Chapter 22: The Empress
Light flooded my eyes, so much purer and more intense than the gray sky overhead, a miasma of white gold. When my vision adjusted, though, I realized what I was looking at:
Another Third Eye player, about to open the door to Next Level Burger.
Then I realized who I was looking at.
I must have made some kind of sound, because NugsFan15 turned to meet my eyes.
Her pupils looked like black holes, framed by wide, upward tilting whites. Her eyes didn’t seem to focus on me. They sucked me in, stole my breath, absorbed me.
One dark halo around her face – her hair, unbound today by gold – then a bright halo around that. The light surrounded her, suffused her, outlined her.
I took in the rest of her. As I’d seen with Lena’s fire dresses, Third Eye interpreted our avatars’ clothes differently depending on what our bodies wore. On top of the impossible one-piece ensemble from her screenshot, NugsFan15’s winter gear became a swooping, geometric cloth-of-gold cloak. It didn’t look like it added a ton of warmth, and if anything it made hers look more like a typical Third Eye outfit, but it was so goddamn cool.
If she’d remained still, silent, a graven idol, I might have fallen to my knees and worshiped.
Instead, she clapped, did an odd little wiggle of her shoulders, held one of her hands up, and said, “Ah. Good morning.”
Her voice was soft, breathy. Something about the way she spoke sounded excessively practiced to me. Maybe she was an actress as well as a model, and these were the results of her vocal lessons?
Oh, and her voice and her raised hand both trembled.
The downside of being a Big Name Fan. Sometimes you got fucking weirdos like me accosting you on the street.
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to interrupt your lunch, but I saw you glowing.” I mangled a laugh. “Sorry. Again. It sounds like some awful pickup line, huh?”
“Are you trying to pick me up?” Her head tilted, birdlike. Again, I got the sense she wasn’t looking straight at me. Her gaze seemed to glide right over me, like mine over an earthworm.
Well, fair enough. I’d earned it with how I started our conversation.
“No!” I raised my empty palm. “I meant I recognized your avatar. If you’re upset, I won’t even keep talking.”
“It’s all right,” she said, without conviction.
Nonetheless, she released the door handle of the vegan burger joint. She held her hand out.
Did she have a ring she expected me to kiss?
No, dumbass, she’s not a real empress. She just wants to shake your hand. Why did my internal monologue sound more like Lena than me?
I shook my head, realized I’d spent the conversation so far pointing my phone at her, and tucked it away.
Disorientation.
The light vanished, leaving me standing in the cold gray of a Denver morning.
For a minute, I thought NugsFan15 had disappeared with her light.
I found myself shaking the hand of this gangly, rail-thin person in a puffy DU jacket, baggy blue jeans, and the thickest pair of eyeglasses I’d ever seen. Tons of hair pulled into tight cornrow braids. Strong handshake. Strong cheekbones.
Oh. Oh!
Everyone else I’d seen, I’d thought of their Third Eye avatar as their Hollywood self. What they could look like with perfect lighting, perfect makeup, perfect costuming, shown from only their best angles.
This time, I was looking at someone transfigured.
“I’m Erin,” NugsFan15 said. She offered a nervous smile that showed braces on her teeth.
“Hi Erin. I’m Cam.” I returned her smile and didn’t want to know what it showed.
She blinked, her eyes magnified to anime proportions by her oversized glasses. “I wonder... OldCampaigner?”
“Uh!” I jerked my hand away like she’d activated a joy buzzer. “How the hell!?”
This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.
Her smile widened. “One of the more active posters on the wiki, memorable. One of the first to post a find in nature, memorable again. Listed Harvard Gulch Park as the location, local. Active Sunday morning, busy player. Oh, and Cam in the username.”
“Wow,” I said.
“I can do better.” She looked in my general direction and squinted. I realized what I’d taken for disdain before was just her being blind as a bat. No wonder she wore those giant glasses. Her smile kept growing as she tapped her chin. “Let’s try. Yes or no, I’m not the first player you’ve met?”
“Yes. As of this morning, you’re the third.” I laughed. “You’re also crazy good at this. Let me see if I can follow your logic. You guessed I’d met other players because I wasn’t surprised enough by how your avatar looked?”
“No. Because you pointed your camera at me without considering whether or not it would seem weird.”
“I didn’t even think about it.” Lena and I had been looking at each other through Third Eye since we signed up, but pointing a phone camera at a person you’d just met was exactly why people got freaked out by smart glasses. Not exactly kosher. I’d need to stop doing that. “My bad.”
“It’s fine,” Erin said, and this time her grin made me believe her. Maybe she preferred to be seen through Third Eye.
“What about you?” I asked.
“You’re the fifth I’ve encountered.”
Dang. Lena and I had considered whether or not to check around DU. On the one hand, university neighborhoods were prime real estate for most AR games. On the other, older grad students and younger teaching assistants would be just about the right age and demographic to have backed Third Eye.
Looked like we wouldn’t find a windfall here.
Still, even at my most pessimistic, I hadn’t expected to meet two players within a few blocks of the university, and hear about as many as four more – depending on whether Erin had met Matt or not. When I’d thought about the distribution of Third Eye players around the world, I hadn’t considered how many would be clustered in the kind of areas where people who backed gaming Kickstarters congregated.
“I guess the DU area’s picked clean, then?” I asked. How long until they ventured down to Englewood? Lena and I needed to grind.
“Relatively.” She bobbed her head. “Who do you know, I wonder?”
I knew she was talking to herself, not me, since she looked down at her phone and wrinkled her nose. Because I’d first seen her in Third Eye, I hadn’t even registered the phone in her grasp, but it explained the weird gesture she’d made when she saw me: checking out my avatar through her camera. Her fingers danced across the screen. “Ah. Is Ashbird one of them?”
“Jesus.” And I’d found her intimidating because of her avatar’s appearance, because of her fandom status? This was next level stathead. I said, “How did you manage that?”
“Much easier than identifying you,” Erin said. “You both posted finds at local sites. Based in... south Denver? Englewood downtown? The timing of your posts doesn’t sync up because you update your finds in bulk at the end of the day and Ashbird does them as they’re made. Cross-reference their times and distances, though, and it’s a close match. You go out searching together? But Ashbird texts readily and you don’t.”
When she spoke at length, Erin’s voice got even more breathless, less polished. She seemed to notice it. Her smile faded. I thought she might have wanted to say more, but after a moment to compose her voice and face, she bit out, “It’s just patterns.”
Weird girl.
I did mean girl, too, not woman.
Erin stood taller than me and, as best I could tell around her oversized glasses, her nose and cheekbones really did look like cut glass. The rest of her face, however, had a college student softness to go along with her college student jacket. Plus, she moved like someone still uncomfortable with her gangly arms and legs. I thought she might be younger now than I’d been when I backed the Third Eye Kickstarter. Undergrad, not grad.
How old would that make her when she backed Third Eye? Fifteen, tops? Basically an infant! Who gives their baby daughter minimum $500 to blow on a Custom Personification?
I wondered if that was why her Third Eye avatar diverged so much more from what she looked like IRL. Lena’s avatar looked like her original character from when she was twenty-two. Mine looked like what Third Eye thought I should.
Did Erin’s look like what she’d wanted to be when she grew up?
I wondered how close she felt she’d come.
She might not look like the empress of heaven in the flesh, but she’d impressed me all the same. “You say ‘just patterns,’ but it’s wild that you can pick them out on the fly.”
“Mrm. Thanks.” She shifted on her feet and reached behind her for the restaurant’s door handle.
Conversation over? I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong after my fumbled greeting. This seemed more like one of Erin’s issues than mine.
Fair enough, but from a Third Eye perspective, I hated to let her go.
I wasn’t sure if I wanted to confront her about keeping the Reactions window under wraps. Her reticence seemed more sinister now that I knew she might be invading other players and leeching their XP like Matt had.
Whether or not it turned into a confrontation, I needed to talk to her. The Reactions cat would get out of the bag soon and I liked the idea of being the one to get the discussion rolling. If Erin was willing to abandon secrecy now, I was willing to let her roll with it instead of getting rolled over. Better for the playerbase.
I couldn’t push it, though. She seemed so uncomfortable and I’d intruded on her to begin with.
“It’s been really cool meeting you, Erin.” I stepped back, giving her space.
She bobbed her head again, which could be read as agreement.
“I’ll stop getting between you and your lunch,” I said, “and I’ve got to get home anyway. Do you mind if I DM you a question about the wiki later, though?”
“No, that would be excellent.” She sounded so earnest, it was hard to believe she’d hidden Reactions from the community. “You know my username, yes?”
I did. It was the kind that sounded strange to say out loud
Nonetheless, she started to grin again when I did. “Mhm!”
I thought about leaving it there, but this was my only chance to see her reaction in person.
“My message,” I said. “It’s about PVP. And about Air.”
“Oh! You’ve found Air? Wonderful! In that case, I’ll send you an invite to the server where we discuss wiki updates.” She didn’t hesitate. Her voice sounded the same as before. Her eyes didn’t flicker to the side. Her grin didn’t waver.
If I hadn’t been watching her hand as it clenched the door handle, I wouldn’t have realized she was anything but thrilled.
Definitely an actress. A scary good one.