Qoheleth
Archivist
- Pronouns
- Any
Cam originally got involved in all this for the ARG angle, right? I have to imagine there's somebody in the player base who's a dab enough hand at conlangs to do something with all these mysterious inscriptions.
Eye Opener
- Thread starter MoogleEmpMog
- Start date
- Original Fantasy Modern
Chapter 49: Stairway to Heaven
Chapter 49: Stairway to Heaven
I'd spent a perhaps unhealthy amount of time thinking about Lena's wings. Can you blame me? Consider all the Third Eye phenomena I'd encountered. What was more visually spectacular than a twelve foot wingspan where each feather was a lick of flame?
And yeah, the fact they emerged directly from her back, rather than being part of her avatar's costume, didn't hurt. The first night where I'd gotten the chance to confirm as much was not going to leave my memory anytime soon.
I had not, however, ever thought of them as functional wings.
They beat in irritation, stretched languidly when Lena did, shuddered when I tickled her, folded in to enclose her and those lucky enough to be welcomed under their canopy.
Actually flying, though? That had seemed absurd before we realized Third Eye had real-world effects, and had never come up since.
Yet there Lena hovered, not atop the Rueter-Hess Incline but in the sky above it, her wings beating, her flames twisting as the stiff wind curled around her. Her hand was raised in front of her face and I knew it was to hold her phone up, but in that moment it almost looked like she was giving a blessing.
It struck me as strange that I'd never thought of her as looking like an angel. A winged humanoid figure, that was the pop-culture version, right? With her curly hair and round cheeks, backed by a pair of wings, she might've seemed cherubic. Even the flames sort of fit, more on the biblically accurate side. And angel was a term of endearment people used sometimes, wasn't it? "She's my angel?"
I just couldn't get it to fit in my head. Maybe because her outfit split the difference between pillars of flame and wheels of eyes on the one hand, and cupids and St. Michaels on the other. Maybe because her expression usually trended toward the impish rather than the angelic.
Either way, in that moment, she descended from the heavens.
Her eyes widened, her wings beat, and she stepped down toward the level I'd stopped at.
Stepped down.
Not flew down.
I wrenched my gaze away from her to my own feet. Which were also suspended above the ground. Also, clad in sturdy, fur-lined leather boots, into which were tucked loose blue trousers. The cloak whipping around them in the wind was a paler blue, streaked with wisps of white cloud that almost seemed to move across it as it billowed in the shifting air currents. Above them hung my amulet, silver and set with an aqua-colored gemstone.
My eyes adjusted and I saw we weren't standing on thin air, but on steps that carried on from the ones below. How many were there supposed to have been? A hundred? Hundred and twenty? We'd simply ascended a few more tiers of the Incline than actually existed.
The wind grew so strong I thought it might legit lift me off even these new steps.
I looked up at Lena and saw she really was rising from the ground. Her wings battered the air, not so much to carry her aloft as to try to force her down, and the flames of her dress flickered so much I thought they might go out.
Then I blinked, and her dress was gone and so were her wings, replaced by striped stockings and a denim skirt and a familiar pink jacket.
The wind was gone, too.
So were the steps we'd been ascending.
I tumbled onto my ass and Lena landed in front of me on her hands and knees.
"Ow, fuck," she cried.
I dragged myself to her side.
"I'm fine." She held up her hands. Bits of gravel and loose dirt fell from her palms, but I didn't see that they'd left any bruises or scratches. Of course not. How high had she been? Eight feet off the ground? Maybe ten? Third Eye would protect her from far worse, as it had me.
She picked up her phone. She sucked air through her teeth.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "How much did you lose?"
"HP?" She shook her head. "Just twenty, that's no big deal. Look at my phone, though."
She turned it so I could see. It must've hit a rock when she landed, because a spiderweb of cracks spread from one corner. Third Eye's interface, ill-suited to a phone screen at the best of times, looked borderline unreadable.
"That sucks," I said. "It still works okay, right?"
"Not for scouting. I can hardly see the screen." She ran her thumb over it. She hissed, which Bernie echoed a second later. "The crack feels pretty sharp, too. I think I'm gonna lose HP just trying to use this thing."
I patted her shoulder. "We better get enough subscribers for you to replace it."
She nodded.
Abruptly, she sat up straight on the dirt. "Oh shit! What happened back there, It must've been..."
My eyes widened. "Can you check your Reactants?"
"It'd take more than a busted screen to stop me." She jabbed at the cracked phone, then pumped her fist. "Hell yes."
I hauled myself to my feet and scurried around to peek over her shoulder. When I saw her screen, or, more accurately, when I squinted to make out what was beneath the cracks, I clapped my hand on said shoulder.
Alongside her familiar three Fire, Lena had acquired two units of Air.
We bumped fists, then we hugged, then we kissed.
Lena couldn't stop squirming. "Back up. I've gotta try it out!"
"Of course!" I stepped away, arms outstretched. "If you need any tips –"
"Nah." She stuck her tongue out. "I watched this great tutorial video."
Once we separated and I got the chance to pay attention to our surroundings, I realized we'd overshot the high point of the Incline. Technically, we were in the brush where people weren't supposed to be, and snakes were.
How many more steps had we taken than actually existed? I supposed it didn't matter anymore, but I did wonder why Lena had only acquired Air, not some Earth to account for the extra tiers we'd climbed. I supposed those were wrapped up in the special effects of the Reactant, rather than being objects we could acquire in their own right.
I pushed speculation aside to watch Lena try out her Air.
She made a half turn, tapped carefully on her cracked phone screen, and conjured a slab of Stone. Courtesy of the mounds we'd been collecting all morning, that had shot past Wood to become our most common Material.
She swept the Stone back and forth. Nothing fancy or particularly fast, certainly nothing on the level I'd learned to operate at, much less what Albie could do.
Still, it brought a huge smile to Lena's face. "I don't know how you stop yourself from doing this all the time. Having such precise control is super fun."
"It's the best," I said. "I just don't want to waste my MP when I don't have a practice plan in place."
She tried pushing the Stone further away, then yanked it back to herself so fast it actually ended up smacking into her outstretched arm. She laughed. "Oops."
"Is that one Air or two?" I asked.
"Just one for now," she said. "I want to get a feel for it before I double up."
I flashed a thumbs up.
"Actually," she said, "c'mere. Could you show me the gesture you use to get rotation?"
"Sure." I stepped around her, balancing on the slope. One of my arms encircled her waist. She settled back against me as best Bernie's sling allowed. He made a happy meep and, judging from the feel of wetness against my face, licked me.
All in all, a very nice way to practice. Easy to get distracted, though. I forced myself to concentrate.
My other arm extended around Lena's shoulder. She stretched her hand out, mimicking the motion. My fingers curled and twisted; I didn't normally pay conscious attention to my Third Eye gestures, at least when I wasn't filming them, but this time, I curved my hand precisely and deliberately.
Lena mimicked that, too, and though I couldn't see the results directly with the hand holding my phone down around her waist, happy squeaks from her and Bernie alike told me I'd shown her exactly the move she wanted to learn.
We tried a couple of my other favorite one-handed moves. I walked her through a wide corkscrew loop I'd tried when I was playing catch with Albie, through the sudden, curling fastball motion I'd actually won the occasional point with in that game, and finally, something more practical: the tight, chopping motions I used to deflect attacks.
"Oh," Lena said. "It's more of a parry than a block, huh?"
We repeated the motion in unison and I paid extra attention to the speed of it. "I guess so. I've never thought of it that way."
"The Earth users go for more of a shield," Lena said, "and that's what I've tried to approximate. This is way more my style, though."
I frowned. "As long as we don't mess up the parry timing."
"You hardly ever have," she said. "Don't tell me you're going to get nervous about it just because I pointed out what it is?"
"I can parry just fine," I lied.
She knew it, because she knew my track record in games where it was the most effective defense. I usually stopped trying and spammed dodge roll instead.
"You can," she said. "More than fine. You've been owning at it this whole time."
"If I was really owning at it, neither Mask nor the creature would've hit us."
Her body tensed. "If you weren't, they would've kept hitting us until we dropped."
"Thankfully, that won't be the case anymore," I said. Not gonna lie, as much as I preferred intellectually if Lena could protect herself, and even me, I felt a pang of regret. We'd started to develop beautiful synergy with me tanking and her providing the DPS.
"Are you kidding?" She wriggled around to face me. "Get real, Cam. You can't actually think that I got access to an amazing, flexible, high-speed power, and I'm going to practice using it for something as boring as tanking?"
I laughed. "I hope you practice at least a little defense, because unless there's a doubles format at the tournament, and also you find somebody with more than 10 Max HP to double with, you're going to be fighting solo."
She turned her nose up. "The best defense is a good offense."
"The second best defense," I said, "is an actual defense."
"Sounds like defeatist talk to me." She gave me a quick kiss on the chest, but danced backwards before I could press my lips to the top of her head.
I think my attempt to do so must've left me in a pretty funny-looking position, because instead of engaging in any non-defeatist talk, she tried and failed to stifle a laugh.
We stood there grinning at each other for a moment.
Before we could get back to work, I noticed a shadow.
My eyes shot to the top of the Incline. With the sun almost directly overhead, that put it right in my eyes, just slightly behind the tall figure silhouetted above us.
I'd spent a perhaps unhealthy amount of time thinking about Lena's wings. Can you blame me? Consider all the Third Eye phenomena I'd encountered. What was more visually spectacular than a twelve foot wingspan where each feather was a lick of flame?
And yeah, the fact they emerged directly from her back, rather than being part of her avatar's costume, didn't hurt. The first night where I'd gotten the chance to confirm as much was not going to leave my memory anytime soon.
I had not, however, ever thought of them as functional wings.
They beat in irritation, stretched languidly when Lena did, shuddered when I tickled her, folded in to enclose her and those lucky enough to be welcomed under their canopy.
Actually flying, though? That had seemed absurd before we realized Third Eye had real-world effects, and had never come up since.
Yet there Lena hovered, not atop the Rueter-Hess Incline but in the sky above it, her wings beating, her flames twisting as the stiff wind curled around her. Her hand was raised in front of her face and I knew it was to hold her phone up, but in that moment it almost looked like she was giving a blessing.
It struck me as strange that I'd never thought of her as looking like an angel. A winged humanoid figure, that was the pop-culture version, right? With her curly hair and round cheeks, backed by a pair of wings, she might've seemed cherubic. Even the flames sort of fit, more on the biblically accurate side. And angel was a term of endearment people used sometimes, wasn't it? "She's my angel?"
I just couldn't get it to fit in my head. Maybe because her outfit split the difference between pillars of flame and wheels of eyes on the one hand, and cupids and St. Michaels on the other. Maybe because her expression usually trended toward the impish rather than the angelic.
Either way, in that moment, she descended from the heavens.
Her eyes widened, her wings beat, and she stepped down toward the level I'd stopped at.
Stepped down.
Not flew down.
I wrenched my gaze away from her to my own feet. Which were also suspended above the ground. Also, clad in sturdy, fur-lined leather boots, into which were tucked loose blue trousers. The cloak whipping around them in the wind was a paler blue, streaked with wisps of white cloud that almost seemed to move across it as it billowed in the shifting air currents. Above them hung my amulet, silver and set with an aqua-colored gemstone.
My eyes adjusted and I saw we weren't standing on thin air, but on steps that carried on from the ones below. How many were there supposed to have been? A hundred? Hundred and twenty? We'd simply ascended a few more tiers of the Incline than actually existed.
The wind grew so strong I thought it might legit lift me off even these new steps.
I looked up at Lena and saw she really was rising from the ground. Her wings battered the air, not so much to carry her aloft as to try to force her down, and the flames of her dress flickered so much I thought they might go out.
Then I blinked, and her dress was gone and so were her wings, replaced by striped stockings and a denim skirt and a familiar pink jacket.
The wind was gone, too.
So were the steps we'd been ascending.
I tumbled onto my ass and Lena landed in front of me on her hands and knees.
"Ow, fuck," she cried.
I dragged myself to her side.
"I'm fine." She held up her hands. Bits of gravel and loose dirt fell from her palms, but I didn't see that they'd left any bruises or scratches. Of course not. How high had she been? Eight feet off the ground? Maybe ten? Third Eye would protect her from far worse, as it had me.
She picked up her phone. She sucked air through her teeth.
"What's wrong?" I asked. "How much did you lose?"
"HP?" She shook her head. "Just twenty, that's no big deal. Look at my phone, though."
She turned it so I could see. It must've hit a rock when she landed, because a spiderweb of cracks spread from one corner. Third Eye's interface, ill-suited to a phone screen at the best of times, looked borderline unreadable.
"That sucks," I said. "It still works okay, right?"
"Not for scouting. I can hardly see the screen." She ran her thumb over it. She hissed, which Bernie echoed a second later. "The crack feels pretty sharp, too. I think I'm gonna lose HP just trying to use this thing."
I patted her shoulder. "We better get enough subscribers for you to replace it."
She nodded.
Abruptly, she sat up straight on the dirt. "Oh shit! What happened back there, It must've been..."
My eyes widened. "Can you check your Reactants?"
"It'd take more than a busted screen to stop me." She jabbed at the cracked phone, then pumped her fist. "Hell yes."
I hauled myself to my feet and scurried around to peek over her shoulder. When I saw her screen, or, more accurately, when I squinted to make out what was beneath the cracks, I clapped my hand on said shoulder.
Alongside her familiar three Fire, Lena had acquired two units of Air.
We bumped fists, then we hugged, then we kissed.
Lena couldn't stop squirming. "Back up. I've gotta try it out!"
"Of course!" I stepped away, arms outstretched. "If you need any tips –"
"Nah." She stuck her tongue out. "I watched this great tutorial video."
Once we separated and I got the chance to pay attention to our surroundings, I realized we'd overshot the high point of the Incline. Technically, we were in the brush where people weren't supposed to be, and snakes were.
How many more steps had we taken than actually existed? I supposed it didn't matter anymore, but I did wonder why Lena had only acquired Air, not some Earth to account for the extra tiers we'd climbed. I supposed those were wrapped up in the special effects of the Reactant, rather than being objects we could acquire in their own right.
I pushed speculation aside to watch Lena try out her Air.
She made a half turn, tapped carefully on her cracked phone screen, and conjured a slab of Stone. Courtesy of the mounds we'd been collecting all morning, that had shot past Wood to become our most common Material.
She swept the Stone back and forth. Nothing fancy or particularly fast, certainly nothing on the level I'd learned to operate at, much less what Albie could do.
Still, it brought a huge smile to Lena's face. "I don't know how you stop yourself from doing this all the time. Having such precise control is super fun."
"It's the best," I said. "I just don't want to waste my MP when I don't have a practice plan in place."
She tried pushing the Stone further away, then yanked it back to herself so fast it actually ended up smacking into her outstretched arm. She laughed. "Oops."
"Is that one Air or two?" I asked.
"Just one for now," she said. "I want to get a feel for it before I double up."
I flashed a thumbs up.
"Actually," she said, "c'mere. Could you show me the gesture you use to get rotation?"
"Sure." I stepped around her, balancing on the slope. One of my arms encircled her waist. She settled back against me as best Bernie's sling allowed. He made a happy meep and, judging from the feel of wetness against my face, licked me.
All in all, a very nice way to practice. Easy to get distracted, though. I forced myself to concentrate.
My other arm extended around Lena's shoulder. She stretched her hand out, mimicking the motion. My fingers curled and twisted; I didn't normally pay conscious attention to my Third Eye gestures, at least when I wasn't filming them, but this time, I curved my hand precisely and deliberately.
Lena mimicked that, too, and though I couldn't see the results directly with the hand holding my phone down around her waist, happy squeaks from her and Bernie alike told me I'd shown her exactly the move she wanted to learn.
We tried a couple of my other favorite one-handed moves. I walked her through a wide corkscrew loop I'd tried when I was playing catch with Albie, through the sudden, curling fastball motion I'd actually won the occasional point with in that game, and finally, something more practical: the tight, chopping motions I used to deflect attacks.
"Oh," Lena said. "It's more of a parry than a block, huh?"
We repeated the motion in unison and I paid extra attention to the speed of it. "I guess so. I've never thought of it that way."
"The Earth users go for more of a shield," Lena said, "and that's what I've tried to approximate. This is way more my style, though."
I frowned. "As long as we don't mess up the parry timing."
"You hardly ever have," she said. "Don't tell me you're going to get nervous about it just because I pointed out what it is?"
"I can parry just fine," I lied.
She knew it, because she knew my track record in games where it was the most effective defense. I usually stopped trying and spammed dodge roll instead.
"You can," she said. "More than fine. You've been owning at it this whole time."
"If I was really owning at it, neither Mask nor the creature would've hit us."
Her body tensed. "If you weren't, they would've kept hitting us until we dropped."
"Thankfully, that won't be the case anymore," I said. Not gonna lie, as much as I preferred intellectually if Lena could protect herself, and even me, I felt a pang of regret. We'd started to develop beautiful synergy with me tanking and her providing the DPS.
"Are you kidding?" She wriggled around to face me. "Get real, Cam. You can't actually think that I got access to an amazing, flexible, high-speed power, and I'm going to practice using it for something as boring as tanking?"
I laughed. "I hope you practice at least a little defense, because unless there's a doubles format at the tournament, and also you find somebody with more than 10 Max HP to double with, you're going to be fighting solo."
She turned her nose up. "The best defense is a good offense."
"The second best defense," I said, "is an actual defense."
"Sounds like defeatist talk to me." She gave me a quick kiss on the chest, but danced backwards before I could press my lips to the top of her head.
I think my attempt to do so must've left me in a pretty funny-looking position, because instead of engaging in any non-defeatist talk, she tried and failed to stifle a laugh.
We stood there grinning at each other for a moment.
Before we could get back to work, I noticed a shadow.
My eyes shot to the top of the Incline. With the sun almost directly overhead, that put it right in my eyes, just slightly behind the tall figure silhouetted above us.
Just a heads-up, distinguished guests.
I have some major dental work coming up, which means no new chapter tomorrow. The break may stretch further into the week depending on how it goes/how ghastly I feel.
At the very latest new chapters will resume next Monday.
I have some major dental work coming up, which means no new chapter tomorrow. The break may stretch further into the week depending on how it goes/how ghastly I feel.
At the very latest new chapters will resume next Monday.
Chapter 50: Revelations
Chapter 50: Revelations
For one absurd moment, I thought it was Mask.
When my eyes adjusted to the sunlight, though, I recognized the jogger who'd stared at us when we passed him on the way up the Incline. Which wasn't worse, but certainly stranger.
He had his hands on his thighs and his shoulders moved with hard breaths. I realized he must've sprinted back up. About the time I turned to look at him, he caught enough of his breath to yell, "You kids all right?"
"We're good," I called. I refused to let myself get annoyed at being called a kid, even though I wasn't sure this guy was even older than us. I supposed he'd seen our phones in our faces and Bernie slung over Lena's back and assumed we were younger than our actual ages. Fair enough. And he had run back to check on us. "Thanks."
He hesitated and looked around. "You're, uh, not supposed to leave the path."
"Right, sorry." I scratched the back of my neck. "I guess we just kind of kept going."
Now that we'd been called on our transgression, I felt my face and chest flush. I clambered back up to the summit of the Incline and reached back to haul Lena up over the lip of the little clearing there.
The jogger frowned at me, then he really frowned at Lena.
She brushed at her skirt. "What? Have I got something on me?"
"No," he said. He shook his head. "Not any more."
Lena shot me a glance.
My face was frozen in the same polite, apologetic smile I'd put on a moment ago. I locked it in, because it was exactly what I needed right now.
I could guess what must've happened. We knew from what Zhizhi experienced at the construction site that non-players could perceive Third Eye phenomena in the moment one of us collected a Reactant.
It was one thing for a non-player to do that after we'd shared the game's secrets with her. Quite another for someone who'd probably never even heard of Third Eye to stumble across the sight of Lena as her flaming avatar, much less the two of us walking into the sky.
"Oh, you saw that?" Nervous laugh from yours truly. "Now I know why you looked at us like we were crazy on the way up."
"It kind of looked like the lady was on fire," he said. "She didn't seem in pain, so I wasn't sure what to think, but then you went all the way up there and fell, and I had to check."
"Good of you," I said. "Sorry we gave you a scare, man. We were trying out some new special effects."
He blinked. "Special effects."
"For our channel?" I cocked my head. "We're YouTubers. Not the asshole kind, I promise!"
"So she wasn't – she didn't –"
"Fly?" I laughed again, less nervously, and put my arm around Lena's shoulders. "Oh man, imagine how many views we could get if we could pull that off for real!"
"Right?" Lena's attempt to chuckle sounded less convincing than mine, either because she wasn't as good of an actor or because I was hearing what I sounded like in my head, not in reality. She gave me a playful elbow in the ribs. "I guess the wire work looked pretty good."
"Wire work," the jogger said. "That's... Very good. Yeah."
"Just imagine how it'll look after post-processing," I said.
He took a while chewing on his response. His mouth worked it over like he had a piece of gum. Or else he really did have gum to chew.
Either way, I saw the moment he decided to believe me. His shoulders sank infinitesimally, even as he leaned back and straightened up. I say he believed me, but it was more like he let me convince him not to think too hard about it. My explanation? Bullshit. He? Could guess as much.
But what else was he supposed to think?
"I'm sure your video will be really cool," he said. "You shouldn't stray off the path when you're filming, though."
"We won't," I said. "We just didn't notice we'd hit the end. Sorry again."
Lena toed the dirt. "Yeah, sorry."
"Well, I guess it's fine. I better get back." He started toward the steps down. He tensed to resume his jog, but hesitated and glanced over his shoulder. "Where can I see it?"
"It?" I blinked.
His lips compressed. "The video."
My skin flushed again. At least we were doing good impressions of clueless influencers. "Oh!"
I glanced at Lena, but she was still studying the dirt at her feet.
"Ashbird," I said. I patted her shoulder. "It's her channel. The Magnificent Ashbird. But, the channel is just called Ashbird."
"I'll check it out," the jogger said.
Lena raised her voice from a mumble for the first time since she'd realized we had a live audience. She flashed her victory sign and her streamer's grin. "Always great to make a new fan!"
The jogger chuckled, and it didn't even sound very forced. Then he took off running.
As soon as he was out of sight, Lena and I sagged against each other.
We must've been pretty wiped out, because after I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, I found Bernie's plushie form in my arms and the half-felt bulk of his Third Eye form curling around both Lena and I. I scratched his back and he hummed happily.
That was enough to put a smile on Lena's face, which did the same for mine.
"I think," she said, "we should save the practice for somewhere less busy."
"I'm with that." I gave Bernie a squeeze. "How much do you think that guy saw?"
"Too much," Lena said. "Do you think it was a mistake to point him to the channel?"
"I doubt he's going to bother searching up the YouTube channel of a couple of 'kids,'" I said. "Even if he did, does it matter?"
"It puts him on the track of looking at Third Eye stuff," Lena said.
"If he watches your videos, he's going to see the same 'special effects' we were showing off today," I said. "Worst case scenario, he's convinced the game gave us real magic and gets a couple weeks head start on us telling everybody as much. Second-worst, he's convinced we're doing everything on the videos with practical effects and conning the players into thinking it's in-game. So what? Anybody who's experimented with Third Eye is going to know we're showing off real techniques."
"I guess it's got to be better than no explanation at all." She leaned forward to fuss over Bernie.
"It was the best I could think of at the time," I said. "It's not completely untrue, either."
"You did good," she murmured. "I froze up on you."
"Just being a good tank," I said.
"The best," she said. "This expedition has been awesome on basically every level, but..."
"You're ready to go home?" I asked.
She bobbed her head.
"Same," I said.
The plan we'd sketched out as we walked over to the Incline involved a walk back through Parker, then north toward Aurora to find whatever further Materials we could before we ran out of time.
Good plan. Efficient. Productive.
Exhausting.
As we started the long walk down, I leaned over and said, "You want to just catch a bus back to the light rail station?"
Lena exhaled. "God, yes."
After that, the only thing we used our phones for was to find the nearest bus stop. I don't know if the suburbanites whose houses we trudged past thought we were there to rob them or not, because seeing their expressions would've required me to drag my eyes up from the sidewalks anywhere but at an intersection.
It did punch through my haze that part of why we'd gotten dirty looks was probably the fact we'd been swaying our phones around like we were filming. People disliked that, the same as they got weirded out by smart glasses – which Lena had been wearing until we sat down at Kurosawa. It hadn't come up much in the city, not because people didn't think we were weird, but because city people respond to weirdness by ignoring it even more aggressively than they do normalcy.
At some point, I figured I should share that revelation with Lena. Some later point. Neither of us felt up for conversation. Something to bring up on the light rail trip home, perhaps, if neither of us fell asleep.
Why had the encounter with the jogger taken so much out of us? The thought of our Third Eye powers being exposed to the world made me break out in a cold sweat, but why? It was nothing we weren't planning to reveal, was it?
Well, was it? We kept making excuses to put the revelation off.
I didn't dwell on the reasons why. Then I started to wonder if Third Eye was somehow dragging my attention away from thinking about it.
I pushed that worry away as well. When we'd discovered that the game conferred real, measurable powers, I'd sort of consigned my fears about it manipulating my mind to my metaphorical recycle bin. If I fished them back out, it meant questioning everything I experienced. While that might be philosophically interesting – also, terrifying – it was useless when it came to guiding my actions.
Almost useless. If I doubted my ability to think clearly because Third Eye might cloud my mind, getting a non-player's take became even more valuable.
I started tapping out an AutoCorrect heavy text to Zhizhi to check if she wanted to film our evening expedition. I hadn't finished by the time we reached the bus stop.
I really needed that BlueTooth keyboard.
As we sat down, Lena eyed my phone. "Who're you texting?"
"Zhizhi," I said.
She watched me struggle for a moment. It didn't speed up my texting.
"I'd offer to take over," she said, "but my phone is fucked."
"We really will need to get you a new one," I said.
"We really can't afford it," she said.
"In for a penny," I began.
"In for, like, three hundred bucks?" She rubbed her eyes. "I thought today was a triumph, but... ugh."
I patted her hand. "It has been."
"Yeah?"
"Of course," I said. "In terms of the players we know, you're officially at the top of the leaderboard now."
"How do you figure?" Her eyes widened. "Oh, you mean in how many Reactants I have?"
I nodded. I was on one each of Air and Water. Erin had Earth, Fire, and Water. The most anyone else on the wiki team had posted was four units, spread across one to three Reactants. (I'd been at four total myself, before I squandered two of my Water, not realizing I wouldn't get it back if I used it as a Material rather than a Reactant.)
Between her Fire and her Air, Lena's total had hit five. A new record!
Sort of. Since Matt hadn't shared his totals, he might have more, and a couple of people who'd chosen to share their stats on the wiki claimed to have as much as seven. Then there was Omar Jeffries, who supposedly had five of each core Reactant – five he was willing to spare, plus any he was keeping for himself. I suspected Mask had a lot, too, although they might have had as little as a single unit of an especially strange one. After all, the phrasing of Omar's post about prizes made a point of calling out "core" Reactants, which seemed to imply the existence of non-core ones.
Still, whether the devs had intended it or not, Erin had turned Third Eye into one of those games that tracks both a worldwide leaderboard and one for your friends list. And on the latter list, Lena now occupied pole position.
She beamed about it, glowing with no need for a filter. Only a flickering glow, though; after a second she grabbed my arm. "You're not upset, are you?"
I drew back. "Why?"
"You're the one with the seas and skies avatar," she said. "I've sort of stolen your thunder."
I laughed. "You're the one who wants to go compete in the tournament! Besides, I still think we're supposed to get all four Reactants before we can start playing the full game."
"Okay." She squinted at my face. She could break out a microscope and she wouldn't find a hint that I resented her getting more Air than me.
"Tell you what," I said. "You let me take the next Reactant we find and we'll call it even."
"Deal!" She relaxed and her grasp on my arm turned into hugging it.
I was about to rest my head against hers when my phone rang. I glanced at the name. Zhizhi. Had I sent my incomplete text while I wasn't paying attention? I picked up and greeted her.
"Yeah, hi, whatever," she said.
Lena and I were seated close enough, and Zhizhi spoke loudly enough, that we both sat up straight.
"What's her deal?" Lena muttered.
We didn't have to wait to find out. Zhizhi asked, "Where are you two?"
"Parker," I said, "scouting. Why?"
A moment's hesitation. I'd swear I could hear a muffled groan. "I swear, Cameron, if you're screwing with me right now –"
"Zhizhi, calm down," I said. "I don't even know enough about what's got you worked up to screw with you. Why do you care if we're in Parker?"
"Because," Zhizhi said, "the station just got a 'crank call' about an angel appearing over a park down there."
For one absurd moment, I thought it was Mask.
When my eyes adjusted to the sunlight, though, I recognized the jogger who'd stared at us when we passed him on the way up the Incline. Which wasn't worse, but certainly stranger.
He had his hands on his thighs and his shoulders moved with hard breaths. I realized he must've sprinted back up. About the time I turned to look at him, he caught enough of his breath to yell, "You kids all right?"
"We're good," I called. I refused to let myself get annoyed at being called a kid, even though I wasn't sure this guy was even older than us. I supposed he'd seen our phones in our faces and Bernie slung over Lena's back and assumed we were younger than our actual ages. Fair enough. And he had run back to check on us. "Thanks."
He hesitated and looked around. "You're, uh, not supposed to leave the path."
"Right, sorry." I scratched the back of my neck. "I guess we just kind of kept going."
Now that we'd been called on our transgression, I felt my face and chest flush. I clambered back up to the summit of the Incline and reached back to haul Lena up over the lip of the little clearing there.
The jogger frowned at me, then he really frowned at Lena.
She brushed at her skirt. "What? Have I got something on me?"
"No," he said. He shook his head. "Not any more."
Lena shot me a glance.
My face was frozen in the same polite, apologetic smile I'd put on a moment ago. I locked it in, because it was exactly what I needed right now.
I could guess what must've happened. We knew from what Zhizhi experienced at the construction site that non-players could perceive Third Eye phenomena in the moment one of us collected a Reactant.
It was one thing for a non-player to do that after we'd shared the game's secrets with her. Quite another for someone who'd probably never even heard of Third Eye to stumble across the sight of Lena as her flaming avatar, much less the two of us walking into the sky.
"Oh, you saw that?" Nervous laugh from yours truly. "Now I know why you looked at us like we were crazy on the way up."
"It kind of looked like the lady was on fire," he said. "She didn't seem in pain, so I wasn't sure what to think, but then you went all the way up there and fell, and I had to check."
"Good of you," I said. "Sorry we gave you a scare, man. We were trying out some new special effects."
He blinked. "Special effects."
"For our channel?" I cocked my head. "We're YouTubers. Not the asshole kind, I promise!"
"So she wasn't – she didn't –"
"Fly?" I laughed again, less nervously, and put my arm around Lena's shoulders. "Oh man, imagine how many views we could get if we could pull that off for real!"
"Right?" Lena's attempt to chuckle sounded less convincing than mine, either because she wasn't as good of an actor or because I was hearing what I sounded like in my head, not in reality. She gave me a playful elbow in the ribs. "I guess the wire work looked pretty good."
"Wire work," the jogger said. "That's... Very good. Yeah."
"Just imagine how it'll look after post-processing," I said.
He took a while chewing on his response. His mouth worked it over like he had a piece of gum. Or else he really did have gum to chew.
Either way, I saw the moment he decided to believe me. His shoulders sank infinitesimally, even as he leaned back and straightened up. I say he believed me, but it was more like he let me convince him not to think too hard about it. My explanation? Bullshit. He? Could guess as much.
But what else was he supposed to think?
"I'm sure your video will be really cool," he said. "You shouldn't stray off the path when you're filming, though."
"We won't," I said. "We just didn't notice we'd hit the end. Sorry again."
Lena toed the dirt. "Yeah, sorry."
"Well, I guess it's fine. I better get back." He started toward the steps down. He tensed to resume his jog, but hesitated and glanced over his shoulder. "Where can I see it?"
"It?" I blinked.
His lips compressed. "The video."
My skin flushed again. At least we were doing good impressions of clueless influencers. "Oh!"
I glanced at Lena, but she was still studying the dirt at her feet.
"Ashbird," I said. I patted her shoulder. "It's her channel. The Magnificent Ashbird. But, the channel is just called Ashbird."
"I'll check it out," the jogger said.
Lena raised her voice from a mumble for the first time since she'd realized we had a live audience. She flashed her victory sign and her streamer's grin. "Always great to make a new fan!"
The jogger chuckled, and it didn't even sound very forced. Then he took off running.
As soon as he was out of sight, Lena and I sagged against each other.
We must've been pretty wiped out, because after I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, I found Bernie's plushie form in my arms and the half-felt bulk of his Third Eye form curling around both Lena and I. I scratched his back and he hummed happily.
That was enough to put a smile on Lena's face, which did the same for mine.
"I think," she said, "we should save the practice for somewhere less busy."
"I'm with that." I gave Bernie a squeeze. "How much do you think that guy saw?"
"Too much," Lena said. "Do you think it was a mistake to point him to the channel?"
"I doubt he's going to bother searching up the YouTube channel of a couple of 'kids,'" I said. "Even if he did, does it matter?"
"It puts him on the track of looking at Third Eye stuff," Lena said.
"If he watches your videos, he's going to see the same 'special effects' we were showing off today," I said. "Worst case scenario, he's convinced the game gave us real magic and gets a couple weeks head start on us telling everybody as much. Second-worst, he's convinced we're doing everything on the videos with practical effects and conning the players into thinking it's in-game. So what? Anybody who's experimented with Third Eye is going to know we're showing off real techniques."
"I guess it's got to be better than no explanation at all." She leaned forward to fuss over Bernie.
"It was the best I could think of at the time," I said. "It's not completely untrue, either."
"You did good," she murmured. "I froze up on you."
"Just being a good tank," I said.
"The best," she said. "This expedition has been awesome on basically every level, but..."
"You're ready to go home?" I asked.
She bobbed her head.
"Same," I said.
The plan we'd sketched out as we walked over to the Incline involved a walk back through Parker, then north toward Aurora to find whatever further Materials we could before we ran out of time.
Good plan. Efficient. Productive.
Exhausting.
As we started the long walk down, I leaned over and said, "You want to just catch a bus back to the light rail station?"
Lena exhaled. "God, yes."
After that, the only thing we used our phones for was to find the nearest bus stop. I don't know if the suburbanites whose houses we trudged past thought we were there to rob them or not, because seeing their expressions would've required me to drag my eyes up from the sidewalks anywhere but at an intersection.
It did punch through my haze that part of why we'd gotten dirty looks was probably the fact we'd been swaying our phones around like we were filming. People disliked that, the same as they got weirded out by smart glasses – which Lena had been wearing until we sat down at Kurosawa. It hadn't come up much in the city, not because people didn't think we were weird, but because city people respond to weirdness by ignoring it even more aggressively than they do normalcy.
At some point, I figured I should share that revelation with Lena. Some later point. Neither of us felt up for conversation. Something to bring up on the light rail trip home, perhaps, if neither of us fell asleep.
Why had the encounter with the jogger taken so much out of us? The thought of our Third Eye powers being exposed to the world made me break out in a cold sweat, but why? It was nothing we weren't planning to reveal, was it?
Well, was it? We kept making excuses to put the revelation off.
I didn't dwell on the reasons why. Then I started to wonder if Third Eye was somehow dragging my attention away from thinking about it.
I pushed that worry away as well. When we'd discovered that the game conferred real, measurable powers, I'd sort of consigned my fears about it manipulating my mind to my metaphorical recycle bin. If I fished them back out, it meant questioning everything I experienced. While that might be philosophically interesting – also, terrifying – it was useless when it came to guiding my actions.
Almost useless. If I doubted my ability to think clearly because Third Eye might cloud my mind, getting a non-player's take became even more valuable.
I started tapping out an AutoCorrect heavy text to Zhizhi to check if she wanted to film our evening expedition. I hadn't finished by the time we reached the bus stop.
I really needed that BlueTooth keyboard.
As we sat down, Lena eyed my phone. "Who're you texting?"
"Zhizhi," I said.
She watched me struggle for a moment. It didn't speed up my texting.
"I'd offer to take over," she said, "but my phone is fucked."
"We really will need to get you a new one," I said.
"We really can't afford it," she said.
"In for a penny," I began.
"In for, like, three hundred bucks?" She rubbed her eyes. "I thought today was a triumph, but... ugh."
I patted her hand. "It has been."
"Yeah?"
"Of course," I said. "In terms of the players we know, you're officially at the top of the leaderboard now."
"How do you figure?" Her eyes widened. "Oh, you mean in how many Reactants I have?"
I nodded. I was on one each of Air and Water. Erin had Earth, Fire, and Water. The most anyone else on the wiki team had posted was four units, spread across one to three Reactants. (I'd been at four total myself, before I squandered two of my Water, not realizing I wouldn't get it back if I used it as a Material rather than a Reactant.)
Between her Fire and her Air, Lena's total had hit five. A new record!
Sort of. Since Matt hadn't shared his totals, he might have more, and a couple of people who'd chosen to share their stats on the wiki claimed to have as much as seven. Then there was Omar Jeffries, who supposedly had five of each core Reactant – five he was willing to spare, plus any he was keeping for himself. I suspected Mask had a lot, too, although they might have had as little as a single unit of an especially strange one. After all, the phrasing of Omar's post about prizes made a point of calling out "core" Reactants, which seemed to imply the existence of non-core ones.
Still, whether the devs had intended it or not, Erin had turned Third Eye into one of those games that tracks both a worldwide leaderboard and one for your friends list. And on the latter list, Lena now occupied pole position.
She beamed about it, glowing with no need for a filter. Only a flickering glow, though; after a second she grabbed my arm. "You're not upset, are you?"
I drew back. "Why?"
"You're the one with the seas and skies avatar," she said. "I've sort of stolen your thunder."
I laughed. "You're the one who wants to go compete in the tournament! Besides, I still think we're supposed to get all four Reactants before we can start playing the full game."
"Okay." She squinted at my face. She could break out a microscope and she wouldn't find a hint that I resented her getting more Air than me.
"Tell you what," I said. "You let me take the next Reactant we find and we'll call it even."
"Deal!" She relaxed and her grasp on my arm turned into hugging it.
I was about to rest my head against hers when my phone rang. I glanced at the name. Zhizhi. Had I sent my incomplete text while I wasn't paying attention? I picked up and greeted her.
"Yeah, hi, whatever," she said.
Lena and I were seated close enough, and Zhizhi spoke loudly enough, that we both sat up straight.
"What's her deal?" Lena muttered.
We didn't have to wait to find out. Zhizhi asked, "Where are you two?"
"Parker," I said, "scouting. Why?"
A moment's hesitation. I'd swear I could hear a muffled groan. "I swear, Cameron, if you're screwing with me right now –"
"Zhizhi, calm down," I said. "I don't even know enough about what's got you worked up to screw with you. Why do you care if we're in Parker?"
"Because," Zhizhi said, "the station just got a 'crank call' about an angel appearing over a park down there."
Chapter 51: Bad News
Chapter 51: Bad News
I hunched over the back of Miguel's couch, eyes once again locked to his TV.
Once again, I watched a video of Lena's wings ablaze in the air.
For the first time, though, it didn't put a smile on my face.
Not because the video quality was shit, although it was. The raws from our first video, before we had any idea what we were doing, had looked better than this. At least we knew how to hold our phones steady. Even if the cinematography in this video had been perfect, you could hardly see anything because it had been shot from so far away. Don't even get me started on the inane commentary. It just went, "Oh my God! Oh my God!" on repeat.
The video repeated, too. A ninety second clip.
Every time it snapped back to the start of the loop, Lena, seated on the couch in front of me with Bernie on her lap, clenched her fists.
"I think we've seen enough," I said.
Zhizhi tapped something on her laptop and the loop stopped, but that left a frozen image of a miniature Lena, wings outstretched, standing atop the Incline. On Miguel's TV I could just barely make out myself in the lower right corner, a cloaked figure who probably would've been odd enough to get a video of my own if I wasn't sharing it with a winged, fiery shape.
After we got the call from Zhizhi, we had agreed to meet here. I'd called Erin, since none of us wanted to leave a text record. She'd said she was going to talk to both Donica and Matt, but only the former had accompanied her to Miguel's. Then I'd left Benji a voicemail, telling him something had come up and we might be out late, but not to worry.
If he followed my suggestion, he'd be the only one of us not worrying.
Zhizhi paced by her laptop. Donica drummed her fingers on the arm of her wheelchair. I gripped the back of the couch hard enough to make the leather creak. Erin fidgeted on her seat.
Worst of all, Lena didn't fidget. Apart from the way her hands flexed when the video looped, she looked more still than when she slept.
Miguel was the only one who could pass for calm. I knew better, though. He lit up a cigarette, something he often avoided both when he had company and when he was early in a relationship. And sure, I could've been wrong about him and Zhizhi, or they could've worked out that she didn't mind him smoking. If so, why wasn't his squirrel-shaped ashtray lending a spot of character to the austere coffee table?
Nope, every last one of us was fretting in our own way.
The worry curdled in my stomach, a different feeling from the acute panic of a confrontation with the creature or the mix of fear and rage I'd felt when we faced off with Mask. This reminded me more of creeping through the halls of the construction site, before we understood anything about it.
I nodded – to myself, since I stood behind everyone but Zhizhi and she was looking at her laptop.
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
"Is it?" Lena asked.
I ran my fingers through my hair. A nervous tic, but it pushed my unkempt bangs up into the more flattering style Third Eye gave my avatar. Maybe that gave me a jolt of confidence, or maybe it reminded me of a detail I thought might be important. "Actually, I think so."
Lena, Miguel, and Erin craned their necks to look at me. Zhizhi turned to us, and Donica gave her chair an eighth of a turn.
"Zhizhi," I said, "did anybody at 9News change their mind about running this footage?"
She snorted. "The only reason I even knew we got it is because one of the anchors and one of the producers were laughing about it."
"I checked all the local newscasts," Erin said. "None of them ran a story about a winged figure."
"So for now," I said, "it's being treated as a hoax."
"By mainstream outlets, yes," Erin said. "The original footage is already up on TikTok."
"How many views?" Lena asked.
"Any is too many," Erin said.
"I'm just going to be pissed if this goes more viral than the videos on my actual channel." Lena tried to laugh but didn't quite manage it.
Erin smiled anyway. "Nowhere near as popular as that. So far, it's only connected with the poster's friends, and a few friends of friends."
The poster was a woman with the handle Carol_homebody. Not the jogger we'd talked to, thankfully. He knew who we were, right down to the name of Lena's channel, and if he'd taken a video of us, he'd have had a much clearer picture. News stations might not have laughed it off.
"It better stay that way," Lena muttered.
I agreed. For all kinds of reasons.
"I've looked through the rest of her posts," Erin said, "as well as her presence on other socials. She isn't terribly active, but she's mentioned cryptids here and there. Not claiming to have seen them, of course, just expressing interest. I suppose this is being taken as more of the same."
"My bosses didn't even get as far as a background check," Zhizhi said, "but if they had, that would've killed any chance of the story running."
Erin frowned. "You could find posts on my socials expressing interest in cryptids."
"Sure," Zhizhi said. "Who doesn't love Bigfoot? People picking which news stories to run after they get sent a grainy ninety second phone video, that's who. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm just saying it's true."
"Which is good for us," I said. "Nobody wants to ruin this lady's reputation, we just want to figure out if we need to go public yet or not."
"What do you think, Cam?" Lena asked.
I reached over the couch and squeezed her shoulder. "This hasn't forced our hand. There's nothing in that video linking you or I to the people in it. Hell. It's not even a clear enough picture to link to our videos. Think about it. We came down the Incline a few minutes after this was taken, right? The lady who shot the video was probably still poking around. We may have even passed her on the way down, and she didn't give us a second look."
"I think I agree," Erin said. "Zhizhi tells me you want to make the announcement at the tournament?"
"That was the plan," Lena said. "No, dammit. Still is the plan."
"Ah." Erin pressed her fingers together. "I suppose it makes sense."
"It does." Donica hadn't said more than "hi" since she arrived, so the sound of her voice made me start. Erin, too.
I said, "I thought so, too, but I'm glad you brought it up. What exactly do you think we're waiting for?"
"I think we've just had a very good demonstration." Donica waved at Miguel's TV. "This is what it looks like when you go to the public and tell them magic is real. You become a laughingstock."
"It doesn't seem very fair," Erin said. "They're treating this lady like a pariah, and all she did was send a video of what she actually saw."
"This is too important to care about what's fair," Donica said.
Erin eyed the medical boot on Donica's ankle, and the wheelchair. She murmured, "Yeah."
"Which also means," Miguel said, "it is important enough to not blow accidentally."
Nods all around.
"We've gotta be more careful," Lena said.
"You're not to blame," he said. "All you did was walk up a trail. How were you to know you would find a Reactant?"
"Still," I said, "we can't risk scouting in public places."
"It would be better at night," Erin said.
"Then we've gotta deal with Mask." Lena punched her palm. "Which is fine for me and Cam. We owe that bastard some payback, and I've got a whole new Air to deliver it with. It's no good if anybody scouts on their own, though."
"We'll just have to make certain we don't go alone," Erin said. "I was hoping to talk to Mr. Green about setting up a rotation with the DU players, but he must've been busy this afternoon. Something to set up over the weekend, then."
Zhizhi raised an eyebrow. "Are we assuming this Mask character is just hanging around town, waiting to ambush the wiki team?"
"I'm not sure he cares about the wiki one way or another," Lena said. "It seemed like he knew me from my channel."
"You're all in on the lurking part, though?" Zhizhi asked.
"We saw them around a couple of times before the actual challenge," I said.
Erin rubbed her arm. "Creepy."
"Lil' bit." Lena shrugged, and it only looked somewhat forced. "It only matters if we travel in small enough groups we can't beat him, though."
Donica sighed. "Does it actually matter at all?"
Everyone frowned at her.
She rolled herself to face us and crossed her arms.
"First," she said, "you mentioned a challenge. Do you even know if there would have been a fight if you'd refused it?"
"No." Lena reached over and stroked Bernie's head. I realized I had yet another reason to be glad he'd come through okay. If he hadn't, Lena would never have stopped blaming herself.
"Second," Donica said, "perhaps one of you loses. Perhaps a whole team does, if 'Mask' is so much better than you at the game."
Lena glared at her. "He's got a really weird Reactant, or Material, that's all. Now that I know what to expect –"
"You'll probably win." Donica waved her off. "Let's say you don't, though. How awful. You've lost a PVP match in a PVP game. I get that it's not what any of us are into. Better than any of you, I get that you don't want to lose your XP. Even so, don't you think you're treating this a bit too seriously?"
I almost caught myself before my eyes flicked to Lena.
"Almost" didn't cut it.
Donica caught my expression. Her lips pressed together. "Or is there something you haven't told us?"
I hunched over the back of Miguel's couch, eyes once again locked to his TV.
Once again, I watched a video of Lena's wings ablaze in the air.
For the first time, though, it didn't put a smile on my face.
Not because the video quality was shit, although it was. The raws from our first video, before we had any idea what we were doing, had looked better than this. At least we knew how to hold our phones steady. Even if the cinematography in this video had been perfect, you could hardly see anything because it had been shot from so far away. Don't even get me started on the inane commentary. It just went, "Oh my God! Oh my God!" on repeat.
The video repeated, too. A ninety second clip.
Every time it snapped back to the start of the loop, Lena, seated on the couch in front of me with Bernie on her lap, clenched her fists.
"I think we've seen enough," I said.
Zhizhi tapped something on her laptop and the loop stopped, but that left a frozen image of a miniature Lena, wings outstretched, standing atop the Incline. On Miguel's TV I could just barely make out myself in the lower right corner, a cloaked figure who probably would've been odd enough to get a video of my own if I wasn't sharing it with a winged, fiery shape.
After we got the call from Zhizhi, we had agreed to meet here. I'd called Erin, since none of us wanted to leave a text record. She'd said she was going to talk to both Donica and Matt, but only the former had accompanied her to Miguel's. Then I'd left Benji a voicemail, telling him something had come up and we might be out late, but not to worry.
If he followed my suggestion, he'd be the only one of us not worrying.
Zhizhi paced by her laptop. Donica drummed her fingers on the arm of her wheelchair. I gripped the back of the couch hard enough to make the leather creak. Erin fidgeted on her seat.
Worst of all, Lena didn't fidget. Apart from the way her hands flexed when the video looped, she looked more still than when she slept.
Miguel was the only one who could pass for calm. I knew better, though. He lit up a cigarette, something he often avoided both when he had company and when he was early in a relationship. And sure, I could've been wrong about him and Zhizhi, or they could've worked out that she didn't mind him smoking. If so, why wasn't his squirrel-shaped ashtray lending a spot of character to the austere coffee table?
Nope, every last one of us was fretting in our own way.
The worry curdled in my stomach, a different feeling from the acute panic of a confrontation with the creature or the mix of fear and rage I'd felt when we faced off with Mask. This reminded me more of creeping through the halls of the construction site, before we understood anything about it.
I nodded – to myself, since I stood behind everyone but Zhizhi and she was looking at her laptop.
"Okay," I said. "Okay."
"Is it?" Lena asked.
I ran my fingers through my hair. A nervous tic, but it pushed my unkempt bangs up into the more flattering style Third Eye gave my avatar. Maybe that gave me a jolt of confidence, or maybe it reminded me of a detail I thought might be important. "Actually, I think so."
Lena, Miguel, and Erin craned their necks to look at me. Zhizhi turned to us, and Donica gave her chair an eighth of a turn.
"Zhizhi," I said, "did anybody at 9News change their mind about running this footage?"
She snorted. "The only reason I even knew we got it is because one of the anchors and one of the producers were laughing about it."
"I checked all the local newscasts," Erin said. "None of them ran a story about a winged figure."
"So for now," I said, "it's being treated as a hoax."
"By mainstream outlets, yes," Erin said. "The original footage is already up on TikTok."
"How many views?" Lena asked.
"Any is too many," Erin said.
"I'm just going to be pissed if this goes more viral than the videos on my actual channel." Lena tried to laugh but didn't quite manage it.
Erin smiled anyway. "Nowhere near as popular as that. So far, it's only connected with the poster's friends, and a few friends of friends."
The poster was a woman with the handle Carol_homebody. Not the jogger we'd talked to, thankfully. He knew who we were, right down to the name of Lena's channel, and if he'd taken a video of us, he'd have had a much clearer picture. News stations might not have laughed it off.
"It better stay that way," Lena muttered.
I agreed. For all kinds of reasons.
"I've looked through the rest of her posts," Erin said, "as well as her presence on other socials. She isn't terribly active, but she's mentioned cryptids here and there. Not claiming to have seen them, of course, just expressing interest. I suppose this is being taken as more of the same."
"My bosses didn't even get as far as a background check," Zhizhi said, "but if they had, that would've killed any chance of the story running."
Erin frowned. "You could find posts on my socials expressing interest in cryptids."
"Sure," Zhizhi said. "Who doesn't love Bigfoot? People picking which news stories to run after they get sent a grainy ninety second phone video, that's who. I'm not saying it's fair, I'm just saying it's true."
"Which is good for us," I said. "Nobody wants to ruin this lady's reputation, we just want to figure out if we need to go public yet or not."
"What do you think, Cam?" Lena asked.
I reached over the couch and squeezed her shoulder. "This hasn't forced our hand. There's nothing in that video linking you or I to the people in it. Hell. It's not even a clear enough picture to link to our videos. Think about it. We came down the Incline a few minutes after this was taken, right? The lady who shot the video was probably still poking around. We may have even passed her on the way down, and she didn't give us a second look."
"I think I agree," Erin said. "Zhizhi tells me you want to make the announcement at the tournament?"
"That was the plan," Lena said. "No, dammit. Still is the plan."
"Ah." Erin pressed her fingers together. "I suppose it makes sense."
"It does." Donica hadn't said more than "hi" since she arrived, so the sound of her voice made me start. Erin, too.
I said, "I thought so, too, but I'm glad you brought it up. What exactly do you think we're waiting for?"
"I think we've just had a very good demonstration." Donica waved at Miguel's TV. "This is what it looks like when you go to the public and tell them magic is real. You become a laughingstock."
"It doesn't seem very fair," Erin said. "They're treating this lady like a pariah, and all she did was send a video of what she actually saw."
"This is too important to care about what's fair," Donica said.
Erin eyed the medical boot on Donica's ankle, and the wheelchair. She murmured, "Yeah."
"Which also means," Miguel said, "it is important enough to not blow accidentally."
Nods all around.
"We've gotta be more careful," Lena said.
"You're not to blame," he said. "All you did was walk up a trail. How were you to know you would find a Reactant?"
"Still," I said, "we can't risk scouting in public places."
"It would be better at night," Erin said.
"Then we've gotta deal with Mask." Lena punched her palm. "Which is fine for me and Cam. We owe that bastard some payback, and I've got a whole new Air to deliver it with. It's no good if anybody scouts on their own, though."
"We'll just have to make certain we don't go alone," Erin said. "I was hoping to talk to Mr. Green about setting up a rotation with the DU players, but he must've been busy this afternoon. Something to set up over the weekend, then."
Zhizhi raised an eyebrow. "Are we assuming this Mask character is just hanging around town, waiting to ambush the wiki team?"
"I'm not sure he cares about the wiki one way or another," Lena said. "It seemed like he knew me from my channel."
"You're all in on the lurking part, though?" Zhizhi asked.
"We saw them around a couple of times before the actual challenge," I said.
Erin rubbed her arm. "Creepy."
"Lil' bit." Lena shrugged, and it only looked somewhat forced. "It only matters if we travel in small enough groups we can't beat him, though."
Donica sighed. "Does it actually matter at all?"
Everyone frowned at her.
She rolled herself to face us and crossed her arms.
"First," she said, "you mentioned a challenge. Do you even know if there would have been a fight if you'd refused it?"
"No." Lena reached over and stroked Bernie's head. I realized I had yet another reason to be glad he'd come through okay. If he hadn't, Lena would never have stopped blaming herself.
"Second," Donica said, "perhaps one of you loses. Perhaps a whole team does, if 'Mask' is so much better than you at the game."
Lena glared at her. "He's got a really weird Reactant, or Material, that's all. Now that I know what to expect –"
"You'll probably win." Donica waved her off. "Let's say you don't, though. How awful. You've lost a PVP match in a PVP game. I get that it's not what any of us are into. Better than any of you, I get that you don't want to lose your XP. Even so, don't you think you're treating this a bit too seriously?"
I almost caught myself before my eyes flicked to Lena.
"Almost" didn't cut it.
Donica caught my expression. Her lips pressed together. "Or is there something you haven't told us?"
Chapter 52: Incentive Structure
Chapter 52: Incentive Structure
Donica might have lost Third Eye access, but she still possessed a potent evil eye.
I tried not to squirm under it.
"There's something I'm not sure we should tell you," I said. "We're not positive it's a thing, everyone's got enough worries on their plates, and we're all being cautious already. It just seems like fear mongering."
"I suspect I already know," Erin said, "But please, tell us. I'd hate to think we'd missed something important."
Of course she'd figured it out. How could I have imagined Lena and I would beat the resident stathead when it came to recognizing patterns in data?
To Lena, I said, "You wanna go, or shall I?"
"Go for it," she said.
I nodded. I rubbed my hands.
I could say what I liked about my reasons, but ultimately, I suspected I hadn't said anything because vocalizing the fear made it feel more real.
Too late to stop now.
Of course, I had to figure out where to start.
At the beginning felt right. Erin would know all of this, but the others might not.
"Mask is pretty distinctive," I said. "Unless there's something even weirder going on than usual for Third Eye, which is saying a lot, we can track where they've been invading since people started reporting them."
"Before we go any further," Zhizhi said, "you and Lena keep using different pronouns for Mask. You don't know if they're male or female?"
"Depends on which of us you ask," I said.
"I don't know," Lena said. "But I know, you know?"
I pressed my lips together. I didn't say, "AlephLambda," because we both knew I was thinking it.
"As hard as it might be to believe, I've been wrong before." Lena tossed her hair. "Seriously, though, the dude is like six foot six. And rake me over the coals for stereotyping if you want, but the specific kind of edgelord he is? I've seen girls do all sorts of cringey shit, but I've only ever seen guys embarrass themselves in that specific way."
A statement which didn't make me want to argue about it less.
"I don't care if the asshole is from Mars or Venus or fucking Jupiter," Donica snapped. "Just pick something and get to the point."
Which, once again, did not make me want to argue less. I just barely managed to realize I'd crossed the line from principled to petulant. "Fine. For consistency's sake, I'll go with 'him.'"
"Thank you," Donica said. "God. Now, will you please enlighten us as to what 'his' oh-so-troubling pattern is?"
I felt partly responsible for Donica getting hurt. If we'd been more cautious about going back to the construction site, or more skilled fighting the creature, she wouldn't have been in a wheelchair and out of the Third Eye beta. Even before that, we'd bonded over our first unnerving visit to the construction site.
All of which was to say, I'd sort of let myself forget how much we tended to rub each other the wrong way.
To hell with rubbing. Time to rip a scab off.
I locked eyes with her and said, "He started off invading solo players. Judging from what happened to Lena, he still does. So why are the only recent reports about him from groups?"
Donica held her glare for a moment. Then the implication sank in and she sort of shrank into her chair. Her voice sounded hoarse. "What exactly are you saying? You think he's murdering the people he defeats?"
Turned out, the scab had multiple layers.
Lena and I had both seen the pattern, both worried about it, but we hadn't said the "M" word aloud. Talk about making it feel more real.
Until Erin said, "He is almost certainly not."
I spun to look at her, and I wasn't the only one.
Too many of us at once. She tried and failed to smile with the pressure on. She mumbled, "Or, at least, that isn't what I got from the data."
"How do you figure?" Lena asked.
"First," Erin said, "it's possible this Mask person is only interested in challenging fights, and no longer finds most solo matches to be such. Whereas The Magnificent Ashbird is far from an ordinary player, and might have been compelling to face off with on her own."
"Makes sense," Lena said. From my angle, I couldn't see her flash a grin, but I heard it in the tone of her voice. "I am pretty awesome."
"You are," Erin said brightly. Then she turned the brightness down about ninety nine percent. "It's an explanation for the pattern, and I certainly hope it's correct."
Miguel puffed on his cigarette. It had burned down almost to the filter, either because he'd been caught up in the conversation or because he didn't have an ashtray handy. He held it away from his face and said, "Because the other explanation you suspect is not so optimistic?"
Erin lowered her eyes. "I'm afraid so."
"Not murder, though?" Zhizhi asked. She sounded the least disturbed by the word of any of us. Because she wasn't a player and thus, perhaps, not a target? Or because she worked at a newsroom and if it bled, it led?
"Not murder," Erin said. "At least there's that."
"You sound pretty confident," Zhizhi said.
"You have to understand, I've looked at a lot of data about Third Eye. Just this afternoon, I spent some time checking if reports of various paranormal events were up since the beta started. To see if what happened to Cam and Lena was typical, yes? They are up, it turns out, although not so dramatically I can rule out it simply being noise. I think our perception of how many players have found even one Reactant is skewed. Most people still just have Materials." Erin's hands fidgeted on her lap as she spoke.
I knew she was talking around the subject, but talking around it sounded pretty good to me, so I made no effort to hurry her. Neither did anyone else.
Finally, she said, "One thing I have not seen anywhere is a report of an unexplained death that looked Third Eye related. From what you've told us and what was in the reports, Mask uses a very distinctive form of attack. I'm not sure what it would do to someone with no HP, but if it really could hurt them, it seems like it would be... well, messy."
I thought about those rapid, tiny pinpricks Mask had peppered me with. Bernie grumbled on the couch and I thought of the hole Mask had put through him.
I really wished I hadn't thought of either, and shuddered. "That checks out."
Erin's head bobbed.
Zhizhi leaned against Miguel's TV. "My understanding is that murderers try to hide the bodies."
"Try, yes," Erin said. "If Mask is invading full time while traveling around the country – around the continent, even –, you're talking about a lot of bodies. It's possible, I admit, and it's also possible that I just don't have access to reports with the, ah, gory details."
She offered up a pause and a weak smile. Only Donica and I chuckled.
"In all seriousness," Erin said, "I simply don't get 'murderer' from this pattern. What would be the point?"
"Silencing witnesses?" Zhizhi suggested.
The rest of Erin's smile disappeared. "Well. Maybe."
"A guy like that wouldn't want to silence anybody," Lena said. She glanced back at me. "You agree, right, Cam? What's the point of putting on that whole getup if you're not leaving somebody to talk about it?"
I nodded. "Yeah. His costume disguises his identity, but you could do that with a ski mask. You cosplay your avatar because you want somebody to see it."
"Besides," Lena said. "Witnesses to what? Playing a game a way some of us don't think is cool? Like, I admit, it scared the shit out of me, and that was obviously what he was going for to some extent, but if I hadn't been worried about Bernie, I think I would've just treated it like when Matt invaded me. I'm not even sure it's a crime."
"I suspect you could get somebody booked for assault," Donica said. "Or at least menacing. How a jury would respond, I really have no idea."
"Any half-decent defense lawyer would just dig up the example of Assassin," Zhizhi said. "You guys know that one?"
Erin, Donica, and I nodded. Miguel inclined his head with only a hint of a smirk. He'd earned far more. From what I understood, he'd twice won his college's semester-long Assassin's Guild; I'd made it as far as the final four one year, but the prize had always eluded me.
Lena looked back and forth between us. "What the hell? Does everybody here know a game except me?"
"It's basically tag for college students," I said. "You sign up and get a name you're supposed to 'kill,' and somebody else gets your name. You have to hit your target with a toy weapon, like a plastic lightsaber or a nerf gun, to 'kill' them, but you can't let anyone else see you. If you succeed, you get their targets added to your list and it goes until one player remains."
Lena stared up at me. "I have never regretted doing online college more than in this moment."
"Not gonna lie," I said, "it was pretty great."
It was also not dissimilar to the PVP element of the Third Eye beta. In-world PVP in the real world, combined with player elimination.
You know. Similar aside from the life-changing, world-changing magic.
Which, as far as we'd seen so far, could only make us safer.
I frowned.
If Albie, as AlephLambda, had explained Third Eye PVP to me in those terms way back on the first night, would I have looked at it differently? Maybe not, because it still retained from invasion the obnoxiousness of PVP intruding on the aspects of the game I'd actually signed up for.
If the original Kickstarter had described it in those terms, though?
Hell. I might've ended up with the same five thousand dollar regrets Lena did.
"It's the same principle," Zhizhi said. "If people opt into the game, they agree that at any time, if another player catches them alone, they can tag them to score a point."
"A defense that would work better," Donica said, "if we'd known there would be a PVP element when we signed up."
Maybe because the Assassin comparison had made at least the conceptual appeal of Third Eye's PVP model click for me, I spoke up. "Fair enough when the beta first started, but it's been running for a while and we all know invasion is part of the game by now. Besides, I bet it was in the EULA somewhere. If nothing else, it would be pretty tough to make a legal claim that you didn't accept the possibility and then turn around and keep playing."
Donica tapped her finger on her leg. "Well, that isn't my problem anymore, now is it?"
I winced.
Lena either noticed or anticipated my reaction, because she twisted around to glare at Donica. "The point is, there's just not enough risk of legal action for somebody to go around killing people to shut them up. Especially somebody who couldn't be identified through his mask and voice changer!"
Donica shrugged. "So he's on a power trip. A disturbed, bitter person who muddles through life with no agency and blames everyone else for it. Then when he gets a little taste of power, he snaps and uses it to lash out. Spree shooter behavior."
That explanation fit my impression of Mask better, which probably wasn't very charitable of me.
It apparently didn't fit Zhizhi's. Or at least her understanding of the facts. "Ignoring your massive oversimplification for a minute, what he's doing isn't a spree. If he's going around murdering people in secret, that's more like a serial killer. Totally different profile."
"Okay, I'll defer to your expertise." Donica's lips curled up. "I'm sure you've covered a lot of murders in your journalistic career."
Lena would've exploded at that, and maybe I would have, too. Sure would've gotten annoyed.
Zhizhi just got even. "About as many as the murder cases you've worked with that law degree of yours, Ms. Junior Athletic Scout."
"I studied contract law," Donica muttered. From her scowl, though, it was obvious which one of them had scored more points in the exchange.
Miguel cleared his throat.
"All of this speculation about Mask's motives for murder is very interesting," he said. "I seem to recall, however, that Erin wished to explain why she did not think he had such a motive."
Zhizhi shot him a look I couldn't quite parse. After a moment, she said, "My bad."
"Yes," Donica said. "Sorry, Erin. I didn't mean to interrupt."
"It's okay," Erin said. "This is important. I sure don't want to leap to conclusions."
"Still," I said, "you've probably figured out more of this than we've even started thinking about. What do you get from Mask's pattern?"
I motioned like I was asking her to take the floor, which in retrospect was maybe rude when it wasn't my floor. Last time we'd had one of these big gatherings, Lena and I had played host, and I'd sort of gotten used to the role.
It didn't matter. Miguel didn't object, and Erin didn't stand up.
Instead, she pushed her glasses up her nose. "When I looked at the pattern, the first thing I thought of was, what does someone get out of invasion?"
"The thrill of the hunt," Lena said.
"A chance to big himself up over other people," Donica said.
I said, "Ten percent of the target's XP."
"Mmhm!" Erin bobbed her head in my direction. It made her glasses slide back down and she fiddled with them as she spoke. "If you stop thinking of it from a criminal perspective and start thinking of it from a game playing perspective, murder seems obviously counterproductive. Someone you've proven you can defeat might not be interesting to fight if you like the fighting side of the game, but they are someone you can get more XP off of whenever you want. Killing them would just be destroying a resource."
Zhizhi raised her eyebrows.
Lena whistled. "Dang. Ice cold."
"Just... trying to be practical." Erin pressed her fingers together.
"It makes sense to me," I said. Frankly, the dissonance between Erin's cheerful, practiced voice and how ruthless what she'd said sounded? Left me grinning. "How does that explain the pattern of people no longer reporting, though?"
"Oh!" Erin blinked. In the exact same tone of voice, she took the smile right off my face. "No, I don't think it makes any sense for Mask to be killing people. If anything, I think he's abducting them."
Donica might have lost Third Eye access, but she still possessed a potent evil eye.
I tried not to squirm under it.
"There's something I'm not sure we should tell you," I said. "We're not positive it's a thing, everyone's got enough worries on their plates, and we're all being cautious already. It just seems like fear mongering."
"I suspect I already know," Erin said, "But please, tell us. I'd hate to think we'd missed something important."
Of course she'd figured it out. How could I have imagined Lena and I would beat the resident stathead when it came to recognizing patterns in data?
To Lena, I said, "You wanna go, or shall I?"
"Go for it," she said.
I nodded. I rubbed my hands.
I could say what I liked about my reasons, but ultimately, I suspected I hadn't said anything because vocalizing the fear made it feel more real.
Too late to stop now.
Of course, I had to figure out where to start.
At the beginning felt right. Erin would know all of this, but the others might not.
"Mask is pretty distinctive," I said. "Unless there's something even weirder going on than usual for Third Eye, which is saying a lot, we can track where they've been invading since people started reporting them."
"Before we go any further," Zhizhi said, "you and Lena keep using different pronouns for Mask. You don't know if they're male or female?"
"Depends on which of us you ask," I said.
"I don't know," Lena said. "But I know, you know?"
I pressed my lips together. I didn't say, "AlephLambda," because we both knew I was thinking it.
"As hard as it might be to believe, I've been wrong before." Lena tossed her hair. "Seriously, though, the dude is like six foot six. And rake me over the coals for stereotyping if you want, but the specific kind of edgelord he is? I've seen girls do all sorts of cringey shit, but I've only ever seen guys embarrass themselves in that specific way."
A statement which didn't make me want to argue about it less.
"I don't care if the asshole is from Mars or Venus or fucking Jupiter," Donica snapped. "Just pick something and get to the point."
Which, once again, did not make me want to argue less. I just barely managed to realize I'd crossed the line from principled to petulant. "Fine. For consistency's sake, I'll go with 'him.'"
"Thank you," Donica said. "God. Now, will you please enlighten us as to what 'his' oh-so-troubling pattern is?"
I felt partly responsible for Donica getting hurt. If we'd been more cautious about going back to the construction site, or more skilled fighting the creature, she wouldn't have been in a wheelchair and out of the Third Eye beta. Even before that, we'd bonded over our first unnerving visit to the construction site.
All of which was to say, I'd sort of let myself forget how much we tended to rub each other the wrong way.
To hell with rubbing. Time to rip a scab off.
I locked eyes with her and said, "He started off invading solo players. Judging from what happened to Lena, he still does. So why are the only recent reports about him from groups?"
Donica held her glare for a moment. Then the implication sank in and she sort of shrank into her chair. Her voice sounded hoarse. "What exactly are you saying? You think he's murdering the people he defeats?"
Turned out, the scab had multiple layers.
Lena and I had both seen the pattern, both worried about it, but we hadn't said the "M" word aloud. Talk about making it feel more real.
Until Erin said, "He is almost certainly not."
I spun to look at her, and I wasn't the only one.
Too many of us at once. She tried and failed to smile with the pressure on. She mumbled, "Or, at least, that isn't what I got from the data."
"How do you figure?" Lena asked.
"First," Erin said, "it's possible this Mask person is only interested in challenging fights, and no longer finds most solo matches to be such. Whereas The Magnificent Ashbird is far from an ordinary player, and might have been compelling to face off with on her own."
"Makes sense," Lena said. From my angle, I couldn't see her flash a grin, but I heard it in the tone of her voice. "I am pretty awesome."
"You are," Erin said brightly. Then she turned the brightness down about ninety nine percent. "It's an explanation for the pattern, and I certainly hope it's correct."
Miguel puffed on his cigarette. It had burned down almost to the filter, either because he'd been caught up in the conversation or because he didn't have an ashtray handy. He held it away from his face and said, "Because the other explanation you suspect is not so optimistic?"
Erin lowered her eyes. "I'm afraid so."
"Not murder, though?" Zhizhi asked. She sounded the least disturbed by the word of any of us. Because she wasn't a player and thus, perhaps, not a target? Or because she worked at a newsroom and if it bled, it led?
"Not murder," Erin said. "At least there's that."
"You sound pretty confident," Zhizhi said.
"You have to understand, I've looked at a lot of data about Third Eye. Just this afternoon, I spent some time checking if reports of various paranormal events were up since the beta started. To see if what happened to Cam and Lena was typical, yes? They are up, it turns out, although not so dramatically I can rule out it simply being noise. I think our perception of how many players have found even one Reactant is skewed. Most people still just have Materials." Erin's hands fidgeted on her lap as she spoke.
I knew she was talking around the subject, but talking around it sounded pretty good to me, so I made no effort to hurry her. Neither did anyone else.
Finally, she said, "One thing I have not seen anywhere is a report of an unexplained death that looked Third Eye related. From what you've told us and what was in the reports, Mask uses a very distinctive form of attack. I'm not sure what it would do to someone with no HP, but if it really could hurt them, it seems like it would be... well, messy."
I thought about those rapid, tiny pinpricks Mask had peppered me with. Bernie grumbled on the couch and I thought of the hole Mask had put through him.
I really wished I hadn't thought of either, and shuddered. "That checks out."
Erin's head bobbed.
Zhizhi leaned against Miguel's TV. "My understanding is that murderers try to hide the bodies."
"Try, yes," Erin said. "If Mask is invading full time while traveling around the country – around the continent, even –, you're talking about a lot of bodies. It's possible, I admit, and it's also possible that I just don't have access to reports with the, ah, gory details."
She offered up a pause and a weak smile. Only Donica and I chuckled.
"In all seriousness," Erin said, "I simply don't get 'murderer' from this pattern. What would be the point?"
"Silencing witnesses?" Zhizhi suggested.
The rest of Erin's smile disappeared. "Well. Maybe."
"A guy like that wouldn't want to silence anybody," Lena said. She glanced back at me. "You agree, right, Cam? What's the point of putting on that whole getup if you're not leaving somebody to talk about it?"
I nodded. "Yeah. His costume disguises his identity, but you could do that with a ski mask. You cosplay your avatar because you want somebody to see it."
"Besides," Lena said. "Witnesses to what? Playing a game a way some of us don't think is cool? Like, I admit, it scared the shit out of me, and that was obviously what he was going for to some extent, but if I hadn't been worried about Bernie, I think I would've just treated it like when Matt invaded me. I'm not even sure it's a crime."
"I suspect you could get somebody booked for assault," Donica said. "Or at least menacing. How a jury would respond, I really have no idea."
"Any half-decent defense lawyer would just dig up the example of Assassin," Zhizhi said. "You guys know that one?"
Erin, Donica, and I nodded. Miguel inclined his head with only a hint of a smirk. He'd earned far more. From what I understood, he'd twice won his college's semester-long Assassin's Guild; I'd made it as far as the final four one year, but the prize had always eluded me.
Lena looked back and forth between us. "What the hell? Does everybody here know a game except me?"
"It's basically tag for college students," I said. "You sign up and get a name you're supposed to 'kill,' and somebody else gets your name. You have to hit your target with a toy weapon, like a plastic lightsaber or a nerf gun, to 'kill' them, but you can't let anyone else see you. If you succeed, you get their targets added to your list and it goes until one player remains."
Lena stared up at me. "I have never regretted doing online college more than in this moment."
"Not gonna lie," I said, "it was pretty great."
It was also not dissimilar to the PVP element of the Third Eye beta. In-world PVP in the real world, combined with player elimination.
You know. Similar aside from the life-changing, world-changing magic.
Which, as far as we'd seen so far, could only make us safer.
I frowned.
If Albie, as AlephLambda, had explained Third Eye PVP to me in those terms way back on the first night, would I have looked at it differently? Maybe not, because it still retained from invasion the obnoxiousness of PVP intruding on the aspects of the game I'd actually signed up for.
If the original Kickstarter had described it in those terms, though?
Hell. I might've ended up with the same five thousand dollar regrets Lena did.
"It's the same principle," Zhizhi said. "If people opt into the game, they agree that at any time, if another player catches them alone, they can tag them to score a point."
"A defense that would work better," Donica said, "if we'd known there would be a PVP element when we signed up."
Maybe because the Assassin comparison had made at least the conceptual appeal of Third Eye's PVP model click for me, I spoke up. "Fair enough when the beta first started, but it's been running for a while and we all know invasion is part of the game by now. Besides, I bet it was in the EULA somewhere. If nothing else, it would be pretty tough to make a legal claim that you didn't accept the possibility and then turn around and keep playing."
Donica tapped her finger on her leg. "Well, that isn't my problem anymore, now is it?"
I winced.
Lena either noticed or anticipated my reaction, because she twisted around to glare at Donica. "The point is, there's just not enough risk of legal action for somebody to go around killing people to shut them up. Especially somebody who couldn't be identified through his mask and voice changer!"
Donica shrugged. "So he's on a power trip. A disturbed, bitter person who muddles through life with no agency and blames everyone else for it. Then when he gets a little taste of power, he snaps and uses it to lash out. Spree shooter behavior."
That explanation fit my impression of Mask better, which probably wasn't very charitable of me.
It apparently didn't fit Zhizhi's. Or at least her understanding of the facts. "Ignoring your massive oversimplification for a minute, what he's doing isn't a spree. If he's going around murdering people in secret, that's more like a serial killer. Totally different profile."
"Okay, I'll defer to your expertise." Donica's lips curled up. "I'm sure you've covered a lot of murders in your journalistic career."
Lena would've exploded at that, and maybe I would have, too. Sure would've gotten annoyed.
Zhizhi just got even. "About as many as the murder cases you've worked with that law degree of yours, Ms. Junior Athletic Scout."
"I studied contract law," Donica muttered. From her scowl, though, it was obvious which one of them had scored more points in the exchange.
Miguel cleared his throat.
"All of this speculation about Mask's motives for murder is very interesting," he said. "I seem to recall, however, that Erin wished to explain why she did not think he had such a motive."
Zhizhi shot him a look I couldn't quite parse. After a moment, she said, "My bad."
"Yes," Donica said. "Sorry, Erin. I didn't mean to interrupt."
"It's okay," Erin said. "This is important. I sure don't want to leap to conclusions."
"Still," I said, "you've probably figured out more of this than we've even started thinking about. What do you get from Mask's pattern?"
I motioned like I was asking her to take the floor, which in retrospect was maybe rude when it wasn't my floor. Last time we'd had one of these big gatherings, Lena and I had played host, and I'd sort of gotten used to the role.
It didn't matter. Miguel didn't object, and Erin didn't stand up.
Instead, she pushed her glasses up her nose. "When I looked at the pattern, the first thing I thought of was, what does someone get out of invasion?"
"The thrill of the hunt," Lena said.
"A chance to big himself up over other people," Donica said.
I said, "Ten percent of the target's XP."
"Mmhm!" Erin bobbed her head in my direction. It made her glasses slide back down and she fiddled with them as she spoke. "If you stop thinking of it from a criminal perspective and start thinking of it from a game playing perspective, murder seems obviously counterproductive. Someone you've proven you can defeat might not be interesting to fight if you like the fighting side of the game, but they are someone you can get more XP off of whenever you want. Killing them would just be destroying a resource."
Zhizhi raised her eyebrows.
Lena whistled. "Dang. Ice cold."
"Just... trying to be practical." Erin pressed her fingers together.
"It makes sense to me," I said. Frankly, the dissonance between Erin's cheerful, practiced voice and how ruthless what she'd said sounded? Left me grinning. "How does that explain the pattern of people no longer reporting, though?"
"Oh!" Erin blinked. In the exact same tone of voice, she took the smile right off my face. "No, I don't think it makes any sense for Mask to be killing people. If anything, I think he's abducting them."
Chapter 53: Tunnel Access
Chapter 53: Tunnel Access
You know what I really wanted to do after learning that my girlfriend and I fit the extremely narrow demographic profile of people who might be abducted by a shadowy figure with supernatural powers?
If you guessed, "slipping out late at night to creep through a dark, dank hole where the only light came from the screens of our phones with their Third Eye filters turned on?"
Then seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?
Nonetheless, that's exactly what Lena, Miguel, Zhizhi, Bernie, and I were doing.
Our little party hadn't started off festive, and after Erin's explanation, none of us felt much like livening it up. I insisted on riding along while she dropped Donica off and returned to her DU dorm, just in case Mask decided to try nabbing her instead of Lena or I. If he'd considered it, if he was even still in town, the size of our group deterred him.
I dropped Benji another message to let him know we remained both okay and busy, then we piled into Miguel's Prius and made for the tunnel.
The familiar streets looked darker to me, their shadows deeper. Warmer, though, because Lena and I pressed even closer together than usual. Though I couldn't see her wing wrapped around my shoulders, I sure as hell felt it.
Miguel parked in the shopping center over the greenbelt and we strolled down the ramp. Acting casual, or failing to.
We paused outside the entrance. This outer gate remained open and unmarred by signs telling us to stay out. Almost inviting. Unlike the shadows behind it.
Miguel lingered near the back of our party. He drummed his fingers on the railing.
"You sure you want to go back in, man?" Lena asked. "It's fine if you two want to run coms for us, like at the construction site."
"Hey, don't count me in that," Zhizhi said. "Now that you've almost been in the news, I really want to get some decent footage."
I'm sure she meant it as a joke, but only Miguel laughed. I thought it sounded forced, but what do I know?
"I'll be fine," he said. "If we encounter another wall of magical Water, I'm sure Lena and Cameron will be clawing to get to it first."
Lena patted my arm. "Nope. I got the last Reactant, so if we find one it's all Cam's."
"As long as it doesn't attempt to be mine again," Miguel said.
When we hesitated to go in, he raised his phone, flicked on his Third Eye filter, and took the lead.
"How are you going to see with no lights?" I asked Zhizhi.
She hefted her camera and showed me. Through its viewfinder, I saw Bernie in salamander form and Lena aflame, just like through my phone. "We've got the filter cloned to my phone and my camera," Zhizhi said. "Seems to be just as functional as Miguel's version. Too bad we can't snag the powers, too, huh?"
I said, "Yeah," even though I'd started to wonder how much I wanted them.
That was the last anyone said for quite a while. Once we plunged into the darkness, silence felt like a natural accompaniment.
At least it didn't smell like a sewer level. The water in the drainage ditch was crisp runoff, not sewage. I'd say "clean," but I'd seen the stains that snow left after it melted.
In my head, I tried to count our footsteps, if only so I had a sound to pay attention to. I lost track after a few minutes. Too hard to tell what was a step and what was an echo.
I didn't hear anything splashing in the water, as I'd thought I had the last time.
Zhizhi broke the silence. I felt absurdly grateful. She asked, "Did this really used to go all the way to the old mall?"
"So I've been told," Miguel said. We'd first found out about the tunnel because of a story from one of his old gaming buddies. He'd claimed to have snuck into the arcade below the defunct Cinderella City mall and spent evenings playing for free.
Zhizhi shook her head. "I think your friend was pulling your leg. It just seems like a maintenance tunnel to me."
"Are you suggesting someone I met while playing a game where we pretended to be people we were not would lie about a cool story?" Miguel clicked his tongue. "Unthinkable."
Lena frowned. "You sure sounded confident when you told us."
"That," he said, "is because I sure was curious."
Both women chuckled.
I tried to, but I didn't think the hollowness in my voice came from the tunnel's echoes.
We were four tiny lights floating through an inky sea. The darkness pressed in on me. I didn't consider myself claustrophobic. I never had before, anyway. So why did I find it hard to breathe like this?
Because it wasn't the close confines that scared me. It wasn't even the darkness.
It was the person who'd decided to make darkness his calling card.
Maybe it was stupid, but Erin's theory made Mask seem more frightening than if he'd "just" been a murderer. If he was abducting players, first, how? Second, where was he putting them?
Third, what did he do with them when their XP dropped low enough that they fell out of the beta?
It seemed like murder with extra steps. Extra, terrifying steps. Once you added kidnapping to the mix, killing witnesses suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense.
Worse was that Erin was the person who'd pointed out why he'd want to capture other players. Aside from – as much as I hated to admit it – Matt, she was the person I trusted most when it came to sussing out game design. She'd picked up on the incentive structure Mask seemed to be following, and it seemed to make sense.
Did that mean Mask was doing exactly what Third Eye wanted?
I'd occasionally wondered if the game wasn't set up to encourage us to commit minor crimes. My group was either trespassing already, or going to be when we reached the locked gate and climbed around it. If we wanted to find whatever Third Eye resources awaited us down here, we had no choice.
Hell, we'd technically broken, if not a law, at least a park rule when we climbed past the summit of the Rueter-Hess Incline and then fell outside the walking trail. How often did Reactants lie outside the bounds of what we were "supposed" to do?
An accident of the generative algorithm?
Or intentional, a subtle way of driving us apart from normal society?
If Mask was abducting people to drain their XP, he'd gone way beyond minor crimes. Had he gone beyond the behavior Third Eye wanted to incentivize?
It reminded me that we had no idea what the devs were or what they wanted from the game. We joked about aliens, because it seemed so ludicrous. We joked about wizards, because if we didn't laugh we'd have to take the suggestion seriously. Neither category explained what they would get out of gifting – or, well, selling via Kickstarter – working magic to a bunch of gamers.
Or what they would get from eliminating said gamers one by one.
I felt something poke me in the ribs and swung my phone toward it before I realized it was just Lena's finger.
"What the hell?" I gasped.
"I could tell you were catastrophizing," she said.
I gave her a sheepish smile. "Maybe a little."
She shook her head. Her wings, pressed close to her back to fit inside the tunnel, rustled.
A word about our four tiny lights. They all pointed directly at our faces. Until we got deep enough in the tunnel that we couldn't see even a hint of the glow from the highway somewhere outside, we'd agreed not to turn on our phones' lights. Instead, we found our way through Third Eye alone, which showed the tunnel bathed in the glow of Lena's flames.
I was pretty sure we'd done this a few times without thinking about it before we realized the game conferred actual magic. Another thing that should have tipped us off. How did the phone camera know what to layer AR over if there was no light for it to see by?
Another thing I didn't know about the game, but this was just a cool – and in this case useful – bit of incidental wizardry. If I'd still been rationalizing, I think I could have even managed to convince myself it was technical wizardry. Massively boosting the light gain on the camera settings and then using AR to fill in the proper color balance, or basing a full AR version of the environment on a glimpse from when we'd had our lights on.
I no longer had to scramble for excuses for Third Eye's weirdness. Whatever rules it followed, they weren't those of the physical world as I'd understood it two months ago.
The important thing in this case was that everything I saw was what the Third Eye filter showed me. At the construction site, it had included working lights over our heads, even though there shouldn't have been any electricity running. Here, however, it just displayed the tunnel more or less as it was in reality, which meant the only light came from Lena's flames.
Which meant it looked even more like a sewer level in a fantasy game than it already had. If I didn't point my phone in Lena's direction, I'd think I was looking at a tunnel lit by torchlight.
Maybe because that made the experience more gamelike, it put a smile back on my face.
It stayed there until Miguel slowed in front of me and said, "Hm."
"You spot something?" Lena asked.
I panned my phone around trying to catch sight of it, but ended up focusing on Miguel and Zhizhi. The two of them looked out of place in their modern clothes. It struck me as especially cruel that we lost our avatars when we got kicked out of the beta; Miguel, at least, should have appeared in an outfit like mine.
He brushed his hand along the railing. "It isn't what I see that I find strange. It's what I do not."
"What's that?" Zhizhi asked.
"The last time I came to this tunnel, I had to trudge out through freezing water, with cracked ribs and a mild concussion." He spread his fingers wide to encompass the tunnel. "Does that strike anyone as a recipe for making me remember the distance as smaller than it actually is?"
Zhizhi frowned at his seeming nonanswer.
I, more used to how Miguel liked to communicate, got it right away.
So did Lena. "Oh yeah! We've been walking for ages. Where the hell was that locked gate?"
Now, there was a perfectly rational explanation for this. Someone – either a City of Englewood employee who was supposed to be here, or another player who wasn't – had come in, unlocked/picked/broken the lock, as appropriate, and left the gate open. With our narrow and, let's be honest, not a hundred percent accurate to reality viewpoints, we'd wandered through it without noticing.
Remember when I said I was done rationalizing Third Eye?
Without hesitation, without fear of being seen by the outside world, I turned and flicked on my phone's light.
There, in the murk just at the edge of my sight, stood the gate. Closed and locked, just as I remembered it. And about fifty feet behind us.
You know what I really wanted to do after learning that my girlfriend and I fit the extremely narrow demographic profile of people who might be abducted by a shadowy figure with supernatural powers?
If you guessed, "slipping out late at night to creep through a dark, dank hole where the only light came from the screens of our phones with their Third Eye filters turned on?"
Then seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?
Nonetheless, that's exactly what Lena, Miguel, Zhizhi, Bernie, and I were doing.
Our little party hadn't started off festive, and after Erin's explanation, none of us felt much like livening it up. I insisted on riding along while she dropped Donica off and returned to her DU dorm, just in case Mask decided to try nabbing her instead of Lena or I. If he'd considered it, if he was even still in town, the size of our group deterred him.
I dropped Benji another message to let him know we remained both okay and busy, then we piled into Miguel's Prius and made for the tunnel.
The familiar streets looked darker to me, their shadows deeper. Warmer, though, because Lena and I pressed even closer together than usual. Though I couldn't see her wing wrapped around my shoulders, I sure as hell felt it.
Miguel parked in the shopping center over the greenbelt and we strolled down the ramp. Acting casual, or failing to.
We paused outside the entrance. This outer gate remained open and unmarred by signs telling us to stay out. Almost inviting. Unlike the shadows behind it.
Miguel lingered near the back of our party. He drummed his fingers on the railing.
"You sure you want to go back in, man?" Lena asked. "It's fine if you two want to run coms for us, like at the construction site."
"Hey, don't count me in that," Zhizhi said. "Now that you've almost been in the news, I really want to get some decent footage."
I'm sure she meant it as a joke, but only Miguel laughed. I thought it sounded forced, but what do I know?
"I'll be fine," he said. "If we encounter another wall of magical Water, I'm sure Lena and Cameron will be clawing to get to it first."
Lena patted my arm. "Nope. I got the last Reactant, so if we find one it's all Cam's."
"As long as it doesn't attempt to be mine again," Miguel said.
When we hesitated to go in, he raised his phone, flicked on his Third Eye filter, and took the lead.
"How are you going to see with no lights?" I asked Zhizhi.
She hefted her camera and showed me. Through its viewfinder, I saw Bernie in salamander form and Lena aflame, just like through my phone. "We've got the filter cloned to my phone and my camera," Zhizhi said. "Seems to be just as functional as Miguel's version. Too bad we can't snag the powers, too, huh?"
I said, "Yeah," even though I'd started to wonder how much I wanted them.
That was the last anyone said for quite a while. Once we plunged into the darkness, silence felt like a natural accompaniment.
At least it didn't smell like a sewer level. The water in the drainage ditch was crisp runoff, not sewage. I'd say "clean," but I'd seen the stains that snow left after it melted.
In my head, I tried to count our footsteps, if only so I had a sound to pay attention to. I lost track after a few minutes. Too hard to tell what was a step and what was an echo.
I didn't hear anything splashing in the water, as I'd thought I had the last time.
Zhizhi broke the silence. I felt absurdly grateful. She asked, "Did this really used to go all the way to the old mall?"
"So I've been told," Miguel said. We'd first found out about the tunnel because of a story from one of his old gaming buddies. He'd claimed to have snuck into the arcade below the defunct Cinderella City mall and spent evenings playing for free.
Zhizhi shook her head. "I think your friend was pulling your leg. It just seems like a maintenance tunnel to me."
"Are you suggesting someone I met while playing a game where we pretended to be people we were not would lie about a cool story?" Miguel clicked his tongue. "Unthinkable."
Lena frowned. "You sure sounded confident when you told us."
"That," he said, "is because I sure was curious."
Both women chuckled.
I tried to, but I didn't think the hollowness in my voice came from the tunnel's echoes.
We were four tiny lights floating through an inky sea. The darkness pressed in on me. I didn't consider myself claustrophobic. I never had before, anyway. So why did I find it hard to breathe like this?
Because it wasn't the close confines that scared me. It wasn't even the darkness.
It was the person who'd decided to make darkness his calling card.
Maybe it was stupid, but Erin's theory made Mask seem more frightening than if he'd "just" been a murderer. If he was abducting players, first, how? Second, where was he putting them?
Third, what did he do with them when their XP dropped low enough that they fell out of the beta?
It seemed like murder with extra steps. Extra, terrifying steps. Once you added kidnapping to the mix, killing witnesses suddenly made a hell of a lot more sense.
Worse was that Erin was the person who'd pointed out why he'd want to capture other players. Aside from – as much as I hated to admit it – Matt, she was the person I trusted most when it came to sussing out game design. She'd picked up on the incentive structure Mask seemed to be following, and it seemed to make sense.
Did that mean Mask was doing exactly what Third Eye wanted?
I'd occasionally wondered if the game wasn't set up to encourage us to commit minor crimes. My group was either trespassing already, or going to be when we reached the locked gate and climbed around it. If we wanted to find whatever Third Eye resources awaited us down here, we had no choice.
Hell, we'd technically broken, if not a law, at least a park rule when we climbed past the summit of the Rueter-Hess Incline and then fell outside the walking trail. How often did Reactants lie outside the bounds of what we were "supposed" to do?
An accident of the generative algorithm?
Or intentional, a subtle way of driving us apart from normal society?
If Mask was abducting people to drain their XP, he'd gone way beyond minor crimes. Had he gone beyond the behavior Third Eye wanted to incentivize?
It reminded me that we had no idea what the devs were or what they wanted from the game. We joked about aliens, because it seemed so ludicrous. We joked about wizards, because if we didn't laugh we'd have to take the suggestion seriously. Neither category explained what they would get out of gifting – or, well, selling via Kickstarter – working magic to a bunch of gamers.
Or what they would get from eliminating said gamers one by one.
I felt something poke me in the ribs and swung my phone toward it before I realized it was just Lena's finger.
"What the hell?" I gasped.
"I could tell you were catastrophizing," she said.
I gave her a sheepish smile. "Maybe a little."
She shook her head. Her wings, pressed close to her back to fit inside the tunnel, rustled.
A word about our four tiny lights. They all pointed directly at our faces. Until we got deep enough in the tunnel that we couldn't see even a hint of the glow from the highway somewhere outside, we'd agreed not to turn on our phones' lights. Instead, we found our way through Third Eye alone, which showed the tunnel bathed in the glow of Lena's flames.
I was pretty sure we'd done this a few times without thinking about it before we realized the game conferred actual magic. Another thing that should have tipped us off. How did the phone camera know what to layer AR over if there was no light for it to see by?
Another thing I didn't know about the game, but this was just a cool – and in this case useful – bit of incidental wizardry. If I'd still been rationalizing, I think I could have even managed to convince myself it was technical wizardry. Massively boosting the light gain on the camera settings and then using AR to fill in the proper color balance, or basing a full AR version of the environment on a glimpse from when we'd had our lights on.
I no longer had to scramble for excuses for Third Eye's weirdness. Whatever rules it followed, they weren't those of the physical world as I'd understood it two months ago.
The important thing in this case was that everything I saw was what the Third Eye filter showed me. At the construction site, it had included working lights over our heads, even though there shouldn't have been any electricity running. Here, however, it just displayed the tunnel more or less as it was in reality, which meant the only light came from Lena's flames.
Which meant it looked even more like a sewer level in a fantasy game than it already had. If I didn't point my phone in Lena's direction, I'd think I was looking at a tunnel lit by torchlight.
Maybe because that made the experience more gamelike, it put a smile back on my face.
It stayed there until Miguel slowed in front of me and said, "Hm."
"You spot something?" Lena asked.
I panned my phone around trying to catch sight of it, but ended up focusing on Miguel and Zhizhi. The two of them looked out of place in their modern clothes. It struck me as especially cruel that we lost our avatars when we got kicked out of the beta; Miguel, at least, should have appeared in an outfit like mine.
He brushed his hand along the railing. "It isn't what I see that I find strange. It's what I do not."
"What's that?" Zhizhi asked.
"The last time I came to this tunnel, I had to trudge out through freezing water, with cracked ribs and a mild concussion." He spread his fingers wide to encompass the tunnel. "Does that strike anyone as a recipe for making me remember the distance as smaller than it actually is?"
Zhizhi frowned at his seeming nonanswer.
I, more used to how Miguel liked to communicate, got it right away.
So did Lena. "Oh yeah! We've been walking for ages. Where the hell was that locked gate?"
Now, there was a perfectly rational explanation for this. Someone – either a City of Englewood employee who was supposed to be here, or another player who wasn't – had come in, unlocked/picked/broken the lock, as appropriate, and left the gate open. With our narrow and, let's be honest, not a hundred percent accurate to reality viewpoints, we'd wandered through it without noticing.
Remember when I said I was done rationalizing Third Eye?
Without hesitation, without fear of being seen by the outside world, I turned and flicked on my phone's light.
There, in the murk just at the edge of my sight, stood the gate. Closed and locked, just as I remembered it. And about fifty feet behind us.
Chapter 54: The Path
Chapter 54: The Path
For once, I didn't panic.
Which made one of us.
I tuned out the sound of Miguel's lighter flicking and him puffing fiercely at a cigarette, and his and Lena's coat sleeves rustling as Zhizhi grabbed them and hissed questions. I even put Lena's worried mumbling out of my mind.
Calmly as you please, and in this case I pleased quite a lot, I approached the gate and shook it.
Locked. Shut.
I grinned.
"This," I said, "is so goddamn cool."
"What are you talking about, Cam?" Lena demanded.
"Watch." I walked about half the distance toward the game. I paused, then started forward again but with all my concentration fixed on my phone filter.
"Look out for the wall," she called.
I didn't.
Silence behind me. My grin widened.
According to Third Eye, I was walking in a straight line. I hadn't drifted left or right, The wall remained far enough away I'd have to stretch to brush my fingers against it. I continued to stride forward, up to where I'd touched the gate. Fifteen paces after that, I turned around and shone my light on the gate again.
From the other side.
I waved to the others. They rushed towards me. Lena skidded to a stop too late. She crashed into the gate with a rattle that echoed up and down the tunnel. Bernie grumbled from his sling on her back.
Lena grumbled, too, but after a moment, she stuck her hands through the bars and beckoned to me. "What was that? How'd you do it? How'd you know to do it?"
When I reached the gate, I tapped my foot against the metal bar that ran all the way across the tunnel walkway beneath it. "As soon as I saw this, I knew nobody had locked it behind us. At least one of us would've tripped for sure. Probably me. From there, it was just a matter of putting together phenomena we've already witnessed."
"It looked super freaky from where we stood," Lena said. "It was like you kept getting closer and closer to the wall, but instead of you running into it, our angle on you got more and more tilted."
"Sorry I didn't explain in advance." I clasped her hands. "You've got to admit, this was a way more dramatic demonstration."
"Well because you decided to be dramatic about it," Zhizhi said, "you're going to have to do it again while I'm ready to film you."
My grin turned sheepish. "My bad. Should you have Lena do it, if you're going to get it on camera?"
"You're part of the show too, lovely assistant," Lena said. "Get your butt back over here so we can get some footage."
"It would be best if you explained for the audience what exactly you're doing, and why you seemed so confident it would work," Miguel said.
Sure. For the audience.
Still, I nodded. "Good call. Give me a second. I want to check one more thing first."
I retraced my steps and checked my position with the Third Eye filter. Looking first through the phone and then around it, two paths diverged. One led to the gate. The other had no gate. The part that made me queasy when I juxtaposed them so abruptly was that even though they clearly split off from one another, they both looked like straight lines.
I started walking with my phone pressed to my face, then I lowered it. I had to fight down a moment of nausea, and just as Lena had said, it looked like I was on a collision course with the wall.
If I approached without watching through Third Eye, would I slam my shoulder into the concrete?
I didn't think that made sense, and sure enough, as I kept walking, it seemed to take more and more steps to reach the wall. I did my damnedest to keep my stride even, but what should have been ten feet became more like twelve, fifteen, and then the wall was no longer getting closer, but moving away.
I started to let myself look around, but there was no need. Lena's arms wrapped around my waist.
I turned and patted her back. "All good?"
"Nope," she said. "You don't have permission to spook me like that."
"If you can take permission away," Zhizhi said, "do. That was some freaky shit. Which is to say, again, please."
I kissed the top of Lena's head and wormed out of her grasp. To Zhizhi, I said, "Do you want me to narrate as I go?"
"Sounds like a plan," she said.
I took a step back toward the gate. Then I took a deep breath. Narrate. Explain. Right.
Everything I'd done made perfect sense to me as I did it. Explaining it in a way an audience could understand – an audience that would still be reeling from a magic-is-real revelation a video or two ago, I assumed – intimidated me more than I expected.
Or was it just that Zhizhi had thrust me into the starring role? I found it much easier to play off of Lena's lines than to sell my own.
If I fretted over how to start and stop the segment, I'd never get it done. I trusted Zhizhi's editing skills enough to know she could dub those bits in later, after we had time to sit down and write a proper script.
All she'd asked for was the explanation.
I checked to make sure my phone was recording audio. Yep.
I explained.
"We've seen Third Eye distort space before. In some cases, it's been obvious, with areas expanded far beyond their physical limits. It's not just that everything gets larger, though; the space isn't just expanded, it's filled by objects that seem to suit it. Extra rows of shelves in a warehouse. Extra steps atop a walking path." I hesitated. "An extra apartment in a block of identical ones."
I had to keep walking forward for the sake of the video, but I would've liked to have seen Lena's expression when I said that last sentence. I had to content myself with hearing a little gasp from her, and a supportive meep from Bernie.
"This is subtler," I continued, "but it's the same basic principle. Now put that together with how objects we create have physical existence. We can climb on them, step on them, and it feels... really weird, I'm not gonna lie, but it does work. We climbed safely over broken glass, and I don't mean the Third Eye material, I mean real stuff, by putting down a layer of conjured Iron."
Murmurs at my back. A wall in front of me.
I kept walking. I kept talking. "I realized that the same thing was happening here. The world as Third Eye sees it is sort of... overlaid on the world we see through our ordinary eyes. But it goes beyond just vision. Both versions really do exist. It's hard to interact with the Third Eye version unless you're exclusively looking through the game's filter, but it actually is possible as long as you know exactly where to go. That's how non-players have been able to benefit from Third Eye objects, or to follow Third Eye paths."
When I lowered my phone, I was standing on the other side of the gate. Lena and Miguel were nodding along with my words. Only Zhizhi wasn't, because she held her camera steady on her shoulder.
I smiled for it and ran my fingers through my hair. Now my bangs would look the same whether she was filming me through Third Eye or not. Good for another shot of confidence.
"I'm not going to pretend to understand how this works," I told the hypothetical audience. "Much less why. I'm starting to get that it works, though, and even a little bit of how to take advantage of it."
"And – cut," Zhizhi called.
I gave her a thumbs up.
"Now," she said, "do it one more time, and I'll film with the filter off and the lights on. We'll have to decide when we start showing the real magic stuff if cutting between the two views will make viewers queasy or not."
"This is a lot of walking back and forth," I said.
Lena smirked. "So explain in advance next time."
I laughed and gave her the finger.
One more trip around the gate. It should've been exhausting, but of course, compared to walking all around Parker and its surrounds, it didn't even rise to the level where I noticed. I didn't feel the least bit out of breath, even though I repeated my monologue so Zhizhi would have another take to pick from when she edited the video.
When I finished my circuit and returned to the far side of the gate, I found Lena holding Bernie out to me. I scratched under his chin and petted the back of his head. He hummed.
She smiled at him, then at me. Same expression aimed at both of us, and the rush of warmth I felt had nothing to do with the flames of her avatar. She asked, "You think this is how my Realm worked, huh?"
We'd found Bernie, and Lena's Fire, at the apartment she'd lived in – had hidden from life in – before she moved in with me. Out of Third Eye, it had looked empty, untenanted, and we'd wondered at the time if that was a lucky break or if the devs had arranged it somehow. Through Third Eye, it had looked like a replica of the apartment as it was the last time she lived there. Her Realm, promised as part of the level at which she'd backed the game.
"I'm almost positive," I said. "The only part I don't know for sure is whether it was the whole floor, and the elevator took us to where we were supposed to be, or if it was just the one apartment, and if you'd checked the next door down, it would've had the same number as yours."
"So weird." She kissed Bernie's head and restored him to his sling. "So cool."
"Nice job, Cam" Zhizhi said. "I followed what you said, and you've almost got me where I'm not freaked out about it."
"I wish that I could say the same," Miguel said.
We all glanced at him.
"It's a great explanation," he said. "I'm just not sure why you're so at ease with it. The last time you led an expedition into a highly distorted space, it did not end well for any of us."
"First of all," I said, "I didn't lead shit."
Miguel shrugged. Lena and Zhizhi exchanged glances.
I didn't understand their reaction, but I pushed it to the back of my mind to answer Miguel's original question. "Second, that's the best part about this tunnel."
He raised an eyebrow and puffed on his cigarette.
Zhizhi frowned at her camera. Reviewing the footage for a clue, maybe.
Lena kept smiling, though. She'd already figured it out.
"At the construction site," I said, "Third Eye put up a bunch of indications we should keep out. Even the way the space was distorted pushed in that direction, made it harder to go forward."
"Whereas here," Lena said, and I nodded along with her, "Third Eye invited us in."
For once, I didn't panic.
Which made one of us.
I tuned out the sound of Miguel's lighter flicking and him puffing fiercely at a cigarette, and his and Lena's coat sleeves rustling as Zhizhi grabbed them and hissed questions. I even put Lena's worried mumbling out of my mind.
Calmly as you please, and in this case I pleased quite a lot, I approached the gate and shook it.
Locked. Shut.
I grinned.
"This," I said, "is so goddamn cool."
"What are you talking about, Cam?" Lena demanded.
"Watch." I walked about half the distance toward the game. I paused, then started forward again but with all my concentration fixed on my phone filter.
"Look out for the wall," she called.
I didn't.
Silence behind me. My grin widened.
According to Third Eye, I was walking in a straight line. I hadn't drifted left or right, The wall remained far enough away I'd have to stretch to brush my fingers against it. I continued to stride forward, up to where I'd touched the gate. Fifteen paces after that, I turned around and shone my light on the gate again.
From the other side.
I waved to the others. They rushed towards me. Lena skidded to a stop too late. She crashed into the gate with a rattle that echoed up and down the tunnel. Bernie grumbled from his sling on her back.
Lena grumbled, too, but after a moment, she stuck her hands through the bars and beckoned to me. "What was that? How'd you do it? How'd you know to do it?"
When I reached the gate, I tapped my foot against the metal bar that ran all the way across the tunnel walkway beneath it. "As soon as I saw this, I knew nobody had locked it behind us. At least one of us would've tripped for sure. Probably me. From there, it was just a matter of putting together phenomena we've already witnessed."
"It looked super freaky from where we stood," Lena said. "It was like you kept getting closer and closer to the wall, but instead of you running into it, our angle on you got more and more tilted."
"Sorry I didn't explain in advance." I clasped her hands. "You've got to admit, this was a way more dramatic demonstration."
"Well because you decided to be dramatic about it," Zhizhi said, "you're going to have to do it again while I'm ready to film you."
My grin turned sheepish. "My bad. Should you have Lena do it, if you're going to get it on camera?"
"You're part of the show too, lovely assistant," Lena said. "Get your butt back over here so we can get some footage."
"It would be best if you explained for the audience what exactly you're doing, and why you seemed so confident it would work," Miguel said.
Sure. For the audience.
Still, I nodded. "Good call. Give me a second. I want to check one more thing first."
I retraced my steps and checked my position with the Third Eye filter. Looking first through the phone and then around it, two paths diverged. One led to the gate. The other had no gate. The part that made me queasy when I juxtaposed them so abruptly was that even though they clearly split off from one another, they both looked like straight lines.
I started walking with my phone pressed to my face, then I lowered it. I had to fight down a moment of nausea, and just as Lena had said, it looked like I was on a collision course with the wall.
If I approached without watching through Third Eye, would I slam my shoulder into the concrete?
I didn't think that made sense, and sure enough, as I kept walking, it seemed to take more and more steps to reach the wall. I did my damnedest to keep my stride even, but what should have been ten feet became more like twelve, fifteen, and then the wall was no longer getting closer, but moving away.
I started to let myself look around, but there was no need. Lena's arms wrapped around my waist.
I turned and patted her back. "All good?"
"Nope," she said. "You don't have permission to spook me like that."
"If you can take permission away," Zhizhi said, "do. That was some freaky shit. Which is to say, again, please."
I kissed the top of Lena's head and wormed out of her grasp. To Zhizhi, I said, "Do you want me to narrate as I go?"
"Sounds like a plan," she said.
I took a step back toward the gate. Then I took a deep breath. Narrate. Explain. Right.
Everything I'd done made perfect sense to me as I did it. Explaining it in a way an audience could understand – an audience that would still be reeling from a magic-is-real revelation a video or two ago, I assumed – intimidated me more than I expected.
Or was it just that Zhizhi had thrust me into the starring role? I found it much easier to play off of Lena's lines than to sell my own.
If I fretted over how to start and stop the segment, I'd never get it done. I trusted Zhizhi's editing skills enough to know she could dub those bits in later, after we had time to sit down and write a proper script.
All she'd asked for was the explanation.
I checked to make sure my phone was recording audio. Yep.
I explained.
"We've seen Third Eye distort space before. In some cases, it's been obvious, with areas expanded far beyond their physical limits. It's not just that everything gets larger, though; the space isn't just expanded, it's filled by objects that seem to suit it. Extra rows of shelves in a warehouse. Extra steps atop a walking path." I hesitated. "An extra apartment in a block of identical ones."
I had to keep walking forward for the sake of the video, but I would've liked to have seen Lena's expression when I said that last sentence. I had to content myself with hearing a little gasp from her, and a supportive meep from Bernie.
"This is subtler," I continued, "but it's the same basic principle. Now put that together with how objects we create have physical existence. We can climb on them, step on them, and it feels... really weird, I'm not gonna lie, but it does work. We climbed safely over broken glass, and I don't mean the Third Eye material, I mean real stuff, by putting down a layer of conjured Iron."
Murmurs at my back. A wall in front of me.
I kept walking. I kept talking. "I realized that the same thing was happening here. The world as Third Eye sees it is sort of... overlaid on the world we see through our ordinary eyes. But it goes beyond just vision. Both versions really do exist. It's hard to interact with the Third Eye version unless you're exclusively looking through the game's filter, but it actually is possible as long as you know exactly where to go. That's how non-players have been able to benefit from Third Eye objects, or to follow Third Eye paths."
When I lowered my phone, I was standing on the other side of the gate. Lena and Miguel were nodding along with my words. Only Zhizhi wasn't, because she held her camera steady on her shoulder.
I smiled for it and ran my fingers through my hair. Now my bangs would look the same whether she was filming me through Third Eye or not. Good for another shot of confidence.
"I'm not going to pretend to understand how this works," I told the hypothetical audience. "Much less why. I'm starting to get that it works, though, and even a little bit of how to take advantage of it."
"And – cut," Zhizhi called.
I gave her a thumbs up.
"Now," she said, "do it one more time, and I'll film with the filter off and the lights on. We'll have to decide when we start showing the real magic stuff if cutting between the two views will make viewers queasy or not."
"This is a lot of walking back and forth," I said.
Lena smirked. "So explain in advance next time."
I laughed and gave her the finger.
One more trip around the gate. It should've been exhausting, but of course, compared to walking all around Parker and its surrounds, it didn't even rise to the level where I noticed. I didn't feel the least bit out of breath, even though I repeated my monologue so Zhizhi would have another take to pick from when she edited the video.
When I finished my circuit and returned to the far side of the gate, I found Lena holding Bernie out to me. I scratched under his chin and petted the back of his head. He hummed.
She smiled at him, then at me. Same expression aimed at both of us, and the rush of warmth I felt had nothing to do with the flames of her avatar. She asked, "You think this is how my Realm worked, huh?"
We'd found Bernie, and Lena's Fire, at the apartment she'd lived in – had hidden from life in – before she moved in with me. Out of Third Eye, it had looked empty, untenanted, and we'd wondered at the time if that was a lucky break or if the devs had arranged it somehow. Through Third Eye, it had looked like a replica of the apartment as it was the last time she lived there. Her Realm, promised as part of the level at which she'd backed the game.
"I'm almost positive," I said. "The only part I don't know for sure is whether it was the whole floor, and the elevator took us to where we were supposed to be, or if it was just the one apartment, and if you'd checked the next door down, it would've had the same number as yours."
"So weird." She kissed Bernie's head and restored him to his sling. "So cool."
"Nice job, Cam" Zhizhi said. "I followed what you said, and you've almost got me where I'm not freaked out about it."
"I wish that I could say the same," Miguel said.
We all glanced at him.
"It's a great explanation," he said. "I'm just not sure why you're so at ease with it. The last time you led an expedition into a highly distorted space, it did not end well for any of us."
"First of all," I said, "I didn't lead shit."
Miguel shrugged. Lena and Zhizhi exchanged glances.
I didn't understand their reaction, but I pushed it to the back of my mind to answer Miguel's original question. "Second, that's the best part about this tunnel."
He raised an eyebrow and puffed on his cigarette.
Zhizhi frowned at her camera. Reviewing the footage for a clue, maybe.
Lena kept smiling, though. She'd already figured it out.
"At the construction site," I said, "Third Eye put up a bunch of indications we should keep out. Even the way the space was distorted pushed in that direction, made it harder to go forward."
"Whereas here," Lena said, and I nodded along with her, "Third Eye invited us in."
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Was talking this over with a friend for a bit. We both came to the conclusion that Third Eye is working at least partially by nudging users into sideways space (a few steps diagonally through the fourth dimension or something along those lines), but we got stumped trying to figure out why the Third Eye developers are doing it like this in particular. I mean, think about it: If they can shunt Cam sideways into a parallel version of the tunnel with no gate in it, why do they shunt him backwards into the original tunnel? We know they have to be doing that (or something like it) because when he turns around, he sees the gate behind him. So there's just a small bypass here for Third Eye players (and extra-dimensional wizard admin, I guess) only. But if they have access to sideways space, why not put the whole 'dungeon' with its reactants into that sideways space?
This could admittedly be a matter of alignment or whatever Albie's talk about 'knowledge of joy and knowledge of the self and knowledge of the world' means in practical terms. Cam isn't high enough level to go sideways enough to enter a dungeon that's purely in sideways space. Or however that works. But thinking about it, how can that possibly be it? They went to Lena's apartment and got a whole extra empty apartment floor that was on fire. That's plenty of room to keep whatever ends up being at the far end of the tunnel, surely. So it can't be purely Cam and Lena needing to grind enough Third Eye XP to unlock it.
Which leads to our current best guess: it's some sort of real estate thing. Specifically, some sort of sideways wizard real estate thing. Whoever is behind Third Eye, they clearly needed the Kickstarter money for something, so maybe they were buying up small plots of sideways real estate on which to build these alternate areas. The tunnel is underground and the apartment block is up in the air, spaces that are probably not being used by anyone else. Other big ticket space warping has been in places of complicated legal jurisdiction, in rural areas (maybe the sideways real estate adjacent to those is cheaper!) and in tiny patches on the margins of existing lots. Like election signs that campaigns stick in people's yards, hoping the hyperdimensional owners don't care enough to tear down the pop-up hedge maze they've planted into the fourth dimensional public sidewalk easement.
This could admittedly be a matter of alignment or whatever Albie's talk about 'knowledge of joy and knowledge of the self and knowledge of the world' means in practical terms. Cam isn't high enough level to go sideways enough to enter a dungeon that's purely in sideways space. Or however that works. But thinking about it, how can that possibly be it? They went to Lena's apartment and got a whole extra empty apartment floor that was on fire. That's plenty of room to keep whatever ends up being at the far end of the tunnel, surely. So it can't be purely Cam and Lena needing to grind enough Third Eye XP to unlock it.
Which leads to our current best guess: it's some sort of real estate thing. Specifically, some sort of sideways wizard real estate thing. Whoever is behind Third Eye, they clearly needed the Kickstarter money for something, so maybe they were buying up small plots of sideways real estate on which to build these alternate areas. The tunnel is underground and the apartment block is up in the air, spaces that are probably not being used by anyone else. Other big ticket space warping has been in places of complicated legal jurisdiction, in rural areas (maybe the sideways real estate adjacent to those is cheaper!) and in tiny patches on the margins of existing lots. Like election signs that campaigns stick in people's yards, hoping the hyperdimensional owners don't care enough to tear down the pop-up hedge maze they've planted into the fourth dimensional public sidewalk easement.
- Location
- United States
Honestly, I feel like there have been hints that very little of what third eye does is actually MADE by Third Eye as part of the game, with only the designer warning signs/avatars being manufactured. With all the talk of it being an altered reality game and things 'already having been there' and 'aligning,' I wonder if all the materials, reactants, and such aren't just a result of misalignment and the beta's goal is to crowdsource (as with Kickstarter) the aligning/combining of two worlds. The exp, which so far has no use, seems to mostly be a metric of how many differences have been pruned and how major those differences are, as well as how much the users have perceived the other world and so observed it into reality, because a lot of the weirder tricks are based in how you perceive things, rather than how many exp or hp or mp you've gained. The beta might be opt-in, but the full release is probably auto-enrolled for everyone on Earth.
I wonder if the only thing Third Eye actually does is grant a shortcut/'prosthetic' eye for things you can learn to do naturally, and that's why people who are kicked can still 'use' the basic parts - they have already observed the other world and therefore still perceive it/know it's there to interact with, they just need the camera to actually see it because they've tricked themselves into perceiving the filter as necessary.
Jim Starluck
CO, ICS Vanguard
- Location
- Cincinnati, OH
This is close to my impression as well: all these phenomena they're attributing to the game were there long before the game came along; it just gives them a way to perceive and interact with them.
That's what a "third eye" often does, isn't it? See things which are real, but imperceptible to most?
Chapter 55: Communication Gap
Chapter 55: Communication Gap
The sense of invitation put a spring in my step and Lena's. This might look like a sewer level, but it looked like a level. We were playing Third Eye as a game, a game we could agree on liking, and that we were playing as intended.
It felt... clean.
Which was ironic, considering that, even though we hadn't initially, intentionally climbed around the locked gate, I was pretty sure we were still trespassing. Also, the walls further out seemed to have been cleaned more recently than those in these deeper recesses of the tunnel. Old, undefinable grime clung to the floors, and the gray concrete walls had stained. Is there a color grayer than gray? If there wasn't already, we'd discovered one.
Our environment was, legally and literally, dirtier than before. But fuck it. This felt the most like what we were supposed to be doing of anything since our visit to Lena's Realm.
Our mood got to Bernie, or else something about the environment did – maybe he liked it more humid than the Denver area usually offered? – because as we walked, he started to chirp in tune to our steps.
I think he affected Zhizhi more than Lena or I, because soon after, I caught her grinning along with us.
Only Miguel continued to frown and puff at his cigarette. I supposed I couldn't blame him. Hell. I remained surprised that he'd wanted to return to the tunnel at all.
The only thing that threatened to spoil my mood was the fact we hadn't seen any golden flashes at the edge of our light. I couldn't imagine that whatever was down here would look less obvious through the Third Eye filter.
Maybe another player had come in and collected it? I shrugged at the thought. If they had, we could see what the area looked like after it had been scouted and treat that as a learning experience.
Because it became increasingly clear that this was, scouted or not, a Third Eye environment. We came to a doorway set into the tunnel's curving wall. Metal door, all very bland and official looking, except that the words on the sign above it were in Third Eye's runic script. Not just through the filter; when I turned my light on, I saw the same door, the same sign.
"Been a while since we ran into this," Lena said.
I nodded.
Third Eye had overlapped with the real world at the construction site, at Lena's old apartment, and in the moments like this morning when we'd collected Reactants.
I looked up at the sign. "Too bad we can't read this."
"This one looks pretty simple," Zhizhi said.
Just three characters, sort of orphaned on a sign big enough to accommodate an officious-looking English word. Way less complex than some of the iconography we'd seen.
I didn't see how it mattered, though. One rune or a hundred, we couldn't parse their meaning.
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Zhizhi nudge Miguel's arm.
"At least scan them into your phone," she said. "I thought you and Joon Woo needed more data points."
Miguel exhaled. "You're right, of course."
He raised his phone and panned it back and forth over the sign.
"What's she talking about?" Lena asked.
"A little side project," Miguel said.
"Is it not going well or something?" Zhizhi frowned at him. "You seemed so excited about it the other day."
He chuckled. "Any of my bosses will tell you, or the players in my games. I'm always excited about the start of a project. Afterwards, I'm reminded that it's a matter of discipline."
On the one hand, I thought he sold his game mastering short. If he'd had to force himself to come up with the ideas we'd encountered late in his campaigns, then it was a testament to his performance under pressure as well as his creativity. As for his computer security work, I couldn't speak directly to it, but I knew he'd gotten raises and a promotion during times when not many people could say as much.
On the other hand, he left out a category of people who might describe him in exactly the terms he'd just outlined: the eleven previous girlfriends he'd had in the time I'd known him. I'd seen a lot more of how those relationships began than how they ended. Most of the girls remained friends with him, so I had to assume they didn't tend to end badly.
But they always ended quickly.
It didn't seem like my place to call him on it. Besides, from the way Zhizhi's frown deepened, I suspected she could figure it out.
His phone beeped as he scanned the characters on the sign. Zhizhi's expression brightened, but, oddly, Miguel's face only grew more unreadable. Which I read as "unhappy."
"I don't have a clue what the third rune is," he said, "and the first is extremely speculative. It may simply mean 'location,' but I wouldn't begin to trust it."
"Hold up." Lena looked back and forth between the sign and Miguel. "Are you saying you and Joon Woo can actually read some of this shit?"
"Would you describe it as reading if you recognized the letter 'd,' but nothing else?" Miguel asked.
Zhizhi elbowed him. "Why are you being like this? You told me the runes are pictograms as well as letters. Knowing the letter 'd' might not help you, but knowing the pictogram for, I don't know, 'danger' would be pretty handy."
"Perhaps that's the third one," he said.
Her frown came back in full force.
"Dude, no, that's incredible," I said. "How are you figuring this out? Do you just have a huge database or something?"
"I have done very little on the project, frankly." He showed me his screen. He had another app open, cleaner and more modern looking than Third Eye's, with a picture of the rune in the middle of the sign. Three curving, parallel, diagonal lines, almost like a wave turned partly on its side. It was captioned with "person/people."
Lena and Zhizhi peeked at the screen as well. The former said, "That's people, huh?"
"It's one of the most common, and perhaps the one we're most certain of," Miguel said. "As to how this is done, Joon Woo has put together what he describes to me as a simple learning AI to analyze and find patterns in all the examples of the script uploaded to the wiki."
"How much do you have decoded?" I asked.
"With certainty? Two characters. This one, and another we're fairly certain is 'road' or 'path.' Then a handful of words made of compound characters, but which have appeared so frequently, and alongside examples in real languages, that we feel confident in at least the approximate meaning."
"Holy shit," I breathed. "This is incredibly cool."
"It's an interesting project," he said. "I hope something useful comes of it. Really, it's Joon Woo you should ask. I've done little more than offer a suggestion here and there."
Lena glared at him. "Phony humility doesn't look good on you."
Miguel shrugged grandly. "I'll have to live with looking less than my best for once."
I was sort of aware of the conversation continuing around me, but most of my attention stayed on that rune. If the one on Miguel's screen didn't match the one on the sign, they differed in too subtle a way for me to notice.
Three curving lines. Why this, for people? Something about it felt familiar to me. I supposed I'd seen it on other examples of Third Eye script. Made sense if it was one of the most common characters, right?
Unless the sign read, "no people or animals beyond this point," or some similar warning – and I didn't believe it did, or else we would've seen other cautionary signs along the way, including some in English – it gave me no reason not to press on.
I tried the door latch to check for a lock.
No lock. It clicked and swung open.
What did I expect to see on the other side? Maybe something more fantastical. Rough-hewn walls carved from the living rock, gargoyles and tapestries. That was just the torchlight effect of Lena's flames talking. Third Eye didn't really go for full-on fantasy environments. It just showed us a world slightly askew from our own.
In this case, a world of building maintenance corridors. The walls were whitewashed drywall, the inner doors were the same kind of metal as the one I'd just opened, and the floors looked like linoleum. Fluorescent light spilled out from the fixtures overhead, which put an end to most of the impression of a dungeon in a video game, but did give us a clearer view of the halls in Third Eye. Someone had left a mop and one of those rolling buckets propped against a wall.
I looked around my phone and saw pretty much the same thing, except that the lights were turned off and the cleaning materials were gone. Which meant they were probably collectible Materials.
"Ooh," Lena said. "Think bleach counts as Water, or would it be its own thing?"
I shook my head. "I think if we were standing this close to a Reactant, we'd feel much weirder."
"Bummer. Still, a good source of Plastic."
I stepped forward to claim it.
Which is why I had my phone in front of my face and was looking through the filter. Which is why I saw the hallway bathed in queasy fluorescent light.
And which is why, when Bernie's hiss made me snap my phone up, I had enough light to see something shiny and golden zip through the intersection at the far end of the hall.
If you think I forgot all about the mop and bucket, you're right. I dashed into the hallway, phone waving, and I heard Lena's boots slapping on the linoleum behind me.
One of us must've run into the mop, because my phone screen flashed and I had to look away. For maybe the first time ever, collecting a Material annoyed me. Not now! While I shook my head and waited for my eyes to clear, though, I realized it wasn't all bad – not just because we'd gotten some Plastic, which was the rarest of the core Materials, but because no player would leave something like that sitting around uncollected. Despite my previous concerns, we had to be the first people with Third Eye access to get into these hallways.
While I processed my thoughts and let my vision recover, Lena just charged forward blindly. She passed one intersection, slowed, spun her camera in both directions, then started running again toward the one at the end where we'd seen something moving.
"Be careful," Miguel shouted.
"Always," Lena called back. "Come on, guys! That looked like another Daimon!"
Miguel had a way of not making a sound, just pausing in his speech, that perfectly conveyed a sigh.
Zhizhi, on the other hand, said, "I think she's right. Look at this footage."
"Screw the footage," Lena said. "I want to see the real thing."
I think Miguel and Zhizhi must've stopped to examine something on her camera, but I surged forward after Lena. Partly because I didn't want her going alone into what might be a dangerous situation.
Mostly because I, too, wanted to see the real thing.
As such, I'd almost caught up to her when Bernie hissed a warning, and the floor responded with a hiss of its own, and the linoleum tiles split open beneath Lena's feet.
The sense of invitation put a spring in my step and Lena's. This might look like a sewer level, but it looked like a level. We were playing Third Eye as a game, a game we could agree on liking, and that we were playing as intended.
It felt... clean.
Which was ironic, considering that, even though we hadn't initially, intentionally climbed around the locked gate, I was pretty sure we were still trespassing. Also, the walls further out seemed to have been cleaned more recently than those in these deeper recesses of the tunnel. Old, undefinable grime clung to the floors, and the gray concrete walls had stained. Is there a color grayer than gray? If there wasn't already, we'd discovered one.
Our environment was, legally and literally, dirtier than before. But fuck it. This felt the most like what we were supposed to be doing of anything since our visit to Lena's Realm.
Our mood got to Bernie, or else something about the environment did – maybe he liked it more humid than the Denver area usually offered? – because as we walked, he started to chirp in tune to our steps.
I think he affected Zhizhi more than Lena or I, because soon after, I caught her grinning along with us.
Only Miguel continued to frown and puff at his cigarette. I supposed I couldn't blame him. Hell. I remained surprised that he'd wanted to return to the tunnel at all.
The only thing that threatened to spoil my mood was the fact we hadn't seen any golden flashes at the edge of our light. I couldn't imagine that whatever was down here would look less obvious through the Third Eye filter.
Maybe another player had come in and collected it? I shrugged at the thought. If they had, we could see what the area looked like after it had been scouted and treat that as a learning experience.
Because it became increasingly clear that this was, scouted or not, a Third Eye environment. We came to a doorway set into the tunnel's curving wall. Metal door, all very bland and official looking, except that the words on the sign above it were in Third Eye's runic script. Not just through the filter; when I turned my light on, I saw the same door, the same sign.
"Been a while since we ran into this," Lena said.
I nodded.
Third Eye had overlapped with the real world at the construction site, at Lena's old apartment, and in the moments like this morning when we'd collected Reactants.
I looked up at the sign. "Too bad we can't read this."
"This one looks pretty simple," Zhizhi said.
Just three characters, sort of orphaned on a sign big enough to accommodate an officious-looking English word. Way less complex than some of the iconography we'd seen.
I didn't see how it mattered, though. One rune or a hundred, we couldn't parse their meaning.
I glanced over my shoulder in time to see Zhizhi nudge Miguel's arm.
"At least scan them into your phone," she said. "I thought you and Joon Woo needed more data points."
Miguel exhaled. "You're right, of course."
He raised his phone and panned it back and forth over the sign.
"What's she talking about?" Lena asked.
"A little side project," Miguel said.
"Is it not going well or something?" Zhizhi frowned at him. "You seemed so excited about it the other day."
He chuckled. "Any of my bosses will tell you, or the players in my games. I'm always excited about the start of a project. Afterwards, I'm reminded that it's a matter of discipline."
On the one hand, I thought he sold his game mastering short. If he'd had to force himself to come up with the ideas we'd encountered late in his campaigns, then it was a testament to his performance under pressure as well as his creativity. As for his computer security work, I couldn't speak directly to it, but I knew he'd gotten raises and a promotion during times when not many people could say as much.
On the other hand, he left out a category of people who might describe him in exactly the terms he'd just outlined: the eleven previous girlfriends he'd had in the time I'd known him. I'd seen a lot more of how those relationships began than how they ended. Most of the girls remained friends with him, so I had to assume they didn't tend to end badly.
But they always ended quickly.
It didn't seem like my place to call him on it. Besides, from the way Zhizhi's frown deepened, I suspected she could figure it out.
His phone beeped as he scanned the characters on the sign. Zhizhi's expression brightened, but, oddly, Miguel's face only grew more unreadable. Which I read as "unhappy."
"I don't have a clue what the third rune is," he said, "and the first is extremely speculative. It may simply mean 'location,' but I wouldn't begin to trust it."
"Hold up." Lena looked back and forth between the sign and Miguel. "Are you saying you and Joon Woo can actually read some of this shit?"
"Would you describe it as reading if you recognized the letter 'd,' but nothing else?" Miguel asked.
Zhizhi elbowed him. "Why are you being like this? You told me the runes are pictograms as well as letters. Knowing the letter 'd' might not help you, but knowing the pictogram for, I don't know, 'danger' would be pretty handy."
"Perhaps that's the third one," he said.
Her frown came back in full force.
"Dude, no, that's incredible," I said. "How are you figuring this out? Do you just have a huge database or something?"
"I have done very little on the project, frankly." He showed me his screen. He had another app open, cleaner and more modern looking than Third Eye's, with a picture of the rune in the middle of the sign. Three curving, parallel, diagonal lines, almost like a wave turned partly on its side. It was captioned with "person/people."
Lena and Zhizhi peeked at the screen as well. The former said, "That's people, huh?"
"It's one of the most common, and perhaps the one we're most certain of," Miguel said. "As to how this is done, Joon Woo has put together what he describes to me as a simple learning AI to analyze and find patterns in all the examples of the script uploaded to the wiki."
"How much do you have decoded?" I asked.
"With certainty? Two characters. This one, and another we're fairly certain is 'road' or 'path.' Then a handful of words made of compound characters, but which have appeared so frequently, and alongside examples in real languages, that we feel confident in at least the approximate meaning."
"Holy shit," I breathed. "This is incredibly cool."
"It's an interesting project," he said. "I hope something useful comes of it. Really, it's Joon Woo you should ask. I've done little more than offer a suggestion here and there."
Lena glared at him. "Phony humility doesn't look good on you."
Miguel shrugged grandly. "I'll have to live with looking less than my best for once."
I was sort of aware of the conversation continuing around me, but most of my attention stayed on that rune. If the one on Miguel's screen didn't match the one on the sign, they differed in too subtle a way for me to notice.
Three curving lines. Why this, for people? Something about it felt familiar to me. I supposed I'd seen it on other examples of Third Eye script. Made sense if it was one of the most common characters, right?
Unless the sign read, "no people or animals beyond this point," or some similar warning – and I didn't believe it did, or else we would've seen other cautionary signs along the way, including some in English – it gave me no reason not to press on.
I tried the door latch to check for a lock.
No lock. It clicked and swung open.
What did I expect to see on the other side? Maybe something more fantastical. Rough-hewn walls carved from the living rock, gargoyles and tapestries. That was just the torchlight effect of Lena's flames talking. Third Eye didn't really go for full-on fantasy environments. It just showed us a world slightly askew from our own.
In this case, a world of building maintenance corridors. The walls were whitewashed drywall, the inner doors were the same kind of metal as the one I'd just opened, and the floors looked like linoleum. Fluorescent light spilled out from the fixtures overhead, which put an end to most of the impression of a dungeon in a video game, but did give us a clearer view of the halls in Third Eye. Someone had left a mop and one of those rolling buckets propped against a wall.
I looked around my phone and saw pretty much the same thing, except that the lights were turned off and the cleaning materials were gone. Which meant they were probably collectible Materials.
"Ooh," Lena said. "Think bleach counts as Water, or would it be its own thing?"
I shook my head. "I think if we were standing this close to a Reactant, we'd feel much weirder."
"Bummer. Still, a good source of Plastic."
I stepped forward to claim it.
Which is why I had my phone in front of my face and was looking through the filter. Which is why I saw the hallway bathed in queasy fluorescent light.
And which is why, when Bernie's hiss made me snap my phone up, I had enough light to see something shiny and golden zip through the intersection at the far end of the hall.
If you think I forgot all about the mop and bucket, you're right. I dashed into the hallway, phone waving, and I heard Lena's boots slapping on the linoleum behind me.
One of us must've run into the mop, because my phone screen flashed and I had to look away. For maybe the first time ever, collecting a Material annoyed me. Not now! While I shook my head and waited for my eyes to clear, though, I realized it wasn't all bad – not just because we'd gotten some Plastic, which was the rarest of the core Materials, but because no player would leave something like that sitting around uncollected. Despite my previous concerns, we had to be the first people with Third Eye access to get into these hallways.
While I processed my thoughts and let my vision recover, Lena just charged forward blindly. She passed one intersection, slowed, spun her camera in both directions, then started running again toward the one at the end where we'd seen something moving.
"Be careful," Miguel shouted.
"Always," Lena called back. "Come on, guys! That looked like another Daimon!"
Miguel had a way of not making a sound, just pausing in his speech, that perfectly conveyed a sigh.
Zhizhi, on the other hand, said, "I think she's right. Look at this footage."
"Screw the footage," Lena said. "I want to see the real thing."
I think Miguel and Zhizhi must've stopped to examine something on her camera, but I surged forward after Lena. Partly because I didn't want her going alone into what might be a dangerous situation.
Mostly because I, too, wanted to see the real thing.
As such, I'd almost caught up to her when Bernie hissed a warning, and the floor responded with a hiss of its own, and the linoleum tiles split open beneath Lena's feet.
Chapter 56: Dungeoneering
Chapter 56: Dungeoneering
I staggered to a stop at the lip of the pit. I stared down.
Lena stared back up at me.
I blinked.
So did she.
Neither of us spoke. I think what she'd fallen into was so bizarre, it short-circuited our brains.
Bernie's grumble snapped us both out of our stupor.
Lena started to giggle. She slapped her hands down. Plastic balls popped up. She grabbed one and tossed it to me. I made a swipe at it, but missed, and it bounced off my shoulder and rolled to a stop against the wall. I started laughing too.
The trap, for such it clearly was, had dumped Lena into a ball pit straight out of a McDonald's playplace. I felt like I hadn't seen one of those in a while. Did I just stop paying attention to them sometime after I outgrew them, or had they been phased out? Even though I'd always disliked them, I felt a sad hit of nostalgia.
Whether I could walk into a fast food restaurant and find a ball pit or not, I sure as hell shouldn't have seen one beneath what appeared to be hydraulic floors in what I'd taken for the maintenance corridors of some vast commercial compound. I supposed the floors could've been reshaped by some kind of ongoing Third Eye effect, but the hiss when Lena had triggered the trap had sounded pretty distinctive, and there was a layer of metal around the rim where machinery would go.
Bernie grumbled again. I'd let my concentration wander for a second, so his plushy form had appeared on top of the balls in front of Lena. His Third Eye form must have been shifting around, because the balls rolled beneath him. When I looked through my phone, I saw his sticky feet gyrating to try to stay atop them.
Lena swallowed her giggles. "Don't worry, little guy. We'll be out of here in just a sec."
His burble sounded the most annoyed I'd ever heard him.
I leaned over the lip of the pit and stretched my hand down. I'd intended for Lena to tuck Bernie back into his sling and then clasp my hand so I could help her out. Instead, she lifted him up and I scooped him onto the linoleum floor.
By then, Miguel and Zhizhi had caught up to us.
"Are you okay, Lena?" Zhizhi called.
"Of course she is," Miguel said. "Else, Cameron would not be nearly so calm."
"You could act a little more concerned," Lena shouted. "I'm fine, though."
I knew Miguel would be grinning like a cat.
I reached down for her again, this time with both hands. She clasped my wrists and I tightened my grip around hers. To the other two, I said, "Can you guys brace me?"
I felt two pairs of hands on my shoulders and waist.
Zhizhi got her first look into the pit then. I knew, because it startled a laugh from her and she muttered, "What the hell?"
"Right?" Lena said. "I can honestly say I never expected this."
"If you're ready," Miguel said.
Lena nodded.
Together, we pulled her up. We staggered back and I ended up on my ass, Lena sprawled on top of me. There were worse fates. She kissed my cheek, scooped up Bernie, and sprang to her feet.
She and Miguel helped me up, while Zhizhi panned her camera over the pit.
Lena and I turned to stare down into it. We should've been looking for the possible Daimon. Or at least watching out for danger. We couldn't help ourselves, though. It was just so strange.
A sea of colored plastic balls. Too bad they weren't collectible objects, or we'd never want for Plastic again.
"So weird," Lena said.
I nodded. "Why do we think that?"
"You see a lot of ball pits in the backs of stores?" Lena asked.
"I don't go into the backs of stores very often," I said. "But you're right. That's what weirds me out about this."
"Hrm?"
"When Third Eye puts something in an environment, it might be odd, or askew, but it usually fits on some level. It's not what's there, but it's something you could convince yourself maybe should be there." I rubbed my palms on my jeans. "Does that make sense?"
"I think so," Lena said.
"It does," Miguel said.
"But this." The ball Lena had thrown at me had rolled near my foot. I kicked it down into the pit. "What would it be doing here?"
"If you're right about Third Eye placing things appropriate for their surroundings," Zhizhi said, "then what we're wrong about must be what environment we're in."
Huh.
I looked around the halls again. If I'm being honest, I'd probably dismissed them as irrelevant when I first saw them. They looked so boring, so mundane. A backdrop for exciting things to happen, not important in themselves, like minimalist set design in a theater production. I wasn't a fan.
These halls weren't just empty archetypes, though. There was a sign over each room, and, in contrast to the construction site, where the back halls had seemed to stretch forever, these didn't actually go very far. In both directions, the halls ended within two dozen feet. This space reasonably could exist. Even the linoleum tiles, for all that they'd yellowed with age, had patterns on them.
"These aren't maintenance corridors," I said.
"What are they, then?" Zhizhi asked.
"A dungeon."
Miguel made a "Hm" sound.
I wanted to press him on it, but Zhizhi's snort distracted me.
"Ah yes. The famous ball pit torture. How could I have missed it?" Her smile slipped. "Honestly, that sounds like it could be a real thing."
"Not a dungeon like a place to keep prisoners," Lena said. "A dungeon like in an RPG."
"Do you get a lot of ball pits in those?" Zhizhi asked.
"Well." Lena looked away and gave Bernie a squeeze.
"It's not so much a trap as standing in for a trap," I said. "We did something wrong, so we triggered it. But it's not actually supposed to hurt us, just kind of embarrass us so we learn to watch out."
"Like a tutorial dungeon?" Lena said.
I considered it. The vibe didn't seem quite right. Tutorial dungeons might be easy for players, but within the worlds of their games, they usually didn't advertise themselves as fake or harmless. "More like what I picture somebody doing if they made a dungeon themed amusement park IRL. The trap is even hydraulic, like something you could build for real, instead of being a Third Eye effect."
It made me think of Omar's VR theme park, Imagined Worlds. Would that come across as cheesy as this did, or slicker? I wasn't sure which would end up more charming. Then again, I couldn't tell if Imagined Worlds had proven charmless enough that no one wanted to visit it.
"Huh." Zhizhi panned her camera down to take in the ball pit again, then back up to examine both hallways leading off of the intersection. "So what is it you did wrong?"
I rubbed the back of my neck. "Hadn't gotten that far."
"You missed this." Miguel traced a line on the floor with his boot, then took over with his hand when it reached the wall. It was subtle, just the point where one of the linoleum tiles met one of the joins in the drywall. At least, that's what it looked like to me until his hand raised further.
A faint pattern had been stamped into the wall.
We crowded over to examine it, then Lena, Miguel, and I stepped back so Zhizhi could film it.
Miguel had found two concentric circles of Third Eye runes. I'd thought they were stamped, but on closer inspection, I realized a piece had been cut out from the surrounding drywall, and this was more like an odd electrical fixture cut and painted to blend in.
Zhizhi held her camera close to the circles and panned up and down.
When she stepped back, Lena poked at the runes. Nothing happened. She furrowed her brow and pushed harder, and the outer ring rotated under her finger with a click.
"Oh," she said, "a puzzle! Cam, Miguel, which one of you wants to do this boring shit?"
I chuckled. "Go for it, Miguel. You know more about the language side of things than I do."
"I already told you –!" He sounded as close to snapping as I'd ever heard him.
Which didn't make a lot of sense to me. As either a game master or player, he usually loved little puzzles. When he had some spare time, he would make props for Lena and I, and the other two players in our group, to fiddle with at the table.
He lit another cigarette – the previous one must've burned down while I wasn't looking –, gave it one angry puff, and left it stuck in his mouth. He took Lena's place in front of the circles, checked his phone, puffed again, and began to rotate them.
He aligned the circles in some way that made sense to him. He paused. Nothing happened. Then he made one more adjustment, almost a full rotation of the central circle, and the hydraulics underneath the floor hissed again. Slowly, two linoleum-covered panels rose and joined together over the ball pit with a sigh of escaping air.
Lena tapped the restored floor with the toe of her boot. When it didn't give way, she stepped out onto it. She twirled around. She flashed both thumbs up.
"Nice job," Zhizhi said.
"Thanks." Another puff. A sigh. "Keep your eyes peeled. I'm sure there will be more of these."
"More ball pits, you think?" Lena asked.
He shook his head. "Something a bit more creative. Even if it does not become dangerous, it might become more embarrassing."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Perhaps we will get drenched by the sprinklers overhead." He aimed his cigarette in their direction.
Zhizhi followed his gesture. "If you get smoke in the detectors, that might happen whether we miss a puzzle or not."
He tilted his head in acknowledgment, but made no effort to put out the cigarette.
"This is cool and all," Lena said, "but don't forget, we got a Daimon to find."
I'd have been happy to concentrate on figuring out the bizarre environment. Even more, to figure out Miguel's bizarre behavior. Everything we'd discovered made the structure seem cooler and more inviting. Maybe he thought the whole place was a trap?
I didn't. The vibe felt nothing like the construction site had. I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt we were supposed to be here.
Or at least that we were welcome. I frowned at Miguel.
But only for a second, and I didn't have time to watch his reaction. With another pet on the line, I knew the best I could hope for was to inject a little caution into Lena's inevitable forward momentum.
I let her get across the pit in the direction we'd seen the golden figure disappear, then sprinted to join her.
We walked side-by-side, and to her credit, Lena did slow down and check everything around her. She was the one who spotted the next circle. She grabbed my arm to keep me from walking over it. "Look at the floor."
At first, I didn't see what had tipped her off. Then I noticed that the squiggly, '70s-ass pattern in the linoleum tiles was disrupted across four of them. When I peered closer, I recognized more Third Eye runes.
I knelt and examined them while Miguel and Zhizhi caught up to us. These looked different than the ones on the circle the former had manipulated.
It clicked for me that the ones on the circle hadn't been full runes, but halves. "You weren't actually solving some kind of riddle back there," I said, "and you weren't just moving it at random until it clicked. Right?"
He nodded. "I just rotated the dials until the full characters resembled those I recognized."
That wouldn't be much of a puzzle for someone who could read this language, but it was pitched perfectly for a player who'd been attentive to the Third Eye objects they found.
"What do you make of this one?" I asked.
He looked it over. "I suspect the right ones need to be pressed in sequence."
"You know which ones are the right ones?" I asked.
"'Know' is a strong word," he said. Instead of focusing on the runes, he began to examine the walls. "Let's see if we can figure out the mechanism of the trap. I wouldn't want to commit without being sure it's not dangerous."
"Don't worry about it," I said. "Guess. I'll go first. If you're right about it being embarrassing, well, it's not like it's going to be the first time I got embarrassed. And if it's dangerous, my HP will tank it."
"Makes more sense for me to go first," Lena said. "My HP come back."
"We'll trade off," I said.
She rolled her eyes, but she didn't argue.
Miguel pressed his lips into a line.
"I can tell you at least have some idea," Zhizhi said.
"Some."
She put a hand on his back and smiled tentatively.
He inclined his head. Smiled back. Then he stepped forward, swept his gaze up and down the hall, and pushed down hard on three of the four tiles in sequence.
Nothing happened.
I strode into what was presumably the target area for the trap. The air went still as everyone held their breath.
Nothing happened.
"Pretty good guess," Zhizhi said.
Miguel tried to smile.
"What was the clue?" I asked.
"One tile was the rune for 'person' I showed you earlier," he said. "The second, I recognized as the central character of what we – Joon Woo and I, I mean – believe to be the word for joy. The third, I made a fifty-fifty guess on, since I didn't recognize either of them."
"Heh." I returned to the runes and etched them into my memory in the order he'd pressed them. "Knowledge of the self, knowledge of joy, knowledge of the world."
Lena's eyebrows shot up. "Like Albie said? Do you think she set this place up for us?"
Albie had suggested that those three forms of knowledge needed to come into alignment somehow. She'd also said she didn't have the "right words" to explain them better to us.
I wondered if the whole game was an attempt to. "I think those concepts are central to Third Eye."
Lena's shoulders slumped. "Aw. I know you're right, but it would've been cool, you know? Like she was our GM for the evening!"
"If you invite her to a session," Miguel said, "I would be happy to let her take a spin."
A dreamy smile appeared on Lena's face. Miguel couldn't have painted a more delightful picture in her head if he'd handed her a Daimon.
I hated to spoil the mood, so I didn't point out that we'd have to ask her and she'd have to agree, and neither of those seemed likely to happen any time soon.
I also didn't point out that I was pretty sure I'd figured out Miguel's problem, and we were about to learn if it would become ours.
I staggered to a stop at the lip of the pit. I stared down.
Lena stared back up at me.
I blinked.
So did she.
Neither of us spoke. I think what she'd fallen into was so bizarre, it short-circuited our brains.
Bernie's grumble snapped us both out of our stupor.
Lena started to giggle. She slapped her hands down. Plastic balls popped up. She grabbed one and tossed it to me. I made a swipe at it, but missed, and it bounced off my shoulder and rolled to a stop against the wall. I started laughing too.
The trap, for such it clearly was, had dumped Lena into a ball pit straight out of a McDonald's playplace. I felt like I hadn't seen one of those in a while. Did I just stop paying attention to them sometime after I outgrew them, or had they been phased out? Even though I'd always disliked them, I felt a sad hit of nostalgia.
Whether I could walk into a fast food restaurant and find a ball pit or not, I sure as hell shouldn't have seen one beneath what appeared to be hydraulic floors in what I'd taken for the maintenance corridors of some vast commercial compound. I supposed the floors could've been reshaped by some kind of ongoing Third Eye effect, but the hiss when Lena had triggered the trap had sounded pretty distinctive, and there was a layer of metal around the rim where machinery would go.
Bernie grumbled again. I'd let my concentration wander for a second, so his plushy form had appeared on top of the balls in front of Lena. His Third Eye form must have been shifting around, because the balls rolled beneath him. When I looked through my phone, I saw his sticky feet gyrating to try to stay atop them.
Lena swallowed her giggles. "Don't worry, little guy. We'll be out of here in just a sec."
His burble sounded the most annoyed I'd ever heard him.
I leaned over the lip of the pit and stretched my hand down. I'd intended for Lena to tuck Bernie back into his sling and then clasp my hand so I could help her out. Instead, she lifted him up and I scooped him onto the linoleum floor.
By then, Miguel and Zhizhi had caught up to us.
"Are you okay, Lena?" Zhizhi called.
"Of course she is," Miguel said. "Else, Cameron would not be nearly so calm."
"You could act a little more concerned," Lena shouted. "I'm fine, though."
I knew Miguel would be grinning like a cat.
I reached down for her again, this time with both hands. She clasped my wrists and I tightened my grip around hers. To the other two, I said, "Can you guys brace me?"
I felt two pairs of hands on my shoulders and waist.
Zhizhi got her first look into the pit then. I knew, because it startled a laugh from her and she muttered, "What the hell?"
"Right?" Lena said. "I can honestly say I never expected this."
"If you're ready," Miguel said.
Lena nodded.
Together, we pulled her up. We staggered back and I ended up on my ass, Lena sprawled on top of me. There were worse fates. She kissed my cheek, scooped up Bernie, and sprang to her feet.
She and Miguel helped me up, while Zhizhi panned her camera over the pit.
Lena and I turned to stare down into it. We should've been looking for the possible Daimon. Or at least watching out for danger. We couldn't help ourselves, though. It was just so strange.
A sea of colored plastic balls. Too bad they weren't collectible objects, or we'd never want for Plastic again.
"So weird," Lena said.
I nodded. "Why do we think that?"
"You see a lot of ball pits in the backs of stores?" Lena asked.
"I don't go into the backs of stores very often," I said. "But you're right. That's what weirds me out about this."
"Hrm?"
"When Third Eye puts something in an environment, it might be odd, or askew, but it usually fits on some level. It's not what's there, but it's something you could convince yourself maybe should be there." I rubbed my palms on my jeans. "Does that make sense?"
"I think so," Lena said.
"It does," Miguel said.
"But this." The ball Lena had thrown at me had rolled near my foot. I kicked it down into the pit. "What would it be doing here?"
"If you're right about Third Eye placing things appropriate for their surroundings," Zhizhi said, "then what we're wrong about must be what environment we're in."
Huh.
I looked around the halls again. If I'm being honest, I'd probably dismissed them as irrelevant when I first saw them. They looked so boring, so mundane. A backdrop for exciting things to happen, not important in themselves, like minimalist set design in a theater production. I wasn't a fan.
These halls weren't just empty archetypes, though. There was a sign over each room, and, in contrast to the construction site, where the back halls had seemed to stretch forever, these didn't actually go very far. In both directions, the halls ended within two dozen feet. This space reasonably could exist. Even the linoleum tiles, for all that they'd yellowed with age, had patterns on them.
"These aren't maintenance corridors," I said.
"What are they, then?" Zhizhi asked.
"A dungeon."
Miguel made a "Hm" sound.
I wanted to press him on it, but Zhizhi's snort distracted me.
"Ah yes. The famous ball pit torture. How could I have missed it?" Her smile slipped. "Honestly, that sounds like it could be a real thing."
"Not a dungeon like a place to keep prisoners," Lena said. "A dungeon like in an RPG."
"Do you get a lot of ball pits in those?" Zhizhi asked.
"Well." Lena looked away and gave Bernie a squeeze.
"It's not so much a trap as standing in for a trap," I said. "We did something wrong, so we triggered it. But it's not actually supposed to hurt us, just kind of embarrass us so we learn to watch out."
"Like a tutorial dungeon?" Lena said.
I considered it. The vibe didn't seem quite right. Tutorial dungeons might be easy for players, but within the worlds of their games, they usually didn't advertise themselves as fake or harmless. "More like what I picture somebody doing if they made a dungeon themed amusement park IRL. The trap is even hydraulic, like something you could build for real, instead of being a Third Eye effect."
It made me think of Omar's VR theme park, Imagined Worlds. Would that come across as cheesy as this did, or slicker? I wasn't sure which would end up more charming. Then again, I couldn't tell if Imagined Worlds had proven charmless enough that no one wanted to visit it.
"Huh." Zhizhi panned her camera down to take in the ball pit again, then back up to examine both hallways leading off of the intersection. "So what is it you did wrong?"
I rubbed the back of my neck. "Hadn't gotten that far."
"You missed this." Miguel traced a line on the floor with his boot, then took over with his hand when it reached the wall. It was subtle, just the point where one of the linoleum tiles met one of the joins in the drywall. At least, that's what it looked like to me until his hand raised further.
A faint pattern had been stamped into the wall.
We crowded over to examine it, then Lena, Miguel, and I stepped back so Zhizhi could film it.
Miguel had found two concentric circles of Third Eye runes. I'd thought they were stamped, but on closer inspection, I realized a piece had been cut out from the surrounding drywall, and this was more like an odd electrical fixture cut and painted to blend in.
Zhizhi held her camera close to the circles and panned up and down.
When she stepped back, Lena poked at the runes. Nothing happened. She furrowed her brow and pushed harder, and the outer ring rotated under her finger with a click.
"Oh," she said, "a puzzle! Cam, Miguel, which one of you wants to do this boring shit?"
I chuckled. "Go for it, Miguel. You know more about the language side of things than I do."
"I already told you –!" He sounded as close to snapping as I'd ever heard him.
Which didn't make a lot of sense to me. As either a game master or player, he usually loved little puzzles. When he had some spare time, he would make props for Lena and I, and the other two players in our group, to fiddle with at the table.
He lit another cigarette – the previous one must've burned down while I wasn't looking –, gave it one angry puff, and left it stuck in his mouth. He took Lena's place in front of the circles, checked his phone, puffed again, and began to rotate them.
He aligned the circles in some way that made sense to him. He paused. Nothing happened. Then he made one more adjustment, almost a full rotation of the central circle, and the hydraulics underneath the floor hissed again. Slowly, two linoleum-covered panels rose and joined together over the ball pit with a sigh of escaping air.
Lena tapped the restored floor with the toe of her boot. When it didn't give way, she stepped out onto it. She twirled around. She flashed both thumbs up.
"Nice job," Zhizhi said.
"Thanks." Another puff. A sigh. "Keep your eyes peeled. I'm sure there will be more of these."
"More ball pits, you think?" Lena asked.
He shook his head. "Something a bit more creative. Even if it does not become dangerous, it might become more embarrassing."
"Like what?" I asked.
"Perhaps we will get drenched by the sprinklers overhead." He aimed his cigarette in their direction.
Zhizhi followed his gesture. "If you get smoke in the detectors, that might happen whether we miss a puzzle or not."
He tilted his head in acknowledgment, but made no effort to put out the cigarette.
"This is cool and all," Lena said, "but don't forget, we got a Daimon to find."
I'd have been happy to concentrate on figuring out the bizarre environment. Even more, to figure out Miguel's bizarre behavior. Everything we'd discovered made the structure seem cooler and more inviting. Maybe he thought the whole place was a trap?
I didn't. The vibe felt nothing like the construction site had. I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt we were supposed to be here.
Or at least that we were welcome. I frowned at Miguel.
But only for a second, and I didn't have time to watch his reaction. With another pet on the line, I knew the best I could hope for was to inject a little caution into Lena's inevitable forward momentum.
I let her get across the pit in the direction we'd seen the golden figure disappear, then sprinted to join her.
We walked side-by-side, and to her credit, Lena did slow down and check everything around her. She was the one who spotted the next circle. She grabbed my arm to keep me from walking over it. "Look at the floor."
At first, I didn't see what had tipped her off. Then I noticed that the squiggly, '70s-ass pattern in the linoleum tiles was disrupted across four of them. When I peered closer, I recognized more Third Eye runes.
I knelt and examined them while Miguel and Zhizhi caught up to us. These looked different than the ones on the circle the former had manipulated.
It clicked for me that the ones on the circle hadn't been full runes, but halves. "You weren't actually solving some kind of riddle back there," I said, "and you weren't just moving it at random until it clicked. Right?"
He nodded. "I just rotated the dials until the full characters resembled those I recognized."
That wouldn't be much of a puzzle for someone who could read this language, but it was pitched perfectly for a player who'd been attentive to the Third Eye objects they found.
"What do you make of this one?" I asked.
He looked it over. "I suspect the right ones need to be pressed in sequence."
"You know which ones are the right ones?" I asked.
"'Know' is a strong word," he said. Instead of focusing on the runes, he began to examine the walls. "Let's see if we can figure out the mechanism of the trap. I wouldn't want to commit without being sure it's not dangerous."
"Don't worry about it," I said. "Guess. I'll go first. If you're right about it being embarrassing, well, it's not like it's going to be the first time I got embarrassed. And if it's dangerous, my HP will tank it."
"Makes more sense for me to go first," Lena said. "My HP come back."
"We'll trade off," I said.
She rolled her eyes, but she didn't argue.
Miguel pressed his lips into a line.
"I can tell you at least have some idea," Zhizhi said.
"Some."
She put a hand on his back and smiled tentatively.
He inclined his head. Smiled back. Then he stepped forward, swept his gaze up and down the hall, and pushed down hard on three of the four tiles in sequence.
Nothing happened.
I strode into what was presumably the target area for the trap. The air went still as everyone held their breath.
Nothing happened.
"Pretty good guess," Zhizhi said.
Miguel tried to smile.
"What was the clue?" I asked.
"One tile was the rune for 'person' I showed you earlier," he said. "The second, I recognized as the central character of what we – Joon Woo and I, I mean – believe to be the word for joy. The third, I made a fifty-fifty guess on, since I didn't recognize either of them."
"Heh." I returned to the runes and etched them into my memory in the order he'd pressed them. "Knowledge of the self, knowledge of joy, knowledge of the world."
Lena's eyebrows shot up. "Like Albie said? Do you think she set this place up for us?"
Albie had suggested that those three forms of knowledge needed to come into alignment somehow. She'd also said she didn't have the "right words" to explain them better to us.
I wondered if the whole game was an attempt to. "I think those concepts are central to Third Eye."
Lena's shoulders slumped. "Aw. I know you're right, but it would've been cool, you know? Like she was our GM for the evening!"
"If you invite her to a session," Miguel said, "I would be happy to let her take a spin."
A dreamy smile appeared on Lena's face. Miguel couldn't have painted a more delightful picture in her head if he'd handed her a Daimon.
I hated to spoil the mood, so I didn't point out that we'd have to ask her and she'd have to agree, and neither of those seemed likely to happen any time soon.
I also didn't point out that I was pretty sure I'd figured out Miguel's problem, and we were about to learn if it would become ours.
- Location
- United States
So far this 'fun tutorial dungeon' feels like it was a tailor-made/'realm' for Miguel. Game master guy who (and I could be remembering wrong) knew about the tunnels the first time they came here and had 'heard a story' about kids using them to play/sneak into the mall, right? If I'm not remembering/coming completely out of nonsense-land, this place has Lena's Apartment vibes but for Miguel.
Chapter 57: Kiddy Stuff
Chapter 57: Kiddy Stuff
I settled into my role as scout and guinea pig.
Nothing opened on me, or shut. Sometimes the puzzles stumped Miguel, but he or Zhizhi could figure out how they connected to the traps so we could avoid triggering them. Most, he solved.
While Lena took her turns, I studied the puzzles with him. They seemed like they would've been pretty rudimentary for anyone who could actually read the runic script. I couldn't tell if their basic nature was appropriate to what I'd begun to suspect about the rest of the environment, or if it was somehow pitched with knowledge of how aware the player who found them would be.
They might have been basic, but they still represented a treasure trove of information about the Third Eye runes.
Speaking of –
"Look at this door," Lena said. We'd traded off twice now, and were near the end of the hall. When Miguel, Zhizhi, and I started forward, Lena held her hand up. "Look at it from back there. Geez. You don't all want to fall in a pit, do you?"
We froze in our tracks.
Lena waved her hand around the door, specifically its knob. Now that she'd pointed it out, I saw a series of runes etched into the metal. Only one visible ring, so it wasn't another instance of just lining them up so they made actual characters; this looked more like a combination lock.
"I'm gonna try the door," Lena said.
Miguel cleared his throat. "Perhaps we should inspect –"
Lena fiddled with the ring of runes, then gave the knob a twist.
Something opened, but it wasn't the door. Another hydraulic hiss, but this was more of a puff, because it only opened a vent over Lena's head.
She sprang backwards, but the slime that oozed through the metal slats was liquidy enough that some still splashed on her hair and shoulders, and Bernie's head. The rest dripped into a puddle in front of the door.
Lena flailed backwards, swatting at her hair.
I caught her. "Are you okay? It's not some kind of acid, is it?"
She paused. Took stock. "No, it doesn't seem to hurt. Check my phone. I don't want to touch it with my hands all goopy."
I did, careful of the cracked screen. "No HP loss."
"I guess it's safe, then." She scooped some of the slime up on a finger and opened her mouth.
I grabbed her hand.
She grinned. "I wasn't really going to taste it. Although I do wonder..."
"Keep wondering," I snapped.
Miguel took her place at the door, squishing through the slime. Why not? His boots looked waterproof. "I doubt you have anything to worry about, although I would not, of course, recommend eating it."
"You know what it is?" I asked. I suspected he would.
I suspected he clammed up at the question, too. He bit out, "Perhaps."
"It looks like the stuff kids' game shows dump on Z-list celebrities," Zhizhi said. She tapped something on her phone and showed Lena and I a picture of someone being drenched in greenish-yellow ooze. "Gunge, right?"
"Or simply slime." Miguel clamped his jaw shut. Tightly, he added, "I'd like to concentrate on these runes."
Lena shrugged and poked at the slime in her hair. Bernie grumbled about it, so she and I focused on trying to get his head as clean as we could manage with no water.
Zhizhi was either less distracted or less willing to let Miguel's evasion go. She joined him by the door. "Why do you need to concentrate? Lena already triggered the trap."
"The door is locked," he said. "It seems wasteful not to open it now."
Zhizhi put her elbow on the door. "Wasteful? We're looking for a Daimon, aren't we? Bernie's great, but I don't see him solving a puzzle and slipping through a door in the few minutes it took us to round the corner."
"What you caught on camera looked bipedal," Miguel said.
Lena and I exchanged glances. I really wanted to see Zhizhi's footage, but now didn't seem like the right time to interrupt. Bernie chirped and we went back to scooping slime off him.
"Perhaps this one is more capable of working doors," Miguel said. "In any case, Bernie's physical form teleports. Why shouldn't he be able to go through?"
Zhizhi sighed. "Okay, fair enough. Are you going to explain why you seem to know so much about this place?"
He crouched and squinted at the runes. "I'm guessing."
She stared at him for a moment, then squared her shoulders, checked her camera, and backed off to join Lena and I.
Our attempts to clean up had mostly resulted in my hands becoming as wet and sticky as Lena's hair.
Zhizhi looked us up and down. She seemed to fight against a smile, and lose. She held out her water bottle. "You're getting nowhere fast like this. Here."
With a few squirts of water, we managed to thin the slime to the point almost all of it ran off our hands, and some of it out of Lena's hair and Bernie's plush surface. By the time we finished, Zhizhi had produced a pair of wet wipes from her fanny pack; we took them and finished cleaning our hands, and I wiped off my phone since it didn't have obvious cracks.
As I was shoving the wet wipe back into its open wrapper, and that into my pocket, the door clicked open.
It swung inwards with what looked like barely a push from Miguel. He stared at the interior. Something glinted in his eye, then he composed his face into an approximation of neutrality and took a drag on his cigarette.
"I'm guessing," Lena said, "there's no Daimon inside."
"Alas not." Miguel stepped back. "You suffered the trap. Would you like to see the prize?"
"Obvs!" She sprang into motion. Two bounding steps later, she peered through the open door. "Whoa. Actual treasure!"
Zhizhi and I joined her.
The room beyond the door appeared to be a storage space. Shelves and racks lined the walls, all metal, all empty. In the otherwise bare center of the room stood a wooden TV tray. Instead of the frozen dinner that was its natural occupant, it held a pile of coins.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
Gold? I didn't even want to say the word for one of the Third Eye resources no one in our group had yet collected.
She tensed to enter, but I caught her arm.
She tugged against my grasp. "If I get slimed again or something, I do not give a single shit. You know what those coins could be, Cam."
I swallowed. I shot a glance at Miguel. I didn't want to say something I was, technically, just guessing at, and which in any case wasn't my place to tell anyone. I also didn't want to take something that wasn't mine.
He met my eyes. "The trap was out here. I don't see any runes inside, although certainly you should keep an eye out."
As much permission as he was willing to give.
I let go of Lena's arm.
She was off like a rocket. Her fingers clinked in the coins. She plucked one from the pile and held it up.
Which was not something we could do with a collectible Third Eye object.
Lena frowned at the coin, turned it in the light – it looked pretty dull for Gold, but then, how much gold had I really seen? –, and said, "Maybe I've still got a layer of slime on my hand?"
She reached into the pile to scoop up more. Her fingers brushed the top of the TV tray.
A flash from all our phones and Zhizhi's camera. Bye-bye tray. One Wood by volume, or three for the two struts and the surface? I supposed it didn't much matter.
Coins clattered to the ground.
One of them rolled near my feet. I scooped it up. No flash.
Did we need to do something special to collect Gold, or were these a different class of object? Or not Third Eye constructs at all?
They sure weren't real gold. The coin in my hand was lightweight and unmistakably dull.
The side facing me had a picture of balloons embossed on it, and a ring of repeating Third Eye runic characters around its edge. So much for it somehow being a real coin. I turned it over – it didn't have the distinctive grooves of national currency around the rim – and inspected its other face. A polygonal pyramid, viewed from an isometric angle. It looked more like something you might see on a real coin. This repeated writing was in English, though, and put paid to the idea.
"One token," I read, "equals one play."
"What does that mean?" Zhizhi asked.
Specifically, she asked Miguel, even though I was the one who'd read it off. Too good a journalist to miss how much more about the situation he knew then he'd been willing to let on.
If he'd hesitated, I would've answered this one for him, since it was general knowledge.
He didn't. Of course, being himself, even when he wanted to answer a question, he did it with one of his own. "What's treasure to a child?"
Zhizhi was in no mood. "Fortnite V-Bucks? I don't know! Are you going to explain or not?"
"Right idea," I muttered, because I wasn't in any mood, either. "Wrong era."
She swung the camera in front of my face. It could've just been because she wanted to capture me saying something, not to put me on the spot. You know. Could've been.
Wasn't.
Before I could speak, though, Lena joined us in the doorway with the remaining coins piled in her cupped hands.
Miguel plucked one and held it up to the light. "It means that if we keep going, we'll find an arcade."
I settled into my role as scout and guinea pig.
Nothing opened on me, or shut. Sometimes the puzzles stumped Miguel, but he or Zhizhi could figure out how they connected to the traps so we could avoid triggering them. Most, he solved.
While Lena took her turns, I studied the puzzles with him. They seemed like they would've been pretty rudimentary for anyone who could actually read the runic script. I couldn't tell if their basic nature was appropriate to what I'd begun to suspect about the rest of the environment, or if it was somehow pitched with knowledge of how aware the player who found them would be.
They might have been basic, but they still represented a treasure trove of information about the Third Eye runes.
Speaking of –
"Look at this door," Lena said. We'd traded off twice now, and were near the end of the hall. When Miguel, Zhizhi, and I started forward, Lena held her hand up. "Look at it from back there. Geez. You don't all want to fall in a pit, do you?"
We froze in our tracks.
Lena waved her hand around the door, specifically its knob. Now that she'd pointed it out, I saw a series of runes etched into the metal. Only one visible ring, so it wasn't another instance of just lining them up so they made actual characters; this looked more like a combination lock.
"I'm gonna try the door," Lena said.
Miguel cleared his throat. "Perhaps we should inspect –"
Lena fiddled with the ring of runes, then gave the knob a twist.
Something opened, but it wasn't the door. Another hydraulic hiss, but this was more of a puff, because it only opened a vent over Lena's head.
She sprang backwards, but the slime that oozed through the metal slats was liquidy enough that some still splashed on her hair and shoulders, and Bernie's head. The rest dripped into a puddle in front of the door.
Lena flailed backwards, swatting at her hair.
I caught her. "Are you okay? It's not some kind of acid, is it?"
She paused. Took stock. "No, it doesn't seem to hurt. Check my phone. I don't want to touch it with my hands all goopy."
I did, careful of the cracked screen. "No HP loss."
"I guess it's safe, then." She scooped some of the slime up on a finger and opened her mouth.
I grabbed her hand.
She grinned. "I wasn't really going to taste it. Although I do wonder..."
"Keep wondering," I snapped.
Miguel took her place at the door, squishing through the slime. Why not? His boots looked waterproof. "I doubt you have anything to worry about, although I would not, of course, recommend eating it."
"You know what it is?" I asked. I suspected he would.
I suspected he clammed up at the question, too. He bit out, "Perhaps."
"It looks like the stuff kids' game shows dump on Z-list celebrities," Zhizhi said. She tapped something on her phone and showed Lena and I a picture of someone being drenched in greenish-yellow ooze. "Gunge, right?"
"Or simply slime." Miguel clamped his jaw shut. Tightly, he added, "I'd like to concentrate on these runes."
Lena shrugged and poked at the slime in her hair. Bernie grumbled about it, so she and I focused on trying to get his head as clean as we could manage with no water.
Zhizhi was either less distracted or less willing to let Miguel's evasion go. She joined him by the door. "Why do you need to concentrate? Lena already triggered the trap."
"The door is locked," he said. "It seems wasteful not to open it now."
Zhizhi put her elbow on the door. "Wasteful? We're looking for a Daimon, aren't we? Bernie's great, but I don't see him solving a puzzle and slipping through a door in the few minutes it took us to round the corner."
"What you caught on camera looked bipedal," Miguel said.
Lena and I exchanged glances. I really wanted to see Zhizhi's footage, but now didn't seem like the right time to interrupt. Bernie chirped and we went back to scooping slime off him.
"Perhaps this one is more capable of working doors," Miguel said. "In any case, Bernie's physical form teleports. Why shouldn't he be able to go through?"
Zhizhi sighed. "Okay, fair enough. Are you going to explain why you seem to know so much about this place?"
He crouched and squinted at the runes. "I'm guessing."
She stared at him for a moment, then squared her shoulders, checked her camera, and backed off to join Lena and I.
Our attempts to clean up had mostly resulted in my hands becoming as wet and sticky as Lena's hair.
Zhizhi looked us up and down. She seemed to fight against a smile, and lose. She held out her water bottle. "You're getting nowhere fast like this. Here."
With a few squirts of water, we managed to thin the slime to the point almost all of it ran off our hands, and some of it out of Lena's hair and Bernie's plush surface. By the time we finished, Zhizhi had produced a pair of wet wipes from her fanny pack; we took them and finished cleaning our hands, and I wiped off my phone since it didn't have obvious cracks.
As I was shoving the wet wipe back into its open wrapper, and that into my pocket, the door clicked open.
It swung inwards with what looked like barely a push from Miguel. He stared at the interior. Something glinted in his eye, then he composed his face into an approximation of neutrality and took a drag on his cigarette.
"I'm guessing," Lena said, "there's no Daimon inside."
"Alas not." Miguel stepped back. "You suffered the trap. Would you like to see the prize?"
"Obvs!" She sprang into motion. Two bounding steps later, she peered through the open door. "Whoa. Actual treasure!"
Zhizhi and I joined her.
The room beyond the door appeared to be a storage space. Shelves and racks lined the walls, all metal, all empty. In the otherwise bare center of the room stood a wooden TV tray. Instead of the frozen dinner that was its natural occupant, it held a pile of coins.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
Gold? I didn't even want to say the word for one of the Third Eye resources no one in our group had yet collected.
She tensed to enter, but I caught her arm.
She tugged against my grasp. "If I get slimed again or something, I do not give a single shit. You know what those coins could be, Cam."
I swallowed. I shot a glance at Miguel. I didn't want to say something I was, technically, just guessing at, and which in any case wasn't my place to tell anyone. I also didn't want to take something that wasn't mine.
He met my eyes. "The trap was out here. I don't see any runes inside, although certainly you should keep an eye out."
As much permission as he was willing to give.
I let go of Lena's arm.
She was off like a rocket. Her fingers clinked in the coins. She plucked one from the pile and held it up.
Which was not something we could do with a collectible Third Eye object.
Lena frowned at the coin, turned it in the light – it looked pretty dull for Gold, but then, how much gold had I really seen? –, and said, "Maybe I've still got a layer of slime on my hand?"
She reached into the pile to scoop up more. Her fingers brushed the top of the TV tray.
A flash from all our phones and Zhizhi's camera. Bye-bye tray. One Wood by volume, or three for the two struts and the surface? I supposed it didn't much matter.
Coins clattered to the ground.
One of them rolled near my feet. I scooped it up. No flash.
Did we need to do something special to collect Gold, or were these a different class of object? Or not Third Eye constructs at all?
They sure weren't real gold. The coin in my hand was lightweight and unmistakably dull.
The side facing me had a picture of balloons embossed on it, and a ring of repeating Third Eye runic characters around its edge. So much for it somehow being a real coin. I turned it over – it didn't have the distinctive grooves of national currency around the rim – and inspected its other face. A polygonal pyramid, viewed from an isometric angle. It looked more like something you might see on a real coin. This repeated writing was in English, though, and put paid to the idea.
"One token," I read, "equals one play."
"What does that mean?" Zhizhi asked.
Specifically, she asked Miguel, even though I was the one who'd read it off. Too good a journalist to miss how much more about the situation he knew then he'd been willing to let on.
If he'd hesitated, I would've answered this one for him, since it was general knowledge.
He didn't. Of course, being himself, even when he wanted to answer a question, he did it with one of his own. "What's treasure to a child?"
Zhizhi was in no mood. "Fortnite V-Bucks? I don't know! Are you going to explain or not?"
"Right idea," I muttered, because I wasn't in any mood, either. "Wrong era."
She swung the camera in front of my face. It could've just been because she wanted to capture me saying something, not to put me on the spot. You know. Could've been.
Wasn't.
Before I could speak, though, Lena joined us in the doorway with the remaining coins piled in her cupped hands.
Miguel plucked one and held it up to the light. "It means that if we keep going, we'll find an arcade."
Chapter 58: Cinder Alley
Chapter 58: Cinder Alley
We arrived at the final door. It capped off the end of the hallway we'd been exploring. Past a series of mostly empty storerooms. Past a series of Third Eye puzzles and children's game traps. I didn't see any more puzzles on it, just a sign overhead in the runic script. I didn't expect any more traps, either.
The door was like the one from the tunnel. Metal, with a push bar to open it. I wondered if it would have the same handle on the other side, bookending the space we'd just passed.
I say "the other side" like I didn't already know, or at least suspect, what we would find out there.
For some reason, Zhizhi had been satisfied by Miguel's answer about the arcade. She hadn't said a peep since. Either she understood what was happening or she'd contented herself with waiting to find out.
Once more, I inspected the door for a puzzle. Nothing. I stepped back and waved at the push bar. "You want to check this, Miguel?"
He didn't say anything, didn't even nod, but he took my place in front of the door. He stared at it. Smoke curled over his head.
The tokens in Lena's hands clinked as she shifted from one foot to the other.
That broke the tension, and Miguel pushed on the bar. The door opened.
No more traps. Seemed we were past that part of the experience.
The space beyond looked terribly dark. No lights, in or out of Third Eye.
Miguel shone his phone light over it. The space seemed to swallow what feeble illumination the device offered, but we caught hints of what awaited us.
Crumbling, pitted, dark brick walls. A concrete ceiling, covered by cracked paint that had lightened to a charcoal color where it hadn't chipped away. It wasn't lower than the one we'd been walking beneath, but it felt so much more so because it covered a wider area. Perhaps strangest of all, even the floor was brick, like some nineteenth century avenue.
"What the shit?" Lena muttered.
Miguel asked, "Do you remember, Cameron?"
I snorted. "I was a toddler, dude."
He dipped his head.
Miguel was only a few years older than me, but for purposes of this place, they were the most critical years. To Zhizhi, younger than us, and Lena, who grew up out of state, this meant nothing. To me, it was a legend.
To Miguel? A memory.
He stepped out into the darkness.
I glanced back at Lena and Zhizhi.
Lena frowned. "So this is Miguel's...?"
"Seems like," I said.
"How do you think that's going to work?"
I swallowed. "No clue. Let's just try not to collect anything that isn't ours."
"Cool," Lena said, and that could have been the end of it. She hesitated to step forward, though. "Doesn't it seem like the kind of place that might fall out of the beta? I wasn't worried about it before, but now I'm starting to get the same vibe as the construction site. Maybe the same thing happened there."
"It's hard to imagine someone having an intense emotional connection with that place." I tried to grin. Maybe it worked. "At least before it turned into a monster-haunted liminal space."
"On the subject of liminal spaces," Zhizhi said. She followed Miguel into the darkness and made a slow pan with her camera. She didn't shudder, but she was so pale it looked like she wanted to and only resisted because she'd been trained to hold the camera steady above all else. "Is somebody ready to explain what this place is?"
"Cinder Alley," Miguel said.
After he said it, I followed him out into the space.
We stood in a side passage. The main concourse was even wider, but with the same low, uncomfortable ceiling. Out there, some of the walls were stucco and faux wood, Tudor revival, not a million miles off from Lena's old apartment building. Idly, I wondered if there was some architectural throughline, if someone on Third Eye's dev team harbored special fondness for these kinds of designs.
In the dark, everything was pitched just at the limit of claustrophobia. I could imagine being charmed by this space, delighted by it, especially as a little kid who wouldn't feel the ceiling pressing so close. Either our phones didn't show off the starscape painted overhead, or the white paint had worn away faster than the darker backdrop, but even so I thought my child self would've been able to imagine he was walking through some enchanted alleyway.
If I'd come here as an adult, though, I think I would've understood why it closed before I got the chance.
And it was closed, a weird dose of reality and modernity against the 1990s memories, the 1960s design, and the construction meant to evoke something a century older than it was. Whenever one of our lights passed over the door or window of a little shop, it reflected off of a folding metal gate that had been pulled down to block off the space. The fake streetlights held no bulbs, the paint had peeled, almost all the signs were gone from over the doorways, and everything looked covered by dust where it wasn't colonized by mold.
"I almost wish we'd brought Ben," I said. "I think he was old enough to remember coming down here."
"Perhaps another time," Miguel said.
"Wait," Zhizhi said. "This is a real place, not a Third Eye thing?"
"It was," Miguel said. "The lower level of Cinderella City Mall. Quaint and fanciful Cinder Alley. Quite the local tourist attraction, until it wasn't. Of course, its prime was in our parents' time."
"Wait, I remember this," Lena said. "Didn't you want to do a virtual tour of it, Cam?"
"Couple years ago, yeah, for the anniversary," I said.
"But this can't be the real place," she said. "We'd be, what? Right under the library and the police station?"
I tried to picture the geometry. "Probably under those apartments we like."
Lena cocked her head. "Wow. So it's a pretty big space down here."
"Yeah." I had a lump in my throat and didn't really understand why. Borrowed nostalgia? Was that a thing? "You're right, though. This can't be the real Cinder Alley. They demolished the mall. I'm sure the underground area didn't survive."
"So what are we looking at?" Zhizhi asked.
"My Realm," Miguel said.
Zhizhi spun the camera to him.
He glanced over his shoulder. To Lena and I, he said, "Am I wrong?"
"Don't think so," Lena said.
"I'm not going to ask what yours was, Lena," he said. "Less discrete people on the wiki have described their own as quite... personalized."
She toed the floor. Bernie stirred in his sling and she reached back to stroke his head. "That's one way of putting it."
Miguel stabbed his cigarette out in one of the abandoned ashtrays over a garbage bin. If the presence of an ashtray in such an enclosed space didn't scream that this had been ripped from a previous century, I didn't know what would.
He said, "Come. I don't know how this will turn out, but I think it's fairly obvious where we'll learn."
"That's where these come in?" Lena shook the tokens in her hands.
Miguel nodded. "I don't know which to criticize more. Third Eye rooting around in my head, or them dredging up such a banal interpretation of my psyche."
Lena pursed her lips, but offered no comment.
Zhizhi caught her expression on camera, though.
I didn't have to.
Lena's Realm had reflected a snapshot of her mentality at one of the darkest points of her life. It seemed to have done a disturbingly good job. More than that, confronting it had forced her to face some truths she'd wanted very much to bury.
I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say Third Eye had saved our relationship by means of that Realm.
What would the game do with the Realm of a player who was no longer playing?
I had no idea. None of us did.
All we could do was follow Miguel into the darkness.
Lena pushed closer to me, arm to arm. Zhizhi drifted next to us as well, clustered tight beneath the warmth of Lena's wings.
I got it. Something about the artificiality of the space freaked me the hell out. It was a copy of a copy, a fake version of a fake street.
I wondered how distorted the space was, and by extension, the time. At the construction site, time had run faster and faster for us relative to the outside world, the gap growing more extreme as the space inflated. How far off were we as we explored an entire duplicated mall?
I realized I could check. Back then, we'd had to borrow Matt's pocket watch, but I'd since downloaded an app to track time locally without checking in with an off-site atomic clock. I compared the app's time with that of my phone's regular clock.
The two were off, but only by a half hour. Which didn't make a ton of sense to me, but I supposed was for the best. Just to be sure, I checked that the date was the same on both apps, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it was. I hadn't considered it out of the realm of possibility that we would've disappeared down here for a month, or a decade, like people in a fairy story who wandered through the wrong mushroom ring.
Maybe I thought of fairy tales because that was what Cinder Alley had been meant to evoke when it was originally built. I doubted it, though. The abandoned version was plenty weird, but almost all the whimsy had leached out of it.
Our footsteps echoed endlessly on the brick floor, bouncing at odd angles. Those and our breaths, plus occasional burbles from Bernie, were the only sounds.
I thought I found the silence unnerving.
Right up until the laughter started.
We arrived at the final door. It capped off the end of the hallway we'd been exploring. Past a series of mostly empty storerooms. Past a series of Third Eye puzzles and children's game traps. I didn't see any more puzzles on it, just a sign overhead in the runic script. I didn't expect any more traps, either.
The door was like the one from the tunnel. Metal, with a push bar to open it. I wondered if it would have the same handle on the other side, bookending the space we'd just passed.
I say "the other side" like I didn't already know, or at least suspect, what we would find out there.
For some reason, Zhizhi had been satisfied by Miguel's answer about the arcade. She hadn't said a peep since. Either she understood what was happening or she'd contented herself with waiting to find out.
Once more, I inspected the door for a puzzle. Nothing. I stepped back and waved at the push bar. "You want to check this, Miguel?"
He didn't say anything, didn't even nod, but he took my place in front of the door. He stared at it. Smoke curled over his head.
The tokens in Lena's hands clinked as she shifted from one foot to the other.
That broke the tension, and Miguel pushed on the bar. The door opened.
No more traps. Seemed we were past that part of the experience.
The space beyond looked terribly dark. No lights, in or out of Third Eye.
Miguel shone his phone light over it. The space seemed to swallow what feeble illumination the device offered, but we caught hints of what awaited us.
Crumbling, pitted, dark brick walls. A concrete ceiling, covered by cracked paint that had lightened to a charcoal color where it hadn't chipped away. It wasn't lower than the one we'd been walking beneath, but it felt so much more so because it covered a wider area. Perhaps strangest of all, even the floor was brick, like some nineteenth century avenue.
"What the shit?" Lena muttered.
Miguel asked, "Do you remember, Cameron?"
I snorted. "I was a toddler, dude."
He dipped his head.
Miguel was only a few years older than me, but for purposes of this place, they were the most critical years. To Zhizhi, younger than us, and Lena, who grew up out of state, this meant nothing. To me, it was a legend.
To Miguel? A memory.
He stepped out into the darkness.
I glanced back at Lena and Zhizhi.
Lena frowned. "So this is Miguel's...?"
"Seems like," I said.
"How do you think that's going to work?"
I swallowed. "No clue. Let's just try not to collect anything that isn't ours."
"Cool," Lena said, and that could have been the end of it. She hesitated to step forward, though. "Doesn't it seem like the kind of place that might fall out of the beta? I wasn't worried about it before, but now I'm starting to get the same vibe as the construction site. Maybe the same thing happened there."
"It's hard to imagine someone having an intense emotional connection with that place." I tried to grin. Maybe it worked. "At least before it turned into a monster-haunted liminal space."
"On the subject of liminal spaces," Zhizhi said. She followed Miguel into the darkness and made a slow pan with her camera. She didn't shudder, but she was so pale it looked like she wanted to and only resisted because she'd been trained to hold the camera steady above all else. "Is somebody ready to explain what this place is?"
"Cinder Alley," Miguel said.
After he said it, I followed him out into the space.
We stood in a side passage. The main concourse was even wider, but with the same low, uncomfortable ceiling. Out there, some of the walls were stucco and faux wood, Tudor revival, not a million miles off from Lena's old apartment building. Idly, I wondered if there was some architectural throughline, if someone on Third Eye's dev team harbored special fondness for these kinds of designs.
In the dark, everything was pitched just at the limit of claustrophobia. I could imagine being charmed by this space, delighted by it, especially as a little kid who wouldn't feel the ceiling pressing so close. Either our phones didn't show off the starscape painted overhead, or the white paint had worn away faster than the darker backdrop, but even so I thought my child self would've been able to imagine he was walking through some enchanted alleyway.
If I'd come here as an adult, though, I think I would've understood why it closed before I got the chance.
And it was closed, a weird dose of reality and modernity against the 1990s memories, the 1960s design, and the construction meant to evoke something a century older than it was. Whenever one of our lights passed over the door or window of a little shop, it reflected off of a folding metal gate that had been pulled down to block off the space. The fake streetlights held no bulbs, the paint had peeled, almost all the signs were gone from over the doorways, and everything looked covered by dust where it wasn't colonized by mold.
"I almost wish we'd brought Ben," I said. "I think he was old enough to remember coming down here."
"Perhaps another time," Miguel said.
"Wait," Zhizhi said. "This is a real place, not a Third Eye thing?"
"It was," Miguel said. "The lower level of Cinderella City Mall. Quaint and fanciful Cinder Alley. Quite the local tourist attraction, until it wasn't. Of course, its prime was in our parents' time."
"Wait, I remember this," Lena said. "Didn't you want to do a virtual tour of it, Cam?"
"Couple years ago, yeah, for the anniversary," I said.
"But this can't be the real place," she said. "We'd be, what? Right under the library and the police station?"
I tried to picture the geometry. "Probably under those apartments we like."
Lena cocked her head. "Wow. So it's a pretty big space down here."
"Yeah." I had a lump in my throat and didn't really understand why. Borrowed nostalgia? Was that a thing? "You're right, though. This can't be the real Cinder Alley. They demolished the mall. I'm sure the underground area didn't survive."
"So what are we looking at?" Zhizhi asked.
"My Realm," Miguel said.
Zhizhi spun the camera to him.
He glanced over his shoulder. To Lena and I, he said, "Am I wrong?"
"Don't think so," Lena said.
"I'm not going to ask what yours was, Lena," he said. "Less discrete people on the wiki have described their own as quite... personalized."
She toed the floor. Bernie stirred in his sling and she reached back to stroke his head. "That's one way of putting it."
Miguel stabbed his cigarette out in one of the abandoned ashtrays over a garbage bin. If the presence of an ashtray in such an enclosed space didn't scream that this had been ripped from a previous century, I didn't know what would.
He said, "Come. I don't know how this will turn out, but I think it's fairly obvious where we'll learn."
"That's where these come in?" Lena shook the tokens in her hands.
Miguel nodded. "I don't know which to criticize more. Third Eye rooting around in my head, or them dredging up such a banal interpretation of my psyche."
Lena pursed her lips, but offered no comment.
Zhizhi caught her expression on camera, though.
I didn't have to.
Lena's Realm had reflected a snapshot of her mentality at one of the darkest points of her life. It seemed to have done a disturbingly good job. More than that, confronting it had forced her to face some truths she'd wanted very much to bury.
I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say Third Eye had saved our relationship by means of that Realm.
What would the game do with the Realm of a player who was no longer playing?
I had no idea. None of us did.
All we could do was follow Miguel into the darkness.
Lena pushed closer to me, arm to arm. Zhizhi drifted next to us as well, clustered tight beneath the warmth of Lena's wings.
I got it. Something about the artificiality of the space freaked me the hell out. It was a copy of a copy, a fake version of a fake street.
I wondered how distorted the space was, and by extension, the time. At the construction site, time had run faster and faster for us relative to the outside world, the gap growing more extreme as the space inflated. How far off were we as we explored an entire duplicated mall?
I realized I could check. Back then, we'd had to borrow Matt's pocket watch, but I'd since downloaded an app to track time locally without checking in with an off-site atomic clock. I compared the app's time with that of my phone's regular clock.
The two were off, but only by a half hour. Which didn't make a ton of sense to me, but I supposed was for the best. Just to be sure, I checked that the date was the same on both apps, and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that it was. I hadn't considered it out of the realm of possibility that we would've disappeared down here for a month, or a decade, like people in a fairy story who wandered through the wrong mushroom ring.
Maybe I thought of fairy tales because that was what Cinder Alley had been meant to evoke when it was originally built. I doubted it, though. The abandoned version was plenty weird, but almost all the whimsy had leached out of it.
Our footsteps echoed endlessly on the brick floor, bouncing at odd angles. Those and our breaths, plus occasional burbles from Bernie, were the only sounds.
I thought I found the silence unnerving.
Right up until the laughter started.
Chapter 59: Laughing Matter
Chapter 59: Laughing Matter
We froze in our tracks as laughter echoed through the empty halls.
It was crude, distorted, mechanical. For a second, it made me think of Mask's voice changer, but this had a different quality to it. More primitive. Rhythmic, almost a drumbeat.
Miguel started walking again.
The laughter faded, and just when I thought silence would resume, a voice took its place. "Step right up and take your shot to win fabulous prizes, kids. One token equals one play!"
I happen to know we've been recording people's voices for well over a hundred years. By the time this mall closed, we'd gotten pretty good at it. My point is, there was really no excuse for how choppy and artificial the voice sounded. Nonetheless, I've never run into a carnival or arcade that doesn't have at least one game using this kind of weirdly primitive synthesizer. At some point, it had stopped being a technological limitation and had become an aesthetic.
We could see light, too, spilling around the escalators at the far end of the Cinder Alley concourse. With the flickering, reflected glow came more sounds. Bleeps and bloops and other announcers more crudely synthesized then they should have had to be in the era in which they'd been made.
"I guess this is what those tokens were for." Lena shook the pile in her hands. "Should we divide them up?"
"Let's see what we're dealing with first," Miguel said. He'd pushed so far ahead of us that his light bobbed halfway between ours and the reflections from the arcade.
I tried to remember if the real Cinder Alley had been laid out this way, with an arcade at one end. No luck. If I'd actually come down here, and not just invented the memories from hearing Benji's or Miguel's descriptions, I'd done so as a tiny child.
This layout seemed too convenient for Third Eye's purposes. The arcade lay almost directly behind the escalators, which meant we had to walk all the way up to them to see anything except hints of light from the machines.
"If this really is Miguel's Realm," Lena said, "how come it's so much bigger than mine?"
I glanced at her. "Do you actually think I could have an answer to that question, or are you just thinking aloud?"
She flashed a smile. "Mostly, I'm just making conversation so we don't act all nervous."
Zhizhi chuckled.
I smiled back at Lena. When we'd revisited the construction site, she'd done an amazing job keeping our spirits up until things turned from scary to outright dangerous. I was glad to see she still could, and would.
Miguel reached the escalators. Despite the enticing sounds from the arcade, he stopped and panned his phone up.
The escalators stretched upwards, and if the roof had been any higher, we might not have been able to see where they terminated. As it was, Miguel's phone light played dimly off a slab of unpainted concrete. The escalator railings extended right up into it.
I'd never doubted that this whole place was a Third Eye construct dredged from the past or from Miguel's memories. A part of me had clung to the notion that it might not be, though. Maybe Cinder Alley had retained just enough whimsy to inspire me. I'd imagined the gorgeous, oh-so-convenient apartment complex that was probably somewhere over our heads having kept the place open and installed a secret entrance just for the tenants.
This weird concrete blockage put paid to the idea. It looked like the whole building had been dipped into an ocean of cement and then flipped upside down.
Miguel grunted and stepped around the escalators. Thanks to his delay, the rest of us had caught up to him.
As we got our first look at the arcade, the recorded voice cycled back around to its drumbeat laughter.
The arcade's name was spelled out in bright neon, completely at odds with the fauxstalgic nineteenth century facade over which it was set. Not that it would've fit in a modern mall, since it was spelled out in Third Eye runes.
"That's the character for joy, right?" Zhizhi asked. She pointed to a series of squiggles forming a shape somewhere between a triangle and a circle, with a burst like confetti in their center. Now that she pointed it out, I recognized it from the tile Miguel had pressed back in the hallway.
He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. "Damn. I don't know why I even use the app."
Zhizhi brushed her hand through her hair. "Because I only know two runes?"
Lena bumped her shoulder into me. "It is *so* freaking cool to think we could actually learn this language."
"We're a long way from that," Miguel said.
"A lot closer than we thought we were," I said.
He glanced down at his phone. "Indeed."
"What's the name of the arcade?" Zhizhi asked.
Miguel swept his phone over the neon. It beeped a couple of times, indicating matches, including the symbol for joy at the end, but this wasn't a simple three-rune sign like the one in the maintenance tunnel. He got four hits out of seventeen.
"It's not a transliteration of the name of the old arcade?" I asked. "I guess you were just a little kid, so you probably wouldn't remember –"
"No," he said curtly.
I guessed he would, in fact, remember. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.
"This is very little like the arcade that existed then," he said. "That was more of a family fun center, with a few machines on one side."
"Why would Third Eye go through all this effort to re-create the mall," Lena asked, "then put in a different kind of arcade than the one you remember?"
"Why would Third Eye go through all this effort for someone it did not extend even twenty four hours of beta access to?" Miguel gave an exaggerated shrug. "Seeking a method in this madness is the maddest thing of all."
"It always makes sense eventually." When we all glanced at Lena, she bit her lip. "Well. Usually."
"There must be something we're supposed to find in there," I said. "Something *you're* supposed to find, Miguel."
He regarded us for a moment, then lit another cigarette and stalked toward the arcade.
We followed.
Third Eye might not have planted an authentic arcade in Cinder Alley, but it had certainly captured the feel of one. The only lights came from the machines. If there were any other sounds, those drowned them out. Every surface had been infused with the smell of cheap paint, cigarette smoke, stale pop, staler sweat, and the occasional hint of weed. Just beneath all that, the hot electric buzz of components pushed to the limits of their technology, a sound and a smell and even a vibration unique unto itself.
Because I was bringing up the rear, I got to see the difference in Lena's and Zhizhi's reactions.
Lena straightened up like one of those buzzing wires had gone straight into her nervous system. The tokens shifted and clinked in her fingers as a wiggle worked its way from her head to her feet and back up.
Zhizhi, on the other hand, sagged against her camera, not sighing but swallowing a sigh.
For my part, I felt a little buzz of anticipation, being surrounded by so many electronic games, but it was muted by the fact I doubted I'd actually *like* them. The archetypical arcade game was pitched to a level of difficulty where you had to memorize it to progress, and the process of memorization meant pumping in far more tokens then we had.
If they hadn't largely gone out of business in the English-speaking world, our modern Internet would've ripped arcades to shreds for being pay-to-win. Because they were rooted in the past, nostalgia papered over their sins.
I'm not saying the Internet would be right. Just that I found the prospect of playing the actual games here much less interesting than figuring out how to play *Third Eye* here.
What was the game? Did we need to beat certain cabinets? Play one of the physical games, chuck basketballs at a hoop or smack plastic moles with a rubber mallet?
Or was it just about Miguel confronting something from his past, like Lena had in her Realm?
"We must have to do something with the games themselves," I said. "Otherwise, it would just be a copy from your memories."
"If anything about this makes sense," Miguel said, "that does."
"Any idea where we should start?" I asked.
"We should play something, duh," Lena said. She spilled her tokens onto the glass counter and walked around with one pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She stopped at a Street Fighter 2 cabinet and slid one into the slot. "Who wants to try my Dee Jay?"
"Nobody," I said, "because that's a World Warrior cabinet. I'm pretty sure he wasn't introduced until Super."
"Ugh, just like at The Tabletop Tap. There's retro and then there's plain old *old*. Whatever, I'll just play Ken." She mashed through the intro screen.
She almost mashed all the way through selecting a character and starting a match before any of us noticed something wrong.
Up until now, the Street Fighter 2 cabinet had looked and behaved exactly like the one at the retro arcade near our apartment. I recognized it all too well, if for no other reason than Lena's familiar annoyance at having to play the World Warrior version, rather than one of its many revisions.
The original release of Street Fighter 2 featured, famously – or infamously, to hear Lena complain about it –, eight playable characters.
All of them were present here. So far, so normal.
But splitting them down the middle was a ninth, blank character selection box.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
"Miguel," she called. "I think maybe you should play this round ."
"I've never been much for fighting games." Nonetheless, he swept over to stand in front of the cabinet. He frowned at the screen. When Lena backed away, he took her place and gripped the stick.
With short, jerky motions, he tapped to the center of the character select screen and highlighted the blank box.
There was no character portrait, no name. Strings of intermingled Roman and Third Eye characters, all in a harsh, overly bright yellow, filled the space where both should have gone.
"Absolutely bizarre," Zhizhi said. "You'd better select it."
"I had, had I?" Miguel hesitated, puffing on his cigarette. "I suppose we might as well find out how pointless this is."
His finger flicked to the light punch button.
The screen went haywire, and in place of any sound Capcom ever put into Street Fighter, familiar mechanical laughter poured like a drumbeat from the cabinet.
We froze in our tracks as laughter echoed through the empty halls.
It was crude, distorted, mechanical. For a second, it made me think of Mask's voice changer, but this had a different quality to it. More primitive. Rhythmic, almost a drumbeat.
Miguel started walking again.
The laughter faded, and just when I thought silence would resume, a voice took its place. "Step right up and take your shot to win fabulous prizes, kids. One token equals one play!"
I happen to know we've been recording people's voices for well over a hundred years. By the time this mall closed, we'd gotten pretty good at it. My point is, there was really no excuse for how choppy and artificial the voice sounded. Nonetheless, I've never run into a carnival or arcade that doesn't have at least one game using this kind of weirdly primitive synthesizer. At some point, it had stopped being a technological limitation and had become an aesthetic.
We could see light, too, spilling around the escalators at the far end of the Cinder Alley concourse. With the flickering, reflected glow came more sounds. Bleeps and bloops and other announcers more crudely synthesized then they should have had to be in the era in which they'd been made.
"I guess this is what those tokens were for." Lena shook the pile in her hands. "Should we divide them up?"
"Let's see what we're dealing with first," Miguel said. He'd pushed so far ahead of us that his light bobbed halfway between ours and the reflections from the arcade.
I tried to remember if the real Cinder Alley had been laid out this way, with an arcade at one end. No luck. If I'd actually come down here, and not just invented the memories from hearing Benji's or Miguel's descriptions, I'd done so as a tiny child.
This layout seemed too convenient for Third Eye's purposes. The arcade lay almost directly behind the escalators, which meant we had to walk all the way up to them to see anything except hints of light from the machines.
"If this really is Miguel's Realm," Lena said, "how come it's so much bigger than mine?"
I glanced at her. "Do you actually think I could have an answer to that question, or are you just thinking aloud?"
She flashed a smile. "Mostly, I'm just making conversation so we don't act all nervous."
Zhizhi chuckled.
I smiled back at Lena. When we'd revisited the construction site, she'd done an amazing job keeping our spirits up until things turned from scary to outright dangerous. I was glad to see she still could, and would.
Miguel reached the escalators. Despite the enticing sounds from the arcade, he stopped and panned his phone up.
The escalators stretched upwards, and if the roof had been any higher, we might not have been able to see where they terminated. As it was, Miguel's phone light played dimly off a slab of unpainted concrete. The escalator railings extended right up into it.
I'd never doubted that this whole place was a Third Eye construct dredged from the past or from Miguel's memories. A part of me had clung to the notion that it might not be, though. Maybe Cinder Alley had retained just enough whimsy to inspire me. I'd imagined the gorgeous, oh-so-convenient apartment complex that was probably somewhere over our heads having kept the place open and installed a secret entrance just for the tenants.
This weird concrete blockage put paid to the idea. It looked like the whole building had been dipped into an ocean of cement and then flipped upside down.
Miguel grunted and stepped around the escalators. Thanks to his delay, the rest of us had caught up to him.
As we got our first look at the arcade, the recorded voice cycled back around to its drumbeat laughter.
The arcade's name was spelled out in bright neon, completely at odds with the fauxstalgic nineteenth century facade over which it was set. Not that it would've fit in a modern mall, since it was spelled out in Third Eye runes.
"That's the character for joy, right?" Zhizhi asked. She pointed to a series of squiggles forming a shape somewhere between a triangle and a circle, with a burst like confetti in their center. Now that she pointed it out, I recognized it from the tile Miguel had pressed back in the hallway.
He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. "Damn. I don't know why I even use the app."
Zhizhi brushed her hand through her hair. "Because I only know two runes?"
Lena bumped her shoulder into me. "It is *so* freaking cool to think we could actually learn this language."
"We're a long way from that," Miguel said.
"A lot closer than we thought we were," I said.
He glanced down at his phone. "Indeed."
"What's the name of the arcade?" Zhizhi asked.
Miguel swept his phone over the neon. It beeped a couple of times, indicating matches, including the symbol for joy at the end, but this wasn't a simple three-rune sign like the one in the maintenance tunnel. He got four hits out of seventeen.
"It's not a transliteration of the name of the old arcade?" I asked. "I guess you were just a little kid, so you probably wouldn't remember –"
"No," he said curtly.
I guessed he would, in fact, remember. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.
"This is very little like the arcade that existed then," he said. "That was more of a family fun center, with a few machines on one side."
"Why would Third Eye go through all this effort to re-create the mall," Lena asked, "then put in a different kind of arcade than the one you remember?"
"Why would Third Eye go through all this effort for someone it did not extend even twenty four hours of beta access to?" Miguel gave an exaggerated shrug. "Seeking a method in this madness is the maddest thing of all."
"It always makes sense eventually." When we all glanced at Lena, she bit her lip. "Well. Usually."
"There must be something we're supposed to find in there," I said. "Something *you're* supposed to find, Miguel."
He regarded us for a moment, then lit another cigarette and stalked toward the arcade.
We followed.
Third Eye might not have planted an authentic arcade in Cinder Alley, but it had certainly captured the feel of one. The only lights came from the machines. If there were any other sounds, those drowned them out. Every surface had been infused with the smell of cheap paint, cigarette smoke, stale pop, staler sweat, and the occasional hint of weed. Just beneath all that, the hot electric buzz of components pushed to the limits of their technology, a sound and a smell and even a vibration unique unto itself.
Because I was bringing up the rear, I got to see the difference in Lena's and Zhizhi's reactions.
Lena straightened up like one of those buzzing wires had gone straight into her nervous system. The tokens shifted and clinked in her fingers as a wiggle worked its way from her head to her feet and back up.
Zhizhi, on the other hand, sagged against her camera, not sighing but swallowing a sigh.
For my part, I felt a little buzz of anticipation, being surrounded by so many electronic games, but it was muted by the fact I doubted I'd actually *like* them. The archetypical arcade game was pitched to a level of difficulty where you had to memorize it to progress, and the process of memorization meant pumping in far more tokens then we had.
If they hadn't largely gone out of business in the English-speaking world, our modern Internet would've ripped arcades to shreds for being pay-to-win. Because they were rooted in the past, nostalgia papered over their sins.
I'm not saying the Internet would be right. Just that I found the prospect of playing the actual games here much less interesting than figuring out how to play *Third Eye* here.
What was the game? Did we need to beat certain cabinets? Play one of the physical games, chuck basketballs at a hoop or smack plastic moles with a rubber mallet?
Or was it just about Miguel confronting something from his past, like Lena had in her Realm?
"We must have to do something with the games themselves," I said. "Otherwise, it would just be a copy from your memories."
"If anything about this makes sense," Miguel said, "that does."
"Any idea where we should start?" I asked.
"We should play something, duh," Lena said. She spilled her tokens onto the glass counter and walked around with one pinched between her thumb and forefinger. She stopped at a Street Fighter 2 cabinet and slid one into the slot. "Who wants to try my Dee Jay?"
"Nobody," I said, "because that's a World Warrior cabinet. I'm pretty sure he wasn't introduced until Super."
"Ugh, just like at The Tabletop Tap. There's retro and then there's plain old *old*. Whatever, I'll just play Ken." She mashed through the intro screen.
She almost mashed all the way through selecting a character and starting a match before any of us noticed something wrong.
Up until now, the Street Fighter 2 cabinet had looked and behaved exactly like the one at the retro arcade near our apartment. I recognized it all too well, if for no other reason than Lena's familiar annoyance at having to play the World Warrior version, rather than one of its many revisions.
The original release of Street Fighter 2 featured, famously – or infamously, to hear Lena complain about it –, eight playable characters.
All of them were present here. So far, so normal.
But splitting them down the middle was a ninth, blank character selection box.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
"Miguel," she called. "I think maybe you should play this round ."
"I've never been much for fighting games." Nonetheless, he swept over to stand in front of the cabinet. He frowned at the screen. When Lena backed away, he took her place and gripped the stick.
With short, jerky motions, he tapped to the center of the character select screen and highlighted the blank box.
There was no character portrait, no name. Strings of intermingled Roman and Third Eye characters, all in a harsh, overly bright yellow, filled the space where both should have gone.
"Absolutely bizarre," Zhizhi said. "You'd better select it."
"I had, had I?" Miguel hesitated, puffing on his cigarette. "I suppose we might as well find out how pointless this is."
His finger flicked to the light punch button.
The screen went haywire, and in place of any sound Capcom ever put into Street Fighter, familiar mechanical laughter poured like a drumbeat from the cabinet.
Chapter 60: Bug Out
Chapter 60: Bug Out
The laughter faded and normal Street Fighter sounds resumed.
It looked like Miguel had started a mirror match. On one side, under the CPU's control, was normal-ass Ryu, the poster boy for the game. White gi, brown hair. On the other side, a palette swap.
I didn't know this specific version of this specific game well enough to say for sure, but somehow I doubted there was a palette for Ryu where every surface was the same oversaturated, hurt-your-eyes yellow.
"So weird," Lena said. "Do you think you have to win the match, or...?"
"I seriously doubt that it matters," Miguel said.
She waved at the buttons. "At least try some moves."
Miguel's shrug was almost, but not quite, imperceptible. He executed the quarter circle forward fireball motion and tapped light punch again, but he did it so slowly that his golden Ryu went through a little dance of crouching, standing up and taking a step forward, and throwing a punch into thin air.
While he ate a fireball from his CPU opponent, Lena scowled at him.
"I told you I was not much for these games," Miguel said.
"Were you when you were a little kid?" Zhizhi asked.
"I wasn't allowed to play violent games at that age." He exhaled a puff of smoke. On screen, he got kicked back to the ground just as he finished rising.
I saw Lena's fingers flexing and knew she was a lost round away from asking to take his place.
I laced my fingers through hers and felt the tension. She flicked a glance at me, but there was only so much I could do. Thankfully, Bernie meeped in solidarity with me; she reached back and pulled him out to hug him.
Zhizhi said, "Why do you own a copy of one of these Street Fighter games if you never play them? I saw the box at your place."
Miguel shot her a glance, giving even his passive, first match CPU opponent another unanswered opening. "As you correctly deduced, I've played since."
"When did you start?" she asked.
I didn't understand her line of questioning, but it seemed to hit home. Miguel's hand tightened on the stick.
When the CPU shuffled forward to attack again, he twitched through a series of motions. In the darkness of the arcade, I couldn't follow such quick hand movements. I only knew what he'd done when his golden Ryu countered the CPU with a dragon punch, a fiery rising uppercut.
The whole screen flashed with golden light. Between that and the single color glitched palette, it was hard to tell where Miguel's actual Ryu ended and his afterimages began, as both rose into the air and the CPU's health bar emptied out.
Which was wrong on at least three levels. First of all, Miguel hadn't done anything in the match except whiff a single punch, certainly not enough to fill up a super meter that would usually require multiple exchanges to charge. Second, there were no supers in the original release of Street Fighter 2. Third, when supers finally did get introduced, Ryu's was an enhanced fireball. Despite using a re-colored version of the original sprite, I was pretty sure this animation was ripped straight from the sequel, a game that hadn't even come out when Cinderella City closed.
All of which was sort of interesting in the abstract, but I had no idea what it meant. I stifled a laugh and Lena glanced at me. I'd just wondered if Third Eye Productions could be sued by Capcom for distributing a modified version of their game in this unreal environment.
Then Miguel's golden Ryu landed and turned toward the camera to flash a victory pose.
The cabinet said, "Congratulations!"
The character's mouth synced up perfectly with it.
Nobody was laughing now.
The game seemed to freeze on the victory screen, except that the golden Ryu's mouth spread in a grin that really didn't fit the character. It continued spreading to the edge of the sprite's face, then kept going a few pixels beyond.
On a scale of creepy shit we'd encountered since we started to play Third Eye, this probably shouldn't have even rated. At least for me, though, and I'm sure for Lena, it evoked the many video game creepypastas we'd stayed up late reading on the internet. She squeezed Bernie tighter and I wrapped an arm around both of them.
I didn't think our fear was completely irrational, either. Sure, there was no evidence that this grinning presence could hurt us physically, or even that it would want to. Something messing with our electronics represented a different and equally terrifying threat, though. Our livelihoods, our hobbies, and even our access to Third Eye depended on our phones and computers.
Miguel just seemed annoyed, though. He tapped light punch until the screen unfroze. A second round began, but the CPU's Ryu stayed prone and its health bar didn't refill.
Miguel pushed away from the cabinet and took a drag on his cigarette.
"Did it bug out?" Zhizhi asked. "If you can't attack, you can't win?"
"Depending on how bugged it is," he said, "I'll win when the timer runs out, since my opponent has less health. If that doesn't work, then I'm done with this nonsense."
She approached the cabinet for the first time. After she shifted her camera to the opposite shoulder, she touched Miguel's hand. "Does it bug you because you don't think you're going to get anything out of this? Or because you don't like having your past dredged up?"
"Both," he snapped. His shoulders sagged. "Sorry. I know I've been short with you this evening."
Zhizhi patted his arm. "Once I understood, it didn't bother me."
"No?" He raised an eyebrow.
She grinned. "Didn't bother me much."
He held his cigarette out to the side and leaned in to kiss her cheek. She tilted her head at the last second and he got more of a kiss than he'd bargained for. Although as easily as he leaned into it, perhaps he had bargained for it – that was the smooth sort of move he'd always had and I hadn't.
I felt Lena's elbow in my stomach and glanced at her. She was staring at Miguel and Zhizhi. She mouthed, "When?"
Meaning when had they gotten together. I realized I'd never confirmed my suspicion with Lena, or even voiced it. Between – everything – it had slipped my mind. So much shit had happened.
And continued to happen. On screen, the timer ran out. The mechanical voice announced, "You win."
"You'd better see this through," Zhizhi said. She stepped away and Miguel turned back to the cabinet.
The win screen flickered as he gripped the controls again. When it cleared, it showed the map with the different characters placed around the world. Except that while the flags representing their home countries seemed to be in the right places, the map itself had glitched out and was all blue. A drowned world.
Aside from that visual bug, the game worked about like it had. Miguel breezed through his next match. His golden Ryu was absurdly overpowered. He had supers that hadn't existed in this version of the game, he seemed to have no limits on how or when he could use them, and they did outrageous damage. He finished Ken with a fireball super and, like the CPU's Ryu, the American fighter spent the whole second round lying broken on his side of the screen.
While we waited for the timer to tick down, I said, "Maybe try beating the next one without a super?"
Miguel grunted. "It would be more engaging. Perhaps it will be informative, too."
We waited in silence for about thirty of the sixty seconds. Amazing how long that can feel.
Abruptly, Miguel said, "You were right."
About finishing a round without a super? Before I could put my foot in my mouth by saying it aloud, Zhizhi nodded.
"It was a hell of a birthday party," Miguel said. "It may legitimately have been the last one ever held down here. My brothers, my sister, my cousins, my classmates. We did not fit in the arcade, so we took turns exploring Cinder Alley."
"Even you, birthday boy?" Zhizhi asked.
"Even me. My papa insisted." Miguel's fingers drummed on the rim of the cabinet. "He was also the one who insisted I be allowed to play every game, though. Even the forbidden ones. I didn't understand at the time why my mother indulged him.
The end of the match put his story on hold.
If it'd been me at the controls, I would've gone back on my resolution when I saw the next match was against Zangief. I've always hated fighting grapplers, and here was the origin of the entire archetype. I'd have whipped out an instant kill super on him for sure and gotten back to my emotional journey.
Or maybe I just wanted to hear Miguel get back to his emotional journey.
Instead, he buckled down and won the match more or less fair and square. More less than more, considering that even without the absurd super, golden Ryu moved crazy fast and hit like a truck.
Miguel's reward was a normal second round, and he played it normally. It seemed like it would be possible for him to lose if he played sloppily, since he did take damage when he let hits through, but he cruised to another win.
Golden Ryu frowned at us from the screen, and I frowned back. The character, or the game, was definitely reacting to what we did, and didn't like this approach. Did that mean we weren't supposed to play fair? Was that a message straight from Third Eye Productions?
Miguel didn't seem to notice. He said, "It turned out to be a farewell party."
"You don't mean for the mall, do you?" Zhizhi asked.
"I suppose it was that, as well," he said.
Another trip across the drowned world. Another match. Miguel dialed in and, once again, won without using one of his character's broken supers. Once again, it looked to me like the character was frowning. After the second round, he showed off a new win pose: pacing back and forth on the screen.
"Interesting," Miguel said. "Another piece of sloppy design."
The pacing stopped. Golden Ryu glared out of the screen. It wasn't proof that whatever Third Eye entity we were dealing with could hear us, but it sure as hell felt like it.
Either Lena shuddered or I did. Maybe both. Bernie grumbled.
"How so?" Zhizhi asked.
"Third Eye obviously wants me to dwell on my tragic past. I'm sure it will be exceptionally therapeutic." Miguel saluted the screen with his cigarette. "Why, then, does my character throw a fit if I don't breeze through matches without thinking?"
"You think the character is, what, a representation of Third Eye itself?" she asked.
"It's obviously connected," he said.
She paid the character more attention. He snapped instantly to his original win pose, complete with too-wide, face-splitting grin.
While the match ended and Miguel moved on to his next opponent, she compared her footage of the screen. "It's mischievous."
Lena's eyebrows raised. She pushed Bernie against me. I gave him a hug and he responded with a happy hum, but I felt like I was missing something.
Miguel struck a balance with the next match. He played the first round without using a super, then ended the second instantly. Golden Ryu struck a win pose straight out of the normal game. Neutral.
While the next match queued up, Zhizhi said, "May I ask?"
"If I said no," Miguel said, "would you go home and search the obituaries?"
She rested her hand on his arm. "You already know the answer."
"The arcade was closed within the week," he said, which definitely wasn't what she'd planned to ask about. She seemed content to wait while he ended the next match, but she didn't have to. He'd fallen into a rhythm, and, coupled with the strength of his character, won even as he continued to speak. "Papa checked into the hospital a week later. All the adults already knew he had cancer."
Zhizhi glared at Miguel's cigarette.
"Colon cancer." Between rounds, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tilted it in her direction. "Where do you think I'm putting these?"
She leaned away and folded her arms.
"Sorry to hear about your dad," I said. "I never knew that."
Miguel startled all of us by barking a laugh. "Cameron, he died when I was six. You and I didn't meet for another twenty years. That is what makes this whole thing so absurd. Third Eye has opened a window into my soul? It needs to look closer."
He'd just won another match. Instead of even bothering with a win pose, golden Ryu put his hands on his hips and glared out of the screen.
Miguel glared back. "I'll get nothing out of this. I can't play the game, and whatever trauma it's trying to dredge up is so old I can't even remember how I felt about it at the time."
Golden Ryu hung his head.
"Maybe it's trying to help you remember," Lena said.
"That's not my definition of help," Miguel said. "I'm glad the game worked you through some things, but this? Does nothing for me."
Lena propped her chin atop Bernie's head.
"Let's see it through," Zhizhi said. "If nothing else, we'll learn something. And Cameron and Lena should get something out of it, right?"
The prospect of collecting a resource from Miguel's Realm made my stomach churn, but he just nodded.
"I'll win this," Miguel said. "But that's it. One token, one win, one prize. The three of you are welcome to play on if you want, but I've had my fill."
We got a full blast of mechanical laughter.
The screen glitched out. Instead of another trip across the drowned world, it launched directly into the versus screen, with both character portraits a garbled mess.
From the cabinet emerged a familiar line, but spoken in the same carnival attraction voice as the laughter:
"Here comes a new challenger!"
The laughter faded and normal Street Fighter sounds resumed.
It looked like Miguel had started a mirror match. On one side, under the CPU's control, was normal-ass Ryu, the poster boy for the game. White gi, brown hair. On the other side, a palette swap.
I didn't know this specific version of this specific game well enough to say for sure, but somehow I doubted there was a palette for Ryu where every surface was the same oversaturated, hurt-your-eyes yellow.
"So weird," Lena said. "Do you think you have to win the match, or...?"
"I seriously doubt that it matters," Miguel said.
She waved at the buttons. "At least try some moves."
Miguel's shrug was almost, but not quite, imperceptible. He executed the quarter circle forward fireball motion and tapped light punch again, but he did it so slowly that his golden Ryu went through a little dance of crouching, standing up and taking a step forward, and throwing a punch into thin air.
While he ate a fireball from his CPU opponent, Lena scowled at him.
"I told you I was not much for these games," Miguel said.
"Were you when you were a little kid?" Zhizhi asked.
"I wasn't allowed to play violent games at that age." He exhaled a puff of smoke. On screen, he got kicked back to the ground just as he finished rising.
I saw Lena's fingers flexing and knew she was a lost round away from asking to take his place.
I laced my fingers through hers and felt the tension. She flicked a glance at me, but there was only so much I could do. Thankfully, Bernie meeped in solidarity with me; she reached back and pulled him out to hug him.
Zhizhi said, "Why do you own a copy of one of these Street Fighter games if you never play them? I saw the box at your place."
Miguel shot her a glance, giving even his passive, first match CPU opponent another unanswered opening. "As you correctly deduced, I've played since."
"When did you start?" she asked.
I didn't understand her line of questioning, but it seemed to hit home. Miguel's hand tightened on the stick.
When the CPU shuffled forward to attack again, he twitched through a series of motions. In the darkness of the arcade, I couldn't follow such quick hand movements. I only knew what he'd done when his golden Ryu countered the CPU with a dragon punch, a fiery rising uppercut.
The whole screen flashed with golden light. Between that and the single color glitched palette, it was hard to tell where Miguel's actual Ryu ended and his afterimages began, as both rose into the air and the CPU's health bar emptied out.
Which was wrong on at least three levels. First of all, Miguel hadn't done anything in the match except whiff a single punch, certainly not enough to fill up a super meter that would usually require multiple exchanges to charge. Second, there were no supers in the original release of Street Fighter 2. Third, when supers finally did get introduced, Ryu's was an enhanced fireball. Despite using a re-colored version of the original sprite, I was pretty sure this animation was ripped straight from the sequel, a game that hadn't even come out when Cinderella City closed.
All of which was sort of interesting in the abstract, but I had no idea what it meant. I stifled a laugh and Lena glanced at me. I'd just wondered if Third Eye Productions could be sued by Capcom for distributing a modified version of their game in this unreal environment.
Then Miguel's golden Ryu landed and turned toward the camera to flash a victory pose.
The cabinet said, "Congratulations!"
The character's mouth synced up perfectly with it.
Nobody was laughing now.
The game seemed to freeze on the victory screen, except that the golden Ryu's mouth spread in a grin that really didn't fit the character. It continued spreading to the edge of the sprite's face, then kept going a few pixels beyond.
On a scale of creepy shit we'd encountered since we started to play Third Eye, this probably shouldn't have even rated. At least for me, though, and I'm sure for Lena, it evoked the many video game creepypastas we'd stayed up late reading on the internet. She squeezed Bernie tighter and I wrapped an arm around both of them.
I didn't think our fear was completely irrational, either. Sure, there was no evidence that this grinning presence could hurt us physically, or even that it would want to. Something messing with our electronics represented a different and equally terrifying threat, though. Our livelihoods, our hobbies, and even our access to Third Eye depended on our phones and computers.
Miguel just seemed annoyed, though. He tapped light punch until the screen unfroze. A second round began, but the CPU's Ryu stayed prone and its health bar didn't refill.
Miguel pushed away from the cabinet and took a drag on his cigarette.
"Did it bug out?" Zhizhi asked. "If you can't attack, you can't win?"
"Depending on how bugged it is," he said, "I'll win when the timer runs out, since my opponent has less health. If that doesn't work, then I'm done with this nonsense."
She approached the cabinet for the first time. After she shifted her camera to the opposite shoulder, she touched Miguel's hand. "Does it bug you because you don't think you're going to get anything out of this? Or because you don't like having your past dredged up?"
"Both," he snapped. His shoulders sagged. "Sorry. I know I've been short with you this evening."
Zhizhi patted his arm. "Once I understood, it didn't bother me."
"No?" He raised an eyebrow.
She grinned. "Didn't bother me much."
He held his cigarette out to the side and leaned in to kiss her cheek. She tilted her head at the last second and he got more of a kiss than he'd bargained for. Although as easily as he leaned into it, perhaps he had bargained for it – that was the smooth sort of move he'd always had and I hadn't.
I felt Lena's elbow in my stomach and glanced at her. She was staring at Miguel and Zhizhi. She mouthed, "When?"
Meaning when had they gotten together. I realized I'd never confirmed my suspicion with Lena, or even voiced it. Between – everything – it had slipped my mind. So much shit had happened.
And continued to happen. On screen, the timer ran out. The mechanical voice announced, "You win."
"You'd better see this through," Zhizhi said. She stepped away and Miguel turned back to the cabinet.
The win screen flickered as he gripped the controls again. When it cleared, it showed the map with the different characters placed around the world. Except that while the flags representing their home countries seemed to be in the right places, the map itself had glitched out and was all blue. A drowned world.
Aside from that visual bug, the game worked about like it had. Miguel breezed through his next match. His golden Ryu was absurdly overpowered. He had supers that hadn't existed in this version of the game, he seemed to have no limits on how or when he could use them, and they did outrageous damage. He finished Ken with a fireball super and, like the CPU's Ryu, the American fighter spent the whole second round lying broken on his side of the screen.
While we waited for the timer to tick down, I said, "Maybe try beating the next one without a super?"
Miguel grunted. "It would be more engaging. Perhaps it will be informative, too."
We waited in silence for about thirty of the sixty seconds. Amazing how long that can feel.
Abruptly, Miguel said, "You were right."
About finishing a round without a super? Before I could put my foot in my mouth by saying it aloud, Zhizhi nodded.
"It was a hell of a birthday party," Miguel said. "It may legitimately have been the last one ever held down here. My brothers, my sister, my cousins, my classmates. We did not fit in the arcade, so we took turns exploring Cinder Alley."
"Even you, birthday boy?" Zhizhi asked.
"Even me. My papa insisted." Miguel's fingers drummed on the rim of the cabinet. "He was also the one who insisted I be allowed to play every game, though. Even the forbidden ones. I didn't understand at the time why my mother indulged him.
The end of the match put his story on hold.
If it'd been me at the controls, I would've gone back on my resolution when I saw the next match was against Zangief. I've always hated fighting grapplers, and here was the origin of the entire archetype. I'd have whipped out an instant kill super on him for sure and gotten back to my emotional journey.
Or maybe I just wanted to hear Miguel get back to his emotional journey.
Instead, he buckled down and won the match more or less fair and square. More less than more, considering that even without the absurd super, golden Ryu moved crazy fast and hit like a truck.
Miguel's reward was a normal second round, and he played it normally. It seemed like it would be possible for him to lose if he played sloppily, since he did take damage when he let hits through, but he cruised to another win.
Golden Ryu frowned at us from the screen, and I frowned back. The character, or the game, was definitely reacting to what we did, and didn't like this approach. Did that mean we weren't supposed to play fair? Was that a message straight from Third Eye Productions?
Miguel didn't seem to notice. He said, "It turned out to be a farewell party."
"You don't mean for the mall, do you?" Zhizhi asked.
"I suppose it was that, as well," he said.
Another trip across the drowned world. Another match. Miguel dialed in and, once again, won without using one of his character's broken supers. Once again, it looked to me like the character was frowning. After the second round, he showed off a new win pose: pacing back and forth on the screen.
"Interesting," Miguel said. "Another piece of sloppy design."
The pacing stopped. Golden Ryu glared out of the screen. It wasn't proof that whatever Third Eye entity we were dealing with could hear us, but it sure as hell felt like it.
Either Lena shuddered or I did. Maybe both. Bernie grumbled.
"How so?" Zhizhi asked.
"Third Eye obviously wants me to dwell on my tragic past. I'm sure it will be exceptionally therapeutic." Miguel saluted the screen with his cigarette. "Why, then, does my character throw a fit if I don't breeze through matches without thinking?"
"You think the character is, what, a representation of Third Eye itself?" she asked.
"It's obviously connected," he said.
She paid the character more attention. He snapped instantly to his original win pose, complete with too-wide, face-splitting grin.
While the match ended and Miguel moved on to his next opponent, she compared her footage of the screen. "It's mischievous."
Lena's eyebrows raised. She pushed Bernie against me. I gave him a hug and he responded with a happy hum, but I felt like I was missing something.
Miguel struck a balance with the next match. He played the first round without using a super, then ended the second instantly. Golden Ryu struck a win pose straight out of the normal game. Neutral.
While the next match queued up, Zhizhi said, "May I ask?"
"If I said no," Miguel said, "would you go home and search the obituaries?"
She rested her hand on his arm. "You already know the answer."
"The arcade was closed within the week," he said, which definitely wasn't what she'd planned to ask about. She seemed content to wait while he ended the next match, but she didn't have to. He'd fallen into a rhythm, and, coupled with the strength of his character, won even as he continued to speak. "Papa checked into the hospital a week later. All the adults already knew he had cancer."
Zhizhi glared at Miguel's cigarette.
"Colon cancer." Between rounds, he took the cigarette out of his mouth and tilted it in her direction. "Where do you think I'm putting these?"
She leaned away and folded her arms.
"Sorry to hear about your dad," I said. "I never knew that."
Miguel startled all of us by barking a laugh. "Cameron, he died when I was six. You and I didn't meet for another twenty years. That is what makes this whole thing so absurd. Third Eye has opened a window into my soul? It needs to look closer."
He'd just won another match. Instead of even bothering with a win pose, golden Ryu put his hands on his hips and glared out of the screen.
Miguel glared back. "I'll get nothing out of this. I can't play the game, and whatever trauma it's trying to dredge up is so old I can't even remember how I felt about it at the time."
Golden Ryu hung his head.
"Maybe it's trying to help you remember," Lena said.
"That's not my definition of help," Miguel said. "I'm glad the game worked you through some things, but this? Does nothing for me."
Lena propped her chin atop Bernie's head.
"Let's see it through," Zhizhi said. "If nothing else, we'll learn something. And Cameron and Lena should get something out of it, right?"
The prospect of collecting a resource from Miguel's Realm made my stomach churn, but he just nodded.
"I'll win this," Miguel said. "But that's it. One token, one win, one prize. The three of you are welcome to play on if you want, but I've had my fill."
We got a full blast of mechanical laughter.
The screen glitched out. Instead of another trip across the drowned world, it launched directly into the versus screen, with both character portraits a garbled mess.
From the cabinet emerged a familiar line, but spoken in the same carnival attraction voice as the laughter:
"Here comes a new challenger!"
Chapter 61: Gremlin Energy
Chapter 61: Gremlin Energy
We all knew what was coming.
On one end of the screen, Miguel's golden Ryu. On the other, the same character, but colored even more obnoxiously yellow. A true mirror match. A fair fight. The parameters had been established, the characters had identical abilities. Winning or losing would come down purely to the players' skill.
Lena would've loved it.
Miguel –
Let go of the stick.
"This is stupid," he said.
Both golden Ryus turned to stare out at us, frowning their little pixelated faces off. (Literally, since, like their manic grins, their frowns extended beyond the bounds of their sprites and looked like they were sawing their jaws off.)
The mechanical voice repeated its spiel about tokens, wins, and prizes. The tone hadn't changed, but the timing made it sound whiny.
"Both characters have a move that kills in one hit and even wins both rounds? I'm sure that entertains someone, but it isn't me. And I already know I won't get anything out of this." Miguel shook his head. "This entire adventure has been nothing but a glitch."
Frowns deepened. On and off the screen.
"Go ahead and attack," Miguel said. "I inserted my token, and I'm not going to win, so you don't need to figure out how to process my prize and discover that it won't work. Really, I'm doing you a favor."
"At least try," Lena snapped.
"If you wish to make the attempt, be my guest," he said. "You could actually get something out of it."
"What if you could get back in the beta?" I asked.
Miguel scoffed, but he stopped backing away from the Street Fighter cabinet. "Has anyone gotten back in?"
"A couple of people claimed to," I said. "They didn't offer any proof, so most people dismissed it as bullshit."
"Like the ones who claimed the game can do real magic," Zhizhi said quietly.
The filter of Miguel's cigarette crumpled as he gnashed his teeth.
He stalked forward and grabbed the stick. He bit out, "Fine."
A super fireball rippled across the screen.
Miguel's golden Ryu collapsed and mechanical laughter filled the arcade. It seemed to spill from every cabinet, every machine.
Miguel's character remained prone. The mirrored version threw his head back, cackled, danced. His victory "pose" seemed to stretch on and on.
Miguel stared at the screen. My and Zhizhi's shoulders slumped. Bernie grumbled.
Lena almost managed to stifle her snort.
When Zhizhi and I scowled at her, she mushed her chin against Bernie's head, trying to look as small as possible. She couldn't banish her smile, though. "Come on, guys. You have to admit that was kinda funny."
"Do we?" Zhizhi asked.
"We've got a whole pile of tokens," Lena said. "It's just playing around. Besides. You can't even really call it unfair. It waited for Miguel to come back before it attacked."
"I get why you like it," I said, "but seriously, not the time."
Lena's eyes flashed. "Oh, my bad. I wasn't taking the literal game within a game seriously enough?"
"You're the one who made Realms out to be this huge deal," Zhizhi said. She'd half turned before, but now she faced Lena and pushed past me, into her space. Zhizhi wasn't a tall woman, no Erin or even Donica, but like just about everybody, she had half a head on Lena.
That was initially exaggerated by Lena scrunching in on herself, but not for long. As soon as Zhizhi got in her face, she straightened up. Fight or flight cranked all the way to fight.
"I do think it's a big deal," Lena said. "Maybe the big deal is telling Miguel to lighten up about it!"
"Can't you just admit you liked the little joke but that it was kind of a shit thing to pull?" Zhizhi asked.
Lena pushed back, squishing Bernie between them. She tilted her head back, grinned like a maniac, and said, "Nope."
Bernie's hiss seemed to back her up.
Lena handed him to me. "Hold him for a sec, okay?"
I took him, but I caught her hand in the process. "Why?"
"We're in an arcade," Lena said. "We're standing in front of a Street Fighter cabinet. If two people have an argument, there's only one way to solve it."
"Yeah, no." Zhizhi backed up, bumping into another cabinet. She kicked at it. "I'm happy to document your gamer rituals, but they don't settle anything for me."
I thought she did a great job of not saying "weird" or "little" rituals, even if her barely constrained eyeroll spoke volumes.
"Concession accepted," Lena said.
Zhizhi stared for a moment, then sighed and shook her head. "Jesus Christ."
I rubbed Lena's arm. "Maybe take it down about ten notches."
She hunched her shoulders. "So you think I'm wrong?"
"I think," I said, "I don't care."
I hoped she'd recognize the callback to when Benji and I were arguing. Maybe even appreciate it. Instead, she just slumped.
I patted her arm, kissed the back of her head, and turned to Miguel. "You okay, man?"
He waved a hand in the air. "Of course. I only played to indulge you."
"What do you want to do with the rest of the tokens?"
"Whatever you like." His brow furrowed. "I'd like to keep one. A souvenir, yeah?"
"You can keep them all if you want," I said.
"They're meant to be used for play, I think. One is an indulgence; the whole pile?" Instead of declaring what the whole pile would be, he shook his head. He swept past Lena and I, toward the counter. To pluck his "indulgence" off it? But he paused as he passed Zhizhi and leaned close to whisper something to her. She cracked a smile.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose.
I turned to the Street Fighter cabinet. The round two timer hadn't actually run out yet, probably because the CPU's golden Ryu had gone through such an elaborate "win pose." Right now, Miguel's was lying there, and the CPUs was shuffling back and forth. In fighting games, they call that kind of in-and-out movement "footsies," but I thought this was just the digital equivalent of pacing. Frustration.
I remembered what Lena had called the Third Eye entity we were dealing with: mischievous. It had wanted to troll Miguel, not drive him off.
Sorry, pal, I thought. He's not somebody who would enjoy that kind of thing.
I propped Bernie on the edge of the cabinet and one of his legs brushed the stick.
Miguel's golden Ryu hopped to his feet. I realized that unlike the CPU characters Miguel had beaten, his character's health bar wasn't actually empty to start the second round.
I said, "Oh shit!" Instinctively, I gripped the stick.
The CPU stopped its footsies, or its pacing. It froze for a second, indecisive. I kept calling it the CPU, but it was painfully obvious that there was some kind of controlling intelligence here. It might be artificial, but it was far more sophisticated than anything from a game that came out in the early nineties. It acted like another player.
Maybe it intentionally gave me enough time to jump, or maybe my hand just drifted upwards on the stick; either way, I vaulted over the super fireball it tossed my way. I landed and hit the dragon punch input. Rather, I tried, but I was actually kind of shit at Street Fighter and I got a fireball instead. It chunked a significant portion of my opponent's health bar but didn't one-shot it the way a super would have.
"What's the super input?" I called.
"Double fireball, then punch," Miguel said.
Since I had his attention, I said, "Take over."
He shook his head sharply. "Win if you can."
I sucked air through my teeth. It felt wrong to finish the match, even more wrong than if I'd started a new run with a token of my own. There's something about standing in front of an arcade cabinet, though. About knowing your coin is on the line if you lose. I couldn't bring myself to throw the match.
I blocked a super dragon punch and watched all but a sliver of my health bar vanish just to the chip damage that went through my block. Because it didn't kill my character or send him flying, though, it left my opponent pathetically overextended. I had all the time in the world to input a super of my own and blast him out of the air.
The other golden Ryu crumpled into his defeat pose in mid-air and drifted to the glitched ground like a deflating balloon. Mine landed and flashed a V for victory and a huge grin.
"Come back and see if it gets up for round three," I said to Miguel.
"I already gave up," he said.
"This is your Realm, man. I'm pretty sure it's your –"
"Cameron."
I risked flicking a glance his way.
He shook his head.
I bit my lip.
When the third round started, I immediately launched another fireball super. The opponent sprang up and countered with one of his own. The projectiles canceled each other out, but what the hell. I had unlimited meter. I kept firing.
Now, if I'd been fighting the real CPU, and if it'd had all the advantages I did, this would not have mattered. We could've kept mashing fireball super inputs at each other for the whole match, and the only possible outcomes would be time running out and the match ending in a draw, or me missing an input or doing it too slowly and one of my opponent's fireballs sneaking through.
That's not what my opponent did. He turtled up, trying to block, and lost almost his entire health bar to chip damage. He countered my third super fireball, but for the fourth, I did a single motion for the regular version. Way less visually impressive, but it traveled across the screen faster.
More chip damage, and more than enough.
The mechanical voice proclaimed, "Congratulations! Approach the counter to collect your prize!"
I wanted to linger at the Street Fighter cabinet to see if it would do anything else revelatory, but the screen glitched out and went right back to character select – with only eight options.
"Nice job." Lena squeezed against me and looked up at me out of the corner of her eye.
"Thanks." I gave her a quick kiss, mostly to let her know I wasn't mad at her, and was rewarded with a sigh of relief.
From my other side, Bernie meeped happily. Lena scooped him up. "To the counter!"
"There's something we can agree on," Zhizhi said. She re-centered her camera and led the way.
Because the only light came from the cabinets and the counter was at the farthest point from them, it was one of the hardest places in the arcade to see. As we approached it, Miguel shone his phone light into its shadows.
Everyone but him froze. His light reflected off the contours of a humanoid figure.
But it was just one of those fortune-telling automatons they have at carnivals. The sort of thing the mechanical voice should have gone with, quite unlike the arcade cabinets it had been attached to.
Gears whirred, and a line of tickets printed out from the figure's outstretched hand. Quirky, but not completely bizarre for an arcade. Most didn't give tickets out for winning electronic games, but if you got stuck on the more primitive physical ones, you might win enough of these to exchange for a prize.
Nonetheless, my eyes widened. I elbowed Lena's arm and she nudged me back. We were both practically vibrating. We mouthed, "Tickets!" to each other.
Here was a Third Eye resource that, as far as we knew, nobody had been able to collect yet. At one point, I'd theorized that what seemed to be the game's cash shop would actually run on Tickets rather than real money.
How did I square that with the fact we only knew about Tickets because, like so many otherwise undiscovered resources, they appeared in said shop? Easily. Most mobile games had multiple currencies that exchanged at arcane rates to suck players into spending more; once the game left beta and the shop opened, we might be able to exchange Tickets for Gold and Gold for Tickets, or something even less intuitive.
Cautiously, Miguel leaned over the counter. His hand hovered over the tickets.
Lena's body shook even more against mine, and I probably reciprocated. Even Zhizhi tilted forward, her camera fixed on the intersection of his hand and the automatons.
Would the automaton come to life and grab his wrist? Would he snatch the Tickets and absorb them and regain beta access?
Or, as actually happened, would he tear the tickets loose and hold a chain of them up?
All of us deflated.
Miguel turned around and held the tickets out. "Go on, Cam. Try them."
I sighed, nodded, and did so.
As soon as my fingers touched the chain of tickets, they flashed white. When my vision cleared, they were gone.
I checked my phone. "I've got an achievement."
Third Eye displayed achievements on a tacky looking clipart scroll that occupied the entire screen. This one had the header Refined Palate, so I had a pretty good idea which category I'd unlocked. Like every other achievement I'd gotten, it was worth a thousand XP, which had once seemed huge, but now paled in comparison to the haul Lena and I could get just by scouting outside of town.
On the other hand, I had a new tab. Refinements, the same category other players had found Gold and Crystal sorted into. I tapped it and found I was now the proud owner of six Tickets, the same number Miguel had handed me.
"What can you do with them?" Lena asked.
"No clue," I said. "We're either the first people to get them, or we're going to be the first to post about it."
Technically, I didn't know that was true. I'd been way too busy to stay up-to-date on the wiki today.
"I know one thing we can do," Lena said.
I raised an eyebrow.
She scooped a handful of tokens off the counter. "Win more!"
"I wonder," Miguel said. "Is there a pile of tickets inside that automaton? I have a pocket knife on me. We could unscrew the back panel and take them all."
"Or," Lena said, "we could find out the reason Cam could absorb those and you couldn't is because he won, not because you're out of the beta, and if we cheat we don't get any."
Miguel inclined his head. He took the knife from his pocket anyway.
When he held it up, a burst of static assaulted our ears. The automaton tipped onto the counter, cracking glass, scattering coins.
Its back panel swung open, and from it, a golden figure unfolded.
We all knew what was coming.
On one end of the screen, Miguel's golden Ryu. On the other, the same character, but colored even more obnoxiously yellow. A true mirror match. A fair fight. The parameters had been established, the characters had identical abilities. Winning or losing would come down purely to the players' skill.
Lena would've loved it.
Miguel –
Let go of the stick.
"This is stupid," he said.
Both golden Ryus turned to stare out at us, frowning their little pixelated faces off. (Literally, since, like their manic grins, their frowns extended beyond the bounds of their sprites and looked like they were sawing their jaws off.)
The mechanical voice repeated its spiel about tokens, wins, and prizes. The tone hadn't changed, but the timing made it sound whiny.
"Both characters have a move that kills in one hit and even wins both rounds? I'm sure that entertains someone, but it isn't me. And I already know I won't get anything out of this." Miguel shook his head. "This entire adventure has been nothing but a glitch."
Frowns deepened. On and off the screen.
"Go ahead and attack," Miguel said. "I inserted my token, and I'm not going to win, so you don't need to figure out how to process my prize and discover that it won't work. Really, I'm doing you a favor."
"At least try," Lena snapped.
"If you wish to make the attempt, be my guest," he said. "You could actually get something out of it."
"What if you could get back in the beta?" I asked.
Miguel scoffed, but he stopped backing away from the Street Fighter cabinet. "Has anyone gotten back in?"
"A couple of people claimed to," I said. "They didn't offer any proof, so most people dismissed it as bullshit."
"Like the ones who claimed the game can do real magic," Zhizhi said quietly.
The filter of Miguel's cigarette crumpled as he gnashed his teeth.
He stalked forward and grabbed the stick. He bit out, "Fine."
A super fireball rippled across the screen.
Miguel's golden Ryu collapsed and mechanical laughter filled the arcade. It seemed to spill from every cabinet, every machine.
Miguel's character remained prone. The mirrored version threw his head back, cackled, danced. His victory "pose" seemed to stretch on and on.
Miguel stared at the screen. My and Zhizhi's shoulders slumped. Bernie grumbled.
Lena almost managed to stifle her snort.
When Zhizhi and I scowled at her, she mushed her chin against Bernie's head, trying to look as small as possible. She couldn't banish her smile, though. "Come on, guys. You have to admit that was kinda funny."
"Do we?" Zhizhi asked.
"We've got a whole pile of tokens," Lena said. "It's just playing around. Besides. You can't even really call it unfair. It waited for Miguel to come back before it attacked."
"I get why you like it," I said, "but seriously, not the time."
Lena's eyes flashed. "Oh, my bad. I wasn't taking the literal game within a game seriously enough?"
"You're the one who made Realms out to be this huge deal," Zhizhi said. She'd half turned before, but now she faced Lena and pushed past me, into her space. Zhizhi wasn't a tall woman, no Erin or even Donica, but like just about everybody, she had half a head on Lena.
That was initially exaggerated by Lena scrunching in on herself, but not for long. As soon as Zhizhi got in her face, she straightened up. Fight or flight cranked all the way to fight.
"I do think it's a big deal," Lena said. "Maybe the big deal is telling Miguel to lighten up about it!"
"Can't you just admit you liked the little joke but that it was kind of a shit thing to pull?" Zhizhi asked.
Lena pushed back, squishing Bernie between them. She tilted her head back, grinned like a maniac, and said, "Nope."
Bernie's hiss seemed to back her up.
Lena handed him to me. "Hold him for a sec, okay?"
I took him, but I caught her hand in the process. "Why?"
"We're in an arcade," Lena said. "We're standing in front of a Street Fighter cabinet. If two people have an argument, there's only one way to solve it."
"Yeah, no." Zhizhi backed up, bumping into another cabinet. She kicked at it. "I'm happy to document your gamer rituals, but they don't settle anything for me."
I thought she did a great job of not saying "weird" or "little" rituals, even if her barely constrained eyeroll spoke volumes.
"Concession accepted," Lena said.
Zhizhi stared for a moment, then sighed and shook her head. "Jesus Christ."
I rubbed Lena's arm. "Maybe take it down about ten notches."
She hunched her shoulders. "So you think I'm wrong?"
"I think," I said, "I don't care."
I hoped she'd recognize the callback to when Benji and I were arguing. Maybe even appreciate it. Instead, she just slumped.
I patted her arm, kissed the back of her head, and turned to Miguel. "You okay, man?"
He waved a hand in the air. "Of course. I only played to indulge you."
"What do you want to do with the rest of the tokens?"
"Whatever you like." His brow furrowed. "I'd like to keep one. A souvenir, yeah?"
"You can keep them all if you want," I said.
"They're meant to be used for play, I think. One is an indulgence; the whole pile?" Instead of declaring what the whole pile would be, he shook his head. He swept past Lena and I, toward the counter. To pluck his "indulgence" off it? But he paused as he passed Zhizhi and leaned close to whisper something to her. She cracked a smile.
I rubbed the bridge of my nose.
I turned to the Street Fighter cabinet. The round two timer hadn't actually run out yet, probably because the CPU's golden Ryu had gone through such an elaborate "win pose." Right now, Miguel's was lying there, and the CPUs was shuffling back and forth. In fighting games, they call that kind of in-and-out movement "footsies," but I thought this was just the digital equivalent of pacing. Frustration.
I remembered what Lena had called the Third Eye entity we were dealing with: mischievous. It had wanted to troll Miguel, not drive him off.
Sorry, pal, I thought. He's not somebody who would enjoy that kind of thing.
I propped Bernie on the edge of the cabinet and one of his legs brushed the stick.
Miguel's golden Ryu hopped to his feet. I realized that unlike the CPU characters Miguel had beaten, his character's health bar wasn't actually empty to start the second round.
I said, "Oh shit!" Instinctively, I gripped the stick.
The CPU stopped its footsies, or its pacing. It froze for a second, indecisive. I kept calling it the CPU, but it was painfully obvious that there was some kind of controlling intelligence here. It might be artificial, but it was far more sophisticated than anything from a game that came out in the early nineties. It acted like another player.
Maybe it intentionally gave me enough time to jump, or maybe my hand just drifted upwards on the stick; either way, I vaulted over the super fireball it tossed my way. I landed and hit the dragon punch input. Rather, I tried, but I was actually kind of shit at Street Fighter and I got a fireball instead. It chunked a significant portion of my opponent's health bar but didn't one-shot it the way a super would have.
"What's the super input?" I called.
"Double fireball, then punch," Miguel said.
Since I had his attention, I said, "Take over."
He shook his head sharply. "Win if you can."
I sucked air through my teeth. It felt wrong to finish the match, even more wrong than if I'd started a new run with a token of my own. There's something about standing in front of an arcade cabinet, though. About knowing your coin is on the line if you lose. I couldn't bring myself to throw the match.
I blocked a super dragon punch and watched all but a sliver of my health bar vanish just to the chip damage that went through my block. Because it didn't kill my character or send him flying, though, it left my opponent pathetically overextended. I had all the time in the world to input a super of my own and blast him out of the air.
The other golden Ryu crumpled into his defeat pose in mid-air and drifted to the glitched ground like a deflating balloon. Mine landed and flashed a V for victory and a huge grin.
"Come back and see if it gets up for round three," I said to Miguel.
"I already gave up," he said.
"This is your Realm, man. I'm pretty sure it's your –"
"Cameron."
I risked flicking a glance his way.
He shook his head.
I bit my lip.
When the third round started, I immediately launched another fireball super. The opponent sprang up and countered with one of his own. The projectiles canceled each other out, but what the hell. I had unlimited meter. I kept firing.
Now, if I'd been fighting the real CPU, and if it'd had all the advantages I did, this would not have mattered. We could've kept mashing fireball super inputs at each other for the whole match, and the only possible outcomes would be time running out and the match ending in a draw, or me missing an input or doing it too slowly and one of my opponent's fireballs sneaking through.
That's not what my opponent did. He turtled up, trying to block, and lost almost his entire health bar to chip damage. He countered my third super fireball, but for the fourth, I did a single motion for the regular version. Way less visually impressive, but it traveled across the screen faster.
More chip damage, and more than enough.
The mechanical voice proclaimed, "Congratulations! Approach the counter to collect your prize!"
I wanted to linger at the Street Fighter cabinet to see if it would do anything else revelatory, but the screen glitched out and went right back to character select – with only eight options.
"Nice job." Lena squeezed against me and looked up at me out of the corner of her eye.
"Thanks." I gave her a quick kiss, mostly to let her know I wasn't mad at her, and was rewarded with a sigh of relief.
From my other side, Bernie meeped happily. Lena scooped him up. "To the counter!"
"There's something we can agree on," Zhizhi said. She re-centered her camera and led the way.
Because the only light came from the cabinets and the counter was at the farthest point from them, it was one of the hardest places in the arcade to see. As we approached it, Miguel shone his phone light into its shadows.
Everyone but him froze. His light reflected off the contours of a humanoid figure.
But it was just one of those fortune-telling automatons they have at carnivals. The sort of thing the mechanical voice should have gone with, quite unlike the arcade cabinets it had been attached to.
Gears whirred, and a line of tickets printed out from the figure's outstretched hand. Quirky, but not completely bizarre for an arcade. Most didn't give tickets out for winning electronic games, but if you got stuck on the more primitive physical ones, you might win enough of these to exchange for a prize.
Nonetheless, my eyes widened. I elbowed Lena's arm and she nudged me back. We were both practically vibrating. We mouthed, "Tickets!" to each other.
Here was a Third Eye resource that, as far as we knew, nobody had been able to collect yet. At one point, I'd theorized that what seemed to be the game's cash shop would actually run on Tickets rather than real money.
How did I square that with the fact we only knew about Tickets because, like so many otherwise undiscovered resources, they appeared in said shop? Easily. Most mobile games had multiple currencies that exchanged at arcane rates to suck players into spending more; once the game left beta and the shop opened, we might be able to exchange Tickets for Gold and Gold for Tickets, or something even less intuitive.
Cautiously, Miguel leaned over the counter. His hand hovered over the tickets.
Lena's body shook even more against mine, and I probably reciprocated. Even Zhizhi tilted forward, her camera fixed on the intersection of his hand and the automatons.
Would the automaton come to life and grab his wrist? Would he snatch the Tickets and absorb them and regain beta access?
Or, as actually happened, would he tear the tickets loose and hold a chain of them up?
All of us deflated.
Miguel turned around and held the tickets out. "Go on, Cam. Try them."
I sighed, nodded, and did so.
As soon as my fingers touched the chain of tickets, they flashed white. When my vision cleared, they were gone.
I checked my phone. "I've got an achievement."
Third Eye displayed achievements on a tacky looking clipart scroll that occupied the entire screen. This one had the header Refined Palate, so I had a pretty good idea which category I'd unlocked. Like every other achievement I'd gotten, it was worth a thousand XP, which had once seemed huge, but now paled in comparison to the haul Lena and I could get just by scouting outside of town.
On the other hand, I had a new tab. Refinements, the same category other players had found Gold and Crystal sorted into. I tapped it and found I was now the proud owner of six Tickets, the same number Miguel had handed me.
"What can you do with them?" Lena asked.
"No clue," I said. "We're either the first people to get them, or we're going to be the first to post about it."
Technically, I didn't know that was true. I'd been way too busy to stay up-to-date on the wiki today.
"I know one thing we can do," Lena said.
I raised an eyebrow.
She scooped a handful of tokens off the counter. "Win more!"
"I wonder," Miguel said. "Is there a pile of tickets inside that automaton? I have a pocket knife on me. We could unscrew the back panel and take them all."
"Or," Lena said, "we could find out the reason Cam could absorb those and you couldn't is because he won, not because you're out of the beta, and if we cheat we don't get any."
Miguel inclined his head. He took the knife from his pocket anyway.
When he held it up, a burst of static assaulted our ears. The automaton tipped onto the counter, cracking glass, scattering coins.
Its back panel swung open, and from it, a golden figure unfolded.
Chapter 62: Outreach Program
Chapter 62: Outreach Program
The panel on the back of the automaton was maybe a foot tall and nine inches across. The creature that unfolded from it was at least three feet tall, just enough that when its ungainly feet were planted on the floor, its sloping head and pointy ears and the tops of its luminous yellow eyes poked over the countertop. Don't ask me how the geometry of that worked. Presumably, in more than three dimensions.
None of the four of us moved in any dimensions.
Miguel was the closest to the creature, standing with his pocket knife. He had the screwdriver/nail file flipped out, but, lit by the flickering arcade cabinets, it looked indistinguishable from a blade.
It's sure where those huge yellow eyes focused. The creature hunched lower behind the counter.
Miguel closed the pocketknife and slowly eased it back into its namesake receptacle. He spread his hands and backed away from the counter.
The creature inched its head back over, showing off the same wide mouth we'd seen on the golden Ryu sprite. Its eyes tracked back and forth, but it didn't move any further.
Neither did we.
To be clear, I don't think any of us were scared of this thing. I know I wasn't, and I'm sure the same went for Lena. Scared people, as a rule, do not sheathe the weapons they already have out, so that ruled out Miguel.
The creature was weird, but it was an ugly-cute kind of weird, and despite the multidimensional shenanigans associated with it unfolding from the back of the automaton, it seemed much more normal than the creature at the construction site. I guess it might not have been a Daimon, but get real. We knew it was.
The reason nobody moved is because we had no idea what to do.
I realized that unlike Reactants and Refinements and even Materials, there hadn't been a definite moment when Lena went from not having Bernie to having him. She'd recognized him as the living embodiment of her old stuffed toy and accepted him, and the next time we checked her status, there he was. He hadn't been accompanied by a flash from our phones, though, and the spectacular special effects in the apartment had seemed more associated with her acquiring Fire.
I hadn't gotten a dramatic scene to go with my new Tickets, either. Refinements seemed much rarer than Reactants. Intuitively, I expected them to come with more impressive effects. Nope.
What about Daimons?
Third Eye usually worked on touch. Maybe Lena had "acquired" Bernie when he leaped into her arms.
This new Daimon seemed a lot less affectionate. It watched us from behind the counter.
I put a hand on Miguel's shoulder. "Maybe try offering a token?"
He shot me a glance. "You want me to approach it? Why?"
"Whether you can collect resources or not, this is your Realm," I said. "You can interact with a Daimon in most of the ways we do with Bernie, so why not try to bond with one?"
He pressed his lips together. "That would be a waste."
"The waste would be to not try."
I thought it was a pretty good line, the kind he usually gave me.
I got no response.
After a moment, though, he stepped forward and scooped a token off the counter. He held it on his outstretched palm and eased it across.
Zhizhi's hands tightened on her camera. Lena held her breath. I tensed up.
The Daimon didn't move and neither did Miguel.
Bernie grumbled.
The yellow Daimon's eyes shifted to him. It stretched a hand up over the counter, toward Miguel's. Unlike its feet, its hands were long and deft, almost delicate. One of its fingers poked at the edge of Miguel's hand.
His back tightened up, but he kept the token outstretched.
The Daimon cocked its head. Its eyes narrowed and its mouth widened in a frown. Its teeth looked extremely sharp.
It smooshed a long finger into Miguel's hand again, harder this time.
"I'm not sure what you're expecting, little one," Miguel said, "but I seriously doubt I can offer you whatever it is you want. Unless it's this token."
The Daimon seemed to consider this. Its head kept tilting further and further until it was at a ninety degree angle.
Suddenly, it reached past Miguel and snatched the whole pile of tokens, then took off running. Mechanical laughter echoed from every cabinet, drowning out the sound of its feet.
"Dammit!" Miguel slapped the counter.
"What a little brat," Zhizhi said.
I glanced at Lena. Unsurprisingly, she was grinning. I suspected I was, too.
"This one definitely seems like a handful," she said.
"More than I care to handle," Miguel said. "If this is what Third Eye Productions thinks I need in my life, I'm better off without my beta participation."
"Aw, don't say that," Lena said. "It just wants to play a game with you."
"Hide and seek?" he asked. "The only winning move is not to play."
"If you think I won't get mad at you just because you quote a great movie..." Lena chuckled. "Okay, you're probably right. Still. Don't be mean to Daimons."
"If you seriously don't want to try and connect with it," I said, "I'm sure Lena will. Shall we poke around?"
Miguel tossed the last token we had. I snatched it out of the air. "Be my guest."
It felt wrong, the antithesis of accepting Third Eye's invitation to come down here in the first place. But if Miguel wasn't going to engage, I couldn't force him.
The same was true for the Daimon. If it would only bond with Miguel, and him dropping from the beta meant he couldn't make the connection, then not only did we have no idea how to force it to come with us, I wouldn't feel right trying. The creatures didn't seem to need to eat, and I supposed if this one liked games it could keep playing the CPU, so it wouldn't be too bored.
Although, would this Realm even continue to exist? Lena's flames had burned away the replica of her old apartment. It had seemed like her Realm was just a temporary holding area for a power and a Daimon she was supposed to gain access to.
Pointless to speculate. We had no idea how any of this worked, or why.
"I suppose I should film your attempt," Zhizhi said.
Miguel waved her on. He put out his burned-down cigarette and lit another. "I'm sure I'll enjoy the show."
Lena and I split and fanned out through the arcade machines.
After a moment, Lena said, "You want down, little guy?"
I watched her set Bernie on the floor. Considering the smell of the tiles under our feet, and the occasional stickiness, I wouldn't have made the same decision. But as soon as I looked away, Bernie was on the move.
I took out my phone so it would be easier to follow him. I sprinted down the aisle on his right. Lena took the far side.
When we'd first entered, I'd perceived the arcade as fitting in its slot in Cinder Alley, but as we pressed on, it became increasingly obvious that the space must be distorted. I passed row after row of cabinets.
Some of them looked too new to have been present beneath Cinderella City. An arcade owner in a doomed mall wouldn't have sprung for a brand-new Virtua Fighter in '94, right? And House of the Dead 2, had that even come out when the place closed?
It seemed like the deeper I went, the less authentic the machines became.
Bernie stopped in front of one. He hissed, wiggled his backend, and bumped his snout against the cabinet.
I circled around to the back of it while Lena approached the front. Zhizhi hung back far enough to film us both. I could only tell where Miguel lounged from the pinprick light of his cigarette.
The whole vibe felt off. Askew. I kept expecting him to charge forward, hold out his hand for the remaining token, boss whatever game the cabinet contained, and make a heroic display to claim his Daimon.
He didn't.
I slapped the token on the cabinet and gave it a good look. I snorted. "Now I know this doesn't belong."
It was an Ikaruga machine. A game that never released in arcades outside Japan, and didn't come out even there until years after this entire mall got demolished. A great game, by all accounts, but sure as hell nothing I could beat.
"If we have to play this, Lena, you better give it a shot," I said.
"You sure? As far as I'm concerned, those Tickets aren't enough to make up for me taking the Air this morning."
"Positive," I said. "If I play Ikaruga, we're just going to lose our last token."
Lena narrowed her eyes. "I'm decent at shmups, but it's not like I know this game well enough to 1CC it."
A 1CC playthrough was what fans of scrolling shoot-'em-up games called it when you beat them with one credit. Single credit clear. As gaming challenges go, it's probably about the hardest you'll find without dipping into PVP or speedrunning.
"For the fighting game, you got an overpowered character, right?" Zhizhi said. "You seem to think this little monster wants to play with you. It probably wants you to win."
Lena shrugged. "I'll give it a shot."
I started to round the cabinet, but she shook her head.
"You don't want me to watch?" I asked.
"I don't want you distracting me, being all supportive and boyfriendly." She tossed her hair. "Also, if the Daimon scrambles out the back, you can catch it."
I raised an eyebrow. "Do you think we should?"
"Part of the game, isn't it? I think Zhizhi's right. It wants to play, wants to be caught. We just have to want to play, too."
Play, she did. She inserted the token and hit player one start, and the game's bombastic soundtrack – its best quality, if you asked me, a person basically incapable of playing the genre, which you shouldn't – poured from its decidedly post-'90s speakers.
Almost immediately, Lena laughed. "Okay, like this, I can 1CC the game."
"What's different?" Zhizhi asked.
I leaned around the cabinet and recognized it immediately, but I let Lena explain.
"You're supposed to have two polarities, light and dark. As long as your ship is in the right mode, you absorb enemy fire of the same color." She demonstrated the technique, but the visual change in her golden vehicle was way subtler than it should have been. She plowed through a cloud of bullets of both colors. "It's supposed to be all about switching back and forth at the right times. But my ship is yellow, and it absorbs everything."
"Stay on your toes," I said. "You'll probably run into something you have to try against soon."
Lena nodded. I retreated to my side of the cabinet, Zhizhi braced herself against another, and Bernie curled at Lena's feet.
It only took a couple of minutes for my prediction to come true.
"Check it out," Lena said. "Third Eye text."
Once again, I stretched to see the screen. It flashed a warning, golden text with a red outline. Parts of it looked Japanese, parts English, and parts Third Eye runes. The text I could read was a garbled mess, but I thought it had been in the original.
The boss appeared, a mech with golden armor. Its projectiles were a mix of the original light and dark, with some fluorescent yellow interspersed that clearly didn't fit the game's aesthetic.
Lena ducked and wove around the yellow bullets. Her hand tapped rhythmically on the fire button. "Watch the back," she reminded me.
"Watch yours," Zhizhi said as one of the dangerous projectiles almost clipped Lena's ship.
Lena grunted and tapped the stick.
I retreated to my side of the cabinet as much because watching her play with our last token frayed my nerves as to prevent an escape attempt by the Daimon.
I knew she'd cleared the boss because the music cut out and the mechanical voice announced, "Congratulations!" Which was not something Ikaruga did after each stage.
The music resumed. The game, it seemed, continued.
I wanted to scramble around to look at the screen. I wanted to cover my eyes, and maybe my ears while I was at it. My hands sweated. If I'd been at the controls I'd have fucked up for sure.
Lena tilted closer and closer to the screen. Zhizhi drifted nearer with each boss cleared. Eventually, even Miguel picked his way through the cabinets to stand beside her. He'd put his cigarette out at some point and had his hands clasped behind his back.
Shmups are short games, typically, and Ikaruga was no exception, but still, the minutes ticked by. I measured the passage of time not by checking my phone's clock, but by listening for the announcements of Lena's victory over each boss in turn. How many were in the game? I didn't remember, had never beat it, even on an emulator with save states.
Finally, though, Lena said, "Oh shit. I think this is it!"
I resisted the urge to look, gave into the urge not to. I told myself I had to stay alert, which I hadn't been.
The sound cut out entirely. All I heard was the clack of buttons and the stick slamming against its housing as Lena dodged and fired.
And then, one more time, "Congratulations!"
Lena slumped over the controls. She breathed, "Hell yes."
The back panel of the cabinet swung open.
The Daimon squeezed out. I tensed, but it made no effort to run. Instead, with its shoulders hunched and its head bowed, it held up a chain of Tickets. It shuffled around the cabinet, past a grumbling Bernie, and presented them to Lena.
She knelt and held out her hands. The tickets flashed; in their wake, Lena offered a radiant smile. "So cool! You know, I'd love to play with you some more. Will you let us have our tokens back?"
Head bob. Long yellow fingers pointed in my direction.
I crouched and saw the pile of tokens dumped in the maintenance area of the Ikaruga cabinet. I scooped them out and held one up so the others could see it.
"Thanks!" Lena beamed. "Have you got a name?"
No response.
"Do you want to come with us?" Lena asked.
Tilted head. A glance in Miguel's direction.
We all looked the same way. He frowned and shook his head.
Hesitation. Shoulder slump. Head bob.
The yellow Daimon reached out, and Lena clasped its hand.
Nothing happened.
Lena kept up her bright smile and her welcoming body language, but I saw her wings droop on my phone.
When the Daimon let go, she took her own out. To check her status, I supposed.
She didn't get the chance.
The moment Lena raised her phone, the Daimon lunged for it.
The panel on the back of the automaton was maybe a foot tall and nine inches across. The creature that unfolded from it was at least three feet tall, just enough that when its ungainly feet were planted on the floor, its sloping head and pointy ears and the tops of its luminous yellow eyes poked over the countertop. Don't ask me how the geometry of that worked. Presumably, in more than three dimensions.
None of the four of us moved in any dimensions.
Miguel was the closest to the creature, standing with his pocket knife. He had the screwdriver/nail file flipped out, but, lit by the flickering arcade cabinets, it looked indistinguishable from a blade.
It's sure where those huge yellow eyes focused. The creature hunched lower behind the counter.
Miguel closed the pocketknife and slowly eased it back into its namesake receptacle. He spread his hands and backed away from the counter.
The creature inched its head back over, showing off the same wide mouth we'd seen on the golden Ryu sprite. Its eyes tracked back and forth, but it didn't move any further.
Neither did we.
To be clear, I don't think any of us were scared of this thing. I know I wasn't, and I'm sure the same went for Lena. Scared people, as a rule, do not sheathe the weapons they already have out, so that ruled out Miguel.
The creature was weird, but it was an ugly-cute kind of weird, and despite the multidimensional shenanigans associated with it unfolding from the back of the automaton, it seemed much more normal than the creature at the construction site. I guess it might not have been a Daimon, but get real. We knew it was.
The reason nobody moved is because we had no idea what to do.
I realized that unlike Reactants and Refinements and even Materials, there hadn't been a definite moment when Lena went from not having Bernie to having him. She'd recognized him as the living embodiment of her old stuffed toy and accepted him, and the next time we checked her status, there he was. He hadn't been accompanied by a flash from our phones, though, and the spectacular special effects in the apartment had seemed more associated with her acquiring Fire.
I hadn't gotten a dramatic scene to go with my new Tickets, either. Refinements seemed much rarer than Reactants. Intuitively, I expected them to come with more impressive effects. Nope.
What about Daimons?
Third Eye usually worked on touch. Maybe Lena had "acquired" Bernie when he leaped into her arms.
This new Daimon seemed a lot less affectionate. It watched us from behind the counter.
I put a hand on Miguel's shoulder. "Maybe try offering a token?"
He shot me a glance. "You want me to approach it? Why?"
"Whether you can collect resources or not, this is your Realm," I said. "You can interact with a Daimon in most of the ways we do with Bernie, so why not try to bond with one?"
He pressed his lips together. "That would be a waste."
"The waste would be to not try."
I thought it was a pretty good line, the kind he usually gave me.
I got no response.
After a moment, though, he stepped forward and scooped a token off the counter. He held it on his outstretched palm and eased it across.
Zhizhi's hands tightened on her camera. Lena held her breath. I tensed up.
The Daimon didn't move and neither did Miguel.
Bernie grumbled.
The yellow Daimon's eyes shifted to him. It stretched a hand up over the counter, toward Miguel's. Unlike its feet, its hands were long and deft, almost delicate. One of its fingers poked at the edge of Miguel's hand.
His back tightened up, but he kept the token outstretched.
The Daimon cocked its head. Its eyes narrowed and its mouth widened in a frown. Its teeth looked extremely sharp.
It smooshed a long finger into Miguel's hand again, harder this time.
"I'm not sure what you're expecting, little one," Miguel said, "but I seriously doubt I can offer you whatever it is you want. Unless it's this token."
The Daimon seemed to consider this. Its head kept tilting further and further until it was at a ninety degree angle.
Suddenly, it reached past Miguel and snatched the whole pile of tokens, then took off running. Mechanical laughter echoed from every cabinet, drowning out the sound of its feet.
"Dammit!" Miguel slapped the counter.
"What a little brat," Zhizhi said.
I glanced at Lena. Unsurprisingly, she was grinning. I suspected I was, too.
"This one definitely seems like a handful," she said.
"More than I care to handle," Miguel said. "If this is what Third Eye Productions thinks I need in my life, I'm better off without my beta participation."
"Aw, don't say that," Lena said. "It just wants to play a game with you."
"Hide and seek?" he asked. "The only winning move is not to play."
"If you think I won't get mad at you just because you quote a great movie..." Lena chuckled. "Okay, you're probably right. Still. Don't be mean to Daimons."
"If you seriously don't want to try and connect with it," I said, "I'm sure Lena will. Shall we poke around?"
Miguel tossed the last token we had. I snatched it out of the air. "Be my guest."
It felt wrong, the antithesis of accepting Third Eye's invitation to come down here in the first place. But if Miguel wasn't going to engage, I couldn't force him.
The same was true for the Daimon. If it would only bond with Miguel, and him dropping from the beta meant he couldn't make the connection, then not only did we have no idea how to force it to come with us, I wouldn't feel right trying. The creatures didn't seem to need to eat, and I supposed if this one liked games it could keep playing the CPU, so it wouldn't be too bored.
Although, would this Realm even continue to exist? Lena's flames had burned away the replica of her old apartment. It had seemed like her Realm was just a temporary holding area for a power and a Daimon she was supposed to gain access to.
Pointless to speculate. We had no idea how any of this worked, or why.
"I suppose I should film your attempt," Zhizhi said.
Miguel waved her on. He put out his burned-down cigarette and lit another. "I'm sure I'll enjoy the show."
Lena and I split and fanned out through the arcade machines.
After a moment, Lena said, "You want down, little guy?"
I watched her set Bernie on the floor. Considering the smell of the tiles under our feet, and the occasional stickiness, I wouldn't have made the same decision. But as soon as I looked away, Bernie was on the move.
I took out my phone so it would be easier to follow him. I sprinted down the aisle on his right. Lena took the far side.
When we'd first entered, I'd perceived the arcade as fitting in its slot in Cinder Alley, but as we pressed on, it became increasingly obvious that the space must be distorted. I passed row after row of cabinets.
Some of them looked too new to have been present beneath Cinderella City. An arcade owner in a doomed mall wouldn't have sprung for a brand-new Virtua Fighter in '94, right? And House of the Dead 2, had that even come out when the place closed?
It seemed like the deeper I went, the less authentic the machines became.
Bernie stopped in front of one. He hissed, wiggled his backend, and bumped his snout against the cabinet.
I circled around to the back of it while Lena approached the front. Zhizhi hung back far enough to film us both. I could only tell where Miguel lounged from the pinprick light of his cigarette.
The whole vibe felt off. Askew. I kept expecting him to charge forward, hold out his hand for the remaining token, boss whatever game the cabinet contained, and make a heroic display to claim his Daimon.
He didn't.
I slapped the token on the cabinet and gave it a good look. I snorted. "Now I know this doesn't belong."
It was an Ikaruga machine. A game that never released in arcades outside Japan, and didn't come out even there until years after this entire mall got demolished. A great game, by all accounts, but sure as hell nothing I could beat.
"If we have to play this, Lena, you better give it a shot," I said.
"You sure? As far as I'm concerned, those Tickets aren't enough to make up for me taking the Air this morning."
"Positive," I said. "If I play Ikaruga, we're just going to lose our last token."
Lena narrowed her eyes. "I'm decent at shmups, but it's not like I know this game well enough to 1CC it."
A 1CC playthrough was what fans of scrolling shoot-'em-up games called it when you beat them with one credit. Single credit clear. As gaming challenges go, it's probably about the hardest you'll find without dipping into PVP or speedrunning.
"For the fighting game, you got an overpowered character, right?" Zhizhi said. "You seem to think this little monster wants to play with you. It probably wants you to win."
Lena shrugged. "I'll give it a shot."
I started to round the cabinet, but she shook her head.
"You don't want me to watch?" I asked.
"I don't want you distracting me, being all supportive and boyfriendly." She tossed her hair. "Also, if the Daimon scrambles out the back, you can catch it."
I raised an eyebrow. "Do you think we should?"
"Part of the game, isn't it? I think Zhizhi's right. It wants to play, wants to be caught. We just have to want to play, too."
Play, she did. She inserted the token and hit player one start, and the game's bombastic soundtrack – its best quality, if you asked me, a person basically incapable of playing the genre, which you shouldn't – poured from its decidedly post-'90s speakers.
Almost immediately, Lena laughed. "Okay, like this, I can 1CC the game."
"What's different?" Zhizhi asked.
I leaned around the cabinet and recognized it immediately, but I let Lena explain.
"You're supposed to have two polarities, light and dark. As long as your ship is in the right mode, you absorb enemy fire of the same color." She demonstrated the technique, but the visual change in her golden vehicle was way subtler than it should have been. She plowed through a cloud of bullets of both colors. "It's supposed to be all about switching back and forth at the right times. But my ship is yellow, and it absorbs everything."
"Stay on your toes," I said. "You'll probably run into something you have to try against soon."
Lena nodded. I retreated to my side of the cabinet, Zhizhi braced herself against another, and Bernie curled at Lena's feet.
It only took a couple of minutes for my prediction to come true.
"Check it out," Lena said. "Third Eye text."
Once again, I stretched to see the screen. It flashed a warning, golden text with a red outline. Parts of it looked Japanese, parts English, and parts Third Eye runes. The text I could read was a garbled mess, but I thought it had been in the original.
The boss appeared, a mech with golden armor. Its projectiles were a mix of the original light and dark, with some fluorescent yellow interspersed that clearly didn't fit the game's aesthetic.
Lena ducked and wove around the yellow bullets. Her hand tapped rhythmically on the fire button. "Watch the back," she reminded me.
"Watch yours," Zhizhi said as one of the dangerous projectiles almost clipped Lena's ship.
Lena grunted and tapped the stick.
I retreated to my side of the cabinet as much because watching her play with our last token frayed my nerves as to prevent an escape attempt by the Daimon.
I knew she'd cleared the boss because the music cut out and the mechanical voice announced, "Congratulations!" Which was not something Ikaruga did after each stage.
The music resumed. The game, it seemed, continued.
I wanted to scramble around to look at the screen. I wanted to cover my eyes, and maybe my ears while I was at it. My hands sweated. If I'd been at the controls I'd have fucked up for sure.
Lena tilted closer and closer to the screen. Zhizhi drifted nearer with each boss cleared. Eventually, even Miguel picked his way through the cabinets to stand beside her. He'd put his cigarette out at some point and had his hands clasped behind his back.
Shmups are short games, typically, and Ikaruga was no exception, but still, the minutes ticked by. I measured the passage of time not by checking my phone's clock, but by listening for the announcements of Lena's victory over each boss in turn. How many were in the game? I didn't remember, had never beat it, even on an emulator with save states.
Finally, though, Lena said, "Oh shit. I think this is it!"
I resisted the urge to look, gave into the urge not to. I told myself I had to stay alert, which I hadn't been.
The sound cut out entirely. All I heard was the clack of buttons and the stick slamming against its housing as Lena dodged and fired.
And then, one more time, "Congratulations!"
Lena slumped over the controls. She breathed, "Hell yes."
The back panel of the cabinet swung open.
The Daimon squeezed out. I tensed, but it made no effort to run. Instead, with its shoulders hunched and its head bowed, it held up a chain of Tickets. It shuffled around the cabinet, past a grumbling Bernie, and presented them to Lena.
She knelt and held out her hands. The tickets flashed; in their wake, Lena offered a radiant smile. "So cool! You know, I'd love to play with you some more. Will you let us have our tokens back?"
Head bob. Long yellow fingers pointed in my direction.
I crouched and saw the pile of tokens dumped in the maintenance area of the Ikaruga cabinet. I scooped them out and held one up so the others could see it.
"Thanks!" Lena beamed. "Have you got a name?"
No response.
"Do you want to come with us?" Lena asked.
Tilted head. A glance in Miguel's direction.
We all looked the same way. He frowned and shook his head.
Hesitation. Shoulder slump. Head bob.
The yellow Daimon reached out, and Lena clasped its hand.
Nothing happened.
Lena kept up her bright smile and her welcoming body language, but I saw her wings droop on my phone.
When the Daimon let go, she took her own out. To check her status, I supposed.
She didn't get the chance.
The moment Lena raised her phone, the Daimon lunged for it.
Chapter 63: Adoption
Chapter 63: Adoption
Squeezing in and out of the backs of cabinets and automatons was one thing. A person the size of the Daimon couldn't do it, unless maybe they were an expert contortionist. Other creatures, though, more flexible or compressible, could've managed. It would've been a piece of cake for an octopus.
When the Daimon grabbed Lena's phone, though, and squeezed into that?
Yeah, there was no natural animal, maybe no natural substance, capable of it.
I think the weirdest thing about it – and that's saying a lot – is that I didn't feel the wrench of nausea I did when watching the creature at the construction site, or even the hints of it when I looked too closely at distorted space.
The Daimon's arm narrowed and elongated and then its whole body followed suit, and it streamed through the cracks on the phone screen and into every port. It seemed less like it distorted or liquefied and more like it turned into a yellow laser beam.
Still, Lena almost fumbled the phone. "Holy shit!" She caught it before it could hit the floor and shatter the rest of the way.
"God," Zhizhi whispered. She tilted her head back to stare at her camera. "And I've got the whole thing recorded. No one will believe this wasn't a special effect."
"Then they will believe it was a good one," Miguel said.
She glanced at him. "Heh."
Then we all crowded around as Lena flicked to the Third Eye app. Including Bernie, who must've climbed up her leg and onto her shoulder, because when I looked at the screen and back to Lena, I saw his plushie form balanced beside her head.
She opened the app to the same achievement scroll I'd gotten when I acquired my Tickets. She swiped it out of the way with more force than necessary and hissed when her finger scraped a crack. She jabbed the header for the Daimons window.
The table at the top had expanded with another row. In addition to Fire 1, Lena now had Tickets 1. Weird! But I supposed it made sense. If Tickets were a resource in Third Eye, why shouldn't a Daimon be associated with them?
Then there was an oversized header called Personal, with Bernie's name in smaller text beneath it. Lena told me this had read "Salamander" when she first got Bernie, and she'd been able to change it by tapping it.
Then, and this was new, another header (similarly oversized, but I suppose that was better than using a different font and making it look like a subheading) called Utility. The name, or title, beneath it? Gremlin.
I assumed the default names tied in to the associated resources. Fire, Salamander; that made sense, salamanders were a traditional fire elemental. Tickets, Gremlin; odd, but only because Tickets themselves were odd. I'd heard IT people joke about gremlins in computer systems, which seemed to be the reference here.
I nodded to myself. It seemed right.
Lena apparently didn't think so.
"That's just wrong." She mushed her finger against the screen and tried to drag Gremlin up into the Personal section, but when she released her finger, all it did was bring up a name entry screen. She tapped out of that and tried again, but got the same result.
I understood why the screen annoyed her – I mean, besides it being a UI disaster. She didn't want to think of Daimons as tools, so Utility was the last way she'd ever categorize one.
For my part, though, I found it fascinating. What did it mean to have, more or less, a "Tickets elemental," both in terms of what the gremlin could do and in terms of how we ought to understand the resource? What kind of Utility did Daimons have? Would other categories appear? Was it like a paper doll inventory system, and Lena could only have one Daimon per slot, or more like a -mon game, and she could pick one – or had been assigned one – as her personal companion, and all the rest would slot into Utility?
Most of those were questions we couldn't answer yet. They still buzzed in my mind.
"Congratulations," Miguel said. I half expected to hear it in the mechanical voice the gremlin had used to communicate with us.
Lena hung her head. "I'm sorry, Miguel. You should've been able to –"
"Invite a mischievous little monster into my phone?" he asked.
Lena blinked at him.
"I love cats," he said. "Dogs are delightful. Parrots are very clever. Tropical fish are beautiful."
Zhizhi got it immediately. "And you enjoy all of those pets, when a friend or family member keeps them?"
The smile he gave her was one of the warmest I'd ever seen on his face.
It took me a second longer than it had her, but I understood what he meant. He liked animals, enjoyed their company, appreciated their best qualities, but he wasn't going to seek out the responsibility of pet ownership.
"I don't get it," Lena said. "If you're really not upset, though, I guess that's a good thing."
Miguel clapped her shoulder. "Believe me, I'm not. This evening has been... interesting. Better than expected, perhaps. I am, however, very glad it ends this way."
"It hasn't ended," Lena said.
"True," Miguel said. "We haven't all had a turn at one of the games."
Zhizhi shook her head. "Yeah, no. No thanks. If you hand me one of those tokens I'm just going to throw whatever game you make me start. Total waste."
"Papa would be so disappointed." Miguel clicked his tongue. "I, on the other hand, have no intention of forcing anyone to do something they don't want to."
I'm not saying he was drawing a contrast with what he perceived Third Eye as having tried to do.
I'm not not saying that, though.
Lena put a hand on her hip. "Okay, but, that's not what I meant."
"Now I am sorry," Miguel said. "Go on."
"The evening's not over," she said, "because we've still got to pick out a name!"
Miguel and Zhizhi chuckled. Bernie chuffed.
Lena turned to me. She did a pretty good job of hiding her annoyance, but I caught the twitch of her eye.
Daimons were by far and away her favorite part of Third Eye. To her, obtaining a new little monster was one part being dubbed into knighthood and one part being given a puppy. I couldn't think of another subject about which she'd think other people were insufficiently reverential.
I couldn't decide if I agreed with her or not, but I certainly found it charming. I kissed the top of her head. "I think you and I are going to have to work that one out on our own."
She wrapped an arm around my waist. "Any ideas?"
Bernie's name was an awful pun. Burn-y, for a stuffed dragon. Either of her parents could've been responsible for that, but personally, I suspected her dad.
Should I try to come up with something equally groan-worthy? Absurdly, I felt a bead of sweat roll down my forehead. It's one thing to know you're not ready for the responsibility of being a dad, even a pet dad. Quite another, to be faced with the awful weight of trying to tell a good dad joke.
No, puns weren't the right approach. Whatever Lena might say about Fire, it was a concept we all grasped. It might be weeks or months or forever before I understood Tickets and gremlins well enough to even try.
"The only thing I've got," I said, "is Ryu."
Lena cocked an eyebrow. "A gremlin named 'dragon?' That's what it means in Japanese, right?"
"I think so." I scratched the back of my neck. "What can I say? Street Fighter was the first game we played, so that's the first name I associated with it. You could go with Ikaruga?"
"I don't even know what that one means," she said.
"Is that better or worse than knowing it means the wrong thing?"
"I'm not sure if it's much of a name. Also, I would totes end up using Icky as a nickname, and that seems mean." She sighed against me and held her phone up. The name entry screen remained open. A gray text box with a flashing black cursor, like something from a computer as old as the mall. She murmured, "Ryu, huh?"
I rubbed the small of her back and she rubbed her chin.
"What do you think?" she asked.
I opened my mouth to answer before I realized she'd leaned closer to her phone's microphone.
"I don't really know how to communicate with you," she said. "So much to learn! Whatever the game says, you better believe I'm gonna figure it out. However many of you I get, you're all 'personal' to me. So, c'mon, let me know, please?" She hesitated. "... Ryu?"
Her screen flickered. A smiling emoji, big smile, the kind phones liked to turn "
" into, appeared in the text entry space.
I was pretty sure it was one of the stock Android emojis, but it struck me that it was the exact same color of yellow as the gremlin.
Lena pumped her fist. She gave Bernie a peck on the cheek and me one on the collarbone. Her thumb darted across the bottom of the screen, dodging cracks, and the emoji was replaced with the three letters of the gremlin's new name.
Squeezing in and out of the backs of cabinets and automatons was one thing. A person the size of the Daimon couldn't do it, unless maybe they were an expert contortionist. Other creatures, though, more flexible or compressible, could've managed. It would've been a piece of cake for an octopus.
When the Daimon grabbed Lena's phone, though, and squeezed into that?
Yeah, there was no natural animal, maybe no natural substance, capable of it.
I think the weirdest thing about it – and that's saying a lot – is that I didn't feel the wrench of nausea I did when watching the creature at the construction site, or even the hints of it when I looked too closely at distorted space.
The Daimon's arm narrowed and elongated and then its whole body followed suit, and it streamed through the cracks on the phone screen and into every port. It seemed less like it distorted or liquefied and more like it turned into a yellow laser beam.
Still, Lena almost fumbled the phone. "Holy shit!" She caught it before it could hit the floor and shatter the rest of the way.
"God," Zhizhi whispered. She tilted her head back to stare at her camera. "And I've got the whole thing recorded. No one will believe this wasn't a special effect."
"Then they will believe it was a good one," Miguel said.
She glanced at him. "Heh."
Then we all crowded around as Lena flicked to the Third Eye app. Including Bernie, who must've climbed up her leg and onto her shoulder, because when I looked at the screen and back to Lena, I saw his plushie form balanced beside her head.
She opened the app to the same achievement scroll I'd gotten when I acquired my Tickets. She swiped it out of the way with more force than necessary and hissed when her finger scraped a crack. She jabbed the header for the Daimons window.
The table at the top had expanded with another row. In addition to Fire 1, Lena now had Tickets 1. Weird! But I supposed it made sense. If Tickets were a resource in Third Eye, why shouldn't a Daimon be associated with them?
Then there was an oversized header called Personal, with Bernie's name in smaller text beneath it. Lena told me this had read "Salamander" when she first got Bernie, and she'd been able to change it by tapping it.
Then, and this was new, another header (similarly oversized, but I suppose that was better than using a different font and making it look like a subheading) called Utility. The name, or title, beneath it? Gremlin.
I assumed the default names tied in to the associated resources. Fire, Salamander; that made sense, salamanders were a traditional fire elemental. Tickets, Gremlin; odd, but only because Tickets themselves were odd. I'd heard IT people joke about gremlins in computer systems, which seemed to be the reference here.
I nodded to myself. It seemed right.
Lena apparently didn't think so.
"That's just wrong." She mushed her finger against the screen and tried to drag Gremlin up into the Personal section, but when she released her finger, all it did was bring up a name entry screen. She tapped out of that and tried again, but got the same result.
I understood why the screen annoyed her – I mean, besides it being a UI disaster. She didn't want to think of Daimons as tools, so Utility was the last way she'd ever categorize one.
For my part, though, I found it fascinating. What did it mean to have, more or less, a "Tickets elemental," both in terms of what the gremlin could do and in terms of how we ought to understand the resource? What kind of Utility did Daimons have? Would other categories appear? Was it like a paper doll inventory system, and Lena could only have one Daimon per slot, or more like a -mon game, and she could pick one – or had been assigned one – as her personal companion, and all the rest would slot into Utility?
Most of those were questions we couldn't answer yet. They still buzzed in my mind.
"Congratulations," Miguel said. I half expected to hear it in the mechanical voice the gremlin had used to communicate with us.
Lena hung her head. "I'm sorry, Miguel. You should've been able to –"
"Invite a mischievous little monster into my phone?" he asked.
Lena blinked at him.
"I love cats," he said. "Dogs are delightful. Parrots are very clever. Tropical fish are beautiful."
Zhizhi got it immediately. "And you enjoy all of those pets, when a friend or family member keeps them?"
The smile he gave her was one of the warmest I'd ever seen on his face.
It took me a second longer than it had her, but I understood what he meant. He liked animals, enjoyed their company, appreciated their best qualities, but he wasn't going to seek out the responsibility of pet ownership.
"I don't get it," Lena said. "If you're really not upset, though, I guess that's a good thing."
Miguel clapped her shoulder. "Believe me, I'm not. This evening has been... interesting. Better than expected, perhaps. I am, however, very glad it ends this way."
"It hasn't ended," Lena said.
"True," Miguel said. "We haven't all had a turn at one of the games."
Zhizhi shook her head. "Yeah, no. No thanks. If you hand me one of those tokens I'm just going to throw whatever game you make me start. Total waste."
"Papa would be so disappointed." Miguel clicked his tongue. "I, on the other hand, have no intention of forcing anyone to do something they don't want to."
I'm not saying he was drawing a contrast with what he perceived Third Eye as having tried to do.
I'm not not saying that, though.
Lena put a hand on her hip. "Okay, but, that's not what I meant."
"Now I am sorry," Miguel said. "Go on."
"The evening's not over," she said, "because we've still got to pick out a name!"
Miguel and Zhizhi chuckled. Bernie chuffed.
Lena turned to me. She did a pretty good job of hiding her annoyance, but I caught the twitch of her eye.
Daimons were by far and away her favorite part of Third Eye. To her, obtaining a new little monster was one part being dubbed into knighthood and one part being given a puppy. I couldn't think of another subject about which she'd think other people were insufficiently reverential.
I couldn't decide if I agreed with her or not, but I certainly found it charming. I kissed the top of her head. "I think you and I are going to have to work that one out on our own."
She wrapped an arm around my waist. "Any ideas?"
Bernie's name was an awful pun. Burn-y, for a stuffed dragon. Either of her parents could've been responsible for that, but personally, I suspected her dad.
Should I try to come up with something equally groan-worthy? Absurdly, I felt a bead of sweat roll down my forehead. It's one thing to know you're not ready for the responsibility of being a dad, even a pet dad. Quite another, to be faced with the awful weight of trying to tell a good dad joke.
No, puns weren't the right approach. Whatever Lena might say about Fire, it was a concept we all grasped. It might be weeks or months or forever before I understood Tickets and gremlins well enough to even try.
"The only thing I've got," I said, "is Ryu."
Lena cocked an eyebrow. "A gremlin named 'dragon?' That's what it means in Japanese, right?"
"I think so." I scratched the back of my neck. "What can I say? Street Fighter was the first game we played, so that's the first name I associated with it. You could go with Ikaruga?"
"I don't even know what that one means," she said.
"Is that better or worse than knowing it means the wrong thing?"
"I'm not sure if it's much of a name. Also, I would totes end up using Icky as a nickname, and that seems mean." She sighed against me and held her phone up. The name entry screen remained open. A gray text box with a flashing black cursor, like something from a computer as old as the mall. She murmured, "Ryu, huh?"
I rubbed the small of her back and she rubbed her chin.
"What do you think?" she asked.
I opened my mouth to answer before I realized she'd leaned closer to her phone's microphone.
"I don't really know how to communicate with you," she said. "So much to learn! Whatever the game says, you better believe I'm gonna figure it out. However many of you I get, you're all 'personal' to me. So, c'mon, let me know, please?" She hesitated. "... Ryu?"
Her screen flickered. A smiling emoji, big smile, the kind phones liked to turn "
" into, appeared in the text entry space.I was pretty sure it was one of the stock Android emojis, but it struck me that it was the exact same color of yellow as the gremlin.
Lena pumped her fist. She gave Bernie a peck on the cheek and me one on the collarbone. Her thumb darted across the bottom of the screen, dodging cracks, and the emoji was replaced with the three letters of the gremlin's new name.
Chapter 64: Error Checking
Chapter 64: Error Checking
Was the Cinder Alley concourse shorter on the way out? It felt like it, but maybe that was because instead of dwelling on every shadow and echo, I had a million thoughts rampaging through my head.
Or maybe the space had compressed instead of expanding on the way out. The opposite of the construction site, just as so much about the mall had been.
At some point, we needed to find a way to test spatial distortion more precisely. Better still would be to figure out how to predict it. Best? To control it.
Then again, what aspect of Third Eye could I not say that about?
We'd decided to leave right after Lena added Ryu to our weird little family. We probably could have learned more, and maybe acquired more Tickets, by continuing to play. We would definitely learn more by seeing if the place still existed the next time we tried it. In the meantime, it was getting late enough to be a problem when half our party didn't have HP to insulate them from exhaustion, and did have normal work schedules.
We left through the same maintenance area, then out into the runoff tunnel. Briefly, I wondered if we'd have to climb around the locked gate because the distortions were collapsing, but that didn't seem to be the case. We walked right around it by following the path in Third Eye, the same as when we'd entered, the same as when I'd demonstrated how it worked.
And then? The outside world.
A blast of cold air hit my face and it made me miss a step. I didn't find it unpleasant, just shocking. We'd been underground for – how long? An hour and a half, according to my offline clock app, a little under three hours according to my phone's main clock. Not ages, but apparently enough to have grown accustomed to stagnant air the temperature of the surrounding soil.
"Something the matter?" Miguel asked.
I blinked up at the streetlights on Hampden overhead. "Nope. Just readjusting to the real world."
"Ah," he said.
I leaned against the railing and regarded him.
He raised an eyebrow. "Do you want me to ask if something is the matter again?"
"I think that's our line," Lena said. She looked down at her phone screen. A smile flickered across her face, which made me think she'd seen an emoji there. Whatever sentiment Ryu conveyed to her, her own happiness faded in an instant. She whispered, "Are you really okay?"
"I spent an evening at an arcade in good company," Miguel said. "I solved some puzzles. I acquired many more data points for Joon Woo's language project."
Lena hung her head. "You know what I mean."
Miguel reached out and lifted her chin. Her eyes widened.
"In all honesty," he said, "I don't."
Lena blinked.
"Do you mean," he asked, "I should be upset because I'm not the owner of a virtual pet to which I would feel emotionally obligated? Despite the fact that its existence in the real world seems to be in the form of a living glitch in the very electronics it is my work to secure?"
"Well... when you put it that way –"
"Or," Miguel continued, "do you mean I should be upset because a video game that may have been made by wizards or aliens has failed to strike a psychological chord with me? That it has not instilled in me some new level of understanding about how my life, which I quite enjoy, actually begs for some drastic change?"
Lena's freckles showed in the street lights. She pawed Miguel's hand away from her face. "Okay, okay. I'll believe you."
Zhizhi came up behind him and touched his wrist. He let her guide his arm away from Lena.
Lena joined me by the railing.
Zhizhi arched an eyebrow. "You've got everything in life on lockdown, huh?"
Miguel regarded her. "I'm quite pleased with how things are."
She laughed. She patted his arm and stepped away. "Works for me."
Watching the two of them, I could believe it.
As we trudged up the ramp to the parking lot where Miguel's Prius waited, I fell into step beside Lena. She tried to smile up at me and I beamed down at her, and that seemed, finally, to put her at ease. She hugged my arm. I felt the heat of her wing cradle my back. I pressed a kiss to the side of her head.
Ahead of us, Miguel and Zhizhi walked and talked. No PDAs, no reassuring touches, but an animated conversation. They were a good match. They didn't seem to have many common interests, so I didn't know if they'd last as friends. If they found one, or for as long as they had a project to bind them together, though? They'd get on forever.
How long would they date? Six months? Three?
In the years when Lena and I had been drifting apart, especially in the last year when it had seemed like we weren't just breaking up, but had broken up, I'd always sort of expected Miguel to make a move on her. Never happened. He'd charmed, flirted a little, but only because that was a game he played with anyone who seemed comfortable with it.
I finally understood that it never would have happened. Even if Lena and I had broken all the way up, even if she'd thrown herself at Miguel on the rebound.
The reason Miguel stayed friends with his ex-girlfriends was because he only ever dated people who would be okay with being exes. Lena was like me; she hadn't been okay with it even before it was true.
It made sense. I'd probably known it, intellectually. It had just never clicked for me because it was so different to how I'd ever approached a relationship.
Also, because you could probably add my and Lena's emotional intelligence together and end up with less than Miguel's.
As people went, he was a finished product. Maybe the most of anyone I knew. Good job, good friends, good times. Some of those friends became girlfriends, for a season or two; others were exes he'd drawn into his life. He could flit between an entire crowd of nieces and nephews, being a cool uncle.
He'd constructed his life with a degree of intentionality I was lucky to manage for the length of a 500-word clickbait article.
I'm not saying he couldn't change or grow, just that he'd found a state of being he was comfortable with. He'd optimized himself for his habitat and his habitat for himself.
Which raised a fascinating question. (To me, at least.)
Why had Third Eye presented him with the same kind of blast from the past it had Lena?
We settled into the back seat of the Prius. I watched Miguel drive. His hand movements looked so languid I thought the car shouldn't respond, but it curled gently into the roundabout and out toward Broadway. He reached the speed limit without a glance at the speedometer and, courtesy of a green light, cruised through the intersection without deviating a mile an hour off it. Smooth. Effortless. Because he put the effort in to know himself and his car to an exceptional degree.
Lena saw me watching and her lips curled down. I flashed her a smile to reassure her; she cocked her head, but shrugged, smiled back, and plopped Bernie on her lap so she could focus on petting him.
I think she thought I was going to beat myself up about the comparison in our driving performances. That wasn't the point, though. I'd literally never driven his car before the first night we explored the tunnel, and hadn't driven anything for years.
What interested me was not how badly I'd driven Miguel's car, but the way in which he'd mastered doing so.
Third Eye had presented him with a Realm to challenge who he was, how he lived.
Increasingly, I thought the central question was, "Why?"
My first assumption had been that under the surface, he was as fucked up as any of us. Both Lena and I had approached the situation that way, had fretted when he refused to engage, had pushed him.
It's not like we'd had no evidence! This evening might've been the most uncomfortable I'd ever seen him, and I included the night he'd gone over the railing and injured himself in the runoff tunnel.
"We're here," he said.
I blinked and shook my head. While I'd gotten lost in my head, he'd brought us to the parking lot of our apartment building. While I'd considered whether he might be a seething cauldron of unspoken traumas, he'd parked so softly I didn't even realize we'd stopped moving.
"Thanks for the ride," I said. "You want to come up and say hi to Ben?"
"Why not," Miguel said. "Zhizhi?"
She shrugged. "More stairs? Well, I can't complain. I haven't been getting my reps in jogging."
Our party ascended. Four people, two demons, and plenty to think about.
I thought about bringing my question up with the others, but I hesitated. Miguel had made it crystal clear how little he thought of Third Eye's attempt to get in his head. Talking about it again would only annoy him. I wanted Lena's and Zhizhi's feedback, but I could get the former any time we had a few spare minutes, and the latter, any time I sent her a Discord.
Conversation could wait until I knew what I wanted to say.
So. Miguel's Realm.
If I rejected the premise that he actually needed what it was offering, what did that leave me?
Third Eye had made a mistake.
Albie was a joy, Third Eye was actual magic. You want me to trust them over Miguel, where Miguel was concerned? Nope.
The game's awful UI was one thing, not that it was something I really understood. Same with its business model. Same with its game design. Third Eye was deeply, broadly imperfect everywhere it intersected the real world.
When it came to the magic shit, though, I think all of us had tended to assume it would be perfect. The devs could do things we hadn't believed were possible! They'd developed a technique or exploited a resource that had escaped human understanding for centuries. Surely they knew what they were doing.
Did that actually make sense, though?
If the devs had just discovered whatever power they wielded, they would be stumbling almost as much in the dark as the rest of us.
What if they were the first to share a secret?
Well, why were they sharing it? Albie had only talked about a brother, never parents. Whatever else she was, she seemed very much like a little kid.
What if we weren't getting hints at wizardry from the grimoires of archmages, but the sum total of the knowledge of a couple of desperate apprentices? Not sufficiently advanced technology straight from the brains of alien scientists, but the equivalent of Physical Science from a pair of alien schoolkids?
Lena squeezed my hand.
When I looked at her, she said, "I think this is for you."
"Huh?"
She showed me her cracked phone screen. It was dominated by an emoji with its tongue sticking out.
I breathed out a chuckle. "Is that from Ryu, or from you?"
"It can be both," she said.
As much as I enjoyed the twinkle in her eyes, I'd have liked a straight answer for once. How attuned was Ryu to my (or Lena's!) mood? How aware, from his dwelling place in Lena's phone? Bernie seemed pretty empathetic, come to think of it.
Before I could ask, we reached our front door. I got my keys out and let us in.
Benji sprang to his feet. He was in pajamas, but he'd been sitting at the kitchen counter with his laptop, his phone, and a pile of papers arranged around him. Late work?
He took a half-step back when the door opened, saw me, and glared. "Decided not to party all night, bro?"
Annoyance flickered through me. I fought it down. Mostly. "Somehow, I managed to restrain myself."
"Cool." Benji snapped his laptop shut and set it over his papers. "Hey, Lena. And Miguel. Right, you're into this, too. And you're –"
"Zhizhi," said she.
"Right. From the park." Benji shook her hand.
Between his pajamas and his unbrushed hair, he looked like he'd tried to go to bed but hadn't managed to fall asleep.
"We got caught up in some Third Eye shit," Lena said. "Good shit, this time, just fyi. I got a new Daimon!"
"Cool," Benji repeated. He didn't sound particularly enthused.
I thought about how haggard he looked, and about how badly I'd misread Miguel's needs. Hell. How badly Third Eye seemed to have. I'd given Benji advice based on what the game had pushed Lena and I into.
Surely he wouldn't have listened. Not to his little brother.
Right?
I swallowed. "Hey, Ben. Did you get a chance to talk to Sandy?"
"Just a call. We'll hash things out this weekend." He pinched his nose. "Actually, Cameron, I kinda expected to get a chance to talk to you."
Was the Cinder Alley concourse shorter on the way out? It felt like it, but maybe that was because instead of dwelling on every shadow and echo, I had a million thoughts rampaging through my head.
Or maybe the space had compressed instead of expanding on the way out. The opposite of the construction site, just as so much about the mall had been.
At some point, we needed to find a way to test spatial distortion more precisely. Better still would be to figure out how to predict it. Best? To control it.
Then again, what aspect of Third Eye could I not say that about?
We'd decided to leave right after Lena added Ryu to our weird little family. We probably could have learned more, and maybe acquired more Tickets, by continuing to play. We would definitely learn more by seeing if the place still existed the next time we tried it. In the meantime, it was getting late enough to be a problem when half our party didn't have HP to insulate them from exhaustion, and did have normal work schedules.
We left through the same maintenance area, then out into the runoff tunnel. Briefly, I wondered if we'd have to climb around the locked gate because the distortions were collapsing, but that didn't seem to be the case. We walked right around it by following the path in Third Eye, the same as when we'd entered, the same as when I'd demonstrated how it worked.
And then? The outside world.
A blast of cold air hit my face and it made me miss a step. I didn't find it unpleasant, just shocking. We'd been underground for – how long? An hour and a half, according to my offline clock app, a little under three hours according to my phone's main clock. Not ages, but apparently enough to have grown accustomed to stagnant air the temperature of the surrounding soil.
"Something the matter?" Miguel asked.
I blinked up at the streetlights on Hampden overhead. "Nope. Just readjusting to the real world."
"Ah," he said.
I leaned against the railing and regarded him.
He raised an eyebrow. "Do you want me to ask if something is the matter again?"
"I think that's our line," Lena said. She looked down at her phone screen. A smile flickered across her face, which made me think she'd seen an emoji there. Whatever sentiment Ryu conveyed to her, her own happiness faded in an instant. She whispered, "Are you really okay?"
"I spent an evening at an arcade in good company," Miguel said. "I solved some puzzles. I acquired many more data points for Joon Woo's language project."
Lena hung her head. "You know what I mean."
Miguel reached out and lifted her chin. Her eyes widened.
"In all honesty," he said, "I don't."
Lena blinked.
"Do you mean," he asked, "I should be upset because I'm not the owner of a virtual pet to which I would feel emotionally obligated? Despite the fact that its existence in the real world seems to be in the form of a living glitch in the very electronics it is my work to secure?"
"Well... when you put it that way –"
"Or," Miguel continued, "do you mean I should be upset because a video game that may have been made by wizards or aliens has failed to strike a psychological chord with me? That it has not instilled in me some new level of understanding about how my life, which I quite enjoy, actually begs for some drastic change?"
Lena's freckles showed in the street lights. She pawed Miguel's hand away from her face. "Okay, okay. I'll believe you."
Zhizhi came up behind him and touched his wrist. He let her guide his arm away from Lena.
Lena joined me by the railing.
Zhizhi arched an eyebrow. "You've got everything in life on lockdown, huh?"
Miguel regarded her. "I'm quite pleased with how things are."
She laughed. She patted his arm and stepped away. "Works for me."
Watching the two of them, I could believe it.
As we trudged up the ramp to the parking lot where Miguel's Prius waited, I fell into step beside Lena. She tried to smile up at me and I beamed down at her, and that seemed, finally, to put her at ease. She hugged my arm. I felt the heat of her wing cradle my back. I pressed a kiss to the side of her head.
Ahead of us, Miguel and Zhizhi walked and talked. No PDAs, no reassuring touches, but an animated conversation. They were a good match. They didn't seem to have many common interests, so I didn't know if they'd last as friends. If they found one, or for as long as they had a project to bind them together, though? They'd get on forever.
How long would they date? Six months? Three?
In the years when Lena and I had been drifting apart, especially in the last year when it had seemed like we weren't just breaking up, but had broken up, I'd always sort of expected Miguel to make a move on her. Never happened. He'd charmed, flirted a little, but only because that was a game he played with anyone who seemed comfortable with it.
I finally understood that it never would have happened. Even if Lena and I had broken all the way up, even if she'd thrown herself at Miguel on the rebound.
The reason Miguel stayed friends with his ex-girlfriends was because he only ever dated people who would be okay with being exes. Lena was like me; she hadn't been okay with it even before it was true.
It made sense. I'd probably known it, intellectually. It had just never clicked for me because it was so different to how I'd ever approached a relationship.
Also, because you could probably add my and Lena's emotional intelligence together and end up with less than Miguel's.
As people went, he was a finished product. Maybe the most of anyone I knew. Good job, good friends, good times. Some of those friends became girlfriends, for a season or two; others were exes he'd drawn into his life. He could flit between an entire crowd of nieces and nephews, being a cool uncle.
He'd constructed his life with a degree of intentionality I was lucky to manage for the length of a 500-word clickbait article.
I'm not saying he couldn't change or grow, just that he'd found a state of being he was comfortable with. He'd optimized himself for his habitat and his habitat for himself.
Which raised a fascinating question. (To me, at least.)
Why had Third Eye presented him with the same kind of blast from the past it had Lena?
We settled into the back seat of the Prius. I watched Miguel drive. His hand movements looked so languid I thought the car shouldn't respond, but it curled gently into the roundabout and out toward Broadway. He reached the speed limit without a glance at the speedometer and, courtesy of a green light, cruised through the intersection without deviating a mile an hour off it. Smooth. Effortless. Because he put the effort in to know himself and his car to an exceptional degree.
Lena saw me watching and her lips curled down. I flashed her a smile to reassure her; she cocked her head, but shrugged, smiled back, and plopped Bernie on her lap so she could focus on petting him.
I think she thought I was going to beat myself up about the comparison in our driving performances. That wasn't the point, though. I'd literally never driven his car before the first night we explored the tunnel, and hadn't driven anything for years.
What interested me was not how badly I'd driven Miguel's car, but the way in which he'd mastered doing so.
Third Eye had presented him with a Realm to challenge who he was, how he lived.
Increasingly, I thought the central question was, "Why?"
My first assumption had been that under the surface, he was as fucked up as any of us. Both Lena and I had approached the situation that way, had fretted when he refused to engage, had pushed him.
It's not like we'd had no evidence! This evening might've been the most uncomfortable I'd ever seen him, and I included the night he'd gone over the railing and injured himself in the runoff tunnel.
"We're here," he said.
I blinked and shook my head. While I'd gotten lost in my head, he'd brought us to the parking lot of our apartment building. While I'd considered whether he might be a seething cauldron of unspoken traumas, he'd parked so softly I didn't even realize we'd stopped moving.
"Thanks for the ride," I said. "You want to come up and say hi to Ben?"
"Why not," Miguel said. "Zhizhi?"
She shrugged. "More stairs? Well, I can't complain. I haven't been getting my reps in jogging."
Our party ascended. Four people, two demons, and plenty to think about.
I thought about bringing my question up with the others, but I hesitated. Miguel had made it crystal clear how little he thought of Third Eye's attempt to get in his head. Talking about it again would only annoy him. I wanted Lena's and Zhizhi's feedback, but I could get the former any time we had a few spare minutes, and the latter, any time I sent her a Discord.
Conversation could wait until I knew what I wanted to say.
So. Miguel's Realm.
If I rejected the premise that he actually needed what it was offering, what did that leave me?
Third Eye had made a mistake.
Albie was a joy, Third Eye was actual magic. You want me to trust them over Miguel, where Miguel was concerned? Nope.
The game's awful UI was one thing, not that it was something I really understood. Same with its business model. Same with its game design. Third Eye was deeply, broadly imperfect everywhere it intersected the real world.
When it came to the magic shit, though, I think all of us had tended to assume it would be perfect. The devs could do things we hadn't believed were possible! They'd developed a technique or exploited a resource that had escaped human understanding for centuries. Surely they knew what they were doing.
Did that actually make sense, though?
If the devs had just discovered whatever power they wielded, they would be stumbling almost as much in the dark as the rest of us.
What if they were the first to share a secret?
Well, why were they sharing it? Albie had only talked about a brother, never parents. Whatever else she was, she seemed very much like a little kid.
What if we weren't getting hints at wizardry from the grimoires of archmages, but the sum total of the knowledge of a couple of desperate apprentices? Not sufficiently advanced technology straight from the brains of alien scientists, but the equivalent of Physical Science from a pair of alien schoolkids?
Lena squeezed my hand.
When I looked at her, she said, "I think this is for you."
"Huh?"
She showed me her cracked phone screen. It was dominated by an emoji with its tongue sticking out.
I breathed out a chuckle. "Is that from Ryu, or from you?"
"It can be both," she said.
As much as I enjoyed the twinkle in her eyes, I'd have liked a straight answer for once. How attuned was Ryu to my (or Lena's!) mood? How aware, from his dwelling place in Lena's phone? Bernie seemed pretty empathetic, come to think of it.
Before I could ask, we reached our front door. I got my keys out and let us in.
Benji sprang to his feet. He was in pajamas, but he'd been sitting at the kitchen counter with his laptop, his phone, and a pile of papers arranged around him. Late work?
He took a half-step back when the door opened, saw me, and glared. "Decided not to party all night, bro?"
Annoyance flickered through me. I fought it down. Mostly. "Somehow, I managed to restrain myself."
"Cool." Benji snapped his laptop shut and set it over his papers. "Hey, Lena. And Miguel. Right, you're into this, too. And you're –"
"Zhizhi," said she.
"Right. From the park." Benji shook her hand.
Between his pajamas and his unbrushed hair, he looked like he'd tried to go to bed but hadn't managed to fall asleep.
"We got caught up in some Third Eye shit," Lena said. "Good shit, this time, just fyi. I got a new Daimon!"
"Cool," Benji repeated. He didn't sound particularly enthused.
I thought about how haggard he looked, and about how badly I'd misread Miguel's needs. Hell. How badly Third Eye seemed to have. I'd given Benji advice based on what the game had pushed Lena and I into.
Surely he wouldn't have listened. Not to his little brother.
Right?
I swallowed. "Hey, Ben. Did you get a chance to talk to Sandy?"
"Just a call. We'll hash things out this weekend." He pinched his nose. "Actually, Cameron, I kinda expected to get a chance to talk to you."
Chapter 65: Weekend Outing
Chapter 65: Weekend Outing
"You should've texted, Ben," I said. "Actually, I've got Discord on my phone, you should try that first. I'm more likely to see it."
"I didn't feel like getting a response at one word a minute," Benji said. "Besides, I can't believe you're comfortable leaving a digital record of this Third Eye shit. I'm not."
Judging from where he was looking, he'd directed that statement more to Miguel than me.
Its recipient shrugged. "We plan to go public with it when the time is right. At that point, better to have a record."
"Go public." Benji swallowed. "Right."
Miguel clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't worry yourself, Ben. Cooler heads then Lena and Cameron are helping with the plan."
"Hey!" Lena put her hands on her hips, but she continued to smile.
Benji didn't. "It does make me feel better to hear you say that, frankly."
Miguel lowered his voice. "Don't underestimate those two. I'm being serious now. The situation is very strange, potentially dangerous. They've handled it well."
"Thanks, man," I said. Hearing him vouch for us made my voice catch. I hated it.
Miguel, on the other hand, seemed to love it. He turned and transferred his hand to my shoulder. Before I could either clasp it or brush it away, he swept past me. "We shouldn't keep you up."
"You guys don't want to stay for coffee?" Lena asked.
"I'm good," Zhizhi said. "I try not to drink caffeine after five."
Lena checked the clock over the counter. "Technically, it's first thing in the morning."
Zhizhi laughed. "Yeah, well, I might get away with that since tomorrow's Saturday. I'd just end up miserable on Monday if I kept it up, though. Miguel, you want to take me home?"
"I'd love to."
"Night, you two." I got the door for them. "Thanks for your help tonight."
"Thanks for the footage," Zhizhi said.
"It was certainly an experience." Miguel waved past me. "Nice seeing you, Ben."
"Likewise." Benji gave them a thumbs up. "Keep on keeping an eye on my little bro, yeah?"
Miguel inclined his head. "When do I not?"
Zhizhi watched my reaction. Her mouth crinkled. I don't know where she found the reserves of willpower not to laugh.
"Enough already." I opened the door and shooed them out. They went, and I almost got it closed behind them before I heard their laughter.
I leaned back against it and sighed. After a moment, I chuckled as well.
Lena plopped down next to Bernie's pet bed and settled him into it. She stroked his head with one hand and tapped at her phone screen with the other.
Benji looked up at the clock. He rubbed his eyes. "Shit. It's actually after midnight?"
"I guess we ended up staying out later than I expected." I joined them at the counter. I wanted to reach down and stroke Lena's hair, but I was trying not to get too lovey-dovey in front of Benji when he and Sandy were going through a rough patch. "You still want to talk?"
"Want?" He shook his head. "We need to, but your friend Zhizhi was right. Some of us have schedules to keep."
"You're not going home first thing tomorrow morning, are you?" Lena asked.
He hesitated. He reached up to run his fingers through his hair, then pressed them flat on the counter. "No. I need to understand the crap you've gotten yourselves into or it's just going to drive me nuts."
"We can talk tomorrow, then," I said. "Go to bed, Ben. Sleep on it."
"You too, Cam."
"That's the plan."
I can't speak for either Benji or Lena, but I know I followed it. I might've been absurdly resistant to physical exhaustion, but mentally? I was wiped. Multiple discoveries, multiple crises. My head hit the pillow and I conked out.
A crowing rooster woke me at the crack of dawn.
I sat up, blinking wildly. The blanket snarled around my shoulders and pulled Lena and Bernie onto my lap. He hissed angrily. Her hands scrabbled up my pajamas. She dragged herself to a sitting position and groaned.
I traced the source of the barnyard noises. Lena's phone, emitting light as well as sound from beneath its casing. She'd left it face down on her nightstand, but it was on max volume.
"What the actual fuck?" I snarled.
The rooster cut out instantly, replaced by familiar mechanical laughter.
Lena snatched up her phone. "Ryu, no! You can't do that to us. You gotta let us sleep."
By the time I groped for the lamp and turned it on, though, I saw her smiling at the screen.
"Seriously," I said. "No more of that."
Lena nodded absently, more at the sound of my voice than at what I'd said.
I swallowed a sigh. I knew she'd side with the Daimon. She'd only had him one night and he was already spoiled.
It shouldn't have made me smile, but for some reason, the corners of my lips wouldn't stay down. I pressed them to the top of Lena's head so she wouldn't see and think I approved.
She slid her arms around me and murmured, "Mm." Maybe I hadn't sent the right message.
Maybe I revised what message I wanted to send.
A knock at our bedroom door derailed my train of thought. Benji called, "What was that?"
"My alarm," Lena shouted.
He must have stepped back from the door, because his response was too muffled to make out.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
I said, "We better get dressed."
She sighed, but nodded.
A few minutes and our best scouting clothes later, we emerged into the living room.
Benji was already dressed – jeans, polo, tennis shoes – and blowing coffee steam off the top of one of our foam cups.
Lena grabbed the pot and poured us cups of our own. We sat down. We sipped. We waited.
When we were done drinking ourselves awake and Benji still hadn't spoken, I said, "If we need to talk, let's talk."
"Yeah." He tipped his empty cup back, then tossed it into the trash bin. I'd noticed one in there every morning since he'd started staying with us, but hadn't had the heart to admit we washed them out and reused them until they cracked. "We should. What's your plan for the day, though?"
"We've got some experiments to run," I said. We had yet to even try to figure out how our Tickets worked. "Mostly, though, scouting. Looking for more Third Eye resources."
His brow furrowed. "You need to do that, huh?"
"We do," I said, "but we've got to be careful about where we go during the day. Okay, we have to be careful about it at night, too, but in a different way. That's not the most important thing."
"Isn't it?"
I spread my hands. "I guess that depends on how many of the things we're afraid of turn out to be true."
"The most important thing," Lena said, "is that we're cool. In general, but of course we are! You and us, I mean."
Benji rapped his knuckles on the counter. "I'll take you scouting. We can talk while we drive."
"Ben, you don't have to –"
"Awesome!" Lena clapped. "That would be a huge help. We can check places that aren't on the RTD system. Right, Cam?"
I ran my fingers through my hair. "Right."
Utter defeat. Good thing I was pretty sure I shouldn't have tried to resist in the first place.
We got our coats, marched down to the parking lot, and piled into Benji's Sonata. Lena rode shotgun. I sat in the back with Bernie at my side.
Benji fired up the car. "Where to?"
"The farther out of town you're willing to go," I said, "the better."
For some reason, that made him laugh. "First time for everything."
"What do you mean?" Lena asked.
"Cameron wanting to leave town? He always hated road trips growing up."
"Oh, he still does," Lena said.
"I didn't realize I'd RSVPed to the roast of Cameron Howard," I said. "Hopefully the better comedians will come on later."
Lena bent over the armrest to look back at me. She stuck her tongue out, but it was surrounded by an easy smile.
Benji laughed, full-throated.
What the hell. I laughed along with them.
"Seriously, though," I said. "You're right that I'd rather hang out in the city, but we did so much better finding Materials when we roamed out of town."
"This game is so weird," Benji muttered.
"You're not wrong."
He stayed on Hampden, westbound. We cruised past the greenbelt and the tunnel. If we pulled into the parking lot and delved inside, could we return to Miguel's Realm without bringing the man it was meant for? I wanted to know, and I was curious what Benji would make of the echo of Cinder Alley, but not enough to go into the tunnel in broad daylight. Besides, it wouldn't be a very efficient way to scout.
We drove through commercial and industrial parts of town. The speed limit jumped and the Sonata stayed five, ten miles per hour above it. Only a few trucks and SUVs overtook us.
When was the last time I'd been in a car moving this fast? Any time I'd traveled far from Englewood, it had been on a bus or a light rail train. Between that and being situated in the back seat, the ride really did feel like a flashback to my childhood.
Right down to Benji saying shit I didn't want to hear. "I've been looking up Third Eye. Couple of weird stories floating around. Did you know somebody got booked for assault?"
"Playing Third Eye?" I nodded. He could see me in the mirror. "We heard about it, yeah. A PVP incident that got weird. There's a reason we're down on invasions."
Lena fixed her attention on her phone. Still feeling guilty about how she'd planned to invade Matt? Or still wishing she could? Whatever was running through her head, it stopped in its tracks. She started tapping on the phone and trying and failing not to giggle.
"What's Ryu up to?" I asked.
"Ryu?" Benji asked.
"My new Daimon," Lena said. "He lives in electronics like Bernie does in his plushie. Wanna see?"
"Not while I'm driving," Benji said. Which wasn't exactly the same as, "Later," but he let Lena take it that way and so did I.
"We know Third Eye can get dangerous," I said. "It's more than just other players. One thing we haven't told you about. We went... somewhere the game didn't want us to. We ran into a monster there. Not a Daimon. Something a lot weirder, a lot more hostile. You remember Donica, from the park?"
"The woman with the busted ankle?"
"That's how she got hurt," I said. "We're pretty sure we would all have suffered worse if we'd stuck around. One of the devs had to rescue us."
Benji shook his head. "And yet, you're still playing."
I thought about my speculation from the night before. If the devs weren't infallible when it came to magic, if Albie wasn't, then how justified had her confidence about confronting the creature been? It was one thing for her to miscalculate about a player's state of mind. Quite another for her to overestimate herself in life or death situations.
I didn't want Lena thinking about that, so I pushed the conversation on as fast as the car zipped down Hampden. "I told you, in a lot of ways, we're safer staying in and getting stronger then we would be quitting. Besides. Are you really telling me that if you got access to a game that could change the world, you'd stop playing?"
There weren't many stop lights on Hampden, but we'd reached one and it was red. Benji took the opportunity to lean over and look me in the eye.
"Depends," he said, "on what it changed."
"You should've texted, Ben," I said. "Actually, I've got Discord on my phone, you should try that first. I'm more likely to see it."
"I didn't feel like getting a response at one word a minute," Benji said. "Besides, I can't believe you're comfortable leaving a digital record of this Third Eye shit. I'm not."
Judging from where he was looking, he'd directed that statement more to Miguel than me.
Its recipient shrugged. "We plan to go public with it when the time is right. At that point, better to have a record."
"Go public." Benji swallowed. "Right."
Miguel clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't worry yourself, Ben. Cooler heads then Lena and Cameron are helping with the plan."
"Hey!" Lena put her hands on her hips, but she continued to smile.
Benji didn't. "It does make me feel better to hear you say that, frankly."
Miguel lowered his voice. "Don't underestimate those two. I'm being serious now. The situation is very strange, potentially dangerous. They've handled it well."
"Thanks, man," I said. Hearing him vouch for us made my voice catch. I hated it.
Miguel, on the other hand, seemed to love it. He turned and transferred his hand to my shoulder. Before I could either clasp it or brush it away, he swept past me. "We shouldn't keep you up."
"You guys don't want to stay for coffee?" Lena asked.
"I'm good," Zhizhi said. "I try not to drink caffeine after five."
Lena checked the clock over the counter. "Technically, it's first thing in the morning."
Zhizhi laughed. "Yeah, well, I might get away with that since tomorrow's Saturday. I'd just end up miserable on Monday if I kept it up, though. Miguel, you want to take me home?"
"I'd love to."
"Night, you two." I got the door for them. "Thanks for your help tonight."
"Thanks for the footage," Zhizhi said.
"It was certainly an experience." Miguel waved past me. "Nice seeing you, Ben."
"Likewise." Benji gave them a thumbs up. "Keep on keeping an eye on my little bro, yeah?"
Miguel inclined his head. "When do I not?"
Zhizhi watched my reaction. Her mouth crinkled. I don't know where she found the reserves of willpower not to laugh.
"Enough already." I opened the door and shooed them out. They went, and I almost got it closed behind them before I heard their laughter.
I leaned back against it and sighed. After a moment, I chuckled as well.
Lena plopped down next to Bernie's pet bed and settled him into it. She stroked his head with one hand and tapped at her phone screen with the other.
Benji looked up at the clock. He rubbed his eyes. "Shit. It's actually after midnight?"
"I guess we ended up staying out later than I expected." I joined them at the counter. I wanted to reach down and stroke Lena's hair, but I was trying not to get too lovey-dovey in front of Benji when he and Sandy were going through a rough patch. "You still want to talk?"
"Want?" He shook his head. "We need to, but your friend Zhizhi was right. Some of us have schedules to keep."
"You're not going home first thing tomorrow morning, are you?" Lena asked.
He hesitated. He reached up to run his fingers through his hair, then pressed them flat on the counter. "No. I need to understand the crap you've gotten yourselves into or it's just going to drive me nuts."
"We can talk tomorrow, then," I said. "Go to bed, Ben. Sleep on it."
"You too, Cam."
"That's the plan."
I can't speak for either Benji or Lena, but I know I followed it. I might've been absurdly resistant to physical exhaustion, but mentally? I was wiped. Multiple discoveries, multiple crises. My head hit the pillow and I conked out.
A crowing rooster woke me at the crack of dawn.
I sat up, blinking wildly. The blanket snarled around my shoulders and pulled Lena and Bernie onto my lap. He hissed angrily. Her hands scrabbled up my pajamas. She dragged herself to a sitting position and groaned.
I traced the source of the barnyard noises. Lena's phone, emitting light as well as sound from beneath its casing. She'd left it face down on her nightstand, but it was on max volume.
"What the actual fuck?" I snarled.
The rooster cut out instantly, replaced by familiar mechanical laughter.
Lena snatched up her phone. "Ryu, no! You can't do that to us. You gotta let us sleep."
By the time I groped for the lamp and turned it on, though, I saw her smiling at the screen.
"Seriously," I said. "No more of that."
Lena nodded absently, more at the sound of my voice than at what I'd said.
I swallowed a sigh. I knew she'd side with the Daimon. She'd only had him one night and he was already spoiled.
It shouldn't have made me smile, but for some reason, the corners of my lips wouldn't stay down. I pressed them to the top of Lena's head so she wouldn't see and think I approved.
She slid her arms around me and murmured, "Mm." Maybe I hadn't sent the right message.
Maybe I revised what message I wanted to send.
A knock at our bedroom door derailed my train of thought. Benji called, "What was that?"
"My alarm," Lena shouted.
He must have stepped back from the door, because his response was too muffled to make out.
Lena and I exchanged glances.
I said, "We better get dressed."
She sighed, but nodded.
A few minutes and our best scouting clothes later, we emerged into the living room.
Benji was already dressed – jeans, polo, tennis shoes – and blowing coffee steam off the top of one of our foam cups.
Lena grabbed the pot and poured us cups of our own. We sat down. We sipped. We waited.
When we were done drinking ourselves awake and Benji still hadn't spoken, I said, "If we need to talk, let's talk."
"Yeah." He tipped his empty cup back, then tossed it into the trash bin. I'd noticed one in there every morning since he'd started staying with us, but hadn't had the heart to admit we washed them out and reused them until they cracked. "We should. What's your plan for the day, though?"
"We've got some experiments to run," I said. We had yet to even try to figure out how our Tickets worked. "Mostly, though, scouting. Looking for more Third Eye resources."
His brow furrowed. "You need to do that, huh?"
"We do," I said, "but we've got to be careful about where we go during the day. Okay, we have to be careful about it at night, too, but in a different way. That's not the most important thing."
"Isn't it?"
I spread my hands. "I guess that depends on how many of the things we're afraid of turn out to be true."
"The most important thing," Lena said, "is that we're cool. In general, but of course we are! You and us, I mean."
Benji rapped his knuckles on the counter. "I'll take you scouting. We can talk while we drive."
"Ben, you don't have to –"
"Awesome!" Lena clapped. "That would be a huge help. We can check places that aren't on the RTD system. Right, Cam?"
I ran my fingers through my hair. "Right."
Utter defeat. Good thing I was pretty sure I shouldn't have tried to resist in the first place.
We got our coats, marched down to the parking lot, and piled into Benji's Sonata. Lena rode shotgun. I sat in the back with Bernie at my side.
Benji fired up the car. "Where to?"
"The farther out of town you're willing to go," I said, "the better."
For some reason, that made him laugh. "First time for everything."
"What do you mean?" Lena asked.
"Cameron wanting to leave town? He always hated road trips growing up."
"Oh, he still does," Lena said.
"I didn't realize I'd RSVPed to the roast of Cameron Howard," I said. "Hopefully the better comedians will come on later."
Lena bent over the armrest to look back at me. She stuck her tongue out, but it was surrounded by an easy smile.
Benji laughed, full-throated.
What the hell. I laughed along with them.
"Seriously, though," I said. "You're right that I'd rather hang out in the city, but we did so much better finding Materials when we roamed out of town."
"This game is so weird," Benji muttered.
"You're not wrong."
He stayed on Hampden, westbound. We cruised past the greenbelt and the tunnel. If we pulled into the parking lot and delved inside, could we return to Miguel's Realm without bringing the man it was meant for? I wanted to know, and I was curious what Benji would make of the echo of Cinder Alley, but not enough to go into the tunnel in broad daylight. Besides, it wouldn't be a very efficient way to scout.
We drove through commercial and industrial parts of town. The speed limit jumped and the Sonata stayed five, ten miles per hour above it. Only a few trucks and SUVs overtook us.
When was the last time I'd been in a car moving this fast? Any time I'd traveled far from Englewood, it had been on a bus or a light rail train. Between that and being situated in the back seat, the ride really did feel like a flashback to my childhood.
Right down to Benji saying shit I didn't want to hear. "I've been looking up Third Eye. Couple of weird stories floating around. Did you know somebody got booked for assault?"
"Playing Third Eye?" I nodded. He could see me in the mirror. "We heard about it, yeah. A PVP incident that got weird. There's a reason we're down on invasions."
Lena fixed her attention on her phone. Still feeling guilty about how she'd planned to invade Matt? Or still wishing she could? Whatever was running through her head, it stopped in its tracks. She started tapping on the phone and trying and failing not to giggle.
"What's Ryu up to?" I asked.
"Ryu?" Benji asked.
"My new Daimon," Lena said. "He lives in electronics like Bernie does in his plushie. Wanna see?"
"Not while I'm driving," Benji said. Which wasn't exactly the same as, "Later," but he let Lena take it that way and so did I.
"We know Third Eye can get dangerous," I said. "It's more than just other players. One thing we haven't told you about. We went... somewhere the game didn't want us to. We ran into a monster there. Not a Daimon. Something a lot weirder, a lot more hostile. You remember Donica, from the park?"
"The woman with the busted ankle?"
"That's how she got hurt," I said. "We're pretty sure we would all have suffered worse if we'd stuck around. One of the devs had to rescue us."
Benji shook his head. "And yet, you're still playing."
I thought about my speculation from the night before. If the devs weren't infallible when it came to magic, if Albie wasn't, then how justified had her confidence about confronting the creature been? It was one thing for her to miscalculate about a player's state of mind. Quite another for her to overestimate herself in life or death situations.
I didn't want Lena thinking about that, so I pushed the conversation on as fast as the car zipped down Hampden. "I told you, in a lot of ways, we're safer staying in and getting stronger then we would be quitting. Besides. Are you really telling me that if you got access to a game that could change the world, you'd stop playing?"
There weren't many stop lights on Hampden, but we'd reached one and it was red. Benji took the opportunity to lean over and look me in the eye.
"Depends," he said, "on what it changed."
Chapter 66: Benefits Package
Chapter 66: Benefits Package
I don't know why Benji's words hit me so hard. I sank into the back seat. Sank? Shrank. I tried to wrap my head around the question, which hadn't even been phrased as a question. Found I couldn't.
Benji frowned at me. "Cam?"
I held up a hand. What was the gesture even supposed to mean?
He took it as "give me a minute" and concentrated on his driving. Good enough? Better than nothing.
I stared out the window. Strip malls and suburbs rolled past. Most of the smaller shops weren't open yet, but people were already zipping up and down the streets, heading out for breakfast or to big-box stores. The same scene I could have watched a year ago, two months ago.
Well, not quite. Two months ago, people would've been doing last-minute Christmas shopping. The streets would've been a mess of cars and we'd have spent the next hour in traffic.
The thought made me chuckle.
Third Eye hadn't changed the world for these people. Maybe it would in the future, but for now, the differences between December and February dwarfed it. Could I envision a time when the hot holiday item was something made real by magic? Yes. How hot an item would a virtual pet be if it was as real and lovable as Bernie?
It would still be subject to a holiday rush.
So what had Third Eye changed?
"You didn't actually ask," I said, "but if you want, I'll tell you. All of it."
"Hit me," Benji said. "I've got a sense of the margins of the game, but not the details. I don't really get what it means to you."
"You don't mind, do you, Lena?" I asked.
"No way," she said. "When are we going to get the chance to sit back and really talk it through?"
Third Eye had been a maelstrom. Confusion, then realization, then the realization that we were more confused than ever. Exhaustion, then immunity to exhaustion, but that immunity didn't extend to our minds. Terror. Euphoria. There was always a crisis to manage or an opportunity to seize, a defeat to mourn or a triumph to celebrate.
Yesterday – God, had it just been yesterday? It felt like weeks ago. – we'd resolved to focus entirely on the game, even at the risk of our tenuous financial safety. All it seemed to have done was leave us with even more to worry about.
Right now, though, all we could do was sit in Benji's Sonata and wait until he drove us out of town.
Neither Lena nor I had proposed a destination. I wondered if Benji had anywhere specific in mind. Then I allowed myself to stop wondering. We'd get there when we got there.
In the meantime, we went back to the beginning.
"It started with my amulet, right?" Lena said.
"The one you wore to the park?" Benji asked.
"Mmhm!" She wasn't wearing it today, generally didn't except for videos. We still didn't know what, if anything, it did. "When we signed up, they gave us a choice between physical or digital, and for the lulz, I chose physical. It showed up on our doorstep that same night, about as quick as it took for us to get pizza delivered."
"At the time, we thought it had to be drone delivery," I said. "Now? I don't know if the devs created it right outside our door, or if they made all the amulets in advance and teleported them to anyone who signed up for them."
"Is that a thing you can do?" Benji asked. "Teleport? That'd be a hell of an incentive to keep playing."
"We don't have proof that it's possible," I said. "Albie, the little girl who seems to be on the dev team? We have evidence that she's traveled all over the world, and it's fast enough to be weird, but I'm not sure if it's outright teleportation."
"Same with Mask," Lena said. "The guy we fought the other night. The guy who hurt Bernie."
"There's also the question of how Mask got away," I said. "We were distracted when you pulled up, Benji, but it sure seemed like the guy outright vanished."
Benji tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. "And the alternative. Creation on-site. The amulet looked pretty swanky."
"As near as we can tell," Lena said, "it's real jewelry, not costume. Real metal, real gem. I'm not gonna sell it, but I almost want to get it appraised."
"And they'd have to be able to make these for thousands of people, on demand, at a distance?" Benji asked.
"Seems like it," I said. "We're not sure how big the dev team is. We've only had contact with two, and the one we know only ever mentions one other. If the amulets were created in the moment, I think it would have to be by some kind of prepared... process, spell, ritual, whatever you want to think of it as."
"Industrial magic," he muttered.
"Just be careful you don't get any light in there," Lena said. "Then I don't care if you're a wizard or an alien or what, you're getting your ass sued."
It took me a minute, then I snorted and started to laugh.
Benji rubbed his nose. "Oh. Ohhh. Heh."
Lena wiggled her eyebrows.
Inexplicably, he didn't start laughing. He looked off in the distance and shook his head.
"Seriously, though. If you can make real shit, valuable shit, that just anybody can interact with?" He whistled. "I don't know if that's as good as teleportation, but it's pretty crazy."
"For sure," Lena said. "If we get to a point where the stuff we make is fully real –"
"Fully aligned," I said.
Normally, the interruption might've annoyed her, but in this case it didn't even break her flow. Probably because I was reminding her of something Albie had told us. "– fully aligned, and permanent, and we get good at shaping it? We'll never have to buy clothes or furniture ever again."
Benji opened his mouth, but an SUV took the opportunity to overtake us and he had to concentrate on the road. He didn't drive with the kind of relentless precision Miguel did, but he still knew his shit. He slipped back half a car length and I doubted the SUV driver ever realized anyone had shown the temerity to clog up their lane with a smaller vehicle.
If Benji had been a worse driver, or that SUV had been a little more aggressive, we might have spent Saturday on the side of the road waiting for cops and insurance. A lot more aggressive, or somebody as crappy as me at the wheel, and we might have spent Saturday at a hospital.
Only for Benji, though, or the SUV's driver.
It reminded me of maybe the biggest way Third Eye changed the world.
"You saw the jump I made," I said. "The way it didn't hurt me. Everything else sort of pales in comparison to that. As long as we have HP, nothing can hurt us. It's not just attacks within the game. It's not just genuinely dangerous stuff, either. We don't seem to get physically tired. Hell. I haven't had to deal with allergies since we started playing."
Benji exhaled. "That's... wow."
"Yeah."
"Don't forget about the best part of Third Eye," Lena said. She showed Ryu's smiling emoji on her phone screen, then reached back to scratch Bernie's head.
"I agree," I said, "the Daimons are amazing. An absolute delight. I'm afraid it's not going to be as obvious to everybody."
Bernie grumbled and Lena narrowed her eyes.
To my surprise, though, it was Benji who corrected me. "A pet that can't get sick, doesn't need to eat, and if it gets hurt, it's fine in the morning? A pet with magical powers, no less? I think the appeal of that is pretty fucking obvious, Cam."
I leaned back. "Huh."
Bernie chuffed.
"It's funny," Lena said. "The stuff we can do with Reactants is a lot of fun, and it's really interesting because every time we practice we learn something new, but it almost doesn't rate compared to some of the rest of what we've seen."
"Still, it is fun," I said. When we didn't have to use it in life or death situations, anyway. "I was out there playing catch with Albie. Normally not the highlight of somebody's day, catch. Using Air for it made it astonishing."
"Gotta admit, just the little taste I've gotten of Air, I can see why you enjoy it so much." Lena's fingers danced through one of the Air control moves Albie had taught me, and I'd taught Lena. She didn't call anything up with her phone, so nothing happened. It occurred to me that we'd never tried conjuring an object while we were in a moving car. Another test to run at some point.
At this point, Lena kept talking. "Fire is still the best, though!"
"It seems like it's the most useful," I said. "Cooking. Electricity."
Benji flicked a glance at Lena. "That's real electricity you generate?"
"Sorta," Lena said. "I need more Fire to make it real enough – to align it enough – to do anything useful, but I can turn on a light bulb if it's low enough wattage."
"But you could get more Fire," Benji said.
"It's on my shopping list!"
He nodded. The conversation tapered off as we passed beyond the suburbs. A golf course and a park on our right looked promising. I panned my phone over them.
"Looks like somebody picked over this area," I said.
Lena rapped her knuckles on the window. "Probably 'cause of Red Rocks."
Red Rocks, in case you're not from around here, is a huge, open-air amphitheater. It's one of the few places outside town that attracts a lot of people in the demographic likely to back the Kickstarter for an AR-ARG.
"Was that where you wanted to go?" Benji asked.
"No," I said, "we're just exploring. Someplace more off the beaten path is better. A park, maybe."
"Someplace you normally wouldn't go, right?"
To me, that sounded like a shot at my indoor lifestyle. I forced myself to believe otherwise. Or at least to ignore the bait, if bait it was.
Besides, he wasn't wrong.
I said, "That's a good rule of thumb."
I thought he might explain where he planned to go, but he just kept driving. After a few more miles, he said, "Is that everything?"
"Everything Third Eye changes for us?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"No," Lena said quietly. "There's my Realm."
Benji flicked a glance at her. "What's that?"
She looked out the window. "A place I didn't want to go back to, but maybe needed to. Or maybe a copy of a place."
"A copy? How?"
"We don't know," I said. "It could've been from Lena's memories, or it could've been from the actual past."
"Mind reading or remote viewing," she said. "Or scrying, if you want to put it in magical terms."
"Not sure that sounds like a plus," Benji said.
"We weren't, either, at the time." Lena smiled back at me. She stretched her hand out and I clasped it. "It was."
I rubbed my thumb on her palm and enjoyed the way her eyelids drooped.
I noticed the tension in Benji's shoulders, though, and forced myself to let go.
Whatever had gotten to him, it didn't seem to be my and Lena's relationship. He drove in silence for several more miles, concentrating as 285, the highway Hampden turned into, zipped underneath an overpass and cut into the foothills. The few times I'd come this far, the people I'd ridden with had always turned north to Red Rocks, but Benji stayed on course.
Lena and I watched through our phones. Third Eye objects began to appear along the roadside, but there was no good place to pull over and none of them looked like possible Reactants.
Still, scouting for them distracted us enough that I almost jumped when Benji spoke again.
"Transportation," he said.
I cocked my head.
I didn't have to wait long for him to continue.
"Manufacturing. Medicine. Entertainment. Energy. Pets!" He laughed. "Freaking relationship counseling."
Ah. I said, "Every way Third Eye changes the world."
I saw his raised eyebrow in the rearview mirror. "Anything else?"
"Not of the good stuff," Lena said.
"Cam's already told me most of the bad," he said.
"Guilty as charged," I said. "So."
I lowered my phone, even at the risk of missing a resource.
"Would I quit?" he asked.
I nodded.
He didn't hesitate. "No."
I started to nod again, but just then he turned onto a smaller road and pulled up at an empty rest stop. I raised my phone to look it over.
Benji reached back and pushed it down. "That's not really why I asked. I'm not in the beta, so it doesn't do me any good to know what I could've gotten out of it."
"Why, then? I'd get you an invite if they were on offer, but –"
"Cam."
I stopped talking. Lena and I both stared at Benji.
"I wanted to know," he said, "what Omar Jefferies ripped off our family to chase."
I don't know why Benji's words hit me so hard. I sank into the back seat. Sank? Shrank. I tried to wrap my head around the question, which hadn't even been phrased as a question. Found I couldn't.
Benji frowned at me. "Cam?"
I held up a hand. What was the gesture even supposed to mean?
He took it as "give me a minute" and concentrated on his driving. Good enough? Better than nothing.
I stared out the window. Strip malls and suburbs rolled past. Most of the smaller shops weren't open yet, but people were already zipping up and down the streets, heading out for breakfast or to big-box stores. The same scene I could have watched a year ago, two months ago.
Well, not quite. Two months ago, people would've been doing last-minute Christmas shopping. The streets would've been a mess of cars and we'd have spent the next hour in traffic.
The thought made me chuckle.
Third Eye hadn't changed the world for these people. Maybe it would in the future, but for now, the differences between December and February dwarfed it. Could I envision a time when the hot holiday item was something made real by magic? Yes. How hot an item would a virtual pet be if it was as real and lovable as Bernie?
It would still be subject to a holiday rush.
So what had Third Eye changed?
"You didn't actually ask," I said, "but if you want, I'll tell you. All of it."
"Hit me," Benji said. "I've got a sense of the margins of the game, but not the details. I don't really get what it means to you."
"You don't mind, do you, Lena?" I asked.
"No way," she said. "When are we going to get the chance to sit back and really talk it through?"
Third Eye had been a maelstrom. Confusion, then realization, then the realization that we were more confused than ever. Exhaustion, then immunity to exhaustion, but that immunity didn't extend to our minds. Terror. Euphoria. There was always a crisis to manage or an opportunity to seize, a defeat to mourn or a triumph to celebrate.
Yesterday – God, had it just been yesterday? It felt like weeks ago. – we'd resolved to focus entirely on the game, even at the risk of our tenuous financial safety. All it seemed to have done was leave us with even more to worry about.
Right now, though, all we could do was sit in Benji's Sonata and wait until he drove us out of town.
Neither Lena nor I had proposed a destination. I wondered if Benji had anywhere specific in mind. Then I allowed myself to stop wondering. We'd get there when we got there.
In the meantime, we went back to the beginning.
"It started with my amulet, right?" Lena said.
"The one you wore to the park?" Benji asked.
"Mmhm!" She wasn't wearing it today, generally didn't except for videos. We still didn't know what, if anything, it did. "When we signed up, they gave us a choice between physical or digital, and for the lulz, I chose physical. It showed up on our doorstep that same night, about as quick as it took for us to get pizza delivered."
"At the time, we thought it had to be drone delivery," I said. "Now? I don't know if the devs created it right outside our door, or if they made all the amulets in advance and teleported them to anyone who signed up for them."
"Is that a thing you can do?" Benji asked. "Teleport? That'd be a hell of an incentive to keep playing."
"We don't have proof that it's possible," I said. "Albie, the little girl who seems to be on the dev team? We have evidence that she's traveled all over the world, and it's fast enough to be weird, but I'm not sure if it's outright teleportation."
"Same with Mask," Lena said. "The guy we fought the other night. The guy who hurt Bernie."
"There's also the question of how Mask got away," I said. "We were distracted when you pulled up, Benji, but it sure seemed like the guy outright vanished."
Benji tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. "And the alternative. Creation on-site. The amulet looked pretty swanky."
"As near as we can tell," Lena said, "it's real jewelry, not costume. Real metal, real gem. I'm not gonna sell it, but I almost want to get it appraised."
"And they'd have to be able to make these for thousands of people, on demand, at a distance?" Benji asked.
"Seems like it," I said. "We're not sure how big the dev team is. We've only had contact with two, and the one we know only ever mentions one other. If the amulets were created in the moment, I think it would have to be by some kind of prepared... process, spell, ritual, whatever you want to think of it as."
"Industrial magic," he muttered.
"Just be careful you don't get any light in there," Lena said. "Then I don't care if you're a wizard or an alien or what, you're getting your ass sued."
It took me a minute, then I snorted and started to laugh.
Benji rubbed his nose. "Oh. Ohhh. Heh."
Lena wiggled her eyebrows.
Inexplicably, he didn't start laughing. He looked off in the distance and shook his head.
"Seriously, though. If you can make real shit, valuable shit, that just anybody can interact with?" He whistled. "I don't know if that's as good as teleportation, but it's pretty crazy."
"For sure," Lena said. "If we get to a point where the stuff we make is fully real –"
"Fully aligned," I said.
Normally, the interruption might've annoyed her, but in this case it didn't even break her flow. Probably because I was reminding her of something Albie had told us. "– fully aligned, and permanent, and we get good at shaping it? We'll never have to buy clothes or furniture ever again."
Benji opened his mouth, but an SUV took the opportunity to overtake us and he had to concentrate on the road. He didn't drive with the kind of relentless precision Miguel did, but he still knew his shit. He slipped back half a car length and I doubted the SUV driver ever realized anyone had shown the temerity to clog up their lane with a smaller vehicle.
If Benji had been a worse driver, or that SUV had been a little more aggressive, we might have spent Saturday on the side of the road waiting for cops and insurance. A lot more aggressive, or somebody as crappy as me at the wheel, and we might have spent Saturday at a hospital.
Only for Benji, though, or the SUV's driver.
It reminded me of maybe the biggest way Third Eye changed the world.
"You saw the jump I made," I said. "The way it didn't hurt me. Everything else sort of pales in comparison to that. As long as we have HP, nothing can hurt us. It's not just attacks within the game. It's not just genuinely dangerous stuff, either. We don't seem to get physically tired. Hell. I haven't had to deal with allergies since we started playing."
Benji exhaled. "That's... wow."
"Yeah."
"Don't forget about the best part of Third Eye," Lena said. She showed Ryu's smiling emoji on her phone screen, then reached back to scratch Bernie's head.
"I agree," I said, "the Daimons are amazing. An absolute delight. I'm afraid it's not going to be as obvious to everybody."
Bernie grumbled and Lena narrowed her eyes.
To my surprise, though, it was Benji who corrected me. "A pet that can't get sick, doesn't need to eat, and if it gets hurt, it's fine in the morning? A pet with magical powers, no less? I think the appeal of that is pretty fucking obvious, Cam."
I leaned back. "Huh."
Bernie chuffed.
"It's funny," Lena said. "The stuff we can do with Reactants is a lot of fun, and it's really interesting because every time we practice we learn something new, but it almost doesn't rate compared to some of the rest of what we've seen."
"Still, it is fun," I said. When we didn't have to use it in life or death situations, anyway. "I was out there playing catch with Albie. Normally not the highlight of somebody's day, catch. Using Air for it made it astonishing."
"Gotta admit, just the little taste I've gotten of Air, I can see why you enjoy it so much." Lena's fingers danced through one of the Air control moves Albie had taught me, and I'd taught Lena. She didn't call anything up with her phone, so nothing happened. It occurred to me that we'd never tried conjuring an object while we were in a moving car. Another test to run at some point.
At this point, Lena kept talking. "Fire is still the best, though!"
"It seems like it's the most useful," I said. "Cooking. Electricity."
Benji flicked a glance at Lena. "That's real electricity you generate?"
"Sorta," Lena said. "I need more Fire to make it real enough – to align it enough – to do anything useful, but I can turn on a light bulb if it's low enough wattage."
"But you could get more Fire," Benji said.
"It's on my shopping list!"
He nodded. The conversation tapered off as we passed beyond the suburbs. A golf course and a park on our right looked promising. I panned my phone over them.
"Looks like somebody picked over this area," I said.
Lena rapped her knuckles on the window. "Probably 'cause of Red Rocks."
Red Rocks, in case you're not from around here, is a huge, open-air amphitheater. It's one of the few places outside town that attracts a lot of people in the demographic likely to back the Kickstarter for an AR-ARG.
"Was that where you wanted to go?" Benji asked.
"No," I said, "we're just exploring. Someplace more off the beaten path is better. A park, maybe."
"Someplace you normally wouldn't go, right?"
To me, that sounded like a shot at my indoor lifestyle. I forced myself to believe otherwise. Or at least to ignore the bait, if bait it was.
Besides, he wasn't wrong.
I said, "That's a good rule of thumb."
I thought he might explain where he planned to go, but he just kept driving. After a few more miles, he said, "Is that everything?"
"Everything Third Eye changes for us?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"No," Lena said quietly. "There's my Realm."
Benji flicked a glance at her. "What's that?"
She looked out the window. "A place I didn't want to go back to, but maybe needed to. Or maybe a copy of a place."
"A copy? How?"
"We don't know," I said. "It could've been from Lena's memories, or it could've been from the actual past."
"Mind reading or remote viewing," she said. "Or scrying, if you want to put it in magical terms."
"Not sure that sounds like a plus," Benji said.
"We weren't, either, at the time." Lena smiled back at me. She stretched her hand out and I clasped it. "It was."
I rubbed my thumb on her palm and enjoyed the way her eyelids drooped.
I noticed the tension in Benji's shoulders, though, and forced myself to let go.
Whatever had gotten to him, it didn't seem to be my and Lena's relationship. He drove in silence for several more miles, concentrating as 285, the highway Hampden turned into, zipped underneath an overpass and cut into the foothills. The few times I'd come this far, the people I'd ridden with had always turned north to Red Rocks, but Benji stayed on course.
Lena and I watched through our phones. Third Eye objects began to appear along the roadside, but there was no good place to pull over and none of them looked like possible Reactants.
Still, scouting for them distracted us enough that I almost jumped when Benji spoke again.
"Transportation," he said.
I cocked my head.
I didn't have to wait long for him to continue.
"Manufacturing. Medicine. Entertainment. Energy. Pets!" He laughed. "Freaking relationship counseling."
Ah. I said, "Every way Third Eye changes the world."
I saw his raised eyebrow in the rearview mirror. "Anything else?"
"Not of the good stuff," Lena said.
"Cam's already told me most of the bad," he said.
"Guilty as charged," I said. "So."
I lowered my phone, even at the risk of missing a resource.
"Would I quit?" he asked.
I nodded.
He didn't hesitate. "No."
I started to nod again, but just then he turned onto a smaller road and pulled up at an empty rest stop. I raised my phone to look it over.
Benji reached back and pushed it down. "That's not really why I asked. I'm not in the beta, so it doesn't do me any good to know what I could've gotten out of it."
"Why, then? I'd get you an invite if they were on offer, but –"
"Cam."
I stopped talking. Lena and I both stared at Benji.
"I wanted to know," he said, "what Omar Jefferies ripped off our family to chase."