Chapter 11: Talkin’ About Practice

Lena and I watched a cloud of sparrows burst from the nearest tree as we tramped across the muddy ground of Harvard Gulch Park. We had a warmer day to practice on, which worked out well. With most of the snow gone, people were less likely to notice it melting as Lena queued up Fire.

I stepped beneath the tree, took out my phone, and manifested Stone with Air. I flicked to the camera. Through Third Eye, I saw a meter by a meter and a half slab of Stone floating in midair. I did mean meters; Third Eye seemed to deal exclusively in metric. Really, the object looked more like concrete than any kind of natural rock. Smooth, gray, and nondescript. All our Materials started out as the least detailed, least specific versions of themselves.

If I activated Water, I could change that, altering the slab’s appearance and properties to match just about anything that fell under the umbrella of Stone. That could get interesting, especially with other Materials like Iron and, especially, Wood. I didn’t need it this morning, though.

By manifesting the slab with Air, on the other hand, I could move it around with far more speed and precision than if I’d used any other Reactant. I swung my hand through a few test passes. The Stone danced in the air, as agile as the birds we’d startled.

No smart glasses for me, so I had to choose between being able to see what I was doing through my phone camera or having both hands to manipulate my Material. For an exercise like this, I could use the camera. If I played a more intense game, like I had with Albie, I’d have to rely on watching my opponent’s hand movements.

That had been fun, but, especially when I was facing Lena, I preferred to do things this way.

I looked past the Stone and saw her squaring up by the bench where she’d propped Bernie.

Outside Third Eye, she looked pretty silly this morning. She wore her smart glasses, anything but a fashion statement at the best of times. She had her toque pulled down too low in a futile attempt to hide them. Her sweater, at least three sizes too big for her, didn’t seem to serve any function.

Third Eye hid the glasses, just as it did both our phones. It transformed the clothes.

Nothing silly about how she looked through the game’s filter.

She saw me admiring her avatar. I saw her smirk. Her wings fluttered.

In the end, I hadn’t had the heart to ask if she really believed her parents would take her into a potentially dangerous situation. Maybe their trust in her was so absolute, they wouldn’t hesitate.

Maybe I’d checked the price of bus tickets from Lawrence, Kansas to Tampa, Florida, in case we needed to pay our own way for the second leg of the journey.

Of course, if Lena couldn’t beat Matt, we’d be going to the tournament as commentators, not competitors. A much easier sell.

Nonetheless, I wasn’t about to try to throw the match for her.

Matt had agreed to a duel in two days. We’d get all that on camera and posted to the Ashbird channel to demonstrate Earth. If worse came to worst, we could edit around a loss, but for all sorts of reasons, both Lena and I wanted to make sure she won. Better video. Better omen for the tournament.

Also, it would feel good to watch someone kick Matt’s ass.

Which brought us to the park today, and – weather permitting – tomorrow, too.

“You ready?” I called.

“I was born ready.” Lena rolled her shoulders, flexed her wings, tapped on her phone.

Wood appeared in the air between us, already smoldering.

Her eyes narrowed. “I’ve got to figure out if there’s a way to keep the initial temperature down. I can’t queue up anything in advance with Fire the way you can with Air.”

“Something to work on today, maybe?” I asked.

She shook her head. “Today, I’m trying to figure out how to go further in the opposite direction.”

“Well?” I asked. “What are you waiting for? That Wood already comes with an expiration date.”

She pocketed her phone and swung her hand back and forth. The smoldering Wood swept through the air, matched roughly to her movements. Without Air as a Reactant, she couldn’t push it nearer or farther, or higher or lower, and she certainly couldn’t execute any quick maneuvers. All she could do was adjust what direction it projected out from her.

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Lena had believed in Fire before she ever got access to it. She’d insisted it would be the coolest – metaphorically – Reactant, and the most powerful.

In a way, she was right.

Our most dramatic demonstrations of Third Eye’s ability to affect the real world all used Fire. When she used it for attacks, it ripped through HP far faster than anything I could do with Air.

Water, my other Reactant? It had its uses, but direct attacks were not among them.

From the Third Eye fights we’d either seen or participated in, however, we’d realized that Air, and the one reactant neither of us had, Earth, had massive advantages.

When the wiki team first discovered Reactants, they assigned a verb to each one that best described its function. Lena and I came late to that process, so we only got input into the verb for Air. So far, I’d felt pretty good about the choices the team made, though. They might not tell you everything you could do with the Reactant, but they gave you a good starting point.

Fire “destroys.” That one’s pretty self-explanatory. Somewhat to Lena’s frustration. It consumes the Material used with it, and if you bring it into contact with an opponent, it eats through their HP like nothing else.

Water “changes.” It can make Iron more flexible or increase its tensile strength or even turn it into liquid mercury. It can change the opacity of Glass, the rigidity of Plastic, the surface of Stone. It can even do weirder things, like making Wood bloom into a seemingly living plant. I’d made us a houseplant that way and it remained in a corner of the apartment, as vibrant as the day I grew it. Lots of room for exploration with Water. Less for direct combat.

Air “moves.” Get a slab of Stone or a sheet of Iron moving with hurricane force and you can make up a lot of the difference in damage between Air and Fire, while having far more versatility on defense. I was either not powerful or not experienced enough to do that, but Albie certainly had been. I’d used Air to play catch before I knew Third Eye could confer real magic; I’d used it to move a weathervane to prove that it could.

Earth, though.

Earth “shapes.”

When we watched Matt and Erin duel, they’d used Earth not just to make weapons out of their Materials, but, by reshaping them at high speeds, to simulate complex movement even though neither had Air. Albie hadn’t needed to use such tricks, but she’d swapped the forms of her weapons and shields on the fly, so she always had the most appropriate one for the instant even as she flung them around the battlefield.

Matt would need a lot of those Earth tricks to beat Lena. Versatile though they were, they only did minor damage. Minor to her 1,000 HP, at least. If not for Albie’s Potion, I would’ve had a maximum of 10 and gone down to even the lamest attack. That wasn’t speculation on my part. Matt had one-shot me the first time we fought.

If Lena couldn’t defend herself, though, and if she couldn’t strike back, then it wouldn’t matter how many times Matt had to hit her. She wasn’t walking out of there with a win, and we had a whole lot of reevaluating to do.

Hence, practice.

Lena took a sharp step forward and thrust her palm out. The Wood she’d conjured shot ahead of her, maintaining its distance.

Rather, it would have, if I hadn’t smacked it into the sky with a twitch of my finger.

She clicked her tongue and adjusted her stance, bringing the Wood level again. This time, she spun as she advanced, and the Wood came at me from my left.

Once again, I flicked and knocked it away.

“That wouldn’t work if I used Stone of my own,” she said.

“True,” I said. “I’d have to use a more dramatic gesture.”

Lena’s eyes narrowed. “You sure you don’t want to compete? You’re actually really good at this.”

“Positive,” I said. “Besides, this has nothing to do with the tournament. You’re the one who challenged Matt. If you can’t even get through my defenses, how are you going to deal with somebody who can make actual shields?”

“Shields that don’t move anywhere near as fast as the panel you’re whipping around,” she said.

“Unless he’s picked up Air somewhere since the last time we saw him,” I said.

She swallowed. “No way. We’ve been looking all over, trying to chase patterns and follow clues, and we’ve yet to come across another Reactant. You really think he’s found three different ones?”

“I think you need to be prepared for him to have found all four.” I’d bet at least one person at the tournament would have done so, unless there was some rule in Third Eye’s generation algorithm that prevented it. From the way the Reactants worked in concert, I suspected it was the opposite. The game intended for us to get all of them eventually.

“That would be totally unfair,” Lena said.

“As opposed to all the things about Third Eye we’ve found to be perfectly balanced?”

“Ugh. Point.” She squared her shoulders. Abruptly, she pivoted her feet, thrust her hand out, and sent the Wood spiraling back at me.

She caught me by surprise. It didn’t matter. Her attack only moved as fast as she could, and my Stone, courtesy of Air, whipped into place to block it with just a twitch of my fingers.

Lena pulled her Wood back into place and kept advancing, trying to push through with force where speed had failed. No luck. A series of taps and I first pushed her Wood back toward her, then, as the fire burning inside it weakened its structure, crumpled it into ash and debris.

Lena stalked back to the sidewalk and squared up again. Bernie peeked over the back of the bench. She took her phone out, noticed him, and paused to give him a pat. It seemed to center her. She exhaled and found her smile.

She glanced up at me, then back to her phone. I assumed she was considering the interface, maybe deciding what Material to try next.

She asked, “How’s your HP?”

“I don’t know why you’re asking that, when you haven’t even gotten close to hitting me,” I said.

I thought she might glare at me, but she just stroked Bernie with her free hand and swiped at her phone with the other. “Are you going to answer, or am I going to assume you’ve got plenty?”

“We’re here to help you practice fighting, Lena. If you’re holding back because I don’t regain this HP every night, the only thing you’re going to learn is bad habits. You said yourself that I’m pretty good at this. Trust that I’ll defend myself.”

“Okay,” she said. “I will.”

Then she flicked her phone up and jabbed three times at its surface.

The explosion ripped through my conjured Stone.