Chapter 53: Troubled Waters

The Iron between Lena and I flowed and dripped and twisted and curved until, after a moment, it came to rest as a sphere of shimmering metal.

“So cool,” Lena murmured.

I smirked. “I thought I was going to demonstrate the boring stuff.”

“Me too,” she said, “but then you finally did something that looks like it could be done with Fire.”

I laughed. It almost made me drop the sphere, which would, I suspected, really suck. When I shattered my Glass last time, I’d thought cleanup would be a pain, but at least it remained in solid pieces.

“You might be wondering what exactly I’ve done, distinguished guests,” I said. “Did I switch Reactants in mid video? No. At least, not yet...”

“Spoilers,” Lena hissed.

“Teasers.” I grinned. “Don’t touch it, but do you want to poke this with a stick?”

“Why not touch it?” Despite her question, Lena scooped up a stick and approached with it outstretched. In Third Eye, the wood smoldered in her grasp; looking over the top of my phone, I saw the real stick unburnt and reminded myself not to be surprised.

“I guess it’s not like you could actually get poisoned by it,” I said. “But what this so-called Iron is right now is not something you should ever come in contact with if it were real.”

“Molten metal, you mean?” she asked, playing along. She poked it with the stick.

The surface rippled, the ripples wrapped around and smashed into each other and the whole thing looked wonderfully complex for a few seconds before subsiding back into a smooth sphere.

Lena held up her stick. Bits of metal dripped off it, flowing back to the sphere for as long as it remained selected. From what I’d read, I was pretty sure that if I had used Fire to melt a unit of Iron, touching it with a stick would cause Third Eye to depict that stick as burning up.

Then, before I could say anything, Lena reached out and slapped the sphere.

“Careful!” I said.

“I wanted to check something.” Her hands made a complicated dance in the air that, by now, I recognized as the sign of someone using a phone that Third Eye refused to show me. “No HP loss.”

“Isn’t this stuff super toxic?” I asked. “If Third Eye models that, I would expect touching it to drop you in a hurry.”

“Nah. Somebody didn’t pay enough attention in Chemistry, except to the warnings. Elemental mercury is tough to absorb through the skin; the really nasty shit to touch is mercury salts. Now if I snorted it, that would fuck me all the way up.” She bit her lip. “I’m right about what you did, yeah?”

“That’s right,” I said. “The way I made a sphere is by changing the Iron’s properties to be those of mercury.”

“It sounds more fantasy-ish if you call it quicksilver,” she said.

I tried the line again, incorporating her suggestion. We both nodded. So did Erin, from the bench.

We lined up to resume the video.

“Don’t mess around with this too much,” I said. “If you turn something into a toxin and ingest it, I don’t know if Third Eye will just keep depleting your HP every day when it’s supposed to refresh.”

And if Miguel was right, and it was, at least sometimes, more than just a game?

Abruptly, I wondered if I should include this in the video at all.

“Timeout,” I said.

Lena cocked her head.

I turned so I could look at both her and Erin.

I eyed the sphere. Lena’s flames reflected weirdly off its curved surface. I said, “I don’t know if we should show this off.”

“What? But it’s one of the two coolest things you can do with Water.” Lena poked with the stick again and sent another of those amazing ripple patterns through the sphere. “We’re legit going to lose viewers if you just spend the whole video changing the color of Stone and Plastic.”

“You get it though, right, Erin?”

Slowly, Erin returned my nod.

I wondered just how much she got.

“If this can be turned into a toxic substance and a player can end up hurting themselves with it long term...” She looked away. “If someone could lock themselves out of playing, I mean.”

“Granted,” Lena said, “that would suck.”

“So is it really wise for us to tell people how to do it? To show off the gesture, even?” Erin rubbed her arms. “Cam might be right. We should just find another way to keep people engaged.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Lena said, “Bullshit.”

Erin’s eyes snapped to her. “I know you said before that I shouldn’t feel responsible, and I’m sure that you and Cam don’t want to, either. I’m not saying that you should. But Cam recognized that this could be dangerous –”

“Which is exactly why we have to do something about it,” Lena said. “Cam, how long did it take you to figure out you could change Iron into mercury?”

“Couple days,” I said. “I mean, that was working with what was already posted on the wiki, plus what Erin showed me this morning.”

Plus, although I didn’t say it, a general “sense” of the kind of gestures that worked in Third Eye, which I’d picked up from practicing with Albie. I suspected they somehow corresponded to the runes.

“So people are going to find this out on their own,” Lena said. “It’s literally the same thing as with PVP. We found a potentially dangerous exploit, so we need to tell people about it. TBH, we should probably test if it actually does the ongoing internal damage thing. They may not have modeled it being toxic. Hell, we haven’t even seen it deplete HP.”

She took a step toward the sphere.

I used my control over it to yank it away. Without Air, all I could do was move it a set distance away from me in whatever direction I was focusing, but it was still enough to slide it out of Lena’s reach. “I’m not ready to put that to the test by having you snort mercury, Lena. On camera or otherwise.”

“Are you suggesting that Third Eye Productions would leave an exploit in the game that would let someone completely screw themselves over, possibly forever?” She leaned forward, eyebrows raised.

Erin and I exchanged glances.

“Yeah, no, you’re right about that,” Lena said. “If we can think of a safer way to test it, we probably should, though. Like, do we know when our HP refreshes?”

“I do,” Erin said. “It happens every midnight.”

“Midnight our time?” I asked.

“Yes, actually,” she said. “I thought maybe it happened while we slept, but I stayed up one night and watched my MP tick back up. Then I asked Shake to do it, and he said it happened at 11:00 PM for him.”

“He’s on Pacific time?” I asked.

She nodded. “I think it’s because the devs’ office is in Calgary.”

“Depending on where you were in the world, you could do some pretty fun tricks with that,” I said. “Why did you want to know, Lena?”

“Staying up till midnight doesn’t bug me at all,” she said. “We should set up some kind of controllable source of ongoing damage and see what happens when the day ticks over.”

“Makes sense,” I said. “We can try it tonight. With something easier to reverse than mercury poisoning. Then, depending on how it turns out, we can incorporate that into the warning for this video.”

“Cool,” she said.

“If it came down to it,” Erin said, “do you have anything you could use to get rid of a substance that was harming you, Lena?”

“You mean,” Lena asked, “have I got Water of my own?”

Erin looked down at her feet. “I assume if you did, you would’ve wanted to practice with us.”

“Pretty safe assumption.” Lena rubbed her hands as she turned back to me.

“What I meant,” Erin said, “was that I hoped you’d found a way to control your Fire that precisely.”

Lena scowled in a way that didn’t look cute at all, with or without Third Eye. I wasn’t even sharing that clip with our editors, much less putting it in the video.

I wouldn’t put my own expression in, either. I tried to swallow a sigh, but I think some must’ve got out, or else my face betrayed me, because Lena turned her scowl in my direction. Through Third Eye, her wings swatted at the air.

I got it, okay? There aren’t many things more embarrassing than fibbing to someone and then being forced to admit you’ve done it. And there was still a chance, though I had no idea how much of one, that Lena could get real Fire before it was time for her to do her own video on it.

Hell, if my – I won’t say suspicion, because it still made no sense to me to be suspicious of it, but my feeling – was right, and Third Eye Productions had somehow seeded Reactants in places where players with the right affinity would pick them up first, she might have a better chance of getting Fire in time for a video than either of us did getting Earth. Maybe ever.

That chance would only go up if she admitted to Erin that she still needed to find Fire.

Especially since Erin also had a vested interest in us being able to keep making videos.

It was Lena’s secret to keep. And I’d promised not to talk about it. At the same time, though, we had so much riding on her ability to pick up a Reactant. I knew how much she wanted one. It was my fault she was still waiting to get her first.

I lowered my voice. “Are you sure you don’t –”

“I am pretty goddamn sure, Cameron.”

“Okay.” I started to spread my hands and realized what it would do to the sphere. I managed to adjust to a different gesture before it deselected, turning it back to its original Iron form. It stayed in the shape of a ball, but now if I dropped it, it would just roll around instead of splashing theoretically toxic goo everywhere.

For the final version of the video, I would do that on camera. The next step would be to switch to Air. I’d seen how that worked while Erin demonstrated swapping between Earth and Water. If you used the same Material and a new Reactant, then instead of manifesting a new object, Third Eye would apply the second Reactant’s effects to the one you already had selected. For Erin, that meant first shaping, then changing. For me, changing, then moving.

Eventually, I hoped we’d all be able to do all four. Even if it was just for PVP, it would open up a lot of possibilities.

At the moment, though, I didn’t have time to explore any of them.

Because Erin had joined us on the grass. She reached out to Lena.

Lena stared down at Erin’s hand. “What?”

“I guess I should keep playing along,” Erin said, “but it’s starting to get really uncomfortable, and if it keeps up, it’s going to become a problem for all of us.”

“No shit?” Lena hummed a bar from an old cartoon intro; I recognized it even though I couldn’t place it. “And here I thought we were all having a gay old time.”

Erin flinched, but her hand remained outstretched. “Not... exactly. Er. There’s no need to be ashamed of having a Custom Personification. I know you can tell that I do, too.”

I nodded along with her words.

Lena flicked a glance between us. At me, she flashed a glare. To Erin, without taking her hand, she said, “Pay-to-win girls unite, huh?”

Erin swallowed. “If it’s pay-to-win, why don’t you have a Reactant?”

Lena snorted. “I guess I’m the kind who can’t win even when she pays. How pathetic is that?”

“It’s not –”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t want your pity, Erin.” Lena didn’t snap, or snarl, or even shout. She didn’t so much as raise her voice.

Erin’s hand dropped to her side.

I released the Iron sphere and reached out to Lena. “Hey.”

She stepped out of my reach.

I wanted to say I hadn’t actually told Erin anything, but I knew what a pathetic excuse that would be. Lena had asked me to play along with her ruse; I’d played poorly enough to ruin it.

“Now that I look completely ridiculous,” she said, “I’ve got nothing more to accomplish here. I’m out. You two script the episode and I’ll read my lines tomorrow.”

“I’ll go with you,” I said.

She half-turned, not looking back, but catching sight of me out of the corner of her eye. With her voice pure saccharine, she asked, “Is that a promise, Cameron?”