Chapter 3: Northbound

“We really are going to have to invite someone to demonstrate Earth,” Lena said.

I blinked. I’d been watching Broadway roll past as the bus carried us home, or at least to the nearest convenient stop.

I did occasionally think about things other than Third Eye. Especially when I was out during the day, and the hustle and bustle of normal people’s lives made what we’d seen at the construction site feel a lifetime away.

But who was I kidding? It’s not like I got off the bus five stops early and popped into some store I’d never had an interest in and struck up a conversation with the clerk.

Lena didn’t kid herself at all. Not about that, anyway.

She poked me in the ribs. “Cam?”

“Sorry, yeah. You’re right.” I turned to her. “What milestone got you thinking about the Earth video?”

“25,000 subs,” she said quietly.

“Damn.” I checked the YouTube page for Ashbird, Lena’s handle. We’d started posting Third Eye tutorials there. I knew the views had gone crazy, but I hadn’t realized just how high the sub count had climbed. “Damn.”

“Whatever we do,” she said, “we’ve got to keep this rolling.”

I nodded.

We’d shot and uploaded videos of us using Air, Water, and Fire, the three Reactants we had between us. That began as a way for us to help the wiki team convince the playerbase to approach Third Eye the way we thought would be safest.

But as our views climbed, and now the subscribers with them, it looked more and more like a plausible source of income. Which was more than Lena and I could say for the gig work we normally scraped by on.

Plausible – as long as we got our videos out fast and in reasonably high quality.

Which was going to be tough, when neither of us had Earth.

Earth topped the list of resources we’d hoped a trip to Chatfield might provide us with. The Reactants, aside from Fire, were all things that would be appropriate to find in a natural environment.

No such luck.

“It’s too bad Erin doesn’t want to do it,” I said.

“Her call.” Lena shrugged. “I wonder if Donica can walk yet?”

“You’re kidding, right?” Donica was the friend – or at least acquaintance – who’d had her ankle snapped by the creature we fought at the construction site.

And no, a week had not changed her status. Last time I talked to her, she was still in the hospital. She might’ve gotten out by now, but I was sure she’d have a boot and crutches for a lot longer than a week.

HP might prevent damage until they ran out, but they didn’t seem to repair it when they came back. A pity, I’d say, except I had no idea what parts of our biology Third Eye might consider “damage.” Frankly, the degree to which the game could alter our bodies scared me already, if I thought about it too much. Add it to the list.

Fortunately, Lena provided ample distractions.

“True,” she muttered. “Trying to shoot a video with Donica would be pretty miserable.”

I snorted. Where was the lie, though?

Actually, I realized exactly where. “You know who that leaves, right?”

Lena wrinkled her nose. “No way.”

Unless one of the members of the wiki team who lived outside Denver decided to take a road trip to us, we were out of acquaintances who had Earth. “It’s Matt or bust.”

“Not only would that suck,” Lena said, “we would lose all of our subscribers.”

“You have to admit, he knew some amazing tricks with Earth.”

“You have to admit, to talk to him for like five minutes is to want to punch his lights out.”

I was about to agree with her, when I saw her cup her chin. “Lena...”

Her eyebrows raised. “I guess that would be an option.”

“It’s not a good option,” I said.

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“Isn’t it?” she asked. “People are gonna want to watch PVP, especially with this tournament thing riling them up. We should be trying to get in on the ground floor, before anybody else has videos out there.”

“First of all, do a search. A couple people have already done Third Eye PVP videos.”

“Yeah, but their videos suck,” Lena said.

Well, she wasn’t wrong. The ones I’d seen had a certain college-students-with-foam-swords charm. Courtesy of some of the wiki team members, and now an actual pro in Zhizhi, ours were produced to a much more professional standard.

Courtesy of playing, however briefly, with Albie, our understanding of how to use Third Eye was even further ahead of the pack.

Lena grabbed my arm. “Wait, this is an awesome idea! I already wanted a rematch.”

“And now you’ve got an excuse?” I asked.

“Exactly!” She flashed a smile that looked genuine to me, not one of her forced, manic grins.

I didn’t have the heart to point out I was being sarcastic. “I guess it’s not the worst plan, if we’re going to have to work with Matt anyway. Assuming he’s willing to go along with it.”

“The dude literally took me up on an offer to punch him in his smug fucking face,” Lena said. She didn’t mention that she hadn’t gone through with it. After what happened at the construction site, even the more competitive among us had lost the taste for fighting.

Apparently, it hadn’t stuck, at least for Lena. She asked, “Why would he say no to normal PVP?”

“For one,” I said, “because for the video to work on your channel, you kind of have to win. It’s less that you’re asking him to a duel, more that you’re asking him to throw one.”

I regretted my words as soon as they left my mouth.

First, Lena’s face fell. Then she let go of my arm and looked away. “So. You don’t think I could beat him.”

“That’s not what I said –”

“But it’s the only reason it would even come up!”

“It would come up,” I said, “because our videos are scripted.”

Mostly. Lena had a tendency to wing things once she started performing, and I’d gotten carried away with my demonstrations a few times. Still, we’d never done anything as open-ended as an actual PVP match.

“Uh-huh.” Lena hugged her arms. After a moment, she glanced at me over her shoulder.

“That really did bug you,” I said.

She hung her head. “It’s stupid, I know.”

“Once again, that’s not what I said.” I reached over and tilted her chin until she had to look at me. She let me. I smiled. She tried to. “Of course I trust that you’d win. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m kind of biased.”

Her smile broke through. She leaned up and kissed the tip of my nose. “Better be.”

I bent to kiss her back, but she ducked back to her seat and pulled her phone out. “I’m’a ask him,” she said.

I chuckled. “He might still say no, you know.”

“Why? Dude is all about PVP.”

“All about invasions, where he’s essentially guaranteed to win,” I said.

“He dueled Erin just fine,” Lena said.

“To make a point,” I said. “When he had a much better understanding of what she could do than vice versa, and way more PVP practice. Plus, you notice he stopped before anybody ran out of HP? Sure, he had excuses for it, and he did eventually try to help us, but he was also making sure he didn’t lose any XP in the exchange.”

When we lost a PVP match, the winner got 10% of our current XP.

We hadn’t actually found a use for XP in Third Eye yet. No way to spend it, and if anyone had gotten enough to level up, they’d kept it to themselves. We suspected, though, that XP was at least one of the measures the game used to determine who counted as the “bottom 1%” of players at the end of each day.

Those who fell into that category got kicked out of the beta.

By now, we had enough data to say confidently that the 1% was calculated from among the initial Kickstarter backers, not the current player base. If the beta lasted for one hundred days, everyone would lose access.

I didn’t understand why the game would be set up that way, back when I saw it as just a game. Learning that it unlocked the ability to alter the world around us had not made the reasons any more obvious.

Regardless, those of us who wanted to keep playing as long as we could – a category that certainly included Matt, as well as Lena and I – did our damnedest to keep our XP totals high.

Lena cocked her head. She bit her lip. But she tapped a message into her phone anyway. “Well, whatever. It can’t hurt to ask.”

I checked the wiki team’s Discord, but it looked like she’d chosen to DM Matt instead of sending a public challenge.

Not that it mattered. I wasn’t nearly fast enough at texting to keep up with a conversation.

I had a shopping list of equipment I wanted to buy for Third Eye purposes. It included a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone. But since we’d just forked over rent, and we wouldn’t get even the still-small returns from Lena’s YouTube channel until later in the month, my purchase list consisted of food for the next week and nothing else.

At least Third Eye seemed to be saving me the price of Kleenex and antihistamines.

I wondered if in the Spring, assuming I still had access, my allergies would grow severe enough to make me lose HP, instead of seemingly being absorbed by them.

“Hmph,” Lena said.

I raised an eyebrow. “He said no?”

“Nah, he’s offline. The coward!”

“So’s Erin.” I tapped my screen. “It’s the middle of the afternoon. They’re probably in class.”

“Sometimes I forget she’s basically an infant –” Which was Lena’s way of describing a college student, about eight years younger than us. “– and he’s supposedly a teacher.”

“I can’t say I like the idea of sitting in on one of his classes.” I felt like I’d been to at least one, since having a conversation with him bore far too many similarities to listening to a lecture.

Lena nodded. “They better hurry up. I’ve been waiting way too long for this rematch.”

I patted her shoulder.

I wondered, but very much did not ask, why she’d waited until she had the excuse of a video. I suspected the answer was the same for her as it would’ve been for me.

We both wanted to stay active in the Third Eye beta. We both wanted to get stronger within it. We both wanted to learn more about it.

But when faced with the prospect of actually playing Third Eye, we both remembered the last time we’d had to.