Chapter 20: Invasion

Water!

My pulse quickened. My fingers tightened around my phone.

I took in the neighborhood around me. I didn’t recognize it.

No surprise. I hadn’t had a dog to walk since I moved out of my parents’ house, I battled pollen allergies every season but winter, and I’d never contracted an addiction to jogging. I knew the stretch between the apartment, the downtown stores and the light rail station. Before I started playing Third Eye, though, I hadn’t walked into a residential neighborhood in a solid year.

Still, I should at least know a little of the geography around here, right? There was a drainage ditch or a concreted creek by the hospital on Downing, but that should be a few blocks away. Anyway, it hadn’t snowed for the past week, sure as hell hadn’t rained. Would a drainage ditch sound so loud?

I followed the gurgling water like a moth follows a bug zapper.

The sound led me around the end of the block, past a series of houses I barely registered. They were less residences to me than the idea of residences, cutouts, movie set houses.

Instead of an alley they had a drainage ditch behind them. Had I crossed Downing while I brooded, after all? Good thing it was Sunday morning and light on traffic. If I’d looked both ways, I sure as hell didn’t remember it.

A railing blocked the ditch off but it terminated at a set of concrete stairs. Hinges hung forlorn from the end of the railing, the last remains of a gate to keep idiots from going down and hurting themselves.

I went down.

Three steps – when my feet touched the last one my arms were still level with the middle rung of the railing – and I stood just over the water. It surged from a grate under the cross-street. Only ankle-deep, but it moved fast.

Little snowmelt, no rain. Where had this come from?

Was there a golf course upstream, overwatering its greens year-round? Don’t ask me. My only golf experience was of the miniature variety, and I’d spent more time in the little arcade next to the course than trying to putt.

I crouched over the water. My fingers stretched out.

Not gonna lie. I expected to touch it and feel the same rush as when I’d grasped the orange tarp and gained Air. Some part of my mind remained ready for my fingers to just get wet in real water.

I sure as hell wasn’t prepared for the water to explode into my face.

I staggered back, sputtering, flailing my arms in the air. I felt concrete under my ass; from this position I couldn’t walk or climb, so I half-scuttled, half-scooted upwards a step at a time.

That should’ve been the end of it, but before I got more than a step up, the water surged again. Flash flood? From where?

I thrust my hands out, phone in one like a talisman – like an amulet – and the flow stopped.

I cracked an eye open.

I must’ve switched from my camera to Third Eye, and I’d left Third Eye up on the Reactions window. My thumb had mashed the button where Air met Plastic.

“Not bad,” said someone above me.

I looked up at the railing. A guy in a brown bomber jacket, leather or vinyl with a wool lining, leaned over it. He had one hand outstretched, palm-up, like he expected a handout or applause. I thought he looked a little older than me, but maybe that was wishful thinking. Definitely heavier, though, broad-faced, broad-shouldered, broad-waisted. His goatee and his hair were blonde and cropped close, aerodynamic.

He wore a pair of smart glasses, sleeker and newer than Lena’s first-generation Google Glass. No consideration for the norms of normie society here, apparently.

He smirked down at me. “A Reaction and quick reactions.”

I smacked my lips. Dry. Like my mouth. And my coat and my pants and my boots.

Like the empty drainage ditch.

I switched to my camera.

Through Third Eye’s filter, a sheet of Plastic rippled between me and the water – his Water. Weird and awful as this experience had been, I couldn’t help but appreciate how the light of the gray morning filtered through the Water and the Plastic.

The guy crushed his hand into a fist. The Water exploded upwards again, folding my malleable plastic and shoving it toward me.

I shifted my thumb with one hand and my palm with the other. Wood joined Plastic in the air, reinforcing it.

“What the hell is your problem?” I shouted.

“No problem at all,” he said.

In Third Eye, he wore a flowing cloak, dark blue highlights that faded to an earthy black in its deep shadows. Brown tunic with silver piping, padded leggings. An onyx for an amulet.

Something about his outfit bothered me.

All that brown. Sure, lots of water is muddy in the real world, but if you’re assigning elementally-themed outfits to a game avatar, one dressed like that is going to use Earth.

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I cried, “Shit!”

He clenched his other fist.

My thumb jabbed at the Third Eye app and I got more Wood suspended before me.

Which was no help when the concrete at my back erupted.

I didn’t feel the blow to my back, of course, and I couldn’t see it, but I heard the crack and the impact through Third Eye’s too-good audio design. I couldn’t help it, I flinched. The motion shifted my hand and another surge of Water crashed over my Wood and Plastic dam.

For a heartbeat, I swore I felt stone grinding into my back and water filling my mouth.

Then both were gone.

I blinked and saw the guy tucking a phone into his jacket. He tilted his smart glasses my way, like a douchebag tipping his hat to hit on some girl.

“What the hell, man?” I brushed my hands off on my pants. “Why did you do that?”

“Because you couldn’t stop me,” he said. “Free XP.”

“You got XP for that?” I checked my Third Eye interface. My Hit Points or Health Points or whatever this game meant by HP had dropped to 0/10. My XP?

I hadn’t memorized the total, but I knew it had been closing in on 4,500.

Now it was 3,969. Down, I was sure, by a clean ten percent.

The guy hadn’t just gotten XP for beating me. He’d gotten my XP for beating me!

Overhead, his smirk widened, but I’d stopped paying attention to him.

The design implications staggered me. Repulsed me.

Games offer two kinds of player versus player content. Okay, that’s a lie. There’s like a million. But the two in my mind were structured and unstructured.

In structured PVP, like most games’ entire online modes or the battlegrounds in a massively multiplayer role-playing game, both players enter into the contest with full understanding of what they’re in for. It wasn’t what I always wanted, but I enjoyed it often enough. Competition, clarity.

In unstructured PVP, like an open PVP server in an MMORPG or a Dark Souls invasion, one player can attack another without the target’s agreement. Some people, a lot of the invaders but some even of the targets, love it the way some people love horror games. There’s no AI monster as scary as being hunted by another human being. Spontaneity, tension.

Lena had done turns as an invader in plenty of Soulslikes, and she played all of those games Human or Embered or whatever state you had to be in to invite invaders to your own session. Hunter or hunted, she adored it.

Me, I played those games offline when I played them at all.

AlephLambda had convinced me to buy into what I pictured Third Eye PVP being: competing for clues. I’d adapted to grabbing Materials just fine, although I still felt like we as a playerbase had missed a bigger pattern. But what use, then, HP? I should’ve known from the moment I saw that 10/10 that we’d have actual, direct conflict.

Still, this was completely beyond what I’d considered. Invasion PVP in real life. Any time I left the house with Third Eye active, any time I scanned for Materials, some motherfucker could jump me and drain my HP for a quick boost to their growth.

Movement in front of my face pulled me out of my thoughts. A hand.

I blinked at it and up at the guy, who’d descended the steps and reached out to me.

“First time doing PVP?” he asked.

“In Third Eye? Yeah.”

Again that smirk. Or was it just how his smile looked? Was he an asshole or just an invader? Was I prepared to recognize the difference?

He said, “Hell of a rush, huh?”

Between the graphics and the sound design, I’d really felt like he was trying to kill me with magic. A rush?

Well. Maybe.

I had to say something so I settled on, “It must be really something through smart glasses.”

“Damn straight.” He flexed his fingers in the air in front of me.

I realized he meant to help me to my feet. I clasped his hand. He hauled me up like I weighed a hundred forty pounds soaking wet and was not, despite what my memories kept trying to convince me of, soaking wet.

“Thanks,” I mumbled.

“No prob.” He gave my hand a shake. He had one of those death grip handshakes and I didn’t have the energy to resist, so my arm flopped in his grasp. “What do you go by?”

“My name or my username?”

He shrugged.

If I decided I didn’t want to deal with him in the future, I’d have an easier time avoiding him if I gave him a name he couldn’t trivially search up on the Third Eye Discord. “Cam.”

“I’m Matt,” he said. “What have you got? Air? Looks like it works like TK?”

His topic shifts ambushed me like – well, like he had. “TK?”

He pursed his lips. Apparently I’d failed a test I hadn’t known I’d been taking. “Telekinesis. Psychokinesis? Poltergeist phenomena?”

“Oh. No, yeah, I know telekinesis. It’s not quite like that, though. I’m not moving the Materials directly. The Air seems to create wind and that moves stuff.” I realized he’d got me talking about my abilities without revealing his own. “You can control the Water and Stone directly, though?”

He released my hand and spread both of his. “Ah, but that would be telling.”

“Screw you,” I said, but without heat. If I’d made a habit of resenting people who outplayed me, Lena and I wouldn’t have lasted until we met in person, never mind for five years after.

I sighed.

“Once you start trying things, you’ll get it down quickly enough,” Matt said. “If you can get what I’ve got, anyway. I’m still not sure if it’s baked into our ‘characters’ or not.”

“Not what I’m sighing about,” I said. “I just feel kind of stupid this morning.”

“I hear it happens to us all.” That smirk again, and this time I knew he meant it, because I got the implication:

He was still waiting for it to happen to him.

I think it would’ve pissed me off most days, but I felt charitable at the moment.

Thing about invasion PVP. It’s tense as hell, sure. In the moment, when it had felt way too real, I’d panicked and adrenaline had flooded my head and I’d hated few things in my life more. But tension eventually gets released. Win or lose, it’s over, and unlike a real ambush, you get to go home afterwards.

Which was exactly what I needed to do.

“Listen,” I said, “this has been... educational.”

“Then my work here is done.” Matt pushed his smart glasses up his nose, but the universe refused to cooperate by giving them an evil glint like they’d have had in an anime. Too many clouds in the sky.

I suspected he’d be as disappointed as I was.

“Just for future reference,” I asked, “do I need to watch my back for you all over south Denver, or just near DU?”

When I mentioned Denver University, his eyes narrowed. So I’d hit home? He looked too old to be a grad student, too young to be a professor, but I could see him as a teaching assistant. Or just somebody who worked one of the shops nearby.

Maybe to disguise his reaction, he said, “You always need to watch your back.”

“Heh.”

His smirk disappeared. “I’m serious. You think I’m the only player who’s figured this out?”

“I guess I’d hoped so.” I swallowed. “It hasn’t shown up on the wiki yet.”

For some reason, that made him guffaw. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Cam, than are added to your wiki.”