Chapter 15: The Grind
I beat Trowel Samurai 2 that night.
I had to check Lena’s guide to beat Cake Daimyo. I’d missed the audiovisual cue for his second phase and that was completely on me. A full stomach helped me pay attention to the fight, but it turned out I’d also done a skip in Bone Daimyo’s castle without realizing it. It left me tackling Cake Daimyo without one of the tools the game meant for me to have. It had seemed weird at the time not to get a new subweapon, but I’d shrugged it off. A speedrun strat for sure if the devs didn’t patch it out, but way beyond my skills.
After that, I breezed through the rest. It felt good to beat the game, but it also felt like I’d done it just to put it behind me. Which was crazy. I’d been itching to play a new Trowel Samurai for years and, if anything, this went even harder than the original. I opened a blank Google Doc to write a review I could shop around, but I didn’t get past the title. ‘Trowel Samurai 2 Digs Even Deeper.’
The next day, Lena and I left the apartment before eight.
Lena, up before eight! Either of us, outside two days in a row!
Third Eye had stunned us. Scared us. Amazed us. Intrinsic rewards.
I wanted those. I respected those.
But now we had a wiki page to fill up.
Number goes up. Human beings go mad for it. Pavlovian. Hit the feeder bar to get a food pellet. And FOMO – the fear of missing out, of being kicked out of the beta. Extrinsic rewards.
I hated that it worked. Brother? It fucking worked.
We grinded.
I found a chain link fence along a stretch of sidewalk that wasn’t under construction. Four units of Iron. Why four? The links, two poles, the crossbar. Why Iron? I was fairly sure it had been aluminum. Third Eye didn’t have aluminum. Or even the Commonwealth version, aluminium.
On the wiki, a second person found Fire. I wanted to find Fire.
A pile of bricks outside a construction site. It seemed so contextually right I missed it, but Lena made the spot. She stuck her finger through the (real) fence and poked it. A construction worker shouted at us to stay off the site. Lena got three units of Stone. Why not one per brick? Was it based on volume? Weight? Whim?
On the wiki, someone found Water. God, I wanted to find Water.
Instead, I got ahead of Lena with back to back discoveries. First, Stone and Iron from a concrete post with rebar and a metal sign. The sign looked familiar but it didn’t match the style of the rest of the parking lot. Then, twenty more Wood, another fence, this one tall and wide enough to block off a yard in a neighborhood where nobody fenced their front yard and it might have even been against code.
Thousands of entries on the wiki now. People all over the world were pouring them in.
We started reading up on people’s finds and using those to track down similar ones near us. Exercise stations on the walking trail around Harvard Gulch Park? We wouldn’t touch the real thing to save our lives, but following someone’s tip, Lena found a false one in Third Eye and scooped it up. Iron.
On the official Discord, AlephLambda smiled encouragement.
Lena got another hit on our way home from the park. One extra bench at our bus stop. I almost sat on it by accident, but she stopped me before I fell on my ass. Only fair she scoop it up after that. Her find, her save. Wood, Iron.
On the subreddit, people buzzed about what we were supposed to do with this stuff. No one could get the app to do anything but list our Materials. The Game Mechanics tab on the wiki remained almost empty but Theories went wild.
Fence, Wood. Pane, Glass. Wall, Stone. Another wall, brick with abstract graffiti on it, and I hoped I’d get something extra for the paint. Just more Stone.
A faction had formed around ShakeProtocol’s initial complaint. They started bugging AlephLambda on Discord. They went too far for my tastes so I told them to cool it and they told me where I could shove my advice. Was this treating the staff and each other with respect? AlephLambda didn’t ban them.
NugsFan15 owned them, though.
NugsFan15: I don’t think you’ll enjoy sticking with this game if you do not enjoy the discovery of game mechanics.
Half of them shut up, a quarter kept going. Some of them even fired back at her. Didn’t they know she managed the wiki?
Finally, ShakeProtocol put in another appearance on the Discord. He posted a link to Third Eye Productions’ website, specifically the feedback form, and @’ed the remaining malcontents.
ShakeProtocol: Here’s a place to leave feedback.
His would-be followers shut up, cowed.
AlephLambda smiled through it all. VisibleFromSpace, the other developer? Not visible on the Discord, that was for sure.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
The next day, following another tip from the wiki, we went back to the park and ventured off the path. I got distracted watching people walk their dogs for a while, but then I picked my way down the hill to the waterside and scanned the cattails. It was slow, tedious work compared to looking for human structures, but we found clusters that looked too vibrant for the middle of winter. We each got a unit of Wood. But no Water.
God. God! I wanted to find Water.
No, just Wood, Stone, Iron, Glass. Late that afternoon Lena scored Plastic, the first for either of us. It seemed to be a rarer resource. She got it from one of those fold-out announcement boards outside a Pearl Street shop. Too easy. No one on Pearl Street would condescend to advertise with a plastic sign.
On the wiki, someone added Crystal. One of the game’s big currencies, I was pretty sure. The Discord and subreddit buzzed. NugsFan15 added a note to the Materials page on the wiki, reminding people to please list where they’d found their resources.
Further down Pearl Street I found a terracotta wall jutting out of a shop at an odd angle. I was sure it would turn into Stone. Or maybe something new, like Clay. Then I looked at it outside of Third Eye and realized it was just an artsy bit of real architecture. On the next block I scored some Glass and Wood from another artsy wall, but in a residential area where they didn’t go in for that shit.
On the Discord, Lena and Salamancer agreed the Crystal was fake. I couldn’t say, because I couldn’t type fast enough on my phone to keep up with the Discord; I only chimed in when we crashed for the night. NugsFan15 posted that she didn’t like to believe someone would input false information. AlephLambda told us nothing by telling us we were making great progress figuring things out.
Oh, and, ‘:)’
Obvs.
Stone and Wood. Glass and Iron. My first Plastic. More Wood.
Then it was Sunday. Lena and I often spent the morning at our church, praying and offering alms. But can you believe it? That morning, we were up so early Microcenter wasn’t even open yet! No electronic sacrament for lunatics who rose before 8:00 AM.
My legs weighed a million pounds. Then I tried my arms and realized I’d been exaggerating before. I dragged myself out of bed to boil the morning eggs. Lena had beaten me to the kitchen – madness – and put a couple sausages in the microwave. Neither of us spoke while we cooked and ate. We weren’t distracted, I don’t think. Just, who had the calories to waste on speech?
Once breakfast settled into my stomach, I finally said, “What’s your plan for the day?”
Lena groaned.
Maybe people like ShakeProtocol and NugsFan15 could do this physical shit day after day. He probably benched the million pounds my limbs weighed for each of his reps. She probably looked at the barbell and it jumped to do the reps for her.
Not me. Not Lena. Mere mortals. Feeling extremely mortal this morning.
“Way I see it,” I said, “we have three options.”
Lena flopped onto the counter. Forks rattled on plates. “Uh-huh.”
“First,” I said, “we could go out and grind for more Third Eye shit.”
“Ughhhh,” she said. “Yeah. Probs.”
“Second, we could do a wiki trawl here at home. Collate a bunch of data and try to draw some conclusions of what to target. Work smarter, not harder. You still think the Crystal find was fake?”
“Uh-huh.” One of her eyes cracked open. “If somebody found something really huge, something that blew the whole game open, they’d either tell everything to impress people, or they wouldn’t post about it on the wiki at all.”
I nodded. Made sense.
“What’s behind door number three?” she asked.
“Third,” I said, “we ditch Third Eye for a day.”
Her mouth set in a hard line. Then she expelled a burst of laughter. “Yeah, okay, that one sounds pretty sweet.”
“There’s other games to play. The winter season of anime to watch. Fanfic to read. Fanfic to write. Paying work to write.” I winked at her. “Or we could try to catch a Nuggets game.”
She stuck her tongue out. “Or we could lay right here on the counter and fall back to sleep.”
“That would also be good.” I slumped forward and closed my eyes. I wanted to say the countertop felt cool and comfortable. Cool, anyway. The furnace hadn’t turned on this morning.
Lena stretched out her pinkie and poked my arm. “It’s your turn to take the garbage out, btw.”
“It’s probably not full.” But when I forced my protesting body up and peered under the counter, the smell said otherwise. “I’ll rock-paper-scissors you for it?”
Her paper covered my rock before we even started to play. “When we did that and I kept winning, you said we had to start taking turns.”
“Yeah, but I’m a lot more tired this morning than when we agreed to that.” I softened my words with a smile I didn’t feel, patted her hand, and wrestled the garbage bag out of the bin.
The prospect of returning to the bedroom, where my clothes were, and then leaving again? Too daunting. I’d worn a sweatshirt to bed. The dawn had just cracked over the plains. Who’d see me in my pajama bottoms?
I tied off the garbage bag and pulled my boots out from under my desk.
“Phone,” Lena said. She grabbed mine from the counter where I’d left it and stretched it up to me. “That way when you freeze to the pavement, you can call 911.”
“Not you?”
“Bitch, please. I’m not getting up from this counter.”
“Heh.” I took the phone and tucked it into my pocket. I squared my shoulders, stepped into my boots, and opened the door.
Cold air didn’t hit me, exactly. No wind to give it force. Instead, it crept up on me. Easy to ignore until it was too late. I needed to find a burst of speed somewhere in my aching muscles, or I really might freeze out here.
I didn’t sprint down the walkway and the four flights of stairs, but I managed a credible jog.
I hefted the garbage bag into the dumpster. Someone had left it open, which simultaneously annoyed me and spared me having to try to open it one-handed. I slammed the lid shut on the amazing stench inside.
I took a couple steps back to the apartment, but a sound made me hesitate.
I glanced over my shoulder.
Still no wind. Nothing moved. Yet I swore I could hear something whip and snap like fabric in a blizzard.
I took my phone from my pocket and held it up. I turned Third Eye on, switched to my camera and surveyed the scene.
An orange tarp, one corner trapped under the lip of the dumpster, blew in the wind.
The wind that didn’t exist.
I focused on it through my phone camera and got my hundred XP. I thought about calling Lena, but we’d just agreed not to do a bunch of Third Eye shit today. Did I really want her to bundle up and trudge down here? Once we started, we’d just end up going out again. The loss of ten XP wouldn’t drop her from the beta.
And I didn’t want to turn my back on the billowing tarp.
I reached out and grabbed it.
When the fingers of my avatar closed over the tarp, I got a nice windfall of Plastic.
But better, by far, I got Air.