Eye Opener

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 86: The Forest for the Tree

"We're not going to clear this place out today," Lena said.

That was for sure. One thing that had become obvious as we circled through the woods was just how vast a forested park could seem when you weren't restricting yourself to the premade trails someone had cut through it. It didn't help that every few minutes, we spotted a new Third Eye object and rushed over to document and collect it.

We'd been walking for over an hour and still hadn't reached the huge tree. Every time we came to a gap in the canopy, we saw it looming over us, ever closer but still out of reach.

Some kind of spatial distortion? Nope. I checked my Maps app again and confirmed that it was just taking us that long to wind our way toward it.

As a jutting rock flashed and turned to Stone beneath her hand, Erin asked, "Do you think we should change our plans and come back here tomorrow?"

I'd have let Lena field that question, but when I glanced back, I saw her biting her lip.

I said, "No."

"We're going to leave a lot of materials uncollected," Erin said. "It just doesn't seem very efficient to flit around the country instead of cleaning out a promising location."

"I understand," I said, "but... I think it might be important that we keep moving forward."

Erin cocked her head. "How so?"

"We've had the most luck when we've done what Third Eye wants us to do, right?" I asked.

Lena and Erin nodded. Zhizhi didn't, but she shifted the hand bracing her camera to a thumbs up to indicate agreement.

"Well," I said, "this seems like more of the same. The game wants us to push ourselves onward, literally and figuratively. Maybe it's stupid, maybe it's just an affectation, but I don't think making this forest our new base and scrounging up every last Material in it is the intended model of play."

"I didn't mean we should just stay here for weeks," Erin said. "One more day while Donica does her work in Colorado Springs seems like something we could stretch to."

I scratched the back of my neck. "That's fair. Is the practice you're going to in the morning or the afternoon, Donica?"

"Morning," she said. I'd already suspected as much; if what was convenient for her had lined up with Erin's proposal, I was sure Donica would have volunteered it without prompting.

"Play it by ear?" Lena asked.

I cocked an eyebrow, wanting Erin to answer first.

That proved to be a mistake. She tapped her finger on her cheek, lost in thought and oblivious to my reaction.

I looked away, feeling silly, and mumbled, "That works for me."

"Oh!" She blinked. "Yeah. We can decide tomorrow. Or even later today, depending on what we find."

I had trouble verbalizing why I thought it would be a bad idea to stay in the Black Forest. Someone could just as easily argue that Third Eye rewarded diligence as much as curiosity.

Maybe now that I'd gotten behind the wheel of a giant SUV for a couple of hours, I'd developed an insatiable thirst for the open road. On second thought, staying here didn't sound so bad. We could camp overnight and not have to drive for days.

"Hey," Zhizhi said. "Can one of you take over with Donica's chair? Not you, Cam –" I spread my hands and stepped back. "– one of the girls. Let's get some footage in the can so I can edit the episode tonight."

On top of Erin's reluctance to appear on camera, either her or Michelle being caught in frame would tip off Mask that we'd brought a whole team. Although we were all taking notes and would post everything we'd found tonight, the plan was for Lena and I to claim to have scouted everything. Miguel had agreed to write up a series of plausible finds for Erin and Michelle to post from somewhere that fit their supposed itinerary.

Our hope was that not only would it make our team appear smaller than it was, it would also make our personal XP totals look swollen to irresistible heights. The juiciest 10% in Third Eye, open to any PVP player willing and able to take it from us.

"I'll get the chair," Michelle mumbled.

It struck me that she'd said almost nothing else during the walk. She went through the motions of acting as a Third Eye player, then shrank back in on herself.

I felt like I should talk to her, but to say what? The truth was, I didn't know her well enough to begin to guess how to cheer her up.

Especially since she had every reason to worry. Missing teacher, missing friend, too little power, too much need for it. On top of that, she'd been roped into a scheme that could get her in trouble with the authorities if it didn't work – her college for sure, and maybe even the cops.

If bringing any of that up was my idea of a pep talk, better to keep my mouth shut.

I felt my own smile fade, until Lena danced ahead of us and struck a pose for Zhizhi to film.

"Heya, folks," she said. "It's ya girl, Ashbird, back for kind of an unconventional tutorial. Today, we're gonna talk about scouting. If you're still in the beta, I'm sure you've gotten up to plenty of it. You've probably scoured your whole neighborhood, right? You hit up the coffee shop downtown, the game store on the main drag, the outdoor mall. Every place you'd go to find something in an AR game, amiright?"

Watching her, I couldn't help but grin. I shot glances at the rest of the team before I sprinted forward to join her for the shoot. Erin and Zhizhi looked almost as delighted as I felt. And was it my imagination, or did Donica's eyeroll look more forced than exasperated? Lena's performance didn't seem to be enough to lift Michelle's mood, though, which just went to show I had no chance.

I joined Lena in the camera's frame. "Sounds like a pretty solid itinerary, Ashbird. So... how come we're in a forest?"

"The Black Forest," Lena said. She did a twirl, but slowly enough that it panned her camera around the canopy.

"The one in Colorado," I said. "Not the one in Germany."

"We'll have to go there, next!"

I laughed. "Let's take it one at a time."

"I guess." Lena's twirl finished with her camera pointing upwards, through the canopy. In Third Eye, the edges of a second canopy stretched over us, the outermost branches of the great tree. "See that up there? That's what we're heading for. We don't know yet what it's going to end up turning into. A ton of Wood? One Wood, but presented super spectacularly? Or something fancier?"

"Why don't you tell our distinguished guests why we're so far out of town in the first place," I said.

Lena tossed her hair. "And give up our chance to grab all this before someone else finds it?"

"That's kind of the point of a tutorial, isn't it?" I asked.

After a theatrical sigh, she grinned. "You heard the man, folks. In addition to being my lovely assistant, OldCampaigner doubles as my conscience."

I turned to Zhizhi's camera. In what I hoped was a deadpan, I said, "I'm the hardest-working man in show business."

I thought the line must've landed, because even Donica openly cracked a smile.

"And don't I just appreciate it," Lena said. She hesitated. I didn't turn to look, but I knew she'd be eyeing me suspiciously. Just for the video. Surely. "Anyway. The point is, we've recently made kind of a massive discovery when it comes to the distribution of Third Eye resources..."

Over the next half hour, we spelled out what we'd found. We kept getting interrupted to collect the Third Eye objects we passed, which made the point better than anything we could say.

Two or three of those finds might make the final video, but Zhizhi said she thought the scouting process would get repetitive if we included too much.

Plus, we were only collecting half of what we saw. The other half went to people who weren't supposed to be on camera.

At least, that was the idea. In practice, we got two thirds.

It took me a while to notice, but once she'd taken over pushing Donica's wheelchair, Michelle stopped grabbing Materials. She panned her camera around and accepted her 10 XP per object, but she made sure to do it slowly enough that someone else always got the 100 XP for being the first to focus on a find, and she never left Donica's side to actually collect something like Erin did.

On the one hand, it made sense. Michelle didn't have a Reactant yet, so anything she collected would, at least temporarily, be unusable.

On the other hand, if she got a Reactant, she was going to need resources to practice with, and even more to burn if she was going to help us in our attempt to rescue her friends.

I wasn't going to call her on it in front of everyone. Still, I tried to make eye contact to at least let her know I'd realized.

She averted her eyes. Message sent?

It probably would've helped if I knew what I wanted my message to be.

She'd agreed to come with us because the alternative was to stay in class and potentially be questioned about Matt and Gerry's disappearance. I wasn't going to force her to play Third Eye if she didn't want to, though; Miguel's reaction to his Realm had taught me that much.

Instead of dwelling on it, I let myself get sucked back in by Lena's chatter. Now that we were working with Zhizhi on the videos, Lena tended to say whatever popped into her mind if it fit her streamer persona, and we worked on editing it into something coherent after the fact. That might burn us someday, if we did a real livestream, but the audience seemed to like the edited version almost as much as I did.

Mid-sentence, the stream of Lena's consciousness dried up.

Silently, she panned her phone upwards. Zhizhi did the same with the camera.

I turned and pointed my own camera in the same direction.

What looked like more of the same piney woods to my naked eye was, through the Third Eye filter, almost a solid expanse of bark.

It silenced me, too. It stole my breath.

I told myself we'd known this tree would be huge. I told myself it still wasn't as big as some real ones, giant redwoods and sequoias and shit.

I had to tell myself those things, because seeing the tree up close, it looked impossibly, overwhelmingly vast. The shadows of its boughs stretched farther than we could see. Just hints of the wind whipping through the branches were enough to make Lena's flames flicker. All the smaller trees that weren't overwritten by this single, vast one bent in the breeze, but its own trunk remained unmoved.

I stepped forward and put my hand on the small of Lena's back. "Who's... who's going to try collecting this?"

"I don't want to," Lena murmured. There was nothing of The Magnificent Ashbird in her voice.

Which should've made me stare at her, but I didn't.

I kept gazing at the tree.

Why not? I understood exactly how she felt.

We'd collected some cool objects in Third Eye. Some interesting ones, even a few impressive ones. I'd never been the least bit bothered by it. Collecting them was the game, especially at first. Besides, we took extensive photos and notes and shared them on the wiki.

For the first time, though, I felt like if we could collect something, we'd be depriving the world of it.

 

[Crayz9000]

It's funny, I was just reading an article about the thousand year old grandfather sequoia that was cut down almost immediately by the idiotic settlers that "discovered" it.

And who's to say the third eye effects are going to stay limited to just the app or an AR headset?

 

[Qoheleth]

Can't read that last bit without thinking about Albie's half-articulated explanation of alignment to Third Eye's hidden world.

"Knowledge of joy and knowledge of the self and knowledge of the world."

I think, if I was in this situation, I'd walk around the tree, looking to see if it marks or reveals a path to follow... but the tree itself, I'd leave alone. Part of understanding joy and understanding yourself, I think, is recognizing satiation - recognizing "I've got enough" - and prioritizing other joys instead. And if this is a story in the "progression" genre, then that's one of the topics lurking in its structure: what is enough? What resources can we afford not to exploit? What kind of person do you become if your answer is "nothing"?

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 87: Leaf Blower

"I don't think," Erin said, staring up at the vastness of the tree, "that's going to be collectible."

She padded forward, pine needles crunching almost silently beneath her careful steps. When she was level with Lena and I, she stopped.

"What do you think it is?" I asked.

"I think it must represent someone's Realm," she said.

That got everyone's attention. Erin's hands flexed as she tried not to squirm under it.

Lena was the one to ask, "How do you figure?"

"Not only have none of us seen a collectible object even close to this scale, none have ever been reported to the wiki. Unless someone added one today, I suppose. I haven't checked since last night..." She frowned and tapped at her phone.

"If it hasn't happened yet," I said, "I doubt it started this morning."

Unless the tree represented something new in Third Eye? So far, the only resource we'd seen refresh was Tickets, unless you counted our HP and MP. Impossible objects seemed to have been seeded when the beta began and remained static until someone collected them.

Erin shook her head. Kind of mixed messaging, since she said, "It looks like you're right. I just wanted to be thorough."

"How do you know no one has reported something this big?" Lena asked.

"Whenever someone fills in the type and amount of a resource that they got, it also outputs it to a database. I can sort it by the largest quantities."

"What is the most anyone's gotten in a single find? Just out of curiosity?"

"Sixty one Stone," she said. "That was three weeks ago, and notable enough for me to check the entry. It was a statue, quite an impressive one, but still only sixteen meters tall."

I wasn't good at judging distances, or at metric conversions on the fly, but I guessed the tree before us had to be at least fifty meters tall. If someone told me I'd undersold it by ten, I'd believe them. Or by fifty. "We don't actually know that this would give extra Wood just on account of its size, do we?"

Erin shook her head. "It's not a one to one relationship, but it does seem to have at least some correlation. I'm sure if we were allowed to collect this, it would represent an extraordinary windfall."

"If this is a Realm," I said, "that opens up two more questions."

Which shifted everyone's attention to me. Once, I would've gotten uncomfortable with that, but some combination of doing the videos and revealing Third Eye's nature to people had started to inure me to eyeballs.

"First," I said, "whose Realm is this?"

"No one we know, I imagine." Erin lowered her eyes. "Still, it doesn't feel quite right to raid it, does it?"

"Nonetheless, that's exactly what we're going to do," Donica said.

"Well, some of us are," Lena said. "Unless you got back in the game somehow?"

Donica rubbed the bridge of her nose. "You know what I mean."

"Just sayin', it's on our heads if we steal somebody's Third Eye shit." Lena folded her arms over her chest and stared up at the tree. "Which we're gonna. You're right about that."

I nodded. "I don't like it, either, but it's been months. Whoever they are, they've either dropped out of the beta or they have no idea how to scout for this. Hell. For all we know, every Reactant represents someone's Realm."

"I have considered that possibility," Erin said, "but we found so many of them out in the open. I just don't see how they could be associated with a specific person. Do you?"

"No," I said. "Besides, Donica got her Earth from a place the devs insisted none of us were supposed to go. I can't imagine they'd have put a Realm there, or allowed one to form, or however it works."

"In other words," Lena said, "we're acknowledging that taking this might make us kinda assholes, but for the greater good and/or getting to do more awesome things, we're prepared to accept that burden."

Donica, Zhizhi, and I all laughed. Erin tried to smile.

"What's the second question?" Zhizhi asked.

I looked up the tree, and up, and up. I couldn't see the top because the natural trees canopy hid most of its branches, but I knew they soared far out of sight. "If this is a Realm, are we going to have to climb all the way up it to get anything?"

"Hard pass," Donica said.

"It wouldn't be safe for anyone without HP to try," I said. "And I don't think any of us could pull it off."

Seemingly in contravention of what she'd said, Donica rose from her wheelchair, tested her ankle, then crunched her way across the pine needles to join us. She left Michelle staring behind her.

I thought Donica was going to line up next to us, but she kept walking right up to the trunk of the giant tree. She tracked it with her phone and reached out to touch the bark.

The whole thing didn't flash, but then, she wasn't in the beta anymore.

She lowered her phone. "God, this is so weird."

She pushed her hand forward.

I peeked around my phone camera and saw her pressing against thin air. Either she'd concealed her past as an expert mime or she felt serious resistance. When she squared her shoulders and took another step, she grunted from the exertion.

And in or out of Third Eye, I saw her clothes stir in the wind.

"I don't think we're going to have to climb," Erin said.

Lena and I nodded. We could feel the wind gathering. The Air.

Interesting that Donica's approach would stir it, even though she couldn't collect it. Would a non-player do so, or just an ex-player? I supposed it shouldn't have surprised me, though. The same thing had happened to Miguel in the runoff tunnel with what eventually became my Water.

Water was better at imparting force to a person than Air, courtesy of its higher density, but wind could be plenty dangerous. Did they get tornadoes out here? How much Air would one represent? How real, how aligned, would the manifestation be in the moments before one of us collected it?

Real enough to hurt.

"You should step back, Donica," I said. "Miguel got hurt by Water before I could collect it, remember?"

She hesitated, but spun on her good heel and rejoined our line.

She and Erin exchanged a glance I didn't know how to interpret. Donica stomped past and sank back into her wheelchair.

Erin lowered her voice. "Cameron, Lena, the three of us should wait here."

"I told Cam he could have the next Reactant we found," Lena said.

And I told myself that with however much Air we found here, I might be able to fly.

Nonetheless, I nodded. "Erin's right."

"I know," Lena said, "but you keep giving up chances."

"I'm not playing the martyr here." I squeezed her hand. "Promise."

All three of us turned to where Donica was seated. Zhizhi lounged against one of the smaller real trees, still filming.

Michelle stood behind the wheelchair, unmoving, unspeaking, eyes averted.

"Chelle," Erin called. "You should claim this one."

Michelle shuddered. "No."

Donica glanced over her shoulder. "You're sure?"

"No." Michelle's laugh sounded hysterical, and not the funny kind.

"I know you're worried," Erin said, "but –"

"It's not that!" Michelle shook her head. "Not just that. It's not... efficient. Me taking this."

"How so?" Erin asked.

"If I get some Air or whatever, I'm starting from scratch with it. I have to learn everything that Cameron and Lena already know, plus any general principles that you understand, too. Even if I do, whatever I can accomplish, it's all going to be low level stuff, no different from what we've already seen. If one of you takes this, added to what you already have, you can work wonders."

"Oh." Erin lowered her eyes. "I see."

Lena nodded along with Michelle's words. She tugged on my arm, trying to pull me toward the tree.

Zhizhi kept her expression neutral. Michelle's? Driving again must have rubbed off on me, because I found myself equating how she looked to one of the controls on the Yukon. If Zhizhi was in neutral and Lena was in drive, Michelle was in reverse.

For some reason, I found myself looking to Donica, even though she was the one who should've had the least to do with this decision.

She was glancing over her shoulder, not enough to catch Michelle's eye, but clearly observing her body language.

And she was scowling.

Unlike me, she knew Michelle pretty well. Unlike Erin, she wasn't relentlessly positive.

From what they'd told me, Donica had once scouted Michelle for a possible career as a gymnast, but ultimately supported – encouraged? – her staying amateur.

What qualifies a person to go pro? In anything, really, but especially something crazy competitive, like a sport? Talent, obviously, and physical aptitude, and dedication. A bunch of statistical shit that Erin would know like the back of her hand and I wouldn't have the first clue about, but would probably find super interesting if I had the time to delve into it.

Maybe Michelle had lacked something in one of those regards. Maybe she was too short, or, I supposed, for gymnastics, too tall. Maybe Donica had given up on her because Donica was too harsh, or because that was mostly what Erin's dad asked her to do: let down prospects easily, but definitively.

In my head, though, based on about three days of knowing Michelle, it made sense that what Donica had seen was that Michelle was the kind of person who, when she got scared, chose flight rather than fight.

If I was wrong, there was a decent chance I was angling for a punch in the face. Also, that I would deserve it.

I said, "Nope."

All eyes back on me. If I gulped, I was pretty sure I hid it well.

"Until we got a steady supply of Tickets, there was an argument either way." I raised my phone and tabbed to the Refinements page of the Third Eye app, although we stood too far for me to get any use out of it as a prop. "Now, there really isn't."

Michelle balled her fists. "But you only get one set of Tickets a day, and it gets more and more expensive to increase your totals."

"Exactly," I said. "Cranking our numbers up is really hard, really inefficient. Worth it? Sure. There's still ample reason for us to scout and find new Reactants. The single most important thing we can do, though, is to add new resources to the list of what we can buy. And when we add those new resources, they start out really cheap to increase to a level where they'll be useful."

"It would still help more for Erin to get Air, since she doesn't have any yet," Michelle said.

"Then," I asked, "what are you going to spend your Tickets on?"

Michelle winced.

I wondered if I was pushing too hard. If I asked Erin I was sure she'd say yes, which is probably why I looked to Donica again. Who was maybe not the best judge of what represented pushing too hard, considering what I'd seen of her management style.

She gave me a tiny nod, or else her neck was tired.

Michelle's shoulders slumped. She shuffled around the wheelchair, started to glance at Donica, then quickly looked away. She took a step forward. "You're right."

I didn't say it because I thought I was wrong, I thought. Donica, I suspected, would've said it aloud, but I kept my mouth shut.

"So," Michelle mumbled. "This is what I have to do."

She took another step forward.

Again, I said, "Nope."

She looked up sharply.

"You should only claim a Reactant," I said, "if you really want to."

"I have to! Otherwise, it would be like I'm abandoning Gerry and Matt."

I shook my head. "That's not saying you want to. It's saying you feel like you have to."

"Don't I?"

"No. By the time we face Mask again, we'll have all the backup we need." I rested one hand on Lena's shoulder. The other hovered over Erin's; I wasn't sure how she'd react, but she leaned into it.

Michelle looked at her.

I think Erin flicked a glance at me, but if I looked away to return it, I was sure I'd lose the confidence I was trying to project. She said, "We'll manage, Chelle."

"Even if we couldn't," I said, "that's not the point. You said it yourself the other day, and I think you were right. You signed up to play a cool and fun game. You're not a cop or firefighter or soldier. If you're not enjoying this, you should stop."

Michelle held her hands up and looked at her palms. "Yeah, but, could a cop or firefighter or soldier save my friends?"

"No," I said, "but if we had to, Lena and I could do that on our own."

"Um," said Erin.

Michelle stared at me. "How can you be so cocky?"

I thought, because we have a plan. But there were details of it Lena and I hadn't shared with Erin, much less Michelle, and I wasn't about to. For one thing, I hoped we wouldn't need to try everything we'd discussed. For another, I knew they'd try to talk us out of it.

Besides, that wasn't the point.

I said, "Because we're a team."

Lena hugged my arm. "That line is cheesy as hell."

Screw maintaining my confidence. I grinned down at Lena. "Where is the lie, though?"

In response, she sort of climbed up my arm to kiss me. I leaned into it. I felt her easy smile against my lips. I'd worried this would risk my confidence? Instead, I felt hers flowing into me.

When we finally came up for air, I found Erin and Zhizhi smiling at us, Donica with her arms folded, and Michelle standing where she'd been, eyes so downcast I couldn't tell if they were closed or not.

I shifted on my feet. "I was kind of hoping that would cheer you up."

"No offense," Michelle said, "but you're pretty bad at this."

"Sorry." Reluctantly, I pulled my arm from Lena's grasp so I could clap. "Look, Michelle. If you want to play, we'd love to have you on the team. If you don't, we'll still save your friends. Either way, try to enjoy the trip. That's the best I've got."

She sighed.

For a moment, none of us moved.

Then Michelle swept past Lena and Erin and I, up to the tree, into the Air.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 88: Inventory Management

Lena flopped onto the middle of the bed. She stretched her arms as far as they would go and, just barely, wiggled her fingers over the edges.

This wasn't quite the twin bed in a closet of a room in a dive motel like I'd imagined for our trip. It was a reasonable double bed in a full-sized room with a working TV, an en suite bathroom, and log cabin walls. I hadn't gotten out a tape measure and checked, but I suspected it had more living space than our apartment.

Lena and I wouldn't spend the night cramped in each other's arms because we had nowhere else to sleep. Of course, being stuck in a twin bed while Benji stayed with us had made me realize how uncomfortable that would get night after night, especially when Lena wouldn't turn off her Third Eye app and let her flames die down.

Plus, this way, we wouldn't have to share the bed with any cockroaches so bold they didn't even bother to hide from us.

Even the shithole I'd fantasized about would have been too rich for our blood. This cabin represented an unfathomable expense for us.

We weren't paying for it.

Donica had looked over the reviews for the motel Lena and I had picked out and given it a measured critique. Or maybe she'd said, "I wouldn't kennel a dog in that."

"Well yeah," Lena had said. "It doesn't have a vet on staff or anything."

Instead, we were staying the night at a cluster of lodges right in the Black Forest. In the morning, Donica, who had declared herself fit to drive "after a whole day taking it easy," would head into Colorado Springs to do her scouting and we would wrap up ours.

"Tired?" I asked Lena.

She rolled over and patted the bed. As much as I wanted to join her, I remained crouched by the TV, hooking it up to my computer. What would I do if we got one without an HDMI port? Hopefully never find out.

Bernie jumped up in my stead. Lena hugged him and said, "I feel like I should be."

"Right?" While I fired up the computer and navigated to the Third Eye wiki, I propped my phone next to the TV. I scrolled up and down on the document I'd filled with shorthand even I could barely parse. I tapped over to the list Erin had given me and smiled crookedly at the neat, precise, almost spreadsheet-like accounting of her finds. I would add these lists together and post them to the wiki to make it look like I'd grabbed half of everything we discovered.

"I guess I better put my entries in, too." Lena kissed Bernie's head and took her phone out. She chuckled as she swiped something off her screen. "Gimme a little while, Ryu. I'll play with you after I upload all this."

Lena couldn't gain any more Tickets from Ryu today, but I knew that wouldn't stop her from playing his games.

Frankly, I was a little surprised she let the task we'd set ourselves do so.

At the bottom of Erin's list, she had totalled up her finds for the day. As I flipped back and forth, I mentally tallied mine as well. I called, "Did you and Michelle add up everything you got?"

"Mmhm," Lena said. She crawled to the edge of the bed and showed me.

I read over each tab as she flipped between them. "Damn."

"Mmhm."

Now that I had a keyboard to work with, I typed out a quick list of everything we'd gathered. At the end of the document, I recorded the total we'd gained of each resource and the number of times we'd found it.

Lena and I sat there a while, reading and rereading each line as I wrote it.

Two hundred and forty two Wood across thirty seven finds.

Fifty one Stone across seventeen finds.

Eleven Iron across five finds.

Three Plastic from one find.

The total haul of Materials outweighed what we'd gained on any single day of scouting in or around Denver, even at the beginning when no one had picked over anything. Since we'd been dividing the results two ways instead of four on our trip to Parker, though, we'd gotten more for ourselves that time.

More basic Materials, that was.

Reactants, on the other hand...

Three Air from the wind through the boughs of the great tree, which I'd convinced Michelle to claim.

"Considering what we found," Lena asked, "do you wish you'd taken that Air, after all?"

"Nah," I said.

"You're too nice of a guy."

"I'll be sure to finish last tonight." I leaned back so she could see me wiggle my eyebrows.

She laughed as she kissed the top of my head. "I could get behind that."

Not that I didn't really, really want more Air.

Michelle had risen skyward when she accepted the Reactant into herself, and the hooplike sleeves of her Third Eye robes had made passable wings. When the moment passed and she returned to the ground, though, three Air had proven insufficient for her to fly under her own power. She weighed less even than Lena, let alone me. Could I have pulled it off with five? It would've put me at the highest single Reactant total of anyone we knew. The magic carpet ride I wanted to take Lena on would require even more, but what about personal flight?

Well, maybe. I'd rather have a teammate.

I could save up my Tickets if I had to, but after today, I no longer harbored the slightest doubt about our scouting plan. This road trip might not be the fullness of how Third Eye was meant to be played – we were still doing far too little with the ARG side of it for my tastes – but it came far closer than how we'd played it until now.

I would open myself to the new things the game wanted to show me, and I'd grow far stronger for it. Flight was just a matter of time, and along the way, who knew what other wonders I would discover?

"Besides," I said, "this way I'm one Reactant away from the whole set."

I continued down the inventory of our finds.

Two Earth, from the ground beneath the roots of the great tree.

We'd realized that something was weirder than usual when Michelle touched gracefully down before us – and all four of us active players continued to appear as our Third Eye avatars.

Erin's eyes had widened and her face had lit with the biggest smile I'd ever seen. I realized she must've been imagining that she could stay as her avatar indefinitely. After a moment, though, her delight had ebbed. Only a little. She'd said, "There must be another Reactant near."

The heaviness came when I approached the tree and touched its bark. I hadn't absorbed it as Wood, but my feet had sunk into the loamy dirt. I'd felt like the whole weight of its vast trunk was pressing down on my chest, and when I dragged my eyes away from it, I'd seen Lena on her knees and Erin and Michelle clinging to each other as they tried to stand.

As much to try to prop myself up as anything, I'd dug my fingers into the dirt. Instantly, I'd felt lighter, stronger. The same hadn't been true for the rest of the team until the dirt streamed up my arms and formed a suit of earthen armor over me, then vanished into my amulet.

Only then had I blinked and found my amulet gone, and all of our avatars with it.

"You could have completed the set, Cam," Lena said.

"Yeah, well." I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "I want to say it wasn't my turn, but..."

"It was just too weird for you guys, I know."

We'd roamed far from the great tree after that. After another hour's walk, our path had looped into a patch where most of the real trees were much younger, interspersed with thick underbrush. At the heart of the new-growth area stood a single tree, not as spectacular as the oversized Realm-tree, but as tall as the ones we'd been walking beneath most of the way.

Tall, but also blackened and dead.

Ten years ago, a horrible wildfire swept through this part of Colorado. Which doesn't narrow things down much; every summer, we have to deal with some stretch of the state turning to kindling.

The Black Forest fire set records at the time, though, bad enough ones to sear it into our memories. Erin, Donica, Michelle, and I had paced around the edges of the new-growth area. Even Zhizhi had only crept a little ways in, more shaken by the sight of the burned dead tree than she had been by Mask getting right in her face.

If Third Eye had chosen to seed Fire there, I thought it was a pretty fucked up thing for the devs to do. I wouldn't blame Albie, but I'd sure give her brother a piece of my mind.

Increasingly, though, I'd begun to doubt that there was anything like that level of intentionality on the part of the devs. There was Fire in the Black Forest because it was a place associated with fire, either as part of its nature as a force of death and rebirth, or in the minds of people who thought of the tragedy before they did the park itself.

An association strong enough to keep almost all of us from approaching.

Only Lena, the out-of-towner, had pushed ahead.

Ten years ago was ancient history for Lena. While the fire in the Black Forest darkened the evening news for all of us, she'd still have been living at her parents' store in Lawrence, Kansas, doing online college between record sales by day and binging ancient VHS movies by night.

She'd approached the burned tree and it had blazed back, not to life but to flame.

I'd called to Lena, but for once, I hadn't been able to bring myself to run to her side. I'd remained rooted at the edge of the new growth, too far to even feel the effects of Lena gathering a Reactant to herself. Not even Erin had wanted a part of that transformation.

The conflagration had rippled down the trunk of the dead tree and up Lena's outstretched arms.

And when it had passed –

Back in the cabin, I reached up and caught Lena's hands. I traced my fingers up and down them. She sighed happily at the contact. I grinned up at her.

After today, we had a truly extraordinary amount to smile about.

Like the last line in our inventory.

"What do you think you can do," I asked, "now that you're up to seven Fire?"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 89: Springing Forward

"How'd your scouting go?" Lena asked.

"Fine." Donica practically snarled the word, which did not suggest she meant it. Neither did her tight eyes and pressed-together lips. I wasn't sure if those had anything to do with whatever basketball players she'd watched, though. When she pulled herself out of the Yukon, her lip curled and she sort of hopped around to the hood. She paused there, breathing hard, favoring her ankle.

I dragged my suitcase up to the back of the vehicle. It carried a couple changes of clothes, my necessities, and my PC case, and two months ago I might not even have been able to pick it up. Now I could carry it and Lena's both and not get tired. Sometimes I really loved Third Eye.

It wasn't Lena whose luggage I thought I should take charge of carrying, though. I eyed Donica's ankle. "I think you should leave the driving to us for a while."

She glared at me. "If I'd let you drive me I'd have missed practice."

I knew two things: first, that Lena would agree, and second, that she'd want to pick a fight anyway because she felt like she was defending me.

Quickly, trying to head off the conflict, I said, "Did you find anybody you wanted to try to lure to the agency?"

"I wasn't expecting to," Donica said.

"How come you couldn't have let Cam drive, then?" Lena asked.

Donica pinched her nose. "How did you sleep last night?"

"Great!" Lena laced her fingers together and stretched. "Thanks again for covering us."

"That's how come I couldn't have let Cameron drive," Donica said. "I have to at least pretend to be doing my job, or I'll find myself staying in someplace you would pick out."

Lena's arms flopped to her sides. I watched her face ripple through a series of expressions as irritation warred with gratitude.

To keep her from settling on the former, and definitely not because I found the sight of her internal conflict adorable, I kissed the top of her head. She squirmed, but leaned into me.

Donica swept her gaze over the parking lot. "Where are the others? And how did your scouting go?"

"They're just grabbing the last of their stuff," I said. As we spoke, the door of one of the other cabins opened and Erin, Zhizhi, and Michelle stepped out. Erin waved to us. "As for scouting, you're looking at the first person we're sure has completed the set."

"Of Reactants?" Donica scowled. "Really, Cameron? I thought you were going to take turns collecting things, and the next one certainly wasn't yours."

I chuckled. "I was actually talking about Erin."

"She got Air? That's fantastic." Donica took out her phone. "Although I think you're exaggerating. We know that Omar person has all four, unless he's simply lying. And let's see..."

I saw her bring up the Third Eye wiki.

I got ahead of her objection. "Six people on there claim to have collected at least one unit of each of the four core Reactants. Let's say, you're looking at the first person we know who's gotten them all."

Before Donica could respond, the rest of the team reached us.

While I helped Zhizhi load bags into the Yukon's cavernous cargo space, Donica hugged Erin. "Congratulations."

"Thanks," Erin said. "This has been a pretty incredible trip so far."

"I'm glad," Donica said. Her voice caught.

I glanced around the side of the Yukon to see Erin frowning at Donica's ankle.

"Are you okay?" Erin asked.

Donica managed a credible shrug. "I'm fine. I'll let other people handle the rest of the driving today, that's all."

Erin's frown deepened. "I appreciate you looking out for me, but if you need the rest, I can drive you back to Denver. It's only an hour, hour and a half out of our way."

And the same back, but I knew why she wouldn't mention it.

"I said I'm fine." Donica drew herself up. "I'll stop being fine if someone half my age tries to mother me."

"Sorry," Erin mumbled. She sounded sorrier that she'd failed than that she'd tried.

When Donica pulled away from Erin and stalked to the back seat of the Yukon, though, she did a damned good job looking like she could take a walking tour of the Black Forest. I wondered how much Advil and Tylenol she'd downed on the way over when Erin wouldn't be able to see. Even injured and out of the game, Donica still felt like she had to play the cool big sis.

They had such a weird relationship. But then, who doesn't?

"Everything loaded?" Zhizhi asked.

I looked over the parking lot and gave her a thumbs up.

She matched it. "Then let's roll."

Lena and I shared one row, Donica and Michelle took the back, and Erin sat up front with Zhizhi.

Our route appeared on the SUV's console. We'd debated it last night before retiring to our respective cabins.

"Last chance to rough it this afternoon," Zhizhi said. "If we cut east there's a weird route we can take that's all fields and windfarms."

"No point making a plan if we don't try to stick to it," I said.

Erin bobbed her head, and we were away.

We cruised through the last of the Black Forest and into the outskirts of Colorado Springs.

It was a shame Donica couldn't, or at least shouldn't, take another turn at the wheel. We'd have to take full advantage of Zhizhi's stint. When the non-player or ex-player drove, all four people still in the Third Eye beta could at least collect XP from the objects we drove past, even when they weren't worth finding a place to pull over and collect.

Initially, we saw plenty to grab. The materials didn't seem to dry up anywhere in the forest, and they stayed plentiful into the suburbs. As we got closer to I-25 and the center of Colorado Springs, though, we abruptly stopped finding anything.

I panned my camera back and forth, but I felt my shoulders sag.

I felt Lena's hand on my arm. "Sup?"

"I'm getting nothing." I ran my fingers through my hair. "Did we screw up?"

"By going through the city?" Michelle asked.

"Probably," I said. With nothing showing up outside, I turned back to the Yukon's cabin to look at my teammates. "That's not what worries me. Lena and I are posting all our finds to the wiki to try to lure Mask out, right?"

Michelle shifted in her seat. "Right."

"I'm wondering if we're ruining our chances of finding more," I said. "Somebody could've realized we were scouting in the area and decided to beat us to it."

"Still worth, though," Lena said.

"I know. If we didn't collect anything else it would be worthwhile, provided we actually get his attention." And provided we won the rematch, and that winning gave us an angle by which we could rescue Matt and Gerry. I kept those qualifiers to myself. "It will still suck, though. Especially after we stop delaying the posts."

"You don't have to worry," Erin said. "Er, not about that."

I frowned at her. "You sure?"

"Colorado Springs has four very busy wiki contributors." I saw her tap her phone to bring up the entries. "Everything here along '25 was cataloged in the first week."

"Jesus." I had to swallow a chuckle at the fact my brain had gone blasphemous. Colorado Springs meant two things in my head: an awesome zoo, and an unusually high rate of religious people. Neither was something I associated with a big population of gamers. "That's a higher rate of active players than Denver!"

"It's the same with game stores, actually," Erin said, "and they have a lovely tabletop games convention every year."

A good reminder not to make an ass out of u and me. Although I'd never understood what u were supposed to have done wrong in that saying.

"Should we pivot?" Zhizhi displayed her ability to do so by shifting seamlessly into the middle lane. Imagine having the confidence to make runtime decisions about where to direct a civilian tank! I was sure that was crazier than anything we'd tried in Third Eye.

I clenched my teeth and tried to pass it off as a grin. Lena noticed and massaged my wrist.

"Let's try scouting the west side of town first," Erin said. "I'm looking at the list of finds here and I don't see many there."

Hope sprang eternal. Unjustifiedly, in this case, as it turned out.

Zhizhi turned onto US-24. If somebody drew a line from Florida to Colorado we could've been riding on it, aimed directly away from our nominal destination. As we cruised toward the foothills, though, no Third Eye objects appeared. I frowned at my camera screen.

We might find something if we roamed off into the neighborhoods, but these were nice neighborhoods. We'd get a pass as long as we stayed in the Yukon because it fit in with the vehicles around it, but if we disembarked to collect objects, someone might complain. Or call the cops.

Besides, I had no guarantee we'd even find anything to collect.

I didn't, quite, believe someone was cleaning out Colorado Springs specifically to try to get ahead of the finds Lena and I were posting. The problem, I supposed, was that there was no extensive RTD here. Everybody had cars, and the Third Eye players in town must have decided to make good use of theirs.

I eyed the mountains.

What I really wanted to scout lay up there, but it was, like Red Rocks, the kind of technically out-of-town place I could see getting a lot of traffic from potential Third Eye players. We'd have to pass right by a couple of major tourist destinations just to reach it.

"This is pointless," Donica said.

Michelle nodded.

Erin leaned over the armrest to look at us.

"I really, really wanted to try the Cave of the Winds," I said. "It being a cave says it might have Earth, the name and the sound it's named for that it might have Air, and with some of the formations in there I can't shake the thought it might have Crystal."

"And what are the chances you're the first person to come to these startling revelations?" Donica asked.

Lena folded her arms. "But have you considered Crystal, though?"

I touched her shoulder. "As much as I'd like to try, it probably isn't worth our time. We haven't seen anything in Colorado Springs. The town's picked clean."

She slumped against me. "I guess."

"I'd love to visit the cave," Erin said. "Even if it ended up a bust, we should make time for fun, too. I'm looking at the website, though, and it seems like the next tour won't start for a couple of hours."

Going in the wrong direction to scout a potential windfall was one thing. Waiting for a tour to start, without even the chance of finding anything in the meantime?

I sucked air through my teeth. I shook my head.

"You sure, Cam?" Lena asked.

"If there's any point, we should vote on it," I said. "Realistically, I think we should pivot."

"Pivot," chorused through the Yukon's cabin. Only Lena dissented.

Zhizhi merged back into the right lane, then slid to the offramp that led to the fantastical rock formations of the Garden of the Gods. I had no doubt the park there had been an incredible source of Stone when the Third Eye beta started, and maybe Earth, Air, and Fire besides.

Now, there wasn't a single impossible object in sight.

We took a moment to appreciate the scenery, and to double-check that we weren't missing a subtle resource.

Then Zhizhi got us going again, headed in the right direction this time. The Yukon crested a rise and we got a look at all of Colorado Springs, with the plains stretching as far as we could see on the other side. Even the edge of the Black Forest looked flattened from this distance. Everything else in view was fields or empty grassland.

I swallowed a sigh.

I liked mountains well enough. Forests were cool. I loved cities best of all.

Third Eye, however, seemed to want me to plunge into the heart of what looked to me like the out of bounds area of reality's game world.

I supposed it was only fair we try for the boundary break. What were we doing scouting out of town, if not trying to speedrun Third Eye?

 

[Candlelight]

Cam has clearly learned nothing here. We already saw what going for a boundary break and speedrunning Third Eye looks like, and it's creepy elevators and invisible multidimensional shadow monsters that you have to call on a literal magical girl to survive.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 90: Travelog

All excerpts taken from the Third Eye Wiki.

-----

Resource: 4 Wood, 4 Iron

Status: Collected

Time: 01:27 PM MST

Location: Roadside of CO-94, east of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Description: Stretch of barbed-wire fence directly behind an existing fence. Thankfully the other fence was not barbed-wire so it was safe to reach. There were four spans, each exactly 3m long, with metal wire stretching between wooden posts about 1.6m high. After collection, the ground appeared slightly disturbed where the posts had been (when viewed through Third Eye.)

-----

Resource: 4 Stone

Status: Collected

Time: 01:36 PM MST

Location: Roadside of CO-94, east of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Description: .9m high, 1.2m radius cairn-like pile of stones. (See attached picture.)

Note: I've found and posted about multiple examples of this structure in Third Eye, and I've never seen one outside of the app. If anyone knows their significance please append a note to this find! Or any other find of them. It isn't the first and probably won't be the last. I keep searching them to see if someone knows wtf their deal is but it hasn't happened yet.

-----

Resource: 3 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 01:49 PM MST

Location: Roadside of CO-94, east of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Description: A group of bushes with clusters of small red berries, growing along the side of the road. Bushes ranged from .3m to .6m in height, but they were worth 1 Wood each. Initially I thought they were a type of holly bushes but comparing the leaf shape to real hollies, they seem evocative of them but not the same. (See attached picture and comparison with real holly taken from the internet.)

Note: Like all living sources of Wood we've seen these bushes appeared to be in full bloom. I doubt enough time has passed to tell for sure, but keep an eye on any of this type of object you see to determine if they are just "set" to Spring, or if they're seasonal but on a schedule that's off-kilter with the real world's. Maybe the release was at one time planned for last Spring but got delayed to this Winter?

-----

Resource: 9 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 02:06 PM MST

Location: Roadside of CO-94, east of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Description: A lone tree, about 6m tall, with purple fruit growing on it. Visually it resembled a scrub oak but those don't bear fruit. I think the canopy was also unusually broad, but it was hard to measure that from ground level without annoying local people. It may simply have looked that way because it was in bloom and the real-world deciduous trees near it had bare branches.

-----

Resource: 1 Iron, 1 Wood, 4 Glass

Status: Collected

Time: 02:27 PM MST

Location: Convenience store parking lot in Yoder, Colorado.

Description: An old-fashioned enclosed glass phone booth overlapping part of a parking lot. The word "Phone" was spelled out in English over the door, but there was an open yellow pages inside and all of the entries in it were spelled out in Third Eye runes. I attempted to photograph all parts of the object in as much detail as possible.

Note: See attached photos for every view I could get of the booth and (especially) the yellow pages. They were very faded but some of the numbers should be readable. If the "phone numbers" are actually numbers then we may be able to start identifying numerals in other Third Eye runic scripts! If we can translate those I'd be curious about calling the phone numbers. Are they for real businesses? Are they an ARG clue?

Comments

LikeItsNinetyNine: Sorry but it makes no sense for those to be real phone numbers. The most any of these numbers have is six digits and most only have five. One's kind of blurry but it looks like just four.

ShakeProtocol: Third Eye doesn't appear to use base ten numerals. At one point I thought it used base twelve, but of course that would be too simple. It seems the number base varies by context. See this link for what we have determined about the way the game's script displays numbers. Some of the characters you photographed appear to be new digits, if they are intended as digits, but it is possible these are real phone numbers.

OffGrid: Might be worth checking the local library or government office to see if they have copies of old yellow pages from the area. If it matches up to a specific page. It would help if you could tell what year it's from. Maybe 2018 when the Kickstarter ran?

OldCampaigner: I've already moved on but if we come back through here, I'll check that out. Anyone else is welcome to check it out if you get the chance. What we could see of the yellow pages looked really old, I'm not sure if they'd be that weathered from 2018, but maybe. Of course, the game is under no obligation to weather them realistically, same as with the plants and the seasons.

ShakeProtocol: I have decoded two of the clearer numbers on that page and attempted to call them. One was out of service, the other was the number of what seems to be a local restaurant in that town. Based on what we've seen of in-game text, I expect that was a transliterated version of a real yellow pages, or at least the two open pages of it; any of the numbers that aren't out of date or garbled by the transliteration algorithm are probably real.

-----

Resource: 3 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 02:32 PM MST

Location: Empty lot in Yoder, Colorado.

Description: A 4m tall tree resembling a scrub oak. It wasn't flowering or bearing fruit but the leaves were green.

-----

Resource: Unknown, probably Wood but possibly a Reactant as well

Status: Not Collected

Time: 02:40 PM MST

Location: Roadside of CO-94, east of Yoder, Colorado.

Description: A tree resembling a scrub oak, but it is at least 14m tall and probably more like 18m, which is much larger than the type of tree it appears to be should grow. It isn't flowering or bearing fruit but its leaves are green. Despite it being apparently alive and healthy, it looks like it was split by a lightning strike.

Note: I couldn't collect this one because it was on private land and out of reach. I've seen a steady stream of impossible objects behind fences, but this one seemed large and impressive enough to make note of. If someone else wants to try to persuade the landowner to let them onto the grounds it would be worth checking out in case it signals the presence of a Reactant! (See entry from yesterday about the tree Ashbird and I found, or watch the latest episode of The Magnificent Ashbird where you can see me acquiring Earth from the base of the tree.) This one is a lot smaller but it's isolated so it still stands out. You could probably collect dozens of other finds on just this one lot while you're at it.

-----

Resource: 1 Stone

Status: Collected

Time: 02:59 PM MST

Location: Residential lot in Rush, Colorado.

Description: A somewhat abstract outdoor sculpture, 15cm long, probably of a catfish. See attached picture. It was placed in a bird bath and I was briefly hoping it would give Water, but only the statue was a Third Eye object. The bird bath and the water were all real.

-----

Resource: 2 Iron

Status: Collected

Time: 02:50 PM MST

Location: Street corner in Rush, Colorado.

Description: Street sign at a thirty degree angle to the actual streets.

I explored the surrounding area to check if there was a whole Third Eye "street" to collect but there didn't appear to be anything except the sign. This is pretty typical of what I've found in cities but I wanted to look around since the area was open enough to check.

-----

Resource: 1 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 03:07 PM MST

Location: Roadside of Kendrick Rd., northeast of Rush, Colorado.

Description: A lone bush, .3m tall with red berries. See link for previous instance of the same bush. Attached photo confirms they are the same type but clearly different instances.

Note: I found this by attempting to follow the path marked by this street sign (see link). If this is what it was supposed to point to it's not much but it is another resource.

-----

Resource: 1 Water

Status: Collected

Time: 03:48 PM MST

Location: Open space near cemetery on CO Rd 6, northeast of Rush, Colorado.

Description: A fountain with a design similar to the statue I found earlier (see link), resembling a catfish. Unlike that statue which was placed in a bird bath, this one was freestanding. Upon approaching, I noticed some of the special effects associated with finding a Reactant, so I made sure to photograph everything extensively before approaching. (See attached photos 1 through 11.)

I was not able to collect the fountain itself. If another Third Eye player passes by this way they can check if the water is "reconnected" to this location, or just check out the fountain to see if I missed any further ARG clues. (See attached photos 12 through 16.)

Note: I found this by attempting to follow the path marked by this street sign (see link). I might have found it just by exploring the area around the town and the sign may have been a coincidence, but we did have to go quite a ways off main roads to discover this. Reminder that at least some collectible objects also seem to point to more valuable resources! Keep recording your finds and check carefully for any indication they're pointing you in a specific direction.

Comments

OffGrid: Could the previous statue you found have been a clue to look for this design?

OldCampaigner: It's possible, but I've seen the same design in several places in Third Eye. It seems to be a popular theme with the devs.

-----

Resource: 2 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 04:12 PM MST

Location: Roadside of CO-94, east of Rush, Colorado.

Description: Back on the road! Almost immediately I saw this wooden sign with Third Eye runes on it. It poked about .7m out of the ground. If it's pointing to another resource, I don't know what, and it seemed to be at the edge of private land so I couldn't check further.

Comments

Ashbird: This is turning into a travelog lol.

OldCampaigner: Heh. Should I tone down the personalized comments?

Ashbird: Nope it's max adorbs, yo.

OldCampaigner: In that case, on to Punkin Center!

Ashbird: Is that actually a real place?

OldCampaigner: Yep. It's where we're turning south.

Ashbird: Max. Adorbs. Yo.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 91: Consenting Adults

Was the air ten percent hotter? The humidity, ten percent thicker? The hats, ten gallons bigger?

Okay, that last one was unambiguously true. Lena grinned from beneath the brim of her brand new cowboy hat. It would've looked humongous on just about anyone. She looked like a cartoon character in it. Even Third Eye didn't help; it rendered the ten-gallon hat as a miter-like crown, but threw up its proverbial hands at making it fit.

I raised an eyebrow.

"It's a business expense," she said.

My eyebrow didn't get any lower.

She put her hands on her hips. "For the videos!"

"I'll let you explain that to the IRS," I said.

"The sad part is," Zhizhi said, "costuming is a legitimate business expense for a Youtuber."

Lena adjusted the brim of her hat and beamed.

We'd crossed the narrow strip of Oklahoma separating Colorado from Texas, which had inspired her choice of accessories. Despite my complaints about the weather, the hat seemed to be the biggest change in our trip.

We still found one Material after another as long as we stuck to small towns and two-lane roads. (Dirt roads were even better, but Erin had vetoed them after Donica insisted a little too loudly that the bumpy ride didn't make her ankle worse.)

We still found enough Reactants to make our weeks of searching around the Denver metro area feel like an absurd waste of time.

We still left a real-time record of our finds for the edification of wiki readers –

– and we still hadn't seen any sign of Mask.

"Of course," Zhizhi said, "if you want to count that hat against your taxes, you'll have to wear it in a take we can actually keep."

"Yeah, yeah," Lena said. "I'll get it right this time."

I couldn't find a trace of annoyance in Zhizhi's smile. What had her newsroom internship entailed, that a couple of amateurs doing one bad take after another in the shockingly warm, wet weather didn't so much as make her twitch?

"Everybody ready?" she asked.

Lena and I nodded. Erin and Michelle said, "Mmhm."

The two of them were standing behind phones attached to fold-out tripods that Zhizhi had deployed to catch the action from multiple angles.

One other thing we were still doing:

Filming and uploading a new video every day.

On Tuesday, we'd focused on scouting in the Black Forest and how other players could benefit from extending their efforts outside of town. On Wednesday, we'd shifted to Lena and I volleying with Air and how much we'd learned about using it. That had been a lot of fun, not least because it evoked my session playing catch with Albie.

The daily uploads had pushed Lena's channel higher, too. Not so far that we could allow ourselves to believe it would cover our living costs, but far enough we could at least imagine it.

Far enough I suspected Lena was allowing herself to do exactly that.

If nothing else, filming videos had been a lot of fun.

Today, though, we were going to focus on PVP.

I got it, okay?

First, we had to practice. It did us no good to lure Mask to us if we couldn't actually beat him, and I had no doubt that he would be practicing – and engaging in – PVP every day. We had to strike a balance between dropping our HP, and thus rendering ourselves vulnerable if he chose that particular day to strike, and falling behind in the skills we'd need to defeat him.

Second, we had to film some of our practice. The fact was, Omar's tournament remained the biggest news in the Third Eye community. If we wanted to keep people watching, we had to give them at least a taste of the action they craved.

Did we want that?

We needed that.

Lena's hat and our portions of the food and the printer and the rent on an apartment we weren't going to use for a month and the gas that no one asked us to pay for but we both wanted to cover our share of? All of those expenses were going on our credit cards, and that bill was going to come due all too soon.

We could pay all of it if Lena won the tournament, and Omar actually paid out to the winner, and we didn't expose his fraud and put him out of business before he had the chance to.

And, you know. If we didn't get dragged to another dimension first.

I supposed that would eliminate our financial worries, at least.

"What are you smiling about?" Lena asked.

"Silver linings," I said.

She looked skyward, maybe for clouds. There weren't any, gray or otherwise, just a sun that shimmered down on us as we stood at the edge of a camping area in the Rita Blanca National Grasslands.

From here, we could already see dozens of impossible objects. They seemed as dense as in the Black Forest, but with almost nothing but unfenced open plains between us, they would be even easier to collect.

Our plan was to leave them visible in the backdrop of the video to drum up extra excitement in the players watching. Of course, our plan was also to collect them all before we moved on. The objects would – hopefully – generate more buzz on the subreddit and the official Discord, get a few more eyes on Lena's channel, but if somebody wanted to jumpstart their own supply of Materials, they would have to find their own national park.

"Are you two in position?" Zhizhi asked.

I shifted so I stood closer to parallel with Lena, with a selection of anomalous trees, poles, signs, hills, and one structure that looked like a sort of geodesic shed at our backs.

I was still partially turned toward Lena, though, so I got to watch her transformation.

In its own way, I found the way she changed when she felt the camera on her as profound an alteration as when she activated or deactivated Third Eye. Not that I'd seen her drop the app in – how long? Weeks? Had she turned it off since the construction site? She certainly hadn't since our first fight with Mask.

Her slipping into streamer mode, on the other hand, was just as impressive as ever. Her posture straightened, her smile broadened, her eyes lit up. That hat that looked so absurd on Lena was exactly the right kind of silly for The Magnificent Ashbird.

She did a half-turn and struck a new pose, tipping her oversized hat. "Howdy, folks," she said.

"Absolutely not," I said.

She turned to me and gave an exaggerated pout. "What are y'all talking about?"

"I'm sorry, Ashbird, but we're not doing a whole video where you put on your idea of a 'Western' accent. Especially when we've actually traveled east from home."

She thrust her chin forward. Her hands curled into finger guns. "I reckon, OldCampaigner, if you're fixing to stop me, we're a'gonna hafta slap leather."

"Are you going to say that this town ain't big enough for the both of us?"

Lena cocked her head. The hat fell off and she caught it without looking.

"No, that would be super dumb," she said, in her normal, or at least streamer, voice. She turned to the camera. "Do you guys even see a town around here?"

Zhizhi gave us both thumbs up. That hat catch had gone wrong four takes in a row. If Lena had missed it again, I was pretty sure we'd have had to abandon it, if only to keep Donica from prying herself out of the Yukon to strangle us.

I pinched my nose. "Accents aside, distinguished guests, we really are going to slap leather today. In a Third Eye sense."

"That's right, folks," Lena said. "It's the day you've all been waiting for. My lovely assistant and I are going to have a fight right here on camera!"

"You say a fight," I said, "but it's not as though I'm going to show them my true power just for the sake of your video."

"Are you holding out on us with a sealed secret technique?" Lena's eyes grew huge. "Something you'll only reveal when the world is in direst peril and everyone else has fallen?"

"No," I said, deadpan as I could. "I'm just holding out for when I launch my own channel."

Lena tossed her hair. "After people see how bad you get your ass kicked here, they sure aren't going to go there in search of PVP tips!"

"Big words, Ashbird. Let's see if you –"

Lena's explosion cut me off.

It would've knocked me flat, if not worse, because she'd poured four Fire into it and that was enough to burst Stone in an instant the way she used to do with Wood.

Even if we hadn't been engaging in a rehearsed bit, though, I think I would have gotten my own Stone shield raised in time to deflect the blast away from me. It wasn't just that I'd emptied out my Tickets to add one more Air to my arsenal. Daily practice, not just against Lena but, off-camera, against Erin and Michelle as well, was seriously improving my reflexes.

"– you can manage to land even a single hit," I finished.

Lena's puffed out cheeks and the way she hunched over were purely for the video, I was sure. Just like my shit-eating grin.

I think my tone, or the fact that this was the fifth time we'd filmed ourselves bantering over accents, infused her glare with some genuine feeling, though.

At the very least, she lashed out with her next move like she meant it. She snapped her hand to the side and manifested Stone with Air. It skipped around my shield and darted toward me. Whenever she wanted, she could switch to Fire and turn that spinning plate into a bomb.

She wasn't the only one with new tricks, though.

My shield twisted in the air in the throes of Earth, changing from a simple plate to something more like a rocky gauntlet. It closed over Lena's projectile, then rocketed skyward, pitting my Air against hers.

We were past the scripted part of the video. This was legit practice now. If need be, we could always dub more banter in later.

Still, I couldn't quite resist stoking Lena's fire. It blazed so magnificently, even if, at the moment, I was its target. "Speed is nothing without technique, Ashbird. I know you're new to Air and all, but you should've learned that much yesterday."

"Technique ain't shit without power, OldCampaigner," Lena snarled. "I know you haven't got any, so here's a taste."

How much had I pissed her off and how much was for the sake of the viewers?

Either way, I thought she was fantastic.

My big dumb grin wouldn't fit the mood of the video, but I was sure Zhizhi could cut around it.

Lena clenched her fist and narrowed her eyes. Her hand shot forward, almost flat, then she brought her other hand up and held them level. She could manipulate her conjured object like this while watching the effects through her smart glasses, but to swap or increase her Reactants she'd have to touch the phone strapped to her chest.

Iron formed before her. I couldn't tell if she'd called it with Air or Fire.

I couldn't tell what she was planning to do with it, either.

I swallowed and conjured my shield again. Still Stone, because we'd found so much more of that than Iron, but depending on what Lena planned to do, I might be giving myself a serious handicap. Every Third Eye discovery we made recontextualized most of what we knew about how to use the tools the game had given us. Nonetheless, I still found Stone to be the least useful and interesting Material. Iron seemed to do everything it could, better.

In a serious fight, I doubted I would risk matching Stone against Iron. Here, I was perfectly content to let Lena take her best shot.

I wasn't going to make it easy, though.

She moved with an odd slowness, rotating her hands and, with them, her Iron.

A new technique? Flashiness for the sake of the video? Or just something to confuse me about when she would actually strike?

It didn't do her any favors. While she dallied, I prepped my shield.

With Water, I adjusted its properties, changing its surface from featureless concrete gray to a porous off-white. This form of stone was softer, more malleable, but seemed to deform rather than shatter under explosive force. Then I used Earth to form the shield into a convex shape for even more resilience.

Lena gave me enough time to swap back to Air. She'd let me craft my ultimate shield and direct it as swiftly and precisely as I could? What the hell was she planning?

My eye twitched.

She wiggled her eyebrows.

Still, nothing happened. Was she going to try to outlast me? Bait an attack? Wouldn't happen. There were a thousand skills and virtues in which Lena lapped me; patience sure as hell wasn't one.

Still, not all the sweat trickling down my forehead came from the unseasonable mix of heat and humidity.

She shrugged. Her Iron sagged in the air. "Eh. It wouldn't be fair to use 'that.'"

"Don't you dare take pity on me," I said. "Hit me with your best shot."

"Clip that!" Lena flashed a grin for the camera. "You heard my lovely assistant, folks. He literally asked for it. Everything you're about to see is between consenting adults. Only trouble is..."

Her grin widened, while my smile froze. Zhizhi and Erin frowned, while Michelle and Donica leaned forward.

"... it might get a little hot for YouTube," Lena said.

She snapped her hands up and slammed her palms together.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 92: Practicing Magic

I felt hands clutching my arm.

As I dragged myself to a sitting position, the ringing in my ears and the spots in my eyes cleared. I realized the agony in my shoulder was just an echo, a memory, the nerves weren't really screaming that my arm was gone –

Lena threw her arms around my shoulders, both of which were, against all reason, intact. "Holy shit, Cam. Are you okay?"

"I'm fine." I reached over to hug her back. My body didn't protest compressing muscles that my brain was sure had been ripped apart. "I'm fine, Lena."

She blinked tears out of her eyes and squeezed me. "You better be."

"I am. Promise." I kissed her forehead; when she looked up, I kissed her lips, too.

She sagged against me.

We stayed like that long enough for me to convince myself that I really was fine, and maybe a little longer. Maybe a lot longer. Eventually, reluctantly, I hauled us both to our feet.

"Nice hit," Zhizhi said. "Now let's do it again, but this time, Lena doesn't break character."

"Hey!" Lena glared at her. "Cam could have been legit hurt."

"Are you?" Zhizhi asked me.

I rubbed my shoulder. "Only in my imagination."

"Not your pride?" Her head tilted microscopically, then she shrugged. I didn't understand her reaction, and she pushed on too quickly for me to think about it. "We don't have to do the hat thing again. I'll just cut around the break."

Lena's head drooped. "I don't want to go that hard again."

"I really am fine," I said.

Her fist tapped against my arm. "I know! We shouldn't burn through your HP, though. Anyway, I shouldn't show that move off on camera until I've mastered a better one."

I pushed past the memory of pain and thought about the technique she'd used. With the one Earth she'd picked up the day before, she'd shaped her Iron into a lance – or a missile. She'd switched to Air to give it a burst of forward momentum, then, just as it smashed into my shield, poured on the Fire.

When I scanned the ground with my phone, I saw the rubble that had been my shield. I didn't think Iron would have allowed me to block; however much I hated it, I was going to have to learn to parry.

I bent over and gave Lena a peck on the cheek. "We should workshop how hard of a hit you want to record."

Either to the kiss or my suggestion, she said, "Mmhm!"

Zhizhi lowered her camera. "In that case, I'm going to take five. Anybody else want Gatorade?"

Nobody did.

"Why don't you hobble over and sit down, Cam," Lena said. "If we're not filming, that's a chance for Erin and Michelle to get some practice, yeah?"

"Good call." If Donica hadn't been watching, I would have put on an exaggerated limp to try to make Lena laugh. Instead, I strode over to the open tailgate of the Yukon, where Donica sat and sipped water from a plastic bottle.

"Here to join the injured reserve?" she asked.

I looked away. "You know I'm not actually hurt."

"But you are actually running out of HP."

"Yeah." I sank onto the tailgate beside her. Bernie pressed against my leg, so I started petting him.

Donica said nothing else, and I thought she might drop it.

I watched Erin and Michelle put on smart glasses and strap their phones to their chest harnesses. I had the harness but not the glasses. I wondered if that would come back to bite me in the ass.

Erin paced in a circle while Michelle stretched in place. Lena stood between them, not even conjuring an object, looking completely at ease. She waved to me and mimed a scratching motion. I gave Bernie another blast of attention and got a nod in return.

"I don't think you ever explained," Donica said, "why your HP doesn't come back."

"No," I said. "I guess I didn't."

She eyed me. "Are you going to make me ask?"

I sighed. "I wasn't trying to hide it, I don't think. It just feels weird to say. I didn't know at the time, but in retrospect, it's like a dev gave me an unfair advantage."

"Your HP not regenerating every night is an advantage?"

"I have ten HP," I said.

She blinked.

"Max," I said.

"Bullshit," she said.

"It's true. You can check my phone." I leaned back into the Yukon's trunk and rested against the PC stowed in my luggage. "Ten max HP and ten max MP."

Donica folded her arms. I supposed she thought I was trolling her.

"It happened while Lena and I were trying to film our first video." I closed my eyes. A smile spread across my face as I remembered cooler, crisper air, the snow on the ground, Lena's first take as The Magnificent Ashbird. And, of course, what happened next. "This is back when we were worried about Third Eye getting canceled over PVP. Back when Erin and I were the only people in our group with Reactants. If I didn't get a workable video out of my ten MP, we'd have to wait a day to film it."

Donica tapped her foot.

"While we were recording in the park, Albie –"

"The little girl you believe is one of Third Eye's developers," Donica said.

I nodded. "– she came up and wanted to play with us. Honestly, I was gonna be a dick about it and try to let her down easily, but Lena convinced me. I ended up learning more about Air in a half hour playing catch with that little girl than I would have in a month of practice."

Donica kicked at the asphalt. With her good leg, thankfully. "I saw what she could do. I don't doubt it."

"Since you saw, I'm sure you won't be surprised that I lost the game of catch."

"That wouldn't have surprised me anyway."

Now it was my turn to eye Donica. She was smiling, though, maybe the gentlest smile I'd ever seen on her face.

She nudged my arm. "Finish your story before I get bored."

"Right," I said. "The long and short of it is, it took one clean hit from Albie to drop my HP. When she realized I had so little and she'd ruined our video shoot, she got really upset. She insisted I accept a Potion, which not only got me back in the game, it overhealed me. HP and MP both."

"By how much?"

"9,999," I said.

"Jesus. How much have you got left?"

I checked my phone.

I winced.

I showed her.

She took a long time looking at the numbers. In fairness, they were displayed in awful neon green against the Third Eye app's gray background.

8,825/10 MP, still by far the most of anyone we knew.

917/10 HP. Second most on the team, but mine weren't coming back. Lena's regenerated to more than that every day.

Donica said, "Fuck."

I nodded.

"Your plan is terrible, Cameron," she said.

"My plan doesn't require me to win a fight."

"Are you sure? Do you realize how much better at this you and Lena are than Erin and Michelle?"

"We're not that far ahead." I shrugged. "Anyway, that's why they need the practice."

Donica scowled. I realized she wasn't reacting to what I'd said when I followed her gaze.

Lena stood between Erin and Michelle on the dry grass. She was, in theory, on the defensive, flanked. What did they call it in basketball? Double teamed.

If this was a double team, it was a couple of amateurs failing miserably to contain a pro.

Michelle had more Air than Lena. Erin had all four Reactants to draw upon.

It didn't matter.

Lena danced between half hearted attacks, her Stone shield ping ponging back and forth seemingly more so she could practice moving it than because she had any need to block.

She feinted a strike at Michelle, and the latter cried out and scrambled backwards, her own Stone deselected and lost. Erin gasped and lunged with Stone made red-hot by Fire, but see "feinted" above; Lena had never committed to an attack, so it was simplicity itself for her to flick the object she'd manifested backwards to serve as a shield. Smoothly, she turned the tumbling Stone into an attack that bowled Erin to the ground.

I couldn't help but beam at the way Lena fought now.

Air helped, of course, but a lot of it came down to her skill. She moved with an easy confidence she hadn't shown in her match with Matt, or even when we fought Mask together.

How did she compare to those two now? Like this, she would've crushed Matt, even with the rules of their match compensating for his lower HP total. I suspected she could've beaten Mask as he was that first night we fought him, but of course, I knew all too well he was growing stronger every day, too.

How did Lena compare to me? I hadn't exactly covered myself in glory so far today, and I couldn't match her attacks for raw power, but I knew I could keep up with her speed and then some. If we fought seriously, I suspected the match would hinge on whether I could pressure her too much for her to build up to an attack like the one she'd dropped me with. I didn't dare engage in a war of attrition when it came to HP, with her or anyone else, but MP? I still had tons to burn, whereas Lena's total was struggling to keep up with the costs of her stronger techniques.

One thing was for sure. We both looked like we were playing a different game from Erin and Michelle.

They stood up and dusted themselves off. They glanced at the Yukon. They averted their eyes.

I applauded.

"Keep it up, ladies," I called. "That's the spirit. You've got to commit to your attacks, though, really go for it. Your HP mean the worst that's going to happen is it hurts for a minute, right?"

Lena put a hand on her hip, though she kept waving her other finger to keep her Stone selected. "Hey! Whose side are you on, Cam?"

I grinned. "The side of everybody getting better at Third Eye."

She flashed a thumbs up. "You're giving the right advice, then. The best thing you can do in any game is whole-ass it!"

The way she said it made me laugh, but where Third Eye was concerned, she'd hit the nail on the head. The difference in her motion – and, I hoped, mine – was that we'd been forced to learn to be decisive with our every move.

"A little pain and losing some HP is not even close to the worst thing that could happen," Michelle muttered.

"Against Mask, no," I said. "Lena's not going to hit you when you're down."

"Not unless you really piss me off," Lena said.

Michelle flinched.

Lena rolled her eyes, but then her smile softened and she trudged over to pat Michelle's arm. "I'm kidding, okay? Let's go another round."

Michelle gave a ragged nod. "I'll try."

I clapped again. "You've got as much Air as me. You saw how fast I was whipping my shield around. The only thing stopping you from doing that is the fact you don't realize you can yet. If you attack that quickly, Lena literally can't get her shield in place fast enough to stop you. Neither can Mask, for what it's worth."

"You didn't get any hits in," Michelle said.

"That wasn't the story we were telling with the video." I hated having to attack Lena, to give her even momentary pain, but I understood our need to practice enough that I would push past that, same as she had. "I'll get my licks in when we film the second half in a few minutes. You want me to tag in now and show you?"

She shook her head. "No, I understand. I'll go again."

"You got this," I said.

"You do," Lena said.

Erin had returned to her position and stood with one hand clasping her other wrist. Her fingers drummed against her denim skirt – outside of Third Eye – or her cream-colored imperial dress – through its filter –, keeping her Stone selected. I noticed that she'd swapped it to a different Reactant during the lull to keep it from getting damaged by continuous Fire.

Smart, but her whole posture seemed wrong to me. She looked like she was trying to disappear, not trying to win. Unfortunately, Third Eye hadn't offered us invisibility.

"Erin," I said.

She fidgeted.

I scratched the back of my neck. I felt an urge to glance at Donica, but I didn't dare. I lowered my voice. "Listen, if I'm being a dick, saying this stuff, let me know, okay?"

"No," Erin said. "You've done more PVP than us, you've faced that creature, and you've played with Miss Albie. If you see something I'm doing wrong, please, tell me."

I nodded, but hesitated. "It's tougher, because you don't have as much Air as I do. The things we attempt are going to be different. I guess it's probably not going to work to tell you to have fun with it?"

"I'm trying to enjoy the practice, at least." She shrank further in on herself. "It just isn't my thing, though."

"Fair." I chewed my lip. "Even if you can't have fun with it, I think the best advice I can give you is, 'be creative.' You've got all four Reactants, and you've studied the mechanics of this game more than maybe any other player. You can do things nobody else we know would even think to attempt, and that's going to be your superpower."

Erin touched the bridge of her glasses. After a moment, she nodded. "I have a few ideas I should test."

"Can't wait to see," I said.

I sat again as the practice session resumed. I felt a weight settle onto my lap and glanced down to see Bernie's plushie form.

A minute passed. Bernie's contented murmur and the ringing of Stone against Stone seemed like the only sounds for miles.

I almost jumped when Donica spoke, even though her voice was softer than I was used to. "You wouldn't be an awful coach, Cameron."

For some reason, praise from her, especially about something I had to assume she knew a lot about, made me shrink in on myself. I stroked Bernie's back and mumbled, "Thanks."

Of course, Donica had to go and ruin the moment.

As Lena smashed aside Erin's conjured net and pivoted to dump Michelle on her ass, Donica added, "Trouble is, you can't scout players for shit."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 93: Four Stories

Flat land, dry grass, wet air, as far as the naked eye could see.

I couldn't complain, aloud, because the Third Eye could see so, so much. We couldn't collect everything because a lot of it lay on well-fenced private land. Some of what we had to leave behind looked fascinating enough to make it onto the wiki. The roadsides alone showered us with Materials and drip-fed us Reactants, though.

My parents had dragged kid me across the high plains for a road trip three times. On each, I spent as much of it as possible trying to sleep. When Benji made that impossible, which was always, I'd traded sleep for trying to read or play on first my GameBoy, then my DS. When Benji interrupted those, too, I'd concentrated on bitching at him.

It had passed the time.

The bus trip Lena and I had taken to Kansas had been, by contrast, incredibly restful. With both of us glued to our phones, there had been no one to unstick us. Apart from not being able to access our PCs, it was practically like taking our apartment with us. (The flu we caught on the way home proved somewhat less restful. Oh, to have had HP then!)

Now, as always, I found myself looking at my phone whenever I wasn't at the wheel.

This trip, however, I wasn't reading or surfing the internet. I was, technically, playing a mobile game, but Third Eye's nature meant I couldn't take my eyes off my surroundings.

Which brought me back around to flat land, dry grass, wet air.

I'd seen almost nothing else.

We'd developed a policy for cities:

Avoid them.

Anyone who knows me can imagine how much I loved that. In case there's any ambiguity, the answer is "not at all."

We ourselves had helped pick Denver clean. Colorado Springs had been a bust. Pueblo, same. Hell, even the town of Dalhart where we'd stayed last night had been emptied of Third Eye objects in its city center, and that was, like, a tenth the size of Castle Rock!

Anywhere with consistent internet access, we'd find gamers. Anywhere there were gamers, there was a chance someone had thrown ten bucks at the Third Eye Kickstarter. How many players had fallen out of the beta after a few days without realizing that if they ranged just a little ways out of town, they'd find they were playing the one AR game that catered to rural life?

I tried to feel bad for them, but we were damned lucky. Dalhart was less than an hour's drive from the Rita Blanca National Grasslands; if the player there had just gone for a long walk, we'd be way poorer in Third Eye resources.

The next major city our route should have taken us to was Amarillo. On a normal road trip, I'd have been counting the miles to it. Restaurants! Museums! Five bars of connectivity! An honest-to-God downtown!

Erin had shown us wiki entries indicating that, at least for the first three weeks of the beta, Amarillo had played home to a couple of active players. They'd either dropped out of the beta or out of the habit of posting to the wiki, but the entries they'd already made were enough to indicate stopping there would be another waste of our time. Besides, it was where I-40 met I-27; we'd been burned by interstate highways before.

So, instead of cutting through the city, we were taking a long, wide loop to the southwest of it. Our plan was to check Palo Duro State Park for Third Eye content, film another video there, then start winding our way north again.

Good plan. Smart plan. Wise plan.

The Palo Duro website even made it look like it had terrain, so that would be a relief.

But holy shit did I want to see a building more than four stories tall.

Grain silos and wind turbines didn't count.

I swallowed a sigh and pried myself up off the windowsill I'd sunk down. I peeked over the top of my phone camera, then through it. Yep, there was another Third Eye object. "Wooden signpost coming up."

"Worth stopping for?" asked Zhizhi, who was taking her turn behind the Yukon's wheel.

"Eh." That would be one, maybe two Wood. "Record and move on, I think."

She nodded.

"I see it," Erin said. I heard her fingers tap on her screen. "Marked."

"Thanks," I said.

We no longer got out of bed – or, less colloquially, out of the Yukon – for two Wood, or four, or an equivalent amount of Stone. Maybe we'd kick ourselves for that someday. This day, we marked the location, uploaded it for anyone else who was interested in sweeping up our crumbs, and moved on.

Which didn't help my boredom.

The only breaks in our routine came when we found a state or national park, or some unincorporated (or at least unfenced) area where we could pull over and scout on foot.

Rita Blanca had been such a win. We'd only explored a third of the park and it had delivered everything we could ask for. Additional Reactants for all four of us active players, tons of Materials, a video, a practice session.

Such a win.

So why did I see myself frowning in the side mirror?

That goddamn practice session.

"You can't scout players for shit." Donica's words echoed in my mind.

I hadn't repeated them to Erin or Michelle. I wasn't that oblivious. Even when Lena and I were alone in our hotel room, though, I'd clammed up. Let her distract me.

In my defense, she was good at it.

What's that? Objection!, cries the prosecution?

(In the evenings, I'd bounced off Trowel Samurai 2 on Switch, as Gerry had predicted. What was it missing that the first game had in, well, spades? Regardless, I'd switched to the Ace Attorney Collection and its dialogue was derailing my train of thought.)

Objection sustained. Lena didn't have to be good at distracting me to make me shut up about what Donica had said. I didn't want to face it.

I pulled myself away from my phone camera to glance back at Erin and Michelle.

Erin waved and I conjured a smile.

It had vanished by the time I was looking out the window again.

Donica was a good scout.

Erin was an amazing Third Eye player – when she had time to sit down, experiment, bounce ideas off others, take notes, and run her experiment again. Along with Matt, she'd pioneered using Earth to move a conjured object. Air always moved stuff faster, though, so how much good did that do? Turning Wood into fiber with Water, weaving it into a net with Earth, then moving it with Air? A sick combo. Slow to execute, though, and would it even do anything to restrain an enemy who could sink into the floor? Erin had loosened up after my "coaching" and tried all kinds of cool techniques. By the end she'd even seemed to be enjoying herself. Everything she did was a step too slow, though. Too cautious, too defensive. I wondered if she'd taken a single HP off Lena; after I tagged in, she sure hadn't hit me once.

Michelle was even worse. She'd had less practice with her Reactants, but that would improve with time. Of all of us, she'd been the most athletic before the game started, and with the addition of Air, she could absolutely zip around a battlefield. The only way she wanted to zip, though, was away from harm. I didn't blame her, but the contrast between her evasion and her attacks was ludicrous. By the end of the session Lena and I struggled to tag her, but her hits came in slow, predictable, and feeble.

Neither of the girls would be of much help against Mask.

Best case scenario, their participation would take him by surprise and create an opening for Lena or I.

Worst case scenario, them being present would turn the encounter into even more of an escort mission than just having Zhizhi along.

Which was... fine, right?

Before the trip started, I'd thought Lena and I would have a chance of defeating Mask.

Since, we'd doubled our Reactants, swelled our stockpiles of Materials, and practiced extensively.

The missile Lena had asked Zhizhi to cut from our video was the single strongest attack I'd seen a regular Third Eye player use, Mask very much included. Only Albie's big techniques surpassed it, her tornado of blades and the firestorm she'd used after the rest of us fled. I thought the lower-level strikes she'd used to fend off the creature might have been less powerful than Lena's missile, though.

I didn't have a trump card on that level, but after Rita Blanca I had at least one of each core Reactant, and the speed and power I could get from Air had soared past my previous limits. I'd have to see if I could up my offense with the single Fire I'd gained from a Third Eye-only bonfire, but my defense would give anyone fits.

But.

We'd also seen the kind of windfall a Third Eye player could get on the road.

Had Mask gone on the road? If he'd driven cross-country, especially earlier in the beta before the major highways mostly got picked clean, then what we'd seen from him was not him fighting us with his full strength.

I could hope his Key let him teleport wherever he wanted, and I could hope he'd had the same tastes as me. City to city, and skip the wide open spaces in between.

I couldn't bet on that, though. The record of Mask's invasions left plenty of time for him to have driven to each location and only used his Key to return to places he'd already visited. That was how teleportation worked in a lot of games, and while Third Eye bucked plenty of design conventions, sometimes, as with the types of Daimons and the classical elements of the Reactants, it followed them.

I still thought Lena and I could, would, beat him.

Could we do it while protecting Erin and Michelle?

The thing about escort missions is that you fail not when you're defeated, but when the NPC you're protecting is. We wouldn't be protecting NPCs, but real people, our friends.

Who I'd encouraged to come with us.

Sad to say, I thought Erin was safer with us. She was a famous enough Third Eye player that Mask would have come after her sooner or later. Hell, he'd recognized her instantly in Cinder Alley.

Which, I realized, told me something about Mask's equipment.

I glanced at the rear-view mirror. Erin sat one row back, one hand on her lap, the other holding her phone. She'd dressed more girlishly since we'd left Denver: skirts and floral blouses every day, big hoop earrings like her avatar wore, and heavier, if still artfully applied, makeup. I smiled to see her feeling comfortable expressing herself around us. Still, no one would confuse her for her regal Third Eye avatar, and that was the only image of her the wiki had ever had. What had she worn to Cinder Alley? Her in-town uniform of androgynous jeans and flannels, I was pretty sure.

To have recognized Erin, Mask had to have been wearing smart glasses beneath his eponymous headgear. Not unexpected, but good to confirm. Could we use that somehow? Something to workshop with Lena, perhaps.

Regardless, I knew he knew Erin, and I suspected he'd have come after her.

Michelle, though. She'd wanted to walk away. Her only online participation in Third Eye had been on Erin's private Discord. Maybe Mask knew about that from capturing Matt, but if Michelle had gone through with her plan to drop out of the beta, she would also have dropped off his radar.

Lena and I had convinced her to keep her hand in the game.

At the time, I thought we'd been recruiting a teammate. At worst, someone who could watch Erin's back while we focused on offense. At best, another attacker to ambush and overwhelm Mask. Either way, someone who could keep enjoying Third Eye as soon as we humbled the worst of its bad apples.

Now, I wondered if we'd given ourselves one more potential victim to escort into danger.

She bolted upright and for one horrible moment, I thought I'd muttered something out loud. Instead, she said, "Got a big one coming up on the far side of the road."

I leaned forward to direct my camera over the dashboard.

"Ooh," Lena said. "Looks like an oil pump!"

Through Third Eye, we were already in its shadow. It looked like an old design, turn of the previous century maybe, but massive, with a wooden frame and a big counterweight that made the Civ player in me think of a trebuchet.

"That's easily a tree's worth of Wood, at least, if we can collect it," Michelle said.

"What if it has oil with it?" Erin asked. "Would it be Oil? No one has reported it as a Material. Or it could be Fire, since it's an energy source, or Water, since it's a liquid, or Plastic, I suppose..."

"Or Gold," Lena suggested. "People call oil black gold, yeah?"

"That's a stretch," Donica said.

Lena grinned as Zhizhi did a U-turn to pull onto the shoulder of the road. "Wanna bet?"

"Against someone who can't pay if she loses?" Donica sniffed, but she was grinning, too. "Pass."

I grinned as well, but didn't say a word. If I explained why the giant pumpjack put a smile on my face, even Lena would call me a dumbass.

I was just happy to see another structure more than four stories tall.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 94: Home To Roost

We still didn't know whether Third Eye oil would give us Fire, Water, Gold, or a hitherto undiscovered resource of its own. The pumpjack turned out to be eighteen Wood and three Iron worth of dried-up well. A good haul for a single object, but still kind of disappointing.

It set the tone for the next leg of our trip.

My eyes tracked more Third Eye oil equipment as we drove past. This one looked more modern, all metal, half again as tall, and lacked the distinctive counterweight. Awesome! But it was also behind a fence taller than I was. Lena and I might have risked climbing over for something that would either give us a Reactant or double-digit Iron or both. Not when our objective stood right next to a cluster of real buildings and was surrounded by people at work, though.

That find went onto the wiki as Not Collected.

So did a cluster of trees, a rocky outcropping, a barn, a lone dead tree with huge gnarled branches, a windmill of the old grain-grinding variety, a wind turbine of the modern energy-producing variety, a silo, another copse of trees, a big flat rock like a miniature mesa, and something like a cell tower.

Erin dutifully entered them all. By the time we saw the last one, she was the only one of us who had the heart to.

We did come across one more find on the side of the road. A small bush that turned into a single Wood. Probably less than one of us would have gotten from the sign I'd turned my nose up at, yet we stopped for it anyway just so we could feel like we were making progress.

Technically, we were gaining XP from each object we focused our cameras on. XP to keep us in the beta. Would it ever do anything else? Getting kicked was too distant a threat to motivate us. I suspected Lena and I were in the uppermost 1% of players in terms of XP at this point, Erin couldn't be far behind, and Michelle? A few days ago she'd wanted out.

I would've thought Third Eye was trolling us if I hadn't believed that the objects were either procedurally seeded or echoes of some preexisting magical world. We'd just had a run of bad luck.

Our route took us through the outskirts of Canyon, which was probably the biggest town we'd visited since Pueblo, but all we saw of it were some industrial buildings, billboards, and the usual cluster of roadside services like gas stations and fast food joints. I didn't see an actual canyon, either; maybe it was named for the one in Palo Duro State Park, even though it was still pretty far away?

Zhizhi navigated some gnarly intersections to get us headed toward it.

We'd driven that way for a few minutes when Erin said, "Hm."

"Sup?" Lena asked.

Erin pointed to an odd, conical Third Eye structure sandwiched between a pair of storage buildings. Fenced off. Of course. "Did anyone get a hundred XP for focusing on that?"

"I kind of spaced out," I admitted. I checked the app. My XP had ticked up by ten.

"Ten here," Lena said.

"Same," Michelle said. "Didn't you get the hundred, Erin?"

Erin shook her head. She frowned at her phone. "Let's keep an eye on this, okay?"

We did. The next two objects gave the same result. We didn't find so much as a scrap of Wood to collect along the roadside.

"Somebody else came this way," I said.

"It seems so," Erin said.

"We're pretty close to I-27," Zhizhi said. We would have to cross under the interstate on our way to Palo Duro. "It makes sense this area would be better-traveled."

I leaned over to look in the back seat.

Lena, Erin, and Michelle were all frowning. I supposed I was, too.

"Does it change anything?" Donica asked.

"We could skip Palo Duro," Erin said. "It's an hour out of the way and probably a half-hour back. If it's already been scouted, that's a waste."

"If there aren't any objects to stop for," Donica said, "it will only be a half hour each way. We've allocated most of the day to this park, we can afford to detour for that long."

"Besides," Lena said, "on their website it looked like a really pretty park."

Donica chuckled. "God forbid any of us enjoy the trip."

"Personally," Zhizhi said, "I'd rather stick to our plan. Navigating these roads is... interesting... enough when we're not changing our minds at the drop of a hat."

Erin lowered her eyes. "Sorry."

"It's fine," I said. "Staying flexible is good. If we need to make a change, we can do it at a rest stop and trade off drivers. For now, though, the upside of an unscouted park seems worth checking out, and at minimum we need somewhere to film an Ashbird episode."

Nods all around.

I nodded back, but the way the conversation had flowed bugged me for reasons I couldn't quite pin down. I scratched the mental itch while Zhizhi drove on.

I was still scratching as she pulled through a gate marked with the name of the state park. Hadn't figured it out, though.

Beyond the sign lay a big gravel parking lot. The tallest things in sight were a couple of RVs. A dozen pickup trucks and SUVs and a single dwarfed-looking compact sedan occupied a third of the lot.

Zhizhi brought the Yukon to a stop and our team piled out.

Palo Duro was supposed to be named after a canyon, but everything we'd seen on the ride in had been just as flat as the surrounding area. When I got out and approached a railing, I finally saw where the name came from. It seemed like a broad wedge had been carved out of the flat surface of Texas, all the way to the horizon, into which all the rocks and scrub trees and terrain of the whole region had poured. I felt in-world again; another boundary break survived!

"Ooh," Lena said, "this is sick."

I reached over and squeezed her hand. We grinned at each other.

She raised her phone and panned it around. "That's weird."

"What?" I tried mine.

There were no impossible objects near the parking lot, nor at the trailhead. Down in the canyon itself, however, Third Eye weirdness abounded. Either it wasn't as dense as at Rita Blanca or the more complex terrain hid some of the objects. Still, the supply more than justified the trip. I started trying to tally what we might collect but got distracted by the mystery of why everything was so far from where we'd parked.

"Why would somebody come this far," I said, "only to turn back when all the best stuff was right in front of them?"

Lena scratched her head. "Maybe their phone ran out of battery?"

Instinctively, I checked mine. Close to full. Donica's Yukon had about as many USB ports as my and Lena's apartment, so all our devices stayed topped up on the road.

"What's the deal?" Zhizhi asked. She rolled her shoulders and rubbed the back of her neck. "Does it look like it's worth me getting my camera?"

"Yeah," I said. "Seems there's plenty to scout, although it's all far away. In any case, we should find a spot to film an episode. If you need a minute –"

"I do." Her hands stretched skyward and she sighed. "It's been a while since I drove this much."

I chuckled. "As you can probably guess, same."

"Really? I hadn't noticed." She laughed.

After a delay to check that I didn't look annoyed, so did Lena. She said, "Next time we're on a back road, you guys should let me have a turn at the wheel. I've gotta get back in practice, but I do have a license."

Zhizhi narrowed her eyes. "Spoken like somebody with magical defenses against a car wreck."

"Yep!" Lena winked.

Erin and Michelle were at the back of the Yukon, unloading Donica's wheelchair. Donica claimed her ankle felt better every day, but I suspected the regimen of hiking through parks and riding in an SUV for hours would wear on even a healthy person who didn't have Third Eye. After the first day, Donica had swallowed her pride and no longer complained about us bringing the chair along.

I turned to help them out and found a trio of phones practically in my face.

Two were held by a couple wearing his-and-hers jeans and long-sleeved tee shirts. They looked maybe a couple years younger than Lena and I. I recognized the Trowel Samurai on the woman's shirt, while the man's advertised something I didn't know. A band, probably.

Their eyes started out wide and they got wider when I turned to face them.

The third phone was held in both hands by a little girl sandwiched between the couple. She was the only one who didn't seem in on whatever had amazed them, but she wore a miniature version of the same clothes. She blinked at me, then up at her – mom and dad? In my head they were too young but they were probably as old as Lena's parents would've been when she was that age.

None of which explained why their whole family would be staring at me. I blinked back at the kid.

"Oh my God," the woman whispered. She had a much lighter, much more authentic version of the accent Lena had faked at the start of our last video. She nudged the man.

He grinned and nudged her back. Their kid jostled between them. "Told you, didn't I, hon?"

I cleared my throat. "Hi there...?" It came out as more of a question than I'd intended.

Instead of answering it, the woman repeated, "Oh my God!"

Not because I'd spoken, but because Lena had turned at the sound of our conversation. She cocked her head. "Sup?"

Both the adults' phones had shifted to her in an instant, which, yeah. Who wouldn't rather look her way?

The kid kept her phone pointed up at me. We exchanged another round of blinks.

The woman gripped the man's arm and squealed, "It really is The Magnificent Ashbird!"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

My apologies for the non-Third Eye threadmark, dear readers - I'll delete it in a week or so for the sake of archive bingers - but this is important info!

You can now read all five free chapters of my novels The Mechaneer and The Fox Who Stole Monaco on my Patreon. (Up to twenty five for patrons.)

And that means you can also help decide which one comes to Sufficient Velocity!

Don't miss this chance to vote in the Fox vs. Mecha poll and let me know which of these novels you want to see continued here in the coming months.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 95: The Other Team

"It's such an honor to meet you! We're just the biggest fans." The woman reached out to grab Lena's hands. When those remained pressed to Lena's sides, the woman wrung hers and looked back and forth between us. "Oh, I mean, fans of both of you!"

"There's no show without the lovely assistant." The man flashed a wry grin my way and went back to looking at Lena through his phone.

"Uh," said Lena.

"You weren't serious about starting your own channel, though, right, OldCampaigner?" the woman asked. "You just can't. You two are so great together."

"That was them doing a bit, hon," the man said.

"'Course it was a bit, but sometimes..." She leaned in and Lena, in a tremendous act of will or maybe just a daze, didn't lean back. "There's no drama, right?"

"Britt can't stand YouTube drama," the man said. I wasn't quite sure but I thought I caught a hint of sarcasm.

"It's just awful," said – Britt, I supposed. "Sometimes I hear a circle's going through a bad patch and I'm up all night refreshing their sub for news."

I'd watched plenty of YouTube gaming content, but only vaguely understood the ecosystem around it. Probably something I should fix, considering where Lena and I were pinning our financial hopes. I supposed Britt meant a group of creators when she mentioned a circle, and the sub in question was a subreddit for their channel?

I shot a glance at Zhizhi, but she was leaning against the railing and failing to hide her smile. No help at all.

Then I glanced at the Yukon. Erin, Donica, and Michelle hadn't emerged from behind it, which I supposed was for the best since we didn't want to advertise their presence to Mask. Not that I thought these two were connected to him. Either way, it meant no help from them, either.

"No drama, I promise." I shifted to interpose myself between Britt and Lena and offered my hand.

Britt clasped it instantly, pumped it up and down, and dragged it over to the guy, who gave me a normal-ass fistbump.

"I'm Jim," he said. "You've met my wife Britt, and this here's our little jewel. Say hi, Zealia."

The little girl reached up and offered a tiny fistbump of her own. Her dad had taught her right! I returned it and she mouthed, "Hi."

"I guess you guys know us," I said. "Our handles, anyway. I'm Cam, this is Lena."

"Oh!" Jim coughed. "Should we use our handles instead of names? Is that how folks do in Third Eye?"

"I don't think it matters," I said.

"It's just, we haven't met any other players before. Not in person. We want to do it right."

Britt grabbed her husband's arm. "Oh my God. I think about you two being the first we met and I get shaky all over. When Jim said you might be here today, we just had to try."

I really could've used some backup with this conversation, but the whole team seemed content to hang me out to dry. "You came to the park just to see us?"

Idiotic. She'd just said as much.

Neither of them seemed to notice how stupid my question had been. Jim said, "We had our fingers crossed. You been shooting episodes in parks and this one is the biggest around for miles."

Which was, I thought, exactly the message we'd wanted to send, albeit only to Mask. We'd debated explicitly announcing our next destination at the end of each video, and we might yet have to, but that might seem like too obvious of a trap. Better by far if he could convince himself he'd tracked us down.

"'Course," Britt said, "even if we hadn't got to meet you, we'd still have been following your advice by scouting here."

She frowned.

They tilted toward each other.

Jim smiled, but with a tightness in his eyes that hadn't been there before.

I struggled to follow their conversation. They seemed to bounce from topic to topic, mood to mood. A few seconds respite would've let me parse what was bothering them, I was sure, but none seemed forthcoming.

Lena came to my rescue.

Rather, The Magnificent Ashbird did.

She danced around me, and I gave her room to. She didn't twirl or take a bow – we didn't have that much room – but her body language alone told me she'd slipped fully into streamer mode. She stood up straighter and moved with a grace that looked unconscious, quite in contrast to how forced I knew it was.

Like the way she offered her hands, something Lena would almost never have done for a couple of strangers if she was being herself.

Britt and Jim brightened as each of them clasped one of Lena's hands. Brightened, hell. They practically glowed.

"It's awesome that you guys could make it," Lena said. Those clear, confident tones made her fans grin even more. I did the same. "It's a total honor for us, too. Would you believe this is only the second time we've gotten to meet our fans?"

I knew the first time she had in mind was our first meeting with Albie. Lena had declared Albie our number one fan, a title the little dev seemed to delight in.

"That can't be right," Jim said. "You've played with other folks up in Denver, yeah? I'm sure everybody playing this game is a fan of yours."

"Nope!" Lena flicked a curl away from her forehead. She leaned forward and, in a stage whisper, confided, "Some people are jealous."

Jim chuckled.

Britt, on the other hand, shook with high, wheezing laughs. "Oh my God. You're just as funny IRL."

Lena spread her hands and soaked up the praise. Then she crouched and extended her palms to the little girl. "Zealia, right? How about you? Are you a fan, too?"

Zealia looked to each of her parents in turn. Her dad put a hand on her back.

She shook her head.

Even in full streamer mode, Lena couldn't quite hide the way her shoulders slumped. She recovered instantly, though. "Well, I promise to work extra hard until you are!"

"How come?" Zealia mumbled.

Lena cocked her head.

Britt knelt next to her daughter. "What's wrong, darlin'? I thought you liked Ashbird's videos."

"How come," Zealia asked her mom, "her hair's not on fire?"

"Oh, right," Jim said. He knelt on the other side of his daughter and held his phone up for her. "Have a look."

Zealia's eyes widened. Her mouth formed a perfect 'o,' and her own phone almost slipped from her hands. She caught it and pressed it to her chest.

From where I stood, I couldn't see the glow of Lena's smile, so I had to imagine it from how it was reflected in Britt and Jim's.

"You're not a Third Eye player, Zealia?" Lena asked.

The little girl didn't answer, but her mom said, "She was just a glimmer in her daddy's eye when the Kickstarter ran."

Jim snorted a laugh.

"Well," Lena said, "I can't get you into the beta, but if it's okay with your mom and dad, I can let you see how cool they look."

"Mommy and daddy showed me." Zealia's voice dropped to a whisper. "You look cooler."

"Well yeah," Lena said. "I don't mean they'd have to show you, though. You could look for yourself."

She reached out and held her fingers over Zealia's phone, not quite touching it but letting the little girl push it forward into her hand.

Lena looked up at her parents. "Is that cool with you?"

I wasn't sure she'd explained what she was offering very well, so I said, "Our editor has a version of the camera filter that works for every phone, not just ones with Third Eye installed. We could get it running on Zealia's phone if you like."

"That would be amazing," Britt said. "I don't know how to thank you!"

"The only thanks we need are your smiles," Lena said. She tapped her finger on her lower lip. "Well, and your likes. And a comment or two wouldn't hurt..."

"Oh," Britt said, "we comment on every video."

Lena beamed up at me. "Our fans are the best, right, Cam?"

"You know it," I said. "We're the ones who should be thanking you."

Britt hugged her daughter. "It's nothing much."

"Zhizhi," I called. "Can you help us out here?"

"I heard," she said.

"Here's the real secret weapon of our channel." Lena stood and presented Zhizhi to our fans like a magician pulling her cape from the big reveal. "If you ever wondered why our production values went through the roof, you're looking at her."

"Oh, I know," Britt said. "Editors are so, so important. It's great you give yours credit. When I see a channel where they don't put credits up, I always think, isn't that the most selfish thing? Terrible. But you make sure to thank everybody."

"It's all true," Zhizhi said. "Of course, I am the one who attaches the credits to the videos..."

As far as I was concerned, she had a better deadpan than me. I couldn't help but imagine a version of Lena's videos where she and Zhizhi shared the screen. Too bad the latter wasn't a player.

Lena and I laughed, and so, after a moment, did Britt and Jim. I thought their laughter sounded a little nervous. Still wondering if there was some kind of "drama" with the channel, maybe.

Lena reached out to Zealia's phone again. "Will you let Zhizhi work her magic on your phone, Zealia? You'll get to see your mom and dad looking cool whenever they play, and me and Cam, too."

Zealia nodded as she pressed the phone into Lena's hands.

Lena bounced on her heels and presented it to Zhizhi. "Take good care of it."

Zhizhi arched her eyebrows. Solemnly, she said, "I'll treat it like a precious relic."

"Mmhm!" Lena turned back to fuss over Zealia while Zhizhi tapped at the screen, I supposed to connect to Miguel's server and install the camera app.

"I hadn't heard about a filter for non-players," Jim said. "Where'd you get a thing like that?"

"A friend of ours put it together," I said. "We work pretty closely with the wiki team, and some of them are into software development."

He scratched the back of his neck. "God. Makes me realize how we've just been playing around with this."

"Well," I said, "it is a game."

"I suppose so!" He grinned easily.

Which I thought was a pretty interesting reaction.

I'd dropped out of most of the conversations on the official Discord and the subreddit. Too many other plates to juggle. Hell. I'd exchanged more words with a developer than I had with any ordinary player outside the wiki team's circle.

Britt and Jim weren't just fans of Lena's channel. They were normal gamers, still playing Third Eye as a normal game. If I got the chance to pick their brains, to get a sense of how most people were playing, I should take it.

I got the chance.

While Zealia danced around, pointing her phone at her parents, Lena, me, and the impossible objects in the distance, Jim nodded to one of the pickups parked near the railing. "Minute of your time?"

"Sure," I said.

He ambled over.

I gave a quick glance to the rest of our team, who had deployed Donica's wheelchair and were standing near the trailhead. At this rate, Zealia or her parents would see them and we'd have to make introductions. Not exactly a problem, except that I wasn't sure how to ask Britt and Jim not to gossip online without scaring them.

Jim said, "I've got no right to ask you this."

I turned back to him. "Hm?"

"It's just..." He looked out over the railing. "Me and Britt, we're down from Amarillo. This is the closest big park to us. We hoped we'd get to meet you, sure. We also hoped we'd get to scout this stuff."

"Ah." I swept my phone over the canyon. Was I close enough for my XP to tick up? I didn't check. "That's fair. It's pretty much in your backyard and we're coming in from out of state."

He nodded, but his frown deepened. "You're doing stuff for the whole playerbase, though."

"Not big into PVP, I guess?" I asked.

"I'd love to give it a try, being honest. You and Ashbird make it look damned cool." He kicked at a railing. "I wouldn't want it to just crop up anywhere, though, especially when I'm out with my family."

He didn't know the half of it.

"And the scouting," he continued. "We got what we could in town and we didn't think to look anywhere we couldn't catch something in Pokemon. You got us out here in the first place. Only fair you collect what you can, huh?"

He looked sweatier than the weather justified and he couldn't meet my eyes. His hands kneaded the rail.

I tried to think of what an equivalent conversation would be for me. Nothing, not for a long time. Before Third Eye, I hadn't done anything that had famous participants.

Asking one of my favorite authors to bow out of a competition so I'd have a shot, back when I'd imagined I'd have a writing career beyond websites and ad copy?

"Jim," I said.

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

I smiled. "If you want us to leave the canyon to you, we will. Even if I wanted to be a dick about it, Lena would insist to put a smile on your daughter's face."

"Lots of the folks Britt and I watch, I like to watch them but I probably wouldn't like to meet them." He turned to where Lena was demonstrating something to his wife and daughter. It was hard to say which of the three had a broader smile. "She's good people, Ashbird."

"Agreed." I swallowed the frog that threatened to occupy my throat.

Jim folded his arms. "I can't ask you to do that, OldCampaigner. Cam. It wouldn't be fair."

"Let's make it fair, then," I said.

He turned fully to me for the first time since we'd stepped aside. "How?"

I looked past him, past his family and Lena and Zhizhi, past the parked Yukon. Erin was studying something in the canyon. Donica must have wanted an eye on our scene, though, because she'd made Michelle tilt the wheelchair toward us, so both were looking our way.

I tried to smile at them but it probably looked queasy. I was getting too used to the feeling that something I was about to say could blow up in my face.

I turned back to Jim and said it anyway. "You did mention wanting to try PVP."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 96: The Gap

Jim stood there, frowning at the canyon, flexing his hands, long enough for me to conclude I'd said the wrong thing.

Which was pretty bad, since it hadn't been his reaction that worried me.

"No offense," he said at last, "but I think that amounts to the same thing as us letting you collect everything."

I chuckled. "None taken. If you haven't tried Third Eye PVP before, you're probably right that you wouldn't stand a chance against Lena or I. Not always by our choice, but we've ended up practicing often enough."

"You get invaded a lot up in Denver?"

"A lot more than I wish."

He sucked in a breath and shook his head.

"Most of the community is great," I said, "but when there's a lot of players around, 'most' isn't the same as 'all.'"

He rubbed his chin. "Guess not."

"Point is," I said, "I'd offer some PVP tips if you or Britt wanted, but I wouldn't offer a challenge. That would be an even shittier thing to do than just taking the resources from your park, since you'd lose XP from it."

"What are you saying we should do, then?"

"We're actually traveling with some friends," I said, "including some other players. One of them has never been in a real PVP match, and she only started practicing with us during the trip."

Jim looked around. He didn't raise his phone, though, so he didn't immediately lock on to Erin and Michelle. "Me winning a match with one of your friends would be enough for you and Ashbird to turn the park over to us?"

I shrugged. "I told you, we'd stand aside if you just asked. This way, win or lose, one of our friends will get some experience."

Jim furrowed his brow. "Thought you only got XP for winning."

"I don't mean experience as a game currency," I said. "Think of it as experience..."

I started to say "in a real fight," but managed to swallow that.

Near as I could tell, Britt and Jim were playing way below the level where Mask would think to threaten them. They were following the advice from the Ashbird videos to the letter, which included lots of cautions about PVP and scouting in dangerous places.

Their way of playing Third Eye was already as safe as we knew how to make it.

Did I have an obligation to tell them more?

Even if it stopped them playing?

Even if it stopped them watching?

I had to end my sentence one way or another, before my hesitation got too weird.

"... playing PVP with something on the line," I finished.

It sounded lame in my head, but Jim nodded like it made sense.

"How much HP have you got?" I asked.

"Three forty," he said. "Can't tell if that's high or low. Britt's only got a hundred and twenty five. Neither of us have lost more than one or two along the way, that we noticed. Being honest, we're not real sure how that happened."

"Pretty high," I said, and it didn't sound like my teeth were audibly gritted. Almost every max HP value seemed high to me. I knew from the wiki some players had single-digit totals, even lower than mine. I didn't know if any of them had stuck with the game, though, and even now, I hadn't met anyone in that situation.

"Really?" He brightened. "Great!"

"I ask," I said, "because I don't want anyone to lose XP. I'd like to set up a match with the same rules you saw when Ashbird played CannibalHalfling."

Jim grinned. "The Earth episode!"

He got busy reminiscing, so I didn't think he caught how I looked away when I mentioned Matt's username.

I told myself this match could, in some small way, get us closer to rescuing Matt and Gerry.

"I don't know how much I can manage," Jim said, "but I'm happy to give it a shot."

I plastered on a smile. "Cool."

I gestured to the Yukon and we walked that way.

Erin touched her glasses, leaving her hand up to cover her mouth. She doubled down on surveying the canyon.

Michelle shifted behind Donica's wheelchair, frowning at Jim and especially at me. Did she know what I was up to? I didn't like being "up to" anything. Schemes were Lena's bag. This one wasn't much of a scheme, though, right?

Donica locked gazes with me and flashed a hint of a smile. She definitely knew, and approved. She stood up. Either her ankle felt better or she'd gone full agent and refused to let the pain show. "Cameron. Are you going to introduce us to every fan we run into until we start to believe that you and Lena really are famous?"

"You're the friend?" Jim's gaze slid to the wheelchair. "If you're hurt, I just couldn't –"

"'Friend' is a strong word," Donica said. "I prefer colleague. Anyway, Cameron knows better than to rope me into another of his schemes."

"'Schemes' is a strong word," I said.

Neither of us laughed, even though I thought Erin, Michelle, and Jim's expressions were all pretty funny.

Despite the fact I had, on some level, gotten Donica hurt, and despite what she might say about our friendship, I'd found myself getting along better with her since the start of the trip. We both did our share of looking out for the younger members of the team.

I made introductions, looping Britt and Zealia in when Lena dragged them and Zhizhi over, then explained what Jim and I had discussed about PVP.

"I don't see why we can't share," Erin said.

Michelle, who had hardly looked away from me the whole time, nodded. "Yeah, that would be way better."

Donica shook her head. "If you want to share, then offer to after you've won. Don't you think that's more in keeping with the spirit of the game?"

She didn't invoke Matt's name, but Erin, in particular, obviously thought of him. Nobody we knew cared more about the incentives a game's rules created. Erin hugged her arms.

"I don't want to push nobody," Jim said. "It'd be a real thrill to get the chance to play you if you've trained with Ashbird and OldCampaigner, though."

Michelle squeezed her eyes shut. She swallowed. "I'll do it."

I didn't give her a thumbs up because I worried she might take it as patronizing.

Donica did, and when Michelle opened her eyes, she stared at Donica's thumb for a long time. Frankly, it left me feeling I'd been right to worry.

"Why don't you set up over there." Zhizhi pointed to a flat stretch of ground – no shortage of that – to one side of the trailhead. "You want to ref again, Cam?"

Before I could answer, Britt grabbed Jim's shoulders. "It's just like in the video!" They bounced back and forth.

Which didn't leave me much choice.

Britt left Zealia with Jim while she ran over and backed their pickup into a parking space abutting the play area. Erin turned the Yukon the same direction. We opened the gates of both vehicles to form a little tailgate party, with Donica in her wheelchair next to Zhizhi and Erin, who took up position on the back of the Yukon.

Jim lifted Zealia up to Britt in the bed of their pickup. All three of them looked to Lena. She spread her arms and flashed a magnificent streamer-mode smile. "You guys would let me sit with you? I'm honored!"

Her fans for life bounced even more.

"I'll do it, obvs," Lena said. "One thing, though. You've got to agree to a sneak preview."

Zealia grabbed her mom's arm. "What's that?"

"I don't know, darlin'," Britt said. Her wide eyes spoke volumes about how much she wanted to find out.

Lena dashed to the Yukon and retrieved Bernie from the back seat. "An introduction to Daimons!"

I was vaguely aware of Zealia first hiding behind her mom, then, gradually, inching her way around until she was giggling and hugging Bernie. Lena waved Bernie's plushie form around enough that I didn't think Britt or Jim would notice him moving under his own power outside of the Third Eye filter. Not that they were looking at anything outside the filter. Lena chattered away, extolling the virtues of her favorite feature of Third Eye.

When was the last time she'd spoken this much to people she'd just met? Much less while maintaining the relentless good cheer of The Magnificent Ashbird?

God. She was going to be spent in the evening.

For once, though, I couldn't pay attention to her.

I had a match to referee.

I waved Michelle and Jim close. "You've both seen the episode, right?"

It only then occurred to me that I didn't know if the former had. Thankfully, she nodded.

"Cool," I said. "Just a quick refresher on the rules, then. Three rounds, and we call each at fifty damage."

"In the episode, it was a hundred," Jim said.

"Yeah," I said, "but both players you saw in the episode had a lot of PVP experience."

Besides, Michelle 'only' had two hundred and thirty max HP. She could theoretically run out if we used the same format Lena and Matt had.

It didn't take me long to realize I needn't have worried.

We took our starting positions and I formed a sphere of Wood to mark the beginning of the round. Another benefit of Earth: I didn't have to use my workaround of Water and Iron to get a round object! I switched to Air and raised the signal.

Michelle immediately went defensive, conjuring an Iron plate and waving it around fast enough I knew she had to be using at least two units of Air, probably three.

Jim took a long time thumbing through his options and ended up with Iron as well. He stretched it into something like an oversized sword, so clearly, he was using Earth.

If Michelle had attacked, I was pretty sure she could have taken fifty HP off him in the time it took him to decide on what to conjure, much less to finish shaping his weapon. Instead, she waited for him to step forward and make a chopping motion. She sidestepped the attack, not even bothering to block it.

I kept my expression as neutral as I could. No need for anything else. Michelle was already frowning at the sight of Jim's crude sword sticking out of the dirt next to her.

"Come on, hon," Britt called.

Jim turned away from the match to wave to his family and Lena.

Michelle glanced at me.

I raised an eyebrow.

She averted her eyes, but her hunched shoulders told me I'd annoyed her.

Jim tried another swing, and this one, she did at least bother to block. The alternative would have been to jump it. Both slabs of Iron rang in the cool, moist air.

That was apparently enough to push Michelle into at least trying offense. She snapped her Iron up and forward, fast enough my phone lost track of it. I knew when it hit because Jim grunted and stepped back.

"Damn," he said. "It all looks so real, I've gone and convinced myself that hurt."

Only the need to hold my phone in one hand and my orb overhead with the other kept me from running my fingers through my hair. "Third Eye will do that," I said. "How are your HP?"

He checked. "I took thirty nine damage."

He'd lost selection on his Iron when he touched his phone. Even though it wasn't exactly a ref's job, I stepped forward and showed him how I curled my fingers to keep my Wood under control. He conjured another Iron sheet and matched my gesture.

"No tips for me, coach?" Michelle asked.

I shifted on my feet. "Did Donica put you up to calling me that? Don't. Please. Anyway, do you feel like you need tips right now?"

She looked like she was trying to frown. The corners of her lips quirked up despite her best efforts. "I guess I'm good."

They reset to their starting positions, which wasn't actually part of the rules Lena and Matt had fought under. It didn't matter. As soon as Jim brought his Iron up, before he even started to shift for an attack, Michelle flicked hers forward and grazed his shoulder. A very tight move, controlled, no more or less force than needed.

"That takes me up to fifty even," Jim said. This time, he didn't lose his selection.

"Michelle wins round one," I said.

It was obvious to all of us that at this rate, the match would not go to a third round.

"I don't feel good about this," Michelle said.

"Aw, it's fine," Jim said. "I knew going in I was gonna be out of my depth. Gotta learn."

"Cool," Michelle said, "but the fact you're being cool about it just makes me feel worse. How about we change things up for the next round?"

"How?" I asked.

"Does Britt have any Reactants yet?" Michelle asked.

Jim nodded. "I've had Earth for a couple weeks, and she got Air. She just picked up Fire on the way down here, too. We were hoping to fill out our supply some."

The word Fire made Michelle's shoulders tighten, but she shook them loose. "Just so you know, if I do end up winning this, you're still welcome to tag along and collect stuff with us. I want to finish out the match either way, though, and this sounds perfect. Everybody can learn."

She waved to Britt. I didn't catch the conversation in the bed of the pickup, but it ended with Britt hopping down and Zealia snuggling Bernie. Lena sat beside them, unable to hide her wide eyes and nervous smile. Left in charge of a kid, she didn't need to pretend to be honored.

Britt joined her husband and faced Michelle. "Like this? You want to take us both on at once?"

"Is that okay?" Michelle looked back and forth between them. "I'm not trying to be a jerk, I've just had a little more experience than you, so this seems fairer."

"I'm game if you are, hon," Jim said.

"Course!" Britt rubbed her hands. "I've been hoping all along we'd get to team up proper-like."

Michelle turned to me. "That's cool with you, right, Cam?"

"If it's agreeable to all the players, how could I complain?" I did my damnedest to look the part of the impartial referee. I cast my gaze toward the horizon and pitched my tone calm and distant.

It helped that Donica was doing the grinning for me.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 97: Hot Ticket

"Sorry, little guy," I told the screen. "You're stuck with me again this evening."

My computer bleeped with a series of notifications. Although I'd heard him trigger .wav files before, these text popups seemed to be Ryu's favorite way of communicating when he occupied a desktop. By the time I clicked on them to check their details, all but one had vanished. The last read, "Warning: User Conflict."

"I know it's not my turn," I said, "but your mom needs her beauty sleep."

"Mmhm," Lena murmured from the bed.

As I'd expected, spending most of the afternoon talking to people outside her established friend group, all while bouncing around as The Magnificent Ashbird, had left her utterly spent. She'd kept up her smiling, energetic front to raise Britt and Jim's spirits after they lost two-on-one against Michelle, and to keep them and Zealia entertained while we scouted the nearer part of Palo Duro.

What had surprised me was that, while Lena dropped part of her act after we separated from our fans, she'd kept on smiling and chattering to the rest of the team right up to the moment I locked the door of our hotel room behind us.

Then she'd staggered to the bed and flopped atop it, face down.

I glanced back at her.

She still wore her muddy boots and her dusty jeans and long-sleeved tee from the day's expedition. At some point, either she'd found the energy to roll over or Bernie had nudged her onto her back. His plushie form rested against her side.

I smiled at them, but I turned back to the computer.

I uploaded the information about our most recent find, a rack of postcards and brochures that Third Eye had displayed in the hotel lobby. We hadn't grabbed it because the desk clerk kept talking to us and I didn't see any way to hide the flash from her. It would probably amount to just one Wood (for the paper) and one or two Iron (for the rack), but I went ahead and recorded it. If another player stayed at the Best Western in Canyon, maybe they would get the chance to grab it. Maybe someone could extract ARG clues from the images on the brochures and postcards.

Then I swapped to Steam. "How's this, Ryu? Your pick tonight."

After a second, my copy of Civilization: Beyond Earth fired up.

I tried not to wince, although without a webcam hooked up, I didn't know if Ryu could see my expression.

It wasn't just that the game itself was kinda mid. I'd only left it installed because I'd insisted to myself that I should give it one more try after picking it up in a bundle. Still, this was the kind of game I'd play for fun, at least, if not my first choice example of the genre. A lot of the games Ryu modified were outside my usual interests and I only tackled them to get my Tickets.

No, my problem with playing Beyond Earth was how long a game could take. If Ryu expected me to finish a whole campaign before he coughed up any Tickets, I'd have to slog through it all night.

I wondered if it was his little revenge for taking Lena's turn in the queue. Not that I blamed him for preferring her company, but there were limits.

Apparently, he agreed. I had barely finished zipping through faction customization and building up for a few turns when one of my scouts spotted a unit of wireframe gold figures, clearly not part of the intended structure of the game. Upon mousing over them, I found their name and stats to be a garbled mess.

I moved my scout unit adjacent. The gold unit moved away. A few turns, a second scout and some careful maneuvering later, and I was finally able to move my first scout into contact.

Both my scout and the wireframe unit vanished, briefly flushing the whole screen with the latter's golden color palette. On my left, the printer coughed to life and loaded a sheet of letter-sized paper. It moved like it was printing something but the sheet appeared blank when it settled into the tray.

When I looked through my phone, I saw an image of six old-timey arcade prize Tickets printed on it.

"Thanks, Ryu," I said.

I chose to interpret the notification that popped up in the lower right corner of my computer screen as a positive one.

I saved my campaign, curious what the game state would be after Ryu decamped to Lena's phone, then stood, stretched, and shifted to the printer. I hesitated before I touched the paper. From prior experience, I knew that when I did, it would flash and the Tickets would disappear into my inventory, leaving a blank sheet.

I turned to the bed. "You could still take these if you want, Lena."

She cracked one eye open. "You gonna carry the printer over to me?"

"Nope," I said.

"Then pass."

I chuckled. "Actually, I've been meaning to try something."

I conjured Wood with Earth and spent a few minutes folding the resulting object into an inverted 'u' shape in the air. Satisfied, I closed the open end of the construct over the paper and tried to lift it from the printer.

The paper rustled, but didn't rise.

Because I hadn't grasped it tightly enough, or because my conjured object wasn't aligned enough with the real world? At minimum, I hadn't collected the Tickets by touching the paper with my Third Eye powers. That was the most important test. From here, I just had to refine my execution.

I reshaped the object until the end of it resembled a hole punch. I tried again. Through my phone camera, it looked like I'd pierced the paper with a wooden dowel. It even crinkled where the halves of wood met. I glanced around the camera. The paper looked creased, but not torn. I tried lifting again but wasn't surprised when it didn't work.

"Watcha doing?" Lena asked.

"I want to be able to manipulate objects without collecting them," I said. "I'd love to read the insides of those pamphlets in the lobby, for example, or the yellow pages we found the other day. Plus, this would let us give stuff to each other."

She smiled and dragged herself to the edge of the bed to watch. "Cool."

"It will be once it works, anyway." I used Earth to clamp the Wood shut over the paper one more time. This time, however, I swapped to Air before I tried to lift it. Not so much for precision movement, although if I could just get the paper wafting on the breeze I could control it like I had the napkins at Benji and Sandy's house. More importantly, I had more Air than the one Earth I could bring to bear.

One Air would work no better than one Earth, despite how much overkill it would be to move paper around if it were fully a Third Eye construct. Two might work, but if it didn't, it would mean reverting to Earth to reestablish my grip and each of those MP I spent was one I wouldn't get back. Ultimately, I settled on three, the same as the amount of Fire Lena had used to turn on the LED bulb back at our apartment.

Carefully, I raised the sheet from its cradle and lifted it into the air.

Even when I looked at it without my camera, I saw the paper hovering in place. Since it wasn't moving with an air current like the napkins had, it looked even more unnatural. Straight up poltergeist shit.

Lena scooted a little further off the bed and stared up at it. "Oooh! Spooky."

Moving the paper meant not overdoing my hand gestures. Three Air could conjure enough of a gale to send every loose scrap of paper in the room flying, just not anywhere I wanted it. Also, enough to tear this piece out of the grasp of my conjured object.

Instead of using the properties of Air, I backed around the room, holding the paper steady. I was almost to the door when it lined up over Lena's chest. Her eyes followed it.

"Ready?" I asked.

She raised a limp hand and made a crab-claw motion. "Sure."

"Catch," I said.

I swapped back to Earth. The paper stayed suspended in midair. Had the object's alignment with the real world been "set" by the single largest stack of Reactants used on it? If so, we'd have to workshop ways to use that with Erin in the morning.

This evening, I adjusted my fingers until the object lost its grip on the paper.

It fluttered down. Lena made a halfhearted swipe for it, but when it blew out of her reach, she just craned her neck to watch it fall to the carpeted floor.

"Shit." I pushed my bangs back. "Sorry, I'm still working this out."

"It's fine, Cam." She smiled up at me. "The show was awesome. Anyway, you basically played two minigames to get those Tickets. You should keep them."

I ambled back to the bedside. I shunted my object aside and looked down at Lena and the paper. "Even though it's your turn?"

Her head bobbed. "I passed, remember?"

I deselected my object and it fell against the side of the bed. Instead of picking up the paper with the Tickets, though, I sat down beside Lena.

She tilted my way. "Sup?"

I touched her cheek. "Are you okay?"

She swallowed. "It was... a lot, today."

"Too much?"

"Nah. I'll have to stay switched on like that at the tournament, you know? Gotta get more practice."

"Plus," I said, "you made some fans for life."

"Totally worth." Her eyes half-closed. "They were great, huh?"

I thought the way Britt and Jim acted toward us seemed pretty silly, but I was glad we'd been able to put smiles on their faces. No doubt Lena and I would act just as dorky if we got to meet someone who counted as a celeb in our books.

"Especially Zealia," Lena said.

I kissed her forehead. "Somehow, I figured you'd say that."

My fingers brushed the paper on the floor, but for once I hardly saw the flash. My whole world was Lena's little smile and the way her curls dangled every which way as she lay on the edge of the bed.

I laid down beside her and pulled her to the middle so she wouldn't fall off. She snuggled into the crook of my arms. I pressed my smile to the back of her head.

Totally worth, indeed.

From the sound of her slow, steady breathing, I thought she'd already dozed off. The rhythm would lull me down with her soon enough, even with the lights on. Who cared if we fell asleep in our dusty clothes? Maybe the hotel staff.

I imagined them bitching about us like we were rock stars who'd trashed the room.

Then, and if this didn't prove my brain was as exhausted as Lena's, I imagined them gossiping about how they'd played host to rock stars.

My eyes closed.

I'd almost joined Lena in sleep when I realized she wasn't there at all.

"Cam," she whispered, "do you think I'd be a good mom?"

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 98: Responsibility

"Sure," I said. "You'd be a good mom."

Lena squirmed around to face me. When I opened my eyes, I got a closeup of hers, wide and bright, and of the smile that split her face. Then her mouth and eyes narrowed. "Are you just messing with me?"

Her tone snapped me all the way awake. I propped myself up. "Um."

Lena's question shouldn't have surprised me.

I couldn't watch her light up whenever she got the chance to make a kid happy, listen to her fret over the realization she was technically old enough to be Albie's mother, and not think she had parenthood on the mind.

No, it shouldn't have surprised me.

So why did it take me so long to answer?

Long enough her head started to dip toward the mattress. "Sorry," she mumbled. "I didn't... just forget it, okay?"

"I think," I said, "you'd give your kid a hundred percent."

She sat up in an instant. "That's not exactly answering my question, you know."

I scratched the back of my neck. "You really want a serious answer?"

She swallowed. "Yes."

"Okay," I said, which bought me a few seconds to try to bring my brain online. "First of all, let's both agree about this: as a cool aunt, you're completely OP."

"Obvs!" Lena tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and turned her nose up.

The more she preened, the more I realized how nervous this conversation made her.

"You like kids, which puts you ahead of a lot of people," I said. "More than that, though, you're good with them. You get on their level somehow."

She wrinkled her nose. "You're saying I'm basically a huge baby."

"Generously, you're young at heart." I almost enjoyed her expression too much to kiss it away. Almost. "Tbh, I have no idea how you do it."

I felt her shrug against me. "I try to make stuff fun. And, like, just complicated enough the kid will get it, but have to think a little to get it? So it makes them feel like they're in on a grownup secret, you know?"

"Huh." I tilted so I could see her. "Again, completely OP."

"As a cool aunt." She lowered her eyes. "Not as a cool mom?"

"I'm not the person to judge that, Lena," I said.

"Your mom is kinda cool," Lena said.

"Not the same kind of cool."

"Not... really, no." She chuckled, but only for a moment.

"If you were to ask my mom, she'd say you're in no position to even pose the question. You've got no steady job, you're not with someone with a steady job, you've got more debts than assets, and if you've got any long-term plans, you haven't shared them." I shook my head. "Maybe that's not fair, but it's how she looks at things."

Lena nodded. "It worked for you and Ben."

"For a certain value of worked," I said. "Regardless, I think in a lot of ways you'd be great. You'd work your ass off, you'd make your kid smile, you'd share what you love, you'd be happy to do what they loved."

"Feeling a 'but' coming."

"But what if your kid did something genuinely bad, like hurting an animal? Or something dangerous, like playing around an electrical socket? I'll give my mom this much, she knew how to shut shit down with a glance."

Lena fidgeted. "I'd have to learn."

"And I'm sure you can, Lena. I mean it." I rubbed her arm. "If you're asking me to go on what I know of you, though? Yes, you'd have a lot to learn. It would be hard, and exhausting, and you wouldn't be able to switch off the way you can with a niece or a nephew or your friend's kid."

"Well..." She bit her lip. "I'd have help, though. What about you?"

"I think," I said, "I'd be a pretty shitty mom."

My grin was not mirrored by her's. She landed one of the least imposing punches of her life on my arm. "You know what I mean, Cameron."

So much for grinning. "I'd be an infinitesimally less shitty dad."

Lena pulled out of my arms and scooted to the edge of the bed. "Would you please quit that?"

"Quit what?"

"Running yourself down." She stood and padded over to the drawn beige curtains.

"I'm not, Lena."

"You are! I think you'd be –" She balled her fists. "Forget it."

"Everything my mom would say about you," I said, "applies double to me. At least if everything breaks right with Third Eye, you could be a star. Successful videos, tournament wins. I couldn't do that if I wanted to. I'm the end of Albie's Potion away from being a glorified NPC."

Lena bonked her head against the glass.

I rose and joined her by the window. "If I sorted out my financials, I could support a kid. Then I could come home, smile over dinners, try to play baseball twice and find out they sucked at it, and maybe play Mario Kart on a holiday. That's the example of dadhood I'm working with."

"You could do better," Lena said.

"I've got a million other things to worry about," I said. "Mask. The rescue. Omar. The tournament. The channel. The reveal. Albie. Third Eye itself."

"Things," she said, "we're trying to solve."

"And when we do," I said, "I'll start taking this seriously. Promise."

"That's fair," Lena said. "That's smart. I'm just being stupid."

"You're not." I cupped her chin.

She rubbed her cheek against my palm. "Really?"

"Well." I managed at least a ghost of a grin. "Maybe a little."

I could have left it there. Lena seemed content to, and started to sag against me. If I just kept my mouth shut, I knew we could lay back down and get the sleep we'd been about to. She wouldn't bring it up again any time soon.

We could bury another conversation without me telling her the truth.

Instead, I averted my eyes. "I'm terrified of responsibility."

"Bullshit!"

I felt Lena's fingers on my cheek and let her turn me back to face her. Her brow was furrowed, her frown as deep as I'd ever seen it.

"It's not," I said.

"What about the way you lead the team?"

I stared at her. "Lead?"

She glared. "If you don't want kids, you can just say that. You don't have to be a dick about it."

"Lena, I swear, I'm not trying to be a dick. How could I know if I want kids or not? It's literally not something I've ever been in a position to consider." I locked gazes with her. "I just have no idea what you're talking about when you say I'm leading anybody."

She screwed her face up. "For real?"

"For real." I waved to my sleeping PC. "If anyone's our leader, it's Erin. She's the head of the wiki team."

"She's the admin. The organizer, even." Lena shrugged. "That's not the same as being the leader."

"Well whatever it is you think I'm doing," I said, "it's not the same as being a leader, either!"

Of all the directions this conversation could have gone, this wasn't the most uncomfortable. Most surprising, though? Well, maybe.

Even if it did put some of the conversations I'd had lately in context. Like why I'd come away from what should have been perfectly normal interactions feeling like something had gone very, very wrong with the universe.

"Erin's super smart and observant," Lena said. "Give her, like, two hours, and she's gonna figure out all kinds of shit you and I would never think of."

I nodded. "Exactly."

"Give her two seconds and she freezes up."

"Which," I said, "is the point of the training we do every day."

She tapped my chest. "Training that you lead."

"No more than you do." I brushed my hands through the warm air where her wings pressed against the curtains. "Hell. I'm not even the best fighter, you are."

Those wings beat in irritation. "I'm too much of a loner. I can put on an act for a video, but look at what it does to me to try to put that on just to talk to a couple of nice people who think I'm cooler than I am."

"You kept smiling until we got in here," I said.

"I'm trying, okay? I've gotta." Lena swallowed. "Erin's basically a kid herself. Same with Michelle."

"You know you don't have to try to be strong for them, right? They think of you as a teammate, not a team mom. Not even –" I smiled down at her. "– a cool aunt."

"You sure?" Lena cocked her head.

Of course I was sure. I opened my mouth, but those words refused to emerge. Instead, lamely, I said, "Zhizhi and Donica are with us, too."

"They aren't players," she said. "They don't have any power in Third Eye. However with it they are as people, we have to protect them. Same with Miguel when he tagged along."

"I don't like being a protector." Didn't like? I hated it. I'd just wanted to play a cool game with my friends. I'd take protecting people a thousand times over being in charge, though. "I will, if I have to. That doesn't mean I'm some kind of leader."

"Okay," Lena said.

I didn't think it was.

I said, "Okay."

Her eyes tightened. Whatever expression she'd tried to force didn't come, and she slunk back to the bed.

"Lena..."

"You really don't get it, Cam." She sank onto the edge of the mattress. "You think I started talking about the mom stuff because of Zealia, right?"

"And Albie, and Mason." I spread my hands. "And, just, it's obviously something you've thought about way more than me."

"It's not that," she said. "I mean, it's all that. More, though, it's the way you are with them, and even Erin and Michelle."

"The way I am?"

"When I watch you now, I don't just see my boyfriend who I think is really hot, or my best friend I have a great time with. I see a good man." Lena shrunk in on herself.

Which made two of us. I don't know why her words hit me as hard as they did. By the time I'd dragged my eyes up off the squiggly abstract pattern of the carpet, I found Bernie nestled in Lena's lap. No idea if he'd climbed there on his own or if she'd grabbed him because she needed something to hug.

I wasn't sure she was going to continue speaking, but I couldn't find my voice.

Bernie's burble seemed to energize her, just a little.

She whispered, "I see the man I love."

The lump in my throat refused to go down. I stood by the window, heart thudding, head full. Mouth determinedly, traitorously shut.

Lena covered her face. "Oh God, fuck, sorry. We've only been back together like a month and I'm dumping this on you and I'm not trying to pressure you I just got excited and –"

I was there without having to think, gently prying her hands away from her blazing freckles.

"Lena," I said, "I love you, too."

Her smile broke through.

I bent forward to kiss it.

Then the door of our hotel room, the locked door, the door I'd double and triple checked behind me, clicked open.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Final reminder that the Fox vs. Mecha poll closes tonight! (Realistically, it closes tomorrow morning when I wake up and close it.) That makes this your last chance to vote on whether you want to see The Fox Who Stole Monaco or The Mechaneer here on Sufficient Velocity.

There will be no new Eye on the Road chapter on Monday as I handle some admin related to whatever the poll result ends up being.

 

[Crayz9000]

Noo! Evil cliffhanger and delay announcement combo!

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 99: Challenge

My phone was on the TV stand.

That was the first thought that ran through my head as I heard the door click. It was a thought so absurd, so frightening, I had to clamp my jaw to stifle a panicked giggle. I finally got, not just understood, why Lena never let her phone out of reach anymore.

Two months ago, I would've frozen. If the shock of an intruder didn't do it, the whiplash from my heart-to-heart with Lena to sudden fear would have.

A month ago, I would have scrambled for my phone, but wouldn't have made it. Fight over flight, however desperate.

Now, I marked the phone's location and how long it would take me to spring to it, but didn't move.

In a few minutes I'd know if that meant I was wiser, or just fooling myself.

Bernie growled.

The door of the hotel room swung open. The light from the hall silhouetted the triangular cutout of darkness that was Mask's cloak. The tip of his hood reached the doorway's lintel and at the base, the flared cloth completely occluded the light around it, leaving two smaller triangles on either side.

The effect looked so dramatic that, if we'd bothered to turn off the lights in our room before going to bed, even I might have had to admit to being impressed.

Instead, I got my clearest look yet at Mask's porcelain namesake, as well as his clothes. Jeans with kneepads, a long-sleeved tee, and what looked to me like the chestplates people wore for paintballing. All black, of course; the man had his aesthetic.

He wore his phone strapped near his shoulder, similar to how Lena did when she was scouting with her smart glasses but still wanted quick access to it. Mask had his slung higher on his chest, though. He wouldn't be able to access his screen quite as fast, but his cloak almost entirely hid its light. Probably a good trade for him, since he liked sneaking around and I'd never seen him adjust the Reactant he used in combat the way most of us did. If he ever needed a change, it would slow him down. Something to keep in mind.

Take away the closet cosplay edgelord aspect of his getup and I'd consider it a pretty sensible set of equipment. Seeing it in the light from our room rendered it a lot more mundane than it seemed in the depths of Cinder Alley or the darkness between street lights.

I wondered how much that annoyed Mask.

Not as much as he had Lena. She pushed Bernie behind her and surged to her feet. Her phone was in her hand already, of course, plucked from her back pocket.

Courtesy of a shot of adrenaline, her earlier exhaustion had vanished. Courtesy of Third Eye, it wouldn't come back in the form of a crash – at least, not a physical one.

From her hand motions, I knew she'd conjured an object but hadn't fired it off. Yet. She growled, "You ever heard of knocking, asshole?"

Mask's voice changer emitted a burst of feedback that I took for a snort. "Heard, yeah."

Lena's fingers twitched, reinforcing her conjured object. Still, she didn't send it flying Mask's way. "I don't know if you were eavesdropping or not, but we were kinda in the middle of something."

"Oh?" Mask tilted his head. "Should I come back later?"

"Actually," Lena said, "yeah."

"Too bad." He stretched his hand out.

Without my phone, I couldn't see the effects of his gesture. Manipulating the Third Eye version of his cloak, presumably, since that seemed to be his go-to move, but I had only his hand motions to go by and they weren't the same as the ones Lena and I had learned from Albie.

I wasn't just a bystander right now. I was a bystander who couldn't even gawp at the forces beyond my control.

Another reminder of how helpless I was.

Another reason to panic.

I refused to.

I said, "Wait."

Mask's head tilted slightly.

"Cam –" Lena began.

I shook my head. "You don't want to fight here."

For just a second, her glare flickered my way. "Wanna bet?"

Despite the situation, I smiled at her. I waved a hand at our surroundings, bringing it to rest atop Bernie's head.

If Lena relaxed, it wasn't so much that I could catch it with a glance.

"We," I said, "don't want to wreck our hotel room."

Her lip twitched. After a moment, she gave a single, harsh nod.

Mask said, "I don't see how that's my problem."

I turned my focus back to him. My smile widened. "Oh, I know you don't want to fight here. Figured that went without saying."

His shoulders shifted before he could stop himself. At least, I was pretty sure I hadn't imagined it.

God, I wanted to rip his stupid namesake off so I could do more than read into his body language. He did an annoyingly good job controlling the latter.

As it stood, all I got was the creak of the leather of his glove when he curled a fist. "You think I came here just to chat?"

"You came here," I said, "to challenge us."

He said nothing. Didn't move, either.

I stepped away from Lena and Bernie and spread my hands. My motion brought me a step closer to my phone. From here, based on what I'd seen of Mask, I could grab it before he struck me. Certainly before I ran out of HP.

Still, I didn't make a move.

"If you'd wanted to catch us sleeping," I said, "you would've waited until there was no light under our door."

For just a second, his mask tilted toward the floor.

Meaning he hadn't thought to check. Meaning he'd have been perfectly happy to ambush us.

Meaning I was playing with a lot more fire than I'd thought.

I tried not to gulp. No idea if I succeeded or not.

When I spoke, though, my voice sounded calm. "And since you knew we were awake –" He hadn't. "– you knew there'd be a fight." He hadn't. "Having it out in public isn't in your interests."

He shrugged. "It's not my hotel room, OldCampaigner. Not my problem."

I cocked my head. "The hallway security cameras aren't your problem?"

He didn't turn to look, but his stance shifted. One foot into the hall, one into our room. Wary, but also, unless I missed my guess, ready to bolt.

Did the hotel have security cameras in the halls? I had no idea, but it sounded plausible enough.

"Why should I care?" he asked, with nonchalance I had to believe he was faking.

"Why don't you tell us?" I asked. When he didn't respond, I added, "When you thought Zhizhi was broadcasting us to a live audience, you didn't seem real happy about it."

From the way his mask shifted, I thought he'd turned his nose up. "Scaring the normies will just make it harder for other people to grind."

"Did you seriously go with 'normies?'" Lena asked. "Like, with zero irony?"

Despite all the very good reasons not to – not least, the fact I was pretty sure she'd used that word herself once or twice – she barked a laugh.

Mask's gloves creaked.

Lena's laughter cut off instantly. "Try it, pal, and we'll see what gets more fucked up. Our room or your secrecy."

"Keeping in mind," I said, "you'd better beat us both in an instant, because the first thing either of us will do with a moment's respite is call the cops on your ass."

"Cops ain't shit," he said.

"They bring a lot of noise. A lot of attention." I tried to smile and probably ended up grimacing. "Even if you win and get out of here before they show up, they might figure out enough to scare the normies."

Mask stretched his neck. "What's your alternative?"

"You issue your challenge," I said, "and we answer it. Somewhere that works for both of us."

I watched his hands. He might or might not control the rest of his body language, but if he wanted to go at us in Third Eye, those had to move.

Instead, they relaxed.

He asked, "Where?"

"I'll show you, if you let me." I nodded to the phone I'd forced myself to stay away from during our entire conversation.

Maybe Mask realized I could have grabbed it before he could stop me. Maybe he held me in such contempt he didn't give a shit.

Either way, after a second's hesitation, he nodded.

I scooped up my phone. Tempting as it was to blast Iron with maximum Air into Mask's face, I opened Maps instead of Third Eye. I showed him the screen. "There's an open field a couple blocks northeast from here. It's off the main streets, away from street lights. Nothing but grass, dirt, and a couple of shipping containers."

"And you expect me to believe you'll show up?" he asked. "What stops you from running away and wasting even more of my time?"

"We posted a find from the lobby of our own hotel," Lena said. "You seriously think we've been running?"

"... Fine. You've got fifteen minutes." Mask flicked his hand to the side, deselecting his conjured object, and turned on his heel. "If you don't show, I might start to get pissed."

Lena gave him the finger. "Right back at you!"

Mask stormed into the hall.

As soon as he was gone, Lena sagged against me. Her conjured Iron clattered to the floor. When I turned to her, I found Bernie in her arms.

I wrapped both of them in an embrace. When my heart stopped pounding, I whispered, "Holy shit."

"Right?" Lena shuddered. "You were awesome, btw."

"Likewise."

She kissed my chest. "God. Are we really going out there, Cam?"

"He's got our friends." I rested my chin on the top of her head. "And as long as he's hunting us, we're not going to feel safe. We have to finish this."

"I know." She tilted her head to look up at me. "Besides, I owe him for interrupting us."

"I don't know where you thought that conversation was going," I said.

She wiggled her eyebrows.

Obviously, I couldn't help but kiss her.

Then I forced myself to let go of her and step back. "It's time to finish this."

"I know." Lena sighed. She raised her phone. "Let's make some calls."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 100: Arranged PVP

Our battleground was everything I'd promised Mask.

A triangle of open ground, grass where it wasn't worn down to dirt. Some apartments overlooked it on one end, and our hotel was tall enough I could see the windows of its top story poking over the intervening buildings. Those were far enough away I didn't think anyone could make out what we were up to.

Especially since our only lights came from our phone screens. Lamps shone through a few of the distant windows, street lights glowed from the main drag a block away, and a few stars shone overhead. Now and then, headlights marked the passage of a vehicle.

None of it seemed to touch the field, and there wasn't any moonlight to pickup the slack.

Lena and I had kitted ourselves out as best we could. She had her phone strapped to her chest and her smart glasses on. We both had headsets to put us in touch with the rest of the team, and cameras on our shoulders. We wore our heaviest jeans and coats, plus some athletic pads for our knees and elbows. Mask's paintballing gear would've been an upgrade. Was it as good as a real bulletproof vest, and, if not, could we get those? Something to research, something to buy.

Something out of our price range. What we had fit, if not our actual budget, then the budget we liked to pretend we had.

Hopefully, we'd still be around to see our credit card bills and regret our hubris.

I liked to think we were on the right track, because Third Eye interpreted our gear as armor.

Through my phone camera, Lena's avatar glowed like a steel cage trying to contain molten lava. Her wings trailed flames behind her, and burning ringlets of hair curled at the base of a helmet with a pattern that evoked her usual crown.

I'd seen my avatar's getup. Nothing so fancy, as usual, but at least I got a padded jerkin in place of my usual tunic. Apart from Lena, Matt was the only person whose avatar I'd seen take on an armored configuration, and his had looked a lot like this.

A good reminder. Matt's armor apparently hadn't helped him much when Mask invaded him.

As for the man himself...

"Fourteen minutes," Mask called. "You actually made it."

Lena tossed her hair. "You sound disappointed. You really wanted to get pissed at us, huh?"

"After you dragged me all the way to the ass end of Texas," he said, "I already was. You breaking the rules would make it fair."

"The rules you imposed," I said.

He didn't respond verbally, and if he twitched, I couldn't see him do it.

Without my phone, Mask would've been essentially invisible: a triangle of black against the darkness of the lot. From the way his voice echoed, I knew he had his back to us, so we couldn't even see the porcelain of his namesake.

Good thing I had my phone.

If anything, Mask's attire looked more deeply black through Third Eye, but there was a glossiness to his cloak that reflected the light of Lena's flames. Even the distant stars and street lights seemed to shine back from him. I felt like I shouldn't have had as clear a sense of his outline as I did.

Maybe Third Eye didn't approve of stealth builds.

"You actually left your Daimon behind?" Mask asked. I wondered how he was checking without turning to look at us.

Whatever he was doing, he sure didn't have a complete picture. Lena had left both her Daimons behind, and neither had seemed real pleased by it. The last we'd seen of Bernie, he'd been growling from where we left him in Donica's arms. Ryu had contributed a string of frowny faces from his temporary home on my computer.

"I'd be a pretty crappy pet owner if I asked Bernie to fight for me," Lena said. "And a pretty crappy player if I needed his help to beat you."

"Bullshit!" Mask tensed for a second, then, with what looked to me like a lot of effort, shrugged. "Whatever. It won't make any difference."

"I have to admit," I said, "I wasn't sure you'd just stand here waiting for us."

Mask turned at last. I only knew because the familiar oval of his namesake shone out of the darkness. All three of his eyeholes fixed on me. "You think I'm scared of you, OldCampaigner?"

I forced myself to shrug. "I think agreeing to fight us two on one is... ambitious, considering everything we've logged this past week."

"Then you've got a lot more to learn," he said.

"Always." For once, I could smile at him honestly. "I'm just saying, man. We can still settle this without a fight."

"For what it's worth," Lena said, "I'm not convinced we can. Also, if I want to."

"You should listen to Ashbird," Mask said. "There's nothing to settle."

"You sure?" I asked. "You could always tell us where our friends are."

His mask tilted back. "Pointless."

"Why?" I asked the question even though I was pretty sure I knew what his answer would be.

He proved me right. "Because you'll see them soon enough."

So I stepped forward, spread my hands, and said, "Okay."

For a moment, nobody answered.

"What?" Echoed back and forth across the field, distorted by Mask's voice changer. Plus the fact Lena had shouted it at the same time he had.

I took another step forward. "Use your Key – yeah, we know what it is – and send me through. I can see what it is that has you so spooked, and talk to the people on the other side, and, again, we can settle this like grown-ass adults."

Lena grabbed my arm. "No way. You want to let him pick us off one by one?"

I reached up and squeezed her hand. "I want to avoid a fight, if we can."

She shook me. "And lose one if we can't."

I turned just enough to catch her eye, while keeping my own on Mask. "If it came down to it, you could always just beat him yourself."

"I mean, you're not wrong." Lena let go of me to cup her chin. Then she tensed. "That wouldn't bring you back, dummy!"

I found it surprisingly easy to grin. "Would you be okay with it if we both went through the Key?"

She hunched her shoulders. "Okay, yeah. That works. Although I'd still rather kick Mask's ass first."

We both shifted our stances toward him. Neither of us had actually looked away.

"Well, Mask?" I reached out with my free hand, palm out. "You came here to grab Ashbird and I. Here we are."

The sound of Mask's gloves clapping together rang like a gunshot in the empty field.

I didn't think it meant he wanted to take us up on our offer.

"Nice acting," he said. "Did you adlib it, or did you script it while you spent the last week running away from me?"

My grin turned rueful. "Scripted."

"Cut us some slack," Lena said. "We only just started doing YouTube a month ago."

"No," Mask said. "I don't think I will."

He snapped his hands to his sides. His cloak rippled and pooled at his feet. Tendrils crept across the dirt toward us.

"We may have rehearsed our lines, Mask," I said, "but they weren't lies. All we want to do is save our friends. Learning what you want is literally a bonus. Why insist on fighting us?"

"You want me to send you through with all your resources intact? To believe you'll understand? To trust you?" His staticy laugh cut through the air. "Never again!"

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lena shift her attention to me. She mouthed, "Again?"

I started to shake my head.

Mask's darkness slammed into our shields.

Trying to talk him down had been worth a shot. The next time I walked into a serious fight without a plan to defuse it would be the first. Maybe it didn't bode amazingly that this would be the first time I knowingly walked into a serious fight at all, but still.

Let's be real, though.

Mask talked a decent game about being the hero of his own story, but everything from his actions to his outfit screamed that he didn't like the kind of narrative where the "hero" got his way without throwing hands.

Just as Lena and I had rehearsed our scripts, we'd rehearsed our defenses.

My fingers flew across my screen, pumping more Air into the Iron I'd been primed to conjure before I ever started talking.

Lena and I had each blocked Mask's attempt at a surprise attack, but now I took over the tanking duties. Mask's blows thudded dully against the sides of my Iron, not so much blocked as cut off before they could form into proper attacks. When he swung his hands around to try to strike us from behind, I flicked my shield back to mash the darkness into the soggy ground.

At the same time, Lena's Iron blazed red-hot with Fire, then shot forward with Air. Mask dropped any pretense of offense to draw his cloak up between the two of them. The darkness rippled and buckled where she struck, but her attack did rebound off it.

I started to whip my own Iron in at a different angle.

Mask pivoted in a heartbeat, conjuring a lance of darkness from the pool he'd snuck around our backs.

I didn't react as quickly and my shield had twice as far to travel. So what? With four Air pumped into my Iron, Mask might as well have been attacking through molasses.

Lena struck again, perfectly timed with my deflection, and Mask didn't manage to get his cloak in the way. Her Iron smashed him to the ground, then glowed brighter as she pumped in more Fire for another attack.

Mask rolled out of the way and up to his feet, and both sides of his cloak swept up to block Lena's strike.

Which meant he was defending with both hands.

He had none left to deflect my Iron, careening down from overhead. It smashed him to one knee. When his hand shifted to brace himself against the dirt, Lena's object reformed into a crude missile and shot through the gap in his conjured darkness.

Lena said, "Shit."

Though I couldn't see why, I nodded. "We knew it wasn't going to be that easy."

She shrugged. "A girl can dream, yeah?"

Mask drew himself up. He snapped his hands to his sides, flaring his cloak once more. His avatar's chestplate, black leather crisscrossed with straps, so glossy it shone almost as much as his cloak, looked undisturbed. It certainly wasn't lit by a glowing projectile inches away from it.

Lena's missile had vanished.

"You know," Mask said, "when you bailed on a repeatable source of Tickets to get away from me, I wondered if you weren't worth invading, after all. If you weren't as strong as I'd hoped."

Lena groaned. "Careful you don't get a boo boo from all that edge. Do you even listen to yourself?"

"Even if I'm the only one who will," he said. "I don't care about your opinions. Just that you're worth my time."

"And?" Lena asked.

Mask brushed the dirt from his gloves. "You'll do."

"What changed your mind?" I asked. I kept my gaze fixed on him, and decidedly not on the hints of motion in the darkness behind him.

I couldn't see his expression, and his voice changer made his mood hard to read. Nonetheless, I couldn't help but imagine a grin splitting his face when he said, "When I realized you were trying to set a trap."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 101: The Trap

At the start of our trip, I would've shouted a warning and I would've needed to.

Now, by the time Mask snapped his hands up and his darkness rippled backwards toward the opposite edge of the field, Erin and Michelle were already dodging in opposite directions. They didn't need a word from me.

Which left Lena and I free to continue our attack.

I took the momentary respite to use Earth to reshape my Iron into a more aerodynamic, triangular form, like a big metal version of those napkins on Benji and Sandy's counter. Then I switched back to Air to take advantage of it. It zipped past Mask's cloak and sent him skidding back.

That left him exposed to the next object Lena conjured, another glowing missile that crashed into his back and sent him tumbling.

He abandoned his attack on the girls to try to hit Lena and I while we were overcommitted, but my Iron was a shield once more, now at my side, now at Lena's, tamping down the darkness.

Suddenly, there was a lot less of that darkness in the field.

Light bloomed behind Mask as Erin activated Third Eye. Between her sourceless illumination and Lena's flames, our battleground glowed. Instead of blending into the surroundings, the darkness spreading from Mask's cloak stood out in sharp contrast.

If anything, it made the details of Mask himself harder to see. I didn't have time to let my eyes adjust, so I concentrated on his broad, sweeping motions.

His style of Third Eye control didn't sync up with what I'd seen from anyone else. For most of us, the process was a bit like puppeteering, but he made it look more like conducting an orchestra.

Assuming we made it through this fight, I'd have to see if I couldn't make that work for me, too.

First, I had to help make sure it didn't for him.

Fortunately, we seemed well on our way to doing that.

Mask tried to strike Erin, but her conjured Iron first stopped his blow, then turned to mercury to engulf it, then hardened again. The black tendril thudded to the ground, trapped, while Erin conjured another plate.

Mask tried to strike Michelle, but she clamped her hand around her conjured Plastic and zipped away from his strike. She couldn't quite fly, anymore than I could, but between her natural dexterity and four Air, she glided around the battlefield.

Mask tried to strike Lena and I; I batted aside two hammer blows and ground a swarm of needles into the dirt.

And while he tried each of those things, Lena's attacks sizzled through the air around him.

Some, he blocked. Some, he dodged.

One after another crashed into him, though. I'd felt enough of those blows and practice to know how much they hurt. Not to mention how much HP they took off me.

Mask tried shifting all his focus to Lena. Tendrils bubbled from the ground, lances whipped out, needles snaked around.

I smashed every one of them flat. Only when the shadow of his cloak darkened the dirt beneath our feet did we even have to dodge, and for that, I could focus on my own footwork and scoop Lena out of the way with a nudge from the same shield I used to block Mask's attacks. She never had to so much as pause in jabbing her missile at his defenses.

Better yet – not so much for the sake of us winning this fight, because I still felt pretty good about Lena and I doing that on our own, but for what it said about how they'd improved – as soon as Mask stopped trying to pressure the girls, they switched to offense of their own.

Michelle's Plastic whipped around Mask's legs. He managed to stomp on it before it could tangle him and drag him down, but that still pinned him in one place, unable to dodge.

Erin extruded her Iron into a wire that whipped across the field. Mask caught it on his cloak and hissed as it glowed with a sudden influx of electricity.

He twisted to face her. I caught a glimpse of his hand moving, and the wire seemed to fall forward into him.

"I suppose that's a defensive use of your Key?" Erin asked.

Mask didn't respond, outside of the distorted sound of his heavy breathing through his voice changer.

Not that I thought Erin expected him to. Her speculation was more about making sure our team understood what he was doing. Through our headsets, her voice came through as clearly as if we'd been standing side-by-side.

"Handy way of telling which of our attacks are serious enough to be worth repeating, huh?" I said.

She bobbed her head. "Mmhm!"

Depending on how much of a resource expenditure it was for Mask to use his Key for defense, I supposed he could've been bluffing. I didn't buy it, though. He'd clearly treated Erin's electrified wire and Lena's most powerful missile differently from everything else we'd tried to hit him with.

Speaking of those worthwhile attacks, the missile Lena was guiding glowed brighter and made a feint for Mask's head. Erin conjured another wire and launched it at the same time. Michelle's Plastic yanked at Mask's leg, holding him in place.

He made an awkward pivot. His Key swallowed up Lena's missile, but he had to take Erin's wire on the chest instead of on his cloak. The wire glowed and I waited for the screech of feedback as her electricity shorted out his voice changer.

It never came.

"Crap," Lena said. "He must've upgraded the insulation on his costume after I zapped him the first night."

"Target his cloak instead," I said.

I didn't know why a jolt to his cloak would bother him if the clothes under it were insulated, but he'd clearly reacted when Erin hit him there and shifted to take her next attack on his chest.

Erin's hands twitched, swapping Reactants so she could move her wire more precisely. I'd noticed her defaulting to Earth instead of Air. More flexible, but a little slower. It might not matter in this case, but something she couldn't tighten up in the future.

Maybe it did matter in this case.

Mask's darkness slammed into Erin before her wire could worm its way around to his cloak. The blow rocked her back, and I knew damn well how much one of those could hurt.

Worse, she deselected her wire to conjure a new shield. She got it in the way of Mask's next attack, but that bought him time to gobble up another missile from Lena.

"This is getting expensive," she said. Each missile she'd lost cost her at least two MP, one for the Earth to shape it, one for the Air to move it. I didn't think Mask would bother using his Key on them if they didn't have at least enough Fire to make them glow. Three MP or six? Either way it would add up.

I nodded. "Michelle, cover Erin."

"Got it." Michelle let go of her Plastic and conjured Iron. She interposed herself between Mask and Erin. The next time he tried to strike, she parried. She didn't knock his attacks away with the ease I did, but the only point to my doing so was to try to demoralize him. As long as Michelle's parries connected, they sufficed.

I kept up my own, mashing darkness into dirt with twitches of my finger. It amazed me how easy it was compared to working with my previous Air total. Trouble was, it also amazed me I still had to do it.

How the hell did Mask keep up his offense against two groups of us at the same time, even under constant attack? How did he control whatever Material he used for that darkness at all? His motions didn't seem detailed enough to direct its subtle and rapid shifts.

However much I might dislike his personality, however bad his actions were, I couldn't help but admire his play.

Admire, however, didn't mean worry about.

So far, he'd only landed one hit on Erin, none on the rest of us. Sure, he'd managed to sap quite a few of Lena's MP, but the fact he chose to soak small hits rather than disappearing any object that got close to him suggested his Key cost enough resources he couldn't use it for everything.

We, on the other hand, had just started our routine.

Lena and I had no need to discuss anything out loud. We'd gone over our plans and contingencies often enough to swap between them in unison. Beside me, she conjured another piece of Iron. She left this one as a simple plate, unheated, and flung it at Mask with Air.

She didn't have enough to prevent him from dodging now that he no longer had to worry about the Plastic at his feet, but she pushed him back. While he was distracted, Erin's new wire struck his cloak and he snarled a curse. The darkness writhed.

He spun and grabbed the wire, which didn't accomplish much because it just snaked around his grip. While he wrestled with it, Lena's plate caught him in the legs and dropped him to his knees.

The next time the plate dipped low, a pseudopod bubbled from the darkness to pin it. Naturally, Lena switched to Fire, and Mask's cloak recoiled from the suddenly red-hot Iron.

He managed to disappear Erin's wire again, but by then she'd abandoned it to conjure another and it snaked across the ground toward him.

Between his distraction and the speed I could propel my Iron shield across the field, I launched an experimental attack of my own. It pummeled his chest. Rather than try to lose it through his Key, he retaliated with another attack on Lena.

Wrong choice. Long before the darkness reached her, my Iron blocked its path and hers, unimpeded, smashed into his side.

The four of us advanced.

"Satisfied, Mask?" I called. "Is that enough of a show of strength? Are you willing to talk?"

Our conjured objects swirled around him. Not quite the tornado of weapons Albie had deployed against the creature at the construction site, but not, I thought, too bad for a bunch of ordinary players.

It was almost enough to make me proud of our practice, but I noticed Michelle had added hers to the storm. I tried not to frown.

If she felt confident she could switch from defense to offense as fast as me, good for her. As long as she was right.

If she thought we'd finished the fight and just needed to intimidate Mask, she was wrong. He clearly still had HP.

"It's enough, yeah." He tapped the phone strapped to his shoulder and a plane of Iron appeared in the air before him.

I didn't see how using normal Materials represented an escalation for him, but rather than give him a chance to demonstrate, I smashed my Iron into the new object.

It flashed white hot along the edge and cut right through. His hand twitched with the same motion I used when I swapped to Air, and his object swirled over the shattered pieces of mine.

"Enough," he said, "that I'll take you on myself."

His cloak roiled at his feet. Its surface rose and fell in a rhythmic motion, almost like –

Like the cloak was breathing.

As its "cloth" wings stretched into the air behind him, and its "porcelain" face spread with a silent laugh, Mask commanded his Daimon, "Phantom? Let's play."

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 102: Actual Play

A lot of things slammed into place for me at once.

Why Mask's playstyle in his first reported invasions had sounded like normal Third Eye PVP, but soon after it changed to something no one else seemed able to replicate.

How Mask could swap to using his Key to disappear attacks without losing control over the darkness he used for offense.

Why Mask had had no compunctions about attacking Bernie, and tonight had acted offended that Lena hadn't brought him for the rematch.

Why Mask felt so confident taking on even groups of players when he seemed to be operating solo.

And, finally and most significantly, the white-hot edge of Mask's conjured Iron. It seared into my chest. I felt like I'd fallen onto the edge of a working stove, which would've sucked if it came and went like most Third Eye pain. Because the damage kept accruing, though, this agony didn't go away.

Third Eye was screaming at me to get this shit the hell off me.

I think I might have screamed right along with it.

I jabbed blindly at my phone screen and got Stone. I slammed the conjured object into Mask's. That managed to push the burning edge away. Barely. It flipped in midair and over the next two seconds, clashed dozens of times with my frantically spinning Stone.

Lena tried to redirect her Iron into a makeshift shield, but she had so little Air compared to Mask and I that she couldn't even change the angle he struck from. She should've concentrated on hitting Mask while he was distracted, but I didn't have a second to spare to comment on anyone else's play.

Sparks flew. Stone cracked.

Maybe I'd lucked out with the Stone. It came away from the exchanges chipped and pitted, but its sheer mass held it together better than I'd expected. Mask's Iron, softened by heat and weakened by whatever Water or Earth technique focused that heat on one edge, first deformed, then snapped down the middle.

He discarded it and conjured more. That still bought me enough time to get a glimpse of the battlefield.

His Daimon – Phantom, apparently, and I had to wonder if that was the name he'd given it or Third Eye's description of its type – writhed and contorted, lashing at Erin and Michelle. Its tendrils and needles and pseudopods bubbled up seemingly at random from the shadow it cast across the dirt.

It didn't seem to be hitting the girls, at least not yet.

Michelle had retreated to pure defense, soaring around the field with her Air filling her Plastic sail. Phantom darkened the ground she was about to land on and she adjusted mid-air, pulling herself aside and landing safe and smooth on the sidewalk.

Erin had used Earth to shape a broad Stone bowl and Air to bring it close enough to step into. Whenever Phantom tried to extrude something to strike her, she just rolled her crude chariot to absorb the blow.

As I watched, though, the weakness of her defense became obvious: it could protect against anything, as long as it came from below. When Mask twisted and sent his Iron flying back at Erin, there was no way she could block it at the same time as the strikes Phantom continued to launch from all around her.

I flung my Stone in her direction, but I'd lost my speed advantage. Mask clearly had every bit as much Air as I did. I willed my crude shield toward Erin. Trouble was, Third Eye didn't give a shit how much I wanted something, only how many resources I poured into it.

I simply didn't have enough.

Erin cried out and tumbled out of her chariot. My Stone smashed into the back of Mask's Iron and batted it away before he could strike her again, but with her own defenses no longer protecting her, Phantom closed in.

I risked trying to smash a blow into the roiling mass of the Daimon, even though it meant giving Mask a second of free reign.

I realized my mistake when I saw his Iron tumble into the street.

It meant he hadn't tried to resist when my Stone slammed into it, and that he hadn't called it back.

He'd deselected the object to conjure another. In fact, I was pretty sure he'd baited me into defending Erin specifically to get my Stone out of the way.

I'd grown too used to fighting Phantom, whose attacks weren't as powerful as the nastiest stuff we could pull out with Third Eye, but who didn't obey the same one-at-a-time rules. Was that more bait on Mask's part, luring people into fighting the wrong way so that when he cut loose they'd forget their basics? Or had I screwed up all on my own, with no need for my opponent to get in my head?

All those thoughts stampeded through my mind as I frantically worked my fingers to conjure a new shield closer to Lena and I.

I almost made it.

Another piece of Iron smashed my legs out from under me. I hit the dirt knee-first and rolled, more on instinct than with any plan in mind. The closest thing to a saving grace was that Mask had traded power for speed. Pure Air, no Fire.

Of course, as saving graces went, this one only lasted for the first attack. His next strike sizzled when it hit the mud where I'd lain.

I kept rolling. Right into Phantom. The Daimon punched me in the small of my back. Painful, but nothing compared to how big a problem it was that I couldn't keep retreating from Mask.

Darkness surged around me, but the scariest thing was the single line of light headed straight for my face. Mask had adjusted his object again, focusing all its heat back to one edge. Gerry's technique, originally. Had Mask forced him to cough it up or developed it independently?

Instinct took over. Instead of doing anything useful, I flung my hands up in front of me and braced for pain.

It came, but only in the form of Phantom jabbing me in the back again.

I scrambled to my feet, smacked Phantom away with an almost unconscious swing of my Stone, and panned my phone around.

Mask's Iron hissed in the mud beside me, cooling rapidly, abandoned.

The man himself hunched over, clutching his chest. His boots had carved furrows in the mud, and he stood in the center of a semicircle of shrapnel. His paintball vest smoldered around a caved-in portion of its foam. His voice changer crackled with heaving breaths. When he spoke, it was obvious even through the distortion he was gasping. "What the fuck?"

I could've told him. I'd gotten hit by the same missile when we were training at Rita Blanca.

Why would I tell, though? I'd be a pretty shitty assistant if I warned our enemies about The Magnificent Ashbird's secret techniques.

Admittedly, when I looked at that damaged paintball vest, I almost did feel like I had to warn people. I knew how much the missile had hurt when I experienced it through my HP, but I was pretty sure Mask's armor had only been subjected to the part of its impact that was aligned with the real world. For a person without HP, would getting hit by that be the equivalent of getting shot? If so, it was the first unambiguously dangerous Third Eye technique anyone but Albie had shown off.

Lena didn't seem inclined to stop using it.

"I thought I was pissed when you hurt Bernie," she said. She stepped forward and conjured another piece of Iron.

Mask called up another of his own, but Plastic wrapped around it and pulled it down. Michelle flashed a thumbs up.

"I thought I was pissed when you kidnapped our friends," Lena continued. Her Iron wrapped into a tube, then crimped at one end into an aerodynamic missile.

Mask let go of his captured object and flung new Iron wildly in Lena's direction. I batted it aside. He hadn't had the chance to pump as much Air into it as with his previous objects; I gave him no time to.

"I thought I was really pissed when you interrupted me and Cam tonight," Lena continued. Her Iron twitched in the grasp of her Air.

Mask swapped to pure defense. His already dark clothes turned murky and indistinct across his chest. This had to be what it looked like when he used his Key to shield himself. I cast around for some way to negate it, but Erin was way ahead of me. One of her wires snagged Mask's arm and tugged him sideways, exposing his back.

"But what pissed me off so, so much more," Lena finished, "is that you made me hurt a Daimon."

Her missile shot forward. Just before it made contact, she jabbed her fingers six times into her phone screen.

I didn't have hot Iron plunging toward my face this time, and the missile wasn't knocking the sense out of me. I heard its explosion ripple across the field. I saw the mass of it smash Mask and Phantom to the ground, and the shrapnel rain down around them.

None of that was what stunned me, though. I forced myself to keep my eyes on Mask, even, robotically, to advance on him, but it was all I could do not to stare at Lena.

Because I'd just realized that her "secret technique," the move she'd asked Zhizhi not to film until she got something better, the strongest attack I'd seen a normal Third Eye player deploy, the first manifestation of the game I'd seen that impacted the real world enough to be dangerous?

Only used six of her seven Fire.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 103: Four Questions

Mask pushed himself up to his hands and knees.

His movements looked laborious. His breath hissed through his voice changer, a constant backdrop of static.

Above all, his cloak blew with the breeze our Air generated. When it whipped far from his back, I saw the ragged hole torn in it, with dozens of other rips up and down its back. The darkness staining the dirt around him had vanished like the shadows of passing clouds.

Phantom was knocked out, stuck in whatever dormant state Bernie had been after Mask struck him down.

I had to assume the Daimon would come back at midnight, too, same as Bernie. We had hours to go until then, during which Mask would be just one ordinary Third Eye player pitted against our team.

Well. However much I hated to admit it, he was an extraordinary player.

The proof was in the fact that he kept rising. To his knees. To a crouch.

At last, with a deeper hiss, he straightened up.

He could've feigned his shakiness. He could've forced his breathing. I didn't believe he was doing either, but I made myself ignore both, just in case.

Instead, I watched his hands.

They stayed wide, balancing him. Not darting for the phone on his chest.

As long as that remained true, I considered the fight suspended.

"Give it up, Mask." Even though I addressed him, I meant it as much for my teammates.

This wasn't me getting sucked into offering stupid mercy like I had the first time we fought. At least, I hoped not.

Lena and I had actually hoped to convince Mask he'd lost without taking all his HP. We had contingencies for how to deal with it if we found we needed to drop him first and talk second, but Plan A remained convincing him to go along with what we wanted because we proved ourselves the stronger force and he at least claimed to prize that.

Regardless of our plans, I'd just seen evidence that we were now playing with Third Eye forces powerful enough to endanger someone who ran out of HP. Exactly how deadly Lena's missile was depended on how sturdy Mask's paintball vest turned out to be; I thought I saw a depression in the foam in the back as well as the front, even though Lena's second missile must have spent some of its force knocking out Phantom.

Killing Mask would legit be far worse than losing to him. I don't mean because of what it would do to Lena psychologically, although I sure as hell didn't want to see her have to cope with blood on her hands. I mean because Mask was the only person who knew where Matt and Gerry were. If he died without telling us, our friends might be stranded forever, and we certainly wouldn't find them in time to avoid becoming the primary suspects in their disappearance.

Every part of my mind – moral, ethical, tactical, practical – said I didn't dare strike Mask if there was a chance he'd run out of HP.

Which really sucked, because I wanted nothing more than to pound the son of a bitch to within an inch of his sneering, edgelord life.

The vehemence of my own reaction shocked me. I supposed Lena wasn't the only one pissed at him over her litany of complaints.

The shock helped calm me down. A little. When Mask turned at the sound of my footsteps, I didn't conjure anything. I didn't even haul off and slug him in his porcelain namesake.

I held my hand out, offering a shake, even offering to brace him if he found it as hard to stand as he seemed to.

Had he run out of HP before Lena hit him the last time? No. It wasn't possible. He'd been conjuring objects to the last, and nothing we'd done to him should have knocked his last few HP off until the missile landed.

If only I knew how many he'd started with. He'd certainly taken more damage than any player I knew could withstand and still stay in the game for the day.

As much as he'd soaked up in the most extreme invasion reports about him?

I couldn't be sure.

His mask tilted downwards and regarded my hand.

He didn't take it.

His arms started to rise.

I set my jaw.

But he kept raising his arms over his head and intertwined his fingers at the back of his hood. "You're right, OldCampaigner," he said.

I caught myself before I could exhale with relief. "Oh?"

"Your team can beat me," Mask said. "I didn't expect you'd all get this strong."

"Wasn't easy," Lena said.

"It's great." Mask glanced over his shoulder. Though it was hard to tell, I was pretty sure he was eyeing Michelle. "Ashbird is one thing. The wiki admin obviously knows a lot, and anyone could see you're holding back on video, OldCampaigner. If you can train even a mediocre player to this level, though –"

"Hey, screw you!" Michelle snapped.

Mask's voice changer hissed with his snort. "I'm serious. It's a good thing."

"What does it say about you that you lost to a 'mediocre' player?" she asked.

"Lost?" Mask's head tilted. His fingers unlaced from behind his head.

Mine shifted on my phone.

"Want to start Round Two, OldCampaigner?" he asked.

"I didn't want to start Round One," I said.

He shrugged. "Then let's make one thing clear. I said you're strong enough that you can beat me. Not that you have."

"Whatever helps you sleep at night, asshole," Lena muttered.

"I don't," Mask said.

I really wanted to look back at Lena rolling her eyes, as I knew she must be. I had to settle for the image of her in my imagination while I kept my actual eyes – Third Eye very much included – focused on Mask's hand movements.

He reached toward his chest.

I tensed.

His fingers simply felt around the caved-in portion of his vest, though, and that was on the opposite side of his body from his phone. A burst of feedback from his voice changer marked what I was pretty sure was a whistle. "I could take you if it wasn't for that missile. What are you pumping into that, anyway, Ashbird?"

"I can't believe you'd just stand here and chat about an attack I hit your poor Daimon with," Lena said. "Or that you'd expect me to answer your questions when you're still fronting that we could start up the fight again at any minute."

Mask shook his head. "Phantom will be back tomorrow, stronger than ever. As for asking pointless questions, I'd think you'd be used to it by now."

"Yeah? Why?"

"OldCampaign asks me a load of shit he knows I won't answer."

I laughed.

Mask looked at me. So did Erin and Michelle, which wasn't great, but I stood close enough to Mask now it hopefully wouldn't take their attention entirely off him.

Either way, I didn't regret my laughter. For one, the bastard had a point. For another, him pushing Lena's buttons until she restarted the fight was very close to the last thing we wanted.

For another, being able to laugh at my own foibles was part of what separated me from the assholes. Insofar as I succeeded in separating myself from them, I mean.

"Heh." Mask shook his head. "Fine. You win. I concede."

I cocked an eyebrow. "Then you'll answer my questions, after all?"

"Why would I do that?" he asked.

"Because if you don't," Lena said, "we'll take your phone and hand you over to the cops."

He tilted his head. "You're gonna steal from me and then confess?"

"No!" The mud squelched beneath Lena's feet as she advanced to where Mask and I stood. She poked her finger in his face, or at least the porcelain covering it. "I've seen the video! We have you on camera abducting Gerry, remember?"

"You've got a video of a tall guy dressed like this –" he pinched his ragged cloak. "– and of your bud disappearing into what looks like a special effect. There's no evidence the person that looks like me did anything."

"Unless we explain about Third Eye," I said.

The threat of exposure had seemed to stay his hand before. When he turned my way now, though, I got the impression he wasn't just looking down his nose because he was taller than me. "Even if some local cops believed you about the game – which they wouldn't –, so what? You coulda just dressed me up in the same outfit as the guy in the video to act as a scapegoat for your weird cult."

Lena flinched.

I didn't. "If we did, how come you knew so much about what was in the video? Or did you think we weren't recording this fight, too?"

Mask's face turned infinitesimally. I'd noticed that the more he tried to hide his body language, the more it told me. He knew he'd slipped up. After a second, he said, "Could've told me in advance. Even shown me your video. Entrapment and shit."

"You sound pretty trapped right now," I said.

"Bullshit," Mask snapped. "You wouldn't risk it. Maybe you convince the cops. Uh-huh, and maybe they take a closer look at who knew a bunch of people that disappeared and then skipped town."

Erin swallowed hard. Apart from some light trespassing unrelated to our clashes with Mask, the only actually illegal thing any of us had done was her faking Matt's email to their professor.

Thankfully, Mask wasn't looking her way, and I was almost certain that the eyes-in-the-back-of-his-head shit he'd pulled relied on Phantom's senses.

My own cocked eyebrow never twitched. "Maybe we'd risk it and maybe we wouldn't. Maybe the cops would believe us, or maybe they'd believe you. Maybe they'd lock us all up. No matter what, they'd hold you for questioning."

Mask almost hid the way his back tightened.

Almost.

"You're so obsessed with getting stronger," I said. "Are you really okay with losing days or weeks of grinding, even if you're ultimately released?"

He didn't answer, which was answer enough.

I softened my voice. "We just want to talk, man. That's got to be better than the alternative, doesn't it?"

"Yeah."

I blinked. "You'll answer our questions?"

"Four of them," he said.

"You're in no position to give us an ultimatum," Michelle said.

He shrugged. "Four players, four questions."

I exchanged glances with the team.

Haltingly, we all nodded.

"Where did you take our friends?" Erin asked. "Please, tell us!"

"I took them through my Realm," Mask said.

Erin bowed her head. "Thank you."

Mask snorted.

I thought he might find it less amusing if he realized he'd said something that would sound an awful lot like a confession to a cop who'd been clued in to Third Eye. I didn't plan on pointing that out until we'd exhausted our questions, though.

"That doesn't tell us anything!" Michelle said. "Where is your realm?"

Mask hesitated. I didn't get so much as a hint from his body language. Maybe he was formulating an answer to serve his interests, but I got the impression she'd legit thrown him for a loop.

"You promised each of us an answer," she said.

Mask's gloves creaked as his fingers curled into fists. "I got there from Philly, but... whatever. Try and get to it if you want."

"A real answer would come with an address," Michelle said.

He raised his hand, his dominant hand, the one he used to work his phone. His three eyeholes lined up with my gaze. "Want me to Discord her, OldCampaigner?"

"It's none of my business," I said. "Now, if you're the kind of person who promises four answers and bails on the last two, that's also useful information."

His hand twitched in annoyance. Slowly, he unclipped the phone and tapped something out with his index finger. I knew from trying to text with winter gloves that it wouldn't work if they were thick all the way through. Sure enough, when I looked closely at his fingertips, I saw that the leather gave way to a thin, stretchy material.

Michelle's phone bleeped. Her eyes flickered to it.

Mine never left Mask.

"It's an address," she said. "No idea what it means, or if he's being honest."

"Why lie?" he asked. "It won't help you."

Did that mean the path to his Realm had closed, as Lena's seemed to have, rather than remaining open like Miguel's or the massive tree we'd found in the Black Forest? If so, could Lena get back to hers? Would she need a Key of her own?

None of those were questions I was going to burn up our total with.

Instead, I asked, "Why are you capturing people?"

"Cute," Mask said. "Still fishing for a confession?"

I waited, eyebrow raised.

After a moment, Mask said, "I go after strong players because they're the ones with the techniques I need."

Lena pushed her finger into his armored chest. "Why don't you just ask?"

Mask looked down at her. I supposed he couldn't help it, since he was at least a foot taller, but it still annoyed me.

"I don't know, Ashbird," he said. "Why didn't I see those missiles of yours in your PVP tutorial?"

"Ha! So you admit you're secretly a fan!" Lena started to toss her hair, but then Mask's words sank in. Her shoulders slumped.

"Why are you teaching your fans techniques you ditched weeks ago? Why doesn't OldCampaigner show almost anything on video? Why does your 'wiki team' get every discovery weeks before it shows up on the actual wiki? Why do you post false results to hide who actually collected the finds on your trip?" Mask's voice rose, turned screechy as his voice changer struggled to keep up. "Why haven't you told anyone this shit is real?"

Erin and Michelle averted their eyes. Lena staggered back, hit harder than if he'd whipped out an explosion of Fire.

I cradled her waist when she backed up beside me. "That's enough, Mask!"

"Yeah," he said. "Is. You got your questions."

His hand shifted on his phone.

"Don't!" I shouted.

He did.

The ground darkened at his feet and he sank into it just like Gerry had.

But unlike Gerry, Mask was close enough for me to fling myself at.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 104: In Another World

Darkness –

Disorientation –

Inversion –

Light –

I landed with a grunt atop something lumpy, something moving. I gasped and tried to stand, then a weight crashed onto my back and drove me down again. Bile burned its way up my throat. I gagged. I managed to choke back vomit.

An urp behind me presaged a burst of wet chunks down my neck and back, and that pushed me over the edge, too.

"Sorry," Lena groaned, and rolled off me.

If I opened my mouth again there was no telling what else would spill out. Probably not words. I just collapsed in the opposite direction.

With our weight off him, Mask hauled himself to his feet and swatted at his soiled cloak. He snarled, no words, just hisses and crackles through his voice changer.

He was still up, still active.

My brain insisted that nausea gripped my stomach, but that was just an echo. My actual stomach felt fine. How many HP had that cost me? It didn't matter. I still had at least one. My fingers groped my phone – God, imagine if I'd dropped it! – and conjured a shield.

Long before I swung it into place, I felt the edge of an Iron plate against the back of my neck.

"Keep your eyes on the floor," Mask said.

"I'm not super inclined to agree," I said, "considering if you try to push that in, I'm just going to lose HP and I can still hit you back."

"Dickhead! It's such a pain when I have to bring people through with me instead of dumping them. Don't look at the sky!"

Lena pushed herself up on her hands and knees. "If you sent somebody through on their own, how would you tell them not to look up?"

"If they're on their own," Mask said, "they don't puke on me."

Lena almost bit back a laugh. She ended up gagging from the attempt. "Asshole."

From the way Mask's cloak shifted on the floor beside me, I was pretty sure his only response was a shrug.

I didn't understand why looking at the sky would make us throw up again. None of the other Realms had felt disorienting the way travel through his Key had. Was it because his Realm was somehow associated with Keys as a resource?

Or was it because we'd never clearly seen the sky from within a Realm?

We'd never looked out the tiny window of the Third Eye version of Lena's apartment. Cinder Alley had lain underground even when it was a real thing, and the version in Miguel's Realm was sealed off at the escalator. The great tree in the Black Forest came closest. Even there, though, all we'd really gotten was light filtering through a double-thickness canopy. Not only did the great tree occlude most of the light, the regular ones grew right up to it, whereas if it had existed fully in the real world, they would have crowded outside its shade.

I decided to believe Mask until I had reason to do otherwise.

Both to avoid having an Iron plate dig into the back of my neck and to keep whatever was left in my stomach where it belonged, I pressed my forehead to the floor. My eyes scanned back and forth within those limits, though.

From what I could see of Mask's Realm, it took the form of some sort of building. A parking garage, maybe? I sprawled on bare concrete, and the three walls I could see were made of the same material. Old concrete, cracked, pitted, and coated with fine gray dust everywhere we hadn't disturbed it.

"You better pull that Iron away from Cam," Lena said, "or we're starting up the next round right here, right now."

"Don't be stupid," Mask said. "You can't fight me here."

Lena rose to a crouch. I couldn't see her shift her hand to her phone, but I knew she would have. "Wanna bet?"

"I don't think he means we can't win," I said. "He means we don't dare."

"Huh?"

"Mask is the one with the Key." Experimentally, I tried a push up. Once upon a time, by which I mean a couple months ago, I would've huffed and puffed from just the one. It came easily now, and the Iron brushed harmlessly against the hairs of my neck. Careful to keep my eyes low, I turned to face Lena. "If we knock out all his HP, we've got no way out."

I could see Mask out of the corner of my eye. Despite what I'd said, I kept his hand in view. If he moved to touch his phone and add Fire or more Air to his Iron, or even just started swinging it around, I'd strike him anyway and we'd figure out where to go from there.

He didn't make any aggressive moves, though.

"You know," Lena said, "we could kick his ass and wait for midnight."

"No!" Mask jerked the Iron away from me.

Even through his voice changer, the shift in his tone came through. Dude sounded shook. He backed toward the doorway with his Iron between him and us.

Lena blinked after him. "I was kidding."

"Good!" His fist unclenched, but he kept the Iron between us. He backed further into the doorway, and when he spoke again, he'd tamped down his panic. "Hurry up. I'll take you to your buds but I won't wait forever."

"Okay," I said. "We just need to get our bearings."

Mask's only answer was to spin on his heel and stalk into the hallway. His tattered, soiled cloak, Phantom's equivalent to Bernie's plushy form, swirled behind him. Then it, too, disappeared behind the pitted concrete.

I risked standing up and surveying what I could of the room we'd found ourselves in. I revised my estimation of it. It didn't look like a parking garage, because you'd be lucky to squeeze a scooter in through the only doorway, much less a car.

Another unfinished building, like the construction site?

My hand tightened on my phone. If this was anything like the last one...

"What was up with him?" Lena muttered.

"Only one way to find out," I said.

She scowled. "Follow him."

I nodded.

"First," Lena said, "I'm looking out that window. He could just be messing with our heads."

"That's probably going to suck for you." I padded over to her and rubbed the small of her back. "I'm not going to stop you, Lena. Just, if you end up puking again, try not to hit me this time."

She narrowed her eyes. "Aw, you're so supportive, Cam."

"I try."

She hugged my waist, then stalked to the window.

I still wasn't willing to look up, but I did watch Lena's progress. The cracks around the window were bad enough that parts of the concrete had chipped away, revealing bare rebar. I caught a glimpse of another building across what looked like a narrow street or wide alley, but deliberately didn't look any closer.

I could tell that Lena did, because I heard her gulp and saw her grip tighten on the window.

"I guess," I said, "Mask wasn't just messing with our heads?"

She staggered back to my side and slipped her arms around me.

"This doesn't feel like a good way to avoid throwing up on me," I said. Nonetheless, I wrapped her up in a hug.

We stayed that way for a few minutes while her stomach settled. Finally, carefully, she peeked upwards to meet my eyes. She flinched away from something past my head, probably a crack in the ceiling. "The sky is all fucked up."

"How?" I asked.

"You know that one window at the big fish tank in Tropical Discovery?" she asked. "The round one that's sort of like a dome sticking into the tank?"

I nodded. Now that she'd mentioned an exhibit from it, it struck me that I didn't know if any of the wiki team had scouted the Denver Zoo. A big oversight, if not. Lots of walkable spaces, and who knew what Third Eye would associate them with? Water, for the aquariums? Earth, for the craggy enclosures? Air, for the birdcages?

Keys, for the locked gates?

None of which were available to us right now. I shook away my speculation and answered Lena's original question. "I know the window you're talking about. I think the way it looks is called a fisheye effect, which I guess is appropriate. What about it?"

"The way it distorts the view at the edges, the whole sky here is kinda like that. Except, like, a bunch of those bubbles going in and out at different sizes." She shuddered.

I patted her back. "Shit. I can see how that would be disorienting."

She clutched my back. "Mask is wrong, though."

I frowned. "About what?"

"The sky's not the worst part."

I gave her another squeeze. Then I extricated myself from her embrace and approached the window.

I kept my eyes low and shielded them with my hand so I didn't have to see the whole sky, but even a glimpse of it through the gaps in the buildings made my vision swim. I braced myself on the windowsill.

That left me looking down.

My initial impression of "narrow street" seemed accurate. Six stories below, chunks of pitted asphalt suggested what must have been an urban road at some point. Some far removed point, because most of it had crumbled or been covered by dust and dirt. Even that was hard to see beneath a layer of mosses, vines, and ferns. Here and there, I saw rusted boxes of metal that might've once been cars but now looked more like jagged planter boxes for how overgrown they'd become.

At the end of the block, a fire hydrant remained distinguishable. Almost intact, in fact, having lost only its paint and one of its nozzles. More vines grew out of the hole, so it was clear no water had pumped through it in a long time.

Beyond it, block after block of the same. An entire urban center reclaimed by nature.

Whatever city this Realm evoked, it had been abandoned and fallen into ruin at least decades ago.

Which didn't make a ton of sense, considering that every other Realm we knew the provenance of tied in to something that Third Eye, at least, considered to be a pivotal moment in the life of the player it was attached to. I didn't think there was a city this size in all of North America that had been so thoroughly abandoned.

"The ruins are creepy," I said. Especially to someone as attached to urban life as me. I'm sure some people would find the idea of plant life overtaking a city calming, even comforting. Or at least they'd say so until they saw it. "I'm not sure how they're worse than the sky, though."

"Keep watching," Lena said. She shook her head. "The hell am I saying? Don't."

I tried to drag my eyes away from the disorienting scene. The sky still bubbled at the edge of my vision, and below me, plants shifted in the wind.

Wind? Weird. I hadn't felt any up on the sixth floor.

I blinked. Lena was beside me, grabbing my arm.

"Why do you want me to stop watching?" I asked. "I think I've seen enough of the sky now that I'm not going to get sick just from a glance."

Movement near the base of the building drew my eye. Young trees that had grown up through the cracks in the pavement swayed in the breeze.

In opposite directions.

While none of the foliage around them moved.

Wind couldn't do that.

"You should stop watching," Lena said, "because I really don't want them to see us."