Chapter 3: Beautiful Disaster

I turned to Lena and swallowed a snort. She had her honest-to-God, look-like-a-douchebag smart glasses on. I guessed she’d fetched them from the bedroom while I got the pizza in.

She stared at me through the smart glasses and looked like she’d seen a ghost.

I brushed my hands on my pants and ran my fingers through my hair. “I got something on me?”

Lena pulled the glasses down and stared over the top of them. She pushed them back up. She ripped them off her face and dropped them on her desk.

I cocked my head. “What’s gotten into you, Lena?”

“You looked. Uh. Pretty cool.”

“Thanks?”

“Through the app,” she said.

“Good thing you clarified.” I rolled my eyes and it got me thinking. “By app you mean Third Eye?”

She nodded. “It said it was compatible with Glass, so I figured, what the hell.”

“I guess it works, huh?”

“Not gonna lie, the graphics are something else.”

“Maybe I’ll start saving up for smart glasses.”

Lena shot a glance at hers. “Might want to.”

“It’s weird I didn’t get any kind of character creation prompt, though. Are they just randomly assigning – classes, or avatars, or whatever you’re seeing on me?”

“I don’t know about you.” She shrugged. “I, uh, may have specified things for myself back when I backed the project.”

“Oh really.” I opened Kickstarter in another tab and searched up the original Third Eye campaign. Sure enough, Magus of the Fourth Circle and above backers – those who had put at least $500 in – got the chance to submit “custom personifications.”

“Don’t look at that,” Lena snapped.

“I won’t say a word.” Why should I? She’d made the decision to wear the appearance of her original-character-do-not-steal in front of an audience of, admittedly, probably not very many people. I couldn’t possibly top that in the embarrassment department.

My expression must have betrayed me, because she put her hands on her hips. “Just show me how I look, already.”

“Fine, fine.” I trained the phone on her and tabbed back to Third Eye.

Heat, welcome after opening the front door, washed over me. It was like someone had just installed a fireplace. Apparently our landlord finally repaired the apartment’s heating system.

“About time the furnace came on,” I muttered.

Lena cocked her head.

“Don’t move,” I said. “I want to see what your outfit looks like and you squirming around might screw up the tracking.”

“If you’re going to admire me, don’t mumble about unrelated things.”

“Sure. Admire. Let’s call it that.” I grinned, but when I switched to my camera, the grin slipped from my face.

It’s hard to keep grinning when your jaw drops.

Through the lens of Third Eye, Lena looked like – herself, or maybe like a biopic version of herself played by an actress with an uncanny resemblance. Her Hollywood self wearing a dress and crown made of fire, melding seamlessly into burning wings that licked the roof of the apartment.

Lena turned her nose up. I’d worried about screwing up the tracking? No worries. The graphics followed her movements perfectly.

She mimicked, “‘Let’s call it that.’”

Her imperious tone would have annoyed me any other time. Coming from the vision I saw through my phone, it seemed only appropriate.

She stretched. The flames danced along her arms. Her wings extended and fluttered.

“Screenshot?” she prompted.

“Right.” I blinked. I snapped a couple of photos.

“I’ll do some cooler poses once I’ve seen it,” she said. “For now, let me get a pic of you so you can see yours.”

I nodded, because I didn’t know what else to do.

She walked over to the desk where she’d left her smart glasses.

I shivered. The initial blast of hot air must’ve been all the furnace could cough up. So much for it being fixed.

The momentary cold snapped me enough out of my haze to remember we had pizza waiting. I glanced one more time at my phone and shook my head at the photos. It really did look like someone had set a big-budget fantasy movie in our shitty apartment. Lena was going to be feasting off those photos – and my reaction – for ages.

A sobering enough thought to get me moving. I cracked the pizza box and took a slice of pepperoni. “Don’t forget to eat,” I called.

“Oh, shit! I completely spaced on it.” She joined me by the pizza box and shoved half her own slice in her mouth. Had I really thought “imperious” was an appropriate tone for her a minute ago?

She said something through the pizza that was completely incomprehensible to me.

I finished chewing my bite and swallowed. “You’re going to choke if you talk with your mouth full.”

She wrinkled her nose but finished chewing. “I said, ‘I liked you better looking at me through that phone.’”

“I think you’ll get sick of that as soon as you want me to do something other than stare at you.”

“I don’t know. It looked to me like if I’d asked you to clean the floor, I’d have had to specify I didn’t mean with your tongue.”

“Come on, I wasn’t that bad.”

She raised an eyebrow.

I felt my cheeks heat up in ways that had nothing to do with the furnace. “In all seriousness, you do look amazing. If that’s how you designed your OC, props; I’ve got no room to make fun of you for it. And you wear the outfit all kinds of well.”

She looked away and took another bite.

Open worship, she could handle. Honest complements? Forget it.

“Hey,” I said. “Put your damn glasses on. I want to see if I look just as cool.”

“Bitch, please. I wiped out my life savings to look this awesome.”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“I think that might be the first time I’ve ever heard you speak in favor of a pay-to-win mechanic.”

“It’s cosmetic! I’ve never had a problem with cosmetic microtransactions.”

I wanted so much to say, “Micro?” But I had promised.

She finished devouring her slice of pizza, grabbed a second, and skipped back to her desk to snag her glasses. Much as I rolled my eyes at an expensive pair of smart glasses, I had to wince at the thought of her getting her greasy fingers all over them. She, of course, didn’t care. When she turned back around, she’d put them on.

“How do I look, anyway?” I asked.

“Like a wizard,” she said, mostly between bites. “Maybe a sorcerer? You don’t have a floppy hat.”

“Disgusting,” I said. “No hat, no purchase. I’m gonna refund.”

“After the way you looked seeing me through your phone? Yeah right.”

“Apparently, I didn’t pay enough to look as impressive.” I scowled. “I don’t mind coming out of it as a wizard, or a sorcerer, like that makes any difference in this. Actually, it’s what I was planning to pick if the game had a class system. But it’s pretty shitty that we don’t get to choose.”

“Well, it is still in beta. Maybe they’re just randomly distributing appearances to people now and they’ll put in character creation later.”

“Here’s hoping.” I had no room to complain. Apart from the ‘customized personifications’ for big money backers, a pair of buzzwords that could have meant anything, the Kickstarter hadn’t been clear that we’d have avatars of any kind.

“You do look really cool, by the way,” Lena said. “I like what they did with your hair.”

“What’s wrong with my hair normally?”

“Apart from the bangs that make you look like you’re a tub of eyeliner away from joining an Emo band’s revival tour?”

I batted at my bangs. “It’s just too much of a pain to brush them back all the time when we’re not going out.”

“We’ll just have to convince everybody to sign up for Third Eye and get some smart glasses. Then neither of us will ever have to comb our hair again.”

“If you never combed your hair again, you’d just disappear into the tangles.”

“What a way to go.”

Her – everything – had been so overwhelming, I hadn’t even thought about what Third Eye had done with her unruly mop of short copper curls. As good an excuse as any to go back to my phone and take another look.

It was hard to tell where her hair ended and where the crown of fire began, but the software had teased the snarls into burning ringlets far more effectively than any job she’d ever done with brush or comb.

I waved the phone at her. “I’ll show you yours if you show me mine.”

I didn’t wait for her to do as I asked – especially since it would be awkward with her smart glasses. I put the first shot I’d taken on our household Discord server.

“Woah,” Lena breathed.

“Right?”

She raised her hand in front of her face. She flexed her fingers. I had to assume that through the smart glasses, she was watching the flames dance along her outstretched hand just like I was. “I actually look like that.”

“No, your Third Eye avatar looks like that,” I said. “You actually look like you always do. Which, don’t get me wrong, is fine! I just don’t want you to start preening because they gave you a really cool character design.”

“First of all, Cam, I’ll thank you to remember that I gave me a really cool character design. They just implemented it.”

“Fair, fair.”

“Second, forget about how awesome I look for a second.”

“Doesn’t sound like you have,” I said, because it was easier than admitting I couldn’t.

“Cam.” She clenched her fist. Through my phone’s camera, I saw sparks fly from between her fingers. “We gotta be serious again for a minute.”

“Twice in one night. That might be a new record.”

“How the hell,” she snapped, “are our phones rendering flames like this in real time?”

Again, I stared. This time in puzzlement rather than awe. Although, since she still looked like her Third Eye self through my phone camera, still in a little bit of awe. Nonetheless, I forced myself to think. “It must be cloud served.”

“I guess?” She held out both arms and made a series of passes in the air. Fire dripped off one hand to cup in the palm of the other. “It’s going to be murder on anyone with a data cap.”

“So did I get any special effects, or what?” I asked. “At least on the server end, it wouldn’t be quite so bad if they’re only rendering a few big spenders with such flashy details.”

The puzzle apparently interested her too much to care that I’d come close to talking about how much she’d backed the Kickstarter for. Or maybe she’d concluded it was a bargain at any price. Maybe she was right.

Regardless, instead of snapping at me, she snapped a photo. “Have a look.”

Her screenshot came in. I steeled myself, wrenched the phone away from the sight of her, and flipped to Discord.

“Definitely sorcerer.” No hat, no wizard. But I did look pretty damned cool. My Third Eye avatar had peaked and parted hair, the way I did on the rare occasions I bothered to tackle the problem of it. It should have made my eyebrows dominate my face even more than usual, but somehow the arrangement of hair and clothes made them look proportionate. He – I? – wore a short cape and something like a long tunic, deep blue near my knees fading to almost white at the collar, belted at the waist. Seas and skies. Plus the amulet I’d gotten from picking a digital signup bonus. Not as flashy as Lena’s astonishing fire dress, but cool all the same.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think I’m wondering about the cloth physics of this outfit. Hell. What about the hair physics?”

“Pretend you’re at a metal concert.”

I cupped a finger to my ear and mimed being deaf.

She rolled her eyes. “Pretend you have good taste in music and start headbanging already.”

I laughed, threw the horns, and did as instructed.

“Damn.” She pulled her smart glasses down, pushed them back up. “Damn.”

I stopped gyrating and rubbed the back of my neck. “So whatever they’re doing on the server-side, it looks as good for me as it does for you, just without the special effects?”

“This is crazy. Even if it is on their servers, they must be melting down the whole farm to handle this kind of graphical load in real time.”

“I agree, it’s pretty wild.” I looked at her through the phone again. Purely for research purposes. “I don’t get how they’re doing our hair at all. My forehead is visible on the screenshot but not in real life.”

She fiddled with hers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her do it in the real world, tugging at one of the stubborn tangles near the bottom. On the phone, it looked like she was playing with a lick of living fire.

“Take your glasses off for a minute,” I said.

“I don’t know, you look way better through them.”

“Come on, Lena. There’s something I want to test.”

“Ugh, fine.” She glanced at me and at her hand one more time, then pulled the glasses off and set them on her desk.

Through my phone camera, she retained her fire-goddess looks.

“Let’s go to the other room,” I said.

“You get one look at me through that phone and all of a sudden you want to head right to the bedroom?”

“On the one hand, yes.”

Her eyes widened a little. Not, presumably, at the suggestion she turned me on. We had slept together back when we first agreed to cohabitate, after all. I imagined she was more surprised at the fact I could admit a compliment without affecting distance.

“And also on that hand,” I added, “at some point, I definitely want to find out how this thing is interpreting our clothes by taking at least some of them off.”

“That does actually sound pretty interesting,” she said. “You know. For science.”

See affected distance, exhibit A. We were two peas in a pod in that respect.

“On the other hand,” I said, “that’s not why I want to go to the other room.”

“Okay, okay.” She threw her hands up. “But I’m coming back here to finish my pizza before we fool around.”

“No fooling,” I said.

“Maybe some fooling.”

“Okay, maybe some, but we’ve gotta test something first.” Before I could change my mind, I jogged to our bedroom. I made for my bed, the furthest point from the living room. The furthest from Lena’s glasses, PC, and phone. I trained my camera on her.

It was hard to stick with the idea of no fooling when I saw her flit into the room. Even though she looked like she might burn me to a cinder if I had the temerity to touch her. Even though that meant the test had turned out the way I’d hoped it wouldn’t.

“Come over here,” I said.

“Pizza first,” she said.

“Please.”

Something in my tone made her stop snarking. She padded over and stood over me.

A magnificent vision, her ideal self, or at least how she’d idealized herself six years ago, brought to life and flame so close I just had to reach out and –

I shook my head. I tossed the phone on the bed.

Lena was herself again. She wore her usual uniform: skirt, stockings, shirt with a meme on it. My friend, my ex-girlfriend, pretty when she wanted to be, cute in spite of herself most of the time, familiar in every respect except the worried expression on her face.

She reached out to me. “Cam, what is it? What are you testing?”

“Your glasses are in the other room, Lena. So is your phone.”

“Yeah, so?”

I clasped her hands. No flames. Obviously. But there had been through my phone. “So how,” I asked, “does Third Eye know to attach your avatar’s movements to what you’re doing in here?”