Chapter 16: Reactions

Third Eye chimed on my phone but I didn’t need to switch tabs to know something incredible had happened.

The breeze swirled around me and billowed the cape at my back, the tunic belted at my waist, the peaked, parted hair on my head. I waved my hand and the breeze became a gale, chasing my gloved fingers. I stirred it and it intensified, a cyclone in my grasp. It blew so hard even my amulet shifted, clinking against the clasps of my cape.

My amulet. My signup bonus. My digital signup bonus. Right?

I touched my chest. No amulet. No cape, no gloves even though I could have really used a pair just then. No tunic, although my oversized sweatshirt, with its unlicensed pop art picture of Nintendo mascots, hung low enough to pass for one.

I ran my bare fingers through my uncombed bangs.

A breeze had come up, biting cold, but it wasn’t enough to budge the faded Broncos flag one of the first-floor tenants hung outside their door. The wind tilted a balled up piece of paper someone had tossed in the general direction of the dumpster, but not quite enough to tip it into a roll.

So.

None of that gust had really ripped through the parking lot of my apartment building. I’d imagined the feelings, but why would I? Because the audio had been real. Why wouldn’t Third Eye’s sound design be as good as its graphics?

Idly, I picked the paper up and nudged it under the dumpster lid. With my other hand, I switched my phone to the Third Eye app.

I learned three things immediately.

First, I’d gained Air. I felt like I’d known it already, but now I had an achievement scroll to prove it. 1,000 more XP and the ‘chieve ‘Elementary, My Dear.’ I winced. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t appreciate being associated with a magic-themed game. On the other hand, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle might’ve liked it. I decided to give it a pass.

Second, getting Air changed more than anything since my first units of Wood. I had a new window to open: Reactions. I tapped it and saw another ancient spreadsheet that looked similar to the one for Materials. It had buttons, though! Where the row for every Material I’d gathered intersected with the column for Air, I could tap a button and do – what? Fire I could understand, even Water induced state changes in a lot of materials, but what would Air do?

Forget that for now.

Because third, NugsFan15 had played us for fools.

Oh, she’d made and managed the wiki. She’d contributed to it so crazily I wondered how she found time to hunt down her own Third Eye materials. She’d played peacemaker on the Discord, more of a mod than the actual, inept, mods. She’d positioned herself as, conservatively, the lead figure in the playerbase. A genuine Big Name Fan.

Unless Fire and Air worked nothing alike, though, the BNF had hidden something right from the start. She’d gained Fire before we ever saw her wiki, yet there was no Reactions wiki page for us to study. There wasn’t even a mention of the window on the Game Mechanics page.

I wasn’t sure how to feel about that. It played into why I’d initially recoiled from the idea of PVP in an Altered Reality Game. But also, into how AlephLambda had talked me around to it.

Cooperate. Help each other.

But only so much.

Besides, hadn’t Lena and I done the same thing on a smaller scale? We still hadn’t posted about Third Eye attaching our avatars to our movements even when we stepped away from the devices we ran it on.

“Oh!” I realized a fourth thing. This interface did not scream Survival-Crafting. I had no idea what would happen if I tapped the buttons, but the fact I could apply Air to Wood but not Iron to Wood spoke against a progression ripped off from something ripping off Minecraft.

Also, fifth: I was freezing out here.

I tucked my phone into my pocket and left my hand there, put the other hand into the other pocket, and did my achy-legged jog back up to the apartment. Going up, I hurt worse than I had coming down. Then, I’d had some residual warmth in my bones. Now, I felt so hyped, I hardly noticed the pain.

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I threw open the door to the apartment.

Lena staggered backwards and toppled onto her ass. “Fuck!”

“Shit, sorry!” I rushed forward and reached down to clasp her hand. She had gloves on, and her cute black-and-pink vinyl coat, but touching her still flooded me with the warmth I’d started to imagine was as fictional as the wind in the parking lot. I tugged her to her feet, one in stockings and the other in a boot.

“Didn’t think you’d be by the door,” I said.

She stared at me for a second, then yanked her hand away. “Whatever.”

I frowned. Why had she gotten geared up? What had I said wrong?

I pushed the questions aside. “I got Air.”

“Here I thought maybe you got hypothermia.” She turned her back on me. “Shows what happens when I try to give a shit.”

“No, I mean –”

“Done giving a shit.” She tore her coat off and dumped it and her gloves on the floor, kicked her boot off next to its partner, and stalked toward the bedroom. I realized she still had her pajamas on. Why had she put her coat on without getting dressed?

“Lena, wait.”

She glared over her shoulder. “The hell you think I’ve been doing for twenty minutes? I texted you, I called you!”

“I must’ve had my phone on mute,” I mumbled. “Wait, twenty minutes?”

I looked at the knockoff vintage Kit-Cat clock over the counter. 8:30. I’d left to take the garbage out right after breakfast, hadn’t I? Hadn’t I marveled that Lena and I were both up so early on a Sunday?

I’d run back and forth from the dumpster. Sure, I’d paused to process what happened with Third Eye, but for, what, a minute or two?

Where had the time gone?

Too weird. I shook my head.

I also straightened Lena’s boots out, then picked up her coat and gloves. I held them out to her. “You were gonna rescue me?”

“A waste of time. Obvs.” She ducked her head, but she took her clothes from me.

“Thanks,” I said.

She shrank further in on herself. “Welcome.”

“I didn’t mean to worry you. Honest.”

“What did you mean to do? Go viking?”

“I just got distracted,” I said. I guessed. The last few days had passed in kind of a blur, but I didn’t think I’d really lost time until now. “Like I said, I got Air.”

Lena draped her coat over her computer chair. “I’m guessing you don’t mean you wanted a breath of the rich atmosphere outside our apartment.”

“I got Air in Third Eye,” I said.

She leaned against the chair, but it rolled against her desk with a rattle and spoiled her attempt at nonchalance. Since she’d intended to rescue me, I swallowed my laugh and let her compose herself. She repositioned her arm on the chair. As if we hadn’t been interrupted, she asked, “As a Material?”

“No, I...” Was it also that? I checked my Materials window. Air did indeed appear there. I owned a single unit of it. “I guess, yeah. But not just that. I’ve got a new window.”

I walked over and held out my phone so she could see.

She gasped. “Actual gameplay?”

“In my Third Eye?” I asked.

“It’s more likely than you think,” we chorused.

We grinned at each other.

I really wanted to kiss her right then. Forget her queenly Third Eye guise; this was way better. This dumb shit, memeing back and forth, we’d met over it, bonded over it. Fallen in love over it? Or had that just been me? I didn’t know anymore. Was I ever going to find out?

I started to lean forward.

But her finger hovered over my phone screen and I looked back at it to make sure she didn’t push any buttons.

“So,” she asked, “what does it do?”

“I haven’t tried it yet,” I said. “It was too cold out there.”

“You dawdled all that time and you didn’t even get anything accomplished?”

I conducted the wind with a wave of my hand, I thought. Which was absurd as both a thing to imagine doing, and a thing to admit to Lena even if it had been true.

“I don’t know if I want to,” I said instead. “What if it uses up my Air?”

“Then we’ll learn something.” She made a jab for my phone.

I dodged. “If anybody’s pushing buttons, it’s me.”

“So push, already!”

“Fine. No point putting it off forever.” I looked at my list of options.

Air, obviously. Although it appeared on a row as well as a column, I didn’t have a button to make it react with itself. Maybe if I got a second unit of it? Or would I need a different Material with a column of its own? Another... Reactant?

Then Wood, Stone, Iron, Glass, and Plastic.

Such a weird list. Glass was a simple molecule in an artificial structure. Plastic was complex and artificial. Wood was complex, too, maybe moreso, chemically, but natural. Biological. Stone was natural and covered a huge range of materials but most of them were simple. Iron was a single, simple molecule. Two of them had historical ages named after them. Even in games they rarely went together like this. What did they have in common? Why had Third Eye Productions chosen them?

I wasn’t going to figure it out this morning.

I picked Plastic because I’d found the least of it. If I used up my Air to make some kind of secondary resource or turned it into XP or Crystals or Tickets, I might get more by using a rarer base material. Besides, from the way the plastic tarp had blown in the fake wind, I had a hint Air could interact with it in Third Eye.

“Here goes,” I said.

Lena pumped her fists.

I jabbed my finger into the button where the column of Air intersected the row of Plastic.