Chapter 48: So Inclined

We left the town of Parker pretty confident no one who lived there was a Third Eye player, armed with about eight hundred more XP, substantially richer in Materials like Iron and Plastic, and with a trail of suspicious suburbanites in our wake.

We could’ve gotten a lot more resources by traipsing up and down the streets, but at a certain point I really did think someone would call the cops on us. I’d been more relieved than when we reached the start of the walking trail near the reservoir – hell, I’d been more relieved in just the last twenty-four hours, when we saw Bernie alive and well. The start of that trail would make my relief shortlist, though.

A few joggers and a few tourists passed us, but nobody shot us dirty looks just for having the temerity to share their sidewalks.

The trail wound into the gradually rising terrain around the Rueter-Hess Reservoir. With no more houses and walls and fences to obstruct our view, we got a better look at the Third Eye objects we could collect.

More mounds led up into the hilly ground to the southwest. A small forest’s worth of signs joined the IRL mile markers and warnings not to stray off the path or take pets up the Incline. (If they only knew about Bernie!) Also, an actual small forest; unlike on the highway, the Third Eye trees weren’t the only ones in sight, but they were only ones with green leaves in February.

Maybe the most interesting object was one we had no practical way of reaching. Out on the artificial lake of the reservoir, I spotted something like a big houseboat or catamaran, an arrangement of wooden platforms with a conical structure poking up from the middle. A weathered sign over the door showed a torpedo-shaped cartoon fish, and might’ve explained the structure’s purpose if I could read its Third Eye runic script.

Lena and I stopped at the edge of the path and spent a while recording the structure as it bobbed up and down.

“Think we should rent a boat?” she asked.

“It looks like a lot of Wood,” I said. “It’s cool, but probably not worth spending money on. Or changing our itinerary to hunt for a rental place.”

“Yeah, probs.”

We jotted down everything about the structure and took a few photos to upload later. If somebody else wanted to collect it, I considered them welcome to it. If somebody could parse it as a clue, all the better.

In deference to the signs that said we should stick to the path, we did. Mostly. When no one else was around and something appeared within a few paces, one of us would zip out and grab it. It wasn’t like the distant objects were useless to us; we could still collect XP just by focusing our phone cameras on them for the first time, even if we didn’t add them to our stockpile of Materials.

I’m not sure why we respected these signs more than ones telling us to keep off the grass of a subdivision greenbelt.

Maybe because they were claiming it was to protect the local ecosystem.

Maybe because they were claiming the local ecosystem included rattlesnakes.

If our HP protected us from being bitten, great. We’d just leave a confused snake behind us. If, on the other hand, the bite went through, would the poison count as a debuff the way it did in so many games, ticking our HP down until – what? It ran out and we actually suffered the effects?

We didn’t get close enough to any snakes to hear them rattling, much less to find out what would happen if we got poisoned.

Instead, we began the climb up the Rueter-Hess Incline.

Over a hundred steps, and some of those were long enough I needed a couple of paces to cross them. Lena, with her shorter legs, almost always did. Once, this would’ve been, if not insurmountable, at least obnoxious.

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Now, we scaled it easily.

We had every reason to. It seemed like the mounds we’d seen everywhere else in the region were clustered together more tightly here. We didn’t see any other Third Eye objects, but we came across another mound every few steps up. They even pressed closer to the path, so we could reach out and snag them without offending joggers on their return trip from the summit. Or snakes in their dens.

We climbed, we took notes on our finds, we collected. It didn’t even take us long.

“How much Stone do you have now?” I asked.

“Just crossed five hundred,” Lena said.

I’d hit that milestone near the base of the Incline. “This is crazy efficient compared to scouting in the city.”

“Right?” She shook her head. “We should’ve been doing this all along.”

“I wonder if it’s how Mask got so strong,” I said. “You look at the record of their fights, at least the ones that got posted to the Invasion Report, and they started out as just another player with an edgy gimmick. Then they went on a road trip, and the next thing you know, they’re taking on whole groups.”

“Makes sense,” Lena said. “Except, if somebody took off from – where was he from? Philly? If somebody headed out from there a month ago and stopped to pick up all the shit along the highway, they’d still be on the East Coast.”

I laughed. “Maybe not, if they only stopped for the really interesting stuff.”

She tapped her chin. “Cruise around a highway until you find something that looks like a Reactant, then pull over and grab it?”

I spread my hands. “It might work.”

“Could be worth a shot,” she said.

“Except for the part where neither of us have a car, and couldn’t drive it if we did.” I at least had a license, but my short-lived attempt to drive Miguel’s Prius after he got hurt in the tunnel had reminded me of how out of practice I’d gotten. We couldn’t exactly ask a bus driver to pull over every time we saw a strange object out the window.

“Ugh, yeah.” Lena’s shoulders slumped. She gave herself a little shake and perked up. “Whatever. We’ll just have to focus on quantity over quality! Let’s finish up here.”

I gave her a thumbs up and we resumed our climb.

There were so many mounds, and they stood out so much from the surrounding terrain, I stopped bothering to compare the real world to what I saw through the Third Eye filter. I walked the rest of the Incline with my phone close to my face like I was shooting a travelog.

I supposed Lena was doing the same thing, and both of us looked like influencers out farming content. Which I guess we sort of were.

I’m not sure if you know this, but that isn’t an archetype everyone in the world loves.

Take the next jogger we ran into. For some reason, he’d stopped well before he reached the summit of the Incline, but when he turned around and saw us, he stared. He scooted to the far side of the steps and eyed us like we’d put on placards announcing our leprosy.

Did Lena give him the finger? I didn’t check, but contented myself with knowing in my heart she had.

As we ascended, though, I at least thought I understood why he’d turned back. Down in Parker, it had seemed like a calm day, but as we neared the higher steps, the wind intensified. Even though I was walking side-by-side with Lena, I regretted taking my gloves off. When I tilted my phone so I could catch a glimpse of her, I saw the flames of her wings and her dress being whipped behind us like banners. Bernie clung to her back with his tail wrapped around her waist, as though he expected to blow away any minute.

How high had we climbed, anyway? Denver boasts about being the “Mile High City,” which sounds hella impressive if you’re coming from sea level. The truth is, it’s the lowest point for miles around, surrounded by high plains on one side and foothills on the other. We’d ascended way above city level now. Between the wind in my face and the thinner atmosphere, I had to fight for every breath.

If Mask really did come from Philadelphia, I thought, we should lure them up here for a rematch. Before we ever started fighting, we’d find out if HP could protect against hypoxia.

I grinned as I thought about it, until I considered the possibility of Mask swapping or supplementing their voice changer for an oxygen mask. Edgelord or no, they seemed pretty practical in blending mundane solutions with Third Eye ones. Then we’d be the ones with the breath disadvantage.

Intellectually, I knew the Incline couldn’t actually stretch dangerously high. We were a long way down from the fourteener mountains further west, and people got by just fine climbing those. I supposed we’d at last found the limits of our Third Eye-granted stamina.

Our limits? Oh shit. My feet froze on the next step. Had we been draining our HP this whole climb?

Lena didn’t seem to notice. She kept trudging up the Incline ahead of me.

I jerked my phone away from my face so I could flick to the Third Eye app.

I breathed a sigh of relief. Not only had I not run out of HP, my total hadn’t gone down at all.

Lena must have finally registered that I’d stopped my ascent, because she turned back to me. “Sup?”

I glanced around my phone, ready to explain.

Right up until I saw Lena hovering in thin air.