Eye Opener

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 86: The Forest for the Tree

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, "No."

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

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

Erin cocked her head. "How so?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Play it by ear?" Lena asked.

I cocked an eyebrow, wanting Erin to answer first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She averted her eyes. Message sent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It silenced me, too. It stole my breath.

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

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

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

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

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

I kept gazing at the tree.

Why not? I understood exactly how she felt.

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

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

 

[Crayz9000]

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

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

 

[Qoheleth]

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

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

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 87: Leaf Blower

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hard pass," Donica said.

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

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

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

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

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

She pushed her hand forward.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Real enough to hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle shuddered. "No."

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

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

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

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

"How so?" Erin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

And she was scowling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said, "Nope."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle winced.

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

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

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

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

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

She took another step forward.

Again, I said, "Nope."

She looked up sharply.

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

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

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

"Don't I?"

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

Michelle looked at her.

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

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

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

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

"Um," said Erin.

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

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

Besides, that wasn't the point.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She sighed.

For a moment, none of us moved.

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 88: Inventory Management

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

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

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

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

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

We weren't paying for it.

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

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

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

"Tired?" I asked Lena.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Mmhm."

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

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

Two hundred and forty two Wood across thirty seven finds.

Fifty one Stone across seventeen finds.

Eleven Iron across five finds.

Three Plastic from one find.

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

More basic Materials, that was.

Reactants, on the other hand...

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

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

"Nah," I said.

"You're too nice of a guy."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I continued down the inventory of our finds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tall, but also blackened and dead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And when it had passed –

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

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

Like the last line in our inventory.

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 89: Springing Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I saw her bring up the Third Eye wiki.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Are you okay?" Erin asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Everything loaded?" Zhizhi asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Erin bobbed her head, and we were away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"By going through the city?" Michelle asked.

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

Michelle shifted in her seat. "Right."

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

"Still worth, though," Lena said.

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

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

I frowned at her. "You sure?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I eyed the mountains.

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

"This is pointless," Donica said.

Michelle nodded.

Erin leaned over the armrest to look at us.

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

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

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

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

She slumped against me. "I guess."

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

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

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

"You sure, Cam?" Lena asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I swallowed a sigh.

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

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

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

 

[Candlelight]

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 90: Travelog

All excerpts taken from the Third Eye Wiki.

-----

Resource: 4 Wood, 4 Iron

Status: Collected

Time: 01:27 PM MST

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

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

-----

Resource: 4 Stone

Status: Collected

Time: 01:36 PM MST

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

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

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

-----

Resource: 3 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 01:49 PM MST

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

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

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

-----

Resource: 9 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 02:06 PM MST

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

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

-----

Resource: 1 Iron, 1 Wood, 4 Glass

Status: Collected

Time: 02:27 PM MST

Location: Convenience store parking lot in Yoder, Colorado.

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

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

Comments

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

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

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

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

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

-----

Resource: 3 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 02:32 PM MST

Location: Empty lot in Yoder, Colorado.

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

-----

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

Status: Not Collected

Time: 02:40 PM MST

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

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

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

-----

Resource: 1 Stone

Status: Collected

Time: 02:59 PM MST

Location: Residential lot in Rush, Colorado.

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

-----

Resource: 2 Iron

Status: Collected

Time: 02:50 PM MST

Location: Street corner in Rush, Colorado.

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

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

-----

Resource: 1 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 03:07 PM MST

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

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

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

-----

Resource: 1 Water

Status: Collected

Time: 03:48 PM MST

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

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

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

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

Comments

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

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

-----

Resource: 2 Wood

Status: Collected

Time: 04:12 PM MST

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

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

Comments

Ashbird: This is turning into a travelog lol.

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

Ashbird: Nope it's max adorbs, yo.

OldCampaigner: In that case, on to Punkin Center!

Ashbird: Is that actually a real place?

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

Ashbird: Max. Adorbs. Yo.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 91: Consenting Adults

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

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

I raised an eyebrow.

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

My eyebrow didn't get any lower.

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

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

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

Lena adjusted the brim of her hat and beamed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Everybody ready?" she asked.

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

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

One other thing we were still doing:

Filming and uploading a new video every day.

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

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

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

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

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

I got it, okay?

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

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

Did we want that?

We needed that.

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

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

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

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

"What are you smiling about?" Lena asked.

"Silver linings," I said.

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

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

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

"Are you two in position?" Zhizhi asked.

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

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

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

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

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

"Absolutely not," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lena's explosion cut me off.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Either way, I thought she was fantastic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My eye twitched.

She wiggled her eyebrows.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She snapped her hands up and slammed her palms together.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 92: Practicing Magic

I felt hands clutching my arm.

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

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

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

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

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

She sagged against me.

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

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

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

"Are you?" Zhizhi asked me.

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

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

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

"I really am fine," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody did.

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

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

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

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

"But you are actually running out of HP."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I have ten HP," I said.

She blinked.

"Max," I said.

"Bullshit," she said.

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

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

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

Donica tapped her foot.

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

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

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

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

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

"That wouldn't have surprised me anyway."

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

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

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

"By how much?"

"9,999," I said.

"Jesus. How much have you got left?"

I checked my phone.

I winced.

I showed her.

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

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

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

Donica said, "Fuck."

I nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It didn't matter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I applauded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michelle flinched.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You got this," I said.

"You do," Lena said.

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

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

"Erin," I said.

She fidgeted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 93: Four Stories

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

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

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

It had passed the time.

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

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

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

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

I'd seen almost nothing else.

We'd developed a policy for cities:

Avoid them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good plan. Smart plan. Wise plan.

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

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

Grain silos and wind turbines didn't count.

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

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

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

She nodded.

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

"Thanks," I said.

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

Which didn't help my boredom.

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

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

Such a win.

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

That goddamn practice session.

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

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

In my defense, she was good at it.

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

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

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

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

Erin waved and I conjured a smile.

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

Donica was a good scout.

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

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

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

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

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

Which was... fine, right?

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

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

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

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

But.

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

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

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

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

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

Could we do it while protecting Erin and Michelle?

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

Who I'd encouraged to come with us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I leaned forward to direct my camera over the dashboard.

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

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

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

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

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

"That's a stretch," Donica said.

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

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

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

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 94: Home To Roost

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

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

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

That find went onto the wiki as Not Collected.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Sup?" Lena asked.

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

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

"Ten here," Lena said.

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

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

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

"Somebody else came this way," I said.

"It seems so," Erin said.

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

I leaned over to look in the back seat.

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

"Does it change anything?" Donica asked.

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

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

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

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

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

Erin lowered her eyes. "Sorry."

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

Nods all around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What?" I tried mine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yep!" Lena winked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

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

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

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

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

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

Chapter 95: The Other Team

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

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

"Uh," said Lena.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idiotic. She'd just said as much.

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

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

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

She frowned.

They tilted toward each other.

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

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

Lena came to my rescue.

Rather, The Magnificent Ashbird did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim chuckled.

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

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

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

She shook her head.

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

"How come?" Zealia mumbled.

Lena cocked her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jim snorted a laugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I heard," she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I suppose so!" He grinned easily.

Which I thought was a pretty interesting reaction.

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

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

I got the chance.

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

"Sure," I said.

He ambled over.

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

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

I turned back to him. "Hm?"

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

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

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

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

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

He didn't know the half of it.

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

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

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

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

"Jim," I said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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