Chapter 2: Points and Prizes

“You should sit down,” I said.

I already had, on a too-cold bench along Santa Fe Avenue, watching SUVs whiz past and kick snow onto the sidewalk near Lena’s boots.

I’m not saying I wanted her to sit just so she’d heat up the metal of the bench. The thought may have occurred to me, though.

Didn’t matter. Lena ignored me and the SUVs alike.

She paced. Her eyes remained glued to her phone screen. They had ever since we first tapped Zhizhi’s link. There hadn’t been any point in continuing our walk through Chatfield, since I could tell we weren’t going to enjoy the nature around us or pay enough attention to pick up whatever Materials we might pass.

“You’d really want to get involved with something like that?” I asked.

“Like you wouldn’t?” She raised an eyebrow. “I hate to admit it, but Matt is right. PVP seems like our best chance to get stronger.”

More like our best chance to get hurt when somebody went too far, I thought.

But I understood where Lena was coming from.

Matt Green – CannibalHalfling, on the wiki team’s Discord – was a game design teacher at Denver University. He was also the only Third Eye player we’d encountered who actively participated in invasion PVP. I first met him when he used the sound of Water to lure me into an ambush, smacked me down, and claimed 10% of my XP, Experience Points, within the game.

As first impressions went, not the best.

The rest of the wiki team opposed invasions. At first, because Erin had worried Third Eye might get canceled as a result of them.

Later, because we all feared it might not.

Whenever Lena played a game that offered invasion, she loved it more than any other game mode. She had, begrudgingly, accepted that it was a bad idea in Third Eye.

Matt insisted Third Eye was set up to encourage PVP, even invasion PVP.

I really wanted him to be wrong.

If wishes were horses, you know? Lena would have her magic steed in addition to a cute salamander.

Which is to say, I feared Matt was right.

After we encountered a dangerous creature within the game, I’d had to revise my opinion. We needed to get stronger to defend ourselves. It was even possible that the game existed to make us stronger, perhaps so we could shift from defense to offense.

Didn’t mean I had to like it, though, or him.

Didn’t mean I liked the idea of foregrounding the game’s PVP.

“Tell me I’m wrong?” Lena said.

I couldn’t tell if she was just reiterating her point, or if, for once, she genuinely wanted me to contradict her.

I scratched the back of my neck. “You’re probably right. And I probably just hate to agree with Matt.”

“As all right-thinking people should.” Lena nodded. “But even a broken clock, you know?”

She’d first met him the same way I did. Except that where I’d had too few HP to realize what was happening and respond, Lena’d had plenty, but no Reactant with which to fight back. She’d been completely helpless while he chipped away at her HP to claim his victory. Not a great first impression, either.

Plans for a rematch, now that she could fight back, had been put on hold after we saw how dangerous Third Eye’s effects could be.

And now this.

I scrolled back to the start of the post on r/thirdeyegame. I first joined the subreddit back when Third Eye got Kickstarted. For years, when it looked like the game would turn out vaporware, it had been a wasteland. Since the beta launched, all that had changed. Now, most posts disappeared before I got the chance to bother with them.

This one had not.

I reread it.

Cash plus in game prizes! Third Eye Tournament!

Hey guys, OdysseyZZ here. Are you having a great time playing Third Eye? It’s blown way past my expectations. Those were pretty high to begin with. You can check that username on the backer list and see. Yeah, I went in at Magus of the First Circle tier during the Kickstarter. Yeah, I put $10,000 into this game.

Best investment I ever made? Maybe not, but it sure hasn’t been the worst!

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

In fact, I want to put even more money into Third Eye.

But this time, I want to pay you!

One of the coolest things about Third Eye is getting to see the way different people have used it. A few have started putting up tutorial and actual play videos, and that’s cool. But I know a lot of you are saving your best tricks. Who doesn’t love a hidden secret technique?

I do.

That’s why I’m putting up a prize pool of $1,000,000 US dollars for the winner of the first ever Third Eye PVP tournament!

Do you want to show off, find out if you’re one of the top players, and maybe win some of my money? Then get your butt down to Imagined Worlds in Tampa, Florida, USA, by March 1, 2023, where I’ll be hosting qualifiers.

Oh, and if you’re not interested in money? (You’re interested in money.) I’m also offering five, count them five, of each of the core Reactants, and one bonus resource that I’m not going to reveal until the prize ceremony. Yes, I’ve got all those. Yes, I know how to give them to you. Yes, that information is also something I’ll reveal to the winner of the tournament.

I can’t wait to see you all there.

I switched back to the wiki team’s Discord, where Zhizhi had posted another link. This one led to OdysseyZZ’s own wiki page.

Yeah, the dude had his own wiki page.

It was under his real name, Omar Jefferies, and it suggested that he wasn’t exactly breaking his bank account by offering a million dollars in prize money. He was a venture capitalist, techbro type, who’d surfed the last few waves of dot-com bubbles and busts and kept his head enough above water to attract other investors.

Hell, judging from his wiki page, Omar had lost almost that much by the day on his most famous investment. That was the Imagined Worlds in his Reddit post, a “VR Amusement Wonderland.”

Turned out, people didn’t vacation in Florida to stick VR headsets on their noggins and lock themselves in tiny rooms. Crazy, right?

Still, his bio made me wonder.

“Are you excited about watching the tournament,” I asked, “or do you think he’s the guy?”

Lena froze in mid step. She tugged on a strand of her hair. “I mean. This dude’s almost exactly the kind of person we thought Albie’s brother had to be, right?”

Albie, the little girl and apparent Third Eye developer who had saved our lives, had told us about a big brother who was also involved with the game. He was, supposedly, the source of the Potion she’d given me, which had overhealed my HP and MP vastly beyond their normal, disgustingly low, totals.

After we first met her, we’d speculated that her brother might be an investor who’d swept in to save the project after the Kickstarter proved woefully insufficient to finance its crazy excesses.

We’d enjoyed Albie’s company, but when she left that day, our last glimpse was of her looking frightened. We’d worried about her ever since. Was she in trouble? Could we help?

Of course, in the end, she was the one who ended up helping us.

Which might also explain why she’d looked scared.

Albie was basically a child soldier. One with more power packed into her tiny hands than an armored division, fighting against creatures so weird and eerie, I struggled to even describe the one that had almost killed us.

We still wanted to find Albie again, for her sake and ours. We wanted a word with any big brother who thought sending his little sis into combat was appropriate. And more than ever, we wanted to find answers about what Third Eye really was, and what it was for.

If Omar really was Albie’s mysterious big brother, he might be able to tell us.

But since that first meeting in the park, Lena and I had learned that Third Eye was so much more than a mobile game with a seemingly unlimited budget.

A game too expensive to ever possibly turn a profit? Sure, I’d look for a techbro, and one who’d blown a small fortune on a similarly misguided game center would be my first choice.

A game that gives real magical powers, and that the developers use to fight monsters? Not so much.

I said, “Nothing on his page suggests this guy is a wizard, Lena.”

“Or an alien.” She sighed. “It also doesn’t mention him having a little sister, and he’s a little old to be Albie’s bro.”

His wiki page said he was thirty three. Old enough to be Albie’s dad, not her brother.

“So,” I said.

“So,” she said, “I’ll have to stick to being excited because we’ll get to see some awesome Third Eye PVP.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Just see?”

Her eyes lit up. “What, you want to sign up?”

“No thanks.” I thought PVP was how Third Eye intended to teach us to use our powers, but do as I say, not as I do.

Participating guaranteed I’d burn through my unreplenishable HP. I didn’t fancy my chances in, say, the third round of a tournament if I rolled in with a max of ten HP. Unless you meant my chances of being embarrassed.

Oh yeah. It also scared the shit out of me.

The more real Third Eye phenomena got, the more likely it became that someone would get physically hurt by an attack that landed after they ran out of HP.

None of which I wanted to say to Lena. She’d call me a wuss. She’d laugh about it, but she’d also be right, so I wouldn’t. Instead, I shrugged and said, “It’s not like we could, even if we wanted to.”

“I mean, you say that...” She kicked at the snow and looked away.

Good thing, because I don’t think she would’ve appreciated my frown.

A lot of what Lena did, I feigned exasperation at. In truth, though, her gremlin energy was a big part of what I loved about her.

Until she took it too far.

I enjoyed hijinks.

I accepted pranks. Mostly.

I drew the line at schemes, though. When Lena got an idea in her head, she didn’t always let things like common sense or physical possibility get in the way of pursuing it to its absolute limit.

On the plus side, just such a scheme was how we’d gone from online dating to living together. On the minus side, the guilt and discomfort we’d both ended up feeling from that had almost driven us apart.

Which reminded me.

I stood up and reached out to Lena.

She felt my hand on her elbow and started to sag into my embrace. She began to tilt her head back to look up at me.

Then the brakes of the RTD bus hissed as it pulled to a stop in front of us.

Lena sprang from my arms, flashed her RTD pass to the driver so fast I doubted he even saw it, and ran to the nearest open seat.

Literally and metaphorically, the afternoon felt colder without her by my side.

I ran my fingers through my hair, squared my shoulders, flicked my phone to my own RTD pass, and trudged up the steps after her.