Chapter 5: Dinner Engagement

NugsFan15: Can we talk over dinner? My treat.

This in a DM, copied to both Lena and I.

NugsFan15 was Erin’s username. When I first saw her post a link to her wiki on Third Eye’s official Discord, it had tipped me off to the fact she lived near us. Not a lot of fans of the local basketball team outside our metro area.

It turned out fandom wasn’t her only connection to basketball. Her father ran a sports agency focused on the sport.

Which was why I didn’t feel like a total asshole for perking up at the words “my treat” in a DM from a college student.

Lena and I had shared lunch with Erin once. We’d each paid our own way and it had been way out of our price range.

Tasty, though.

“Do you want to go in on this?” I called.

The sound of Lena’s mechanical keyboard stopped. I knew that once we’d finally gotten back to our computers, she’d joined me in querying various freelance sites. The hint came from how she pecked out letters, instead of letting her hands fly across the keyboard the way they would if she was doing something that interested her.

“If I ever start turning down free food,” she said, “it must mean we finally made it big.”

“To be clear,” I asked, “since you occasionally like to act like we already have, that isn’t your way of turning down free food, right?”

“Oh hell no.”

OldCampaigner: Sure, sounds great. Where do you want to meet?

In a way, my handle, OldCampaigner, came from my fandom as well. I’d started using it as a teenager, playing strategy games against forty-year-old grognards. It hadn’t fooled anybody until I started winning as much as I lost.

NugsFan15: Chop Shop SoBo is pretty close to your apartment. Do you know it?

In that I’d walked past it? Yeah. In that I felt like more of an asshole when I thought about her treating us to a meal there, since I hadn’t seen anything on their menu with a single digit price? Yeah. That too.

OldCampaigner: You sure? We can cover a meal, you know.

Technically, we could. It would just take the place of two others down the line.

NugsFan15: Positive.

“I’m gonna get ribs.” Lena hummed to herself. “When was the last time you had ribs, Cam?”

How could I argue with that?

So, an hour later, we bundled back up and made for the door.

At the last minute, Lena slipped Bernie’s harness on and whistled. “C’mere, little guy. You get to go, too.”

I must have looked incredulous, because she put her hands on her hips.

I spread my palms. “The restaurant didn’t look that fancy. Worst case scenario, they make us sit on the patio and you have to keep us warm.”

“Exactly. Bernie likes going with us, and you know Erin will get a kick out of seeing him again.”

“True.” I turned to open the door, and when I looked back, Bernie was on her back, tucked into the harness.

I supposed Lena didn’t need to put her jacket on. She only needed the snow pants to keep water off, and didn’t bother with them for a walk in town. From what we’d seen, Third Eye would keep her warm if she wore a summer outfit of a T-shirt, skirt, and thin leggings. Her jeans and boots and jacket were more for plausible deniability than warmth.

I might want to stick close enough to her that I didn’t need my coat, either, but I preferred not to chance it.

With Bernie in tow, we braved the stairs once more and started our walk north. Once, we might’ve waited for a bus, but walking halfway between us and DU no longer felt intimidating.

We reached Chop Shop SoBo with fifteen minutes to spare. I realized for the first time that the SoBo in its name stood for South Broadway, and felt like an idiot for not getting it back when I’d looked the prices up.

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Lena glanced behind us. She seemed to have an eye on the retro facade of the Gothic Theater, a half block away.

I raised my eyebrows as I watched her looking at it. “If you want to catch a show, we can start saving up.” Saving how? Great question. It would be a more plausible use for our YouTube money than upgrading our apartment, anyway.

“It’s just a cool building.” She shrugged. “I don’t even like most of the acts they get in there.”

I’d made the mistake of inviting Lena to a concert at the Gothic once, a few months after she moved in with me. We’d gotten tickets, survived the line, and made it through the first song of whatever indie rock band had been playing the opener.

Then I’d noticed Lena huddling against the wall, hugging her arms and eyeing the crowd like they’d turn cannibalistic as soon as a beat dropped. So, you know. Perfectly safe at an alt rock act. She didn’t seem to see it that way, though.

When I shouted to ask if she was okay, she’d snapped she was fine, gulped down her whole cup of beer, and taken mine when I offered it to her. Naturally, I declared I’d gotten a stomach ache and we bailed before the main act came on.

After that, I got more careful about inviting Lena to crowded places. A restaurant she could handle, compartmentalizing the other diners as being up in their own business. A board game or role-playing group, she could accustom herself to, and even enjoy once she got to know the players.

A crowd?

We hadn’t tried in years.

I hadn’t expected it to come up, but now, I realized, it might. I asked, “If the whole PVP tournament thing kicks off, and they do one here in town, would you want to go?”

“I’d want to compete.” She looked away from the Gothic. “They don’t let fans near, like, basketball players or whatever, do they?”

“They have courtside seats, Lena.”

“Seriously?” She shook her head. “I knew there was a reason I didn’t like sports.”

It was definitely that, I thought, and not that her image of most social groups came from the VHS tapes she’d watched from her parents’ old video store. Despite living through negative five years of the ‘80s, she mainlined throwback nerds-vs-jocks energy.

I’d known too many people into sports statistics to believe in such a binary.

For instance –

“Hi, you two.” Erin waved from the intersection.

She had an actual jersey on this evening, long and powder blue, poking out from beneath her scarf and puffy coat. It seemed like an awkward combination, but then, Erin herself often seemed awkward, like she’d never quite accustomed herself to the length of her limbs. Her hand bobbed in the air as she waved. So did her hair, despite her best attempts to bind it between cornrows and a tight ponytail.

Lena ran up to her and they embraced. I ambled along in her wake.

“You mean ‘hi you three.” Lena reached back and pulled Bernie from his harness. “Look who I brought!”

Erin blinked behind her coke bottle glasses. Her face split in a huge grin. “Bernie!”

The Daimon chuffed happily as they both fussed over him. I supposed that was another way his presence might cause a problem in a restaurant; he didn’t seem to eat anything, and visibly, he just looked like a stuffed toy, but even people who’d never so much as heard of Third Eye could hear the sounds he made.

I supposed it didn’t matter. We might get embroiled in a weird scene if someone accused us of bringing a pet into the restaurant, but it wasn’t like any of them would be able to identify one.

Unless they looked through our phones. I took a glance through mine and saw Bernie stretching and preening as Lena held him up and Erin scratched under his chin.

Of course, that also meant I saw Erin’s Third Eye avatar. Hers looked the most different of anyone’s I’d seen. She looked even taller than IRL, but there was nothing gawky about her. Her hair, unbound, formed a dark halo around her head, limned with the same, sourceless light that seemed to suffuse her whole body. Her mismatched clothes were translated into a single, impossible strip of cream-colored fabric that twisted and wound upon itself in something like an imperial gown.

Like Lena, Erin had backed Third Eye at a high enough tier to receive a Custom Personification. On all sorts of levels, it meant even more to her. This elegant, unmistakably feminine form wasn’t just aspirational for Erin. The fleeting moments when she’d been able to embody it were a reprieve from her dysphoria.

Which went a long way toward explaining why, more than any of us, she was desperate to remain active in Third Eye.

I clapped her shoulder and patted Bernie’s head. “Thanks for inviting us to dinner.”

“It’s no trouble at all. I’ve been meaning to talk to you all afternoon.”

“Not that I’m complaining,” Lena said, “but how come you didn’t just Discord us?”

Erin’s smile turned nervous. “Well. Why don’t we eat first?”

“Okaaay,” Lena said. “Just so you know, though, if you leave Cam with a mystery, he’s gonna worry over it and spoil his appetite.”

Erin blinked at me.

“Lena isn’t wrong,” I said.

“Oh. Well, I suppose it doesn’t hurt to explain. I’m a little worried about how much information the devs get from our phones.”

She wasn’t worried about nonspecific surveillance from Apple or Samsung, I knew. “So whatever you want to tell us,” I said, “I guess it’s not flattering to Third Eye?”

Erin shook her head. “It’s not that bad. I don’t think? Just, a trend that’s worrying me a little.”

I’d never met a stathead as dedicated as Erin. She could look at a mass of seemingly unrelated data and tease out meaningful patterns in just a few minutes. “What kind of trend?”

She toed the pavement with her boot. “If I tell you, it may not make you worry less.”

“Trust me,” I said. “Whatever you’re concerned about, it’s not going to make me fret as much as my own imagination.”

She smiled, briefly. “Okay.”

But she hesitated so long, her hand clenching and unclenching under Bernie’s chin, that I thought for a moment she wasn’t going to explain.

Finally, she said, “A lot of top players have vanished from the wiki.”