Chapter 24: The Castle

I looked up to make sure the light rail hadn’t reached Englewood Downtown yet. Nope. Another station to go. I sighed. I wanted to get home, to my keyboard, to Lena.

We needed to sort shit out. Not just about where we were going, but about where we’d been. I couldn’t keep pushing it out of my mind. Every time I looked at the Discord I saw the username DeepingShadows, and it left me with a reminder of what I thought of as happier times.

For me? Absolutely. For Lena?

After she’d admitted her financial troubles, I’d had to reexamine everything I thought I knew about our relationship. Why she’d moved in with me.

Why she’d dated me in the first place?

Somehow I’d failed to do much examining of those questions.

Third Eye had been a great distraction. Guess what? My 0 HP ass couldn’t accomplish anything Third Eye.

For now, I started to type. I couldn’t bring myself to leave a Discord record as messy as my texts, which meant a long, long time picking at letters on my phone.

Nice thing about text chat, though. Compared to voice, it’s much easier to fake good cheer till you make it.

OldCampaigner: Hi! I feel like I’m in exalted company.

Ashbird: Right? I mean, I’m here.

OldCampaigner: lol

NugsFan15: Ha ha! I can tell you two know each other.

No shit, I thought. I was pretty sure Erin had sent an invite to Ashbird because she suspected we might come as a package deal. She didn’t want someone inside her circle teamed up with an outsider. Safer to bring both Lena and I into the fold.

I wondered how Erin kept the levels of information she shared with different people straight. Maybe she used spreadsheets.

NugsFan15: That’s great. A lot of us are just meeting for the first time through Third Eye. It’s pretty exciting, and it can be intimidating, but I hope we’ll all be friends.

NugsFan15: Speaking of which, that means no getting intimidated, @OldCampaigner! Everyone here is just another player. And one developer, admittedly.

Ashbird: Does he post any more here than in official? Naughty!

NugsFan15: No, I think VisibleFromSpace accepted my invite to keep an eye on our little wiki community.

NugsFan15: Oh. Were you being sarcastic, OldCampaigner?

It took me long enough to respond that I wondered if she’d think I was lying, but I got my message out eventually.

OldCampaigner: I wasn’t. You have an impressive group of friends.

NugsFan15: Most of us are still working to become that.

NugsFan15: All of us want to keep playing Third Eye, though. Because of the conditions of the beta, that means we have to make sure to play it well.

Discord told me ‘NugsFan15 is typing,’ then nothing, then the message again. I thought she must have entered something, deleted it and typed something else.

NugsFan15: We’re not going to give this up.

What had Erin originally wrote that she felt she needed to edit?

I guessed, ‘I’m not going to give this up.’

Of course, what Erin left unsaid was that she didn’t just have to play “well” to keep playing. She had to play better than other people. Which was, I still believed, part of why she and a lot of other top players were swapping information over Discord instead of posting it directly to the wiki.

Once I got home, and sorted things with Lena, and recovered emotionally from whatever the fallout of that turned out to be, and read through the – extensive, I saw at a glance – logs of all Erin’s Discord rooms...

Look. Eventually, I would get around to talking to Erin about how we should reveal Reactants to the broader playerbase. I still had no clue how she’d react. Probably safer to do it in a DM –

Ashbird: So now that we’re through the castle gates, do we get access to the Secret Wiki?

Welp. I hadn’t asked Lena to wait. I hadn’t even mentioned that I’d realized Erin had hidden Reactions. I had no room to complain if Lena figured it out herself and took the direct approach to the question.

I really needed to get better at texting. Or get one of those little bluetooth keyboards.

NugsFan15: Sorry, but there isn’t a secret wiki.

NugsFan15: If you want to talk about gameplay concepts we haven’t included on the public wiki yet, you’ll find a lot in the other rooms. I’m not sure how to present all the information.

The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

Smooth. But I remembered Erin’s hand tightening on the door handle of Next Level Burger.

Ashbird: Okay, but have you considered it would be cooler if we had a ~secret wiki~?

NugsFan15: It would be!

NugsFan15: However, I think anything actually secret, rather than simply not yet posted, should have false information. Then conspiracy theorists who didn’t trust the public wiki would find it and be misled, while people who tried to play fair would succeed.

Ashbird: Ooh. Nasty! I love it.

NugsFan15: Is that nasty?

NugsFan15: Let’s be clear: I want us in the castle. I’m not trying to pull the drawbridge up behind us. But I will patrol the ramparts.

If their conversation had continued I’d have been left out. Lena was probably at her computer and Erin clearly texted a lot faster than me. Blessed with young thumbs. Or at least with a childhood smartphone.

But neither posted anything else, so I managed to get a word in edgewise.

OldCampaigner: It does sound like you want to decide who makes it through the gates.

NugsFan15: Castles are grand.

NugsFan15: Castles are safe.

NugsFan15: And castles are meant to be defended from barbarians.

What a line! I didn’t have a comeback because it took me ages to type anything, the light rail was pulling into Englewood Downtown, and I didn’t know if I wanted to come back at Erin.

Maybe she had the right idea.

It bugged me, though. I left the light rail slouching. Even though my legs hurt, I passed up the Englewood shuttles. I needed to burn some energy and figure out why I needed to.

Did it occur to me that I’d found another way to think about Third Eye instead of what I needed to say to Lena? Yeah.

When it did, what did I think next?

That I didn’t mind Erin using her position as wiki admin to cement herself in the playerbase.

I won’t say don’t judge. I’m not a huge fan of fighting hopeless battles.

So. Erin’s Discord.

I didn’t mind its existence. I didn’t mind hanging out with Third Eye BNFs, most of whom seemed like pretty cool people. I didn’t mind the inside track on new discoveries, either. If this was a team scavenger hunt, I had lucked into one hell of a team.

So what did I mind? I turned the question over as I walked. I didn’t even scan for Materials. After a block, I turned Third Eye off entirely. No invasions for me, thanks.

Instead I brooded. I popped an earbud in, turned up a Spotify playlist of soundtracks, and forgot to skip the songs I disliked. When I had to stop at a cross street, I rechecked the chat log and tried to put my finger on what was eating at me.

I made it all the way to the light across from the apartment when it came to me. Lena had called it naughty, but she hadn’t seemed upset and I’d glossed over her comment.

I minded VisibleFromSpace joining Erin’s Discord.

A developer creates a competitive game. Players play it and try to win. Some of those players are a lot better than others. It doesn’t matter if the game rewards strategy or twitch reflexes or a poker face or just grinding like mad. Some always end up surpassing others, but they start on a fair playing field.

A developer creates a competitive game, but it has a pay-to-win element. Now it’s no longer fair, at least to me and most people I know. I’ve read that in some countries they think it’s more fair than a grindy game; if you’re making enough of a living to spend on a P2W game, that’s a sign of your contribution to society. Maybe that was a bullshit story from Reddit or maybe it was different strokes. I disliked it. But I was pretty used to it.

This, though.

A developer creates a competitive game, but the developer sides with some of the players. Nobody thinks that’s fair. How could they? It must have happened, at least in some indie game, but I’d never heard of it.

It was such a bizarre scandal no one had even registered it as scandalous.

Erin’s castle housed, in her extended metaphor, the... swordsmith, perhaps, for knights and barbarians alike, if there were only one smith in the whole known world.

Nah, that wasn’t extreme enough. Even if it were impossible to obtain a sword, you could still fight with a club.

In Third Eye terms, Erin’s castle housed God.

Would Lena disagree? If she sat warm and snug in the castle, would she be happy? I didn’t think so. Would she join the barbarians, then? Flame out of Erin’s server and try to blow up her deception on the wiki?

Did I even want to bring it up? If we made an open enemy of Erin, it would make our Third Eye experience a lot worse. Depending on the relationship between Erin and the devs, it might end our Third Eye experience.

Bottom 1% of players? By what metric? Whether or not the devs agreed they were “barbarians?”

I found myself wondering what DeepingShadows thought about it. Not enough to DM her. “Hey, DS, it’s been a couple years since you kicked my girlfriend and I from your server and I kind of cut you out of my life! My and Lena’s relationship is on the rocks now, but how’d you like to join us in finding out how the kicking feels?”

I’ve made better pitches.

I still wanted to know, though. I remembered what she did to a player she caught using an aimbot almost as vividly as I did her and Lena’s fight. The cheater got banned from our server, reported to the game’s anti-cheat, named and shamed on two other channels some of us frequented, and cursed so much in voice DeepingShadows would’ve caught a ban herself if she’d said it through in-game voice rather than her own Discord.

And what of Erin? Maybe she was just too good of an actress, but I didn’t get a sinister vibe off her. Pragmatic, driven, sure. Not a villain. I didn’t want her as a foe, not just because I worried she’d win but because she seemed like she’d be a cool friend.

Ultimately, all she’d done was grind hard, play well, share some but not all of what she’d learned – and send a Discord invite to a dev.

No, the one who bothered me was VisibleFromSpace. A dev should know better.

What to do about it?

How the hell should I know?

What I did about it at that moment was stalk across Hampden when the walk signal changed.

When I passed the apartment parking lot, I noticed someone had left the dumpster’s lid open again. What was people’s problem? Did one of my neighbors run a secret raccoon trapping ring? If I saw somebody with one of those Davy Crocket hats we were gonna have words.

Anyway, I’d glare at them.

I slammed the lid shut for the second time today. Should’ve been a positive association. I’d found Air here!

And what had that gotten me? Some cool special effects, a stupid prank by Lena, a stupider fight with Lena, and my ass kicked by an invader.

Yeah. Real positive.

Every step up the apartment steps felt higher and every breath colder. At least whoever had left their garbage on the walkway had cleared it out. Of course, that was probably the same neighbor who left the dumpster open.

I felt like crap, sore mentally and physically.

The perfect time to have a conversation that could reshape every aspect of my life.