. He might not be building thrones of skulls and plunging the land into darkness. Then again, I didn't actually know he wasn't.

And castles? I thought about the stage hazards that had excited me so much I hoped someone would try to stall a match in the tournament so I could see them trigger. Omar had, or at least claimed to have, some kind of Third Eye-based control over the environment we would be plunging into. It was his compound, staffed by his loyalists, equipped with his VR technology. Pretty good approximation of a castle.

Lena and I had fretted about taking on Mask on the strength of a weird pattern of invasion reports. We'd never proven he'd done something wrong, though, and he'd evidenced at most a little more power than us.

So why did we plan to walk cheerfully into the stronghold of somebody we knew for a fact was, one, a lot more powerful than us and, two, willing to commit actual crimes?

I think Sandy must've seen all that run through my head, because she folded her arms and sat down.

I had the strangest impression she thought she'd mommed me, which was especially weird because I couldn't remember a case of my own mom adopting a tone like that. Her management style, whether for her kids or her subordinates, was to provide clear goals and frown meaningfully until people either achieved them or gave up hope of ever doing so.

Maybe that was why Sandy's approach didn't work on me.

"You're right," I said.

She nodded to herself.

Until I kept talking. "It could be dangerous, and we have to treat it as such. But that's all the more reason we have to go."

She straightened up. "Cam!"

I spread my hands on the table and leaned forward. "I promise I'm not taking this lightly. Maybe more lightly than I should have, yeah, so your reminder was legit really helpful. Thanks."

"You can thank me by staying at least a thousand miles away from Florida."

I shook my head. "That's the thing, Sandy. I couldn't, even if Lena and I didn't already have business we have to finish there. Which we do. Apart from that, we might legit be the only people in the world who can both suss out what Omar is up to and know to try."

Sandy pressed her lips together. "If you were an evil wizard, what would you do with the only two people in the world in position to foil your scheme?"

I scratched my chin. "Probably send an army of skeletons to stab them to death."

She stared at me.

This time, I got all the way through laughing. "We're not that kind of wizards, Sandy. And we're not in a fantasy kingdom where we're the only chosen ones. Long before we set foot in Florida, we will have told other people who can stop Omar. Including one of the Third Eye devs, and if anyone involved is an actual wizard, it's her."

"And will she?"

"Stop him?" The thought of Albie pushing a button to turn Omar's powers off – or, more likely, waving her hand to do it – made me smile. I couldn't picture it, though. He was breaking financial rules, not Third Eye ones. "Not over anything he's done so far, I don't think."

"So after the skeletons get done stabbing you," she said, "somebody qualified can solve the problem?"

"Well, yes." I held my hand up and shook my head, chuckling. "So, Omar has an incentive to try to handle us more diplomatically."

"And what would that look like?" Sandy asked.

I shrugged. "He's not a real evil wizard, he's a techbro who stumbled onto a weird technology and tried to exploit it. His first, second, and final plan will be to try and buy his way out of trouble. He'll try to hire us, and we'll string him along until we know what he's up to."

Sandy shot a glance at Benji.

"I'm not about to defend the bastard," he said, "but I did listen to his podcast for years. I think he found out about a crazy opportunity and decided to throw everything away to try and get on top of it. Not that he's been some kind of Bond villain all along."

"Don't remind me about the podcast, Ben." She rubbed her temples. "This is all so crazy."

"Believe me," I said, "I know. I've been living it for over a month now."

"And it's still a secret?" Sandy asked.

"More or less." I thought of Lena appearing on that woman's camera with her flaming wings. A hoax, as far as mainstream society was concerned. For now. How long before enough incidents piled up that they stopped being dismissed, though? "We do intend to go public with it. We're just waiting to do it until we have enough eyes on us, and enough proof."

"That's one smart move, at least," she said.

In the interests of not disabusing her of that notion, I neglected to mention that we planned to make the reveal at the end of Omar's tournament.

We all settled back into our chairs, stewing in our thoughts.

I felt like I'd made a hash of justifying why Lena and I needed to go to Florida. I hadn't expected it to need justification. Benji had accepted it right away, once we couched it in terms of stopping Omar rather than in terms of playing his game.

It was a very "playing a game" way of looking at things, though, wasn't it? You got powers, somebody's doing something bad with the same powers, so you run off to stop them and expect to be showered with rewards.

If there was a morality mechanic in Third Eye, though, we hadn't encountered it. I thought the game seemed to want to help its players, even if it wasn't always good at it. Past that, neither the game nor the devs had ever expressed an interest in how we used the powers we obtained.

Albie might congratulate us if we foiled Omar's scheme, but only because she liked us or because we'd won at PVP. Not because we were doing something heroic and he was doing something villainous.

Hell. Look at Mask. We thought he was doing something a hell of a lot worse than Omar, and nobody on the wiki team had so much as suggested that the devs might strip him of his powers.

What had I been thinking, dropping all this on Sandy? If anything, I should've worked harder to hide it from Benji. They had plenty to worry about without my tearing down their understanding of reality and substituting one full of evil wizards.

At least I hadn't mentioned the monsters this afternoon. Maybe the conversation could drag on and I'd blurt that out, too.

If the kitchen chair had been plusher, I think I would've found ways to sink deeper into it. It was hardwood, though, so I just sort of ground my back against it.

If the powers Third Eye had granted me included invisibility, I'd have been sorely tempted to disappear.

Instead, the sound of footsteps charging up the stairs snapped me to alertness.

Mason burst into the kitchen. "Mom! Dad!"

They turned to the doorway and I shifted my chair to follow their gaze.

Mason held Bernie up over his head. "Check it out! Aunt Lena's got an actual dragon."

"And a very cute one," Sandy said. I didn't know where she conjured a smile from, but would have liked access to it.

Mason shook his head. "What? Not like this. You can't see him for real unless you look through your phone."

Lena appeared in the doorway behind him. I knew exactly where she conjured her smile from.

I found myself mirroring it.

At least someone had done a good job with her Third Eye reveal. Of course, she'd had Bernie's help.

Sandy glanced at me, then at Lena. Whatever she expected from us, she apparently got, because her smile didn't slip. She waved Mason to the table. "Why don't you and your aunt come on over and show me."

 

[Qoheleth]

TBH Sandy's saying what I was thinking. Anyone going to Omar's event is sorta intrinsically rolling the dice that his head start means he doesn't need XP anymore. Because if he does need XP, the terms of the event as he described them to Lena would give him carte blanche to wait until everyone's in the designated PVP zone and then squish them all under an octuple Earth asteroid or something.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 72: Some Good

I don't know if Lena and I convinced Sandy we were qualified to defeat an evil wizard. But between Bernie jumping around on the table and Ryu pulling faces on any device we let him near, we at least left her, Benji, and Mason with big grins. I was sure they had plenty to talk about, plenty to decide.

I was also sure they'd work it out, though.

On the bus ride home, Lena huddled against me. She rested her head on my shoulder. When I glanced down at her, her lips curled in a contented smile and her eyelids drooped.

I watched her doze for as long as I could, but the RTD route from Aurora back to Englewood asked more of us than just boarding a light rail car. All too soon, I had to nudge her awake so we could switch buses.

She stirred. I felt her wings brush against my back.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Never better," she mumbled. "Tired."

"Did Mason give you any trouble?"

"Yeah, for some reason, he wouldn't let me do all the work on his Lego set. Shocking behavior." She winked. "He's great. I had a great time. It's just been... a lot."

I nodded. A lot of interacting with people outside our home, outside our usual social circle. A lot of turmoil. A lot of surprises.

I rubbed her arm. "You still down with the plan?"

"Gotta be." She gave me a thumbs up.

"You don't have to –"

"I do." She gripped my arm, hard. For a moment I thought she was being serious. Then she added, "If I left everything to you, I'd have to watch you try to fumble your way through sending a Discord message while we rode back."

I snorted. "There's no way I'd get it done before we got home."

An exaggeration. Unfortunately. It would've taken me the better part of the next leg of our journey to get word out to the other members of the wiki team, but we had another bus to change to after that.

Lena, on the other hand, was done tapping out her message before the next bus even pulled into the stop.

Another transfer and one final hop onto Englewood's Art Moves You shuttle later, and we trudged up the steps to our apartment just as the sun began to set. I opened the door and held it while Lena continued tapping at her cracked phone screen.

"What's everybody saying?" I asked.

"Hm?" She shook her head. "I'm not on Discord. I'm just playing with Ryu."

I leaned in to look over her shoulder. "What's the game?"

"Basically, hide and seek," she said. "I figure out which of my apps he's infiltrated and then go in and see what he's done with it."

"So he can manipulate the games on your phone the way he did the ones in the arcade?" I asked.

She bobbed her head. "Most of them, it's like playing with wacky God-mode mods, but it's still fun to see how he turns stuff into his little playgrounds."

"Too bad you're not getting Tickets for winning." My eyebrows raised. "You aren't, right?"

"Nope. Where would they print out?"

We hesitated in the doorway and exchanged glances.

"Now I kind of wish we owned a printer," I said.

"Madness." Lena chewed her lip. "Maybe we should hit up Miguel or Erin and see if they have ones we can try?"

"It's worth a shot," I said. "We could even try an office supply store; they usually run printing services. Of course, the main thing we have to test is what our Tickets actually do. You haven't tried yours yet, have you?"

She shook her head. "I wanted to square the whole thing with Ben and his family first. After that, I figured a little relaxation wouldn't kill us."

"At this point," I said, "we might as well wait until we have the whole team assembled in case we need help figuring out the results."

"Good call." Lena stepped past me into the apartment.

I shut the door behind us.

I took out my own phone and examined Discord. Judging from who was listed as Online, we didn't have to wait any longer.

The gang was as close to all here as they were likely to get. Not just Erin (NugsFan15), Miguel (GMiguel88), Zhizhi (CubSoda), and Donica (DeepingShadows), who I'd expected to respond. Both of Erin's other local friends in the playerbase, DU_Goldie and OffGrid, had joined us. So had three of the members from out of town, ShakeProtocol – Joon Woo –, LikeItsNinetyNine, and Salamancer.

Even VisibleFromSpace was listed as Online. One of the devs and, we suspected, Albie's older brother. Despite accepting Erin's invite, he'd never posted a message on her server.

Indeed, as far as I knew, he'd only communicated with the playerbase three times. Once on the official Discord, to announce that the bottom one percent of players would be dropped from beta participation. A second time in a direct message, to agree to Erin's invitation to the server but only on the condition that she didn't extend the same offer to AlephLamba. And finally, in another DM, to tell Erin – too late – that under no circumstances should we enter the construction site.

I didn't expect him to break his silence this evening. For better or worse, everything we had to discuss seemed well within the bounds of normal, intended Third Eye play.

A couple of the out-of-towners weren't around, but they were some of the least active members of the group.

It felt weird to say, but the one username whose absence disappointed me was CannibalHalfling's.

It didn't come as a huge surprise. Matt lurked way more than he posted. Unless he was set to Invisible, though, he wasn't even lurking this afternoon. A shame. We didn't always get along with him – okay, if I'm being honest, we never did – but our plans hinged on our understanding of how Third Eye was meant to be played. Short of asking Albie directly, Matt was our best source.

"You did send an invite to Matt, didn't you?" I asked Lena.

"I just did an @everyone," she said. "I guess he counts. I mean, if he could beat me, he's got to know a thing or two about this game."

I chuckled.

"He didn't show?" she asked. She started up her computer, then hurried over to the pet bed at the foot of the kitchen counter. She settled Bernie into it and lingered to scratch under his chin.

"Doesn't look like it." I fired up my own computer. It would be far easier for me to follow the conversation on Discord there, much less to respond. I'd just as soon have done it over voice, but Erin seemed to prefer to stick to text where possible. I supposed that even among friends, she only trusted her voice coaching as far as she had to.

"Bummer," Lena said. "I wanted to let him know how I was going to blow past his power level."

It took me a second to connect her statement to Matt's absence. "If he really doesn't pay attention, he'll have a nasty surprise for your next rematch."

"Hell yeah!" Lena gave Bernie a kiss and bounced to her feet.

While we waited for the PCs to boot, I took in the state of our living room. We'd packed up all of Benji's shit and taken it home with him, but had left my bed out here. The smallest of compromises to the idea that Sandy might not have wanted him back.

Unnecessary, as it turned out.

I thought about hauling everything into its original configuration, but why rush? We'd need to unplug our computers to move them, and anyway, I kind of liked being able to glance over at Lena while we typed. I'd probably want the separate bed soon enough, but the thought of sharing one with Lena when we didn't have company was a lot more appealing than when we did.

Besides, I found I liked the reminder of Benji's time with us.

I started when I felt Lena's hand on my cheek.

I blinked down at her. "What?"

"I know Matt can be annoying," she said, "but is not having to talk to him really enough to put that smile on your face?"

"Heh." I bent down and kissed her. "Is it enough to put that one on yours?"

"Honestly?" Her arms wrapped around my waist. "Kinda, yeah."

We laughed against each other.

When we fell silent, Lena whispered, "We did some good today, didn't we?"

"I think Benji and Sandy would've been just fine, regardless of what we got up to." I nestled my chin in Lena's curls. "But yeah. I think we did."

Even if it was just by giving them something stranger and bigger-picture to dwell on, we'd helped smooth over some cracks in their relationship. Necessary? Probably not, but every little bit helped.

I had no way of knowing whether we could help with the financial as well as emotional aspects of their situation.

I didn't doubt for a second that we would.

Win a tournament? Unravel a scam? Defeat an evil wizard? Hell. Convince the world that a phone game could give us magical powers?

Please.

We'd tried to help out with a family problem and made things better.

Compared to that, everything else sounded like easy mode.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 73: Trip Advisor

OldCampaigner: There's been a change of plans.

Lena and I sat side-by-side at our computer desks. Well, I sat; she perched on her chair like a gargoyle.

We each had Discord open on our PCs. I couldn't speak for her but I had browser tabs open for the notes we'd already taken, the Third Eye Wiki, the Invasion Report, and Imagined Worlds, plus the secret tournament rules page Omar had linked us. Finally, I had a blank document open in Notepad++ to record anything new that cropped up.

Cups of coffee steamed on each of our desks. Our phones lay beside them, open to duplicate Discord instances in case we needed a convenient way to check a DM in the middle of the conversation. I had a pad of paper and a pen for extra note-taking. Lena had a mini donut for sugar-intaking.

We were basically ready for anything.

ShakeProtocol: A change, huh? I'd hope so, since you asked us all to make it here at once.

ShakeProtocol: The last time you hosted one of these town hall meetings, it was certainly dramatic.

Joon Woo was the only remote member of the wiki team Erin had included in our initial reveal, and the one who'd taken it the worst.

Since then, though, I knew he'd thrown himself into studying all aspects of Third Eye. His discoveries of new techniques filled the Discord. I'd read them a lot more intensely the moment Lena or I got access to Earth. He didn't seem to have shared his project to decode the Third Eye runes with the team yet, maybe because it was still in beta. From what Miguel had demonstrated, it seemed to be developing fast.

OldCampaigner: I don't think we're going to top revealing the existence of magic.

LikeItsNinetyNine: If you were about to, would you have invited all of us?

I grimaced.

LikeItsNinetyNine was one of the mods on the Third Eye subreddit. She'd filmed one of the very first videos of the game we'd seen, and helped us out with Lena's first video, too.

As PVP had loomed larger in the game, however, she'd backed off. She didn't want her husband and kids getting caught up in a fight. Understandable.

Because of her misgivings, because she'd started playing less, she hadn't been included in our initial reveal. Erin had eventually decided to share the news with the entire wiki team, but she'd done it in DMs. LikeItsNinetyNine had never brought it up with Lena or I, and it only now occurred to me that it might have bothered her.

OldCampaigner: Yeah. Do you wish you'd known from the start?

LikeItsNinetyNine: No, you're right to be cautious about who you tell.

LikeItsNinetyNine: Sometimes I wish I still didn't know.

Salamancer: I am unbothered, but make no mistake. I hope for even more spectacular revelations!

Salamancer was one of the few people on the wiki team who wasn't an admin for some Third Eye community. Along with Joon Woo, he'd been an especially busy poster on the game's official Discord, which was where he'd made contact with Erin.

In theory, he provided us with insights into what was up with the Third Eye playerbase outside North America. In practice, he mostly lightened the mood, since he refused to be forced to take the game seriously. In chat, anyway; it was a lot easier to force cheer in text.

ShakeProtocol: What would be more spectacular than Third Eye affecting the real world?

Salamancer: I have no idea. That is why I'm so eager to learn!

Ashbird: tbh, if we found out something that huge, we'd probably talk through it with NugsFan first and let her send the invites.

OldCampaigner: I'm not sure how much this one will affect all of you directly. What we're talking about doing will be good for the Third Eye community, but it's not for the Third Eye community, if you know what I mean.

NugsFan15: I think so.

OldCampaigner: It's very important to Ashbird and I, though. And we're going to need your help.

NugsFan15: We'll do whatever we can, of course!

ShakeProtocol: What are friends for, right?

NugsFan15: Mmhm!

Lena and I exchanged glances. I think we both read more sarcasm into Joon Woo's line then Erin seemed to.

I'm sure Miguel perceived it the same way we did, which was probably why he decided to play peacemaker.

GMiguel88: Why don't you start with what you've learned. From there, we'll better understand what help you'll need, and we should offer.

OldCampaigner: It's about OdysseyZZ.

LikeItsNinetyNine: The guy hosting the big tournament down in Florida? It's all folks are talking about on the subreddit these days.

OldCampaigner: Ashbird and I happened to find out some of the other stuff he's been up to, and it doesn't exactly paint him in the best light.

NugsFan15: Is this about the lawsuit against his financial company?

Lena stretched. "Welp. So much for our big reveal."

"I don't know why I ever thought we'd be the only people to notice," I said.

"The perils of working with statheads, am I right?" She was, even if I was the one who'd had to convince her of it. Before we'd met Erin, Lena's first impulse had been to dismiss her as a Third Eye rival because she was a sports fan. "I mean, it wasn't completely crazy. We had way more reason to look into Omar's business than most Third Eye players would."

"Maybe, but you missed one crucial detail."

She cocked her head.

I grinned. "You should've known Erin would be happy to dig up dirt on somebody who was pushing PVP."

I was rewarded with a laugh.

Buoyed by it, I copied a series of lines from my notes into the Discord.

They summarized most of what Lena and I – and Benji – had discovered, from Omar's apparent early access to Third Eye, to the way he'd closed his park to visitors but kept his whole staff on, to the sneak peek at the tournament rules he'd offered Lena, and, finally, to how he'd stopped letting his investors withdraw money from Odyssey Futures. I'd cut all direct mentions of my family, in case they didn't want their financials splashed around, but left in that I personally knew someone who'd been ripped off by Omar.

NugsFan15: Just awful. If there's anything we can do to make sure their lawsuit is a success, please, let us know.

OldCampaigner: It's not so much the legal side we might be able to do something about.

ShakeProtocol: What exactly is it you're planning to do?

Ashbird: We're going to Florida!

OldCampaigner: Specifically, we're going early.

OldCampaigner: Our original plan was to head down there and arrive in time for the preliminaries.

Ashbird: So I could boss them like I'm gonna the tournament, obvs.

ShakeProtocol: And now?

OldCampaigner: We're heading out – I'd love to say right away, but realistically, there's no way we can get going this weekend. As soon as possible. By the end of next week, at the latest.

ShakeProtocol: From what you said of OdysseyZZ, why are you so eager to put yourselves in his power?

OldCampaigner: I wouldn't say we're eager. We're also not going to take the fastest possible route. Recently, we realized just how many more Materials and Reactants we can get outside of well-traveled areas. I'm not sure how much there would be on major highways, but I am sure it would be a pain to try to pull off and collect them.

OldCampaigner: We're going to take the most scenic route we can. If we're lucky, OdysseyZZ won't realize we're in town until we've already found out what he's up to. And either way, by the time we arrive, we expect to be a hell of a lot stronger than when we leave.

Ashbird: Plus, the route will be super scenic!

OldCampaigner: Once we get to places with scenery, anyway.

ShakeProtocol: But you do still intend to arrive early?

OldCampaigner: Yes.

ShakeProtocol: Why?

OldCampaigner: Because we need to figure out what OdysseyZZ is up to before he actually pulls it off. The tournament has to be a key part of it. Otherwise, there's no way he would risk doing something so public.

ShakeProtocol: So instead, you'll risk doing something in secret?

OldCampaigner: That's why one of the main things we need from all of you is to keep track of us. We're not asking for backup in Florida, but we do want to make sure that everything we discover is spread to multiple people right away, so there's no point in trying to silence us.

ShakeProtocol: Sensible.

Salamancer: Personally, I'd love to back you up! As soon as you've set the date for your arrival, I'll wing my way down there to meet you.

I raised an eyebrow. Actual, physical backup – Third Eye backup, no less – was more than I'd dared to hope for.

OldCampaigner: That would be awesome.

Salamancer: Of course, if the tournament does go ahead, we will have to be rivals as well as allies.

OldCampaigner: You and Ashbird can sort that out between yourselves. I'm even less inclined to compete than I was before I knew OdysseyZZ was a scammer, which is saying a lot.

Ashbird: The more the merrier. To be the best, I've got to beat the best!

Salamancer: Fantastic!

Salamancer: There is just one other tiny, little, insignificant thing. You'll have to buy my plane tickets.

"I knew it was too good to be true," Lena muttered.

"The backup," I asked, "or the rivalry?"

In response, she just widened her grin.

I didn't know why I'd bothered to ask. Of course the answer would be both.

OldCampaigner: I'm afraid that's not something we can handle. Actually, it brings up the other way we need help.

ShakeProtocol: You're also trying to scam plane tickets out of us?

Salamancer: That is unfair. I did not scam, I merely asked.

OldCampaigner: Plane tickets wouldn't do us any good. The area we want to scout along the way is literally what people call flyover country.

ShakeProtocol: What is it you need, then?

OldCampaigner: I know it's a lot to ask, but we're going to need wheels.

NugsFan15: I'd love to go with you, but somehow, I don't think @CannibalHalfling will be able to persuade the rest of the DU faculty that it's a good use of my semester. Any more than he'll be able to go himself.

NugsFan15: I suppose I can ask him Monday, assuming he's back.

DU_Goldie: yeah. would be cool trip, but cant do it till spring break.

OffGrid: Maybe for the tournament itself, but we can't go early.

DU_Goldie: if oc + ash dont get it canceled lol.

LikeItsNinetyNine: If this Odyssey guy is doing something sinister with Third Eye, or if folks can get their money back from his scam, surely that's worth canceling the tournament.

DU_Goldie: yeah

DU_Goldie: not going to fl then tho. id rather ski.

LikeItsNinetyNine: Ha! Fair.

LikeItsNinetyNine: I can't come out to Denver to pick you up, but promise you'll swing by Atlanta on your way and I can at least put you up for a spell.

I'd have accepted that invitation in a heartbeat, but it sounded like a lot of forced socializing for Lena. I glanced at her.

I needn't have. Her fingers were already clacking away at her mechanical keyboard.

Ashbird: Awesome! It will be super cool to meet you and your family.

DeepingShadows: And you're going to get there how, exactly?

DeepingShadows: Even if I were able to get free, which I'm not, and inclined to join you on a road trip, which, see above, I'm in no condition to drive.

I sighed. Donica wasn't wrong, but she wasn't helping, either. Unless pointing out that our plan was hopeless was helpful, since it would force us to make a new one?

OldCampaigner: We're not trying to get someone to drive us. We're hoping to borrow a car.

If we couldn't, we'd have to rent one. How much would a month-long rental cost us? More than bus or even plane tickets.

It seemed like every time we had to change our plans, it led to us spending more and more of the money we didn't have.

DeepingShadows: Out of curiosity, when was the last time you or Ashbird drove?

Ashbird: It's been a while, but it's just like riding a bike. I'm sure it'll come right back to us.

DeepingShadows: On interstates, two-lane highways, and maybe dirt and gravel back country roads? Truly, the best places to practice.

GMiguel88: I hate to admit it, but you have a point.

Miguel knew better than anyone how out of practice I was behind the wheel. We'd poked along at five miles per hour the night I'd had to drive him from the runoff tunnel to Swedish Medical Center.

OldCampaigner: I told you I was being cautious the other night, since you were hurt.

GMiguel88: Very much so.

Lena bent over her keyboard.

Ashbird: Is that you offering to drive us? Or are you just running Cam down for no reason?

GMiguel88: I wish I could go with you. Alas, my work isn't going to send me on a month-long ramble across the country.

Ashbird: Then what's even the point of bringing it up? You think we should let Omar get away with whatever because we can't get a freaking driver?

I worried that was exactly what Miguel was saying. Either because he genuinely didn't think it was safe for us to drive to Florida, or because he knew it wouldn't be safe when we got there.

He wasn't the one who answered, though. Zhizhi did.

CubSoda: He's saying that you need to ride with me.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 74: Ride Along

When Lena and I agreed to see if any of the team could loan us a vehicle, we hadn't considered the possibility that any of them would be able to get free and accompany us.

That was supposed to be the advantage of our unconventional work, right? We might not make much money, or get any benefits, or have any job security. We might have to put in a work day and a half to scrape together a minimum-wage day.

But at least it was easy to quit!

OldCampaigner: Don't you have a job, too?

CubSoda: Yeah.

CubSoda: Let me tell you about that job.

CubSoda: Third Eye is bigger than every story my newsroom has covered since I started working there combined.

CubSoda: You, all of you, are that story. And you're here, in this chat, talking to me, letting me film you, giving me interviews. Inviting me in!

CubSoda: You know what would happen if I took everything I've recorded so far, all of my notes, the entire story – literally the biggest story in the world – and offered them to my bosses? If I told them, 'That angel video you got sent and you thought was a prank? I not only know the girl in that video, I know she really does have wings, and I can show you both proof and an interview with her I've already filmed?'

Ashbird: They'd take it from you and hand it over to one of the anchors?

CubSoda: I wish!

CubSoda: No, I mean it. This is a big enough deal that I'd happily give up credit if it meant getting people to believe it. That's not what would happen, though.

CubSoda: First, they'd throw away everything I gave them.

CubSoda: Second, they'd start looking for a way to get me off the staff without looking like they'd fired me because I was dealing with a mental illness.

ShakeProtocol: What are you saying? Because they wouldn't believe you, you don't mind quitting on them out of the blue?

CubSoda: It's not like that.

CubSoda: I'm not even saying it to shit on them. Third Eye sounds completely mental to anyone who hasn't seen proof of what it can do. And the reality is, nothing I've got on video is something that couldn't be faked by digital effects from a talented amateur.

CubSoda: But we all know it's real, we all plan on telling the world that, and if we keep racking up more footage, eventually, it's going to be too much to ignore.

CubSoda: I can go back to the newsroom and do coffee runs from 9 to 5, or I can help Ashbird and OldCampaigner and be the person getting that footage.

CubSoda: It's not a hard choice.

ShakeProtocol: It's still a bad idea to quit without giving your notice.

ShakeProtocol: At some point, you're going to need those same newsrooms that currently wouldn't give you the time of day. You shouldn't burn your bridges with them.

CubSoda: I know. I'll take time off first, then let them know I'm quitting once I've already got my vacation squared away. The longer we delay, the better it works for me, but I'm not going to hold you back just so I can jump through a few bureaucratic hoops. And I'm not missing out on the chance to cover this story.

GMiguel88: More than fair.

It probably spoke to my lack of "real world" experience, but all this talk of giving notices sort of went over my head. When I'd worked retail, I'd told my boss I was quitting three weeks in advance, hadn't I? I thought so, but it felt like a lifetime ago. I had no idea how wide the bridges Zhizhi was burning were, or how much kindling she'd be piling on them with her proposed plan.

In my head, the bigger issue was that she'd be leaving Miguel behind so soon after they'd gotten together. I knew better than to ask either of them about it, though. They'd probably say absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Lena reached over and nudged my arm. "You disappointed?"

"What? No. Zhizhi is good company." I answered without really thinking about the question. It only struck me as a strange thing to ask after I'd already responded. I touched my lips and found I was frowning. As much to myself as her, I asked, "Why?"

Lena twirled some of her hair around her finger and tugged at it. "Not exactly a romantic getaway if we've got a third wheel."

"Oh." I scratched the back of my neck. "Are you disappointed?"

"Lil' bit." She sank into her chair and pulled her knees up. She propped her chin on them.

I stood up and shifted to rub her shoulders.

"Mmm." She leaned back and closed her eyes. Just as it seemed like she was about to relax, she suddenly opened them and looked up at me. They twinkled. "But then I remember that if you drove, we wouldn't get to Florida in time for the tournament even if we left tonight."

"For the hundredth time," I said, "I was trying to be careful the other night."

She wiggled her eyebrows. "You sure managed."

"Hmph." I kissed the top of her head and slid back to my chair.

"Seriously, though," she said. "It is a good thing, Zhizhi coming. We'll get more footage, maybe for normal episodes and definitely for the eventual reveal. And though I'm sure you'll be fine driving, and even I can take a turn on a back road, it'll be good to have somebody else to spell us at the wheel."

"I'm glad you're not upset," I said. "I'd love for us to go on a proper vacation, but we have to take this a little more seriously."

She cocked an eyebrow. "We have to take a game more seriously than a vacation."

"I know, it sounds absurd, but..." I sighed. "But yeah."

I think she tried to nod, but she only managed to bob her head. "It's too bad none of the actual players can come with us."

I plopped down. My chair rolled back until I dug my heels in to hold it in place. "Yeah."

What would we face on the road? Another PVP player like Mask, if not Mask himself? I felt like we could take him together.

A player like Omar, who supposedly had five or more of each Reactant? We'd need to get a lot stronger before we reached Florida to have a chance of opposing him directly, although we could hope it wouldn't come to that.

A creature like we'd seen at the construction site?

Back then, it wouldn't have mattered if we brought the whole wiki team with us. If Albie hadn't appeared to bail us out, we'd all have died. Each of us had learned more about our Reactants since then, and some, like Lena, had gained new ones as well.

Even collectively, we couldn't come close to matching Albie's power. When she called him into combat, her Daimon, Marroll, had turned from a big dog into an alien worm the size of a whale. Albie herself had melted an entire warehouse to slag with a tornado of flame. I wasn't sure how much she'd overkilled the creature by, but unless the answer was "a hell of a lot," we wouldn't stand a chance of defeating it.

I thought we might be at the point where, as a team, we could fend it off long enough to escape, though.

Trouble was, we wouldn't be fighting as a team.

Zhizhi could help us improve Lena's channel. She could help us get the word out about Third Eye. She could certainly help us drive!

But if it came down to a fight, she'd be no help at all. In fact, she turned it into an escort mission. The worst kind of quest in any game.

I'm sure it sounds absurd, but that thought put enough of a smile on my face for Lena to notice.

"What are you grinning about?" she asked.

"I just thought, if a Third Eye escort mission ends up being as good as a Third Eye sewer level, we're in for a great time."

She laughed. "Where is the lie, though?"

"Speaking of..." I turned back to the Discord and surveyed where the conversation had gone while Lena and I talked.

Looked like they'd moved on to discussing the practicalities of the trip. The central divide seemed to be between the camp who thought we needed, well, an entire camp's worth of gear, and the camp, mostly comprised of Zhizhi, who thought she drove a compact car with a compact trunk.

I suspected I'd be rereading this section a few times before we headed out, because I wanted to be as prepared as possible. One thing we absolutely stood to learn from Mask was how to take advantage of mundane equipment to help with Third Eye problems.

I also suspected, between Zhizhi's car and our budget, that we would depart with a hell of a lot less supplies than Joon Woo and LikeItsNinetyNine seemed to think we needed.

There was at least one more thing we had to square away locally before we set out, though.

Trouble was, I didn't know if I had a right to post about it.

I switched to my DMs and opened my conversation with Miguel.

OldCampaigner: If we can still reach the arcade in your Realm and get Tickets out of it, it could be a pretty valuable path to power. Not so much for Lena and I, because we really do need to get a move on. But for the players who stay behind in Denver.

GMiguel88: And you think that I should have to give my permission for you to tell others about it?

OldCampaigner: I know I do.

GMiguel88: I don't want the place, Cameron. If it turns out to be an arcade that everyone can access, however, I might just start warming to it. In fact, I'll share it myself.

Which was exactly what he did.

GMiguel88: While mundane preparations are all fine and well, I think the most important thing right now is to find out how your Tickets work, and for everyone here to get as many as they can, should that prove to be possible.

NugsFan15: Tickets? You mean you've actually found some?

Ashbird: We got them last night. Tickets and a Ticket Daimon!

Ashbird: He's the best, except for Bernie, who is also the best.

Ashbird: (Marroll is awesome, too, just fyi.)

OldCampaigner: Sorry for not posting about it until now. It's been a busy day.

NugsFan15: They all seem to be, anymore.

Where, as Lena had said, was the lie?

NugsFan15: Please, though, tell us everything you found!

OldCampaigner: GMiguel, CubSoda, Ashbird, and I went scouting last night. We discovered what seems to be a Realm here in Englewood. A spectacular one.

GMiguel88: It is, at the very least, large.

OldCampaigner: There weren't a lot of resources, but we did get quite a few Tickets there, plus Ryu – that's the Daimon that Ashbird mentioned.

OldCampaigner: It's not that the Tickets were just lying around, though.

OldCampaigner: If we can keep accessing the Realm, we might have a renewable source of them.

NugsFan15: Oh my goodness! I can't tell you how much I appreciate the heads-up. And you'd be willing to show us even though you're not going to stay in town to get more? Thank you! If it works, we could arrange regular trips to stock up.

ShakeProtocol: If it works, and if the Tickets are worth the trouble.

NugsFan15: Well.

NugsFan15: Yes.

Salamancer: When you say Ticket, it is what I see as Billet in my store interface?

OldCampaigner: I think so.

That was the first time I'd realized the Third Eye app had a proper translation. I wondered if it would be easier or harder to go from the game's runes to French than it was to English.

Salamancer: I confess, most of what was not for sale in the shop, I wished very much I could buy. Alas, I didn't have money and they would not take the money I lacked.

Salamancer: But these Tickets, they are a strange inclusion, no? Not so very magical. Not so exciting.

Salamancer: What do they actually do?

OldCampaigner: That...

I glanced at Lena.

We both glanced at our phones.

OldCampaigner: Is a great question.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 75: Ticket Taking

Lena repositioned herself so she could push her chair back, then hopped off it. After a few clicks of her mouse, her Discord icon changed to reflect the fact she was streaming.

"Haven't done video chat in a while," she said. "Here's hoping my camera didn't get disconnected when we moved the PCs."

I clicked her name in the interface and was rewarded with a second view of her. This one showed her in her Third Eye finery. I could even see Bernie stirring in his pet bed just at the edge of the screen. He rolled one eye in our direction and made a little chuffing sound.

"Which did you install on your computer?" I asked. "Third Eye, or the camera software Zhizhi uses?"

"The app itself," Lena said. "I didn't used to have it on there, but after my phone broke, I wanted a second copy running."

I nodded. I'd begun the sign-up process on my PC in the first place, and had noodled around with the desktop version of the app enough to know that our status and resources transferred across them. It made sense, as much as anything in Third Eye did. The vast majority of the app's functions were handled in the cloud.

How much of that cloud consisted of servers, and how much drifting fields of pixie dust, we were not at all sure.

Regardless, that was good, because now that we knew we weren't going to have to rent a car for the trip, it seemed marginally more palatable for us to replace Lena's cracked phone.

If not for those cracks, I thought she might have continued typing her Discord messages into her phone. I'd seen her do that back when we'd first started video chatting. As it stood, though, every time she touched the screen, she risked either damaging it further or depleting her HP.

She spoke instead. "Can everybody hear me?"

Inevitably, two members of the audience could not. If you've ever started a Discord call without somebody's audio being set to the wrong device, you've had far better luck than us.

Once we got that squared away, however, and Lena did another test, she nodded at the camera.

"Okay! Tickets. The story so far. OldCampaigner?"

"Not much, Ashbird." Why were we presenting this like an episode? I didn't know, but it felt right. Belatedly, I turned my own webcam on. "We got six Tickets each, given to us by Ryu, who is listed in your interface as a Ticket Daimon. We seemed to get them as a reward for beating arcade games within a Realm."

"Right now, we're not sure if the Tickets come from the Realm or from Ryu modifying a game. He's modded other games for me since, and I haven't gotten any Tickets for winning, but I also don't have a printer attached to my device."

"That's another, much smaller bit of help we're hoping someone on the team can provide us with," I said. "Do any of you have a printer we can test it on?"

Literally every local member of the team responded with "yes," as – uselessly – did Joon Woo and LikeItsNinetyNine. What the hell, people? Only Salamancer shared our proper respect for a paperless home office.

"Sounds like we won't have any trouble running that test," Lena said.

ShakeProtocol: Why don't you just buy a printer? You're out here asking to borrow people's cars but you won't ask us to loan you twenty dollars for cheap electronics?

I didn't trust myself not to talk about waste paper, the inevitable hassle of incompatible drivers, or the suite of bloatware every printer I'd ever used tried to worm into a computer unlucky enough to share a network with it. I bent over my keyboard and typed instead.

OldCampaigner: Good call. We'll think about it.

"The way I see it," Lena said, "there's four possibilities. From worst to best. One, the Tickets were a one time offer and we blew it by not winning more of them when we had the chance."

"There's got to be some way of getting more," I said, which could have been a quote from a couple people in the Discord if it hadn't been my own sentiment.

Lena nodded. "Second, the Realm and Ryu are both Ticket typed, and they have to work together to generate more. In that case, assuming we can get back in, we can get a few more, but the supply is pretty limited because we have to skip town."

"If they prove to be crazy useful," I said, "maybe we should rethink our plans?" I shook my head. "I don't think so, though. If we're taking whole days to explore outside of town, I'm sure we can get more resources than anything we could get by just farming Tickets here. Plus, I'd much rather keep Omar guessing about our ETA."

"Makes sense," Lena said. "Third, the Tickets come from Ryu. In which case, we just need to figure out how to rig up a printer to work while we're on the road, or at least in hotels. We won't have anything to offer anybody else, which is a bummer, but it would be a good thing to know and it'll make us even stronger by the time we get to Florida."

"Fourth is that the Realm can generate Tickets on its own?" I asked.

"Yep!" Lena flashed double thumbs up and a grin at her webcam. "Then the people who stay behind can stock up, while we get other resources."

"You said there were only four possibilities, but you actually missed the best one," I said.

She cocked her head.

"The ideal," I said, "would be if both Ryu and the Realm can generate tickets independently."

"Oh hell yes." Lena pumped her fist. "Let's not get too excited, though. It could legit be any of the above."

"Enough about how we got them, and how we might get more." I skimmed the commentary in the Discord to confirm my guess about our audience's mood. Yep. Interested but impatient. Joon Woo, in particular, seemed to think we were stalling.

I thought he was right, although I wasn't exactly sure why.

I still felt weird about the Tickets. Why hadn't these Refinements come with a spectacular alteration of reality the way Reactants had, despite the fact that they seemed to come from an even rarer class of resources?

Or was it just because we'd gotten them from Miguel's Realm, and he wasn't able to get his own?

Hell. We still weren't a hundred percent sure he hadn't been able to absorb the Tickets because he was no longer an active player, and not because he bailed on the Street Fighter game that had inspired Ryu's name. So far, every person we'd seen collect Tickets was both an active Third Eye player *and* someone who had just won a game Third Eye had altered.

If we could get back into Miguel's realm, even if it was just once more before we left, we'd have plenty of time to discover the answer.

For now –

"Let's find out what we can actually do with them," I said.

I caught a line of text on my computer screen.

ShakeProtocol: That was the original question, yeah.

For a wonder, neither Lena nor I were inspired to put off our Ticket test any longer. If you want to send in our applications for sainthood, you can start with that.

Lena's fingers picked their way around the cracks on her phone. Through Discord, it looked like her avatar was playing a piano in thin air. Where she touched the invisible screen, she left little puffs of flame.

"I'm on the Refinements page now," she said. "The only thing I have here is Tickets. Six of them, like we said."

"What happens when you press the entry?" I asked, for my benefit, and the benefit of the audience.

Her tongue poked through her lips. In person, it looked undignified, if cute. On her avatar – pretty much the same. Third Eye made the effort to faithfully translate our mannerisms, even when they didn't fit the personas it assigned to us. "It brings up a menu with all of my resources, the same as when we use a Reactant."

Considering how bad the app's UI was, I supposed that would get pretty cumbersome as we obtained more different resources. How many types of items were listed in the game's store? Too many to fit on a drop-down without scrolling, the way it displayed them. I asked, "What are you going to try?"

"Wood, I guess." She shrugged. "It's what we've got the most of, and especially now, what we're likely to get more of."

We'd never really had to care about the different resources in our stockpiles, apart from our Reactants. From what we'd seen, though, we were in for absolute piles of Wood and Stone when we scouted outside of town. Iron, Glass, and especially Plastic, not so much.

"And..." Lena frowned. "Huh. I'm not sure. It bumped me back to the main page."

We looked around the apartment, with and without our phones. There was no new panel of Wood, the way there would've been if she'd manifested it with a Reactant.

I stepped sideways so I could peer over her shoulder. "What do your stats look like?"

She squinted at the screen. One of the cracks ran right through the upper area where Third Eye displayed HP, MP, and XP. "I'm down one MP, the same as if I'd used a Reactant. It must have done something."

"Try your Refinements page."

She did. "Five Tickets left."

"So one got spent. Again, it must have done something," I said. "Did it take your Wood, too?"

"Lemme check." She tapped twice, once to close Refinements, once to open Materials. "Oh shit!"

I narrowed my eyes, trying to see what had made her react. "Three hundred and eighty seven Wood. How much did you have before?"

"I wrote it down when we sat down tonight." She had. She brought the note up on her computer, partially covering the Discord window. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped almost to a whisper. Props; a whisper was more than I could manage. "Before I hit that button, I had three hundred and eighty six."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 76: Cost-Benefit Analysis

Lena and I stared at each other, wide-eyed.

If we'd just been experimenting on our own, I think we might both have stood there like a couple of idiots for, conservatively, a while. Thankfully, a Discord chime broke us out of our shock right away, letting us know a message had come in.

It wasn't the last.

I'm not going to repeat them all, because they repeated themselves. They also more or less repeated what was playing on repeat in my head.

If we were looking at an exchange rate of one Ticket for one resource, regardless of what that resource was, then Lena and I were about to become two of the four most powerful Third Eye players we knew of. Also, we'd probably discovered why Omar was willing to part with Reactants in a volume we'd never even seen anyone else possess.

Why the hell were we standing here thinking about it instead of splurging on new purchases, though?

I snapped my phone up and tabbed to the Refinements page.

I forced myself to slow down, just a little, because we were still in a call.

"I'm going to try it with a Reactant next," I said.

"If it's one to one for everything..." Lena shook her head. Why finish saying it? It was what everyone was thinking.

I felt sweat trickle down my back as my finger pressed the line for Tickets. The dropdown menu appeared. It already reached the bottom of the screen. Such poor UI design! Eventually, we might have Gold and Crystal on this page, and perhaps other Refinements, so we wouldn't be starting from the top of the table and even more would be pushed off the screen.

Out of curiosity, I dragged up at the side. I half expected it to close out of the dropdown menu, meaning that, barring a UI update, we literally wouldn't be able to access the bottom of the list as we got more options on it.

That wasn't what happened.

The list scrolled upwards and I saw its final entries.

It made sense, in retrospect, because they were things that we'd seen in the in-game store and had hated to think of people being able to buy.

I said, "It looks like I can buy HP, MP, and XP directly."

If the first two raised the maximum, then whatever else Tickets could do, they would finally provide me with a way of permanently increasing my shitty starting values for HP and MP. When I at last burned through Albie's Potion, I wouldn't have to be quite so cautious.

NugsFan15: That's interesting, and we should explore the exchange rate, but surely a Reactant would be a better purchase?

If her Discord server was any indication, Erin spoke for the masses.

The masses didn't have 10 HP and 10 MP.

Nonetheless, I nodded. If my choice was between raising my maximum HP to eleven or getting a second unit of Air, that was no choice at all.

If it was just between another unit of Wood, or even Plastic, and raising my maximums? At a certain point, buying the resource I couldn't just find out in the world would make more sense, even if the exchange rate was terrible.

This might sound insane, but I found that thought almost as exciting as realizing we were allowed to buy resources at all.

Whatever else Third Eye was, it was a game, and whatever else it involved, it required quite a bit of strategy. But the strategic parts weren't very gamey, and up till now, the gamey parts hadn't been very strategic. We collected what we could find, we learned to use it as best we could. At most, we could optimize where we scouted and what we practiced.

Here, though, was a Third Eye game mechanic I could strategize about!

I allowed myself a tiny fantasy of getting Gold, which nobody had yet posted a use for but which Erin suspected could turn resources into Tickets. I would spend the whole day shuffling everything back and forth until I had my stats and resources arranged exactly as I liked them.

And then I'd reshuffle them the next day!

This day, however, I had no Gold, six Tickets, and was getting way the hell ahead of myself.

"I'm going to try Air now," I declared.

I scrolled back up and pressed the entry.

The results left me with a lot less ambiguity than Lena's purchase of Wood had.

As soon as my fingertip brushed the screen, a blast of lukewarm air erupted from the overhead vent. It wasn't our landlord finally, belatedly fixing the furnace, as I'd once thought he had when Lena's flames first warmed our apartment. For one, there was zero chance that even a repaired furnace would put out a gale like this. For another, it surged through the apartment, scattering my written notes and swirling into the amulet on my chest.

I reached up to clasp it, but by the time my hand got there, I'd blinked, and the amulet – along with the rest of my avatar, and Lena's, except through her webcam – was gone.

Instead, my phone was in my hand.

She brushed her hand over her windblown hair. "I'd call that a successful test."

"Holy shit," I said.

At the push of a button, I'd just changed the world. Also, gained a Reactant.

I was pretty sure my MP had changed, the same as Lena's had, but I hadn't written my total down in advance so I couldn't be certain. A quick trip to the Reactants page confirmed what I already knew. I was now the proud owner of two units of Air.

Not enough to fly, but getting closer. I wondered if I could pull off a proper glide with two Air.

But why wonder? All I had to do was buy more!

I closed out of Reactants and went back to Refinements.

My grin wavered. "Ah."

Lena cocked her head. "Sup?"

I showed her my screen while I explained to the people watching over Discord. "Buying a single unit of Air cost me five Tickets."

"So much for buying our way to previously unheard of levels," Lena said. "Still, that's totally worth, isn't it?"

"Of course!" Now that I was back to figuring out what I could accomplish with two units of Air, I started running through the possibilities in my head. Gliding seemed like it might be possible, but I would need a wider, more stable frame to do it. If I had Earth I could shape something to my exact specifications, but even if I'd had more Tickets, it didn't seem like we could buy our first unit of anything, since it didn't appear on the dropdown. Unless we could use the shop, after all? Something else to check.

Would it work better if I used a real object as a glider, rather than another conjured one like a sheet of Plastic? My Air would be less aligned with the object, but the object would be fully aligned with the world and my body.

It wouldn't hurt to save on Plastic, in any case.

Speaking of saving...

"Are you going to hold onto your last Ticket?" Lena asked.

Good question.

I wanted to spend it on HP or MP, now that I knew the exchange rate wasn't a simple one for one. How much would I get? Ten? A hundred? Somewhere between those two numbers lay the point at which I would start pumping any Tickets we did get in that direction as soon as I got enough Air to fly with.

For now, though, it made no sense to buy what I hoped would be a permanent increase to my maximums, because until the Potion ran out, my maximums didn't really do anything.

"I'll save it for now." I started to explain my reasoning, but hesitated. I'd never sat down and told the rest of the wiki team about the Potion. I hadn't hidden it, not intentionally, but the details had never come up in conversation. Explaining now just felt awkward. Instead, I said, "That way if we get four Tickets for something, I can buy another unit of a Reactant."

"Good thinking," Lena said. "God, I wish I hadn't bought a stupid Wood."

"We had to find out, and it was the safest thing to risk losing." I touched her elbow. "You've got five left, right? Get yourself something cool."

"Mmhm!" She wiggled her shoulders and held her phone out in front of her. She hesitated. "Air or Fire?"

"Your call. Do you think three Air would be enough to fly with?"

"'Prolly not." She bit her lip. "That would be so sick, though..."

I said nothing.

She kept chewing on her lip. I was about to try to distract her, just so she didn't lose HP, but abruptly, she tossed her hair and stepped back. "Fuck it. Air's your thing, Fire is mine. I want to be able to hit harder, and I want to see how much juice I can squeeze out of it when I use it for electricity."

I gave her a thumbs up and braced against the arm of my chair. Not so much for the eruption of Fire itself, because I didn't think that would be aligned enough to harm anything in the apartment, us included.

More so I could catch the moment of transfiguration when Lena and I appeared as our avatars.

Trouble was, that moment never came.

Lena frowned. "It bumped me back to the main screen, but I didn't lose any MP."

"What does it say on your Reactants?"

She shook her head. "Three Fire. Same as before."

"I don't get it," I said. "You definitely had five Tickets left."

"Still do. At least it didn't spend any of my Tickets when it failed." She perked up. "You do realize what this means, right?"

"I really, really don't."

"It means Third Eye agrees with me!" She grinned. "Fire really is the best."

I supposed it was possible. Some games costed their most powerful or direct offensive options higher than anything else, even if as a result, they ended up not being especially practical. Was Third Eye such a game?

I glanced at Discord.

NugsFan15: I'm not sure that's right, although it would be very funny if so.

NugsFan15: You have two Air right now, yes? Please try buying another.

"I guess I can settle for maybe being able to fly." Lena heaved an exaggerated sigh. She tapped her screen.

Nothing happened.

She said, "What the shit?"

"It sounds like you already have a theory, Erin," I said.

NugsFan15: From what we've seen, having more than one unit of a Reactant is exceptionally powerful. I suspect the cost to purchase another scales based on how many you already have.

NugsFan15: It's how I would design such a system, at least.

"It also," I said, "explains why Omar would be willing to give away five of each Reactant."

"Trade away his extras, make himself look super generous to everybody who doesn't have this part of the game unlocked, then buy his way back at a lower cost?" Lena chuckled. "Pretty slick."

DU_Goldie: can tell ur not in chs class.

It took me a second to realize "chs" was "CannibalHafling's." Matt's. Sometimes DU_Goldie's abbreviations tipped over into incoherence.

Lena glared at her monitor. "Why?"

DU_Goldie: ur not thinking like an exploiter.

DU_Goldie: u get it rite nf?

NugsFan15: Although I hope you're wrong, I think I do.

Now that they'd brought it up, I suspected I did, as well. "You think that if Omar has some way to package his Reactants up for someone to absorb later, he can set himself back to one of each, buy them back, then reabsorb the ones he had before?"

DU_Goldie: wouldnt u?

"I totally would," I said. "Hell. One of the first things I ever did in this game was hunt for an infinite XP glitch."

NugsFan15: You didn't find one, did you?

"Alas, no." I rubbed my chin. "I mean, it's good if there isn't one. But if there is, I sure as hell want to be the one to find it."

"What are we figuring Omar has, then?" Lena asked.

"A source of Tickets and at least some Crystal," I said. "That's what Crystal is supposed to do, right, Erin? Make constructs the user can reabsorb?"

NugsFan15: Everyone who's tried it has used it that way, yes. If anyone's been able to experiment with giving constructs as Materials to other players, they haven't reported it yet.

It was easy for us to forget sometimes, but most people were performing their Third Eye experiments on their own. They could benefit from what people were willing to share with the community as a whole. When it came to their own discoveries, though, they ended up with weird gaps in their knowledge.

Eventually, that would change. Playing with a team offered too many advantages. Anyone who went solo would either have to reach an extreme level on their own, as Mask seemed to have, or they'd fall out of the beta entirely. Of course, I had only my impression of Mask's character to lead me to believe he was playing without a team. Maybe he was the Matt of his group, one PVP-mad player supported by a bunch of friends who were more interested in exploring the game's systems.

Was that the optimal configuration?

Or was it to hire a bunch of other people, equip them with the ability to see Third Eye phenomena, and turn them loose to act as your proxies?

Hell. Between Omar's money and the ability to give out Reactants, why was I assuming his employees were non-players? If I hadn't known he was scamming innocent investors, would I have turned down an invitation to act as a full-time scout on his payroll? I supposed it depended on the pay I'd be rolling in.

"Depending on how much Omar has been able to pull that trick off," Lena said, "and how long he's been doing it, how strong do you think he's gotten by now?"

"Depends on a lot of factors, I suppose." I started counting them off on my fingers, but stopped at one. Right now, it was the only one that mattered, because it was the only one we could answer.

And, depending on what that answer was, the only one we could benefit from ourselves.

"Starting with," I said, "does he have a steady supply of Tickets?"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 77: The Gang's All Here

What I'd intended to be another expedition to the Third Eye version of Cinder Alley had, somehow, turned into a going away party.

I say "somehow" but in truth, I knew the answer. It happened because Erin had arranged it.

Almost as soon as I'd made the proposal, she'd stepped in and begun making it happen. Either her organizational skills or the lacking social lives of Third Eye players meant that almost the entire in-town contingent showed up, including a couple I'd never met in person before.

Miguel and Zhizhi had texted to say they'd join us late, which left Matt as the only unexcused absence.

Erin was present, of course. Donica, too, and that gave us a pleasant surprise. Donica was on her feet! Armed with a pair of crutches, but she seemed to contrive every excuse to lean them against a wall and test her ankle.

They introduced us to DU_Goldie and OffGrid, the newbies from my and Lena's perspective. Although they'd technically joined the wiki team before us.

DU_Goldie's name was Gerry, or Jerry – nobody clarified, and I assumed it was spelled with a G because it fit his username – and he was tall, heavyset but athletic looking. OffGrid introduced herself as Michelle, and she was almost as short as Lena and even tinier in build, with thick glasses that gave Erin's a run for their money.

I guessed that Erin had met one through sports and the other through video games. I turned out to be right in all the wrong ways. While Lena hugged Erin and Donica's expression spoke volumes about her desire to avoid the same treatment, I fist-bumped the newcomers and got their story. Michelle was a gymnast, just an amateur now but Donica had scouted her for a possible pro career when she was in high school competitions; Gerry was a full-time game design student.

We'd gathered at an Asian Fusion place called ZOMO, on Broadway between the apartment and the tunnel entrance. Lena and I had walked past it dozens of times, maybe hundreds, but had never stopped in. I'd like to say it was because we couldn't afford it, even though the prices seemed reasonable enough. I'd settle for saying it was because we didn't get out as much as we should've, which was at least true.

The reality, though, was that, like the nearby bookstore, it had gone into a building that, years ago, had housed a hobby game store that was super convenient for me. Even though it wasn't the fault of any of these businesses that the old place closed, I'd never been able to overcome a vague resentment of them.

Five minutes after we'd taken over a pair of tables near the doors, though, and the combination of intriguing aromas, cheerful staff, and Erin's relentless positivity knocked my resentment into the past where it belonged. The eggrolls we got as appetizers, inexplicably described as "Kansas City style", didn't hurt. Lena and I would be in Kansas City later this month. Would we find more like these there?

Miguel and Zhizhi joined us halfway through the appetizers. I waved them over while Erin said something to the waitress, and extra eggrolls appeared by the time we finished the introductions.

The eight of us filled our two tables. I noticed Lena shrinking in on herself and rubbed the back of her hand.

She smiled and mumbled, "I didn't expect such a big to-do."

"Everyone wanted to try their hands at getting Tickets," Erin said. "At that point, it only seemed natural to see the three of you off."

Zhizhi, who was included in that number, flashed a thumbs up. She asked me, "Do you know when you'll be ready to leave? I'll put in for vacation time tomorrow, but I'll annoy less people if I know exactly when to say I'm leaving."

"I want to get going as soon as possible," I said, "but you're doing us a huge favor. You let us know when it will work for you, and we'll make it happen."

"Great!" She brought her hands together like she was clapping. She didn't actually let them make a sound, though, lest it seem like she was rude as hell and trying to summon the waitress back. "We can leave in two weeks!"

Lena straightened up to object, but I'd been watching Zhizhi's expression and knew better. I said, "Tuesday?"

She nodded. "Works for me."

"And for me," Miguel said. "We can leave the Monday campaign at a good stopping point."

"Oh. Right." I hadn't thought of that. So many things to do! Leaving town was exciting, but also a huge pain. "We didn't mean to bail on your game."

He chuckled. "Cameron. I think you have more important things to worry about. I'm merely enjoying the happy coincidence."

"We should've gotten Yvonne and Big Charlie to come over tonight," Lena said, referring to the other two players in Miguel's game. They'd be playing host tomorrow night. Would two more people have overtaxed Lena more, or would two more familiar faces have helped her relax? If she'd thought it through, she'd apparently concluded the latter. "I bet they'd like to play at a magic arcade, too."

Miguel pressed his lips together. "So much so, that I'm not sure their prudence would win out."

"You don't want to involve more non-players?" Erin asked.

He raised an eyebrow. "Don't you think that's the safest course?"

"I'm not sure any of us have room to talk about what's safest." She nibbled on the end of an eggroll. "Safer, at least. I agree with you."

I wasn't sure, but I thought the discussion of safety annoyed Donica. I supposed I couldn't blame her. Regardless, she cleared her throat and said, "What's the plan for this evening? Ordinarily, I'd be happy to destroy all of you at old arcade games, but I'm not sure I want to stay on my feet that long."

"We've got to run some tests," I said. "First, see if a group can get into the Realm without Miguel serving as a key, or a guide, or something along those lines."

"It doesn't seem very fair, you not getting to go," Lena said to Miguel.

He shook his head. "I don't know about fair, nor do I care, but by far the best result is if everyone can use it freely."

"That's really generous of you," Erin said.

He spread his hands and inclined his head, which made it seem like he accepted her praise.

I exchanged glances with Zhizhi. She looked like I felt, her mouth crinkled with the effort of stifling a laugh. Miguel had made very clear how he felt about his Realm the last time we visited. He wasn't exactly making a sacrifice by trying to open it up to anyone but himself.

"The other thing we need to test is whether Ryu needs to be there for us to get Tickets," I said.

"More tickets," Lena said.

Wide eyes all around the tables.

Lena had invited the attention, but when they all looked at her, her grin wavered.

I stepped in to relieve the pressure of explaining. "We stopped at Office Depot on the way over. Lena got six more Tickets to print out."

Excited murmurs all around, except from Donica.

She asked, "You couldn't get any?"

I ran my fingers through my hair. "It got... a little weird. We had to stand by their counter and Lena pretended she was trying to get her document up while she played the game Ryu picked out for her. I'm sure the clerk thought we were trying to put a virus on their printers or something. In any case, it was way too uncomfortable for us to stick around."

"But it worked!" Erin said.

"Yep." Lena showed her Third Eye interface to the table. It was a lot more legible than it had been last night, because, in a probably vain attempt to seem less weird at the Office Depot, we'd bought both a printer and a new, cheaper phone for her. "I haven't tried spending them yet, but I'm up to eleven Tickets."

"That's awesome," Gerry said. "We gotta get us some of that."

"Mmhm!" Erin bobbed her head. "I can't wait until we get a proper map of the costs."

Which was just about the nerdiest thing I'd ever heard a person say. Probably why I found myself grinning and nodding along with her.

"My plan is," I said, "we send in one team without Miguel or Lena, and by extension Ryu. Zhizhi or I will have to go with that group to show them the way. First we find out if we can get in, then if we can get Tickets from the arcade without Ryu. Once we're done with the tests, we can pop back out and get everybody."

"You plan on being out all night?" Donica asked.

I considered. "I don't know about all night, but it'll take a while, yeah. Hours at least."

"If you think it's going to be too hard on your ankle," Erin said, "I can drive you home and take the light rail back here."

Donica pressed her lips together. "I'm fine."

Erin touched the rims of her glasses. "What would you say if a player you were agenting pushed herself back from injury that way?"

"That probably depends on how much long-term value I thought she had," Donica said.

Erin swallowed and tried to smile. The rest of us laughed. Correctly? I wasn't sure. I supposed Erin knew more about Donica's business than any of us, considering she'd grown up around it. Maybe she wasn't joking.

Donica sighed. "I take your point. If someone can help me get it out of the back of my Yukon, I'll bring the wheelchair. I don't need it most of the time, but if I need to sit down, I will."

Erin's smile came easier. "Great! Then all that's left..."

She looked my way, for reasons I didn't understand. At least I knew what she wanted me to say, though. A sports reference. Would've been funnier to make Lena say it, but she might not have picked up on the phrase as Erin wanted.

I finished, "... is to pick the teams."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 78: Retro Vision

We could, in fact, return to Miguel's Realm without the man himself in tow.

The most trouble I ran into leading the first team through the tunnel and the maintenance area was convincing Erin to hurry on to the arcade, rather than lingering to pore over the various runic puzzles. Zhizhi helped, probably because she wanted to get in and out as fast as possible. Gerry helped, probably because he wanted to take his shot at Tickets as soon as he could.

Lena, Miguel, Donica, and Michelle were waiting outside for the results of our test.

An even split between the teams, though not, unfortunately, an even split of active players.

With a sigh and a last longing glance at the runes, Erin let me usher her into Third Eye's dead and empty echo of Cinder Alley.

I stepped aside so the two newcomers could go first, which proved to be a mistake. They froze as soon as they stepped onto the brick "street."

"This," Gerry whispered, "owns so fucking hard."

Erin could only nod.

Zhizhi gave them a sidelong glance. Even I raised an eyebrow.

"There's no way either of you were born when this place closed," Zhizhi said.

"Of course not," Erin said. "That's what makes it so exciting! I'd say it's like getting to walk through a piece of local history, but we shouldn't conflate this Third Eye construct with the real thing. Didn't you say that the arcade, at least, doesn't follow the original layout?"

"Miguel said that." I spread my palms. "I'm pretty sure I went to the real place, but it was when I was too young to remember it. Come on, let's try and get some Tickets."

"Oh. Of course." Erin pushed her glasses up. From the angle the light glinted off them, I could tell she was eyeing one of the gates pulled down over the fake brick storefronts. Although she walked in the general direction of the escalator, she drifted toward the gate. "I wonder what would be in the other stores if we opened them up..."

"You'll have plenty of time to figure that out," I said, "while Lena and Zhizhi and I are on the road."

Erin blinked. "Sorry. I'm getting distracted."

"No worries." What did I have to worry about?

Just Lena waiting outside, backed up only by Michelle, a player whose strength I'd never had the chance to judge. A player who, as far as I knew, had never been tested in PVP, much less PVE.

We hadn't had a choice in the matter. Any configuration we settled on would've left one group with just a pair of Third Eye players. Would I have felt better if it was Erin out there with Lena?

Despite the way Erin had allowed herself to get distracted, yes. I'd seen her match up with Matt, and that was weeks ago. I had no doubt she'd improved since. She was a creative and inquisitive player. Prior to my recent, Ticket-powered upgrade, Erin and I had been equals at worst in total Reactants, and she had both the offensively powerful Fire and the defensively specced Earth to call upon.

A safer person to leave in duos, yeah. How the hell had I let myself get talked into this team selection?

Did I have anything to worry about?

Or was I just missing Lena already?

I shook my head. Kinda pathetic if so, tbh.

Whatever I might think of the setup of the teams, the first team trudged through the mall's concourse. As far as I could tell, Cinder Alley's layout hadn't changed. Neither had its musty smell. The only difference, apart from the company, was that we approached the escalators without hearing the mechanical laughter of the automaton Ryu had taken control of.

That's not to say the arcade was silent. The games were clearly, audibly active. Their clashing soundtracks and the sound effects of their attract screens echoed through the halls. Now and then, one of them flashed bright enough to reflect off dusty windows and metal gratings.

"Do you guys play a lot of arcade games?" I asked Gerry. I'd fallen into step with him while Zhizhi, camera at the ready, walked alongside Erin.

"Hell yeah," Gerry said. "I love all that retro shit. That's where all the creativity is these days."

I didn't stop walking, but I had to catch myself before I tripped. "In arcades?"

He cackled. "In retro games, man! The indie scene is all about going old school. Trowel Samurai was goated."

"Oh, that makes way more sense." I nodded. "Also, true."

He returned the nod. "Sucks about 2."

"I liked 2," I said, and immediately regretted my words. The next productive argument about video games will be the first.

Gerry didn't launch into a tirade, though. He proved cagier than I'd expected from his Discord persona. "Played it a lot, did you?"

Trowel Samurai 2 had come out the same day the Third Eye beta launched. It was hard to remember how hyped Lena and I had been – about the retro platformer, not about the AR-ARG we'd long ago despaired of seeing the release of.

I'd beaten Trowel Samurai 2. So had Lena, and she'd written up a glowing review of it. Neither of us had touched it since, though, even though we'd played the original to death and hunted down every secret in it.

"Third Eye has sort of taken up all my gaming time," I said. You could cut the word "gaming" and that sentence would be, if anything, more accurate.

"I'm telling you, 2 is shit," Gerry said. "Try the original again. I've been grinding Third Eye, too, but I still make time for the classics."

I couldn't decide if he was being a dick or giving good advice about life balance.

Or, most likely, both.

"I did pack our Switch," I said. "Maybe I'll try a replay on the road."

He flashed a thumbs up.

Zhizhi leaned close to Erin and whispered, loudly enough for Gerry and I to hear, "Did you follow all of that?"

I think she expected Erin to shake her head. At most, to prevaricate.

A rare example of Zhizhi failing to read her subject.

"Oh yes," Erin said. "I wish I had more time to devote to the differences between Trowel Samurai 1 and 2. 2 is so much more proficient, technically and design-wise, but on the whole, I agree that it lacks the same spark. I don't want to just accept my first impression of it, though, you know? Game design is no place for uncritical nostalgia. Yet I can't shake the feeling. Which did you like better?"

I couldn't see Zhizhi's expression. I imagined a frozen smile. She said, "I, uh, haven't played 2 yet."

"You should," Erin said. "We may quibble about its intangible qualities, but there's no question that it's a brilliantly made game. Worth admiring for the pixel art alone. You'll at least admit that much, won't you, Gerry?"

"Nope," he said. "No spark. Goes for the art, too, just sayin'."

Erin laughed. "You're so mean. You're worse than Mr. Green."

"Matt?" I asked. Talk about somebody who I'd want outside backing Lena up. Just so long as they didn't start fighting each other. Maybe it would've been better to have him down here watching my back, while Lena kept the advantage of numbers. Just so long as he and I didn't start fighting each other. "Too bad he couldn't join us tonight."

"Yeah..." Erin hung her head.

"The Prof's got better things to do than hang out with a bunch of kids, Erin," Gerry said.

"I wish he were the professor." Erin hunched her shoulders. "Now I'm being mean. I'm sure Dr. Yeboah has all kinds of interesting ideas about design."

Gerry snorted. "Just gotta read his papers to find out what they are?"

"Well." Erin pressed her hands against her jeans. "Yeah."

Gerry tried to nudge my arm, but, trained by years of brotherly ribbing, I dodged. He didn't seem to notice. "The Prof – Matt – is the TA, but he's the only one who actually wants to teach us shit. Too bad we've been stuck with the actual professor, Yeboah, the last few days."

"Matt hasn't been teaching his class?" I asked.

Both his students shook their heads.

My brow furrowed. A couple of days?

"When was the last time either of you heard from him?" I asked.

Zhizhi glanced back at me. Her frown matched mine.

Gerry wasn't following my train of thought. "Couple days. I literally just said."

"Erin?" I called.

She'd stopped in her tracks.

I thought it was because my question had brought her up short.

I kept thinking that when she murmured, "Oh my."

Then I rounded the escalator and saw what she was staring at.

The arcade glowed ahead of us, eerie, enticing, out of place even though it didn't look like it. Potentially fun. Potentially a font of immense Third Eye power. The Street Fighter 2 cabinet Miguel and I had played on was near the entrance, beckoning me back to battle.

So was the figure whose cloak hid most of it from view.

"About time you showed up." The words echoed weirdly through Cinder Alley's subterranean concourse.

But then, thanks to the voice changer, Mask's words always sounded weird.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

tl;dr, I need a break, so I'm going to give you more content!

Good news and bad news, distinguished guests.

Ever since my recent dental surgery, I haven't been able to get back into enough of a rhythm writing Eye on the Road to make up for the chapters that slipped out of the backlog. I've been sixteen chapters ahead for my highest tier of Patrons for weeks, and have repeatedly been up past midnight fighting to avoid falling to fifteen. Which is exactly where I've fallen with today's announcement taking the place of an episode on Patreon.

That's not sustainable. It's negatively impacting the hell out of my life, and if it keeps up it could hurt the story, too.

As such, Eye on the Road will be moving to a Monday/Wednesday/Friday schedule.

However, I don't want to leave you without anything to read, so I'm breaking open the old trunk and offering you a sneak peak at not one but two of my hitherto unpublished novels.

For the next four weeks on Tuesday and Thursday, I'll be posting a summary and a chapter of The Mechaneer and The Fox Who Stole Monaco on my Patreon page. You won't need to be a Patron to read them, or even to sign in; they'll be available 100% free. I'm using my Patreon to host them so my fans from multiple communities can participate in the same place. Patrons will, however, also get up to twenty bonus chapters of each to help decide which they want to see more of.

At the end of those four weeks, I'll host a poll so you can decide which of my novels you want to see posted here going forward, where it will be put into daily circulation.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 79: Distinguished Competition

Was it bizarre to see Mask, in full costume, eponymous mask, voice changer and all, standing in front of a Street Fighter 2 cabinet? Apparently, from what I could hear from the machine, playing a match while he waited for us to show?

Less than you might think, honestly. I'd seen weirder cosplay at comic and game conventions, and those often got arcade cabinets in when they could.

Was it a shock to see him here, in Miguel's Realm?

You bet your ass.

At least I knew he was here, not outside invading Lena and the others.

He abandoned his game and strode to the doors of the arcade. He swept his hand out to the side, and his cloak billowed behind him, although I didn't hear or feel the telltale brush of Air. He stopped in the doorway, one hand outstretched, the other on his hip.

His head didn't move, and with his face covered, I couldn't see where he was looking, but I knew he had to be scanning our team.

"No Ashbird tonight?" There was a weird sound, even weirder than the usual output of his voice changer, and I realized he was laughing. "Instead you've brought the wiki admin herself. You've got quite a harem, OldCampaigner."

I felt my chest flush.

"Um," Erin said.

Apart from Mask, Zhizhi was the only one who laughed.

She walked forward, which struck me as a terrible idea. She pointed her camera in Mask's face, such as it was, which seemed even worse. "You must be the famous Mask I've heard so much about."

He said nothing, didn't shift from his position at the entrance of the arcade, but was it my imagination, or did he stand up a little straighter? His outfit made it difficult to notice tiny changes in his posture, which was probably part of the point.

It made it hard to judge his exact height, too. Seeing him next to Zhizhi, I thought Lena had overestimated when she called him 6'6". Not by much, though.

"Is that how you'd like to be referred to?" Zhizhi asked. "I can use a name, a username, whatever works for you."

After a momentary silence, he said, "Mask suits me."

People he'd invaded might have given him that moniker, but with his edgelord persona, I'd expected him to embrace it. I'd been right.

"Cool, cool," Zhizhi said. "So. Mask, the famous Third Eye invader! Or is that infamous?"

He didn't move, but she seemed to have him on the back foot all the same. As best I could tell through his voice changer, he had to fight not to sputter. "Who are you?"

Seemed he wasn't all-seeing. The only people he'd recognized so far were ones with a public Third Eye persona.

"Zhizhi Wong," she said, "9News."

That got an unmistakable twitch out of him. His three eyeholes pointed first in my direction, then Erin's. "You're broadcasting this?"

"Why not?" Zhizhi asked. "It's a hell of a story, isn't it? 'ARG players discover hidden remnants of demolished mall'?"

"Ah," Mask said.

I realized what Zhizhi was up to. She'd implied that we'd told her only about Cinder Alley, not the rest of Third Eye. Also, that she was broadcasting live to the local news.

If Mask chose to pick a fight with us here and now, she wanted him to think he'd be exposing both Third Eye and himself to public scrutiny. If he used his powers, people would see them. If he beat us and did something criminal, it would be on the record. Sure, he had his disguise, but was he willing to test it?

"If you're a news anchor," he asked, "where's your cameraman?"

Zhizhi exhaled. She remained where she stood, but I couldn't tell if it was because she refused to back down or because she was frozen in place. Her voice almost sounded calm when she said, "You got me. This is off the record."

I didn't want to give Mask the impression that Zhizhi was just recording, not streaming. She might not be blasting her footage to the entirety of the Denver metro area, but it wasn't contained within this Realm, either. Whatever happened here, someone was going to see it.

"Right now," I said, "we're only streaming to the rest of the team. What part of this gets shared in a video... that remains to be seen."

Mask surveyed us for what felt like a long time. I mean, I assumed that's what he was doing. For all his stance betrayed, he could've been trying to remember the last item he wanted to add to his shopping list.

Finally, he shrugged. "It doesn't matter."

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

His mask tilted. "The same thing as you, I imagine. Grinding."

I didn't have either his concealing outfit or his relatively restrained mannerisms. I'm sure I stiffened. Erin sure did.

"Oh," Mask said. "Were you still at the stage of figuring out how it works?"

Erin began, "We weren't certain if we needed –"

"If it would work for just anyone," I said.

Erin glanced back at me, blinking rapidly.

I didn't want Mask to know whose Realm this was, nor that we'd found a Ticket Daimon here. He might lack one or both pieces of information, and any informational advantage we could get was one I planned to hang onto.

I realized that, without the need for any test, he'd just confirmed our best-case scenario. Both Realm and Daimon could generate Tickets independently!

Unless he was lying, but why would he? Either he would follow up this conversation by attacking us, in which case he presumably thought he could do to us whatever it was he did to the people he beat and we wouldn't be able to pass on any information; or he would let us into the arcade and we'd find out for ourselves soon enough.

"Cagey," he said. "Good. I wonder how much more you know that hasn't appeared on the wiki."

Erin flinched.

I glared.

Gerry pushed past both of us, drawing level with Zhizhi. He wasn't quite as tall as Mask, but, as best I could tell, he was more broadly built. Maybe that gave him a shot of confidence, because he reached out to poke his finger into Mask's chest. "Guess you tell the world everything you know, buddy?"

Mask slapped his hand away. "I don't claim to be the voice of the community."

"Aw, bullshit," Gerry said.

Erin shook her head. "No. He's right."

"Oh?" Mask asked.

"I feel awful, concealing what I know from the playerbase," Erin said. She stepped forward as well, so I kept pace with her. "You'd be well within your rights to blow me up for it. The only thing I can offer in my defense is that I'm trying to do what I think is right."

Mask's, well, mask tilted backwards, and his discordant chuckle echoed through Cinder Alley.

Gerry glanced back at us. He must not have liked what he saw of Erin's expression, any more than I liked the way she hunched her shoulders. He turned back to Mask and tried again to poke him. "What's so fucking funny, asshole?"

Mask's laughter stopped in a heartbeat.

This time, instead of slapping Gerry's hand away, he extended his palm.

I couldn't see what happened next, but Gerry skidded backwards, coughing. I don't know if he would've fallen, because Erin and I caught his arms and steadied him.

Zhizhi scrambled sideways. She stared at Mask's outstretched palm.

"Two points," Mask said.

I couldn't tell if he meant he'd scored two or that he was about to make them.

Fortunately, he kept talking after just enough of a pause for me to think it was done deliberately to up the drama. "First," he said, "and I'm not going to repeat this, don't touch me. You won't get another warning."

Gerry rubbed his chest. "Warning, my ass."

"Second," Mask said, "what's so funny is that our dear admin took my line."

I patted Gerry's back and, satisfied he'd suffered nothing more than the momentary pain Third Eye used as a warning when we got hit, stepped past him and Erin. To Mask, I said, "Now I've heard it all. It's one thing to go, 'invasion is just part of the game.' Another to make it sound like a moral imperative. You're doing what you think is right?"

"Think?" He shook his head. "I guess there is one difference."

"You mean," Zhizhi said, "you don't think, you know."

Her voice wavered, but she forced the words out and held the camera steady on Mask.

He let the statement hang in the air.

"I've heard quite a bit of speculation about what you're up to, and why," Zhizhi said. "Not all of it flattering."

No response.

"Here's a chance to set the record straight," she said. "Tell your side of the story."

Still no response. The moment stretched out. Mask didn't move, hardly seemed to breathe.

Then again, I wasn't sure any of us did.

Abruptly, he turned on his heel. His cloak swirled behind him as he stalked back into the arcade. Over his shoulder, in a voice that came through clipped despite the distortion, he said, "This interview is over."

Did he think that line made him sound cool? I felt like I understood his actions less than I had before having a real conversation with him.

Before we decided what to do about the arcade, though, I needed to know at least one more thing.

"Hey," I called.

Mask didn't stop walking.

Dick.

Partly because I thought he might be trying to lure me into a trap, mostly because I refused to give him the satisfaction, I neither stepped forward nor raised my voice. With the acoustics of Cinder Alley, I knew he could hear me just fine.

"Answer me this." I didn't wait around for him to acknowledge that I'd spoken. I didn't have all evening. "Do you know where Matthew Green is?"

I thought Mask hesitated, though it was hard to tell since he'd reached the Street Fighter cabinet.

"The guest star from Ashbird's Earth video?" Mask asked. "Why would I know that?"

"Good question," I asked. "Here's another. Considering that he went by his username in the video, how do you know who he is?"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

No threadmark for this because it's technically not Third Eye content, but here's a reminder that the first chapter of my romantic space opera, The Mechaneer, is now available on my Patreon for all readers. You can get a new chapter every Tuesday for the next few weeks.

Patrons can access up to twenty bonus chapters.

Remember that in a few weeks, all readers will get the chance to vote on whether they want to see The Mechaneer or The Fox Who Stole Monaco (debuting this Thursday) continue here and on other sites. Don't miss your chance to help decide!

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 80: No Eye In Team

I don't think anything Mask could have said would have allayed my suspicions entirely. He could've offered an explanation that left room for reasonable doubt, though.

Say he'd looked Matt up after watching Lena's video, for example. That would make sense. If you were impressed with a guest star's cameo, why not check if he had his own channel? Even though Matt didn't, his username might still lead back to his real name through some social media linkage; I knew my digital trail wasn't obscured carefully enough to hide my name.

That's not what Mask did. I'm not sure what sound he tried to make, but it sure wasn't an explanation. Through his voice changer, it came out as a burst of static.

He gripped the edges of the Street Fighter 2 cabinet. Despite the admittedly impressive Third Eye shit he could do, it didn't crack under his grasp.

I'm sure that was very disappointing to him.

I reminded myself that it didn't matter how ridiculous I found his persona. The dude had just, if not admitted, at least confirmed in my mind that he was up to some very dark shit. I had to take him seriously.

Eventually, he released the arcade cabinet and turned to face us. His three eyeholes lined up on my face. I'm sure he was glaring, but of course, I couldn't see it.

Gerry elbowed my shoulder. Because I was focused on Mask, I didn't dodge this time.

I risked flicking a glance at him. "What?"

"We gonna fight now?" he asked.

I probably shouldn't have, for a number of reasons, but I chuckled. "I think that's up to Mask. What'll it be? An answer, or a fight?"

"You want an answer to your question, OldCampaigner?" Mask asked. "I can provide it."

"If you know where Mr. Green is, please, tell us," Erin said. "I've been trying not to worry, but it sounds as though I should have."

"He's somewhere his talents can be put to better use." Mask shook his head. "I think you've misunderstood what I told your bud, though."

Erin pushed her glasses up. "I think you deliberately said it in a confusing way."

His mask tilted, just a little.

"It sounds as though you're implying you're not going to tell us," Erin said. "Instead, you're going to show us, probably by doing the same unpleasant thing you did to him."

I was either getting better at reading Mask's body language, or I was projecting my ideas about him onto his almost microscopic motions. The slightest shift of weight from one foot to the other, the tiniest creak of the leather of his gloves.

It seemed to me that Erin spelling out his sinister implications annoyed him.

Because he wanted to play the enigmatic villain? No, the enigmatic antihero. He had declared that in his mind, he knew he was doing the right thing.

Or was his reaction because he wanted a last scrap of plausible deniability while Zhizhi was filming the whole confrontation?

Either way, I was sure the answer to Gerry's question was about to be "Yes."

My fingers slid across my phone. I'd gotten pretty good at swapping to the Third Eye app and the Reactants page without looking. I didn't call up Air – yet. If Mask wanted a fight, he'd have to start one.

This time, I fully intended to finish it.

Maybe once we got Mask's HP down, he would drop the edgelord act and give us some straight answers.

Or, he might turn our broadcasting around on us, trusting we wouldn't threaten him while we were on camera. Ironic, but fair enough. I could try to sell him on the idea that we were the ones controlling the footage and could cut or keep whatever we liked, but I didn't think it would work. I trusted Zhizhi to play along. I wasn't sure about Gerry, though, and I was very sure Erin would either fail to sell a threat or refuse to make it in the first place.

Whatever. At the very least, Mask wouldn't be a danger to anybody else for the rest of the night.

Was I getting ahead of myself?

The next few seconds answered that question.

Mask went for his phone.

I called up Iron with Air as soon as I saw his hand twitch toward the folds of his cloak.

I still wasn't fast enough.

I staggered back, clutching my throat where it felt like I'd been punched by the guy fifteen feet away. This wasn't the rapid, repeated pinprick attack he'd used against Lena and I. It was more like the one he'd used to knock Bernie out of the fight before I arrived.

I didn't know how much HP I'd lost, but it felt like if I'd taken that hit with none left, my windpipe would've been crushed. It probably wasn't true, because Third Eye effects didn't seem to apply their full force to physical objects, but that didn't make the pain any less stunning in the moment.

Zhizhi scrambled backwards while Erin and Gerry brought their phones up. When I recovered enough to drag my own into place, I saw she'd gone for a malleable Earth and Stone shield, while he had deployed Iron, with no obvious indication what Reactant he'd used to conjure it.

They both swung their shields into place, as did I, but Mask hesitated and let us all overcommit. Only then did he whip another hammer blow at me. The light in Cinder Alley was dim, but brighter than on the street when I'd fought him before, enough for me to see that the shadows he wielded did extend from the hem of his cloak. I still didn't know what Reactant he was using, nor what Material he was using it on.

I did, however, move fast enough to bat it harmlessly aside.

In exchange, we got –

Nothing.

Erin didn't attack at all, just spread her shield to a wider form so that it would make attacks on both herself and Zhizhi difficult. Gerry tried, but he reacted too slow to what both Mask and I were doing, and his swing was overly telegraphed when he lunged forward. I was pretty sure I could rule out Air as his Reactant. Probably Earth, too; either or both of Matt and Erin would've taught him the trick of manipulating an object's shape in place of moving it.

Hopefully, he had Fire. At least if he did manage to land a hit, that would do a lot of damage.

He didn't manage.

Mask sidestepped, barely even a dodge, swatted Gerry's attack to the brick at his feet, and used the same motion to strike at me again. He transformed the roiling shadows halfway through their thrust, turning them from a single mass into dozens of tiny lances. I blocked all but two, and those only had enough momentum to sting when they jabbed into me.

Every little bit hurt, though.

Worse, by far, he kept the pressure on. His other hand swept around. If I hadn't practiced with Albie, I never would've moved fast enough to deflect his next blow, much less to pivot and fend off the stabbing tendrils.

For somebody outnumbered three to one, Mask was absurdly overcommitted. Although I hadn't tried to attack, I'd seen openings I could've targeted. Why, though? I had the most agile defense, and I seemed to have pulled aggro. My teammates should've been picking him apart.

Trouble was, Erin wasn't attacking and Gerry's attacks weren't landing. It wasn't just that he struck slowly. In fact, considering that he had to move his whole body to manipulate the spacing of his conjured object, he moved damn fast. It was that by the time he realized Mask had left himself open and started trying to exploit it, Mask was already on to his next attack.

In theory, the three of us should have been so much better off than when Lena and I fought Mask. More players, more Reactants between us.

Lena and I, however, knew each other's games inside out. Years before we'd loaded Third Eye for the first time, we'd honed the rhythm with which we attacked and defended. I knew exactly how to create openings for her. She knew precisely when to exploit them.

I'd never played a single game with Gerry, and Erin and I had only played Third Eye together in situations where we had no time pressure.

Surely Erin and Gerry had played together, at least? It didn't matter. Erin stayed on the defensive, and Mask seemed content to ignore her. Gerry couldn't pin Mask into a range where his strikes could land.

While our timing and spacing were horribly unoptimized, I could tell Mask's attack was the opposite. He'd hit me first, so he was going to keep hitting me until my HP dropped to zero and the odds tilted back in his favor. That was in keeping with how he'd handled the invasions we'd read reports of.

However much I might hate it, Mask was a hell of a player. There was a very real possibility he'd engaged in more Third Eye PVP than anyone in the world. Who would have him beat?

Albie and her brother, perhaps, if they'd been doing this for a long time. But unless they were part of a secret order of battle wizards waging an invisible war in the shadows of human history, who would have given them enough of a challenge for them to learn anything from it?

Omar, perhaps, if he really did have other players on his payroll and chose to practice his PVP skills against them. But would his employees really have gone all out against their boss?

It didn't matter. Omar wasn't here. Unfortunately, neither was Albie.

Mask slipped effortlessly past one of Gerry's attacks. Erin backpedaled to keep her shield between him and Zhizhi.

I was on the back foot, too, because Mask was almost in my face now, crowding me, attacking from strange angles, cutting into the speed advantage I got from Air and maximizing the mutability he got from whatever he was using.

He might be the best Third Eye PVP player in the world.

And for all intents and purposes, I was fighting him solo.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Once again, no threadmark because it's not technically Third Eye content, but Chapter One of my urban fantasy heist novel The Fox Who Stole Monaco is now available free for all readers.
Patrons can access up to twenty bonus chapters -- making sixty total across three books, btw, an incredible value!
Remember that in a month you'll get to vote on which of this and The Mechaneer gets posted here and elsewhere. Don't miss the chance to give it a look!

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 81: The Better Part of Valor

I tried. Honest.

As soon as I realized Mask was trying to cut me from the fold, wolf to sheep style, I flipped from defense to offense. Maybe if I could get a few hits in, or even a few near misses, he'd have to concentrate enough that Gerry and Erin could –

As soon as I did anything except defend myself, another hammerblow slammed into my gut.

I staggered back and didn't get my Iron up in time to stop another strike from clipping me in the shoulder. My hand almost spasmed open, which would've sent my phone scattering out of reach. I managed to grip it, just. While I focused on that, pinpricks rippled up and down my face and chest.

By the time I dragged my shield back between Mask and I, I was sure I'd lost hundreds of HP. All I was doing was flailing back and forth with the Iron, trying blindly to knock attacks away.

I tried to get a sense of my positioning. Ten feet back from where the rest of my team stood. I'd be pinned against the escalator soon, if I didn't manage to change the angle of my retreat. Gerry was charging after Mask and I, but without ever taking his eyes, or at least his eyeholes, off of me, Mask shot a lash of darkness back to trip him up.

I tried switching to offense again, even though I knew Mask was still paying attention to me. As I feared, I took another hit for my troubles. Even with the speed of Air, my Iron couldn't reach Mask before he hit me. I needed to cover too many angles, and he kept his tendrils too close.

Faced with a superior opponent and a pair of allies I didn't know how to combine with, I did the only thing I could think of:

Retreated.

No, that's not quite right. "Retreated" implies I kept backpedaling, attempting frantic deflections, launching the occasional feint to make it seem like I was still in the fight.

What I did was, I threw out one wild attack in the vague direction of Mask's face, accepted a stinging but not especially damaging stab in return, and ran like hell.

I tore across the concourse, headed for the escalator.

For a moment, the only sounds were my footfalls slapping on the brick. I'd left everyone too startled to speak, much less to move. Then I heard not just an echo of my steps, but more in a different tone. Mask in pursuit.

He was certainly a better fighter than me, and whatever combination of Reactant and Material he used, it offered him a powerful mix of offense and defense.

But I had two Air now, and after I didn't get to Lena in time to save Bernie, I'd done a bit of practicing with ways to use it. Zero chance Mask was catching me.

I whipped my Iron around behind me, pumped a second unit of Air into it, and pulled it along in my wake. I leaped more than I ran, and every time my feet left the bricks, I gave myself a shove in the back. I didn't nail every landing, but even missing one now and then, I still made time that would've gotten me on a track team if it hadn't looked so absurd.

"Pussy!" Mask shouted, from shockingly far behind me. His attempt at a barb didn't land. Partly because the bravest – or at least most combative – person I knew was a woman. Mostly because thoroughly modern slang sounded absurd coming from his movie-villain altered voice.

Let's be real, though. Were there things he could have done to arrest my flight? Yes. Something he could have said? No chance.

I heard the exact moment he realized it. He skidded to a stop just as I reached the escalator.

When I kept running, one of my teammates finally reacted.

Erin's voice cracked as she called, "Cam, what are you –"

Whatever she intended to say to me – probably a more polite version of Mask's sentiment, frankly – something cut her off. I didn't dare turn to look, but I could guess that Mask had decided he'd cut me from the battle by scaring me off and had finally turned to the others.

If he'd done that right away, it would've counted as something that stopped me from running. At this point, though, I poured on another burst of speed. I rounded the escalator.

Then, with a twirl of my fingers and a pivot of my heels, I smashed my Iron into my own back and hurled myself back toward the fray. Judging from the pain, that cost me some HP. It also put me right where I wanted to be.

As I sailed back, I had a second to take in the sight of Mask sidestepping one of Gerry's swings and retaliating with a palm-first hammer blow that sent the wiki team member staggering.

Clean hit, and good target prioritization. Erin was too busy defending herself and Zhizhi to extend her shield to Gerry, and Gerry was clearly trying to act as DPS. Another indication that Mask knew his shit when it came to Third Eye PVP.

He didn't, quite, know his enemies, though.

Erin's attack whipped into his legs and made him stagger. She'd pivoted to offense at the perfect moment. When Mask scrambled upright, he burst back, and though Gerry couldn't quite land his retaliatory swing, this time, he came within inches. From the burst of static, I suspected Mask was cursing under his breath.

I'd guessed this would happen, because I knew Erin and Gerry must have played together, in other games if not Third Eye. They'd have a more effective rhythm than either had with me. All it had taken to bring to the fore was getting Mask's attention on them.

He backed off a step. He lashed out at Erin and Gerry at the same time. Erin was back on defense already, her shield spreading to absorb both strikes. A fast reaction, but a mistake. She hadn't recognized just how much force Mask imparted to his blows. Her shield cracked and tendrils zipped through to sting her.

She hissed in pain, but rather than try to block, she launched a lance of Earth-formed Iron. It scraped Mask's side.

I knew an Earth attack like Erin's wouldn't do anywhere near enough damage. That was Earth's weakness in Third Eye combat. For all its versatility, all its defensive qualities, even for its deceptive speed, it took a while to deplete an opponent's HP.

But every little bit hurt.

And every little hurt distracted.

You know what does a lot more damage than Earth?

An Iron orb shaped by Water, propelled like a cannonball with the full force of two units of Air.

Mask hadn't noticed me swing around the escalator. For a moment, I'd lost his aggro. My attack caught him clean in the chest, undodged, unblocked. It flung him back into the arcade. He crashed into the counter and it shook from the impact.

I'd learned my lesson from the last time I thought I'd dropped this asshole. Before he could rise, I flicked my orb backwards, then flung it into him again, battering him to the tiled floor.

He started to drag himself up. Good call, because I had no intention of stopping. I'd seen how many HP he'd had in some of those later invasion reports. Bad call, because dragging himself to his feet was not going to get him up faster than I could smash him back down.

I didn't advance any further. Why would I? Even if he managed to shield himself, he'd have to cross most of Cinder Alley to hit back at me, and expose his flanks to both my allies with every step. Me? I could fight just fine from here.

Mask slumped against the counter.

Sorry, "Bud," I thought. No way in hell do I believe you're out of HP.

I whipped the orb up and down like a yo-yo, pummeling his chest and shoulders. The difference a second Air made shocked me. I hadn't had the chance to practice much with it, but it was only when I compared it to what other players were doing that I realized just how fast it had made my attacks.

Once, I might have let that make me complacent.

I was sure, though, that Mask must have faced someone with two or more Air before. I had him on the ropes because I'd sucker-punched him, but the moment I let up, he would turn the tables on me.

Speaking of letting up –

"Don't hesitate," I shouted. "Hit him with everything you've got while you have a chance!"

Gerry needed no further encouragement. He stepped forward, careful not to block my line of sight – too careful for my tastes, since I didn't actually need line of sight to keep smashing my Iron into the same place – and brought his own Iron up. I realized I still didn't know what Reactant he was using. If he had Fire, we might be able to finish this fast.

I thought Erin might hesitate. I could see her shoulders shaking even from where I stood. Nope. She might hate this, but Mask had killed her reluctance when he'd implied he'd hurt her teacher. She stepped forward, and her Stone flowed into the arcade.

Not to strike, but to wrap around Mask's hands.

That was one of Matt's tricks. In fact, I'd seen him use it to end a duel with Erin. As attacks went, it seemed both very effective and suited to her preference not to inflict any more pain on an opponent than she had to.

I considered that my preference, too. I didn't think I had the luxury to act on my preferences at the moment. I kept smashing my Iron into Mask's prone body, even as Erin tightened her grip on his hands.

Gerry followed my lead. The edge of his Iron glowed red-hot. Fire! Yes! What was more, he seemed to have developed a trick with it that Lena hadn't, focusing all the heat on one edge like the tip of a soldering iron.

Mask hadn't responded with more than a grunt to my attacks, but when Gerry's Iron sizzled against his cloak, he let out a distorted cry.

"Surely this is enough," Erin said. "I have his hands trapped. We can stop!"

I bit my lip.

"He could be out of HP," Erin said.

"He's not," I said.

He wasn't.

Was he?

I snapped my Iron up.

And damn me, I hesitated to bring it down.

"Hell with that," Gerry said.

The edge of his Iron glowed as he slammed it home.

And it kept on glowing when it plunged through Mask to sink into the tiles beneath him.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 82: Key Item

Gerry said, "What the shit? N-no way."

He spoke for all of us.

Through my phone camera, I saw his red-hot Iron plate bisecting Mask's prone form. The glow on the Iron faded and it tipped over, deselected, as Gerry staggered away from the scene of the... crime?

Erin covered her mouth and whispered, "Oh, God."

Zhizhi and I dashed forward to get a clearer look. Even though I thought I might regret it.

Because from where I'd been standing, it looked an awful lot like Gerry had just cut Mask in half.

Except –

"Don't let up," I shouted.

"Dude, quit it," Gerry said. Snapped. "This is on you. You made me keep going!"

I shook my head, which was pretty pointless since he hadn't wrenched his eyes off Mask. "It's a trick, dammit!"

Erin's shoulders tensed, but I saw her hands shift, working the Stone she'd conjured around Mask's hands. Either she still extended me her trust, or she'd realized the same things I had.

Gerry didn't. I could tell from the way he whirled to face me, arms spread wide, instead of staring at Mask's shadows and calling up another piece of Iron to defend against them.

The shadows which were still roiling.

I didn't know everything about Third Eye, but three things had been consistent in every aspect of the game.

First, no regular player had ever showed off an attack that would do more than annoy someone without HP. It probably had something to do with what Albie called alignment, but what felt like a punch to the throat while your HP was up was more like a spitball without.

Second, even if someone did have such an attack, you couldn't be seriously hurt by anything as long as you still had HP. In-game or out-of-game, damage would just slide off you after a moment of pain.

And third, once you were out of HP, you couldn't keep playing until the next day. Or until a little girl gave you a Potion. Even with a Potion available, though, whatever object you'd had selected would fall inert and your avatar would fade until you'd drunk it.

Gerry wasn't looking for advice, though. He was looking for somebody to take the blame for what he thought he'd just done. He balled his fists, and I thought if he did conjure another object, he would throw it my way.

He didn't get the chance.

Mask's shadows surged up and wrapped around Gerry's legs.

Then Gerry fell through the floor.

That definitely qualified as something I didn't know about Third Eye.

His hands scrabbled at the tiles. He cried, "Oh fuck, help!"

I swept my Iron orb downwards. It should have rebounded from the floor, but instead it sank in, meeting almost no resistance. Gerry tried to grab hold, but if anything, the orb was slicker than the tiles. I tried to haul him up, but two Air wasn't even close to enough for me to fly, much less to lift someone heavier than I was.

His head went under the floor, like he was a swimmer caught in an undertow. His hand stretched upwards.

Erin's fingers worked frantically, weaving a ladder of Stone. Gerry's outstretched hand snagged a rung. His head broke the surface for a second, his mouth open to shout. The ladder tipped over, though, and slid in faster than he could climb it. I slammed my orb down to try to hold it in place, but still, he weighed too much for me.

His hand clamped on the final rung. Then the ladder vanished into the darkness with him.

Erin screamed, "No!"

To her absolutely insane credit, she scrambled in to the arcade.

I followed.

By the time we reached the counter, Mask's body had seemingly melted into the floor. So had his shadows.

So had Gerry.

I scanned the tiles with the Third Eye app, and again without it. I got the same sight either way: an old and pitted linoleum floor marked by a weird, semicircular discoloration where Mask had lain, stretching to where Gerry had disappeared. At first I thought it had been stained by whatever effect Mask used, but then I realized the truth. Everywhere else, the floor was sticky with a layer of dust, old sweat, and spilled stale pop. This patch had been cleaned down to the tiles.

Which meant...

What?

I had no idea. Hell. I didn't know how to begin figuring it out.

There was obviously no split in the tiles, no hydraulic mechanism like the one that had opened a pit in the maintenance corridors in imitation of a dungeon. This was a one hundred percent Third Eye phenomena.

I was, at least, sure it was something from Third Eye, not some other supernatural effect. As horrifying as it had been, as bizarre as it had seemed, it hadn't been accompanied by the same gut-wrenching distortion as the creature we'd faced at the construction site.

What Mask had done was part of the game. He was just playing on a completely different level than the rest of us.

I met Erin's eyes.

Hers were wide and teary, even before they were magnified by her thick glasses.

Zhizhi rushed up to us. "What the hell just happened?"

"I haven't got a clue," I said. "Whatever that was, it's not anything we've seen before. I can't even think what Mask could be using. Can you, Erin?"

She squeezed her eyes shut and started to shake her head. She hesitated. "I don't know whether it counts as a Reactant or a Refinement, but I think I know what the resource is."

"What?" I asked.

Erin glanced around, looking for immediate danger. Smart. I did the same, and so, despite her inability to respond to it, did Zhizhi. The arcade was full of shadows, uncomfortably close, and with our lights inside it, the concourse looked even worse.

None of them appeared to be creeping closer to us.

I had no idea if that mattered.

Mask and Gerry had disappeared through a solid floor. What kind of warning did we expect to get if the former resumed his attack?

Maybe Erin realized that scanning her surroundings was pointless. She tapped on her phone and showed it to me. She'd gone to the in-game store in the Third Eye app and scrolled down to one of the entries. Her thumb hovered above it.

Keys.

"For opening the way," she said.

I found myself nodding. "I'd say we've found out what happened to the people Mask invaded."

"Including Mr. Green," Erin said. She shuddered. "And now Gerry. Cam, what are we going to do?"

I clasped her arm. "I don't think Mask is hurting them, beyond beating them at PVP. It's like you said, he's better off farming them for XP than killing them. Then there's what he said about Matt being somewhere he can put his talents to better use. We're not seeing the whole picture."

Erin blinked rapidly. "You're right. You have to be."

I sure as hell wanted to be.

I invented as much conviction as I could and squeezed her arm. "We're going to find them."

She reached up and clasped my hand. "I just hope it's not because we get dragged in after them."

I winced.

That was a good reminder, though. We had no reason to think we were safer then we'd been when Mask was actively fighting us. If anything, he represented a more grave danger now, when he could strike from any direction.

I pushed Erin's hand away and swept the arcade again, with and without my phone. "We've got to keep our eyes open."

"Great," Zhizhi said. "Done. I don't know how I'm ever going to get them to close again. What next?"

"We have to find Gerry," Erin said.

"Have you got a Key and we're just now hearing about it?" I asked. My words sounded harsher than I'd meant. "Sorry."

"No, you're right. I have no idea how to go about looking for him." Erin sighed. "If we don't find a Key, we may not be able to."

I felt her back press up against mine. Probably the safest formation, unless Mask could use his Key to open something beneath both our feet and suck us in together. Then it was the most dangerous.

Lena and I hadn't felt safe after facing the creature? What a load of crap. We'd only encountered it in an isolated place, and only after ignoring plenty of warnings both in and out of Third Eye, and whether Albie had killed it or not, it hadn't pursued us off the site.

Mask could get to us anytime, anywhere, and he clearly intended to.

I flicked a glance around the arcade. Searching the darkness for some sign of Mask emerging, yeah, but also looking at the array of machines. He'd confirmed that we could use this place to get more Tickets. We needed the strength they offered more than ever.

There was no way in hell I was going to stand here playing Street Fighter 2 when Mask could surge out of the darkness and pull me in at any moment.

Worse, when for all I knew, he could already be outside, invading Lena and the others.

Someone would alert us over Discord if that happened, right? Even if Mask overwhelmed all of them before anyone could send a message, Joon Woo was watching our camera feeds from another city. Surely Mask couldn't attack everyone at once.

I checked my phone. A ton of messages had come through, and they kept piling up. Not just from Joon Woo and the four outside, but from Salamancer, as well. We literally had eyes on us from around the world.

Best of all, Lena was still typing.

I tapped out as reassuring a message as my shaking hand and awful texting technique allowed. To Erin, I said, "We have to go. We have to link up with the others."

"I am also in favor of this," Zhizhi said.

I felt Erin's shoulders slump against my back. Quietly, she said, "This... really sucks."

"Yeah," I said.

Erin stood, head bowed. But when Zhizhi and I started picking our way toward the doors of the arcade, she followed.

As we walked, I said, "At least it explains some things, doesn't it?"

"What Mask does with people," Erin said.

"And how he gets around." I'd wondered about the way Mask seemed to pop up all over North America. His itinerary had stood out so much, even Benji asked about it.

Teleportation, it seemed, was on the table after all.

"And how Albie does," Erin said.

My jaw tightened. I hated the comparison, but it fit the facts. Of course Albie would have Keys, alongside every other resource. She was a dev.

"Good point," I said. "Good reminder."

"Of what?" Erin asked.

"That this power is scary as hell," I said, "but that's because of the person who's using it. Abusing it. The power itself is just a tool. It's not good or bad."

"Pretty bad," Zhizhi said, "if it lets him kidnap people."

"A car helps you kidnap people," Erin said. She fiddled with the bridge of her glasses. "Well. Maybe that's a bad example. I suppose cars do a lot of bad things."

"And plenty of good," I said. "They're certainly useful. Which is what this is, too. Even more so now."

"How do you figure?" Zhizhi asked.

"Once we get Keys of our own, then if Mask nabs us, we can just teleport right back out. Once we can do that, we can rescue our friends, too, and anyone else he's captured."

Erin managed a smile.

Zhizhi didn't. If anything, her frown deepened.

"What's wrong?" I asked.

"First," she said, "you're jumping about six steps ahead. Neither of you has one of these Keys. Until tonight, the only indication you had that they so much as existed was that they showed up in the in-game store that doesn't work."

I swallowed. "Point."

"Second," Zhizhi said, "let's say you find your first Key. That helps all of one of you. I'd hate to know how you pick who gets it."

"Point," I repeated.

In truth, if I found it, I knew. Lena would, even if I had to push her into it with my Air.

The fairer thing, though, would be for us to take some kind of vote.

"But what the hell," Zhizhi said. "Let's say you both find one. And Lena. And Michelle, Joon Woo, and everyone else on the team. Every player, even! Awesome!"

It sure would be. Depending on how the gateways Mask could open worked, we might be able to summon the entire team with a phone call or a Discord message. We could crisscross the country, the world even, just by stepping through our own shadows. Or were the shadows part of Mask's personal aesthetic, not necessary to a Key?

I noticed Zhizhi's tight eyes and lips. Her expression suggested that hers had been a sarcastic "Awesome!"

"What's the downside?" I asked.

"A car can help you kidnap someone, and a car can help you escape," she said. "But a car isn't the only way to escape. And a car isn't something only about fifty thousand people around the world are allowed even a chance to acquire."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 83: The Only Ones

Lena flung herself on me and squeezed so tight I could hardly have breathed if not for my HP. Not that I was complaining. I wrapped my arms around her and lifted her off her feet.

I was vaguely aware of Bernie nuzzling my leg, and even more vaguely of Zhizhi sagging against Miguel, while Erin pressed her back to one of the pressed board walls and Michelle pressed close and whispered to her. Vaguest of all was my recognition of who wasn't present. Donica.

Reluctantly, I eased Lena back to the linoleum tiles with their Third Eye runic squiggles. She didn't let go of me, though, so I held her with her head smushed against my chest until she got her sniffles under control.

Then she stepped back and rubbed her nose and eyes.

What remained of the first team had just made it to the intersection in the maintenance hallways when our backups joined us. I didn't have a clear sense of the length of the tunnel, but I knew it was a lot longer than the concourse in Cinder Alley. "You guys made good time," I said.

"We came running as soon as Mask showed up on the stream," Lena said. "Sorry we didn't get here sooner."

"Don't be." I had no idea if it would've made a difference, having Lena and Michelle to back us up. Could we have saved Gerry? Or had Mask been toying with us the whole time?

I knew I was glad that Lena hadn't been around to become a possible target of Mask's Key.

"Don't be sorry?" Michelle asked. She'd been comforting Erin, or being comforted by her, I couldn't tell which, but now she glared at me. "Gerry's... he's..."

"He's okay," Erin said. "He's going to be. We just have to find a Key and we can rescue him, and everyone."

"How can you be sure of that?" Michelle asked.

Erin swallowed. "I can't. But I believe it."

Michelle hugged her arms.

"Where's Donica?" Erin asked.

"Waiting outside," Miguel said. "When we realized what was happening, she encouraged us to run to you. She was in no condition to do so, and as a non-player, not especially inclined to."

"Didn't stop you," I said.

Instead of offering a good answer, he inclined his head.

"Did it really go down like it looked in the video?" Lena asked.

"I'm not sure how it looked, but probably, yeah." I bent and picked up Bernie. Hugging him was almost as calming as hugging Lena. Though I couldn't see him do it, I felt him give the side of my face a huge lick. "We can fill you in on any details later, after we get out of here."

"We can't leave now," Lena said.

I shook my head. "There's no point in going back, Lena. We don't have the tools we need to follow Mask or find where he took Gerry. The best thing we can do now is to –"

"Collect as many Tickets as we can," she said.

"What?" Michelle's expression had started to soften, but her glare came back with full force. She directed it at Lena this time. "If that's a joke, it's an awful one."

"The joke is that they drove Mask off, and you don't want to power up when you have the chance," Lena said.

"Power up?" Michelle shook her head. "You're still treating this like a game."

"Because that's how it's made!" Lena balled her fists. "If you think I want to do this for fun after what we just saw, think again. But if you think I'm going to pass up the chance to get stronger when the alternative is letting that bastard do whatever he wants to us? Think way the hell again."

Michelle sagged.

Erin cocked her head. "You believe we drove Mask off?"

"For sure," Lena said. "He didn't come back, did he? Whatever he's up to, he seems to want to capture strong players. The only reason he wouldn't come back for you and Cam, Erin, is if his HP was too low for him to think he could win."

"Maybe he was satisfied with abducting Gerry," Erin said.

Even though she was answering Erin, Lena looked up at me. "Does Mask strike you as the kind of dude who would be satisfied with taking less than he can get?"

He did not. I started to shake my head, to back Lena up. I wanted to support her, sure, but more than that, her analysis of the situation seemed spot on to me, and it fit what we'd read in the invasion reports.

Then I thought about what it would mean to agree. If we persuaded the others, our group would go back to Cinder Alley. Back to the arcade. Back to those shadows. Playing games I didn't care about at the best of times, while every moment wondering if Mask's Key would turn one of those shadows into a portal and drag me through.

Or drag Lena through.

She searched my face.

I wrapped her into another hug, pressing Bernie between us.

I said, "I know you're right. Just, I hate it."

"Yeah, you must be sick of it happening all the time." She tried to laugh but it didn't quite come out right. She peeked over the top of Bernie. "Seriously, though."

I shuddered. "I think we've got to try."

"No," Michelle said. "No!"

"Chelle..." Erin began.

Michelle pushed her way. "Not you, too? This is ridiculous. Crazy!"

"Even Joon Woo agrees." Erin showed her phone screen.

Michelle didn't even glance at it. "Then screw him, too!"

She advanced on Lena and I and jabbed her finger forward.

Before she ever made contact, Lena skittered back like she'd gotten an electric shock.

"Listen, you," Michelle said. "All of you! This game was cool and fun, and we could do amazing things, and the players were some of my cool and fun friends, and the new people seemed neat. Now one of my cool and fun friends? Gerry? He's gone. You're taking it on faith that he's not dead! And it sounds like my teacher is, too!"

"I know," I said. "It's awful."

"I was totally into it," she said. "Now I am all the way out."

"Cool," Lena said. She recovered from her initial shock and pushed back. It was bizarre seeing her go nose to nose with someone about the same height, and it seemed to throw her off. Only for a second, though. "I guess you're going to tell us how we get out, now?"

"Hit me," Michelle said.

"What?" I asked. I sure wasn't the only one.

"Hit me," she repeated, "or I'm going to find a stick and bash myself in the head with it until I run out of HP. And I'll do it every day until I drop out of the beta. Can't take that long."

"Chelle, please, stop," Erin said. "I know you're upset. Believe me, we all are. You can't think being powerless is the way to solve this, though."

"Can't I?" Michelle locked eyes with Lena. In what I think was supposed to be an imitation of Lena's voice, she said, "'He seems to want to capture strong players.'"

I winced.

Lena probably should have. But Michelle mocking her voice had tipped her the rest of the way over from flight to fight. She pushed into Michelle's chest. "Some friend."

Michelle drew back. "Huh?"

"Gerry gets kidnapped," Lena said, "and you go, 'better him than me?' Screw that, and screw you if you mean it."

Michelle's eyes widened. Her lip trembled. "It's... it's not like that..."

"I barely know Gerry," Lena said. "One of the first things he ever said to me was to call my video cringe. Matt? He invaded me when I couldn't fight back. Every time I've talked to him, he's annoyed the crap out of me. He humiliated me in my own video and I had to smile about it for the camera."

"S-so?"

"So, those guys are barely my acquaintances. They probably are people I'd call friends, but that's because I'm kind of a fuckup." Lena exhaled. Her anger left with the breath. What remained, forged in it, was the steel that made my heart skip a beat. Gently, firmly, she said, "But you know what? Somebody used Third Eye to hurt them. Third Eye is our only chance to help them. So I'm gonna."

Michelle backed off. Erin touched her wrist, and she went to pieces. She collapsed against the wall, tears streaming down her face.

Erin knelt beside her.

Lena shrank in on herself. She tried to catch my eye without turning, but I could see her haunted expression. From steel to shattered at one burst of tears. She mumbled, "Too much?"

"I agree with you," I said, "but... probably."

She bit her nails.

I rubbed the small of her back, and it seemed to relax her some.

She squeezed her eyes shut and crouched in front of Michelle. "Sorry. Didn't mean to go off on you."

Michelle held up her hand, palm out, and shook her head. She started to try to speak, shuddered again, and fell silent.

I glanced over to see what Miguel and Zhizhi were doing. Whispering to each other, it turned out. I couldn't see her expression, but he wore a wan smile. I suspected he agreed with my assessment of what Lena had said.

When I looked back to her and Erin and Michelle, I found Bernie at the feet of the latter. I glanced through my phone and saw him nuzzling her leg.

She half sobbed, half laughed, and reached down to pet his broad head. He murmured softly.

She blinked her tears away. "You say we're the only ones who can help Gerry and Matt. But it's not like that for me."

"What is it like?" Erin asked.

Michelle turned to her. "I'm not like you. You know that."

I didn't. Whatever this was, was news to me.

Erin nodded, though. "You don't have a Reactant yet."

"Yet!" Michelle's voice rose. She tamped it down.

I didn't say anything, which was for the best, because my voice sure as hell would've risen, too. I'd thought I was leaving Lena with one other player who could fight beside her, and worried I didn't know how strong Michelle was. Now I knew Lena would've been fighting solo if Mask had chosen to invade out there instead of in the arcade.

Lena took it better than I would've. She hung her head. "Shit. That's rough."

"I thought so, but..." Michelle shook her head. "I want to help Gerry and Matt. I do! But even if I tried, even if I get these Tickets, I'm powerless. I might as well be a non-player, except if somebody wants to farm XP off me, they can."

"We won't let that happen," Erin said.

"You can't stop it," Michelle said.

Erin hung her head.

"I don't mean it like that, Erin." Michelle turned and hugged her friend. "I know you're really good at this. So are Cam and Lena. I'm sure you'll figure out a way to beat this Mask guy, and stop the jerk in Florida from abusing the game, and even fight monsters if it comes to that."

"We have to try," I said. "Lena is right about that much. We're the only ones who can."

"Are you?" Michelle asked. "This is nothing like a game anymore. Can't we call the cops and wash our hands of it?"

"'Cops got better things to do than get killed,'" Lena quoted.

Michelle stared at her, aghast. So did Erin. Even Miguel and Zhizhi broke off from their private conversation to frown at her.

Lena scanned their faces. "Seriously? Nobody's seen Big Trouble in Little China?"

"What are you talking about?" Michelle asked.

Lena looked so indignant, so offended, I couldn't help but crouch next to her and kiss the side of her head. Into her hair, I whispered, "Maybe not the time for movie quotes."

"It is always the time for movie quotes," she said.

So I kissed her again.

Everyone except Miguel looked at us like we were both crazy. It's not so much that he didn't think so, too. He just already knew what to expect of us.

He and Zhizhi joined the huddle, although they stayed standing. He said, "Unfortunately, in this case, I'm afraid Lena is correct."

"Not so much that they'd get killed," Zhizhi said. "But how are the local cops supposed to arrest a guy who can literally melt through the floor?"

Erin and especially Michelle shrank in on themselves.

"By taking his phone away," I said. That was what Lena and I had said to Benji about Omar when the subject of teleportation came up. Now that I'd seen what Mask could do, what Omar might be able to pull off as well, I knew it wouldn't be that simple.

Michelle brightened, but Erin shook her head. So did Miguel and Zhizhi.

They got it.

So did Lena. "How would the cops get his phone away from him? It's not like he's gonna hand it over."

"Oh, I know," I said. "That's why we have to make sure we take all his HP for the day before turning him in."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

No chapter on Friday while I do 4th of July stuff with the family.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 84: Going Down

"Do you want regular chips or Ruffles?" Lena asked.

I admit I wasn't paying much attention, but one of her words cut through the fog in my mind. "Ruffles?! Come on, Lena. We're not made of money."

She laughed like someone who wasn't paying by credit card for this shopping spree at a white stucco gas station called Alta Convenience, while dodging the only guaranteed paying work either of us had.

I heard her talking to Zhizhi near the counter, but my mind was a million miles away.

Okay, maybe forty miles away.

I'd just noticed that tucked in the back of the convenience store, they had a Street Fighter cabinet. I don't mean 2; that was one of the most popular arcade games of all time, so while I had a weird association with it now, it wouldn't have surprised me to see it crop up all over the place. I mean the convenience store had the garbage original, from the '80s. Where would you find a working original Street Fighter? How would you maintain it? It had to be more expensive than an arcade machine someone would actually want to play, right?

It was so incongruous that I had to go up to it and touch its fading wooden frame. I wasn't looking at it through a phone camera and there were people in the store who I had to assume weren't Third Eye players. Still, a part of me expected the cabinet to flash and me to get some kind of Materials out of it.

Nope.

Crazy.

I'm sure there was a story behind it. It had to be important to somebody. The manager, or the former manager, or the owner. I tried to imagine the chain of events that could lead somebody to care enough about this particular game to work as hard as they had to be to keep it around.

But when I let myself drift into my imagination, all I could think of was two nights ago, in the arcade in Third Eye's version of Cinder Alley.

At Lena's urging, we'd gone back. Back to the shadows, but they hadn't reached out for us. Back to the flashing lights, but they hadn't disguised any dangers. Lena had been right. Mask might have won, but he had no interest in coming back for another round.

I'd paid less attention to the Street Fighter cabinet there than I did to the one in the convenience store now. Instead, I'd roamed up and down the lines of arcade machines until I found a game that didn't look remotely combative. NBA Jam.

Erin and I had ended up taking turns on that one, me because I didn't want to look at a brawler or fighting game or shmup, her maybe the same, but also because she was a huge basketball nerd. She'd seemed to know every player on every team, even though almost all of them must have retired before she was born.

She'd started to smile halfway through explaining why I didn't know two of the Bulls players, while Michael Jordan, probably the only basketball player from before my time who I would recognize on sight, wasn't on the roster. Then she'd glanced at the spot by the counter where the floor looked scrubbed clean. Her smile had faded.

I knew the feeling. I hadn't had to grapple with it much in the arcade, but today, on the road, I'd smile at Lena's chatter or the sight of an especially cool Third Eye object, then I'd look around at my teammates and feel guilty.

What was Gerry dealing with right now? What had Matt been dealing with for days before we realized he was gone?

I couldn't begin to guess.

Frankly, I didn't want to think about it. I shook my head, banishing memory and imagination alike, and joined Lena and Zhizhi at the counter. The latter had a bag of Ruffles she'd already paid for.

She popped one into her mouth and crunched it. When she saw me eyeing the bag, she said, "Turns out, I actually am made of money."

Lena and I both laughed.

As soon as I did, I felt my smile draining away.

"Chin up, Cameron," Zhizhi said. "These roads aren't busy and they're in good condition. You're next in the driving rotation."

"Is that supposed to cheer me up?" I asked.

"Nope," she said. "It certainly doesn't put me at ease. But we've all got to do our part."

"When am I next in the rotation?" Lena asked.

Zhizhi considered this. "Maybe not all of us."

With that, she took her expensive chips, along with the rest of our supplies, and pushed out the front door of the convenience store. She left us with the ringing of its bell and the heat of a burn that Lena's Fire could do nothing to ameliorate.

Lena puffed her cheeks out. Her freckles showed. She paid for our regular chips and two cans of Pepsi without a word to either me or the clerk. Then we followed Zhizhi out.

I pushed the glass door open and the bell rang again.

Lena said, "She's right, you know."

"That you're a terrible driver? I forgive you."

She kicked in the general direction of my shins, but didn't make contact. "Not about that! I mean, technically, about that, too. But you're not an asshole for smiling, Cam. We're gonna fix this, and anyway, it's not your fault."

Asshole or not, I smiled down at her. "Thanks, Lena. I know you're both right. It just feels weird."

She nodded.

"Let's give this place a quick scan before we get back on the road," I said.

She raised her phone and swept it over the convenience store's parking lot. She pumped her fist. "Over there!"

I checked through my own camera.

For all that we'd talked up all the resources outside of town, we'd found disturbingly few so far this morning. Occasional copses of trees for Wood, a fake Wood or Iron sign here and there, but little that had been worth pulling over for. I'd begun to wonder if we should have just taken an expressway after all, instead of the state highway south from Parker. I'd begun to wonder if someone had noticed the finds we'd uploaded last week and decided to beat us to the rest in the area. All the convenient turnoffs and rest stops seemed to have been scouted. Even Castlewood Canyon, a big state park we'd thought might have a new Reactant, had been a bust. Picked clean.

Here, though, was an indication that we'd ventured into unscouted territory. The vacant lot across from Alta Convenience was not vacant when viewed through the Third Eye filter. According to the game, it contained a low, flat sheet metal shed, complete with a pile of tires out front and a sign I didn't know how to read. Maybe Miguel or Joon Woo could've parsed it, depending on how far along their translation project had gotten.

Regardless, it was worth grabbing. How much Iron did that represent? I almost didn't care. The tires would give us Plastic, and that was looking increasingly precious. I didn't think we'd seen a single instance of it on the whole drive.

If we spent enough time on the road, would Plastic become valuable enough to us that we'd consider buying it with Tickets?

We had a few extra in our coffers now. Any thought that Mask had been lying about the Tickets ended the first time Erin won a game of NBA Jam. The Tickets had printed out from the automaton Ryu had once possessed, just like the first night at the arcade. Ryu himself had been with Lena at the time, modding a Strider cabinet, so we knew he wasn't involved.

Collecting the Tickets had meant going up to the counter. Another thing that should've been fun, should've been cause for celebration, but which instead put us all on edge. Erin had stepped around the clean patch on the floor like she expected it to swallow her up, too.

Michelle wouldn't even do that. She couldn't so much as bring herself to look at the counter. She'd spent most of the evening playing Tetris – fair enough, great game, but it was famously unwinnable. I suspected she didn't want to have to face the prospect of going up to collect her Tickets, and I didn't blame her.

Eventually, it became apparent that we could each win just one string of Tickets, whether we played a cabinet modified by Ryu or not. I assumed it would refresh at midnight when our HP and MP did, since Lena and I were able to collect more after we'd already gotten some on our first trip. After that, Michelle had squared her shoulders and played a round of Street Fighter 2, while Erin either threw the match or proved herself to be a spectacularly terrible fighting game player.

Michelle had still refused to collect her Tickets. It took longer for her to argue with Erin about it than it had for her to win the match. Finally, shoulders slumped, Erin had tried collecting them, and they'd flashed and disappeared into her inventory.

Lena and I had six more Tickets each from Ryu and the printer we'd bought. He seemed limited to a single set each day, whereas Miguel's Realm could serve up a set to every player. We could trade off collecting them, but it would slow our growth if we didn't find enough Reactants in the wild to make up the difference. Maybe we should've swallowed our fear and huddled around that arcade, after all.

Far from it, in the bright light of the cloudless Colorado sky, the sparse traffic cleared. Lena sprinted across the road to examine our find.

I followed, scanning everything. Third Eye treated the tableau as two objects, and it apparently thought Lena had focused on both before I did, because I got only 10 XP for each. We still had no idea how these collectible objects were divvied up. Why were the shed and the pile of tires considered two separate things, despite their proximity, but, say, the door, walls, and roof of the shed all counted as part of one object?

Lena reached out. She hesitated. "I better wait."

I nodded.

I thought about calling, but with the light traffic, it was faster to sprint back to the parking lot of the gas station.

I didn't like most of the terrain out here, wide open with few trees and fewer hills, but I did find myself appreciating the lack of shadows. Because of our stop at Castlewood Canyon, it was almost noon. Almost exactly as far from the darkness of the other night as it was possible to get.

We were sort of on the run, although nobody outside our team knew it yet. For maybe the first time, though, I let myself feel like I was on vacation, too.

The last shock we got in Cinder Alley had come on the way out.

We'd hung around long enough for the clock to tick over and our resources to refresh. That had indeed allowed us to grab another six Tickets per player. Third Eye seemed to know that Miguel, Zhizhi, and Donica, who had joined us by then, were out of the game and not allowed to collect any, so they couldn't generate any extras for us.

I'd been ready to put the grind behind us, and I thought everyone else felt the same, but as we left the arcade, Erin had hesitated.

"We are going to need to tell the police, you know." Her words had echoed up and down the concourse.

None of us had responded until Miguel nodded. "Matt has already been gone long enough to be reported as a missing person. Gerry will soon join him. I don't necessarily rate the Denver and Englewood PD, but it does not take a brilliant detective to think to ask close friends in the class one took and the other taught."

"I don't think I can lie to the cops about this," Michelle had whispered.

Erin had nodded.

"Then there's no way we can leave town," Zhizhi had said. "We're going to be at the top of the suspect list if we do."

"I know," Erin had said. "I'm so sorry."

I remembered running my fingers through my hair while scenarios ran through my mind. All of them disastrous. Rescuing our friends? Foiling Omar's schemes? Bringing Mask to justice? We'd be lucky if we didn't hear the tournament results from our jail cell.

Who was I kidding?

If we couldn't get stronger, if we were separated and isolated, if we had our phones confiscated as evidence?

The only reason Mask wouldn't capture us with trivial ease was if he decided some of us weren't worth bothering with.

"There's got to be something we can do," Lena had said. Of course. Doing something, making something happen, pulling some scheme. She always wanted to try, until there was nothing left to try.

Erin had swallowed. "There's not." She'd pushed her glasses up, and her hand stayed covering her face. Her voice dropped to a mumble. "Unless... he did give me the password so I could cover admin..."

Lena's eyebrows had shot up.

"I know what you're thinking," Donica had said. "You'll buy some time, but you will get found out, and then we're going to have a huge problem. What am I supposed to tell your dad? It's a terrible idea."

"Have you got a better one?" Erin had asked. From anyone else, it would've been sarcastic, a way of lashing out. I know that's how Lena or I would've meant it. Erin, on the other hand, had genuinely wanted to know.

Donica had not had a better idea.

The proof?

Lena waved to Erin as we returned to the parking lot of the Alta Convenience. From the passenger seat of Donica's Yukon, the only vehicle any of us had that was big enough to accommodate our team, Donica herself swallowed a sigh. Michelle peeked around the back of the SUV where she was helping Zhizhi load our supplies.

We were on the run. We were on a quest. We were on vacation. All of those could be true, but they wouldn't buy us any time. They weren't the explanation people outside the team knew about.

According to the email Erin had sent from Matt's DU account, we were attached to a school trip.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 85: Roads

A geographically inclined person might suggest that halfway through the first day of our trip to Florida, we'd traveled about as far east as when we visited Benji's house. They might point out, not unfairly, that if we were still planning to visit Lena's parents in Kansas – and we were – that maybe I-70 would have been a better starting point even if we wanted to roam off the beaten path to scout parks and little towns.

They might have gotten annoyed when, after a nerve wracking hour poking along at the helm of Donica's Yukon, I turned right off the evocatively named Colorado Rd 17 and headed back toward the mountains.

I wasn't lost! Honest!

Under other circumstances – say, if there had been more than one turnoff every ten miles – maybe I would've gotten lost. Or if I hadn't had an SUV full of people with GPS apps open to chart a course for me.

I turned west for two good reasons.

"It's okay that we don't get to Colorado Springs until tonight?" I asked. A straight trip down I-25 would have gotten us there in two hours, tops, even with me at the wheel. Our "scenic route" would get us there after dark.

"It's fine." Donica's voice was always clipped, which made it hard to say if she'd put frustrated energy into that "fine." "The practice I'm supposed to scout is tomorrow."

Erin and Michelle were supposedly going on the trip as part of their schoolwork. I'd seen a copy of the email Erin had sent from Matt's account. "Matt" thanked his boss, the Dr. Yeboah that Gerry had complained about, for approving a trip to a rising game studio on such short notice, and regretted that they couldn't persuade the devs to accommodate the whole class. Erin believed that Dr. Yeboah left enough of the admin to Matt that the professor wouldn't question Matt rubber-stamping such a trip. Of course, that wouldn't hold up if the trip dragged on, and it sure as hell wouldn't if we couldn't rescue Matt and Gerry.

Lena, Zhizhi, and I had quit our mundane jobs entirely. If we couldn't keep growing Lena's channel, or she couldn't win the tournament and collect an actual prize, or we couldn't find a way to turn Third Eye into paying work, or Zhizhi couldn't transform our story into some kind of career-making journalistic achievement, we were all some variation of professionally fucked.

Donica, on the other hand, was still at least nominally doing her job. She'd sold her boss, Erin's father, on a cross-country scouting trip of college basketball players. Apparently, this kind of travel wasn't anything unusual for her, and the only reasons she hadn't set out already were her broken ankle and Erin's involvement with Third Eye. Donica would legit be doing her job, even if it just happened to get her out of town exactly when people might start asking questions about where Erin had gone.

Of course, since Donica had apparently fabricated the scouting report that interested her in a player at the Air Force Academy on the outskirts of Colorado Springs, she didn't seem to care about doing her job well.

Her schedule could have constrained our trip, except that basically every town in America had a college basketball team.

Donica's scouting wasn't the only reason we were headed back toward the Springs, though.

We had a prime scouting location of our own to check.

After another twenty minutes of my excessively cautious driving, we saw the Black Forest. It was a big span of piney woods, almost all public land, lightly traveled, open to people and their dogs and their horses. Open to Third Eye players and their Daimons, but if none had ventured this far off the beaten path to scout it...

"Holy shit," Lena said.

"That," I said, "sounds positive." I risked glancing at her in the side view mirror. I knew I should check those regularly, anyway, right?

Lena had her head and phone out the window and was staring at something in the forest. Between her enthusiasm and the way her red hair blew in the breeze, she put me in the mind of an Irish Setter. She said, "Mmhm!"

"Anybody want to clue me in?" I asked.

Erin began, "It's –"

"Nope," Lena said. "Cam's got to see for himself."

Erin laughed. "Okay."

I rolled my eyes. Instead of hitting the gas – I cruised about ten miles per hour under the speed limit – I slowed even more.

Lena flicked a glance my way, but I couldn't be checking my mirrors all the time. Had to watch the road.

The trees closed in around us. We'd seen more foliage, more hills, as we got further south. Real terrain. It made me feel better, more like I was within the bounds of reality, but it also meant turns I couldn't see coming from miles away.

One last time, I fished for a hint. "Seriously, what's got you bouncing?"

"You've waited this long," Donica said. "Park and have a look for yourself."

"Fine." I eased her Yukon into a gravel parking space. Against all reason, the monstrous vessel obeyed my commands. When I pushed its gear shift into park and turned the key, the titanic rumble from its engine subsided.

God, I wished we could've taken Zhizhi's Neon instead. I could still do a lot of damage if I screwed up with it, but it wasn't as viscerally terrifying as being in command of this civilian tank.

I'd made it through my first turn at the wheel, though. It could only get better from here. Right?

I pried my sweaty hands off the wheel and handed Donica her keys. I'm not sure anyone but she and Lena caught my expression; Lena smiled at me, while Donica rolled her eyes.

Freed from the responsibility of controlling over five thousand pounds of metal, I couldn't help but chuckle.

Lena cocked her head? "Sup?"

"Just thinking about responsibility," I said.

Her head tilted further to the side.

"Sorry." I opened the door and stepped out onto the gravel. "Driving puts me in a weird mood. Let me get my phone out so I can see what's impressed all of you so much."

While I waited for the phone and the Third Eye app to boot, I thought about Erin and Zhizhi comparing Keys to a car. The way Mask used his Key was scary, and if it really allowed for teleportation I would rather have it than any vehicle.

Unless, however, it had offensive applications we hadn't seen yet, or the environment it opened doors to was far worse than made sense based on what he'd said and done? It wasn't even close to as dangerous as the SUV I'd just been allowed to drive, despite everyone on the team agreeing I was rusty as hell.

The point was, with one exception, we had seen nothing in the game that even came close to the destructive power of a device that anyone in the country could acquire if they were willing to stand in line at the DMV every few years, then go into a lifetime of debt.

How many units of Earth would someone need to erect a shield that could withstand the Yukon slamming into it? How many HP would I lose if it hit me at full speed? More than I had from the attacks of the creature at the construction site, far more than from any attack we'd seen a regular player use.

Once again, I found myself wondering how much Third Eye could change the world. We'd picked up some useful tricks, seen some scary shit. The scientific implications were staggering, way above my pay grade. It seemed to me that on a societal level, though, access to the game might prove less impactful than the automobile, and a hell of a lot less dangerous.

Of course, the exception I'd thought of was the firestorm Albie used to finish off the creature. We hadn't seen it happen, but we'd gotten a real good look at the aftermath. She'd turned a huge, space-distorted warehouse to slag. If that kind of power was something ordinary players could eventually obtain, Third Eye access was closer to owning an attack helicopter than a car.

Only one way to find out. Keep getting stronger.

I raised my phone and swept it over the parking lot.

The lot offered spaces for a dozen vehicles but only one other was present, a dusty F-150 almost as big as the Yukon. There were two trails that Google Maps suggested formed a big loop, but tracks led off in all directions.

And from where I stood, Third Eye already showed me:

A duplicate of the metal drum garbage cans near the trailheads.

One of those strange stone mounds we'd seen all over the southern outskirts of Denver.

Just at the edge of my vision, a cluster of unnaturally green undergrowth.

In the opposite direction, a wooden sign marked with Third Eye runes.

And most impressively, in the distance, a single towering pine tree that rose at least twice as high as the surrounding canopy. Somehow, I suspected it was that last that had excited my teammates.

How much Wood did it represent? One, because it was ultimately a single tree? Ten, because it was ten times the height of the city trees we'd occasionally collected Third Eye versions of? A hundred, because that was how much greater its volume was?

However much Wood the tree ended up giving, it was an unambiguous sign that no Third Eye player had come within miles of the Black Forest before us. No one would have ignored it.

"Wow," I whispered.

Lena touched my elbow. "Right?"

"I want to go straight there," Erin said, "but we should be thorough."

"Clearly," Donica said, "we should split up so we can cover more ground."

Lena spun on her. I couldn't see her expression, but I could imagine it: eyes wild, lips curled. And fists balled. Those, at least, I could see. Anyone who tossed off a cliched horror movie line drew her ire.

All of which Donica had clearly anticipated. She smirked.

Erin, who was still gazing up at the tree, missed the entire interaction. "No, we need to stick together so we maximize our total XP."

Donica pursed her lips. "Mm, point."

Lena hunched her shoulders and turned back to me. I was so impressed she hadn't taken Donica's bait that I bent over and kissed the top of her head. Well, maybe I didn't need an excuse. Either way, it seemed to calm her.

"I'll get your chair," Erin said.

"I don't think I'll need it," Donica said. "I would've been perfectly capable of driving today."

Erin frowned. I didn't think it was because of the veiled shot at my skill behind the wheel.

Donica, from what I could see, made a terrible patient.

"If all goes well," I said, "we're going to be walking for hours. By the time we're done, you won't feel better anymore."

Donica locked gazes with me.

Was I pushing back because she'd provoked Lena? Maybe a little. But I also didn't want to have to slow down our scouting trip to accommodate her injury. Frankly, we'd have been better off if we brought wheelchairs for her and Zhizhi both.

"How are you going to feel," Donica asked, "if you have to push a wheelchair up and down a dirt trail all day?"

"Just fine, obvs," Lena said. "Unlimited stamina, remember?"

Donica took a long, deep breath. Flatly, she said, "How could I forget?"

I reminded myself that she'd lost Third Eye access in part because Lena and I had pushed ahead at the construction site. We owed her a little patience.

Not unlimited patience, though, especially if she was going to abuse it to hurt herself worse. I helped Erin and Michelle unload and unfold her wheelchair.

"I can push it," Lena said.

Donica raised an eyebrow. "Pass. I'll start off walking."

Her resolve lasted until she realized just how uneven the terrain was. Maybe if we'd stuck to the trails, she'd have managed more than fifteen minutes, but soon, she was in the chair and Lena was trying not to hum as she pushed it along.

Donica kept shooting worried looks Lena's way, but as far as I could tell, Lena didn't get up to any shenanigans. I'd never understood why pushing someone around in a wheelchair appealed to her, but clearly, it did. She'd wanted to when we got Miguel out of the hospital, too.

I tried to figure it out, but soon enough, Third Eye distracted me.

We took a wide, looping path in the general direction of the giant tree, and everywhere we went, we found more Materials. Wood in abundance – extra trees indistinguishable from their neighbors through the app, as well as unnaturally green underbrush –, intermittent Stone in the form of mounds or outcroppings, occasional Iron when we neared the trail and found signs. No Glass or Plastic, yet, and none of the advanced resources we really craved.

Still, the density shocked me. I thought there might be as many Third Eye objects per square mile as in the heart of Denver, and unlike in the city, there were no property lines to keep us from claiming them. The XP flowed in. Every Material we gained was something we could practice with. And if we obtained Gold, and it worked like Erin suspected, a potential source of Tickets.

I'd pushed hard for this plan, but only because we hadn't had a better one. We'd all taken some huge risks to make it happen.

We'd take plenty more if we got our way. Tonight, Lena and I would turn the team's notes into wiki posts. Tomorrow, while we waited for Donica to do her scouting, we'd work with Zhizhi to edit a video documenting our trip.

For now, we'd leave a delay. Soon, though, we'd start updating the wiki in real-time.

If he didn't already, Mask would know exactly where Lena and I were.

If we were lucky, he wouldn't know we weren't alone.